Ancestor Stones (40 page)

After a bit I began to explore my surroundings. This had been my favourite hiding place when I was a child. I'd lie on top of my mother's belongings, waiting for someone to come and find me, as scared of being discovered as of not being found at all. When the lid finally opened above me, I screamed and screamed. Still, I went back, over and over, to hide in the same place. I didn't think anyone would imagine I would be so stupid as to choose such an obvious place. My double bluff never worked. I prayed it would work this time.

I ran my fingertips around the sides of the box. It was well
made, solid and strong. We were more or less the same age, and yet I was the one who'd begun to sag and creak. The box on the other hand had only grown more handsome with the years: the richness of the patina, the worn-smooth surface. I had become so used to it over the years, I'd stopped seeing it, but it was a very elegant box.

I came across a knot in the wood and explored it with my fingers. It was grainy, at odds with the feel of the rest. I scratched it with my fingernail and felt it crumble. I reached up and took a pin from my hair and began to dig at the place. The knot wasn't wood at all, but some sort of plaster, probably where the carpenter had plugged the place where a knot had fallen through. I scratched away like a mouse until I had made myself a spyhole. It was a little high, I had to push myself up on one elbow, but it was better than nothing.

There was more light now, a circular beam coming in through the spy hole. I followed the beam to the other side of the box where it revealed a series of markings: vertical cuts, where somebody had scored the wood with a knife. Two rows of ten, one above, one below. A carpenter's trademark? Perhaps the box had been made using wood from something else. I ran my thumbnail across the rows, backwards and forwards, making a vibrating sound like a musical instrument.

Now I remembered. As a young girl, watching my mother. Every year, on the day we ate the first rice of the new harvest, going to her room where the great chest stood. With a sharp knife she would score the wood in the same place every year. Every year for ten years. Ten anniversaries. Ten birthdays. Asana and Alusani. Then Alusani died and stole her happiness to take with him back to the other world.

Rofathane. I had fought so hard to leave all that behind. And yet.

We had a herbalist, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a birth attendant and a boy who never grew old. Soothsayers prepared us for the unexpected. Teachers travelled to us, bringing the word from Futa Djallon. People who wanted to live in Rofathane had first to find a patron and then to ask permission to settle. There existed an order,
an order in which everybody had their place. An imperfect order. An order we understood.

A lullaby came to me, one my mother used to sing:

Asana tey k' kulo
,

I thonto, thonto
,

K' m'ng dira
.

Asana, don't you cry,

I'll rock you, rock you,

Until you sleep.

I hummed softly to myself, and as I did so I began to rock back and forth, growing sentimental, a wet-eyed, foolish old woman. I thought of my mother and father, sleeping safely in their graves. I thought of Osman, of Ngadie. I hoped Kadie and Ansuman were still in Guinea and that they would hear what was happening and not come back. I feared for Alpha.

Voices! Ugly, bold, challenging. They seemed to come from all directions. Voices and the sound of running feet. The feet were bare, I remember that because there was something oddly unthreatening in the way they patted the earth.

I put my eye to the spyhole, and looked left and right.

Two men and a woman came into view. Walking high on the balls of their feet. The woman and one of the men were carrying guns, resting them upright against their shoulders, fingers on the trigger. Just like they do in the cinema. The other man carried a machete and smoked a cigarette. They were looking this way and that, all around them, as they advanced.

Such strange garb, they were dressed like children who had found a dressing-up box. A pair of ladies' sunglasses. Amilitary-style jacket with gold epaulettes. A red bra. Jeans. Camouflaged trousers. A T-shirt with the face of a dead American rapper. A necklace of bullets. Around their necks and wrists dangled charms on twisted strings. They were talking to others I couldn't see, but their talk was unintelligible to me. I thought at first it was some
strange tongue, the kind we made up as children. But every now and again a fragment of the exchange occurred in my own language. Gradually I realised that I was listening to several languages being spoken at once.

I had left the back door to my house open. This was how I could see what was going on. I expected my neighbours had bolted theirs before they fled, and sure enough a moment later I heard the sound of wood splintering, of a door being broken from its hinges.

Beneath the cooking pot in the yard the embers of the fire throbbed faintly. One of the intruders raised the lid of the cooking pot. Good, I had wanted them to find the food. I saw him dip his fingers into the sauce, he made a joke to the others.

I pulled my eye back from the spy hole. The other man was wandering dangerously close to the house. I listened to his steps as he approached the door, heard him carefully cross the threshold, the click of his weapon. My heart thudded, my breaths came short and fast. Surely he could hear me, I thought. I cowered inside the box, waiting for the lid to open. They would kill me straight away, of that I was certain. An old, crippled woman, there was not much sport to be had with me. Softly, the footsteps came closer, inches now from my head. I held my breath.

He stopped, swivelled, turned. He had spotted the jewellery on the table. The chink of metal as he turned over the pieces and began pocketing them. The sounds must have alerted the others, I heard them coming to see what he was doing. I listened in the dark as they began to squabble over my possessions.

Somewhere in the distance a voice shouted orders. The three looters snatched up the remainder of the jewellery and began to move off. I put my eye to the spyhole, watched their backs as they disappeared. I lay back and breathed out.

I slept. I woke. I slept again. A serpentine dream wove its way through my mind. Dreams of discovery. Dreams of death. I slipped in and out of consciousness and woke struggling for air. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. For a moment I had forgotten where I was. My body was damp, pools of sweat had gathered on the floor of the box. Something had woken me. I could hear
scattered gunfire. From outside came the smell of burning straw. I peeped out of my spyhole. Against the darkness, a halo of flickering light: fire from flaming houses

In the yard a stone ricocheted. A figure appeared carrying a burning brand. It lit up his features, turning his nostrils into black holes, his eyes into dark hollows. With silent steps he crossed the yard, making for my neighbour's house.

The hours passed. I must have lost track of time. The next I knew the three from before were back. I listened as they slit the throats of my chickens and roasted them over the fire. The contents of my cooking pots were passed around. More people came, bringing loot from the surrounding houses. Evidently they had broken into the bottle store. There was music and much rough laughter. Different smells drifted into the box: the sour smell of unwashed bodies, rum fumes and the scented smoke of marijuana.

Hamdillah, how I prayed. I don't deny it. Not at all. To the gods of Islam and Christianity, to every god in the skies plus any others I might not have thought of. Would they set fire to my house when they had taken what they wanted? Would I die of thirst trapped in my hiding place? Somewhere my fate was already cast in stones.

Have you ever wondered what it is that makes people do terrible things? I have. Since that day, I have set my mind to it many times. All the stories of supernatural beings and yet those men and women out there were not so different from me, only that something inside them had been unleashed. So, where does it come from, the fury? A thousand indignities, a thousand wrongs, like tiny knife wounds, shredding a person's humanity. In time only the tattered remnants are left. And in the end they ask themselves — what good is this to me? And they throw the last of it away.

At dawn, finally, they slept. I listened to the sound of their snoring. I didn't dare let myself fall asleep again in case I snored too, or cried out in my dreams. The sun was halfway up the sky and the temperature inside the box was rising rapidly by the time they had woken up. Through my circular window I watched them rouse themselves, collect up their weapons and as much of their stolen booty as they could carry, and stumble away like sleepwalkers.

I waited two hours more, then I opened the lid of the box and climbed out. I plunged my arm into the water jar and retrieved the bundle. I allowed myself a few sips of water before I picked my way across the yard, through the banana grove and into the trees. I kept on walking. I left the path. I crossed the boundary into the sacred forest. It was a forbidden place, but what did that matter now? Things had changed, perhaps for ever. The old order had gone, those rules no longer applied. I had to find Adama, to help bring her baby into this world.

With me I carried my gifts for the baby. But what would I say to her? How would I explain that her great-grandmother, who had lived for longer than eighty years, had learned nothing at all, had no knowledge to give? That she had arrived in a world where suddenly we were all lost, as helpless as newborns.

Kuru Massaba made the world and placed it upon the head of a great giant. This is what Pa Yamba told me once. Every day the giant turned himself slowly from east to west and then slowly turned himself back again. People lived on the earth and should have been happy, for everything they needed was there. But they fought among themselves and their anger caused pain to the giant in the form of terrible headaches. He shook his head to free himself of the torment and brought down great storms that only tormented him more. In time the pain became unbearable. The giant lay down, grew sick and died, the world became dark.

This is what we know happened to the world. I told Mr Lockheart this story. And this is the story I will tell you, the last one.

‘Go on, Mary,' he said.

Kuru was angry. So angry he turned his face away. But when he heard the distress of the dying people on the darkened earth, his heart softened. He forgave them, he placed the world upon the head of another giant who turned from east to west every day. He pushed all the bad spirits into the underworld, and gave the rest of the world to human beings, because he loved them. But Kuru is disappointed again, because we will not love him the way he wishes to be loved.

Sometimes the giant stumbles. You can feel it. He is weakening. Every time he stumbles the earth is shaken, it crumbles and cracks. The spirits in the darkness down below are woken.

‘What will happen then, Mary?' Mr Lockheart liked to use my
name a great deal, and to look me in the eye as he did so. I had expected this, I wasn't offended by it. I quite liked him.

I replied: ‘If you would like to call me by my name, it is Mariama.'

‘I will, if that's what you would like. I thought Mary was your Christian name. Why do you call yourself Mariama?'

Yes, Mary is my
Christian
name. That's exactly what it is. That's all it is.

Mariama was the name given to me. The nuns took it away and replaced it with something that sounded like my name, that I learned to answer to. It was easier to remember, they said. For whom? I might have asked. And why did I need a name that was easy to remember? Perhaps they thought we weren't worth the effort. Or that it was presumptuous of a little pagan baby to walk through life trailing a name of four syllables, flagrantly, like an ermine cloak or a silk scarf, something that should only be worn by the most important people. But Mary wasn't mine. It never had been. Mariama was the name my mother had chosen for me.

Some of this I said out loud. Some I kept to myself.

Mr Lockheart nodded: ‘I see. Mariama it is. And you must call me Adrian.'

He glanced down at the desk, I could see he wanted to pick up his pen and make some notes about me. He wasn't sure. Now he was masking his hesitation by pretending to look like he was thinking about something. He was new, had only been here a few months. But he thought that if he was calling me by my first name, I should call him by his. They all did that, so they could feel they were treating us like equals.

As a matter of fact, if it were up to me I would tell him to call me
Aunty
Mariama. Because at his age he ought to show a little respect. That's if it were up to me. But it isn't.

I think of that giant turning slowly round. From east to west, from west to east. Endlessly revolving. I wonder if that is why our lives so often end up in the same place they began? Because life is not a
straight line, just as the earth isn't flat. You don't walk and walk until you reach a place you know is the end. Like the Europeans once believed. They thought if they sailed their ships towards the horizon they would plummet off the end in a cascade of water. Then came Galileo. And after that they found us here, clinging on to the curve of the earth. What took them so long? I sometimes wonder. We knew the earth was round long before that.

No, life isn't a straight line. It is a circle, whose slow and gentle bend we fail to spot, until we realise we are back where we started. I don't know when I realised I knew this, but it was some time before I met Adrian Lockheart.

The next time, Adrian Lockheart asked: ‘Do you believe in ghosts?'

‘You mean like the Holy Ghost.'

‘Are you teasing? It's OK if you are. I don't mind. And I take your point, Mary.'

‘Mariama.'

‘Mariama.' A pause. ‘I mean ghosts, spirits, devils.'

He is trying to understand, and despite myself I would like to help him. He has read newspapers and scholarly reports about us. And he has been talking to the others who come here. He will have been out drinking with them, which I know is where he was last night. I saw him: leaning across the table, hovering above the pools of beer stretched out on the plastic. He is the new boy. The others enjoy the fact, they can pretend to be old Africa hands. Tales of cannibals and juju. If ever they see a shadow of scepticism on his face they shake their heads knowingly. ‘I'm telling you. Just like that. Dead. Convinced someone had placed a curse on him, doesn't matter how educated. I've seen it before. Rwanda. The Congo.'