by Ben Okri
When mum finished there was a long silence. Without any ceremony, dad rose from his chair and asked us to fetch him alum and kaolin. Mum had already purchased some. Dad went out with his towel and after a while he came back. He couldn’t find his way. I led him to the bathroom and waited for him to finish bathing and led him back to the room.
‘The world is full of new lights. There are more colours on this earth than the eyes can see,’ he said. ‘When you see too much you become blind.’
We waited for dad to oil himself and dress. And when he had settled back in his chair, mum began the ritual of his unblinding. After uttering her strange words seven times, after she had prayed to the angel of women, mum pressed the two lights into dad’s eyes. He screamed. Then he shouted that we were burning his eyeballs with bitterwood ash. The lights stung him. They made his eyes red, then yellowish, then greenish. While he groaned me and mum tidied the mess that his storm had created in the room.
All through the night green liquids poured out of dad’s eyes. He couldn’t sleep and it was a wonder that he stayed silent, rocking his head, while his eyes flamed, while the invisible weight pressed down on him, and while the cuts became sores on his face.
In the morning he went around flailing, screaming that he had flames in his eyes, that the fire of sorcerers was burning his brain, turning his old thoughts into green ash. Apart from the pain, the lights had no effect on dad’s eyes. He was as blind as ever. We were bitterly disappointed. Mum stayed silent. Every now and again, she looked at us sheepishly. She had returned to her normal personality. When dad screamed about rocks in his eyes, fire in his brain, all we could do was stare at him. He was in utter agony for three days.
9
A DAY OF HALF-MIRACLES
THAT MORNING, HOWEVER, the whole street was talking about the lights they had seen flying about in their rooms. Clusters of blind neighbours, with crude walking sticks in their hands, stood at housefronts, gesticulating excitedly, speculating about the marvellous lights. Some of them had seen yellow balls of fire, some had seen blue flames, others said they watched green lights wandering in the mist of their blindness. They all agreed, however, that the lights vanished after midnight.
Driven by the fever of the new day, I went from one group to another, telling them that the corpse had returned. The ones that hadn’t yet been struck by the plague shouted at me. Others knocked me on the head and drove me away. But wherever I went, repeating the words that had grown roots in my brain, people began to leave. It was as if I was the bringer of a new plague. I carried on saying the words and when no one listened I began to cry. Some of our neighbours jumped on me from behind and sealed my mouth with strips of cloth and tied my hands behind my back. Mum eventually freed me and when I told her what had happened she admonished me, saying:
‘There are some things people don’t want to hear. Why don’t you learn to shut your mouth, eh?’
I tried to explain to her that the words seemed to come out of their own accord, that it wasn’t really me who was speaking them, but she wouldn’t listen. Mum was very strange that morning and I wasn’t sure if her odd behaviour didn’t have something to do with her failed attempt to cure dad’s blindness.
It wasn’t only mum who was strange. The whole world was somewhat bad-tempered that day. Shopkeepers put up the prices of their goods. Landlords sent word round that the rents were going to be increased. People were brusque with one another, and arguments broke out all over the place. The presence of the corpse became more monumental in our lives, and not even the wonder of the errant lights lasted till the afternoon.
It was also a day of half-miracles. Women in white filed silently down our street and disappeared into the forest. Someone shouted that they had seen a one-eyed boar in their backyard. We rushed there, and found nothing. A woman said that she had heard knocks on her door the previous night, and when she opened it she beheld a man with bloated eyes. She had screamed, people came rushing with lamps, they saw nothing, and put it down to a vivid dream which she had confused with reality. And when another man, recently blind, said that he had seen a ghost, people merely laughed and asked where he bought his ogogoro.
Looking back on the previous night it seemed to me that there had been two real miracles. The first was that Madame Koto, fatigued by her swelling foot and the widening domain of her power, entirely left our night-spaces to the spells of the moon. And the second miracle was that no one had seen the nightmares flying about in our lives like birds with primeval wings.
The heat was mild that afternoon. No one gathered outside the fabulous bar where men with masks of bulls and crocodiles performed their mock wrestling matches or their somersaulting dances. People spoke of the taste of ash in their mouths. Children were invaded by visions of spirits in caravans, with veils glittering in a silvery sheen over the faces of dead women. Eggs were found to have worms in them and the blind old man appeared amongst us saying that he had swallowed a diamond. The smell of the decomposing corpse had become part of our air and at dusk we had a complete shock when the wind blew over to us the shrill noise of the corpse singing.
The moon was out early and parts of the sky seemed to bleed with the fierceness of the evening. The clouds were stained with a brilliance of red. And when the corpse started singing the people of our area woke up temporarily from their long and impenetrable sleep.
The half-miracles became omens that drew the blind together, and for the first time they acknowledged the existence of the corpse and the necessity of its burial. No one referred to the corpse directly, but we all understood. And as the evening made the face of the moon brighter the community of the blind gathered to have meetings about the corpse. They argued for a long time. We could hear them from ten houses away. And when the offspring of dissension went amongst them, sowing confusion, they argued with bitter vehemence. It was strange to hear how ferociously and with what certainty the blind disagree.
10
THE PERVERSE JUSTICE OF THE POOR
THAT EVENING DAD began to rave again. His eyes itched furiously and he couldn’t stop scratching them. He screamed that we had stolen his kingdom from him and poisoned his mind with ash. He swore that the ash had compacted into a rock, and that now he saw only the rock when previously he had seen magic trees with fruits that were precious stones.
He became uncontrollable in his hallucinated rage, swearing and stamping up and down the room, punching the walls. We were afraid that something horrible was eating up his brain and mum had to get ten strong men before we could hold dad down and tie him up with cow-hide ropes. When we placed him in his chair he sat bolt upright, with green liquids rolling down from his eyes. His rage had temporarily cooled and he was silent. Mum began all the prayers she knew, appealing to all the different gods that human beings have wept to and worshipped, while the heat intensified in our room, and hunger made me light and airy. We stayed up late, listening to our stomachs groan, listening to the community of the blind arguing bitterly about a corpse they had never seen.
Dad’s own blindness had grown worse. He saw only the colour green. The weight on him had become heavier. He refused to eat what he couldn’t see. And we felt so ashamed at eating while he listened and salivated that we took to cutting down our food. And to make matters worse, the night-runners started again.
They came on waves of fire. They brandished blazing firewood in the air. They poured unfamiliar chants at the houses, uttering deep cries, ominous threats, in voices dark with menace. It was only when we made out their words that we understood what was happening. The Party of the Poor had started their own brand of terror. They banged on doors, disturbing the air with the noise of glasses breaking, talking drums stammering, and cowhorns blasting the wind. And to our greatest astonishment they brought a new and perverse message. In voices with ancestral accents, frightening and pitiless, they told us that no one in the area or in the whole wide world must bury the corpse of the carpenter unless they were the murderers. In effect they were sa
ying that anyone who buried the dead carpenter was admitting to having murdered him.
A new curfew had begun. The war of mythologies had entered a bloody-minded dimension. In some ways it wasn’t surprising that the Party of the Poor tried to intimidate us back into the fold, but it was surprising that they tried to use the methods of the other party to frighten us into remaining loyal. In fact it seemed that their new strategy was to out-terrorise the Party of the Rich. They had seen just how many converts the other party had won through sheer terror and it was a measure of their desperation that they were now using the same methods to protect their natural constituencies. But the real shock of it was that they used those methods against us. And beyond that was the astounding intransigence of using the dead body of the carpenter as a weapon in the battle of political ascendencies.
That night the stench of the decomposing corpse was stronger on the wind. The night-runners and thugs and masquerades ran up and down our streets, through our compounds, with feet of stampeding elephants. We sat in the room, in the dark, listening to the domination of the night-runners. As they sounded more terrifying, drawing closer to our compound, dad began to stir from his inscrutable silence. Then the masquerades and thugs ran past, howling and ululating, hurling firebrands everywhere. Dad moved. He creaked his neck. I could feel an elemental rage growing in him. And when the night-runners came back again, stamping, beating their drums, warning us not to bury the dead carpenter unless we had murdered him, dad suddenly shouted something about protecting his kingdom and with a demonic, unnatural scream he burst free of the cow-hide ropes, and went charging into the street.
I ran out with him, clinging on to the back of his trousers, trying to restrain him, afraid of what might happen to him in his blindness. But he threw me off, and when I landed on the ground I saw the air lit up with blazing firebrands. The humidity made it hard to breathe; the moon seemed to have lowered and its light made everything hotter. The night-runners of the poor people’s party wailed their eerie message. They floated on moonlight, their faces like grim ancestral carvings. The antimony on their features was set on silvery fire by the intensity of the moon. And their bodies, solid and quivering and half-naked, were like ancient memories of a mystical time without boundaries when it was possible to enter the consciousness of a cornseed and foretell the harvest to come. But the terror they spread, their breaking of windows, the people that they beat up who were returning home late, and the vehemence of their counter-mythology was a distortion of that mystical time, and it made the night alien. There was the smell of woodsmoke on the air and in the midst of the bristling masquerades dad was turning round blindly and shouting like a heroic dervish:
‘Coup-plotters! Bandits! Destroyers of my kingdom!’
The night-runners surrounded him like shadows and when they began to hit him with sticks and whips dad raged, saying:
‘I have a mountain on my head, I have fire in my brain, and I am as blind as a king, so why should I be afraid of you?’
And he lashed out with his mighty fists and pounded two men so hard that I heard their masks splinter.
‘Men of wood, bandits of stone,’ dad cried, ‘you have undammed the fury of the sleeping Tyger!’
The night-runners pressed on him and he swung at them, unleashing thunderous blows, disconnecting the fearsome jaws of the masquerades. He broke their wood with his bare fists. He pulverised them. He fought them with a white-hot animal rage and in complete innocence of his own danger. And while he lashed out, throwing vicious punches in lightning arcs, he kept shouting. His voice had taken on an enormous pressured ferocity. He charged in every direction, howling as if he were mad. And when he laid out his antagonists it was almost completely by accident. Or instinct. Blindness somehow made him a more terrifying fighter. Someone struck him on the head with burning firewood and dad laughed, and muttered something about the fire of witches, the weight of sorcerers. And then he charged at the man who had dared to strike him. He grabbed the man round the waist, lifted him up, and hurled him into the darkness. Such was his fury that he harvested confusion everywhere. I had never seen him so demented, never witnessed him release such elemental energies. His cyclonic rage mesmerised them. He battled them, unaware of their knives, their broken glass, their whips and their clubs. And all the time that he battled against them he thought that they were enemy warriors besieging his kingdom.
‘My kingdom must be protected!’ he kept shouting.
And while he was rushing from one direction to another, he tripped over a man he had laid out. He fell on a thick piece of wood, snatched it up, and swung wildly, furiously, like a deranged swordsman. He laid out the antagonists, one after another, not knowing how much success he was having. He kept swinging at them, and the night-runners – frightened by the violence of a man who met their terror-mongering with unrestrained madness – retreated swiftly into the darkness, dragging their fallen companions with them. Dad went on swinging at the empty air. He lashed out at antagonists who weren’t there.
‘They’ve gone!’ I shouted.
But dad, in his madness, not recognising my voice, charged in my direction, swinging the ugly piece of wood. I fled into the dark, and watched his insanity from a safe distance.
‘But there is no one there!’ I cried again.
And dad went on battling against imaginary dragons, slaying beasts with human faces, knocking down the invisible warriors with their copper raiment, whose faces were like severe wood-carvings. He fought them tirelessly, kicking, bellowing and shouting into the vacant spaces. As I watched him, and as the moon cast its lights on the sleeping road, weaving a white diaphanous spell over everything, a strange epiphany insinuated itself into the solvent darkness. A shroud of mist came over the night air and I suddenly noticed the other forms, the multiplying ghosts, the tall and great spirits like pre-historic giants, the unbowed colossi, the negative ghommids, the swooping nightmares like vengeful earthbound birds; and dad fought them all. He battled with their lions and plumed tigers, he pounced on their foot-soldiers and attacked their brave warlords. He battled them even as he couldn’t see them, and even as they went through him, disdaining to engage him in his furious combat. It was strange to see dad so demented while being surrounded by spirits of air and night bound for their own unalterable destination.
Dad’s fury became more intense as the serene spirits and the chaotic nightmares concentrated around him. The area of his rage seemed to be the conjunction of different dimensions, the transient meeting-point of the negative and the semi-divine. His blindness served him well; his undammed energies routed the political night-runners and left them stunned in the tornado presence of a wild human force. But his powers were not infinite, and when a little errant light went through the back of his head and disappeared into the fever of his brain, dad released a mighty cry of a warrior conquered by an insignificant thing, and sank suddenly to the floor. He had won three different battles, and hadn’t known it: he had driven away the thugs; he had triumphed over forms visible to him in his blindness, but which I couldn’t see; and he had earned the respect of the spirit-warriors and hierophants who were in their enigmatic procession.
He lay on the ground with his legs twitching as though he were still fighting in his unconsciousness. I crawled over to him apprehensively, afraid that he might jump up suddenly and knock me out with a blindly flailing fist. But when I touched him on the face with the palm of my hand, he sat bolt upright and said:
‘It’s cold. Where am I?’
‘You have defended your kingdom,’ I replied.
He lay back on the earth and complained that a horse had kicked the base of his skull.
‘What horse?’ I asked.
‘Didn’t you see them?’
‘No.’
‘You must be blinder than I am, my son,’ he said.
I was silent.
‘There were one hundred and seven horses, and all the horses had white and black and red bandits. They had spears and cleavers and s
hields of gold. Some of their faces were made of marble. Their master, the devil, sent rocks in the shape of human beings to destroy me, but I answered them with bone.’
Dad’s fists were raw and bleeding, he had cuts and bruises on his head and face, his hair had been singed, his neck had come out in burns, and all he could say was:
‘If it hadn’t been for that horse I would have defeated all of them.’
‘But they’ve gone. They fled. You defeated them,’ I told him.
‘They’ve gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘They ran away?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did they run?’
‘I don’t understand.’
