Eddie Signwriter (19 page)

“Use that,” she says. As Festus Ankrah turns to take the cloth, she nudges the fire in the tin closer with her foot so that he can share its warmth.

He dries as much of the water as he can from his skin and clothes and hair, looking up from time to time toward the woman. He wants to catch her eye so that she can see he is grateful, to acknowledge her kindness. But she has turned her body and is looking away, and seems to be caught up in her own thoughts.

He draws the cloth around himself. It is heavy, and under it he begins to feel dry, and he waits to feel the heat of the fire. The truth is it is good to be out of the rain.

Then the woman moves, and Festus Ankrah thinks she will turn to him, but she does not, and she begins addressing herself to the child. She whispers in his ear, and the child smiles, and she strokes his head, and looks out the side of the portico beyond Festus Ankrah.

The sound of the heavy rain carries on around them.

The dog, finding the heat gone, turns its head, moves closer to the fire, looks lazily for a moment at Festus Ankrah, then closes its eyes.

“Thank you for your kindness,” Festus Ankrah says at last.

He sees the shape of the woman’s face turning toward him.

“I am thanking you,” he says, speaking a little slower.

“It is just kindness,” the woman says.

“Nonetheless,” he says.

“To keep a stranger dry in the rain is not difficult,” she says.

It is a dry voice, drained of intonation, tired, Festus Ankrah thinks, with harshness near its surface.

The evening has begun to gather in now, and he tries to see his watch in the light of the flames. The light is too weak. He stretches his legs out and feels the warmth of the tin in his shins. He sits back and lets the heat rise into him.

He looks at the woman’s face, mostly covered in shadow, though the light catches her eyes. He sees momentarily an absence in them that makes him uneasy. The gratitude he feels dissipates at the thought of being in the presence of somebody who might not be in full control of their faculties. He feels stupid for having responded to the asking in her voice. He wishes now that he’d kept on walking. Perhaps he will start again soon.

He has already considered the conversation with the woman over when she speaks again.

“Kindness becomes easier with age,” she says, and it is as if by saying it the harshness goes out of her voice, and there is kindness in it.

Festus Ankrah turns toward her again.

“I have found it the opposite,” he says cautiously, but the woman evidently has said her piece, and does not respond.

The child standing against the woman stirs. He cannot be much more than three or four. His arms are propped against the woman’s legs. His face is quiet and it has an expression of drugged contentment. His eyebrows rise like two gentle hills, and the milk of his eyes is as white as linoleum.

Noticing that the child’s attention is fixed on him, Festus Ankrah smiles. Caught in his observations, the child retreats into the woman’s embrace. Her fingers move across his chest at the pressure of his movement as if they have a life, an intuition of their own, and Festus Ankrah looks away.

“You are not old,” the woman says.

“These days I am very old,” Festus Ankrah replies before he can reconsider the wisdom of exposing something true about himself in the company of a stranger, just because it is true.

“No, I have seen you in the town,” the old woman says, and there is wiliness now in her voice, “I know who you are.”

That the woman has knowledge of him surprises and unsettles Festus Ankrah.

The woman smiles. The child moves in her embrace and she leans forward. Festus Ankrah can see her clearly now, her head, smooth as a coffee bean, covered in a black scarf only a few shades darker than her skin. Her cheekbones stand out through the loose skin under her eye sockets like solid balls of meat, and her mouth is as wide as a scythe, and seems to cut her face in two.

“All I say is you are not old,” she says.

When she talks it is as if her mouth peels back to let her teeth and gums speak. Her face moves in expressions of wonder and concentration, as if she were telling a story to a child, or confiding a wonderful secret. “As for me,” she says—her hand falls onto her chest—“me, I know my full account, before my God I do. Everything now is in its place, everything now is over; the shape of everything—it has all happened—this tree is now forever, rain is now forever, ground is now forever,” and she pats the stone bench with the flat of her palms. “Nothing now that happens gets added to the past. It makes a person free. Everything just …” and she brings her palms together, and
opens her fingers like a flower, “—unfolds.” Then she brings her fingers to her mouth, and her laughter is like the laughter of an embarrassed girl, coy and uncertain.

Then Festus Ankrah is no longer afraid.
This woman is mad
, he thinks to himself, she can do him no harm, and how little it would cost him to give her her moment, and not turn on her, as he has on others who have shown him less kindness.

“Do you know something?” he says. “Do you know something you want to tell to me?”

To be able to ask the question fills him with a sense of control and strength he has not expected.

“I know.”

“What is it?” Festus Ankrah asks.

The old woman does not respond.

The child, seeming to sense the change in Festus Ankrah’s tone, becomes restless, and turns towards the woman, who in a single quick movement, lifts him into her arms and lays him across her lap.

They sit a few moments in silence in the rain.

Then the old woman says, “When a child does what he is not supposed to do, he suffers what he is not supposed to suffer.”

Festus Ankrah finds himself unable to respond, though he knows the proverb.

The woman looks at him, and for a moment there is knowingness in her eyes that unsettles him. Her mouth creases in a shrewd smile. Then the whole expression unknits.

“To look a person in the eye who does not know themselves,” she says, “you leave your own image in them. And children do not know themselves. They are all the same child in that.”

Then she looks down to the child in her arms, who has fallen asleep, and she places her hand over his eyes, and cannot be made to say another word.

IT IS NIGHT
on the Akwapim Ridge. Night lies over the fields, holding them close. Night holds the towns and the churches and the steeples in its soft fist. The bells of the churches are muffled in darkness, the taxis huddle in their ranks like birds. In the houses and the shacks, in the villages and the boarding houses and seminaries and under the trees in the open, the people are asleep, the only light is the moon’s exclaiming O, and the stars, like sand scattered on a dark mirror.

Waking the owner of the hotel gives Festus Ankrah some satisfaction. For more than a minute he stands on the step of his house, set a small distance from the hotel, pounding heavily on the door with his fist. A light comes on, the sound of footsteps approaching the door.

“What do you want?” the voice says.

“Open your door,” Festus Ankrah replies.

The door opens. The hotel owner stands naked but for a towel around his waist. As the hotel owner strains to see, the creases of his squinting eyes knot the whole lower half of his face, drawing his top lip from his teeth like a snarl.

Festus Ankrah smells of wet clothes and fire smoke. The hotel owner stares at him, says nothing.

He is going, Festus Ankrah tells him. First thing in the morning. No breakfast, just the bill. And something inside him laughs like a child as he leaves the hotel owner standing on his step and walks back out into the night.

Back in his room he begins to pack his bags, and when he is finished starts to straighten up the room.

But once he has moved the beds and furniture back into place he finds he cannot stop. With water from the barrel in the bathroom, soap from his basin, he cleans the tables, the bedframe, the window
sill where the mosquito coils have burnt into black ash. He gets down on his knees and sweeps dust with his facecloth, wrings it out and shines the floor.

It is ridiculous, he knows—the pleasure he takes from removing by himself the signs of his habitation in this place; but he takes it nonetheless.

And as he works into the still early hours of the morning, his mind begins for the first time since the discovery of his nephew’s disappearance to turn to other things. Loose strings of memory, unrecalled for many years, and unrelated, fire behind his eyes—a conversation in the street, a young person who exists now only in his head, something said in an immigrant bar on another continent, in another life—so quickly, though, that all he is sure of is the act of memory itself, while the thing remembered is lost.

How fast it has all been, he thinks. The passing of all that time. The endlessness of experience, of things happening. Endless because it never stops, though it’s over the moment it’s happened, too fast to store, pitting the body, pitting the pits of the body. Like trying to catch the rain—that’s what it is.

When he finishes cleaning the room he undresses and lies on the bed with his hands on his stomach. He feels the rhythm of his body moving in the palms of his hands.

For the first time in almost a month he feels the ability to endure what he cannot control.

The muscles know it first.

An easing in the neck’s stiffness, in the weariness of the heavy frame. The ache of constant vigilance leaving its ghost in the joints. Nothing is true that the body does not feel, nothing is true that isn’t verifiable in the flesh. So that when the knowledge comes the flesh is where the body knows.

And then he sleeps, and later wakes, and he senses without having to open his eyes, the square of dull light at the window.

He tastes a sourness in his mouth—cigarettes and food and not enough sleep.

He draws comfort from the physicality of his own body, these
things that are truly his. The pain in his muscles and joints, the cramps of his digestive tract.

In the hotel lobby Festus Ankrah recognizes the boy behind the counter as the same who signed him in on the evening of his arrival. He does not wait for the boy to count the money he hands over in two envelopes. He slings his bag over his shoulder, and leaves the hotel for the last time.

The boy lifts his eyes to see him pass through the door, his lips moving silently as he counts the notes.

No car waits for Festus Ankrah to take him to the taxi station. He walks the shortcut through the grass to the edge of the town, avoiding the turn-off to the school. Is there something to regret in spending time in this place without having established the smallest connection of sympathy, of kindness? If so, he cannot find the place inside himself in which he feels it so.

Arriving at the station he walks past the taxi rank where cars for hire will take you single-drop down the escarpment to Accra. He heads for the tro-tros. The noise surrounds him—of baggage carriers, and hawkers, drivers and touts. He throws his bag to the baggage boy on the roof of the car, then takes his seat in the back of the tro-tro, and stares down the steel tube through the window. A child’s shoe hangs from the mirror, flags and stickers are arranged on the dash. He waits for the car to fill.

A large woman with chickens in a reed bag squeezes herself into the seat in front of him, sweat lining the creases of her flesh. A man takes two sleeping children onto his lap. Three boys take the front bench, talking loudly. The driver saunters over to his cab and leans against his door, while his tout takes his place in the open sliding door, slaps the top of the tro-tro with his open palm, and shouts out in his clattering, treble voice, “Accra-cra-cra-cra-craaaaa!”

Then passengers waiting in an emptier car are hustled unwillingly into the worst remaining seats in the tro-tro. The fares are passed from seat to seat, overhead to the driver. Change passes back. Now the hawkers start hustling round the windows, passing up bread on dustbin lids for forty cedis, water in plastic bags, nuts in newspaper cones,
plantain from the forest, oranges, eggs, ice cream, sodas. Prices begin to fall as the engine is fired and the tout jumps out of the car, slams the door shut and slaps it one more time with his hand.

Then the car begins to move over the stony yard of the taxi station. The head of Festus Ankrah, wedged in the far-right seat against the side, begins to rattle and jump against the window. But he feels nothing. Already he has been asleep for ten minutes, and will not wake up until the shuddering of the chassis finally stops in Tema station, and the driver leans over him, holding his bag, telling him this is no hotel, and to be now on his way.

T
HE TEACHER
, from the back of the taxi rank, observed Festus Ankrah climb into the tro-tro. As he made his way back to the school he heard the tro-tro sound its horn. He withdrew to the side of the road, and from inside a shed housing a small provisions store, saw the vehicle pass by on its way towards Peduase Lodge, and the winding path down to the plains that stretch all the way to Accra.