Eddie Signwriter (20 page)

The teacher returned quickly to his quarters. He poured himself a glass of water, then went into his study and closed the door. He sat down at his desk, where less than three weeks before he’d been sitting after classes and had heard the voice of the boy downstairs for the first time in years, then the familiar sound of his whistling—a new tune, but the same tone, the same lips pursed around the same needle of air.

The teacher had looked up, then returned to his work, as he heard the sound of the boy mounting the stairs, then the footfalls reach the landing outside his room. The boy was at the door. The teacher had looked up a second time, then finished the sentence he’d been writing in the margin of the paper open before him, beside the pile of forty at his right hand, bound in faded pink ribbon, and eight at his left hand.

“Strong point,” the teacher had written. “Compare Okonkwo with the bureaucrat in Ayi Kwei Armah.” He had assigned the paper a grade, closed and placed it on the pile to his right, taken another from the pile on his left, set it squarely before him, sat back, and waited.

Then the door to his study had swung open and the boy stood on the landing, an expression of stupid satisfaction on his face, and challenge in the posture of his man’s body, and the teacher had felt the dryness in his throat but had not swallowed, because he had not wanted the boy to know the dryness in his throat, and mistake the swallowing for fear.

As on that day, so on the day of Festus Ankrah’s departure, the teacher stayed in his room. Towards evening the old woman who tended the house knocked at the door to announce that she was going home. There was no response. On the other side of the door the teacher sat at his desk, surrounded by his papers, though now he paid them no attention. He’d long since lost track of where he was, what he’d been reading. For a long time he’d been thinking. But now he just sat. The visit of Festus Ankrah had disturbed him more than he’d thought. Now the teacher felt the beginning of a fever. His skin was wet, his muscles alert. In the room he was sitting at his desk, but inside he was crouching, did not know whether to run or wait. Run or wait. Run.

Wait …

How the time had passed he could not say. But he knew—when the old woman knocked on the door, and a minute later let herself out—that he could not spend another moment there. That he too had to leave the house, had to walk, though where … but in a moment he knew.

Unsteadily he lifted himself from his chair, stepped round the table, descended the stairs and swung the wire door open. The sun had already slipped down the ridge, and rested beneath the horizon. It left a cool afterlight, that deepened colour and slowed motion, and even the shallowest objects were lengthened by their shadows. He felt the coolness of the hour against his flesh, the temperature of his body rise to meet it, dampness on the bare skin. The first signs of sickness announced themselves at the end of the nerves.

In front of him the forest rose up the side of the hill. Everything not leaf, vine or trunk was a contourless wall of darkness. Sounds came out of it: the ubiquitous undertone of crickets, a sharper trill, a sound of birds, three deep plumbing notes repeated, like a stone reaching water from the bottom of a well. A little further down the path round his yard the water tower rose three stories into the air, and the wind rustled in the reeds growing at its base as tall as a man, in the mulch of water-logged soil.

Then he passed round the side of a series of storage sheds and up onto the main plateau. The school buildings were spread out to one side: the administrative offices, a square of lawn, the whitewashed slatted cabinet of a weather station raised on tall legs. To the other side he could see the road that would take him down towards the town. Ten minutes’ brisk walk would get him only to the gate. If he didn’t hurry he’d get there after dark.

He walked faster. Breathing was like breathing through a wet rag. He felt the cold jewels begin to form on his forehead. He clenched his teeth against it.
Not yet
, he thought, and immediately the words fell into the rhythm of his strides, became part of his walking—
Not yet. Not yet
. A little further. A little further from the town. And then it was as if the part of his body with which he was concentrating had begun to think on its own. Not something foreign inside him, but a version of his own voice, which the sickness had drawn out, lifting the silence off it—exposing the nerves, all the channels in the brain ready to receive experience, only a little dusty, but not sealed, not grown over, not healed.

I am choosing to do this
, he reminded himself—only it was the voice saying it:
I am choosing to do this. I am choosing
.

Though he knew in fact that all along he had never chosen. That already, in those first weeks at the rest house, all those years before, when it first started, already it had been happening a long time. Already it had a direction of its own, a steady pull, taking him along, taking them all along. Yet there must have been a moment, when the four of them sat together, and the boy looked at Nana Oforiwaa and the teacher looked at the boy, and then the boy looked at him, and they all knew what they knew. There must have been a time when
someone first started it. A first tacit consent. A first
I-will-not-stop-you
. Before words became impossible, and nothing could be acknowledged, and anything could happen, and did, and the strength of that silence took hold, and still held, all those years later, when the boy returned and still he could not accuse the teacher.

Accuse the teacher of what? What was taken from the boy that he did not give himself? Are we not all responsible for our actions? Although it had not been necessary to use these words. The boy had not returned to the ridge for recrimination. Anger did not drive him. Not after the first show of confidence, which melted away in a moment at the teacher’s first gesture of kindness.

It had been too easy for the teacher to absolve himself, at least while the boy was there. Although only at the end of the boy’s visit did the teacher know what it was that he’d come for. What the boy needed was for the despair inside him to be released. Because that was what the boy was full of—not anger, but despair.

And he could have given it, the teacher knew, and thought to himself now as he walked. So easily he could have given what the boy wanted. Except when the moment came, he couldn’t. When to himself he’d said it a thousand times before, the teacher could not say it to the boy, who—too weak, weakened by being so vulnerable to this man—could not himself ask the question straight out. And so in place of an apology, which the teacher had been ready to give, the boy asked for something else—an explanation. “Why,” he asked, “did you not protect me?” “Protect you?” the teacher had replied. “Protect you from what?” invoking the things that could not be said, and so ending the boy’s hopes, when what the teacher should have said—how he knows it now, and wants to shout it out—was that he did!
He did!
But in the end, too late.

