The Famished Road

by Ben Okri

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Madame Koto asked.

  ‘Those beggars are drunk.’

  ‘On my wine.’

  ‘If we don’t get rid of them our business will fail.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense. Go home. Come tomorrow.’

  She went. We listened as the beggars called out to her. She cursed them. The beggars laughed raucously.

  ‘Those friends of yours broke all my glasses,’ Madame Koto said. ‘And my plates. Abused my customers. Broke two chairs. Who will pay, eh?’

  ‘My father wants to talk politics with you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You.’

  Madame Koto reached for a stick and began to hit me. I didn’t move. She stopped.

  ‘You and your father are mad.’

  ‘We are not mad.’

  ‘I’m not well,’ she said, in a different voice.

  ‘What is wrong?’

  ‘Money. Politics. Customers. People.’

  I was silent.

  ‘What does your father want?’

  ‘Palm-wine.’

  She gave a short laugh.

  ‘I gave all the palm-wine to the beggars.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They were causing trouble so I gave them palm-wine and they left. I told them to go far away, but they went to my frontyard.’

  ‘They want to vote for my father,’ I said.

  Madame Koto stared at me.

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She laughed again.

  ‘Only chickens and frogs will vote for him.’

  ‘What about mosquitoes?’

  ‘Them too. And snails.’

  ‘He said I should call you.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the bar.’

  ‘So he has come back to my bar after calling me a witch, eh?’

  ‘He wants politics.’

  ‘Go and tell him I’m coming.’

  When I went back into the bar Dad was asleep. He slept with his head held high, as if he were in a trance. I drew close to him and listened to him grinding his teeth. Fireflies lit up the darkness. A yellow butterfly circled Dad’s head. I watched the butterfly. When it landed on Dad’s head I could suddenly see him clearly in the dark. A yellow light surrounded him. The light was the exact shape of Dad and it rose in the air and came down and began to wander about the bar. I watched the light. It kept changing colour. It turned red. Then golden-red. Then it moved up and down, lifting up in the air, and bouncing on the floor. It went round Dad as if looking for a way to get back in. Then the golden-red light came and sat next to me. I started to sweat. I cried out. The light changed colour. It became yellow again, then a sort of diamond-blue. When I touched Dad the butterfly lifted from his head and disappeared through the ceiling. Dad opened his eyes, saw me, and gave out a strange cry. Then he looked around as if he didn’t know where he was.

  ‘You’re in Madame Koto’s bar,’ I said.

  He stared at me, lit a match, and when he recognised me he blew it out. He drew me close to him. I could smell his frustrated energies, his mosquito-coil fragrances. He lit a cigarette and smoked quietly for a moment.

  ‘A man can wander the whole planet and not move an inch,’ he said. ‘My son, I dreamt that I had set out to discover a new continent.’

  ‘What is it called?’

  ‘The Continent of the Hanging Man.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘When I landed with my boat I saw mountains, rivers, a desert. I wrote my name on a rock. I went into the continent. I was alone. A strange thing happened.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re too young to understand this.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘As I went I started to dream the place into existence. I dreamt plains, forests, paths, great open spaces, spiked plants, and then I dreamt up the people. They are not like us. They are white. Bushmen. They advanced towards me. They wore strange clothes and had precious stones round their necks. To the eldest man, I said “What are you people doing here?”

  ‘“What about you?” he asked.

  ‘“I have just discovered this place. It is supposed to be a new continent. You’re not supposed to be here.”

  ‘“We’ve been here since time immemorial,” he replied.

  ‘And then I dreamt them away. And then a shepherd came to me and said:

  ‘“This continent has no name.”

  ‘“It’s called the Continent of the Hanging Man.”

  ‘“That’s another place,” he replied.

  ‘“So why doesn’t it have a name?”

  ‘“People do not often name their own continent. If you can’t give it a name you can’t stay here.”

