by Ben Okri
‘How do you know?’
‘I know. I saw them.’
He stared at me dubiously.
‘What else?’
‘The blind old man is going to take over the world.’
‘What blind old man?’
I stared at him, bewildered. I went on.
‘The forest has been singing.’
‘How can a forest sing?’
‘Many people have disappeared into the forest. I saw white antelopes with jewels round their necks. Thugs killed the carpenter and Madame Koto’s driver ran over Ade, my friend, the carpenter’s son. The carpenter’s body has been walking about the street and he held me one night . . .’
‘A dead man?’
‘Yes.’
He stared at me again, as if I were in a fever, or as if I had appeared without explanation in a dream he was having.
‘Tell me something else. Tell me something I can believe,’ he said, eventually.
‘I am,’ I said.
‘Tell me something else anyway.’
‘There is an old leopard in the forest which only Dad can see.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes.’
The Photographer turned to look at Dad. I tugged at his shirt.
‘Madame Koto has been going mad. There was a mighty evil wind with rain and earthquakes which destroyed people’s houses. Dad went blind because of the dead carpenter. Madame Koto’s masquerade rode a white horse killing spirits. The political thugs came and stoned our windows. Soon there is going to be a great rally where . . .’
‘I know about the rally,’ he interrupted.
‘Will you come?’
‘Of course.’
He was silent for a moment. Then he spoke again.
‘You are the strangest child I have ever met,’ he said. ‘No one mentioned anything about a masquerade on a white horse killing spirits, or a dead man walking. Are you well?’
I nodded.
‘Tell me about the old leopard.’
‘Only Dad can see it.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s because Madame Koto has been sitting on his head. Maybe it’s because he went blind.’
‘Blind?’
‘Yes.’
‘How could he see a leopard if he was blind?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What a crazy family,’ he said. ‘Everything seems to have changed. What happened to the rats?’
‘They didn’t come back.’
‘Didn’t I tell you?’
‘You did.’
‘I killed all the rats in the house of a millionaire. One hundred and six rats died in his house. That’s how I got my job.’
‘What job?’
‘Working for a newspaper. I take their photographs.’
‘So you are a big man now?’
‘No,’ he said, laughing. Then, lowering his voice, he asked:
‘Can I photograph the leopard?’
Dad mysteriously stirred on his chair. The smile had widened imperceptibly on his face.
‘I have taken photographs of all kinds of things, of white men flogging their black servants, of riots and strikes, political rallies, boxers being knocked out, wrestlers lifting cars with their teeth, houses collapsing because of the storms, goats being slaughtered for religious feasts, people of new churches, in white dresses, praying at the beach, prisoners rioting, politicians making speeches about Independence, birds flying out of a huge magic saxophone, but I want to take the sort of picture I’ve never taken before. I want to photograph an old leopard, a free leopard, in the forest of the city. I can see it in my mind already.’
‘But only Dad can see the leopard.’
‘Nonsense,’ the Photographer said, unwisely.
Suddenly, like an apparition rising from the earth, Dad got up from his chair. He towered over us. His presence was menacingly serene. The Photographer stood up hurriedly, and said:
‘Well, I suppose I must be going. Yes, I will go and develop the photographs. Thank you for all the drinks. I will be back before the rally.’
He made for the door. Dad caught him on the shoulder. They shook hands.
‘You are a strange family, but you are my favourite family in the whole world,’ the Photographer said, with a grand gesture, leaving.
Outside I heard Mum thanking him for his tenacious support. I heard them talking about newspapers and fame. Their voices went towards the street. Dad sat back down in his chair. He looked at me with wide-open eyes. Then he smiled, and said:
‘My son, I have seen wonders.’
Then he became silent again, his eyes vacuous, his face almost foolish with his smile of a hidden pleasure. Not long afterwards Mum came back into the room. She sat beside me on the bed. She put her arm round me and held me close. We sat alone in the room full of shadows. We stared at one another in silence. It felt like we were at the bottom of a sacred river.
TWENTY-FIVE
Destroying the veil
ON THE DAY after Dad was released from prison, Madame Koto stopped raving. Her bar was shut and none of her women were seen around. No one went there to drink palm-wine and peppersoup. There were no political meetings. There were no rehearsals for the great rally. It had been postponed so many times because the voices of the oracles were not yet favourable and the alignment of the planets had not been propitious.
The continual postponement of the rally left us in a state of frustrated expectancy. The people of the area, the shopkeepers, petty traders, sellers of fried food and soft drinks had made great preparations for what would be a fiesta of sales. The rally had come to assume mythic proportions in our minds. We looked forward to big bands, magicians swallowing gold coins, somersaulters, fire-eaters, dancers, acrobats, contortionists, jugglers and bombastic speech-makers. There were no circuses in those days and the rally focused our minds on the spectacle of politics.
With Madame Koto’s bar empty and silent, a fabulous lightness filled our beings. But we waited that morning for her appearance. We waited for her daily public confessions, her forty-five minutes of delirium, her curses, her sinister utterances; and when she failed to appear we were disappointed. We became somewhat irritable. With her disappearance also went her tragic drama. We felt cheated through the day, and in the afternoon it rained.
The dead carpenter also temporarily disappeared from our lives. When the government pressed on with the destruction of the forest the dead carpenter’s grave was discovered. The grave was freshly carpeted with wild flowers and it had the most expensive gravestone we ever saw, bearing the legend: ‘HERE LIES A CARPENTER WHO REFUSES TO DIE.’ We had no idea who had erected this wonderful memorial.
After the discovery of the grave, and one week after Dad had been released, the two murderers were rumoured to have gone insane in prison. One of them had managed to scratch out his eye, apparently thinking it was a weird kind of slug that was burrowing its way into his head. They were both carted off to a maximum security prison and we didn’t hear anything about them any more.
But on the night that the dead carpenter’s grave was found sinister new voices sounded in our street. The forest was silent. There were no empty spaces in public spectacle in those days but it came as a shock to us to hear gruff voices, red-hot with drink and vengeance, accusing Madame Koto of being a traitor.
‘THOSE WHO BREAK SACRED OATHS MUST DIE!’ the voices cried, obscurely.
We didn’t know what it all meant. For three days the voices continued. Madame Koto retreated to her secret palace to recuperate, and her absence intensified the myths about her which the voices made more ominous.
The rains fell, and turned our roads into muddy streams. Eventually the voices, hoarse from their chanting and their threats, were silent. Fresh winds, unsifted by wild leaves and aromatic climbers, blew through the gaps in the forest. The gaps widened daily.
The forest once represented the beginnings of dreams, the boundary of our visible community, the drea
ming place of spirits, the dwelling place of mysteries and innumerable old stories that reincarnate in the diverse minds of human beings. The forest was once a place where we saw the dreams of our ancestors take form. It was once a place where antelopes roamed with crowns on their heads. It was a rich homeland of the spirit. Its nocturnal darkness was the crucible of all our experiments in imagination. The darkness there had always been a spell, a hallucination, a benign god. In its silences old herbs kept their secrets of future cures. The trees stored the stories of our lives on their gnarled and intelligent faces. In the dark forest snakes swam on dead leaves, spiders laid eggs that shone at night, and the eyes of strange animals turned yellow and flared intermittently.
The forest was once a place where the spirits and elves came awake at night and played and wove their spells of mischief and delight. This forest of dreams and nightmares, dense like all the suffering of our unrecorded days, was being altered for ever. This forest of our living souls was beginning to show gaps. We saw the sky beyond. We also began to see other communities. But they were as a dream, fading and reappearing in a yellow mist.
The destruction of the forest, the unfamiliar gaping holes, the great wound of it, seemed to our horror like a veil rent asunder, cut through with flashing knives, to reveal not mysteries, but nothingness. It was as if the veil itself were the mystery.
At first the gaps in the forest were not noticeable. The rent in the trees had not yet begun to eat away at our psyches. But the forest dwellers compacted their living spaces. The spirits and tangential beings fled from the exposure, from the shallow reality of daylight.
At first, the spirits thought only of the continuation of their mysterious lives. The destruction of their crepuscular abodes had not yet begun to drain our souls. Vengeance had not yet entered a new war. The war humans were waging on the spirits’ realm. The war they would rage on ours.
At first we humans didn’t notice the great trees dying, crying out as they fell in the agonized voices of slain benign giants. At first the falling trees, crashing down on their mortally wounded colleagues, didn’t alter the stories of our lives. We still had our spectacles, and our daily dramas to divert us.
TWENTY-SIX
The silence of the Tyger
WHEN THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S pictures were published in the newspapers we became famous for three days. The seven women who had made the search with Mum turned up at our house, bearing the newspapers. They talked all day long about their future plans. Mum took to fame very badly. She became loud-voiced. She talked of becoming a wrestler. She spoke of becoming a politician. She dressed in very bright clothes and even stopped hawking for a while. She invited her new friends round and made frenzied plans and bought drinks on credit.
All that time Dad slept, woke, went off to work, came back, and stayed silent, with an unconquerable smile on his lips and a depthless emptiness in his glassy eyes. He resented the new interest in him. He didn’t speak to anybody. He stayed indoors, in the dark, with the door always open, and with a complete absence of expectancy on his face, always staring through people and things as if he were in a realm where perspectives were radically different from ours.
For three days Mum was famous and when we began to starve again she went out hawking, and took the newspapers with her, telling strangers about her prominence when they wanted to buy her wares. She took her fame badly and no one wanted to buy anything from her and she came back in the evenings dehydrated and depressed, having alienated all her customers with her self-obsession. One evening when she returned from a bad day’s hawking, she said:
‘We are in the newspapers and still we are hungry.’
We said nothing to her. It was just as well, for the next day we read in the papers that the elite women and the lawyer were claiming all the glory for freeing Dad from prison. Mum was furious and she set out immediately to the newspaper to correct the lies. She returned in the evening thoroughly disillusioned and hungry because she had spent the whole day searching for the newspaper offices and had been unable to find them.
