by Ben Okri
‘Dad!’ I screamed with all the power of my lungs.
He stopped, turned, looked around with eyes that couldn’t seem to focus. Then he vanished. I thought he had fallen. I ran there. The crowd had swarmed the place I had last seen him. We looked for him among the feet of people, among the fallen. He wasn’t anywhere. Green Leopard stood in the middle of the ring, his arms outstretched as if he had won an important championship fight, his face pouring with blood and a mess of gore.
‘Where is the man with no weight?’ he asked.
The crowd replied:
‘He has run away!’
‘Tell him to run far. Because when I catch him I will …’
Suddenly Dad reappeared. He stepped out from the spectators, a ghastly, horrifying sight, an apparition covered in rubbish. From the waist downwards he was pouring with mud and slime. For some reason he had gone into the swamp. He was an ugly sight. He was beyond caring, his eyes were not afraid of dying, he was no longer a defensive animal, and his eyes burned as if he had the sun in them. He had gone back to some primeval condition. He stepped into the ring and said:
‘What will you do?’
‘Kill you,’ Green Leopard said.
‘First you have to find me.’
‘That’s easy.’
‘Then promise me that your followers will not interfere.’
Green Leopard looked confident and puzzled at the same time. Then he spoke to his followers rapidly in the only language they would thoroughly understand. His followers protested, but he spoke angrily, berating them, and they nodded reluctantly.
Madame Koto kissed her teeth and said:
‘Men are mad! I am not going to stand here and watch people kill themselves.’
She pushed her way out of the crowd. I heard her calling her driver.
‘Women!’ the blind old man said.
Dad went into the ring. He didn’t dance, or do anything fanciful. He stood, fists guarding his face, ready. Green Leopard danced towards him, swaggering almost, confident, arms at his side. His followers began to chant his name.
‘Green Leopard!’
‘Master boxer!’
‘Destroy the Tyger!’
‘Eat up his fame!’
The music started again from the loudspeaker. The blind old man squeezed additional discord from his accordion. I found a hardened lump of eba on the floor and threw it and this time I didn’t miss. I caught him flush on the mouth. He looked blindly around. He stopped playing his instrument. Then I heard him say:
‘Take me away from here. The spirits have started attacking me in broad daylight.’
The woman who had brought him wheeled him off. When he had gone the mood of the fight swung into a new hemisphere. The Green Leopard lunged in, wading, arms swinging in a curious half-hearted attack on Dad. He was half-hearted, it seemed, because Dad looked finished anyway, he looked wobbly on his feet, a defeated man whom a few ordinary punches would destroy. And that’s why we were all so surprised. Suddenly, from seeming so weak, Dad became rock-like, and charged. He let out a manic scream. Energy, concentrated, glowed from him in an instant. His fists, released from their immobility, shot out in a series of fast, short punches, raining down from a hundred different angles. The punches were blistering, mud from Dad’s fists flew everywhere, and the entire action lasted a short time but the speed of the attack seemed to elongate the moment. It was mesmerising. Dad didn’t rush into an attack. He didn’t move forward. He punched from the spot where he stood, as if he were in an invisible, invulnerable circle of power. A short burst of this close-range fighting ended with an upper cut that travelled from Dad’s solidly planted feet and all the mud of his rage. It connected with Green Leopard’s jaw, drawing a great sigh from the crowd. The day darkened. A cloud passed over the face of the sun. Birds wheeled overhead. The music from the loudspeaker was full of victory and celebration. Green Leopard stood, arms out, as if he had gone deaf, or as if he had been shot from behind. His eyes were blank, his mouth open. A cloud of dust flew up as the great boxer collapsed slowly to the floor. It was like a dream. Dad was on one knee, within his invisible circle. The crowd was silent, stunned by its unbelief.
