Eddie Signwriter

by Adam Schwartzman

  What happened to him here, over the course of a few months, started one evening as he sat with the five hundred other students in the school hall where meals were taken. The rain was coming down, as it had been on and off for a few days. It hammered on the tin roof so hard that night that it drowned out the sound of the talking and shouting of the children gathered there, so that soon people stopped trying to speak at all, and they ate in silence, surrounded by the storm, while the smell of the wet ground began to rise up, rich and choking.

  After the meal the rain still had not stopped. It was at least a five-minute walk to the closest dormitory, and so the children all gathered outside under the eaves of the dining room, pressed against the walls.

  As he stood there somebody dashed out—a girl, running, laughing at her daring. He’d never talked to her before, though he’d noticed her a few times—the first, a few weeks before in one of the telecentres in town, from which his mother had made him phone to let her know he’d arrived safely. The girl had been there with a friend. They’d seen him staring, and laughed as they left.

  Now, standing under the eaves, he watched the girl running out into the storm, as the rain wrapped her up in her clothes.

  Something beautiful passing by, he reflected.

  Then gone.

  The sky was a little short of night. There was texture still in it, and he could make out the rise of the hill that separated the school from the town, and the half-presence of electric light behind it. There was a breeze—not cold, but damp—and he felt it in his shins and through his shoes, as if it were trying to flow into him. He stood for a few moments there. And then there seemed no point in standing there any longer, and he put his hands in his pockets and stooped his head into the evening and walked through the rain the distance back to his boarding house.

  By morning he had a fever. He spent the next four days in bed. On the first night he was given an extra blanket. Meals were brought down to him, then taken away untouched. He lay in his bunk during the day while the other boys were in classes. He slept, and when he was tired of sleeping, stared at the ceiling and thought.

  He thought about many things. He thought about what had happened. He thought about how his life was now, and how it had been before, and why his father had sent him back, and why he felt so alone, and how these things were connected.

  And then he was so tired he could no longer think. He could hardly go to the other side of the room to get water. Noise came in through the windows all the time, but he was defenseless against it. The fan above him was catching, crinkling like plastic, throbbing in the ceiling, but he needed the breeze to keep his temperature down.

  And as he lay in bed, sweating and distracted and wishing for things to be different, he suddenly felt a lightness—which at last was calming, and felt like sleep, so that he gave into it, and when he woke he no longer felt agitated at all, but rather disconnected from himself, as if he’d become an observer, a mere witness, removed from events that were happening in his own life.

  While his body recovered, he continued to feel this strange feeling of absence. He continued to attend classes. He continued to speak to people. Complete distance was impossible. They slept ten to a room at that place, on double bunks, and woke, and washed and ate together, worked, then slept again, and the physical living of their lives was very closely bound. But he did not join in with other children. He had no friends. Friends did not interest him. And nor, after a while, was anyone interested in befriending him.

  Though undisturbed, he did not go unnoticed. His aloofness attracted the attention of his teachers, and eventually the head teacher, who took an interest in him, saw him as a challenge, and so invited him to visit him in his quarters after class.

  The head teacher’s quarters were on the school property, near the water tanks on the hill. His house had two stories, and large empty rooms, and only him to fill them, except for the old woman who was his cook and stayed until the evening. Inside, the house had a wooden staircase and smelled of tobacco. On the walls there were original artworks—paintings and drawings done by artists from around the area—which he had not seen before in a house, and thought of at the time as being very beautiful.

  The head teacher was a small man. But also he was very self-possessed and calm and thoughtful, and difficult to raise to anger. There was something impressive about that. He had a lot of authority and respect in the eyes of people because of it and the boy respected him too.

  If other children visited the head teacher in his quarters, or he was the only one, he did not know, and he never asked. Maybe seeing the teacher became another of the routines he fell into. But also the teacher had known his father once. They’d attended training college together in Cape Coast, before the boy was born. The teacher liked asking about his father and he liked answering the teacher’s questions. About how his father was. How it had been to live in Botswana.

  In some ways his father and the teacher were alike—in their seriousness, in the way that it was often difficult to guess what they were thinking. Also, like his father, the teacher had traveled. He read and had interests, judging by the books that he took out from the library at Legon. About history and painting, and the biographies of generals and politicians. Napoleon. Churchill. Martin Luther King.

  After a time he and the teacher established a friendship. He told the teacher about what he felt without it seeming like an effort. He told the teacher about the things that were important to him and the things that disappointed him. About returning to his mother’s home, and finding everything so much smaller and different from what he remembered, and how his homecoming didn’t feel like homecoming at all. The teacher listened to these things, and he offered advice. Although mostly the teacher just listened, which was all that the boy wanted.

  Also the teacher was kind. The teacher took an interest in him, encouraged him. Sometimes with books, or with ideas, or through conversations in which the teacher tried to challenge him to think, to draw him out.

