by Ben Okri
TEN
Wrath of the Wandering Spirit
IN THE AFTERNOON of the next day the Wandering Spirit went past, unleashing a catastrophic heatwave that made women faint, made men gasp for breath, and made eagles fall from the sky. Butterflies flew wildly in the boiling air. The heatwave stunned lizards and spiders, made white snakes come out of their lairs, caused tortoises and cats to collapse on banks of fallen trees, exhausted from the sunstroke. Strange cries of asphyxiating animals came from the forest. The water levels in the wells dropped, and everywhere the people of our area cried about the abnormal heat.
Bottles cracked on the street. The road became a boiling river. Plants dried up. Cracks appeared on the walls of our houses. Everywhere the water was hot, and drinking intensified our thirst, and dehydration left us breathless. Our mouths hung open, our breathing became shallow, and we were unable to speak. Cracks appeared on people’s faces. Children playing in the street collapsed suddenly. The air was still. Chickens and goats lay at street corners, jerking occasionally, their eyes fixed and dreamy.
For three days the heat was relentless as the Wandering Spirit passed over the city, spreading spontaneous combustions in its wake. There were inexplicable fires in the market-places. Thatch huts crackled into flames. Stalls burst into smoke. And on the third day the heat intensified over our street in the shape of blazing clouds which turned black as nightfall neared. Stars were in flame that night and the moon was hot and we breathed in the fires of insomnia. We heard pregnant women screaming in the dense heat.
The heat made a furnace of the night. People sat outside their housefronts, their brains stunned, staring at the sky in silence. The heat aged everything; it made the night very old. And for the first time we became aware of a deep silence which had never been there before. The forest was silent and no voices travelled over that air of liquid heat.
Our bodies burned that night. The air made strange popping noises. And even the fireflies had their lights extinguished. Toads and frogs were silent; the owls didn’t hoot; but I saw the old woman in the forest floating on a block of ice, while the Wandering Spirit unleashed its innocent vengeance over our lives. The block of ice, white under the moon, melted beneath the flesh of the old woman – and her eyes were very bright.
After she had cooled down considerably, the old woman hobbled to the river bank with the one-legged girl. They fetched water from a secret spring which got cooler the hotter the air became. They made the animals drink. They gave the magic water to their protected outcasts, to the homeless beasts, and the wounded antelopes.
All over the forest, spirits were rising from their sleep of centuries. Spirits exiled from their forest homes danced on the heated rivers.
The old woman then sent a cool wind through the nightspaces, and it brought temporary relief to the gasping animals. The wind travelled across our street. It was a soothing stream of air that made a little sleep possible, but not many slept that night, for the wind, laden with the heat it had cooled, itself became hot.
Meanwhile the Governor-General was in his white mansion at Government Quarters, fanned by three servants. His wife lay semi-conscious in the living room from the heat which had conquered the electric fans. The Governor-General had completed the first draft of the rewriting of our lives. He put down his pen, ambled to the bay window, looked out, saw the night with its orange tinge, the stars white hot in the sky, the moon with its shade of red, and he began to contemplate the continent. He pondered the passage in Ovid’s Metamorphoses which spoke of the chariot of the sun-god, ridden by his wilful son, and how the chariot, veering close to the earth, scorched the trees, turned the land to desert wastes, disturbed the waters, and came so close over Africa that it permanently burned the skin of the inhabitants, altering their colour for ever. The heat invaded the Governor-General’s brain and from the waves of dizziness came the question which he uttered out loud to his wife, who had now found the ultimate reason to return to her native land and its cool climate. He said:
‘Who are we to believe? Herodotus or Ovid? The historian or the poet?’
‘What’s Herodotus got to do with the heat, darling?’ his wife asked.
‘Well, my dear, Herodotus suggests that ancient Greece got its gods and its myths and its philosophies from Egypt, and therefore Africa.’
‘The heat, darling, do something about the heat,’ his wife replied, indifferently.
