by Ben Okri
The weight on him made him humble for a whole day. He never went out. He never spoke. His agony began to affect us and mum complained of a black rock in her brain. But like a lamb, dad did everything we told him to do. He retreated from our world. His shadow grew smaller.
Meanwhile, the season was changing, and the preparations for the great rally were moving steadily towards their climax. And a new cycle of time was beginning. It announced itself with another inexplicable plague and a smell of sulphur in the air.
6
A PLAGUE OF BLINDNESS
IT WASN’T ONLY dad who was overcome with the fear of shadows. We had all become afraid of the corpse. We were afraid of breathing in its air and its silence. We feared that it was spreading death in the atmosphere, sowing it in our eyes, reaping it in our dreams. And because we were so afraid and so cowardly, we stopped looking at the corpse.
The activities for the rally became hectic at the barfront. Fire-eaters, somersaulters, soft-limbed dancers performed in bright-coloured dresses to the beating of drums, while Madame Koto’s stomach grew bigger, while her bad foot split the plaster-cast, and while the dead man rotted on our street. None of us looked at the body as we hurried past the bushes, and a great infernal stink settled over our houses. Not even the winds that made the trees bend could move the smell. We made no reference to the body and we stopped using the word death.
Then one day we heard that the body had gone. The first person to say this publicly went blind that very night. The smell of sulphur increased the darkness in the evenings. Those who went past the bushes and came back to tell us that the body had disappeared were struck with blindness. It wasn’t long before the ordinary inhabitants of our area began to go about the place with their hands outstretched, feeling the empty air, saying that everything had changed, and that minor spirits with large heads and kwashiorkor stomachs were passing through our buildings as if they were transparent.
We woke up one morning to find that a mysterious plague of blindness had struck our community after we had stopped seeing the dead body. In the mornings or in the afternoons, in the midst of daily tasks, we heard people crying out that they couldn’t see. No one went to their aid because of the fear of its transference. The blindness spread like the night, invading the carpenters, the street traders, the hawkers and the butchers. We heard stories of children who were born blind. We heard stories of hawkers who went down the streets, selling their wares, with children leading them. The blind multiplied in our street. Then the nightmares which grew fat over the bushes began to appear amongst us with quickened wings, swooping into our midst, flying over our houses, entering our rooms, dwelling with us, eating our food before we did, drinking our wells dry, spreading the pungent sulphurous smell into our living spaces. The nightmares became our companions. They came with red eyes and weird vegetable growths on their disgusting bodies. We could no longer bear our rooms. In the evenings the inhabitants began to go out into the street. No one spoke of the plague or the unbearable smell.
Dad was silent through it all. He sat in his chair, in a royal solitude, weaving in and out of his new kingdom, suffering his agony with a curious timidity, asking no questions, and doing everything we asked. His body began to lose its forceful presence.
‘The dead are more alive than the living are,’ he said one night.
His pain had opened a door in his spirit. He spoke of strange animals with diamonds round their necks. They wandered around in our room. That night mum went out and didn’t return till we were fast asleep. In the morning I noticed that she too had changed. Her acceptance made her sadder. That evening she went out again, and when she came back I could smell the forest on her clothes. There was a new moon out and when it was brightest in the night sky the corpse began to sing.
7
THE LIGHT OF THE DEAD
I TOLD DAD about the corpse singing. He listened intently through his pain, and said:
‘That is the road singing. Everyone should be careful.’
As the night grew darker the song of the corpse became more intense, and sweeter. It made the room hot. I found it difficult to sleep. As I listened to the solitary voice of the abandoned corpse I began to feel quite ill. That night the room glowed with a little green light in the dark. The light had nothing to do with dad, who sat in his chair, disappearing under the invisible weight. It had nothing to do with mum, who became more compact in her inexplicable stillness. Something was being born in our living-spaces. The little light kept flitting about the room. It shot past my face and I saw it as a phosphorescent fire which didn’t hurt.
‘The moon is burning our room,’ I said.
‘It’s not the moon,’ mum said. ‘It’s the fire of sorcerers.’
The light hovered over the centre table.
‘I can see it!’ dad cried. ‘It is a wandering spirit, a soul that has lost its body. My father always told me that when I see this light I should know that there is a person who is dead and who is trying to be buried.’
‘A child trying to be born,’ mum added.
Then, suddenly, the light went out through the open door.
‘I can still see it,’ dad said again. ‘A spirit is trying to tell us something.’
After a while mum got up and, saying words we couldn’t hear, went out into the passageway. I followed her. She went to the housefront. The street was covered in rubbish again. The inhabitants, under the spell of blindness, had begun to dump their refuse everywhere. In the backyard, near the well, two men, recently blind, were talking while the moon cast a spectral bewitchment on their faces. Mum went down the street. In front of her I saw the phosphorescent little light flitting over the road, darting all over the place, while the solitary voice sang from the bushes. Nightmares deepened the shadows in the air. The moonlight brightened the road as if it were a river of silver reflections. Mum followed the erratic light, and I followed her.
The world was silent except for the corpse singing and the jackals baying somewhere at the other end of the forest. Mum went past Madame Koto’s place and alongside the forest till she came to the marshes where a crocodile lay dead on a fallen tree. Mum didn’t see the dead crocodile. Maybe I’m the only one who did. When the erratic light reached the marshes it became two, and the two lights became three, and they darted everywhere, sometimes colliding. Mum stopped near the invisible crocodile and watched the lights. Then she turned and went into the forest.
I followed her till I came to a black rock which not even the moon could illuminate. The rock gave off the living smell of a great human body and when I touched it I was amazed to find that it was sweating. I drew back and noticed that curious-looking flowers were growing on the rock. The horror of it knocked me backwards and I banged my head against a tree. Almost immediately afterwards, I heard voices inside the dark stony mass; and I went round it three times, but I saw nothing. Then I drew closer, and put my ear up against it, and listened. When I heard my heart beating inside the rock, I gave a startled cry, and jumped back. And when I recovered, alarmed by the certainty that the rock was alive, I fled from its monstrous freakishness.
The forest was silent. The trees watched me with blind eyes. The wind was quiet. I couldn’t find mum. After running for a few moments, I stopped. I stayed still and let the world re-align itself about me. I watched spiders weaving their webs from threads of moonlight. A bird swooped over me and when it had gone I noticed the little green light flitting across the forest floor. I followed it silently, tripping over climbers. The leaves of medicinal plants cut me with their serrated edges.
The corpse had stopped singing and the moonlight made me sweat. The green light danced among the leaves and eventually led me back to the crocodile with its head on the tree trunk. Jumping everywhere like a compact and luminous butterfly, the light wandered to the marshes and skated over the shadow of bushes, dimming when under the power of the moon, brightening when under the power of the earth. Away from the forest, further up the street, it gathered more lig
ht to itself. Then it hovered over a dense whale-like form under the bushes, and suddenly stopped. I noticed that there were more lights around. They were bigger than fireflies, and more intense. They kept moving round the hidden form like eyes without faces.
The moonlight made the forest shimmer, made the air limpid, and it shone on the rooftops with a hallucinatory sheen. The moonlight made all metallic objects sharp with points of unmoving lights, it made the eyes of cats and dogs a little deranged, it made all things weave, but not even the moon with its omnipotent democracy could light up the solid whale-like form beneath the bushes.
Surrounded by errant green lights, I looked around. The area seemed transformed. There was a white heat in my eyes. I couldn’t seem to blink. My eyes were stuck fast, wide open, unable to shut, and my brain was momentarily paralysed. Incomprehension flooded me. The delirium of lights was all about me, luminous without heat, alive without bodies, intense without intention. Then something very peculiar happened to me as I stood there under the bewilderment of an intoxicated moon. I couldn’t move. I was rooted to the quivering road. Everything began to sizzle. The wind was still.
Suddenly, two green lights, the size of needle points, flew into my eyes, burning my eyeballs. It was as if bitterwood ash had been blown into my brain. Tears flowed down my face. The world was silent. The moon, fertilising me with incandescent hallucinations, planted strange words in my head, words that hinted at the near impossibility of seeing clearly.
I have no idea how long I was rooted to the road, but when I heard something gliding on the ground near me, I was surprised to find that I could turn my head. And to my horror I saw the black form glowing in the dark. There was a white snake stretched out over its length. The snake had eyes of liquid diamonds, and it was staring at me. I jumped in fright and fell and hit my head on the ground. But before I could cry out, I heard the road raging, and I heard the dissonant wailing of the forest spirits, angry at the loss of their companions.
The air turned sinister. The moon spread the incredible stench of a body in advanced decomposition. And when I got up, my head reeling from the fury of the sulphurous smells, I saw the corpse for the first time in seven days.
The night was a forest of disembodied eyes. My head was full of grating noises. While my teeth chattered the snake slid off the corpse and drew itself across the road and disappeared into the forest undergrowth. The corpse was bright under the moonlight. It was a mystery how it always seemed hidden. The dead man had bloated and his feet had split his shoes. His trousers and shirt had burst at the seams. His eyes, still open, were large like two diseased mangoes. And a mushroom, bright yellow, had sprouted from his navel. All sorts of obscene flowers sprouted in my brain. All sorts of harsh voices gnashed in my ears. A strange peppery heat fanned my face.
Everywhere I looked I saw the dead man’s eyes. And with the boiling rage of the road crashing in my head, the fevers of forest spirits goading my thoughts, and with isolated cries all around me, I ran home as fast as I could, stumbling, but not falling, over the debris in the dark. The errant lights were now everywhere. Insects crawled on my living flesh. The moon made the air shimmer with a new clarity.
8
A GOOD MAN HAS TO BE BLIND BEFORE HE CAN SEE
WHEN I GOT home I found dad staggering around the room with his hands outstretched, talking to the green lights that weren’t there, talking and laughing like a madman. The room looked as if a malign storm had paid a visit. The table and chair were upturned, the mattress had been hurled from the bed, the bed had been wrenched from its position, the cupboard was tipped over. Dad charged round the room, kicking things, throwing clothes and pots about the place, muttering under the influence of an incoherent fever. I held him round the waist and he dragged me all over the room as if he were a deranged bull and I kept telling him that the corpse of Ade’s father was still there but he wouldn’t listen to me because of his new obsession with the fires of sorcerers and the wandering souls. I was very afraid of dad that night because the world was changing and the moon was beginning to brand itself on everything. And it was only when I let go of his waist and sank to the ground, weeping and wailing, that dad heard me and came to me and felt for my eyes and wiped the tears from my face. Then he lifted me up and held me to him so tight it was as if he wanted us to become one person. When his obsession had cooled, and I knew that he was listening, I said:
‘Dad, the dead body is still there.’
He put me down. He felt for his chair, and couldn’t find it. I found it for him. When he sat down, he said:
‘But you told me it had walked away.’
‘It has come back.’
He was silent. I lit a candle. I straightened the centre table. Dad looked doubtful.
‘Did you see it walk back?’
‘No.’
‘Then how do you know it came back?’
‘Because I saw it.’
‘With what?’
I didn’t understand. His question confused me. Then he said:
‘What happened to the light?’
‘What light?’
‘The fire of sorcerers. The light that was flying about the room like a sign.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It was a wonderful light,’ he said. ‘A homeless miraculous light. Did you see it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where did it go?’
‘It went away.’
‘Where to?’
‘To the dead man.’
‘What dead man?’
‘Ade’s father.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes. You know he is dead. You saw him die.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very strange. I don’t remember.’
‘But you were there.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the light went to him.’
‘Yes.’
‘To do what?’
‘I don’t know.’
Dad sighed. He seemed very confused indeed. And he seemed quite aged when he said:
‘When the light comes back, tell me. I am very tired. I feel as if I have been dreaming for three years.’
Then he fell silent for a long time. The candle kept spitting. I watched dad. He had begun to snore with his eyes open.
I put out the candle and listened to the wind blowing hard. I listened to the silence beneath the wind, wondering what had happened to mum. Everything was dark. I shut my eyes. Time must have passed. When I opened my eyes again, the darkness was still there. I didn’t move. Then I heard mum’s footsteps coming down the passageway. When she entered the room I smelt a strong aroma of leaves and bark, medicinal herbs and the sleeping earth. She noticed the chaos in the room, the mattress flung on the floor, the scattered clothes, but she said nothing. Her hair was wet. She still had the moonlight on her face. A radiant lilac brilliance faintly shone round her cheeks. She came over to me, and crouched. Overwhelming me with the nocturnal aroma of forest vegetation, and speaking in a soothing voice which lifted the heat of ashes and fevers from my brain, she said:
‘Look!’
In her open palms, glowing like incandescent moonstones, like disembodied eyes alight with rainbow sheen, were two errant fires of sorcerers that she had captured.
‘How did you catch them?’ I asked.
‘They came to me.’
‘Where?’
‘In the forest.’
Dad moved on the chair. We both looked at him. I could see his face in the half-darkness. His eyes were still open. His mouth was also open, but he wasn’t drooling.
‘What are you going to do with them?’
‘Put them in your father’s eyes.’
‘Why?’
‘To help him see again.’
‘Won’t they burn him?’
‘They will burn out his blindness.’
‘Are you going to put them in now?’
Mum looked at dad again, and t
hen back at me. Mum had become a fire. Her whole being was alive. She seemed like a secret priestess of the moon. The intensity of her presence made me feel as if I were floating on limpid air.
‘Yes, but we have to wake him up first.’
We were silent. Then, suddenly, in the dark, his eyes still open, dad said:
‘What are you two conspirators talking about, eh?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
Mum lit the candle. Dad was sweating profusely.
‘I am covered in witch’s piss,’ he said.
‘We are going to cure you,’ I ventured.
‘Of what?’
‘Your eyes.’
While dad thought about it, mum suddenly started to become transformed. She became more erect. An intense energy emanated from her, brightening her face. When she stood up she looked very serene. Then, as if she were in a secret space, enacting a secret ritual, she began muttering words to herself, the same words. Her movements became both fluid and definite. I couldn’t make out the words, but she uttered them rapidly, altering her own energies. The words made the candle flare. And then, in a dream-like voice, mum said:
‘I was in the forest. There was a rock inside my head. I saw an old woman who had fallen on her back and couldn’t get up. She was very old and she was crying. When she saw me she asked me to help her. I was very scared . . .’
‘What were you doing in the forest?’ dad interrupted.
Mum continued, without answering his question.
‘The old woman stank like a dead body. She was very ugly and she had the face of a rotting owl. But something made me want to help her. As I bent down to help her up, she seized my neck with her bony hands. She didn’t let go of me till I had taken her to a hut deep in the forest. There were birds asleep on the roof. Everywhere on the ground outside the hut there were white eggs. On her wooden bed there were black eggs. When I helped her on to the bed she began to cough. When she stopped coughing she began to laugh. She had sores all over her body and it occurred to me that she was blind. Her mouth stank like a vulture. She said: “You people are all blind because you don’t use your eyes.” I was surprised. “What about you?” I asked her. She didn’t answer. Looking at me with eyes like those of a strange bird, she said, pointing at me: “I know your husband. He likes to fight. Sometimes I watch him training here in the forest. He thinks I am an eagle. He is a good man, but he is also a fool. That’s why he is blind. A good man first has to be blind before he can see.” Then she laughed again. Then she said: “I have got a message for your husband. One day a great animal will visit him. Tell him to take care of it. The animal will show him some of the wonders of the earth.” Then she gave me two lights of sorcerers. “Put these in his eyes. Tell him to bathe with alum and kaolin. He has a strange destiny and he is the only one who can stop the plague of blindness.” Not long afterwards the old woman became different. She started to shout at me as if I were her worst enemy: “Leave my house now!” she said. “Leave now, before I turn you into a goat!” I ran away from her hut, and didn’t stop till I got home.’
