by Ben Okri
For a long moment dad didn’t seem to know what to do. Then, wiping their anger off his face, galvanised by the desire to redeem the suffering he had caused, dad went after Helen. She led us deeper and deeper into the darkness. There were whispers and murmurs everywhere. The trees resounded with the chorus of the beggars’ lamentation. I saw butterflies with red wings appear from the thick bushes. Long-legged insects leapt across my face. An owl flew over dad’s head. Cobwebs became wrinkles on my forehead. The forest was changing. The air turned black. A formation of white bats descended on us and we ducked in terror. By the time we had recovered, the beggars were nowhere in sight. We couldn’t even hear their song. The world turned on an inscrutable axis and plunged us into an alien terrain. We heard a tree groaning deep in the forest. Then a fantastic noise shook the earth. Dad rushed on ahead and the next thing I knew I was alone. The darkness bristled. I felt disembodied forms jostling me, whispering numinous words into the pores of my body, as if all my pores were undiscovered ears. I went forward cautiously, feeling the air like a blind man, when a white wind swooped up into my face. And when I looked down I found myself staring into an abyss, a pit of darkness.
Dad was clinging on to the roots of a tree. I could hear his feet kicking the earth and the empty spaces.
‘Help me,’ he said.
I did my best and after a while dad managed to climb out from the hole. When he regained firm ground he held on to me. We were still. Much more cautiously now, we felt our way through the darkness. I climbed a tree. Dad walked round in circles. I couldn’t see anything, and climbed back down. To our terrified astonishment, much as we tramped through the bushes looking for Helen and the beggars, much as we tried, we could not find them. It seemed another realm had swallowed them up. It seemed as if they had stepped out of this reality, and into another. Maybe we need to keep looking at the world with new eyes.
6
THE DREAMING FOREST
‘THEY’VE VANISHED,’ DAD said.
‘The world has changed,’ I said.
Dad was in a frenzy. My head kept spinning. We sat on the forest floor. All around us in the dark everything was still, and yet everything was moving. I listened to the night, and heard the whispering wind. The leaves rustled and insects were in secret conversation everywhere. I listened to the silence of the moon as it cut a shimmering path through the branches. A rubber tree dripped sap not far from us. The air was sweet-smelling.
‘The forest is dreaming,’ dad said, lighting a cigarette.
Then he was silent. I couldn’t see his face. After he had finished the cigarette, he said:
‘Let’s go home.’
‘There is a river coming,’ I said.
The mighty sound of flowing waters, each wave murmuring with human laughter, gathered behind us, deep in the forest. The insect noises became more tumultuous. Birds flew wildly from the invisible trees and shot past us. Dad jumped up.
‘Let’s run,’ he said.
Seizing my hand, he broke into a canter. We ran for a long time. The air turned green. A hyena laughed in the dark. An owl called. Ritual noises surfaced among the bushes. Suddenly, everything was alive. The air crackled with resinous electricity.
‘I can’t breathe,’ I said. ‘The air is turning to fire.’
‘Just keeping on running,’ dad said, ‘and don’t close your eyes.’
We ran into a quivering universe, into resplendent and secret worlds. We ran through an abode of spirits, through the disconsolate forms of homeless ghosts. We hurried through the mesmeric dreams of hidden gods, through a sepia fog thick with hybrid beings, through the yellow village of invisible crows, past susurrant marketplaces of the unborn, and into the sprawling ghommid-infested alabaster landscapes of the recently dead. We kept pushing on through the inscrutable resistance of the moon-scented air, trying to find the road back into our familiar reality. But the road eluded us and we troubled the invisible forms of great trees with our breathing, and the spirits of extinct animals with our fear. Our heads pulsated with an infernal violet heat.
We broke into another level of time. I could hear the moon-voices of my spirit-companions calling out to me from the nocturnal choir of insects, the rococo piping of night-birds, and the penumbral cries of agonised trees. Haunting flute-songs followed us. I saw solitary fauns dancing in the dark. Hidden monsters that bred all year round watched us as we stumbled through their living spaces. I looked back and noticed green lights, isolated in the air, following us steadily.
