8

I WAS AWOKEN by voices in the dark. I was on Mum’s shoulder and I saw faces of women in the rain, faces lit up by lightning flash. They crowded us, arms outstretched, eyes warm. We were surrounded on all sides. The women touched me and looked at me as if I were a wonderful thing that had fallen from the sky. They fondled my hair, rubbed my skin, and felt my bones as if, in being lost and found, I belonged to all of them. I had brought with me a new hope. They too became reasons for staying on this earth, to sometimes taste the joys of homecoming.

Mum put me down. My legs were weak. Everything looked strange. Our new compound looked very odd indeed. I walked on shaky feet, staggering, and Mum took my hand and steadied me. Then she led me to a room, opened the front door and, pointing, said:

‘Your father is waiting for you.’

There was a man asleep on the chair. I didn’t recognise him. He had a bandage round his head and his left arm was in a dirty sling. He was unshaven and his bare chest heaved as he snored. The room was very small. It was full of the mood of his sleep, of hunger, and despair, sleepless nights and the gloom of candle smoke. On the centre table, in front of him, there was a half-empty bottle of ogogoro, an ashtray, and a packet of cigarettes. There was a mosquito coil on the table as well and its acrid smoke filled the air. The man sleeping on the chair was like a giant in fairy tales. His big feet were on the table. He slept very deeply, frightening me with the great movements of his chest.

When lightning flashed outside, and the downpour increased, the man woke up, a stern look in his eyes. Then his eyes changed. They became big and bloodshot. Bewildered, he gazed around the room as if he had woken up into an alien world. Then he saw me in the doorway. For a long moment he stayed like that, caught in an enchantment, his arms stretched out. Jumping up suddenly and with such energy that he sent the chair flying from underneath him, he rushed towards me. I ran round the table. He pursued me, but I ran the other way, keeping the table between us. I had no idea why I was running away from him or why he was running after me. When I found an opportunity I fled screaming towards the door, out of the room, but he caught me in the passage, under the torrential rain. Hollering, he kept throwing me up in the air, filling me with dread. And when he held me to him firmly, so that I was overwhelmed with his great bristling energies and his quivering heart, I burst out crying without knowing why.

When the rain stopped, Mum stripped the dead boy’s clothes off me and later burned them with kerosine and herbal fluids. The clothes burned for longer than expected. Her eyes bright with superstitions, she kept feeding the yellow and black flames with kerosine. When the clothes burned down to curlicues of ash she gathered them into a newspaper and went out in the dark towards the forest.

On her return she seized my hand, pushed me to the bathroom which had millipedes on the walls, and made me bathe from a bucket of specially treated water. I had to use a brown soap which produced little foam. As I struggled to wash myself, Mum stayed outside the squalid bathroom, and told me all that had happened since the night of the riots. The way she told it filled me with wonder about her.

That night, when the crowds separated us, the unleashed Masquerade had pursued women across streets because they were not supposed to see its terrifying presence. She looked for me in every corner, under every car, had shouted my name where houses were burning. And when she went back home, hoping I might be there waiting, she learned that Dad too had disappeared.

‘In one night,’ she said, ‘I lost my only child and my husband.’

She stayed up the whole night, outside the burnt compound, with all our possessions scattered about the street. In the morning the tenants moved to new compounds, to different ghettos. Mum managed to distribute our property among relations. Then she went to all the hospitals and police stations she could find. She walked the whole city, inconsolable in her loss. And when she was about to succumb to despair, in a last effort she went to a police station in the centre of the city and was told that Dad was there, imprisoned for taking part in the riots. She managed to see him. He had been beaten by the police and there was an ugly cut on his forehead, bruises on his face, and his arm hung beside him like a diseased appendage. The next day, after much begging and some bribery, Dad was freed. He went to work that day and found that he had been sacked. During that time Mum had succeeded in finding a room for us to rent. She had also found a way to pay a month’s rent in advance. Dad came to his new home bad-tempered and in a violent mood. He fell ill that night, muttering about insane soldiers who had killed white men in wars across the seas.

Mum was frantic over my disappearance. Her friends suggested consulting a herbalist. At first she was doubtful; but after she had tried everything and failed, gone to police stations and hospitals, and been unable to find me, she relented. She was taken to a herbalist. There was a mound of broken glass in front of her hut. Mum had hardly stepped in when the herbalist, a fierce-looking woman with one eye that glittered more than the other, told her from the shadows that she knew the purpose of Mum’s visit.

‘Go away,’ she shouted in a cracked voice, ‘bring me a white cockerel, a bottle of gin, feathers of a dove, and three pieces of chalk. Then I will help you.’

When Mum returned with the items the woman, attired in a severe black smock, consulted her cowries. She made offerings to her goddess who sat in a corner of the room, brooding in the dark with shining sunglasses. Then she told Mum to leave. She wanted to sleep on her divination. Mum came back the next morning and without any preamble the herbalist told her that the fee would be very expensive because the case was very difficult.

‘Your son is trapped in a house of ghosts,’ she said.

Mum was so terrified that she left instantly, gathered all the money she had saved from her trading, took some off Dad, and borrowed the rest. The herbalist went on to tell her that I was being held by a man and a woman who either wanted to keep me as their own child or sacrifice me for money, and that I was surrounded with such powerful spells that if Mum didn’t act quickly I would be lost to her for ever. Mum paid the fee and sat in the dark, listening as the strange-eyed herbalist embarked on the most extravagant conjurations she had ever witnessed. The herbalist wrestled with the powers of the house, trying to break the spells surrounding me. After five hours, during which Mum sat rigid with fear, the woman emerged from her secret chambers and said:

‘I have broken all the spells except one. That one is too powerful for me. Only lightning can break that spell.’

Mum sat confused. The herbalist gave her instructions. Mum went home, her heart heavy.

That night she was lamenting her condition, blaming herself for having lost the only child she had, a child who had chosen to live, when a distant relation paid a visit. She had heard of Mum’s troubles and had come to offer consolation. She brought a few gifts and congratulated Mum on finding me. Dad took it as a good omen. Mum was puzzled. Then it emerged that the relation had seen a picture of me in the newspaper on the day after my accident. That was how Mum traced me to the police station and eventually to the officer’s house.

Mum went back to the herbalist, who now gave the final set of instructions. Mum was to go to the house, to be humble, to thank the officer and his wife for keeping me, to take them presents, and to throw the white cockerel into the room so they could transfer their sacrifice from me to the bird. And then she was to run away from the place as fast as her legs could carry her. But before she could do any of this lightning had to first strike the house. Mum had waited in the rain, outside the house, for three hours. She had stood patiently, with thunder growling above her, watching as lightning flashed in different places, over many houses and trees. And she stayed like that, not moving an inch, till lightning struck directly over the house of ghosts where I was held captive.