I let out a cry of joy. Green Leopard’s followers rushed to pick up their man. But he was out cold and didn’t so much as twitch. His mouth flopped open and his body was limp as if he had totally given up on reality. The crowd, profoundly disappointed, spat abuses at Green Leopard and his followers. They showered curses on his reputation. They damned his fame and booed his reputation and they began to leave in utter disgust at the money they had lost betting on a man who was much weaker than his legend had suggested. Green Leopard’s followers lifted up the prostrate form of their chief protector, master boxer, terroriser of ghettos, the orchestrator of their myths of invincibility. They looked overcome with shame. The music died out and a funereal silence reigned. They carried the horizontal form of their legend, they lifted him high as if he were dead, as if he were a corpse, and they took him to the van. Hurriedly, they bundled him in. Hurriedly, they drove away. Green Leopard did not honour his bet. They left with their philosophy in disgrace. The pamphlets they had distributed, which were scattered about the street, flew all about as the van sped off over them.
No one rushed to congratulate Dad except me and Ade. The crowd were curiously unforgiving of his surprising victory. We jumped around Dad and he lifted us up and carried us in the air and our thin voices rang out his name and sang out his achievement so that the earth and the wind and the sky would bear witness to it even when the spectators didn’t. The crowd scattered in shame at having backed the wrong man, in shame for having judged things by appearances, and in bad temper because they didn’t know how to achieve the swift turnaround in appreciation. We were not bothered. Dad’s victory was all the world we needed. And beaten, mashed up, his face broken, he carried us, cheering, towards the room. Then Ade remembered our bets.
‘Sami has run away with our money!’ I cried.
Dad immediately put us down and stormed to the betting-shop. We strode, proudly, behind him.
When we arrived, Sami was counting the money he had collected in his bucket. His hefty brothers sat around him in the shop, their faces glowing with money and the light from the kerosine lamp. Sami sat on a stool, his face covered with sweat, his eyes glittering. When he looked up and saw us his face darkened. Then he broke into a smile.
‘Black Tyger,’ he said, ‘you surprised everybody. Sit down. Have a drink. We were just counting the money. Then we were coming to give you your share. So, what will you drink? This fight of yours has made me more money in one day than I have made in months.’
‘So I see,’ Dad said, refusing to sit.
We stood on either side of him, his minute bodyguards. There was a long silence.
‘Are you going to give me my money or not?’ Dad asked finally. ‘Or do I have to fight everybody here as well?’
Sami smiled. There was silence. The flame crackled. Then Sami got up, went to the back room, and eventually came back with a thick bundle of notes. He gave them to Dad, who gave them to me. I counted the money. Dad nodded his satisfaction. As we turned to leave, Sami said:
‘Send one of your boys the next time you are fighting.’
‘Why?’
‘We could make more money together.’
Dad said nothing. We left. On the way Ade said he had to go home. Dad gave him a pound note and Ade went on home, dancing down the street, singing of our triumph.
It was only when we got home that a monstrous exhaustion seized hold of Dad. As we opened the door Mum was sitting on a stool, with a candle on the table in front of her. She was in an attitude of prayer. She looked up, saw Dad, and rose. Her mouth opened wide when she saw the devastation of Dad’s features. She rushed to Dad and embraced him. She began weeping. Then Dad collapsed on her. It took us an hour to carry him to the bed. He did not stir.
12
DAD SLEPT, WITHOUT waking, for two days. He wa
s like a giant on the bed. It was a shock to see his bruised feet, the cuts on his soles, corns on his toes. His swollen face grew bigger as he slept. His mouth puffed out, red and frightening. His forehead became almost twice its normal size and the cut on his nose widened. While Dad slept, his face swelling, his eyeballs expanding, blood occasionally spurting from his numerous wounds and lacerations, Mum applied warm compresses to his bruises and treated him with herbal fluids. Mum nursed him, washed him, combed his hair, as if she were nursing a corpse she didn’t want to bury. On the second day we worried about him and tried to wake him up. He turned in our direction, opened his swollen eyes, and threw a feeble punch, clobbering Mum. She went around that day with a swollen jaw and had to hide her face with a headtie. We gave up on waking him and took to watching over him, as if to ascertain that he was still alive. We would sit in the room in the evenings, three candles on the table, our faces long with anxiety. His sleeping form spread a ghostly silence in the room and made the shadows ominous. Occasionally, Dad would mutter something. We would wait and listen. But he would be gone again.
