Shapes. Shadows. They passed me so close I could have reached out my hand and touched them. Bodies gleaming in the moonlight. I turned and pressed my face against the tree. I stayed that way for I don’t know how long, feeling the smooth bark against my cheek, wishing it was my mother’s skin. I whispered her name. The wish turned into a dream. For a moment I was in her arms. Then just as quickly the dream lost its colour, and turned back into a wish. Try as I might to hold on to the comforting feeling, it slipped away. I was alone and afraid again.
The moon shone like a blind man’s eye. In the dim light I saw the form of a man, coming towards me through the trees. He drew close, saw me and stopped. We stood still, gazing at each other through the grey. As I looked at him I had a strange feeling, like a scent that carries the memory of a touch, or a taste that brings a glimpse of something past. I had seen this man before. I felt sure of it. I did not move. I stood there as fleeting images formed behind my eyes. I saw the bolted gates of the miners’ compound. The men standing silently beyond. The police. Twists of smoke coming out of the barrels of the guns. Red and pink stains blossoming like flowers on the wet ground. And as the memories formed and dissolved I saw him staring at me, making up his mind what to do.
You see, I believed this man was dead. The same man who even before that was once mixed up in some trouble with one of the younger wives.
So now I made up my mind that this was no mortal man but a falang, come back to settle old scores against the people who had murdered him. I didn’t try to run away. For some reason I felt no fear. I was certain the time had come to die. In the pale light I could just make out the mark on his lip, the stain like a splash. He stepped towards me. My legs went weak. I closed my eyelids to shut out the darkness crowding in. When next I opened them I was alone again in the forest.
The rest of the night I spent with my body wrapped around the box of sacred objects entrusted to my father. I slept with my cheek resting on the lid. Inside the box was the skull of the obai who went before. We grow up and we are told a chief never dies. Instead his spirit flies out of the old body and into the new one. The elders keep the head of the last chief to bury with the body of the next. So the line goes on unbroken.
We slept and woke up damp with fright and dew. And when we woke up the rule of the new chief was already over.
And afterwards we heard how the rioters sang the same song all over the land. In town the pink and anxious Assistant to District Commissioner Silk gave the order to fire upon a crowd gathered around his office. Some fell. Those who didn’t took off through the chiefdoms, marching upon the compounds and houses of the chiefs, lighting bonfires of paper money, throwing radios and refrigerators from the windows, chasing the chiefs’ wives into the banana groves.
For days the ash and soot floated down like black rain. And that awful smell. Years later, even to make a cup of coffee for the man I was married to made my stomach churn.
The colonials held a Commission of Inquiry and blamed the disturbances on the chiefs. So they curtailed the powers of some, and others they deposed. Nobody could understand how this could be, since a chief is a chief for ever. Others said it was right. And yet others asked who had given the chiefs such power they were able to rule in defiance of their people?
Of course, the pothos were no fools. They knew better than to stay too long afterwards. They packed their bags, gave us back our country and whoosh — like the wind they were gone.
I met Khalil under my father’s roof, where he had come to live with my family as a ward. Nearly ten years had passed since the rebellion against the chiefs. My father no longer attended court. He lived in his house in town. The day I first saw Khalil I arrived struggling with my son in my arms. Okurgba escaped and jumped in a puddle, scattering some ducklings. Khalil ran down the steps and caught him for me. After that I would see him often; sometimes as soon as I turned the corner and came into view of the house, Khalil would appear and walk alongside me.
Later people said things about me. How could I, a married woman? And him so much younger than me. Still a schoolboy. Well, that was true. Ah, but he had a way about him, I don’t know. He knew things. In many ways it was as if he was the older of the two of us.
You see, I didn’t know anybody who had been to school. Mariama, yes. She was sent to the missionaries because nobody knew what to do with her. Your Aunt Serah, well she was born later than me. By then things were different.
How could you possibly understand? You would jump on an aeroplane sooner than you would ride in a poda poda. I had never left my home. I had never even seen the sea.
Khalil described the oceans for me. Told me of lands covered in snow. Of red deserts where nothing existed but sand and rock. The sun was a great orb of burning gas, he said. The moon was the size of the earth and only looked small because it was many miles away. Even the stars, though they might look like holes in the sky, were really planets whose light reached us years after some of them had already died.
One day I came back from the market with a package of oxtail. I had left some at my own house — by that time I had a girl to help me with the cooking and the children. The remainder I brought with me.
Khalil teased me, saying oxtail was his favourite: ‘I hope there’s enough for me.’ Of course he was only a ward, he would have to wait until my father and others had eaten.
I smiled and spoke with the same laughing tone. I wagged my finger at him: ‘You wait until I count up what’s left,’ I said.
‘How many did you get?’
I told him thirty. But then I had left two each for everybody at home. I remembered then I had forgotten about the girl, doubtless she would want to eat.
Khalil stopped walking and asked: ‘So how many are left?’
I told him I would count them.
It’s so simple for you. Of course I could count. But to add, subtract, multiply. To play with numbers the way you juggle balls. How do you know how to do these things unless somebody shows you? Khalil was the one who taught me. At first I was slow, embarrassed by my ignorance. But he persisted. Every day we drew numbers in the dust, subtracting, adding, then multiplying, dividing: heaps of beans, grains of rice, bowls of oranges, even the stars in the sky. And by the time we had finished I counted the number of times I thought about him in the space of an hour, I multiplied that by the number of hours in the day. And I realised I had fallen in love.
Step by step I moved into my family home. I found reasons to visit, reasons to stay over, reasons not to go home. I sent trays of food over to my husband to keep him from complaining. But I could not stop the rumours from reaching him. And when he finally sat up and looked around him, he realised that I had left.
After the rebellion a change had come over my father. Slowly at first. For days at a time he stayed shuttered up against the sun. In the darkness of his room his skin stretched until it was thin and dry as paper. The flesh moulded itself to his bones. His voice faded to a whisper.
When he had accepted my bride price my father knew he was marrying me to a man who was beneath me. The amount was so little. Like I was worthless, the last item left behind at an auction. And yet all the time I was growing up I had listened to the stories of Asana’s bride price, seen the listeners’ eyes grow as big as coins as the figure rolled out. She who hadn’t even held on to her man.