Ancestor Stones

by Aminatta Forna

On and on. Here the houses were fewer, mostly bungalows with gardens all the way around, some with garages. In front of one house plastic toy windmills stuck into the grass turned in the wind. The whirring sound they made was the same as the call of a little black and yellow bird at home. I walked on, passing rows of mismatched allotments until there were no more houses. By now the rain was coming down. The path narrowed, my shoes slipped in the mud. Empty fields on either side, no crops but hillocks of rough grass. I pushed back my hood and felt the rain on my face, numbing my lips and my nose. I lifted my head to the sky.

  The scent of rotting fruit: a plum tree had scattered its fruit across the path. I sheltered beneath it for a while. I was hungry, I picked up a plum and bit into it. The fruit was acidic and fizzed faintly on my tongue. Still it tasted good. I gathered several more, searching for the ones that hadn’t been attacked by the birds. For a while I ate greedily, then I collected up more of the fruit and pushed it into my pockets to feed to the pigeons on my window sill.

  More time passed, how much I don’t know. I wiped my chin on my sleeve. I was cold, I decided to start back, to get back into the warm. The rain had eased off a little. On the way I passed the house with the windmills. I stopped to watch them, their red and yellow sails rotating, picking up speed as sluggish gusts of wind blew through them. I stared at the turning wheels, felt them sucking the thoughts out of my mind. One by one, the thoughts whirled away from me until they were caught by the rotating blades and spun out in all directions, across the garden and up into the air. At first I tried to catch them, but changed my mind and flew after them instead. Then I was floating up in the sky, side by side with the birds, gazing down at the shrinking dot of the town, heading far out to sea.

  A child’s face. At the window, framed by curtains, a child was watching me, unblinking black eyes. For several seconds I stared back. The child didn’t move and neither did I. Just gazed into each other’s eyes. I felt peaceful. For a moment I caught a glimpse of my own face among the reflections in the glass, my head superimposed upon the child’s shoulders. The image wavered. I saw the child’s eyes grow wider and its mouth open, though the sound was drowned out by the rain and the flapping of wet wings. A woman appeared behind the child. I saw her look up and take a step towards the window, pushing out her chin and drawing it back with a jolt, something like shock.

  I turned away, pulled my hood back over my head. I walked fast, until I broke into a run. My heart was beating. I began to feel afraid. I worried the woman might leave her house, come after me, demand to know what I was doing. Suddenly the fear reared up, like great shadows behind me, chasing me. Faster and faster, I ran all the way to the hostel.

  The next day it was cold, too cold to get out of bed. I lay there, pulling the cover over my head to block out the slow light that burned through the window. I dozed and dreamed. And in my dreams I saw sometimes the child, and sometimes the face of Bobbio my childhood friend. Another time I was snatched up by a great, black bird, carried through the air and dropped into a nest, where I lay on soft feathers, surrounded by jostling chicks. I woke up to the sound of tapping, saw a pigeon’s red and yellow eye staring at me as its beak struck the glass.

  The room grew dark and light again. How many times I don’t know. Once somebody knocked on the door of my room. I didn’t answer, I waited until they went away. It was quiet again, I was pleased at that. Silence, except for the sounds of the pigeons on my window sill, but they were my friends. Another time, another knock. Still I didn’t reply; the person came in anyway. She looked a bit like one of the nuns from the boarding home, so I let her urge me out of bed and slip my duffel coat over my shoulders. I put my hands into my pockets and felt the slimy mush that lined the bottom. I wondered what it was.

  Next I was in a car. The driver kept turning around to look at me, asking me questions I couldn’t hear so instead I looked out of the window. A stone horse reared up from a plinth. The rider, halfrisen in the saddle, stared straight at me. A man leaning out of an advertising billboard, proffering a cigarette, fixed me with his gaze. A woman beckoned me with a sideways look, raised a steaming mug of drinking chocolate. A dog’s bulging, brown eyes followed my progress from the kerb.

