Ancestor Stones

by Aminatta Forna

  Of course they all thought it was her. My mother — come back for revenge. Whatever else they did or did not believe, there was not a soul in the village who dared defy a ghost. And Pa Yamba made an offering to try to appease her. I laughed inside, especially when Ya Isatta began to tell me how much like my mother I was, trying to flatter me. I just bowed my head modestly and thanked her, never looking at her directly. But I could feel the big yell growing in my chest, bursting to come out. How I wanted to throw back my head and open my mouth wide and shout at her, shout at them all and tell them it was me. It was me. It was me who let the fish out.

  But I knew better than that. Life hadn’t been fair to me. I kept quiet. And that day I learned how to turn my luck around.

  5

  Serah, 1950

  Woman Palava

  My mother? I haven’t thought about her in a long time.

  My mother left.

  Tried to alter her destiny. Looking back it was a brave thing to do, I suppose. Foolish, maybe. I don’t know. Who did she think she was?

  She was Saffie. The tenth wife. Imagine it.

  A tenth wife has no status. Not much better than a servant. But sometimes it is the lowliest people who have the most courage — because they’re the ones with the least to lose.

  There are things I remember. I don’t know if any of it makes sense. Some questions were never answered. And there were other things I made myself forget.

  Well, let me see. Where do you want me to start?

  My mother used to tell me how she first met Ya Namina. My mother was a young girl standing at the side of the path when Ya Namina and her entourage passed by on their way back to Rofathane. She had been at court with her husband and was returning without him. My mother was carrying a pot of water and she stepped off the side of the road to allow this woman past. Whoever she was, my mother could see she was important. Everybody around her was laden while she walked ahead unburdened.

  Ya Namina had journeyed for many miles. She beckoned the child with the water pot over. My mother lowered the heavy pot from her head, filled a cup of water and held it out to the older woman, bowing as low as she could. Bent over double like that she noticed the woman’s feet: long toes, and toenails that curved at the ends and pointed downwards. Ten toes pointing at the ground.

  As my mother stretched out her hand for the empty cup, the woman touched her chin, tilting her face upwards. She asked her name and what family she belonged to. That was it. Where it all began. How she became my father’s next wife.

  Three years later she saw the moon. Two years after that she was taken to her husband’s room. Ya Isatta performed the obligations on behalf of Ya Namina, bathing her, rubbing her limbs with oil and perfume, carrying her into the room. That night my father sat on a cushion on the tapestries on the floor, counting silver coins, stringing them, through the hole in the middle of each one, into great ropes of money. My mother perched on the edge of the fourposter bed, a bed as big as a boat, and watched him until she became drowsy and fell over backwards. In the morning she woke up alone.

  The next night he brought out a board hollowed out in twelve places, six on each side, and numerous small, silver beans. He beckoned her to sit opposite him, took a handful of the beans in one hand and allowed four to drop into each hollow. Afterwards he gathered up the contents of one and began to count them out. One, two, three, four. All this was done in silence. My mother gazed at him. He jabbed his forefinger at the board. She dropped her eyes. He never spoke.

  Later he stood up, placed a round felt hat upon his head and left the room. My mother was a virgin. But she had been initiated and she was a married woman. She knew enough to know this was not the way it was supposed to be, though she let on to nobody. Not even Ya Isatta who called her to one side the next morning with a crafty look on her face. That was how they often spent their nights together. Playing warri. She became very good at it.

  Of course, these were things I found out later. Ya Memso was prone to those sorts of indiscretions.

  It wasn’t as though nothing ever happened. My mother gave birth to me and then to my brother. But, warn? Warri is a fine game. But when was a board game ever enough for a woman?

  All this was many years ago, around the time people began to build square houses. All my father’s wives lived in round houses. My father’s house was square, it’s true — it was so large. In every other respect, though, his house was built in the old way, without bricks or cement and with a thatch roof.

