The Famished Road (19 page)

It was quite dark when Dad returned. He looked sober and exhausted. He looked miserable and moved listlessly and his face hung down as if he would burst into tears any moment. He complained about his head, his back, his legs. He grumbled about the political thugs who were giving him trouble at the garage.

‘I nearly killed one of them today,’ he said, with a raving expression in his eyes.

Then his voice changed.

‘Too much load. My back is breaking. I must find another job. Join the army. Be a nightsoil man. But this load is getting too much for me.’

There was a brief silence. Then Mum told him about the great event of the day and showed him the milk. She seemed quite proud of having put up a good fight to obtain a basinful against all the competition.

‘Now we can have milk in our pap,’ she said.

‘Not me,’ I said.

‘You think their milk is too good for you, eh?’

Dad tasted the milk and wrinkled his face.

‘Rotten milk,’ he said. ‘Bad milk.’

And then he fell asleep in the chair, overcome with exhaustion. He had not bathed, nor had he eaten, and he stank of dried mud, cement, crayfish, and garri sacks. Mum stayed up for a while to see if he would wake; but Dad slept on, grinding his teeth, snoring. And so Mum stretched out on the mat, blew out the candle, and soon began to snore herself.

I stayed awake for a while. I was still feverish and the darkness quivered with figures moving about blindly. Just before I fell asleep I heard a noise on the cupboard and as I looked I saw something growing out of the milk. It grew very tall and white and resolved itself into a ghostly agbada. There was no one in the agbada and it took off from the powdered milk and flew around the room. Then the garment, all white, folded itself, compacted, and settled into the form of a bright indigo dragonfly. It buzzed its wings round the room and disappeared into the impenetrable darkness of a corner. My headache grew more severe. The milk and its peculiar nightgrowths were my singular memories of that Saturday when politics made its first public appearance in our lives.

SUNDAY BROUGHT us the secret faces of politics.

Dad’s relations came to visit. They came with their children, all of them stiff and shy in the good clothes they rarely wore. We didn’t have enough chairs for them and Mum had to swallow her pride and borrow chairs from our neighbours. The compound was aflame with politics. Our relations came to visit, but they also came to criticise. They attacked Dad for not visiting them, for not attending the meetings of our townspeople, for not contributing to wedding presents, funeral arrangements, and endless financial engagements. Dad responded badly to their criticisms. He blamed them for not helping him, for not being visible during his times of crisis; and their recriminations flew back and forth, developed into terrible arguments, with everyone shouting at the top of their voices, till they all seemed more like implacable enemies than like members of an extended family.

They seemed so much against one another that I felt ashamed being in the room, witnessing it all. The wives and children of our relations avoided looking at me and then I suspected that they hated us as much as we avoided their company. After a long period of shouting one of our relations tried to change the subject by bringing up politics and the coming elections. It was the most unfortunate change of subject.

Another great altercation started and burned vehemently in the small room. Dad, who supported the Party for the Poor, quivered during the argument, unable to contain his rage; our relation, who supported the Party of the Rich, was very calm, almost disdainful. He had more money than Dad and lived in a part of the city that already had electricity.

The room vibrated with their differences and at times it seemed they would fall on one another and fight out the battle of ascendancies. But Mum came in with a tray of food and drinks. Dad sent for some ogogoro and kola-nuts and made a libation, praying for harmony in the extended arms of the family. Our relations ate in silence.

After they had eaten, they drank in silence. Conversation had been exhausted. When the silence got too oppressive the wives of our relations went out into the passage with Mum and I heard them laughing while the men sat in the room, embarrassed by their differences.

The afternoon intensified with the heat. Voices in the compound grew louder; children played in the passage; neighbours quarrelled; our relations said they were going; Dad didn’t disguise his relief. One of the wives gave me a penny and called me a bad boy for not visiting them. Dad saw his relations off. He was away a long time.

When he got back he was in quite a storm of bad temper. He raged against all relations, against all the relatives who had more money than him. He cursed their selfishness, and swore that they only came to visit to make themselves feel better in comparison with our condition. He worked himself into a tremendous verbal campaign against the Party of the Rich and in the height of his denunciation his eyes fell on the basin of powdered milk. He snatched it from the top of the cupboard and stormed out. I heard Mum pleading with him not to throw the milk away and then I heard her sigh. Dad came back with an empty basin and a wicked gleam in his eyes.