‘Newspapers are printed by devils,’ she said.
For days afterwards we heard more stories about other people the lawyer had freed, and the cases he had won. We learned that the leader of the elite women had become a politician and an official candidate for one of the political parties. Mum became bitter because the elite women had somehow entered a higher zone of public life on the basis of three days of her agony. She was bitter, but she didn’t know what to be bitter about.
‘My husband is free,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t talk, and sits around like a fool, but at least he is safe. And my son is well. What more do I want?’
But Mum wanted more. She had tasted more. She had learnt more. Somehow she felt that a new life, a greater opportunity, a new freedom had been snatched from her. She felt that a door had been shut on her new possibilities. The seven women came often to discuss, to plan; but with the birth of the famous Society of Women headed by the elite group, with all the interest they had generated in the newspapers, their fund-raising events, their highly publicized speeches and well-organized demonstrations, their meetings with members of the government, what chance did eight women from eight different ghettoes stand? Their meetings in our little room turned into squabbles and power struggles. The group splintered. They quarrelled endlessly. Their friendships turned sour and then the whole idea died and then they stopped coming to our place.
I was very sad when the seven women stopped coming. They brought activity, twelve languages, strange philosophies, and many interesting dishes of food with tastes like the memory of a rich dream in our mouths. They brought hope and activity and argument and lovely voices. They had dreams of improving the lives of women, dreams of getting the government to change our society’s perception of women, of creating better hospitals, and setting up schools and universities to educate women for the best jobs that the land had to offer. Their dreams were chaotic and related to their experiences and they always argued. But they argued with lots of food in the house. They talked a great deal about politics and they made the word take on a better taste, like the taste of succulent mangoes, or sun-ripened oranges.
When they stopped coming our room became small and sad again, devoid of different lovely voices and languages and faces, devoid of the laughter of those who dream intensely from intense suffering. And Mum became more shrill, more irritable. Her brief fame had cheated her and she took out her annoyance on us. That was when it occurred to me that fame is often a devourer of the best things in our spirit. I suffered Mum’s annoyance the most. I was made to run long errands, was sent to the market, and made to wash clothes under the merciless sunlight. Mum became a stern disciplinarian, shouting at me, putting me through my paces, and bellowing stories to me of what happens to lazy people, how they become criminals, how they go mad in jail.
Through all the comings and goings of the seven women, through all the dying of their dreams, through Madame Koto’s absence, and the destruction of the forest, Dad remained silent. He was silent for several weeks. Not even the groans of the devastated trees stirred him.
During the long weeks of his vacancy, we became aware that we were being spied upon. Policemen in mufti would hang around outside our compound, watching our movements. The secret policemen spied on us, thinking we were agitators. But after observing the comings and goings of the seven women, their public arguments about who should be chairwoman, their quarrels which flared in the street, after observing Dad’s wandering off to work, his staggering back, his complete silence, his idiotic stare, his fixed smile, they lost interest in us. They saw us as buffoons who had somehow stumbled into national prominence.
When the spies stopped watching us, our sense of significance diminished. When the seven women vanished from our lives, we were fairly dazed. We were left only with Dad’s silence and his holographic smile. His dead-eyed stare continued. His wounds and bruises had gone, but the pain of them remained. He groaned in agony every night. He
ached all over. As the weeks passed the pain increased, as if he were paying an additional price for having all evidence of his wounds disappear from the surface of his flesh in the first place. The gold dust rimming his eyes gave him an increasingly demented, sleepless expression. The ash in his hair, the diamond-powder streaks, which had been a continuous source of mystery, made him look older and at the same time more striking, curiously distinguished, almost demonic.
Dad’s silence was deep and on many nights he took us with him deep down into a hole or abyss which left us frustrated by the beginnings of sentences that he would launch into once every ten days. He would say something, an oblique word. We would become tense. We would listen, waiting. Then we would find ourselves following his silence into coral reefs and dark caves, into places deep under the earth, and deep into the sea, where fishes of the diamond seabeds utter strange melodies. And it would be another ten days before Dad would speak again, saying one word, a word like ‘wood’ or ‘tree’ or ‘sun’, and then again his silence would suffocate us. He made our lives so airless.
While we watched the invading phenomena of a new time full of sinister omens, Dad lay on the seabed, the moonbed, of a long agonizing dream, an unfathomable meditation on the nature of the gods and on the fifth stage of history. While Independence approached with all its signs and cross-currents, while the trees died, and Madame Koto regained her strength, while the rainy season unleashed an avalanche of dead leaves and dead birds, of streams and primeval mud on our destinies, Dad did nothing but make us suffer the silence of a man who has survived the manifestation of a dreaded deity, a new god.
BOOK TWO
ONE
Circling spirit (1)
THERE IS A famous story of a chief who ordered all the frogs to be killed because they disturbed his sleep. The frogs were killed and he slept well till the mosquitoes came and destroyed his kingdom. His people fled the realm because of the diseases the mosquito brought and what was once a proud land became an empty waste.