by Ben Okri
Mum told this story several times through Dad’s long silence. I never understood the story till one day after it rained. A horde of frogs appeared in our street, croaking all night. The frogs got into our buckets, into our wells, and into our water from the aluminium tanks. The people of the street fell into an orgy of murdering frogs and the more we killed the more appeared, and the more they croaked at night, till none of us could sleep.
‘Where are the frogs coming from?’ I asked Mum one day.
‘From the forest,’ she replied.
I didn’t believe her. It seemed as if yet another plague had descended upon us. Not long afterwards toads and snakes appeared in our street. Mighty spiders turned up in our rooms. Wolves and hyenas roamed the area at night. A white antelope was found dead in an unfinished house. Through the days we listened to the woodcutters chopping down the trees. Our area filled up with strangers who came to the city from their villages deep in the country. There were no houses for them and sometimes ten of them lived in one room and when the diseases began to visit us from the forest many people died while the trees fell one by one. Things changed rapidly and at night all kinds of animal cries kept us awake.
One afternoon, as I played outside our compound, I heard a giant cry from the forest. Without knowing why, I ran towards it. I ran past Madame Koto’s bar, which was still shut, her signboard taken down. I made my way into the forest. I saw blobs of snakespit everywhere on the matted grass. Animals gasped for breath in the undergrowth. I heard the roar of the distant river. The forest had the dense odour of crushed leaves, fervent tree sap, broken bark, dead animals, the cruel fragrance of uprooted herbs and the intoxicating aroma of overfertile earth. I went deep into the forest, following the great cry that sounded from the treetops.
Soon I came to the place where Dad had originally buried the dead carpenter. The great black rock Dad had hefted over to mark the grave was still there. It bristled with furry growths, green mushrooms, snails, and things that looked like eyes but which were actually tiny plants with a bitter smell. The black rock had grown curiously bigger. All manner of noises crackled inside it. Beneath the rock, where the grave had been, the earth was gashed and torn open. I fled from the ugly sight of the gutted earth and went on following the cry till I came to a place where machinery and electric saws filled the air with grating cacophony. All around were the hulks of great trees, their trunks bleeding. All around were bulbous men, with heaving muscled chests, cloth-covered faces, saws and huge axes in their hands.
‘What are you doing here?’ one of the men shouted at me. ‘Or do you want a tree to fall on your small head, eh?’
Behind the men was a majestic iroko tree. It was beautiful. Its trunk span was so vast that ten men couldn’t link their arms around it. The iroko stood a third sawn through. The men had thick ropes attached to its higher parts.
Men were shouting everywhere and the noise of weeping sounded all around like a giant in agony.
‘Someone is crying,’ I said.
The man who had shouted at me came closer. His sweat was pungent.
‘Who?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. I heard it from the street, so I came.’
‘No one is crying. Go away!’
‘Can’t you hear it?’
‘Get away from here, you mad child, before I crack your head with this axe!’
I stood still, rooted by the spectral weeping. The men went on sawing away at the tree. Their chainsaws produced buzzing noises which started a headache in me. The men started hacking at the tree again, their axes bouncing off as if the tree trunk were made of metallic rubber. Their chainsaws coughed and clogged with wood fibre, eventually stuttering to a halt. The men, meanwhile, hacked and sawed and cursed. One of the burly men said something about the tree being full of devils. The man who had shouted at me turned and saw me still standing there.
‘I said GET AWAY FROM HERE!’ he bellowed, taking a few menacing steps towards me, lifting the axe above his head as he did so.
I turned and started back home. The weird weeping intensified all around me. I wandered for a long time in the forest. Banks of leaves, dense canopy of branches, crowded jungle foliage, all shut out the sunlight. I walked in a green darkness. Thunder sounded above the green ceiling of the forest. I began to run. The trails multiplied. Many paths intersected. Red cloths were tied to tree branches. Snails everywhere. A leopard coughed far behind me. Rubber pods exploded and fell through the leaves. The paths confused me. I followed one of them and it led me deeper into the foliage. Led me to parts of the forest I had never seen before. I beheld a settlement, a cluster of white huts, with a fence round them, with white dresses out drying on the lines, with odd-looking animals wandering around in the premises. I took the path back, and came to another intersection. Another path led me to a stream. Another one just went on and on, as if the forest had been inwardly growing, as if the trees had been walking.
