The Famished Road (9 page)

The bar was shut. At the backyard Madame Koto, wearing blue wrappers and a red blouse and a filthy head-tie, was strugglingwith a huge chicken.

‘Madame Koto!’ I called.

She glared at me, striking me dumb, and the chicken flew out of her hands. She pursued it into the bushes, grabbed it firmly, gave me a sour look, and said:

‘Your father owes me money.’

Then she forgot about my presence altogether. The chicken fought in her hands and she grabbed its thickly feathered neck. Twisting her mouth, she held the chicken’s body down with her foot, and sliced its throat with jagged motions of her long knife.

The chicken’s blood burst out from the gash, staining the air, splattering my face, deepening the red of her blouse. The blood poured into a hole she had dug in the earth and the chicken fought, its comb rising and falling, its mouth opening and shutting in its final spasms, and when it died its eyes were open. They stared at me. Then Madame Koto washed the knife, sweat dribbling down her face and breasts. She regarded me with big eyes as if she were going to swallow me. I was crying.

‘Because of a chicken?’ she said, sucking her teeth.

She reached for a kettle of boiling water. I held on to her blouse, pulling her, my mouth wet, unable to speak. She pushed me away and I fell backwards on the ground and I stayed there, kicking the air, and eventually I said:

‘My mother is dying.’

‘How do you know?’ she asked, eyeingme.

‘Smoke is coming from her.’

‘Smoke?’

‘Red smoke,’ I said.

She got up immediately, washed her hands, and started to hurry towards our compound. But at the barfront she stopped and said:

‘Go and boil some water. I’m coming.’

I was confused. She went to her room, came out with a handful of herbs, stamped around the bushes, tearing off leaves from plants. Then she fetched a coarse sponge, dark green soap, a black metal container, looked round, saw me, and said:

‘Go! Boil water! I’m coming.’

I rushed home, started a fire in the kitchen, and boiled water in the pan that Mum had burnt. Madame Koto arrived soon afterwards. She washed and boiled the leaves. We went to the room. Mum was still on the bed. The mist above her had almost vanished.

Madame Koto tried to put leaves in her mouth, but they merely stayed on her lips.

Then she poured a distillate in a cup, added black oils and ogogoro, held Mum’s head up and tried to get her to drink. Mum choked and Madame Koto called her name with such violence it sounded like a whip. She went on whipping Mum with her name, calling back her spirit, in a very peculiar birdlike voice.

After a long time Mum opened her eyes and stared at Madame Koto. Then at me.

She stared at us utterly without comprehension. Her eyes stayed open, unmoving, blank. Grief threw me to the floor and I thrashed about and wailed because I thought Mum had died. Then, from a great distance, I heard Mum speak, and I fell silent. In a very feeble voice, she said:

‘I saw my son in the land of death. Azaro?’

‘Yes?’

‘What were you doing there?’

‘I’m here, Mum,’ I said.

She stared beyond me. Madame Koto gave her more of the herbal mixture to drink.

Then she made her drink some peppersoup, and got her to sit up straight. Then she told me to talk to Mum, to keep talking to her; and as I spoke to Mum about whatever came to mind the mist above her changed colour and slowly disappeared.

‘The smoke is going!’ I cried.

Madame Koto opened the door and the window. Light and air filled the room and Mum fell asleep in her sitting position, her head flopped forward. We stretched her out. I listened to her rough breathing. After a while Madame Koto said we should let her rest. She went back to her bar and to the chicken she was about to cook for food. I stayed outside our room, and kept listening. I watched the children playing as I listened.

When Mum called my name three times I hurried in and sat on the bed. Her face was covered in sweat. The room smelt of illness. There was a little foam on her lips and sweat on her forehead. Her lips quivered. She could scarcely speak.

‘My son,’ she said, ‘I saw you walking on your head. You were walking away from me. I pursued you but you ran very fast. And you were laughing at me, my son.’

‘I’m not laughing at you, Mum.’

‘When I caught you,’ she continued, ‘I saw you had no eyes and no mouth, and you had little legs on your head. There was a white rope round you and it went up to the sky. I pulled the rope and it pulled me. I couldn’t cut it. And then the rope jumped from your feet to my neck. The rope pulled me up to the sky and I passed the moon and a red cloud shut my eyes.’

