Ancestor Stones

by Aminatta Forna

  I looked and looked again. Something strange. I could see straight through the flimsy wood of the coffins. There were no bodies inside, only piles of sticks. The mourners were talking to each other, I could see their mouths opening and closing. I was too far off to hear what they were saying, though the calls of the market traders reached me. It was as though they were communicating soundlessly, like animals. And I alone seemed to see them. The people in the market went about their business, bargaining and bantering with one another. Other strangers walked between the stalls. A young woman buying sweet potatoes stood right next to one of them, who stared lasciviously at her breasts. When she turned around she brushed past him, but never so much as glanced his way.

  A fist of fear squeezed my belly. Trailed its fingertips slowly across my scalp. Sapped the strength from my muscles. I gasped, choking on my own breath. Drops of moisture rose on my forehead. I let go of my load. The plastic bags tumbled down the hill, tearing open, all of my oranges bouncing away. A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.

  I saw them returning at night, moving between the headstones and the mausoleums, indistinguishable from the shadows, from the dark shapes of the statues. Great slabs of stone and marble were heaved aside, coffin lids swung open. I saw the graves open up, the spirits of the dead walk away from their resting place.

  Then just as suddenly the vision disappeared. It was market day again. A little boy, naked but for a pair of shorts, was standing next to me holding my shopping bags. Another boy had climbed up the hill and was holding out the last of the runaway oranges. They were both smiling up at me, thinking of the coin I would give them, ignorant of everything I had just witnessed.

  When I had finished speaking Adrian waited, as though I would go on. As though there was more. There was, but for the time being I was finished. I folded my hands in my lap. He was staring out of the window, flexing his long fingers. He didn’t turn to me when he spoke, and when he did his words came quiet and slow:

  ‘That was how they got into the city, wasn’t it? The rebel army. They hid their weapons and their men in the graveyards. Collected them at night.’

  Yes, I told him. That was how it happened. Nobody realised it until later. We awoke the next day to find them in our midst.

  We were silent together for a while. Then he pushed back his chair and left the room. When he returned he was carrying a tray, upon which some tea things slid dangerously about. He set them down, stirred the tea to hasten the brew, poured two cups. Halfway to the top, the way Europeans do. He added milk to both cups, and pushed the sugar bowl towards me; the loose grains stuck to the underside of the bowl scratched the surface of the table.

  ‘The starlight was blue. There was a patch of the night sky where the stars crowded together — astronomers call it a “butterfly cluster” — and in the middle a single pale, yellow star brighter than all the rest. I used to like to tell my class about the stars. For some reason they can imagine it, the night sky. Even the ones who were born blind. We would go outside and they would turn their faces upwards, like flowers to the sun. Somehow they could sense the vastness above.’ I stopped. The sky had never looked so beautiful as it did that night.

  ‘The next day was Twelfth Night. Did you know that? They came on the feast of the Epiphany.’

  A fly had become trapped behind the window. The angry buzzing invaded the room, and an insistent tapping. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. As the fly hit the windowpane. The tapping punctuated our conversation.

  ‘Do you still believe in God, Mariama?’

  ‘I believe he exists.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Just that. I believe he exists. I don’t believe in him.’

  Adrian folded his hands in front of him.

  ‘Like you here,’ I said. ‘I believe you are sitting there. I can put out my hand and touch you. You exist, but that’s all I know about you. I don’t know whether you are good or bad. Whether I can trust you, or whether I would be a fool to do so.’

  ‘You can trust me, Mariama.’

  A pause. Tap, tap. Of course, we were talking about God.

  ‘So what do you think about, when you think about God?’

  ‘I think he doesn’t like black people very much.’

  * * *

  Something happened here. A change. Stealthy, creeping, slow. Like the way the desert is gradually covering the plain, one grain of sand at a time. It took place without us even noticing, so that the moment when we might have resisted passed unremarked. Suddenly it was irreversible. The evil had been let loose. But it was no longer among us, it was within. Everybody became part of it.

