The Famished Road

by Ben Okri

  She took the bundle roughly from her protector and put it on the table.

  ‘I pray you should be strong soon,’ she said, and left the room.

  Mum went out with her. I heard them talking in the passage. The people gathered in the room were uneasy. Dad made faces at them. There was a long silence. Dad went on making strange faces, his blue bruises and his green wounds concentrating his expression into a distillate of indecipherable mockery. He was actually in great pain. One of the gathered visitors, speaking for the others, said it was time to go. But they didn’t move. Mum and Madame Koto stayed talking in the passage for a while. The gathered visitors stayed a while too. In silence. When Mum returned, her face bright, the gathering dispersed, one by one, leaving their modest gifts behind.

  On the sixth day, when Dad had shown a few vague signs of improvement, the blind old man came to pay his respects. He wore a bright yellow shirt, a red hat with feathers in the felt, and blue sunglasses. He was led in by a younger man. He sat on Dad’s chair. He had brought his instrument.

  ‘When I heard that you were ill, I brought my accordion so I could play for you,’ he said in his weird voice.

  Dad groaned. Mum served him ogogoro and the blind old man made a libation and drank the alcohol down as if it were a soft drink and began to play the accordion with astonishing vigour. Now and again he would swing his blind eyes in my direction, as if he were demanding applause. He played blissfully, happily. He played the most dreadful music that could possibly be imagined by the most fiendish mind of man. He deafened us with the sheer fabulous ugliness of his music. He made our flesh crawl and bristle with his noise. Mum’s face began to twitch. I kept jerking. A strange smell, as of a rotting corpse, or of a great animal in the throes of death, rose from the music, and occupied the room. It was incredible. Dad twisted and contorted on the bed as if the cruelty of the music were causing him greater agony than all the unearthly blows of the celebrated Yellow Jaguar. Mum opened the door and window to let the music out. The foul air of the compound came in. Dad began to sit up on the bed, struggling, kicking, fighting to get out of the womb of the vile music, as if he were trapped in a space too small for his spirit or his frame which was accelerating in growth. Fighting to get up, he groaned, almost weeping because the music hurt him so much. The blind old man turned to me again and intensified the full ugly power of the music. Dad was struck still, unable to move, frozen by his own efforts. Then suddenly the old man stopped playing. Dad slumped back down. The old man said:

  ‘How many times is a man reborn in one life?’

  He chuckled, looked at me, and carried on playing with unrestrained zest. Then someone came in through the door, bringing ghosts and memories and a magic, fleeting smile. I looked up. A flash dazzled me. It was the photographer. He had just taken a picture. He hurried over to Dad’s bedside. He made a quick speech about his best wishes and hopes for recovery. Dad did not recognise him. The photographer didn’t let it bother him. He took Dad’s hand and shook it. Dad made faces. The photographer took another picture. The flash hurt Dad and he groaned. The photographer, with an air of mystery, said:

  ‘They don’t know I am here. So I’m going.’

  He touched me on the head, fondled my hair, put on his hat, and crept out into the compound as if everyone were after him.

  ‘When people keep running, something keeps pursuing them,’ the blind old man said, in his sepulchral voice.

  The old man started to play again. Dad was so irritated that, to our amazement, he got out of bed and saw the blind old man to the door.

  On the seventh day Dad rose miraculously from his condition. It was as if he had snapped out of a trance. The colours of his bruises had become fairly normal. His face was still disfigured, his eyes still swollen and angry, his wounds livid, but something in him had mended. His recovery surprised all of us. I woke up to find him jumping and shadow-boxing again. He looked lean but his eyes glowed. It seemed as if his illness and his escape into the world of infancy had given him fresh energies and accelerated his healing. He went to work, but came back early. He slept for a while, boxing in his dreams. When he woke up he made me tell him about his epic battle with Yellow Jaguar. He made me tell it several times. He didn’t seem to be able to remember most of what had happened. He spoke of the fight as something that he had dreamt, and the illness as the only thing that had been real.

  Mum returned late and told us of the preparations for the great rally. She said women were earning a lot of money cooking for the event and that Madame Koto had offered her a job. She asked Dad if she should accept.

  ‘People will think you are a prostitute,’ Dad said.

  ‘But what about the money?’

  ‘We don’t need their stinking money.’

  Mum sulked for the rest of the night. It didn’t bother Dad because all he wanted to do was talk about his fight with Yellow Jaguar. He grew so obsessive about the fight that all through the next day he talked about it, made me repeat my account of how he had crouched low, and moved into the dark, how he had launched his counter-attack. The only thing that spoiled it for him was that there had been no one else apart from me who had witnessed the strange battle.

  ‘Are you sure no one else saw it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nobody woke up?’

  ‘No.’

  Dad grunted in agony. It seemed to hurt him a little to have performed such a heroic feat unwitnessed.

  ‘So no one saw it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even a woman?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No other children, no one passed along the street, no traders?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So no one else saw me beat him?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Not even a dog, a cat?’

  ‘Not even a dog or cat.’

  ‘No strangers?’

  ‘No. Except three lights.’

  ‘What three lights?’

  ‘Three lights,’ I said.

  He hit me on the head.

  ‘Then other lights came and joined them.’

  He hit me again. I shut up. Dad was so impressed by his performance that he badly wanted to boast about it. He knew no one would believe him. But that, in the end, didn’t matter because after Dad got well he developed interesting powers and a kind of madness.

  ‘Maybe you have to overcome things first in the spirit world, before you can do it in this world, eh?’ he would say to the wind.

  He went around, demented and restless, as if a jaguar had somehow got trapped in his brain. An unbearable energy bristled in him. Whenever he came near me I felt him shivering like a great animal startled by its own ferocity.

  4

  AND SO DAD resumed training. He woke us up with his exercises. He went off to work, and came back early. In the evenings, after he had slept, he would practise at the housefront. The neighbours, who stayed outside drinking and talking because of the heat in their rooms, watched him. Most evenings they brought out their chairs and stools and made themselves comfortable in anticipation of Dad’s arrival. When enough people had gathered he would bound out of the room.

  ‘Black Tyger!’ the people would cheer.

  Then shamelessly he would begin to shadow-box and make grunting noises. His activity drew so much interest that street hawkers, prostrate from a whole day’s wandering, would stop to watch him. Sellers of oranges, boiled eggs, bread, roasted groundnuts, would crouch and stare at him. Some of them did quite well for themselves, selling their wares to the compound people. Some of them, seated on the sand, their basins of goods beside them, would eventually stretch out and fall asleep while Dad trained. Mallams and children on errands, old women on visits and charm-sellers, all stopped to watch for no other reason than that a crowd had formed around him.

  Meanwhile, Dad jumped about, throwing combinations to the four winds.

  ‘Is this a new thing?’ one of them would ask.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is
that so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A new thing, eh?’

  ‘Completely new.’

  ‘So who is he?’

  ‘They call him Black Tyger.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The shop-owners and street traders around did excellent business on account of Dad. They all did good business, except Mum, who was unaware of the interest Dad was generating, and who at that moment was probably pounding the dust of the great ghetto wastes, selling nothing but a box of matches for the whole evening. While Mum wended her long way back home the street traders sold drinks and sweets, cigarettes and mosquito coils, kola-nuts and chewing gums, cheap sunglasses and kerosine lamps. They wove Dad’s antics into their sales cries; meanwhile, Dad sparred with the air and dust and shattered bricks with his fist. He developed such a reputation from fooling around at the housefront that everyone became afraid of him. His fame spread on the wings of their fear.

  I would wander round our area and pass bars and drinking houses and hear people talking about Black Tyger. I heard his name mentioned in the wind. Women talked about him in dark places. People argued about how he rated in comparison with current boxing heroes and decided in Dad’s favour, because he was unknown, because he belonged to the ghetto, and because he was not afraid to show the range of his styles to the people. When I told Dad about all this his obsession grew. We became very poor because of his obsession. We ate very little and he ate a lot, because his increased powers needed it. His appetite grew legendary, like that of the elephant. After he had trained for the evening, bathed, drunk bottled malt and stout, he would settle down to eat. He ate ravenously. We would stare at him in horror as he swallowed mighty balls of eba.

  ‘There was once a man,’ Mum would say to me, ‘who choked on eba. They had to cut open his throat to get it out.’

  ‘That man was not Black Tyger,’ Dad would say, in between one gulp and another.

  Not only did he swallow such death-defying dollops of eba, he ate gargantuan quantities as well. He ate as if his body were some sort of abyss. And he ate fast, as if he were attacking the food, ranging counter-gulps and eating-combinations on the massive portion. He ate so much that Mum became very lean indeed and I lost appetite for food. Dad did all our eating for us. And at the end of every meal he always complained about how the eba was never enough and how he could have done with more stew. He never spoke of the taste of the cooking. My stomach began to expand.

  What made all this worse was that he brought back less money from work. He spent all his time thinking about boxing. He would travel long distances to see a free or a cheap boxing match. He would disappear for hours. Then he began to spend less money on food. For one thing, he drank more. After he had eaten he would go out and visit a round of bars and everywhere, on account of his new-found fame, people bought him drinks. He would come home drunk. The more he trained, the more he drank. And the more he drank, the madder he became, the more restless. He could spend an hour creaking his joints, freeing his body of trapped energies and frustrated dreams of greatness.

  He began to scare us. In the evenings, when I knew he was coming back from drinking, I would take to wandering the streets. But in the late afternoons, when he trained outside, I was always in the crowd watching him improvise and conjure new movements into being. People began, however, to comment on my swelling stomach. While keenly watching him exercise, two men said:

  ‘His son starves.’

  ‘His wife is lean.’

  ‘Have you noticed that as he gets stronger …’

  ‘His son gets thinner.’

  ‘While his power increases …’

  ‘His wife’s presence decreases.’

  ‘While he learns new tricks …’

  ‘His son’s legs become like sticks.’

  The pair of them laughed. A deeper voice in the crowd said:

  ‘He eats up all their food.’

  A woman said:

  ‘Something has entered his head.’

  The pair of wits began again:

  ‘Big man …’

  ‘With no shame.’

  ‘Big muscles …’

  ‘With no brain.’

  They laughed drunkenly. Hearing all this didn’t make me too happy and after some time I temporarily stopped watching Dad train. I played alone in the street while people watched him perform his new feats. He had now taken to breaking planks with his fists, smashing bottles on his head, lifting several people on his arms, and bending metal rods round his elbows.

  I was sitting alone, away from the crowd, watching the street, when a sharp flash of blue cracked me between the eyes. I heard the blind old man cry out. I didn’t understand. A dog barked. The sky was clear. I watched the street and then suddenly I saw the metal rim of a bicycle wheel rolling along by itself. I froze. The metal rim, rolling along, dispersed flashes of lights with each revolution. I waited. I looked around. The street was empty, but the metal rim rolled towards the burnt van. I heard a noise. I blinked. And when I looked again I saw a shadow, and then the shadow became a boy. He wore white shorts and a blue shirt and he was driving the hoop along, round and round the burnt van. Where had he come from? I was amazed. He seemed to have appeared from nowhere. I was furious. And then, just as suddenly, he disappeared. I got up and went to the van. The metal hoop was on the ground. I looked round the van and saw nothing. I was about to leave when a shadow blocking out the sun from my face made me turn round. Standing on the top of the van, like a child-conqueror surveying his newly won lands, was the boy who had been burnt out of reality during the blistering afternoons of the harmattan and who had now materialised in the break of the rainy season. He was watching Dad practise from his height.

  ‘Are you the boy who vanished?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you turn into your own shadow?’

  ‘No.’

  He answered my questions, barely giving me a glance.

  ‘Come down!’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are not allowed to play on the van.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Disconcerted by his serenity, I clambered up the van and tried to push him down. We began to fight. I hit him in the face and he hit me back. I hit him again and he grabbed me round the waist and we wrestled. He tripped me, I fell, and he fell on me, knocking the wind out of my chest. Soon we were on solid ground. I kicked him, he caught my foot, and threw me down. I jumped back up and lashed out in all directions, with the sort of blind ferocity that Dad sometimes had, and one of my punches made contact. His nose sprouted blood. He was untroubled by the bleeding and he unleashed a volley of blows on me, cracking the side of my face, and we wrestled again, and fell, and we got up, and hit one another blindly and soon several adult hands tore us away from one another. Like two wild fighting cocks separated in a bloody battle, we kicked and raged in the air, cursing and swearing.

  On another day, when Dad was training, I saw the boy standing on the top of the van again. I went over.

  ‘Come down from there!’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  I clambered up again. He didn’t move.

  ‘My father’, he said, ‘has given me something special.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘If you touch me …’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘And I hit you …’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘You will fall down seven times and then die.’

  ‘Who is your father?’ I asked him.

  ‘My father is a great cobbler and carpenter,’ he replied.

  ‘My father’, I said, ‘is Black Tyger.’

  And then I hit him in the face. He hit me back. Nothing happened. I began to laugh.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘Because of the stupid thing your father gave you.’

  He didn’t say anything. After a while he got down from the van and went and played nearer the crowd watching Dad. I stayed on the van for some
time. It wasn’t much fun and I got bored and I noticed that people were staring at me. I got down and went to look for the boy. At first he didn’t want to talk to me. Then I told him again that the man shadow-boxing was my father. His face lit up in transferred admiration.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Ade. What’s yours?’

  I told him. We shook hands. His father was a cobbler and carpenter and a fierce supporter of the political party on the side of the poor. He was also something of a medicine man and counted many feared thugs as family friends. I was somewhat impressed.

  He took me to their house. They lived in our area, in one small room. Their family was large; his father had two wives and ten children. I don’t know how they all managed in that room. His mother, was buck-toothed and small and ferocious. She was the eldest wife. His father had great scarifications, noble and impressive like the statues of ancient warriors; he was tall and his spirit was rather terrifying. His teeth were kola-nut-stained and his eyes bloodshot, and he beat his children a lot, in the name of the sternest and most corrective discipline. His voice had a chilling, piercing quality. I didn’t like him much.

  Ade took me to his father’s workshop and showed me the tools of his trade – his hammers and tongs, his chisels and boxes of heavy nails, his long work-bench and tables crowded with a mountainous tumble of shoes and handbags, the place smelling of glue and rusted nails and old metal and raw earth and ancient wine spilled on fresh-planed wood. The shadows gave off the aroma of cobwebs and the intense sleep of cockchafers, of fetishes twisting on rafters. The ceiling was dark with a fastness of ancient cobwebs, and lengths of leather hung from the ceiling. The workshop was an exciting place and it seemed I had found an entirely new universe in which to explore and play. We tried on the different shoes, with their incredible variety of sizes and shapes. We hid behind the cabinet. We banged nails into fresh-planed wood. We glued bits of abandoned leather together, trying to create new shoes instantly. We were totally absorbed in our play when his father came in suddenly. He saw us playing, saw the laughter on our faces, and brought out the long whip he kept on a nail behind the door. He thrashed us on the backs and we ran out screaming. I decided not to go there again.