by Ben Okri
The weapon of the old woman with the feet of a lioness had become golden-red. One of the heads of the spirit had rolled on to the river of mirrors and its eyes stared at the eternity of reflections in a bad-tempered astonishment. The spirit, turning round and round, howling, spinning, confused, made for the dug-out canoe. He suddenly jumped in, pushed the canoe out on the mirror, and began to row on the lights. The old woman went towards him, striding on silver, weapon raised. Dad’s knife, full of reflections, was lifted above me, as if I were to be the sacrificial victim of my own birth. I screamed. The knife in Dad’s hand descended swiftly, slashed the air twice. The herbalist released a piercing cry. The old woman struck the spirit at the same moment, with a mighty swipe of her weapon. Dad slashed the chicken’s throat. The old woman severed the spirit’s last head. The spirit fought vainly in the canoe as the chicken twitched. Its blood dripped on my forehead. The herbalist fell silent. The spirit’s head, landing on silver, looked around, saw itself separated from its body, and let out its final scream of horror, cracking the surface of the river. The mirrors shattered. It became dark. Splinters and reflections caught in my eyes.
3
MUM WAS SITTING beside me, stroking my eyelids. Dad sat on his chair, his forehead creased, stubbles of beard on his chin. There was a full bottle of whisky on the table. There was the smell of superb cooking in the air. I opened my eyes wide and said:
‘Where is the road?’
Dad immediately rushed at me and kept my eyes open with his fingers. Mum poured a black liquid into my eyes. The liquid hurt when I shut my eyes. But when they were wide open they did not hurt. I stared wide-eyed at everything. The herbalist was gone. His shadow and the flight of his eagle feathers remained. Mum made me drink bitter herbs. Dad made razor incisions on my chest and shoulders and forehead and pressed stinging potions on the cuts. I cried out for food. They paid no attention. I tried returning to my journey but couldn’t shut my eyes. Mum fed me water, and pap, and orange juice. Dad, lingering in the shadow of the herbalist, looked as if he hadn’t slept all his life. Mum was so gaunt, and bony, and beautiful in her sorrow, so radiant at seeing me alive, that I wept for them both. Dad burst into song. Mum stroked my temples. I hadn’t eaten for two weeks. The doctors had pronounced me dead. But I had never really left the world of the living.
4
I WAS FED gradually; from pap, they moved me on to heavier food. Mum spent much love creating for me the most ravishing dishes. I wondered where they got the money for delicious soups of goat-meat and stockfish, the peppersoup full of new yams, the vegetable dishes, the stews with aromatic peppers and bright-red lobsters. I had become very lean and insubstantial, too weak to move. Walking was painful, my soles hurt, my eyes developed odd irritations. Each night the liquid they poured into my eyes made my sleep shallow. I slept the way rabbits do, with eyes open, to fool antagonists. Dad stayed up most nights, alternating with Mum, watching over me. Candles burned into the dawns.
The herbalist came again on another visit. He performed rituals and treated me with the deepest suspicion. He told Dad and Mum to be kinder to me, to not shout, not beat, not restrict me, to not quarrel amongst themselves, and he hinted at the prospect of performing the ceremonies that would cut off my access to the world of spirits. He said something about the importance of retrieving my spirit tokens which he believed I had hidden in secret places. He spoke to them at night, while they thought I was asleep. I immediately thought of him as an enemy. He collected his exorbitant fee and when he left he took his sentient shadows away.
And so for a long time they spoke to me gently, and treated me kindly, as if I were a newborn child. When I ate the choice dishes Mum prepared both sat opposite and watched me, smiling. Mum’s eyes became bright with joy and, curiously, with pride. Dad watched me as if I were a strange and surprising animal. They kept pleading with me to eat more than I wanted. They bought me soft drinks and Dad shared his whisky with me. If they had enormous difficulties earning money, if Dad had suffered untold humiliations, unspeakable torments borrowing the money or carrying loads, if Mum walked the entire city selling her provisions, crying out in dust-dried streets, her voice hoarse, they did not show it. Somehow my return had assumed great importance. I felt bad that I may have increased their suffering. I tried to please them, to run errands, wash plates, stay in, attend school. But they seemed more anxious to please me and they took offence if I tried to do anything. During that time Dad swept the room, fetched water from the well, came back from work always with a cheerful spirit, was delicate and kind to Mum, and would hug her often, and would sit on his chair, smoking and singing bright ancestral songs.
