by Ben Okri
‘Did they run like rats?’
‘Like chickens,’ I said.
He seemed pleased.
‘Help me to stand up. I think I’ve twisted my ankle.’
I couldn’t help him to get up. He was too heavy. We sat there in silence. He breathed deeply the rarefied air of his blind conquest. The moon was low and the road fairly quivered under its ambiguous light. Ghosts flew over the forest like glimmering ancient birds.
‘Describe the world to me,’ dad said.
‘I’m tired,’ I replied.
He was silent. His dim sight stared into the intensifying night. Insects made dissonant music around us. The moon-swept wind brought the smell of the corpse and the aromatic dreams of sleeping vegetation. Then suddenly, from the ghostly distance, from beyond the dense shadow of trees, beyond the houses, and seemingly from all around us, we heard a voice speaking through a loudhailer, saying:
‘NOBODY MUST BURY THE CORPSE OF THE CARPENTER. ONLY THE MAN OR WOMAN WHO KILLED HIM CAN BURY HIM.’
There was a pause. And then:
‘IF YOU DON’T WANT TROUBLE, AND IF YOU DIDN’T KILL THE CARPENTER, THEN DON’T TOUCH HIS CORPSE.’
Another frightening silence. Then the voice rose again, swirling in the air, changing its accentuation, deepening the threatened dread in its voice:
‘ONLY THE MURDERER MUST BURY THE BODY AND MAKE A PUBLIC CONFESSION. ANYONE WHO BURIES THE BODY IS THE MURDERER! DON’T SAY YOU HAVEN’T BEEN WARNED!’
On and on the voice went, weaving menace and terror, threatening the burning of the house and the destruction of the family of anyone who dared to go against their edict. It surprised me that dad couldn’t make out what was being said.
‘What corpse?’ he asked.
I was exhausted. I got up, went in, and came back out with mum, whose face seemed altered by her prayers. Together we managed to get dad into the room. But as we entered the compound I noticed that the errant lights, spirits of the dead who speak with fulgent eyes, had all returned. The lights, unburning fires of invisible sorcerers, flitted about with the intensity of their numbered days. When we got to the room I was surprised that none of them came in with us.
Without complaining, mum treated dad’s wounds. She even managed to get him to the bathroom where he washed himself. When they came back we were all silent. The room was sad in the candle light and the air stank of dad’s blood. His furious spirit, uncalmed by his bath, crowded us. He breathed heavily and his blind eyes were suspicious. He held his head at an angle, his ears cocked to pick up the slightest sound. When the candle spat he asked:
‘What was that?’
‘The candle,’ I said.
‘It sounded like a cutlass on our gate.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘Have our enemies returned?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because you drove them away.’
He was still restless for action, for combat, for deeds of courage. I felt his spirit rising at the prospect of a good war against our antagonists. He was very alert and his presence became very large in the room. His shadow was a giant behind him, filling the wall, moving constantly, afraid of the candle’s brightness. When mum finished with his wounds, and bandaged his forehead, she took great pains in preparing the bed. Then she went out to bathe.
When she returned she combed her hair, anointed her skin, and perfumed herself lightly. She seemed to be preparing for an important event, as if she were going to be presented to an august personage. I was surprised, however, when she urged me to get some sleep and unceremoniously blew out the candle. For the first time in many weeks she allowed dad to sleep with her on the bed. And when the springs began to creak, mounting in suppressed vigour, in the hunger of remembered movements, I slipped out of the room, out into the adventures of darkness and dreams.
In the freedom of the night, with the great velvet universe breathing all about me, I followed the brightest errant light there was, the little star of the dead, which burned with a satin purple fire, and which bounced over the rubbish, and wandered across the bushes, and disappeared into its own dreaming, and re-appeared into its awakening. And as I followed the erratic movements of the little light, allowing it to lead me where it would, I nearly fainted when out of the great mysterious silence of the earth the dead body suddenly started to scream.
11
INTO THE DEAD MAN’S DREAM
ALL THE LIGHTS in the houses along our street were off but I knew that no one was asleep. I knew it because there were no dreams floating about in that moon-dominated air. Usually dreams floated from their dreamers and entered the minds of other sleeping forms. Sometimes dreams were transferred from one person to another. I remember once entering the dream of the carpenter’s wife, who was encoiled round the solid post of her husband, and who was dreaming the dreams of the tailor across the road who found himself in a land of birds and who had been asked to sew the cloth of leaves into one vast garment that could make the earth more beautiful.
While the corpse screamed, the moon did all the dreaming that night. I had been following the flitting light and it had led me on a confusing journey. The road was wide awake. Cats occasionally cried from the bushes with the voices of abandoned babies. Enchanted by the erratic light, I had passed Madame Koto’s bar without knowing it. And when the light vanished completely, leaving me isolated in the darkness of the watchful road, I saw ghosts floating beneath the clouds. The road held its breath while the wind cleansed the air with moonlight. I looked behind me and was surprised to see that someone had left a solitary lamp near the corpse.
There were the ghost forms of dogs over the body. Spirit-jackals came and tore off the corpse’s thighs before time would. Invisible vultures had hollowed its eyes. I became terrified. There was no way I could get home without going past the dead body. It occurred to me to run. But the air had turned mysteriously static. I picked up a stone, threw it at the jackals, and missed. The jackals fled into the forest without a sound. My stone had knocked over the lamp. The oil, pouring from the fallen lamp, made the earth burn. Feeling something hot on the nape of my neck, I tried creeping past the corpse. But something rooted me to the ground. The air became an invisible wall. The earth around the lamp flared and when I noticed that a yellow flower had grown from the dead man’s forehead, the space around me exploded.
I turned and ran without thinking. I scampered into the bushes and stumbled on sleeping dogs. The sky suddenly went dark. I screamed and flailed, I walked into trees and tripped over their roots, I waved my arms about, fearing that blindness had come upon me. There was no wind, but the air had become dense. The smell of sleeping weeds, the somnolent thoughts of wild flowers hung in the air like a thickly scented pall. I couldn’t move for the sheer density of the smells. My arms outstretched, I pushed through the unmoving air, with blackness all around me. I had been struck blind by the sight of a flower.
The rich humus of the dreaming earth suffused me and the warm aromas of herbs and lilies floated on heavy wings of purple all about me. Everything was silent except for the persistent dialogue of those insects which give off a bitter perfume when crushed. The darkness intensified. I looked up and saw that the moon had dimmed. Veils of moondust clung to everything. In my panic my sight kept clearing and darkening. The wind blew leaves into my face. Creepers seemed to twist themselves around me. And as I stumbled about in my new blinding, casting around, screaming for mother, I noticed that the forest was full of the ghosts of trees that were no longer there.
I had steadied myself and had launched out into the purple darkness, when I saw the dead man tramping around, muttering feverishly to himself. Flailing in the dark, I fled in another direction, unable to distinguish the night from the bushes. I ran right into the black rock and cracked my head and when I recovered I saw the dead man again. His hair was matted with blood, and he was pursuing me. I ran deeper into the
forest, screaming, and not hearing my own voice; tripping, and not entirely falling down; completely lost, and not being able to see a single thing – except for the ghosts, who watched me with neutral eyes.
A strange fever had seized my brain. I stopped running and rested against a tree, and held on to it with all my might. The forest spoke in many harsh voices. And as I stood there, my heart pounding in my brain, a cold wind blew the back of my neck. And when I turned round I saw the dead man, with his empty eye sockets and his mad breath, right behind me. I tried to scream but he grabbed me with his bony rotten hands and he forced me to the ground and began to press me into the earth. He pressed me down with a demented roughness, as if he wanted to bury me alive. He held me so hard that the night suddenly became populous with errant lights spinning around in my eyes. The dead man gave off such a foul stench of putrefaction that I could hardly breathe. He went on shaking me, hitting me against the earth, deafening me with his high-pitched agonised silence. And then, as the wind changed, he stopped. Slowly, as if to emphasise the importance of what he was about to tell me in his dreadful silence, he brought his monstrous decaying face closer to mine. The empty sockets of his eyes glowed with bristling yellow things. Worms crawled out of his nostrils. And when he opened the gaping hole of his mouth I saw earthworms slowly uncoiling themselves. And when he spoke in the harsh unnatural voice of the dead, when his dead breath hit my face, begging me to tell the world to bury him, banging my head violently against the roots of a tree, something burst open in my mind, something cracked asunder – and I heard the great howling funereal wail of the unnumbered dead, heard their complaints, their cries, their lamentations, their regrets, their simultaneous speeches, their threats, their broken promises, their perpetual dreams, their furious lists of all the ways they would have lived their lives differently, more luminously, with wise silence and effective courage; I heard the voices of the unhappy dead, the unburied dead, those whose deaths were unacknowledged, those to whom justice hadn’t been done, whose restless sleep was spiked with the lies and silences of the living; I heard their voices, full of messages and signs, lessons to be learnt, histories that mustn’t be forgotten, stories that must be told, melodies that must be created, possibilities that must be discovered, lives that must be redeemed, sufferings that must be transformed into wonders, and all the thousand permutations of love that must be incarnated and kept whole and regenerated every day of our lives. I heard all these things and saw the forms of the dead all around me. I saw my spirit-companions with them, serene in the white boiling agony of my entrapment, joyful even that I had been caught in the middle space between the living and the dead, the shining purgatory brimful of negation and signs. And through all this, the dead man was begging me to tell the world to remember him; and all that time he didn’t stop banging my head against the twisted roots of a living tree. And then something happened. My agony became too much for me, and I passed through many spheres full of radiant voices. Streams of blue pulsating light poured over me, and then quite suddenly it all went dark.
When I opened my eyes the spectre of a big stubbled face looming above me and huge clammy hands feeling my face made me scream and jump. I leapt up and scampered around in a forest of tables and chairs and clothes hanging from a line and ran into a wall that seemed like a rock and rebounded to the table and nearly set myself alight on the steady magnified flame of the candle. I found myself running round the room, shouting and raving, as dad, with arms outstretched, came towards me. Then mum caught me from behind and held me tight and said:
‘Why are you so afraid of your father?’
But I went on raving, unable to control the words pouring out of me. With great gentleness mum covered my mouth with her palm and lay me down on the bed, stroking my hair, and speaking to me softly. I raved on as she spoke in the voice of one whose secret powers had somehow grown fainter. And when she asked, ‘What were you doing in the forest at this time of night?’ all I could think of saying, through the confused heat of my brain, was:
‘The dead carpenter asked me to bury him.’
No one said anything. Dad, sitting in his chair, kept nodding. Mum stared at me for a long time. Then she took off a layer of wrapper from around her waist and spread it over me. The warm comforting smell of her body surrounded me and I fell asleep, and woke up in Madame Koto’s dream. She was dreaming that all her enemies were turning into trees and that the trees were growing on the island of her body, fastening her flesh into the earth with their relentless roots.
