Eddie Signwriter

by Adam Schwartzman

  She, Nana Oforiwaa—a woman of such power, who could make the world do anything—was consenting to no longer being young when other people still were. Lord, it wasn’t easy—to give everything up for a child, a weak-willed child—but she was doing it.

  “How old are you, Edward?” she asked him once.

  He was out back at the rest house, stacking empty beer bottles, when Nana Oforiwaa asked him this question.

  Seventeen, he told her, which he was at the time.

  “That’s a good age, Edward,” she said, “don’t you think?”

  It felt all right to him, he told her.

  “I’d like to be seventeen again,” she replied. “I’d like to be seventeen and not know who I am.”

  He didn’t understand what she meant by that and told her so.

  And she replied, how could he, when he couldn’t imagine anything different.

  Then she stopped and thought, and sighed, and said how she just had a need right then to say these things. And she asked whether a person wasn’t allowed to have a need every now and again, and whether he thought that was a crime.

  No, he told her, he didn’t think it was a crime.

  She seemed to be pleased by that, and she smiled, and he smiled back, though he didn’t know how much she believed him. Nor how much he believed himself.

  ONE AFTERNOON he took a taxi to the rest house on his own. He’d done it a few times before, when he hadn’t remembered to organize a lift with Nana Oforiwaa’s driver in advance. When he arrived that day Nana Oforiwaa and Celeste were not there. They were at home, Nana Oforiwaa’s head waiter thought, and gave him directions.

  The house was a few minutes down the road. It had wood walls and a tin roof and a thirty-foot pylon in the driveway, which made it easy to recognize. When he got there he saw Nana Oforiwaa’s car parked outside. Her driver was asleep on the back seat, with a newspaper over his face and his feet hanging onto the ground. As he approached the house Nana Oforiwaa opened the door and stood watching him, then embraced him on the stair. She smelled of fresh soap, and the edges of her dress were wet, and he thought that she must have just bathed. Then she turned into the house and he followed her.

  “Nana?” he said.

  “I was feeling tired today,” she began to say, as if she hadn’t really heard him, “—don’t know. I had a sore head.”

  “I was wondering,” he said.

  She seemed pleased at the idea of his concern.

  Then she let him go. “Celeste isn’t here,” she said. “You can see her later.”

  She walked a few paces to the other side of the room, then turned around and clasped her hands together.

  “Sit,” she said.

  He sat on one of the chairs that lined the walls of the room. In the corner there was a table with a plastic cloth, and there were windows facing a shady patch of trees.

  “I sent her out,” she said, picking up the train of her thought, “to get some banku.” And then she waved her hand, as if dismissing the thought. “She’ll be back. Do you want anything to drink?”

  She got him a mineral, taking nothing for herself, and they talked for a short while, about how things were, and about what he was doing. But after a while Nana Oforiwaa excused herself to get ready for the evening. He could drive with her later, back to the rest house, she said, and she went to her room, closing the door behind her, and left him to wait.

  The kitchen was behind him. There was a small area for eating and the space where he was sitting. To his right was a short corridor, leading to the door through which Nana Oforiwaa had gone to her own room, and a last door that was closed and that he guessed must lead to Celeste’s.

  He got up and walked around. He could hear the pressure of Nana Oforiwaa’s feet moving around on the wood floor. He looked at the closed door of Celeste’s room. How unwise would it be for him to go in there, he wondered, with Nana Oforiwaa next door. But even before the thought was fully formed he had opened the door and was standing inside.

  It was a small room and did not contain many things. The bed was neatly made. It had a knitted bear on it, and on the walls there were a few magazine cutouts, cards and photos, and a lizard made of wire with deep blue marble eyes. There was a desk with boxes and childhood toys, and in place of a cupboard there were open shelves on which shirts, trousers, socks, and underwear were folded, and a metal bar in an alcove on which Celeste’s dresses were hung. He walked over and ran his fingers over them. The hangers made a tinkling sound.

