Eddie Signwriter (2 page)

She had told all this to the police, and later to the doctor, who now repeated it to the gathered people, so bringing to a close his account of the last hours of Nana Oforiwaa’s life. He looked to the people seated behind him for a sign of whether they should stop for a rest, or whether he should continue with his story. They nodded to him to continue, since he had only begun and there was a long way to go. Somebody went to refill the doctor’s water jug, and when that person returned the doctor began again, setting out the rest of the story, from the moment the children’s absence was first noticed to the moment of their return, and further back still, to the events that preceded their disappearance.

All the while as he talked his eyes were fixed above the heads that
listened, gazing out through the door, where the black outlines of the trees stood against the speckled sky. His soft, even voice moved fluidly, like water, and soon it was as if the words had a natural life of their own. They were not coming from him, it seemed, but rose around him, as if conjured, until the sound of the words saturated everything and nothing was possible outside of them. And when it was over the people assembled there knew that what they had heard was true, though they did not quite remember how it had become so.

The doctor told of how earlier that Sunday Nana Oforiwaa had taken her niece to the Botanical Gardens after church. The boy had been with them too, and Nana Oforiwaa had gone into one of the glasshouses, leaving the children outside. When she returned both children had gone.

She had summoned the groundsmen, who searched the gardens for them, but that took over an hour on account of the size of the gardens, and all through that time Nana Oforiwaa had stayed, alone, at a table under the trees in the café. There were plenty who would have sat with her, but none dared. She sat, her arms folded heavily across her breasts, her mouth tight as a hairpin, and her eyes full of righteous hostility.

Later, they discovered from the park guards that the children had not gone out through any of the gates. But that meant nothing. There were many places in the fence where they could have slipped through. That was when Nana Oforiwaa decided that the children had purposefully disappeared. “Look now what has happened,” she said, voice raised, and the groundsmen stood quietly, heads lowered, as if they were responsible. But Nana Oforiwaa was more than angry: she had begun to panic, and the people said (her driver, the customers under the trees, the waitresses) that she feared now for her niece, she feared for what the boy had done with her, a girl she’d brought up as her own.

Everybody knew about Nana Oforiwaa’s niece and the boy, the half-foreigner. It was a matter of silent outrage, their shameless public intimacy, touching each other like the whites did on the streets of Accra. It was spoken of by everyone (and not in lowered tones either).
At weekends, people would see him waiting for her at the back of the Methodist hall, as the solemn hymns came rolling slowly down the hill, waiting to take her away, to couple like monkeys in the shade of the banana trees. Afterwards they’d come out into the church square, where people attending funerals congregated in their red and black robes, and walk together openly, her books crossed in his arms against his chest. Many times they were seen taking the shortcut back to the school, up the steep paths from the other side of the main road, down through the alleyways between the collapsing bungalows whose old steps were covered with moss, down the rocky paths on which washing was laid out to dry. And if they felt it was safe enough, and that they were not followed, they would do it again, stripping off their clothes in the tall grass, surrounded by the noise of women talking in their compounds, of carpentry and of sick children.

Now, in Nana Oforiwaa’s anger, in her indignation and impotence, many felt their own anger and indignation and impotence, which they had endured for many weeks; and it swept them up in a rush of sympathy. Nana Oforiwaa had not seen it all clearly before, they said, but now she had,
now
she understood. And such was the strength of the resentment unleashed against the boy that he might just as well have murdered Nana Oforiwaa with his own hands, while the girl remained immune from their anger, on account of the fact that she was Nana Oforiwaa’s niece, even if both she and the boy had run off that Sunday together.

And so, when on Monday morning the two of them had come walking up Aburi Main Road, passing Peduase Lodge, brazen as the day and ignorant still of what they had caused, two different receptions awaited them. As they reached the rest house they heard from inside the sound of a prayer meeting in full swing. They had not yet climbed the stairs when there emerged from the door a phalanx of churchwomen, bustling with the determination of martyrs, that pushed the boy aside (not violently, but as if they had not seen him) and swept up the girl into the bosom of holiness and propriety.

As for what had passed between Nana Oforiwaa and the teacher before the first search party set out to find the missing children, the
doctor could add little. What he could tell them he had learned from remarks the teacher had made to his companions during the night’s search: that Nana Oforiwaa had come directly from the Botanical Gardens to the school; that she was upset and anxious; that she’d wanted to search for the children herself, and immediately, but that the teacher had persuaded her to wait a little longer, arguing that the children might return on their own.

When later the doctor had tried to talk to the teacher himself, he told the crowd, he had met with no success. The teacher was, by this time, beyond rationality.

“He says things over and over again. Nonsense, unintelligible things …” the doctor said. “Otherwise he lies completely silent for hours, his whole body clenched …”

Then the doctor stopped talking. There was silence for a long time. Silence that was full of pity for the teacher. Though not only pity, but gratitude too for his carrying such grief. And as the doctor stood there, looking out over the quiet people, it occurred to him for the first time how much the grateful will forget.

And how much they will forgive.

W
HEN NANA OFORIWAA DIED
, the teacher was not permitted to attend the funeral. Nor the hearings that followed. It was two months after her death that he was again seen in the town. For two months he was kept away, in a compound somewhere on the other side of Koforidua, on three occasions restrained, and never alone. In the first days he could make little sense of what was around him. The hands in the starched shirts that brought him food. Smell of naphthalene, rain, and urine (his own). The doctor (who only later he recognized as his friend of thirty years). The green walls, in the bathroom the blue barrels of rainwater for bathing and for the toilet that was flushed for him. The red balcony of the bungalow, set aside from the others, which were white, and by the low wire fence that separated it off.

