by Ben Okri
Mum whipped the table with a wet rag, as if it had annoyed her. When the flame had been put out she came and sat on the bed and held my face between her hot palms and said:
‘My son, what were you doing in my dream?’
I said nothing.
‘Answer me,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t your dream. It was Dad’s dream.’
Mum sat up. I couldn’t see her face in the darkness. Her sadness made the night quiver.
‘Your father got into the car and went to the village. Your grandfather treated his wounds and soothed his spirit. Then he travelled to Ughelli to buy the perfume that would get rid of the bad smell of poverty. Then he went to the moon. Then he travelled to the land of spirits far away. Many lands. I heard his voice crying out in the sky. They refused him entry to heaven. They sent him past hell, past spirit lands where our ancestors ask one another impenetrable riddles all day long. He came to a country full of palaces, a country of dreams, where the people are invisible, where wisdom and joy are in the air. He went to the law courts of the spirit worlds. I heard him crying for answers. Then he came back and a war broke out and they shot him on the road that he had built.’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘So lie down and sleep. This is a strong night. I must protect your father’s spirit or it will go away.’
I lay down.
‘Your father is playing a flute,’ Ade said in his own voice. ‘It is sweet music. I didn’t know he could play so well.’
Then the room was silent. Sleep stole over me and I resisted it. Mum ground her teeth on the bed, struggling with Dad. Ade began to quiver again.
‘I’m going slowly,’ he said.
‘Shut up,’ I said.
Mum was still. I heard her snoring. Sleep came to me in the form of white birds and I saw Mum fighting Dad in his dreams, trying to get him to gatecrash his body. Ade lay next to me, twitching through the night in his fits. And his spirit, swirling and turbulent with blinding energies, began to affect mine. We swirled in the sweet savage torrent of his epilepsy and travelled the red roads of the spirits and arrived at the Village of Night, where birds were laying out electric cables, where Masquerades were alchemists, where the sunbird was priest, where the moonprince was a foundling, and where the tortoise was a wandering griot who warned me at the roadside that no story could ever be finished. As dawn approached the Village disappeared and I heard the songs of my spirit companions. In flames, the great king of the spirit world flashed past my eyes. The mountain heaved. I saw a black cat at my feet and I fed it bean-cakes. Ade lay quiet beside me. His past lives had begun to conquer him. I saw that he had not told me the whole truth. I saw his other images. I saw a murderer in Rome, a poetess in Spain, a falconer among the Aztecs, a whore in Sudan, a priestess in old Kenya, a one-eyed white ship captain who believed in God and wrote beautiful hymns and who made his fortune capturing slaves in the Gold Coast. I even saw a famed samurai warrior in ancient Japan, and a mother of ten in Greece.
Then, in the middle of the night, when I was still amongst the images, a mighty cry woke us up. I looked and in the darkness I saw Dad’s face. Then it vanished.
‘What did he say?’ Mum asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You didn’t hear?’
‘No.’
‘I did,’ Ade said in the dark.
‘What did he say?’
‘He said: “OPEN THE DOOR.”’
Mum rushed from the bed, tripped over my foot, and hit her head against something. She didn’t cry out. She opened the door and went back to the bed. Mosquitoes and night-moths came in. We slept but Mum got up and woke us, saying:
‘No one must sleep. We must bring back your father’s spirit.’
10
WE SAT STILL. The wind blew in leaves. The air smelled of the forest and the sleeping ghetto. Strange dreams, floating on the wind, looking for dreamers, drifted into our room.
‘Tell us a story,’ I said.
Ade sat up. His limbs were peaceful.
‘Tell us the story of the blue sunglasses.’
‘Okay.’
We waited. Mum went and sat on Dad’s chair. She rocked back and forth. I saw Dad’s spirit hovering round her. Then it entered her and I heard Mum shiver. She got some ogogoro, made a prayer and a libation, and we drank. As if Dad’s personality were taking her over, she lit a mosquito coil and a candle. Then she lit a cigarette. She rocked back and forth in Dad’s restless manner of a great lion in a man’s body. Her face serious, her features altered, she began to speak.