  All the time I was growing up, corners and angles gradually replaced curves and arcs. Some people warned it was inviting trouble in through the door, making hiding places for every kind of spirit in search of a warm, dark place to nestle. The women complained the new-shaped houses were dirt traps, a nuisance to sweep, with corners full of dust and spiders’ webs.

  Back then my father began to draw up plans for a new house. A house with more rooms for visitors, for relatives, for new wives maybe and new children. A house with a roof of corrugated iron.

  I was one of the last. The oldest children had grown up and left home. The first coffee trees had overreached their prime. New seedlings were planted every year and every year extra labourers brought in to tend the bushes. At harvest everyone, wives and children included, had to pick alongside the men in the fields. And afterwards we helped to husk the sun-baked beans, pulling away the tacky pulp with deft, skinny fingers. Raking the pale green beans out in circles on the ground, so many moons fallen from the sky.

  My father was a wealthy man. No doubt about it. But everywhere glittering riches were being dug out of the earth. In the next door chieftaincy gold had been found on one family’s land. Now the men were marrying wives from the ruling families, building houses, acquiring followers.

  I remember where it all started:

  A dry, cool morning, I watch the horizon fade, swept over by the red dust of the harmattan like a line drawn in the sand erased by the tide.

  In front of us men shovel piles of sand. Others walk to and fro, toting great blocks of baked clay. They come from the village, the village given to my father a long time back. Some of them are the same ones who work in the plantation. Others I have never seen before. In the morning they arrive and depart by nightfall. Every day for weeks now my brother and I have left our house to take up our place opposite the site. Yaya is fascinated.

  The walls of the house climb as each row of bricks is cemented into place. The new house is being built next door to the old one, and it is exactly the same shape, but all the dimensions are so much bigger. Right in the middle of the dry season storm clouds sailed over the village and unleashed a storm. Magnificent rumbles straight from Pa Yamba’s magic box. Spears of rain tearing into the new walls of the house, washing away the foundations. Yesterday our father himself appeared to say the men must work every day now until the house is complete. I heard the foreman try to tell him the men needed one day off to work in their own fields. My father’s face looked as though it had just been caressed by a freezing hand. A rigidness around the upper lip, a tugging at the corner of the eyes. I saw it. I know these things. I am a child, versed in reading adult faces. The foreman understands these things as well. His nerve sputtered and died.

  No problem, Pa. And he scurried away like an ant.

  Today I am foreman and Yaya is the labourer. Our bricks are baking on top of the drying rock, a great slab jutting from the earth in front of our home where my mother dries the clothes. The bricks are nearly ready, though the house we are building has run into some difficulties, just like my father’s house. The bricks crumble, the mud dries out and won’t stick. Today we work at refining our recipe, squatting on our haunches over the hole where we mix earth and water together, using a pair of sticks to swill a slippy sliding mess.

  Busy, we are. Preoccupied with problem solving. Until our mother calls. Until it’s time to do something else.

  A shadow falls over us. A hand appears: palm stained red by the earth, knuckles callu
sed and grey. Short fingernails, ridged and blackened. I watch the hand. It pours grey dust from a funnel of torn paper. A moment later another hand tosses in a handful of sand. In front of my eyes our mixture transforms into something tacky. The hands take two of our bricks, smear them with the mixture, slap one on top of the other.

  ‘Give it to me.’ Yaya reaches out.

  I look up. A man is smiling down at me. He has lips curved like lily petals, a tiny pink patch right in the middle of his lower lip, shining eyes, white teeth, an erratic beard. The lips uncurl and reform into a new shape, a flower spreading its petals at dawn.

  ‘So, little brother, whose house are you building?’

  ‘It’s our house. Me and her. And our mother’s house,’ says Yaya, not looking up. In a small serious voice. A will-not-be-mocked voice.

  But this man is not mocking us.

  ‘Maybe when you’re done there you can come and help us with this one. Eh?’ The man jerks a thumb in the direction of the unfinished house, the half-a-house. His thumb curls back on itself like a wood shaving. I try the gesture out myself, experimentally. ‘And what is your name, little brother?’

