by Ben Okri
‘Good!’
Omovo let go of his father and went and stood near his room door. His father staggered, caught the chair, and held onto it, looking round the bare room drunkenly, his head jerking, his eyes heavy, his gestures slow, his speech slurring.
‘Good, I said!’ He raised his voice steadily, till he was practically shouting. ‘Foolish son... Your mother was a witch. She is still pressing me down. Was this how I was when she died?... Were... were we not living in Surulere? Now look at us... look at this gutter, this ghetto, that we share with riffraffs... with rats and lizards…’
‘It’s your own fault, Dad.’
His father either didn’t hear or ignored the statement altogether. ‘She wanted to kill me... drive me mad... “Do this, do that,” she would say... “Invest in this, invest in that” ...honestly... she wanted to drive me mad and collect... collect all my hard work for herself...’ He gave his weird laugh. ‘She is the one spoiling my life now... pressing me down... driving away business... confusing me... whispering things about Blackie to me...’ He laughed again. ‘She has now turned into a mosquito... gossiping about my wife... I can see her... pressing me down... She sends the tax people to me... drives away customers... When her witchcraft failed it turned back on her. I sat in the house and watched, yes watched her wickedness eat her up and kill her... I laughed the day she died... I opened a bottle of whisky... She has not let me rest since...’ Laughter again. ‘Have you... heard of a person... dying of an unknown disease before, eh?’
There was a long silence. It seemed a kind of eternity. The silence was ugly. The candles’ illumination seemed to die and resurrect. Omovo could no longer bear it, could no longer restrain himself. His anger burst the banks of his pity. Waving his hands furiously to include everything in the house in his accusation, his voice sharp and loud, Omovo said:
‘I am ashamed of you, Dad. You don’t see what’s right in front of you. You are blind. And deaf. And a coward. That’s why you have failed. You’ve failed all of us. Your life has become one big empty pretence and now you blame a dead woman!’
Omovo was angry but what he actually said surprised him. He had voiced an emotion but in the end he had said the words. And in saying the words the emotion betrayed itself and then dissipated. Omovo felt hurt. He felt rotten. He wished he could take the words back. But the damage had been done. The pain dulled in his head. His thighs trembled. A sickening void opened up inside him.
‘Me, me, a failure...?’ his father said incredulously in a weak voice, a pleading voice.
At that precise moment Omovo suffered an absurd revelation of love.
‘Omovo! My son! You call ME A FAILURE?’
He blinked. Then he staggered to a cushion-chair and sat on the armrest. Tears rolled down his drunken face. He cried like a child unsuccessfully fighting down its humiliation.
‘Daddy, I didn’t mean it... I didn’t...’
His father, regaining a shred of his dignity, raised his palm, commanding his son to be silent. ‘Don’t say anything. Just leave the room... leave me alone... please.’
Omovo stayed still. After a moment his father slid down from the armrest onto the cushion. He convulsed. Tears ran down his face. The convulsion soon stopped. His mouth flopped open. He began to snore, awkwardly asleep on the chair. He looked more haunted than ever. But he also looked like a child that had lost something and had cried itself to sleep.
Omovo called Blackie. He knew she had been eavesdropping. She came and dragged his father to their room. He didn’t wake up. Omovo went to his own room, dismantled the blank canvas, and wrestled with insomnia.
4
The morning after her return from the forest, Ifeyiwa fell ill. For three days she hallucinated about her mother, about returning to her village. The ghost of her brother hovered over her. The prostrate figure of her father, begging for forgiveness, tormented her. She couldn’t bear being bound to the bed. The room suffocated her with the smells of dust and camphor balls. The toilet made her feel worse. The corridors, with its clutter of baskets, brooms and stained three-legged tables, the noise of squabbling tenants and screaming children, of radios loudly blaring, made her head and eyes burn. She could find no peace anywhere.
