by Ben Okri
The only thing that sustained him was the vague, mystical certainty that he would gain unique heights, paint works that might last, and that he would live an unusual life. It helped that his brothers believed in his potential as an artist. He treasured the fact that his mother was quietly proud of the beadworks, wood sculptings and paintings he had done as a child. It also helped that his father encouraged his interest in art from when he was six years old. His father used to go over his work painstakingly. He made Omovo enter for a competition which he won when he was twelve years old. And he used to read aloud from books on great artists which he had bought for his son.
Omovo did a quiet stocktaking. He had lost his mother. His brothers had gone out into the world and were destroying themselves. He loved Ifeyiwa, but she was married. He was alienated from his father. He had a bad school certificate result. He had a mindless job in a hostile office. He thought: ‘Aha. There we are.’
His head throbbed. The room was dark. The curtains had not been drawn. A solitary mosquito whined above him. He felt empty. He remained in that state, motionless, for a long time. He thought of the painting he had to do. He felt a moment of excitement. In doing the painting he felt he may begin to feel his way towards some sort of orientation, of meaning. The impulse swept softly through him. He thought about the mutilated girl in the park. He wondered what Keme had done so far. He wondered if the police, notoriously slow in their duties, had begun to investigate the horrible crime. As he thought about the girl, he felt guilty. He felt that he should be doing something about it. But he was powerless. He felt in curious need of redemption. He felt that his powerlessness, and the powerlessness of all the people without voices, needed to be redeemed, to be transformed. With this feeling his urge to do the painting reached fever pitch.
He remembered a drawing he had done when he was thirteen years old. It was composed of jagged lines that suggested the obscure shapes of pyramids, rock-faces with the eyes of birds, mountain ranges inseparable from sea and sky. The ends of the lines were lost in the maze of entanglements. His father saw the drawing and praised it. His teacher pondered it and pinned it to his office wall. Their interest had baffled Omovo: he had simply taken up a pencil and made movements on paper. When his teacher saw the drawing he said:
‘Omovo, do you know what you have done?’
‘No,’ Omovo had said.
‘Well, this is life. But you are too small to understand. One day, if you are lucky, you will understand. Give this drawing to your father. When you are older he will give it to you. Then you will see the things that you did in innocence.’
Later, Omovo drew other lines, which were lost in themselves, in their formation of obscure shapes. But his father shook his head gravely and stayed silent. And his teacher smiled indulgently and also shook his head. Omovo understood wordlessly that he had done it once and could not do it again until he really knew how. And as if life were leaving him no option, the drawings got lost when they were moving from one house to another.
Omovo, sitting in the darkness of the room, wasn’t sure why he remembered these incidents. He felt his deeper mind was trying to tell him something. He didn’t know what.
Then he remembered he was going to meet Ifeyiwa later in the evening. It made him feel happy. He got up, drew the curtain, and reached for his sketchbook and pencil. He drew lines that became the obscure shapes of crowds at the markets, mother and child on the edge of a precipice, clouds full of faces. He drew the lines without trying to interpret the emerging shapes, nor to will their destinations. And the ends of the lines were always lost in themselves. When he got tired he stopped. He had done ten different drawings. He wrote ‘Lifelines’ boldly on the top of the first sheet. Then suddenly, as he looked through them, he thought: ‘Nonsense.’ He ripped the pages from the sketchbook, and tore them into shreds.
His head throbbed. The noises from the compound became strangely muted. He knew that the lights had been seized. He got into bed and tried to sleep off his confusion.
4
As Ifeyiwa passed the wooden window of their apartment she saw her husband sitting on the bed. His legs were sprawled carelessly apart. His mouth formed the beginnings of a yawn. She hurried on with her bucket of water.
‘Ifeyiwa!’ he called loudly. ‘What have you been doing, eh? Why did you take so long?’
When she heard his rasping voice her legs weakened with fear. Her heart beat faster. Quickening her steps, she went past the apartment without answering his queries. She went through the scurvy backyard and into the stinking bathroom. She dropped the bucket on one of those stones people stood on while having a bath. Then she shut the door. The bathroom, for that moment, was her only refuge. The zinc roof was low and the compartment was small. The cracks on the walls widened at night and looked snake-like in the day. Slats of grey light filtered into the murky darkness. Slimy substances clung to the walls. The floor was covered in a stagnant pool of filthy water. As she stood there she was suddenly startled by the noise of something thrashing about in the water. It was a rat. She opened the door and watched the rat as it kicked and swam in the bathroom scum. When it scurried out through the drainhole, she withdrew to the kitchen and sat on a stool.
The compound was quiet. A fowl strolled through the backyard. A woman came out of one of the rooms, hurried past the kitchen and rushed into the toilet. Ifeyiwa heard sounds. Then after a while the rusted zinc door of the toilet creaked open and the woman went leisurely back to her room.
Ifeyiwa looked round the backyard. In spite of all her honesty, her energy, her dreams, this was where she had wound up. This was where life had washed her up. Her mother had named her Ifeyiwa. It meant ‘there’s nothing like a child’. This was where that child had ended. With rats. With a man she hated. With someone she loved but could not reach. Ifeyiwa wept.