12
MANIFESTATIONS OF THE HIDDEN
MY RAVINGS WERE worse the next day. No one could cure me of the raving. My eyes were twitching hot and I talked about the dead carpenter wandering around at night, reciting the names of all the people he knew, all of whom refused to recognise him, or even acknowledge his existence. I talked about the people for whom he had made beds and tables and chairs, people whose cupboards he had fixed, who ate off the tables he had shaped, slept on the beds he had fashioned, and sat on the chairs he had constructed. I raved on about the women who spat when they went past him, about the men who had somehow become blind to his presence, about the nasty treatment the dogs and birds dealt him, about how his own party had betrayed him, and how his thoughts were turning into a yellow flower whose roots were made of steel. I couldn’t seem to stop talking about the horrible earthbound hell of his unburied existence, how his spirit tramped the nights, banging on doors, trying to get through the greater doors beyond which lie the adventures of infinity. How could I stop muttering about his rage and bitterness, his promise of vengeance, the swirling molten heat of his unfinished condition? How could I stop, when it seemed as if the dead man was speaking through me, taking over my mouth and thoughts, growing inside my flesh in an unhappy occupation of my being?
Dad listened to my ravings intently. He listened without moving from his chair. He listened, it seemed, without hearing me. Mum spent the whole day going from one herbalist to another, praying loudly along the street. None of the herbalists appeared to be able to do anything. They all said that the chains tying us down must first be broken by us before they can be of any help. By the evening my energy ran out. My jaws ached. And horses stampeded over the flowers and visions that seared my brain. The curious thing is that when I stopped raving I saw butterflies everywhere, fluttering amid the vibrations of which objects are composed. Then I saw a clear field with a white tree in the middle of it, on which the dead carpenter lay asleep in the topmost branches. And sometimes when I ceased raving Ade would come into the room and sit beside me with a sweet smile on his face. On one occasion he said:
‘Your father is right.’
‘About what?’ I asked.
‘What?’ dad said.
‘Everything is alive,’ Ade continued. ‘There are some things that can make a stone cry.’
‘Like what?’
‘What?’ dad asked again.
‘Many things,’ Ade ventured. ‘A dry wind, a dying bird, the death of a nation, the birth of a witch, the laughter of angels, the songs of the devil, the dreams of a toad, the piss of a goat, the serenity of a tyrant, the destruction of a people’s history, the triumph of the wrong, the thoughts of a butterfly, the dreams of the dead.’
‘How come I’ve never seen a stone cry?’ I asked.
‘Because you don’t use your eyes.’
‘Why should a stone cry?’ asked dad, sitting up and turning his blind eyes towards me.
‘How should I use my eyes?’
‘By not using your head first.’
‘But how?’
‘Azaro, what’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s not the eyes that see.’
‘Then what does?’
‘It’s the light in the eyes that sees.’
‘What light?’
‘Are those lights back?’ asked dad.
‘No.’
‘The light that makes everything alive.’
&nbs
p; ‘So how do I use the light?’
‘You have to discover it first.’
‘How do I discover it?’
‘Azaro, who are you talking to, eh?’
‘No one,’ I said.
‘I better go,’ said Ade.
‘Don’t go.’
‘Your grandfather is worried about all of you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Have you seen the rainbows?’
‘No.’
‘Have you seen the trees turning into ghosts?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you seen my father?’
I was silent. Dad knocked me on the head. He was quite frustrated. He got up and began feeling the space around me.
‘Are you talking to yourself again?’
‘No.’
‘So you haven’t seen my father?’ Ade pressed on.
‘He nearly killed me last night.’
‘Why?’
‘He asked me to bury him.’
For a moment Ade vanished. Then, after a few seconds, he re-appeared behind me.
‘I have a message for you.’
‘From who?’
‘Your spirit-companions.’
‘What is the message?’
Dad lifted me up and held me tightly to him. He was crying. He was crying that his son had gone mad. He irritated me with his heavings.
‘You will find out what the message is when my father has been buried.’
Then Ade was silent. Then, with the smile becoming even sweeter on his face, he said:
‘I’m going now.’
‘Wait!’
‘What?’
Dad covered my mouth with his palm. I bit him.
‘What?’
‘Are you still my friend?’
‘I am your father,’ dad said, sadly.
Ade vanished altogether. When he vanished the bed and the table, the walls and the ceiling, the cupboard and the jumble of clothes and the rafters and the air in the room burst into great flutterings of butterfly lights and I cried:
