Girl

by Edna O'Brien

  ‘Tell them, Esau … tell our companions what happened to you,’ the driver urged him. Esau was halting at first, but nevertheless eager to tell it and I felt he had told it many times:

  I lost territory. I lost Binta. I lost everything. The Jas Boys didn’t impact on us, so we thought we were safe. Then one evening they came. I was putting the doves into their cotes, as Binta and I kept lovebirds. I heard shooting. People screaming and running and I ran like all the others. Binta was not back. She had gone to market to sell some of her pots. After a week or so some were lucky to be reunited, in the bush, in church halls, in dry wells and in caves on the mountains that skirted the forest, but not us.

  He is overcome with emotion, describing the clay pots Binta made, pots to keep water cool and littler pots to store palm oil and butter. How they were prized. People gave them as gifts. Their colours were a deep earthen brown, but also fired with the magic blends of Binta’s imagination. If only, as he said, he had grabbed one pot as he ran, he would now have something of her to hold on to.

  ‘We find her … we find her,’ the driver said, but Esau was now crying unashamedly.

  Once he had regained his composure, he told of a chance meeting with an aid worker who mentioned a partially blind woman named Binta, in a camp, who spent her time walking up and down the road, expecting her husband to come for her. According to the aid worker, she said she would recognise her husband’s footsteps, on the very threshold of the underworld. With time, he made his way there and among the constellation of sad and broken faces, there was no one who resembled his wife. Much later on, he met a trader who told him a happy story that revived his hopes. It concerned a little lost girl, also in a camp, whom the trader met when he went there on business. The little girl had a telephone number written on a torn piece of paper that she believed was the number of her uncle, who had fled their community after the war began. The uncle had moved to the Plateau region, and they had heard that he worked as a mechanic in a garage there. That piece of paper was all she had between her and the abyss. She found it in her father’s pocket after he and others were executed. She asked the trader, since he travelled around so much, if he might locate that uncle and see if they were blood relatives. It turned out that they were. She worked night and day, doing farm work near the camp and then one night, without telling the steward, she ran away. Her journey was mostly on foot, always hungry and always afraid. The uncle was stunned the day she walked into his garage to ask for help. He had a new wife and three children and it would not be easy to persuade his wife to have another mouth to feed. Nevertheless, they took her in. This the trader learnt months later, when he found her in dungarees, working as an assistant in that garage.

  Fearing that things were getting morose, the Englishman volunteered to tell a story. When he left university, full of countless plans, he decided to come here briefly, do some fieldwork and perhaps write a thesis on his findings. Instead, he had stayed almost eight years, travelled all over and had many adventures. He slept in the Sahara under the stars – ‘A star-spangled sky’ as he termed it. There, according to local tradition, he learnt how his future could be revealed. When he saw a shooting star, he was to take a pinch of sand before the star disappeared, then tie the sand in a rag and sleep on it. Whatever pattern the sand had formed during sleep was a symbol of his future fortune, except that he had completely forgotten what the various configurations stood for.

  Pointing to a long range of mountains in the distance, he told us then that he had lived with a tribe whose ancestors had settled there hundreds of years back. They knew nothing of life down below. They did not know who was in government or of the oil boom that had come and gone. If there was conflict, as there sometimes was, the elders in each family were called to settle it. They were completely self-sufficient. They grew corn in the little patches of field between the surrounding scarps and also built terraces for climbing vegetables. An unwieldy spreading shrub had been woven into a sort of rookery that not only protected them from the Sahara winds but was also a hatching ground for guinea fowl, bush fowl and once a year, a marvellous migration of lime-green butterflies.

  Hausa cavalry, as he then told us, had their annual tournaments up there in the centuries gone by. Those feasts lasted for days and he had found records of them in old almanacs. Meats, game, poultry, palm wines were served and flowers, such as marigolds, taken between courses to help the digestion. The chefs were from Arabia and the cuisine so exquisite that the outer skin and feathers of peacocks were removed before cooking, then meticulously restored, to give a lifelike appearance. Acclaimed minstrels and storytellers were despatched from beyond the Red Sea and one of the fabulists was renowned for being able to speak through the night, to send sleepers into a trance.