  In the city the animals grew fat while the humans starved. The dogs were sleek and fit, their coats glossy. Vultures gorged until they could barely take to the air. The abundance of food gave the dogs a new confidence, the only ones with the freedom of the city. Under the bridge the fish nibbled at the jetsam of human corpses jamming the bay where every night suspected insurgents were shot by the dozen, their bodies tossed over the railings.

  From the East, which had fallen into the hands of the rebels, a cloud of smoke drifted across the river to the West, bringing with it the scent of blood and fear. And every night the stars formed the shape of a beautiful butterfly hovering over the city. We hid and waited for them to arrive. And waited, until in the end we were forced out by our hunger.

  I was standing at a checkpoint, behind a queue of people. The checkpoint was manned by black soldiers from another country, sent by their government to fight our war. They were poor; they were afraid for their lives; they had no choice; they hated us for it. Nobody spoke. You could smell the perspiration on the people as they waited silently for their papers to be checked.

  Then, suddenly, from behind me — a woman’s voice, shrill and steely.

  ‘Rebel!’

  Again. ‘Rebel!’

  The soldiers’ heads snapped up. One of them handed back the identity card he was holding, tightened his grip on his gun. Two of them began to move down the queue, towards the source of the outburst. I dared not look around. None of us did. The soldiers were heading straight towards me. Weapons at the ready, their faces arranged into expressions of hostility to cover the fear. Only when they had passed me did I dare turn around.

  A woman was pointing at a younger woman further back in the queue. She stood with her legs apart, one hand on her hip, glaring fiercely. With her other hand she jabbed the air, shrieking the word repeatedly. ‘Rebel! Rebel!’

  Up until that moment the woman she had been pointing at had stood quite still, as though none of this had anything to do with her. The instant the soldiers seized her and pulled her out of the line of people, however, she came alive — struggling, begging and screaming. Her accuser, who was relentless, now released a torrent of accusations. She had seen the young woman with a pistol, had seen her in the east end of the city earlier in the month. A man, clearly the young woman’s husband, came forward from the back of the line to his wife’s defence. He approached the soldiers hesitantly, holding his hands out in front of him, the palms turned up. It was all a misunderstanding, he pleaded. But the soldiers didn’t seem to want to listen. One of them slapped the man’s wife, slapped her repeatedly, asking questions, demanding answers. Then they began to hit him, too. Both of them. He shielded himself by bending over double, but she had her arms pinned behind her back and took the full force of each blow. Their pleas, the sound of their voices, were lost in the flood of accusations.

  And people knew the killers came in all guises: as men, as women, even in the form of sweet-faced children.

  The officer in charge ordered them to be executed. There and then, in front of us. The soldiers stripped them, forced them to kneel. They shot her first. Then him. She was a pretty girl, flawless skin and angled cheekbones, I remember because I wondered, in that moment, if the soldiers who were away from home, away from their loved ones in this desp
erate, dark and ugly land were not somehow outraged by the way she looked. It made them want to kill her.

  The bodies lay in the dirt. The rest of us shuffled through the checkpoint. On the other side a man in front of me told us that he knew her, the dead woman. Her accuser was a neighbour of his who had once lost a lover to her. Naasu. That was the murdered woman’s name. He had only just realised who she was, now he was certain of it.

  Soldiers loaded Naasu’s body, and that of her husband, into the back of a lorry to be thrown over the bridge and into the bay. Much later, when it was dark, the people who lived among the rocks next to the water went out in their canoes, collected the corpses and buried them. The killers, the innocent, and those whose beauty offended, side by side in the same grave.

  This was the story I told Adrian Lockheart. By the end he was leaning forward, his eyes glistening, the picture of professional caring. Not that he didn’t care. He just wanted me to be in no doubt about it. But I could read Adrian Lockheart’s mind. I could see the thoughts running behind his eyes. Beneath the still waters of sympathy was a great, heaving tide of relief. His mind was on his wife and his child in the place where he had left them, safe on another continent.

