This Side Jordan (14 page)

‘It was not that,’ Nathaniel interrupted desperately. ‘I prepare my next term’s lectures in the vacation. I have much reading to do.’

‘Oh, well –’ she said, appearing to believe him, ‘in that case – you’ll go when you can?’

Nathaniel almost told her bluntly that the meagre cream of the crop did not interest him, that it was only the failures he worried about. But something stopped him from saying it.

Some of the boys who would fail School Certificate this year would be bright and ambitious. If they could get in with a business firm –

He must be crazy.

‘I will think about it,’ he promised casually.

‘There’s something else I wanted to ask you,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking for someone who could explain the things in the market to me. It seems a bit of an imposition to ask you, but – do you suppose you could come with me one day? Just for a quick whip round.’

‘There’s nothing much to see. It’s just – an ordinary market –’

‘ To you, perhaps. It’s all new to me. I’ve been around once or twice by myself, but there’s so much I’d like to ask about, and I –’

‘I’m very busy,’ he evaded. ‘I work in the Public Library every afternoon these days –’

‘After work, then? The market doesn’t close early.’

Nathaniel fingered his glasses. The memory of his lie about the rheumatism made him unable to think of an excuse now. Why did he not tell her the truth? But she stood there, waiting confidently, certain he would be delighted to go with her. He did not know what to say.

‘All right,’ he said finally, and it was almost a sigh, ‘I’ll go.’

So Nathaniel did show her the market, one afternoon the following week.

Miranda’s car was waiting for him when he left the Library. The driver gave Nathaniel a long amused stare. Nathaniel was thankful when they reached the market and got out.

They were sucked into the whirlpool of humanity that swirled unceasingly around in the small square. There were rough shelters for the sellers, but these had long since been outgrown and the stalls spilled out onto all the paths and crazily winding by-ways.

‘Come on,’ Miranda said, ‘let’s go to the vegetable stalls first.’

It was his own doing, this. He would see it through. He would be calm, perhaps a little amused. The way Victor would have been.

He tried not to look at her, pressing ahead, huge in her billowing smock. The mammies at their stalls grinned at him. Nathaniel did not speak good Ga, but he had no trouble in following the gist of their comments.

A rag-clad labourer, carrying a headload of empty kerosene tins, passed close in front of them. His eye caught Nathaniel’s.

‘Is it yours?’ he shouted gaily in Ga.

‘Be quiet, you!’ Nathaniel snapped.

It would have been easy to reply in kind. He could have had the whole market shaking with laughter. But he could not.

‘Oho!’ the man said rudely, jostling him, ‘it’s easy enough to put it in, but when it comes out, it’s a different colour. Watch out, brother!’

The big-breasted market women showed their teeth in wide bawdy grins, and their laughter, warming as liquor, entered into Nathaniel. They could not read, but they could read him or anyone. No one was private, but what did it matter?

Nathaniel threw back his head and laughed, and the deep warmth of his voice made Miranda turn around.

‘You watch yours,’ he called to the labourer, whose head-load rattled and banged with his mirth, ‘and I’ll watch mine.’

‘Mastah, you got sense,’ one of the women cried in pidgin.

Miranda was smiling.

‘They’re very friendly,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he cried, in a voice like Victor’s, ‘very friendly, Mrs. Kestoe! We Africans are very friendly!’

She gave him an odd glance.

‘I can guess what they’re saying,’ she said dryly.

Startled, Nathaniel saw from her face that she knew. He had underestimated her. Victor would not have made that kind of mistake.

All around them, African women walked tall with their laden brass headpans shining. In the mud, a child crawled, crying, its mother lost, its nose pouring mucus onto its lips. Almost under the host of padding, pushing feet, a man sprawled sleeping, nearly naked, his head on his hands, his genitals lying flaccid across one leg.

At the vegetable stalls, Miranda asked innumerable questions. The big round wooden platters that held the neatly piled tomatoes – where did they come from and could she buy one? Nathaniel did not know. And the red and green peppers, where were they grown, how were they used?

She fingered the green okra, the yellow garden-eggs, the groundnuts, the yams, the calabashes full of corn and dried cassava, the trays of coarse salt and onions. She asked him about African cooking.

‘I don’t know much about that sort of thing,’ Nathaniel said. ‘My wife knows.’

‘I’d love to ask her about it someday.’

‘Someday,’ Nathaniel said uneasily, to pacify her.

They passed the stalls that sold mammy-cloth, the stalls where women were cranking out shirts on hand-run sewing machines, the stalls where clay cooking-pots were stacked.

But Miranda was forging her way determinedly towards those other stalls. Nathaniel knew all this was only a prelude. He tried to distract her. But it was impossible. Quite clearly she had been here many times before, and she knew exactly where she wanted to go.

Here they were, then. The medicine stalls.

Miranda was only mildly interested in the bundles of roots, herbs, leaves, twigs, the raw materials of brews that could cure or kill, depending on which of the two you required.

‘Look –’ she insisted, ‘over there.’

The place was a blind alley, and there were only three or four stalls. It seemed dark and airless as though it were out of the sunshine of the general market.

Miranda’s fingers, eager, alert, touched, touched, touched.

What was it that made some Europeans behave this way when they came in contact with these piles of rotten bones? What was it made them want to touch, touch, touch, and stare – as though to remember a past that was for them so comfortingly long ago?

‘What’s this?’ she cried. ‘How do they work? How do they make ju-ju out of them?’

‘You don’t want to see this rubbish,’ Nathaniel said gruffly.

‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘It’s tremendously interesting.’

She could draw back any time she chose, into the safety of the thousand years that parted them.

Nathaniel stood beside her, staring stupidly. He had a headache, and his briefcase felt heavy in his hands.

– What can I say? That this is my heritage? The heritage of Africa, the glorious past.

– The crocodile head was put out in the sun, and the sun rotted its flesh, and the ants picked it clean. And here it is, the bones grating against the husk of brittle skin. Here it is, in its power. And the monkey head, dried and hairy, eyes closed, dead nostrils puckered with the stench of death, here it is in its power. And the clenched hands of dead monkeys, they are here. And the putrid bird heads, blood dried on the mouldering feathers, they are here, their beaks sharp in their power. And the skulls of small animals that died running, they are here.
And the patches of crocodile skin, leopard skin, snake skin, half scraped, stinking in the sun. And the dead chameleons, tails curled as they curled in life, bones rattling inside grey decayed almost-transparent skin. They are here in their glorious power.

– Oh my people. Oh my children.

– Soul is abroad in the world. Soul is stronger than flesh. We believe it. And believing it has led us to this. The taste of death is in our mouths. The stench of death is in our nostrils, and we pray to old bones. Our crops are blighted and our children die. The husband is cut down by his enemy, and the wife bleeds to death in birth. What can we do? The taste of fear is in our mouths, and we pray to old bones.

– My heritage was the heritage of gold, the heritage of kings, of women splendid as silver, and the brave message of the drums. And my heritage was reeking bones, dried leaves, stones, sea-shells curiously curved, small jingling bells, medicine yam like dead brown phalli, rock sulphur, bluestone, gourds that rattle when you shake them. Death beats his drum in the quiet night. Oh my people. Play with your toys. Pray with your toys.

– The fetish priest danced, and his eyes were topaz, his eyes were flame, his eyes were the sun. Writhe, writhe, and work the work you were paid to do. The priestess danced, and her breasts were painted white, white as the moon. Writhe and work the work you were paid to do.

– My sister was ill. It was a long time ago. She was two years old. She vomited again and again, and her skin burned to the touch. My mother had some money saved. She kept it buried in a clay pot deep in the earth beneath her sleeping-mat. She dug it up. She went to the fetish priest. They are very skilled in medicinal herbs. Oh, quite true. But some are more skilled than others. This one said the child had been polluted
by an evil touch. She was two years old. I crouched in a corner while the rites went on. I was frightened, and there was so much noise. The child cried, but only a little, and then she died. My mother did not cry. She did not cry or wail or move. She was stone and her eyes were dead.

‘This little clay vessel,’ Miranda was saying, ‘it looks as though it were meant to mix medicine in. Is it?’

Nathaniel almost struck it from her hands.

‘Why are you interested?’ he cried. ‘What does it matter to you? Let it be!’

‘I don’t understand –’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know. I know.’

Slowly, she put the vessel back on the heap.

‘You don’t want to think about it, do you?’ she asked.

He did not reply.

‘I’m sorry,’ Miranda said. ‘I didn’t know –’

‘Come,’ Nathaniel said roughly. ‘Let us go.’

Meekly, she followed him.

‘Have I offended you?’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘It is nothing. I am sorry.’

She looked at him, wanting to understand. Her eyes pleaded with him to explain.

‘It is nothing,’ Nathaniel repeated. ‘I – I have a headache. It is very hot and noisy here. Yes, that is all. I just have a headache. I must leave.’

Jacob Abraham stuck his massive head inside the door of the classroom where Nathaniel was sorting out last term’s essays. He beckoned urgently, and Nathaniel, surprised, followed him out.

‘You have a visitor – a lady,’ Jacob Abraham leered. ‘A European lady.’

Nathaniel stared at him, appalled. It could be only one person. Why did she keep troubling him?

‘I have told her she could see you in my office,’ Jacob Abraham hissed, his fish eyes agape with curiosity.

Nathaniel blinked and wiped the sweat from his chin. Now she had seen Futura Academy. In all its glory.

‘Well,’ Jacob Abraham said, with a trace of impatience, ‘don’t keep her waiting, Amegbe.’

Stiffly, as though he were performing in front of an audience, Nathaniel stepped into Mensah’s office.

Miranda was leaning back comfortably in one of the armchairs. She was regarding with interest the lace doilies and gilt-framed photographs on the small tables.

Her face, well-carved in the angular way the English admired, looked young, and incongruous above the unwieldy body. The severity of her hair, plaited across her head, made her face look even less like a woman’s. It was something Nathaniel had noticed before in whitewomen. Their faces grew yellow and tired here, but retained a strange look of boyishness. They could bear children, even, without seeming aware of their own womanhood, as though it were unimportant to them. He wondered if these boy-women could change, suddenly, at nightfall, become soft and hungry and supple. It was ridiculous. He could not imagine it.

‘Good morning,’ Miranda said humbly. ‘I hope you don’t mind my coming here, Mr. Amegbe.’

And then he was conscious again of the building outside this carpeted office – the cracked plaster, the corridors strewn with refuse, the empty classrooms with their unswept mud floors.

‘I know you must be busy,’ she hurried on, ‘but I wanted to tell you – look here, though, before we go further, you’re
not still annoyed about the other day, are you? The market, I mean –’

‘No, no, it was nothing,’ he mumbled. ‘I have told you. I had a headache.’

At her quizzical look, fury rose in him.

‘A simple headache. Why do you trouble me about it?’

Miranda Kestoe flushed, a bright dye along her cheekbones.

‘I – I’m sorry,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I never seem to –’

Either they never apologized for anything or they apologized all the time for everything. Nathaniel’s face went blank.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘I beg you – forget about it.’

He realized too late that he had said ‘I beg you’. It was a pidgin phrase. Every beggar, every market urchin used it. She would think he could not speak proper English.

– Mastah, I beg you. You go dash me one penny.

Nathaniel could not look at her. But she did not seem to have noticed.

‘Very well,’ she was saying, ‘let’s forget it, then. The thing is – my husband tells me he’s got to find boys for those posts within the next week, if possible. It would be a shame for you to miss the opportunity –’

Nathaniel did not know what to say. Because now he wanted to go and wring those jobs from Johnnie Kestoe, a niche for the dispossessed, an awakening for the dream-addicts who had chewed the sweet bitter kola nut of unreality.

That was the terrible thing – he wanted to go. She had talked and talked, and he had begun thinking about it, and now the wish was there.

And yet he held back. He did not want to accept anything from her. She was so eager to offer help. She urged and
pleaded. She thrust her goodwill down his throat. And Nathaniel gagged on it.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I don’t know –’

He wondered if Miranda would tell her husband what the school looked like, its every crack and stain, the bedraggled goats lying in the courtyard, the stench of the open latrine.

Then he knew, and even in his relief he despised her for it, that she would not tell.

‘Why are you so anxious for me to do this, Mrs. Kestoe?’

‘Well, it would help Johnnie tremendously in his job, you see, and also, it might show him – it might convince him –’