‘No, you look like greasy chips.’ He lit the cigarette, then gave it to me.
I sucked the smoke into my mouth, blew out quickly and smiled. I did not feel like smiling. I was afraid. ‘All those stories you tell,’ I said, ‘they’re not true, are they?’
He looked at me for so long it seemed he had gone to sleep behind his eyes. ‘Our language hides,’ he said finally, ‘in the dance, the drums, in cloth.’ He sat back, even though the car was filling up with smoke and hail was beating down on its roof.
I watched his serious face behind his new, wet glasses. He looked like Clark Kent, and with him I never had to pretend that I did not know as much as I did. At night I dreamt that he was Superman, but now the dampness from outside was creeping in or perhaps it was the other way round.
‘I grew up standing behind the Divine Drummer, Odumonkomakyerema Kwasi Pipim, watching him beat out the history of our state on the drums.’
He spoke quietly, so that I had to lean forward to hear him under the noise of the hail.
‘Kwasi Pipim’s eyes,’ he said, ‘were as hooded as the sticks he held to beat the drums, his skin was as black as the tar used to paint them, his hands were as leathery as the elephant ears that covered the drums’ heads, his veins stood out as tight as the intestines that bound them. The drums and their truths entered him and made him theirs so completely that he had become one with them.
‘I learnt from him to beat the atumpan drums, whose notes are so like our Akan words. I learnt from him to strike the fontomfroms that were taller than me when I began. I learnt from him to scratch the surface of the etwie, its notes so like the growl of the leopard that gave the drum its skin. We all learnt from him, but not all of us were told the secrets of the drums. Only those who were born to the right of knowledge were told the meanings behind the tones, and those who persisted.
‘Listen.’ He began drumming on the dashboard with his fingers. ‘You will hear the drum orchestras and you will hear only noise that clashes and makes more noise, but if you listen, then it will hold you still in its middle. You will hear only beats, but I will tell you their meaning.’ He spoke in time with the beats:
‘Okwan atware asuo
Asuo atware okwan
Opanin ne hwan?
Yeboo kwan no kotoo asuo no.
Asuo no firi tete.
Asuo no firi Odomonkoma oboadeɛ.
‘The path crosses the river
The river crosses the path
Which of them came first?
We made the path and found the river.
The river came from long, long ago.
The river came from eternity.’
He told me it spoke of our constant striving towards knowledge, of our ignorance in the face of death.
‘Then the drummer gives thanks, to the spirit of the tree that he fells for the drum, to the earth that gives birth to it, and in the language of the drums you will also hear the languages of these things, of the trees, the earth, but you must listen, and you will hear all this and then you will know.’
I looked at him and nodded. It was this knowledge that gave him the power to upset the order of things. Could I learn these secrets and codes, even though I did not grow in our country? Could I tell them with the same conviction, so that I too would be believed? An image came of Brigitte Bardot, of her mastery of forms, of looks, of gestures. If I could learn one, as well as the other, I too would be known and could keep what was most sacred hidden away until it was safe to be revealed.
‘There is a book,’ Kojo said.
‘A book?’
‘Our grandfather knew there would come a time when all our secrets would be forgotten. When the young would no longer want to learn from the old. He was a member of a society of elders from across the world. In the same way he turned into a cat, he took on this cloak. He learnt from them, how to guard the most sacred wisdoms so that one would only have to look at them for power to be restored. He tried to teach this to them, our fathers and mothers, how to cross over from one world to another, and take the best from both. He sent them to the best schools and universities, trained them in the old ways and the new, but they were too soft. No one could hold the balance like he did, and when he died, it all fell apart. He asked my father to write the book, that holds the secrets of our kingdom.’
‘Out in the open? After all this time?’
‘Coded, still.’
‘Where is it?’
‘That is why I am telling you. Each of them, the elders, placed a book into a library—’
‘A library? Where?’
‘In America.’
‘America?’ I crossed my arms and looked out of the window. I had believed him, until then.
‘Why not America? Should it be Russia with its weeping sisters?’
‘At least Russia has depth and melancholy and poetry and soul. America has fat people and too much food.’
‘Ha, what about Michael Jackson and Apollo 16? You think Russia is better, just because its people suffer? They suffer in America too.’
‘Only in a Beach Boys kind of way, not truthfully.’
‘Who says people have to suffer for there to be truth? We would be the most truthful people in the world if they did.’
‘But we are. You know we are.’
He looked away.
‘I just can’t believe this library is there. And if it is, then just because it has to be the biggest and the best. Because all that information is a form of control, not because of any ideal symmetry.’
‘Who said anything about ideal symmetry?’ He crossed his arms now too. ‘So you won’t help me?’
‘I will…’
‘You have to do it with your entire spirit, with everything you have, otherwise nothing at all.’
‘I do. I will.’
‘My father made a copy of the book for our people. It is time now. I am telling you this because you were born to this knowledge. You asked if what I said was true… When I say “I” on the drums, it is not just I, Kojo, but also my father, my grandfather, the sunsum in us all. Our stories are not like your book stories that do not change whether they are true or not. Ours are born again with each telling and, if they were not true, they become true, and if they were true they might change.’
I looked at him and wanted to ask how this change had been written into the book, but instead asked, ‘Who are we, Kojo, and who are you?’
He smiled. ‘You, oburoni.’
I squeezed his arm hard. ‘I am not oburoni.’
‘Aich.’ He unhooked my hand, rubbed his arm. ‘You do not understand what I am talking about, and neither do they, but they will.’
I looked out of the window. I wanted to tell him that I did understand, that I had felt, as far back as I could remember, that something had been lost to us, that I had been called upon to bring it back, and that since he had arrived, that call, in all its silence, had become clearer; but it had grown dark.
8
‘What in God’s name do you think you’ve been doing, heh?’ My mother was shouting even before she saw us. ‘We were calling the police—’
‘You think this is funny?’ The anger in my father’s voice was coming out to break. ‘You shut that big mouth of yours when your mother is speaking to you.’
‘I didn’t say anything,’ Kojo said, before I could stop him.
My father took him by the ear. ‘I am damn tired of your damn stupid wickedness.’ He was kicking off his leather brown sandal. ‘You with your fresh mouth. You damn fool. Who taught you to talk back at me?’
Upstairs, I closed my eyes and put my head in my mother’s lap.
‘He has to be disciplined or there will be trouble for him later.’ She stroked my head.
I hit her hand away. I wanted to hide in her, not for her to touch me.
I heard Kojo come up the stairs. I got up and went to my room. It was already past our bedtime. I turned out my light and put on the torch underneath the covers. I opened The Three Sisters and read unti
l I forgot about the smoke and hail and darkness and my father’s slipper. My eyes began to hurt and I closed them, almost forgetting to go and see Kojo. I forced them open and went into his room.
He was banging his head, face down on the pillow, with a force that frightened me.
‘Kojo.’ I went to him. ‘Kojo.’
His eyes were closed. He was asleep.
‘Kojo!’ I was shaking him now. ‘Wake up, Kojo, wake up!’ I shouted in his ear.
My parents were at the door.
‘Oh yei,’ my father said.
My mother put her hand on the back of his head. ‘Shh,’ she was saying. ‘Shh.’
Kojo opened his sleepy eyes. ‘Heh?’ He looked up at us.
‘You must learn to sleep quietly,’ my father was saying. ‘Turn around and lie on your back.’
Kojo turned heavily and fell back asleep.
We all three stood and looked down at him.
‘Why does he do that?’ I asked.
He looked strange now without his glasses.
‘He is hyperactive,’ my father said. ‘If he does not calm down now, he will begin to work against himself.’
I put my hand in my father’s hand and watched as my mother laid the fallen covers back on to Kojo and stroked his forehead to calm him down.
