Ancestor Stones

by Aminatta Forna

  My heart thumped hard inside my ribs. I told the driver to wait, got out of the car, and stepped towards her, but a woman carrying a tray of fish upon her head passed in front of me. The fish were packed into tight circles with all the care of a flower arrangement, their mouths open, pointed at the sky as though they were catching raindrops. For a few moments my view was blocked and when the way was clear again, my mother was gone. I craned my neck, searching for her among the people changing buses, but I couldn’t find her again.

  All the way home I wondered what I might have said to her. What kind of life was she leading? Did she even know I was back home?

  Then I decided maybe it hadn’t been her at all. Just a woman with the same look. Why, I probably wouldn’t even recognise her now. By the time I was in front of the gates of my house I had decided I had been mistaken.

  Ambrose’s work kept him late at the office on many evenings. There were times when I was already asleep by the time he came home. The lawyers in his office were labouring around the clock drafting the new constitution to turn us into a republic. It was important work.

  One evening he arrived home bringing a friend of his, a townsmate whom he had happened upon in the street. I don’t mind telling you that from the very start there was something about this man that I didn’t like. He sweated and wiped his forehead with a flannel he kept in his pocket. He wore a suit, shiny at the lapels. And shoes made from two types of leather like a Nigerian pastor. He held on to my hand for too long and pushed his face into mine, his breath was sour and the look he gave me was of hunger mixed with something knowing.

  It was a Thursday, the servants’ day off. I went to the fridge and fetched cold beers, poured some nuts into a dish along with some of Ambrose’s favourite fried dough pieces and carried them out to where the two of them sat at the front of the house.

  How this man liked to talk! And to drink. Several beers were downed, Ambrose went to fetch a bottle of Scotch and set it on the table. I watched as the man filled his glass right up to the brim. I tried to replace the bottle with a bowl of cashew nuts, but he waved at me to put it back. Time passed with no indication of when he might be leaving. We sat side by side on the settee watching him drink, until Ambrose was obliged to invite him to eat with us. I whispered into Ambrose’s ear there was no food. Ambrose’s erratic hours meant he had taken to eating on his way home. I ate with the children. It was too late now to start cooking.

  ’OK, we’ll go out.‘ Ambrose picked up his friend’s jacket just as the man poured himself a third glass of whisky.

  ‘What? Hey! Out you say? But I am very comfortable here. This is a fine place you have.’

  Ambrose apologised, explaining there was nothing to eat. His friend belched and laughed, a big laugh, fat with scorn.

  ‘Let your woman cook some rice for us. What do you think a wife is for, my man? Or don’t you know? Maybe you’d like me to tell you.’ This time his laugh was harsh: a coarse, dry cough.

  Well, I’m sure you can guess by now Ambrose didn’t like to be mocked. Who does, after all? I would have felt better if he’d told his friend to watch how he spoke in front of me, but instead he tossed the man’s jacket towards him.

  ‘Come on. We’ll get some roast meat.’ He turned to leave, without looking once at me, though the set of his jaw betrayed his mood.

  But his friend was too drunk to notice. I saw him clap Ambrose on the shoulder as he staggered out, heard him teasing Ambrose about what a spoiled wife I was. ‘Is that what they teach you in England?’

  And that laugh. ‘Heh! Heh!’ All the way down the lane.

  I sat in the house listening to that laugh, like a bad odour, mingling with the smell of the frangipani. I went to the bathroom and took a cigarette from the packet of 555s I kept wedged behind the cabinet. Ambrose, who once used to light my cigarettes with a lighter he kept in his pocket, now forbade me to smoke.

  I remember my grandmother once made a joke at my expense soon after I made her buy me a pair of new shoes, too tight because I had been in so much of a hurry to possess them. She had caught me hobbling around the house as I tried to walk in them. ‘Who knows how much a pretty pair of shoes pinch, except the person wearing them?’ she said, because I was always wanting something more, something that somebody else had, and this saying now fitted my predicament in more ways than one. My grandmother laughed some more.