‘One day I was selling my provisions. I went from street to street. The sun was very hot, there was no shelter in the sky or anywhere. I was tired. I began to see things. I began to complain, weeping about how hard this world is. Then I came to a crossroad. I saw a tortoise crawling out of the bushes and crossing the road and I was about to pick it up when it spoke to me.’
‘What did it say?’ I asked.
‘On another day I was hawking things in the city when a white man came to me. He had on the blue sunglasses. It was very hot. The sun and the dust made my eyes red. The white man said: “If you tell me how to get out of Africa I will give you my sunglasses.”’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said, “There are many roads into Africa but only one road leads out.” He said: “What road?” I said: “First tell me what the tortoise told me.” He was confused. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said. So I told him that I wouldn’t show him the only road out of Africa. Then he told me his story. He had been here for ten years. For seven of those years he was an important man in the government. Then all the Independence trouble started and for three years he tried to leave but kept failing. He couldn’t find a way out. Every time he prepared to leave something came along and prevented him. He even got on a plane but the plane went round the world and when he got out he found himself here, in the same place.’
‘So what happened?’
‘So I made him buy all my provisions. Then I asked him to tell me what the tortoise said. He stopped and thought for a long time. Then a bus went past slowly. It had a motto written on its side. The white man laughed at the motto and read it out and I said that’s what the tortoise told me. “What?” he asked. “All things are linked,” I said. “What has the tortoise got to do with it?” he asked. I said: “If you don’t know you will never find any road at all.” Then he gave me the blue sunglasses and before he left he said: “The only way to get out of Africa is to get Africa out of you.’”
‘Then what happened?’
‘On another day I was selling fish in the market. A strange Yoruba man came to me and bought all my fishes. When his hands touched them they all came alive and began to twist in my basin. I threw the fishes on the floor and they wriggled and I started to run away, but the man held my hands. “Don’t you remember me?” he asked. He was a black man but he was familiar in an odd sort of way. “I gave you the blue sunglasses,” he said. Then I remembered him. But it took some time, and I first had to turn and twist my mind around. He was the white man. His face and his nose and everything was exactly the same except that now he was a Yoruba man with fine marks on his face. “I met you five hundred years ago,” he said. “I discovered the road.” “What was it?” I asked. Then he told me his story. “When I left you,” he began, “I became feverish in the head and later in a fit of fury over a small thing I killed my African servant. They arrested me. I sat in a cell. Then they released me because I was a white man. Then I began to wander about the city naked. Everyone stared at me. They were shocked to see a mad white man in Africa. Then a strange little African child took to following me around. He was my only friend. All my white colleagues had deserted me. Then one day my head cleared. Five hundred years had gone past. The only way to get out of Africa was to become an African. So I changed my thinking. I changed my ways. I got on a plane and arrived in England. I got married, had two children, and retired from gove
rnment service. I was in the Secret Service. Then before I turned seventy I had a heart attack and died. They buried me in my local parish cemetery with full national honours.” “So what are you doing here?” I asked him. I was afraid now. I was very scared. He said: “Time passed. I was born. I became a businessman. And I came to the market today to buy some eels and I saw you.” I said: “But I only met you two weeks ago.” “Time is not what you think it is,” he said, smiling. Then he left. That is the end of my story.’
There was a long silence.
‘Strange story,’ I said.
‘It’s true,’ Mum replied.
The wind blew the floating dreams into our room. The yellow light of the candle fluttered. The candle had burned low. I felt I was in another place, a country of white fields.
‘Look!’ Ade said.
The wind had blown the dawn into our room. At the door, sitting on its tail, was a black cat. We stared at the cat in silence. It stared at us.
‘The world is just beginning,’ Mum said.
The cat turned and went back out of the door. We all got up and followed the cat. Sitting outside our door, her wounds still livid, was Helen, the beggar girl. We stared at her in puzzlement. Then she got up and went to the housefront. We didn’t follow her. When we went back into the room Dad was sitting up on the bed like Lazarus.
