Land of My Fathers

by Vamba Sherif

  He was silent, and after a while he said, ‘The artist’s life is a difficult one here. Too much passion could end up killing him. I remember meeting an artist during the Second World War who drew only women. I could not understand why a man would choose to draw women and nothing else until I met my wife.’

  The barman broke off and shuffled to the other end of the bar to change cassettes in his tape player. A Congolese song began to play, the most recent to hit the stores, and many were taken by it. The old man swung to it as he moved towards me.

  ‘Halay, have you ever wondered what it feels like to find yourself at the centre of things?’ He smiled and tapped his head. ‘No, not the centre of things. I mean the centre of war.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It could be exhilarating, especially for an artist, what with all the explosions, the cries and screams, the confusion. Nowhere is human courage more evident than in war.’ He shared such vivid and minute details of his life as a sniper that a chill ran down my spine.

  I was about to leave, but he served me a drink and told me about his wife whom he met in France. He married her just after the war. In the years that followed, they had three children. He was penniless during that time, sleeping and waking up to a hungry wife and children. Matters turned for the worse when his wife delivered their third child. He came home one night and met his children famished and his wife throwing him looks that reduced him to nothingness. Wretched and no longer capable of bearing her gaze, he waited till they slept, then packed a suitcase with clothes, taking along the photo albums, and stole out of the house and into the night. The next day, he boarded a ship bound for the land of his fathers. He never returned.

  But he loved that woman, he told me. He loved her blue eyes and short brunette hair, her faint dimples, and the smell of mashed potatoes that seemed to always linger about her. He loved how her gentle gaze would sweep across the table as they shared their meal. Most of all, he loved the feeling of being in love and being loved. He understood then why the artist who painted only women never lacked inspiration.

  Years later, after their first child, he would learn that she came from a prosperous family, a descendant of a long line of musical instrument makers. Her family had all perished in the war. She had survived a bombardment because she happened to be in the garden and not her father who played piano at that hour of the day, nor her mother who was sitting before the window doing some embroidery, and nor her brother who was in his atelier painting horses and cows.

  The barman was about to say more when a handsomely dressed young man strutted into the bar. Before serving him, he asked me to accompany him to his home after he closed up.

  It was a tidy house with a living room simply decorated with gilt-framed pictures. It had a verandah that looked out onto the ochre street. He showed me to a seat, went to his bedroom and emerged with a pile of picture albums. Pictures had always fascinated him. He would cut them out from books and newspapers and date them, including the hour and how he had come upon them. He would note down the country, the continent and the world’s reaction to such an occasion. Now he had pictures of every major event since the Second World War.

  The pictures were many, each with a story. In one of the pictures, he was standing and smiling, wearing the uniform of a soldier. In another he was in a suit and stood beside a seated woman whose hands were in her lap. There were his children, the eldest with a severe expression, the second with closed eyes and the third a cheerful baby.

  He told the story of the family portrait with such tenderness that I wondered why, surrounded with such love and beauty, he had chosen to abandon them. I thought of the longings of the heart. Had his love for his wife driven them apart instead of bringing them closer together? I wanted to draw him as the man he once was, and draw his children and his wife before her gaze had become unbearable.

  5

  My father was sitting in the shade of the mango tree in front of the house. ‘You are here, Halay,’ he said, and shifted his attention to the fruit on the mango tree, which were still unripe. My mother had taken to returning home earlier from the market because of the constant friction between her and the market women. They would not let her be. After sharing a few words with her, I ate my meal of pounded cassava and peanut sauce, a combination that had grown on me. I decided to draw the barman and his family. I pictured them seated around a table in a room with a sofa that served as a bed, a burning candle and a small painting of flowers. I drew his wife and children with their anticipating stares, drew them lanky from hunger, drew them walking hand in hand on the main thoroughfare of their city, drew them with healthy limbs and faces, evoking a time when they seemed at ease with the world until poverty began to gnaw away at the foundation of their lives. I drew nothing else but the barman and his family for days on end and in different shades and moods.

  Then I went to show him the drawings. He was busy clearing the bar for a performance. An acrobat in baggy trousers, a Fulani perhaps, was dancing in the cleared space, accompanied by his flute player. Soon the bar was crowded. Whenever the acrobat jumped, cheers and applause rose, and the crowd tossed money at him. The man left the bar and climbed to the rooftop from where he somersaulted and landed on the ground. He repeated this many times, as though his body was of steel.

  I happened to shift my attention and my gaze rested on a girl whose hair was tied into little knots with tiny black ropes. Her eyes were wide with excitement, and beads of sweat were coalesced on her nose. The acrobat ceased to amuse me. A boy about her age approached her and whispered something in her ear. She laughed, and her face lit up like sunlight on a river. There was something peculiar about her. She was part of the crowd but stood apart, and whenever someone touched her, her face would flame up with irritation. Her plainness, the fact she was not a great beauty, fascinated me. She would stand on her toes, straining her neck to watch the performance, but afraid of being touched. The urge to draw was stronger than the desire to watch her, and so I left.