  The grass is always greener, I suppose that’s the nearest saying. Or perhaps it’s about appearances and how they can be deceptive. Or does it really mean be careful what you wish for? Perhaps it means whatever it needs to mean, some combination of all three. The truth is I did not care for who I was. I closed my eyes and made a wish. The wish came true. I closed my eyes and made another wish, and that came true, too. So I kept my eyes closed and kept on wishing.

  Come to think about it, the old shoes were soft and made of canvas. The saying must have been invented later.

  The point is, I had nobody to turn to. My grandmother had passed on years before. Even if she had still been alive what did she or Ya Memso or even my mother know of the way we lived now?

  Those days Ambrose was so busy he still hadn’t got around to teaching me to drive. When he found out I was riding the poda podas he told me I should take taxis instead. What would people think? But taxis were expensive and the truth is I liked the minibuses. I liked the rattle of the day’s talk in my ears. I liked the dense scent of sweat from a hard day’s work. Gradually I learned what hardships people bore by the things they joked about. A woman so fat the bus boy charged her for two places was comforted by a passenger who reassured her she would soon be as thin as everyone else. A market woman pushed her nose in the air and imitated the voice of our first lady, her friends laughed until they noticed the man on the back seat watching them through narrowed eyes, and one by one fell silent. ‘We’d all run away from this place if we could,’ to a girl whose fiancé had jilted her and gone to live in another country. Even through her tears, the abandoned girl agreed.

  One Friday in the late afternoon I was returning home from Fula Town. I had to switch buses at the big roundabout in the centre of town near Government House, close to Ambrose’s office, and I was waiting there for a poda poda headed west. I was thinking idle thoughts, listening to the music of the bus boys calling the different destinations, when I saw Ambrose drive towards me. What luck! I thought, perhaps he had time to quickly drop me home. I stepped off the kerb and waved, the sun was in my eyes, I shielded them with one hand and carried on waving with the other, but Ambrose didn’t see me. The car, in the middle of the traffic, swept on by. Too bad. I shrugged. I stepped back on to the pavement, but just as I did I heard the slow wail of a siren starting up. A policeman raised a white gloved hand, the traffic came to a standstill. At the top of the hill the President’s convoy came into view.

  I looked this way and that for the car. Ambrose was on the other side of the roundabout. If I was quick I could just make it. I began to hurry over. But as I wove through the cars I saw I had been mistaken. The driver of the car was a woman. Though I couldn’t see her face, I could see her hands resting on the steering wheel. And yet again the car was identical in every way to our own. I paused, I checked the number plate. No, I had not been mistaken. It was our car. So who could be driving it, if not Ambrose?

  The policeman lowered his arm, the cars moved forward. The sun was behind me, reflecting off the chrome of the cars, lighting up their darkened interiors. The traffic gathered pace, the profile of the driver came into view, and briefly she turned her face towards me. It was Hannah.

  At home I smoked three 555s in a row. I was angry, yes. But I felt sure there was an explanation, I just did not think it was right a man’s wife should use common people’s transport while her friend drove about in the man’s car. I hadn’t even known Hannah could drive.

  I was angry, yes. Suspicious? Not so much. I did not reckon on Ambrose’s reply:

  ‘You are my wife and Hannah will never be a t
hreat to you.’ Those were his words. I stared at him, my brain felt sluggish and cold. Then it dawned on me — Ambrose was confessing to an affair.

  Afterwards I realised he couldn’t help himself. I don’t mean about sleeping with Hannah. I mean in telling me. There had been no tears, no threats or recriminations. I hadn’t even had time to think such a dreadful thought, let alone utter it. And the expression on his face: it told not of shame, or fear or even guilt.

  ‘Now Serah,’ he had said in his lawyer’s tones. ‘Now Serah. You must understand. This is Africa. We are in Africa now. And I am an African man. That’s just the way it is.’

  No, Ambrose hadn’t been confessing at all. Not at all. He’d been boasting!

  I heard about it all in the months that followed. Everything. The gossips made sure of that. The shop where Hannah charged new clothes and shoes to Ambrose’s account, the bars they visited, and the parties Ambrose’s face-wiping friend took him to. Parties where men brought girls like Hannah. Parties for men like Ambrose — men who wanted the best of both worlds.

  Hannah’s place was up on the hill and she was not at home when I arrived. The houseboy let me in and showed me into her tiny sitting room. A moment later I heard him at the back of the house, pounding clothes in the basin under the standpipe.

  I only meant to talk to Hannah. To sort the matter out. I had even rehearsed what I was going to say, up to a point anyway. I had made a vow not to allow myself to ask details of their betrayal, I’d heard enough already. No, I would take care to talk to her as a friend, we would both behave in a dignified manner. I wasn’t the first woman to find myself in this position, and I wouldn’t be the last. But there was no question of allowing Hannah to continue to see Ambrose. None at all.

  I smoothed my skirt and sat down in a low chair. It was some months since I’d been in Hannah’s flat. I wondered what she earned and whether Ambrose was giving her money as well as gifts. The minutes passed. I stood up and wandered about a bit, going over my lines in my head. Back and forth. On the table at the other end of the room was a pile of Hannah’s belongings. I caught a glimpse of a record: Orchestre Bella Bella, a Congolese band. I owned exactly the same record, except it occurred to me I hadn’t seen my own copy in a while.

  Outside the pounding had ceased. I heard footsteps: the click of heels on concrete. I spun around. I could hear Hannah’s footfall along the exterior wall of the house. Suddenly I was unprepared. I didn’t want her to see me when she passed the window. I moved and stood beside the door, where I would be ready to greet her when she came in. In my haste I brushed against an umbrella standing there, flustered now I reached out and caught it before it hit the floor. I stood with my back to the wall holding the umbrella in front of me. Outside I could hear Hannah rummaging in her bag for the keys. I tried to prop the umbrella in its place and as I did I glanced down at it.

  James Smith & Sons. On New Oxford Street. I still remember the look in Ambrose’s eyes when I gave it to him on his first day at the Inns of Court. He had opened it in the living room and twirled it around and around, even though I warned him it was bad luck. It was raining the morning he set off, a soft drizzle. He had clicked his heels and sung a chorus from ‘Singin’ in the Rain’; it was so unlike him, so endearing, I laughed and embraced him. He kissed me in return and promised to cherish it always.

  The door opened.

  Am I proud of what I did? At the time, no. I was angry. I wasn’t proud of myself, I was miserable. Only later I became defiant. Am I proud now? Well, now you’re asking. Now I’m thinking back on it. Yes, actually. I believe I am.

  I hit her. Again and again. Oh, what a noise she made as she went down. She begged me to stop. But I didn’t stop. I beat her the way you beat a snake, to make sure it’s dead. And maybe I would have killed her if the houseboy hadn’t heard the palava and come running. He caught my raised hand. ‘Stop, Ma. I beg.’ So softly, it brought me to my senses. And ever so gently he removed the umbrella from my hand.

  I had spent my whole life trying not to be like my mother. I had taken the opposite path and hurried along it, all the time looking over my shoulder instead of ahead, so that I failed to see how the path curved back again in the same direction.

  When a woman is thrown out by her husband, there aren’t many places for her to go. Ambrose said I had humiliated him, by playing into the hands of the gossips. That might come as a surprise to your way of thinking, but it’s true. In the city appearances were the thing that mattered most. I had caused us to lose face; next to that Ambrose’s fidelity was unimportant. Of the two of us, it seemed, I was the one who was in the wrong.

  So there. No home. No husband. No job. The first person I went to was my sister Mary. And she was there for me, just as I had been there for her once, she made space for me and my sons in her tiny room at the Catholic Mission School for the Blind, but it was clear we couldn’t stay there long. What I’ve learned, though, is that luck likes to stay out of sight until she’s needed. Ya Memso had not seen my mother for many years, since before I left to go to England. From the time I married up until that day she had held on to my mother’s share of my bride price. Well, the marriage was over, so she gave it to me to rent a place until I found a job. My qualifications were good, it didn’t take me long. And with the rest of the money Ambrose had given me I paid for driving lessons and in time bought a small car of my own.

