by Wole Soyinka
The move was anticipated, the counter-measures had been worked out in advance. Ahime waited only for such a warning to send couriers off to the new outposts of Aiyéró. The men would expect evictions from their homes, punitive taxations, loss of jobs, even arbitrary detentions and trumped-up charges. The strategy was simple. The men would leave areas which had become too hot for further functioning, change places with others. The Aiyéró presence would be maintained. Ofeyi tied up his boat and climbed inland.
Inwardly he took pleasure from the knowledge that Aiyéró, once the comic Utopia, had become a moral thorn in the complacent skin of the national body. While it remained quietly in the backwaters, a quaint tourist diversion, nothing ruffled the composure of the Cartel or their allies in the successive power shifts. That aspect was perhaps unfortunate, that the movement had been traced directly to Aiyéró, to any particular region of the country. Anonymity would have served more effectively. Still, they could not hope to keep the identity of the cadres secret forever, in fact it was a marvel that the genesis of the movement remained hidden for so long. The Cartel had long tentacles to begin with and, now that it had identified itself with the new power from the barrel its Intelligence had become redoubled. The new alliance had been made manifest. There was the unmistakable boldness in the air.
He had come as far as the pen of the sacrificial bulls when he saw the figure of Ahime approaching him, the old man’s eyes fastened on his and strained with anxiety.
“What’s the matter? Have you heard?”
The old man nodded.
“Well, it’s happened much later than we expected.”
The old man scanned his face. “I don’t think you know.”
His voice was slow. His tone raised the scale of reverses far higher than Ofeyi had any cause to expect. Apprehensive now he asked, “What is it I do not know?”
“You haven’t heard the radio?”
Ofeyi shook his head. “I’ve been on the lagoon all day.”
“Come with me.”
In the meeting-house the old man stopped and made Ofeyi sit down. Then he broke the news of the magnitude of the disaster. Ofeyi’s face froze slowly, stunned.
“There is one glimmer of light” the old man consoled him. “Yesterday, even before any news came from the radio, a man came from Shage. They had received warning from their co-workers at the dam, from the Cross-river people themselves. They held a meeting, all of them, and decided to stop work until the troubles subsided. That was the advice given to them by the native Cross-river workers. There at least we did not fail.”
“It seems a pitiable fraction” Ofeyi muttered, “if that is all.”
“It may not be” Ahime said. “But even if it is, the community at Shage was the most important. Or don’t you believe your own words any more?”
Ofeyi tried to rouse himself, conceding that Shage was central to the less obvious penetration of Aiyéró through the land. Old villages had been uprooted, inundated and replanted making the concrete achievement visible, the marriage of the physical and the ideal. Even as the dam grew and the hydroelectric promise moved towards fulfilment, the men of Aiyéró sowed their seeds in the soil of the new communal entity. Shage was even placed strategically, an almost symbolic settlement on the Cross-river border itself. If the bond had been strong enough there at least, to make the Cross-river workers save the aliens in their midst….
“I would like to talk to the man.”
“He is waiting in my house.”
Then he burst out with the other fear that had tugged at him since Ahime revealed the ruthless, indiscriminate sweep of the Cartel’s campaign of re-assertion: Iriyise who had just left for Cross-river, and Zaccheus with his band…
It seemed an endless dusk before Ahime led him into the courtyard of the meeting-house and through a cluttered grove. The caryatid ringed grove was a surprise to him. The path at the end of it sheered off abruptly, a cluster of deciduous creepers parted to reveal a break in the walls. A quick warning from the old man saved Ofeyi from slithering down the sudden moss-covered slope into a spread of water hemmed in on all sides by seemingly impenetrable mangrove. A canoe with both paddles and outboard motor, long and sleek, nosed the shore-line, yet so still and archine was the bough-vaulted pool that it appeared no more than a fallen pod from an extinct species of the silk-cotton tree, the pool itself a subterranean lake whose surface had lain unbroken by man or fish for a long millennium.
