by Ben Okri
‘Let’s wade through.’
‘Yes, and get your tail bitten off by a guard dog, eh?’
They turned back and picked their way aimlessly through the obstacles in the dark.
‘This is a bloody anti-climax.’
‘No, man, the night is balancing itself, claiming what it gives.’
‘Then the night is bloody selfish.’
Omovo thought: ‘God, the silent drama is becoming dangerous.’ The night had assumed the aspect of a ritual: a thing enacted by the dark-cast trees.
‘God, Omovo, this is not a joke anymore. My mother is waiting at home. This is how my sister...’
‘Shut up, Keme! You are making it worse.’
‘Omovo, you are pretending! You are as afraid as I am.’
‘Even more.’
The trees were brooding, watchful figures. The shrubbery took on different shapes. The wind howled like a thing possessed and the raging surf orchestrated the separate terrors. Then, mercifully, the moon unfolded its soft radiance. But when the anaemic fingers of moonlight passed under a massive cloud, the park darkened again.
‘God is playing games with us.’
‘We are in a zoo.’
Leaves crunched. Twigs cracked and broke underfoot. Empty cans twanged. Footsteps thudded away from them. Keme kicked something and stumbled heavily. Omovo growled: ‘You damn oaf. Get up and let’s get out of here while the moon amuses herself.’
His voice was forced. Then Keme shrieked. It was a lone sound. Omovo’s heart missed a thousand beats and the chill held his vitals in a relentless grip. Keme screamed again. And this time Omovo knew that the nightmare had materialised.
‘Omovo, Omovo, come and see...’
Omovo dashed behind the scrub. He friend was kneeling beside a body.
‘Omovo...’
‘Stop calling my name!’
‘Sorry. I think... it’s...’
‘Dead?’
‘Yes...’
‘Have you a match?’
They lit a match and covered the flame with two cupped hands. It was the body of a girl. Her head had been roughly shaved. The eyes were half open. Her mouth was abnormally pouted. Her teeth gleamed. There was a bronze cross round her neck. It dangled towards the earth. Her flowered cotton dress had been torn and was bloodstained. A white foul-smelling cloth had been used to cover her lower parts. She was barefoot. She couldn’t have been more than ten years old. And she was pretty. There was a blank, pale expression on her face. Omovo gave a low, helpless cry. Then the matchlight flickered. Shadows leapt and the light died out. The night was silent.
The shock exploded in their minds. Omovo was seized with a strange bitter feeling. And then he experienced a sensation of ‘déjà vu’.
‘It’s a ritual murder.’
For Keme the night had tipped over the electrified edge of nightmare. It brought sharply back to him the horror of losing both his father and sister. A blurred aspect of evil conjured itself before him.
‘We’ve got to do something.’
‘Yes. We have.’
Omovo looked at Keme. The emergent moonlight touched his face with sheen. Something had happened to Keme’s face. It had transformed itself into a rock-hard abstraction. Omovo felt a coldness on his skull, as if an invisible pair of icy hands had been placed on his head. He shivered. Then the implications of the fear and the terror became lucid.
‘We can’t take her out or report directly.’
‘No. We would be the first suspects. God, this is meaningless...’
‘Senseless...’
‘God, I’m going to follow this up to the end. It’s stupid...’
‘Let’s go to Dele’s place and ring the police. Anonymously.’
‘Yes. First problem is how to get out.’
‘I wonder if your bike is still safe.’
‘We will cross that bridge later. It’s all...’
‘You are no longer afraid.’
‘No. I’m angry. This fucking night...’
‘Come on. Let’s go. I have a feeling...’
They trudged on and searched for another ten minutes before they eventually found the entrance. It was as if the night had released them from its terrible enchantment. The moon too was released from the obscurity of clouds. Keme’s motorcycle was still where he had hidden it behind a bush. They climbed on.
‘That was a bloody nightmare.’
‘It might not be over.’