  ‘The continent vanished. I found myself on a strange island. The people treated me roughly. They were also white. Unfriendly people. Unfriendly to me, at least. I lived among them for many years. I couldn’t find my way out. I was trapped there on that small island. I found it difficult to live there. They were afraid of me because of my different colour. As for me, I began to lose weight. I had to shrink the continent in me to accommodate myself to the small island. Time passed.’

  Dad took a drag from his cigarette. His eyes were bright in the darkness.

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘I began to travel again. I travelled on a road till I got to a place where the road vanished into thin air. So I had to dream a road into existence. At the end of the road I saw a mirror. I looked into the mirror and nearly died of astonishment when I saw that I had turned white.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Then everything changed. I was in a big city on the island. I was a news-vendor, selling newspapers outside a train station. It was a temporary job. I had bigger plans. It was very cold. There was ice everywhere.’

  ‘Ice?’

  ‘Yes. Ice fell from the sky. Ice turned my hair white. Everywhere ice.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Then one day you came to buy a newspaper from me. You were a young man. When you gave me the money it burned my hand. I started to run away when you woke me up.’

  We sat in silence. Dad creaked his bones for five minutes. Then he stretched. Then he banged the table and said:

  ‘Where is the wine, eh?’

  The electric light came on in the bar, driving away the shadows, rendering the objects curiously flat. Madame Koto, two bottles of beer in one hand, a bowl of peppersoup in the other, hobbled over to our table.

  ‘Finish this and go,’ she said, banging down the beer and soup.

  ‘The Great Madame Koto, aren’t you pleased to see me, eh?’

  ‘After you called me a witch?’

  ‘That was your palm-wine talking, not me.’

  She hobbled away. Her foot had grown worse, and had been rebandaged. She went to the counter, sat behind it, and put on some music. Dad drank the soup hungrily. He gave me some meat. He opened the bottle of beer with his teeth.

  ‘No wine?’ he asked.

  ‘I gave all the wine to your friends.’

  ‘What friends?’

  ‘The beggars,’ I said.

  ‘They broke my plates and glasses. Why did you have to bring them here, eh?’

  ‘I didn’t bring them.’

  ‘Why did you invite them to your party?’

  ‘I didn’t invite them.’

  Madame Koto stopped the music. Dad finished the first bottle of beer and started on the second one.

  ‘Madame Koto, I want to talk politics with you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Out of interest.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘People.’

  ‘Who will you vote for?’

  ‘Myself.’

  ‘I hear you want to start your own party, eh?’

  Dad said nothing. I looked up at the posters of the political party that Madame Koto supported. I studied the pictures a
nd almanacs of their leaders. She said:

  ‘Don’t bring me trouble. Take your beggars away. I don’t want to lose my customers.’

  ‘Beggars also vote.’

  ‘Let them vote for you, but take them away.’

  The wind blew at the door. Then we heard a curious drumming on the roof. The bulb kept swaying. Someone came in. At first I could not see them.

  ‘Get out!’ Madame Koto shouted.

  Then I saw three of the beggars at the door. Two of them were legless and moved on elbow pads. The third one had a bad eye. They came into the bar and gathered round Dad’s table. Dad finished off his beer.

  ‘If you get rid of them,’ Madame Koto said, ‘I will forget the damage, and you and your son can come here to drink anytime you want.’

  The beggars played with the empty beer bottles. Dad snatched the bottles from them and stood up.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said to me.

  We went out and the three beggars, chattering, pawing Dad’s trousers, followed us. Along the street other beggars were asleep. The three beggars followed us till we got to our place. Dad turned to them and waved them away. They stopped. We went on. I looked back and saw the three beggars, crouched in the darkness, staring at us with odd eyes.

  2

  THE WIND AND thunder were hard that night. We found Mum sitting on Dad’s chair, a mosquito coil on the table, a tattered wig on the bed. Mum looked tired. She didn’t say anything when we came in. She was rocking back and forth, while the wind blew over our roof and thunder rumbled above us. Things were changing, the room looked strange, and Mum sat there staring straight ahead as if down a long unfinished road. The candle had burned low, mosquitoes whined, a moth circled Mum as if her head were a flame, and her eyes became very bright.

