by E. C. Osondu
If we wanted to build walls, our playmates provided mortar and cement and concrete mixers and trowels—they even gave us plumbs to see that the wall was straight. We would build and then, when we got tired, we would climb on the bulldozers that were standing by and begin to demolish the walls until there was no sign that the walls were once standing.
There were days we did not feel like going back to earth. We could tell that our friends would not mind our staying to play with them forever. On such days we would only just manage to return home a few minutes before our mother got back home from the market.
She would look at our tired faces and hiss.
“A child that comes back home with oily lips from eating outside will one day come back home with bloody lips,” she said to us on such days.
“Go do the dishes. I have to get dinner ready. Someone has to work even if all you people know is to play.”
We never felt hungry in this other world. We never felt thirsty. When we played near the house it was not unusual to run into the house for a drink of water and to quickly grab a snack—sometimes an orange, some chin-chin, groundnuts, or a quarter loaf of bread in a transparent plastic bag.
Our playmates did not run home to have a drink either. We never wondered about this. We did not wonder about many things.
Where were their parents?
Where did all the bulldozers and guns and bullets that we played with come from?
Why did they live in mud-adobe houses and why did the houses glow bluish even in the daytime?
Why were there no animals running around their houses? No chickens, no goats, no ships, no dogs?
We became tired of shooting mechanical birds that never died and of walls that were eventually flattened. On this day we came to play and gestured that we wanted to make a fat man out of cement. Our playmates gestured that they would prefer that we made a thin man and then feed the thin man until he became a fat man. This sounded like more fun and we nodded in agreement.
We molded the thin man’s head and legs and his body, but we did not forget to make his mouth big because we were going to feed him until he grew fat.
Soon the thin man whom we were going to feed until he became a fat man was ready.
But where was the food? What were we going to feed him? We thought lots of carbohydrates like fufu and yams and bread would do the trick.
Our new world-playmates had a different idea.
They mixed cement in a concrete mixer and began to pour the cement into the mouth of the thin man. As he drank the cement he began to grow big. But all his body was not growing big. Only his stomach was enlarging. We watched as the thin man became the big-bellied man and our eyes grew with wonder and we almost forgot that we should go home and that our mother would be calling our names. We hurried to leave. We went to our spinning spot.
We began to spin and soon we surfaced near our backyard.
Mother was back and she was fuming. We still had specks of cement dust on us from the other world.
“Where have you children been?” she asked. “Look at how dirty—you look like children without mothers. Run inside this minute and go take a bath. I keep warning you children that the dog that refuses to heed the hunter’s whistle will soon be lost in the forest. Only a stubborn fly follows a corpse into the grave,” she said, and spat.
We ran into the bathroom and washed up. On the floor of the bathroom the cement from our skin formed a gray concrete mini-pyramid and we pushed it with our big toes until it dissolved.
We decided that we were not going to the other world to play for a while. Our mother’s proverb about the stubborn fly was still fresh in our ears.
We struggled not to go, but we could imagine our playmates in the other world building a pillar that would be higher than what the eye could see. We wanted to be there.
We decided that we would spin but we would not go to the other world. We would spin and just at the point at which we would be in the other world we would stop spinning. Is it possible for the whirlwind to change its mind in mid-spin and no longer be a whirlwind and dissipate into ordinary dust?
We could not stop ourselves and soon we surfaced in the other world. We could tell from their manner that our playmates had missed us. There was no time to waste. They had a new project in mind. There were no trees here and they wanted us to make tree sculptures with branches. Using our fingers we drew a tree with branches on the red earth for them. They looked at our drawings in wonder and then got to work. First we gathered the pieces of steel together. They brought out welding instruments and we started with the trunks and then the branches. This was fun but a lot of work.
They used the bulldozers to dig holes in the ground where the giant trunks would be planted.
It looked to us like this project was going to be a different one. Each thing we had made in the past we eventually demolished at the end of the day. This particular project looked quite elaborate and we went about it with the mindset of people creating something permanent.
We soon had all the tree trunks lined up in a row.
But trees were not trees if they had no branches and leaves.
It was getting late and we had to leave.
We spun and spun.
Our playmates watched us. They would usually wave excitedly when we were leaving, but was there a certain kind of reluctance in their waving today?
For some reason our spinning took longer than usual, but eventually the ground opened up and we found ourselves back home.
Our mother was like an angry frizzle chicken on that day.
“Today, you children will know who is mother and who is child in this house. You will tell me today whether I was the one who lay down and made you or if you both wandered in from the evil forest into my womb. I did not kill my own mother and if you children think you are going to kill me with worry, you will be the ones to go first.”
“We are sorry,” I said.
“Do not be sorry now. It is not yet time for you to be sorry. You are the ringleader. Since your sister can not speak for herself, you must drag her everywhere you go with you.”