  It was late one afternoon, as he was leaving the teacher’s house to go back to classes, that the teacher first mentioned his idea of chance. He was standing on the step of the teacher’s door, and outside the mists were beginning to draw in for the evening, and the lamps that had already been lit were surrounded by milky halos.

  “Do you think you’re lucky?” are the words the teacher used.

  The teacher had a way of slimming his eyes when he asked a question and was already anticipating the answer, which was how the teacher looked at him then.

  “Sometimes,” he said.

  “But what if there isn’t such a thing as chance?” the teacher said. “What if chance is a choice. What if you choose to be lucky?”

  The teacher was talking fast now. He was excited because of his idea and it was difficult not to be drawn into his excitement.

  What the teacher said was that people believe too easily in chance. They believe that chance has power over them. That chance explains why things turn out or don’t. But what if we choose not to believe in chance? What if we banish the idea of it? This, he said, is what great people in history have done, perhaps even without knowing it.

  “What?” he asked. “They haven’t been lucky?”

  “No,” the teacher said, “they have been lucky, but not by accident. Their wills are so strong that their own luck is a choice.”

  He thought he saw what the teacher was trying to say to him and it seemed all right to him then. Not that he knew too much about great people in history—about Napoleon and Churchill and Martin Luther King. Though he did know for sure that he wasn’t going to be one of them. And so the fact that many things seemed to happen accidentally in his life was no argument against the teacher’s. But it set him thinking, and the next time he was at the teacher’s house he told the teacher about something that had happened when he was younger and living in Botswana. Not to him, but to a neighbour who was murdered by South African soldiers, who came across the border looking for some
body from the ANC but threw a grenade into the wrong person’s yard, and killed a man’s wife, and how afterwards they all came and saw the cotton dress flapping round the body like a chocolate wrapper, and the rest of the woman’s flesh hanging in a thorn tree.

  And he asked the teacher, “What kind of luck was that, to be the wife of the wrong person?” And was there something not great enough about her that this is what happened to her? And he told the teacher about something he often felt was true: that things didn’t have to happen for a reason, that they happen for nothing, as that woman was dead for nothing.

  The teacher was quiet for a while, and then he said, “Do you think about that a lot?”

  He said, “Not until last week,” although that was not true. He lied because he thought the teacher was sorry for him and he didn’t want him to be.

  “That’s bad,” the teacher said, and he thought that was the end of it. But then the teacher added, “especially for her.” And he was surprised by that, because it seemed that the teacher was laughing and inviting him to laugh with him at what happened to this woman, as children laugh about cruelty, and he didn’t know the teacher to be that way.

  But he didn’t laugh. He said: “It was very bad. I felt sorry for her.”

  The teacher said, “Not the destiny she would have preferred for herself.”

  “I don’t know what she thought about herself,” he said, and although he tried not to show it, he was confused, because he didn’t know what the teacher meant when he said the word destiny like that, as if the whole idea were a joke that the teacher was contemptuous of himself.

  And he thought the teacher noticed his confusion, because he turned his head away suddenly, as if struck by an unconnected thought. When the teacher turned back to him he was himself again.

  “A person has to learn to live with their life,” the teacher said, and that this was the advice he was giving him. The teacher said, “Try to own what happens. Try to have a view on things.”

  But maybe he didn’t have any ideas about how things should be, he said. Or maybe he hadn’t yet come across a view that made much sense to him, and didn’t have one of his own, unless having no view itself constitutes a view.

  He said, “Maybe it’s easier to let things happen to you. That’s what they’re going to do anyway. It’s easier than being worried all the time.”

  “Do you feel worried?” the teacher asked.

  He told the teacher that he didn’t, that in fact he felt nothing.

  “You don’t have goals?” the teacher asked, “Ambitions?” and there was that mocking tone again in his voice.

  “Of what?”

  “Of how you’d like your life to turn out,” the teacher suggested.

  He shrugged.

  The teacher did not respond.

  It seemed to him then that what he had said to the teacher had saddened and exhausted him. First the teacher looked at him and then he looked away again. The teacher was very still. He could see his breathing. He sensed at first that the teacher was making up his mind. That he had decided something important about him, or possibly himself, and so he waited for the teacher to finish thinking, and say something. But the teacher didn’t say anything, and when he looked up again he saw that the teacher had not moved. And he’d remember very distinctly what it was he thought he was seeing in the teacher, and how surprised he was to see it. As if the teacher had found himself caught out, and wanted to hide himself in silence.

  All of this was very long ago. Not much later he met Nana Oforiwaa, the aunt of the girl he saw running through the rain, and many things happened after that to dull his memory of the time before.

  But he’d often come back in his mind to that conversation he had with the teacher about chance. He’d wonder what the thing was that the teacher gave away, then tried to hide. Were the things he said too much like what the teacher believed himself? Did his own weaknesses illuminate weaknesses that the teacher knew were also his own?

  That, at least, was the opinion that he formed at first and held for a long time. Though later he began to wonder something different: that really the teacher had not been trying to teach him anything at all, as much as he’d been testing him. To see how far he might let things go in his life. How far he could be taken, before there’d be a story to pull him back.