They made it to Dele’s place in silence. Dele’s father opened the door when they rang. He was short and good-looking. He had tribal scarifications as big as fingers on his face. He shouted: ‘Dele awon ore wa ibiyi-o. Your friends are here.’
Dele came down. He had been watching TV in his room. They called him aside and told him their mission and summed up what they had experienced. Keme rang the police anonymously. An uninterested, sleepy voice at the other end took notes grumpily and promised to investigate the matter.
Dele told Omovo that one of his girlfriends was pregnant by him. He had tried to get the girl to have an abortion but she refused. Omovo wasn’t listening. He made suitable noises and soon said he was going. On the way out Dele said: ‘See how Africa kills her young ones…’ Then he added: ‘Africa is no place for me. That’s why I’m going to the States…’
They were silent on the ride back home. Keme dropped Omovo off at the Badagry Road. It was very dark. Everything was clear in his mind. The experience was still close: close, and terrible.
7
As he made his way home he was unaware of the vibrant night life about him. The orange-seller raised her voice when he tramped past her. The akara and dodo woman called out to him. When he went past without so much as looking up, she muttered: ‘Moro-moro! You dey carry dis world on your head?’
Omovo quickened his steps. The hotel was loud with discordant tunes. Garish prostitutes drunkenly pottered about the street. Omovo went past without looking at the murals Dr Okocha had done which brightened the otherwise dreary-looking hotel.
His mind quickened somewhat to attention, however, when he got to the bushes near his home. They were massed shadows in the darkness. Babies had been discarded in that patch, women had been raped there, and inexplicable sounds issued from the bushes as if they had acquired an infernal life.
Omovo’s heart beat faster when he heard the familiar voice of his father’s wife. In that harsh but soft tone of hers, she was talking and laughing with a man in a wrapper. Nothing was clear. Omovo was confused. He didn’t know whether to go on or turn back. His legs carried him on. He went so far to the side of the road that his shirt brushed against the branches and dried leaves.
His father was angry with him when he walked into the house. Caught in the middle of a pace, his father turned around and spluttered at Omovo. His anger was incoherent. He muttered words from which Omovo could only make out forgotten grudges and arguments. There was something about the witchcraft of Omovo’s mother, and how she was responsible for his current condition. And there was something else about debts. As he talked the wrinkles on his face and the red raw veins in his eyes defined themselves sharply. His face was shrivelled and his mouth compressed in a delirious passion. One moment Omovo felt warm and loving. The next moment left him with a soft-hued indifference.
‘Where is Blackie, Dad?’
‘It’s not your business. Leave her out of this. I sent her to buy me some milk.’
Omovo fell silent. He watched his father pace round and round the dining table. And then he remembered many things: his mother dying while his father ran after other women, his brothers thrown out when they questioned him about the aimlessness of their lives. His father stopped pacing and brought up a fresh complaint about how useless all his children were and how unmerciful God had been to him in this respect. He said it with a sad passionate conviction. And over every one of his actions was that impression of acting out a feverish mania.
The white documents were still on the table. They were in the sa
me position as when Omovo last saw them. Their presence conjured up in Omovo’s mind overdrafts that had been stretched beyond their limits, court cases, teeming creditors, office notices to quit, and unrealised import deals.
His father raised an ogogoro bottle to his mouth. Omovo sped on to his room as his father put down the ogogoro bottle with a certain dignity and resumed his raillery to the gloom-etched sitting room.
In his room the events of the day eddied in his mind. He got out his notebook and wrote:
Ideas take form and haunt me. My drawing was stolen. Today my painting was seized by government officials. Things happening in vicious circles. The portent has acted itself out: a silent drama of losses. This evening I walked through a landscape of nightmares. The night moved from peace to terror. Keme was very hurt. I have never seen him like that before. Dele is to be an unwilling father; he made a remark about Africa killing her young ones. Poor mutilated girl – why did they do this to you? Sacrifice to an African night? What can I or anybody do? Hide? Be anonymous? It’s lousy.
He paused. Then went on:
When we were young our parents often frightened us with the darkness. ‘No go there-o. O-juju dey for there,’ they would say. As we grew older the fear was lost on us. We found we could walk through the alleys without the darkness banging us on the head. The day is bright. Everything seems present. We lost our fear of the darkness. But we have never lost our fear of what it possibly contained, its frightful mystery. The ‘O-juju’ takes different shapes in the mind and in the land. Now the ‘O-juju’ has claimed a soul. The earth claims what is left. The water washes the hands...
He stopped. The act of writing seemed futile. Waves of nausea poured through him and he flung the notebook towards the ceiling in climatic disgust. Constructing a parabola in the air, it hit the wall and brought down some of the snail shells that were dangling there. The shells hit the ground and shattered. The shattering echoed his mind. When it all stopped, he thought: ‘Good. Something unnecessary has been displaced.’
He got into bed and went to sleep.
That night he had a dream. He woke up sweating. He reached for his notebook and wrote down the dream as he remembered it. And throughout the rest of the night he could not sleep, or so he thought. But sleep came. Mercifully.
EXTRACT FROM A NOTEBOOK
I was walking through a dark forest when it happened. The trees turned into mist. And when I looked back I saw the dead girl. She walked steadily towards me. She didn’t have a nose or a mouth. Only a bright pair of eyes. She followed me everywhere I went. I saw a light at the end of the forest and I made for it. I didn’t get there.
Book 2
1
Omovo couldn’t escape from the dead girl. She followed him in his dreams and haunted his memory. She reminded him of an event he had witnessed when he was in Ughelli, his home town, during the civil war. He was nine years old. That night he had been sent on an errand by his father to go and buy some herbs. Omovo had walked in search of the herbalist’s house and was soon lost. He came to a mighty iroko tree. He stood under it and started crying. There was no one around. He had wandered into curfew time.
As he stood under the tree crying, he saw a crowd of wild people coming down the street. They had sticks and cudgels. They chanted and in their songs called for the killing of Igbo people. Then they went towards a hut that wasn’t far from him. They sang around the hut, broke down the door, and charged in. Then he saw them drag out an old man and a girl. They beat the old man into a bloodied, whimpering mess. And they carried the girl away. He didn’t understand what was happening. Then he saw the crowd run towards the hut with a big piece of timber. They banged the hut several times. The walls suddenly gave way and the roof caved in. The crowd broke into a riot of cheering. And from within the hut came muffled cries that inexplicably reminded him of beetles being crushed with a bottle.
When he got home his elder brothers beat him for staying away so long. But he didn’t cry because he knew that he had seen something terrible. He had never been able to come to terms with the forbidden sight, the serious stain of that night. Whenever he witnessed an act of terror, he always became that little boy who watched helplessly. And he could never escape the fact that he too was stained in some way.
I
That week there was a one-column article in the newspaper about the dead girl. The article only ventured to say that it was probably a ritual killing and an anonymous policeman was quoted as saying that such murders were almost impossible to investigate. Omovo didn’t see Keme throughout the week, but he couldn’t forget the rock hardness that came over his face that night.
On Saturday morning he was in his room when someone knocked. Omovo opened the door. It was his father. ‘A letter from Okur,’ he said flinging it on the table. Then he left. Omovo felt that a phantom finger had suddenly touched him. He had got on well with his elder brothers, in spite of the fact that they beat him a lot when he was much younger. As the years passed they all seemed to grow away from one another. They grew into themselves, each wrestling with private torments. He knew very little about his brothers. When he was growing up, they were away at boarding-school. When he went to boarding-school, they had finished. Whenever he came on holidays he saw them lying about the house, depressed, ragged, unfriendly. And they often fought between themselves. It was only after their father had turned them out of the house that Omovo sensed how hard it must have been for them all those years. Especially when Mother died.