She wept often. It was all she could do when she remembered her brief school days. Then she would sit in the field in the evenings with her friends and dream about life. Or she would tiptoe to a friend’s bed at night because she couldn’t sleep and they would sit up talking about their futures, the men they would marry, the children they would have, the careers they would embark on. But her life was wrenched out of the shape it could have taken, as if by sinister design. First there came a terrible piece of news. Her father had gone hunting one evening with his dane gun. He was alone. He saw an antelope. He followed it deep into the forest and lost sight of it. Not long afterwards he saw the animal moving in a thicket. He aimed at its head and pressed the trigger. He couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the dying animal turn into a little girl with a gaping bloodied head. He seemed to be hallucinating. He screamed. People rushed to him and saw the girl that he had shot. This was his story. Afterwards he became quite mad. Ifeyiwa knew little about what followed except that the two neighbouring villages began fighting one another over a boundary dispute which had been given a violent new dimension.
Her father grew lean, haggard, lost in spirit, unable to sleep. His eyes began to stare at nothing. He wandered aimlessly. Harassed and obsessed, he complained of seeing ghosts. He kept mumbling: ‘I killed a girl. Me, I killed a girl.’
One morning the village was rocked with another shot. They buried her father on a hill miles away from the village.
Ifeyiwa was withdrawn from school. Her fees could no longer be paid. She came home and helped the rest of the family on the farm. Blight had entered their lives.
Around that time Takpo went home to his village to find himself a wife. He wanted to marry a young girl who would take care of him in his old age. Family friends had told him of a beautiful girl who had attended secondary school. He made his approach to the elders of Ifeyiwa’s family. The dowry was paid and almost all other arrangements had been finalised before Ifeyiwa knew what was happening. Without any choice in the matter the marriage was forced on her.
She ran away from home, but she was caught before she reached the village boundary and brought back. She made attempts at po
isoning herself, but gave up each time at the last moment.
During the period in which her marriage negotiations dragged on, another blow fell on her. Nobody knew why it happened. It was her brother. Some people said that his mind became tormented, that he stared vacantly at the sky, that he had detached himself from the life about him. He began to go around like a madman. He talked of seeing spacecrafts land on the farm. He talked of a young mermaid who had a hole in her head, and who kept calling him to the river. He ranted about an old man who kept calling his name deep in the forests. Then he began tramping the bushpaths, following a madwoman around like a demented lover. He shouted that he was going to travel far into the world, into life, and that he would withhold his secret discoveries. When he began to talk incoherently of dead bodies tilling the farms in the dead of night, of ghosts eating the crops before their harvest, it became clear that he needed extreme treatment. The next day his body was found on the swollen river.
His death made up Ifeyiwa’s mind for her. She had to escape that ravaged, neglected landscape. Her mind teemed with visions of demons, of dead people dancing on the hills, and the voices of young girls singing from the bottom of the river at dawn. Then she began to be haunted by dreams in which she was drowning. In the dreams she drowned slowly, over a period of time. She always woke up with a feeling of unbearable suffocation.
The marriage ceremony went off without a hitch. Her mother had urged her on, saying that life would take care of its own. Ifeyiwa had only one consolation: that her dowry might be of use to her mother. Ifeyiwa was the only daughter and one of her secret dreams was to be able to take care of her mother as she grew old. Her mother didn’t even cry when Ifeyiwa left for Lagos with her husband. She had made her compromise to the terrors that hung over her family and the village. Ifeyiwa had succumbed to the marriage with Takpo in the hope that the elder women of the village were right. They had said that with time she would learn to live with him, and might even grow to love him.
She had no sooner arrived in Lagos than she realised that her act of compromise had forever caged her buoyant spirit. A feeling of isolation and a sense of having left too much behind crowded the first few months of her arrival. She had taken the step. And every step after that became another foot forward into a landscape of losses.
Ifeyiwa found her husband revolting. He had a small head, severe eyes, a large elastic mouth and browned teeth. He was quite tall, and stooped, and he had long arms. His habits appalled her. All morning he masticated his chewing stick and spat the mangled fibres all over the house. He had no style. He was incredibly hairy. And he treated her like a slave: this was the part to which she found it hardest to adjust. After a hard day cooking the food, cleaning the room, washing his dirty clothes and his old-fashioned khaki underpants, fetching water three times a day for baths, splitting firewood, sweeping the corridor, going to the market, she was barely able to snatch time to eat. Often, as she ate her food in a corner, he would calmly fart. She would hear the sound and soon afterwards the smell, which she had grown used to anticipating, would overpower her. She would immediately lose her appetite. But she wouldn’t be able to get up and leave the room for fear that this might annoy him.
His temper was unpredictable. And he was a very jealous man. There once used to be a photographer in the compound who was friendly to Ifeyiwa. Absolutely nothing passed between them. But one day Ifeyiwa’s husband paid two men to beat up the photographer. He lost two of his front teeth and had a swollen eye. His shop windows were broken. One night he packed and moved away from the compound and the area. Ifeyiwa’s husband took to keeping a machete in his shop and another one in the room. He said the machetes were for any person ‘foolish’ enough to linger about with her.
For over a month she totally resisted being touched by him. He talked sweetly to her. He begged her. He even tried bribing her with offers of money and gifts. But her revulsion was uncontrollable. He grew angry. He beat her. He punished her. He starved her. It became an absurd war of his will against her absence of desire. Sometimes, at night, he went around naked and forced her to look at his erection. She never forgot the first time she saw him naked. The size of him terrified her. It reminded her of a long, curved plantain. She ran, screaming, out of the room. One day, before she could escape, he caught her, pinned her down, struggled over her, and suddenly slumped over her, cursing and spent. The stuff from him was smeared over her stomach and on her torn dress. She rolled out from under him, tied on a wrapper, and went and threw up in the backyard. She bathed three times that evening.
Then on another day he came home from the shop in good spirits, smiling, bearing gifts for her. He seemed happy. He seemed harmless. Then he began to talk about himself. He spoke of his struggles in ‘this hell-hole they call Lagos’. He seemed capable of humour. He laughed. He spoke of his ambitious plans for the future. She warmed to him a bit as he talked. He was unusually attentive to her. She even smiled at one or two of the funny things he said. She stirred. She began to feel that he wasn’t as bad as she had thought. Then he sent her to buy some drinks. She went in good spirits. When she returned, and had her back to him, he dropped two Madras tablets into her Coke. Afterwards she felt groggy. Drowsiness overcame her. And she could not summon the energy or will to resist him when he took off her pants and climbed on her. She tried to fight him off, but her limbs were heavy and she moved as if she were submerged beneath oil. She felt the blurred form of her husband struggling over her. In a curious way she felt that it was all happening to someone other than her, to someone she didn’t know. Then she felt him as he penetrated her, plunging, ripping her open. She felt her blood drip down her. She started to cry. But he stopped. She held her breath. He got off her, opened a bottle of Vaseline, came back, and spread open her legs. After applying the Vaseline he struggled over her again, and penetrated roughly. She felt the tear of flesh, and she cried out. She bled profusely. She cried all through the crudity of his movements. He didn’t enjoy the act. When he got off her, and got dressed, he stunned her with a slap on her face.
She never forgot, or forgave, the state she found herself in. The next morning her mind cleared. She spent most of the day on the bed pondering her rape. She cried. She slept. She woke up and helplessly called for her mother. She washed herself obsessively. She refused to eat for days. She kept talking about wanting to die. She was listless, her eyes became dull, her movements sluggish. She sat and stared out of the window. She walked oddly for weeks.
Her compromise had betrayed her. For the first time she realised how alone she was in Lagos. With no one to turn to, nowhere to run, she learnt her first lesson. She gave the impression of being subdued. With this pretence a strange quietness insinuated itself over her. But within her there was a seething fermentation which fed on the morass of her life. She learnt to be patient. She learnt to wait.
It was around this time that something unusual entered her life.
Ifeyiwa and her husband had moved house from Ajegunle to Alaba, from one ghetto to another. Their former room in Ajegunle had been continuously flooded during the rainy season. Their new compound was directly opposite Omovo’s. Ifeyiwa fetched water from Omovo’s compound because both houses were owned by the same landlord. There wasn’t a well in Ifeyiwa’s compound. She had been fetching water from the house opposite for some time without being aware of Omovo’s existence. She first noticed him one day when he was painting in front of his room. She stopped to watch what he was painting. She had a bucket of well water on her head. He turned, saw her, then looked away. After a moment he looked at her again, longer. She felt her heart beat unusually fast. He went on staring at her. Then, to her astonishment, he smiled. To calm her beating heart, and to prevent herself from dropping the bucket because of the sheer force of her unexpected confusion, she said:
‘Do you paint?’
He looked at the canvas. He had almost finished an acrylic study of a woman plaiting the hair of a younger woman. The woman whose hair was being plaited had a
child playing at her feet. All around them was the vibrant decrepitude of the compound. There was a green bird perched on the wall near them. The bird seemed to be staring at the child.
‘Yes,’ Omovo said finally. ‘Yes, I paint.’
With a touch of wonder in her voice, Ifeyiwa said: ‘Your painting is like a magic mirror.’
After a while Omovo said: ‘I have been noticing you for some time. Are you new in the compound?’
‘Yes. But I live across the road, in the house opposite.’
Then they were silent. Omovo stared at her with an intense scrutiny. Then, with his head turning in slow degrees, he returned to his painting. She waited for a bit, not knowing why. Then she said: ‘Goodbye.’
And she left.
The next time she saw him he was sitting in front of his room reading a novel she had just finished. It was Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child. He didn’t look up when she paused and stared at him. For the first time she noticed the softness of his features and the sharpness of his eyes. It was only when she came back with the bucket of water, and spilt some in front of him, that he looked up. He smiled. After that, she noticed that whenever he looked at her there was a flame of a secret interest in his eyes. Then their coincidental encounters in the backyard became more deliberate. One day she was washing clothes at the backyard. He came to do some washing as well and they fell into a discussion of Ngugi’s novel.
‘I cried when I finished it,’ she said.
