This Side Jordan (4 page)

‘I am pleased to meet you,’ he said stiffly. ‘I am Mr. Amegbe. I am a schoolmaster. No, I do not know this artist personally.’

He realized too late that he had said ‘Mr. Amegbe’ and that the girl had said ‘Johnnie and Miranda’. Nathaniel’s hands tightened around his briefcase. In a moment he would say something rude, to even the score, and then he would despise himself and them.

The white woman was chattering on, in the determined way such women had. Her husband had moved on to the next picture, his jaws clamped hard together and his eyes narrow with disgust.

‘I think these exhibitions are a good idea,’ Miranda was saying. ‘It must do something to encourage African artists. There aren’t many yet, are there? Of course, it’s no wonder. The early missions must have done a great deal to wipe out indigenous art here. By forbidding image-making, I mean.’

Nathaniel hesitated, and then plunged.

‘No doubt,’ he said. ‘The missions tried to destroy our African culture –’

He stopped abruptly. He had overstated the case, overstated it deliberately. Now a hundred details and qualifications came to his mind, but he knew he could never tell them to her. There was too much to say. And so much that could never be said.

Nathaniel remembered the Drummer, and the boy who had trembled with the fear of many gods. What could be said? Not that.

And so his tongue would play him up, once again, and he would fail to make himself clear, getting deeper and deeper into illogicalities that he himself recognized. Nathaniel felt as though he were choking.

‘Of course,’ he said with a slight shrug, ‘there is much more to it than that –’

He broke off again, wondering if he should tell them that he taught a course in African Civilizations of the Past. No doubt they thought he was completely uninformed. He ought to tell them.

‘You’re damn right there’s something more to it,’ Johnnie Kestoe said. ‘This much-vaunted culture never existed – that’s what. The missions tried to destroy it – nonsense! What was there to destroy?’

Miranda turned on him.

‘That’s not fair, Johnnie. You don’t know.’

Nathaniel felt anger swelling in him like a seed about to burst its pod.

‘I have made a considerable study of the subject,’ his voice was harsh now, and he did not care, ‘and I can assure you, Mr. Kestoe, that we in West Africa had civilizations in the past. Great civilizations. Ghana was a great civilization. I don’t suppose you have heard of Ghana. Europeans do not know much about Africa. The school where I teach has begun
a course in ancient African empires. As a matter of fact, I teach it.’

‘How fascinating!’ the white woman gabbled. ‘I’d simply love to know more about –’

But the whiteman was looking at him suspiciously.

‘What school is that?’

All at once Nathaniel felt defeated.

‘One of the secondary schools,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ the expression was insulting in its implications.

‘I must be going now,’ Nathaniel said hotly. ‘As a matter of fact, I am already very late.’

‘I – I’m so sorry we’ve kept you, Mr. Amegbe,’ Miranda stumbled. ‘It’s been so interesting. I do hope we’ll see you again –’

Her voice was young and bleak, and Nathaniel almost relented. She had meant well. Then his resentment gained command. She had tied him here, his hands damply clutching his briefcase.

‘I think that’s extremely unlikely,’ he said.

Home, home, home, said the hum and whir of the bus. It stopped and Nathaniel climbed out. He was in his own territory now. He had been born far inland in the forests of Ashanti, but he had lived for six years in this decaying suburb of Accra and sometimes it seemed almost his own. It was good to get away from the centre of the city, with its white shops and faces.

But he carried the encounter with him.

He walked quickly into the maze of streets, towards his home. The air was thick with the pungent smoke from charcoal pots and the spiced smell of food being cooked in the open, outside every hovel, beside every roadside stall.
Groundnut stew, bean stew, ‘mme-kwan’ – palmnut soup, with the rich sharp smell of the palm oil and the salt-and-woodfire smell of the smoked fish. The moist yeasty odour of ‘kenkey’, fermented corn dough, steaming in black round-bellied cooking pots. The sweet half-cloying smell of roasting plantains. And over all, the warm stench of the sea.

Beside the road, the petty traders’ stalls sprouted, dozens of little ramshackle tables made of old boxes and piled high with lengths of cloth, packets of sugar, mirrors, sandals, sweets, pink plastic combs, a thousand thousand oddments. Women minded the stalls, or children. One small boy slept, his charge forgotten, the goods arrayed for thieves. At another stall, a woman reached down to turn the half-done plantains on the charcoal burner at her feet, then glanced at the baby she held in one arm, her tired eyes growing momentarily rested as she watched him drink her milk.

The street was a tangle of people. Women in mammy-cloths of every colour, women straight as royal palms, balanced effortlessly the wide brass headpans. A girl breadseller carried on her head a screened box full of loaves and cakes. Coast men strolled in African cloth, the bright folds draped casually around them. Muslims from the north walked tall and haughty in the loose white trousers and embroidered robes of their kind. Hausa traders carried bundles tied up in white and black rough wool mats. A portly civil servant in khaki shorts wore with dignity an outdated pith helmet. And everywhere, there were children, goats and chickens. Vivid, noisy, chaotic, the life of the street flowed on.

Nathaniel was part of them, and yet apart. He did not any longer live as these slum-dwellers lived, and yet he lived among them. He was educated, but he was not so much educated that he had left them far behind. Sometimes they were
his fear expressed, and he wanted to shun them lest they pull him back into their river. And sometimes, more rarely, they were his hope.

They lived in mud and thatch huts, but never mind. They sickened with damp and malaria and guinea worm and yaws and bilharzia, but never mind. They went to the ju-ju man to get charms for curing, but never mind. Most of them were illiterate, shrewd and naïve, suspicious and gullible. Any political shyster could move them with luxuriant promises. But never mind. They were strong.

They would do something, do something –

The tailor’s young son, leaping nimbly over the mangy goats that cropped dispiritedly at the weeds in the compound, ran up to greet Nathaniel. The tailor was one of the many inhabitants of the tenement. His sign was outside the main door.

Nathaniel sometimes wondered who had written the sign, but he never offered to correct it, for it was Yiamoo’s greatest pride. All day long the tailor sat on the stoep, his bare feet working the treadle of his old sewing machine. Strung on a line above his head were the cheap cotton shirts he made, magenta and blue and orange, flapping like flags.

The compound was littered with the curious accumulations of many lives. The rusty shell of a car, stripped of tyres and engine, had been there for years. Under the mango tree stood a huge untidy pile of firewood and two smaller ones of sugarcane, belonging to a woman trader who lived in the house. An old upholstered rocking chair, its carved wooden swirls and roses white with mould and its springs protruding
obscenely, rested beside a cage full of live pigeons and another of ‘cutting-grass’, the big bush rats. A weaver owned the cutting-grass and the birds. He claimed he bled them and used their blood in the making of dyes according to the ancient recipes. But Nathaniel always thought this was a story to impress European customers.

Weed-flecked and unkempt, the compound had never been touched by hoe or machete. But beside the open reeking drains a patch of portulaca flaunted a purple-red defiance to the barren earth.

Red, white and green, a Convention People’s Party flag had been erected near the house. The flagpole was a crooked bamboo, striped in the same colours, with the party’s red cockerel perched on top. Nearby, a dissenting tenant from Ashanti had put up a National Liberation Movement flag, green and yellow, with its cocoa-pod emblem.

The house itself was a massive two-storey pile made of sandcrete blocks, of the standard pattern built by Syrians for renting. Inside, it was a warren of tiny rooms. Nathaniel and Aya were fortunate. They had two small rooms on the ground-floor, a side entrance of their own, and a stoep where Aya set the charcoal pots to do the cooking.

As he had foreseen, Aya was cross at his lateness.

‘Does Mensah pay you so much,’ she demanded, ‘that you have to give him his money’s worth by staying until night?’

Aya was twenty-four, but she did not seem to have changed at all from the sixteen-year-old he had married. Despite the heartbreak of two previous miscarriages and the years of pining for a child, her face was still smooth and round, unlined except by an occasional exaggerated frown when she was angry. Nathaniel was glad she had not grown older in appearance. But she had not grown older in mind, either.
There had been less difference between them eight years ago than there was now.

Nathaniel patted her shoulder. He found he did not want to mention his meeting with Miranda and Johnnie Kestoe.

‘How are you feeling?’ It was pleasant, after the daytime English, to speak again in Twi.

Aya touched her swollen abdomen proudly. She had kept this child, when everyone had given up hope of her holding one to full-term.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Very well. He kicks all the time, now. I was thinking, Nathaniel –’

‘Yes?’ he looked at her suspiciously.

