The first people I asked directions answered in a language I couldn’t understand. By chance the fifth person I turned to happened to be a townsmate. What luck! He carried my box on his shoulder while he showed me to the place I needed. ‘Watch yourself, sister!’ he told me as he set down my box.
Five days I was in that city. Five days that seemed like five months! It was already late afternoon when I arrived. I sat on my box and waited as the light dwindled. Two men playing a game of chequers on an upended crate threw glances at me in between games. In time one of them came over and asked me my business. I explained to him. I pointed at the building. He turned to his friend, who shook his head. Together they made me understand the address I had been given was the wrong one.
What was I to do? I had no relatives in the city. In those days there were no such things as hotels, and even if there were I could never have afforded to stay in such a place. I was stranded. The men seemed to understand this. One of them beckoned me to follow him. I suppose I should not have trusted a stranger so easily, but what choice had I? Besides, in those days it was different. People helped each other. Not like now. I followed him through the streets, long straight ones that soon became narrow and short. Here the houses were small and wooden, built side by side with no room in between. On the steps a woman braided another’s hair by the light of an oil lamp, a man sat in front of a python skin for sale, a thin puppy licked the dirty water from the puddles. We passed piles of stinking refuse and gutters foaming with filth. Next we were in an open space with a big cotton tree, children playing with a straw ball in the dusk. And presently we reached a small house where a woman sat next to a candle on a saucer, with a child sucking at her breast. From the way they greeted each other I did not imagine the man and she were very closely related to each other.
In exchange for a sum the woman gave me a place on the floor to sleep, yams and pepper soup with skimpy shreds of meat to eat. Later I lay listening to the sound of a man and a woman arguing in the street. My nostrils were filled with the stench of the pit latrine outside my window. I lit a small stick of incense. I dreamed and woke and for a moment imagined I was somewhere else.
In the morning the landlady taught me some words to use to find my way around. But the words were not enough. I went from one place to the next, grinding the stones of the streets into dust beneath my heels, while the sweat poured off me. Each day I exchanged a little more of my money for the woman’s food and a place to sleep, subtracting what I had spent from the little I had left.
All the time I felt the hope in my heart growing smaller and smaller, like the first piece of ice I held in my hand and watched melt away, until the last sliver disappeared and the enchantment was gone.
Still I persisted. You see, I had come to that city for a reason. I had to find the doctor, the one who had tied my tubes. To ask him if he might undo what he had done, so that I could bear children again. It was the only thing I could think of to stop Zainab from replacing me.
Maybe you think I was stupid to go to a city full of strangers, in search of a man whose face I couldn’t even remember. Only his hands and the certificates on his wall and the smell that clung to his clothes. But as it happened, on the fourth day I passed a building and I smelled that same odour. Something like starch and indigo dye and wood resin all rolled into one. I followed it to the place it was coming from. I entered the building, somewhere I had never been before. I found myself in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery. Not the same man I had come to find, but another one with clean soft-looking hands and certificates on his wall.
Yes, the doctor told me. The operation was reversible. Not easy, but possible. Even after that there was a chance I still might not bear children. I ignored the last part of what he said. I felt the hope begin to crystallise again. I was sure after all this time I was to be rewarded with some good luck. After all, hadn’t I seen the sea?
But a moment later, I felt all the same newly formed crystals of hope melt, drain away out through the ends of my fingers and the soles of my feet. He told me the cost. Six pounds!? I had never even seen so much money.
I returned home on a different bus. All the time I barely lifted my head to look at the landscape. I set my mind to thinking. I would write to my brothers. Perhaps they would help. I only had to work out how to ask them for the money in a way that meant they couldn’t refuse me.
These thoughts were still chasing each other in my mind as I walked the last of the way home. Too late, I realised I had forgotten to think up something to tell Khalil about my trip to see my sister.
The house was quiet. There was my son standing outside my neighbour’s house. I knelt down and stretched out my arms to him, and he ran to me, throwing himself against me. I lifted him up and held him to my chest, pushed my nose into his hair and breathed his good smell. I walked up the path.
The house was empty. No cooking smells. No children. Something strange. Where were Khalil and Zainab? I turned around and around on the same spot. Okurgba laughed as if this was a game. I set him down. I thought many things. Somebody ill? One of the children? I never imagined what was to come. I opened the door of my room. Everything was exactly as I had left it. One by one, I pushed open the doors of the other rooms. Khalil’s. Zainab’s. Empty. Just walls and a floor. Sleeping mats rolled up in the corner. Pegs bare. All gone.
They had left me.
The neighbour informed me of the manner of their departure. They had left my three sons with her. She relished my discomfort and the petty power her knowledge gave her, that much I could see. Watching me with gleaming eyes and a curved smile like that cat of hers. I half expected her to lick her lips as she spun the story out to see my reaction. I emptied my face, simply to deny her the satisfaction. But it came down to this: they left no forwarding address; hand in hand, they ran away like children.
When she had finished she pretended to comfort me, inviting me to sleep in her home, but I brushed her aside. I had only one question. When? I asked her. When did they go?
And she told me. Later on the same morning, the very morning that I had left for the city. At almost exactly the time I first laid eyes on the sea.
11 Mariama, 1970: Other Side of the Road
In the village where we lived people didn’t always greet each other in the usual way. Often they just said: ‘Baba?’ Like that, with a question in the word. A pair of doves somehow escaped from their locked cage and flew away, and people smiled knowingly: ‘Baba.’ If the bucket had been left at the bottom of the well, they said the same: ‘Baba.’ Or if a young girl had been made love to by some man whose name she refused to call, the other men nudged each other while the women spat into the dust. ‘Baba!’
When I was perhaps ten I asked Ya Sallay — who by then had become my mother: ‘Who is Baba?’ And she told me that she had asked the very same thing soon after she had married my father and come here herself. She was told there was once a man who went by that name. Babatunde was an unreliable type of person, the kind who would borrow something and not bring it back. This man owed money to everybody in the village, and was never ready to repay it. So his creditors decided to hold a meeting and sent a message telling him to attend. But Baba somehow got wind of the purpose of the gathering, and on that day he fled the village.
Well, the men went out looking. Even sent messages to the neighbouring villages asking after him. For days people searched the neighbourhood, and whenever they crossed paths would say to each other: ‘Have you seen Baba?’ And after many months and years the question became simply: ‘Baba?’ And then there came a time when the other began to answer in jest, as if to say, I am very well thank you: ‘Tunde.’