On the first day of her illness her husband kept away from her and stayed at the shop. When he appeared he had a brooding but softened air about him. In the evening she roused herself to prepare his food. She couldn’t eat and sat huddled on a chair, covered with blankets, shivering, and watching him with dull eyes. She couldn’t sleep all night and she cried for her mother.
On the second day some of her husband’s people came to her. They all looked like wraiths. They were poor, hunger and bitterness had ravaged their features, they looked lean, their eyes were pitiless, and when they touched her – to comfort her – their hands were so cold and bony that they seemed to increase her debilitation, seemed to draw strength away from her. They frightened her. Their poverty had deformed them. The women were like reformed witches and the men were severe and odd. When they left she realised for the first time that they resented her, that they were suspicious of her, and had pronounced judgement on her in some way. In her confused state she understood that they somehow blamed her for not being pregnant, for keeping her husband from them. She even suspected that they hated her and thought her responsible for her husband’s meanness. She was relieved when they were gone.
Tuwo also came to visit. He wore his favoured French suit, he stank of cheap aftershave, and he made long speeches about politics while her husband sat chewing his chewing stick, listening with an abstract look in his eyes. From their conversation she gathered that Omovo was also ill. She heard them talk about sending her to the doctor, or taking her home to the village to recuperate. When Tuwo left, her husband sprayed the room with insecticide and lit two candles, one on the table, the other at the door. Then he made strange rites with a juju she never knew he had. He wore a white wrapper, got her out of bed, smeared her with herbal paste, made libations, prayed fervently to his ancestors, sweating profusely. Then he went out, brought in a squawking white chicken, slaughtered it, and let its blood drip on the door, on the plate of candles, and on the juju which he had hung up above the door beam. When the chicken had stopped flapping, her husband dumped its severed head on the plate, and then he mixed its blood with the herbal paste and smeared the mixture over her stomach and on her breasts. He made her repeat certain solemn words after him. Then he carried her to bed, gave her a stiff portion of ogogoro in which roots had marinated, and disappeared into the backyard, taking the headless chicken with him. She dozed for a while. In her sleep she dreamt that her husband was going to sacrifice her for his relatives. She saw him, completely naked, wholly erect, and with a frightening knife in his hand. Everywhere she ran she was blocked by his relatives, by the women with small bitter faces, and hard eyes. She screamed. She saw a clear road and made for it – but her father, headless, his dane gun in one hand, appeared suddenly. She stood still, sank on her knees, and waited for her husband. He approached with a smile on his face, his neck weighed down with golden necklaces, the knife in his hand. Behind him, through an open door, she saw Omovo painting. Her husband raised his hand to strike her with the knife. She felt calm for a moment. Then, overcome with panic, she made a sudden movement in his direction and accidentally felt the coldness of the knife slice into her. She didn’t know whether she had died or not when she woke up.
He stood over her, his palm on her forehead. There were strangers in the room. They were all in shadow. All she could make out of them was the raggedness of their clothes, the roughness of their skins, and the shadows they cast. She began to scream. Her husband calmed her. She had no idea how long she had been sleeping.
One by one the strangers left. They went but they left curious smells in the air. They left negative feelings, unspoken thoughts, moods of bitter presences. They left their shadows behind. She complained of the darkness. Her husband lit five more candles. Then she saw th
e white basin with steaming water on the table. And beside it a glittering knife, still stained with the blood of the slaughtered chicken. On the cupboard she noticed a new pot, steaming with food. On a chair she saw a white cloth. On the floor, the dead flower she had brought in the last time she saw Omovo.
‘Where am I?’ she asked.
‘You’re getting better,’ he said.
She couldn’t see his face. His voice sounded a little different.
‘But what has been happening?’
‘You have been ill. Now you are fine.’
She tried to sit up, but couldn’t. He sat staring at her for a long time. He said nothing. She slept and woke again to find him in the same position. There were now three candles alight.
‘Do you feel stronger?’
She sat up.
‘Good.’