At night, the movement of his body turning in sleep wrung the sheets around him. By day he sat in a deck chair on the balcony in his pajamas, the intention of his thoughts twitching in his fingers. And then after a week he could no longer keep his memory at bay, and the contents of it spilled out, jumbled up and unjoined, but all of it
somewhere in there, and every bit as he had feared. It was like light streaming, blindingly white, leveling the world into a single dimension, still, like an unending plane of flooded water.

The doctor signaled that soon it would be time to bring the teacher home. Not long afterwards he was returned to the town, though it was a further two months before he resumed his duties. During his convalescence an informal routine regulated his waking hours—the visits of the doctor in the morning, a walk before lunch, his afternoon sleep, and then the evening visits, as the prominent people of the town took it in turns to call upon him. Although there was nothing to constrain him during the time of his recovery, he had no desire to disturb the new order into which he had been returned. His life grew back slowly. The gaps filled in.

There were times still that he asked after Nana Oforiwaa, that he asked after the children. It didn’t matter that they were gone, it seemed; that Nana Oforiwaa was dead; that the boy had been sent away; and that the girl had been removed to Kumasi to complete her education, where she had distant family that would take her. Still he wanted them to visit, and did not understand why they could not. Were there recriminations, was there anger?—he could understand if there were, that he could. But surely nothing that couldn’t be worked out by speaking it all through? Yes, they had all gone a little far in their different ways, even himself. Himself as much as any of them. But the truth was that nobody had meant any harm, none of them, even if they’d been forgetful of themselves, thoughtless, unwise—all those things perhaps, but not to do harm.

He tried to explain—to the old woman, to the doctor—but didn’t seem to be able to make himself understood. And so for a period he stopped talking at all. He saw no point. He refused to answer questions. Refused even to communicate his own needs—food, water, medication, help in getting up—but instead would point or gesture, and when visitors came around he’d pretend to be asleep, and would listen to them whispering to each other at the foot of his bed.

A full week of silence gave him time to gather his thoughts, and one evening, as the doctor was showing visitors out of his room, he decided to try again. He waited for the latch to click shut, and then
he opened his eyes and called to the doctor, whispering as loud as he could.

The doctor turned and looked at the patient. The doctor’s hand was still flat on the face of the closed door. These were the first words he’d heard in a while from the teacher, and it made him smile—the teacher, wrapped up in his blankets, calling out to him like a guilty child.

“Hello,” the teacher whispered.

“Hello,” the doctor replied, and came to sit on the teacher’s bed.

The teacher tried to sit up, but only managed to lift himself a little up the pillow.

“I thought you’d forgotten how to talk,” the doctor said.

The teacher snorted.

He said, “Now I am ready to talk. Before I was not ready.”

“What is it?” the doctor said, picking up a medicine bottle beside the teacher’s bed and reading the label.

“Kwaku, we need to get the boy. You need to get him here. This is important. Listen—”

The doctor gave the bottle a small shake, then put it down. “John,” he said, and then he began to explain, as he had many times before, and would many times again. How the boy was gone. How they had to send him away. That they did it on the exact day of Nana Oforiwaa’s death. They didn’t even call his parents, but came to find him in the afternoon, and they took him from the dining room of the school where meals were still being served, and they put him in a taxi and told it to take him back to wherever he came from, with a message to his mother to come pick up his belongings within a week.

The teacher would listen. He would nod gravely, and seem to understand, but the very next visit he would ask again after the boy. The doctor tried to be patient. He needed to keep the teacher settled, and isolated too until the teacher could better fend for himself. The questions that the teacher asked, with more and more lucidity, were dangerous. They told too much.

“John, enough,” the doctor replied eventually, allowing his frustration to get the better of him, “For your own good. The boy is gone. Do you understand? I need you to understand.”

“Kwaku—” the teacher began to plead, but the doctor would not let him continue.

“John,” he said, and then he hesitated, since they had not talked directly before of what had happened on the day of the storm—“for the memory of Nana Oforiwaa.”

As soon as the words were out he saw their effect in the expression on the teacher’s face—of slight. As if the words had wronged him. Though a moment later it was gone. And whatever it was inside the teacher that had jumped up and grasped the knowledge fell back again, and all that remained on his face was a look of tiredness, and a few moments later the teacher closed his eyes, and his head went to the side of the pillow.

Perhaps it was to soften the shock of it, the doctor reflected on what he had seen. How much better it would be if the teacher could just realize one day that something had always been true, without having to encounter it for a first time. But the time was nearing that the doctor would have to start getting the knowledge through, in the way that the teacher now absorbed knowledge—through repetition.

And so, when he felt the time was right, the doctor raised the issue again, as the two of them sat together outside the teacher’s house in the late afternoon. Cups of sweet tea were on the table between them, steaming, and a soft breeze moved through the canopy in the trees surrounding the plot. The teacher had lost a lot of weight, and the shirt in which he had been dressed was now too big for him. His neck was too thin for the stiff collar, and his hands, sticking out of the ends of his cuffs, sat dumbly on the tabletop, as if they didn’t quite belong to him.