Eddie Signwriter

by Adam Schwartzman

  Then passengers waiting in an emptier car are hustled unwillingly into the worst remaining seats in the tro-tro. The fares are passed from seat to seat, overhead to the driver. Change passes back. Now the hawkers start hustling round the windows, passing up bread on dustbin lids for forty cedis, water in plastic bags, nuts in newspaper cones, plantain from the forest, oranges, eggs, ice cream, sodas. Prices begin to fall as the engine is fired and the tout jumps out of the car, slams the door shut and slaps it one more time with his hand.

  Then the car begins to move over the stony yard of the taxi station. The head of Festus Ankrah, wedged in the far-right seat against the side, begins to rattle and jump against the window. But he feels nothing. Already he has been asleep for ten minutes, and will not wake up until the shuddering of the chassis finally stops in Tema station, and the driver leans over him, holding his bag, telling him this is no hotel, and to be now on his way.

  THE TEACHER’S WALK IN THE NIGHT

  THE TEACHER, from the back of the taxi rank, observed Festus Ankrah climb into the tro-tro. As he made his way back to the school he heard the tro-tro sound its horn. He withdrew to the side of the road, and from inside a shed housing a small provisions store, saw the vehicle pass by on its way towards Peduase Lodge, and the winding path down to the plains that stretch all the way to Accra.

  The teacher returned quickly to his quarters. He poured himself a glass of water, then went into his study and closed the door. He sat down at his desk, where less than three weeks before he’d been sitting after classes and had heard the voice of the boy downstairs for the first time in years, then the familiar sound of his whistling—a new tune, but the same tone, the same lips pursed around the same needle of air.

  The teacher had looked up, then returned to his work, as he heard the sound of the boy mounting the stairs, then the footfalls reach the landing outside his room. The boy was at the door. The teacher had looked up a second time, then finished the sentence he’d been writing in the margin of the paper open before him, beside the pile of forty at his right hand, bound in faded pink ribbon, and eight at his left hand.

  “Strong point,” the teacher had written. “Compare Okonkwo with the bureaucrat in Ayi Kwei Armah.” He had assigned the paper a grade, closed and placed it on the pile to his right, taken another from the pile on his left, set it squarely before him, sat back, and waited.

  Then the door to his study had swung open and the boy stood on the landing, an expression of stupid satisfaction on his face, and challenge in the posture of his man’s body, and the teacher had felt the dryness in his throat but had not swallowed, because he had not wanted the boy to know the dryness in his throat, and mistake the swallowing for fear.

  As on that day, so on the day of Festus Ankrah’s departure, the teacher stayed in his room. Towards evening the old woman who tended the house knocked at the door to announce that she was going home. There was no response. On the other side of the door the teacher sat at his desk, surrounded by his papers, though now he paid them no attention. He’d long since lost track of where he was, what he’d been reading. For a long time he’d been thinking. But now he just sat. The visit of Festus Ankrah had disturbed him more than he’d thought. Now the teacher felt the beginning of a fever. His skin was wet, his muscles alert. In the room he was sitting at his desk, but inside he was crouching, did not know whether to run or wait. Run or wait. Run.

  Wait …

  How the time had passed he could not say. But he knew—when the old woman knocked on the door, and a minute later let herself out—that he could not spend another moment there. That he too had to leave the house, had to walk, though where … but in a moment he knew.

  Unsteadily he lifted himself from his chair, stepped round the table, descended the stairs and swung the wire door open. The sun had already slipped down the ridge, and rested beneath the horizon. It left a cool afterlight, that deepened colour and slowed motion, and even the shallowest objects were lengthened by their shadows. He felt the coolness of the hour against his flesh, the temperature of his body rise to meet it, dampness on the bare skin. The first signs of sickness announced themselves at the end of the nerves.

  In front of him the forest rose up the side of the hill. Everything not leaf, vine or trunk was a contourless wall of darkness. Sounds came out of it: the ubiquitous undertone of crickets, a sharper trill, a sound of birds, three deep plumbing notes repeated, like a stone reaching water from the bottom of a well. A little further down the path round his yard the water tower rose three stories into the air, and the wind rustled in the reeds growing at its base as tall as a man, in the mulch of water-logged soil.

  Then he passed round the side of a series of storage sheds and up onto the main plateau. The school buildings were spread out to one side: the administrative offices, a square of lawn, the whitewashed slatted cabinet of a weather station raised on tall legs. To the other side he could see the road that would take him down towards the town. Ten minutes’ brisk walk would get him only to the gate. If he didn’t hurry he’d get there after dark.

  He walked faster. Breathing was like breathing through a wet rag. He felt the cold jewels begin to form on his forehead. He clenched his teeth against it. Not yet, he thought, and immediately the words fell into the rhythm of his strides, became part of his walking—Not yet. Not yet. A little further. A little further from the town. And then it was as if the part of his body with which he was concentrating had begun to think on its own. Not something foreign inside him, but a version of his own voice, which the sickness had drawn out, lifting the silence off it—exposing the nerves, all the channels in the brain ready to receive experience, only a little dusty, but not sealed, not grown over, not healed.

  I am choosing to do this, he reminded himself—only it was the voice saying it: I am choosing to do this. I am choosing.

  Though he knew in fact that all along he had never chosen. That already, in those first weeks at the rest house, all those years before, when it first started, already it had been happening a long time. Already it had a direction of its own, a steady pull, taking him along, taking them all along. Yet there must have been a moment, when the four of them sat together, and the boy looked at Nana Oforiwaa and the teacher looked at the boy, and then the boy looked at him, and they all knew what they knew. There must have been a time when someone first started it. A first tacit consent. A first I-will-not-stop-you. Before words became impossible, and nothing could be acknowledged, and anything could happen, and did, and the strength of that silence took hold, and still held, all those years later, when the boy returned and still he could not accuse the teacher.

  Accuse the teacher of what? What was taken from the boy that he did not give himself? Are we not all responsible for our actions? Although it had not been necessary to use these words. The boy had not returned to the ridge for recrimination. Anger did not drive him. Not after the first show of confidence, which melted away in a moment at the teacher’s first gesture of kindness.

  It had been too easy for the teacher to absolve himself, at least while the boy was there. Although only at the end of the boy’s visit did the teacher know what it was that he’d come for. What the boy needed was for the despair inside him to be released. Because that was what the boy was full of—not anger, but despair.

  And he could have given it, the teacher knew, and thought to himself now as he walked. So easily he could have given what the boy wanted. Except when the moment came, he couldn’t. When to himself he’d said it a thousand times before, the teacher could not say it to the boy, who—too weak, weakened by being so vulnerable to this man—could not himself ask the question straight out. And so in place of an apology, which the teacher had been ready to give, the boy asked for something else—an explanation. “Why,” he asked, “did you not protect me?” “Protect you?” the teacher had replied. “Protect you from what?” invoking the things that could not be said, and so ending the boy’s hopes, when what the teacher should have said—how he knows it
now, and wants to shout it out—was that he did! He did! But in the end, too late.

  Now the teacher quickened his pace. He came to the top of the path, to the gate, then turned right. A pineapple seller beside an electricity pole raised her hat to the teacher. He barely noticed, nodding just in time. A dog ran out across his path, and stopped in the road, yapping. Its jittering feet threw up a scuff of dust. Its gums were bared, its tail wagging. But he walked straight past the dog, and it scurried into the grass. The teacher strode on and the town fell away and then he was out of the town. The light was still deep but a little deeper, and the shadows a little longer, and the soft wind swished in the grass and lifted the branches on the palms with a crinkling, rattling sound.

  The teacher’s clothes fluttered around him, the wind picked up. The sky, a brief silver, began turning metal gray. The shadows began to draw in, closing vision down to a few barely distinguishable tones of blue and black. Soon the line between path and forest grew indistinct, and the teacher moved now by sense. The regular beat of his footfalls on the road, the sound of rubber against compacted earth assured him that he still had the path. He sensed the gradient through his tired ankles. Besides this, his shallow breathing, and his heart, beating its rhythm in his ears, against his forehead—not hard, not insistent, but there.

  Then the forest started becoming the night. The small shavings of the moon’s light lay on the path. Then the forest was the night, having dropped away either side into a ravine, and he felt the darkness, unencumbered by the wood and the flesh of vegetation, flowing across the path.