  And this is what he was thinking. He was thanking God, thanking him over and over in all his merciful glory, that this would never be them. That he would never be me.

  That was the last time I saw him. He wrote a report for my employers. In his opinion I was suffering from post-traumatic stress as a result of the war, the most notable manifestation of which appeared to be the habit of decorating my room in a manner that, while a little bizarre, was completely harmless. There was no reason I should not continue my work as a teacher.

  The great Kuru Masaba, of course, the most powerful of them all. Creator of the earth, the skies, the rivers, the forests, the seas and every living creature. Kumba, the rain god who brings the rice harvest. Yaro, Anayaroli, whom they call Mammy Wata, goddess of wealth. Aronson, the hunter. Kassila, the sea god. Those are the only names that survive. The others are lost for ever. Don’t you see? We have forgotten them.

  Sometimes I still dream of them, like I used to. Adrian Lockheart taught me how to stop them from taking over my mind, to imagine a row of boxes and to put the things that disturbed me inside and close the lid. But they won’t be contained.

  Always it is Kassila who breaks out first and frees the others. Once I dreamed I saw them, strolling between the stars, surrounded by flashes of lightning and the roll of thunder. Cowrie shells and glass beads decorated their hair, gold rings and bracelets adorned their arms, they were wrapped in garments woven from rainbows and embroidered with sunbeams. They had their backs to us, they were walking away, headed to some other dimension.

  Free from us, free from our foolishness, our fickleness and petty betrayals. They were arm in arm, laughing out loud. Without a care in the universe.

  EPILOGUE

  18

  Abie, 2003

  The Women’s Gardens II

  London, November 2003.

  During the last days of my stay in Rofathane I decided I wanted to bathe in the river. The morning was cool, a steaming bucket stood outside my door. It was pleasant enough to stand in my palm frond enclosure, and to pour hot water over myself, but that day I wanted the sensation of water gliding over my body. I tied a lappa around myself, searched for the nub of black soap. It was barely light and I passed not a soul on the path through the old coffee groves and the women’s gardens, down to the river.

  Slippery mud oozed between my toes, as I waded out into the water. A little further out, where a bed of weeds like tattered ribbons rippled in the current, the river bed turned to sand. Into the deeper water now I released the knot of my cloth and let it float on the surface. A tree, ebonised by time and the water, lay partly submerged. The roots reached up into the air like a giant’s hand. I knotted the soap in a corner of the cloth and suspended it from a limb. The water was cool, unexpectedly so. I shivered, raising tiny goosebumps on my skin, took a deep breath and plunged below the surface, coming up for air twenty yards on, where the river parted around an island of mangrove. I kicked out down the narrower of the tributaries, turned on to my back and floated for a few minutes with my eyes closed, feeling the faint warmth of a new sun on my face. I swam back to retrieve the cloth. I bathed, lathering my body, watched the bubbles swirl away. And after wards, I climbed up on to the bank where I shook the river water out of my hair. I would tell Aunt Serah I no longer needed hot water in the mornings, I made up my mind to bathe in the river for the remaining days of my stay.

  Wrapped in my sodden cloth I walked back to the village, passing the women on their way down to work in their gardens. Isatu, who gave birth to twins a few months ago, pressed an avocado into my hand and I walked on, tearing away the papery skin, biting into it like an apple. The scent of fruit, of damp earth, the ‘touk touk touk’ of a tinker bird, the women with their babies bound to their backs — there is nothing here that could not be a hundred years old, that could not have been exactly the same on the day Asana arrived here as a girl riding on her father’s shoulders.

  On my way through the village people called out little courtesies to one another and to me: ‘Did you sleep well?’ And I replied: ‘Thanto Kuru.’ I was no longer a stranger. I knew just where into all of this I fitted. Because in this small world everybody had a place, meaning they all knew how they came to be here. A story of which every detail was cherished. And I had mine.

