The Famished Road

by Ben Okri

  I tried to get Ade to wander the streets with me, but he never went far. He was scared of his parents. If they called him and he didn’t answer he got whipped for it later. I told him to run away from home and to come and stay with us, but he was afraid. He said his father would thrash him and put pepper on the wounds. He showed me his back and I saw the old whip marks along with numerous razor incisions for the herbal treatments he received. I felt sad for him. And because of him I didn’t go wandering for a while. I tried to take him to Madame Koto’s place, but he wouldn’t go there either. His father had told him that she was a witch who supported their political enemies.

  We were playing in the forest one day when we came upon Madame Koto. She lay on the earth, at the root of the legendary iroko tree, her white beads like a jewelled snake in her hand. When she heard us coming she jumped up and dusted herself. She looked very embarrassed.

  ‘Who’s your friend?’ she asked, blinking.

  ‘Ade,’ I said.

  She gave him a curious intense scrutiny. Ade said he was going home. He wandered off and waited a short distance away, watching us furtively. Madame Koto turned her disquieting gaze on me. She studied my stomach. The merest hint of compassion crossed her face.

  ‘So you don’t like my bar any more, eh?’

  ‘No.’

  She smiled.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How is your father?’

  ‘No.’

  She stared at me. Then she unwound her wrapper and untied the big knot at the end. I had never seen so much money in my life. She had a thick wad of pound notes at her wrapper end that could easily have choked a horse. She unwrapped several notes and gave them to me. At first, looking over at Ade, I refused. But she pressed them on me, shutting my fingers tightly.

  ‘If your mother asks, tell her you found them in the forest, eh?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t tell her I gave them to you, you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She touched me gently on the head. For the first time I saw that she had changed. She was now wholly enveloped in an invisible aura of power, a force-field of dread. Her stomach was really big and she seemed very wide. There was a heaviness about her that made her look as if weariness had moved into her face as a permanent condition. Even her shadow weighed me down. Her eyes were distant. They couldn’t come near human beings any more. They had the same quality that the eyes of lions have. Her face was round and fresh and she seemed very well.

  ‘I am not happy,’ she said, suddenly.

  ‘Why not?’

  She gave me a puzzled look, as if she were surprised that I had spoken. Then she smiled, and turned, and shuffled down the forest paths with the grace that most human beings seldom have. The midges trailed her.

  Ade didn’t speak to me for days because Madame Koto had given me money. And when I gave the money to Mum it caused an upheaval in the house. It turned out to be much more money than I had imagined. She made me sit on the bed and spent hours subjecting me to the most rigorous questions about where I had found the money. She feared that it belonged to some trader, to ritualists who could infuse syllabic curses into their possessions, or some powerful figure who might hunt us out and punish us. But it was her suspicion that I had stolen it which annoyed me so much that I burst into angry weeping. Dad sat in his chair, rocking himself, smoking. Mum insisted that I take her to the spot where I had discovered the windfall. I told her I didn’t remember, that I had stumbled upon it as if I were in a dream, and that it was on the ground near some bushes.

  ‘Are you sure it wasn’t spirits who gave it to you, eh?’ Mum said with more than a hint of mockery.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Then Dad broke out of his imperturbability and threatened to beat me if I didn’t tell the truth. I went on lying. He got so impatient that he slapped me on the face. I stared hard at him. My body suddenly became serene. Then he held me to his chest and swayed and said:

  ‘Forgive me, my son. I did not mean it. But we are not thieves in our family. We are royalty. We are poor, but we are honest.’

  Then he asked me again where I had stumbled upon such an amount of money. Still I went on lying. They gave up trying to get any sense out of me. They had been at it for hours and night had fallen. They decided they wouldn’t touch the money for a week and if they didn’t hear anything from anybody they would consider it a gift from heaven. Dad, in a mood of celebration, sent me to buy a big bottle of ogogoro. When I got back he spent another hour praying to our ancestors and to the inscrutable deities. Then he and Mum spent the rest of the night discussing what they would do with the money. Dad wanted to buy all the paraphernalia he needed for boxing. Mum wanted to open a shop of provisions and a boutique. They argued bitterly all night and I fell asleep to the sound of their raging acrimony. When I woke up in the morning they were still boiling with discord. They were both foul-tempered. For three days they went on like that. Another four days passed and they still hadn’t reached an agreement and they quarrelled the whole time, dredging up old memories about a hundred unforgiven matters relating to money. During that time Dad used some of the windfall to buy drinks, entertain friends, and to buy a pair of canvas shoes and a second-hand pair of boxing gloves. As it turned out there was more than enough to get Mum a completely fresh stock of provisions for her trade, to buy us all some new clothes, to pay our rent, and to feed us happily for more than a good month.

  5

  THE DAY OF the great political rally, which had been much talked about and much postponed, drew nearer. The most extraordinary things were happening in Madame Koto’s bar. The first unusual thing was that cables connected to her rooftop now brought electricity. Illiterate crowds gathered in front of the bar to see this new wonder. They saw the cables, the wires, the pylons in the distance, but they did not see the famed electricity. Those who went into the bar, out of curiosity, came out mystified. They couldn’t understand how you could have a light brighter than lamps, sealed in glass. They couldn’t understand how you couldn’t light your cigarette on the glowing bulbs. And worse than all that, it was baffling for them to not be able to see the cause of the illumination.

  Madame Koto, much too shrewd not to make the most of everyone’s bewilderment, increased the price of her palm-wine and peppersoup. Then, for a while, she began to charge a modest entry fee for merely being able to enjoy the unique facilities. She was after all the only person along our street and in our area who had the distinction of electricity. She was so taken in by this distinction that she had her signboard amended to highlight the fact.

  The next thing was that people heard very loud music blaring but saw no musicians performing. After that came stories of strange parties, of women running naked into the forest, of people who got so drunk they bathed in palm-wine, of party members giving away large quantities of money to the women whose dancing pleased. There were lush rumours of the things the men and the women did together, screaming into the electrified nights. In the midst of all this Madame Koto grew bigger and fatter till she couldn’t get in through the back door. The door had to be broken down and widened. We saw her in fantastic dresses of silk and lace, edged with turquoise filigree, white gowns, and yellow hats, waving a fan of blue feathers, with expensive bangles of silver and gold weighing her arms, and necklaces of pearl and jade round her neck. When she walked all her jewellery clattered on her, announcing her eminence in advance. She painted her fingernails red. Her eyelashes became more defined. She wore lipstick. She wore high-heeled shoes and moved with an increasingly pronounced limp, walking stick always in hand. She began to resemble a great old chief from ancient times, a reincarnation of splendour and power and clannish might.

  Cars began to converge at her place. The lights burned till deep into the night and always from the street I could hear them talking, planning heatedly, and could see their shapes through the strips of curtain. Rumours, always stale, began to circulate that she had j
oined the most terrifying cults in the land, that she had been accepted in organisations that usually never allow women, that she performed rituals in the forest. I heard of bizarre sacrifices, goats being slaughtered at night, of people dressed in white habits dancing round her house, heard of cries that pierced the ghetto air, of drumming and thunderous chants, but the strangest thing I heard of was the forthcoming birth of the four-headed Masquerade. No one knew what it was.

  People came to believe that Madame Koto had exceeded herself in witchcraft. People glared at her hatefully when she went past. They said she wore the hair of animals and human beings on her head. The rumours got so wild that it was hinted that her cult made sacrifices of human beings and that she ate children. They said she had been drinking human blood to lengthen her life and that she was more than a hundred years old. They said the teeth in her mouth were not hers, that her eyes belonged to a jackal, and that her foot was getting rotten because it belonged to someone who was trying to dance in their grave. She became, in the collective eyes of the people, a fabulous and monstrous creation. It did not matter that some people insisted that it was her political enemies who put out all these stories. The stories distorted our perception of her reality for ever. Slowly, they took her life over, made themselves real, and made her opaque in our eyes.

  In spite of what people said, however, she prospered, while the rest of us suffered. She opened another bar in another section of the city. She divided her time between both. She opened a mighty stall in the big market where she sold garri, lace materials, and jewellery. She had many servants. Conflicting stories, however, did reach us about her wealth. Some said she wasn’t very rich, that she had too many people to support. Others maintained that she had so much money she could feed the entire ghetto for five years. I heard that she spent endless days counting her profits, that when she went to the bank she needed an armed truck. Then we began to hear of how mean she was, that one of her servants needed money for treating a liver condition and she wouldn’t give him so much as a farthing. On the other hand, we heard that she had given a lot of money to a woman she didn’t even know, whose child would have died from food poisoning if it hadn’t been for Madame Koto’s timely intervention. It began to seem as if there were many Madame Kotos in existence.

  And then one day as I was playing with Ade we saw several people gathered outside her barfront. They all stood in the mud. They all wore white smocks and had ostentatious Bibles. Their leader had the biggest Bible of them all. It looked like an instrument of vengeance. He had wild hair and the rough, scraggy beard of a self-anointed prophet. He was barefoot. If it hadn’t been for the authority with which he held the wooden crozier, he could well have been mistaken for a complete madman. A large cross dangled from his neck. The whole group of them, whipped up to paroxysms of denunciation by their leader, constituted the representatives of one of the most influential new churches springing up in the city. The group consisted of prophets of varying ranks and they danced with righteous fervour and prayed with fearful certainty in front of the bar. They evoked visions of fire and brimstone, sulphur and torment and damnations. They prayed as if they were purging the land of a monstrous and incarnate evil. They sprinkled holy water over the ground and threw holy grains of sand towards the bar. They stayed for a long time, singing with brio and might, in lusty voices, in perfect rousing harmony, chanting and stamping in the mud. Their presence stopped people going to the bar. The women in the bar would occasionally peep out between curtain strips and the leader of the group, the chief prophet, foaming at the mouth, would point a crooked finger at the women and the singing would reach new proportions of intensity. They carried on till nightfall and completely succeeded in imprisoning Madame Koto and her women within the bar, souring their business for the day.

  The following evening they returned, bringing a larger congregation. We saw them chanting and beating their church drums along the street. It seemed they had an entire orchestra with them. Brass sections pierced the air with their clash and roll, the trumpets blasted the wind, and the deep voices of the prophets leading the way to the battle against evil woke the street from its mid-season slumber. As the procession approached Madame Koto’s bar the world joined them. They became a great flood of human beings, a surging mass of spectators, like an army of divine vengeance. They sang different songs all at once. They arrived at Madame Koto’s bar and found it shuttered. They sang, played their music, chanted, and stomped. They bellowed and belted out their holy tunes till they were hoarse. Those who had expected something to happen were disappointed. The only thing that happened was that the frustration made factions of the crowd begin to quarrel. Fighting broke out between musical sections, between prophets of differing denominations, between contending visionaries. The head priest was leading a song of exorcism, his staff and Bible high in the air, when the fighting encircled him. He found himself torn between quelling his unruly flock and launching his bitter attack against the scourge of Madame Koto’s electricity. He managed to deliver, in the midst of all the chaos, a tremendous philippic on the apocalypse of science. The shouting grew wilder amongst his congregation. A man was hurled to the mud. Another man was being strangled with the folds of his smock. Soon everyone seemed to be fighting everyone else.

  ‘The DEVIL has come into our midst!’ the head priest cried.

  No one listened.

  ‘Let us stand as one to drive out this ABOMINATION!’

  No one heard.

  ‘THEY WILL START WITH ELECTRICITY AND THEN THEY WILL BURN UP THE EARTH!’ he thundered.

  No one cared. And then the most extraordinary thing happened. The sky was rent asunder. The air lit up as if an unbearably radiant being was going to descend from the heavens. The light in the sky, flickering brightly, stayed for a long moment. Everyone fell silent and froze in the presence of the unknown annunciation. A terrible enchantment hung over us like a single flashing sword. The wind flowed in silence.