On the third day, in the evening, when the wind started to rattle our rooftops, Dad began to howl in his sleep. Then he kicked and struggled on the bed, and fell down. He jumped up, his eyes big and mad, ran around the room, kicking things over, sowing havoc with his gigantic shadow, wounding himself on sharp objects, and then he collapsed at the door while he was trying to get out. It took us another hour to drag him back to the bed. Mum lit three sticks of incense and stuck them in strategic corners of the room, to ward off evil spirits. Then that evening, as I sat in the room alone, watching Dad heave on the bed as if breath were deserting him for ever, Mum brought three women into the house. One of them was Madame Koto. They were all dressed in black. One of them, I learned later, was a powerful herbalist who had once been a witch and who had confessed in public, and who was stoned. She reappeared a year after her confession, transformed into a strong herbalist who had promised to do some good to the community. Everyone feared her and few trusted her.
When the three women came into our room I knew something very serious was happening. I stayed silently in a corner, hidden by clothes. They didn’t seem to mind my presence. I stayed silently in the corner and watched them calling Dad’s spirit back from the Land of the Fighting Ghosts. All through the night they called Dad’s public and secret names in the strangest voices. All through the night they performed their numinous rituals, singing the saddest songs, weaving threnodies from his names, chanting incantations that altered the spaces in the room, that increased the sepia-tinted shadows, that made the cobwebs writhe and flow as if they had become black ancient liquids. The forms of night-birds took shape amongst us, fluttering swiftly over the candle-light; the room filled up with nameless presences, passing through the air of burning sacrificial herbs. The black sea-waves lashed on the dark shores of the ceiling as the women conjured a hundred forms to fight the things that prevented them reaching Dad’s spirit in the remotest regions of the human hinterland. The herbalist who had been a witch sweated and performed, conjured and contorted, she changed her guises under the cover of shadows, she fought heroic battles with the spirits we couldn’t see, and she fought them with her frail form, her face crushed and wrinkled like the skin of the aged tortoise which she put on the bed to help her travel faster through those realms where speed is an eternal paradox. Over the door she hung the dried heads of an antelope and a tiger, the skull of a boar and the bristling paws of a lion long dead in its prime. She sacrificed two white cocks. Their blood, mixed with strong smelling potions, was smeared on our walls. The feathers of a parrot and an eagle were burned on our floor and nearly burned down the house. The herbalist made razor incisions on Dad’s shoulders and pressed ground herbs into the bleeding cuts. Dad didn’t move. I watched his blood trickle down his shoulder, black with the herbs. Then deep in the night the women began to dance round the bed, shrieking. A crowd gathered outside our room. Dad began to stir. The wind seemed intent on blowing our houses away. The door was thrown open, all the candles were extinguished, and in the darkness I saw the huge white form of a swollen spirit suspended in the room. I screamed and the form weaved in the air and came falling down at great speed. It fell down on Dad. When the door was shut, and the candles lit, Dad jerked up suddenly, gasping for breath, heaving, his eyes wide as if he had woken from a dream of terrors. The women rushed to him and Dad, not knowing who they were, or whether he had indeed woken up, pushed them aside, sent the herbalist collapsing on the bed, and shoved Madame Koto, who came crashing down on me. Like someone trying to escape from a nightmare he fled out of the room and was seen tearing down the road towards the forest.
