I FOLLOW CHIKELUE’S EYES TO IHEBUBE AND EBUBE. They are walking round the car and smiling at their reflections in its glittering body as we step outside to go to Ezenwanyi’s cave.
“You may look at the motorcar, but do not touch it,” I say to them, surprised that at their age they still slobber over a motorcar.
My father is still sitting under the tree. “Should not a poor old man like me have a little something for a sip?” he says to Chikelue, his eyes milky with expectation.
I feel a rush of blood to my face.
“Sure, Papa, but why not?” Chikelue counts off some crisp notes from a bundle and hands the money over to my father.
“Agunnia. Akunwata. Akunatakashi.” My father grabs the money with both hands and calls Chikelue the praise names people call any young man with money to throw around.
In extended appreciation of the money my father breaks into egara, eulogizing Chikelue; it is accompanied by a series of wild movements combining nimble foot thrusts with delightful springy jumps and precise hand gestures—a flare of athleticism you would never picture a man of his age executing. I see nostalgia in my father’s eyes, a longing for a certain time in history when he embodied the dazzling spirit whose metallic costume of bright buttons catches mirror reflections, a time when he was the masker of Echaricha maa, whose face is defined by horizontal linear radiations of white thread and motions marked by a poetry of body movements, the masquerade with a lofty plume everyone rushes to the village square to watch on the day of Omabe Festival.
“Back then your father was in his prime, strong and graceful. He was the toast of the village women,” my mother would say every time she retold the story before she became born again, sparks of memory brightening in her face. Behind that wistful smile a frown at history, time, and habit that eroded his qualities was thinly disguised. I’d remember those evenings that my father would stagger home from his bricklaying work smelling like a jar of ekpetechi, his eyes red and glazed, his trousers wet and muddy, a halting and lisping quality to his voice, and his pockets empty.
My father’s masking exploits inspired my thesis at the university. First, I had considered studying the arua mythology, influenced by the conspiracies against my father. I thought it would be interesting using my family as a case study and studying the myth surrounding the arua, the belief that if my father or any member of his caste touched the arua staff, there would be fatal consequences. But then I remembered my father’s words, the night he told me about our ancestry: I have one regret. That my family is divided in their faith. I decided to write about my father’s belief in traditions in contrast to my mother’s extreme Pentecostal views and condemnation of Traditional African Religion. “Mushroom churches are sprouting everywhere,” I wrote, “but of the mushrooms few are edible.”
I notice that Chikelue is in a better mood after watching my father’s footwork. He also shares money out to my mother and siblings in generous proportions. I am not sure if my father still makes bricks, and looking at him, a rag of himself whose height—though no longer as erect as it used to be—remains the only vestige of a certain poignant time in history, a time when he used to have bulgy pectorals and the best pair of calves in the village, I think not.
I suddenly remember his sister, my aunt Ogbom, who performed her trademark legwork at Nkwo square on the day of the Onunu festival in honour of the ancestral mother Nkwo, to the cheering of a large crowd. My father had said that Igba Echi unlocked open doors, bringing sound health, wealth, good suitors, and a home full of children. Ogbom’s case turned out different for obvious reasons.
I feel an intense longing to see her. I mention this to my friend.
“We will make it snappy.” Chikelue is impatient to get to the cave.
On our way out, we pass through my aunt’s old hut.
“Is it you, Dimkpa?” Ogbom says.
I embrace her, feeling her scrawniness.
She looks pasty-faced. Age has dug depths in her cheeks. Her shock of hair is a small patch of white on the dark cloud of her head. The burden of time that dug chasms in her cheeks weighs down more heavily around her neck, with its mass of wrinkles and taut veins. Ogbom was never large, but now she is an old, shriveled rag of a woman. Inscriptions that resemble Arabic are tattooed on her shrunken arms. I have always seen her as a sad woman. I think of her failed marriage with a man outside of her—our—caste, and I squeeze her hand.
We talk with her. She asks a few questions, sometimes being drowned in her forgetfulness, her voice a sonorous tremble.
“I saw the fire in your eyes as you left for the city, blazing like red-hot charcoal, and I knew you were ready to pluck success from the land of the spirits. I have been proved right.”
“My friend from the city would like to see your footwork and hear your egara,” I say to her. Ogbom earns gifts from people for her skill as a griot, a repository of oral tradition.
She laughs toothlessly, and I see a shy old bride. The musty smell of age fills the air.
“Your aunt is old. Can she still lift her ragged, weak legs in legwork?” she says.
Normally, she requires a stimulant, a shot of ekpetechi to put her in the mood, or anything that stirs up poignant memories, especially of the happy early times before her failed marriage. Chikelue sets her off with money, a bunch of clean banknotes. Ogbom is bewildered; instantly, she breaks into a cantillation and slowly works herself into the mood, her voice shaky at first, and her mouth trembling around the words. Bit by bit she gathers the limbs of her voice until it wraps itself around the lyric like a braid. Ascending in variation, her voice then picks up a sonorant quality too amplified for a woman of her age. Now in her element, she thrills us with egara and omaganga, a flowing combination of footwork accompanied by the clear resonance of her voice, one of my best vocals ever. Surprisingly she carries the burden of age lightly, still retaining that gracefulness of carriage, that swing of movement that only a few women of her time and age could perfectly execute in that flowing sequence that catches light. I know that in the night, though, in the loneliness of her world when everyone is asleep, Ogbom will intone slow threnodies in a voice that echoes the depths of her sorrow.
After leaving Ogbom’s house, Chikelue and I walk through the narrow, rocky track that links the cave and the village. The village is covered in lush green farmlands with bright cascades of cornsilk. Okra flowers are perching on their plants like yellow butterflies. Sparrow hawks are wheeling high above the valley, wings splayed, bodies given totally to the will of the wind as they explore and savour vast spaces.
“It is a beautiful country.”
I am glad Chikelue likes the countryside. Walking along the outer wall, we enter the quiet grove with caution. The cave still lies crusted at the basin of high rock bluffs despite a few rains. We settle on a shelf of rock. I laugh, a guffaw that wakes echoes in the cave, and instantly water begins to trickle from the rocks. I yell out. The cave yells back at me. The water leaps to our amazement. It is not the first time I have come here to sit on steps cut into the rocks by the goddess to yell with the hope that she might spill her water and heal the world. We came here uncountable times when we were children, yelling ourselves out of our minds for nothing. But now the water leaps in excitement, and a huge waterfall drops off the last shelf of rock and thunders down into the bottom of the cave. The more I yell into the cave, the higher the water leaps. Chikelue is watching with wide eyes. He is now on his feet, yelling, too, and, yelling and yipping together, we set off a magnificent cascade and a fine ricochet of echoes, water pouring from all the openings, lashing onto the rocks and thundering to the bottom of the cave.
“Hurrah!” Chikelue is saturated with pleasure.
At last we tear ourselves away from the cave. We climb up the hill to the full panorama of palm trees dotting a rust-coloured village below. We savour the magical moment back in the cave, a moment staggering and euphoric. And then we begin to walk home with the sun setting on us, painting the sky in watercolours and crayons.
“Is the moon rising tonight?” Chikelue says.
“I will ask my mother.”
“I will pass the night and watch the moon,” he says.
I hide a chuckle.