The silence enveloped them, unyielding. Ofeyi’s eyes, gradually allied to the emerald gloom discerned at last an outlet from the pool; he wondered if this led to the sea itself or simply into yet another bowered escape from time. Neither leaf nor straggle of vine seemed out of place; a dense-textured drape hung round the pool, sealing them within the dark preserve of spirits, placid and protective.
Ofeyi wrestled free of the spell. “Why have you brought me here?”
“To recover yourself, and think wisely. If you need to, use the boat. It is not wise for you to be seen in the Corporation boat any more. Leave it here, we’ll know what to do with it.”
“You think I shall go back to Ilosa then?”
“It is more likely you will want to fly to Cross-river, but bear in mind what I have said. I shall send the man from Shage to talk with you. No one will come here to disturb you.”
“You are so swift to plumb a man’s needs” Ofeyi remarked, gratefully.
“Is it such a mystery? You need a peaceful place to think. Join me in the meeting-house when you are done.”
“Don’t send the man just yet. Let me have a few moments by myself.”
Ahime looked a little dubious, then shrugged. Ofeyi heard his soft footsteps brushing the moss along the path.
Failure. Was this the smell, the colour, the phantasma of failure?
The shadows closed around him. Ofeyi felt grateful over again for Ahime’s tact, predictable though it was. Felt privileged to have been left alone in what he guessed must have been the private sanctuary of the late Custodian. It seemed a well of restoration, used perhaps in those moments of “doubts upon doubts” which Ahime had revealed that other night.
And then, inexplicably, rose the conviction that this had served as sanctuary also for others in the not so distant past. The noise of slavers’ raids broke through the silence and a feel of massed anxious flesh wafted through time and assailed his pores. He sensed the waiting, watchful eyes of Aiyéró’s fugitives through mangrove twists and archways, merged with the Cross-river whiff of violence, rape and death.
Iriyise, Zaccheus, blissfully unaware, driving straight into a holocaust that had already commenced….
Skirting the edge he sleep-walked to where the canoe lay, pushed the sheath of pitch and corkwood onto the pool and sat on its cross-bench. It drifted, its prow towards the faint outlet he had observed. He felt borne on a vintage fluid and potency of the past, as if invisible denizens of that space had laid their hands on him. What answers shall I make you then, you restless questioners rising from dank silt-beds? How change your whitened bones into something rich and strange? The lines had haunted him from his first glimpse of the pristine moment—full fathom five his father lies…of his bones are coral made…those are pearls….
The pool stank of history. Slaves, gold, oil. The old wars. Sightless skulls, blood, sweat and bones, agony that lay on seabed, silenced cries forever mingled with black silt. Ever-present energies from the past, staring sockets that demanded that living eyes see, learn through their terror, through rings of past hollowness, empty visions, skeletal fingers webbed in mud, imprints of experience signalling renewed demands…this spent energy, this spent error, this violent, untimely cycle of waste renewed a demand for transformation. What would his paddles turn up from that rank bed of history if he dug deep enough—what, beyond the intertwining of matter and deeds! It defied a break in awareness, the oil trade flowed
into a smell of death, disruption and desolation, flowed in turn into tankers for the new oil. Ofeyi fed this symbiosis with faces of prospecting teams he had chanced upon…the Italian covered in flea bites of every shape and hue, and the beefy engineer, scarred and mangrove tendoned, breaking into the quiet of the creeks on apocalyptic footsteps. Bulbous chromium tanks sprouted from the warts on the Italian’s face, the prominent veins of the other dived under his earthy flesh, surfacing and re-diving like sea-serpents, curving up for a surface run of pipe-lines and diving into earth again. Restless eyes flitting in a treasure-hunt of fluids through burial-grounds of the unknown, knuckles snapping to the rhythm of drills and detonators sending shockwaves through placid arteries of clay and stone…rotted leaves and wood, peat, shale; yet the long latent metamorphosis would erupt. Looking up at the rich black fountains, at the protean flow that answered a thousand demands he wondered what answer he must make to the puzzled dead searching in the living for the transformation of their rotted deeds, thoughts, values, tears, bile, decadent and putrescent memories, searching for a parallel transformation to that of rotted earth-flesh reborn into life-giving oil. From the archine strength and failures, what interchange effected? Within the fluid, rancid energies, what new state of being abstracted, answering a million demands?
Embarrass me no more with your accusations, he murmured. Ask your questions of the Cartel who will drain the oil as they have the milk of the cocoa.
Enervation snared him in a dark sheath on a surface that closed up its scar. Paddling in somnolence, a little of the water seeped through the floorboards as he manoeuvred the prow away from a widening slit in thick forest wrap. The quiet bred a greater disquiet, the news from Cross-river re-surfaced in serpentine coils, asphyxiating, ringed him with a paralysing knowledge of futility in thought or motion. Both seemed fated to tend towards the starting point. The refutation of change brought moments of despair. Behind the canoe, even the lake conspired to breed spores of this paralysis, closing up the scar of passage, blotting out the challenge of the voyager, substituting a statement of immutability even for this simple rite of passage. Ofeyi muttered, Camouflage! The regenerative powers were only jealously contained within the pool, hidden but attainable, awaiting only the rightful challenger. It awaited only the precise trigger to arouse it to its function within convulsive, rock-blasting, honing tides.
Ofeyi grimaced in self-mockery, blotting out the ghostly illusions of hope. This pond denied even its undertows, presenting a clean slate of perpetual calm. The rower confessed to envy.
The outboard motor sat like a huge malevolent toad on the stern of the canoe, another challenger to the innate rhythm of the place, obscene and gross in its hidden power. It created resentment in Ofeyi, forced him instinctively to side on this point with the paddle’s subtler propulsion, its near sacramental union with psychic nuances of time and place. Ahime was himself like that paddle, creating motion within himself and within his environment without a hint of stress, without disrupting the pristine balances. He had held him back from the first instinctive headlong rush. What will you change? If the men of Aiyéró are dead, what can you do? If they are in danger, how can you help them? I love Iriyise like a daughter but her fate was never in my hands. Nor in yours.
Yet someone, a group with desperation enough had plotted her fate and the fate of others. And he…no, this was one danger to which, in spite of the horrors that raced through his mind, he would not expose himself. No regrets. No remorse. No will-sapping self-recrimination. Unless…
The Dentist! Unless the Dentist had been right after all. The Dentist with his unassailable logic of extraction before infection. Extract the carious tooth quickly, before it infects the others. And the Dentist had accepted his, Ofeyi’s leadership, placed the final responsibility on him. What alternative to his could have prevented the insidious process of mass infection, exposed daily by proximity, hunger and need, human weakness and deprivation, exposed to temptation by the passage of sweetmeats, cunning, corrupt confections. What choice precisely did I make, he demanded of the brackish pond. His paddle clove the water, the ripples strove against with self-protective need for stagnation to swallow up the markings.
The magic mirrors, the sub-aqueous crystals of time-fragmenting cycles persisted. Iriyise surfaced through ripples in the heavily sedimented goblet of wine and he stopped the idle motions of his finger. From merely stirring he began to revolve his glass in the light, marvelling at the illusionary wonders of a coarse, full-bodied glass of wine.
He stared in the full-length mirror that doubled the depth and length of the muted cave of passage. A bloodless orchestration of dead melodies and acoustic magic blotted out the roar of angry jets that rose and landed just without. Swathed in some animal fur, expensive, she entered on flat sandals. And her eyes were as sleepy, ocean-bedded as ever. He questioned his interest. A need for encounters far different from confrontations that lay four thousand miles away. He transformed the stranger to no less than Iriyise, in spite of the much lighter cocoa skin in the dim tranquilizing light. Her pace was a shade less leisured than he remembered, but this seemed natural enough on the thick carpeting. He insisted that the texture of flesh was the same; if he touched it it would radiate the warm thrill of velvet in the dark. He eyed quadrupled reflections of a tone of golden syrup in the cave of mirrors. A shawl slid off one shoulder, a slender arm gathered it, replaced it round her neck.
Iriyise he murmured, what are you doing here in this staging pool of Europe?
The transit lounge turned familiar earth, for this sorceress was known to him. Homesickness? He indulged the warm delusion. He was alone with her, the secret word had been spoken and he was led, a lone night guest into a virgin’s lair. Given that he had created her, her face, her own vulnerable shoulders pronounced her virginal.
No matter, the spell remained intact. Not even the nervous rasp in his throat could break it as he signalled the waistcoated barman for another raw glass of wine. The lamp of nostalgia and escape soon came crashing down, its myriad reflectors splintered and embedded in his flesh. The doors swung open and a stranger intruded, flesh and blood. Ofeyi winced. He was black too. Ten to one he would speak to him.
The man seemed copper-coloured and his hair was covered in what could be dust. Before long Ofeyi saw him glance indifferently into the mirror. Eyeing the virgin? The stranger’s presence renewed his longing for familiar earth. A soft near inaudible swish, yet his ears caught the sound of his first distraction, the shawl sighing to the ground. He rose, retrieved it and received the startled thanks of two large, impossibly luminous eyes. Indian? All practised openings failed him at the crucial hour and he stammered back to his seat.
So be it then. The voyager consigned himself to guardians of hospitality of the road. Lead me where you will, so be it some handmaid of dawn be found waiting at the end.
He twirled the glass stem between his fingers. The male intruder watched him from beneath deceptive eyelids. Raging now from boredom, indecision, Ofeyi railed at those who had forced the journey on him. Why should I roam these barren, condescending shores to learn—? What had they called it? A-ah, promotion methods! He slammed his glass back on the table muttering, “I’m returning home!” It splintered in his hands. The stranger looked up, the virgin also. The starch corruscated waiter arrived with dishcloth and chiding glare. He ordered another glass of wine.
With Iriyise unbound, unearthed, salvaged, transformed and fresh created, a grand design for the Cocoa campaign had crystalized in the flash of their first encounter, leapt from his hot brain entire. Goddess, Princess, Chrysalis of the Cocoa Grain, around her burgeoned a thousand schemes and devices, a panoply of adulation and Svengalian transformations, ending her immaturity and self-prostitution. And then, at the very commencement, banished to a six-month Study Tour! He swallowed his wine in self-pity, turned again to linger over the part-bared shoulder of the virgin at the bar. Strange, she could be
Iriyise, even her skin was right. Just then, the hidden loudspeakers began to speak.
But it was the girl’s reaction to the cancellation of her flight which sent his heartbeat quickening once again. She turned towards the source of the announcement in disbelief, her mouth drooped in distress and she appeared close to tears. Gathering her shawl and overnight bag she made for the door. Ofeyi scrambled to his feet and followed her.
Only to have the stranger step in his path. “Excuse me, are you from…?”
“What?” Embarrassed at the involuntary irritation in his voice he turned to face the interloper. “What is it?”
“I hope you don’t mind…I heard what you shouted just now, when you broke your glass.”
“Yes?” (Insensitive, interfering ass!)
Oblivious to his impatience the stranger continued, unruffled. “Can I buy you a drink? I guessed you were a compatriot and when I heard you exclaim a moment ago.”
“Where are you from?”
He did not wait for an answer however. Stung by a sudden conviction that he was delaying too long he rattled at his countryman “One moment, I’ll be back!,” sped through the doors and slowed down only when he found her at the airline desk.
For the first time he remarked her extra-long mannequin legs, the only part of her that appeared to have developed to full maturity. He watched them wade delicately creating ripples in the pool that lapped his mind, stirring up visions of Iriyise.
She looked up as he stood beside her. “Oh, were you also on the cancelled flight?” He lied affirmation, nodding in triumph.
The stranger was sitting patiently when he returned. Elation drowned his feeling of guilt at his abrupt departure.
By way of apology he offered, “Let me buy the drinks.”
The stranger smiled in turn. “I am sorry but I didn’t realize…I hope I haven’t…?”
Ofeyi reassured him, then asked, “And how long have you been away from home?”