  Now he’d arrived. He took a few paces onto the bridge. He stopped, let his senses sharpen. His breath slowed. He walked to the railing, let its weight support him. Somewhere in the darkness the sound of the river, in between the sound of the wind in the reeds. He leaned over, trying to see into the steep ravine. How weak the eyes in darkness, how useless. He could see nothing. Had it changed? In three years had it changed? His eyes were blind in the darkness. But his memory searched for the path leading down the side of the ravine, that traversed the slope almost horizontally, then turned, and passed beneath itself in the other direction barely two meters below its last pass, and two meters above its next. He remembered the wet grass growing over the track. The treacherous slipperiness of the stones. And somewhere below, after the precipitous winding, a leveling off, and a softness underfoot, made of the leaves’ mulch and the sheets of fern.

  That is where he’d stood all those years before. He did not have to go there now to know. And in his mind he saw the rain coming down in slanting sheets, and remembers being surprised to see a figure further down the path, stumbling through the reeds—a shape he knew well. As he approached, wondering what she was doing there, he saw her lose her footing and slip, and go down on her shoulder, her left leg under her body. For a moment her face was in the water, water was flowing in her hair, as he made his way towards her, water shearing down around him, water rushing in the river at his feet. He saw her try to get up on one arm, but either it slipped, or she wasn’t strong enough. Then she saw him. “O—John,” she said, waiting for him to come and help. She let herself relax, shifting her body round away from him to untwist her leg, which was facing down the slope. The teacher crouched beside her. She felt his presence, familiar and safe, and the current flowing round his haunches as he got down, before it flowed round her. She waited for his touch—an arm under hers. But when it came it was not what she expected. Just his palm on the back of her neck, holding her. “John?” she asked, but had only time to ask it once, as her head was turned, and her face was in the water again. She felt a leaf catch against her cheek, and though she tried to move she could not. Then his other hand was on hers, stroking her wrist, and all she heard was his voice, telling her that soon it would be over, soon things would be back again as they always were, before the boy and her niece, what they’d made her do. “Shhh,” she heard him say, “shhhh, Nana,” and then the sound of his voice became the sound of the water, flowing against her head, and the calm settled round, and the darkness drew in.

  MAN TRAVELING

  KWASI DANKWA, setting out on his journey, slips out before dawn, leaving the house, unnoticed. During the night it has rained, and water has gathered against the street curbs, reflecting the gray sky. A child is washing outside a shop. A woman is sweeping the ground in front of her stall. Another day is about to begin in Tudu and Adabraka. Another day is gathering, preparing itself, but when it comes he’ll be long gone.

  With a false name he gets the last seat on the bus to Tamale. His family will expect him to head west. So he’ll travel north, to Ouaga, and then on to Mali, and in Bamako pick up the train to Dakar.

  In the bus he sits up front, wedged between excess baggage and bags of rice. But in front of him there is only the driver and the road, and as the bus travels it feels as if he alone is pushing through the scenery; that the tangled forests are wrapping round him, the dense green hills giving way, the gray clouds rising up from the forest.

  The bus travels on towards Kumasi, muscling its way through the village traffic, past road works, accidents, the carcasses of old accidents. Where the cars and buses and trucks bunch up, people appear from the forest and stalls are set up beside the road. Yams fry in skillets over flaming branches hewn from the trees on the sidings. Kenke is wrapped up in leaves, and bowls of chilies balance on the young girls’ heads.

  But after Afrancho the road begins to clear. The clouds begin drawing back and folding up, becoming a thin layer miles up in the sky. The land flattens, the trees start dispersing and the horizon reveals itself—pale blue sky, anticipating the dust and heat further north.

  He sleeps the night in Tamale, above a shop near the market. Up at dawn, he catches the first vehicle north. The clouds are down again, but the earth is flat and dotted densely with trees. None of this he has seen before. As he travels through the morning he feels the strangeness of the land begin to surround him.

  Then he reaches the border, and the car pulls over, and the people unpack themselves slowly from the benches, then stand at the side of the road as the baggage boys crawl over the roof, untying the possessions strapped to the bus, and throwing them down.

  He waits his turn watching, twenty paces off, a queue taking shape in front of a shed, while small birds colonize the trees beside them, chirping madly.

  From the other side of the shed, people with stamped passports begin making their way across the hundred meters or so of no man’s land to the next border post. Dangerous-looking boys mill about, accosting strangers, offering their help, grabbing hold of bags and suitcases, shouting and altercating.

  Looking dead ahead, he tries to make himself unnoticeable. And it works. Nobody approaches him. His passport is stamped and he moves on by foot towards the other side, where he joins a group of women traveling with small children, busy in negotiation with a taxi driver.

  He can see a small mosque behind a tree on the Burkinabe side. A couple of dilapidated stalls line the street. He notices the small traders cycling lazily by, passing through the borders unhindered.

  Then a second taxi pulls up. The women split up with their children, and he travels on with one group. They drive to the second border post and get out. From here on he will be a foreigner, connected to nothing.

  And that is how it is, later that afternoon, as the streets of Ouagadougou pass by, and he thinks of his father, and chooses not to stop.

  Four days more to Bamako—through Sabou, Boromo, through Bobo Dioulasso, where mango trees line the streets and for a night he stops, and sleeps in a room made from a steel transport container, in the shade of some trees in a mission yard.

  Then on through San and Ségou to Bamako—towns and villages that pass from the back of a car in a haze of red dust, and the heat rising from the road—different cars, station-side hotels, the tightly packed bodies of different strangers.

  In Bamako he spends the night in a dormitory bed at the Carrefour des Jeunes. A
luxury of clean sheets he allows himself before the final leg by train to Dakar.

  This is the part he has heard of from before. Everything before Bamako is just the beginning.

  HE GETS TO the station well before time. Already there is a crowd. He fights his way along the platform and onto the train, through the other passengers, well-wishers, through ambulating vendors, beggars, hustlers, touts, con artists, pickpockets, and into the seat of a third-class carriage. The appointed departure time approaches, then passes. The crowd continues to mill about. The carriages fill up. Baggage is stowed. People settle in for the journey. Then the sound of a whistle and the first jarring shunt on the old rusty line. The city begins unraveling around the train, and soon the train is out in the country, and the soft weaving light comes round, and spirits the landscape away. Everything is still to come: Kati, Diamou, Kayes, Kidira, Tambacounda, Kaffrine, Guinguinéo, Diourbel, Thiès, Dakar. Outside the window there is only his own reflection, and that of the lights in the ceiling and the crowded bodies sharing meals, talking, settling down for sleep, a single shifting surface of flesh, but for those who’ve arrived too late, and are standing still and will for much of the next two days. The train picks up speed. Its movement is endless. Its voice constant. Sometimes a squeal, sometimes a whistle as of escaping air, and a lower, briefer tick—like a match catching; and then its main voice—a high-pitched whirr, like the sound of metal shearing through bone, until the speed is so fast that it all mixes, like water rushing past incredibly fast—a single, even sound, to which all movement is an accompaniment. All through this time his thoughts have been narrowing. The world apart from movement, apart from sound, begins to recede, the world apart from what the eyes can see. He has a wall to lean against, and a window, scratched and scored by fingers, luggage, by washing rags wet with water full of dirt. The night draws on. People talk less, though many are not asleep who are silent, and he imagines that they, like him, are gathering strength—because only a few hours have passed and still two days lie ahead and already the body aches with discomfort and the anticipation of endless discomfort. People curl round their bags to sleep, though it’s not only theft that they fear, but the closeness of strangers, the tangle of flesh, the arm that you see but don’t feel as your own; the smell of food, the inconsolable babies, the short tempers, the animal warmth that covers them over already (though still the sun hasn’t risen yet) and fills the carriage, and takes him to sleep, then out again. Dawn has broken. Soft light lies over the still carriage. The fresh smell of morning. A light chill on the skin. In his dream they were all stumbling from the carriages, thick-eyed, full of sleep. From the whole length of the train people were pouring. The arcs of the electric lights were full of insects darting, dust rising from the ground where they walked. Families, young men, traders, soldiers, businessmen, mothers with their babies bundled into them, children pulled along by the arm. The train was still warm with movement. The breathing of the engine throbbed through the wheels. He cast a look back as he joined the stumbling crowd. The train’s weak lights glowed dully, and suddenly he was afraid to separate. Afraid of being left in the night. Except he realizes, as he wakes, that this was no dream. That the border was crossed, his papers were stamped. He feels his back pocket. They’re there where he left them, his papers, and he let himself wake. The dark conch of a woman’s ear drifts in and out of focus. Small bubbles gather at the corner of her mouth, multiply, pulse in the air of her breath. In the fold of her eye a crust of mucus the colour of mother-of-pearl. The train is stopped on the tracks. It purrs like a fridge. It seems so innocent—you’d never know its strength. But then it jerks. Eyes snap open inside the carriage. The expanse of flesh shudders. Somebody exclaims in indignation—ah! The train is hardly moving, but the purr deepens, a sound from the throat. Then the first tug of unevenness catches in the movement, like a stone against tin, though it’s not just a sound, but something stronger that registers in the body. A small jolt, and then another, and another. In the walls against the seat, in the glass, in its frame, in the light fittings in the roof, all these parts of the body capable of sound. The wheels pick up a heavy double beat: da-DA, da-DA, and somewhere in the train another set answers, more softly, da-DA, faster and faster as the whole train starts picking up the music. The wheels, the walls, the windows, the track and the horn braying—a sound of warning; but not only that—of pure pleasure—on through the day, the first endless day, too endless to resist, as hard as he tries. But silence is patient, is always waiting at the end of each sentence, which falls into nothing, though throughout the day people try to talk. To pass information. To remain themselves. To be people coming from somewhere, going somewhere, to have stories. Someone has left a husband. Someone is fleeing war. Someone doesn’t know a soul in the place where he’s going. Someone wants to achieve something with his life, who has never been beyond the compound of his parents. Someone recounts the beauty of his woman (don’t worry, a voice comes from the other side of the carriage, you’ll find her again in Dakar, and other voices laugh). Some who have traveled before have advice, encouragement, and in softer voices, stories to tell. Of time in foreign countries. Time spent getting there. Time in jail. In the no man’s land between borders, penniless, unable to go forward or back. Stories of traffickers, and scam artists, and the brotherhoods that make life possible in the towns they hope to reach. Some have come to trade, some to work, some come to steal, some just to see. From all the capital cities, all the large towns. Wherever people are hungry. Wherever the young are brave. For some, Dakar is the end of the journey, for others, a stop to somewhere else. By ship, by land, by air, but always north. Some, they know, will be thrown from cargo boats to the ocean. Some will die of thirst in the desert. Some will suffocate in the back of vans, be beaten to death in the mountains of Algeria, or die on their own of filth and desperation. Some will be stopped at the border, at the passport desk, on the quayside. Some will be caught, then return, and be caught, then return, as many times as it takes. Some will reach refugee camps, prisons. But many will make it through to the coasts of Spain, of Italy, France, Britain, through seaports and airports and on, to cook fast food, sell handbags, sweep streets, stack boxes, pick fruit, hawk watches, hats, perfume, in a thousand towns and cities—wherever a living can be made, wherever existence can be justified. But only so much can be said, before the journey takes them back again, and he loses himself, becomes part of the passage, his energy dissolving into it. The sun is everywhere. All that matters is the water he takes to survive. The heat is breaking him down. His clothes are warm and wet with him. Dirt covers him. Sweat comes out of every part of him. His body is giving up its water, giving him up and he can’t stop it as the train carries on racing across the land. Or for no reason stops in the middle of nowhere—although everywhere now is the middle of nowhere. But still, people rise out of the land with their wares, shouting their wares, their food, their drink, their plastic hangers. Where do they come from? Where is the settlement he cannot see? The settlement of these people pressing against the glass, so many words flowing from them, so many words for just a few eggs, just a few packets of water. And then they disappear, one by one. He doesn’t notice it until, somehow, they’re gone, and the next night is already beginning to settle in, coming from the distant horizon, and here he is, still going nowhere. Passengers start leaving the train to stretch their legs, and look about them, to see what it’s like to be nowhere, and he jumps down too, and when the need takes him, goes to the back of the train and empties his watery guts under the carriage, squatting as the sun finally dies into the sand. And then without warning the train starts to move. A mother screams, and a child cries steadily, and men shout. But the train does not stop for the separated family. Goods are thrown from a door. The woman and the children jump down. And then he sees the lost child standing at the tracks, paralyzed with the prospect of being left behind. But the train cannot stop. Doesn’t know to stop. And it leaves them behind, a family lost along the way, in a strang
e place, with not so much as the language. And now he hates the train, until it starts lulling him again, with its rolling and jolting, with a soft rocking that comes up through the cushion of the seat, and he falls asleep. A second night. When he wakes again, he is covered in leaves and the fresh smell of sap. (They have ridden through some bushes at night, and the branches have whipped the train, and windows have torn the ends of the branches. He remembers now the sound of it from his sleep, the scraping and ripping.) Gray light sits upon the land. A second morning. Birds are circling over a tree, where something must be dead. Mosquitoes drift in. Most people still sleep, the women like rolling hills, children bundled into the crooks of them. A few talk softly in a far corner. His shoulder is wedged against a bench. He feels a screw against his hip, that must have been there all these hours. He doesn’t feel he can move his body, all the suppleness is out of it. His right arm, lying across his left, is covered in bites. Somebody turns a radio on, a handset they hold against their head, and there’s a whisper of voices, a thread of sound coming out of the static that still reaches him, somewhere out here, between the world he’s come from, and the one he’s going to. A light wind brings the smell of fuel. Then the landscape of flesh around him begins to unfasten itself. The hills rise and unfold, and the children are lifted out of the valleys and folds of flesh, some oblivious, some still asleep, limp and pliable in mothers’ arms, others howling. The train sounds its horn. The last hours are arriving. The movement starts again. Today, a grinding, circular motion, as if milling corn beneath the wheels, and something else new: in the clatter of the carriages before and behind, soft and steady like the sound of rain. Diourbel … Thiès. The towns start approaching. Rubbish is piled beside the track, hills of it, fluttering in the wind and full of stench—a thin, bitter smell. In places the earth is claiming it back, soil growing up into it, creepers clinging to it, trying to hold it down. But still it gets loose and catches in the thorn bushes, or is held down, and becomes part of the ground. Patterns appear through the bush. A fence swings down to accompany the track. Roads appear in the distance, maybe more than one, and begin to bend in towards the approaching town, pulled like gravity. Animals—a donkey, sheep, more than one sheep, a cow tethered to a tree. The town is still approaching, it must be drawing close. The thorn bushes start coming down to the track, lining it, then suddenly break away, and there are shacks, people sitting on their porches, watching. He sees a father lift his son in the air, and the boy shriek with happiness, but they fly by in an instant, and then a horse is drinking water that’s collected in a tire, there are goal posts in a dry river bed, and small children in a yard, jumping and shouting and waving at the train, men carrying heavy sacks and a row of small naked boys, squatting in a yard and chatting away as they shit. How many hours to Dakar, he does not know, but the endless landscape is behind, there are baobabs now, and the land is lime-green with a thin covering of grass. People notice, sit up. There is shuffling in the benches. The sea appears—just for a moment, before the land rises above it again, and houses begin to intervene, but there it was: a sliver of blue—bluer than the sky—and rocks, and a road, along which there were buses driving, each behind the other, as in a child’s cartoon. Now the houses are coming in thick. Markets. Roads. The land is overrun by the city. Already he’s in the city. Only the station remains. People are gathering their goods, those who know the route, while those who know nothing observe and do likewise. Some have already found their way towards the exits. Young boys open the door and hang out, scooping the moving air with their arms. Now the train enters the station, which at first is no more than a ragged concrete platform. Then he sees the station building in front. The high roof, and the whole city gathered round. He can hear traffic, he hears music and shouting as the people stream from the doors. So many people—he can’t believe that so many people have come this far. The porters hustle round. The conductors with their whistles and their uniforms flapping round their midriffs. All he has is a single kit bag as he moves quickly through the crowd, feeling the solid ground beneath his feet. The smell and the sound and movement of the city is everywhere, as he steps beneath the doors of the station into Place de la Gare, and Dakar opens up to take him in.