by Vamba Sherif
On the fifth and sixth day, his anxiety began to wear off. On the morning of the seventh day, Halay was led out of the hut. The entire town was waiting there; thousands had gathered. He paused to glance at the cracks and bumps in the earth he walked on, the shapes of houses and the thatched roofs; the trees, the orange trees, mango trees and avocado trees, the grasses along the road, the ochre colour of the road itself, the overcast sky, the goats and sheep lying idly on the roadside. He strove to imprint on his mind the face of every individual in the crowd: the face of a young man who seemed not to comprehend the meaning of the ceremony; the anxious face of one who questioned his decision; and a face that was overwhelmed with joy, for at last the land would cease to be embroiled in constant war. A face littered with the creases of old age; a serene face that had been troubled by recent events. And a face every angle of which he knew and had touched: Miatta’s face? And another face that bore his father’s broad nose, his strength, his gait, and that was a replica of his mother’s with the broad forehead, the smiles, the laughs, and the gentleness: his son Salia’s face. He turned his back to the faces and walked on.
A square-shaped hole came into view when he mounted the hilltop. Palm fronds encircled it. The trees had been felled to clear as much ground around his final resting place. Once again, very briefly, he felt the intimations of doubts, but the longer he gazed at the clearing, at the hole, the doubts began to subside. His future was certain. He was alone now, a solitary figure about to embark on his final battle, his final war, and whose feat would be remembered by his people.
Halay started down the hill towards his final resting place.
Book Four
Exile
1
War met me sitting at the table and reading a book in the light of a bare bulb. My mother had purchased the book during one of her trips to Monrovia, with money I had accumulated by running errands for her and doing chores around the house. The book was about a boy growing up in a town in the savannah, a boy named Kamo who tried to negotiate the challenges life threw his way. There was something about how he conducted himself that appealed to me: he was alone most of the time, conjuring up words in which he was the master, just like I often did when I drew the world around me: the butterflies at the river, my mother’s face, the professor’s Afro, the chair on which I sat, my table and bed.
Before me on the table were other books, many of which once belonged to my father, books loaded with stories ranging from those about American Indians and the Chinese who lived on the edges of the Gobi Desert. There were other books for school, but my sketchbooks took a prominent place on the table. Nothing mattered to me more than giving shape to the world. Behind me was a poster of a jet plane I had drawn, based on the one I had seen in a film at the local cinema. The drawing had established me as an artist in the eyes of my teacher Mr Wilson, who had taught me to look at the world closely and with deliberation.
I was so buried in the world of the book that when war came I thought it was the sound of fireworks, but soon it was followed by my father’s hurried footsteps going towards the room where he kept his belongings, and then I heard the sounds again.
He entered my room with a rifle.
The sight of my father holding the weapon as though it were a toy unnerved me. I stood up to make for the door.
‘Halay, those idiots have brought war to our city. I am going out with others to chase them away.’
My mother burst into the room.
‘You are scaring the child with that gun, Frederick. Give it to me right now,’ my mother said and whisked the weapon away.
‘But those brutes are already here,’ he said.
He was right. Outside, down the hill on the main street, machine guns were firing.
The three of us made for the door, but my father paused, hesitant to open it as the gunshots came nearer.
‘Frederick, we will die here,’ my mother said.
Hurried whispers and trampling feet populated the world around us. We darted out of the house. Somewhere in the dark, a cock crowed and a panicky dog barked. Most people seemed to be heading towards the mountains, which was also our destination. My mother had managed to bundle up some of our belongings, including clothes, a tin of palm oil, smoked fish and meat, some vegetables and fruits, a family album and my sketchbooks.
We followed a path once used by people a century or more ago but was abandoned when a bulldozer clearing it had crashed and its driver had claimed to have seen the dead. My mother was silent while my father kept lamenting the sudden transformation in our lives.
‘Jowo, your ancestor sacrificed his very life to prevent wars such as this. Yet, more than a century after his death, war comes. This must be the work of not more than a thousand people,’ he said. ‘Just a handful of people plunging the whole country into a nightmare!’
My mother ignored him. At one point, after we had climbed the mountain and had turned to stare at the city lying below us lit up in flames, my father stopped my mother. ‘Jowo, we can’t leave. I just remembered that we forgot the professor. He’s been like a father to you since the death of your parents. Everything we worked and lived for is right there. We can’t leave,’ he said.
‘You are behaving like a child, Frederick,’ my mother said and brushed past him, hauling me with her. My father followed.
Now in the forest proper, we were assailed by the terrifying cries of animals. Thick foliage and sharp entwining plants hindered our passage, but my father would clear them with his cutlass. I marvelled at his dexterity. I had never seen him dig a furrow with a hoe or use a tractor like other farmers did, for his gift lay in bringing those farmers together and harnessing their power in a cooperative society that catered to their needs, selling their crops in Monrovia and supplying them with farming materials. He worked to gain the farmers’ trust by being fair and fought corruption to hold on to that trust. Farmers were so taken by him that sometimes we would wake up and see them gathered in front of our house, waiting for him, trusting his verdict regarding their products.