It seemed that our lives would know a new dawn, take on new colours of sweetness, and that in the warm spirit our miseries would be transformed into something miraculous and tangible like the birds of heaven. The world was new to me, everything was fresh. It was the earliest days of creation. I marvelled at cobwebs and cockroaches. I couldn’t stop staring at people’s faces and their eyes. The fact that human beings talked, laughed, wept, sweated, sang, without some visible thing which made all the animation possible, the fact that they were alive in their bodies, contained this thing called life in their flesh, seemed incredible to me. I watched babies with open-mouthed wonder. I couldn’t get over the fact that we can look out of our eyes, out of our inner worlds at people, but that people, looking at us couldn’t see into our eyes, our thoughts, our inner worlds. How transparent one feels, but how opaque: it mystified me. Even the act of motion, human beings walking on two legs, balancing on them, surprised me. With eyes wide open from a new fear of sleep, I looked at the world, I tried to see all that was in it, I embraced all things into my life. I hugged the alarming mystery of reality, and grew stronger.
Everything felt strange to me. Everything felt as if it were both floating away and being reborn for ever. Even our neighbours who had grudges against us came one evening to pay us a visit. They brought gifts of sweets, drinks, and lengths of new cloth. They brought their children to play with me. They drank and talked merrily with Mum and Dad, as if there had never been great animosities between us. Their faces were all vaguely familiar. I felt I had been away a long time. During that period names were a mystery to me and I pronounced their different nicknames or public names over and over again as if for the first time. I played, it seemed to me, in slow motion, with the children, touching them tenderly.
Our neighbours spoke warmly to me. As they spoke I watched their faces. My heart heaved for them all. Like a stranger, I saw the suffering on their faces, the years of misery and suspicion, their extreme sensitivity to slights, the vigour of their reactions, the energy of their appetites, their boundless enthusiasm and hope. Their faces, solid and thickly masked with time, seemed fragile to me. Everywhere terror looked out at them. Years of frustration had turned their eyes into instruments which looked out at the world with a peculiar, unforgiving, sharpness; often, even, with meanness. And yet, there they were, with privation before them, hunger behind them, paying us a visit to welcome me back from being dead.
5
DAD BOUGHT THEM drinks. Mum served them food. They all talked in subdued tones as if in the presence of a corpse. It was from them that I learnt of some of the things that had been happening during the time that I had been away.
There had been a break in the rainy season. Houses had been flooded and whole families had been forced to move. Streets had become streams. Improvised graveyards had become so waterlogged that coffins had been seen floating past houses, or beached in front of the abodes of certain minor politicians. Electric cables had been brought down by the force of wind and rain and, some people added, by the forces against progress. Fishes had been found in wells. A snake had slid into a house and killed a woman. People said the snake had been sent by an enemy. I heard stories of politicians, who were members of secret societies, who tried to hold back the rain because of the grand rally which they had to keep postponing. I heard that Madame Kot
o had joined them. I also heard that one day she had slipped on the muddy ground, had taken a nasty fall, and had to be rushed to a powerful herbalist. That was how the talk went, from the most ordinary events to the most singular, from the man who had raved under a tremendous downpour, swearing that he saw red eagles with flowers in their mouths, to the woman who was said to have given birth to a big white egg.
