The Famished Road (38 page)

We were silent again. Then he asked if there was any food. I soaked some garri for him, which he ate with dried fish. Then I noticed a bowl of fried plantain and stew which Mum had put aside and I gave it to him. After he had eaten he opened the case of his camera and brought out a bundle of fine-smelling pictures. He looked through them and gave them to me. There were pictures of a fishing festival, of people on the Day of Masquerades. The Egunguns were bizarre, fantastic, and big; some were very ugly; others were beautiful like those maidens of the sea who wear an eternal smile of riddles; in some of the pictures the men had whips and were lashing at one another.

There were images of a great riot. Students and wild men and angry women were throwing stones at vans. There were others of market women running, of white people sitting on an expanse of luxurious beaches, under big umbrellas, with black men serving them drinks; pictures of a child on a crying mother’s back; of a house burning; of a funeral; of a party, with people dancing, women’s skirts lifted, baring lovely thighs. And then I came upon the strangest photograph of them all, which the photographer said he had got from another planet. It was of a man hanging by his neck from a tree. I couldn’t see the rope that he hung from. A white bird was settling on his head and was in a blurred attitude of landing when the photograph was taken.

The man’s face was strange, almost familiar. His eyes were bursting open, they were wide open, as if he had seen too much; his mouth was twisted, his legs were crossed and crooked.

‘What happened to him?’

‘They hanged him.’

‘Is he dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened?’

‘They hanged him.’

‘Who?’

‘Across the seas.’

‘The seas hanged him?’

‘No. Another continent.’

‘A continent hanged him?’

‘No.’

‘What?’

‘They.’

‘Who?’

He paused. I was confused.

‘Some white people.’

I didn’t understand. He took the picture from me and put it back amongst the others.

‘Why?’

‘You’re too young to hear all this.’ I became more interested.

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why did they hang him?’ He was silent. I thought for a moment.

‘Is it because of the white bird?’

‘What white bird? Oh, that one. No.’

‘Why?’

He was silent again. Then he said:

‘Because they don’t like piano music.’

I could see he wanted to change the subject. He put the pictures back in the case.

His eyes were different. His voice had changed when he said:

‘Eight of the people I took pictures of are now dead. When I look at the pictures of dead people something sings in my head. Like mad birds. I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. You are a small boy.’

He stretched out on the mat. That was when I noticed that he smelt of a sweet perfume, a curious incense. I asked him about it.

‘For protection,’ he said. ‘Protection from my enemies.’

‘I smelt it before you knocked on the door,’ I said.

He smiled. He seemed pleased with his charm’s efficacy. He lay very quiet and after a while I thought he was asleep. I wanted to hear him talk.

‘Tell me a story,’ I said.

‘Blow out the candle and sleep.’

‘Tell me a story first and then I will sleep.’

‘If I tell you a story you won’t be able to sleep.’

‘Why not?’

He got up and blew out the candle. The room was quiet. I could hear him breathing.

‘It’s a hard life,’ he said.

‘That’s what the rats used to say.’

‘What do rats know about life,’ he said.

‘Why is it hard?’ I asked. He was quiet.

‘Go to sleep.’

‘Why?’

‘If you wait till the sunbird starts to sing you won’t be able to sleep.’

‘Will you come and visit us?’

‘Every day.’

I knew he was lying. That was when I knew we wouldn’t be seeing him for a long time. It even occurred to me that we might never see him again. But his lie made me less anxious. I was going to ask him to promise that he would come and see us often, but he started grinding his teeth. I lay awake hoping that he would suddenly resume talking, the way he did when he was drunk. He did start to talk, but he was talking in his sleep, and I couldn’t make out what fantastical things he was saying. Then he turned, and he kicked, and his teeth-grinding lessened, and his speech quietened. He had convinced me. I would miss him.

In the morning he was gone. I felt sad he wasn’t there. He had taken pictures of everyone except himself. And after a while I forgot what he looked like. I remembered him only as a glass cabinet and a flashing camera. The only name I had for him was Photographer. He left a written message to Dad to say he was leaving and to thank us for our help. Dad was pleased with the letter and on some happy nightswe sat up and talked about many things and many people, but we were fondest of the photographer. And it was because of our fondness that I was sure that some day we would see him again.

MADAME KOTO GREW distant. Her frame became bigger. Her voice became arrogant. She wore a lot of bangles and necklaces and seemed weighed down by the sheer quantity of decoration she carried on her body. She walked slowly, like one who has recently acquired power. Her face had taken on a new seriousness, and her eyes were harder than ever. I didn’t go to Madame Koto’s bar so much any more.

Dad spoke badly of her, though at first he did not prevent me going to sit in her bar.

I would sit there amongst the flies which increased with the customers. When the thugs came in I would slip out and wander. Afterwards I would play in front of our house.

On some afternoons, after the first visitation of the thugs, it seemed that nothing ever happened in the world. In the mornings Mum went hawking. On some evenings she returned early. She often had a vacant look on her face, as though the market had disappeared.

In the afternoons the heat was humid. The shadows were sharp as knives. And the air was still. The boiling air made even the birdcalls sound like something heard in a stifling dream. The sweat of those afternoons became vapours in the brain. It became possible to sleep with eyes wide open. It was so hot that sleepwalking seemed natural.

Time did not move at all.

I would sit on the platform in front of our house and watch the rubbish along the roadside reduced to crust by the flies and the sun. A flock of egrets, flying past overhead, always made the children jump up and down in the street, singing:

The children would flap their fingers, palms-down, to the flight of the birds. When the birds had gone, white dots in golden-furnace sky, the children would look at their fingernails and find one or two of them miraculously speckled with whiteness.

Time moved slower than the hot air. In the distance, from the forest, came the unending crack of axes on trees. The sound became as familiar as the woodpeckers or the drumming of rain on cocoyam leaves. The noise of machines also became familiar, drilling an insistent beat on the sleep-inducing afternoons.

Sometimes it seemed that the world had stopped moving and the sun would never set. Sometimes it seemed that the brightness of the sun burned people out of reality. I sat one afternoon thinking about the photographer when I saw a boy running down the street, his shorts tattered, his shirt flapping, and he was chasing the metal rim of a bicycle wheel. Three men were behind him, also running. But as he passed the van a terrible light, like the momentous flash of a giant camera, appeared in the sky, blinding me with its brilliance, and I saw the boy’s shadow vanish. I shut my eyes.

Luminous colours, like the flames of alcohol, danced in my eyelids. I opened my eyes and saw the metal rim rolling along by itself. The boy had become his own shadow.

The three men ran past the metal rim. The boy’s shadow melted and the rim rolled over and fell near the gutter. I screamed. A dog barked. I hurried over and picked up the bicycle rim and went to the burnt van and looked all around and I couldn’t find the boy anywhere. I asked the traders at their stalls if they had seen the boy and they replied that they hadn’t seen anything unusual. I threw the rim on to the back of the burnt van, now bulging with rubbish, and sat in front of our compound, puzzled, annoyed.

That evening I heard that an old man who lived near us had been staring at a lizard, while drinking ogogoro in the afternoon heat, when a flaming-yellow angel flew past his face and blinded him. I did not believe the story.

THEN One AFTERNOON time moved and something happened in the world. I had been sleeping on the cement platform and when I woke the photographer’s glass cabinet was gone. Someone had set fire to the rubbish on the back of the burnt van. The rubbish crackled with flames, the smoke was black and awful, and through the afternoon the street stank of smouldering rubber and burning rats.

It was impossible to escape the thick smoke, which formed a haze on the hot unmoving air, and it was impossible to avoid the pungency of the smells, which were harsh on the lining of the throat. So I began to wander. There was music and dancing at Madame Koto’s bar. The place was packed with complete strangers. Madame Koto was singing joyfully above the loud voices and the vigorous revelry. The bar stank of cheap perfume and sweat and spilt palm-wine and trapped heat. The benches and tables had been moved. Paper handkerchiefs were soggy on the floor. Bones and cigarette stubs were all over the place. I looked for Madame Koto but all I saw were men in bright hats, women in phoney lace, waving white handkerchiefs in the air, dancing and stamping to high-life music. The men, covered in sweat, so that it seemed they had just emerged from steaming rivers, had bits of foam at the sides of their mouths. The armpits and the backs of the women’s dresses were wet. I couldn’t see where the music was coming from.