“We will not do it again,” I said.
“You will do it again, but you will not have the chance to do it again. From today going forward everywhere I go you must go with me.”
“To the stream …”
“We will go with you,” I said.
“To the farm …”
“We will go with you.”
“To the market …”
“We will go with you.”
“To the river …”
“We will go with you.”
She was beginning to calm down.
“There are people in this village with seven children; their children have not driven them out of this town with their troubles. I have only two. Even your sister has refused to open her mouth and speak. What have I done? Who have I offended? What did I do wrong? I go out to find what you children will eat. What is it that keeps the mother hen clucking in both rain and sunshine if not the search for what her children will eat?”
We felt sad and felt truly sorry for our actions.
From that day we would go with mother wherever she wanted to go. We were glad to go with her, but she was not happy to have us trailing behind her. We made her a little less nimble on her feet. It was only a matter of time before she got tired of dragging us along with her and told us to stay home and not wander off and play too far away from the house.
It was only a matter of time that we grew bored. We were soon missing our friends. We derived no pleasure from our old cooking game.
Then one day I said, “Maybe we don’t know how to spin any more. Let’s spin a little and see what happens.”
We began to spin. Things soon began to blur. We were one with the whirlwind. Soon the ground opened and we found ourselves in the other world.
We could see that our playmates were not happy. The trunks of the trees were still lying the way we left them.
As soo
n as they noticed that we were ready, they became excited. We began to make the branches for the trees. There were so many tree trunks. We needed a lot of branches. It was as if the more branches we made the more the branches that were needed.
It was time for us to go.
We stood up and went to our spinning spot. We began to spin. Our feet felt like molted iron. We would not spin. We were stuck in one spot.
Our playmates beckoned for us to return.
There were more branches to make.
And after the branches?
We would have to make the leaves. Thousands and thousands of leaves to cover many trees.
We went back to our playmates.
Was that our mother’s voice we were hearing above ground, wailing, weeping, and crying?
“Where are these children?”
“Where have these children gone?”
“It is growing dark and they have not come back home.”
“It is growing dark. So dark,” she cries.
“Over here it never grows dark,” our friends said. “It is always daylight.”
The tree trunks were calling out to us, “Where are our leaves? Make us leaves. What are trees without leaves? Give us leaves. Hasten, give us leaves.”
Who Is in the Garden?
His wife came into the house like a mini-hurricane, sweeping the curtains to one side with her left hand and not even pausing to drop her purse before attacking him.
“Why did you turn on the generator? Eh, why are you running the generator by this time of the day?”
She did not wait for him to answer. His mouth was still half-open mulling his response.
“Don’t you know that the cost of fuel has gone up? Don’t you know that we need the generator to power the air conditioner through the night so I can sleep and wake up to go to work and earn money to buy petrol for the generator?”
“I only turned it on to watch the match. My team Liverpool is playing. It is only for ninety minutes,” the man said.
The wife snorted. She tossed her purse on the worn-out sofa. She hunched her shoulders. For a moment she looked like a boxer gathering herself to let fly a punch in the ring.
“Your team? Did I hear you say your team? How many times have they called you to share money from their winnings with them? Your team, indeed.”
The man sensed a minuscule opening and tried to think of a response that’d lighten her mood and lessen the thick tension gathering in the room. His wife sensed this too. Pausing was a mistake. She decided to intensify her onslaught.
“How does your watching these grown men kick a ball around help put food on our table? At least the players are making more than enough money to feed their own families.”
“Let me go and turn off the generator,” the man said.
He had no real plans to turn off the generator. A player from the opposing team had just been given a red card. Liverpool would be playing against ten men. This could put Liverpool in front even if only with a lone goal.
But his wife called his bluff.
“Turn it off. At least if there’s any fuel left it should carry us for a few hours,” she said.
He reluctantly went and turned off the generator. His day was ruined, or whatever was left of it. The game would have given him enough energy to survive his wife’s onslaught from the dinner table to the bedroom. Now, deprived of the high from the game that would have carried him through the remainder of the day, he felt deeply bereft.
He contemplated going to read last week’s issue of the newspaper, the Tuesday edition that carried job vacancies, but he suddenly had no strength to see those jobs. These were jobs that he was qualified for but was tired of applying for because he knew that the positions were already filled and that the adverts were mere formality.
What he found even more painful were the chirpy, smiling faces on the “Moving Up” column. Some of the smiling faces were former colleagues and people he knew from past professional association. He knew he dared not step out until it got dark because of the stares from the neighbors who even though they knew he had no job would still ask him if he was back from work already.