  So you see, in this way my poor mother, bound to my father by her own bride price, unexpectedly gave me the keys to my freedom.

  And do you know what else I think? I think Ambrose was bluffing when he ordered me to leave our house, imagining I would soon beg him to take me back. He didn’t know I was my mother’s daughter. He didn’t know I preferred to make my way alone than live with unhappiness. Yes, Ambrose was wrong about that, just as he was wrong about many things.

  There was one thing he was right about, though.

  A single issue of Janneh’s newspaper appeared on the streets. The next day the police rounded up all the newspaper vendors and put them in prison. As for Janneh, he simply vanished. His empty car, the headlights dying, was found at a crossroads one morning. Other people disappeared, too. A nursery school teacher here. A city councillor there. A poet ordered down from his crate in the marketplace. One by one, like lights going off all across the city. People talked about a labour camp in another country where the President was a friend of our President. But it was only a rumour. Nobody had ever come back to say whether it was true or not.

  As for me, the gossip-mongers soon found new victims to torture with their tongues. Tongues like leather cords, tying a woman down, cutting into her every time she tried to break free. They laughed, not knowing that the last laugh belonged to none of us. Ambrose spent his days at the Attorney-General’s office drafting new laws to take away our freedom little by little. And they never even noticed, they were too busy tittle-tattling. But one day they would find out what some of us already knew. That the reality was not so brightly coloured as the dream. That the dream no longer existed, maybe had never existed. It was all just a rainbow-coloured hallucination.

  And when you reached out to touch it, your hand went straight through to the other side.

  13

  Asana, 1985

  Mambore

  When I was a child Karabom warned me of the dangers of breaking the rules. I must be careful not to trespass in the sacred forest, she said, or the men who belonged to the secret society would snatch me and take me away and I would not see my mother for a long, long time. This was what happened to children who played truant, or who went wandering alone in forbidden places.

  I heard these warnings all my life. Sometimes they came to town, the members of this fearsome order — to stir our terror in case, untended, it congealed into something resilient. Women and children ran away to hide, we were not even allowed to gaze upon them. Such was the power of the society, even the chiefs obeyed them for in times of peril it was the society we looked to for protection.
For centuries people feared them even more than they came to fear the army.

  Another day Karabom had warned me against keeping bad company. Two girls were walking home, she told me. One a girl of noble birth. The other a girl from a disreputable family, the kind of people who move from village to village like nomads. She had grown up doing as she pleased, disregarded her chores and never learned to cook. On their way they passed a place where the society men were busy in the forest. They could tell this by the tools left lying at the side of the path, among them the tortoiseshell drum they beat to warn people of their approach. The errant girl picked it up and, despite the protests of her friend, banged on it loudly, laughing wildly as she did so. Within moments they were surrounded by masked men, who carried them away deep into the forest. They were not seen for a year or more. Even the wealthy father, with all his connections, could not find his daughter or free her from the men of the secret society.

  ‘What happened to them?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Who?’ said my grandmother, knowing perfectly well. It meant she was finished with talking.

  ‘The girls.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said my grandmother. ‘It’s not important. They came back, but their chances were ruined. What man would want to marry girls like that?’

  The question itched me like an insect bite for a few weeks, and then I forgot it. I was a child after all. Such was the awe in which the society was held that it was forbidden to speak of their doings, but still, there were whispers. I can tell you now the girls were not ravished, nothing like that. The society was an ancient and honourable one. But one that guarded its secrets and demanded respect. Those for whom awe proved insufficient were bound instead by its oaths of allegiance.

  Remember when you were a child you used to ask so many questions? La i la! Aunty, what’s this? Aunty, what’s that? Your father spoiled you. Letting you talk too much. He should have used a firmer hand with you, I told him so. But your own children talk even more. Just open their mouths and say the first thing that comes into their heads, doesn’t matter who else is speaking. When I tell them to be quiet, you frown at me. Oh, it’s natural to be curious. How else are they supposed to learn? Aunty, you mustn’t stifle their imagination. And you turn away from your elders to answer the questions of a foolish child.