The Famished Road

by Ben Okri

  He cracked his knuckles again. He sighed.

  ‘Where am I going to find that kind of money every month, eh?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He stared at me. So intensely did he stare at me I felt that I was the enemy.

  ‘Do you see how they force a man to become an armed robber?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sighed again. He lit a cigarette. He smoked in silence. Then, as if he had hit upon a most brilliant idea, he put out his cigarette, and put on his work-clothes. I was disappointed when he said:

  ‘When I come back I will go and see Madame Koto.’

  ‘She is mad,’ I told him.

  He stared at me in that curious fashion again.

  ‘Maybe she can loan us some money,’ he said, ignoring my piece of information.

  He got into his shoes, stamped them on the ground, touched me on the head, and went out to work.

  After a while Mum came in, her wrapper wet. She had been washing clothes in the backyard. Washing and thinking. Washing and singing. The compound had awoken. A stray dog wandered up the passage. It was a dull morning. The sky was grey as if it might rain. The noise of metal buckets clanking at the well, the sound of water being poured, a woman raising her voice, grew on the morning air. The school-children were in their uniforms. A cock crowed repeatedly. Mum got her tray together. I was ready for school. Mum went down the street, swaying, moving a little sleepily, with one more burden added to her life. Soon she was merely a detail in the poverty of our area.

  10

  I TRIED TO sneak past Madame Koto’s place but she saw me, and said very loudly:

  ‘Are you running from me again?’

  She looked different. She wore a new lace blouse, an expensive wrapper, coral beads round her neck, and copper bangles round her wrists. She wore eye-shadow, which darkened her eyes, and powder on her face, beneath which her sweat ran. The day had become hotter. It seemed impossible to avoid the sun. I was thirsty.

  ‘Come and have some palm-wine,’ she offered.

  The bar had changed again. There were two almanacs of the Rich Party on the walls. It was surprisingly crowded for that time of the afternoon. There were normal, decent-looking people, as well as men with scars, women with bracelets that weighed down their arms, men with dark glasses. Arguments reverberated in the heated place. They discussed politics and scandals in loud, passionate voices. Some of them had thunderous faces, gleaming with sweat, and when they talked their mouths opened to astonishing degrees. Some of them were thin and bony, with ragged hungry beards and furtive eyes. The women had long painted fingers. They waved their hands violently when they spoke. They fanned themselves with newspapers. Their noises mingled with the incessant buzz of the flies.

  There was a hammer on the counter. I thought the carpenter was around, but upon looking, I found he wasn’t. There were several gourds of palm-wine on the tables, and flies jostled on their rims. The plates empty of peppersoup were also a little busy with the flies. At one corner of the room a man lay on the bench, his mouth and eyes open. He was fast asleep. A wall-gecko ran across his face and got caught in his hair and he woke up screaming. The others burst into laughter.

  In the midst of all the noise sat a man with a chief’s cap on his head. He sat straight, with inherited dignity, and there was a boy next to him who fanned him. He had great orange beads round his neck and wore a dazzling blue agbada. He drank as if he owned the place. He looked familiar. I looked hard at him. Then I remembered him as one of the men on the van who had been overseeing the distribution of poisoned milk. His lips were large for his face and the colour of his lower lip was a curious mixture of red and black. There was more red than black and it seemed he had been burnt there as a child. He had the eyes of a rat. He caught me staring at him.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ he asked.

  The voices in the bar stopped.

  ‘You,’ I said.

  ‘Why? Are you mad?’

  ‘No.’

  He gave me a vicious stare. One of the men in the bar got up, came over, and cracked me on the head.

  ‘You are mad,’ he said.

  I spat at him, but it didn’t travel very far.

  ‘Look at this bad boy,’ he said, and cracked me a second time.

  I spat again. It landed on my shirt. Madame Koto came into the bar. The man slapped me with two thick fingers and I shouted and rushed for the hammer on the counter. I tore at the man, who for some reason fled. Madame Koto grabbed my arms and took the hammer from me.

  ‘Don’t be a bad boy! Do you see that man there?’ she said, pointing. ‘He’s a chief. He is going to rule our area. He will swallow you.’

  The chief, satisfied with the tribute, smiled, and went on drinking. The noises resumed. Some of the people commented on my behaviour and lamented the way children no longer respected their elders and blamed it all on the white man’s way of life which was spoiling the values of Africa.

  Then one of the men suggested to Madame Koto that she would be better off with girls as waiters and servants than with boys. A woman amongst them said that if Madame Koto wanted some girls to work for her, and to help her serve the customers, she could arrange it.

  ‘That ugly boy will destroy your business for you,’ said the man who had knocked me twice on the head. ‘Who wants to be drunk on your excellent palm-wine and see that terrible face?’

  ‘You will die!’ I said to the man.

  The voices stopped. The man rose from his bench, his face quivering under the superstitious fear of a child’s curse.

  ‘Say I won’t die!’ he demanded.

  ‘No!’

  He came towards me. Madame Koto was counting money behind her counter. She was too engrossed to be aware of what was happening.

  ‘Take it back!’

  ‘No!’

  He strode towards me. Only the flies made any noises.

  ‘Flog him till he pisses on himself,’ said the chief. ‘That’s how to train a child.’

  I watched the man without moving. He raised his hand to hit me and I ran neatly between his legs and everyone laughed. I stopped and made faces at the chief and the painted women. When the man dashed at me, enraged by the trick, I fled out of the bar and went on fleeing and didn’t stop till I was in the forest. I looked back. The man was panting. He gave up and turned back. I went deeper into the forest and sat on the mighty tree that had been cut down. I looked over the great pit from which they had been dredging sand to build the roads of the world.

  And then I wandered. I wandered for a long time in the forest. The earth gave off a potent aroma and in the heat the palm trees released alcoholic fumes deep in their trunks which I breathed in with the smell of their barks and their wine-sap evaporating into the quivering air. I listened to the curlews in the groves of wild pine trees. Intoxicated with the alcoholic fumes of sun on earth I broke through a remote section of the forest, where sunbirds clustered in baobab branches, and I emerged in another reality, a strange world, a path which had completed its transition into a road. The surface of the road was uneven with bumps. The tarmac melted under the sun and my soles turned black. The smell of melting tarmac was heady and I saw the mirage of a trailer, quivering in its frightening speed, coursing down the road towards me. The mirage shot right through the road construction machines that stood at the intersection. It ground its way over the women who sold iced water and oranges, over the beggars and the workers and shacks within which the eternal arguments about pay and strikes raged. And then the great mirage of the trailer went on, plunging forward, right into the forest and I did not see it any more.

  I came to another half-constructed road. Workers stood around the hulks of machinery, abusing those who were working. They waved sticks with words written on them. I gathered that those who cursed had been sacked. They shouted slogans at the white engineers. I did not see any white engineers. It might have been the sun. I passed them and when I looked back I saw figures setting upon the protesting
workers. The sun was remorseless. Shadows were deep. Where the sun was brightest, objects were blackest. Antagonists and protesters twisted in an extraordinary dance and all I could make out were the confusing shapes of glistening bodies moving in and out of visibility. The lights made everything unreal.

  Birds cawed overhead, flying around in widening circles. I re-entered the forest. The sun’s rays were sharp like glass. The blue shadows of green trees blinded me for a moment. The shade was cooling and the air smelt of fine aromatic herbs and bark. Patterns of light and colours danced on the forest floor. Flowers which I didn’t see scented the dense and tender breeze. I listened to the fluted sound of birds, the murmurings of a distant stream, the wind in the somnolent trees, and the pervasive concert of insects. And then, suddenly, that part of the forest was over.

  I had emerged into another world. All around, in the future present, a mirage of houses was being built, paths and roads crossed and surrounded the forest in tightening circles, unpainted churches and the whitewashed walls of mosques sprang up where the forest was thickest. The worshippers in the unpainted churches wore white cassocks and prayed to the ringing of bells all afternoon. The world of trees and wild bushes was being thinned. I heard the ghostly wood-cutters axing down the titanic irokos, the giant baobabs, the rubber trees and obeches. There were birds’ nests on the earth and the eggs within them were smashed, had fallen out, had mingled with the leaves and the dust, the little birds within the cracked eggs half-formed and dried up, dying as they were emerging into a hard, miraculous world. Ants swarmed all over them.

  At intervals I passed people who were sitting behind trees. When I looked back they were no longer there. Nude women appeared and vanished before my gaze. The smell of earth, leaves, sun, and the merest hint of dried excrement overpowered my senses. I wandered deeper into the world of trees, amongst the solitude of acacias and needle-pines, and saw people clearing the bushes, uprooting tree stumps, raking great clusters of climbers and dried mistletoes into heaps. I saw old bicycles resting on trees. I saw men and women burning the bushes, the clusters of climbers and vines, and there must have been ecstatic herbs amongst what was being burnt for the smoke yielded up voluminous aromas of sage and rosemary, dried leaves and densities of green and yellow fumes and all manner of secret potencies and powerful crackling smells into the air.

  And the smoke and the smells were dense everywhere and it was impossible not to breathe them in and the mysteries of burning plants in the deep forest charged my head and I went around stumbling into trees, tripping over roots, walking up against the ochre palaces that were anthills, or wandering round in circles, or watching bicycles riding around among the trees without riders, or noticing women pedalling the air without anything beneath them. Anthills which I had passed followed me. I became certain that the whole forest was moving.

  The trees were running away from human habitation. My eyes became charged too and I saw people with serene bronze masks emerging from trees. I saw a bird with a man’s hairy legs flying clumsily over the branches of the rain-tree. An antelope with the face of a chaste woman stopped and stared at me and when I moved it disappeared among the luxuriant bushes. An old man emerged from the anthill that had been following me. He had a white beard and green bejewelled eyes and a face that was both a hundred years old and childlike. His hands were up in the air, his neck slightly bent, as if he were carrying the heaviest riddle in the world. He seemed to follow me wherever I went. He had a staff which was the flowering branch of an orange tree and he hobbled slowly and came after me with inscrutable persistance. When I became aware of how intent he was I ran, but no matter how fast I fled he remained the same distance from me. I became confused and afraid. I tripped over a skull and hurt my ankle and couldn’t move. I waited. I heard no footsteps, but the old man kept on at me, neither catching up with me, nor retreating. He remained at the same distance, bearing the great weight of an invisible enigma on his head.

  The forest was full of mirages from which I could not escape. I dragged myself along on the ground. The man kept on coming. I grew so scared that after a while I turned and dragged myself towards the old man to find out what he wanted. I became frustrated at the slowness of my pace. When I got to the skull, I picked it up, and threw it at him. He vanished and a wind blew hard through the trees and the voluminous air was full of leaves whirling and fruits and seeds falling. I dragged myself on till I came to a palm tree. There was a tapper’s gourd at its root and I was thirsty and drank of the new wine. It added to my intoxication. A black wind circled my head. A strange sound came from the centre of the tapper’s gourd. Trying to escape it, I hobbled towards the houses on the rim of the forest. But they too were a mirage.

  Then I came to a place in the trees where it was raining. I couldn’t understand it. There was sun and wind everywhere else, but at this spot it rained and water ran down the leaves of the cicadas and banana plants. I was afraid of the rain. Beyond the curious downpour I could see a man, lights flashing at his feet, in front of a well near the houses. It was the old man. He seemed to be staring at me. For the first time I noticed that he had hooves for feet. Golden hooves. I turned in the opposite direction and hobbled away painfully. Then I got tired and didn’t care what happened to me any more.

  I rested against a tree and shut my eyes. After a while I heard a low continuous song. I opened my eyes and saw a tortoise moving past me. I watched it for a long time and it moved so slowly that I fell asleep. When I woke up I felt better, but my feet still hurt. I pushed on and found myself at the same place where the bushes were being burnt, where the potent fumes made the forest itself fall into dreaming. There was no one around. In the bright white smoke I saw spirits turning into air, spirits of plants and herbs and things I didn’t yet know about; I saw their brightness of blues and yellows, shapes of sad faces, legs brilliant with oil becoming soot, golden eyes melting into vibrant space. I did not linger; I went on and when I recognised the place ahead, dimly at first, something fell on me and the black wind descended on my soul. It was the sunbirds that awakened me.

  What had fallen on me? I looked around. Beams of sunlight converged on my face. There were branches and leaves and burst fruits on the floor. Strange stones warmed my soles. Not far from me, like a skull sliced in half and blacked with tar, was a mask that looked frightening from the side, but which was contorted in an ecstatic laughter at the front. It had eyes both daunting and mischievous. Its mouth was big. Its nose was small and delicate. It was the face of one of those paradoxical spirits that move amongst men and trees, carved by an artist who has the gift to see such things and the wisdom to survive them. When I picked up the mask a white bird flew out of the bushes, startling me with the wild clapping of its wings and its piercing cry. I dropped the mask. Then I picked it up and wore it over my face and looked out from its eyes and something blurred the sun and the forest became as night.

  When I looked out through the mask I saw a different world. There were beings everywhere in the darkness and the spirits were each of them a sun. They radiated a brilliant copper illumination hard to the eyes. I saw a tiger with silver wings and the teeth of a bull. I saw dogs with tails of snakes and bronze paws. I saw cats with the legs of women, midgets with bright red bumps on their heads. The trees were houses. There was music everywhere, and dancing and celebration rose from the earth. And then birds with bright yellow and blue feathers, eyes that were like diamonds, and with ugly scavenging faces, flew at me and kept pecking at the mask. I took it off and the world turned and the trees seemed to be falling on me and it took a while before things came back to normal. I held on to the mask and went on hobbling, looking for a way out of the forest.

  And as I went I saw the golden hooves of the old man again. I hid behind a tree. The weight he was carrying seemed to be getting unbearably heavier. He stooped as he walked, but he showed no pain. If he saw me, he pretended he hadn’t. When he went past I wore the mask and looked at him. He was completely invisible. He was not the
re. I could not see him at all through the eyes of the mask. But, sitting in the air above his invisible space, floating on the wind, serene in the midst of a great emerald light covering that other world, was a beautiful young boy whose slender body somehow suggested the passionate weight of a lion. The boy stared at me with simple eyes that conferred on me an unspoken benediction. I took off the mask and saw the old man re-entering the anthill. I put it on again and was amazed to see not an anthill but a grand palace with beryl colonnades and jade green verandahs, parapets of gold, mistletoe clinging to the fierce yellow walls, with sculptures in dazzling marble all around. Into this palace of turquoise mirrors the boy-king of purest innocence disappeared, with a smile like that of a god. And then darkness fell over everything again.

  The wind sounded strange. My wonder turned to bewilderment. When I took off the mask the darkness was the same. Patches of light came over the wind. I had begun to lose my sense of reality, confused by the mask. I sped on, my feet in agony. I went on for a long time, turning round and round, my sense of direction askew. After a while, when some light filtered through the leaves, when confusion was really beginning to twist my brain, I suddenly broke out into the clearing.

  It was the clearing where I used to play and where I had buried Madame Koto’s fetish. The curious thing was that there was something different about the clearing. It was both exactly as I remembered it and different. For some reason the place felt shaded even when there were no trees around. I stared about the clearing, trying to isolate what was different about it. I couldn’t. So I wore the mask and looked and saw that what was a clearing was in fact a village of spirits. In the middle of the village was a great iroko tree, golden and brown, with phosphorescent leaves and moon-white birds in the branches, twittering out the sweetest essences of music. There were rose-bushes in the radiant square. I saw skyscrapers and flying machines and fountains, ruins covered in snails and flowering climbers, grave-stelae, orchards, and the monument of a black sphinx at the gate of the village. Luminous pilgrims, celebrants in yellow cassocks, made processions in honour of the mysteries of strange gods. I took off the mask, my head turning, the world spinning, my eyes flaming. I sat down on the ground and rested.