‘KEEP THE ROAD OPEN,’ he said, and fell back into sleep.
We touched him and he didn’t move. Mum was happy. Ade kept smiling. Mum was happy because Dad had begun to snore. Ade kept smiling because he could hear his father’s weary footsteps, as he made his long journeys, like an ancient hero searching for his son. Ade heard his father’s footsteps, heard the anxious hypertensive beat of his heart, and was following him through his guilt and confusion, as he made his way to our house. But Ade also smiled because his father had been delayed getting to our place by a funeral cortège. It was not a big procession, and there were only a few mourners at that hour, all of them prostitutes, except for Madame Koto, who wore dark glasses and a black silk gown, and who was thinking about the money she could make from the fabulous political rally rather than about the prostitute whose body lay charred in the cheap wooden coffin and who had died from electrocution after the wind blew the tent away.
11
THE FIRST THING that woke us in the morning was wailing from the road. Someone knocked on our door and when I shouted for them to come in we saw Ade’s father. He was very tall, his head was bowed, and his face bore the misery of a night-long vigil.
Ade got up instantly and rubbed his eyes. They were bulbous and inflamed. He had grown paler and more beautiful overnight. His smile had gone. When he saw his father at the door he didn’t move or render a traditional greeting.
‘How many times can a man be reborn in one miserable life?’ his father asked the room at large.
Mum was not on the bed. There was food for us on the table. She had left before we woke and her hawker’s basin was not on the cupboard. Dad was still asleep on the bed, his big legs sprawled apart, his arm dangling over the side.
Ade’s father looked terrifying.
‘Where have you been all night, eh?’ he asked his son. ‘Why didn’t you come home? Your mother is almost ill with worrying about you.’
A dark glow surrounded him. He came into the room. Ade retreated to the window. His father sat on the bed. I could smell the frustration and the anxieties in his night-long sweat. His spirit had the potent odours of one who has been making ritual offerings, talking to his ancestors, trying to communicate with the gods. His spirit was charged and deep. He filled the room with terror. Ade, standing at the window, seemed radiant with the glow of his father’s temper. He did not appear repentant or even rebellious. He held his head firm, and his face had the impassivity of one who knew that his father could no longer dare to beat him or make him cry. There was something cruel about my friend’s spirit and I understood why spirit-children are so feared. Faced always with the songs and fragrances of another world, a world beyond death, where the air is illuminated, where spirit companions know the secrets of one’s desire, and can fulfil those desires, every single one of them, spirit-children do not care much for the limited things of the world. Ade did not want to stay any more, he did not like the weight of the world, the terror of the earth’s time. Love and the anguish of parents touched him only faintly, for beyond their stares and threats and beatings he knew that his parents’ guardianship was temporary. He always had a greater home.
I never knew how different we both were till that morning when his father began his long tirade, his complaints, all designed to make his son feel guilty. Ade, his head held lightly, with his eyes fixed on ghosts, simply left the window and went out of the room as if he were sleepwalking. His father followed him, caught between anger and despair. I followed his father. The world was old that morning. Out in the street his father caught him and lifted him up and Ade began to cry unbearably as all the murky lights from the ghetto and the filthy untarred road and the broken-down houses and the ulcerous poverty converged on him. His father tried to console him, threw him up towards the sky and caught him again. But Ade only cried more and in that sound I knew he wasn’t crying because of his father’s love, or his own guilt, or his mother’s illness, but because the pressure of time was tightening round his neck.
12
THE SPIRIT-CHILD IS an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the living and the dead. Things that are not ready, not willing to be born or to become, things for which adequate preparations have not been made to sustain their momentous births, things that are not resolved, things bound up with failure and with fear of being, they all keep recurring, keep coming back, and in themselves partake of the spirit-child’s condition. They keep coming and going till their time is right. History itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake of the condition of the spirit-child.
There are many who are of this condition and do not know it. There are many nations, civilisations, ideas, half-discoveries, revolutions, loves, art forms, experiments, and historical events that are of this condition and do not know it. There are many people too. They do not all have the marks of their recurrence. Often they seem normal. Often they are perceived of as new. Often they are serene with the familiarity of death’s embrace. They all carry strange gifts in their souls. They are all part-time dwellers in their own secret moonlight. They all yearn to make of themselves a beautiful sacrifice, a difficult sacrifice, to bring transformation, and to die shedding light within this life, setting the matter ready for their true beginnings to cry into being, scorched by the strange ecstasy of the will ascending to say yes to destiny and illumination.
I was a spirit-child rebelling against the spirits, wanting to live the earth’s life and contradictions. Ade wanted to leave, to become a spirit again, free in the captivity of freedom. I wanted the liberty of limitations, to have to find or create new roads from this one which is so hungry, this road of our refusal to be. I was not necessarily the stronger one; it may be easier to live with the earth’s boundaries than to be free in infinity.
Given the fact of the immortality of spirits, could these be the reason why I wanted to be born – these paradoxes of things, the eternal changes, the riddle of living while one is alive, the mystery of being, of births within births, death within births, births within dying, the challenge of giving birth to one’s true self, to one’s new spirit, till the conditions are right for the new immutable star within one’s universe to come into existence; the challenge to grow and learn and love, to master one’s self; the possibilities of a new pact with one’s spirit; the probability that no injustice lasts for ever, no love ever dies, that no light is ever really extinguished, that no true road is ever complete, that no way is ever definitive, no truth ever final, and that there are never really any beginnings or endings? It may be that, in the land of origins, when many of us were birds, even all these reasons had nothing to do with why I wanted to l
ive.
Anything is possible, one way or another. There are many riddles amongst us that neither the living nor the dead can answer.
SECTION THREE
BOOK EIGHT
1
DURING THE THREE days that Dad stayed in recuperating, the road had the first of its wave of nightmares. The road’s sleep was disturbed first by the prostitute who had been electrocuted on the night of Madame Koto’s initiation into higher powers. They held a small funeral for her. They carried her coffin up the road and at night we heard the wailing of some of the prostitutes. The next day it rained and three men who were laying out cables for the big political rally also died of electrocution. The rains were crazy in those days. The beggars suffered the onslaught, sleeping under the eaves of our compound-front. Every morning Helen would come to our door. Mum left her food which she didn’t touch. Every morning Mum went out with her basin of provisions and the rain drenched everything and she came home in the afternoons soaking wet, no profits made, her provisions rendered useless.
Dad slept like a giant through the new season. He missed the big trucks of the political parties as they went round the city, making announcements over their loudspeakers. He missed their violent confrontations, the eruptions, when they met on the same street. He missed the beggars who stayed on our road, begging alms round the broken vehicle. In the evenings I watched them conferring energetically amongst themselves. They seemed to be waiting for a sign, so palpable was their expectancy. No one gave them alms. The inhabitants of the area never missed an opportunity to tell them to move on. They themselves seemed anxious to move on, to travel the roads to a new destination. It was only Helen who held them back. She never spoke, but around her was concentrated the initiative to set off for new places. It was odd to see them trying to continue with Dad’s attempts to make them useful. Every now and then they would try to clear up the accumulated garbage on the road. They tried in their clumsy way to be of help. No one appreciated it. I passed them on the second day of Dad’s sleep and I heard them arguing in harsh voices about the endlessly postponed forthcoming rally, about the school Dad was going to build for them, and about money. When they saw me they would brighten up, and their faces would lift with hope. They would come towards me, stop, and watch my movements with hungry eyes. I took to stealing food from the house for them. Dad’s sleep made us very hungry. Mum made no money. Our meals got smaller. We would eat quietly, watching Dad snoring on the bed as he devoured the air in the room, his spirit growing larger all the time, feeding on our hunger. He grew in his sleep. I watched as his feet began to dangle over the edge of the bed. I saw his chest expanding, bursting his shirt. He gained weight; and when he tossed, as if riding mythical horses in his dreams, the bed would groan. He slept deeply, darkening the room. The candles burned low while he slept. The door was kept open. Visitors would come in, talk in whispers over his sleeping form, and depart on tiptoes.