by Ben Okri
I drew near to the light. So did dad. We were silent. After a while, dad said:
‘The air has changed in our room.’
‘What are we going to do about mum?’
‘I will do something,’ he said.
He looked tortured. His face was shrunken.
‘Get some sleep. I’ll be watching over you. Our spirit is strong, you must fear nothing, you hear?’
I nodded. Fear nothing? I knew he was afraid, but he didn’t know what he was afraid of, so I said:
‘Something is happening.’
‘Something wonderful,’ he replied.
His voice had no conviction. The fact is that a weird anti-magnetism was operating on our lives, pulling everything apart. Dad got up and began pacing the room, stirring his spirit, uttering incantations, filling the place with his energies.
‘The secret of strength is in the spirit,’ he said. ‘Life is often like fighting, and sometimes you have to draw power from your eyes or your toes or from your heart.’
He sat in his chair. I got out my mat and spread it on the floor.
‘Tell me a story,’ I said.
He smiled, stayed silent for a while, and then began speaking in the voice of a story-teller who can spread power with words.
‘There was once a man who suffered all the bad things that can happen to a human being. He was a good man in a world full of wickedness. When a new bad thing happened to him he refused to lose heart and he tried harder to live the good life. Then his only son died. His house burned down. His wife left him. He was sacked from his job because he refused to be corrupt. He was crossing the road one day when a cow kicked him and broke his face. He lived in the streets and bore his suffering with a smile in his spirit. Then he fell ill and began to die. While he was dying a mosquito landed on his ear and said, “If you stop being a good man wonderful things will happen to you.” “Like what?” he asked. The mosquito replied, “You will be rich and famous. You will have many beautiful wives and lovely children. You will have power. Everybody will love you. And you will live a long and fruitful life.”’
‘So what did the man say?’
‘He said, “And if I don’t stop trying to be good?” The mosquito replied, “You will die when the sun comes out.”’
‘Then what did he do?’
‘He knocked the mosquito away, got up from his bed in the street, and he went from house to house asking people if he could help them in any way because he was going to die that night. He helped the weak to fetch firewood. He carried loads at the night-market and gave the money away to beggars. He went to hospitals and spoke kind words to people who were also waiting to die. He settled quarrels between husbands and wives, between friends and enemies. And he preached everywhere he went, saying that people must learn to love one another because death was coming. He did a lot of things in that night, more in one night than in his whole life.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘Morning drew nearer. When he saw dawn in the sky he went and lay down on his bed in the street. His heart was full of peace. His face suddenly looked younger. His body was surrounded with a powerful and gentle light. Then a dog came to him and licked his feet. Then a goat came and licked his hands. Birds settled round him and began to sing. People whom he had helped saw him and drew a crowd round him. Then the mosquito came and landed on his ear and said, “Your time is up.” “Good,” the man said. “I am not afraid.” “Why not?” asked the mosquito. “Because”, he said, “love is the real power. And where there is love there is no fear.” The mosquito became very unhappy. It started to cry. The man said, “Why are you crying?” The mosquito answered, “It’s because you are not afraid. I have brought death to thousands of people, but you are the first person I have met who is not afraid of dying.” “But I am not going to die,” said the man. “Why not?” asked the mosquito. The man then pointed to the birds and the animals and the human beings gathered round him. “Because”, he said, “I have given them my life. I used to be one. Now, I am many. They will become more. How many of us can you kill? The more you kill, the more we will become. So you have done me a great favour and I thank you.” Then the man drew his last breath and shut his eyes and the sun came out. All the people buried his body in a special place and his spirit became the guide of all those whose hearts are pure.’
When dad finished there was a silvery silence. Then, in a different voice, he said:
‘Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.’
In the new silence I noticed that Madame Koto’s presence had receded from around us. Dad’s story had driven her away. His story made the candle burn brighter and seemed to have increased the serenity of his own spirit. He no longer looked tortured. His eyes shone and sweat glistened on his forehead. When I looked up I noticed a sentient silence among the cobwebs. The spiders had also been listening to dad’s story.
‘So get some sleep, leave the door open, and when you need me I will be here.’
He blew out the candle. I didn’t hear him leave the room. He went out, but a form the exact shape of his body – only larger – remained sitting in his chair. Through the night the form grew even larger, filling out the room. It became lighter and cooler, a gentle shade of gold.
When I woke up in the morning the room had again been cleaned. There was food on the table. A pleasant aroma lingered in the air. I knew that dad hadn’t returned, but I wasn’t afraid. And I wasn’t afraid because the good spirit had been visiting and keeping our lives company while dad did his penance and I stayed alone.
10
YOU MUST ALSO LEARN HOW TO FAIL
FOR THREE DAYS I followed dad in spirit. I followed his penance and I circled him in his journeys. In the daytime he went away. At night he would tell me a story. When he left, his other form in the chair grew more powerful and it protected me. The good spirit would tiptoe into the room while I was asleep and clean the place and prepare the most savoury dishes. Dad didn’t sleep for seven days. I didn’t see him eat. I ate, and grew leaner. The fleas harassed me. The mosquitoes fattened themselves on my blood and died from over-nourishment.
The wind kept trying to blow away dad’s other form. The harder it tried, the lighter dad’s other form became. It seemed like water. The intentional wind blew it one way, and it flowed, and re-formed in another space. The war between the nightwind and dad’s secret form went on during the periods when dad left the house and carried mountainous loads at the docks, or mighty bales of cloth or bulging bags of garri at the markets, or broke rocks for the construction of roads.
The harder the wind blew, the harder dad worked. He seemed to be punishing himself, filling with suffering the empty spaces where the demon-girl once resided. He starved. He didn’t drink any alcohol and didn’t smoke any cigarettes. He didn’t get into any fights and when provoked he allowed himself to be beaten. He came back a strange man every evening. He would rest a bit, pace the room, and tell stories about people who were dying and who went around helping others who were also dying and the mosquito said different things to the hero on the dawn of his transformation. Sometimes it was a lion that licked the good man’s feet. Sometimes it was a tiger. Sometimes an elephant bore his body deep into the forest and to the land of spirits. Other times it was a giraffe that bore him on its cushioned hump into the kingdom of pure spirits on the great dawn of his coronation.
For three days I followed my father in spirit as he worked to earn mum’s forgiveness. I never knew that dad also had many people inside him. He grew taller. His eyes became sunken, but they shone brighter. His unshaven look and the broken expression on his face kept making me want to cry. But a moment before I might have started to weep, he would begin a story. And when he left the house, staggering from his loss of weight, I realised that as he grew thinner his other form in the chair became so vast and powerful that it was soon bigger than the whole compound. It was a mystery. The other tenants, for no apparent reason, became kinder to me. They brou
ght me food and kept touching my head fondly. Then one day a most curious thing happened. I was alone, playing in the street, when an old man with reddish teeth came to me. He stared into my eyes, smiled, and made a prayer over me, and went away.
My father carried loads with a vengeful determination. His neck shrank. His boots looked sad. He took to clearing the accumulations of rubbish in our street. He gave the money he had suffered so much to earn to families and total strangers who were poorer than we were. His penance became a new kind of demon. He offered to wash clothes for over-burdened women. He fetched water from our well for everyone. He dug gutters, he helped to build wooden bridges over marshlands near us, he worked on building sites, he visited our poor relations and took them medicines and fruits during their illnesses, and he came back every night with his head bowed, his eyes raw, unable to forgive himself.
On the third night he came home sadder than usual. He said:
‘My son, I have been unable to gatecrash your mother’s forgiveness.’
I stayed silent. Dad was disappearing. He hadn’t eaten and his body was growing hollow.
‘There is a red wind in my head,’ he continued. ‘When I was carrying loads today a fly sat on top of the load and I fell down and couldn’t get up. No one in the wide world came to help me. I stayed on the ground the whole afternoon. The owners of the load came and kicked me and called me a dog. I didn’t retaliate. Then an old woman came to me and said, “You can’t hide your head from life. If you succeed you will lose your head. You must also learn how to fail.” Then she left. She was a messenger from my father, the priest of Roads. But, Azaro, my son, I don’t understand the message.’
He stared right through me. The door creaked open gently, as if the wind wanted to come in and listen to a story. I didn’t like the wind any more. It had chilled me, and it had not stopped waging war on my father’s secret form. But something made me want to turn round.
‘Don’t speak,’ dad said in a low voice that made me think he was dying.
His face hung down, his jaws were slack, but he stared at something behind me with a glittering intensity in his eyes. When I turned right round the sight of the black cat sitting on its tail, its eyes alight, frightened me. When I screamed, the cat disappeared.
‘You have driven our visitor away,’ dad said sadly.
‘It was another messenger,’ I said.
‘What was the message?’
‘Go and beg mum,’ I replied.
Dad was silent. He shut his eyes. He didn’t move for a long time. I blew out the candle. For the first time in seven days, dad slept. He slept in his chair. That night, as dad slept precariously in his three-legged chair, I saw his other form gradually grow smaller. The gentle haze of gold diminished and settled in him and I never saw it again. I knew then that dad had found a secret way back into the immeasurable invisible happiness that is mixed like air into the long days of suffering, into the nights of agonised sleep. I knew then that he had somehow rediscovered the magic substance which the great God sprinkled in us and which sings with the flow of blood through all the journeys of our lives. And I dreamt that a large handful of that wonderful substance was sprinkled on us as we slept in the truce of the nightwind.
I woke to find that dad had bathed, shaved, combed his hair and put on his French suit. He was also singing. When I sat up the first thing he said was:
‘My son, today is Madame Koto’s day. Get ready. We are going on an interesting journey.’
11
THE QUEST FOR MADAME KOTO
NO ONE HAD seen Madame Koto for a long time. She existed only in rumours and in our dreams. Her absence had increased the force of her legend. The road was asleep when we set out to find her.
We made enquiries at the bar and the women gave us directions to one of her great stalls in the marketplace. When we got there her shed was shut. A woman directed us to another market. The same thing happened. Dad was not discouraged. We received many directions which sent us up and down the city. At one of her shops, where jewelry and lace materials were sold, a little girl told us she had just left. It was late in the afternoon before we arrived at a shop which Madame Koto rarely visited. It was a small shop, with a few tables of trinkets outside. We went into the shop and met a lean woman with a bandage over one eye.
‘We have come to see Madame Koto,’ dad said.
‘Which Madame Koto?’ the woman asked.
Dad was confused.
‘How many Madame Kotos are there?’
‘It depends,’ the woman said.
We looked around the shop. It was bare except for a few chairs. The place stank of sweat and urine and human misery. The woman stared at me with her one eye. She seemed rather intent on me. It made me uncomfortable. Dad said:
‘Maybe we have come to the wrong place.’
The woman didn’t say anything. A child began crying in a room at the back of the shop. The woman went out and my eyes cleared a little and I suddenly noticed the political posters in the deep shadows of the walls.
‘Let’s go,’ dad said. ‘This is the wrong shop.’
He started to leave when I heard other voices at the back, the voices of women whispering in a corridor. While I was straining to hear what they were saying, a goat wandered into the empty shop from the front door. It stared at us. Then the goat moved towards me, and edged me to the wall. It had big eyes, unfathomable and curiously human. I pushed the goat away, but it came back at me, its head lowered, its green eyes glittering.
‘Leave that goat alone,’ dad said.
The goat turned to dad and subjected him to a long intense scrutiny. Then it went out through the front door and soon afterwards the woman with the bandaged eye came in and said:
‘Wait.’
Then she was gone. I listened to the bustle of the main road outside the shop, the voices calling, the hawkers drawing attention to their goods, car horns blasting, news vendors rattling out the sensational headlines of the day, music playing all over the distances. While I listened dad touched me on the head and I suddenly had the distinct impression that Madame Koto was in the shop. I could feel the awesomeness of her body. She was breathing in the air. Her legend surrounded us, watching our every movement.
Dad sat on a bench. I stood beside him, conscious of the disquieting notion that Madame Koto had somehow multiplied in the spaces where we waited. Then the wind shifted in the shop and a big man, draped in a cheap agdada, strode in. He eyed us and went through the back door, leaving behind flashes and hints of indecipherable possibilities. These were intensified a moment later when the woman brought in a tray of food – pounded yam and spinach stew, rich with dried fish, fried chicken and goat meat. She put the tray down on a low table which she dragged out of the shadows. She brought water for us to wash our hands. We didn’t touch the food. The woman watched us. Dad’s face was stony; he registered no bewilderment. After a few moments of silence the woman said:
‘Follow me.’
We rose.
‘The boy first,’ she said.
We followed her through the back door, along a corridor, into another house, up a winding set of stairs, across a landing to the top floor of a two-storeyed building, down another set of winding stairs, and back into the same shop we had originally set out from.
‘What’s wrong with you, eh?’ dad growled. ‘Are you playing games with us?’
The woman smiled. She indicated the bench. Dad sat down. The food was gone. The room was somehow different. The woman left and soon came back with a crying baby. She left the baby on a chair and went out again. The baby shrieked and made us feel quite scared. I went over to the baby and played with it, trying to get it to stop crying. I touched the baby’s face and it stared at me with deep fearful eyes. I realised in an instant that it was not an ordinary baby. I was playing with its tiny hands when, with a sound in my head like the roaring of an enraged lion, it suddenly scratched me, drawing blood. Then it flashed me a radiant toothless grin. I showed dad the scr
atches.
‘Let’s go and get you a plaster,’ he said.
‘That baby isn’t human,’ I said.
‘All babies are strange,’ dad replied.
We went out and bought a plaster and when we got back the shop was full. Chairs and benches were packed tight with visitors, traders, hawkers and children. Loud voices made the crowded spaces quiver. There was a perpetual din of heated arguments. The spaces were jammed with all kinds of human beings and the intra-spaces were packed with all kinds of shadows. The goat wandered amongst the strange crowd and no one seemed to notice. The evening drifted into the shop and everything slowly darkened. The walls yielded up their secret colour of green; the political posters were gone; the screaming baby was no longer there. The people went on arguing, gesticulating, and I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying or what their gestures meant. My head fairly whirled in the changed atmosphere of the airless shop. The goat rubbed its head against the legs of the men. Dad leant against a wall and lit a cigarette. The darkness pressed down on us.
‘We are under the sea,’ I said.
Dad was silent. The goat attempted to walk between dad’s legs, and I drove it away. Standing a short distance from us, the goat suddenly reared on its hind legs and gave vent to a chilling cry, like a woman in agony. The voices stopped. The woman with the bandage over her eye pushed her way over to us and said:
‘Follow me. Madame Koto will see you now.’
Dad crushed out his cigarette. We followed the woman down three long corridors. Animal skin lined the walls. In the third corridor there were drums at intervals next to the closed doors. Mirrors vibrated over the lintels. The corridor seemed endless. We went deeper and deeper, as if into another reality. The air smelt of cloves and river banks. In one room there were many goats. In another room there was a white horse with the heavy-lidded eyes of certain politicians. At the end of the corridor there was a sign which told us to take off our shoes. Dad took his off. I remained barefoot. There was pepper in the air. My eyes watered; I sneezed. We entered a big room. The walls were completely white. The ceiling was low. Dad had to stoop. On the walls there were preternatural feathers and flywhisks, empty bird cages and spears, animal hides and the head of an antelope. Beyond that room was another one in which a tumultuous gathering of women was holding a meeting. They fell silent when we came in. They had suffering faces, scoured with the religion of misery. They were petty traders, women without children, women with ailing children, women with angled faces and hollow cheeks and sober eyes, faces that never smiled. They were waiting to be called in to see Madame Koto and they had been arguing about who was next, whose case was more urgent.