‘And if we are to believe Ovid then Africans were originally white before the chariot of the sun burned them.’
‘Believe what you want, darling, but just do something about this heat.’
‘A few cranky anthropologists of course believe that man began in Africa. In that case Africa wasn’t so hot in those distant days, and Africans were white. I think I favour the poet.’
His wife opened her eyes, stared coolly at him, and said:
‘You didn’t hear a word of what I said. This heat will roast us alive. If you don’t do something about the heat, I will never speak to you again, my dear.’
But the Governor-General was so taken with his perception that he began to laugh. His servants fanned him, barely stirring the heat; a window cracked; their daughter woke up; another window splintered. Mosquitoes and maddened fireflies came in. The Wandering Spirit passed over the house and in the pantry a bottle of castor oil caught fire. The fire spread round the house, exploding the jars, and burning the well-kept garden of jasmines and chrysanthemums. And while the Governor-General meditated on Ovid’s indirect theory of racial differentiation, his daughter, upstairs in her room, was suffering hallucinations in which fire spirits of the air were trying to get into her body through her mouth and between her legs. The servants noticed the fire in the kitchen; panic engulfed the house; the fire spread along the Persian carpets, travelling serenely, burning in a low flame. When the household recovered from their stupor they found the walls and floors charred, they found books burnt with their covers and illustrations intact. But all over the house, as if the fire and ash had given birth to monstrous prodigies, were a host of black butterflies with green eyes, creatures of the god of chaos.
In the wake of the Wandering Spirit houses caught fire, cars burst into flames, and people reported seeing green flares on the lagoon. Some even spoke of thin trails of fire searing the wind. The fire travelled through the air, giving birth to its own kind. And in our room, with Mum suffocating on the bed, and Dad breathing hoarsely on his chair, I dreamt that I saw the fire travelling in a horizontal spiralling line to the old woman in the forest. Then she did something quite astonishing. She seized the fire with her wizened hands, trapped it in her earthenware pot, and buried it three feet deep in the potent soil. And when she returned to her tapestry she gasped at the realization that she had completed a visual story about the fiery spirit awoken on the ninth day of the apocalyptic disturbance of the earth. In what mood had she been when she wove her threads of fire round our lives? Aware of the silent vengeance of the forest spirits and the disturbed balances of the forces of our world, she took up her marvellous thread and began a counter-motion. Her head was yellow under the red moon. As she worked, she sighed deeply, and a wind started at the mouth of the forest and blew across our street. And then, in an exhausted voice, she cried:
‘After fire, flood!’
And the Wandering Spirit, released from its dream of centuries, went from city to city, from country to country. And then, because it was permanently homeless, it began to roam the entire world, spreading its erratic heatwaves and spontaneous combustions and curious weather conditions wherever circumstances were favourable. It created droughts, extended desert spaces in lands of rich vegetation, and created roads on which nothing would grow and along which the god of chaos would travel. And it mingled with the other negative forces released in the new times, and found affinities with the pollutions and radiations of the century.
ELEVEN
Burning the future
LATER THAT NIGHT, with the heat everywhere, Mum’
s eyes were bright with terror. Dad was rocking in his three-legged chair. I sensed something come into our room, and I woke up.
‘They are burning up our future,’ Dad was saying.
‘Who?’ Mum asked.
‘Across the oceans,’ Dad replied, cryptically.
There was a long silence. The wind blew in gently, sweeping the heat from our faces. I saw a green light growing bigger beside Dad, and I cried out because I thought the house was on fire. And when I jumped up from the floor, I noticed the smell of the forest and felt the personality of a great animal. In the flash of a moment’s clarity I saw the emerald leopard at Dad’s feet. Its eyes were like diamonds. As it looked up at Dad its aura diminished. Then its presence waned. And it vanished.
‘Somewhere, a mighty leopard is dying,’ Dad said.
‘It’s gone,’ I said.
‘It will rain tomorrow,’ Mum said.