‘Ghosts are spying on us,’ I said.
Dad lifted me on his back and bounded on through the pullulating darkness of the shadow worlds. We passed a vermilion toadstool, spectral and sentient. I heard the awesome roar of a big jungle cat. Dad ripped through the bushes like a madman, chanting curious incantations. The world went on changing and all kinds of lights kept appearing above the undergrowths. It was impossible to determine how long we had been running, or how far we had travelled. But after a while, it seemed as if dad had been running in a straight line which paradoxically curved into an enchanted circle. We couldn’t break out of the forest. It had become a labyrinth of secrets and dreams.
‘My head is burning,’ dad said.
Suddenly, my forehead caught fire and I screamed; and when I looked up I saw that there were gigantic spirits everywhere. Their thoughts pervaded the forest like scented woodsmoke. I knew instantly that they belonged to the slow migration of the great spirits of Africa. Where were they going? I had no idea. Their dreams were impenetrable, locked and coded in gnomic riddles. In the time we had been running civilisations had risen, had fallen, had disappeared. Transformations are faster at night. In that same time great leaders had been assassinated. I heard their astonished cries. New worlds were bursting out of the egg-shells of a million mutinous dreams. The labyrinth contained them all.
‘If only I can find my secret training ground, I will get us out of here in no time,’ dad said, his chest heaving, his back rippling.
The wind sighed over us, cooling the fire in our heads. Dad started to slow down. His breathing had become laboured. Then he stopped, and I got off his back.
Standing there in tenanted spaces, looking around, I could only make out the forms of trees moving in the waves of darkness. For a moment the air was still, and the moon had gone. We were silent for a long time. We couldn’t even see the sky. There were green thoughts around us everywhere. I heard the river rushing towards us from behind. I said nothing. The wind heaved. A mighty thought shook the earth. I heard padded footfalls. Something cracked above us, and a silver wing cleaved the air. Something brushed against my foot, but I couldn’t see what it was.
‘What are we going to do?’ asked dad.
He was invisible.
‘Something has just touched my leg,’ he said.
I looked down again and saw the two golden discs of a cat’s eyes. Then I couldn’t see them any more. Then after a while I saw them in the distance.
‘Let’s follow those eyes,’ I said.
‘What eyes?’
I pointed, but dad couldn’t see my finger. So I took his hand and led him on. Then he said, his spirit rising:
‘I can see them!’
He lifted me on to his back and we followed the golden eyes that kept appearing and vanishing.
‘They remind me of Green Leopard,’ he said, referring to his defeat of the famous boxer from the land of the dead.
‘It’s a cat,’ I said. ‘It’s my friend.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ he replied.
‘It’s not nonsense.’
He didn’t say anything. He went on running, pacing his breath, and after some time he cried out and said:
‘My stomach is on fire!’
‘The river is coming,’ I said.
The cat’s eyes disappeared and we didn’t see them any more.
‘Where has that cat gone?’ dad asked in exasperation.
‘I don’t know.’
He stopped. W
e stayed like that for a moment. Dad looked around, trying to find the cat’s eyes. Then something cracked again in the sky and before we knew it the silver wings sliced open the heavens and a flood of water crashed down on us. The water was warm and the wind buffeted us, smashing us against trees, hurling us into undergrowths. We fell and struggled back up and tramped through the loamy water that kept shifting the earth from beneath our feet. The rain thrashed us, blinded and deafened us, flogged us till we were livid all over. As we trudged on, directionless, the darkness kept opening and shutting. When it opened, in a swift deluge of light, I saw a bright city full of sunflower houses and blue streets. And when it shut, the darkness flashed with water. When it opened again I saw, in a crack of incandescence, the faces of three white women with dishevelled blonde hair and dolphin eyes and bleeding lips. And when it shut, dad said:
‘Something is biting me all over.’