‘Mum, your eyes are not shut.’

‘It was because of you that the white rope jumped to my neck. What were you doingwalking upside-down?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How did you get little legs on your head?’

‘I don’t know, Mum.’

‘Go and fetch me some water, my son. I am thirsty.’

I ran out and fetched water in a clean cup and when I got back she was fast asleep.

Her breathingwas much gentler.

Early in the evening the compound women came to see how Mum was doing. She sat up and received them. They prayed for her recovery. They left and Madame Koto came with a bowl of food and another of peppersoup. Mum didn’t want to eat, she was so weak, but we pressed her. I washed the plates and took them back to Madame Koto’s bar. Then afterwards the creditors came to ask for Dad under the pretext that they had come to wish Mum well. When Mum saw them she got very upset and shouted at them, accusing them of poisoning her.

I came in and saw Mum staggering and throwing things at them. She was very lean, and she swayed, and threw shoes at the creditors. I joined in the attack. They retreated. When they were outside they cursed us and encouraged their children to throw things at us and one of them threw a stone which hit Mum on the head and she collapsed at my feet and a tragic wail rose collectively from the women of the compound. The creditors fled. The women carried Mum into the room. She came to as they crossed the threshold. Her eyes were hard and when she lay on the bed she had a strange little smile on her mouth as if she finally understood something that had always eluded her.

The smile stayed on her mouth all evening. I listened to the flies. The sounds of the evening intensified. The flies played on Mum’s smile and she made no attempt to wave them away. I waved them off and Mum looked at me expressionlessly. I sat on the bed and watched the night creep into the room through the open window.

It was quite late when a sound at the door woke us up. I was curled up in a corner of the bed and Mum’s eyes were wide open. I looked up at the door and saw Dad standing there like a tall ghost, his eyes bright, his sling gone. He was like a giant who was lost. He didn’t move for a longmoment. Then he lit a candle, shut the window and the door, and when he sat down a thick cloud of white dust billowed out from the seat of his trousers. His hair was white. His eyelashes were white. His hair was dishevelled. He had a bewildered expression on his face that frightened me. He stank of cement, dried fish, garri, and white dust. He sat silently for a long time, without moving. When he did move his joints creaked. His bad arm hung loosely by his side.

His bandage had gone and the wound was covered in white dust. Then suddenly, out of the silence of the slow burning candle, he said:

‘How’s your mother?’

‘She nearly died today. Madame Koto helped us.’

He breathed deeply and shut his eyes. He was silent and still for a while and I thought he had fallen asleep. Mum’s eyes were open and devoid of expression.

‘Is there any food?’

‘No.’

Dad was silent again. Then, wearing his bathroom slippers, taking his towel and soap, he went to bathe. He came back clean and handsome, with all the white dust and the cement smells gone. But his eyes were heavy and he still looked bewildered and he still frightened me. He rubbed himself with oil, combed his hair, and lit a mosquito coil. We moved the centre table and spread the mat. The room stank of his boots and his clothes. He sat on the chair and I lay on the mat, a pillow beneath my head. He smoked into the night.

‘So what happened today?’ he asked after a while.

I wanted to tell him about the creditors and Mum, but I felt a certain weariness about him which made the night heavy, and so I said:

‘Mum nearly died.’

He released a long sigh. Then he got up, looked down at Mum, placed his palm on her forehead, and shut her eyes. He went back to the chair and smoked some more and I could measure the sadness of his thoughts by the way he dragged on the cigarette and the way he sighed while exhaling.

I watched the bright point of his cigarette in the dark and it eventually lulled me into Madame Koto’s bar. Dad was there. The bar had moved deep into the forest and all her customers were animals and birds. I sat on a bench which was really the back of a goat and I drank off the back of a bull. A massive chicken without feathers strode into the bar, sat next to me, and ordered palm-wine and peppersoup. Madame Koto didn’t want to serve the chicken, but Dad said:

‘Serve him!’

