by Ben Okri
The statues stood there, in the white space, with beautiful and elongated faces, elegant scarifications, short arms and seven fingers. Some of them had inturned feet and glass eyes. They were a race of magnificent warriors and at the same time the wisest and most tranquil people in the universe.
There were rows and rows of them, standing in straight lines, with the shorter ones in front and the taller ones ascending behind them. The tallest ones amongst them were as gigantic as the mighty trees around. Midgets, intermediaries and giants coexisted with splendid equanimity.
A faintly roseate mist floated just above their heads as they stood there in complete silence. Birds trilled around them. Running water whispered among the rocks, rare flowers and herbs scented the wind. The statues seemed to move and yet they didn’t. Harmonious and mysterious, they might have been sculpted by enlightened strangers to the planet to honour one of the holy places of the earth.
Everyone had heard the great tales of their fabulous healing properties. Everyone had heard rumours that they were the guardians of a secret religion. These were the legendary statues which had been talked about for centuries and which no one had seen.
I stood in complete wonder before the awesome figures. I breathed in their air of enchantment and soaked in their tranquillity. Beautiful spirits danced in the clear spaces. I was overwhelmed by the mood of those silent stones. Awestruck by their dignity. Astonished by the humorous philosophies in their eyes. I was lost in their listening stillness.
The wind surrounded me with their meditations. And then, from among the stones, an unearthly light shone momentarily upwards, and was gone. One of the statues moved, and my heart heaved with wonder. Profound spaces opened up in my soul. And then Dad stepped towards me from the stones, smiling.
‘My secret training ground is near here.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes, not far from here. I have been coming to this area to train for years now, but this is the first time I found this place.’
He sat on the ground beside me. We stared in fascination at the rows of statues. They were like frozen spirits, frozen dreams.
‘One legend has it that at night these stones move. They turn into magic antelopes and into human beings, and they perform wonders in this world full of evil,’ Dad said.
His words started a saffron-coloured breeze in my mind.
‘A more recent legend, born in our times, has it that the people who disappeared from our street turned into these stones. And another legend says that these statues turn into human beings and come and live amongst us as strangers, to see what our hearts are like. They are messengers of the gods, spies of the god of justice. They have their kind all over the world.’
Dad paused again. A flock of white birds circled overhead and alighted on the branches of the low tree in the middle of the grove.
‘These stones know the secret of time and creation. That’s why they can heal. In the olden days people used to set out on pilgrimages for this place. They came with their sick and their dying, and they were cured. Priests of old religions used to conduct initiations here. This place filled them with wisdom. It was also an oracle. Some people believe that after God created man he moulded these stones, but he didn’t breathe life into them. Their spirits are pure. Centuries passed, and we forgot about them, and no one has seen them since.’
TWO
An ambiguous old woman
DAD HAD HARDLY finished what he was saying when we heard an agonized cry near us in the forest. The birds flew up in the air, not in confused motion, but as one. They circled the air as the cries continued. In another direction, deep in the forest, we heard a tree crashing down, sending the reverberations of its death all along the earth. The cry pierced the air again, louder, as if the agony were in some way connected to the fallen tree.
Dad stood up and, without dusting the back of his trousers, set off in the direction of the voice. I went with him along the paths. The cry kept receding. Dad stopped twice, wanting to go back to the sacred grove. But the voice kept moving away and we weren’t sure if we were merely following an echo. We went further into the forest, passing a flame tree in full blossom, till we left the magnetic field of the sacred grove and came to an overhang of dense creepers which formed a cave of vegetation near the forest path. A voice drew us into the green cave of lianas and leaves and we saw an old woman lying on the ground, with a yellow lantern beside her. She was very old and was covered all over with pustules and sores. Her jewelled eyes were set deep within a face that had mushroom-like growths of flesh. She was old and frail and she stank. Her clothes were disgusting and her general appearance revolting. Her nose was sharp, almost beak-like; and her voice was horrible and rasping, full of rabid bitterness.
‘Go away! Go away before I curse you with my diseases!’ she cried, in the voice of an old witch.
Dad was taken aback by her ugliness and her pustules. Her voice opened up a vision of worms in my head. Her right foot was bleeding. Dad was frightened by this apparition, this creature uglier than the fetishes that repulsed evil from the nightspaces of our ancestors. But he leant over to her and said:
‘Do you need help?’
The old woman spat a foul mouthful of bile at Dad, and shouted:
‘Go away, or kill me now! Run before I turn into a leopard and eat you up!’
Dad stayed still. The wind rustled the leaves. Night came slowly into our midst. After a long silence, the old woman said:
‘Hunters are trying to kill me.’
‘Why?’
‘They thought I was an antelope.’
‘An antelope?’
‘There was a white man with them.’
‘We didn’t see any hunters.’
‘No hunters?’
‘No.’
The old woman tried to get up. Dad moved, hesitated, then helped her up.
‘I am an old woman,’ she said, her voice mysteriously losing its rasp. ‘I can’t walk. And I have far to go.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To my house.’
‘Where?’
She pointed with her bony finger. There was another silence. A soft wind changed the air. We heard someone singing from a distance. The air changed our minds. I fetched her crude walking stick with the forked top, cut from the branch of an orange tree. The old woman hobbled slowly, with one diseased hand round Dad’s neck and the yellow lantern in the other. We were very silent as we went up the path. We walked for a long time. Bird noises kept following us. The old woman didn’t speak for a while, but her presence filled me with words. Strange philosophies shimmered from her bird-like face and her peculiar green eyes. She kept looking at me.
She took us round in a wide circle. We passed the cave twice. And when we came to it a third time she gave a mischievous cackling laugh, and I noticed a silver egg at the mouth of the cave. I was about to speak when she stopped Dad, asking to rest a little. Then she turned her face to me, and said:
‘Did you know, my son, that in the olden days there were colours which human beings couldn’t see?’
I stared at her, confused. I didn’t see the pustules any more. Her smell had become almost fragrant. For a second I saw the little girl in her old face.
‘In the olden days,’ she continued, ‘people could see angels. Now, they can’t even see their fellow human beings.’
She gave her cackling laugh again and indicated to Dad that she wished to carry on with her journey. She didn’t speak, but her presence was a mood of a thousand stories. We passed trees with clusters of red cobwebs, trees with birds nested in their trunks. We went deep into the forest, past all known boundaries of its limits. Dad asked no questions. The woman hobbled on in obvious pain and when Dad lifted her up he grunted, and said:
‘You are very heavy!’
‘I am an old woman,’ she replied.
‘How far are you going?’
She pointed again.
‘Not far,’ she said.
We walked
for a long time. We went round in complex patterns, till we came to a stream.
‘Across,’ she said.
Dad hesitated. Then he turned to me.
‘Wait here for me,’ he said. ‘And if I don’t return by nightfall, go home.’
The old woman gave me her yellow lamp and said:
‘Don’t take it home. Leave it at the edge of the forest.’
‘Dad, I will wait for you,’ I said.
‘I won’t be long,’ he replied.
I watched him step into the stream. I watched his back rippling with the weight of the old woman. The crossing was difficult, but he held the old woman high and he bore her across without getting water on her body. When he waded out on the other side he turned to me. I couldn’t see him clearly. He shouted something which the stream carried away, and then he disappeared into the forest on the other side.
THREE
Dialogue with an unhappy maiden
I SAT WITH my back against a tree. The lamp shone its spectral light all around. I watched night moving closer to me from across the stream. Shadows of trees slowly merged. Blue mist rose from the forest. An owl circled the tallest tree, and perched, and began to hoot. Water gurgled softly. Invading night was green. Far side of the sky was a blaze of gold and pink which I had never seen before. Red moon. Yellow stars. The forest spoke in many accents. I waited for a long time, sitting there, weaving in and out of a dream in which I saw Dad carrying the old woman over long distances, to another country beyond the boundaries of men.
And when I was awoken by a noise I couldn’t identify, I looked around and saw that the forest had changed. The lights were different. A twilight penumbra had descended on the world. I felt as if I had been spirited to another country. With the universal dimming of the lights, the forest became populated. When I heard the cowhorns, the pipes, and the drums of people bustling down the forest path, I rushed and hid in the bushes. The forest was now darker than the sky. The music went past, and I saw people with cloven hoofs, dancing along the path. Dancing to the boisterous music.
They were a fascinating crowd of twilight people. They had weird faces. Incomplete faces. Or faces with too many features. Some were without noses. Or without ears, or teeth, or hands. Some had a combination of too many noses, ears and teeth. A few were distinguished with an excessive number of legs. Maybe they had the farthest to go. Most of them talked in nasal accents as if they still were not used to their noses. They were like spirits who had borrowed parts of the human anatomy.
Not all of them danced to the music. I heard some of them sniffing the air, saying that they could smell something nasty. Then I realized that many of them were without eyes and they depended on those with eyes to do all their seeing for them; and there were those without ears who relied on those with ears to do all their hearing. They danced past, playing their sweet music, arguing, talking from their noses. Many had feet facing sideways and backwards. Some of them were without toes. I glimpsed their long necks and their painted faces. A lot of them had eyes at the back of their heads like a race of people who only remembered, who only looked back towards the past. Some of them had feathered arms like birds that have forgotten how to fly. Others had heads with porcupine quills, as if their thoughts would always be spiky. I noticed a few with long up-curving toenails and crustacean legs. The more learned among them wore glasses.
Some of the women had children growing out of their backs. Some had tuberous legs from the infernally long distances they had walked. Some were sliced in half as if when they lived they were never complete. One woman had three hands and a sagging chin. Their eminent women bore flywhisks, their praise-singers rattled castanets. The horde of them danced past me as if they were returning from an uproarious meeting. Or going to a fantastic party of spirits. Or as if they were looking for dreams to enter as a way of making their existence known in the scheme of things. I hid in the bushes, concealing the lamp under my shirt. But I had no need to do that because the lamp burned very dimly, regulating its own illumination.
The nocturnal beings danced past in their weird and splendid attire of lace, bangles, cowries and jewellery. Then the wind blew along beings with beetle voices. They were gibbering about Madame Koto’s return, about the baker’s child who was so intelligent that certain spirits were jealous of her, and about the sign-painter’s daughter who looked more beautiful every day because she was soon going to die. I listened as they gossiped about Latifa Malouf of Mali who sold delicious peppersoup to travellers and lived under the silk cotton tree at the crossways near the Futa Jallon mountains. They said she would fall ill in three days time because of her pride. The voices, in their eerie susurrations, talked about the sensational party of Miss Rolufo Matumbe of Swaziland. And they compared notes about the fabulous masked ball in honour of Mr Harold Macmillan, prime minister of England, which was attended by many spirits who had borrowed the bodies of his friends.
The voices went past. The path became silent. I was about to emerge from the bushes and resume waiting for Dad under the tree, when I heard someone crying. I waited and saw the most beautiful little girl in the whole world. She was dressed as if returning from a wedding feast. And she was weeping about how she had been betrayed by her future husband with whom she had made a pact before birth in the spirit world. He had just gone and married the first woman that allowed him to make love to her. When she went past I came out and sat in the silver glow of the old woman’s lamp. The girl tiptoed back and sat opposite me and said:
‘I saw you hiding.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Who are you waiting for?’ she asked.
‘My father,’ I replied.
‘Where did he go?’
‘To the old woman’s house.’
‘Did he leave a long time ago?’
‘Yes.’
She smiled and gave me a piece of bread which she took out of her pocket. I was hungry and every time I tried to put the bread in my mouth it fell from my hands. When it fell on the ground the third time I saw that it was covered with ants.
‘Follow me,’ the girl said.
‘Where to?’
‘To my place.’
‘Where?’
‘Across the river.’
‘Do you have a canoe?’
‘Three canoes I have. I live in a great city. We have light there and life is easy. There is no death and there is no wickedness. Everyone is happy in my city.’
‘I’m waiting for my father,’ I said.
‘How can you wait for a father who leaves you in the forest?’
I was silent.
‘PUT OUT THAT LAMP!’ she commanded suddenly.
I tried, but the lamp wouldn’t go out. She began to weep again. Then she took out a little flask from her pocket.
‘You have a big pocket,’ I said.
‘Everything we need is in there.’
She was about to pour some wine into my mouth when I heard someone calling my name.
‘Is that your name?’ the girl asked.
‘No,’ I said.
She stared at me.
‘LOOK!’ I said.
She turned. It was Dad. He seemed weary and he came slowly towards us.
‘That’s my father,’ I said to the girl.
‘Who are you talking to?’ asked Dad.
I turned. The girl had gone.
‘Didn’t you see her?’ I asked Dad.
‘Who?’
‘The girl.’
He stared at me.
‘No,’ he said, and sat down beside me.
His breathing sounded exhausted. After a while, he said:
‘I crossed two rivers and climbed a white hill and came to a sacred spot with statues just like the ones we saw today. Exactly the same.’
He paused.
‘Water flowed in the rocks of the white hill and when we came to a tree full of white birds the old woman told me to put her down. She went into a bush and didn’t come back. I looked for her and then I waite
d. Then I thought that maybe she didn’t want me to know her place. So I returned.’
‘How did you find your way back?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t even remember. It’s as if I have been walking and dreaming at the same time.’
There was a long silence. The wind blew words in my ears and I said:
‘You crossed the same river twice.’
‘You mean I stepped into the same river twice?’
‘No.’
‘You mean I stepped into two rivers at the same time?’
‘No.’
Dad pondered me, and then he said:
‘Rivers sometimes change their course, my son, for reasons we don’t understand. Is that what you mean?’
‘No.’
He stared at me as if I were ill.
‘You’re confusing me, my son,’ he said. ‘Let’s go home.’
We rose. He carried me on his shoulder and I held up the lamp so that he could see the road ahead.
