This Side Jordan

by Margaret Laurence

  ‘I greet you,’ the woodcarver said. ‘You are the teacher? They told me you are from Asante, like myself.’

  Nathaniel nodded, and they exchanged names and the names of their villages. The carver was Ankrah, and he had moved in that morning.

  ‘You are at work quickly,’ Nathaniel said.

  ‘I am a poor man – I can’t afford to do nothing, like some people.’ The carver gave him a sly glance. ‘Besides, my wife is fixing up our room. That’s woman’s work.’

  Nathaniel felt a sudden mistrust of this man with his jutting pugnacious features and narrow eyes at once shrewd and stupid.

  ‘What are you making?’ he asked, without interest.

  Ankrah held up his work. It was a mahogany block, still rough, but growing into the shape of an elephant.

  ‘You know, my friend,’ he confided, ‘I have never seen an elephant, and yet I make my living carving them. Does that not seem wonderful to you? The whitemen like them. There is always a sale for elephants.’

  He threw down the wood impatiently.

  ‘I tell you,’ he finished, ‘all I want from the House of Nyankopon, when I die, is that there should be no elephants there.’

  Nathaniel grinned.

  ‘It must get boring,’ he agreed. ‘There are not many left who carve in the old way.’

  Ankrah looked insulted.

  ‘What is a man to do? If the whitemen will pay for elephants, I will make elephants until my own nose grows into a trunk. But I remember, too, how my father taught me. My father was a woodcarver also. A real craftsman – learned his carving at Afwia in the old days, when they knew everything there. He knew all the royal stools, although he only made a few, of course. But ask him about any one of them – he knew them all, and could have done them. And everything else – the sword hilts, to be covered with gold leaf, the umbrella tops, the chief’s “asipem” chair, the carved doors, the staves of the Akyeame – the Spokesmen, the “sankofa” birds and – oh, many others. He did them all. This is his “sekanmma” knife I’ve got here, and this chisel, a “bowere,” the small one, see? He did masks, too, if a priest needed one for his fetish. He taught it all to me. I could do it, too. But how is a man to make a living from that, with everything so dear nowadays? The old chief and his ministers die, and the new ones need stools made for them, and maybe you make half a dozen stools in your lifetime. You won’t drink palm-wine on that, my friend. It’s not like the old days, when a chief helped you through the lean days. He’s got no money for that now. The government’s taken it all, these fancy boys from the coast, robbed him even of respect, coming in and putting up their flags all over the place, when anyone knows only a chief should have a flag –’

  Nathaniel shrugged. He knew it all so well. It was partly true, but he did not want to listen to it.

  ‘Don’t you ever make anything but elephants?’

  Ankrah nodded.

  ‘Sometimes I make copies of stools. The Europeans like them, too. That’s one, there.’

  Nathaniel looked. It was a copy of a chief’s stool, ancient symbol of kingship, badly done in poor wood. But Ankrah seemed proud of it. He reached out and patted it.

  ‘Not so bad, eh? My father taught me everything he knew. He had three sons, all carvers, and he always said I was the best –’

  ‘All the other things –’ Nathaniel probed. ‘If you haven’t done them for a long time, how can you remember? It must be difficult, if you never use –’

  Ankrah drew himself up.

  ‘Does Nyankopon forget how He created man?’

  It sounded brave. But Nathaniel, now regretting he had asked, knew it was not true. He turned to go.

  ‘Well, I hope you like living here. It’s not very quiet.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Ankrah said. ‘I’m not a quiet man, myself. Of course, one could hardly like living here – in Accra, I mean. But the money’s better. These coast people – you’ve got to watch them. They’re slippery, like the fish they catch. They’d stab their mothers for tuppence in gold dust. And cheat! You’ve got to keep an eye on them. Here – I’ll tell you what they’re like. Just like those crabs you see on the sand here. Step this way to catch one, and it slips off that way. You move that way, it passes this way –’

  He gestured vividly. Nathaniel wondered how he could get away from the woodcarver’s clacking tongue without offending him.

  ‘My wife will have the food ready –’ he began.

  ‘Wait!’ Ankrah hissed. ‘Who is that long-legged ape who sits on the stoep there, making shirts?’

  ‘That’s Yiamoo, the Tailor. He’s a Togolander.’

  ‘Why should he have all the stoep?’ Ankrah demanded. ‘I pay as much rent as he does. I tried to tell him so this morning, but he only laughed and said something in his own language. Well, I thought to myself, I’ve only come here today, so I’ll wait and see. But I mean to have part of that stoep, I can tell you.’

  ‘Yiamoo’s been here a long time,’ Nathaniel said quickly. ‘I wouldn’t argue with him if I were you.’

  Ankrah spat noisily.

  ‘Why not? Since when does an Akan take orders from a carrion-eater like that? I’m not afraid of him. I’m not going to take anything from him, I’ll tell you that.’

  ‘Have it your way,’ Nathaniel said. ‘But I warn you, Yiamoo’s got a terrible temper. And when he’s angry he’s like a bush-cow – he charges everything in sight.’

  Ankrah sucked his teeth and smiled scornfully.

  ‘I thought you were from Asante.’

  ‘Does that mean I have to pick fights with everybody I meet?’

  ‘No-o. I suppose when you get to be a teacher, and wear a white shirt, you don’t want to get it dirty.’

  ‘Go ahead, then – fight with Yiamoo, if that’s what you want. You’ll find out quicker that way if there are elephants in Nyankopon’s House.’

  ‘Don’t be angry,’ the woodcarver said quickly. ‘We are of one people. Here –’

  He held out his hand, and Nathaniel, embarrassed, took it.

  Nathaniel passed Yiamoo on his way into the house. The tailor was folding a pile of gaudy shirts, his big hands smoothing the material expertly.

  ‘Morny,’ Yiamoo said cheerfully, in pidgin. ‘What you t’ink him?’

  He yanked one thumb towards the carver. Nathaniel shrugged.

  ‘He talks a lot.’

  ‘I tell you true,’ Yiamoo said, ‘he say – go, you, I come here. I no agree. He say – chik, chik, chik, chik –’

  He imitated the sound of a small lizard. Nathaniel could not help laughing. Yiamoo’s laughter boomed out, and the carver turned suspiciously and stared at them.

  Nathaniel stopped laughing. He did not want to be involved in anything. He could fight, if he had to, but he resented this place imposing its problems on him. And there was Aya, here by herself all day –

  He could see that Yiamoo was enjoying the situation. Once more there would develop the inevitable antagonisms, and some night everyone in the tenement would be wakened by the snarls and screams of two men who had come to hate each other.

  Nathaniel felt tired of it all, the raucous squabbling life of this place. If only he and Aya could afford better rooms, a small house of their own – Who did he think he was, a ‘been-to’ man, educated abroad, like Victor?

  ‘Yiamoo –’ he said suddenly, ‘why African all time make palavah? We no got sense.’

  The lanky tailor stretched himself luxuriously in the golden sunlight.

  ‘Ahaa –’ Yiamoo replied, ‘we got sense. But we no got money. Man he be poor, what he do? Two t’ing he no cost. At all. He make pickin, he make palavah. God, He dash poor man dese two t’ing. No be so?’

  Nathaniel smiled.

  ‘Be so.’

  He felt a surge of friendliness towards Yiamoo, almost a sense of comradeship. He knew he would never feel the same thing towards the sly woodcarver.

  And yet he was not free to like whom he chose. Because the carver w
as from Asante, because their villages were not more than twenty miles apart, Nathaniel could not help feeling guilty that he did not sympathize with Ankrah.

  Aya met Nathaniel at the door. She smiled in the half-anxious way she had when she hoped to placate him but feared it would be impossible.

  Before she had time to speak, he heard the scuffle of feet in the back compound, and muffled laughter. Nathaniel groaned.

  ‘Who now?’ His voice was sharper than he had intended.

  ‘Someone has come to visit,’ Aya said apologetically.

  ‘That is clear.’

  ‘My aunt –’ Aya went on, the words tumbling out, ‘you know, Nathaniel, my aunt Akosua. She has two girls, you remember, one is five and the other eight. She is my mother’s half-sister, but she isn’t much older than I –’

  ‘How long,’ Nathaniel forced calm on himself, ‘how long does she plan to stay?’

  ‘I thought –’

  Akosua Sackey came in from the compound at that moment. She was a tall, spare woman in her late thirties. Her face was handsome in a thin-boned hawkish way, and her wrists were slender and fine – they did not seem to own the wide, capable, hard-skinned hands.

  ‘I greet you,’ she said to Nathaniel. Then, looking from one to the other, ‘You wonder why I have come, Nathaniel. Look at your wife’s face. She looks tired. The child is heavy in her, and she needs help with her work now. I thought you would not mind.’

  ‘You are welcome,’ Nathaniel said stiffly. ‘It is kind of you to come. If there is room –’

  He looked helplessly around him. They had only the two rooms. Somehow, he did not want people sleeping all over, on the floor, as they did in the huts of his childhood. But it could not be avoided.

  ‘It is all right,’ Aya said hurriedly. ‘They can sleep in here. My mother has loaned me the mats.’

  She looked at him pleadingly, begging for his acceptance.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘It will be good for you, Aya.’

  He turned to Akosua, suddenly apprehensive.

  ‘You know that Aya is having the baby in the hospital?’ She gave him, momentarily, a sour glance. Then her face was serene once more.

  ‘I know,’ she said. Then, as easily as though she believed it, ‘She will be well cared for.’

  Nathaniel nodded his satisfaction. At least she would not try to upset Aya about it: he could not hope for more.

  ‘Well –’ he said self-consciously, ‘you are welcome, Akosua.’

  Aya’s quick childlike smile of gratitude made his heart contract.

  After that day, life seemed to change at home. Aya became more relaxed, less liable to flare in anger. It was as though, having her aunt there, she felt she had come home. She let Akosua take over much of the work, and when the burden of the washing and the market shopping was taken from her, she was content to sit placidly in the sunshine, watching the two little girls as they played. Sometimes she seemed closer in age to the children than to anyone else.

  When Nathaniel came home from work, he would find Akosua pounding cassava for fufu, while Aya and the children sat close by, listening to the stories she told. Aya’s eyes would be soft and happy.

  ‘Akosua –’ she would cry, ‘tell how Ananse stole food from the god Thunder – that is a good one –’

  And Akosua would begin the tale of Ananse Kokuroko, Ananse the Giant Spider, the cunning one, the son of guile. And Aya would listen eagerly, her lips parted in a half smile, her eyes tender with memory. Sometimes it seemed to Nathaniel that Aya was living, with a strange delight, in her childhood. Finally he spoke of it to her, ashamed of himself for placing the burden of his worry upon her.

  ‘You are not a child,’ he said. ‘Why do you try to be one? Do you want so much to go back there?’

  Aya looked away from him.

  ‘You do not understand,’ she said. ‘After he is born, I will be different, different, different, all my life, until I die.’

  It was her way of saying goodbye to herself. Perhaps she accepted not going back home more than he did, in the same way that she accepted the fact that once her child was born, her youth was over.

  Nathaniel was frightened at the years that waited for them both.

  FIVE

  Slowly the city became familiar to Johnnie, and he no longer turned in the street to stare at the death-eyed beggars, or the trader mammies with trays on their heads and babies strapped to their backs. Any place was ordinary when one had lived in it for a while.

  Then Africa began in various ways to taunt his knowing novice eye.

  On a Sunday morning, the streets almost empty, Johnnie dropped into ‘Saleh’s’ for cigarettes. The Syrian’s shop resembled not so much a building as a form of plant life – some monstrous baobab with roots of cellars spreading deep and mould-encrusted underground, and branches in the form of innumerable wooden balconies, and latticed window shutters that fluttered leaflike in every tremor of hot salt wind from the sea.

  The old man was the only one behind the counter this morning. Saleh was hugely fat, and his skin was yellow-brown. In the centre of that puffed pastryflesh, his blood and organs must have been quite lost, like the red dab of filling in a jelly doughnut.

  ‘How you liking it here, Mr. Kestoe?’

  ‘I expect it’s as good as most places in Africa.’

  The Syrian belched laughter.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘the best place in Africa. I been here – how long you think? Fifty-seven year. My parents bring me to this country when I was five year old. My father start a little shop – so small you couldn’t hardly see it. We live at first in a hut, like Africans, and we eat kenkey and fishheads. But not for long. We are good businessmen. And now – my grandson Joseph, he buy a new Buick last month. He like American cars. He got three. He never remember when times was hard. His father – my son Edward – is dead. So unless I watch the boy, he spend like he was a king. Funny, eh?’

  ‘Have you never been back to Syria?’

  ‘Oh, sure. I been back four times. First time, I go back to get a wife. My wife never like Africa. I thought maybe I would send her back to Syria alone, she want so much to go. But she got sick first. So she die here. Let me tell you something. If your wife want to go home, you send her. If you don’t, you might be sorry. I was sorry. But what good was that?’

  ‘I’ll remember.’

  The door to the back of the shop opened gently, and an African girl slithered in. She whispered to Saleh, and he replied with a hoarse grunt and a few words of pidgin. The girl giggled softly and shot a glance at Johnnie. She was tall and sleek, and her dark slanted eyes, half closed, seemed to convey her knowledge of men, a knowledge both amused and lustful. She smiled at him, and preened a little, her apple-breasts showing under the tight cloth. Then she was gone.

  Saleh chuckled.

  ‘You like?’

  ‘Mm,’ Johnnie said carefully. ‘Not bad.’

  This amused Saleh vastly.

  ‘Not bad – yes. I am glad you think so. She is my daughter.’

  Johnnie stared at him.

  ‘But she’s –’

  ‘Oh – did you not know? After my wife die, I take an African wife. I have three children by her. That one, and two younger boys. Good children. Joseph don’t like them, naturally, but he never dare to say anything. She is his half-aunt. This he don’t like to be told. The two young boys will be educated in England. I have it in my will.’

  A trace of malice appeared in his fatly smiling face.

  ‘We Syrians are not like you English, Mr. Kestoe. My woman is old now, and she is not beautiful any more. But I keep her. She always been a good wife to me. But you English – you want to try a black girl, see what she’s like. But all very quiet and secret. Then, if a baby come, you say – “Who, me? Impossible! That girl, she’s crazy – I never seen her before in my life. I bet you it was some Italian or Frenchman did it!” Eh?’

  Johnnie laughed awkwardly.

  ‘Please to underst
and,’ the Syrian went on, ‘I don’t care what a man does, just so he don’t pick on Saleh’s daughter to do it with. A man should go to the proper place – don’t you think so? If you should be interested sometime, I can give you a name. Clean – so I heard.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Johnnie said, too quickly.

  Saleh laughed.

  ‘Whatsamatter?’

  ‘I’m not interested,’ Johnnie said curtly. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Oh –’ Saleh said, ‘you’re not interested. From the way you look at my daughter, I thought maybe you was wondering – well, never mind. You know, a young Englishman come in here the other day – nice boy, I know him well – he don’t mind an old man who talk too much – well, he says to me, “Saleh,” he says, “tell me what it’s like to sleep with an African woman.” You know what I tell him? “When you’re my age,” I says to him, “you’ll know all women are the same. There’s no difference.” Well, he don’t believe me, see? “C’mon, Saleh,” he says, “you can do better than that.” So I tell him – “If there’s a difference, it’s that an African woman knows when to move and when to keep still.”’

  The Syrian’s belly shook with laughter.

  ‘A lie, of course,’ he finished. ‘Some do and some don’t. What a woman is like – it depend on the man who taught her. But I tell him what he want to hear. And he stand there, breathing a little – you know – hard –’

  Saleh leaned across the counter, his warlock’s eyes narrowing.

  ‘Like you are now,’ he said softly.

  The mid-morning sun gave a metallic lustre to the hibiscus leaves and flowers, making their green and scarlet appear as hard and gaudy as the enamels on a brass bowl. In the niim branches the ravens cawed disdain, painted birds, birds with brazen throats.

  The cook’s wife, pounding cassava out in the compound, sang to the rhythm of her work. Her voice rose shrill and mournful, and the wooden pestle thudded again and again, like a slow metronome.

  Johnnie put the car in the garage and walked into the bungalow. Miranda’s voice came from the kitchen, talking to the cook.

  ‘Surely you must save something, Whiskey. There’s just yourself and your wife.’