by Ben Okri
Ifeyiwa sat on a large wooden bed on which was a threadworn blanket. When he looked at her again he noticed a mysterious twinkle in her eyes. From the far corner of the room the lamp shone, lighting up one side of her. The other side of her was in darkness. She cast the shadow of an elongated disconsolate giantess. There was an elusive sadness about the way she sat.
‘Come in,’ she said, eventually. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. This is a friend’s place.’
He moved unsteadily into the room. When he had come quite close to her he stopped. He breathed in deeply the air of the room, which he let out at once because the smells sickened him.
‘Why are you standing there like that?’
He didn’t know. He remained standing, silent, thinking, and not aware of what he was thinking; feeling, and not knowing precisely what he felt. Then a tremor came over him, making him shiver.
‘I like your hat,’ she said.
The tremor passed and everything in the bare room suddenly became transformed by the wonder of her presence. He took off the hat.
She smiled. Her uncertainty had gone. A soft radiance bathed her features. Her eyes had a gentle, moonlight intensity. Her lips quivered slightly. She stood up, as if to greet him formally. Her elongated shadow bent along the wall. She seemed somehow to control the atmosphere of the room. He moved towards her, and placed his palm on her shoulder. Then, slowly, he withdrew his arm. She looked at him, and looked away. Silently, as if in a ritual, they both sat down. The bed creaked. Mosquitoes whined around them.
Then she sighed. Omovo, feeling the inexpressible mixtures of emotions that the sigh contained, wanted to touch her. But the silence widened the distance between them. Omovo was about to say something when he heard a scream from outside. He stiffened. A child began to wail. Its mother berated it. Women’s voices rose on crests of different pitches. And then, when a door was slammed shut, there fell a new silence.
‘Omovo?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I think so.’
‘Are you worried?’
‘Yes.’
‘Afraid?’
‘A little.’
She touched his arm. Her fingers quivered slightly. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Are you painting?’
‘I can’t seem to at the moment.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not yet ready, I suppose.’
She was silent for a while.
‘I’m really sorry about Sunday.’
‘Forget it.’
‘He just...’ She stopped. Then sighed again. He touched her bare arm. Her eyes filled with tears.
‘Why are you crying?’
She shook her head, wiped her eyes, and turned away.
‘Why?’
She turned and faced him. ‘I remember the first time you kissed me,’ she replied.
They were silent for a moment. He felt the sweet and sad upwelling of desire extending itself through him. She moved closer. Imperceptibly.
‘I was washing some clothes in the backyard and you came and held my face and looked in my eyes and kissed me.’
He smiled.
‘I was surprised. I couldn’t sleep properly for days after that.’
‘I remember,’ he said. ‘You were wearing a yellow beret held on with a hairpin.’
‘That was another time. Much later.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. That day I wore a blue skirt, the same blue as that hat of yours, and a white blouse. I didn’t even have my shoes on.’
‘Oh. I remember it differently then.’
‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’
‘But I remember the kiss. I don’t know where I got the courage. I walked in a daze afterwards. Kept dreaming about you.’
She smiled. The space around her became charged.
‘So how are things with you, my Ifeyiwa?’
The smile faded. He cursed himself for having asked that question at that moment.
‘I’m happy now. But things are bad.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘News from home.’
‘What news?’
‘The fighting has started again.’
‘Where?’
‘At home. Between our village and the next one.’
‘Is it serious?’
‘Yes. They’ve started killing one another, burning farms. Now men hang around the boundaries all night with cutlasses.’
‘Oh God.’
‘We’ve had trouble for a long time, but it’s only recently we started killing one another.’
‘What’s the trouble?’
‘It’s about the boundary. Many many years ago the white people gave the other village our land and after Independence we went to court and won the case. But they wouldn’t accept. So we are now fighting.’
Omovo made an angry gesture. ‘Those bloody white people. They interfered too much.’
‘It’s us. We’re too greedy.’
‘But they shouldn’t have interfered so much.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘I hope none of your family members have been hurt.’
‘No. But I also heard that my mother is ill. They say she is probably dying. I might have to go home and be with her.’
Omovo didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what could possibly constitute a sufficient consolation. When she made a sound, which she stifled in her throat, and when she trembled as she repressed her crying, he felt wounded. He held her in his arms tightly. She disentangled herself. He searched her face. Her eyes had hardened a little and acquired a curious unreachable coolness.
‘You worry me,’ he said. ‘You keep changing.’
She looked at him. ‘Don’t say that.’
“Why not?’
‘I don’t know. Strange thoughts enter my mind.’
‘Like what?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s not thoughts really.’
‘What then?’
‘It’s hard to say.’
‘Bad dreams?’
‘No. I’ve stopped having them. I think it’s the way my mind has become quiet. When I’m in the house I don’t feel things any more. It’s like I’m dead or something, as if I’m not flesh any more.’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ he said, running his hand through the thickness of her hair.
