The Famished Road (57 page)

When the three women came into our room I knew something very serious was happening. I stayed silently in a corner, hidden by clothes. They didn’t seem to mind my presence. I stayed silently in the corner and watched them calling Dad’s spirit back from the Land of the Fighting Ghosts. All through the night they called Dad’s public and secret names in the strangest voices. All through the night they performed their numinous rituals, singing the saddest songs, weaving threnodies from his names, chanting incantations that altered the spaces in the room, that increased the sepiatinted shadows, that made the cobwebs writhe and flow as if they had become black ancient liquids. The forms of night-birds took shape amongst us, fluttering swiftly over the candle-light; the room filled up with nameless presences, passing through the air of burning sacrificial herbs. The black sea-waves lashed on the dark shores of the ceiling as the women conjured a hundred forms to fight the things that prevented them reaching Dad’s spirit in the remotest regions of the human hinterland. The herbalist who had been a witch sweated and performed, conjured and contorted, she changed her guises under the cover of shadows, she fought heroic battles with the spirits we couldn’t see, and she fought them with her frail form, her face crushed and wrinkled like the skin of the aged tortoise which she put on the bed to help her travel faster through those realms where speed is an eternal paradox. Over the door she hung the dried heads of an antelope and a tiger, the skull of a boar and the bristling paws of a lion long dead in its prime. She sacrificed two white cocks. Their blood, mixed with strong smelling potions, was smeared on our walls. The feathers of a parrot and an eagle were burned on our floor and nearly burned down the house. The herbalist made razor incisions on Dad’s shoulders and pressed ground herbs into the bleeding cuts.

Dad didn’t move. I watched his blood trickle down his shoulder, black with the herbs.

Then deep in the night the women began to dance round the bed, shrieking. A crowd gathered outside our room. Dad began to stir. The wind seemed intent on blowing our houses away. The door was thrown open, all the candles were extinguished, and in the darkness I saw the huge white form of a swollen spirit suspended in the room. I screamed and the form weaved in the air and came falling down at great speed. It fell down on Dad. When the door was shut, and the candles lit, Dad jerked up suddenly, gasping for breath, heaving, his eyes wide as if he had woken from a dream of terrors.

The women rushed to him and Dad, not knowing who they were, or whether he had indeed woken up, pushed them aside, sent the herbalist collapsing on the bed, and shoved Madame Koto, who came crashing down on me. Like someone trying to escape from a nightmare he fled out of the room and was seen tearing down the road towards the forest.

The three women, Mum, and me, went after him. It was fearfully dark. The three women, faces veiled with shadows, kept changing shapes in the darkness. Madame Koto seemed to have recovered the full use of her bandaged foot. The third woman had a presence so featureless that no one noticed her even when she ran. She was like the air or like a shadow or a reflection. Her presence was important in ways I couldn’t fathom. The smallest of them was the herbalist and as she ran I kept noticing that her hands flapped in her black smock. It came as a surprise, a shock from which I didn’t recover for a long time, to see her lift up into the dark air, as if the wind were her ally.

Then the darkness increased round her, became concentrated, like a black smock of cloud, and when the cloud cleared I saw only two women in black running, Mum beside them. The herbalist had disappeared. Then I heard the clapping of great wings in the air above me and I saw a great eagle, black, with red eyes, take off towards the forest, into the night of mysteries. When we got deep into the forest we found Dad asleep, his back resting on the trunk of a baobab tree, with the herbalist standing over his haunted form.

‘We must take him back now. Before the spirits of the forest start to smell him,’

she said.

We were worried about how we were going to carry Dad back. But the third woman, who seemed to have no features, and who never spoke, took his arm and pulled him up. To our amazement Dad stood up like a child, his eyes open and vacant.

Mum held his other arm; they both supported him. And like a man who is neither asleep nor awake, neither dead nor alive, we led him down the forest paths. When we got home the crowd had gone. We lay Dad on the bed. He refused to sleep. He kept jerking up, saying:

‘If I sleep I won’t wake.’

The herbalist gave him something to drink. It seemed a very bitter drug and Dad’s eyes widened as he swallowed the herbal draught. Then he got up and sat on his threelegged chair. With his eyes bulging, his mouth big, slurring his words, Dad began to speak. The three women in black sat on the floor. Mum sat on the bed. I sat in a corner and could see Dad’s face, gaunt in the candle-light, his eyes like those of a man who has stared into the deepest pits of existence. At first it was difficult to hear what he was saying, but we got used to it.

‘I have been having the most terrible experiences,’ said Dad, staring straight ahead, as if he were talking to someone in the room that we couldn’t see. ‘I was sleeping and then I wasn’t sleeping any more. Suddenly I found myself fighting seven spirits. They said they had been sent by Green Leopard’s mother. And they wanted to kill me inmy sleep so that I wouldn’t wake up. I fought them for a long time. All the time you thought I was sleeping I was battling with them. They fought me viciously and kept trying to come out of my dreams to fight my wife. Eventually I defeated them. Then I tried to rest. And then a seven-headed spirit . .

‘No!’ cried the third woman.

‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘A seven-headed spirit armed with seven golden swords came to me and said because I killed his comrades he wants my son’s life in return.’

The women screamed. Mum rushed over and held me, smotheringme.

‘I said NO!’

The women wailed in low monotone. Mum held me tighter. I feared she might break my neck without knowing it.

‘Then the seven-headed spirit attacked me. I fought him for nine nights. I only managed to cut off one of his heads. The spirit was much too powerful for me and there was nothing I could do but run. I ran into the forest. The spirit caught me and tied me up with silver ropes and began to dragme to the Land of the FightingGhosts.

They are ghosts who spend all their time fighting. The spirit dragged me and I never stopped resisting, but the only thing that saved me was . .’

Dad paused. The women made sad noises, heads craned forward.

‘…was my own father, Priest of the Shrine of Roads. He said the spirit couldn’t pass any road that he has blocked. The spirit fought him. They battled it out for a long time. I didn’t know my father was so powerful. He cut off two of the heads of the spirit. They both became tired. They agreed to make a truce. My father said if the spirit let me go, he would take my place. I didn’t understand what he meant.’

Mum began to wail.

‘Shut up, woman!’ Dad said.

Mum fell silent. I heard her swallow down her tears.

‘And then both of them vanished. I freed myself from the ropes. All of my energy had drained from me. An eagle perched on my head and then it turned into a woman.

And then four women, three of them dressed in black, just like you,’ Dad said, pointing at the three women, ‘came and led me from the forest. And then I woke up.’

We all stared at him in silence.

‘Pour me something strong to drink!’ he demanded.

Mum poured him some ogogoro. Dad finished it in a gulp. The herbalist made Dad drink some more of her herbal draught. Then she got him to bathe in specially treated water. When Dad got back she had prepared another potion for him. He drank it in one and surprised us all by the tenderness of his ravings. He sat on his chair and began to talk about how sweet the black rocks of the moon tasted, and how he drank of the golden elixir of the sun, and of the innumerable geniuses of the future that black people would produce, and of how he saw Mum dancing naked in the forest, her hair suspended by the brilliant cobwebs that the gods had spun, and how he saw me walking backwards into a yellow river, and of a beautiful youngwoman he saw who called him deep into the place where dead bodies grew red flowers from their mouths.

And then just as suddenly as he began, he fell silent. His mouth stayed open. His eyes were shut.

‘This man has got a strong head,’ the herbalist said. ‘My medicine usually puts people to sleep before I count to three. Help me carry him to the bed.’

We carried him. Dad snored. After a while the three women got up. Mum talked to them about money. A small argument ensued. Mum loosened the end of her wrapper, counted out some money, and paid the herbalist and the third woman. Madame Koto said to Mum:

‘We must continue that conversation of ours.’

‘My husband says no,’ Mum said.

‘Ask him again.’

The three women left. It was the first time in three nights that we got any sleep.

WHEN DAD WOKE up the next morning he bustled with energy as if nothing had happened to him. His face was still swollen, his eyes almost invisible, his mouth puffed out, but he swore that he felt twenty years younger. He talked of grand schemes. He talked of buying enough corrugated zinc to roof the whole ghetto. He talked of buying enough cement to build houses for all the large families who lived in one room. He spoke of tarring all the roads and clearing away all the rubbish that had accumulated in the consciousness of our people. He dreamt of openingmassive stores that would sell food cheaply to all the poor people. He got us worried when he began to dream of becoming a professional musician. And we started to think that Green Leopard had dislodged something in his brain when he talked of becoming a politician and bringing freedom and prosperity to the world and free education to the poor. And it was when he began to talk loudly about becoming the Head of State, seizing power from the white people that ruled us, and of all the good things he would do for the suffering people of the world, that we stopped paying too much attention to him.

Then one morning he went from room to room, knocking on doors, waking people up, and asking them if they would vote for him. Most of them slammed their doors in his face. It was unfortunate that, to humour him, one or two people said that they would.

It gave him greater encouragement. He went from compound to compound. He spoke to stall-owners and provision-sellers. He queried the ground-nut hawkers and the urban shepherds and the amulet traders. He had long arguments with palm-wine tappers. He was seen in bars, at night, talking to drunkards, outlining his policies for government. A new idealism had eaten into his brain with the freshness of his recuperation. He made enquiries about the cost of zinc. He wondered aloud about how long and how wide the ghetto was. He made extensive, illiterate calculations about how much it would cost to build a house, to build schools, about the population of the poor, and how much money he would need to win an election.

He astonished us with the crankiness of his thinking. He conjured an image of a country in which he was invisible ruler and in which everyone would have the highest education, in which everyone must learn music and mathematics and at least five world languages, and in which every citizen must be completely aware of what is going on in the world, be versed in tribal, national, continental, and international events, history, poetry, and science; in which wizards, witches, herbalists and priests of secret religions would be professors at universities; in which bus drivers, cartpullers, and market women would be lecturers, while still retaining their normal jobs; in which children would be teachers and adults pupils; in which delegations from all the poor people would have regular meetings with the Head of State; and in which there would be elections when there were more than five spontaneous riots in any given year.

Dad began to spend a lot of the money he had won in buying books. He couldn’t read but he bought them. I had to read them to him. He bought books on philosophy, politics, anatomy, science, astrology, Chinese medicine. He bought the Greek and Roman classics. He became fascinated by the Bible. Books on the cabbala intrigued him. He fell in love with the stories of the
Arabian Nights.
He listened with eyes shut to the strange words of classical Spanish love poetry and retellings of the lives of Shaka the Zulu and Sundiata the Great. He insisted that I read something to him all the time. He forced me to have a double education. In the evenings he would sit on his chair, feet on the table, cigarette in his mouth, eyes misty, paper and pencil beside him, and he would make me read out loud. Occasionally he would interrupt me for an explanation. Most of what I read made no sense to me. So he bought a large dictionary which must have cost him at least ten mighty punches from the fists of the Green Leopard. Dad’s bloated eye twitched when he opened it out on our table, releasing into the air of our room the aroma of words and freshwood. Like a battered but optimistic salesman, he said:

‘This book explains books.’

His passion began to drive us slightly mad. The room became cluttered with books of all sizes, ugly books with pictureless covers and tiny letters as if intended only for the ants to read, large books that broke your back to carry them, books with such sloped lettering that they strained the neck, books which smelt like cobwebs and barks of medicinal trees and old sawdust after rain. Mum complained and sometimes made piles of the books and balanced her basins and cooking pots on them. Dad got furious at her disrespect and they argued bitterly. Then Dad began to contemplate the notion of compulsory military service for women. Then, looking at me, he included children.

He saw himself both as invisible Head of State and as fitness master. In the mornings he took to drilling us. Whenever we annoyed him in any way he would wake us up very early and take us through exercise routines. Mum obliged at first, even when she was cooking. That was the first time I saw Mum burn an entire pot of soup. We went hungry that day. Mum became exempt from all drilling. Maybe that was when the future notion of joining the army first entered Dad’s head.