Eddie Signwriter

by Adam Schwartzman

  His trousers are wet up to the knees from the leaves brushing against him. His shirt has come up in patches of sweat. He puts down his briefcase, the handle of which has been digging uncomfortably into his hand, removes his jacket and goes to stand by the window so that the breeze will dry his shirt.

  The teacher arrives at seven fifteen. He walks with the sharp, confident movement of small men, his arse like two ball-bearings at the top of his short legs.

  They shake hands, exchange greetings, and sit.

  The teacher says, “Although I am aware of what brings you here, as custom demands we must go over it again, to refresh our minds about those things that have already taken place.”

  Festus Ankrah smiles, but not with his eyes. He has related the story of his nephew so many times he no longer needs to think as the words form on his lips.

  As he talks the teacher is struck for the first of many times by his solid features—the block of his jaw folded firmly into his head, the massive face, fortress of a face, the careful eyes. He thinks: So this is how a face can carry such a thing—though what had he expected? he asks himself. A brand upon the forehead?

  “On the first day we had reports of him at Tema station,” Festus Ankrah is saying now, “of taking a bus west. There is nothing more from there. I have been to Tokoradi myself, but there are so many cars on that route, and nobody remembers him there. He could have stopped anywhere on the way and changed direction. I do not know where my nephew has gone, or why. All I know is that he has gone.”

  “And the girl?” the teacher asks. “It’s just that your nephew—he mentioned her, when he came to visit me. I thought …”

  Festus Ankrah appears momentarily surprised. “They say she has gone to her family,” he says. “She could not continue where she was.”

  “No,” the teacher says reflectively, “so,”—he seems to be clearing his mind—“anyway, it is good you are here.”

  “Thank you for offering to help,” Festus Ankrah says without the least trace of gratitude in his voice, just a weariness that flattens his sentences into monotones. “Thank you for letting me come here.”

  “No—it is not that I am letting you do anything. It is not up to me. When I heard your nephew had left—and then you called. There was too much to say for a telephone conversation, even a letter.”

  Festus Ankrah’s eyes remain fixed, the expression of his face unreadable.

  The teacher hesitates before he continues, is about to express his regret, to ask about the circumstances, but decides against it.

  “It is thirteen days now since your nephew disappeared?” he asks.

  “Yes,” Festus Ankrah replies.

  “Then it was two days more before his disappearance that he visited here. It was a Monday. He came to talk with me. He did not tell you before … ?”

  “No,” Festus Ankrah says, “I only learned from you, but now that I know I am not surprised. That Monday was not a good day for my nephew. After he came back his shop burnt down. All his work was lost, and his materials.”

  “Do you think there is a connection?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  The teacher does not speak, but nods his head, as if deep in thought, as if he has forgotten the conversation, and the man before him with whom he has shared it.

  “Mr. Bediako, it has not been a long journey here,” Festus Ankrah says eventually. “Still, it has been tiring.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry,” the teacher says. “Well, it was brave of your nephew to come back here. I’ll say that. After what happened. It was a very short meeting. In one car, out on the next. He must have been back by midday.”

  “What did he want?”

  “To talk about the past, Mr. Ankrah. Except we didn’t. He lost his nerve and left.”

  “Why did he lose his nerve?”

  “I can only guess.”

  “Then guess.”

  The teacher smiles momentarily at Festus Ankrah’s curtness, but it’s not the right thing to have done. The face gives nothing back.

  The teacher says, “I think he was ashamed.”

  “Why?”

  “For getting caught up in regrettable circumstances. For losing his way.”

  Such talk angers Festus Ankrah.

  “But I see you have your own views,” the teacher says.

  “I hope my nephew had more sense than to feel responsible for the death of that woman,” Festus Ankrah replies, then moderating the harshness in his voice, “—Celeste’s aunt.”

  “Celeste’s aunt, yes. She and I were friends,” the teacher says.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Festus Ankrah says, “it was a tragedy.”

