The Famished Road (17 page)

When I awoke the moon was still in the sky, like a ghost unwilling to disappear under the force of daylight. It was dawn. A few people were standing over me, with puzzlement on their faces.

‘He’s not dead!’ one of them cried.

I got up quickly; they came towards me with arms outstretched; I fled from them. I ran through the quickening dawn, with the sun riding the sky. The air heated, the sand warmed underfoot; and women of the new African churches, who wore white smocks and rang bells, cried out to the sleepingworld to awake and repent. I passed prophets emerging from the forest with dew and leaves in their hair, cobwebs meshing their beards, their eyes demented with visions. I passed sorcerers with machetes that crackled with flames in the morning light, making sacrifices at dawn of red cocks, who poured gnomic chants on the untrodden roads. I also passed workers who had woken early and with sleepy faces made their ways through the mist, pierced by the sun, to the garages and bus-stops.

My feet were fresh on the paths. Dew wet my ankles. Hunger dried my lips. Newsvendors roused the dawn with their horns, announcing to the awakening world the scandals of the latest political violence. The industrious women of the city, who carried basins of peppered aromatic foods on their heads, tempted the appetite of the world with their sweet voices. The worms of the road ate into the soles of my feet.

I came to another familiar place; the passionate chants of the muezzin roused the Muslim world to prayer. I had turned a corner, and had gone up a path that became a track, when three men in blue smocks rushed at me. I tore into the bushes, ran amongst the trees, and cried out into the echoing forest. Birds scattered from branches and pods fell from the treetops. I shook off the men, but I went on running, for the world seemed populated with people intent on me for one obscure reason or another.

While running through the forest paths I stepped on an enamel plate of sacrifices to the road. The plate was rich with the offerings of fried yams, fish, stewed snails, palm oil, rice and kola-nuts. Shell fragments and little pins stuck in the soles of my feet. I started to bleed. I was so hungry that I ate what I could of the offerings to the road and afterwards my stomach swelled and visions of road-spirits, hungry and annoyed, weaved in my brain. I went on bleeding and a black cat with golden eyes followed the trail of my blood. My head boiled with hallucinations. I walked on broken glass, on the hot sand of bushpaths, on hot new tarmac.

The roads seemed to me then to have a cruel and infinite imagination. All the roads multiplied, reproducing themselves, subdividing themselves, turning in on themselves, like snakes, tails in their mouths, twisting themselves into labyrinths. The road was the worst hallucination of them all, leading towards home and then away from it, without end, with too many signs, and no directions. The road became my torment, my aimless pilgrimage, and I found myself merely walking to discover where all the roads lead to, where they end.

And then I came to a place where I thought the roads terminated. An iroko tree had been felled across it. The tree was mighty, its trunk gnarled and rough like the faces of ancient warriors. It looked like a great soul dead at the road’s end. Beyond, the road sheered into a deep pit. Across, on the other side, were sand-carrying lorries. Strange sounds lisped in the tree trunk, voices echoed in its hollows. I sat on a branch of the tree to ease my feet. And then, while the road-spirits raged in me, I saw a two-legged dog emerge from the forest. It stopped and regarded me, whimpering frequently. I was so amazed to see the dog standing on only two legs that I forgot my hunger and pain.

It had a left forefoot and a right hindfoot and it stood, wobbling, as though on invisible crutches. The dog stared at me. And with a heavy, inconsolable sadness it turned and limped away. In my astonishment at seeing it walk I followed it as it limped on curiously.

The two-legged dog led me through the forest. It was a lean dog, with intense eyes and a sensitive tail and flea-ridden ears. I wanted to get rid of the fleas but I restrained myself and followed it at a distance, till I came to a clearing. I recognised the clearing at once. The dog limped on deeper into the forest. I watched it go and it stopped only once to look at me. I waved, but the dog did not understand my gesture. It went on limping, a solitary and heroic dog, survivingwith only two legs and a sad face.

I carried on home. At the edge of the forest I saw Madame Koto with a plate of chicken and yam in her hands. The white beads weren’t round her neck. She stopped at the roadside, looked in all directions to make sure no one was about, and proceeded with her passionate supplications. I watched her secret fervour. When she had finished with her praying and chanting, she lit a candle and put it on the plate. She placed a finger of kaoline and some cowries beside the candle. Then she straightened, undid her kerchief, looked in all directions, and hurried away. I passed her road offering. I scurried past her barfront. I ran home.

DAD WAS SITTING on his three-legged chair, smoking a cigarette. There were plates of uneaten food on the table. Mum was in the bed. The window was open and the light that came in increased the unhappiness in the room. Mum rushed at me and threw her arms round me, as if to protect me from punishment. She made me sit on the bed and began weeping. Dad didn’t move.

‘Where have you been?’ he asked, in a dangerous voice.

It was clear that neither of them had slept that night. There were circles of sleeplessness round Dad’s eyes. Mum looked as though she had lost weight overnight.

‘Where have you been?’ ‘I was lost.’

‘How did you get lost?’

‘I played and got lost.’ ‘How?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What about Madame Koto?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘She came looking for you last night.’ I said nothing.

‘You didn’t tell her where you were going.’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Have you eaten?’ Mum asked.

‘Don’t ask him such questions,’ Dad said, loudly. ‘First he must tell me where he has been.’

‘Let him sleep.’

‘That’s how you women spoil your children.’

‘Let him rest, then he will talk.’

‘If he doesn’t talk he won’t rest. He has prevented my going to work. I want to know what he has been doing.’

‘Azaro, tell your father where you’ve been.’

‘I got lost.’

‘Where?’ Dad’s voice rose.

He sat up straight. His chair wobbled.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You are a wicked child,’ he said, reaching for the cane he had beside him, which I hadn’t noticed.

He came at me; Mum stood between us; Dad shoved her away and grabbed my neck with his powerful hand and bent me over and flogged me. I didn’t cry out. He whipped me and I kicked him and escaped from his grip and he followed me and whipped my legs and my back and my neck. I ran round the room, knocking things over in my flight, and Dad went on caning me. Mum tried to hold him, to restrain his fury, but Dad went on whipping me and he flogged her too and Mum screamed. I hadn’t uttered a sound and Dad was so enraged that he went on thrashing me harder and harder till I ran out of the room, into the compound. He bounded after me but I fled out to the housefront and up the street and I stopped only when I was a good distance away. Dad gave up chasing me, but he stood threateningme with the cane. I stayed where I was. He called me. I didn’t move.

‘Come here now, you vicious child!’

I still didn’t move. Dad got very angry because he couldn’t get his big hands on me.

‘Come here now, or you won’t eat!’

I didn’t care about food or sleep or anything. He suddenly made a sprint for me and I ran towards Madame Koto’s place and he caught me just before I got there. He grabbed me by the back of my shorts and lifted me up and whipped me and dragged me home. He was so frightening in his fury that I screamed as if he were a spirit that was abducting me to some unknown destination. When he dragged me into the room he tossed me on the bed and thrashed me till sweat poured down his chest. When he was satisfied that he had whipped the wanderlust out of me he threw down the pulped cane and went to have a bath.

I came out all over in heavy welts. I groaned on the bed, swearing a terrible spiritchild’s vengeance. Mum sat beside me. When Dad returned from the bathroom he was still angry.

‘You are a problem to me,’ he said. ‘A problem child. When I think of all the things I could have done—if it wasn’t for you.’

He started towards me again, but Mum interposed firmly and said:

‘Haven’t you flogged him enough?’

‘No. I want to thrash him so thoroughly that next time he will think of us before he gets lost again.’

‘He’s had enough. His feet are bleeding.’

‘So what? If I were a severe father I would put pepper on his wounds to teach him an everlasting lesson.’

Dad sounded more furious than ever; but Mum stood firm, determined that no more beating should be visited on me. Grumbling, complaining about his lot, about how I held him back, how much of a better child he had been to his parents, Dad put on his drab khaki work-clothes. Mum tried to get me to eat. I didn’t want to eat while Dad was around. I had been crying in a steady monotone.

‘If you don’t shut up now,’ he thundered, reaching for a boot, ‘I will thrash you with this!’

‘Yes, and kill him,’ Mum said.

I went on with my steady monotonous weeping. Further punishment couldn’t make me feel worse than I already did. He dressed in a bad temper. When he was finished he picked up the cane and came over to me and said:

‘If you move from this room today or tomorrow you might as well stay lost, because when I finish with you . .

He deliberately didn’t complete his sentence, for greater effect. Then he brought the cane down lightly on my head, and stormed out of the room. I was relieved to see him go.

Mum was silent. She waited a while before she said:

‘Do you see the trouble you’ve caused, eh?’

I thought she was going to berate me as well. I braced myself for her onslaught. But she got up and went out and I fell asleep. She woke me up. She had brought in a basin of warm herbal water. She made me soak my feet. Then with a candle-heated needle she expertly plucked out the roadworms that had eaten into the soles of my feet. But before that she made them wriggle with hot palm-oil. Then she disinfected my cuts.

She pressed herbal juices on my welts. With strips of cloth she tore from one of her wrappers, she bandaged mashed leaves against the soles of my feet. The leaves stung me for a long time. She went and got rid of the needle and the water in the basin. I climbed into bed. She made me get out again to eat. I ate ravenously and she watched me with tears gathering in her eyes. When I had eaten I climbed back into bed. She gathered her provisions and as my eyes shut, she said:

‘Stay in and lock the door. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t open the door unless it’s me or your father, you hear?’

I barely nodded. With her tray on her head, she went out into the compound, out into the world; I locked the door and fell asleep in the unhappiness of the room.

Dad had no need to worry about me going out. I slept through the whole day. In several entangled dreams I fought with the three-legged chair that was trying to abduct me. And when I woke it was only because Mum had returned. I woke up feeling as if an alien spirit had crept into my body duringmy sleep. I tried to conquer the abnormal queasiness and heaviness of body, but my head seemed larger, full of spaces, and my feet began to swell. It was only that night, when I saw Mum split up into two identical people, when Dad’s fiendish smile broke into multiples of severity, when my eyeballs became hot, and my body shook, and great blastingwaves of heat poured through my nerves, that I realised I had come down with a fever.

‘The boy has got malaria,’ Mum said.

‘If it’s only malaria, we’re lucky,’ Dad growled.

‘Leave him alone.’

‘Why should I? Did I send him to go and walk about all day and all night? Did you send him? All we told him to do was stay at Madame Koto’s bar. We didn’t tell him to go and walk about and catch some road-fever.’

‘Leave him alone. Can’t you see that he is shaking?’

‘So what? Am I shaking him? He probably went and walked on all the bad things they wash on the roads. All those witches and wizards, native doctors, sorcerers, who wash off bad things from their customers and pour them on the road, who wash diseases and bad destinies on the streets. He probably walked on them and they entered him. Look at his eyes.’

‘They have grown big!’

‘He looks like a ghost, a mask.’

‘Leave him.’

‘If he wasn’t ill, I would thrash him again.’

Then to me, he said:

‘Do you think of us, eh? How we sweat to feed you, to pay the rent, to buy clothes, eh? All day, like a mule, I carry loads. My head is breaking, my brain is shrinking, all just so that I can feed you, eh?’

Dad went on like that through the night. I trembled and my head was shot with heat and hallucinations. Dad’s head became very big, his eyes bulbous, his mouth wide.

Mum looked lean, bony, and long. They became giant shadows in my fever. They towered above me on the bed and when they spoke about me it seemed they were talking about a ghost, or about someone who wasn’t there. For I wasn’t there in the room. I was deep in the country of road-fevers.

All the sounds of the compound were magnified through the night. I couldn’t eat, I kept throwing up, and all I could keep down was water. Mum kept vigil over me with a candle, Dad with a cigarette. Shadows wandered around the room. I felt I was retreating from the world of things and people. Late at night Mum made some peppersoup. It was hot and spiced with bitter herbs. It made me feel a little better.

Then she poured me a half-tumbler of ogogoro, which had turned yellow with marinating roots.