They spoke of strange things and omens, of the blind old man who had woken up one night screaming that a giant lizard was pursuing him and that it had smashed his accordion. They spoke of omens in the movements of giant constellations. A star had fallen into the Atlantic. Another star had burst into being over our area. Birds of gold had been seen at night. Sweet songs had been heard by women in the dark, songs wandering down the empty street. People dreamed of statues that walked, bringing gifts to the area; they dreamed of birds and butterflies, of hybrid animals, of antelopes with jewelled necklaces, of beggars who were princesses, of a rain of gold dust, of the land suffocating with plenitude while the majority starved, of a cornucopia two decades long with darkness to follow, of miracles on hungry roads, of the wise man who would emerge from nowhere to rule and transform the future agonies of the land. They even talked of widespread rumours, confirmed on two continents, about one of our most important politicians who had been sighted on the moon. Listening to them instilled in me an absolute awe of the world. I was lightning-struck by life. When they left, my brain fairly combusted with the realities they had conjured in low voices. A brilliant aura linked Mum and Dad that night. They glowed with an almost spectral radiance. I felt exhausted and restless. I wanted to see the world again. Mum sang. Dad said:
‘Birth brings glory.’
I slept on the bed that night. Mum and Dad slept on the mat. Later I heard them moving and whispering, moving and shaking the floor, as if they were in a hurry to fill the world with glories.
SECTION TWO
BOOK SIX
1
I BECAME STRONGER. I ventured out into the street. It dawned on me that I had been granted a greater freedom, so long as I stayed alive. When I went out to play it seemed that something had altered the world. Bushes and strange plants had grown wild everywhere. The rain had beaten holes in the ground. Streets were unpassable for mud. Trees had fallen across paths and roads. Electric cables dangled in the air. I tried to wander – my feet had begun to itch – but water blocked off my attempts. The rain too had made the world smaller. In the forest the ground was thick with mud and yellow leaves and sacrificial offerings. I wandered about in the devastation of our area. It wasn’t much fun. The rain had completely joined whole streets to the marshland. All the streets in our area were once part of a river. As always, the river god was claiming back his terrain.
And so with nowhere to go I was forced to be content with the distractions our street offered. As I had to avoid two places along our street I found them both quite magnetic. I climbed a tree, sat on a branch like an awkward bird, and watched both houses. Children were playing outside the blind old man’s bungalow. He was not around. His chair was on the verandah, soaked with rain. His window had been broken and the room seemed empty. Madame Koto’s bar was different. The barfront was covered in water and weeds. Planks on stones led to the bar. Her signboard was askew. The curtain strips had thinned and I could just about see in. Electric cables had been connected to her roof from a pole on the street. She was the only one who had this privilege. A few cars arrived at the barfront and blasted their horns. A great number of women came out of the bar, chattering and laughing. Dancing to strains of music, they filed across the planks. Madame Koto, her stomach bigger than ever, her right foot bandaged, came out and waved to them. The cars drove the women away.
Madame Koto paused at the door, and surveyed the world. Her white beads sat proudly round her neck. Soon her eyes fixed in my direction. She stared at me for a long time. Then, to my amazement, she started coming towards me. I tried to get down from the tree, but the branch caught the back of my shorts. I resigned myself to what she would do. Rolling the fat of her body with each measured step, avoiding the treacherous puddles and mudholes without seeming to do so, she strode up to me. She was massive. The sheer weight of wrappers gave her a queer grandeur. There was an impressive new exhaustion on her face. She stood beneath the tree, fixing me with a stare, and said:
‘Azaro, what are you doing?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Do you think you are a bird?’
‘No.’
‘Why were you staring at me just now?’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘Come down!’
‘No.’
She glared at me. Then, suddenly, she said:
‘What were you doing in my dreams?’
‘Nothing.’
She made an attempt to catch hold of my feet, but I withdrew them. She jumped, landed badly, hurt her foot, and gave up trying to get me to come down. She said:
‘If I catch you in my dreams again I will eat you up.’
Then she hobbled back to her bar. When she had disappeared behind the curtain strips her women came out and stared at me and made abusive signs. When they got bored with watching me I got down from the tree and went home.