Mum sulked and Dad held her close and danced with her; she tried to push him away, but Dad clung to her, and soon she was hitting him affectionately on the back. I turned over on the bed. The fever had been retreating from me and I felt better with each hour. I heard them dancing, heard Mum’s weakening protestations, and heard Dad suggest that they go visiting. Mum liked the idea. Dad went and bathed and when he got back Mum went. It took Mum a long time to get ready and while she powdered her face and arranged the elaborate ornamented folds of her head-gear and dug out her necklaces and bangles, her wrappers and white shoes, and plaited her hair hurriedly in the mirror, Dad was already asleep on his three-legged chair. The room was very hot and patches of sweat appeared on Dad’s French suit, his only decent clothes. And when Mum was ready she was entirely transformed. All the tiredness, the overwork, the boniness of her face, the worry expressions on her forehead, had gone. Her face sparkled with freshness, lipstick, and eyeshadow. Her skin-tone had been softened with foundation and rouge. And I saw in Mum something of the innocent beauty that must have made the village air lustrous when Dad first set eyes on her. She looked radiant and every movement scented the room with her cheap perfume. The sweat ran down her powdered face and her eyes were bright with excitement. She touched Dad and he woke up with a start, his eyes bloodshot and bulging, his jacket armpits wet through with sweat.

‘You women take so long,’ Dad said.

‘We may be poor, but we’re not ugly,’ Mum said.

Dad woke into a good mood. He rubbed his eyes, downed a short of ogogoro, forebade my going out, hooked his arm under Mum’s and, in a picture of wedded bliss, stepped out into the world.

I waited till they had gone. Then I got up, poured myself some ogogoro, downed it, and went to the passage to watch the bustling Sunday afternoon life of the compound.

As the afternoon passed on into the evening the children crying in the compound began to cough. Men and women queued up outside the toilet, and everyone complained of stomach trouble. The women doubled-up and sat miserably on stools outside their rooms. A man heaved and threw-up beside the well. Women screamed that they had been poisoned and said they had crabs clawing around in their intestines.

Children seared the evening with the livid heat of their weeping. Then the refrain of vomiting began.

The compound people without exception looked sick and when they passed me they glared at me as though I were in some way responsible for the mass illness. All the jollity and good feeling of Sunday gave way to groans, to cries of incomprehension, and demands for a witch-doctor’s investigation. This went on all evening. The compound became a place of vomiting; tenants vomited at the housefront, along the passage, in the toilet, outside the bathroom, and the sound itself seemed to become catching. The children, unable to hold anything down, were rushed to the toilet. They were treated with castor oil, to neutralise whatever poisons they had ingested. But nothingworked. I sat outside and watched it all in amazement. Then one of the creditors’ wives went past me, stiffened, turned to me, her eyes openingwide, and, in a groan that sounded like a curse, released a flood of undigested beans and rice and bile all over my Sunday clothes. She disappeared into the backyard. I washed off her vomit and went to the housefront and filled my pockets with stones. I stopped when I saw Mum and Dad returning from their outing and ran back to the room. Dad was high-spirited and drunk. Mum’s face was flushed in sweat and love, her eyes bright, her radiance beautiful.

‘What were you doing outside?’ I told him what had happened. ‘What were you going to do?’ ‘Stone her.’

‘Go and stone her!’ he said.

I went out and threw stones at their door and missed and broke one of their windows.

The creditor came out, looking desperately sick.

‘Are you mad?’ he asked, wielding a machete.

‘Your wife vomited on me,’ I said.

The creditor burst out laughing and then he froze and rushed to the backyard.

‘Everyone must have eaten something bad,’ Dad said.

And then Mum told how mystified she had been at seeing people sick everywhere, at the endemic vomiting along paths and housefronts. The friends they went to visit had been ill the whole time. It seemed a plague had come upon us, insinuated itself into our intestines.