  ‘GOD HAS ANSWERED OUR CRY!’ said the head priest.

  The sky darkened and lowered. The air became full of presence. The wind was still. I smelt, in that moment, all the known and unknown herbal essences of the forest. The world swam in aromas.

  ‘HALLELU … HALLELUYA!’ cried the head priest.

  His congregation picked up the cry, lifted it up to the heavens, and fell silent, waiting.

  Then in the deepest reaches of the sky something cracked. It broke loose altogether. Then it rolled down the unnumbered vaults of the heavens, gathering momentum and great wondrous volumes of sound as it neared us. Then it exploded over our heads and before we could recover from the incredible drama of the universe the sky opened and yielded a river of rain upon us.

  The congregation scattered everywhere. The commotion was farcical and wild. People screamed, children howled, mothers yelled. Only the head priest stood firm. Soon the entire crowd, the valiant brass sections and the rousing wind ensemble, fled their many ways, lashed by the torrential rain. I watched them fleeing as if from a burning house. The head priest called to them, denounced them, urged them to have courage and to be steadfast in crisis. He waved his staff and Bible in the air, and thunder cracked above him. But he did not move. He did not give ground. He went on praying with great fervour. He cursed the abomination that was Madame Koto and referred to her as the GREAT WHORE OF THE APOCALYPSE, and he danced and sang alone, while the rain mercilessly drenched him.

  He soon became a ridiculous sight. He resembled a monstrous drenched chicken. He shivered as he prayed. His smock clung obscenely to his buttocks. As his passion waned, gradually extinguished by the indifferent rain, he trembled more. Everyone watched him from the cover of rooftops and eaves. Trapped in his solitary defiance, his Bible dripping a second flood, his beard a sad sunken ship upon the waters, his voice disappearing in the din of cosmic events, he had no choice but to continue with his absurd posture. He chanted, shaking at the knees. And as he chanted, railing against prostitutes, science, theories of evolution, the
enshrinement of reason against God, and evil women of Babylon, a procession of cars drove down the street. They parked around him. The car doors opened. Men and women in fine attire spilled out. They all had umbrellas. Madame Koto was among them. She wore a massive and dazzling black silk dress, with white shoes and a white scarf, her arms and neck glittering with jewellery. The splendid guests passed the head priest and if they heard his ravings they betrayed no signs of it. The bar door was opened, and they all went in. Only Madame Koto came back to give the head priest her umbrella. Shamelessly, he took it. She limped back to her bar, walking stick in one hand, while the head priest resumed his imprecations and denunciations of her. It was at this point that people began to jeer him. When the evening fell, and the darkness spread, the head priest was a wreck of a soaked man. Under the cover of darkness, shivering, his voice hoarse, he left Madame Koto’s barfront and made his miserable way down the street. Much later we learned that he had led his congregation against Madame Koto mainly at the instigation of the party supported by the poor. There was also talk of possible charitable contributions to church funds. We were disappointed by their methods.

  6

  AND THEN, TO crown our amazement, the news reached us that Madame Koto had bought herself a car. We couldn’t believe it. No one along our street and practically no one in the area owned such a thing as a car. People owned bicycles and were proud of them. One or two men owned scooters and were accorded the respect reserved only for elders and chieftains. But it most certainly was news for a woman in the area to own a car. We clung to our disbelief till we saw the bright blue little car, with the affectionate face of an enlarged metallic tortoise. It was parked in front of her bar. We still clung to our disbelief even when we saw her hopeless attempts at driving it, which resulted in running over an old woman’s stall. She promptly had the stall rebuilt and gave the woman more money than she had possessed in the first place. We watched her learning to drive the car. She was much too massive for such a small vehicle and at the steering wheel she looked as if the car was her shell and she merely the third eye of the tortoise. The fact that the car was too small for her was the only consolation that people had. But we were still amazed.