  ‘What happened?’ Dad asked, sitting on the bed.

  Mum was crying. She made no sound, her eyes were bright, she stared straight ahead as if into the wind, and she was crying. I went over to her and put my head on her lap and she didn’t move.

  ‘Go and buy ogogoro,’ Dad said to me gruffly.

  He gave me money and I hurried across the road. Some of the beggars were gathered at the mouth of our compound. They were crouched in groups. I bought the ogogoro and on my way back I saw that they were now at our housefront. They lay down on mats, under the sloping zinc eaves, eyeing me as I went past.

  When I got back to the room Mum was sitting on the bed and Dad was on his three-legged chair. The smoke from the mosquito coil formed blue spirals round his head. A new candle had been lit. Dad stolidly smoked a cigarette. He snatched the ogogoro from me, poured himself a generous quantity, and drank. Mum watched him. I brought out my mat. I told Dad about the beggars.

  ‘Next thing they will take over our room,’ Mum said.

  ‘I’m going to build a house for them,’ replied Dad. ‘I’m going to build them a school. Azaro will teach them how to read. You will teach them how to sell things. I will teach them how to box.’

  ‘Who will feed them, eh?’ asked Mum.

  ‘They will work for their food,’ said Dad.

  Mum stretched out on the bed. She was silent for a while. Then she sat up and began to complain that her stall had been taken over at the market, that she had been hawking all day and had sold very little, that her feet were swollen, her face raw from the sun, and that the chair-hire man had come by and she had given him the little money she had.

  ‘You must pay me back,’ she said.

  ‘I will pay you double,’ Dad replied.

  Mum went on about how she went hawking and was selling provisions along the main road when she saw a classmate of hers. They used to be in primary school together. Her classmate now had a car and a driver; she looked ten years younger than Mum, and she wore rich clothes. Mum sold her oranges and the woman didn’t recognise her. Mum didn’t sell anything else that day; she came straight home.

  ‘This life has not been good to me,’ Mum said.

  ‘Your reward will come,’ Dad said, absent-mindedly.

  ‘I will make you happy,’ I said.

  Mum stared at me. Then she lay down. Soon she was asleep. The wind blew in through all the cracks in the room and made us shiver.

  ‘Something is going to happen,’ I ventured.

  ‘Something wonderful,’ Dad said, rocking his chair expertly.

  The wind blew hard. The moth circled the flame. Then suddenly the candle went out. We stayed still in the darkness. The room was quiet.

  ‘I miss hearing the rats,’ Dad said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They made me think. Everything has to fight to live. Rats work very hard. If we are not careful they will inherit the earth.’

  The silence grew deeper. I lay down and listened to Dad thinking. His thoughts were wide; they spun around his head, bouncing off everything in the room. His thoughts filled the place, weighed me down, and after a while I was inside his head, travelling to the beginnings: I went with him to the village, I saw his father, I saw Dad’s dreams running away from him. His thoughts were hard, they bruised my head, my eyes ached, and my heart pounded fast in the stifling heat of the room. Dad sighed. Mum turned on the bed. The room became full of amethyst and sepia thoughts. Forms moved in the darkness. A green eye regarded me from just above Dad’s head. The eye was still. Then it moved. It went to the door and became a steady tattoo on the wooden frame. The wind increased the sound. Dad creaked his bones. When the knocks became louder I smelt something so profoundly rancid that I sat up.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Something is trying to get into the house.’