My father was from the south-east of the country, where the ocean joined the land, and where the people perceived water as their god. Part of him belonged to those who sailed across that ocean, but his mother was of the seafaring people, the ones who regarded the sea as an entity that deserved filial treatment and was often given it.
Animals awoke to the sound of our footsteps and ran to safety. Dried leaves chattered as they took to flight. My father led the way, and I followed, and my mother brought up the rear. Near a stream, I realized that my mother was not with us. My father screamed like a wounded animal and darted towards the bush. He tore at branches, broke plants and wrestled with trees. We went up hills, stumbled into caves populated with bats. An animal gave a piercing cry so laden with terror that my knees buckled under me.
‘Halay, stand up, stand up I say!’ he shouted.
I could not move. He shouldered me and trudged on. We came to a more open place with low trees. My father set me down, cupped his head in his hands and burst into tears. I sat beside him and felt his shuddering body, felt him hold me tight, until the crack of dawn.
The rain that came lasted all morning. We continued our search. The trees and plants wafted a mixture of poignant smells. At an intersection of two obscure paths, we happened upon my mother entwined in foliage of thick brush, tortured and bruised. My father rushed to her, tore the brush off her, and revived her with water from a nearby stream.
‘Jowo, you are alive, you are alive …’ he kept saying.
We rested for most of the day and resumed our journey at noon. We came upon deserted villages, upon clothes, utensils, farming implements and cans scattered everywhere. In a village over which a cloud of smoke hung, the homes burning, we encountered a pack of stray dogs. They barked at us but did not attack us. A goat tethered to a house that was in flames wore an expression I had seen on my father’s face when he entered my room the previous night. My father untied it and the animal escaped
toward the bush.
Outside the village, we encountered a heap of masks. Most had been burned and the rest broken into pieces. The one with the face of a woman had been hacked into two and soiled with faeces. A mask with a mirror face had its once proud countenance dipped in mud, and another had its nose chopped off. We paused for a while, gazing at the carnage. My father sucked his teeth and shook his head.
‘Who would do such a thing?’ he asked.
The sun was bright and the air filled with a cloying, sweet fragrance. Insects chirped and birdsong rent the air. We sat down to rest in a clearing in the forest where a drowsy wind wafted over us.
My mother offered me some pounded peanut, and I nibbled at it, savouring it, knowing it was my last real meal.
Then we heard someone crying, the voice so pregnant with sorrow that we hurried towards it and met a woman standing in front of a house in flames, her hands on her head. We stood rooted to the spot as she grieved the loss of her home. Suddenly, she raced towards the house and, before my father could stop her, had flung herself into the burning pile.
None of us moved, too stunned to cry or moan. My father shook his head and led us on. In subsequent days, we slept in abandoned homes and ate fruit that resulted in dysentery, all the while avoiding people and sleeping while one of us kept watch.
Bedraggled, worn out, having suffered the cold, the noise and silence of the nights, and hunger, we crossed the river that bordered the two countries and reached our destination desperate for food.
2
It was a densely populated place. We moved through the streets, gazing at the people with some apprehension, at students in uniform on their way to school, and at cars piping out dark smoke. We gazed at the world around us as if we were seeing these things for the first time. They seemed separate from our reality and no matter how much we tried we could never be part of them. We came to a crowded market. As we edged our way through the throng of people, I bumped into a girl bearing a basket of mangoes on her head. The load seemed twice her weight. A scarf covered her face and a skirt and blouse shrouded her tiny figure. She wore cheap slippers, patched here and there, but from her clean clothes I thought she must come from a home that took good care of her. Her back was straight under the weight, and now and then she would call out offering to sell her mangoes in a high-pitched voice.
My mother’s face had reclined into a smile, perhaps because we had survived the war. My father wore a puzzled look, as if the world had become a riddle he was fighting to decipher. We roamed the city in search of a place to stay until we came to a house on its outskirts, with a piece of cloth as a door and the walls shrouded in bougainvillea. There was a chicken coop on the side of the house, and on the right, giving onto an open field, was a thatched shack that perhaps served as a bathroom.
We called out and an old lady appeared at the door. She wore a white dress that had faded to grey and from whose sleeves emerged tiny hands wrinkled with veins. Her dark, sparkling eyes searched ours.
My father explained our plight.
‘We are refugees,’ he said in French.
To our relief the old woman responded in our language. She asked our names and nodded as my father answered.
The old woman, whose name was Ma-Wata, lodged us in her immaculate home and fed us a meal of pounded cassava – toe – and hot pepper soup. Before leaving that night, she told us that she would be staying at one of her relatives until we had a place of our own or had returned to our land.
After dinner, I moved to a corner of the house and sat on a chair to take stock of our lives. The image of my school surrounded with orange and mango trees came to me, as well as the giant breadfruit tree that stood in front of it, the football field, and the huge bell, which I had been responding to every day for most of my twelve years. I thought of my schoolteacher, Mr Wilson, who had encouraged me to draw and had persuaded my parents to support my talent. My mind drifted to my grandparents, my mother’s parents, who had passed on a few years ago. Every morning, my grandmother, an old woman with skin the colour of deep brown earth, would come to fetch me to see her husband. My grandfather would present me with a cup of tea sweetened with condensed milk and served with French bread, which he smeared with margarine and stuffed with sardines. Seated on a mat, facing him with the morning sun beaming through the window, I would bite into the bread.