Everything confused me. White faces appeared amongst the climbers. Tortoises watched me from the vegetation. A boar rooted around a tree. Antelopes fled into green wastes. Dogs barked at me and vanished. Trees crashed down a short distance away, and rays of the sun slashed at me from chinks in the leaves and branches. The forest had again become a labyrinth, a fiendish maze, and I couldn’t find my way out. As I stood there in the deep shadows, listening to the lisp of forest voices, something fell on my head, filling my eyes with whiteness. When I turned around I saw a girl sitting with her back against a tree. She had one good leg and a wooden one. She had greenish eyes.
‘I can’t stand up,’ she said, staring at me.
A praying mantis leapt past my face. I heard footsteps coming towards me.
‘Help me up,’ the girl said. ‘They are coming for me.’
‘Who?’
‘Them,’ she said, pointing in the direction opposite where the footsteps sounded from.
I looked and saw only trees, lianas, undergrowth.
I went towards her. The forest became silent. The noises of trees being chopped down had stilled. I could no longer hear footsteps. When I got near her she gave out a cry and leapt on my back, clinging to my hair, shouting into my ears:
‘Go! Run!’
Galvanized by a feeling of panic, for she was so heavy, I started to run.
‘That way!’ she cried.
I ran in the direction she pointed, giant footsteps all around us, shadows weaving. A strong wind blowing the treetops, sending pods crashing through the leaves.
‘No, that way!’
She indicated another direction. There there were no paths, only soft earth, covered with decomposing leaves. I ran on, changing direction with her cries, till I burst into a yellow realm, where I saw butterflies vibrating in the wind. Everywhere I looked a settlement was vanishing out of sight. Figures with the faces of antelopes were disappearing into the trees. An old woman sitting outside a green hut was weaving a cloth of many colours. She looked up at us, and smiled. A horse with the feet of men was galloping into the forest roads. Giants with gold teeth sitting on stools the height of baobab trees were telling stories in their yellow time. Their beards were green, and their laughter disturbed the wind.
‘Stop!’ the girl cried.
I couldn’t. My feet ran on, independent of my will. With my burning feet I ran past ochre huts whose walls were made of matted flowers. I ran past a blue and green mushroom on which a thoughtful cricket sat. I fled past an anthill seething with red ants, past honeycombs with bees frantic in the hot air. Went on running till I heard the omnipresent cry again and saw the sky falling down in the shape of a mighty treetop falling slowly over us. Voices seared the wind from the earth and flowers. And it was only then, with the old woman pausing in her design, the figures with antelope faces pausing to stare in our direction, only then could I stop, and it was too late – for the tree had crashed down, bringing three others along with it. And its branches, rich with fruit and bird nests with silver eggs, fell on me and knocked me out o
n the soft earth.
When I recovered, the girl had gone. Deep in the forest the old woman was singing a haunting dirge. The earth was soaked with blood. I tried to move. I breathed in deeply the air of wounded plants. Tears stung my eyes. I looked about me and found myself buried in a bank of leaves and branches. I screamed. Suddenly the wind changed and I disentangled my ethereal self from the wreckage of dead trees and saw a silver egg near my head. I floated above the great elephant of a tree and wandered like a bird through the bewildering expanse of forest, circling the air, weaving in and out of visions. I saw the world through a blue fire. My being fractured into several selves. There was agony in my brain, and butterflies in my ears, stirring my blood. Footsteps sounded about me like the pounding of an enormous heart. I circled in the forest, round and round, like a bird trapped in a labyrinth of trees, unable to reach the sky. My vision swirled. Then suddenly everything settled, and I found that I could control my flight when I stopped being afraid.