  The knocks sounded on the window. I opened it; the wind came in and blew me towards the bed. Mum sat up and went to the door. She opened it and gave a low scream. Dad was still. The smells of death, of bitterness, of old bodies, decomposing eyes, and old wounds, filled the room. Then several eyes lit up the darkness. There was laughter; and from their breath came the bad food and hunger of the world. They came into the room, surrounding us. In the darkness, a bitter wind amongst them, with the calm of strangers who have become familiar, they sat on the floor, on the bed, on my mat. We couldn’t breathe for their presence. One of them went and sat at Dad’s feet. She was a girl. I could smell her bitter beauty, her bad eye, her unwashed breasts. They came amongst us not like an invasion, but like people who have waited a long time to take their place among the living. They said nothing. Mum stayed at the door. All the exiled mosquitoes came in; the fireflies looking for their illumination clustered round the figures in the room. A red butterfly circled the girl’s head and when it settled on her the room was faintly lit up with a ghostly orange light that made my eyes twitch.

  ‘Who are you people?’ Dad asked, in a voice devoid of fear.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Azaro, who are they?’

  The girl stretched out her hand and placed it on Dad’s foot. Then she began to stroke it. She stroked his feet gently, till they too caught the orange light, and looked burnished, separated from the rest of his body in the dark.

  ‘My feet are burning,’ Dad said, ‘and I feel no heat.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Mum shrieked. ‘Get out, now! Get out!’

  There was another silence.

  ‘They are the beggars,’ I said.

  Mum caught her breath. Dad pulled his feet away and sat up straight. The orange light died in the room. I heard Dad fumbling for the box of matches. After a moment the match was lit, but not by Dad. The beggar girl held the flame up in the air so we could see. She looked so wonderful sitting there at Dad’s feet. Her bad eye, in the deceptive light, had turned a curious yellow colour. Her good eye was almost blue, but it was full of the deepest sadness and silence. Her dress stank. Her face was serene like that of a spirit-child. Without taking her eyes off Mum the beggar girl lit the candle. We looked round and saw them, seated peacefully, as if at a village council meeting, on the floor, their backs against the wall, on the bed, each of them fert
ile in deformities, their wounds livid, the stumps of missing arms grotesque, their rubber-like legs distorted. There was one with a massive head like a great bronze sculpture eaten by time. Another had a swollen Adam’s apple. Yet another had two of the most protruding and watchful eyes I have ever seen. They seemed to have been made by a perverse and drunken god.

  Mum cried out and charged at the beautiful beggar girl. She seemed quite demented. She grabbed the girl by the hair and tried to pull her up. The girl didn’t move, didn’t utter a sound. Mum seized her arms and tried to drag her out. Mum was screaming all the time. We all seemed in a trance. We all watched her without moving. Mum tried to shift the girl, but it was as if she were struggling with an immovable force. The girl’s eyes became strange. She took on a great weight, as if all her poverty and her suffering had invisibly compacted her like a dwarf star. Mum began shouting:

  ‘Get out, all of you! Get out, you beggars! Can’t you see that we too are suffering, eh? Our load is too much for us. Go! Take our food, but go!’

  She stopped shouting suddenly. In the silence that followed, the curious spell was lifted. I breathed in the deep fragrances of wild flowers, of herbs beaten to the ground by rain, of clouds and old wood, of banana plants and great open spaces, of verdant breezes and musk and heliotropes in the sun. The fragrances went. Then Mum turned on Dad, pounced on him, and began hitting him uncontrollably. Dad didn’t move in the chair. Soon he was bleeding from a scratch right next to his eye. Then Mum tore at his shirt and when all the buttons flew off she woke from her fever. She stopped again and went to the beggar girl. She knelt in front of her. The beggar girl began to stroke Dad’s feet. Mum, weeping, said:

  ‘I didn’t mean any harm. My life is like a pit. I dig it and it stays the same. I fill it and it empties. Look at us. All of us in one room. I walk from morning till night, selling things, praying with my feet. God smiles at me and my face goes raw. Sometimes I cannot speak. My mouth is full of bad living. I was the most beautiful girl in my village and I married this madman and I feel as if I have given birth to this same child five times. I must have done someone a great wrong to suffer like this. Please, leave us. My husband is mad but he is a good man. We are too poor to be wicked and even as we suffer our hearts are full of goodness. Please go, we will do something for you, but let us sleep in peace.’