The Famished Road (27 page)

Even the dead played with my name that night.

I listened in my childhood hour as the name eventually flowed towards the photographer’s compound and echoed faintly down the passage before passing away into silence. I did not hear Mum’s voice afterwards.

As I sat in the car, overcome with fear, I saw the dead rising. I saw them rising at the same moment that the second wave of havoc started with the chants of the antagonists. The dead joined the innocents, mingled with the thugs, merged with the night, and plundered the antagonists with the cries of the wounded. The dead uttered howls of mortal joy and they found the livid night a shrine glistening with fevers.

They revelled in that night of mirrors, where bodies shimmered with blood and silver.

The dead shook off their rust of living and seized up steel. Their lips quivered with the defiance of the innocents, with the manipulations of politicians and their interchangeable dreams, and with the insanity of thugs who don’t even know for which parties they commit their atrocities.

It was a night without memory. It was a night replaying its corrosive recurrence on the road of our lives, on the road which was hungry for great transformations.

The dead, slowly awakening the sleep of the road, were acrobats of violence. They somersaulted with new political dreams amongst men, women, and children. I heard several voices, without fear or beyond it, uttering a new rallying call. Then I heard fighting. I heard the bright howls of resistance, footsteps running into the darkness, flashing steel on solid bodies, chests painted with antimony being beaten down, and women with mortars for pounding yam pounding on shadows. I heard strong men bewildered by the mutinous wind, deep voices crying out the names of hard gods. I realised that the antagonists were being repulsed. The people from the photographer’s compound were in the vanguard. The dead were curiously on the side of the innocents. Voices I knew bravely cried:

‘Fight them back!’

‘Fight for your freedom!’

‘Stone them!’

‘They poisoned us with milk.’

‘And words.’

‘And promises.’

‘And they want to rule our country!’

‘Our lives!’

‘And now they attack us!’

‘On our own Street!’

‘Fight them without fear!’

Machetes burst into flame. Chants were reversed in syllables. Spells were broken on the jagged teeth of night. The antagonists attempted a last desperate rally.

‘Pour petrol on the house!’

‘Burn it down!’

‘Burn out the photographer!’

‘Burn out Azaro!’

I trembled in the van. Someone hurled a firebrand at the photographer’s compound.

The dead caught it and ate up the flames. Someone threw another brand in the air. It landed on the van, and spluttered out on the bonnet. Something crawled up my legs.

Smoke drifted in from a side window. The van was alive with spiders and worms. I started to get out of the van. I had got my head out of the other window when I heard a great deafening blast from the photographer’s compound. After the blast there was a profound silence. The wind whistled over the noise.

And then the shadows, the footsteps, the green bodies, the fierce jaguars, the disaster-mongers, the fire-breathers, the rousers of the dead, and the rampagers of sleep, became fleeing footfalls scattered by the wind and the great detonation. The dark walls of their bodies disintegrated. Their voices were not so menacing any more, but full of fear.

Another gunshot, not aimed in any particular direction, but cracking the air as though a star had exploded over our street, made the escaping stampede of antagonists more desperate. I could hear them falling over one another, running into the terrors of their own making, colliding into their own shadows, into the luminous bodies in the dark. I could hear them screaming the names of their mothers, calling for their wives, wondering who would take care of their children, as the innocents crashed their heads with bottles, as the men of the street rained an insistent beat of clubs on their retreat, and as they fell under the anger of lacerating claws and blunt-edged cutlasses.

New forces had joined the night, converted the night, made it the ally of the innocents.

When the tidal force had retreated, the agitation quelled, when the antagonists had started their trucks and taken off at Madame Koto’s end of the street—the hosts of the dead descended into the open bleeding mouth of the earth. I saw them from the van. I watched the world dissolving into a delirium of stories. The dead descended into the forgetfulness of our blue memories, with their indigo eyes and their silver glances.

The inhabitants of the street regained the night. Voices were reawakened. Lamps came on one after another. People tentatively gathered at compound-fronts. The only thing that was missing was the photographer to record the events of the night and make them real with his magic instrument. I got out of the van and fled across the street, into the despairing arms of Mother.

In the morning we learned about the wounded, about the woman slashed across the face with a knife, the man whose head was raw with the blunt vengeance of a machete, the people whose noses were cut open with broken bottles, those flagellated with wires, the man who had lost half an ear, the woman whose back was burnt.

Against the innocents who were wounded, we heard of the death of an antagonist. We also heard one party claim that the atrocities had been committed by the other.

The energies that went into fighting back exhausted the street. We did not celebrate our resistance. We knew that the troubles were incomplete, that the reprisals had been deferred to another night, when we would have forgotten. The inhabitants of the street, frightened and angry, set up vigilantes. They were armed with knives, clubs, and dane guns. We waited for new forms of iron to fall on us. We waited for a long time. Nothing happened the way we expected. After two weeks, the vigilantes disbanded. We sank back into our usual lives.

The photographer vanished altogether. His room had been wrecked. His door was broken down, his clothes shredded, his mattress slashed, his available pictures and negatives destroyed, and some of his cameras broken up. His landlord, who had no sympathy for heroes, went around looking for him, demanding that his door be repaired.

We feared that the photographer had been murdered. His glass cabinet remained permanently shattered. It looked misbegotten. It became a small representation of what powerful forces in society can do if anyone speaks out against their corruptions.

And because the photographer hadn’t been there to record what had happened that night, nothing of the events appeared in the newspapers. It was as if the events were never real. They assumed the status of rumour.

At first the street suffered fear. Stall-owners stopped selling things in the evenings.

The street seemed darker than usual at night. People became so cautious that no one opened their doors merely because they were knocked on. Those who usually went out drinking, and who returned late, took to getting drunk in their rooms, and singing into the nights.

After a while, when nothing happened, when no reprisals fell on us, it seemed that nothing significant had happened. Some of us began to distrust our memories. We began to think that we had collectively dreamt up the fevers of that night. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time. Meanwhile, the river of wild jaguars flowed below the surface of our hungry roads.

On many of those nights, in my childhood hour, Mum told me stories of aquamarine beginnings. Under the white eye of the moon, under the indigo sky, in the golden lights of survival in our little room, I listened to the wisdom of the old songs which Dad rendered in his cracked fighting voice. Mesmerised by the cobalt shadows, the paradoxical ultramarine air, and the silver glances of the dead, I listened to the hard images of joy. I listened also to the songs of work and harvest and the secrets of heroes.

Outside, the wind of recurrence blew gently over the earth.

THE VISITATION OF dread didn’t change our lives in any particular way.

Mum went on being harassed at the market. When she moved her stall to another part of the market the thugs would turn up, posing as potential customers. They pestered her and tipped over her things and took her goods without paying. Then they would denounce her, making the most outrageous accusations, and those who wanted to buy provisions from her went somewhere else. Mum came home without selling much.

She made very little money.

Dad returned earlier each night. He too was increasingly harassed. He was more worn out than ever and his back hurt so much that some mornings he had difficulty standing up straight. Dad became clumsier. His neck ached all the time. He developed sores on his feet. The skin around his shoulders, the back of his ears, his neck, and all along his spine began to peel away. His skin turned a greyish colour because of the salt and cement that spilled on him from the loads he carried.

For a while I ceased in my wanderings. When I got back from school I stayed outside our compound and played in the streets. In the evenings I ran errands for Mum and Dad, who were too fatigued to do anything. I bought candles, mosquito coils, ogogoro. I warmed the food, washed the plates, cleaned the room. I picked herbs for Dad to use in his secret medicines. I went to herbalists for medicines with which to treat Dad’s back. We all went to bed early and Dad didn’t sit for long hours in his chair.

When the candle burned low, and the rats began to eat, I would put out the light and lie awake in the dark. I would listen to Mum and Dad snoring on the bed. Sometimes when I fell asleep a lighter part of me rose up from my body and floated in the dark. A bright light, which I could not see, but which I could feel, surrounded me. I would be lifted out of my body, would find it difficult to get out through the roof, and would be brought down suddenly by the noise of the rats eating. Then I would sleep soundly.

One night I managed to lift myself out through the roof. I went up at breathtaking speed and stars fell from me. Unable to control my motion, I rose and fell and went in all directions, spinning through incredible peaks and vortexes. Dizzy and turning, swirling and dancing, the darkness seemed infinite, without signs, without markings. I rose without getting to heaven. I soared blissfully and I understood something of the inhuman exultation of flight.

I was beginning to learn how to control my motion that night when something happened and a great flash, which was like a sudden noise, exploded all through me. I seemed to scatter in all directions. I became leaves lashed by the winds of recurrence.

I felt myself falling through an unbearable immensity of dark spaces and a sharp diamond agony tugged deep inside my lightness and I tried to re-enter myself but seemed diverted into a tide of total night and I fought and tried to be calm and then I felt myself falling with horrible acceleration into a dark well and just before I hit the bottom I noticed that I was falling into the face of a luminous moon. The whiteness swallowed me and turned to darkness. I burst out screaming. And when I regained myself I heard, for a moment, the rats chewing, my parents snoring, and someone banging relentlessly on the door.

I stayed on the mat for a while without moving. I had a violent headache. Lights spun in my eyes. I felt empty inside. My body felt odd. The knocking continued and interrupted my parents’ breathing. Even the rats fell silent. I got up and went to the door and asked:

“Who is it?’

Dad turned on the bed. Mum stopped snoring. The person knocking didn’t answer.

One of the other tenants from their window, shouted:

‘Who is that knocking? If you don’t want trouble leave now, you hear?’

The knocks came again, gently, like a code that I was expected to understand. I opened the door. Crouching in front of our low wall, his camera dangling from his shoulder, was the photographer. His frightened eyes glowed in the dark.

‘It’s me,’ he said.

I stared at him for a long time. He didn’t move. The neighbour shouted:

‘Who is there that wants to die?’

I opened the door wider for the photographer and, still crouching, he came hurriedly into the room. I lit a candle. I saw that he was bleeding from the head. He sat on my mat, blood dripping down his forehead, past his eyes, and soaking his yellow shirt. He breathed heavily and tried to quieten it. His hair was rough, his face bruised, one eye was swollen, his lower lip was puffed and discoloured.

‘What happened to you?’ I asked.

‘A small thing,’ he said. ‘Nothing that a man cannot bear.’

He sat, then he knelt, his head in his hands. When he looked up his eyes were big and bright, full of fear and wisdom.

‘I heard all about what happened in the street. It is happening everywhere. One way or another we will continue to fight for truth. And justice. And we will win.’

His blood was on his hands. He wiped it on his shirt-front. The red on the yellow made me feel ill.

‘Believe me,’ he added.

It was a while before he spoke again. His eyes were remembering and there was a faint smile on his lips.

‘When the three men came the other night I jumped out of the window, ran out into the marshes and stayed there, hiding under the wooden foot-bridge, till the worms began to eat into my feet. I came out from under the bridge. I was afraid. A dog whined at me and followed me wherever I went. A two-legged dog. The wretched animal went on annoying me and whining and people kept staring at me and I didn’t know who was an enemy and who wasn’t so I kicked the dog. It fell down and didn’t get up.’

He paused.

‘Then I went to a friend’s house. He had a girl-friend with him. I washed my legs and stayed outside. Then I went to look for my relatives.’