  Yaya does not answer. He is laying bricks with a shuttered intensity.

  The man watches and waits. Taking all the time in the world.

  ‘His name is Yaya,’ I say suddenly. I can’t bear the silence. And: ‘He’s my brother. I’m bigger. He’s smaller.’ Because I think this man is nice — for a grown-up.

  ‘And what about you, little sister?’

  ‘My name is Serah Kholifa.’

  ‘Well, Serah Kholifa. Yaya Kholifa. That’s a fine house you are building. I hope that one day you people will invite me inside there to eat with you.’

  Now it is I who wonders if he isn’t mocking.

  ‘Yes,’ I reply. This time I use my polite voice for grown-ups.

  The foreman is whistling. The man doesn’t say anything. Just smiles. The foreman shouts his name — what was it? — and begins to move in our direction, to see what is going on. The man turns away. He is smiling, jogging slowly backwards on the balls of his feet. ‘Don’t forget me now, Serah.’

  He points a finger at me. I nod. Then shake my head. Then, confused, again I nod. Yes, I promise not to forget you.

  We have to clear the bricks because my mother comes with a load of clothes to dry. Only the bricks have left dirt and dust all over the drying rock. So our mother sends me to fetch water from the jar by the door. She is not pleased. And she is angry because there is cement in my hair. My braids are cemented together. She plucks at my head with sharp fingers like a chicken looking for insects in the dirt. A little way off I can see the man. He is leaning against a longhandled shovel, watching us.

  Late in the afternoon I follow my mother down to the river with a new load of washing. The colour of the sun has deepened and the red dust sparkles in the air, the day has turned a hazy amber, like a piece of coloured glass tumbled by the sea. The light settles gently on our skin, the soft glow outlines our features.

  Down on the rocks I help scrub the clothes clean with black soap, and I hold one end and twist one way while my mother twists the other and together we wring the water out. And afterwards Yaya and me, we bathe in the stream and watch a single, stray, green-blue, glistening bubble hovering over the river. And we practise opening our eyes underwater. And make boats out of leaves and sail ant families across the water in them.

  And then I see the man again. He is coming down the path behind our mother and he passes the boy, the one who can’t speak and never grew up. The man is wearing country clothes with a triangular pocket at the front of his smock. The boy is standing in the grass. And the man raises a hand and the boy raises one also. And they slap their hands together high in the air. The sound bounces off the water. And the boy laughs and the man carries on walking towards us, while the boy stands on one leg like a heron watching him.

  That’s all I really remember about him. That day he sat next to my mother for a short while. He asked for a piece of our soap; I saw her stand up and go to the laundry basin, unwrap it and hand it to him. And then he slipped into the water and swam with us. He let us ride on his back, and we squirmed and slid off his skin, which was as smooth as a manatee’s. And then I laughed so much I took a big breath and forgot I was underwater; he held me up and squeezed me until I spewed reedy green river water back where it came from. And he said:

  ‘Sorry, Ma,’ as he handed me back to my mother. And she said:

  ‘Come on. Yaya. Serah. Enough.’ He waved at us as we walked away. And when I turned around at the last place where you could see the river, I saw him covered in lather, soaping himself with the slither of black soap.

  For a long time I thought that was all it took: a shared ball of soap between a man and a woman.

  But that was just the beginning. Not the whole of it. Not even the half of it.

  He wasn’t the usual kind of grown-up. We would talk about him in the years to come. In hushed voices. Remember when? We had gathered together fragments of the story and tried to make them fit, wedging in a little detail, filling a space with a new revelation, a sudden realisation.

  We called him the Cement Man.

  The Cement Man. Our name for him. Not the name she refused to call when she faced the elders: the unspoken name that circled in the air like a fly. So why, asked the elders, not too unkindly because after all this was just woman palava, though more serious than most — also because they knew they had her — why did she now refuse to swear?

