FRUSTRATED BY THE limitations imposed on his movement by all the fighting, dad ventured out into the disrupted world. He took me with him to Madame Koto’s bar, the heartland of dissension. Dad went straight in and ordered a calabash of palm-wine. He was thirsty for confrontation and his eyes were rather crazed with undirected fury. He took the calabash outside, along with two chairs, and he drank steadily, itching for a fight. He kept trying to provoke people by the way he stared at them. His big hands trembled as he drank.
Dad’s reputation as a slayer of giants and a conqueror of boxers from the spirit world made it hard to get the thugs to disagree with him. No one took up his baits. He tripped thugs over with his outstretched foot, he shouldered them, he insulted everyone, but got no results. His frustration grew worse. He drank heavily till his eyeballs were fairly floating in palm-wine.
‘Nothing creates more controversy than the truth,’ dad said, glaring at me with diverging eyes. ‘So I am going to tell these people some very troublesome truths indeed.’
He got up suddenly, weaving, staggering. He trod on the instep of a particularly hideous-looking thug. The thug apologised. Dad called him a coward. He said nothing. The women of the party, seeing that dad was raising trouble, hurried over to defuse the tension. Dad called the thugs animals in disguise. They merely backed away from him. Finding no one to respond to his provocations, dad went slightly berserk.
‘Monsters!’ he shouted. ‘You are all draining our people of sleep. You are stealing our powers, taking over our lives. I am not afraid of you. My name is Black Tyger and I eat stones first thing in the morning. I eat rocks last thing at night. My hands are made of tree trunks. You can only conquer people who are afraid of you. I fear only two people, my wife and my son. You monsters with crocodile faces, I shit on you!’
Still there was no response. So dad went on and on.
‘The only thing you stupid people like is War. Trouble. Confusion. You will destroy this country before we are even free.’
Dad was extremely drunk. His wild gestures had burst open his shirt. He began to shout animatedly about the kind of ruler he would be if people voted for him. He said that in the country he rules anyone who proposes war as a solution to any problem must first enlist their wives, their children, their parents, and all their relations into the army and they must all be given front-line positions before the war can begin. He was launching into another speech when the battle of mythologies started to rage at the barfront.
At first all we saw was a prophet in a white robe, with leaves in his hair, kaolin on his face, and a hammer in his hand. He had emerged from the forest and was threatening vengeance to all those who murdered a rare son of the earth. Mixed in with his wild threats were prophecies delivered in a high-pitched insane voice about the great flood that was coming, about the congregation of spirits from all over the continent, about the dreadful consequences that would be visited on those who had been killing the white antelopes. He spoke in waves of incoherent passion, cursing the rock that would be broken by women, the iroko tree that would be felled by a single drop of black water.
‘All of you who killed my son – Beware!’ cried the insane prophet. ‘BEWARE! BEWARE, because the giant of the night is dying on the road. Grass and weeds have covered its GREAT body. BEWARE, a tree is growing on his heart, and a THOUSAND people are trying to move it. BEWARE, because this GREAT giant was killed by a small bird with blue wings, and the fall of this GIANT will create a hole so DEEP that people will think it is a VALLEY. All of you who think you will avoid judgement, BEWARE. Strange animals with eyes of fire will come out of the forest, animals with the feet of men who never die. BEWARE, because the SACRED PEACOCK has been eaten by fearless men who listen to the songs of the forest!’
It was only during his pause that I recognised the demented prophet to be none other than Ade’s father, the fierce carpenter. His voice was mighty, but his presence was diminished, as if a great part of his stature had been eaten away by his insanity. The hammer shone in his hand like a holy instrument. Suddenly, brandishing the hammer, waving it about in the air like an illuminated sword of war, he shouted:
‘MY SON IS NOT DEAD! MY SON LIVES IN MY HAMMER!’
And then he charged at the startled guests, the astonished thugs, the mesmerised women, the indifferent drunkards. He charged at the supporters of the party, uttering a terrifying war cry, and everyone fled except dad. Ade’s father, waving his hammer like a primeval god of thunder, rushed into the bar and proceeded to destroy everything, shouting:
‘TEAR DOWN THIS TEMPLE!’
