The Famished Road (11 page)

We finished eating and I took the plates to the backyard and washed them. On my way back I passed one of the creditors that Dad had beaten up. His face was bruised, ferocious, and cowardly. When he went past he gave me a secretive knock on the head. When I got to our room my eyes were watering. Mum and Dad were sitting together on the bed. Mum looked at me and said:

‘Look, our son is cryingwith happiness.’

I smiled and the pain eased. I cleared the centre table, spread the mat, and stretched out. Dad went to his chair. The candle burned low and Mum lit another one. I watched the mystery of the flame. Mum arranged her provisions in a basin.

‘I’m going to start trading again,’ she said.

Dad smiled.

‘My wife is a serious businesswoman,’ he said.

Then he looked at me.

‘People think I will make a good boxer. A man across the street saw me when I beat up the creditors. He said he would introduce me to some trainers and managers.

A good trainer. Free of charge.’

He laughed. He punched the air and rocked backwards.

‘I will be a great boxer. People say there is money in boxing.’

He hit out at the air again. He began to punch the candle flame, putting it out with each perfect execution, and relighting it.

‘I fight fire and become fire. Anyone who fights me fights the sun.’

He laughed again. I kept on watching the mystery of the flame. Mum made a weary sound. I looked and saw she wasn’t happy about Dad becoming a boxer. She was counting her small change. She said:

‘Your father used to box and wrestle in the village. They used to call him Black Tyger. He beat up all the young men. One day, before a fight, he punched a big hole in the wall of his father’s enemy.’

Dad laughed out loud. Mum continued.

‘The enemy put a curse on him. Then people went around saying that if your father fought again, he would be beaten. They said he would go mad for one week. Your father stopped fighting. The villagers gave his title to someone else. But his supporters kept coming to get him to fight and win back his title as champion of the village. They all bet heavily on him. At first your father refused and then out of pride he accepted. The man, a small man, threw your father in the last round. Your father lost.’

‘But I didn’t go mad for one week. That was all village talk.’

‘But you came to the city.’

‘Yes, I came to the city.’

They both fell silent. It seemed, almost, as if they had come to hell. Mum finished counting her small change and sat on the bed. Dad sighed.

‘I haven’t seen my father in five years,’ he said.

Suddenly a rat began chewing away at something beneath the cupboard. A big fly started up, as if it had just awoken from a long sleep, and buzzed about the room. A moth rose from Dad’s boots and circled the candle flame in a descending spiral. Dad lit a cigarette and smoked meditatively. The noise of the rat increased and other rats joined in the chewing. Mum’s face twitched. Dad said:

‘Your grandfather is completely blind now. He is the head-priest of our shrine, Priest of the God of Roads. Anyone who wants a special sacrifice for their journeys, undertakings, births, funerals, whatever, goes to him. All human beings travel the same road.’

He paused. Then continued:

‘I was supposed to succeed him as priest but the elders of the village said: ‘Your son is a fighter. How can a fighter be the Priest of Roads? The god has chosen a successor outside your family. But who knows the future?” Your grandfather was very disappointed about this. He is blind now and he wears dark glasses and wanders through the village and the world without any walking stick or any help. Our old people are very powerful in spirit. They have all kinds of powers.’

His voice was very sad.

‘We are forgetting these powers. Now, all the power that people have is selfishness, money, and politics.’

The rats went on eating. The moth came too close to the candle flame, singed its wings, and fell into the wax. The smoke from its burnt wings was dense and didn’t rise high and the moth writhed in the wax and caught fire. I blew out the two flames, took the moth from the wax, and lit the candle again. Dad said:

‘The only power poor people have is their hunger.’

Mum said:

‘Those rats!’

She stretched her limbs on the bed. Dad finished with his cigarette. I got out my pillow and cover-cloth. Dad blew out the candle and I listened to the rats eating and the fly buzzing in the darkness. Dad got into bed. The springs creaked. The rats went on chewing and Dad, in the darkness, said:

‘Azaro, rats can be our friends. They can sometimes tell what is happening in the world. They are our spies. Listen to them, Azaro, and tomorrow tell me what the rats are saying.’

I listened to the rats. One of them had teeth of yellow diamonds. They didn’t seem to be saying anything and soon I heard the bed-springs creaking in their particular rhythm of other nights. The movement of the bed overcame the noise of the rats. I slept and woke up and heard Mum sighing differently and the bed shook and humped shapes wandered about in the darkness and I slept again.

I woke suddenly and the bed still moved and soon I didn’t notice the musical creaking of the springs for I could hear beneath those sounds the shrill intensity of the rats. Just before I fell asleep again I stopped hearing the bed altogether because I suddenly realised that if I tried hard enough I could understand the language of rats.

They were saying, as they ate their way through Mum’s sack of garri, that the world is tougher than fire or steel. I didn’t understand what they meant and I dozed off trying to get them to explain it to me. But they couldn’t understand me because, unlike us, they speak only one language.

THE WORLD IS full of riddles that only the dead can answer. When I began to go to Madame Koto’s place I understood why the spirits were curious about her. I went to her bar in the afternoons after school. She was often in the backyard.

She was often digging the earth, planting a secret, or taking one out. One day I hid and watched her and saw her plant round white stones in the earth. I did not know their significance or even if they had any.

Sometimes when I came in from school she would be in the bushes in the backyard and as soon as she heard me she would shout:

‘Sit down! Sit down and attract customers! Draw them here!’

I would sit and swot flies. The palm-wine everywhere made the flies so plentiful that sometimes when I inhaled I was sure I breathed them in as well. I would sit in the empty bar, near the earthenware pot, and would watch passers-by through the curtain strips. At first when I sat there alone no one came to drink and it seemed as if I was bringingmore bad luck than good.

In the afternoons the bar was empty. One or two people who had no jobs would come in and haggle over the price of a glass of palm-wine. The moment someone came into the bar Madame Koto treated them respectfully. What she hated was people standing outside uncertain. She preferred them to go away rather than come in. She was very decided in this respect.

Women sometimes came by in the afternoons. They were mostly hawkers of sunbleached goods. They talked about their children or their husbands or about the forthcoming elections and about the thugs and violence, the people of different parties killed in skirmishes deep in the country. The women always came with bundles on their heads. They often looked both sad and robust, or spirited and lean. Many of them were hawkers on their way to the market or just stopping to get some shade and some respite from the dusty ghetto paths. They talked in high-pitched voices and congregated round Madame Koto in the backyard as she sat on a stool preparing the evening’s peppersoup.

When the women came by they always teased me, saying:

‘There’s the boy who would marry my daughter. Look at him, he’s being trained in the ways of women.’

They all had children strapped to their backs. The ways of women: I learned a lot about what was happening in the country through them. I learned about the talk of Independence, about how the white men treated us, about political parties and tribal divisions. I would sit in the bar, on a bench, with my feet never touching the floor, and would listen to their stories of lurid sexual scandals as sleep touched my eyes with the noon-day heat. It was always hot and the flies and wall-geckos, the gnats and midges, were always active.

The women would talk for a while. Madame Koto would buy a thing or two from them, and they would set out on the hot roads, touchingme or smiling as they went.

Sometimes Madame Koto would vanish altogether and leave me in the empty bar.

Customers would come in and I would stare at them and they at me.

‘Any palm-wine?’

‘Yes.’

‘Serve us, then.’

I wouldn’t move.

‘You don’t want to serve us?’ I wouldn’t speak.

‘Where is your madame?’

‘I don’t know.’

They would wander off to the backyard and come back and sit for a while.

‘What is your name?’

I wouldn’t tell them. They would leave disgusted and I wouldn’t see them again for a long time afterwards. When Madame Koto returned and I told her about the customers she spoke harshly to me.

‘Why didn’t you come and call me?’

‘Where?’

‘In my room.’

‘Where?’

‘Come.’

She showed it to me. That was when I realised she had a room in the compound. Her room was near the toilet. She never let me in, and the door was always locked. I also learnt that in the afternoons she often went to the market to buy ingredients for her evening’s cooking, finding the right herbs for her flavoured peppersoup. Sometimes she bought ground tobacco and rolled it around in her mouth all afternoon long.

One afternoon I was sitting in my customary position when the earthenware pot began to rattle. I put my hands on it and it stopped. I took my hands off and it rattled.

I went to the backyard, looking around for some sort of explanation. When I came back I saw, standing in the doorway, three of the strangest-looking men. They were unusually tall and very black. Their eyes were almond-shaped, they had small noses, their arms were quite short, and the smiles on their faces never altered. They spoke among themselves in nasal voices that sounded as if they had no chests. I couldn’t understand what they said. They refused to move from the doorway. They looked around the bar, inspecting it, studying the place, each facing a separate direction, as if their different heads connected a central intelligence.

Their eyes were deep and dull and confusing. I could not be sure at any given moment if they were looking at me or at the ceiling. I indicated the benches. They shook their heads simultaneously. They just stood there, completely blocking out the light from the door. I looked at their short arms, limp at their sides, and my head nearly fell off in fright when I discovered that all of them without exception had six fingers on each hand. Then I noticed that they were barefoot and their toes were inturned like those of certain animals. They radiated a potent and frightening dignity.

I got down from the bench and ran to Madame Koto’s room and shouted that she had three strange customers. She bustled out towards the bar, tightening her wrapper round her, spitting out the ground tobacco in her mouth. When I got there she was outside. I looked around. The flies and wall-geckos had gone. A black cat peeped at me from the backyard door. I went after it and it leapt over the wall of the compound.

I went to the barfront and couldn’t find Madame Koto. I went into the bar and she was wiping the table tops with a wet rag, saying:

‘I didn’t see anybody. Call me only when customers arrive, you hear?’

I didn’t nod or say anything.

After Mum recovered from her illness she became sadder and leaner and more sober. Each morning when she woke up from sleep she went around the room as if something had knocked her out the night before and she could not place what it had been. Dad took to going to bed late and waking early. When I got up in the mornings he had gone off to look for jobs. Mum would potter about the room, muttering to herself about rats and poverty.

On some mornings I woke to the commotion of Mum thrashing the cupboard with a broom. She lashed at the cupboard, whipped underneath it, flogged her basins of provisions and sacks of garri as if they had personally offended her. Sometimes cockchafers scattered everywhere under her lashing and they clambered on to my face and I would jump up. Mum, oblivious, wreaking vengeance, would carry on lashing them. She would sweep their corpses on to a pan, dump the broom, go out to dispose of the cockchafers, and we would settle down to eat. She always gave me some bread to take to school and she always walked me as far as the junction and then carried on, basin balanced on her head, through the streets, crooning out her provisions.

For a while Dad disappeared from my life. I woke up and he wouldn’t be there. I went to sleep and he wouldn’t have returned. He worked very hard and when I saw him on Sundays he seemed to be in agony. His back always hurt and in the evenings me and Mum had to walk on him to ease the pain. His back was very strong and ridged and I could never balance on it. When Mum trod on him his spine creaked and we took to rubbing him with a foul-smelling ointment we got from an itinerant herbalist. Dad worked hard carrying heavy loads at the garage and marketplaces and he earned very little money. Out of what he earned he paid the creditors, who came to our room every evening to remind us that they were still alive. And out of what was left we could barely manage to pay the rent and eat. After some days of not seeing Dad I asked Mum what had happened to him.

‘He’s working for our food,’ she said.

It was night. Children played in the passage. Inside, we had no light because we couldn’t afford a candle. Mum moved about in the darkness in uncomplaining silence.