by Ben Okri
2
OF SIGNS AND WHITE ANTELOPES
SIGNS MULTIPLIED ALL over our area. Ade had another epileptic fit in front of our compound, and when he was calmer he complained that spirits were marching through him. Later he saw yellow birds flying in diamond formation over the forest. He said the birds were on fire. Afterwards children began to have strange fits along our street. Women talked about the yellow birds they had seen rising from the earth in the morning. The dreams of the road became frightening. In the afternoons, when everything was somnolent, the bushes caught fire. Even patches of the road burst into flames. The fire didn’t burn for long. Later we heard that chickens and goats had mysteriously combusted. That night it rained and in the morning our street was shivering with frogs. Then the oddest thing started to happen. Women began to disappear from their husband’s houses. Young girls vanished. At night we heard the haunting threnody of multiplied female voices from the impenetrable screen of trees.
While all this took place, mum slept, and woke, and didn’t speak. She went about as if she were in two places at the same time, her body here, her spirit somewhere else. And during the last day of her sleep and the first day of her silence – politics returned to our area with its loudest voice yet. The vans of the political parties were bigger than before. The noise they made was worse. They brought great truck-loads of supporters. And they now resorted to using a perversion of traditional masquerades to scare us into voting for them.
At night the masquerades of both parties bounded up and down the streets with whips and sticks, pikes and machetes. Terrorising us, banging on our doors, they shouted our names in guttural voices: they warned that they had people watching us in the polling booths to report on who we had voted for in secret. The political masquerades, the thugs and the supporters invaded our lives and changed the air of the street. Soon no one was sure who was really the enemy. People died from inexplicable poisonings. Meetings were held by elders of the street to discuss the new terror, but the political masquerades disrupted one meeting and set the house on fire. We became afraid. Every day we listened to endless rumours to find out which side had become stronger overnight.
During all this Madame Koto had become more remote. People began to say they couldn’t even remember what she looked like. Then we heard that her fabulous bar was now the ghetto headquarters of the Party of the Rich. When the dreaded masquerades chanted at night, with thugs clanging their machetes on our doors, we thought of Madame Koto with mounting bitterness. The people of the area avoided her bar, but she grew more prosperous anyway. She sent the children of five poor families to school. She gave a scholarship to a blind girl. She had long queues of people at her bar who had travelled vast distances to bring their impossible problems for her to solve. Women who wanted her protection came with gifts and paid homage. Her fame had travelled a hundred secret routes and had spread all over the country. Her legend had become so pervasive that we could no longer give her a human face.
The women who disappeared into the forest, whose poignant songs set fire to our dreams every night, grew greater in number. In fact we could no longer distinguish their different voices, and so we had no idea how many they had become. Those who were out late at night, who suffered the agony of the women’s piercing melodies, said that sometimes they had caught fleeting glimpses of white antelopes with glittering eyes in the forest. The antelopes were ghostly and splendid and when they saw human beings they vanished into the trees. No one had caught any of the antelopes. The trees went on being felled and the women’s voices became more painful in their beauty. And on the day mum woke from her sleep we heard it said that a hunter had succeeded in killing one of the white antelopes. The next day it was rumoured that he had been sacrificed to the road, run over by one of the trucks of politics.
3
THE INVENTION OF DEATH
MUM ROSE FROM her sleep as if she were emerging from a mythic river. Her hair flowed brightly round her face. Her skin had been washed a marvellous roseate colour by her dreams. Enchanted, dad kept staring at her as if she had once again become the very image of his first love. Mum rose from her long sleep and bore herself with the serenity of a princess. She was beautiful and silent, as if her sleep had given her strange powers. Her eyes were gentle and her poor clothes shone on her. Dad wasn’t sure how to treat the new apparition that was mum. He bathed at dawn, combed his hair, polished his boots, and made me read to him from volumes of love poetry while he stared at mum with wondering eyes, nodding his head in silent astonishment at her enigmatic transformation.
Dad changed. He woke early, went off to work reluctantly, and rushed back earlier than normal. He stopped drinking and alarmed me by cleaning his teeth with chewing sticks almost every hour. He started using perfumes with odd smells, he bathed far too often, washed his clothes too frequently, and began to doubt his appearance. He kept asking me if I thought he was handsome. For many days he did not know how to behave towards mum. He didn’t know whether he had been forgiven. Something new had entered mum’s spirit and because we couldn’t comprehend it we were a little afraid of her. For days dad spoke to her tenderly, self-abasingly even, but she remained within the nimbus of her silence. There was always an enigmatic smile on her face. A glimmering light danced in her eyes. In silence she cleaned the place, scrubbed the floor, washed our clothes and aired the room. She brought flowers from the edge of the forest and arranged them in bottles. She lit sticks of incense and watched the smoke-spirals occupy the air. Everything she touched shone.