It seemed that I had walked into the wrong bar, had stepped into another reality on the edge of the forest. On the floor there were eaten bits of chicken and squashed jollof rice on paper plates. The walls were full of almanacs with severe faces, bearded faces, mildly squinted eyes, pictures which suggested terrible ritual societies and secret cabals. There were odd-looking calendars with goats in transformations into human beings, fishes with heads of birds, birds with the bodies of women. Sometimes the dancing got so frenzied that a couple, crushed against the walls, would bring down some of the calendars, and would themselves sink to the ground.

Everyone danced in a curious heat. A woman grabbed my hands. I noticed a female midget near the counter, staring at me. A man danced on my toes. I looked up and the midget was gone. It was very hot. I poured sweat. The woman made me dance with her. She drew me to her and my face pressed against her groin and an intoxicating smell staggered me like a new kind of dangerous wine. The woman held my face to her and danced slowly to the music while I suffocated in an old fever that sent a radiant fire bounding through my blood. The woman laughed and pushed me away and drew me to her again with a curious passion and I felt myself lifting from the ground, feet still on the ground, head swirling, a spasm seizingme, and still lifting, till I was almost flying, someone squirted palm-wine on my face, and I collapsed amongst the dancing feet in an excruciating pleasure. The woman made me get up.

The world swayed; my eyes became a little drowsy; the woman turned me round, and laughed again, and danced with me, shaking her hips. The palm-wine ran down my face, down my neck, joined with the stickiness of my sweat, and mingled with the pleasurable weakness in my legs. The music and the flies buzzed around my face.

Then a thick-set man, who had come between me and the woman, took one look down at me, and very loudly, so that no one could possibly miss it, said:

‘Watch your women-o! There’s a small boy here who wants to fuck!’ The women burst out laughing. Their large hungry eyes sought me out. I fled into the crowd and hid my embarrassment behind the counter.

That was when I located the source of the music. On the counter was an evillooking instrument with a metal funnel that would have delighted the imagination of wizards. There was a disc which kept turning, a handle cranked round by a spirit, a long piece of metal with a needle on the whirling disc, and music coming out of the funnel without anyone singing into it. It seemed a perfect instrument for the celebration of the dead, for the dances of light spirits and fine witches. I fled for a second time, fled from the inhuman thing, and fell backwards, tripping. A woman in a red gown caught me.

The twang of an unnatural instrument raged through my head. Someone gave me a cup of palm-wine. I gulped it down. They filled my cup and I drank it all again. The woman who had caught me had a face crinkled in rolls of fat. Foams of sweat clung to her hairline. The music was full of hunger, yearnings, and the woman danced as if she were praying to a new god of the good life. Her eyes were dark with shadows, her lips red as blood, and she had white coral beads round her neck. Her face was crowded with laughter. She twirled me in an odd dance. Another man caught me, and twirled me on. I became dizzy. Flies did somersaults in my eyes. I became lost in the curious jungle of the crowd, lost in the midst of giants.

The bar seemed to keep expanding. The density of bodies got worse. I was a little comforted when I saw the woman in the red gown again. She was dancing with a fat man who seemed to have power. He thrust himself towards her, crushing her groin in the sensual yearning heat of the music. Then I saw through her changed appearance.

When I stopped being deceived by her hair which was different, as though a god had refashioned it in her sleep—and when I saw through all the make-up, and managed to brush past the distractions of her strong perfume, I was amazed to find that I was staring at Madame Koto. She was amused at my astonishment. She gave me a blue plastic cup of palm-wine. A dead fly floated on its froth. I blew the fly away, and drank. The bar gyrated.