The gentle wind brought sleep. Dad slept with Mum, surrounded by fire, dreaming about rain. I slept on the floor, and dreamt about the old woman in the forest who had been floating on a block of ice.
TWELVE
The secret of the heatwave
IN THE MORNING the people of the street said they had seen a single yellow flower floating in the air. It did not rain, but the heatwave lessened considerably; and though it was not cool, it was not boiling either. The water levels rose mysteriously in the wells. Chickens and dogs began to roam about listlessly, searching for food among the rubbish. Tortoises and birds, white snakes and lizards had died in our street from the vengeance of the Wandering Spirit. Tree-cutters had fainted and we heard stories about a leopard coughing among the trees. Twenty people had died in the city from the heatwave.
As I stayed in the room, recovering from the concussive fever of the great iroko falling on me, I saw that the Governor-General’s house was not completely burnt. His daughter was still in a state of shock from being surrounded by flames. His parrot, which he had taught to say a few African words, had been cindered in its silver cage. The walls of the house and the carpets were charred. The pantry was altogether lost to the flames. One of his servants had suffered skin burns from rescuing the daughter. Hours later she was still hallucinating, still mumbling about the black devils she saw dancing in the invading fires. The first draft of the Governor-General’s rewriting of our lives was intact, but it was covered with inexplicable spangles of gold ash.
And while the Governor-General prepared for the forthcoming elections and the inauguration of the first president, withdrawing his empire from our land, but leaving its vast shadows behind to dog our progress; and while he began to speak seriously of returning to his manor house near Winchester and writing his memoirs, the old woman in the forest went back to an earlier section of her narrative and began to weave into the available spaces a tender myth about how white people were invented.
Dad went to work for the first time in a week. Mum went hawking sardines, candles and oranges. When she returned she told us that Madame Koto, fully recovered from her attack of madness, had begun her journey back into our lives. The great rally preceding the elections had been set for September; Madame Koto was coming back to resume her significant role. But it was not the prospect of Madame Koto’s re-emergence that made the day so unforgettable in my life. It was the news that Dad brought back from the world.
When he returned from work that evening Dad gathered us together in the room. He lit a stick of incense, poured a libation to his ancestors, and prayed to the great heavens to protect our little family and the rest of the world.
‘My wife, my son,’ Dad said solemnly. ‘The white people have just exploded a big bomb in our backyard.’
‘Not our backyard here!’ Mum cried out.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Dad said, flashing her an angry look. ‘The backyard of our country. They call it an Atom Bomb.’
‘What’s an Atom Bomb?’ I asked.
‘It’s a fire that can destroy the whole world,’ he said gravely.
Then he spoke of the explosion which shook the entire continent and made the waves of the Atlantic scream over its vast expanse. He filled us with terror at the thought of what dangerous spirits, what diseases, what earthquakes, what unpleasant destinies, were lying in wait. We listened in complete silence, thinking about the explosion that was going to ambush our future.
When Dad finished telling us about the bomb, Mum began to weep silently. I wept as well. This was the first time it occurred to me that the earth might not continue for ever.
THIRTEEN
Dolores mundi
THAT NIGHT, FOR the first time, Mum dreamt about the secret agony of angels.
FOURTEEN
Invisible books
THERE IS THE story of an African emperor who ordered all the frogs in his realm to be exterminated because they disturbed his sleep. The frogs were killed and he slept serenely till the mosquitoes, whose larvae the frogs fed on, came and spread disease. His people fled and what was once a proud land became a desert waste.
But at least the earth continued.
Dad retold this story in snatches, through his long silence. However, it was not the gradual destruction of the trees, or the news of the apocalyptic bomb, which woke up his spirit. Nor was it the retreating of the heatwave, nor the atomic fumes in our blood. None of these things were truly responsible for Dad’s re-emergence from his deep silence.
He came back early from work one afternoon and began to rummage through the books he had acquired and which he used to make me read out to him. The new heat had become permanent in our lives. I saw him bathed in sweat, leaning over, flicking through the books, whose pages were covered with spiders’ webs.
