by Ben Okri
‘Shut up!’
I couldn’t. Something kept tearing at my entrails. Vicious lights burned at my heart. I trembled in unbearable sympathy with his spasms. And then I noticed that he had a sweet ghoulish smile on his face. He motioned me to lean closer. All around me women were wailing, rocking my soul. I saw Madame Koto hobbling in a great frustrated hurry up the street. Her plaster-cast foot made her look ridiculous. Ade held my head with his good hand and pulled my ears down to his mouth. In our private language, in whispers full of heat, his breath stinging my eardrums, his words scratching my spirit, he said:
‘I failed.’
He said it simply, without a sigh. Then his voice became ghostly, remote, old, as if someone else were speaking through him. I glimpsed other selves, subterranean personalities, lurking beneath his present incarnation.
‘I failed,’ he continued. ‘I knew I would fail. My destiny was not to be an assassin, but a catalyst. The tears of a child dying of hunger in a remote part of the country can start a civil war. I am the tears of a child. I am the country crying for what is going to happen in the future. My new life is calling me. I will always be your friend and helper, but you won’t recognise me.’
He paused, his spasms returned, his eyes faded. Then, with blood pouring from his nose, he coughed, and his eyes brightened in what seemed like a final enlightenment. Around me the adults were in confusion. The driver had stumbled out of the car and was wailing, tearing his hair, throwing himself on the ground, demented at the thought that just as his life was entering a higher level he now had the death of a child on his hands for ever. The crowd tried to restrain him, but his grief overran, and from his kicking and wailing it became clear that the mad fevers of the road had entered his brain.
Madame Koto was still making her painful journey towards us, waving her white crocodile-headed walking stick in the air, walking clumsily on her plaster-cast foot. Ade pulled my head down again, and after a low harsh laughter, he said:
‘Everyone has been assigned a spirit that will come for them when their time has arrived. You have a frightening spirit coming for you: I can see her stirring. The spirit with four hands is coming for me. I am not afraid. My destiny has been hidden from me and it was because of all the poverty, all the suffering in the world, the wickedness and the lies, it was because of all these that I didn’t want to live. But now I know I was born to love the world as I find it. And to change it if I can. I will get a better chance. But before then we will meet again and play in the fountain of rainbows and in the golden sea of music.’
He shut his eyes. There was a contorted smile on his face. I looked up and saw the spirit of rainbows and golden ghosts gathering around his broken body. I heard crying and shouting; but from the spirits, with their sad eyes, and their four hands brilliant like the topaz and ruby lights radiating from the sky when the sun is fading, from the spirits I heard in my heart the unnatural pavane for a spirit-child’s death, the poignancy relieved only by the soaring notes which were the promises of his eventual return.
When Madame Koto got to where Ade lay she brought the urgency of a great mother, hitting her minions with her stick, shouting at the women, lashing the driver till he bled from his ears, commanding her servants to carry the body to her bar for first-aid treatment and then to organise a car to rush him to the best hospital in the city. It was only when she waved her good arm about, hitting people, stunning them into a sense of responsibility, that I noticed she still had the knife stuck in her other arm. She was so engaged in organising her disorderly minions that perhaps she hadn’t noticed. When the women came and pushed me aside and lifted Ade’s body, Madame Koto saw the knife in her fleshy arm, registered its presence, and the blood burst out like a little red fountain when she yanked it from her. She showed no pain. Her blood stained the afternoon with its dense odour of an ancient animal. Ignoring the blood pouring down her arm, her gestures empowered, she urged the women to hurry with Ade’s body. She dispatched a servant to go and fetch a party van. One of the women hurriedly bandaged her wound. The other women carried Ade to the bar and laid him down on three tables joined together. They bathed his broken head and they washed his pulped arm. Yellow liquid flowed out of his mouth. It had a bitter smell that would never leave the air of the bar, branding the signature of his death on the spaces of Madame Koto’s earthly kingdom. The women fussed about him, wailing, singing funereal songs in cracked voices. Amidst their fragmented threnodies Madame Koto stood over Ade, her mighty breasts heaving above his face. He lay still. His eyes were shut. His breathing was almost non-existent. Madame Koto looked down at him with her eyes dark as almonds and she didn’t notice the other presences around his body. She didn’t notice the spirit of rainbows with wonderful colours swirling about it, or the golden ghosts with ruby eyes and blue mouths. These other presences floated over him, breathing consolations into the terrible suffering of his spirit, soothing his restless and terrified soul, assuring him that all was well, that the world would not end, that he had serenity and music and joy ahead of him, that his parents would be all right after their own fashion, that everything keeps turning and changing, and that there was nothing to fear because he was entering the world where love flows from all things and where the spirit is a music that never stops playing and which invents itself all the time, expanding the good spaces in all the worlds.
The women in the bar were silent. All the banners of the party had been furled and lay on the floor. I noticed mum sitting apart from everyone in a corner. She held her head low and I could see her lips quivering.
For the second time in all the years I had known her, Madame Koto wept. Her tears dropped on Ade’s face and turned yellow, as if they were bleaching his skin. Ade opened his eyes, moved his head sideways to avoid the dripping tears, and shut his eyes again. I could see the spirit-lights everywhere becoming more intense. The intensity made the silence deeper. And the silence ended when Madame Koto’s servant bounded into the bar, out of breath, saying the van had arrived but was stuck at the other end of the road because of a tree that had fallen during the storms. Ade had to be carried again, down the street, alongside the forest, to the waiting vehicle. I knew one more journey would be too much for him. Mum lifted up her head to the ceiling, toward the heavens, a painful expression on her face. Madame Koto dispatched another of her servants to find Ade’s father and tell him of the hospital where his son was being taken. The servant rushed out, raising dust with his slippers. The women came and carried Ade once again.
‘Be gentle!’ Madame Koto admonished them.
The women lifted him up gently and Madame Koto, following them, kept dabbing Ade’s face with a hot compress, rich with the healing steam of roots and herbs.
That evening they took his body away and I trailed behind them down the street, weeping for the loss of a special companion, my only true companion, a fellow spirit-child, who knew the things that I knew about death and life, about the worlds beyond, about the fountains and the fauns, about the original river and the original fire, and about the seven mountains of our mysterious destinies. I followed the women who bore the small body of my friend, feeling that his dying was altering my relationship with the living for ever. I felt more alone in the undeciphered spaces of the earth than ever before. Now I had no one with whom to speak the private language and share the secret philosophies of those who, though appearing normal, are in fact wondering strangers on this earth.
Mum walked beside me, her eyes bright, and her silence like the light of diamonds. She may have been looking at the spirits and the bright ghosts that also accompanied Ade’s body, but I doubt it because when their lights dimmed, when the radiant four hands of his guardian spirit began slowly to diminish, when the shimmering ghosts faded into a barely perceptible lilac mist floating over his body and up beyond the trees, mum still looked on ahead, her eyes unchanging in their sad brightness.
And then, suddenly, as if a voice which had existed in other regions of the universe had burst into
our world, Ade began to shout his name over and over again, till it echoed in the forest, rebounding from the bark of ancient and absorbent trees, soaring in the empty spaces where only the wind stirs and the birds flutter in their kingdom of perpetual dreams. And when Ade stopped crying out his name, as if his unique identity would either save him or help his passage through the narrow gates of death – the gate which gets tighter as you get closer to the beneficence and glory of the life in between – when he stopped altogether, leaving only his echo wandering lost and homeless in the forest spaces and the secret roads, a voice seeking its origin, a soul seeking its true home, I knew that Ade had died and that the air and even the trees would remember his story and record it on the coded scripts of their silent trunks. I broke into deep wailing and ran toward his body hanging in the air. The women bearing him froze. Madame Koto’s face collapsed into its true visage of a woman hundreds of years old. But before I got to him mum caught me and held me back, seizing my arms. She held me to her as I fought her suffering incarnation. She embraced me very tightly, absorbing in her flesh the full fury of my grief. As I fought the boundaries of her lean and loving body my grief overcame me. And she took me back home, limp on her shoulder, while the women resumed their procession, and Madame Koto her burden. And as mum took me home I still heard Ade’s name faintly ringing in the forest. And it still echoes to this day when you knock on the doors of certain trees.
BOOK THREE
1
A TRANSFERRED DEATH
TIME QUICKENED. WHEN we got home we didn’t sleep and we were silent. We sat on the floor, with a single candle burning on the table. The door was wide open. The wind brought in the advancing smells of too much perfume, beneath which lurked the faint odour of dung, though it could only have been the intensity of a secret desperation. When dad returned we knew our hunger had driven him into a shameful line of work that we noticed in retrospect and never mentioned. There was no shame on his face as he came in drunk and spread on the table the amount of money he had earned doing something that eroded his spirit years in advance. He was quite drunk, his boots stank of mud and disinfectant, and he had an abstracted look on his face. He kept creaking his neck as if he had been carrying loads more infernal than they were heavy. He struggled to smile, to display an exuberant lack of care, but our silence made him awkward. He was drunk and couldn’t seem to light his cigarette. He was drunk on a secret shame. We were silent and unmoving and we didn’t register any impression of his return or of his dubious exuberance. After three attempts he lit his cigarette and smoked as we stared at the solitary candle. Dad misinterpreted our silence. He thought that we knew what he was trying to keep secret. His pride stirred his anger.
‘A man comes in after doing a dog’s work . . .’ he said, and mum got up from the floor.
Dad didn’t finish his sentence. He stubbed out his cigarette and took notice.
Mum sat on the bed, taking his hand in hers, and told him what had happened, without any pathos in her voice. When she had finished, dad sighed. He lit another cigarette and then put it out. All three of us sat in the advancing darkness, staring at the flame of the candle.
We slept badly that night, entering into one another’s dreams. In the morning we heard about the driver’s fate. We heard that all night he had been seen wandering the streets, talking aloud to everyone, recognising no one, saluting and prostrating to goats, knocking away invisible flies from around his mouth. People said that from the moment of the accident he had aged immeasurably. He seemed to live his life in advance, as all his secret and public ages caught up with him. His face became wrinkled, his jaws became slack, he became cross-eyed, and he kept blinking. He would fall on the road and scream that it was trying to pull him in. When he fell he fought as if several invisible hands were holding him down, dragging him under. When he freed himself from the imaginary hands, he talked of flying. He kept jumping up into the air, and was amazed when he fell back down. He helped old ladies across the roads and forgot to cross over himself. He directed the traffic, and caused untold chaos. He pursued chickens, calling them by the names of Madame Koto’s thugs and minions. People said he had gone mad. But others said that he had entered the world which those who have committed murder wander into – a world of spirits and silences, where chickens become familiar people, where cats are antagonists; a world of unidentified voices, where nightmares drift past the eyes as they stare at the ordinary faces of the earth; a place in which several spheres and realities are all scrambled up. The driver was wandering in the serenity of one sphere – and at the same time raving up and down the main road – when a lorry ran over him. The lorry ground his body into the road and sped on, apparently unaware of what had been done; and it may be that Madame Koto’s distraught driver, having entered another reality, weaving in and out of materialisation, was knocked over when he was invisible.
People said the strangest things about the driver’s death. But the notion that struck me most was something an old woman said. She told us that the driver was a stand-in death for Madame Koto, that he had died in her place. When she first voiced the notion people moved away from her. The idea had an infectious terror. But over and over again that day, before the new cycle of fighting broke out, we heard people whispering that Madame Koto, with her enormous and temporal powers, had transferred her own death to her poor driver. She had in fact postponed her own death, and was now desperate for something we couldn’t remotely imagine – an intangible elixir, perhaps. We heard people warning others to keep their children indoors, that the night-runners would soon begin their curfew-making, their reign of horrors.
And before the fighting started, each new event draining significance from Ade’s death, the people of our area learned a lesson from the driver’s fate which they did not put into practice: his fate was a warning that one mustn’t get too close to powerful people. The world, for me, became instantly full of transferences – people transferring their illnesses, their troubles, their nightmares, their fates to those who happened to be around, to those perceived of as being dispensable.
Again we began to suspect one another of strange powers. And again we were wholly unprepared when the new fighting began which would eventually launch our lives into the time of the relentless flood. It began with the innocent sign of men wearing the faces of white antelopes. They appeared from the bushes, singing snatches of songs which we had entirely forgotten.
2
THE BATTLE OF MYTHOLOGIES
THE ANTELOPES CAME first. And then the crocodiles tried to eat them. We saw men with the faces of crocodiles, yellow paint blazing on their bodies, their machetes giving off electric sparks in the dry air. A new spirit entered our lives. It was a hungry spirit and it rose from the marshes and moors, spreading the larvae of mosquitoes everywhere. It breathed out fire and its footsteps were thunderous and it had all the powers of transference. It made us transfer our fears to one another. We became distrustful, suspecting others of having poisoned us with fevers that induced sleep-walking in the afternoons. It made us think that the demons with the abnormal mouths of blood-hungry crocodiles were hallucinations planted in our eyes by our neighbours.
Everywhere the thugs of the two parties clashed in their endless war of mythologies. Everywhere machetes brought sparks, chantings became frenzied, and people spoke of war as if it were a human being. The new spirit multiplied itself over the city. It spread its instant offspring to every street, every municipal county, to every house where tenants lay in fermenting numbers in small sweltering rooms. The spirit accelerated its dominion over our lives and made our nights longer.
Then, infected with its presence, we saw the wars of mythologies everywhere. The night fought the day. The moon extended its sphere into the dominion of the sun. The rain lashed the earth, lacerating its surface, creating gullies, washing away poorly rooted trees. The air whipped the waters, creating unusual disturbances on streams and rivers, creating new waterways that rushed through old villages. The disagreement
between men and women became aggravated by the new elemental crisis. People from different tribes quarrelled with one another, disputing their myths of supremacy and their legends of the origin of all things. Neighbours quarrelled with neighbours, craftsmen with artists, praise-singers were chastised by satirists, children disobeyed their mothers, the colour brown conquered the colour green, historians argued bitterly with mythologists, journalists mocked griots, politicians attacked the forests, the government declared war on poverty and made us more wretched, the corrupt business men waged a relentless campaign against the crusaders for social justice, storytellers were hounded by the secret police, poets were harassed by propagandists, musicians were dogged by spies, photographers were beaten up by soldiers, the whites locked up the blacks, the blacks rioted against the whites, mottoes warred against mottoes, proverbs discredited proverbs, christians preached against moslems, and moslems against christians, both of them denounced the animists, normal children turned against the abikus and the dadas (who were children born with hair, and whose hair was never touched by razor or comb), and all over the country dissension grew fat while a new curfew extended its control over the evenings.