  A man asked my name. ‘Mariama,’ I replied. I don’t know why I said that. I had been Mary for a long time. We were out of the car now and in a new place. More questions followed. I couldn’t find the English words so I answered him in my own language. He spoke to the woman who had brought me. Meanwhile I sat in my chair and looked at him. There was something strange about him. I stopped listening and watched him closely; still it took me a while to put my finger on it. Then I saw: he had no teeth! No gums, no tongue. Just a black hole behind his barely moving lips.

  It was dark again when I woke up. A soft bed. A hard, square patch of white light fell on to the floor like a trapdoor. Behind the glass murmuring voices, careful footsteps. I sat up and twisted my body round so I could see out of the window behind me. It must have been the early hours of the morning. The street was empty, save for a lone figure who waited at the side of the street for a bus or a taxi. I was on the second, maybe third floor of a house. I looked up and down the street, at the puddles of light below the street lamps.

  The figure below me moved, the slightness of his frame told me it must be a young man or a boy. I watched him idly for a few minutes. Something about him seemed familiar, something in his walk as he sauntered between one lamp post and the next, as though he had nowhere particular to go. Briefly he stepped into one of the circles of light. I caught a glimpse of his profile. The high forehead, the shape of the skull, the upturned edges of the lips, the man below me was an African. He looked up, straight at my window. Bobbio!

  Yes, it was he. Oh, how happy I was to see him. I cannot tell you. I waved. I worried about making a noise, I don’t know why exactly — the place was so hushed, you know. But I knew Bobbio was there for me. All I needed was to tell him I had seen him. I tapped on the glass. Bobbio grinned at me. Waved back. Oh, Bobbio. I pressed the palm of my hand flat against the glass and I stayed like that for a long time, looking at Bobbio who clasped his hands together, held them up and looked right back at me.

  I slept soundly, the bed like a big boat, bobbing on the waves of a warm, blue ocean. In the morning I jumped up and went to the window. At first I couldn’t see my friend, just a line of people waiting at the bus stop, shuffling in the cold. But I never doubted he would be there. I searched the line of people. The bus arrived. The queue inched forward. Ah, there! A glimpse. Behind the woman in the blue anorak and the boy with his hands stuck in the pockets of his striped blazer: bare feet and the hem of a duster coat. Other people came and stood, blocking my view. I didn’t know what Bobbio was doing or how he had found me, but none of that mattered. Bobbio was there. And while he was outside I felt safe.

  I remember that time, because although it was supposed to be a bad time for me, in some ways it was a very good time. The big shadow of fear shrank and slipped away under the door. I lay there and thought of nothing at all. I forgot about what I was doing in England. I cared nothing for the passage of time, instead I watched the patterns of light on the ceiling. Sometimes I sat at the window looking for Bobbio, until somebody came to put me back to bed. At the time it felt like years were slipping by, but now I think perhaps it was only days.

  ‘Hello dear, visitor for you,’ the nurse put her head around my door. It was she who brought me my meals and made me understand I was in the college sanatorium. She tended to talk a great deal as she moved about my room, turning off the night light, rearranging the bedclothes. I had always been sure to reply politely to her enquiries, I didn’t want her to think me rude. Once the doctor with no teeth had been back, but had examined me only briefly and directed all his questions away from me.

  ‘Eating much?’

  ‘Yes,’ the woman had replied. ‘Nothing wrong with her appetite.’

  ‘Said anything?’

  ‘Nothing I understan
d. They’ve called. Apparently somebody’s on their way. Somebody who can translate.’

  That afternoon a young woman followed the nurse into the room. She was black and slim, dressed in European clothes, though she moved easily in them as if she wore a simple kaftan; not at all the way I always felt: tight and trapped. She swung her hip on to the side of my bed, perched there. Leaning forward, she took one of my hands in both of hers and looked at me. I saw deep, brown eyes, tilted upwards at the corners. Buffed skin. When she smiled she showed all her teeth at once and a wrinkle appeared across the bridge of her nose. I let her hold my hand. I even smiled back at her, she seemed so kind.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked. The woman held me in her gaze for a few moments.

  ‘I’m Serah. Serah Kholifa. Your sister.’

  Yes. It was your Aunt Serah. I didn’t recognise her, so many years had passed since I had seen her. She had been just a small girl. Now she was studying in Liverpool. Oh, yes, I knew this. But the distance was great. She had written suggesting I visit during the holidays, when they came. But they were a long time in coming, I never made it. On my college registration form Serah was listed as my next of kin. That day when she arrived at the sanatorium, she had only to take one look at me to see what had to be done. She took me away from that place.

  We left in a taxi. I was impressed at that, how easily she made it happen. At the gate I swung my head this way and that.

  ‘Have you forgotten something?’

  I replied I was looking for Bobbio, my friend. She frowned and the wrinkle appeared on her nose again.

  ‘Oh, yes. I remember him.’

  ‘He was here.’ I couldn’t see him any longer. ‘I never asked him what he wanted.’

  My sister looked at me. ‘Oh, Mary,’ she said. ‘I expect he came to tell you something.’

  And she took me in her arms and held me.

  How long ago, how faraway it had all seemed. The smell of the earth. The whiteness of the sun. The way night arrives like a thing unto itself, instead of the creeping darkness that comes to steal away the sunlight. I returned home the way I departed. I stood on the deck watching the coastline widen in front of me, felt the sea breeze, the molecules of air, salt and water attaching themselves to my skin. Even the whiff of fish and oil at the dock was like a perfume. And the people! The pride in them as they looked and never looked away. For the first time in a long while I saw myself again, reflected in their eyes.

  That’s it, my story. Why do I tell it to you? Not so that you may feel sorry for me. No. But because that day you came home — the very first time, when you brought your new man and your babies, I saw in you a glimpse of something that brought the memories of that time back. Not in a bad way. Not in a way that hurt, but rather an echo of something I have known. I watched you then, and I have been watching you ever since. At that time you were nervous, smiling and laughing maybe too much, trying too hard in front of your husband and your children, your fingers fluttering like butterflies in front of your mouth. And the same again when you came back to us a few weeks ago. Until yesterday when you came out, for once not wearing one of those T-shirts that show your nipples, but in a gown Aunt Serah let you borrow.

  And today you asked me to braid your hair. All that combing and fussing with those hair creams that have to be imported from America had become too much trouble, you told me — here, with only river water to wash your hair. So I plaited your hair, just as I did when you were a small girl, me on a stool, you sitting between my knees. And while I worked the strands I let you listen to my story.

  And now I look at the change in you and I feel happy. For I know what it is to forget who you are. To feel the pieces falling away. To look for yourself and see only the stares of strangers. To search for yourself in circles until you’re exhausted. And I wonder if my story means something to you. If perhaps what happened to me, little by little, isn’t the same thing you felt happening to you. The very thing that brought you back home.

  12

  Serah, 1978

  The Dream

  Well, this story is no secret. Heaven knows, there are no secrets in this town.

  Congosa! Gossip. It’s what people here do all the time, because they can’t be bothered to work. They stick their noses into other people’s business and think they know it all, but of course they don’t.

  The truth is we were the envy of the whole country. Because we were the dream, did you know that? Every parent prays for a special child, and then suddenly — a whole generation of us. As though some maleka, some angel somewhere up above had tripped and scattered her load of blessings all at once. We were the gilded ones. We went this way and that, flying on the wings of our dreams. Me to England. Yaya first to Germany to study design and then architecture in England. We did not miss what we were leaving behind, when we kissed each other goodbye there were no tears. Only Ya Memso cried a little to see us go, but even then there were more tears of joy mixed up with the tears of sadness.

  Neither of us looked back at the old, only forward to the vision of the new.

  People will always say women forget the pain of childbirth, which is strange because I remember it perfectly clearly. What you do forget, utterly, is why you once loved somebody. The physical pleasures, the joy of a newborn, the disappointments, the betrayals, these things you can remember — but when love itself is gone, it vanishes without a trace. It leaves nothing behind.

  When I think about Ambrose now, all I can really remember is his voice.