Now the teacher quickened his pace. He came to the top of the path, to the gate, then turned right. A pineapple seller beside an electricity pole raised her hat to the teacher. He barely noticed, nodding just in time. A dog ran out across his path, and stopped in the road, yapping. Its jittering feet threw up a scuff of dust. Its gums were bared, its tail wagging. But he walked straight past the dog, and it
scurried into the grass. The teacher strode on and the town fell away and then he was out of the town. The light was still deep but a little deeper, and the shadows a little longer, and the soft wind swished in the grass and lifted the branches on the palms with a crinkling, rattling sound.

The teacher’s clothes fluttered around him, the wind picked up. The sky, a brief silver, began turning metal gray. The shadows began to draw in, closing vision down to a few barely distinguishable tones of blue and black. Soon the line between path and forest grew indistinct, and the teacher moved now by sense. The regular beat of his footfalls on the road, the sound of rubber against compacted earth assured him that he still had the path. He sensed the gradient through his tired ankles. Besides this, his shallow breathing, and his heart, beating its rhythm in his ears, against his forehead—not hard, not insistent, but
there
.

Then the forest started becoming the night. The small shavings of the moon’s light lay on the path. Then the forest
was
the night, having dropped away either side into a ravine, and he felt the darkness, unencumbered by the wood and the flesh of vegetation, flowing across the path.

Now he’d arrived. He took a few paces onto the bridge. He stopped, let his senses sharpen. His breath slowed. He walked to the railing, let its weight support him. Somewhere in the darkness the sound of the river, in between the sound of the wind in the reeds. He leaned over, trying to see into the steep ravine. How weak the eyes in darkness, how useless. He could see nothing. Had it changed? In three years had it changed? His eyes were blind in the darkness. But his memory searched for the path leading down the side of the ravine, that traversed the slope almost horizontally, then turned, and passed beneath itself in the other direction barely two meters below its last pass, and two meters above its next. He remembered the wet grass growing over the track. The treacherous slipperiness of the stones. And somewhere below, after the precipitous winding, a leveling off, and a softness underfoot, made of the leaves’ mulch and the sheets of fern.

That is where he’d stood all those years before. He did not have to go there now to know. And in his mind he saw the rain coming down in slanting sheets, and remembers being surprised to see a figure further down the path, stumbling through the reeds—a shape he knew well. As he approached, wondering what she was doing there, he saw her lose her footing and slip, and go down on her shoulder, her left leg under her body. For a moment her face was in the water, water was flowing in her hair, as he made his way towards her, water shearing down around him, water rushing in the river at his feet. He saw her try to get up on one arm, but either it slipped, or she wasn’t strong enough. Then she saw him. “O—John,” she said, waiting for him to come and help. She let herself relax, shifting her body round away from him to untwist her leg, which was facing down the slope. The teacher crouched beside her. She felt his presence, familiar and safe, and the current flowing round his haunches as he got down, before it flowed round her. She waited for his touch—an arm under hers. But when it came it was not what she expected. Just his palm on the back of her neck, holding her. “John?” she asked, but had only time to ask it once, as her head was turned, and her face was in the water again. She felt a leaf catch against her cheek, and though she tried to move she could not. Then his other hand was on hers, stroking her wrist, and all she heard was his voice, telling her that soon it would be over, soon things would be back again as they always were, before the boy and her niece, what they’d made her do. “Shhh,” she heard him say, “shhhh, Nana,” and then the sound of his voice became the sound of the water, flowing against her head, and the calm settled round, and the darkness drew in.

K
WASI DANKWA
, setting out on his journey, slips out before dawn, leaving the house, unnoticed. During the night it has rained, and water has gathered against the street curbs, reflecting the gray sky. A child is washing outside a shop. A woman is sweeping the ground in front of her stall. Another day is about to begin in Tudu and Adabraka. Another day is gathering, preparing itself, but when it comes he’ll be long gone.

With a false name he gets the last seat on the bus to Tamale. His family will expect him to head west. So he’ll travel north, to Ouaga, and then on to Mali, and in Bamako pick up the train to Dakar.

In the bus he sits up front, wedged between excess baggage and bags of rice. But in front of him there is only the driver and the road, and as the bus travels it feels as if he alone is pushing through the scenery; that the tangled forests are wrapping round him, the dense green hills giving way, the gray clouds rising up from the forest.

The bus travels on towards Kumasi, muscling its way through the village traffic, past road works, accidents, the carcasses of old accidents.
Where the cars and buses and trucks bunch up, people appear from the forest and stalls are set up beside the road. Yams fry in skillets over flaming branches hewn from the trees on the sidings. Kenke is wrapped up in leaves, and bowls of chilies balance on the young girls’ heads.

But after Afrancho the road begins to clear. The clouds begin drawing back and folding up, becoming a thin layer miles up in the sky. The land flattens, the trees start dispersing and the horizon reveals itself—pale blue sky, anticipating the dust and heat further north.

He sleeps the night in Tamale, above a shop near the market. Up at dawn, he catches the first vehicle north. The clouds are down again, but the earth is flat and dotted densely with trees. None of this he has seen before. As he travels through the morning he feels the strangeness of the land begin to surround him.