The Famished Road (26 page)

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Nothing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then what is that mud doing on your mother’s face?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

He looked at both of us as if we were conspiring against him. He went on asking us and we went on refusing to tell him. He sought a temper but, having eaten and feeling contented, he could not whip one up. Mum was silent, deep in her solitude, and her face was impassive. It showed no pain, no unhappiness, but it showed no joy or contentment either. Dad pleaded for us to tell him what had kept us.

‘Did anyone threaten you?’

‘No.’

‘Did they steal your things?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t hear any bad news?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Did the thugs harass you?’

Mum paused a little before she said:

‘Nothing.’

Dad creaked his back and stretched. He was deeply uncomfortable and almost miserable. Mum got up, cleared the table, and went to bathe. When she came back she went straight to bed. Dad sat in his chair, belching, and smoking, suffering the insomnia of one who cannot fathom the mystery of his wife’s implacable silence. I spread out my mat and lay watching him for a while. His cigarette became a star.

‘There’s a full moon out tonight,’ he said.

While I watched his silhouette, the moon fell from the sky into the empty spaces of the darkness. I went looking for the moon. I followed great wide paths till I came to a shack near a well. The photographer was hiding behind the well, taking pictures of the stars and constellations. His camera flashed and thugs in dark glasses appeared from the flash and proceeded to beat him up. The camera fell from the photographer’s hands. I heard people screaming inside the camera. The thugs jumped on the camera and stamped on it, trying to crush and destroy it. And the people who were inside the camera, who were waiting to become real, and who were trying to get out, began wailing and wouldn’t stop.

The photographer snatched up the broken camera. We ran into the shack and discovered that it had moved over the well. We fell down the well and found ourselves in a hail. The three men in dark glasses were everywhere, constantly multiplying. Dad was smoking a mosquito coil and he looked at me and said:

‘What was mud doing on your mother’s face?’

One of the thugs in dark glasses heard him and saw us and said:

‘She is not one of us.’

The thugs ran after us. Me and the photographer fled into a room and encountered the sedate figure of Madame Koto, dressed in lace with gold trimmings, with a large fan of crocodile skin in her hand. She invited us in, welcomed us, and as we sat three men came and bound us. They shut us in a glass cabinet which would not break.

Outside the cabinet chickens fluttered and turned into politicians. The politicians, wearing white robes, flew about the place, talking in strange languages. I stayed there, trapped behind glass, a photograph that Dad stared at, till dawn broke.

A FEW DAYS later I came upon Madame Koto and the three men. They were standing near a tree. They were involved in a passionate argument. Madame Koto looked fat and haggard. She didn’t have the white beads round her neck. When she saw me she stopped arguing. She made a movement towards me and a fear I couldn’t understand made me run.

‘Catch him!’ she cried.

The three men started after me, but without much conviction. They soon gave up the chase. I didn’t stop till I was near our compound.

I sat on the cement platform. Chickens roamed the street. Two dogs circled one another and when the afternoon seemed at its hottest one of the dogs succeeded in mounting the other. It was only when children gathered around them that it occurred to me that the two dogs were stuck. The dogs couldn’t separate themselves and the children laughed. They threw stones at the dogs and the pain forced them to come unstuck and they ran, howling, in opposite directions.

I sat watching the listless motions of the world. The bushes simmered in the heat.

Birds settled on our roof. Dust rose from numerous footsteps and became inseparable from the blinding heat. My sweat was dry. The flies came. The wind stirred and turned into little whirlwinds; dust and bits of paper and rubbish spiralled upwards.

Children ran round the whirlwinds and only their piercing cries carried, alongwith the birdsong, over the somnolent air of the world.

Everything blazed in the bright liquid heat. Sounds had their edges softened. Beggars dragged themselves past. Roving cobblers and tailors came around the compounds.

Men who sold charms and slippers made in the desert and bamboo artefacts and bright red mats also came round. Then a goatherd led his goats down the street. The goats shat and left their smells in the air, unmoved by the wind. I got bored watching the ordinary events of the world. Flashes from the photographer’s glass cabinet called me.

I went over and looked at the pictures. They hadn’t been changed. I went to the photographer’s room. I knocked and no one answered. I knocked again and the door was opened cautiously. The photographer’s face appeared at my level. He was crouching and he said, in a voice spiked with fear:

‘Go away!’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t want people to know I’m in.’

‘Why not?’ ‘Just go!’

‘What if I don’t go?’

‘I will knock your head and you won’t sleep for seven days.’ I thought about it.

‘Go!’ he cried.

‘What about the men?’

‘What men?’

‘The three men?’

‘Have you seen them?’ he asked in a different voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘They were talkingwith Madame Koto.’

‘That witch! What were they talking about?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When did you see them?’ ‘Not long ago.’

He shut the door quickly, locked it, and then opened it again.

‘Go!’ he said. ‘And if you see them again come and tell me immediately.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Kill them or run.’

He shut the door finally. I stood there for a while. The image of his frightened face lingered in my mind. Then I left his compound and went and sat on our cement platform and kept a steady watch over all movements along the street. The sun made the air and the earth shimmer and as I kept watch I perceived, in the crack of a moment, the recurrence of things unresolved—histories, dreams, a vanished world of great old spirits, wild jungles, tigers with eyes of diamonds roaming the dense foliage.

I saw beings who dragged clanking chains behind them, bleeding from their necks. I saw men and women without wings, sitting in rows, soaring through the empty air.

And I saw, flying towards me in widening dots from the centre of the sun, birds and horses whose wings spanned half the sky and whose feathers had the candency of rubies. I shut my eyes; my being whirled; my head tumbled into a well; and I only opened my eyes again, to stop the sensation of falling, when I heard the shattering of glass. The noise woke up the afternoon.