She laughed. A tear rolled down from one eye. She brushed it off and said: ‘But when I’m with you I come to life again. I begin to breathe like a woman, but I feel like a little girl. You make me happy.’
‘Then let’s not talk about bad things for a while.’
‘Okay. Let’s talk about your hat.’
‘Why?’
‘Why not?’
‘What do you want to say about it?’
‘It’s blue.’
‘So?’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘A friend gave it to me.’
‘I don’t know of any of your friends. I sometimes see them when they come to visit.’
‘You’ll know them. Or they will know you.’
‘Which one gave you the hat?’
‘Okoro.’
‘You mean he gave it to you – just like that?’
‘Yes. To protect my head.’
‘From what?’
‘The sun.’
She laughed sweetly. ‘Are you sure it’s not another girl who gave it to you?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘You mean you have another girl?’
‘No. I don’t.’
She smiled. ‘Anyway, the hat makes you look like a crook.’
‘So you like crooks?’
‘Only crooks like you.’
‘I’m not a crook.’
‘Wear it.’
‘No. You wear it.’
‘All right.’ She pressed th
e hat down on her rich black fluff of hair.
‘It suits you. Makes you look like a crook.’
She looked round. ‘There’s no mirror in this room,’ she said.
‘Trust me. You look beautiful with it.’
She took it off and placed it on his head at a jaunty angle. She giggled and tried another angle. He took it off and hung it on the bedpost.
‘Now the bed looks crooked,’ she said.
He pushed her playfully.
‘You’d make a good poet,’ he said to her.
‘I’ve often thought of writing poems,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know how.’
‘My brother said the best way to write poems is to write them. That, and reading lots of good poetry. He made it sound like painting.’
‘You said you were going to show me his poems.’
‘I will.’
‘Why don’t you read one out to me?’
‘Which one?’
‘I don’t know. The one you told me about on Saturday.’
‘Is it the one about the birds?’
‘No. The one he sent recently.’
‘Okay.’
She shut her eyes.
‘Why are you shutting your eyes?’
‘Because I want to hear your voice better.’
He read out his brother’s poem in a gentle, hesitant, conversational tone of voice. When he had finished she opened her eyes wide, clapped her hands together once in delight, and said: ‘It’s nice.’
Then suddenly she kissed him full on the lips and drew back, her being alive, her face lighted, her eyes clear. ‘It’s really nice,’ she said.
Then he held her face and kept her still and, looking deep into her warm brown eyes, he kissed her gently and hungrily. At first she gave him a startled, almost frightened, look. But he went on kissing her lips, then he kissed her cheeks, and her neck, and her eyebrows, her forehead, her ears, and came back to her lips again and stayed there. Her lips were warm and soft. They quivered. He pulled closer to her. They held one another passionately in an embrace made awkward by the way they sat side by side. Then, as if in a new ritual, in which they each knew their exact roles, they stood up as one. They clung to one another. Omovo breathed in the rich aroma of her hair oils. Then he felt his way down her back with both hands. And he stopped on the soft rotundity of her backside.
After that things happened rather fast. Her hands moved tentatively down his side and found his thighs, and found his trouser zip, and fumbled with it, and retreated to his chest, and played with his shaven head, and were gentle on his neck. He unzipped his trousers and unloosened her buttons and took off her blouse. Then he pulled off his trousers and relieved himself of his shirt and stood before her, naked and proud. He kissed her downwards and she opened her wrapper and tore down her pants and he planted his face in her warm stomach and held her breasts in his mouth. She had on a string round her waist, which added immensely to the sensuality of her body, the curvaceousness he could never have fully guessed at. And then there were the wonders of touch. He laid her down on the hard mattress and kissed her from her feet upwards, tracing pictures on her stomach and ribs and inner thighs with his fingers. He traced her undulations, her concavities, and was soft on her cleft, and she quivered with desire. Breathing in her potent smells of desire and earth, he felt her tenderly. Her thighs were hot and he played with her pubic hair and marvelled at the loveliness of her sex. It was so neat, so uncomplicated, that he wanted to cry out.
When he touched her body she trembled. It amazed him, this discovery. Her reaction heightened his feelings and he kept touching her gently, in different places, and her tremulousness got worse, got uncontrollable, and he became a little scared at the power of her feelings and held her to him. He wanted to see, to feel all of her, to remember her forever. He turned her over and cried out gently at the beautiful sweep of her back and at the marvellous rotundity of her buttocks.
‘The God that made you,’ he said breathlessly, ‘did it with so much love.’
When he turned her back over he saw the ritual marks on her stomach, the scars on her chest. He stroked them soothingly, lovingly, and held her breasts. She sighed and drew a series of descending circles down his chest, his stomach, to his first loose scatterings of hair, and then she paused. And then, suddenly, with a desire and a quickness that can only have come from the ancient streams of loving, she held on to his manhood and squeezed him and rubbed him against her. He couldn’t understand his feelings and he made her stop and he took in her bronze-brown complexion, the softness of her skin, her radiant, almost golden, glow.
