by Dayo Forster
There’s a constant stream of visitors to the office. Some are besuited, others have shoes made of tyre off-cuts. Over time, I learn to distinguish faces – know who I have to immediately offer tea to, who to tell he’s busy and can they perhaps phone instead, who to give a ten-dalasi note from the brown envelope of cash Amadou asks me to keep in my drawer as his offering for the poor.
I notice his eyes linger on my face, my fingers when I bring him a stack of letters to sign in the evenings. Then I pick Kweku Sola up from the neighbour who looks after him on workdays, and go home to my two-room house. I walk past Kweku Sola’s bicycle chained to an outside post, into my front room with a chest of drawers for his clothes, into my bedroom with a window I can no longer open. I want more for my child. I’d better do something soon.
A year later, Amadou proposes. He does not consider me being a single mother a problem. At this stage in his life, a new wife in addition to the old is like adding ranha to a large bowl of benachin – you can do without it, but it adds another flavour to the experience of eating. It is a sigh of relief at future comfort for me. I accept.
Amadou has three children with Rohey, who will become the senior wife. Her house is behind a high white wall with broken bottles stuck with cement on top. A heavy piece of axle, tied behind the door with a length of fishing twine, lends its weight to push the door closed after Amadou lets go. The metal gate clangs. The outdoor area is concreted around a single mango tree sitting in a circle of free earth, a rough +bantaba seat hammered around it. The forecourt has been swept clean. There is no one in sight and the house seems suspended in a breath. A radio somewhere twangs out a Super Diamano song, ‘Mariama’.
Rohey sits in her front room with her children who have shiny vaselined faces, arms and legs. She is wearing a feather green lace boubou, with a matching scarf twirled on her head and a few strands of braids left to trail on her back.
‘Rohey, this is Dele.’
‘Naka ngon si?’
‘Alhamdoudilah. Thank God.’
The tips of her fingers are long and dark and her hands have recently been hennaed. Her hand feels thin and cool in the quick seconds I have a grasp on it.
Her eyes, heavily lined with kohl, focus on my chin. ‘Come and say hello to your new tante,’ she says to the children. They come up and extend lanky arms, wrists jiggling with thin stranded bracelets. Each child murmurs a greeting. They will call me Aunty Dele.
‘Kai len togg. Come and sit down.’ Rohey extends an arm towards a tray beside her, on which are a jug of deep purple wonjor and some clean glasses: Arcoroc, made in France, bought from Chellarams supermarket. Beside it sits an elaborate tin can with Gem biscuits, with tiny white saucers stacked alongside.
Amadou fills his seat, rearranging his boubou. ‘It is getting hot, there’s hardly any breeze today.’
The smile on Rohey’s face sits tightly, her jamm mouth shadowed dark blue with indigo tattoo. ‘Isatou,’ she says, ‘pour some drinks for your father and our visitor.’
Isatou’s white shoes peek underneath her lace wrapper, and her heels tap out her few footsteps on the stone-tiled floor as she walks towards the table. She pours and comes towards me with both hands gripping the glass. She looks at the floor as she offers me the drink.
‘Tante.’
‘Jerreh jaiffe’ I reply.
Rohey continues, ‘And serve some biscuits, too, eh?’
Isatou traipses back to the table and pops the tin can open. All our eyes are on her, any attempt at conversation suspended. The edges of the room vibrate with the things we cannot say.
Isatou brings me a plateful of tiny beige rounds with scalloped edges. They are slightly stale.
What must they see as they look at me? Presentable enough in my long white skirt, made out of imitation linen, which fits well because it is cut on the bias. I have on a high-collared Chinese-style top in navy blue silk splashed with spreads of large white flowers. On my feet I wear a pair of leather flipflops I bought in the craft market by the beach. My hair hangs in wisps past my ears. I am not wearing much makeup, just a dash of unobtrusive brown lipstick. Tiny studs are in my ears. No rings. Do I pose a mosquito-sized threat that will soon be swiped away?
As we sit and scratch around empty heads to find things to talk about, my fingers float to my mouth and I start to nibble on a fingernail. Amadou asks the girls about school. They squirm, point shoe tips towards the floor, sit on hands and bob their heads. I glance at Rohey. She isn’t looking at me. Her face is carefully erased of all feeling. The set of her mouth reveals nothing. Her elbows rest on the chair’s arms and her tendrilled fingers dangle down. She looks neither content nor angry. I move my hand away from my mouth to let it linger around my glass of wonjor instead.
I take in the details in the room. The curtains are pulled back to reveal shields of netting. The pot of greenery in a corner looks stiff, too uniform. My eyes slide past Rohey. This time, I find her looking at me straight in the eye. I try to recover from the shock of catching her gaze. In the short time I have to read her eyes, I can only find disdain. Her face stays empty.
‘Yes, papa,’ I hear one of the girls say.
Rohey’s eyes sweep towards a door that is slightly ajar. ‘And now,’ she says, ‘maybe I can get you some food.’
She disappears into the corridor behind the door. The father-daughter conversations continue. There is a clatter of tin against tin. Rohey walks back in.
The househelp follows her with a bowl of water, a bar of soap and a dish towel. We wash our hands. Rohey offers us chereh. I cannot refuse the dish she places before me, piled high with chunks of fish and wrinkled chilli peppers. One of her daughters places a side table in front of her father and a similarly full plate is put on it for Amadou.
After we’ve eaten, I smile and lean forward, trying to speak mostly to the girls. ‘I got you some presents. I hope you’ll like them.’
The eldest one slides a glance towards her mother, testing emotion. The answer remains a face wiped of reaction.
I give the eldest of the girls a shiny made-in-Taiwan notebook with matching pen; the second oldest gets a T-shirt with the words Born to Roam; the present for the youngest is a dainty straw basket with embroidered flowers. The fringed cream-coloured scarf, imported from India, is for Rohey. There are enthusiastic thank- yous from the girls. Amadou looks around at his expanding family and taps the sides of his stomach with his hands.
That weekend, I get diarrhoea.
When I try to talk to Amadou about Rohey, he says, ‘Well, it’s not as if it’s the first time I’m taking another wife. I married a girl called Zainab a few years ago. We weren’t suited to each other and got divorced soon after.’
‘Aren’t you scared that could happen to us too?’
‘She wasn’t like you. She liked to socialise a lot more than me, wanted to go out almost every night.’
‘Well, but there’s still Rohey and . . .’
‘She’s not the only wife who’s had to learn how to share a husband. She has to live with it.’
Kainde challenges me about my impending marriage. ‘Are you sure you need to do this, Dele?’
I have a reply ready. It has been formulating in my mind for a while.
‘Look at the story of Uncle Sola,’ I say. ‘Someone on the side hidden from your wife and family is worse than a marriage like this that is in the open.’
‘Yes, other women can do it, but can you?’
‘One can get used to things. There must be something to be said for a husband who, to be fair, has to spend half his nights with his other wife.’ I make a joke of it. ‘After all, I’ll get some time in my head that I can keep for myself.’
I don’t mention the other reasons. About never worrying about having enough to pay school fees. Being able to cook a meal with meat more than twice a week. Access to a car filled with petrol every day. Comfort. Security.
*
What does my mother think? Our relations have gone way beyond disc
ord to something bordering on constant rage. Even with my sisters around, there’s an undercurrent that snatches at my shoulders and claims their muscles for its own. By mutual consent, my mother and I make a great effort not to talk to the other about anything of importance. When I bring her news of my marriage, I make sure at least two people, who are used to our family, are around. She never gets the chance to present her views directly to me, undiluted. They eventually filter through anyhow – the extended family is pretty good at circulating opinions, especially those expressed with deep emotion. So I get to know that she’s not surprised I end up being a second wife. I’ve pretty much messed up my life.
Aunt K continues to do what she can to patch things up between my mother and I. She says, ‘I know this is a hard thing for your mother to tell you. She’s relieved that you’ve found finally someone who can take care of you. She’s heard Amadou Sisoho is a good man, a family kind of man.’
Officially the ban on contacting my sisters is lifted. I invite Taiwo to the wedding. She sends her excuses, saying, ‘You know Reuben got a promotion just this past month. He’s been planning a dinner party at our Sanyang beach house. He’s invited his boss as well as the regional head based in Abidjan. I need to spend time making sure everything’s perfect.’ I haven’t given Kainde enough notice, she’s off on a work tour in the Far East and won’t be able to come. ‘Send me a few happy snaps,’ she says over the phone.
The wedding is on a Friday. I have nothing to do with the bit that takes place in the mosque. The day feels like any other, except that I have on an expensively textured outfit and the gold earrings and necklace Amadou gives me as a present. Kweku Sola looks smart in his mbaseng gown but his five-year-old self cannot resist kicking a ball against a wall. By lunchtime, the gown is off and he’s running around in a vest and the trouser bottoms. A few people drop in during the day – the LaFarges, Aunt K, Amadou’s daughters. We eat bowlfuls of mbahal as the tam tam drummer from next door comes round to sound out our news. We give out plastic bags of beignets and bottles of soft drinks to the children who live along our street.
With my marriage official, I work fewer hours at the office, where everyone takes to calling me Mrs Sisoho.
Kweku Sola asks me one day, ‘You told me to call Amadou Pa, but he’s not really my father is he?’
‘No, but he treats you like a son,’ I answer.
He pauses and in the space, I watch him hesitate, fight his curiosity, but then ask, ‘Who is my father?’ His voice is quiet. I could choose to ignore it.
I let in my own pause before replying, ‘You’ll have to take Amadou as your father now. When you’re older I’ll tell you.’
What I should say is, ‘When you’re older, maybe your face will tell me.’ The secret has stayed hidden. His father’s features haven’t been stamped on his face. Instead, there’s me all over him and nothing of his two possible fathers. There’s my hairline that starts too high on my head, leaving a drift of forehead to slope to my eyebrows. There’s my nose that would crowd out my face if it weren’t for huge, open eyes, edged with long lashes. All of me, and nothing of either of them.
To the question that remains on his face, I try to excuse myself, ‘It’s much too complicated to explain to you right now. Maybe you’ll understand better when you are older.’
Trust flickers and calms some of the questions that remain in his face – but not all.
*
I know I have to work at Rohey, make an effort to befriend her somehow. I want to foster a level of mutual tolerance, I do not want a new war front. I make +nanburu and send her a huge bowlful at Easter. At Christmas, I do likewise with chicken benachin. At odd times, I buy her some kitchen towels, saying I found them cheap at the stores. I never take them round to her house myself. I ask the driver to drop them off, and give him a message to pass on. He usually comes back with simple thanks.
Rohey allows her daughters to visit on Saturdays, even when their father isn’t around. She has to let them come so she is not regarded as a poor loser. The girls sit stiffly in perfect clothes in the sitting room the first few times. As the months pass, they take to skipping outside, playing paginyadi on a rough chalk-drawn diagram in the courtyard. Rohey and I learn to live with each other. So do our children.
One wet Sunday evening, raindrops pelt a dance of marbles on the roof. Amadou is in Dakar to clear some Peugeot orders from the port and won’t be back for a week. Rohey rings me with a sob in her voice: ‘Walai, Dele, they’ve taken it all.’
‘Who? And what have they taken?’
‘How can I explain all this to Amadou? How can people be so wicked? God will have to pay them back.’
She dissolves into tears on the phone. She was out with the girls all day and they have just come back home.
‘Do you want me to come over?’
‘Yes, come and see what these wicked people have done.’
Kweku Sola and I drive to Rohey’s. The rain thins but the car sloshes in scattered puddles. When we arrive, there’s a minicrowd at her metal gate. Snippets of incredulity catch my ear as I +salaam and walk past.
‘Nganeh!’
‘Yaype?’
‘Walai!’
I want to hear the news from Rohey. She is sitting on the steps leading up to her verandah. Her children are next to her in a protective triangle, one on each side and the littlest on the step below, right in front of her mother.
‘What happened?’ I ask.
‘Go in,’ Rohey replies. ‘Go in and see for yourself.’
There’s no furniture in the sitting room. There are no curtains on the rails. No rug on the floor. No vibrantly green plant on a corner stool. I come back outside.
‘But, what happened?’ I repeat.
‘That’s not it. There’s more. Go through. Go into my bedroom. Look at the kitchen.’ Rohey’s voice is smothered by the arms covering her head which is now settled into her lap.
I walk into the corridor and peer into the rooms. The bed frames are there, but nothing else. Wardrobe doors are open. Windows are bare. In the kitchen, the fridge groans and shudders. It and the cooker had been too heavy to carry so they’d left those behind. There are no pots on the shelves. There are no groceries in the tiny store off the kitchen.
Back outside, I ask Rohey, ‘Who could have done this? How did they get in?’
‘It was Kikoi, my gardener, and Kumba, the girl from my village who my mother sent to help me.’
‘How do you know?’
‘The children next door. They saw them. Go and ask them.’
I walk down the steps, across the cleared slab of concrete, past the mango tree to the metal gate that swings itself shut weighted by a Peugeot axle. Outside, I throw a question to the assembled crowd,
‘Who saw what happened?’
A babble of voices. A truck. A pickup. White. A Peugeot. No, a Toyota. Twelve o’clock. Possibly five.
‘Let me go and ask next door,’ I say, leaving the voices behind. I do not have far to go. A woman is in the front yard, tending a charcoal stove on which she is roasting cobs of corn.
‘The children saw them,’ she says. ‘In a white pickup. They came twice, and loaded up high each time.’
‘Did you see anything?’
‘Not much. I popped out to the Amet shop to buy some matches, and the pickup was half full. But I didn’t think much of it at the time. I thought it a bit odd that Rohey had not mentioned she’d be moving, but that was all.’
All Rohey’s clothes are gone – her grand boubous, her shoes, her gold, everything. The space under the children’s bed, which had their new Koriteh things in suitcases, is empty. Everything movable is gone.
The next morning, I pause outside Kweku Sola’s bedroom instead of bustling in as I usually do to wake him up for breakfast. With weak daylight edging the curtains at his windows, I can see the tip of his dark head poking out beyond the pillow he uses to cover his ears at night. I move in, walk past his bed and the shadowy triangles formed b
y his elbows on the white sheets. I push his curtains apart, drenching the room with early sunshine.
He’s covered the cork board on the wall above his desk with his still-life pencil drawings. When I suggested he should try to do portraits, he looked at me steadily and said, ‘Ma, people don’t keep still, they move. When I put things together the way I want them to look, they stay where they are until I am finished.’ I look at some of his recent drawings: a bowlful of mangoes, the dining room chairs in a tangle, cups and saucers after dinner. If we’d still been stuck in a mud-and-wattle, he could never have had this. I haven’t forgotten how we got to where we are.
My househelp Bintou sits in my living room, legs splayed out, a huge chunk of bread in her hands with oil dribbling onto her fingers.
‘Mangai aingh rek. I’m eating now. Ham nga tei si suba mburu amout on. There was no bread this morning.’ She says it as if I really shouldn’t mind. She gets up to amble towards the kitchen. I let my eyes pass over her stout frame, watching her fleshy arms jiggle.
‘I’ve got some fish in the car for Amadou’s dinner this evening. Ask the driver to take them round to the kitchen for you.’
She turns around at the door to ask, ‘And what do you want me to do with them?’
‘I’m making some chereh this evening. You know how he likes his bonga. Make sure you season it with fresh chillis. And you need to make a salad to go with it.’
‘I’ll get started right away.’
I plop into an armchair and get out a notebook from my bag, meaning to continue with the list of things to do that I’d started earlier. Instead, I let my eyes wander about. I’m proud of this house, and how I’ve made it feel a home for all of us. I like my armchairs – they’re solid, yet comfy. I pull a leather pouffe closer to rest my legs on. The rug takes up a fair amount of floor space. Cleaning it is a bit like picking stones out of rice, but I like the close weave, the deep wines, the swirls of pattern in it. At this time of day, with the windows open, there’s a crossbreeze blowing through the verandah and in through the front door.