And my body too began to itch furiously. My eyes itched. My brain itched and I couldn’t scratch it. The irritation grew more inflamed. I started screaming and dad said:
‘I can see!’
The itching ceased. We were still. We found ourselves staring at a fabulous house encircled with red and yellow lights. It had a fluorescent signboard, whose legend I couldn’t read from that distance. In front of the house many women, crowned with flowers, their eyes brilliant with antimony, silver bells in their hands, were dancing to effervescent music. A blind old man, with red bracelets and a white hat, played on an accordion and strutted around them. Then we heard flaming laughter and the strangled cry of a moon-slaughtered goat and dad said:
‘We are in another world.’
‘That is Madame Koto’s place,’ I said.
‘It is! It is!’ dad yelled, breaking into a joyful dance.
He made me slide off his back and he lifted me up and put me down; he threw me up into the air three times in jubilation and it was only when he was out of breath that he stopped to rest from the exhaustion of his own happiness. For a moment he too knew the spirit-child’s exultation at homecoming.
But his momentary celebration was cut short by the realisation that the wind was cold. The rain had ceased. The silence over the forest was total, as if the land had stopped breathing. It didn’t breathe in and didn’t breathe out and we waited for the silence to end; and when it didn’t end dad carried me on his back again, thinking about all the confusion he was going home to face. We had broken out of the dreaming forest, but the new realities of our lives were before us. We went past Madame Koto’s place without stopping. We went up the dry street to our room without speaking. We found our door wide open.
7
IF YOU LOOK TOO DEEPLY EVERYTHING BREAKS YOUR HEART
THERE WERE TWO lighted candles on the table. A mosquito coil burned steadily. Mum was asleep on the floor, under the shadow of the centre table. She had a thin cloth over her. The flickering candle light, making the shadows dance on the bare walls, illuminating the rafters and the cobwebs, revealed to us more forcefully the poverty in our lives. As soon as we stepped into the room, breathing in the stale libations, mum woke up. Dad took a few steps towards her. I saw the plea for reconciliation on his face. He went towards her tentatively, with anxiety on his brow, and when he thought he had her in his arms, when his face relaxed into profound gratitude at being so soon forgiven, mum ducked under his empty embrace. With her eyes wet and shining, she put on her slippers, and hurried out of the room. She didn’t come back the whole night.
Dad sat in his chair and for hours he stared at the cupboard with a confused expression. He had the tormented look of a spurned lover. He sat very still, as if his brain had turned to wood, and didn’t speak. The itching on my body came and went. Occasionally, my eyes twitched. We sat up all night, with the gloom and the midges thickening in the air, the door wide open, and the mosquito coil dropping its perfect spiral of ash on the centre table.
I went and had a bath. When I came back the room was dark, dad didn’t light another candle, and all I heard was his breathing of a great animal in the disconsolate silence. I shut the door a little and brought out my mat. I lay down, listening to the language of mosquitoes, the complaints of the insistent midges, when I noticed that the spirit of the luminous demon-girl had left dad. There were empty spaces where she had been sitting. The labyrinth and the rain had washed away his insane passions.
All night I watched the spaces in dad fill with a great sorrow, the colour of anguished blue. Dad’s colours were of an immense sadness, almost a serenity, and I watched them deepen. I was determined to stay awake with him, but my eyes became heavy. I shut them for a while, and when I opened them again it was morning.
Dad was still sitting on his three-legged chair. His eyes were raw. He hadn’t slept all night. I could tell he’d had a bath. He looked a little fresher and had changed his clothes. When he saw that I was awake he said:
‘Go and buy yourself some food.’
He gave me some money. After I had washed my face I went and bought cooked beans, fried plantain and meat from the woman across the road. Dad didn’t eat with me. I was hungry and ate everything and when I had finished and drunk some water, dad said:
‘I’m not going to work, I’m not eating, and I’m not sleeping till your mother forgives me.’
Then he said:
‘Read to me from one of those books.’
I selected one at random. It was a book of love poetry. The words were strange to me but when I stopped concentrating too much they made sense. I read as if I were repeating words spoken in my head by one of the several lives resident in me. I read five poems out to dad. After a while he was trembling on the chair, his head shaking, his face contorted.
‘Are you crying, dad?’ I asked.
He turned his face away and wiped his eyes and then said:
‘How come you can read these books at your age?’
That was probably the first time that I felt the doors to my other lives – my past lives, my future lives – opening on me with frightening clarity. Sometimes my other lives would open and then shut, and what I glimpsed didn’t make sense. Other times I could see far into an aquamarine past; I saw places I had never been to, saw faces that were both entirely alien and familiar; and my mind would be invaded with the black winds of enigmatic comprehension. The lives in me increased their spaces, languages of distant lands bore my thoughts, and I found I knew things I had never learnt. I knew the charts and tides of the Atlantic, I understood complex principles of higher mathematics, the sign-interpretations of the forgotten magis, the sculptural traditions of the ancient Benin guild, the lost philosophies of Pythagoras and the griots of Mali. Powerful symphonies resonated in me and sometimes I found that I could compose passages of silent spirit-music while I played in the street. The presences in me had been growing vaster, swelling out to include intuitions of other spheres and planets, and the invasions of knowledge had become frightening – and it had all been happening so quietly, so inexorably, that I became sure I was soon going to die. And when dad asked me the question I got up from the mat and put the book on the table and went to him and held his comforting arm, and said:
‘My head grows bigger in the night.’
He stared at me for a while. Then he said:
‘Don’t read any more.’
He lifted me up and held me tightly. He pressed me into the sweet sad colours of his spirit. Deep inside I could hear him weeping. We stayed like that for a long time and then he put me down.
‘We have to go and find your mother,’ he said.
Leaving the door wide open, we went out into the street.
* * *
We searched for mum everywhere. We went up and down all the streets in our area. We asked all the women we encountered if they had seen mum. We asked men lounging outside their rooms, under the thatch eaves of makeshift kiosks; we asked children; we asked old men and young girls. No one had seen her and no one knew who we were talking about. We went to the marketplace where she
used to have a stall before the thugs of politics drove her away because she hadn’t joined their parties. We asked the market women. They remembered her, but hadn’t seen her for a long time, they said. We tramped up and down the wondrous chaotic marketplace, from the ironmongers to the money lenders, from the fish-sellers to the cloth-traders, from the hair-weavers to the corn-roasters, from the makers of rope to the makers of magic. No one could help us. Dad grew frenzied. He asked beggars and blindmen, little girls on errands and the great matriarchs of the marketplace. We left the market and started wandering without any sense of direction. Dad would suddenly sprint across the road and accost a woman with a basin on her head. He stopped all the women he saw, asking them irrelevant questions, on the off-chance that they might be one of her companions in hawking. Many of them were offended at dad’s seemingly impertinent questions and they abused him, suspecting him of trying to rob them in some insidious way. Then he began wandering the confusing streets, the dirt tracks, the rough pitted roads, turning down blind alleys, backstreets, rutted pathways, roads that curved on themselves, following what he imagined to be the secret trail that mum took when she went hawking her meagre wares. How we wandered that day! The world seemed to be a nightmare of streets, a fiendish labyrinth of paths and cross-roads devised to drive human beings mad, calculated to get us lost. The world seemed to be composed of recently invented byways and tracks and dirt-roads created by the endless desire of human beings for shortcuts that elongate journeys, roads that start to induce their own peculiar form of dreaming on the exhausted soles of the feet. There are demons lurking underfoot in all the streets of the world that love to take men on terrifying unintended journeys. We walked that day into places that could only have been created by our own intense desire to exhaust all the routes of mum’s daily journey out of the ghetto. We suffered her secret agonies that day, staggering under the blinding glare, stepping on sharp objects, kicking stones, seeing mirages, but never seeing mum.