Wairimu Muriithi
I did not even know Ma had tinnitus until I found her trying to fit inside the freezer. Our favourite movie when I was six used to be The Prince of Egypt. I watch it once in a while now as an adult, and every time I do I wonder if the inside of Moses’ basket smelled like God.
She only ever sent me one letter, when I was in my first year of university in Cape Town. She tried to explain: The voices lived in my ears. They used to be made of ocean. After reading it, I let the paper disintegrate in a puddle outside the chemistry department, like the poetic genius I thought I was at nineteen. At my father’s behest, I wrote back. She didn’t reply.
And then, as if all of a sudden, I am thirty-two, and sometimes I live with stray cats. They seem to know how to find me when they are at their weakest and leave when they feel better. People call me an artist now. My name is semi-important in certain academic and literary circles because – I am told – the stories I write, the music I make and the pictures I paint are “pertinent to the condition of the postcolony.” People ask me about my inspiration, and I give them the complex answers they want because I enjoy living in a decent apartment. I do not tell them that everything is produced by a tiny memory of a little girl surrounded by the gleaming-white inside of a freezer gifted to her parents on their wedding day.
“She says she wants to see you,” says the voice on my answering machine. “I think she should see you.” At this point I haven’t been able to work for almost two months. My fingers, with all this free time, keep picking my belly button raw of their own accord. I have made two hospital visits for the infections I create, and had one session with a therapist with thick hair growing out of his ears. I itched to braid it. Most days my body floats between errands, and then it floats to places in the city I have never been before. I take up baking because it is cheaper than the ER.
So I figure I might as well book some plane tickets.
“I’m going on holiday,” I say to my landlord, and to my part-time girlfriend. “I’m going home,” I say to the mirror, but just saying those words makes my mouth taste like groundnuts, which I am allergic to, so I empty my bottle of mouthwash and make a mental note to buy another when I get to the airport. I forget the mouthwash. It is so dark outside the plane’s window we could easily be flying underground. What if my teeth aren’t as white as hers always have been? What if I get there and find she’s changed her mind about me, again? I am wearing thick gloves to keep from excavating in my belly, even though my palms are sweaty. What if I still cannot work, even after this?
“I have a plan. Who is that on the radio?” She has not looked up at me once.
“Laura Mvula.” I do not wonder about her plan. I am, for now, categorically anti-plan.
“She has a lovely voice. I am tired. Can you come back tomorrow?” I have painted three nails on her right hand blue. She has not looked up at me once.
“Yes.”
In my father’s living room, there is a framed photo of my stepmother and me on a crowded beach in Dar es Salaam. It is the only holiday I took with her and my father before she died. The scar on my left tricep, which faded when I gained weight in my first year of university, was still visible then.
I pretend I am here to see him. When I arrive he says he has been meaning to ask me to take a break and visit. I say nothing about the freezer he probably got rid of as soon as I left home. He pretends not to hear me talking to myself in the mornings. He still plays the piano. I lie about what I get up to in the daytime. In the evenings, he tells me the different versions of the same story.
“Only people who live in a house like this would let their daughter become a carpenter.” My grandparents bought the place when my mother had just started school. She remembered helping them fix it up, as much as a five-year-old can help with beams and wires and rotting floorboards. Later, she made many of the things inside the house; pieces of furniture created when she was much older, after she got married. Most of them have survived my father’s silence. It is still a beautiful, peculiar house. It traps the wind in its foundations; it dances when no one is inside.
“When she was sure she would marry me, she brought me here and tried to introduce me to her dead father. She said he was waiting for his wife to die. The story is that she burned in a fire when your mother was in high school, and she was declared dead even though her body was never found. He had looked for her wherever it is one looks for souls, but had not found her. So he came back to haunt the house. Your mother said he would help her make furniture while he waited.”
“Did you believe her?”
“Yes. I couldn’t see or hear him, but that did not mean anything. I never knew the man. I didn’t need to, because I knew your mother.”
The freezer had been a wedding gift from one of her clients.