‘The spiders of Africa have been reading these books,’ he said.
Then he made me read to him about an African king who had been saved from death in a battle by a wild boar. He had been told the story as a child and later he was delighted to find it had been written down in a book. While I read, he fell asleep. When I finished the story he woke up suddenly, and said:
‘You know, Azaro, when I was a child like you, spirits used to read to me from invisible books composed by our ancestors. I didn’t understand them at the time. One day, my son, you will make some of those invisible books visible.’
He fell asleep again and I listened in silence to the stories the wind told. Stories told at odd angles, whose logic required serenity and an open heart to understand. Stories about the many invisible lives who were still living out their passions in the spaces we occupied. The wind told several stories at once, interweaving all the simultaneous strands like many voices singing different songs in harmony. There was a beautiful music to the coolness of the wind after the heatwave; and as I sat immersed in the stories Dad suddenly jumped up from the chair. He put on his boots in a hurry and stamped his feet on the ground, trembling the cupboard.
‘Something is calling me,’ he said, and rushed out of the room.
I gave him a little time before I followed. Something had finally awoken his spirit. It was only after he had left, his shadow haunted by an omen, that I understood what had woken him. It was the old leopard, coughing in the depths of the sacred forest, its line coming to an end.
BOOK THREE
ONE
The shrine in the labyrinth
EVERY MOOD IS a story, and every story becomes a mood. In the forest, the wind was full of moods. I followed Dad through the mood of trees about to die. My footsteps were light on the fallen leaves. He went deeper into the forest, stopping now and then to listen to sounds only he could hear. I saw the homeless spirits also following him, listening to the peculiar melodies of his being, curious about his nature. Some of the spirits were mischievous to a point of cruelty. I saw also that angry as they were, none of them wanted to harm him. Dad drew a host of spirits to him as he went from one grove to another, searching for the mysterious animal.
Dad was immune to the forest fevers and the fata Morganas; he was immune to the entrapmen
ts of the labyrinth. But he went long distances, from river’s edge to groves of cedar, in search of the leopard and couldn’t find it. He kept hearing the coughing of the great beast. It always seemed close by, but Dad’s madness didn’t make him think the beast might attack him. And when he couldn’t find the animal whose manifestations had emboldened him, when he succumbed to a feeling of confusion, he lost his immunity to the labyrinth and the forest became a sinister place. The trees and piping birds took on a brooding, watchful menace. I saw my father sit on a fallen tree, trembling.
Not long afterwards he got up and walked round in circles, muttering incantations. And then, as if in a trance, he broke into a clearing surrounded by cedars and baobabs. All around the clearing white rocks rose high, as if there had once been a marble hill in the forest. Blue and yellow flowers grew on the rocks. Water flowed from a crevice. There was a red bird with an old face on an outcrop. The earth was white, the air smelt of happiness and the wind was pure. The forest seemed far away; and the radiant white space was like a paradise within the forest. White flowers with red specks grew everywhere.
And right in front of the marble rocks, like wonderful figures in a vision – were the statues. They were a people with intelligent faces and serene personalities, listening to the great commandments of the universe. They were all standing, and they were all completely still. They seemed alive, but they were still, as if what they were listening to had woven an enchantment around them. Not even the wind stirred them, not even the white snakes coiled on their heads disturbed them. Jewels glistened round their necks. Snails inched up their bodies, turtles were at their feet. Their eyes were alive and vigilant and still, as if they knew their worth and place in history, as if they were aware of everything. They had no divisions in their souls, no doubts, and no fears about anything in the world. The statues were wholly submerged in the mysteries of their times, a race of higher beings at peace in their sanctuary. And yet they seemed perpetually ready for a mysterious call that would sound across the divinity-flavoured regions of space, a people ready to depart their lands for ever. A people who knew the deepest exile. It was as if they had arrived from a distant planet and brought the spirit of the planet with them; so that they were both at home in the sacred grove and ready to depart it at the slightest notice.