I dared the wind, rode its seven humps, and found myself at another site. Eleven men, two of them white, were surrounded by complex machinery for the destruction of trees. I saw them through a blue haze. They stood amongst great indifferent shadows. And one of the labourers, in a despairing voice, said:
‘But, sir, we have been trying to cut down this tree for five weeks!’
One of the white men, wearing crash helmet, glasses, khaki outfit and boots, with a gun under his arm, said:
‘Superstitious Africans!’
And the shadows changed around him and I saw all the footsteps of his life marked by the vibrations of his utterance. Wood sprites in the form of chameleons stared at him from the undergrowth. A spirit with liverish eyes, riding the wind, went into the second white man who said:
‘Ghastly people!’
And the spirit stayed in him for a while. The earth turned slowly. The wind heaved above the trees. The smell of trouble forefelt wafted over their heads in the fragrance of secret nameless herbs which understood the diseases, ailments and afflictions of the future. The herbs whispered their potencies on the wind, naming diseases incurable that they could cure. And the white man with the liver-eyed spirit in him took off his dark glasses, and polished them. He looked around. Then, holding on to his colleague, he said, in a controlled voice:
‘There are devils in this forest.’
‘Steady on,’ his colleague said. ‘You don’t believe in the so-called spirits of Africa, do you? Surely science has conquered all that nonsense.’
‘Absolutely,’ the man with the spirit in him said. ‘But I feel ill. Something’s come over me, Harry.’
The butterflies stirred in my ears and the winds of the new space blew me on, carrying me off like a cotton waft, and I saw the beautiful girl with the wooden leg sitting beside the old woman, helping her with the weaving of the long cloth of stories. They were both singing dirges under the spell of the sun. The wind blew me on and on. The footsteps about me diminished. The agony in my head increased. Then I came to another place where two woodcutters had gone mad from destroying a sacred grove and releasing a host of angry spirits. The plants there were bleeding a purple ink which left a bizarre epic on the red soil.
The two woodcutters were jumping about, screaming that they could see the future. One said that five devils were dancing in his head. The other yelled all the names of his lineage, a line which would end with insanity. The anthill which they had also destroyed poured out its army of poisonous ants which brought out ugly welts on the faces of the two deranged tree-cutters, who went tramping around the forest, and spreading terror before them. They disturbed the silent spaces where secrets dwelled in peace with the dreams of the dead, where forgotten diseases lived in calm quarantined contentment. And when the diseases were dislodged they too began to roam about looking for beings that would give their agitation a new home.
Everywhere the two deranged men went things dwelling in solitude roused themselves. The dead stirred, and spirits fled out from their crepuscular abodes. Leopards with the feet of white men, antelopes with jewels round their necks, fled their lairs, moved deeper into the forest, closer to their extinction.
The new wind blew openings through the forest roof, and exposed the dark rich places of solitude to the merciless glare of distant planets.
TWO
Circling spirit (2)
I WAS BLOWN on and on, and like a spider’s web I caught the surrounding stories as they drifted in the wind. In the distance I heard women calling my name. Their voices resounded through the forest, each syllable changing as the trees altered the sound of my name, changing it into theirs. The trees named themselves through the distorted voices of the women who were searching for me.
Beyond them, in a spell-sealed place, the old woman began to laugh at all the vicious ironies of time and history that she had witnessed in her life of a recluse. The old woman had been exiled from society because she looked frightening. A strange disease had deformed her, humped her back, twisted her eyes, made her voice ghostly, made her legs swell, and made her complexion more radiant. She was driven from society, isolated, avoided. Nobody would do business with her. Landlords refused to rent her rooms. And so she came to the forest and built her hut and watched the changes in society. She lived the life of a hermit, of a herbalist and benign witch. She cured her disease, but she retained her ugliness so that she would never again have to live with the wickedness and hypocrisy of human beings. She began to care for lost animals, wounded beasts, children left in the forest to die because their mothers couldn’t abort them – strange children with powers of transformation. During all her years in the forest the old woman grew to know the secrets of plants and the earth, the disruptive and benign influences of unseen planets, the unsuspected winds, the undeciphered voices, the vast realm of spirits, and all the permutations of omens and signs.