“Your grandmother must have really died when you were a little girl, but we never found out how. Your grandfather left a goodbye inscribed onto a small bookcase I found chopped to pieces in the garden.”
This is how he explains my mother to me. Even though I already know all this, I let him do it over and over again because this seems to be the only memory he has left of her.
In a short story by Dorothy Tse, “Woman Fish”, a man’s wife can no longer tell lies because she turns into a fish with legs. He feeds her in a fish tank and makes love to her with his eyes closed and goes with her to their usual Japanese restaurant. Nothing quite so dramatic happened to Ma, but things might have been better if it had. When the ocean waves became ocean-voices, she initially thought they were speaking fish. And then she decided they were water spirits, and she was not lonely anymore.
“They kept her company, they made her laugh. They tormented her.”
It is a Saturday when I find bricks of meat and ice cream on the kitchen floor, and Ma trying to get inside the freezer. When she sees she cannot fit, she claws at her ears, trying to pull them off. When she cannot do that either, she goes to bed, walking past me without seeing me. The next day, my father feels like roast chicken for lunch and finds me suffocated nearly to death inside the freezer, between the frozen peas and a tub of strawberry sundae. I would not have told on her if he had asked, but she figures out I must have seen her and tells him herself. I am in the hospital when they take her away. I return home to the quietest place on earth.
Every night, after he has gone to bed, I bake for her. He is a heavy sleeper and I leave the kitchen as clean as he likes when I am done, and I hide the muffins or cookies in my bedroom to sneak them out in the morning. They never survive the drive to the hospital. In the heat of the traffic jam on Langata Road, there is a woman who sells bottles of cold water to sweaty drivers and matatu passengers. She wears a large, heavy sweater and a wool cap. The first time I give her the cookies becomes the second and the third, and every day after that. She gives me a bottle of water a day in return. We exchange pleasantries, growing into something of a tacit friendship, even though we never learn each other’s names.
The orderlies and nurses all have “smpcf” stitched onto their left breast pockets in stiff black letters. They shuffle papers in a thick file and then make vague sounds about how much she has improved. I do not believe them because I do not recognise them from her earlier days. They must not know how bad things were when she first got here. I do not know how bad they are now.
“She does not want to see you today,” one of the orderlies says to me, a young man with a beautiful nose, but I insist until I am near tears. My mother’s face breaks into a smile when I walk in, as if she expected me to fight my way in anyway, but I am in no mood for tests.
“You have a child.” She is looking my body over, still avoiding my face.
“Had.” I correct her as if she should have known.
“Okay,” she says. She takes my hand and leads me to the window, where a bottle of nail polish, green this time, and small balls of cotton wool have been laid out for me to finish what I had started. Outside, a brightly painted sign smiles up at us mockingly: SUNSHINE MEMORIES PSYCHIATRIC CARE FACILITY. The steel legs of the sign are wrapped in barbed wire.
“They have had to buy a new sign six times this year. Last year, it was eight. Nobody here likes it, so finding new ways to destroy it keeps us clever.”
“Have you ever tried?” I ask her, unscrewing the top of the nail polish.
The muscles in her neck betray how much she is struggling to look at me. “Before I made you stop visiting, my doctor tried to fix me using you. He told me that you qualified as a ‘sunshine memory’, so that focusing on earlier times with you would drown out the voices. It was so fucking painful. My head hurt all the time.” She coughs a soft cough. “And then you were gone and there was only that useless signboard left, and the dust would get washed off it when it rained and it just would not stop laughing at me. So I found where they had hidden the big flowerpots, and I rolled one over there and threw it at the sign. It stood at about your height then. I managed to create a dent the size of my head, and destroy half the paint job. I haven’t gone near it since.”
I hold her gaze until I cannot anymore, then I drop the bottle on purpose. It shatters on the concrete floor and the glass glistens in beautiful puddles of green. My first instinct is to wipe the floor clean with my tongue, but I reach for the cotton balls instead. I wonder why lying does not come to her as easily as it does to me.
She gets up and walks to the other end of the room, making sure I know from the heaviness of her footsteps that she expects me to join her when I am finished. I throw the green wads away and leave, not even breaking my step when she says, “Baby, I have a plan for us.” To hell with her plan.
I visit her two days a week after she is admitted, even though she cannot hear me anymore. I never go with my father; he picks me up an hour after he leaves me with her.
“Has she gone deaf?” I ask him more than once.
“No, love. She just needs time,” he says, and I do not push because he has come to hate the sound of his own voice. I try to take her my bedroom clock, which I cannot read yet, but the orderlies check the big bag I try to smuggle inside and return it to my father.
I take to watching her face and making up the conversations she is having with the ocean-voices. Over time, I speak these made-up conversations out loud, pretending I am in sync with the voices so that occasionally, she may catch mine. And she does, on the afternoon we are lying on the trampoline in the garden with my ear resting on her stomach. Her hunger from a skipped meal interrupts the jokes I am exchanging with myself. So I say, “There’s a helicopter in your tummy, mummy,” for my own entertainment, and then I am flying and she is clawing at her stomach the way I had seen her go at her ears. “How? How did it get in there, you bitch?!” she screams in the direction she threw me. The orderlies came running out for her, and she spends the next five weeks plugging her belly button with her finger in case something else tries to find its way in.
“Perhaps it would be a good idea to stop visiting for a while,” one doctor tells my father. “Your daughter’s imagination is detrimental to your wife’s health.” If my father says yes then, it will destroy me. Ma, even in her silence, is a loudness I miss sorely.
“No,” he says, offering no further explanation, and for the first time, I forgive his brevity.
After that, I try to stop imagining dialogues out loud when I am with her. Whenever I find myself itching to, I remember the inside of the freezer, and write about the things I think I saw. Sometimes, I make up songs about them. This is how, on another afternoon, I am too pre-occupied to notice her lifting a flowerpot half my size and hurling it at me until it knocks me off the bench I am sitting on. I scrape my arm on the bench’s sharp edge on the way down, but all I can do is sing louder and louder. She probably does not say, “You stupid child, I never want to hear you again!”, maybe it is just my singing that takes her words and strangles them into what I hear. My father is called. “We cannot come back for a while,” he tells me as we drive past the Sunshine Memories sign. I nod. A while becomes never.
“Do you know what blue sounds like?” This time, the nail polish is a garish orange, but the blue on the first three remains.
“Water. Sadness. Peace. Stillness?”
“I love you,” she says, her words mingling with a beautiful laugh that makes me warm behind my eyes and in my ears. “Blue only sometimes sounds like water, but if it sounds like stillness, it cannot sound like water. It’s not often you find perfectly still waters,” she says. She sounds old and sagely, which I suppose she must be, and I resent that I could not watch age come to her.
“And sometimes blue does sound like sadness, but I have never had a sadness that is peaceful. Have you?”
I do not answer, and the question mark sits between us until I have painted her toenails, too. Her feet, unlike mine, are still smooth. They feel like butter. Yellow must sound like her feet.
She tries something else. “You know, I used to think I was a mermaid when I was a child. That is how I would explain the sound of waves in my ears. When the ocean-voices came, it felt like other mermaids were finally speaking back to me.”
“What would they say?” I asked, not really wanting to know but knowing she wants me to wonder.
“They would remind me to do the things I used to do before my baba left, learning from my body’s muscle memory. But things work differently in the water than they do here, and when I found I could not move the way they wanted me to, or breathe the way they told me to, all I wanted to do was to get them out.” She clenches her toes together – I get some orange on the skin of her tiniest one. “Eventually my doctor gave up on sunshine memories. Instead, he tried to teach me to make them say what I needed them to say to make me better.”
“Did it work?” I ask, stupidly, because this is how the conversation is supposed to go.
She smiles curiously. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”
“Are they here now? Can they hear me?”
“They have become me. And I, them. Who do you think is talking to you right now?”
I have so many questions, but the time to learn my mother well enough to ask them is long gone. Suddenly, I want to know what they – Ma, the ocean-voices – think of my baking. I promise myself to make two of anything, or maybe even three, so I can leave one at home for later.