Madame Koto went out and fetched a great broom and she chased the chicken round the bar, lashing its head. Dad laughed. The chicken laughed. Madame Koto tripped, fell, and got up. She whacked the chicken on the head, and missed. The chicken ran out of the bar, destroying the door frame, and laughed deep into the forest. I looked round and saw Dad asleep on the chair, his head bent forward, snoring. I woke him up and he leapt with a start and fell off the chair. When he got up he said a leopard with glass teeth had been pursuing him in his dreams. He lay down beside me on the mat. With his smell in my nostrils, he made me worried and unhappy. He was restless beside me and his bones kept creaking. He kept sighing and muttering words to his ancestors and I found myself again in Madame Koto’s bar deep in the forest. Dad wasn’t there. The customers this time were all invisible and I saw the air drinking palm-wine. Madame Koto sat on a chair made of chicken feathers. Dad began to snore. He snored so hard that the long wooden broom in the corner began to sweep the bar, spreading white dust everywhere. Madame Koto commanded the broom to he still but Dad went on snoring and the broom took on a will of its own and attacked the cobwebs and swept the tables and when it attempted to sweep Madame Koto out of her own establishment she lost her temper. Then I saw her fighting with the long broom. The broom hit her on the head. I laughed. Dad stopped snoring. She grabbed the broom, threw it over her shoulder, and smashed it on the floor, breaking its neck. The handle of the broom began to bleed. With blood on her face, Madame Koto turned to me, who was dreaming her, and said:

‘You laughed at me? You’re next!’

She started towards me with a demonic expression, and I cried out. Dad put his arm round me and said:

‘Go to sleep, my son. Nothingwill harm you.’

After a long silence, as if answering an important question which the night and his parents and his hopes had put to him, he said:

‘I have been carrying the world on my head today.’

Soon afterwards he fell asleep. He slept like a giant.

DAD WAS PRAYING over Mum’s body. There was a herbalist in the room. He looked very fierce and wise and stank of old leaves. He chewed on a root and his teeth were brown. He sprinkled the room with liquid from a half -calabash.

There were candles on both sides of Mum’s body. She lay on the mat, breathing gently. Her eyelids shone with antimony. The corpse of a bat lay by her face. Razor incisions had been made on her shoulders and I watched the blood turn black as the herbalist smeared the cut with ash. The herbalist made her sit up and drink from a bowl of bitter liquid. Mum contorted her face. The herbalist began whipping the air, driving out unwanted spirits with his charmed flywhisk. The air crackled with their cries. When he had sealed our spaces with gnomic spells, he made Mum sit up again.

Under our intense gaze, he bit Mum’s shoulder and pulled out a long needle and three cowries from her flesh. He went outside and buried them in the earth.

When he had finished with his treatment Mum fell asleep, looking more peaceful than before. The herbalist and Dad haggled about money. Dad’s voice was strained and he kept pleading for the charges to be a little lower. The herbalist wouldn’t budge.

Dad said it was all he had. The herbalist wouldn’t relent. Dad sighed, paid, and they sat talking. I hated the herbalist for taking so much money off Dad, and I cursed him.

They talked as if they were friends and I hated him even more for pretending to be our friend. When he got up to leave he seemed to notice me for the first time. He stared hard at me and gave me a pound, which I gave to Dad. I took back my curse, and he left. I sat on Dad’s legs and we watched Mum sleeping soundly on the bed.

Late in the afternoon Dad said he was thirsty. We went to the bar. Madame Koto’s establishment was empty except for the flies. I heard her singing in the backyard. Dad called her but she didn’t hear. We both called her, banging on the table, and still she couldn’t hear us. We were banging away at the table, calling her name, when the front door swung open and a black wind came in and circled us and disappeared into an earthenware pot of water.

‘Did you see that, Dad?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘The black wind.’

‘No.’

Madame Koto came in, her hair a mess, her hands covered in animal gore.

‘So it’s you two. I’m coming.’

She went back out and minutes later was back, her hands clean, her hair in place.

‘What do you want to drink?’

Dad ordered the usual palm-wine and bushmeat peppersoup. When the wine was served the flies thickened around us. A wall-gecko watched us as we drank.