Hardly anyone now came to see her, she whose house had always been host to weddings and parties, endless lunches and dinners.
My mother held a picture of her father to her face and cried bitterly.
I went to hold her, but there was nothing I could do to comfort.
I remembered what my father had once told me:
It is the king alone who dreams dreams.
My grandfather had chosen all forty-three of his wives of royal blood.
It was their bloodlines that gave their children the authority to represent towns and villages on the state council and tribunal.
It was the education their father sent them far and wide for that gave them mandate.
He knew that not only he, but also his children, would have to master the old ways alongside the new, yet in that short space between death and entry into Asamandeefoo, the land of the ancestors, fate had usurped his plans, and it was as if it was up to us – all of us – to realign them.
My mother felt that she had failed not only him, but the markings of her birth.
In every generation of our family, there was always one anointed to knowledge from the earliest stages, to see what others could not: an Akwadaa Nyame, a god child, one who could hear the universe’s whisperings more clearly than the noise of the world around them. She or he travelled the ages, making right at each turn, the things that had formerly gone wrong.
Kojo and I wanted to bring The Book of Histories into reality through our retelling, to create structures to support its meaning; until its truth filled the place of all memory.
The libraries that Kojo had talked of were filled with our external stories of wars and victories and defeats and ancestral stools, but before these were our internal stories of becoming, and it was these we had to master before all else.
My mother asked to hear something of what I was writing.
‘Really?’ I said.
She nodded.
‘I have something. It’s called “Pièces d’Identités”:
‘So many of us were sent. Sons and daughters,
grandsons and daughters of kings and presidents,
bank owners and freedom fighters.
Within the confines of England’s finest and grandest
boarding-school institutions.
They herded us.
English Africa’s noble future.
With a pat on the head and a whisper of our intended paths,
They left us. Alone.
The most robust of us fulfilled our obligations, returned home
as lawyers, doctors and bankers. Ready to rule.
With our Queen’s English and our Bond Street tailored shirts.
So well equipped.
We who were trained as monkeys
to teach the way to civilisation. Follow suit.
A few of us tried our best to be strong,
to follow the path set out for us,
to become what they wanted us to be.
So hard that our softness cracked
at the effort, and we were left
floundering like fish out of water.
We are now lost in the big cities of Europe and America.
Great children of great leaders,
who have lost their way home.
And finally , there are those of us who could see clearly
the lie that they were selling as truth.
Could not blind ourselves to the pain of separation.
Separation from our utmost selves.
We locked what we could away. Built shells, barriers, fortresses. Closed the door and locked it tight.
On the outside we learnt their ways. Talked the talk.
But refused to walk the walk of life they had set us.
We cannot.
Pieces of identity.
Kept hidden away.
Safe.
From all you
parents, teachers, educators.
Friends.
We thank you not for your guidance.
We thank you not for forcing us to live out your dreams.
Not for your selfish blindness to your children’s needs.
We do thank you as we pick up the pieces.
Reshuffle, keep and throw away.
And for setting us on this path of the cycle of freedom.’
‘It’s about you,’ she said. ‘I’m so happy nothing happened to you, that you did so well, that you didn’t turn to boys, or smoking weed when we left you alone. You did well.’
I had not thought she had noticed.
When she brought me back to the airport, she said, ‘I’ll be alone again now.’
‘Not for long,’ I told her.
The text came a week later.
It was from Saba. Mummy is very sick, it said.
There was no finality in the message.
Neither she nor my mother picked up the phone.
A call came hours later.
She had had a severe stroke and was unconscious.
I lost my ability to breathe.
Zinaida shouted at me, ‘Breathe, breathe. You’re hyperventilating. You are scaring me.’
I brought back my breath, because I did not want to scare her.
I booked a flight to Accra.
As I was landing, President Obama was leaving.
We were held in the air for two hours. I arrived too late to see her in the Intensive Care Unit.
She still had not woken up, but I knew that, now I was there, she would.
I went to the hospital at six the next morning. There were tubes coming out of her nose and IV needles plastered over the veins of her hands.
‘Wake up, Mummy, I’m here now. Wake up. Wake up, Mummy.’ I put my mouth to her ear and promised that I would not leave her again, and that everything would be all right now.
She did not stir.
The nurses told me to stop crying.
My mother, smelling of hospital creams and shiny with Vaseline, moved her arm to remove the tube coming out of her nose, tried to speak, then was immobile. There was an almost imperceptible tremor in her head.
I put my hand on her head to calm the shaking.
My mother collapsed at her brother Guggisberg’s wake; her brother who, like her, loved society more than anything else. Who, like her, loved to laugh and entertain and feed.
She always boasted to me that she had no friends, because the Agyatas were only friends to each other.
She woke up once more. Her nephews and nieces and brothers and sisters sitting on the bed around her.
‘I am so glad you are all here,’ she said. Then, ‘You all love me, after all.’
The doctor looked into her eyes with a torch. ‘Her pupils are not reacting,’ he said. ‘It’s not good.
’The life-support machines in the hospital were all taken. The doctor called all the hospitals in Accra to find one. He tried to steer me towards the consultation room. ‘Sit down,’ he said.
I shook my head. I could not stay away from her side. She needed my strength.
The doctor said to my cousin: ‘There is nothing you can do here. Go home.’
At home, I looked for clues on the Internet, as I had all along. First, subarachnoid haemorrhage, Glasgow Coma Scale, hydrocephalus, extraventricular drain, now fixed pupils.
I could see, but not feel; everything in me was contracted. I lay on the bed, closed my eyes and focused health into my mother’s heart, into her mind, into every cell of her body, dreaming her well.
When he called us back into the hospital, my tears came before he opened his mouth. ‘The brain is dead,’ he said. ‘It is your choice, whether you want to keep her on life support.’
‘We only know five to ten per cent of the brain’s functions,’ I said. ‘It is still possible she will come back.’ I quoted my Internet findings. ‘People have been known to come back from brain death. There was a woman whose breathing tube they had removed, a boy who woke up just as they were about to disconnect his life-support machine.’
‘Not in this case, Maya,’ the doctor said. ‘In those cases, the brain was frozen.’
I knew what he said was not true. The woman had had a cerebral haemorrhage. The boy was in a car accident. Their brains were not frozen. In this case, I answered him silently.
The image of her body lying under the frayed thin sky-blue sheet bearing the faded stamp of an East German hospital.
Of her breath leaving that body.
Of the male nurse pumping life in and out of her lungs from a picture-book sun-yellow hand-held oxygen pump, because there were no life-support machines available in all of Accra.
Of the question: Shall we stop? How could we say yes? How could we deny life to the woman who embodied life and all it meant, all that it stood for, even at the expense of a young man’s persistent, futile effort?
A memory of running through the hail beneath my mother’s pea-green silk raincoat, of feeling safe despite the empty streets and the hard, unforgiving rain.
A memory of eternal protection.
Memories of piano lessons, tennis lessons, swimming lessons; of watching Doris Day, Sophia Loren and Elvis Presley; of lying in the bath with her as she told me stories; of standing on the toilet lid as she slathered me with cream; of her powdery perfumy smell; of the snippets of the bouffant wig I took to bed with me at night when she was not there; of lying on the bed watching her in the dressing mirror.
My mother is the most beautiful woman in the world and I am her daughter.
PART FIVE
23
There was our country, ringed by mountains and topped by mist, through which a river, dry in the middle months, wound its way.
Now the absence of her permeates that country’s air, and the future is a place in which you can receive a text that changes your definition forever.
Before, the truth was instinctive. Then, all the trust of things being as they should be went away and there was no more knowing.
Only the visceral understanding of the suffering and unreliability and ephemerality of all things, including the ones we love; of the spectre of death there, always, constant, as true as life, maybe even more so.
Instead of inherent order, there is chaos and the mistrust of it, and I think that it is her that I am missing, but I know it was there, hedging, even before she left.
I am tempted to pick up the phone and call a man, who loved me as a boy, whom I reconnected with, but the love we have now is not the one we had before.
Connecting as adults does not reconstitute connecting as teenagers; fresh, untainted, open, and even then it was not what it was.
When he called me again after all those years, just as I was readying myself for the kind of love that he was open to then and I was not, I thought perhaps that it was life making patterns in the snow.
But he is not the same and neither am I. I wonder if all the people we hurt change in the same way or if we all change differently.
Life is not making the patterns I want it to make, but its own.
When I reach for the phone, it is not him as he is now that I am wanting to call, but the spirit of love, complete and answering, and I no longer know if it exists.
I am in Norway as I write this, where you have to seek out alcohol in special shops, and I am a little drunk. I bought some wine, which is very expensive here.
It is strange to be in a place where I do not speak the language. I must have mastered the gestures of understanding, though, because in the shops, at the tills and counters, they assume I speak Norwegian and are surprised, annoyed almost, when finally I confess I do not. What am I shut out of, not knowing the codes and rhythms and nuances by which these people understand each other and themselves?
I have never been to Norway before and my impressions are of the empty streets of this large town, the shut doors and windows, the doll-perfect pastel-painted frames, the whitewashed wooden houses, with bursts of red and yellow roses, the muggy muteness, the nothingness of it all. It is indecipherable to me at first until I begin to see in these impressions Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, Knut Hamsun’s book Hunger, Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream.
Books, art and films, as always, are beginning to do their work on me, forming a bridge of understanding – even if not of things the way they really are, at least closer.
A man keeps sending me pictures of himself or, rather, he has done so twice.
He is a man in Senegal and I wonder why he is doing this.
