Eddie Signwriter (35 page)

A few feet off pigeons jockey for pieces of bread thrown to them by a child directed by its mother. The pigeons, growing bold, approach too close to the child, who steps back in alarm. The mother stamps on the gravel with one foot and the birds retreat. The child laughs. The mother takes the bread from her child, flings it over the pigeons, picks up her child and leaves. The birds pounce on the bread.

To somebody walking past the two men would appear to be strangers sharing a bench.

Neither of them have spoken since they arrived at this spot five minutes before. Nor the ten or so minutes it took for them to reach the square, the younger of the two leading all the way, not looking back once, the older following a few steps behind.

The younger man is breathing as if he had just run a race. The older is waiting for the younger’s breathing to slow down before he talks, but it is the younger man who speaks first.

“How did you find me?” he says.

“I followed the signs,” the older man says to his nephew.

The younger man is silent.

The older man says, “A person only has to learn what they’re looking for.”

Silence still.

“You left directions. It started with John Bediako. Once I got to Ibrahim it was easy. Ibrahim was very sympathetic.”

“You mean you paid him.”

“No more than you,” the older man says, not allowing the interjection to interrupt his explanation, as he relates to his nephew how he traveled to Dakar, found the hotel in the Place de l’Indépendance, the people in the barber shop; how they eventually sent him to Lille, to his tight-mouthed friend Denis, where the trail seemed about to end, and would have, had he not found an associate of Denis more disposed to financial reward.

“This was almost two weeks ago,” the older man says. “I have been staying here in the neighbourhood ever since.”

“Spying on me,” the younger man says bluntly.

“Taking a holiday,” the older man says, “visiting relatives.”

“Am I meant to thank you?” the younger man says.

The older man doesn’t respond, as he has not responded to any of his nephew’s outbursts.

He says, “You have a beautiful girlfriend.”

“You don’t know anything about her,” his nephew says.

“I know what I see,” the older man says.

“We’re going to get married,” the younger man says softly, looking into his hands, the belligerence suddenly out of his voice, the words spoken with a soft childish intimacy that so takes his uncle by surprise that for a moment he cannot talk.

“I am very happy for you,” he manages to say.

The two men continue to sit in silence, observing the square.

“I can see that your seeing me hurts you,” the older man says at length.

His nephew ignores the observation. They have not been looking at each other. But now the younger man deliberately looks away.

He says, “What are you doing here?”

“I should ask you the same thing,” the older man replies, trying to make a joke.

The younger man says, “I ran away, and this is where I ended up.”

“So you have,” says the older man.

Two shop assistants on their lunch break come into the square. They pick a bench furthest from the two men talking, lay down a newspaper on the seat, take out their sandwiches and begin to talk.

The men watch them, though neither of them is much interested.

The older man says, “To see you here, living like this, it makes me proud. If I’m allowed to be proud.”

“As you like,” the younger man says, the hostility returning, that his uncle knows was never gone, and will not completely be gone, at least during this day’s conversation.

“Kwasi, I know why you left,” the older man says.

“You cannot possibly know why I left.”

“I know enough.”

“What do you know?” the younger man says.

And so the older man tells him. He tells his nephew that he went to Akwapim. That he knows what happened there. That he knows about Nana Oforiwaa and John Bediako. He knows that his nephew came back to Accra and burned his shop.

“What do you know about Nana Oforiwaa?” the younger man says scornfully.

“Do I have to say it?” the older man replies.

The younger man looks at the older.

“No, uncle,” he says softly.

“I went back,” the older man says. “I was there.”

The younger man folds his arms over his chest. He sniffs. He is waiting until he can trust in the steadiness of his voice.

His uncle does him the kindness of not noticing, looks ahead himself, quietly, waiting.

Then the younger man says, “If you’ve come all this way to tell me how ashamed I should be and what you all think of me, then you’ve wasted your time. I already know.”

“No,” the older man says, “I haven’t come to tell you that. And I don’t think it either.”

“Then why have you come?” the younger man says.

“Many reasons,” says the older.

The younger man waits.

The older man looks down at his shoes, brown and scuffed on the toes. He bought them new shortly before he began his journey. He looks away now to the centre of the square, where the statue of a general
on a horse stands on top of a high concrete plinth. The horse, and the general atop it, stride out towards the traffic, great and immortal.

The older man feels suddenly tired, and small, and unequal to the responsibility he has come all this way to acquit.

Then he says, not looking at the younger man, “Shortly before I began my journey here I learned that Nana Oforiwaa didn’t die by accident. John Bediako killed her. Drowned her. In the middle of the storm when nobody could see. That is what made him mad.”

Nothing.

“He wanted me to tell this to you.”

At first the younger man appears not to have heard. Suddenly he starts laughing. “I don’t believe it,” he says, though the laughter is far from a happy sound, and the older man recognizes it for what it is—a sound at the edge of hysteria.

“I think it’s true,” the older man says softly.

“Did he tell you this himself?” the younger man asks, his voice rising, as if in accusation.

“No,” the older man says, and explains the circumstances by which he came by this knowledge.

“So why do you believe it?” the younger man says sharply.

“He has no reason to lie,” the older man says calmly. “Also, I am the easiest person to tell the truth. Who would believe me anyway if I repeated it? Not even you …” and he laughs dryly before adding, “And because of how carefully he worked things out. How he made sure of me—that I really wanted to find you, that he could trust me, that I had the means to get here. No, he went to far too much trouble for this not to be true. I was in his power from the moment I arrived on the ridge.”

The younger man says nothing. He is rocking softly backwards and forwards. For a while a small humming noise has been coming from his mouth.

Then it stops.

He says, “Why would he have done such a thing?”

“For the same reason I am here.”

“What is that?” the younger man says.

“To free you. To let you go.”

The younger man laughs. He says, “Free? Look how free I am. None of you exist.”

“But here I am,” the older man says.

“And tomorrow you’ll be gone again,” the younger man tells him.

“As it happens I will. But it won’t stop the past from having happened,” the older man says. “It takes a lot of imagination to become somebody different. You are full of imagination. But ultimately you will run out of it. Then all you’ll have left is what you started with.”

“What is that?” the younger man asks.

“You come from somewhere. You are the child of parents,” the older man says, and that having total freedom is not the opposite of having no freedom, and that everyone is dependent and that in the end, in the very very end, everything is connected.

“I come from somewhere,” the younger man says, “but I can choose where I go.”

The older man says, “You can, Kwasi, until you can’t.”

Then he adds, “It’s unfair, but you don’t get to choose everything.”

“Right now I can,” the younger man replies.

“I know,” the older man says, “I know how that feels. But don’t enjoy the feeling so long that you can’t come back when you need to.”

“Come back where? So many bad things have happened at home,” the younger man says.

“But are they unbearable, Kwasi?” the older man asks. “Can you really not bear them?”

“I have borne them,” the younger man says.

“I know,” says the older man.

Then nobody says anything. There is just the sound of the traffic behind them, and the noise of the eastern part of the city coming up the embankment.

Then the older man says, “Also, I have come to ask you for forgiveness.”

“For what?” his nephew asks him, surprised.

He says, “I am asking your forgiveness for what happened to you.”

When the younger man hears this he begins to cry.

His uncle puts his arm over his shoulder.

He says, “Somebody said to me that even when children defy us they still want our approval. What is my approval worth? But I can give you my blessing,” and he tells his nephew that he does have his blessing, wherever he goes.

Then his nephew says to him how ashamed he is, and how he is sorry for what he has done to him, and to Celeste and to his parents; that it’s unforgivable, and that he knows it.

“But it’s forgiven,” the older man says.

“All right,” his nephew says at length.

He regains his composure, and after a short while sits up.

The two shop assistants, who have observed this scene, are getting up quickly. They bundle their sandwich wraps together and stride out of the square.

“Pédés,”
one says under her breath, as they pass the two men on their bench.

“Putains!”
the younger man shouts after them as they walk towards the pavement.

“They called us queers. I called them whores,” he tells his uncle.

“A curse on the whole world,” his uncle says, smiling.

They fall into silence.

“Are my parents well?” the younger man asks.

His uncle tells him that they are, although they will be better when he tells them of this visit, and better still when the younger man contacts them himself.

The younger man nods, but doesn’t say anything.

“So what now?” the younger man says after a few moments.

The older man says, “My suitcases are already in storage at the airport. I will fly tonight.”

The younger man doesn’t respond.

He is thinking about the journey his uncle has taken to get here. How difficult it must have been to find him. He is thinking that so many of the people he has met to get here, his uncle has met, and so many of the places he has visited, his uncle has visited too.

“You don’t want to stay a while?” he asks the older man.

“I’ve already stayed a while,” the older man says. “I had a wonderful time.”

“I understand,” the younger man says, and he does.

“Thank you, uncle,” the younger man says softly.

“Thank
you,”
the older man says.

Then the two men get up.

“Don’t stay away too long,” the older man says, brushing imaginary dirt off his trousers.

The younger man watches his uncle prepare to leave. The older man puts on his jacket, which his nephew knows will be too hot. His nephew notices the old clothes. He notices the five-dollar rubber Casio watch that his uncle takes out of his pocket to consult, since a watch can be too easily damaged on the end of a hand. He smells the aftershave that he knows his uncle purchases at Makola market, and that he has not smelled in a long time.

The older man picks up the plastic bag in which he has been carrying his wallet, diary, passport, baggage tag, ticket.

“Goodbye, Kwasi,” he says.

The older man embraces the younger man. For a long time they stand like this in the middle of the empty square.

Then the older man lets the younger man go, and without looking back walks out of the square, catching sight as he does of the woman on the other side of the road, who he is sure will recognize him from the Hotel Anton, and to whom he nods and smiles thinly and who nods and smiles thinly back.