  THE FIRST TIME HE MET Nana Oforiwaa it was early in the evening at the rest house she owned near the Botanical Gardens. Some time before in the afternoon he’d received a message from the teacher to prepare himself for an outing. The teacher wanted him to meet her. Nana Oforiwaa was rich and a senior person on the ridge and a friend of his, from the way the teacher talked.

  The journey by taxi from Akwapakrom took twenty minutes. It was the first time he’d driven on the ridge road since he arrived. He was dressed in a jacket, and long trousers which were tight in some places, and his shoes were polished. The teacher sat up front. At the back he drew the window down and let the air come in over him.

  They drove through the fields and small towns. Nobody talked. In Mampong he saw the old men with their chairs out in the shop fronts. All along the road outside Obosomase wine tappers were heading into the hills with their jerry cans and machetes. He could feel the engine through the body of the car. He closed his eyes and felt all right.

  Just short of Aburi they came to a road with a wire fence, beyond which he could see trees, sheds, and a water tower. The taxi turned right and after the fence ended there was a building. The entrance was a set of wide wooden doors that were shut. Closer to the fence there was a smaller door.

  The taxi stopped and the teacher climbed down and knocked on the door. He stayed in the car as the engine idled. There was no answer. The teacher motioned for him to get out.

  “We will have to go through the gardens,” the teacher said. “She is in the front and cannot hear us.”

  The teacher paid the taxi driver, who watched them walk a few paces before driving off.

  “Do you know this place?” the teacher asked.

  He said he did not.

  “This is Aburi,” the teacher said. “We are at the Botanical Gardens. There is every kind of tree here. You will see it is very beautiful.”

  They walked the length of the fence. He looked in, at the trees and the palms and a solid wall of bamboo. Then the road and the fence separated, and there were buildings between them and the gardens. They turned into the town. They passed a taxi rank which he recognized as the staging post down to Accra, where the buses stopped. Women were selling pineapples under the telephone poles. It wasn’t rush hour and there was little action. Music came from a parked tro-tro, its door open, its driver chewing a match.

  They walked up a path beside a steep bank, and passed the Methodist boardinghouses. The last in the row was abandoned. Part had collapsed and rooms were open to the air. At the gates to the gardens the teacher had a word with the guard and they were let through.

  Emperor palms, twenty feet high, lined the graded sand path up which they walked. Grass stretched to the side into the garden. There were hills, and trees, on their own and in groves. They stayed close to the boundary fence. The sound of a lawn mower buzzed somewhere. They approached a series of sheds. One of the groundsmen saw the teacher and joined them. The groundsman and the teacher spoke. The groundsman led them to a gate in the fence. He opened a large padlock and let them pass through. The boy could see that the building separated from them by a stretch of grass was the same one they had tried to enter from the road.

  They approached. It was a low structure, but with a tall pitched roof made of zinc. They walked up a set of red stairs and through a covered portico onto a restaurant floor, the other side of which was open through a series of large ceiling-high windows to a verandah out front with a view over the flank of a deep, long valley. A waiter was arranging glasses at a bar as they passed through the rest house. The waiter nodded at the teacher. He ignored the boy’s nod.

  The floor was made of polished gray concret
e, and their shoes made a squeaking sound above the heavy fans in the ceiling, turning the slow cool air round. The verandah had chairs and tables arranged on it. All of them were empty except for one, at the front, where a woman was seated with her back to them. She was large, and the boubou flowing over her made her seem even larger. That’s what he noticed first, and the elaborateness of her braids, which were woven in patterns in her hair.

  The teacher approached. The boy followed a few paces behind. Before the teacher reached the table Nana Oforiwaa turned and saw the teacher, and she smiled and she said, “John.” He had not ever heard anybody call the teacher by his name before, nor address him with the warmth that there was in her voice.

  “Nana Oforiwaa,” the teacher said, and there was a shuffling of his feet, and it looked for a moment like the teacher was bowing to her from the waist.

  From behind the teacher he looked at Nana Oforiwaa. She had a high, wide forehead and large eyes that curved exceptionally.

  “Oh, John,” she said, laughing.

  The teacher gave a small smile, and introduced the boy.

  The woman continued to laugh. They were still standing. Then she put out her hand to him. It was warm and strong and she held his hand firmly, and there was a lot of power in this woman, he knew it immediately, in the strength of her hand, and in the strength of her presence.

  “This is Nana Oforiwaa,” the teacher said, “a very important woman.”

  He said, “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

  “Hoowh,” she said, the end of her laughing coming out in a breath.

  Then they sat down.

  He had no part in the rest of the visit. The teacher briefly said who the boy was, that his father had sent him here into the care of the community, and that this was why he had brought him to visit. Nana Oforiwaa asked the boy a few questions about himself, nodding as he answered, as if he were confirming what she already knew, but soon she and the teacher were talking of things that did not concern him.