I look at the emails telling me how ‘they’ miss me in Senegal, and at the pictures, and even though they are of a handsome man I feel nothing and have no urge to reply.
I do not remember that, only two months ago, I was taken by a passion so deep for this man that I spent days and nights imagining our life together, with an obstinacy matched only by the instinctual knowledge that it would not work out.
What is this emotional amnesia? This ability to forget people so completely once I have left them? Will it always be this way? Even when I have children?
Will I leave to go somewhere and write for a few months, as I am doing now in the bus, past the tree-stepped sun-hallowed mountains and fjords, the grassy roofs of multicoloured slatted wooden houses in south-western Norway, and when the telephone rings, and someone – their father, maybe, or nanny – says to me on the other end, ‘Your children want to speak to you,’ will I be jolted? Will I think, children?
Will I struggle to draw their blurry faces into something tangible? Will I wonder in the brief moment that it takes them to reach the phone what resonance their voices will have in me? Will I be that kind of mother?
These recurrent memories of the future can be just as real as those of the past.
And yet, her voice.
There is something of its essence that remains.
In my heart, I feel the timbre of her laugh, the back notes of it, like a formless echo.
I struggle to remember the things she said to me, and how.
How it felt when she put her hands into my hair and I drew away, annoyed.
What it was like to lie on her breast and have her heartbeat deep in my ear, almost in my throat.
The author Paul Auster, writing of the loss of his father, quotes the poet Wallace Stevens: ‘in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination’.
Our bus waits in line to get on to the ferry and cross the fjord. Next to us, a swarm of cyclists in tight shiny shorts and tops, mostly men. I look at their legs and backsides and cannot decide if the body is beautiful or ugly.
Does anyone ever leave a shore by boat and not think of death? Or is it only those of us for whom the door has been opened?And yet, even amidst its presence, it is hard to fathom that these lakes, this patch of sunlit mountain, will continue to exist when this body does not.
Would I have lived differently if I had carried this awareness from birth? Will I live differently now?
24
One night, not long after his death, I saw Kojo looking down on me from the mezzanine in my mother’s house.
My mother told me that I should pray, protect myself.
‘Why should I be afraid?’ I asked.
She did not say.
I was afraid, of the unknown force which had killed him, and which accompanied me on the plane as I flew home, and which eased as I headed to our corner of Ladbroke Grove, which was no longer what it was before.
All our friends were moving piecemeal to East London, where large, high-ceilinged warehouse spaces were still cheap enough to allow us to live off temp jobs and short-term grants.
After months, I too got a grant, for research on Gyata’s looted, stolen, sold objects, and moved to a two-bedroom apartment near Old Street.
Ben, one of a group of misfit friends who wore their privilege and dysfunction on their skins like beautiful armour, was twenty years older than me and young and playful in the way only those free of obligation could be.
He took me to smart restaurants, art-show o
penings, houses in the countryside, insisting that I held his hand, which I refused, having heard that I was not the only girl he was squiring around.
He sat outside in his black Mercedes below a sign that said ‘No Waiting’.
I looked at the softness of his hair, his eyes, his face, the openness for which it would be so easy to fall, and braced myself.
‘We’ll pick up a friend of mine on the way,’ he said.
‘What kind of friend?’
‘She’s called Bernie. She’s one of the Randolphs. I’ve known her for years.’
I had already heard from our friend Tatyana she was the other girl he was seeing. I looked over at him, his face a picture of easy unconcern.
‘She’s not as beautiful as the rest of you girls, so she gets left out,’ he said, feigning charity; he was stopping outside Tatyana’s house, an old converted working man’s club off the Harrow Road.
Bernie came out with a smile that dropped when she saw me. As we drove off, I looked at her in the rear-view mirror. She was sturdy, her hair dishevelled, and her cheeks flushed. She was biting her nails now and, despite my rising irritation, I felt protective of her. I had known she was young, but the stories of her fixation with Ben had led me to think she was sophisticated.
I turned to face her. ‘Have you met any of these people before?’
Bernie shook her head and looked out of the window.
‘I’m intrigued,’ I said and turned back round.
When we got to the restaurant, I flirted with the host, who sat next to me, to distract myself from the discomfort. He was a film producer, an old man surrounded by young; he wore an open shirt and a mischievous look. He was telling me about the last film he produced, an enormous hit, he said.
‘How lovely for you.’
He raised his eyebrows, not used to being unimpressive. He leant over and pointed to the brown-haired woman on my left. She was the real-life princess of a European country, he told me. She even had ‘Princess’ written in her passport.
‘Really? As in her first name?’
He laughed. ‘You are silly.’
I could feel Ben looking at me from across the table. I looked down the end at Bernie watching him. I could see from her eyes that he was everything she wanted, and envied her the solidity of wanting something so tangible, so reachable. She was red in the face and her blue eyes seemed ready to wash out.
The God Child Page 15