  He had a way of speaking. He would tell me I was beautiful. ‘You aah beautiful,’ a long exhaled sound, like a sigh, as though he couldn’t quite believe it himself. Often, when he spoke on the telephone the person at the other end didn’t realise they were talking to a black man. He was particularly proud of that. And then there was the way he dressed, so stylish and so neat; when I first met him I thought he must be from Senegal or another of those French places.

  There was a black American girl on our course. African American as they say now. She liked to hang around the African students, and when she talked everything was ‘black this’ and ‘black that’. She called me sister. ‘Sistah’. That’s the way she said it. For some reason it made me giggle, even though I liked the way it sounded. I didn’t think like her. We didn’t think like her. We hadn’t reached that place yet. To be honest, I’m not sure we ever did.

  She told me I walked like a queen. I longed to be Carmen Jones. I took up smoking: Sobranie Cocktails, with gold tips and pastelcoloured papers; spent hours hot-combing my hair in the same style as Dorothy Dandridge. Later I changed and had an Afro, because by then they were all the rage. People told me I looked just like Cleopatra Jones.

  Well, Ambrose certainly treated me like a queen. When we went out he would hold doors open for me to walk through. If I was carrying a parcel he would insist on taking it from me. He invited me to eat in restaurants where he called for the wine list and talked to the waiters without bothering to look at them. When the food came, those same waiters served me first, only coming to Ambrose second. And he behaved as though this was the way it should be, and I pretended I was used to it although the opposite was true. The way I was raised, only after all the men had eaten did the women sit down to share what was left. And it was the women who fetched the water and carried the heavy loads.

  I loved him so much I even used to buy Ambrosia Creamed Rice. Just for the name. Bloated, sweetened, milky grains: nothing like rice at all.

  These are the things I remember. As for the rest, the years — like an army of silverfish — have eaten them away.

  Some months after we met we spent a weekend in Lyme Regis. Ambrose had promised to show me Venice. ‘Show you Venice,’ he had said, and the words slid off his tongue. Of course I knew he had never been there, but what did it matter? The way he spoke made me believe in him. It would have been impossible for us to travel, we were overseas scholarship students, we would have needed visas. Still, for a few weeks I let myself dream about
it.

  In Lyme Regis a family dressed in oilskins, slick as seals, watched as I waded into the sea. Underfoot the pebbles were slippery, the water so cold it made my ankles ache; I waved to Ambrose standing in his polished brogues and sheepskin jacket on the shore. Back at the guest house, where the hall smelled of smoked fish and the sweet-sherry odour of elderly English people, I warmed my hands and feet against the clanking radiator in our room and later my feet were swollen, shiny and itching. In the mornings we lay together in bed until we heard the woman who ran the place banging on the door, insisting we let the maid in to clean the room.

  That’s as much as I remember about Lyme Regis. The greasy feel of the rain, the ceaseless rolling of the ocean, the metallic taste of stewed tea and the guest house owner hurrying along our love-making. I didn’t know it at the time, but by then I was already pregnant.

  I spent far too much money on the wedding cake. Three tiers, with a little model bride and groom on the top. The bride had ridged, yellow hair and blue dots for eyes, the groom’s face was a pink splodge under a slick of black. Ambrose laughed, joking they didn’t look much like us. Still I had set my heart on such a cake.

  I changed my name to his. It had become the fashionable thing to do among African women, to take our husbands’ names. Now, of course, your generation are all busy holding on to their fathers’ names, to show how emancipated you all are. Well, then, it was the other way around. To the African way of thinking, we took our husbands’ names to show how sophisticated, how Westernised we were. And most of all how different from our own mothers who kept the names they were born with all their lives.

  Ya Memso wasn’t happy about the marriage. She didn’t think Ambrose’s uncles were serious people, the way they behaved over the bride gift, you know. By all accounts my father was most exacting, because by then I was an educated woman. Ambrose’s family didn’t like that, not at all. They were city people, they thought they were doing us a favour. They were already vexed at having to travel all the way up to the provinces. In their view my father was a bumpkin with too many wives and far too many children.