Dad had returned early from work. He was bare-chested and sweating. He had attached a bag full of rags to the wall and was punching it. He looked at me, sweat pouring down his face, and said:
‘My son, your father is practising.’
‘For what?’
‘To be world champion.’
He went on hitting the bundle, making the walls tremble, each punch vibrating the foundations of the house, grunts escaping from his mouth. He went on punching the bundle till a neighbour banged on the door.
‘What are you trying to do, eh?’ he shouted. ‘You want to break down the wall? Go and join the army instead of disturbing people!’
Dad stopped punching the bundle and began shadow-boxing. Each especially solid punch at the air was accompanied by the names of real or imagined enemies and a string of abuses. He jumped about, ducked, jabbed, threw upper cuts, feinted, and bobbed. Foam appeared on the sweat of his chest. He grew tired. He went and had a bath. When he came back I began to serve his food. He stopped me. He served the food himself. We ate together.
When we finished I went off to wash the plates. Dad sat in his chair, smoking. He was restless when I returned. I watched him silently. He looked at me every so often and smiled. Not long afterwards the landlord turned up. He didn’t knock. He pushed his way in, left the door wide open, and addressed his complaints to the whole compound.
‘They tell me you have been breaking down the walls! If you damage anything in my house thunder will destroy you. And you better start getting ready to move away. I am tired of your trouble!’
He stormed away. Dad carried on smoking. He hadn’t moved. When the landlord left Dad got up, shut the door, and went back to his chair. We didn’t say anything till Mum returned.
2
WE HAD NO idea how serious Dad was with his boxing. He began to train dementedly. Sometimes he would wake up at night and bob and counter-punch, hit and jab, swing punches and lash out at imaginary adversaries. In the mornings, before he chewed on his chewing stick, before he ate, he would work out all around the room. He would wake me up with his footwork and laboured breathing. I would look up from the mat and see his giant feet jumping around my head, his elbows protecting his face. He punched at the clothesline, till the line snapped. He punched at flies and jabbed at mosquitoes. He specialised in fighting his own shadow as if it were his most hated antagonist. He would get me to stand on the bed and hold a folded towel for him. He would punch it from all angles. His movements became crab-like, and he developed the oddest upper cuts. The more he became involved in boxing, the more he ate. His appetite got so large that Mum pleaded with him to stop. We couldn’t afford the money, she said. Dad ignored her. We cut down on what we ate so he could build his body. He didn’t know that we did.
It got worse. Dad took to sparring with the air on his way to work. On his way back he did the same thing, shuffling, performing fancy footwork, executing kink jabs, throwing combinations. We began to think something terrible was happening to him.
‘Poverty is driving him mad,’ Mum said.
People began to look at us as if we were freaks. The room became too small for Dad to practise in. He had by then punched practically everything in sight. He had made my mat threadbare by standing it against the wall and thumping it. He had punched holes in the mattress. He burst the bottom of one of Mum’s basins. He stopped listening to anything anyone said. He became so engrossed in his obsession. We couldn’t understand it. But it was when he took to boxing on the verandah that we abandoned all attempts to comprehend what had seized hold of his brain. Something had changed in him. His eyes became cool, serene, fierce, and narrowed, all at once. He seemed to look at people as if they were transparent, insubstantial. His knuckles became big and raw from bashing the backyard walls. One day I stumbled on him in the backyard. He had a cloth round his fists and he was hitting the wall with all his strength. He went on hitting till the white cloth was covered with his blood. Then he stopped.
‘To be a man is not a small thing,’ he would say to me.
His shadow-boxing, however, began to attract attention. When he punched walls in the backyard the women would appear round the well, on the slightest pretext. Fetching water without using it suddenly became fashionable with the married and unmarried women. He didn’t mind performing to the crowd of women and children. But he got dissatisfied with the backyard because the water spilt on the floor made it difficult to do his footwork. One day he slipped and fell. The women laughed. The next evening he shadow-boxed down the passage. And that night, when he thought the world was asleep, he resumed training in the compound-front.