  He took a step backwards and there was the bed, just behind him, and so he sat down on it. It was hard. It had a foam mattress, its base made from an old door panel. He ran his hands over the sheets.

  Celeste’s body lay here at night, he thought. He felt the graininess of the material beneath his fingers.

  “Well,” Nana Oforiwaa said.

  She was standing at the door.

  He started to get up, but then had to stop, afraid that his thoughts would show. He was half crouching, still. He looked at Nana Oforiwaa. His throat was clenched. He wanted to cry with anger, and also humiliation, and humiliation again at wanting to cry.

  Nana Oforiwaa smiled, sadly it seemed to him.

  “You should sit,” she said.

  He did.

  “Move over,” she said.

  He moved up towards the pillows. He could smell the sheets were recently washed.

  She sat a small distance away from him.

  Instinctively he moved backwards.

  She said, “Why are you so unkind, Edward?”

  “I am not,” he said.

  “Yes. You accuse me,” she said.

  He told her he did not.

  “You do,” she said, “but it’s fine. You are young. I am not.”

  He did not know how to respond and didn’t and so she began talking of other things. Mostly what she said he had heard many times before, these stories of her past. About coming to Aburi, moving into this house, and never thinking she would carry on after her brother died. About how much Celeste had been like her father, though now she was more like her mother, and how much it meant to Nana Oforiwaa that now there was him.

  He listened, as he always listened, though he never liked it. He never liked it when she talked like this. When she was weak. When she needed him. Though more than this, he wanted to get out. He wanted not to be having this conversation, here in Celeste’s room. To separate, where he could, the aunt from her niece.

  But Nana Oforiwaa seemed unaware now of his discomfort even as he heard the sound of the front door opening. He couldn’t imagine she didn’t hear it too. Shame he knew she did not have. Did she also have no fear? Though somehow in the back of his mind he thought that if she didn’t move, it was because she had good reason not to. Still he trusted her, even as Celeste came down the corridor, then stopped in the doorway to her room.

  Celeste was smiling, she was about to speak, and then when she saw him beside her aunt, she stopped smiling.

  There was a moment of silence for which even Nana Oforiwaa appeared unprepared.

  “I don’t …” Celeste began, then stopped.

  Nana Oforiwaa cut her off before the thought could articulate itself.

  “What on earth are you thinking?” she said sharply, as she rose from the bed. The boy rose slowly, but once he was up Nana Oforiwaa grabbed his arm and pushed him out of the room, instructing her niece over her shoulder to get ready so that they could all return to the rest house for the evening sitting.

  Nobody talked in the car the short distance back to Aburi. Celeste would not look at him. Nor would she have anything to do with him once they arrived.

  The teacher appeared a little after eight p.m. He’d eaten at home, and thought he’d come to the rest house to take a mineral, and pass the evening there much as he always did—at a table outside on the balcony, sitting with an oil lamp at the edge of the night, reading the paper, talking—while the boy and Celeste and Nana Oforiwaa came and went, as everyone pleas
ed, or as things had to be done.

  Instead the teacher left—he and the boy left together—no more than a few minutes later.

  “What happened?” the teacher asked in the car.

  There was no response.

  The teacher said nothing for a while, and then he said very softly, “My boy.”

  He tried to put his hand on the boy’s arm, but the boy shook it off.

  HE DIDN’T SLEEP that night. He looked for Celeste during lunch and afterwards at the dormitory, but couldn’t find her. The whole day passed before he discovered she’d been absent. The next day he saw her walking among her class, but she didn’t stop. Again she wasn’t in her dormitory when he went to ask for her.

  On the third day he went up to the road where Nana Oforiwaa’s car usually waited. The driver would always come early and sometimes they’d talk, but that day there were only the passing cars.

  He waited long enough to know he was wasting his time. Then he turned back to the school. Just as he was getting down the slope he saw above him the car driving past with Celeste buckled in the passenger seat. She must have arranged the pickup further down the road to avoid him.