  An hour later I left the house and set off in the opposite direction, past the last house in the village, down to the flat grassland on the edge of the forest. There I found Alpha, alone and kneeling in the dirt, surrounded by seedlings in black plastic bags. He was planting them, one by one, in a row in the ground, concentrating so hard he didn’t hear me come up behind him. The sun was still low in the sky, my shadow trailed behind me. I stood behind Alpha for a few moments, watching him. When I saw him reach for the next seedling, I bent down and passed it to him. He took it without turning around and I wondered if he had known I was there all along.

  ‘After tomorrow maybe we’ll be finished planting out,’ he said as he pressed the mud down around the roots. ‘It shouldn’t be too long until the rains come. Maybe two weeks, three weeks. We must keep them watered until then.’

  I knelt down a few feet away, picked up a trowel and began digging, copying Alpha’s actions.

  ‘Am I doing this right?’

  ‘Yes, Abie. That is quite all right.’

  With my hands I moulded the earth into a miniature moat around the plant, feeling the dirt burying itself under my fingernails, then I poured water into it. The first three rows of trees had been staked, to save them from marauding porcupines and some kind of cane rat called a cutting grass. Alpha had supervised as the men set wire traps around the perimeter.

  ‘I’m thinking we’ll plant cassava as a cover crop. We can dry and store some of it.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  We had left the old plantation as it was and begun a new one on the other side of the village. The trees that lived on in the forest had survived the fire, but neglect had taken its toll. Their beans were a long way past their best. So we took cuttings and began to raise seedlings.

  In the meantime a certain giddiness had come over my aunts as if the time spent remembering the girls and women they once had been had invigorated the spirits. They’d lifted the past from their own shoulders and handed it to me. I didn’t see it as a burden, not at all. Rather a treasure trove of memories, of lives lived and lessons learned, of terrors faced and pleasures tasted.

  Still today and every day those women appear to me in my mind’s eye, my aunts in all their guises, often when I am least expecting it. Vibrant and noisy, tumbling through time, jostling for my attention, and always with something new to say about whatever it is I am doing. Superior by far to any box of disintegrating diaries and lifeless letters.

  I passed Ya Namina’s house, whi
ch is how I have come to think of it. A workman was knocking nails into the edges of the window frames. An evening a week earlier, as we all sat keeping company in front of the house, Asana had voiced her intention to move in, to live in her mother’s house again. A moment later she eased herself slowly to her feet with the aid of her stick, saying she was on her way to bed. On the steps of the verandah she turned to Aunty Hawa, who that particular evening had scarcely shared in the talk, but sat silent as the chatter flew around her. ‘And will you stay with me?’ she asked. Aunty Hawa jumped up and ran over to her, and I saw her bend down and fleetingly touch her elder sister’s feet.

  They were all there on the day planting began. Serah poured a libation over the first seedling and uttered a short impromptu prayer. Then she told us she had something to say. She had decided to look for her mother. She and Mary planned a trip to the South, to the town where Serah’s mother was last heard to be living. It was only a beginning, so many years and a war had intervened, but the women who made gara were full of information and all knew each other. They would carry with them the pieces of cloth from Serah’s marriage box to show them. Every woman had her own designs like a trademark, somebody might remember. And afterwards Hawa sang a song, surprising me with a voice that was powerful and true. Gradually the others joined in, and I hummed along to the parts that were familiar, until after a few verses I had the confidence to sing out loud.

  The day before I was due to return to the city to catch my flight to London the four of them decided to join me for my morning bath in the river. They were already there by the time I arrived, I heard the sound of their laughter and bickering bouncing across the water. I suppose, strictly speaking, Aunty Asana shouldn’t have been there, but that was just a convention after all. And if I had learned one thing about my aunts, it is that they would not be bound by anything so flimsy.