‘Why pay?’ Aya burst out. ‘Why, why? I don’t want to have the baby in hospital. All that money. And – I don’t want to, Nathaniel. My mother said –’

‘Your mother –’ he shrugged. ‘I know. She and her friends. They would do a fine job. It isn’t right, Aya. My son isn’t going to be delivered by old women with dirty hands. I know it isn’t right. Why do we become educated, if we do the same things as before?’

‘I was delivered that way,’ she said, ‘and so were you.’

‘It wasn’t any good,’ he snapped. ‘You must know that.’

‘What was wrong with it?’ she demanded. ‘Children came, just the same. I don’t understand you, Nathaniel. All this fuss.’

Nathaniel had waited eight years. It was as important to him as to Aya. And it had become a symbol. More than a safe delivery was the thought that if a child was started in the new way, it would be a favourable omen. The child would not go back, then. Its very birth would set the course of its life.

‘You don’t see anything wrong?’ he cried. ‘The child delivered in the hut where the dirty clothes are washed? We
know more than that now, Aya. And if the birth was difficult, they would beat you, those old women, to force the child out – would you like that? I know these things – I used to hear my sisters whispering. And after it was born, for the eight days it would be nothing – a wandering spirit. No one knows if it plans to stay or go, so they ignore it, put it to sleep on a dirty rag, give it water from a filthy old banana skin. So unless it’s very strong, it dies. Would you like that?’

She looked at him, her face shocked.

‘You must not say it,’ she murmured. ‘You must not say those things.’

But he could not stop.

‘And if it dies,’ he said brutally, ‘it is a disgrace. That small body, whipped because it died, and perhaps a finger cut off –’

‘Nathaniel,’ she whimpered, ‘if I lose it now, it will be because you said – you said the things that should not be spoken.’

He stopped abruptly. He had upset her more than anyone had a right to do. For him, the mention of these things was a matter for anger. For her, it was terror.

‘Aya –’ he choked. ‘Aya – I’m sorry. I have no sense. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. It is just that those things must not happen – not to our child. They don’t need to happen. Please – understand. Please try.’

She turned away.

‘I will go to hospital if you want it,’ she said resignedly.

‘You shouldn’t listen to your mother. How does she know? She’s never been in a hospital.’

‘My aunt has, and she says –’

‘I don’t want to hear,’ Nathaniel said. ‘It is settled.’

‘But the money –’

‘I have the money,’ Nathaniel said firmly.

He would not send it to Kwaale. Not this money. Not this time.

‘So foolish,’ Aya said. ‘Would my mother charge for delivering me?’

‘Aya,’ he said, ‘you must learn.’

Aya sighed.

‘The food has been ready for an hour,’ she said. ‘It will be ruined.’

As they were sitting down to eat, Victor Edusei arrived. Nathaniel was pleased to see him, but he remembered, too, that Aya always said Victor arrived just at meal times.

They had boiled yam and cocoyam leaves stew, the greens mixing fragrantly with the tomatoes, the smoked and salt fish, the rich yellow-red palm oil. Aya was a good cook. Her mother had taught her that, if nothing else. She heaped Victor’s plate and urged him courteously to take more. But Nathaniel knew her eyes were cold with resentment.

Victor knew, too, and he did his best.

‘So your friend is here,’ he said pleasantly to her.

‘Which friend? I have more than one.’

‘Charity. Charity Donkor. From Koforidua.’

‘Yes, she is here. I did not know you knew her, Victor.’

He grinned, his mouth open.

‘I know her all right.’

Aya frowned.

‘She is married,’ she said primly.

Victor looked at her curiously.

‘I wonder how well you know her, Aya?’

‘All my life.’

‘Well, that doesn’t mean – never mind. You know why she is in Accra?’

‘Yes,’ Aya said. ‘I know.’

They both glanced at Nathaniel, almost guiltily. Curiosity stirred in him.

‘Why is she here?’ he asked.

Victor laughed.

‘You tell him, Aya,’ he said. ‘Sometime when he is in the right mood. He is shocked more easily than I.’

After chop, Aya obligingly left them. Nathaniel thought about the Kestoes and wondered if he should tell Victor. Gloomily, he poured a beer for both of them. Victor would have known what to say to Johnnie Kestoe. He always had the right answers. Victor had a degree from the London School of Economics. He had, as well, studied both journalism and accountancy. He had spent six years in U.K. Nathaniel wondered if Victor knew how much he envied him. Probably. He was proud of Victor, as a brother would be, and grateful to him. He had learned more from Victor than he ever had at school. But yes, the evil thing was there, too.