  He did finally stop her the next day. There was only one other path she could take to the road to meet the car. He waited in the shade of some trees and called after her as she passed.

  She let him approach.

  “I didn’t mean for that to happen,” he said.

  He was careful with his words, unsure of what she knew.

  “It doesn’t matter why,” she said.

  “Yes it does,” he said.

  She said nothing.

  “What are you feeling?” he asked, taking a step towards her.

  “I don’t feel anything,” she said.

  “Can you try?” he asked, trying to get a smile from her.

  She seemed to think for a moment.

  “No,” she said.

  But still she let him put his hands on her shoulders, and then pull her towards him, so that her head was on his chest, and the palms of her hands were on his collarbones.

  They only stood like that for a moment. For a moment he thought that this was how it would all turn out. Except then, from within his embrace, she hit his chest with the fist of her hand. Once, hard. It made the sound of a football being kicked.

  He let her go, and she turned around and went away up the hill to the car. Though he could have followed her, he didn’t.

  His next visit to the rest house was excruciating. None of the cooks, nor the head waiter, cared to exchange much more than a cool greeting with him. But Nana Oforiwaa welcomed him warmly. She seemed pleased that he’d come—or maybe more relieved than pleased, he sensed. For the first time it seemed that she was at a loss.

  They talked, but he couldn’t find the words to say what he wanted to say. The sight of Nana Oforiwaa—with the life and vivaciousness all out of her now—filled him with shame. Neither of them mentioned Celeste during that conversation, though he thought of little else. When Celeste did come into the rest house, and saw him sitting with her aunt, she turned on her heel and left. Both of them watched her go, saying nothing.

  He left shortly after that. Nana Oforiwaa saw him out at the door. He watched her in the side mirror of the car, through the dust in between, still standing there at the door as he departed.

  What else was there to do?

  Two more days passed. The teacher sent one of his messengers to the boy. The messenger returned with the back of his head stinging.

  The next day the boy found one of Celeste’s classmates during lunch and handed her a note.

  “Give this to Celeste,” he said to her, and he closed her hand around the paper and held it shut. “She can decide herself to throw it if she wants.”

  He ate alone, and waited at his table after lunch, hoping she would come, as the people cleared out to go to their next classes.

  She did. He heard a chair scraping backwards and then she was walking briskly towards him. When she got close enough for nobody else to hear, she said, “You think she is a lady, but I think she is dirty. I think that what she is doing is disgusting.”

  “What? Do you think I come to drink tea with her?” he said.

  “I don’t care why you come,” she said sharply, and threw the unopened note on the table in front of him, and left him sitting where he was.

  “I think you do,” he shouted after her.

  People turned and looked.

  But he did think that, and it gave him the courage to return to the rest house one more time, as awful as it felt. To drive along the road to Aburi, reach the turnoff, see the water towers appearing over the trees, covered in their vines, and get off at the door, and step down, and go through into the restaurant where so many happy things had happened, with nobody to welcome him except the one person whose welcome meant nothing to him.

  He sat down with Nana Oforiwaa at the table. She looked a little better than she had the last time. She had done herself up. She was wearing perfume, a necklace, and a bright boubou, though also she was coughing.

  “You don’t look so well,” he told her.

  She rubbed her temples. The dry season was almost over and the pressure was changing.

  “It’s the rain,” she said. “The rain is coming.”

  “I’m sorry,” he told her, lying. Really, he didn’t care.

  The conversation between them started moving slowly. Mostly Nana Oforiwaa talked about herself, which made her seem old. He wasn’t concentrating. He was listening for the sound of Celeste’s presence in the rest house and so he heard her entering the verandah before she reached the table.

  She stopped slightly behind Nana Oforiwaa, who wasn’t aware, and so continued talking. Then Nana Oforiwaa saw him looking, and craned her head back and also saw Celeste.

  “Come,” Celeste said to him.

  He got up. Celeste started walking, and he followed her.

  They walked down towards the fence in silence. For a moment he turned back and saw Nana Oforiwaa watching them go, but then his thoughts were free.

  Celeste was walking fast. He could hear their feet in the grass and leaves. They walked through the gardens. He remembered the first time she’d brought him there. Insects buzzed and clicked in the canopies of the rain trees. Brambles grew between their trunks and orchids flowed over their branches like streams. The birds called. They squeaked and whistled, plumbed, ratcheted, whispered, whined, and purred, and on the grass under the camphor trees and the nutmeg trees, rose into the air with the sound of sheets shaken out.

  “Celeste,” he called after her, but she didn’t respond.

  He could see her legs moving under her dress, which was made of cotton and had thin straps, like two pieces of string, that came down from her shoulders and held it around her body just over her shoulder blades.

  He knew where he was. He knew the garden well by now. The familiar sites passed by, but where she was headed he couldn’t tell.

  Still a few paces ahead, she stopped at the helicopter on the mound, right in the centre of the garden. He stopped, too. She turned around and looked him in the eye.

  Then she lifted the straps of her dress from her shoulders and let it fall to the ground.

  “Is this what you want?” she said.

  He looked at her standing. She was naked. Beautiful. There was nobody around, but he could hear the voices of people nearby. Children laughing. A man calling.

  “No,” he started, then changed his mind; “Yes, it is.”

  “Fine,” she said, “then have it.”

  And that’s what happened, in the carcass of a military helicopter left to rot in a grove of candle trees, as the evening approached and another day came to an end in the hills of the Akwapim Ridge.

  AFTER THAT, everything people said about him and Celeste was true. How they shook away discipline and became uncontrollable, and were shameless and wild, and lacked modesty. And how on the day that Nana Oforiwaa died, they stole away from t
he garden after church, and took a car, and went down the ridge to Accra, and spent the day at the beach, at Labadi, while Nana Oforiwaa grew frantic, and later went out to join the search parties looking for them, and eventually lost her life.

  That was the day the rains came.

  The sea at Labadi was like a warm bath. It was the colour of a grove of cocoa—brown and green at the same time. The sky was full of heat and wetness. Groups of fishermen’s children from the Jamestown and Ushertown slums were roaming around measuring each other. The city people sat out in chairs under the trees, and the children hustled to sell fried squid and prawns and oily damp cassava stained red with pepe.

  They put down the tablecloth they’d taken from the restaurant at the back of the beach, where the shade of the trees could cover their heads and nobody was behind them to watch. He stretched out, the sun warming his feet. Celeste lay on her side, facing into him. They talked and watched the people, and later, while he was reading, she touched the side of his face with her fingers and the cup of her palm. And though he felt a rush of happiness, he also felt overwhelmed by sadness and shame for the things he could not say to her, and could not take back, and his eyes filled and his throat grew tight. She looked at him as he tried to keep his face still, but still the tears were coming out silently, giving him away.

  Celeste got up to swim. He watched her walk towards the sea. Still she moved like a girl, long-limbed, gangly, her body keeping inside its new knowledge, of herself, and him.

  And then the sky tore apart.

  She was only a few feet away and she turned and began running towards him.

  The rain came in like waves of stone, slapping the sand, whipping everyone’s bodies. It was deafening. Lightning was catching like webs all over the sky. They both raced for safety, and found cover with other people under the roof of a kiosk.

  Earlier in the afternoon a troupe of drummers had been playing there, who also found cover under the roofs, and soon they started beating their drums again—one setting the rhythm and the others taking turns to weave around it.

  People began to dance. It wasn’t clear who started first—perhaps it was a drunk. Perhaps it was a madman. But many years later he’d still remember the small sharp movements of that dancing, like a shock jumping through the dancer, a small series of convulsions in his legs, in his back and his arse. The dancer’s face was ticking like electricity. And then a circle formed round him. Then there were many circles, with pairs of people taking turns in the centre.