Omovo sat at the dining table and read the letter. It was brief. It wasn’t dated and bore no address. The handwriting was scratchy. The envelope was filthy. And there was a poem contained within. Okur often wrote poetry when he was depressed, or when he was stoned. Nobody took his poetry seriously. But Omovo often found lines from them echoing in the gloom-cramped chambers within him.
The letter read:
Hi little brother,
I just had to write. I’m working my way on a ship. It’s hard. I think often of you and of home and I feel like crying, but I don’t. I think of Dad too and I try to understand him and to forgive him, but I can’t. You, however, must try to understand him and to love him the way you always have. Try to forgive him too. He is weak and tired. I have no home and no destination and every day as I drink I see the dangerous things happening to me. And I fight a lot. Umeh says hello. He is ill. Injured. And by the way, do you still paint? I enclose a poem I wrote yesterday. Omovo, we have all badly lost something. I know you are growing strong.
Your loving brothers, Okur & Umeh.
Take care.
Omovo read the letter several times, hoping to perceive the light he had failed to reach in his dream, hoping to see a portent of life that Umeh had hinted at on the day they were leaving. But Omovo only saw self-destruction. When he put down the letter he knew that his brothers’ lives out there would always be hidden from him, and what he perceived as their degradation would always haunt him. But when he read his brother’s poem Omovo felt something else: a quickening intelligence of possibilities.
When I was a little boy
Down the expansive beach I used to roam
Searching for strange corals
And bright pebbles
But I found sketches on the sand
While voices in the wind
Chanted the codes of secret ways
Through the boundless seas.
The poem spoke to Omovo: and he spoke to the poem. Reaching back in memory in an attempt to connect the scattered threads of their lives and to weave a pattern, he thought: ‘Life has no pattern and no threads. Is it futile trying to weave something through this maze?’
Unable to answer the question he got up, and went to the kitchen and dug out his food that had been placed indifferently on the top shelf of the filthy cupboard. He moved as if in a daze. He ate his breakfast absent-mindedly. His food was eba, and it was rather too heavy for the morning. It was full of lumps which crumbled into grains of uncooked garri when he took a han
dful. The soup was cold and the oil had congealed. The breakfast was tasteless but it was manageable. He swallowed the eba with difficulty.
As he ate without pleasure, he thought about his last dream. He remembered it only as dislodged images and as words he had written in his notebook. His mind turned round on its hazy axis and soon he felt the throb of an impending headache.
He brought his mind reluctantly to the immediate realities of his life. He looked down and saw the cracks on the eba plate. The white coating of the soup bowl had peeled off and its metal was rusted. Omovo picked up the only piece of meat in the soup and threw it into his mouth. It could easily have been a hard piece of rubber. He looked around the sitting room. It served also as a dining room and was partitioned by a little bookshelf. His mother had bought it a long time ago when they were in Yaba, and now it was the only piece of furniture in the room which had any distinction.
The sitting room was scantily furnished. There were four cushion chairs. Their bodywork was multi-coloured with age and use. They creaked like barely suppressed farts whenever anyone sat down. The coverings of the cushions were a faded red. They were washed every fortnight by Blackie. Omovo made out a couple of holes on one of the cushions. The holes, dark green, revealed the colour of the original cloth beneath the faded covering.
Between the two sets of chairs was an over-large centre table. The one that used to be there was broken the day Umeh and Okur left home. Omovo wasn’t sure if it was Umeh who had stumbled backwards and fallen on the table when his father whipped him. But Omovo remembered the day his father brought home the new over-large centrepiece. There was an ‘I-have-managed-and-I-can-damn-well-manage-alone’ expression on his face. When he placed the centre table between the chairs it shrank the available space. It was hilariously large. The expression on his face changed. He shrugged his shoulders and said, in a manner of adjustment: ‘Well, it’s big... Good. We need some big things in this house. Yes.’
