by Ben Okri
Wishing that she would come and pose in a secret place, he got out his sketchbook and board. He moved towards the door and then stopped. He paced the room again. He felt curiously trapped. He felt trapped by his desire and by his inability, his unwillingness to resist its pull. Somewhere in his mind he was aware of the possible consequences of what he was going to do. He didn’t want to think of consequences or of anything else. In a sudden outburst he banged on his table. As the papers amidst the clutter flew everywhere, agitated by the small table fan, he suddenly remembered the source of his nightmare.
Eight years ago, as a boy scout at school, he had gone for survival training in the forests. They had stayed two days in the wilds and had lived only on what they could get from the bush. On the evening of the third day they had got lost coming back to their tents. Someone had fired a gun not far from them and all of a sudden the forest swarmed with a confusion of white birds. Omovo fled for cover. He ran behind a tree and saw a woman staring at him. When she moved, bats flew from her dress into his face. He screamed and dashed to find the others. When they came back from their various covers the sky was calm and the forest was clear, as if nothing had happened. When Omovo went with a group of friends to look for the woman they found nothing except a scarecrow in the shape of a crude masquerade.
The act of reaching the source of the memory made Omovo feel elated. Feeling the joy that perhaps accompanies the pull of a strange fate, the magnetism of events being set on course forever, Omovo turned off the fan, picked up the papers, put them on the table, and went out. In the living room he found Blackie sitting on the arm of a chair staring at him. There was no malice in her gaze but she seemed to be staring right into his more secret thoughts. He didn’t say anything to her. He rushed out into the compound.
In the backyard Ifeyiwa was hanging out the clothes she had been washing. She looked different. Overnight she seemed to have undergone a disenchantment. She looked pale. She seemed, in a matter of twelve hours, to have lost weight. There was no lustre on her face, and she wore rags. She seemed to have almost no connection with the girl he had walked into dreams with the night before. Omovo burnt for her, burnt for her secret pain, for her dull eyes, her sunken cheeks. He wanted so much to soothe her. He wanted badly for her life to be better, but he didn’t know how he could help her. When she saw him her face lit up a trifle and her eyes became defiant. She smiled at him. Unduly conscious of the eyes of the compound, he didn’t smile back.
‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.
‘Nothing.’
He had wanted to ask her to sit with her washing in front of her, but she had so suddenly become a mood he wanted to capture forever. He decided, instantly, to sketch her, to make several rapid sketches of her as she performed the ordinary actions of washing and drying clothes. The more he looked at her between sketches the more he noticed her beauty. It had become a hard beauty, softened only by her occasional smiles. The sadness, the love she made him feel, made him want to draw everything that was connected with her, as if his mood, his spirit, his love, as if her mystery and his helplessness, as if that instant resided for all time in the objects present. So as he drew her he also drew the cement wall of the well, the rusted buckets and unwashed plates, the collective kitchens behind her, the naked children with big stomachs near her, the faded blue wall of the compound, and the washing lines weighed down with clothes.
As he did these sketches, in furious speed, and in absolute concentration, she became self-conscious. She talked to him. She made jokes and tried to sound cheerful, but he didn’t hear her. So after she had dried out some of the clothes she sat down on the low stool and began to wash a blue bed sheet. As she washed she started to sing. She sang very sweetly and while she sang her self-consciousness vanished. As he drew her he became aware that she had stopped moving. He stared at her and saw that the bucket was between her legs and her wrapper had been drawn up. He could see her thighs. His concentration diminished and he grew conscious of the fact that a crowd had begun to gather round him. He was irritated. He felt vulnerable. He also felt a voluptuous heat come over him. To get it all out of his mind, as it would clearly compromise him publicly, he decided also to capture her sensuality, her curves, the promise of her thighs, the definition of her breasts. This seemed to help, for he was soon lost in work, lost in her pose which best coincided, at that moment, with the private image he had of her.
Omovo worked fast. There was too much he wanted to catch which appeared in his mind and moved away so rapidly. He found it increasingly hard to concentrate. The sunlight grew harsher, the sky was more fiery than golden, and he could feel the sweat breaking out on the nape of his neck. And then there were the spectators all around, watching them in idle bewilderment, watching as if Omovo and Ifeyiwa had stopped in a dance, or ritual, and would commence performance any moment. Children had gathered. They asked questions and laughed when he told them to be quiet. The assistant deputy bachelor walked past and said, in a manner of insinuation:
‘Na wa-o! Wonders never cease.’
Omovo went on sketching. He had heard nothing. The pencil scratched on the white surface of the paper. His absorption had the curious effect of making everything still about him, as if he were emanating enchantments. The flies disturbed Ifeyiwa and she brushed them away. Omovo realised that she had stopped singing. He paused and noticed the shadows on her face. When he had re-established the silver line of that unique mood, he continued drawing.
The children became restless. Nothing dramatic seemed to be happening. Their movements disturbed him. One of the compound men came and stood behind him, breathing on his neck, looking at his sketches from over his shoulder. Omovo stopped.
‘I am not a photographer, you know,’ he said with controlled anger.
‘Sorry-o!’ the man said, and went to the toilet.
Omovo had to wait to regain his mood. Struck by the relationships between Ifeyiwa, the well and the bucket, he noticed that the light on her had changed. She looked transformed, as if the sunlight were an invisible kind of water that had washed her face. Her eyes were full of animation. He continued drawing, inspired by the lights on her white blouse. He had worked into a clarity that seemed to absorb everything when from the entrance of the compound someone cried:
‘Trouble dey come-o!’
Omovo was the only person who did not hear. Or rather, he heard a few moments later, for when he looked up he noticed that the spectators had moved away. Ifeyiwa looked up suddenly, a scared expression on her face. Omovo followed her gaze and, too late, he saw Ifeyiwa’s husband striding through the compound towards them, his face stony, his fists clenched.
Omovo’s mind went blank. He held his breath. For a long moment he stood staring, mesmerised by the reality of what was happening. With great speed and without saying a word, Ifeyiwa’s husband snatched the top sheets from Omovo’s sketchbook, tore them to shreds, grabbed Ifeyiwa by the arm, flung her forward and pushed her through the compound towards their house. It happened so quickly that Omovo felt unreal, he felt he had been dreaming it all. Dimly aware of what he was doing, he walked back to the room.
His father was pacing the floor when Omovo went in. His father stopped and, lashing the air with his hands, said: ‘What is wrong with you young people nowadays, eh? Why are you drawing another man’s wife? Watch yourself-o! Women are the cause of many troubles. Leave other people’s wives alone! You know the kind of man her husband is, and yet you persist in this folly! You foolish young men…’
Omovo desperately wanted to say something, to express his innocence, but his voice failed him. Besides he knew his father wouldn’t understand.
‘There are thousands of young girls out there...’ his father was saying.
Omovo didn’t hear him. In a dream-daze he stumbled into his room and fell on his bed.
12
‘Wake up, Omovo, wake up!’
Omovo stirred and opened his eyes. He saw Keme standing over him. He got up.
&nbs
p; ‘I’m rushing somewhere but I thought I should come in and see you.’
‘Keme, how are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘What’s been happening?’
‘I can’t stay long. Left my bike at the other road and someone might steal it.’
‘Sit down, man, and take it easy. I haven’t seen you for some time.’
Keme sat. He fidgeted a bit and was clearly uneasy about losing his motorcycle. Omovo said: ‘Do you want something to drink?’
‘Nothing for me, thanks.’
Omovo went out and washed his face. When he got back Keme was pacing the room.
‘Why are you so restless?’
‘Everything.’
‘So look, what happened with the girl? Did you follow up the case?’
‘Of course I did,’ Keme said somewhat explosively. ‘What do you think I am?’
‘A journalist. A good one.’
Keme looked at Omovo. Then he sat down. He quietened a little, but his voice took on the tones of anger spiked with helplessness.
‘I went to the police station the day after we saw the girl’s corpse.’
He paused.
‘And?’ Omovo asked.
‘I went to find out if they were bothering to investigate the murder. And do you know what happened?’
‘No.’
Keme paused again. His eyes hardened and took on a faraway expression.
‘What happened?’
‘They bloody well detained me for a whole day. They threatened to beat me and lock me up. They somehow got it into their stupid heads that because I was taking an interest in the case I must therefore know much more about it.’
‘But why?’
‘Well, they said that they had got a call about the girl’s corpse, they had gone to the park, combed the entire place, and had found absolutely nothing.’
‘What!’
‘They found nothing – nothing unusual.’
‘But...’
‘I know. It’s weird. We saw that girl’s body. We saw the blood on her. We saw the cross around her neck. We saw that she was beautiful and young. We saw the expression on her face. But when the police went there the next morning they found nothing. Nothing unusual.’
‘But...’
‘I know. It’s strange. I tripped over her. You lit the match. I remember her dress, torn. I remember her thighs, all mashed up. And they found nothing. As if the Atlantic had washed her body away. As if the earth had opened and swallowed her. As if the night had simply wiped her away.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing unusual.’
Keme paused again. They were silent for a long while. Then Keme, breathing out a deep sigh of exhaustion, said: ‘Maybe we dreamt that wicked night.’
‘But...’
‘You would think that something of her remained. Something incriminating. A piece of her cloth. Her cross. Her blood. Her shoes. Anything to show that she had been unnaturally killed. But how do we deal with nothing?’
Omovo stayed silent.
‘I wrote a report about it the next morning, but the editor reduced it to a fraction of a column. It read like a filler. I wrote another piece and my editor said he wouldn’t publish it. I asked why not and he said he needed hard evidence.’
‘Hard evidence?’
‘That’s right. It’s crazy. I mean we print stories about a woman who gave birth to a snake, a man who rose from the dead, a town in which people say they saw a two-headed elephant. We print things like a judge who made love to a madwoman because it was supposed to make him rich overnight. We even print stories about a village where it rained frogs during the harmattan, but now my editor can’t print a story about a little girl who was ritually murdered.’
Omovo got up and sat down again. Keme continued: ‘As soon as the police let me go, and it took a call from my editor, because they were thinking of holding me as an accomplice of some sort, as soon as I was free I went to the park. I searched and found nothing. Life is so strange. The night everywhere was dark and we were lost, but when I went back it was still daylight and I couldn’t find the place where we found the body. The whole thing is beginning to make me doubt my own sanity. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Don’t doubt your sanity. We saw what we saw. It was real. Somebody must have come back and removed the body.’
‘Who? Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So how can this thing be investigated? Where do we start? How do we know that the police are telling the truth?’
‘Keme, we don’t know anything.’
‘So what would have happened if that night we had taken the police directly to the body?’
‘You want the truth?’
‘Sure.’
‘We would have been held for murder.’
‘Why does it have to be like that?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s because it’s pretty impossible to investigate anything in a society as chaotic as ours is right now. But I feel certain that we’d be in deep trouble…’
‘And,’ interrupted Keme, ‘it would be excellent for the image of the wretched police force.’
‘I know. They are more corrupt than boils.’
‘Scumpools.’
They fell quiet again. Then Keme said: ‘When I told Mother about it she broke down and wept. I couldn’t stop her. She wept for hours.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘What can I do? I’ll stay with it, write another article on it, or I’ll write a feature on ritual sacrifices, strange secret societies and blood fellowships.’
‘Be careful. One doesn’t know who is a member of what.’
‘I know.’
‘We know so little about the world, how it works, who manipulates things, who makes dead bodies vanish, who suppresses what information.’
‘I know. Maybe, then, I’ll write a short story about it.’
‘But if you write a short story about it,’ Omovo said, ‘will you invent what you think really happened or will you tell it as you witnessed it?’
‘I’m not sure. All 1 can honestly do is to tell it as I saw it.’
‘But you are doing that already.’
‘It’s not enough. I’m writing facts. I haven’t said anything about how it felt, what kind of night it was, how it affected me, the owl, the moon, and the bells.’
‘I know. It’s not really enough, is it?’
‘No.’
‘I even dreamt about it.’
‘So did I.’
‘I dreamt that when you lit the match I saw my missing sister there and that she suddenly, with sleepwalking eyes, grabbed my ankles. Then she began to crush my bones. I woke Mother up with my screaming.’
‘I dreamt that she wouldn’t stop following me.’
‘Let’s not talk about it. The thing is driving me mad. How is your painting?’
‘Not going well.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It’s part of the business.’
‘Did you see the article that woman at your exhibition wrote?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought it was interesting that she used your painting that was seized as a basis for investigating our national psyche.’
‘I thought so too. It’s just that she could have been describing another painting altogether.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I did not recognise my painting in her words.’
‘Have you heard anything about it?’
‘What?’
‘Are they returning it to you?’
‘No. I don’t expect to hear anything anyway. Let them have the ugly painting. I’ve come to dislike it so much. I think because our lives are so hard our art needs to soothe, to massage, more than it needs to pry open all of our wounds.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not sure. There are some things one never forgets, things one shouldn’t forget. The dead girl’s
body is one of them.’
Omovo paused. Then, changing the tone of his voice, so it became sadder because he had slowed down his speech, he said:
‘When I was a kid I used to sit staring at cobwebs and spiders for long periods of time. Mother was rather scared not so much of cobwebs but that I stared at them so much. She thought it unnatural that I should stare at spiders, dying rats, worms. One day, unable to bear my obsession, she began beating me with a comb and then the heel of her shoe. It didn’t change anything – it actually made me more interested in the hidden, the dark side of things.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m not sure. I wanted to draw them, to know them. They are magnetic.’
‘Too many people are afraid to look at the dark side of things, to look at the things that are there. That’s the problem.’
‘And so we have rituals and stories.’
‘And paintings.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Omovo I have never heard you talk like this before. You’re changing.’
‘I don’t know. I feel things have been happening to us that we know nothing about.’
They were silent. Keme got up and began pacing again. ‘I have to leave town. I am aching for a journey. I want to taste the road. I feel trapped here. And helpless. I want to leave this bloody rat-race. My mind is scattered. I can’t seem to focus. I should be doing something worthwhile with this life that one has only one chance with. I should be building something. I need to get away and look at myself.’
He said all this rapidly, moving his arms, his face passionate, and when he finished he sat down exhausted, almost defeated by his own intensity.
‘You’re right,’ Omovo said. ‘One gets lost too quickly in the city. We stop thinking. We begin to thrash about. In the end we mistake confused motion for progress.’
Keme had started to sweat. His restlessness returned.
‘I better go, you know. Someone might steal my motorbike if I leave it too long.’
‘Okay. It’s good to see you.’
‘And you.’
‘We never meet enough.’
‘I know. My mother keeps asking about you. Come round to ours sometime.’
‘I will. Say hello to her from me.’