  My mother noticed my sunny disposition. ‘You look different, Halay?’ she asked, but I chose not confide in her. I wanted to relish the moment alone.

  I did not share in my father’s victory when he returned from fishing with a basketful of his catch. ‘If this goes on like this, I will start selling fish here, Halay,’ he said, but my mind was elsewhere.

  I drew the girl, concentrating on her slender figure, her hair, her full lips and sharp chin, and on her nose and on the drops of sweat gathered on it. Dusk met me still drawing her, and I slept soundly that night.

  The next morning after my mother had left to wage her war against the market women and my father to fish, I went to the bar, hoping to see the girl. The place was empty, except for the barman.

  ‘You are early, Halay,’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘The acrobat will not be performing today.’

  ‘I am not here for the acrobat.’

  ‘Why are you here then?’

  I was silent.

  ‘If you are not here for me, then you must be here for someone else.’

  I could not tell him.

  ‘It happened to me before, Halay.’

  ‘In France,’ I said.

  ‘Where else,’ he said.

  ‘What should I do?’ I asked.

  ‘Fight until you win her. It’s winners who count.’

  He broke into a love song, and I left him in search of the girl. I had not gone far when I saw her with a huge basket of peeled oranges on her head. Surprised, confused, I turned my back to her.

  ‘Do you want some oranges?’ she asked.

  I was tongue-tied. My poetry, every sentence I’d ever forged, now failed me. I cursed every poet who had ever lived. What did their lines mean if they could not guide me through this moment?

  ‘I saw you yesterday,’ I managed to say.

  ‘You couldn’t take your eyes off me,’ she said.

  ‘Who was that boy with you?’

  ‘So you are jeal
ous?’

  ‘I just want to know.’

  ‘He is my brother, okay?’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I know I cannot love you,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My father says that refugees carry filthy ways with them.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘You have to wait until I finish school.’

  ‘Why finish school?’

  ‘Because we are poor,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to always be reminded of something I want to forget.’

  ‘Do you want to forget poverty?’

  ‘No, I don’t want to be reminded of it.’

  ‘You talk like an adult.’

  ‘I am an adult.’

  ‘You are not older than I am.’

  ‘You think so? I am an adult because I see the world as it is,’ she answered. ‘I cannot love you for example.’

  ‘You can’t stop love,’ I said.

  ‘Who says so?’

  ‘It’s always been so.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Do you love me then? Can you love me?’

  ‘I do. You are the first boy who ever looked at me that way. It’s as if I was the first woman you’ve ever laid your eyes on.’

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep last night.’

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘Do you want some oranges?’

  ‘Yes. I will buy one.’

  ‘They are not for sale.’

  ‘What will you tell your mother when she finds out that a few oranges are missing?’

  ‘The truth.’

  ‘What truth?’

  ‘That I gave you some oranges.’

  ‘It has to be a secret.’

  ‘But I keep no secrets from my mother. I tell her everything.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Nafisat, and you?’

  I gave her my name. Then I went on to tell her about life before the war and about our flight. I told her that I wanted to be equal in talent to an artist whose work I had encountered in one of my books. I told her that my single goal was to draw war, to capture on paper what had brought an end to our lives in our country, to explain war to myself. I became so excited that I stumbled on my words and stopped.

  ‘I will tell my mother about you,’ she said.

  Later we parted, agreeing to meet the next day.

  6

  Unsure of my father’s reaction to Nafisat if he met her, I took her instead to the refugee camp that was stretched along the city’s outskirts. It was a boisterous and chaotic world, as if when my people fled they had taken their disordered world with them. Everything was for sale: zinc sheets, doors, timber, furniture, cars, nails, screwdrivers, mats, brooms, portraits, pans, cupboards, valises, second-hand clothes, shoes, rice, dried meat, yams, eddoes, palm oil, gold, silver, everything. In and around the makeshift camps, with homes built of plastic and mud, zinc and wood and thatch, people haggled over goods. Women, desperate to feed their children and themselves, sold their wrappers, their footwear, their bodies and everything else for ridiculous prices. Men let go of their precious possessions with heavy hearts. A man was lauding the long and loyal service of his jeep as he sold it. I saw a woman with a child seated before her, her feet swollen with jiggers, while flies flew around her and her child. She was a beggar. Her scrawny eyes shot me a look that made me want to break into a run.

  ‘I don’t like this place. Let’s leave,’ Nafisat said.

  ‘No, I want to see this,’ I said.

  ‘But it is such a wretched place.’

  ‘That’s why I want to see it.’

  On a hillock a thatched mosque stood a few feet away from a mud-built church. A crowd had gathered around a reverend and an imam who were discussing Jesus. A stone’s throw away from the two places of worship was a bar that also served as a shop. We entered it. A woman with a vacant stare sat at a table. Flies hummed about and settled on the drinks, the glasses, the bottles, the openers, the lollipops, the sweets and toffees, and on the woman. A cassette player hiccupped and broke into a harsh tone. A child as thin as a teacher’s cane raced into the bar, darted a look around the counter and seeing no one behind it snatched a sweet and rushed out. After a while, a group of young men entered chatting in a language that was both familiar and strange to me. It was my language. But the pitch in their voices, the break in their sentences, the laughter, the nuances, the rhythm seemed new. I felt close to them but at the same time lost in my own exile, unable to attain the level of mirth and confidence being displayed in their strange, chaotic world. Was I forgetting my language or had I been speaking in a different tongue with my parents? I wondered.

  We went out. Along the muddy and cramped road, we met a group of boys playing a game of marbles. One of them broke away from the group and hungrily eyed the basket of oranges on Nafisat’s head.

  ‘How much for the oranges?’ he asked.

  Nafisat told him.

  ‘They are too expensive. Do you want a marble for an orange?’

  Nafisat shook her head. The boy joined his friends.

  Under a huge tree sat a group of elderly men arguing about the war and what had led to it. Their voices rose with passion. The war could only be explained by going to back to the beginning of the country, one of them said.

  Another argued that the beginning had nothing to do with the war. ‘It had to do with greed,’ he said, but a third disagreed.

  ‘The war had to do with tribalism,’ he said, but another shook his head.

  ‘It had to do with nepotism.’

  One of them stood up. ‘Wait, wait, listen,’ he said. ‘The war had nothing to do with any of these, but with outsiders who were pitting groups of our people against each another.’ The rest did not agree.

  We strolled past them. On one side of the road, close to the forest, rice paddies stretched out. Men and women were hard at work with hoes. An obnoxious smell that summed up the depth of deprivation of the camp hung like clouds over the place. Shacks that housed dozens of families rose up before us.

  We came to an area of the camp that could boast a certain degree of decency. Between the mud-built homes was a shop stuffed full of provisions, and there was also a small market. A group of men had gathered around a girl selling fried fish and callas – fried doughnuts.

  In front of a big house, in two lines that stretched to almost a kilometre each, desolate and beaten people stood, holding out bowls for their daily rations. At every turn, a refugee would push forward a bowl, the gaze almost always fixed on the azure blue skies. Was it anger I saw on the faces or the stark expression of people resigned to their fate?

  ‘Where are you from?’ an old man asked me. Before I could get around to answering him, he said, ‘Child, you are looking at us as if you don’t belong to us or as if you don’t want to belong to us.’

  Nafisat pulled my arm to go, but I couldn’t move.

  ‘People, look at this child who pretends he is different from us,’ the old man said. The people in the queue laughed.

  It took a while before I could take hold of myself. I promised that upon my return to the house, I would persuade my parents to move to the camp and become part of this world, our world.

  On the roadside, we saw a man in a gown too large for him. One of those men who grew no beard despite age, he seemed to be the leader of the camp and was overseeing the building of a school. Men and children were labouring around him, digging holes, building mud bricks, fetching wood from the nearby forest to be used as poles to hold the building together. He was an agile man, he moved about shouting out orders, pausing with a frown to listen to one person and berating another.

  By then we had covered the length of the camp and were now at a place where the clearing ended and the forest began. Under a giant cotton tree, a group of men stood trading in currencies, exchanging ours for those of the land of exile. On seeing us, the men fixed their gazes at the skie
s, hurriedly puffing at their cigarettes, pretending not to have seen us. Here and there, new shacks were being put up by fresh groups of refugees.

  Nafisat was overwhelmed by it all. I offered to help her with the basket of oranges. The camp was far behind us now and the noises and smell were replaced by a pleasant freshness when we arrived at the river, which was said to run as far as our land and beyond it, winding its way like a giant python through several countries providing fish, bearing people and goods on its waters and inexhaustibly falling into the ocean.

  I set the basket of oranges down and we sat on the sand, in the haunting silence of the languid river. After a while, a fisherman rowed along the river in a slender canoe, humming a tune as slow as the current until he disappeared beyond the mangroves.

  Nafisat enquired about my drawings. I told her what I had done and planned to do. I did not hide the fact that occasionally after making a drawing I would shed tears. Or, out of dissatisfaction, I would tear my drawings into pieces and would not draw for a while. I told her about my mother and how difficult exile was for my father who spent his days fishing.

  A movement in the river interrupted us. A tortoise was swimming across the river to the other side. We watched it crawl up the bank and get lost under the canopy of dried leaves.

  ‘Why do you want to draw war?’ Nafisat asked.

  ‘Because war haunts me,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I see war in everything.’

  ‘In everything?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Even in me?’

  ‘Yes, even in you.’

  ‘Do you often dream about it? I mean the war?’

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  I had laid bare my soul to her, but instead of feeling exhilarated, free of the burden I had borne since the war, I felt I had betrayed what had held me together by sharing it with someone who had not lived it or could not understand. Would Nafisat understand that my obsession with war went deeper than the loss of property or a home? That it had to do with my past and with my family and its history?

  Nafisat embraced me as if she understood. She held on to me for a long time, and when she let go she said: ‘Let’s swim.’