My father has guessed by now that I spend my days with her. He seems hurt by this – not that I see her, but that I came back to see her – but like always, he says nothing. I know he knows because my pancakes are smaller, and he waits until I have left the house to play the piano. The photo of my stepmother and me has quietly disappeared.
Ma tries other ways to stop the ocean-voices long before she tries to freeze them. Sometimes, she suddenly ends her day in the middle of it and closes her bedroom door behind her. After I have waited long enough to be prudent, I find her in bed, her face contorted in pain from fierce migraines. Later, she undresses and inspects herself all over, then asks me to check if her back is leaking. “You’ll know if it is different from sweat,” she insists. But sweat is all I see. I even taste it to make sure.
It takes a fractured father, a flowerpot, a dead stepmother, a college degree (almost), several border crossings, a permanent residence application and a short stint with a married man for me to realise what she had been doing. When my baby is stillborn, I spend a week in bed before I discover it is physically possible, through an excruciatingly painful process, to purge memory forever. One has to accumulate memories of every size from every reachable time, and stockpile them so that the brain bulges and tires. Once saturated with them, the brain contracts like a muscle and the unwanted memory seeps out every which way it can. Ma was right: you would know if it is different from sweat, or tears, or piss. But Ma was wrong, too: this only works for memories, not for voices that do not require memories to sustain them. I never forget I had a baby, but I do not remember what I named it, or if I named it at all. I do not even remember its father’s face. The art project and the accompanying story that pays the first and last month’s rent for my apartment is a brain, shrivelled and painted grey from exhaustion, and a puddle of memories beneath it. The puddle is blue. I now wish I had left it colourless.
She asks me to tell her about my life between the letter she sent me at nineteen and my appearance in front of her at thirty-two. At least she can look at me now. She is even doing my nails.
I tell her about my music, which I inherited from my father, and about my migraines, which I inherited from her. I take off my hat and show her the strands of hair on my head that are already greying. I show her that my drawing has become my living but I do not tell her why. In the privacy of her room, I show her that my pubic hair has all turned white already. I tell her that Meela loves it. While she examines it in awe – hers is still a dark, dark black – I tell her that Meela says she loves me. I read the short passage cut and pasted neatly on the wall above her bed:
But water always goes where it wants to go,
and nothing in the end can stand against it.
Water is patient.
– Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
She sees where I am looking and tries to glue my attention to it – “That’s my plan” – but I keep talking, telling her my father is lonely and old. I do not mention my dead stepmother, but I show her where the scar used to be and after she asks and after I acquiesce, she licks its ghost. I tell her I have not been able to work in a long while, and that I am not sure I can go back to the things that have made my life. I do not tell her about the hours I spend shining a light into my belly button so I can find the dead skin to pick out. She asks me about my college years in South Africa, my growing years in Senegal and my now-years in Canada: What did you get your degree in? (I didn’t graduate); What is your furniture like? (mismatched and functional); What colour is your car? (I sold it, I was broke, it was green, I cycle now); What colour is your bike? (also green); Have you always lived alone? (I briefly lived with a lover in Senegal, he worked for the WHO); Do you have friends? (sometimes).
By this time there are tears in my voice, and I am sitting on the floor between her legs while she braids my hair. As gently as she touches my head, she says, “I need to get out of here.” At first I think she means her bedroom, and then I realise she means she needs out of Sunshine Memories. Perhaps this means I can never go back to Canada, but she hasn’t stopped talking. She is saying something about furniture.
“The house needs new furniture.” She has not seen the house in over twenty years. “The old furniture used to have fragments of my father and me living in its crevices, but he left mine in there. I want to get the rest of me back; I need to burn the furniture and let me out. And then the house will need new furniture, and we’re going to China to get it.”
I knew I had not wanted to hear her plan, but now it is sitting on my lap as if it were waiting for a hug and a kiss on its cheek. Already, I am tripping over the logistical hurdles in my head so I can rationalise out loud my inevitable rejection. She does not have a passport. She cannot apply for one as long as she is committed. I cannot get one for her because she is still legally under the charge of a man she has not seen or heard from in over a decade. Everything will need money – I have money, but barely enough for import charges and plane tickets and this is all impossible, I don’t even know why I am giving it this much thought like I am trying to convince myself, I just need to tell her no.
“How do you plan to get to China?” I hear myself asking, although I can guess at the answer already.
In my first year in South Africa, I had travelled to Grahamstown for an arts festival, where I watched a play about Makhanda, the Xhosa prophet. In the midst of their struggles against the British in the early 19th century, Makhanda believed that the god of the black people – Mdalidiphu, the god of the Deep – would finally help the Xhosa overcome the white people’s conquest. The white people, he said, were held in disfavour by their own god, Thixo, who had banished them from their homeland across the waters for murdering his son. At the height of the war in 1819, Makhanda led the Xhosa in an attack against the British at their garrison in Grahamstown. They were defeated, and three months after the siege, Makhanda surrendered himself and was imprisoned on Robben Island. But like many in that fated prison, he didn’t stop struggling. On Christmas Day of that year, Makhanda and thirty other men escaped the island by boat. But somewhere along the nine-kilometre stretch between the island and the mainland, the boat capsized, and Makhanda drowned. Many of the amaXhosa refused to believe he was dead: his funeral rites were only observed fifty years later, because his people still thought he would return.
Maybe he did, I thought, after I had watched the play.
When I eventually got back to Cape Town from that trip, Ma’s letter for me was waiting. I filled my reply with stories I thought would not matter to her. I told her about the drowned prophet. She never forgot about him.
“The distance between the ports of Djibouti and Mawei is 6305 nautical miles. The voices know the way, they will take me.” She says this with such conviction that I am finally forced to tell her that she is being ridiculous. “I do not want to die here, love,” she says as stoically as she can, which is not at all, and I tell her she does not have to, but also that she is not going to China. I promise to speak to my father about getting her out, but we both see the problem: the only place she would have to go is the house with the chairs and beds and cupboards she refuses to return to if she cannot destroy them. I promise to look into getting new furniture, even though I know that is not the point.
Perhaps it is because her eyes harden that I miss the desperation. My father comes into the kitchen two nights later, as I pull three loaves of banana bread out of the oven.
“She finally found her way out.”
I age quickly. Now it is six years since she set her own bed on fire and disappeared, and every day, I want to look for her. That same night, over slices of banana bread, my father and I sat at the dining table, that she had made, and decided against it. I told him she was going to China. He told me – I had never known this – about her hydrophobia, which I still think is a little silly. Who has ever heard of a mermaid afraid of water? I told him she was as much water now as the voices in her ears were. We told the police so that we could look concerned, but we knew they would never even try to find her. “There is too much crazy out there already for us to do anything about it,” the inspector’s eyes said, while his mouth promised she would not get past the border, even if she made it that far. It was late, so we did not contradict him.
We got rid of the furniture, and then the house. He and I parted ways for good. I now have a copy of The Penelopiad and an online subscription to every newspaper and magazine from Eritrea, Djibouti and Ethiopia I can find, but I have never actively sought her out. I convince myself that if she emerges somewhere, the people of that place cannot miss her and they will be unable to resist her, even though it is unreasonable to think so. In the years between the flowerpot and Laura Mvula on the radio, she had become less and less extraordinary.
Hans Christian Andersen once wrote about a beautiful, young woman on a ship, who is instructed to kill the man she loves when he marries another woman so that she may live. She cannot bring herself to do it, though, so at sunrise she throws the knife out to sea, kisses the man’s forehead and flings herself overboard. She expects to turn into foam, perhaps the way the woman in Tse’s story turns into a fish, or the way the waves in Ma’s ears turned into voices.
Instead, the young woman becomes the wind, a daughter of the air. If Ma and her voices do not make it to China, I hope they at least find their way under the gaze of a sun hot enough to make them evaporate.