He broke the tables and the chairs, he smashed the calabashes and the charms and the images of the new religion and the earthenware pots, he tore down the banners and the political posters and the cultic almanacs. He hammered the doors into broken splinters, he pulverised the plates and the glasses and the walls and the mirrors. He ran out to the backyard and the women fled screaming. He bounded back to the barfront and chased everyone all over the place, but he left me and dad alone. In and out of the bar he went, breaking things and swearing, shouting and destroying. But by the time he came rushing to the barfront again, swirling his hammer like a blood-crazed ancient warrior, the thugs had organised themselves. Fortified with hatchets, leather shields and spears, they calmly waited for his raging presence to re-emerge.
There was a moment during the pandaemonium when I thought I saw Madame Koto inside the bar, looking out. Enormous as the night, her neck quivering, her eyes severe, a yellow light surrounded her, burning her sequined lace clothing without consuming it. She seemed so fat, so enormous, and yet she seemed to be floating, hovering above the ground like a dream-image, with a great peacock in her hand. The moonstones were turning red round her neck. Servants were fanning her as if in a liquid dream.
I was still trying to make out whether she was real or a simulacrum, when I heard a piercing cry. I turned and saw Ade’s father holding his hammer up in the air, holding it high, as if summoning the mighty powers of the heavens to charge him with their divine thunder. I thought I heard the road screaming. A car horn blasted. An eagle with the face of a jackal swooped down on Ade’s father’s head. He froze. His hammer remained poised. A swift wind jolted me. The eagle vanished and a fountain of blood, thin and clear, burst from a vein in Ade’s father’s neck as one of the men stabbed him in the throat. Then another man stabbed him in the navel. His white robe sprouted patches of thick blood. The smell of the evening changed and I heard the laughter of the blind old man on the wind. Ade’s father cried out long and loud and a third man struck him in the forehead with the sharp point of a knife. He became stiff as stone and when he fell the earth didn’t move. Ade’s father died with an expression of obscene shock on his face.
There was a yellow silence. The wind blew the darkness from the forest and into the open spaces. Then suddenly, from all around, from the distances, from the isolated huts, from the forest, and in the air, great wailings began to grow, to accumulate, voices awakening other voices, till we were surrounded with cries so frightening and omnipresent that for a moment it seemed there were only outraged spirits left in the world.
The thugs and supporters and guests vanished from the barfront. The wind occasionally blew the darkness away, revealing Ade’s father floating in the dense pool of his own blood. His eyes were wide open, almost bursting at the shock of his end. The blood that spilled out from the hole in his forehead filled out the hollows of his face.
Madame Koto’s holographic form remained in the bar. The electric lights weren’t on, but there was a solitary lamp on a table. The lamp shone upwards, making her face bigger and more unreal, covering her loneliness in deep shadows. She looked out, but she didn’t move. The silence was universal, the wind was cold, and dad stared at the dead body of Ade’s father without comprehension. Then he looked at the lonely figure of Madame Koto. He was confused. His drunkenness, obliterating his memory, bewildered him. He didn’t seem to know where he was. He made a futile movement and I felt the agitation of his thoughts and his muscles.
‘There is a war going on,’ he said, rather pointlessly. ‘We are on a battleground.’
The wailing started again.
‘Isn’t that a dead man there on the ground?’ dad asked, stupidly.
I couldn’t speak. The night suffocated me with an ancient smell of blood. We were alone outside with the dead body and when the lamp went out in the bar a greater darkness fell on us. Then, as if awoken from a nightmare, from a dream of stone, dad began to scream. He screamed for the world to come and do something about the dead man. He cried for help. He wanted to get Ade’s father to a hospital. The universal silence answered him. The wailing had stopped. In the icy silence I felt the swift wind of the eagle again and dad cried out that something had knocked him on the head. He turned, venturing into the darkness, and something hit him again. The darkness became full of the Masquerade’s censoring presences. Hot wind blew into our faces. The blast of a furnace opened above my head. A bucket of ice-cold water landed on us. I felt the lash of a metallic whip across my back, and dad screamed. Something scratched my face, just missing my eyes. I ran, howling, towards the street. Dad was behind me, stumbling, staggering, tripping. Then I saw him wandering down the street towards me, his hands outstretched, as if he had suddenly been struck blind. He wandered into the forest, walking into trees, getting entangled in climbers. I caught his hand, disentangled him, and led him back to our room. My head was feverish with excruciating colours. Mum was waiting for us. And when we came in, with dad blind as if the night had entered his eyes, mum wasn’t even surprised.