Across the street three men were smashing the photographer’s glass cabinet with clubs. Then they hurriedly removed the pictures on display. People of the street, awoken by the noise, came to their housefronts. The men, in a flash, had snatched the pictures and had gone into the photographer’s compound. The people who came out looked up and down the street and saw nothing unusual. The action had moved to the photographer’s room. I rushed across the street.

When I got to the room his door was wide open and the men weren’t there. Neither was the photographer. His window was wide open, but it was too high for me to look out of; I ran to the backyard. I saw no one. But I noticed that the backyard led to other backyards. I followed a route past the bucket latrine alive with flies and maggots. The smell was so bad I almost fainted. Another path led to the swamp and marshes and the forest of massive iroko and obeche and mahogany trees. There were deep footprints in the soft soil behind the houses. I followed the footprints, sinking in the mud, till the soft soil shaded into marshes. There was rubbish everywhere. Strange flowers and wild grass and evil-looking fungal growths were profuse over the marshes. Bushes were luxuriant in unexpected places. A wooden footbridge was being constructed to the other side. The footprints merged into many others on the soft soil. Some of them went into the marshes. I looked around, couldn’t find anyone, and gave up the search.

I went back home, washed the mud off my feet, and resumed watch over the street.

Nothing unusual happened.

In the eveningMum returned and was surprised to see me.

‘So you stayed home? Good boy. I thought by now you would have wandered to Egypt,’ she said.

She was back earlier than usual because she hadn’t gone to the market that day.

She had gone hawking. Her face was sun shadowed.

That night I was listening in my childhood hour of darkness. I was listening to Mum’s voice and Dad’s songs, listening to stories of recurrence told down through generations of defiant mouths. In that hour laced with ancient moonlight, I was listening to tales of inscrutable heroes who turned into hard gods of chaos and thunder—when dread paid us a visit. The night brought the dread. It announced itself through piercing voices from the street, crying out in lamentation at the repetition of an old cycle of ascending powers.

We rushed out into the blue memory of a street crowded with shadows. Wild men were wreaking devastation on windows, wooden doors, and human bodies. We rushed out into the haze, into the smell of burning hair, into the acrid yellow smoke from the barber’s shop, into the noises of corrupted ritual chants and caterwauling and machetes giving off electric sparks, crying for medicinal war.

The voices howling for vengeance stampeded the street. The green bodies bristling with antimony sweated animal blood from their naked chests. They were a river of wild jaguars. Their deep earth songs overwhelmed the wind and came from everywhere, from the stars and the broken flowers. They chanted for destruction.

Their whooping filled the night. Their sweating bodies flashed in the lamplight. Their murderous utterances washed over our forgetfulness.

It was impossible to tell who they were. Their chants erupted from crowds gathered outside compounds, from people who we thought were familiar, whose shadows changed beside us into a dreaded heat, whose screechings broke into weird bird-cries.

Even amongst us people were answering the call of old bloodknots and secret tidal curfews.

In great numbers the thugs and ordinary familiar people alike poured over the road of our vulnerability, wounding the night with axes, rampaging our sleep, rousing the earth, attacking compounds, tearing down doors, destroying rooftops. In the wound of our cries we did not know who our enemies were. From the darkness figures with flaming faces attacked us, descended on us with sticks, stones, whips, and wires. It was some time before we realised that we were in the grip of an act of vengeance, a night reprisal, with the darkness as our antagonist. One by one the lamps were extinguished.

The darkness conquered our voices. A great cry, as of a terrifying commander ordering his troops, sprang into the air. There was the silence of deep rivers.

Everything became still. It was as if the night had withdrawn its violence into itself.

The wind breathed over the houses and howled gently through the trees. The whisperings of spirits flowed on the wind. The voices of water and slow footsteps floated towards us. It was as if the wind itself were preparing for a final onslaught.

Then the stillness was broken by the panic of the innocent. There was another cry, not of our antagonists, but of a woman who had seen something wonderful and monstrous. The cry started it all. The innocents turned and with one mind tried to flee back to their rooms. The panic crossed our paths, and collided our bodies in the solid darkness. All over, women wailed for their children. I moved amongst the shadows and ran out into the homeland of darkness, across the street. I thought I was headed for safety. I couldn’t see where I was going. Then voices all around me began shouting:

‘Kill the photographer!’

‘Beat his photographs out of him!’

‘Finish him off!’

‘Blind him.’

‘Blind our enemies!’

‘Destroy them!’

‘Teach them a lesson.’

‘Show them power!’

‘Break their fingers.’

‘Crack their heads!’

‘Crush the photographer.’

‘And leave his body in the street.’

‘Let the birds eat him!’

‘For mocking our party.’

‘Our power!’

‘Our Leader!’

Their chants intensified. Their footsteps became voices, became one, and then multiplied, like fire. The dead rose under the weight of such footsteps, under such voices, under such intent. I banged my head against something solid, scraped my elbow against the jaws of the dead, clawed my way through jagged rust, and discovered I had reached the safety of the burnt van. I hid in the driver’s seat and watched, in that night of blue memories, the drama of the Living that only the Dead can understand.

I couldn’t see anything. But from across the street I heard, first in a whisper, then loudly under the spell of grief:

‘Azaro! Azaro! Where are you?’ It was Mum.

‘Azaro! Azaro!’

Then there was silence. In my childhood hour of darkness, I listened to Mum waiting for my response. But the night and the wind defeated us. From mouth to mouth, from one side of the street to the other, I listened with horror as the wind blew the name.

‘AZARO! AZARO!’

The wind passed the name on. The name flowed to our part of the street and then towards Madame Koto’s bar. The name surrounded me, wavering above the burnt van in a thousand quivering voices, as if God were calling me with the mouths of violent people.