The old woman laughed now, standing up because she had unfurled the full length of tapestry she had been weaving. And the wind in contemplation rushed across the full length of cloth with all its stories of trees and animals and plants. The wind smoothed out the annals of the origin of human beings, from their beginnings in the silver egg which the great god put in space and which hatched into millennia of stories. There were tales of exile and war, the birth and descent of the gods, the hubris of mankind, the flood, and the cycle of vanities. And there was the end which all true stories threaten: the second deluge of fire. It illuminates the choice that has to be made between blindness and vision. Blindness leading to the apocalyptic. But vision postponing it so long as we can keep to the bright side of all creation, and to the shining original dream.
The wind seemed in love with the tapestry of stories and fates which the old woman had been weaving all her days isolated in the forest. And when the beautiful girl with the wooden leg saw the tapestry, she wept. The weaving was not yet complete, but the end was in sight. The tapestry was admired not only by the wind but also by the sun, by the birds who were her servants, the animals she had tamed, and the spirits she had befriended. The splendour of the old woman’s labours made the girl weep, for she too had been woven into the cloth of fates. And as the old woman laughed, the white man whom the liverish spirit had entered said:
‘Listen, Harry, I’m feeling sick. It’s as if I’ve got live eels inside me.’
‘Quite so,’ his colleague said absent-mindedly as he commanded his nine woodcutters to resume their assault on the great sacred iroko.
‘Look, Harry, you believe in Zeitgeist, and the residing spirit of a place. You used to like the great German Romantics.’
‘So, what of it?’
‘I tell you, Harry, this place has a weird spirit to it. And I feel bloody awful. And I feel drunk as a kite and I haven’t had a drop to drink. It’s the damn heat, Harry, the heat’s gone mad, Harry.’
‘Quite so, quite so. Have some whisky or something, old chap.’
The man with the spirit in him staggered to the jeep. His African servant rushed f
orward to help him.
‘Don’t touch me, you ugly creature,’ he screamed.
The servant ignored the remark and helped him into the jeep. He spread himself out on the back seat, his feet on the door. Then he opened a flask of whisky, and drank, and the liverish spirit expanded in him, sitting sideways, a mischievous expression on its woebegone face.
Drunk on the heat, he was suddenly invaded by hallucinations. He saw bats with the faces of pale white women, owls with binoculars round their necks, and he shouted:
‘Damn you, Harry! Damn your imperial dreams, Harry! We’ve been trying to cut down this tree for a whole month. It’s destroyed our saws, blunted our axes, exhausted our workers, taxed our patience, and we haven’t even dented its African face, Harry!’
‘Shut up, old chap, and mind your language with the natives,’ snapped his friend.
And the possessed man, drunk on hallucinations, fell into hysterical laughter. His laughter tickled the air. The forest began to laugh as well, distorting the original laughter. The hyenas took it up and played their variations on it. As did the wolves, the trees, the frogs, the spiders, the lost dogs, the hidden leopard, and even the two deranged men, with the sacred grove spinning in their eyes.
As they fled past the trees, the two men saw beings they last glimpsed in their childhood. Women who walked upside down in a serene realm of sepia. Old men with yellow eyes flying through a silvery air. Old women with one eye each in the middle of their heads. A horse with the face of a village chief. Spirits with many heads all talking and singing at once. A stomach without a body, rolling along an ancient path, followed by the most beautiful girl in the world. The two men saw these forgotten sights of childhood and laughed even harder. The forest distorted their laughter, sifted it, sanitized it, and the white man with the spirit in him sat up in the jeep, his eyes clearing for an instant, and said:
