The Tomorrow-Tamer (27 page)

One afternoon Captain Fossey sent for Adamo. The bandmaster sat in his office, his puffy hands fiddling with an assortment of papers on his desk. Adamo stood smartly to attention.

“I wanted to see you,” Captain Fossey began, pulling a few hairs out of his ginger moustache, “because I'll be leaving soon. Posted back to England.”

He wondered if Adamo would express regret at his leaving. The boy looked puzzled but that was all. Annoyed at himself for having bothered to think of it, Captain Fossey continued more brusquely.

“A lot of officers are being posted, with independence coming up. You'll have your own chaps as officers, God help you. Thought I'd better get this settled before I go. Your five years' service time is up this month.”

Adamo's face retained its composure. He stood very straight, his big hands loose at his sides, his patient eyes waiting.

“Yes, sah.”

Adamo's comprehension of English was slight at the best of times, but now, with Captain Fossey's apparent agitation, he could not understand one word. He was anxious and upset because he sensed these feelings in the bandmaster. But he was still confident that the way would be revealed and he would discover what was expected, what task would be required to restore the harmonious order of things.

Captain Fossey sighed. Having hankered for England so long, he now found he did not want to return. He remembered the damp and the cold, the cockiness and terrifying poise of the English bandsmen. Nostalgically, he recalled the ease of his life here, the devotion of men like Adamo. Would Adamo show the same loyalty to the next bandmaster?

“You can always sign up again, but I don't know that I'd advise it, Adamo. Army's liable to undergo all sorts of changes. One just doesn't know what will happen. Men promoted far too fast, from the ranks. I shouldn't say it, perhaps, but there it is. You've shown a talent for highlife. Not long ago I met the
leader of a local highlife band, and–well, actually, I put in a word for you. He's short of a drummer. You can find him any evening at the Moon Club.”

It seemed to Adamo that the matter could not be such a heavy one after all, for Captain Fossey had calmed now. Adamo relaxed also and was enabled to catch words here and there, like small slippery fish in the hands. Moon Club–he knew that place. It was full of soft mocking girls and gaudy men whose knife eyes Adamo did not trust. Then he understood the command. That place was to be henceforth forbidden.

Captain Fossey glanced up expectantly. “Well, what do you say?”

“Yes, sah,” Adamo said agreeably. Then, after a pause and because the officer seemed to be waiting for something more, “I t'ank you, sah.”

The bandmaster smiled and waved a nonchalant hand.

“Oh, that's all right. You deserve it, Adamo.”

When Appiah, who was now a major, handed over the discharge papers, Adamo frowned questioningly.

“I beg you, sah–what dis t'ing?”

“Discharge papers,” Appiah said irritably, for he was over-worked these days. “You know, you applied for them through Captain Fossey.”

He looked up, about to dismiss the man curtly, but when he saw Adamo's face he changed his mind and spoke in Adamo's own language.

“You are free to leave the army now. You signed on for five years, and the time is over. Captain Fossey said he thought you could get work with a highlife band. That's all. You can go.”

Slowly, Adamo put the papers in his pocket. Then he saluted and left Major Appiah's office without a word.

He walked back to the barracks, and it was almost night. Tribes of white egrets were flying back to the baobab trees where they slept. Through the clash and clatter of the city's cars and voices, the families of frogs in the nearby lagoon could be heard beginning the throaty trilling that would go on until morning. The thin screeching of the cicada clan came from the
niim
branches now stirring with the first breeze of evening. The bandsmen had left the barracks for dinner. Adamo entered quietly and sat down on his cot.

He sat without moving, his arms limp at his sides. Finally he rose and pulled out his kitbag. He went through it, touching its contents lightly with his hands, pocketing a few things apparently at random, leaving others. Then, as though tiring of it, he shoved it away and went out of the barracks, as deliberately as he had entered. And now, outside, it was dark.

Adamo walked across the parade ground, down a road fringed with well-trimmed bougainvillaea and gardens that boasted weak-coloured zinnias. His feet seemed heavy to him, not from his boots, for he had somehow forgotten that he wore boots, but as though they were encrusted with mud formed of dust and his own blood. His head hurt and his shoulders ached. No wonder, for he had been walking such a long time. He reached out one of his hands–that hard-skinned hand was Adamo's–and the plumed
niim
leaves came away in his fingers. He scattered the leaves on the road, some on this side, some on that side, as though they had been the sacred
summe
leaves scattered in the grove. He thought he cried out, but his voice made no sound.

There were no voices to be heard, neither around him nor inside his head. There were no people in this place, no known voices. None to tell or guide, none even to mourn.
Only his own voice which had strangely lost the power of sound, his silent voice splitting his lungs with its cry.

Captain Fossey's bungalow was set in a slight hollow, surrounded by flowering hibiscus with pink tongue-like petals. Adamo knocked, and when the steward-boy came, Adamo asked to see the officer.

Fossey came to the door in his bath-robe, a flowing sea-green silk. He was annoyed at being disturbed while dressing, but when he saw it was Adamo, his expression became a little milder, even anticipatory. His first thought was that Adamo had obtained the job and that he was coming now to express his gratitude.

It was his last thought as well, for within a second Adamo's knife had pierced the pink flesh of Captain Fossey's throat.

 

Major Appiah touched with distaste the iron bars of the cell door.
Iron, cold iron, is master of men all.
A line from something in school. This iron was slimily warm to the fingers. The whole place was stifling, the damp air foul with the stench of sweat and urine. Major Appiah tapped on the cell bars once more. The man lying in the cell lifted his head.

The officer searched Adamo's face, but Adamo was not there. The face might have been shaped of inert clay. All at once it mattered to Major Appiah to know.

“Adamo–why? Why?”

Adamo's voice was slow and even, and he spoke in his own tongue.

“He would have made me go. Now he is gone.”

Then Adamo's face, curiously striped by the iron bars, lost its empty look and his voice was a quick high cry of pain.

“What did I not do? All he spoke was done, that no evil would come. Was it not enough?”

Appiah could not reply, for Adamo's desolation was unreachable. Adamo stood silently for a moment. Then he cried out again, almost incredulously, as though he refused what he spoke.

“My father's knife–to spill his power? My hand, mine?” The voice faltered. “Oh, what may follow? You will tell me what I must do. I would not bring harm upon them all–tell Manu I would not do that. I will do whatever you say, whatever must be done. Only–”

In the anguished eyes a question burned and trembled. Finally he was able to express it.

“I will stay?”

Major Appiah had come to tell Adamo when the trial would be held, perhaps even to prepare the man for the inevitability of the verdict. But he said none of these things, for he saw now that they could make no difference at all. Adamo would discover soon enough what ritual would be required for restitution. Perhaps even that made little difference. It was not death that Adamo feared.

“Yes,” Major Appiah said, and as he spoke he became aware of a crippling sense of weariness, as though an accumulation of centuries had been foisted upon himself, to deal with somehow. “You can stay, Adamo. You can stay as long as you live.”

He turned away abruptly, and his boots drummed on the concrete corridor. He could bear anything, he felt, except the look of relief in Adamo's eyes.

 

A GOURDFUL OF GLORY

Y
ou could walk through the entire market and look at every stall, but never would you see calabashes and earthen pots any better than those sold by Mammii Ama. She was honest–true as God, she really was. You might claim that there were as many honest traders here as there were elephants, and Mammii Ama would understand your meaning, and laugh, and agree with you. But she would let you know she was the one old cow-elephant that never yet died off.

She was a petty trader. A few market women grew rich, and became queen mammies, but Mammii Ama was not one of these. She got by. She lived. Nobody ever got the better of her, but she wasn't one to cheat her customers. She handled good stock. She wasn't like some of those shifty mammies who bought cheap and sold at the regular price the gourd with the faint seam of a crack right in the bottom where you wouldn't notice it until the soup began to leak out. She never sold flawed pots and bowls, either, a bit damaged in the firing so that they broke if you laughed in the same room with them. Such a trick was not Mammii Ama's way. The odd cull, maybe,
she would admit. A few could always slip into a lot. You know how it is. A trader woman has to live, after all.

The cockerels, piercing the dawn grey with shrill and scarlet voices, awoke no earlier than Mammii Ama. Expertly, she bunched her fish-patterned cloth around her, bound on a headscarf of green and glossy artificial silk, and was ready for the day. She puffed the charcoal embers into flame, plonked on the tin kettle, brewed tea and ate some cold boiled yam.

Comfort was still lying curled up on the straw mat. One always hated to waken a sleeping child. Mammii Ama gently shook her grand-daughter, and Comfort sat up, dazed, like a parrot with all its feathers ruffled. She was soon dressed; not yet five years old, she wore only a shamecloth, a mere flutter of red and beaded rag around her middle and between her legs.

Then they were off. Wait–a last thought. Did Adua sleep peacefully? Was she covered? If you sweated, sleeping, you got a chill in your belly and you had pain passing water for evermore. Quiet as a watch-night, Mammii Ama padded across the hut to the iron cot where her snoring daughter lay. Adua was properly covered–the blanket was drawn up to her neck, and all you could see of her was her head with its wiry hair that she was always straightening with hot pull-irons, and her face, breathing softly and brown under its matting of white powder from the night before. Mammii Ama did not understand why her daughter daubed herself with talcum until she looked like a fetish priestess in a funeral parade. Many things about Adua were difficult to comprehend. The high-heel shoes, for instance, which hurt and were all but impossible to walk on. Teeter this way, lurch that–a fine business. The woman's ankle-bones would snap one of these days–but try to tell her. And the palaver about the name–a lunacy. Adua called herself Marcella, and insisted that everyone else do
the same. It was not like the grand-daughter's name. Comfort–a decent name. A mission name, true, but it had lived here a long time, until it seemed to have been African always. But Marcella–whoever heard of such a name? Mammii Ama couldn't bring herself to speak it. She called her daughter “moon woman” or “choice of kings”, and Adua, who was–you had to admit it–very vain, liked to hear those names as she preened herself.

Still, she was a good daughter. She brought home money–worked all night for it. A club girl, she was, at the Weekend In Wyoming, and Mammii Ama loved her more dearly than life, and felt for her a shy and surprised pride, for the daughter was certainly a beauty, not a cow-elephant like her mother.

Mammii Ama looked once more on the powdered and sleeping face, then she was gone, shutting quietly behind her the packing-case door of the mudbrick shanty.

Mammii Ama took the child's hand while they clambered onto the crowded bus. She paid her fare, and the bus, with a rumble like the belly of a giant, jolted off down the road and into the city.

The market was already filling with sellers. The best hunter got an early start, Mammii Ama would say. You'd never catch a fat cutting-grass by sleeping late. As she spread out her wares in front of her stall, Mammii Ama sang. She sang in pidgin, so that every passer-by, whatever his language, would understand.

 

“Mammii Ama sell all fine pot,

Oh oh Mammii Ama.

She no t'ief you, she no make palavah,

Oh oh Mammii Ama–”

 

And the girl child, squatting in dust as she arranged just-so the stacks of brown earthen bowls, the big-bellied black cooking-pots, added to the refrain her high and not-quite-true-pitched voice.

“Oh oh Mammii Ama–”

Everywhere there were voices, and sweet singing bodies. Everywhere the market women's laughter, coarse and warm as the touch of a tongue. It was still early, and the morning cooks had not yet arrived to buy vegetables and meat for the Europeans.

Moki was already perched atop his firewood. He wiped the rheum from his eyes with an end of his dirty turban. He was old, and his eyes ran mucus, especially in the morning. He was not a Muslim, but his nephew, who died of a worm in the guts, had been one, so Moki always wore a turban in memory of him. No one knew where Moki came from. He didn't know himself. He knew the name of his village, but not the country where it was, and he knew the names of his people's gods. He had come here who knows how long ago, with a Hausa caravan, and had somehow lost the trader who hired him to carry headload. Now he sold pieces of firewood, which he gathered each evening in the bush.

“Morny, Mistah Moki! I greet you!” Mammii Ama called, and the old man fake-bowed to her as though she were a queen mother.