Land of My Fathers

by Vamba Sherif

  By the time I had woken up and had taken a shower in the bathroom behind our house, the two women were sitting on the verandah, whispering like two friends who had known each other all their lives.

  ‘We have plans to rebuild my stores and gas stations. Your aunt will run one store and I will focus on the other,’ my mother said when I came out to head to school. She had found her strength.

  The two went on talking as I went down the hill to join other students. At school we waited in our classroom for Mr Wilson.

  He entered dressed in clean clothes. His two daughters were with him. The two girls, seated on a bench in a corner of the room, had on white dresses, their hair plaited in two rows. Mr Wilson taught them himself, for he believed they had nothing to learn at school. His table was empty of millipedes, and while the birds twittered and flew across the window, he paid them no attention. He was staring at us and not through the window, the change in him so visible that it affected us.

  Before he began with the history lesson, he walked up to me and said, ‘I want to see you after school, Halay.’

  We were unusually courteous during the lesson. We listened as he spoke of the past and recent history. His voice was captivating.

  Before the war, during lessons that did not appeal to me, I would draw as the teacher lectured. One day I was caught scribbling a portrait on an exercise book that captured the preoccupied look of our biology teacher. When he saw it he was so worked up that instead of caning me or forcing me to do twenty-five push-ups as was the rule, he asked me to walk to the blackboard and write a hundred times: ‘I will never draw again.’ But I went on to draw, with much more vigour and passion. In the end he gave up on me.

  Now, as Mr Wilson unfolded our history, touching on aspects that were unknown to me, as if intent on resurrecting the past, I listened attentively. I had no urge to draw during the lesson.

  I confined myself to the school compound during recess. Here and there students were engaged in various sports. Two students, a brother and sister, were selling sweets and toffees and tiny cans of sweet condensed milk, attracting hordes of students about them. Before the war, the brother and sister had sold all kinds of sweets at school, and from the proceeds they paid their own school fees, bought school uniforms and exercise books. Girls were clapping hands and counting from one to a hundred in time to the forward movement of their legs. I strolled around, moved to the rear of the school and encountered our principal seated under a breadfruit tree, chewing kola nut, spitting it out and squinting at the sun. His trousers had many creases, and his black shoes were so old they had turned grey.

  ‘Halay,’ he called out to me and I drew closer. ‘How do you feel hearing all the gunshots of those mad people?’

  ‘They frighten me, sir,’ I answered.

  ‘Have you seen them?’

  ‘I haven’t,’ I said and sat beside him.

  ‘I can’t stand the gunshots. I can’t stand this city. Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘No one seems to see.’

  His fetid sweat was overwhelming.

  ‘They are all blind,’ he said.

  He whirled his stump around in agitation.

  ‘You draw, so perhaps you can see.’

  He told me how he had survived the war. The first gunshot had woken him up and he realized that fear had paralysed him. He remained in bed as the gunfire sounded over the city and until a crack sounded at the door. Men dressed in the garb of war grabbed him and led him away to a small house and locked him in with other people. For days, he went without food. The room reeked of urine, faeces and fetid sweat. He longed for fresh air, for a tiny beam of sunlight. One night, some men with the eyes of war entered the cell, blindfolded him and took him to the outskirts of the city. He heard volleys of gunshots and then a sudden, deafening silence, and he fell to the ground and did not move until fiery brightness appeared on his face and he knew it was daylight. On opening his eyes, he saw nothing around him but dead bodies. He broke into a run, avoiding the main road until he came to a deserted village and made it his home. He would slip into the village at night in search of food and then return to the forest during the day. It was an exhilarating feeling of being a master, a lord over a domain as huge as a village. He would move about it at night, searching for its secrets. He found buried trinkets, iron-money, a staff with an animal bone buried deep in it, a beautifully crafted dagger with strange inscriptions written on the blade, an abandoned pot of stale stew with an army of flies feasting about it, a carved sculpture of a heavily bearded man, a bale of leaves like one used to support bundles of firewood on the head but that was now used as a block for carrying out fiendish acts. He slept in a room with a round bed that had the flag of the country printed on the bedsheets. He would play with a bunch of coins left under a bed in one of the biggest houses in the village, counting and recounting them. There were instances, during the night, when he felt no fear and would sing until the dawn of the morning. One day, he came to the village and found it suddenly populated by people and he left in search of another village. He could not tell me what he saw during his flight because it was simply too terrible.

  He spat out the kola nut and waved me on to class. I left him with my head filled with the sensation that he might have felt in the village.

  After school, on our way to Mr Wilson’s home, we met the professor. He was going to see Aunt Elizabeth. He had his manuscript with him, and when he saw me he waved to me.

  ‘Come over here. I’ve been struggling to understand what my ancestor wrote about your namesake. It’s all here in this manuscript.’

  I had often wondered about the book, and his reference to its content drew my attention.

  ‘I understand it now, and I understand you. You are here to remind us of him. Time will tell how valuable you are.’

  ‘What are you talking about, prof?’ I asked.

  The professor drew mathematical figures on the ground with his cane, and filled them with strange but beautiful letters. He kept chanting to himself as he drew. He studied the figures from different points.

  ‘I am almost there,’ he said. He circled the figures again. ‘Just a while longer,’ he implored. ‘Yes, it is clear now, Halay.’ He paused and turned to me, his gaze so filled with sadness that I cringed.

  ‘It says here that you will remain a stranger forever,’ he said.

  I stood as if nailed to the ground, and then I broke into a run towards home and met my parents sitting outside with Aunt Elizabeth.

  They were lunching on bowls of pineapples, mangoes, oranges, and a host of other fruits. It was Aunt Elizabeth who caught the despair in my eyes. What did it mean being a stranger in one’s home?

  ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,’ she said.

  I ignored them and went to the rear of the house, which overlooked the valley. I sat on a tree trunk. Aunt Elizabeth came to me.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  She sat beside me, folding her skirt carefully. Being so close to her, I realized that she was not much older than my mother.

  ‘Your father says that I will remain a stranger all my life.’

  ‘That scared you, right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I’ve been a stranger all my life,’ she said. ‘But now I’ve found home. The yearning to feel at home kept me alive in America. I think when you’ve done what is necessary in life, you might find home.’

  ‘But I am yet to find out what’s necessary.’

  ‘One day you will. In America, I always felt something missing in my life long before I confronted my mother about my father. I questioned every aspect of my mother’s story about his death, and her failure to fill in the gaps in her story about how the two of them had met and how he had met his end bothered me. She was not being honest with me. Now I know.’

  She caressed my shoulders, calming me.

  ‘I want to draw what’s happening around me. I want to capture war on paper. But every time I try, it ends in failure. My talent’s left me,’ I
said.

  ‘So you draw?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s the only thing I know.’

  She was silent for a while.

  ‘I had a son in America,’ she said. ‘He was an artist like you. But his love of art and the urge to represent images on paper and canvas drove him in the end to self-destruction. He would often gaze at things in peculiar ways, his eyes could be disturbing. While bringing him to school, during his childhood, he would be lost in thought, sometimes gaping at passers-by, his whole attention riveted to their faces, just their faces. The people he stared at would feel so embarrassed that they would smile to conceal their unease. ‘Stop looking at people like that,’ I would tell him, but he seemed not to hear me. He talked about faces, about the shapes of mouths, lips, noses, lashes, brows and foreheads. How could a child notice all those features and with such intensity the way he did, I often wondered. His first real drawing was of me. People praised and recoiled from it, for it was grotesque and terrifying in its beauty. He was a young man then when he did the drawing, and I knew that I’d lost him. Art ruled his life. Many a time, he would fall into depression, a deep and bottomless hole out of which it took months and sometimes a year to creep out of, only because he had failed to put on paper or canvas an image that had haunted his imagination. To me, Halay, art is a discipline, but it becomes much more than that when an artist spends a whole night and day on his feet, standing before a canvas and making paintings that horrify and fascinate people to the point of screaming or shedding tears. Then art becomes an obsession, an addiction; you must remember that, Halay. It becomes a religion with a different dimension. This was what my son desired. Don’t let your art own you, child. When my son was gone, I could not live in America surrounded by his ever-haunting presence and I decided to leave to start a new beginning. This is the new beginning.’

  When she was finished, in the lingering silence, I felt so close to her that I lay my head on her lap and she put her hand on my head.

  5

  Mr Wilson’s home, located in Old Town, was a three-room house that had survived the war and now stood amid ruins of concrete and mud-built houses, some burned to the ground. There was a house in that part of the city that still functioned as the occasional home of the masked beings whenever they appeared in the city, which was very rare. Nowadays masked beings of all statures, including the dreaded ones, were considered less important. The tradition had waned long before the war, and after the war it had become irrelevant or merely ceremonial.

  Once, before the war, I was out with my father to see the masked beings who were in town to receive the president of the country. It was a boisterous event. My father and I moved through the crowd, seeing one masked being after another until we came to the one with the crocodile beak. It was dressed in an impressive raffia skirt, and on top of its elongated beak, close to the forehead, was stuck a black triangular nose. The masked being was spinning around to the songs of its retinue.

  When it paused, I approached it and stood in front of it, which in the time of my ancestor was forbidden – for I was not an initiate – and I began to gaze at it with relentless curiosity. Its red teeth, the beautiful, chiselled nose, and the dark and red of its features fascinated me. The masked being ignored me at first, but because I kept staring at it and had begun to draw it in my mind, to imagine the fear it once evoked, the deep mystery it was once shrouded in, the masked being suddenly broke into a song about a boy who had dared to gaze at it.

  I did not realize it was singing about me until I saw the crowd around me begin to disperse and I was left alone, face to face with the masked being. There was no sign of my father. I took to my heels.

  The masked being and its retinue gave chase. Every time I turned around, I saw them hard on my heels, as if my action amounted to the greatest abomination ever. In my fright, the world turned garishly bright before me and my fear was as white as sunlight. The bell announcing the presence of the masked being rang on relentlessly. I decided to head home. Meanwhile, the masked being was raising dust and havoc in its wake. It seemed bent on punishing me and would not let me be.

  I dashed into our house and hid behind the door but forgot in my panic to bolt it. Before I realised my mistake the masked being was on our verandah. Through a chink in the door, I could see it standing still as if it were a statue, while the ceiling and the floor trembled to the power of its hard breath. Then, when I thought it was about to turn around and go down the hill, leaving me in peace, it glided towards the door until its long beak came to rest on the door behind which I stood. I gazed into its eyes which were like a mirror in which I could see myself floating towards a man climbing a hill. On the hilltop, the man suddenly paused, and when he turned around I saw myself in him and the destiny that awaited him. I screamed out of fear of that destiny.

  This was followed by the voice of the masked being, which rose with a song, the voice ancient and august, bearing with it the terror and enchantment of old, the song sweet and in languages some of which I could understand and some not. Then it fell silent.

  ‘You are a descendant of our saviour,’ it said. ‘I can see him in you. You bear his burden, child. Bear it with courage, for none of us can.’

  The masked being then glided away, followed by its retinue. I remembered my parents’ reaction when they found me home. My father was beside himself with rage. ‘What will people say about me if you go on behaving like this?’ he said. ‘They will say I’m bringing you up to behave like this because I’m not from here. Don’t shame me, Halay.’

  My mother was so furious that she refused to talk to me all day. At night, she came into my room and saw me lying in bed awake.

  ‘Halay, you cannot afford to behave like this,’ she said. ‘Our family cannot be seen to be doing disgraceful things. Every eye is on us.’

  She sounded so grave that when she left me I couldn’t sleep a wink. I kept thinking about the words of the masked being, of the burden I had to bear. What burden? I felt no burden on my shoulders or on my head except the terrible urge to draw, to give shape to the world.

  I was thinking about the masked being’s words on my way to see Mr Wilson. What did they mean? What role was cut out for me in this world? I met the daughters sitting in front of the house. I greeted them, and walked to the study where I found Mr Wilson, busy drawing.

  He looked up when he saw me.

  ‘What do you think of the professor’s daughter?’ he said.

  ‘Aunt Elizabeth is doing her best to settle down.’

  ‘Have you tried drawing her?’

  ‘No, but I’ve had the urge.’

  ‘I’ve attempted several times but failed,’ Mr Wilson said.

  He pushed the drawings towards me. They bore no resemblance to Aunt Elizabeth at all, perhaps because Mr Wilson had not studied her enough. ‘I want you to draw her for me,’ he said.

  ‘I am not yet ready,’ I said.

  ‘If you wait to be ready it will never happen.’

  ‘But you draw better.’

  ‘I have tried but failed.’

  I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I agreed to draw my aunt. Night found me staring at the empty papers. How could I give Aunt Elizabeth a face that was hers in every sense? As I bent over the paper, making lines that had no passion in them, a volley of gunfire crashed across the city. The fighters had returned. I thought of my parents and how they would be worried about me. I stood up to leave.

  Mr Wilson stopped me. ‘Go on with the drawing, Halay, and when you are tired, sleep here,’ he said.

  ‘Mother and father don’t know my whereabouts.’

  ‘Going out in the night can be fatal. Stay the night here.’

  Occasionally, soft giggles rose from his daughters’ room. Perhaps they were talking about me, I thought. Mr Wilson left and returned with a mattress. He read for a while in the light of a hurricane lamp, then he bade me goodnight and went to his bedroom.

  I could not keep father and mother in the dark regarding my wher
eabouts. So I tiptoed to the door, opened it and sneaked out.

  I groped my way through the pitch-dark night, and along the way bumped into a bucket, the clanking noise crashing through the silence around me. Whispers floated in the air like the whistling of the winds. Not a single light burned. Following my instinct, careful with every step in a city without current – for the hydro-generator had been bombed during the war – I came to a house I recognized as the mayor’s. I climbed the steps and banged at the door, hoping to see the old man’s face. No one answered. It was the same with other homes in his compound. The houses were quiet and still. Soon it began to rain. I heard a voice screaming as though someone was being beaten, and I hastened towards the sound but crashed into a wall. In a flash of lightning, I saw a figure dart across the street and disappear in the darkness. There was no sign of the fighters.

  The rain had begun to gather force, pouring in buckets like sliding muds intent on burying me. My path was lit by the occasional flash of lightning. I went about searching for a way home until I stumbled on a road that I recognized. The lightning flashed on our house on the hilltop, and just as I was about to break into a run, a pair of hands grabbed me. The fighters, I thought. My end had come. I tore at the hands, fought as if I was fighting death. It was not fear that incited me as I struggled to break free, as I thrashed about in the rain, but the will to survive, to see my parents and to continue to draw and to fulfil my destiny in the world.

  But the hands were trying to calm me, to enfold me, to dispel my fear. And when I yielded to them, I heard a strange voice, and I thought that my end had truly come. ‘You are the child,’ the voice said, and I realized it belonged to one of the fighters. I tried again to get myself free.