He got up and brought the basin over to the bed. He covered her head with the white cloth, then he poured some hot water into the basin. The steam engulfed her.
‘Breathe in the air!’ he said.
She breathed in herbal essences that stung her throat. The steam blinded her. Its pungencies, its bitter power, made her dizzy, and when she breathed she seemed to be falling into a pit of smoke. After a while he took the cloth off her and made her lie down. He went and poured the water away. When he came back he got out a bowl and a spoon. Then he served her from the freshly boiled pot of pepper soup. She refused to eat or drink.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said sternly.
‘I don’t know who prepared it.’
‘My people.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Drink, it will make you better.’
‘I’m not thirsty.’
He tried to force a spoonful of the pepper soup into her mouth. But she kept her lips shut tight and her tremulousness made the soup spill on the bed. He started to get angry, but quickly quietened down.
‘It’s not pepper soup I want,’ she said.
‘What do you want then, eh? Don’t you want to get well?’
‘I want to go home.’
‘This is your home.’
‘I want to go home to my people.’
He stayed silent, watching her, the candles burning, dawn creeping through the window chinks. His eyes were heavy with sleeplessness.
‘What for?’
‘To see my mother.’ She paused. ‘Before I die.’
‘What’s wrong with you, eh?’ he said vehemently, in the tone of his old self. ‘Why are you talking rubbish? What die? Who is dying? Drink this medicine, Ifeyiwa.’
‘No.’
She lay down and covered her head. She heard him breathing heavily, muttering strange threats, heard him pacing, moving objects about the room, like a clumsy old woman. She drifted off to sleep again and woke to find him shaking her.
She looked up. Dawn had broken. The roosters were crowing. Footsteps were busy along the corridor. The noises of the ghetto came to her. The radios, the voices of old women, of little girls. Her husband had bathed, combed his hair, and put on new clothes. He had a bright, hopeful look on his face. He made her sit up, served her food, which she still refused to touch, and began to talk to her. He was curiously, distantly, tender. Then, as if he wanted to prove to himself the fact of his love, he showed her the imitation gold chains, the bronze plaited bangles, and the dyed cowries he had bought to give her when he felt that her spirit towards him had changed. He showed her the chest of clothes, the lace wrappers, the red shoes, the expensive white blouses, and the starched head-ties he had acquired and kept secret. He said he intended to give them to her as a present when she became pregnant. He wanted her to have all these gifts now and to rest content in his house as a wife and to recover soon. She fell into a long sleep, hallucinating, sweating, gnashing her teeth, while he talked.
When, on the third night of her illness, her husband came through the door, she leapt up and stabbed him in the heart and twisted the knife. His chest was bare and she was totally naked. He didn’t fall. She stabbed him repeatedly, in the chest, in the ribs, in the stomach. At first he didn’t bleed. With increased detachment, she hacked at him. Then she dug the knife into his eyes. He fell forward and hit the floor without a sound. When she turned him over his face had changed. One of his eyes had grown blue and big. It wasn’t her husband she saw, but Omovo. She woke up screaming.
When she woke up from her nightmare she realised that she hadn’t uttered a sound. She was breathing heavily. The room was quiet. She didn’t move. Her husband lay snoring beside her. She mistook his profuse sweating for blood. Horrified, she got out of bed with a silent panic in her heart, wound her way down the dark corridor full of obstacles and heavy with stale smells, and washed herself in the backyard.
Her husband’s snoring had subsided when she got back. She spread the mat, took her pillow, and lay on the floor. She was afraid of her calm; she feared she had entered a forbidden zone, an inner area of madness. Everything in her had taken on new dimensions. She looked around the darkness, listening to the rats scratching, wondering what it was in her brain, in her soul, that had made her accept the obscenities of her life. She searched her mind for reconciliations, for things that made sense of her life, that redeemed her existence, and she found none. The unreality of everything struck her suddenly with the force of a witnessed act of cruelty. In the darkness, beside the mat, she made out the flattened shape of the flower. It was like a piece of rag.