  Sometimes when I look at the past I see a swamp: cloying, dark, impenetrable. Like the mud we swilled as children building our playhouse. Mud covering everything, smeared over the detail of recollections, submerging memories. Mud you wade about in trying to locate a lost image or event. Then, usually when you least expect it, the mud throws something up: perfectly preserved as a corpse in a peat bog.

  Night-time. I tumble out of my dreams and into the silence of the bedroom.

  I can hear my breathing. Scared breathing. Short, breathless breaths. My eyes are open wide letting in the darkness, watching the shadowy figures scuttle to the edges of the room where they slide along the walls and slip back into the place where the wall meets the floor. Banished by wakefulness, they promise to return as soon as I close my eyes again.

  I can hear my brother breathing. Open-mouthed, snuffle-nosed breathing. Still holding on to life breathing. The breathing of babies and little children, as though they can’t ever get enough air.

  My mother’s breathing: deep-sleep breathing. Long, slow breaths. Shimmering snores suspended in the air.

  Three kinds of breathing.

  In my bladder, an irresistible urgency. I lie on my back, wishing the feeling away. Then I reach over and rock my brother, vigorously. I’m afraid to go to the toilet in the dark. Yaya is ashamed he still wets the bed. This is our understanding. We go together at night to the toilets behind the houses. So I don’t have to cross my legs and pray until dawn. And he doesn’t dream of floating on warm water and wake up in a cold, sodden bed.

  We bang the door and stamp our feet, announcing our presence for the benefit of the lizards and cockroaches who lurk in the dark places and cling underneath the overhang of the hole in the floor. The hole gives way to a bottomless pit and a nameless, simmering, steadily rising tide. I squat first: knees together, ankles splayed, thighs quivering, head bent watching the steaming trickle fall into the terrifying blackness.

  We march back past the banana groves. The night is cool. A huge moon dangles over the village, like an overripe fruit. The shadows are solid, sharp, small. A dog lifts its head. A nose swings our way like a weathervane, marks our progress for a while and then is tucked back beneath a tail. A lamp behind a window outlines a door and the lattice work of the shutters. Giant shapes move about inside.

  We have been gone no time at all. No time at all. And yet in that time everything has changed. Something is happening in the village. Something mars the
silence, rumbles beneath the stillness. It takes a moment to realise it.

  Far away the sound of voices raised and bare feet pounding the ground and the flicker of torches. People! People purposefully marching. People we have never seen before.

  Something is happening and we are awake to see it. Not going to miss it, not going to sleep through it like all the other somethings that happened after we had already gone to bed. Nobody will say to us: ‘Oh, you were already asleep by then,’ when they tell the story in the coming days. We are awake. Whatever it is we’ll be the ones to tell the other children in the morning.

  We hurry in the direction of our house, a pair of busybodies, to spy from the safety of our bedroom window and discover what business has brought these good folk to us in the middle of the night.

  They are ahead of us. Passing our father’s new house now. The smell of wet plaster carries on the breeze. The house is finished. Today the carpenter came and hung the doors: heavy, wooden doors decorated with carvings of monitor lizards — our family tana. The carvings are not good. The lizards look like pigs.

  The people march on. We follow behind them at a discreet distance. Hearts thumping, scared breathing, not wanting to be seen. What if it is the poro spirit come to town? Then we should run and hide, our mother warned us one day chasing us back from the fields, ‘Or he’ll catch you and take you away. And I’ll never see you again.’ I giggled so hard as I tried to run I ended up with a stitch in my side. Then her face grew solemn. She once lost a brother that way. A little brother who had been sitting in the road when the spirit came to town. Caught unawares, by the time they heard the sound of the tortoiseshell the spirit and his dancers were already close. She was on the verandah and ran inside. The women slammed closed the windows and doors. It was too late to fetch him in. They thought he would be all right; in those days they left the very little ones. But when they came out he was gone. Into the sacred bush.