We were still under punishment rules, forbidden from going to the Amankwahs’ party, though we knew that Uncle Guggisberg would be there, who, Kojo said, knew more than anyone else of our story.
Kojo was in my room now, picking up the books from my bedside table, telling me to ask.
‘Why me?’ I took the books away from him, one by one, and put them in a pile on the floor.
‘Because they will say yes if you ask. You always know how to behave. And you look sweet. Go on. Ask them.’ He sat by the pile, opening the books, as if to read.
I stood up to get away from the shouting feeling that was coming up in me, telling me to rip them out of his hands and bury them in the garden where they would lose none of their power, and I knew he would be hurt. I stood in front of the mirror and thought of Auntie Amankwah’s son Anthony, of the pictures of him on her living-room walls, wearing the red and white colours of the national team, the only dark face in a uniform of pale; his football trophies, dwarfing the plates and glasses in the glass cabinets, standing guard over the television; proof of his having conquered this world, of the widening of possibility, so that when he sat me down on his lap, at one of Auntie Amankwah’s parties, and told me he would marry me when I was grown, I knew that there was now at least one certainty. I pushed my lips out into a pout: tu les trouves jolies mes fesses? Over my shoulder I could see Kojo, bending my book the wrong way round. ‘OK, I’ll ask.’ I snatched it from him, and took at least this one downstairs.
My father was in the sitting room. He had the thin multicoloured rods with elastic bands around them in his hair that would give him Michael Jacksonesque Jheri curls. He was watching a tape-recorded episode of Dynasty and his concentration on the television was absolute.
I waited, thinking that if my father were Blake Carrington, paterfamilias, and my mother were Alexis Colby, in all her powerful and glamorous capriciousness, then who was Crystal, the soothing calming white-fox-haired presence in my father’s life?
There was black and white static on the screen. He had the remote already in hand. Now there were the opening credits of Dallas. I would not be able to get him away from Bobby Ewing.
‘Daddy,’ I said quickly.
He was looking for the play button.
‘Daddy, don’t you think it would be better if we all went tonight? Together? I mean, as a family? We are Kojo’s family now, and he ours, and everyone there will be with their children, and they will ask and ask, where are the children, and how we are, and what would you say to explain? Wouldn’t it be much easier if we all just went?’
He had found the play button and his finger was hovering over it. He was still looking at the screen. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right,’ he said.
I jumped up and ran before he would have the chance to think.
As my father reversed out of the drive, he looked back and reversed a little, looked back and reversed a little, stopping and starting, until Kojo and I could no longer keep our laughter silent.
‘Errgh,’ he said, waving his hand in annoyance, ‘stop that.’ He turned left onto the main road, passing the wheel through both hands.
At the petrol station, Kojo and I opened our doors, and took in large inhalations of the petrol fumes, which smelt like comfort and new car seats. On the motorway, we guessed the models of BMWs, Mercedes, VWs rushing past, speed unlimited, and discussed the merits of engine strengths and lightness of carriage. Each time a Porsche went by, Kojo pointed and said, ‘That’s my car.’ My mother and he talked of the villas and cars we would one day have. I watched them and thought how there was no badness in Kojo. How he did not sulk as I would have after what had happened. How he did not look at the world as if people were miniature soldiers on a battlefield. I listened to them talk and dream and laugh, and wanted to reach over and touch them, but I was strapped into the back seat and it was too far. My father looked cautiously into his rear-view mirror and once in a while crept past another car.
We drove into Bonn Bad Godesberg into the Villenviertel, past the large houses of diplomats and government officials, to the apartment of Auntie Amankwah. I was not sure if she was my real auntie, distant family or a friend of my mother’s, but whenever they, like the rest of my mother’s relatives, came together, they laughed and spoke louder and drank and ate more than I imagined possible.
My mother started laugh-shouting as soon as she went in. Kojo too disappeared. I stayed next to my father as he shook hands and had quiet conversations.
There was a long table with red jollof rice and beef, green kontomire stew and yam, fufu in palm-nut soup, fried chicken, bofrot doughnuts, salads slathered in white salad sauce, and every kind of alcohol imaginable. My father and I went to sit down on the sofa, watching the loudness of the room.
There was Uncle Guggisberg, with the curious down-set of the mouth so many of my mother’s family seemed to have, marking him out, just how English aristocrats bore the stamp of perennially expensive, clean-smelling hair that told stories of winters in Gstaad, summers in Mustique, and autumns hunting, despite the holes in their cashmere jumpers. When he looked our way, I smiled.
He frowned and came to sit next to my father. ‘When are you going home, Kwabena?’ Uncle Guggisberg shouted. He was already drunk and everybody else was shouting with him.
‘Errgh,’ my father said. We had been planning on it before the coup, had sent the car and other things, but now we were waiting.
‘What are you waiting for?’
‘Lass mich in ruhe,’ my father said, ‘and you, what are you waiting for?’
Uncle Guggisberg waved his glass now so that whisky splashed out over the sides. ‘For our time to come. Were we not the ones educated for the purpose of leading our country to prosperity…? And they hold our privilege against us as if it were a badge of dishonour.’ He spoke with a sonorous English accent and spat out on the plosives, so that my father sat further and further back.
‘Look,’ my father said, ‘you had your chance with your Oxford English and all your book learning. Nkrumah won because he spoke to farmers and market women in their language, not because you were cheated out of your rightful place. You are not born to some spurious right, just because you are royal, or part of some bogus educated elite. Nobody’s time will come until they learn to find balms for each man and woman in the country.’
Uncle Guggisberg leant into my father’s face, spitting as he spoke. ‘You have always been bitter, Kwabena. If you yourself were not part of this bogus elite, you would never have been allowed to marry my sister.’
And just then we heard her. I wondered how it was we could have shut her out. She was sitting on the sofa, talking loudly, drinking a very full glass of whisky
quickly, throwing her head back skywards, laughing with her mouth wide open. One of the doctors pulled her to her feet now and she began to dance. The room parted for her, cheering her as if she were walking towards an award. She had the corners of her mouth turned downwards in her family’s expression of complete self-regard. She moved her hips from side to side as she moved forward. They were making a circle around her now, holding two fingers above her head in praise. The man who had pulled her to her feet came to dance with her and they descended in small hip movements towards the floor and up again.
I looked at my father. He looked unhappy and uncomfortable. The blood rose to the surface of my skin and I wished that not everyone was looking at her, that she did not always have to be the loudest, most beautiful, the sun around which we all orbited. That we did not have to flatten ourselves into her shadows to exist. And that once, just for once, she would be quiet.
Then the attention of the room shifted elsewhere. Anthony had come in. The presence of the man who had told me he would one day marry me as I sat in a dress my mother had chosen for me, sharing in my father’s discomfort, was not then a welcome one. I watched him shaking everyone’s hand, smiling, presidential, nearing me. My turn came. I tried to smile back at him, through the heat in my face, to appear more grown up than the child I was, wanted to shake back my hair and pout. He turned and loud-whispered to the handsome Italian-looking friend with greased-back hair that he had come in with. ‘Pretty, isn’t she?’
The friend nodded slowly, then said, ‘But she knows it.’
They moved on, leaving me confused and wondering, for many years more, what he meant by what I knew. Whether it was that I knew that Anthony thought I was pretty, or that I knew that I was pretty. He had said it like a reprimand. Why did they tell me if I was not to know? Should I shrug with the same mock modesty with which I had shrugged at the man in the department store? Was it true what my father said? Would I have to walk through life, feigning ignorance and modesty, making myself smaller to make men shine, flattening myself against walls and smiling abashed when they told me I was pretty, as if I had not heard it a hundred times before? Would I have to pretend each time that it meant more than that I conformed to somebody’s standard of beauty somewhere, when inside it made no difference at all?
The God Child Page 4