Lying face up on the mat, she asked herself what were the realities of her life. She made a mental list: fevers, bad food, overwork, a total absence of freedom, her domination by her husband, unrealised dreams and desires, never enough rest, no play, no dancing or music, no association with people her own age, an unending series of household drudgeries, an unending list of new rules and edicts from her husband to be endured, a repression of the juices, the youthfulness bursting in her, attrition, exhaustion, a lifetime of pretending, of being humble, of holding back her abilities, and a hundred other things. Her list made her dizzy, wearied her. She turned on the mat and shut her eyes.
She had never told Omovo the things she really suffered. She had only hinted. If he knew how to interpret sighs, if he could calibrate their depths, and imagine from what endurances, what silences, they came then he would know, she liked to think. And if he didn’t know, if she had to tell him, then he’d never understand anyway.
She thought about herself and Omovo, about how close they were in space and yet how vast the distances were between them. She thought about the atmosphere into which they had been born and in which they must survive: an atmosphere of confusion, acquisition, an age of corruption, poverty, ghetto dreams, a period of waste and loss, a generation betrayed by their parents.
She felt angry at the feeling that in a better world, a different one, a love story would have been possible between her and Omovo. But the age had thwarted them and she had been married off against her will and without her knowledge and only after she had accepted did she meet the only person she would rather have married. She wished, for a moment, that she had remained a village girl, that she had never been exposed to books, to school, to films and popular records, to the desires and yearnings that the society wouldn’t allow her to fulfil. Things would have been simpler. But – there he was and here she was in the darkness, with love between them and the whole world separating them.
Her eyes had become used to the darkness. She stared at the rag. With shadows in her soul, she thought about the troubles burning up her village. She felt bound to the troubles in some way, in some ancient, secret way. Not being able to fathom how this was, or why, she allowed herself to feel that she could help, that she could spread peace for a change, play some surprising and meaningful role. She saw herself that night, in a strange fantasy, as a sort of a peacemaker, as one who could cross boundaries, and go between the villages, giving speeches that would move the people to stop fighting. She felt the urge of a great pull, an unknown gravity, as if something were
pulling her spirit home.
She remembered the day at school when she had taken part in a debate. The topic was: what is the role of women in the Africa of today? She had been one of the two main speakers. Her opponent had trotted out the old lines that women should be great mothers, should help Africa retain its traditional ways. Ifeyiwa had said that women should change with the changing times. They should be both mothers and leaders. They should be healers, pilots, priests, and that if God gave them intelligence they should use it to the fullest. She spoke with awkward passion, a little too brashly, and she was extremely nervous. She was inflamed with her embarrassment and nervousness and this made her bolder, pushed her beyond her intended motion. Her opponent won the debate, but Ifeyiwa never forgot the curious excitement of that passion, of going over the edge and carrying on, stuttering, fighting the words, defiant, completing her speech. She never knew she could do it and her friends and teachers regarded her differently afterwards. Her triumph always secretly fed her pride, her sense of herself. After that she began to suspect that she was special in some way.
Her thoughts became confused. She began to plan one set of things, one course of action, and then it would be superseded by another. She decided first that she would escape from her marriage, go home to her village, persuade her family to return her bride price, and then return to the city, and to Omovo. Then she decided that was too much like a dream. Instead she would simply return home, make peace between the villages and fulfil the vague notions she had about her destiny. But shadows leapt about inside her. Filled with sudden foreboding, she shut her eyes. She couldn’t hide from the shadows. They were everywhere inside her, large and unformed, monstrous, intent, like shapes that can never be deciphered. The shadows formed themselves into the face of her father, blinded and decrepit from his accidental infanticide; into the face of her brother with his unfocussed eyes, and into that of her mother, with her mouth stiffened into the shape of a plea. Their faces were all like spirits departing the earth forever.