  Because of his having mastered the skills with the plough, the chief emir offered him the choice of one of his fourteen daughters in marriage. It so happened that he had never actually met any of the daughters or the wives. If he came on young girls in a group, sifting grain or cracking kola nuts to make butter, they hid their faces, went into peals of laughter and then clung to one another in mock terror, as if a pharaoh had come into their midst.

  ‘So you weren’t bewitched,’ the driver said.

  *

  No sooner were we out of one city than we came on yet another and another, each one smaller and swarming with life. People walking, people cycling and old people, gaunt and hungry, sitting on the steps of a plinth that had been erected to some forgotten hero. The stalls were of cardboard, canvas and bits of umbrellas, their entrances crammed with goods of every kind. On the street, stacks of tyres covered in shiny white plastic. Squeezed in between these stalls were places of worship, signs that read Jesus Lives or Christ Is Everywhere. On the opposite side, signs and scrolls to Allah, alongside big posters of politicians with immaculate white teeth and similar posters of beaming preachers and their wives.

  The road blocks got more rudimentary the further we went – barrels or sawn-off branches of trees just flung down. We came on a group of women who began to wave animatedly at us, as if we were old friends. The Englishman said it was a common sight, women taking it upon themselves to fill the potholes. They held up the stones as proof of their labour. They were laughing loudly. Some laughed so much I could see their teeth and the gaps between their teeth. In their eyes, curiosity and rampant hope. Who were we in this important car and where might we be going? They showed no resentment at the fact that we did not give them money, but were reinvigorated as they waved us on.

  At the next sentry post we were not so lucky. A sullen young man shone his torch inside the car, with evident disdain. He asked to see our papers. My mother’s hand was trembling as she hauled out a sheet, a handwritten inventory of her family going back many generations, the ink rusted with age. The sentry sneered and the driver reproved him for his insolence. Luckily the fracas ended with the driver, grudgingly, throwing a few naira onto the road and the car sped off.

  Mama whispered to me that she wanted to ease herself and I whispered back: could she wait a little longer. I felt awkward asking.

  ‘Look … look,’ the Englishman said, pointing to a field of sorghum, the leaves green and wavy in the breeze and women kneeling in the furrows, picking out the beans that were trained up along the stalks of corn. I saw what was like a patchwork of green needles in islets of water, but I did not know what they were. The Englishman said it was a rice paddy, which farmers had only just begun cultivating in the past couple of years. It meant two harvests and less hunger.

  Finally the driver pulled in by a petrol station and asked if the ladies might like the ‘facilities’. To one side there was a small structure and in black paint the word Mosque had been written, except that some letters were swallowed in the grains of cement. There were three kettles by the entrance, kettles without lids and of different colours. There was also an inked sign which read Male and Female and an arrow, which we followed. We could see a man in the male closet, his head
jutting above the side wall and he turned and scowled at us. The female closet had a door but it was locked. My mother was agitated. She asked me to keep watch for her. I could hear the quick splashes against a wall and immediately a colony of ants crawled out onto drier ground. My mother was calling me to help her.

  As we walked back towards the car, I saw a girl not much older than me sitting on a litter of rags, talking furiously to herself. She was muttering and arguing and she used the rags to hit out at flies and onlookers. I wanted to give her something from our bag, but my mother pulled me away, saying she was one of the mad creatures. By nightfall she would be brought to a police station for a few hours, then let loose again, or else some man would drag her into the bush.

  Just before it went pitch dark, on a lonely stretch of road, the Englishman asked the driver to ‘Stop, stop.’ It was very sudden. On the roadside, a little girl was holding a pan of oranges in one hand and in the other a boy, probably her brother. The Englishman got out and we could see him talking, then handing over some money, as she tumbled the oranges into a big kerchief. She kissed the ground after he got back into the car. With his penknife he began to peel the oranges. He was expert at it, so that the skin never broke. He had made entire twirls to mimic oranges. He halved them, took the pips out and divided them equally among us. It was such an unexpected moment of gaiety, us sucking and slurping, the juice dribbling down our chins, eating everything, including the white pith. There was general agreement that these were the sweetest oranges any of us had ever tasted.