In that atmosphere suffused with gloom, lost in their acts of faith, they were moving towards the things that would consume them. And meanwhile the oil lamp burnt steadily and the cobwebs crinkled in corners of the ceiling. And as he began touching her again, and she trembled on the bed, eyes shut, both hands clenching and unclenching, her mouth opening and closing, her face changed and strangely beautiful in the depths of her ecstasy, they were lost in all the forces which they knew nothing about, and which were there, defining themselves around their love.
When he stopped looking at her, when he shut his eyes, he too began to enter that state of possession. And when she touched him it drove him to frenzies and in order to prevent himself exploding before he had entered her he drew away. He found it difficult to breathe. She looked like a wild strange animal and her lips were full and her breasts heaved with a passion so irrepressible that he was completely magnetised. He drew lines down to her sex and then he widened her legs. With his eyes shut tight, breathing in the heady aroma of her nakedness, he found her wet and warm. A cry of unholy joy escaped from her and she tightened her legs round him. He found her rich wetness again and she relaxed her legs, surrendering to his tenderness. Then he mounted her, glided up her, and moved into her slowly. She threw her arms out and then clasped him tight and relaxed and then gave herself to him totally and with a wild look in her eyes she lifted her head and said:
‘I want to bear your child!’
And he went in all the way and stayed there and they cried out as one and he moved gently, swimming on her into caverns of sexual dreams. Her hunger shook the bed and she let out a deep deranged uncontrollable noise of bliss and he covered her mouth. Then as he moved in and out of her slowly, savouring every moment, he felt her interiors pulsing around him. He felt her tighten and relax round his sex and she seemed somehow to be sucking him in deeper and he moved faster, pulled by deep currents of indestructible loving. He moved wildly and she moved with him, and then, her legs wide open as if to receive all of him, all of his love, mouth open, face contorted, he kissed her. And the kissing, the meeting of their tongues, increased the feeling of the lovemaking, and the lovemaking heightened the passion of the kissing. And when he felt himself coming from a great distance, when he felt his joy rushing headlong with insane powers he stopped and sucked her breasts and played her nipples between his teeth and soft inner mouth. Then, when he had cooled a little, he went back in and began to cry into her hair because he wanted to make love to her so completely, to go so deep into her, and to enjoy her so fully, and he didn’t know how. And she pulled him to her and turned him over on the noisy bed and she mounted him and he started to kick and struggle and she told him to be still and she moved on him and when he relaxed and trusted her he felt it all so utterly unbearable and burst out into her, exploded into fragments of pulsating being and had started a long deafening cry when he heard the shouting outside the room and the knocking on the door. She went on bouncing on him, riding – a wilful mare – arms out, racing on to her heights, and fell on him and they went on moving into one another, daring the crests, when they heard together, freezing, eyes wide open, absolutely still, the voice of her husband as he said, very loudly:
‘Come out! I know you are both in there!’
Bewildered, disorientated, they lay still, listening to her husband ranting outside, kicking at the door, turning the handle insanely as
if he were going to wrench it off. Omovo began to panic and she signalled to him to be still. And her serenity, her complete lack of fear, quietened him.
‘Come out and let me kill you!’ her husband screamed, kicking the door, making the hinges groan. Dust and plaster fell off the door frame. The wood creaked.
‘Come out or I will break down this door! I saw you going in! Come out!’
Then other voices joined that of her husband. Children began crying. Male voices, gruff and drunken, crowded out her husband’s rantings. The voices swamped him. They heard the men threatening to beat her husband up for coming to their compound and disturbing their peace. Someone suggested the police. Female voices joined the noise. Then a woman’s voice, more indignant than the others, joined in and berated him, saying that it was her room and that her sister and husband were in there and Ifeyiwa’s husband had no right to kick their door. Someone else suggested a long drink to settle matters. The noises died down a little and moved away.
When the discordance had gone, and the banging had ceased, Omovo and Ifeyiwa hurriedly got dressed. Then they sat beside each other, oppressed by the emptiness of the room.
The whitewashed half painted walls seemed to close in on them, and the distances between them suddenly became immense. After a while there was a knock on the door and a woman’s voice said:
‘Mek una go now-o. Take the backyard. Mek una go quick!’
They looked at each other in silence, as if for the last time. They kissed and got up as one, still bounded by tainted wonder. Sex-smells surrounded them in the seedy room. Ifeyiwa seemed unafraid, defiant, radiant, unashamed. She smiled bravely and, walking briskly, disappeared into the corridor.
He waited a few moments. Then he put on his hat. He opened the door. The wind blew through the dark corridor. He went out with the flickering cobwebs above him. Perplexed and drowsy, he stumbled to the house-front, and wandered into the womblike ubiquity of the night, his thoughts trapped in a whirlpool, spinning in confusion.