The three women, Mum, and me, went after him. It was fearfully dark. The three women, faces veiled with shadows, kept changing shapes in the darkness. Madame Koto seemed to have recovered the full use of her bandaged foot. The third woman had a presence so featureless that no one noticed her even when she ran. She was like the air or like a shadow or a reflection. Her presence was important in ways I couldn’t fathom. The smallest of them was the herbalist and as she ran I kept noticing that her hands flapped in her black smock. It came as a surprise, a shock from which I didn’t recover for a long time, to see her lift up into the dark air, as if the wind were her ally. Then the darkness increased round her, became concentrated, like a black smock of cloud, and when the cloud cleared I saw only two women in black running, Mum beside them. The herbalist had disappeared. Then I heard the clapping of great wings in the air above me and I saw a great eagle, black, with red eyes, take off towards the forest, into the night of mysteries. When we got deep into the forest we found Dad asleep, his back resting on the trunk of a baobab tree, with the herbalist standing over his haunted form.
‘We must take him back now. Before the spirits of the forest start to smell him,’ she said.
We were worried about how we were going to carry Dad back. But the third woman, who seemed to have no features, and who never spoke, took his arm and pulled him up. To our amazement Dad stood up like a child, his eyes open and vacant. Mum held his other arm; they both supported him. And like a man who is neither asleep nor awake, neither dead nor alive, we led him down the forest paths. When we got home the crowd had gone. We laid Dad on the bed. He refused to sleep. He kept jerking up, saying:
‘If I sleep I won’t wake.’
The herbalist gave him something to drink. It seemed a very bitter drug and Dad’s eyes widened as he swallowed the herbal draught. Then he got up and sat on his three-legged chair. With his eyes bulging, his mouth big, slurring his words, Dad began to speak. The three women in black sat on the floor. Mum sat on the bed. I sat in a corner and could see Dad’s face, gaunt in the candle-light, his eyes like those of a man who has stared into the deepest pits of existence. At first it was difficult to hear what he was saying, but we got used to it.
‘I have been having the most terrible experiences,’ said Dad, staring straight ahead, as if he were talking to someone in the room that we couldn’t see. ‘I was sleeping and then I wasn’t sleeping any more. Suddenly I found myself fighting seven spirits. They said they had been sent by Green Leopard’s mother. And they wanted to kill me in my sleep so that I wouldn’t wake up. I fought them for a long time. All the time you thought I was sleeping I was battling with them. They fought me viciously and kept trying to come out of my dreams to fight my wife. Eventually I defeated them. Then I tried to rest. And then a seven-headed spirit …’
‘No!’ cried the third woman.
‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘A seven-headed spirit armed with seven golden swords came to me and said because I killed his comrades he wants my son’s life in return.’
The women screamed. Mum rushed over and held me, smothering me.
‘I said NO!’
The women wailed in low monotone: Mum held me tighter. I feared she might break my neck without knowing it.
‘Then the seven-headed spirit attacked me. I fought h
im for nine nights. I only managed to cut off one of his heads. The spirit was much too powerful for me and there was nothing I could do but run. I ran into the forest. The spirit caught me and tied me up with silver ropes and began to drag me to the Land of the Fighting Ghosts. They are ghosts who spend all their time fighting. The spirit dragged me and I never stopped resisting, but the only thing that saved me was …’
Dad paused. The women made sad noises, heads craned forward.
‘… was my own father, Priest of the Shrine of Roads. He said the spirit couldn’t pass any road that he has blocked. The spirit fought him. They battled it out for a long time. I didn’t know my father was so powerful. He cut off two of the heads of the spirit. They both became tired. They agreed to make a truce. My father said if the spirit let me go, he would take my place. I didn’t understand what he meant.’
Mum began to wail.
‘Shut up, woman!’ Dad said.
Mum fell silent. I heard her swallow down her tears.
‘And then both of them vanished. I freed myself from the ropes. All of my energy had drained from me. An eagle perched on my head and then it turned into a woman. And then four women, three of them dressed in black, just like you,’ Dad said, pointing at the three women, ‘came and led me from the forest. And then I woke up.’