Our lives brightened. Good air and wonderful lights flowed through our room. We moved about in the limpid atmosphere of mum’s bliss. In the mornings her singing woke us up. She sang us to sleep at night. Her spirit soared around us. She developed a curious magnetism. One morning a white bird flew into our room and landed on her shoulder. With a smile on her face she took it in her hands and the bird stayed with us for three days. Afterwards she took to wearing white dresses and white slippers. Her hair dazzled with health. She even moved soundlessly. When she went to the market she brought back the most amazing fishes, lovely vegetables, and bread which had in it the perpetual essence of childhood. Her cooking tasted sublime. When she fetched water from the well the water seemed luminous as if it contained an invisible star, or as if it had come from a heavenly fountain. Candles she lit burned blue. Her spirit superceded dad’s, and her radiance drove all the darkness away. Her silence healed our unrest, dissolved our fears. We were never ill, and we slept beautifully. We were so happy in our silence and with our poverty that one day I said to mum:
‘Death is coming.’
She touched me on the head, and said nothing. But that night, while dad was polishing his boots and staring at her as if at a special being who had come to bless our lives, she took me in her lap, fondled my hair, and told me this story.
‘Once upon a time,’ she said, in a voice that was also a mood, ‘human beings were happy and they lived for ever. They did not know death. When it was time for them to change, a light would surround them, and a bird would fly out from the centre of the light. At that moment the person was being re-born – sometimes in the same place, sometimes in another. Human beings understood everything. They had no language as such. With their thoughts they could talk to trees and animals and to one another. There were no wars. People didn’t travel far. And they understood the language of angels. They could actually see angels.’
Mum paused and looked at me with twinkling eyes. She smiled again, and continued.
‘Then one day a rainbow appeared on the earth. It was very beautiful. Where it touched, the earth turned into gold. Then a young man said: ‘I saw that rainbow first. It is mine.’ The men began to argue. They fought. The young man killed his best friend in the fight, and claimed the rainbow. When he claimed it, he became different. He knew hunger. Darkness entered him. He wanted new things, new places, new experiences. He saw the women differently, and he wanted them. There was one in particular whom he wanted more
than all the others, so he didn’t even bother to go to the chief, her father. He went straight to the girl and said: ‘If I can have you, I will give you half of my rainbow.’ It came to pass. The girl became different. She too wanted new things, new experiences. She hungered for dark unknown places. The young man and the girl caused trouble everywhere with their new desires and their ambitions. And because of them fighting broke out and blood was spilled. There were retaliations. And people’s time came up when it wasn’t supposed to and they were re-born too quickly and so they didn’t live long. Corruption came upon the people and grew fat. Diseases dwelled in them and Misery had many children amongst them. The world turned upside down. Creation became confusion.’
Mum paused again. Dad had stopped polishing his boots to listen to her story. He stared at her with eyes wide open, his gestures frozen, every part of him alert and listening, caught in mum’s spell. Touching me again on the head, the smile still playing on her lips, she carried on with the story.
‘God saw all this misery and darkness, and was not happy. So he sent Death down amongst human beings to remind them of the miraculous life they had before. Death lived amongst them. Everyone was miserable, but Death was happy. In fact he was very happy. The people did not recognise him and did not listen to his message. They went on as before, increasing their misfortune, making things worse. Soon things got so bad that the people no longer understood the language of trees and animals. They no longer saw angels and came to believe that such beings had never existed. They no longer understood one another. They became greedy. They broke into tribes. They had wars all the time. And they moved away from the great garden that was their home and travelled far out into unknown darknesses. Death became so angry because human beings did not respect him and did not heed his message that he decided to take the law into his own hands. He drove them deeper into the darkness. He laid waste their habitations, destroyed their means of living, and scattered them all over the earth. Some went to places where ice fell from the sky, and some went to where the sun blazed from the heavens. But Death became the king of the world. He was a very wicked king. He punished human beings and trees and animals for every conceivable reason. His punishment was final. There was no appeal. And then he sent out his children to be the kings of all the scattered tribes of humankind.
‘God, seeing that Death had not only disobeyed him but also tried to rule the world, was not happy at all. So he sent a little blue bird down to earth. When the bird arrived, it turned into a child.’
There was another pause.
‘Then what did the child do?’ I asked.
‘The child travelled to the kingdom where Death was King. He found the King and said: “I have come to kill you.” The King in fact nearly died from laughing: “How can you kill Death?” he asked. The child smiled and said: “With love.” Then the child left. Afterwards Death became angry at the threat and rode through the world killing off people. He poisoned people’s hearts. He destroyed everything that was visible till there were only skeletons everywhere. He did this out of arrogance; he thought that because he could kill therefore he was God. And when he had completed his destruction of everything the child came to him and said: “You did what I expected you to do. Your work is finished. New human beings are being created from the old. From now on you will be king only over those who believe in you. God has put one new thing into people and that is love. If people find it in themselves and keep it, they cannot die. If they lose it, they are yours.” Then the child became a bird again and flew back up to heaven. And that is how Death was killed by a small bird,’ mum said, ending her story.