His great-grandfather Salia was the son of my namesake Halay. Besides stories of this ancestor, Halay, which varied every time, sometimes taking on mythical proportions, my grandfather told me of journeys he had undertaken to lands that went by new names now. He would tell me of a ruler who would force a whole town to bow in prayer night and day and would punish anyone who defied him by pinning his genitals to the ground. The ruler called it the big bowing day. There was another ruler whose reign of terror was such that the mere mention of his name was enough to keep people awake, on edge, afraid he would sack their towns and enslave them. But when the land could no longer condone his deeds, the ruler, while being carried in a hammock, had been ambushed and murdered.
But my grandfather’s favourite story was the one involving my grandmother. ‘She was not particularly beautiful when I first saw her, Halay,’ he would tell me. ‘No, there was nothing remarkable about her. And that’s why what happened to me later after I had learned to know her better, to eat her food, to spend hours with her baffled me.’ He had journeyed to a town in the east of the country to visit one of his friends and had lodged at his place. When dusk fell and it was time to take his bath, a young girl called to him to take his bath. She was the youngest daughter of the house and he had not seen her on his arrival. He was charmed by her smile and by the way she announced the bath. It was when he could not sleep and ate little of the food the next morning and when he walked in a daze and saw everyone returning his smile that he realized he was in love. He saw her once, then twice, but every time he met her, his longing for her heightened. He had asked for her hand in marriage but was told he could only marry after she had completed her secondary schooling. ‘I had to wait for a whole year, Halay,’ he would say.
At that point in the story, my grandfather would pause. ‘Here she comes,’ he would say of my grandmother. ‘Pretend you are eating.’
‘You are telling him one of your fanciful stories again,’ she would chide him. ‘Did you add that you had to wait five more years for me?’
My grandfather would fidget.
‘I don’t remember waiting a single day for you,’ he said.
‘Yes, after high school, I went to university,’ she said. ‘Don’t listen to all those stories, Halay. They are all embellished.’
‘But the child has to know.’
‘Then tell him the truth.’
‘That’s what I am doing.’
She would laugh and shake her head. Later, she would spirit me away after my grandfather had fallen asleep during siesta. She would lead me to a room full of jars of coins and stacks of notes not only of our currency but of many other countries, which she had begun to save the day I was born. In various valises, native cotton clothes were stacked. I often spent the night alternating between being enfolded in my mother’s arms or lying on a king-size bed in my grandparents’ room. When the two died in a car accident years later, I was the sole heir to their wealth.
From looking at the coins and notes, I learned about the flora and fauna of other lands, about their rulers, their artists and statesmen and those who had shaped the destiny of their countries. I would confine myself in the humid, stuffy room for hours on end, rubbing the coins and notes and studying the pictures and strange inscriptions. I would make up a game of trying to decipher the languages and what the images stood for and the stories behind them. Often I would draw them.
Those aspects of my past came to me now in that new home. In an attempt to understand our flight, this house and this exile, I began to jot down my feeling in poems. They were crude lines yet to be honed into something permanent. I turned my attention to my m
other with her mysterious smile and my father huddled in a corner, his eyes closed. I watched my mother move to the only bed in the house. She was glowing amid that confusion, and I could not explain it.
‘You look happy here, Mother,’ I said.
She shook her head.
‘But why the smile?’
‘We are alive, Halay. We are alive. Have you paused to think about it? We are alive. Thousands will perish in that war.’
So this was the source of her happiness, that we had survived the war. Was that enough? I wondered. What did exile hold in store for us?
Moments later, she fell asleep. Her gentle breath rose and fell peacefully in the mud-scented house. Night had fallen. The flickering flame of the hurricane lamp lit up her face in a golden haze.
The urge to capture that moment led me to fetching my sketchbook and drawing her. I drew her hands tucked under her head as a pillow, and I drew her face, made it look younger, her lashes and fluttering eyelids. Instead of the bed and my father huddled beside her as background, I drew patches of clouds and drew the bed as a garden. And I drew my father, and set upon his head a bundle under which his now spindly legs strained.
On my attempts to draw war, to give shape to our terrors and experience, I found that the results were either detached from my innermost feelings, chaotic or mere fantasies that lacked depth.
The light of the hurricane lamp faded out and left me pondering on the subject of war. I had failed to draw it. I spread one of my mother’s wrappers on the cold floor and went to bed. My sleep was capricious. In between sleep, I would hear peals of laughter and snatches of conversation drifting from the houses along the road. Then sleep would overcome me, and I would drift into the realm of dreams. One of my dreams was of a storm that hit the city. The storm headed towards me and was about to sweep me up in its path when I woke up drenched in sweat. By then it was already morning. My mother was absent.