He could have gone to one of the Viewing Centers, but they charged a cover fee and the crowd was oftentimes a rough one. There was no way of knowing who was supporting who until you opened your mouth to cheer your team and the man sitting beside you got angry and tore into you.
He decided to look at the garden. It was actually his backyard, but he was the one who called it a garden. He had had grand plans for it. He had thought he could plant some fruit trees in it and on one side a small orchard for growing his favorite dwarf pineapples but all that ambition had dried up like the arid soil in the garden.
He pulled the curtains aside and looked into the garden. That was when he saw it. It was right there in his back garden. It was sitting majestically, to borrow his wife’s grandiloquent phrase. He could not believe his eyes at first. What was that in his garden? How long had it been there?
At the moment that people’s lives change, most people are usually able to recall with total clarity what they were doing. Sometimes they feel a certain heaviness in the moment preceding the incident. In his own case he felt some certain lightness. He felt the weight around his shoulders lift, suddenly, like a hand had grabbed them and tossed them far from him.
His mother-in-law was the first person to knock on their door the next morning. She entered the house singing a Christian hymn. The man did not find the words of the hymn familiar though the tune was somewhat recognizable. It was not impossible that she had composed the hymn on her way to the house. She was the type of woman who believed that the difference between man and beast was man’s ability to improvise.
“Look at what the Big Man in heaven has done. Look and see what he has done. I told them, didn’t I? Years ago when you came to knock on our door to tell us that you saw a beautiful daughter in our garden that you wanted to pluck—meaning you wanted to marry my beautiful daughter—there was nothing my ears did not hear. My ears heard so much they hurt. He is too short. A woman can be short, but a short man? How can his wife respect him when she can see the top of his head when she’s talking to him? What about that giant beard on his face? Men with huge beards, you cannot trust them. They are always up to something; they have all sorts of evil plans while they tug at their facial hair. Nothing wrong with a full moustache but a full bearded man, now that is something else.”
The man watched his mother in-law sing and dance and talk.
“Ah, people from his ethnicity never marry only one wife. It is even worse when the wife is not from their part of the world. They must marry a second wife or even a third. Do not say I did not warn you,” a neighbor had said to her.
As the man watched his mother-in-law sing and dance in his sitting room, he wondered if it was the same woman who had recently sworn not to set foot in his house again until he worked hard and took care of her like other good sons-in-law. In a way though, she was right. She was setting foot in his house now because things had changed.
The thing in the garden had changed all that, he realized.
His wife offered her mother tea and bread, but she looked at the food and hissed.
“What am I eating for; can’t you see that my stomach is filled with joy? I don’t need any food. All we need to do now is to pray. Ah, this is the time to pray. We must thank heavens for this great good fortune of yours. We must also pray against the evil eyes of enemies looking at you with envy now that things are going to change or rather now that things have already changed for you. We must pray for the eyes of your enemies to go blind. And my daughter, you need to pray even more because men change when their fortunes change. Let us all kneel down and begin to pray,” she commanded.
His wife called her job to let them know she was going to be absent. She was so solicitous towards him that morning. She asked him what he wanted for breakfast. She did not yell at him as she used to when he added an extra cube of sugar to hi
s Lipton tea. Back in the day she would have screamed at him and berated him for having a sweet tooth when he could not afford to give her a sweet life.
He whispered to himself to enjoy this, her newfound largeness of heart.
She was all of a sudden full of suggestions.
“You will need a haircut, my love,” she said. “You know you must look the part. People are going to start visiting soon. We will begin to know important people. Appearance does matter.”
He nodded his head in agreement. He knew that in the past, when he would insist on having a haircut on the last Saturday of every month, she used to mock him and ask him who was looking at his hair to know whether it was cut or bushy.
She talked about the things that must be done. Changing the old brown rug to a new wine-colored one. She said brown was a dead color. She also said that he needed to change the furniture.
He was reluctant to ask, but he finally did ask where the money was going to come from. He knew the thing in the garden meant a change in their fortunes, but it didn’t translate into hard cash, at least not yet.
When he asked the question, he nearly caught a glimpse of her old yelling and quarrelsome affect, but she caught herself just in time and began to lecture him in the tones of an inspirational text.
“Money has become our servant; it is no longer our master. We can now call it and say do this and it will do it. Soon people will be begging to loan us money because of this thing that fortune has bestowed on us. Those who have more get more, and we have joined the group of those who have more,” she said.
She said that after he had rested they would talk about protecting the thing in the garden. He told her that he did not need to rest, but she insisted. She told him that it was important that he rest his head now that they still had the time to do it. It was when he went into the bedroom and she came to join him that he understood what she meant by rest. Not in their entire married life up to that point had she shown such enthusiasm in bed. In their past life when he summoned the courage to bring up sex, she would ask him if that was all he thought about even with the difficult times they were passing through.