  Further on we came on the burnt villages, trembling shells of blackness, the bamboo stalks, on which the huts had once stood, charred and buckled and weird black fungus sprouting everywhere. The saddest of all were the gaping window holes, where people had once looked out at the passing world.

  We were quiet for a time, each thinking our own thoughts and the car kept sliding in the potholes, loose stones flying up, as the driver suddenly decided to make up for lost time.

  A ringing phone made us all jump and the Englishman suddenly realised that he was reaching his destination. He spoke softly, but the people at the other end were talking excitedly, interrupting one another and asking how much longer he would be. Then, quite formally, he shook hands with Mama, myself and the old man and gave us some boiled sweets to share. The car came to a screeching halt by a ruin and his friends were already there and coming forward to greet him. They embraced and soon we saw them go up a steep hill, their shadows colliding into one another in the sporadic light from the several torches.

  We were sad to see him go.

  *

  Esau got out to sit in the front. Night was not far off. The trees looked darker and the spaces between them in purplish-black shadow. There was such bleakness and want and I thought of the shivering child selling the few oranges and kneeling on the ground in gratitude. No one on the roadside now, just one solitary figure walking towards the bush with a mattress over her head and a boy trying to round up a herd of white goats. I pictured Babby being handed over to me by the big-bosomed auntie, and the surprise running out of her eyes at seeing me again, but not kissing me, punishing me a little for having left her and finally, sucking on the collar of my blouse to claim me.

  *

  The mountain was at one with the sky, steaming with a black and violet vapour.

  ‘The old North is dead and the old venerations are gone,’ Esau said, his arm raised in homage as he spoke to it.

  It was the story of a boy and a bull.

  That boy was his grandfather, who had been specially selected and was made to train for three years. It was an ancient sacrifice that happened each year, to appease the god who slept in that mountain and was responsible for the harvests. If the god was left hungry, then the people would starve.

  On the appointed day, the bull’s feet were tied front and back and four youths took turns with the rope. The bull roared and rammed against man and rope. It did not want to go. It knew. It folded its legs going up that mountain and lay down, refusing to move.

  Crowds of men followed and larger crowds, also men, had gathered up there all night, chanting and praying for the bull’s plenitude. A fire had been going for twenty-four hours and the power of the blaze could be seen in neighbouring states all around.

  All his grandfather carried was a small knife with a bone handle that fitted exactly into the groove of his palm. He was both afraid and exhilarated, man and bull within inches of one another, able to smell each other’s fear. He knew, because he had been taught, that the first thrust was the defining one. Then the moment came. The crowd went suddenly silent. His grandfather, as he would later tell it, gripped the horn in one hand and with a skill he was not sure he had, plunged the knife straight into the main artery, so that blood came in one vast torrent and the bull roared its maddened lament. The god was appeased. All his grandfather could ever recall of that primal moment was blood everywhere and the howl from the bellies of the crowd. Others helped him to finish the bull off, but it fought and charged until there was no life left in it. Once the legs caved in and it lay helplessly, it was carted over and lifted onto the roaring fire, where juniper leaves had already been thrown. Every part of that bull got eaten, except for the entrails.

  Esau remembered the knife that took pride of place in his grandfather’s house and visitors always commented on the size of the blade, how small it was. He had been allowed to hold it over the years and often had gone in alone merely to touch it, to relive its history.

  ‘We are almost there, ladies,’ the driver said, turning. Esau had nodded off the moment he finished his story.

  *

  When we arrived at our own village there was not a single light. The driver helped us out and Mama apologised for the fact that we did not have a spare bedroom. He assured us that he and Esau would find a hotel on the way back.

  ‘Plenty of hotels,’ he said blithely, as if we had been driving through a succession of bustling cities. Then in confidence we learnt that whenever he could, he brought Esau along. Esau spent his life hanging around bus stations and taxi ranks, asking strangers if by any chance they had come across a partially blind and beautiful woman called Binta.

  ‘Hope is better than no hope,’ the driver said and Mama and he exchanged blessings.

  Our kitchen smelt sad. Even in the dark I could feel an atmosphere of disorder and neglect. Mama groped then found the matches and lit the kerosene lamp. In the guttering light, I saw two things, Yusuf’s blue shirt, the emblem of martyrdom, stretched along the wall, held down with brass tacks and a tall man emerging from the bedroom. I presumed it was my uncle. She had mentioned that he had come to our house after my father’s death but she had not told me he was living there. He wore a baseball cap back to front and had pulled on a jacket over his night attire. He saw me, but he did not greet me.

  ‘Did you eat anything?’ were Mama’s first words to him, but he did not answer.

  ‘Where is Babby?’ I asked looking around, because I had not heard a single murmur. Mama and he exchanged a look.

  ‘Babby is with Auntie,’ she told me.

  ‘When is she coming?’

  ‘Soon,’ Mama answered brusquely.

  She was fussing over my uncle, taking some eats from the gift basket we had been given, which she set down before him. There were bananas, little cucumbers and biscuits. Hardly had he sat down than he demanded salt.

  ‘How soon?’ I asked, determined not to be fobbed off. I could tell by their expressions, by their haltingness, that something was wrong.

  ‘Go to bed,’ my uncle shouted and so I went on down to my old room. I still had my little torch and saw that the room was a shrine of dust. Dust had adhered to every single surface. The scented sheet of paper was gone from the drawer and instead there were old clothes, rags and a pair of broken glasses that had been my father’s. If my father were there now, this would not be happening.

  I was crying when Mama came in.

  ‘We do not have the
power to change things,’ she said as she set down the lamp on the little table by the bed.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘Because we are women,’ she answered. She was vexed with me.

  She pretended to be too tired to discuss anything, undressed and got into bed face downwards. I stood over her. I had to know.

  ‘The stigma … the stigma,’ she finally said. I could tell it was a word she had picked up from him.

  ‘What stigma?’

  ‘Bad blood,’ she said and I saw everything then, as an approaching nightmare.

  ‘She’s a child,’ I said.

  ‘She won’t always be a child … she’s tainted … she’ll grow up to be one of them.’

  I could not believe her words. I knelt by the bed and still she would not answer.

  ‘What are they going to do to her?’ I asked. I tilted her face and saw that her eyes were sick with terror.

  ‘I have to know.’ I was screaming it, I was berserk.

  ‘He’ll take the stick to you, Maryam … he’ll take the stick to you,’ she warned.

  She managed to blow out the lamp and begged me not to incite trouble, not then. Maybe he had taken the stick to her too.

  We lay there in darkness and confusion.

  ‘What will happen?’ I ask. All I need is a crumb of hope. She cannot give it.

  ‘Only God knows the answer to that,’ she said.

  THE WELCOME HOME PARTY a week later was a fiasco. We had been loaned a barbecue. The air was thick with the smell of spices and the fat was sputtering everywhere.

  Mama had already told me that Auntie was not coming, as Babby was chesty and they did not want to expose her to unnecessary infections. I both did and did not believe it. Even as they arrived, these cousins and neighbours, I felt a freak. I could read their minds, by their false smiles and their false gush. I could feel their hesitation and worse, their contempt. I knew they were thinking, Jihadi wife, with the Sambisa filth still clinging to her. Mama said that I was to sit with them and to thank everyone for coming. The smell from the roast made them holler their hunger, even though the smoke hurt their eyes. I was trying to remember each person’s name. Obie, an old woman whom I used to gather firewood for, came and mashed my hand. I remembered how she used to read our futures in tea leaves. She was on the verge of tears. She knew what had happened, just as she knew things were not right between me and my family.