‘The whole world is sick, but my family is well,’ Dad said, proudly. ‘That’s how God reveals the just. By their fruits we shall know them. We are a strong family.’

He went on in this vein, singing lustily, till the dragonfly awoke in the room and soared violently to the ceiling and kept crashing against the walls in drunken flight.

‘That insect looks like my relative,’ Dad said, laughing.

‘It came from the milk.’

‘What?’

‘The insect.’

‘When?’

‘Last night. Everyone was asleep. Then the insect flew out of the milk.’

‘The milk!’ Dad cried, in a moment’s comprehension. He rushed out into the compound, shouting:

‘THEMILK! IT’S THEMILK!’

Mum picked up a slipper and stalked the dragonfly and stunned it against the wall and smashed it so hard it became an obscene greenish smear. With a look of supreme indifference, she flicked down the bulbous bits of the dragonfly and swept it out into the passage. After she had washed off the smear with a rag, she went to the creditor’s room. She demanded that they clear their vomit from our roomfront and wash my stained clothes. In the meantime Dad was banging on doors, rousing everyone, overcome by the exhilaration of his drunken discovery, shouting:

‘They have poisoned us with the milk!’

Dad’s statement became a cry of understanding that was carried from one mouth to another, almost a rallying call, till the words gained ascendance over the ugly noises of vomiting. The women got out their containers and basins of the politicians’ milk and emptied them on the street. The heaps of rotten milk grew. Other compounds also had their heaps and as I looked along the street I saw the pilings of powdered milk like mirror-images in front of stalls. The inhabitants of the area gathered and held a long public meeting about the rotten milk of politics.

The photographer hobbled about, from housefront to housefront, holding his stomach, his face wretched and pale. Bravely, he took pictures of the milk-heaps and vomit outside the houses, and got the women and children to pose round them. He took shots of sick children, men in contorted forms of agony, women in attitudes of hungry outrage.

The meeting went on for hours. The street was angry and someone suggested burning down the local offices of the rich people’s party. They were angry but they were also helpless and they couldn’t decide on the best course of action. They talked, could find no solutions, and as night fell they dispersed to their rooms, hobbling, wracked by spasms, exhausted of anything to vomit.

The compound became a little friendlier towards us that night. Everyone thanked Dad for his rallying cry, for finding the cause of the malaise. The creditor’s wife cleared her undigested ill-feeling from our roomfront, and the creditor himself did not ask us to pay for his broken window. All through the night children went on weeping.

But the refrain of vomiting lessened, as if knowing the problem had somehow reduced the condition. The toilet was unusable.

Dad made libations to his ancestors long into the night. He prayed for many things, so many that I lost track of the details, and it occurred to me that his ancestors might also be confused by them. We went to sleep in fine spirits, bonded by prayer, and glad that we had survived what became known as The Day of the Politicians’ Milk. That night I slept on the mat. As darkness passed into dreams I heard them again on the bed, moving gently with the music of the springs. The movements stopped. And then a voice, out of the darkness, said:

‘I wonder if the rats are awake.’

THE NEXT TIME I went to Madame Koto’s bar the place was full of big blue flies. The smell of animal skin and sweat and fresh turned earth assailed me. It was hot and stuffy, crowded with total strangers. All of them looked as freakish as the people who were there the last time.

The difference was that there had been a grotesque interchange among the clientele.

There was an albino, but he was tall and had a head like a tuber of yam. The man who was bulbous in one eye was white and blank like a polished moonstone in the other.

The two men who were sinister in dark glasses now had white hair and curious hip deformations. The youth who had no teeth was now a woman. I recognised them all beneath their transformed appearances. There were others I hadn’t seen before. One of them looked like a lizard with small, fixed green eyes. And amongst these strange people were others who seemed normal, who had stopped off on their way home from their jobs for an evening’s drink. The place was so crowded that I had to struggle through the tight-jammed bodies, all of them raucous, all of them singing, passing abuses and bad jokes across the bar. I heard voices that were unearthly, languages that were nasal and alien, laughter that could only have come from dead tree trunks at night or from hollow graves. I began to feel ill again just pushing my way through their bodies which smelt bloodless and looked pale.