  “It was,” the teacher says.

  “But it shouldn’t be my nephew’s tragedy.”

  “No,” the teacher says.

  “But people blame him. They blame him for his rebelliousness.”

  “People say that,” the teacher responds softly, “but that wasn’t what it was. Rebellion takes anger. Your nephew wasn’t angry. Not then, at least. Maybe now he is.”

  “What was he then?”

  “What was he then … ? Thoughtless. He was … without thought.”

  “And so you think he should feel ashamed,” Festus Ankrah says scornfully.

  The teacher says, “No. And so I think he is ashamed.”

  There is no response from Festus Ankrah.

  “But your nephew was young,” the teacher adds. “I should have told him that when he came. He wasn’t in charge. But now he has left. So who knows, maybe now he is in charge.”

  It is moments before Festus Ankrah feels the first flush of anger. I am being played with, he thinks. Just as, deep down, he knew to expect. Because everything that ruined his nephew started here, in this place; because it cannot be anything else; and because after fifteen days of nothing there cannot be more nothing.

  “I must find my nephew …” he manages to say.

  “Your nephew did not come here to leave directions, Mr. Ankrah,” the teacher says before Festus Ankrah speaks again. “If anything, he came here in order to be understood, if he knew it or not … That is how the young are, even today,” he says gently now, “—wanting our approval even as they defy us … See, your nephew and I had a friendship. I knew him well—I mean I took an interest in him—how well can one know a person, after all …”

  Still nothing.

  “Maybe all I did was to be here, to be a witness. You see? And witnesses are storehouses. I am a storehouse—for your nephew. A place to leave things. And people always must come back for the things that they’ve left—this is what I have thought.”

  “I did not come here for my own pleasure,” Festus Ankrah says, raising his left hand. “All I ask is that you tell me what my nephew said and I will be gone. His family is suffering. We are all suffering. We want to find him. Help us if you can. If not …”

  “How?” the teacher says. “How should I help you?”

  Festus Ankrah is standing before he knows why, his chair scraped back, his hands on the table. “Where is my nephew?” he says. His voice is raised, just short of a shout. He is aware of the door opening behind him, then closing quickly.

  “Mr. Ankrah,” the teacher replies calmly (but it is not the calm of self-possession; it is as much an instinct of defense as the other’s rage), “please, remember it is you that has lost your nephew, not I.”

  And perhaps the teacher has started to say something else, but already Festus Ankrah is putting on his jacket. He feels the sweat rising to the surface of his body. He feels the panic pressing in around him, stifling him in his clothes. He feels his breath struggling in and out of him, his collar round his neck.

  Now the teacher’s voice is saying something to him—no, it is not the teacher’s voice (Festus Ankrah is on the stairs now), it is the secretary following him with his briefcase, calling out his name.

  And then he is outside again in the fresh air, his briefcase in his hand, standing on
the gravel path leading to the main road, and he looks back: the school building, whitewashed, pristine, standing out against the hill.

  He breathes deeply.

  He stands and breathes and gathers himself.

  A small child in a uniform, walking past, greets him, shoes polished like wet tar, head like an acorn.

  “Wait,” he says, before he can stop himself, and stifles his voice in a cough as the child hesitates—wait, he wants to say, wait, but forgets what he wants to say.

  WHEN FESTUS ANKRAH returns to the hotel the proprietor is waiting for him. The guest book lies open on the desk. The proprietor makes a show of consulting it as Festus Ankrah enters the lobby, then addresses him without greeting.

  “Do you really think you will find your nephew here?” he says coldly.

  The hands of the clock behind him on the wall are broken, Festus Ankrah notices, the hour hand marooned between twelve and one.

  “No,” he replies, and neither approaches the proprietor, nor retreats, but stands in the doorway where the voice had stopped him, until the proprietor turns into his office without further comment.

  Only when he’s back in his room, standing beside his bed, does Festus Ankrah realize how unready he is to bring his nephew home. How a man cannot find what he does not know.

  FESTUS ANKRAH spends most of the afternoon in his room. He is afraid to go out. What a scandal his presence must be here. His own surname has been no disguise. Everyone knows who he is. Everyone wishes him ill.

  Hunger, at last, makes action necessary.

  He enters the village, passes the roadside stalls made of palm branches, and the brick and tin metalwork shops surrounded by their scrap, and then he is in the main road.

  All along the heat is on him. He feels it on his neck. It pins his damp shirt to his back. His eyes scan about him as he passes the taxi rank, finding out the water sellers who crouch in the shade of a stone wall, tying water into plastic bags.

  They look back impassively as their fingers work the knots, hidden by the lip of the blue buckets from which they draw water.

  Festus Ankrah slows his pace but he does not stop. He would rather go thirsty than have to ask for anything.

  In a restaurant overlooking the empty tables of a market he eats chicken and watches the children fetch water in buckets from the hand pump at the market gate.

  The evening has begun to draw in when he steps out of the restaurant. The air is cool, the colours deepening. When he sees the teacher standing on the other side of the road waiting for him he feels no surprise.

  “And still you are here,” the teacher says, smiling, when they are standing together.

  The teacher’s clothes are crisply ironed, and unwrinkled. He smells of soap, smells cleaned, prepared, everything about him fresh, a man for whom leisure is a thing to dress for, not a thing to be taken idly.

  “Well, I have not yet left,” Festus Ankrah replies.

  “You mistake me. I am glad you have stayed.”

  Festus Ankrah clicks his teeth and looks down the street.

  “There’s an hour still until the light is gone,” the teacher says. “I have ordered my car. Come. It will be good for both of us,” then turns and begins to walk without waiting for Festus Ankrah.

  The taxi is parked further up the road, in the shade of a ceiba tree. The engine startles into life, then purrs as they approach. Purple blossoms lie on its yellow bonnet. It has been waiting some time.

  They climb into the car. The taxi driver looks over his shoulder at Festus Ankrah before they pull off slowly toward the gate. The teacher turns his head and stares through his reflection in the passenger window.

  The houses, as they pass, hold the pale, uneven light of paraffin lamps. And then they are out of the town.

  They pass along the road that links Akwapakrom with Aburi and beyond. Stretches of forest give way to the intermittent fields, steeples rising beyond them from the banana and palm and mango trees—stone churches built by the Anglicans, brick and tin churches of the Methodists, their windows empty, their roofs thin as gold leaf; and beyond, a hinterland of villages and hamlets, remote from modernity, from electricity and the telephone.

  “Where are we going?” Festus Ankrah asks.

  “To Daisy’s,” the teacher says, and when Festus Ankrah does not respond, “Nana Oforiwaa’s rest house.”

  They travel on in silence.

  “I guess it isn’t hers anymore,” the teacher says a few kilometers later, “though it hasn’t yet become someone else’s. Somebody bought it up but still it’s shut. Sometimes tourists find their way up there, the ones with old guidebooks,” and he laughs.

  Short of Aburi, at the bottom of a dip in which a stream flows over the road, they turn off and climb slowly up the flank of a valley until they reach its crest and a row of buildings built in amongst the trees.

  To one side of the road, rising between a few low clustered dwellings, stands a water tank on five steel legs, reinforced by a web of steel struts and bars, around which creepers have wound their way up to the cylinder, where small blue flowers, and the red of the rusted steel, show between the leaves.

  To the other side, where the land begins to fall away sharply, is a two-story structure, its back to the road.

  The car comes to a stop and they get out.

  The teacher crosses the road toward the building, Festus Ankrah following closely behind him. A low wire fence separates the house from the road. A gate leads down two steep stairs directly to a doorway.

  The teacher steps off the road, a level down to the path that circumnavigates the structure.

  There are claw marks in the plaster where a bougainvillea has been cut back, though it covers half the wall, and at least two small windows. The place is still neat, though dereliction hangs about it.

  The teacher pauses briefly before the door, then walks round the rest house.

  Festus Ankrah follows him. The two men climb onto the verandah, from which the land falls away steeply, and below them stretches a wide valley, out towards the horizon, where the distance sews the fields to the sky.

  A naked light bulb hangs like an exclamation mark from a wire swaying from the ceiling in the breeze.

  “Someone should really polish this floor,” the teacher says. Cracks have begun to appear like spider’s webs in the concrete.

  “This is where your nephew came every day. Right here where we’re standing was a restaurant. Just behind you, your nephew and I and Celeste and Nana Oforiwaa used to take tea. Right here, in this space, where we are. It’s nothing now, but once it was grand. There was a chef that Nana Oforiwaa brought in from the kitchens of the Hilton Hotel down in Accra. The menu was written in English and priced for tourists, except for one sentence in Twi: sixty per cent discount on request.”

  Festus Ankrah turns and looks down into the valley. Sunbirds dart through the branches of the giant trees at the end of the plot like ticks.

  “This is a beautiful place,” Festus Ankrah says. “It is a pity that the memory of my nephew is so unwelcome here.”

  “As you said, the people blame him,” the teacher says, “but that is because they are afraid of what else to blame.”

  Festus Ankrah’s silence is an invitation to continue.

  The teacher says, “They are afraid to blame Nana Oforiwaa, although they know they should. People saw. They knew. How she was careless of her duties. Forgetful of her position. They want to blame her for her carelessness. But since they also love her, they can’t, and so hate your nephew more.”

  The teacher stops. He examines his hands, the soft light flesh of his palms.

  “And I too feel something of that,” he says, his voice soft now, “even if I was something of a party to it…. Nana Oforiwaa, she was obsessed with those children. I see that now. She always wanted to be near them. She seemed so strong but really she needed other people.”

  “For what?” Festus Ankrah asks coldly.

  “Why do we ever need other peopl
e?” the teacher says, but knows himself, as the words come out of him, that the question is far more easily evaded than answered, just as he is evading it now.

  But what would he say if he had to say?

  He tries to think what he thinks.

  That he himself had wanted to confront Nana Oforiwaa. That he sensed in her a danger, he sensed in her a desire to own, a covetousness, though what she coveted he could not quite tell. That he wanted to stop her, but did not know what to stop her from.

  “Why are we doing this?” he wanted to ask, though always he knew the response he’d receive: Why are we doing what?

  And then he would not be able to answer, because there was no answer that did not incriminate him as well. After all, had it not all happened on his watch too? Was it not he who brought the boy to the rest house in the first place, and soon every day? It was under the supervision of both of them that the children left together, it was both their authority that the children were allowed to defy—the long disappearances, the immunity to school timetables and routines, the silent shaking off of discipline, the known immoralities.

  “Your niece …” he gathered the strength to say one day, after they’d seen the children disappear together into the long grass near the southern fence of the rest house, where they would not be able to follow.

  Nana Oforiwaa had cut him off: “And your student.”

  It had sounded more harsh than she’d intended. She attempted quickly to reassure him, taking his hand in hers, as she had months before on the evening on which they’d made their decision to leave the children to their affair, without so much as speaking a word.

  “Life is so empty,” she had said at last, as they’d stood in silence, the wind going through the grass, and then she’d turned away.

  “But that is how we know when it is full,” the teacher had replied.

  “Yes,” she said, “but I am not sure that for us it will ever be full again,” and began the long slow walk back to the rest house where more than three years later the teacher now stands alone with the uncle of that boy.

  “But come,” the teacher says, turning to face Festus Ankrah, “now you have seen this place. It is the scene of many times that were happy in your nephew’s life. Here, at least, your nephew was happy.”