Ancestor Stones (38 page)

The stand-off could not last for ever, but it lasted just long enough. Minutes later, out of the darkness — the sound of an engine. Yaya! He had spent the day waiting, listening to the nonews coming from the radio, knowing the less that was said the worse things must surely be. When night arrived he collected his car keys and stepped out of the house and drove through the streets, not daring to switch on the headlights, until he reached our polling station. Together we loaded the ballot boxes into the back of the Peugeot under the sullen stares of the soldiers, and though every moment we thought that they might stop us or that some authorisation might arrive to arrest us, deep down we knew we had called their bluff. We were not street boys, but three middleaged citizens. The truth is, once we were no longer afraid, there was nothing they could do.

At the counting centre, Redempta, Yaya and I, we handed over the boxes to a white woman wearing a T-shirt printed with the words: ‘INTERNATIONAL OBSERVER' in bold letters. And after our mission was complete, we drove home through the dark, silent streets, laughing as we went.

Oh, Redempta! My dear, Redempta. She lived long enough to see how all our efforts had been wasted. Even as we sat chained to our
ballot boxes, on the other side of the country people with telltale purple thumbs were having their hands sliced off, to punish them for daring to insist upon their own leader. The Army handed over power with one hand, only to seize it with the other a year later. Old enemies created new factions and joined together against a common foe, us: the women and the children and the ordinary people. The new President, who was an old man, shook his head, climbed into his waiting helicopter and disappeared into the clouds. From those same clouds a maelstrom was unleashed, and of the many lives destroyed by its rage, one was Redempta. Murdered, alongside her husband, her children and countless others, the day the rebel army stormed the city.

I had a dream. In that dream I was playing with my children in the sun, not a cloud in the sky. I looked up, and high above me I saw the ghost of Janneh. From the top of the escarpment he was waving at me and shouting, but he was too far away for me to catch the words, so I smiled and waved back at him. A cloud crossed in front of the sun, for a moment I could hardly see him, I let my hand drop back to my side. Janneh was still calling to me. But it was too late, too late! The gathering winds swept his words away and hurled them out to sea.

And from somewhere in the distance, I heard the first, faint roll of thunder.

Five months earlier I had woken to a dawn the colour of steel. The curious light lasted through the morning and into the day as if the sun had never risen. The land glowed in silvery shades. Here and there pools of quivering light rested upon the side of a house, on the great leaves of the vine that climbed the wall around my yard. In the middle of the day I looked up at the sky expecting to see clouds, instead I saw the sun, a white disc.

A hawk dropped out of the sky and drank from a puddle of water. A superstitious person might have made something of it, otherwise nothing else remarkable happened. My granddaughter had baked black banana bread and she brought me a piece of it on a dish with a glass of water, staying to keep me company. My appetite had waned as I had grown older, and I covered the dish with a cloth, telling her I would enjoy it later. We spoke little, content in each other's company. I liked simply to watch her liquid movements: flicking a fly with the corner of her dress, fanning her face with her hand, twirling the end of a plait. She sat on the step with one leg stretched out in front of her, the other bent, her cheek resting upon the knee, facing away from me. In the half-light of that day I gazed at the back of her neck, the soft furrow that ran from the nape of her neck down between her shoulder blades; from behind the curve of her waist belied the child she was carrying, just now beginning to show in the roundness of her stomach. With each passing week the birthmark above her navel widened and stretched.

Adama had been eleven years old when her great-grandmother died. Too young to really remember, old enough not to have forgotten. She had loved my mother fearlessly. In a way I had never been able.

When she was three, ignoring Kadie, her own mother, she strode with tiny steps up to her great-grandmother and demanded loudly to be taken to the toilet. My mother threw up her hands and stared aghast, as though she had never cared for a child in her life. Kadie quickly led the child away. But my mother had been amused. The girl called her Ya Mama and sometimes Yammy, and my mother encouraged it.

I know, it's the oldest story in the world. The fresh spirit who frees one that has been bottled too long.

She had been away when Ya Mama died. And she had appeared to accept it as children do when they have yet to learn the meaning of for ever. Years later she began a game, which she played obsessively for a while. I came to think of it as the ‘remember' game.

‘Remember when that bird landed on Yammy's shoulder …'

‘Remember when I made her coffee …' Mud and river water, mixed together in a tin cup. My mother had been fooled into taking a hearty swig. Later, in the mornings, real cups of coffee just as I had brought to my own grandmother a long time ago. Afternoons, they napped together on the four-poster bed that once belonged to my father.

‘Remember Ya Mama's feet …' My mother took care of her feet, soles as smooth as paper, nails dipped weekly in henna. When she could no longer bend to reach them Adama buffed the undersides with pumice.

We would sit for hours sharing memories: fleeting, brightly coloured, sometimes surrounded by darkness, passing them back and forth until I was no longer certain whose were whose. She lent me her own memories of childhood with which to remember my mother.

We had played the game the day before for the first time in a long while. Sorting reminiscences the way we had baby clothes.
Storing some and putting others aside for the new baby, creating space for new things. That afternoon, though, there was no game. We sat together in a sleepy silence, I watched her head sink, listened to her breathing come in slow sighs.

I stood up to fetch a cloth to fold under her head. On my way I reached for the plate of banana bread. Hali! The plate seemed suddenly as heavy as if it was made of iron. My arm dropped. The plate slipped from my fingers, clattered and spun on the stone floor. Adama, startled, leaped to her feet. The heaviness slid down the side of my body into my leg. I tried to take a step, but I couldn't pick my foot up off the floor. Falling, I felt myself falling. With my other hand I reached for the table and missed. Through the gathering darkness I saw Adama hurrying towards me as I toppled forward.

Later I realised it had been haunting me, stalking me all that day: the steel-grey light — I would forever see the world in shadowy twilight. A doctor was called, a quack who gave me headache pills. Then a proper doctor who had studied in China. And he told me I had had a stroke.

I still went to the store. Adama pushed me in a wheelbarrow. The roads were too rutted to allow a wheelchair to pass. Kadie wanted me to stay home and rest. But I missed the smell, the feel of the place. ‘When did you ever see a mother sleep while her child was crying?' I told her. There was always work to do. On days when Kadie went to visit our other shops, I worked the till with my one good hand while Adama climbed the stepladder to bring down the cloths.

My sister Hawa came to see me. Looked at me with sad eyes and shook her head. ‘Nothing happens for nothing,' she pronounced with hidden pleasure. I gave a wave of my good hand, dismissing her. There's a certain kind of person who can always find an explanation for things that happen. My sister was one of those. Something bad befalls somebody they don't like and they say that person must have brought it upon themselves. When precisely the same fate comes their own way, this time it's a spirit bringing bad luck. A person they envy prospers only because that person made a
bargain with a powerful spirit. But when they lose their own business, is it because they didn't work hard enough or because they ate all the proceeds and failed to reinvest them? Of course not. It is a
moriman's
curse, purchased by a rival!

The doctor had explained to me exactly how it happened. A blood clot stopped up one of my arteries so the blood couldn't reach my brain. Like a dam in a river. Even I could understand that. He wrapped a rubber tube around my arm and took my blood pressure, tested my pee for diabetes, wrote a prescription and ordered me to cook with less palm oil.

I took advantage of my state not to offer Hawa anything that might encourage her to stay. She only ever visited when there was something she needed. This time, though, she seemed to want to stay for ever. I peered into her shadowed face.

When had this secret war between us begun? I wondered.

Five months later, though, her words came back to me. Terrible things began to happen to all of us. It was as though the end of the world had come. The earth crumbled, the sky rained down, people fled for their lives.
Nothing happens for nothing
. I wanted to straighten my crooked body, I wanted to stamp the earth, raise both my fists and scream at the skies.

What in the world had we all done to deserve such a fate?

When I think back now, we kept the knowledge a secret, even from ourselves.

Lorries travelling roads in the South were held up by gunmen who hauled the driver down from his cab, thieved the goods from the back of his vehicle and carried them away into the forest. They set fire to the lorry, sometimes roping the driver to the wheel. Other times slicing off his ears and stealing his shoes before leaving him to walk home. A band of miners were marched away from their workplace and not sighted until months later when they appeared on the other side of the country. Their kidnappers never said who they were or what it was they wanted. There were rumours of tattooed strangers who arrived in towns and moved among the people, members of a secret clan, whose mark was worn by the women under one breast
and by the men on the buttock. They looked just like you or I, it was said, some spoke in languages nobody could understand. They disappeared as quickly as they came. There were stories of young men and women who slipped away to join them. The youths' families claimed their children had been stolen and scoured the countryside. Then there were other stories, ones that made your eyes stretch. Of beings that could become invisible, that could fly, leap over houses, that gathered to dine on the hearts of their victims from whence they derived their supernatural powers. There came a time when everybody had heard these stories, some had even claimed to have witnessed them with their own eyes.

Yet who the strangers were, nobody could say.

Members of the ancient clans, the leopard and the crocodile, outlawed for many decades but still continuing their fearful practices, said some. Others insisted such feats were beyond the power of mortal man. And others still said everybody else was talking nonsense, these deeds were the acts of the Army, devious in their hunger for power.

On the radio a Government spokesman reassured us. Small groups of insurgents were at work in some parts of the country. The Army was involved in a series of mopping-up operations, they said. He made it sound as harmless as spilled milk.

What an insurgent was, nobody knew. Then somebody said it was another word for rebel. Rebel!

People whose children had vanished hid their faces. People reporting fresh disappearances had their homes turned over, the roofs torched. People fell silent, dared not open their mouths to speak. There was a stillness in the air. From the outside it looked like calm, but beneath the surface were turbulent, invisible currents: fear, suspicion, confusion.

Still, life continued, for none of us had the luxury of pausing. For many years that was the way we lived. Finding scapegoats. Turning our faces from the truth.

A rooster used to call false dawns all through the night. I remember because when I woke up his voice was the first sound I heard. By
then I had begun to find myself more and more a stranger to sleep. I knew I'd be awake now until morning. It was age, of course, and an effect of my condition. I couldn't keep my eyes open after lunch, only to be awake in the early hours, lying on my back, alone and floating unhinged upon a tide of darkness. That particular morning I woke with a full bladder. Impossible to wait for morning and Adama to come and help me. I put out my hand, felt for my stick, knocking it to the floor. I groped, found it with my fingers and hauled myself up.

Outside the air was cool, damp. I made my way slowly, inching forward with my now sideways walk, like a crab across the ground.

I didn't bother to go all the way to the latrine. I urinated out of doors, something I liked to do: the feel of the air on my thighs, the breeze murmuring in the trees, the smell of damp grass, the sound of the night birds interrupted by the hiss of steaming piss. I pulled up my
lappa
. It amused me to think I was doing something possible only under the disguise of the night. What, I sometimes wondered, would happen if I were to do the same thing in the middle of the day? They would think I had finally gone mad, but men do it all the time, don't they?

Ah, my eyes, my twilight eyes. But for them I would have noticed sooner.

I urinated with my back to the house. I closed my eyes, savoured the weakness that follows the release. Finished, I opened my eyes and squatted there, in no hurry to go back inside, slowly generating the energy to stand up. My eyes rested on the horizon. I blinked. I squinted. Looked again. Brilliant dancing lights of orange, green and gold in the east. Not the warm glow of a bush fire, these were flashing lights, more like Chinese fireworks. I looked up at the night sky and saw the moon still high above me. I stood up, watched the shifting hues of this unearthly display. For a long time I was still, not knowing what to do.