‘So is Death dead?’ I asked.
‘Death is everywhere, listening, waiting to jump on those who believe in his religion.’
When mum finished her story dad was smiling. We were all silent for a long time. Then dad got up and laid out our food. Mum didn’t eat. She watched us with shining eyes as we ate. When the plates had been cleared, and when we were sitting again in a semi-circle of silence, I told mum about the good spirit who helped us while she was away. Mum didn’t say anything. Dad said:
‘Good spirits are always on our side, my son.’
Mum got up and prepared the bed. Dad lit a stick of incense. I fetched my mat. Soon mum was asleep. We watched over her as she slept. Dad didn’t dare get in the bed with her. It had been like that for a while now. Dad slept with me on the floor instead. Throughout that night, unable to contain his new awe of mum, he kept saying, in the mischievous voice of a child:
‘My wife has changed! God has given me a new wife! She has been touched by angels!’
* * *
That same night, as dad lay asleep beside me on the floor, mum came and woke me up. She looked very intense, as if her illumination, her serenity, were a higher kind of flame that was burning up her aura. She took me to the far side of the room and, in a low voice, said:
‘I know what is going to happen. I have been shown it all. Don’t be afraid.’
She sat on the bed and didn’t say anything for a long while. Her eyes were brilliant in the dark.
4
THE PRECIOUS STONES OF SLEEP
DEATH AND IRREGULAR miracles found our street. In the forest the singing of the women grew more elysian. Lightning struck one night. The sky split open. I saw fishes swimming in the cracks.
People in our area claimed that the women of the forest were seers, that they had powers of transformation, and that they turned into white antelopes. It was also claimed that the women had discovered the secrets of herbs and bark, of the earth and the night. They understood the language of trees and butterflies. It was said that an old woman was their leader. No one knew who she was or where she came from. The men of our area began to suspect their wives of belonging to a new, secret sect. More women disappeared from their homes. It was whispered that the women of the forest could see into the future. Some said that the old woman, their leader, was blind. Some said she was an owl. Others maintained that the women, seduced by the spirit of the forest, were against Madame Koto and her ascendant cult. And mum surprised me one night by telling me that the women were singing of the forgotten ways of our ancestors. They were warning us not to change too much, not to disregard the earth.
Things got so confused that when we heard that the Party of the Poor forbade anyone killing the white antelopes we didn’t know what to believe any more. We didn’t even know if it were true that some men, unable to bear the sublime voices of the women, had run off to join them in the forest. Then one night a green leopard with burning copper eyes was seen sitting on a branch. Not long afterwards night-runners with their flaming masks and their silver machetes invaded our area. They pursued children and women, and chanted songs of terror. Some say Death danced with them and took away three of their victims.
With the world changing, my mother silent, my father struck dumb by her transformation, and with bizarre omens populating our lives, I became very lonely. I went to Ade’s place and I wasn’t allowed to see him because he was being treated by herbalists. I wandered up our street, towards the main road, and got lost. Then I came upon the timber-workers, the carpenters, and part-time road-builders who were engaged in the construction of the magnificent dais for the great political rally. I watched them for a while, not noticing anything unusual in the air. And then I found my way back home, troubled by a feeling that the world was becoming overcrowded in ways I couldn’t perceive.
For many nights dad couldn’t pluck up the courage to sleep with mum on the bed. Dad looked sadder as mum became more beautiful, more aloof, like a seraphic priestess. Every night dad dreamt up a new strategy for finding a way into the bed, and every night he failed. He told us endless stories. Many of them were about marriage and love and were so convoluted and full of impenetrable hints that they lost me altogether. Mum didn’t seem affected by them either because when dad finished his stories she got up, lit a stick of incense, went to bed, and slept instantly. Dad took his failure badly. He v
ented his foul temper on me. When mum had gone to sleep, dad would twist and turn, curse and writhe, on the hard floor. One night, he suddenly hit me on the head.
‘What’s wrong with your mother, eh?’ he asked gruffly.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Hasn’t she told you anything?’
‘No.’
‘Azaro, tell me the truth.’
‘She said she knows what is going to happen.’
‘To who?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What about me? Did she say anything about me?’
‘No,’ I said.
He hit me again.
‘Find out about me, you hear? Ask her about me.’
‘I will try.’
Dad turned and creaked his bones all night in his misery. When he began snoring mum came and shook me again. We went to the far corner. She seemed feverish in her strange happiness.
‘Look!’ she said, directing my attention with her voice.
I beheld a kaleidoscope of white and rainbow lights in her hands. She said she had brought these jewels and precious stones and luminous cowries from her dreams. Her cupped hands glittered with wondrous colours, iridescent stones, pearls whose brilliance opened up lightning flashes of joy in the eyes. The lights from the stones illuminated her face. Drops of sweat glistened on her forehead. Turning the lustrous stones over in her hands, she said: