The Famished Road

ONE

BECAME STRONGER. I ventured out into the street. It dawned on me that I had been granted a greater freedom, so long as I stayed alive. When I went out toplay it seemedthatsomethinghadalteredtheworld.Bushesandstrangeplantshad grown wild everywhere. The rain had beaten holes in the ground. Streets were unpassable for mud. Trees had fallen across paths and roads. Electric cables dangled in the air. I tried to wander – my feet had begun to itch – but water blocked off my attempts. The rain too had made the world smaller. In the forest the ground was thick with mud and yellow leaves and sacrificial offerings. I wandered about in the devastation of our area. It wasn’t much fun. The rain had completely joined whole streets to the marshland. All the streets in our area were once part of a river. As always, theriver god was claimingback his terrain.

And so with nowhere to go I was forced to be content with the distractions our street offered. As I had to avoid two places along our street I found them both quite magnetic. I climbed a tree, sat on a branch like an awkward bird, and watched both houses. Children were playing outside the blind old man’s bungalow. He was not around. His chair was on the verandah, soaked with rain. His window had been broken and the room seemed empty. Madame Koto’s bar was different. The barfront was covered in water and weeds. Planks on stones led to the bar. Her signboard was askew. The curtain strips had thinned and I could just about see in. Electric cables had been connected to her roof from a pole on the street. She was the only one who had this privilege. A few cars arrived at the barfront and blasted their horns. A great number of women came out of the bar, chattering and laughing. Dancing to strains of music, they filed across the planks. Madame Koto, her stomach bigger than ever, her right foot bandaged, came out and waved to them. The cars drove the women away.

Madame Koto paused at the door, and surveyed the world. Her white beads sat proudly round her neck. Soon her eyes fixed in my direction. She stared at me for a long time. Then, to my amazement, she started coming towards me. I tried to get down from the tree, but the branch caught the back of my shorts. I resigned myself to what she would do. Rolling the fat of her body with each measured step, avoidingthe treacherous puddles andmudholeswithoutseemingtodoso,shestrodeup tome.She was massive. The sheer weight of wrappers gave her a queer grandeur. There was an impressive new exhaustion on her face. She stood beneath the tree, fixing me with a stare, and said:

‘Azaro, what are you doing?’‘Nothing.’‘Do you think you are a bird?’‘No.’‘Why wereyoustaringatmejustnow?’‘I wasn’t.’‘Come down!’‘No.’She glared at me. Then, suddenly, she said:‘Whatwereyoudoinginmy dreams?’‘Nothing.’She made an attempt to catch hold of my feet, but I withdrew them. She jumped, landedbadly,hurtherfoot,andgaveup tryingtogetmetocomedown.Shesaid: ‘If I catch you in my dreams again I will eat you up.’ Then she hobbled back to her bar. When she had disappeared behind the curtain str4s her women came out and stared at me and made abusive signs. When they got bored with watching me I got down from the tree and went home.

Dad had returned early from work. He was bare-chested and sweating. He had attached a bag full of rags to the wall and was punching it. He looked at me, sweat pouring down his face, and said:

‘My son, your father is practising.’‘For what?’‘To be world champion.’He went on hitting the bundle, making the walls tremble, each punch vibrating the foundations of the house, grunts escaping from his mouth. He went on punchingthe bundle till a neighbour banged on the door. ‘What are you trying to do, eh?’ he shouted. ‘You want to break down the wall?

Goandjointhearmy insteadofdisturbingpeople!’

Dad stopped punching the bundle and began shadow-boxing. Each especially solid punch at the air was accompanied by the names of real or imagined enemies and a string of abuses. He jumped about, ducked, jabbed, threw upper cuts, feinted, and bobbed. Foam appeared on the sweat of his chest. He grew tired. He went and had a bath. When he came back I began to serve his food. He stopped me. He served the food himself. We ate together.

When we finished I went off to wash the plates. Dad sat in his chair, smoking. He was restless when I returned. I watched him silently. He looked at me every so often and smiled. Not long afterwards the landlord turned up. He didn’t knock. He pushed his way in, left the door wide open, and addressed his complaints to the whole compound.

‘They tell me you have been breaking down the walls! If you damage anything in my housethunderwilldestroy you.Andyoubetterstartgettingready tomoveaway.I am tired of your trouble!’

He stormed away. Dad carried on smoking. He hadn’t moved. When the landlord left Dadgot up,shut thedoor,andwentbacktohischair.Wedidn’tsayanythingtill Mum returned.

TWO

WE HAD NO idea how serious Dad was with his boxing. He began to train dementedly. Sometimes he would wake up at night and bob and counter-punch, hit and jab, swing punches and lash out at imaginary adversaries. In the mornings, before he chewed on his chewing stick, before he ate, he would work out all around the room. He would wake me up with his footwork and laboured breathing. I would look up fromthemat andseehisgiantfeetjumpingaroundmyhead,hiselbowsprotecting his face. He punched at the clothes-line, till the line snapped. He punched at flies and jabbedat mosquitoes.Hespecialisedinfightinghisownshadowasifitwerehismost hated antagonist. He would get me to stand on the bed and hold a folded towel for him. He would punch it from all angles. His movements became crab-like, and he developed the oddest upper cuts. The more he became involved in boxing, the more he ate. His appetite got so large that Mum pleaded with him to stop. We couldn’t afford the money, she said. Dad ignored her. We cut down on what we ate so he could build his body. He didn’t know that we did.

Itgotworse.Dadtooktosparringwiththeaironhisway towork.Onhisway back he did the same thing, shuffling, performing fancy footwork, executing kink jabs, throwingcombinations. Webegan to think somethingterriblewas happeningto him.

‘Poverty isdrivinghimmad,’Mumsaid.

People began to look at us as if we were freaks. The room became too small for Dad topractisein.Hehadby thenpunchedpractically everythinginsight.Hehadmade my matthreadbareby standingitagainstthewallandthumpingit.Hehadpunched holes in the mattress. He burst the bottom of one of Mum’s basins. He stopped listeningto anythinganyonesaid. Hebecameso engrossed in his obsession. We couldn’t understand it. But it was when he took to boxing on the verandah that we abandoned all attempts to comprehend what had seized hold of his brain. Something had changed in him. His eyes became cool, serene, fierce, and narrowed, all at once. He seemed to look at people as if they were transparent, insubstantial. His knuckles becamebigandrawfrombashingthebackyardwalls.Oneday Istumbledonhimin thebackyard. Hehad acloth round his fists and hewas hittingthewallwith allhis strength. He went on hitting till the white cloth was covered with his blood. Then he stopped.

‘To be a man is not a small thing,’ he would say to me.

His shadow-boxing, however, began to attract attention. When he punched walls in the backyard the women would appear round the well, on the slightest pretext. Fetching water without using it suddenly became fashionable with the married and unmarried women. Hedidn’t mind performingto thecrowd of women and children. But he got dissatisfied with the backyard because the water spilt on the floor made it difficult to do his footwork. One day he slipped and fell. The women laughed. The next eveningheshadow-boxed down thepassage. And that night, when hethought theworld was asleep, heresumed trainingin thecompound-front.

On thosenightsDadhadthebestsparringpartners.Hefoughtthewind,themidges, and the mosquitoes that rose from their millions of larvae all over the swamp of the road. I would wake at night and be aware immediately that he wasn’t in the room. It was the absence of his restless energy. I would rise, tiptoe out of the room, and go to the housefront. Like a hero of the night, alone, invincible, and always battling, Dad boxed all over the grounds. He always fought several imaginary foes, as if the whole world were against him. He fought these foes unceasingly and he always knocked them out. When they had hit the floor he would throw up his arms triumphantly. For me, then, he was the king of the ghetto nights. I would watch him for a long time. The night became safer for me. And while he trained I would wander our road. When he was around the night turned everything familiar into another country, another world. What a new place the night made the ghetto! The houses were still. There were no lights anywhere. The forest was a mass of darkness, a deep blue darkness, deeper than the surrounding night. The houses, the trees, the bushes, made of our road a curious mountain range. Thehouses werehumped likesleepingmonstersinthedark.Isolated trees were a cluster of giants with wild hair, sleeping on their feet. And the road was no longer a road but the original river. Majestically it unfolded itself in the darkness, one step at a time. It was when I wandered the road at night that I first became aware that sometimes I disappeared.

At first it frightened me. I would be walking along, never able to see far, and then I would pass into the darkness. I would begin to look for myself. I became a dark ghost. The wind passed through me. But when I kicked a stone, or tripped, or when a light shone on me, I would become miraculously reconstituted. I would hurry back to our housefront, where Dad was still training, unaware of my presence.

He seemed so solid on those nights. The darkness became his cloak and friend. His eyes burned bright. He talked to the wind and his voice was powerful; it had weight, it was the voice of a new man. When he had finished his training he would skip and shuffle about in fascinating footworks, calling himself Black Tyger. The name began to fit. I never saw him so radiant and so strong as when he practised at night. And it was through his night training that his name began to spread. When he shadow-boxed he began to attract strange kinds of attention. I was watching him one night, with mosquitoes swarming all over me, when I saw a single light come down the road and stop not far from him. The light was by itself. It was smaller than a matchlight, but it stayed there and watched Dad box with the darkness. As time passed the number of lights that watched him increased. One day I counted three of them.

‘Dad, therearethreelights watchingyou,’ I said.

‘What?’

He was startled to hear my voice. I guess it was the first time he realised that I was there.

‘What lights?’

I showed them to him, but he couldn’t see them.

‘It’s your eyes,’ he said, and went on with his boxing.

The lights watched him till he finished. They didn’t move. The wind had no effect on them whatsoever. When we went in I looked back. They were still there.

On another night Dad was training with a peculiar ferocity when I saw a bright yellow pair of eyes come from over the swamp. It stopped not far from Dad and watched his moves. Dad ducked, shuffled sideways, switched from an anchor punch to a right cross, from an upper cut to a hook punch and ended with a jab. I saw the eyes following him. The eyes studied him as he changed from orthodoxto southpaw stances. I went over to theyellow pair of eyes and found nothingthere. I went back to where I had been sitting and the eyes reappeared. They stayed watching Dad till he finished for the night. We left, I stole back, and the eyes were gone.

AnunusualthinghappenedthenextnightthatIstayedup watchingDad.Thelights turned up, one by one, as if they had a meeting, as if they were forming an earthly constellation. Then the yellow eyes came over from the swamp. And when Dad was taking a short break after the night’s first session, a huge man stepped out of the darkness. He was too big for me not to have heard his footsteps. It seemed he had stepped out of nowhere, out of a different space. I couldn’t see his eyes.

‘Who are you?’ he asked Dad. Dad sized him up.

‘My name is Black Tyger,’ Dad said, fearlessly.

‘Good.’

‘And who are you?’ Dad asked in return. The man chuckled.

‘They used to call me Yellow Jaguar,’ the man replied. ‘Good.’

‘So you will fight me?’

‘Yes,’ Dad said.

The man chuckled again.

‘Your fameis beginningto travel. But I willput an end to it.’

‘Don’ttalktoomuch,’Dadsaid,takingup asouthpawstance.

It worried me that I couldn’t see the man’s eyes. The two men circled one another. Dad lashed out at him and the man grunted. Dad hit him again on the face and this time Dad cried out.

‘You’re like wood!’ Dad said.

‘Now you’re talking,’ the man said, and struck Dad in the face.

Dad fell, rolled over, and landed in a puddle. The man waited for him. I still couldn’t see his face. Dad got up slowly, his head hanging. Suddenly he rushed the man. The three lights dispersed at the assault. Then I noticed that many other lights of different colours had appeared. The two men fell in another puddle. They picked themselves up. Dad hit the man with all his might. The man grunted again and Dad cried out.

‘You’re like a tree!’

The man launched a barrage of punches at Dad. And I saw Dad ducking, parrying, shuffling, blocking with his elbows, bobbing and weaving, but he didn’t give way, or give ground. Then Dad, planting his feet solidly, let out a continuous animal cry, a wounded cry, and unleashed an onslaught of wild blows. He rained them down on the man. He released a veritable hurricane of combinations, of swinging punches, wild hooks, vicious crosses, crackling upper cuts. I saw the man rush backwards, I saw his head lower, his arms helpless. Dad didn’t stop his cry till he had beaten the man into theswamp.My spiritsliftedwithpride.Andthenthedarkness,seemingtorisethicker from the swamp, covered them both. There was silence. I waited. I heard nothing. I saw nothing. Then after a while I heard feet trampingthrough mud. Dad emerged and slouched towards me.

‘Where is the man?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Dad said, his voice heavy with exhaustion. ‘He disappeared in the swamp.’

And then I heard someonekickingin themud. Then amighty voice,speakingwith the power of the darkness, rose and said:

‘I have just started!’

And the man, all thunder and density, came rushing back into the fight. As he pounded towards Dad, emerging from the darkness, two things struck me about him: he was covered completely in mud, and his eyes burned yellow. He descended on Dad like a whirlwind, a mistral, a tornado. He shattered Dad’s defences. He anticipated Dad’severy movement.AndheknockedDadabouttheplace,cuttinghimdownwith swift punches and combinations, merciless blows, blinding and accurate counter-punches. Dad fell under the savage assault like a puppet. The man had become a ferocious energy, an unnatural force of nature, a storm. Like the five fingers of lightningover theforest, heappeared everywhereat thesametime.

‘Your eyes are too bright!’ cried Dad.

And then I realised that the yellow pair of eyes had joined on to the man.

‘I amamad Jaguar!’ theman boasted, andpouredafrighteningtorrentofblowson Dad.

The man went on beating Dad, pulverising him, crushing him with an avalanche of ceaseless punches. I could see Dad falling around in exhaustion and bewilderment. There was a terrified and cowardly look in his eyes. Blood poured down the sides of his noseand thecorners of hiseyes.Dadwastakingacruelbeatingbuthedidn’tturn around and run. He took the blows. He absorbed them. He withstood them. He soaked them into his body and spirit. I heard the wrenching of his neck. I heard the rattle of his teeth whenever the man’s knuckles connected with them. I heard the grinding crunch of fists on bone. Dad cried out and groaned. And then he cowered. With his fists barely held up, Dad bent low, as if he were grovelling. The man towered over him, his yellow eyes steaming in the darkness. And then Dad crouched. He made the movements of a trapped wild animal. Then, slowly, he moved this way and that, swaying, hands in front of him like a praying mantis. Then I saw how Dad was transforming. Hewas goingback to simplethings.Hewasgoingbacktowater,tothe earth, to the road, to soft things. He shuffled. He became fluid. He moved like a large cat. Sliding backwards, he entered into the midst of the gathered arabesque of lights. I felt a great strange energy rising from him. He was drawing it from the night, and the air, the road, his friends. The man closed in on him and Dad went on dancing backwards, shuffling, floating on his agonies, into the darkness. The lights followed him.Andwhenhisbackhit thebody oftheburnt,rustingvan,Dadstopped.Hehad nowhere else to go. Then suddenly, and I don’t know why, and it may be one of those riddles of theLivingthatonly theLivingunderstand,suddenly,Icriedout.My voice, sounding a moment after I had uttered the words, floated on the wind. My voice sounded too thin and frail for what it helped unleash.

‘Black Tyger, USE YOUR POWER!’ I cried.

And Dad, dead on cue, utterly surprised the man with the unrestrained and desperate fury of his own counter-attack. Dad rose miraculously in stature. And with all the concentrated rage and insanity of those who have a single moment in which to choose between living and dying, Dad broke the chains of his exhaustion and thundered such blows on the man as would annihilate an entire race of giants. I don’t know if it was the sheer monstrous accumulation of all the blows and punches, the howitzer combinations, or if it was just one that connected with the right place, but suddenly, amidst the blur of Dad’s madness, the man let out a terrified howl. He staggered backwards. Dad followed him, baffled, arms raised. Then the man stood straight and still, his bright yellow eyes askew. The wind sighed above his head. The yellow eyes dimmed. Then they shut. When his eyes closed it became darker all around, as if a mysterious lamp had been blown out. Then like a tree that had waited a long time after its death to fall, the man keeled over slowly. And when he hit the earth with an unnatural thud, the strangest thing happened. The man disappeared. Into the earth. Into the darkness. I have no way of telling. Steam, tinged with yellow, like low-burning sulphur, rose from the wet earth. The gathered lights had all gone. The night was silent. And then a hyena laughed in the forest. We looked for the man in the dark, but couldn’t find him. Dad was mystified, crushed with exhaustion.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he whispered.

We waited. The wind moaned over the sleeping ghetto. Branches creaked. We felt around on the earth and then I came upon a hole. Dad went in and fetched a match. It wasn’t a hole, but the full imprint of a grown man on the ground, as if he had fallen a long way. Dad was covered in mud and blood. His mouth had been beaten out of shape and his lips had grown monstrous in a short space of time. His nose was all cut up and the swellings on his forehead frightened me. Blood drooled from the cut near his eyes and from the corner of his mouth.

I began to feel cold.

‘What was his name again?’ Dad asked, blowing out the match.

‘Yellow Jaguar,’ I said.

Dad gripped mein asudden horrifyingrealisation.

‘Yellow Jaguar used to be a famous boxer in this area,’ he said, lowering his voice fearfully.

‘What happened to him?’

‘He died three years ago.’

A shiver ran through my bones. I heard the wind draw a breath. Dad had beaten a boxer from the spirit world. He trembled. Then he held on to me, as if for support. I could feel him quaking.

‘It’s cold,’ I said.

‘Let’s go in,’ he said, hurriedly.

Then he lifted me up, ran back into the compound, and into our room. He locked thedoor. Hesatonhischair.InthedarknesswelistenedtoMumsleepingonthebed. Dad lit a cigarette. He smoked, his eyes blazing. I could smell the mud, the sweat, the fight, the excitement, the terror, and the blood on him. I could smell the fists of Yellow Jaguar on his spirit. I could smell Dad’s rebirth in advance. Sulphur stank on his breath. It was a mystery. When he finished his cigarette he went and had a wash. He came back and swiftly got into bed. I heard him tossing, turning, and creaking his body all night. He couldn’t sleep for thinking about the dead boxer. And neither could I.

THREE

DAD STAYED AT home for six days after the fight. His bruises got very big, his eyes swelled to extraordinarily bulbous proportions, and his lower lip grew larger than a misshapen mango. He wasn’t ill, but he wasn’t well either. He lingered in a curious state of shock, between agony and amnesia. He was silent the whole time and his eyes were vacant. Occasionally he would give me a concussive smile, an idiotic wink. We had to feed him pap, as if he were the biggest newborn baby in the world. He slept for long hours, day and night. He slept like a baby. He grinned like one every now and then. He howled like one. And he sometimes even betrayed the curious stare of genius that only babies and certain madmen have. For a time he lost control of his limbs and he jerked constantly on the bed. He drooled and farted indiscriminately. He made funny faces and twiddled his great big fingers like a horrible buffoon. I expected his wounds and bruises to reveal the full extent of the beating he had taken. But the bruises proved short-lived, the swellings were not alarming, the growth of his bulbous eyes ceased, and his wounds didn’t bleed after a while. The true extent of the beating was not visible and that is what worried me. I watched him kicking on the bed like a beetle or an upturned cockroach, as if he had found a new freedom to be an insect, to enter into other statesofbeingnotpermittedtoadults.Hewouldbemoroseforhours and then suddenly delirious and idiotic. Our poor relations came to see us. They had heard what transformations had come over him, but no one could find an explanation for his condition, nor understand what had happened. All they could offer were the usual litany of stories about the hundreds of strange cases they had picked up over the years of consoling themselves on the miseries of others. We kept the business of Dad’s having fought a dead man to ourselves. During those three days the house was crowded with visitors and well-wishers. Dad’s cart-pulling, load-carrying colleagues came and they brought gifts and sat around, drinking in silence. Even the landlord came to see us briefly. He hoped, he said, that Dad had learned his lesson, and that when he recovered he would give up destroying his walls. He brought no gifts and didn’t even notice Dad’s condition, or the mood of the house. Everyone else felt it. Visitors were silenced by Dad’s deliriums and baby-talks, his flatulence, and vacancy, his inability to recognise people, his fits of playfulness. He seemed very tragic in his grotesque condition of an adult trapped in the consciousness of a child. The mood in the room was sad. It was as if an elephant was dying. No one wanted to see how monstrously comical Dad was in his condition. If I had said that a fully grown man, bearded and big-chested, married and with a son, was being born as certain huge animals are born, I would probably have been chastised by all the grown-ups around.

On the day that Dad’s bruises began to take on strange colours, Madame Koto paid us a visit. She too had heard of Dad’s condition. When she entered the room everyone fell silent. This also included those who didn’t even know who she was. She sat on Dad’s three-legged chair. She looked at everyone and everyone avoided looking at her. She had changed. Her face had become big and a little ugly. Her foot had swollen and was wrapped in filthy bandages. There was a patch of rough darkened skin on her face which made her expressions sinister. She had become more severe, more remote, more powerful. Her perfume filled the room and her expensive clothes illuminated everyone’s poverty. Her stomach was bigger. Her eyes were fierce and disdainful. Outside the room there were two men who had come with her. They looked like thugs, paid protectors. Mum invited them in and they stood in the doorway, blocking most of the light. One of them held a bundle under his arm.

For alongmomentMadameKotodidnotspeak.Then,jabbingDadontheshoulder with her stubby fingers, she asked:

‘What happened to you?’

Dad stared at her without recognition. She jabbed him again. He made insect-noises. She turned to me. Then she looked round the room. She drew up straight on the chair.

‘Sonobody wantstotalktome,eh?’shesaid,suddenly.‘WhatwronghaveIdone anybody that you all keep quiet when I come in, eh? Have I stolen your money? Did I burn down your houses? Am I your landlord?’

There was a pause. Then:

‘You too proud,’ someone ventured.

‘And you support that party,’ said another.

There was another pause. No one said anything. The silence waited for her reaction. It didn’t have to wait very long.

‘You are all jealous!’ she said. ‘And none of you can touch me.’

She stood up. She began to gesticulate, waving her arms about, but Dad made noises from the bed. Madame Koto restrained herself. She rearranged her wrapper, a clear sign that she had put up with enough and was now leaving. She made her exit address to Dad.

‘I heard you were ill and I came to see you. We are all human beings. We are neighbours. Your son helped me. I brought some gifts for you. I have no quarrel with you. This earth is too small for people to forget that we are all human beings. As for these other people who keep quiet whenever I come into the room, they will see what I am made of, they will find out what I am.’

She took the bundle roughly from her protector and put it on the table.

‘Ipray youshouldbestrongsoon,’shesaid,andlefttheroom.

Mumwent out with her. I heard themtalkingin thepassage. Thepeoplegathered in the room were uneasy. Dad made faces at them. There was a long silence. Dad went on making strange faces, his blue bruises and his green wounds concentrating his expression into a distillate of indecipherable mockery. He was actually in great pain. One of the gathered visitors, speaking for the others, said it was time to go. But they didn’t move. Mum and Madame Koto stayed talking in the passage for a while. The gathered visitors stayed a while too. In silence. When Mum returned, her face bright, thegatheringdispersed,oneby one,leavingtheirmodestgiftsbehind.

On the sixth day, when Dad had shown a few vague signs of improvement, the blind old man came to pay his respects. He wore a bright yellow shirt, a red hat with feathers in the felt, and blue sunglasses. He was led in by a younger man. He sat on Dad’s chair. He had brought his instrument.

‘When I heard that you were ill, I brought my accordion so I could play for you,’ he said in his weird voice.

Dad groaned. Mum served him ogogoro and the blind old man made a libation and drank the alcohol down as if it were a soft drink and began to play the accordion with astonishing vigour. Now and again he would swing his blind eyes in my direction, as if he were demanding applause. He played blissfully, happily. He played the most dreadful music that could possibly be imagined by the most fiendish mind of man. He deafened us with the sheer fabulous ugliness of his music. He made our flesh crawl and bristle with his noise. Mum’s face began to twitch. I kept jerking. A strange smell, as of a rotting corpse, or of a great animal in the throes of death, rose from the music, and occupied the room. It was incredible. Dad twisted and contorted on the bed as if the cruelty of the music were causing him greater agony than all the unearthly blows of the celebrated Yellow Jaguar. Mum opened the door and window to let the music out. The foul air of the compound came in. Dad began to sit up on the bed, struggling, kicking, fighting to get out of the womb of the vile music, as if he weretrapped in aspacetoo smallforhisspiritorhisframewhichwasacceleratingin growth.Fightingtoget up,hegroaned,almostweepingbecausethemusichurthimso much. The blind old man turned to me again and intensified the full ugly power of the music. Dad was struck still, unable to move, frozen by his own efforts. Then suddenly the old man stopped playing. Dad slumped back down. The old man said:

‘How many times is a man reborn in one life?’

He chuckled, looked at me, and carried on playing with unrestrained zest. Then someone came in through the door, bringing ghosts and memories and a magic, fleeting smile. I looked up. A flash dazzled me. It was the photographer. He had just taken a picture. He hurried over to Dad’s bedside. He made a quick speech about his best wishes and hopes for recovery. Dad did not recognise him. The photographer didn’t let it bother him. He took Dad’s hand and shook it. Dad made faces. The photographer took another picture. The flash hurt Dad and he groaned. The photographer, with an air of mystery, said:

‘They don’t know I am here. So I’m going.’

He touched me on the head, fondled my hair, put on his hat, and crept out into the compound as if everyone were after him.

‘When people keep running, something keeps pursuing them,’ the blind old man said, in his sepulchral voice.

The old man started to play again. Dad was so irritated that, to our amazement, he got out of bed and saw the blind old man to the door.

On the seventh day Dad rose miraculously from his condition. It was as if he had snapped out of a trance. The colours of his bruises had become fairly normal. His face was still disfigured, his eyes still swollen and angry, his wounds livid, but something in him had mended. His recovery surprised all of us. I woke up to find him jumping and shadow-boxing again. He looked lean but his eyes glowed. It seemed as if his illness and his escape into the world of infancy had given him fresh energies and accelerated his healing. He went to work, but came back early. He slept for a while, boxing in his dreams. When he woke up he made me tell him about his epic battle with Yellow Jaguar. He made me tell it several times. He didn’t seem to be able to remembermost ofwhathadhappened.Hespokeofthefightassomethingthathehad dreamt, and the illness as the only thing that had been real.

Mum returned late and told us of the preparations for the great rally. She said womenwereearningalot ofmoneycookingfortheeventandthatMadameKotohad offered her a job. She asked Dad if she should accept.

‘People will think you are a prostitute,’ Dad said.

‘But what about the money?’

‘Wedon’t need their stinkingmoney.’

Mum sulked for the rest of the night. It didn’t bother Dad because all he wanted to do was talk about his fight with Yellow Jaguar. He grew so obsessive about the fight that all through the next day he talked about it, made me repeat my account of how he had crouched low, and moved into the dark, how he had launched his counter-attack. The only thing that spoiled it for him was that there had been no one else apart from me who had witnessed the strange battle.

‘Are you sure no one else saw it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nobody woke up?’

‘No.’

Dad grunted in agony. It seemed to hurt him a little to have performed such a heroic feat unwitnessed.

‘So no one saw it?’‘No.’‘Not even a woman?’‘No.’‘No other children, no onepassed alongthestreet, no traders?’‘No.’‘So no one else saw me beat him?’‘No one.’‘Not even a dog, a cat?’‘Not even a dog or cat.’‘No strangers?’

‘No. Except three lights.’

‘What three lights?’ ‘Three lights,’ I said. He hit me on the head. ‘Then other lights came and joined them.’ He hit me again. I shut up. Dad was so impressed by his performance that he badly wanted to boast about it. He knew no one would believe him. But that, in the end, didn’t matter because after Dad got well he developed interesting powers and a kind of madness.

‘Maybe you have to overcome things first in the spirit world, before you can do it in this world, eh?’ he would say to the wind.

He went around, demented and restless, as if a jaguar had somehow got trapped in his brain. An unbearable energy bristled in him. Whenever he came near me I felt him shiveringlikeagreatanimalstartledby itsownferocity.

FOUR

AND SO DAD resumed training. He woke us up with his exercises. He went off to work, and came back early. In the evenings, after he had slept, he would practise at the housefront. The neighbours, who stayed outside drinking and talking because of the heat in their rooms, watched him. Most evenings they brought out their chairs and stools and made themselves comfortable in anticipation of Dad’s arrival. When enough people had gathered he would bound out of the room.

‘Black Tyger!’ the people would cheer.

Then shamelessly he would begin to shadow-box and make grunting noises. His activity drew so much interest that street hawkers, prostrate from a whole day’s wandering, would stop to watch him. Sellers of oranges, boiled eggs, bread, roasted ground-nuts, would crouch and stare at him. Some of them did quite well for themselves, selling their wares to the compound people. Some of them, seated on the sand, their basins of goods beside them, would eventually stretch out and fall asleep while Dad trained. Mallams and children on errands, old women on visits and charm-sellers, all stopped to watch for no other reason than that a crowd had formed around him.

Meanwhile, Dad jumped about, throwingcombinations to thefour winds.

‘Is this a new thing?’ one of them would ask.

‘Yes.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes.’

‘A new thing, eh?’

‘Completely new.’

‘So who is he?’

‘They call him Black Tyger.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes.’

The shop-owners and street traders around did excellent business on account of Dad. They all did good business, except Mum, who was unaware of the interest Dad wasgenerating,andwhoat that momentwasprobablypoundingthedustofthegreat ghetto wastes, selling nothing but a box of matches for the whole evening. While Mum wended her long way back home the street traders sold drinks and sweets, cigarettes and mosquito coils, kola-nuts and chewing gums, cheap sunglasses and kerosine lamps. They wove Dad’s antics into their sales cries; meanwhile, Dad sparred with the air and dust and shattered bricks with his fist. He developed such a reputation from fooling around at the housefront that everyone became afraid of him.

His fame spread on the wings of their fear.

I would wander round our area and pass bars and drinking houses and hear people talking about Black Tyger. I heard his name mentioned in the wind. Women talked about him in dark places. People argued about how he rated in comparison with current boxing heroes and decided in Dad’s favour, because he was unknown, because he belonged to the ghetto, and because he was not afraid to show the range of his styles to the people. When I told Dad about all this his obsession grew. We became very poor because of his obsession. We ate very little and he ate a lot, because his increased powers needed it. His appetite grew legendary, like that of the elephant. After he had trained for the evening, bathed, drank bottled malt and stout, he would settle down to eat. He ate ravenously. We would stare at him in horror as he swallowed mighty balls of eba.

‘There was once a man,’ Mum would say to me, ‘who choked on eba. They had to cut open his throat to get it out.’

‘That man was not Black Tyger,’ Dad would say, in between one gulp and another.

Not only did he swallow such death-defying dollops of eba, he ate gargantuan quantities as well. He ate as if his body were some sort of abyss. And he ate fast, as if he were attacking the food, ranging counter-gulps and eating-combinations on the massive portion. He ate so much that Mum became very lean indeed and I lost appetite for food. Dad did all our eating for us. And at the end of every meal he always complained about how the eba was never enough and how he could have done with more stew. He never spoke of the taste of the cooking. My stomach began to expand.

What made all this worse was that he brought back less money from work. He spent all his time thinking about boxing. He would travel long distances to see a free or a cheap boxingmatch.Hewoulddisappearforhours.Thenhebegantospendless money on food. For one thing, he drank more. After he had eaten he would go out and visit a round of bars and everywhere, on account of his new-found fame, people bought him drinks. He would come home drunk. The more he trained, the more he drank. And the more he drank, the madder he became, the more restless. He could spend an hour creakinghis joints, freeinghis body of trapped energies and frustrated dreams of greatness.

He began to scare us. In the evenings, when I knew he was coming back from drinking, I would take to wandering the streets. But in the late afternoons, when he trained outside, I was always in thecrowd watchinghimimproviseand conjurenew movementsintobeing.Peoplebegan,however,tocommentonmy swellingstomach. While keenly watching him exercise, two men said:

‘His son starves.’

‘His wife is lean.’

‘Have you noticed that as he gets stronger..’

‘His son gets thinner.’‘While his power increases..’‘His wife’s presence decreases.’‘While he learns new tricks..’

‘His son’s legs become like sticks.’ The pair of them laughed. A deeper voice in the crowd said: ‘He eats up all their food.’ A woman said: ‘Something has entered his head.’ The pair of wits began again: ‘Big man..’ ‘With no shame.’ ‘Big muscles..’ ‘With no brain.’ They laugheddrunkenly.Hearingallthisdidn’tmakemetoohappy andaftersome timeItemporarily stoppedwatchingDadtrain.Iplayedaloneinthestreetwhile peoplewatched himperformhis new feats. Hehad now taken to breakingplanks with his fists, smashingbottles on his head, liftingseveralpeopleon his arms, and bending metal rods round his elbows.

I was sitting alone, away from the crowd, watching the street, when a sharp flash of blue cracked me between the eyes. I heard the blind old man cry. out. I didn’t understand. A dog barked. The sky was clear. I watched the street and then suddenly I saw the metal rim of a bicycle wheel rolling along by itself. I froze. The metal rim, rolling along, dispersed flashes of lights with each revolution. I waited. I looked around. The street was empty, but the metal rim rolled towards the burnt van. I heard a noise. I blinked. And when I looked again I saw a shadow, and then the shadow became a boy. He wore white shorts and a blue shirt and he was driving the hoop along, round and round the burnt van. Where had he come from? I was amazed. He seemed to have appeared from nowhere. I was furious. And then, just as suddenly, he disappeared. I got up and went to the van. The metal hoop was on the ground. I looked round the van and saw nothing. I was about to leave when a shadow blocking out the sun from my face made me turn round. Standing on the top of the van, like a child-conqueror surveying his newly won lands, was the boy who had been burnt out of reality during the blistering afternoons of the harmattan and who had now materialisedinthebreakoftherainy season.HewaswatchingDadpractisefromhis height.

‘Are you the boy who vanished?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Did you turn into your own shadow?’

‘No.’

He answered my questions, barely giving me a glance.

‘Come down!’ I said. ‘Why?’

‘You are not allowed to play on the van.’

‘Why not?’ Disconcerted by his serenity, I clambered up the van and tried to push him down. We began to fight. I hit him in the face and he hit me back. I hit him again and he grabbed me round the waist and we wrestled. He tripped me, I fell, and he fell on me, knocking the wind out of my chest. Soon we were on solid ground. I kicked him, he caught my foot, and threw me down. I jumped back up and lashed out in all directions, with the sort of blind ferocity that Dad sometimes had, and one of my punches made contact. His nose sprouted blood. He was untroubled by the bleeding and he unleashed a volley of blows on me, cracking the side of my face, and we wrestled again, and fell, and we got up, and hit one another blindly and soon several adult handstoreusaway fromoneanother.Liketwowildfightingcocksseparatedin a bloody battle, we kicked and raged in the air, cursing and swearing.

On another day, when Dad was training, I saw the boy standing on the top of the van again. I went over.

‘Come down from there!’ I said.

‘No.’

I clambered up again. He didn’t move.

‘My father’,hesaid,‘hasgivenmesomethingspecial.’

‘For what?’

‘If you touch me…’

‘Yes…’

‘And I hit you…’

‘Yes..’

‘You will fall down seven times and then die.’

‘Who is your father?’ I asked him.

‘My father is a great cobbler and carpenter,’ he replied.

‘My father’, I said, ‘is Black Tyger.’

And then I hit himin theface. Hehit meback. Nothinghappened. I began to laugh.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘Becauseof thestupid thingyour father gaveyou.’

He didn’t say anything. After a while he got down from the van and went and played nearer the crowd watching Dad. I stayed on the van for some time. It wasn’t much fun and I gotboredandInoticedthatpeoplewerestaringatme.Igotdownand went to look for the boy. At first he didn’t want to talk to me. Then I told him again that the man shadow-boxing was my father. His face lit up in transferred admiration.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Ade. What’s yours?’

I told him. We shook hands. His father was a cobbler and carpenter and a fierce supporter of the political party on the side of the poor. He was also something of a medicine man and counted many feared thugs as family friends. I was somewhat impressed.

He took me to their house. They lived in our area, in one small room. Their family was large; his father had two wives and ten children. I don’t know how they all managed in that room. His mother was buck-toothed and small and ferocious. She was the eldest wife. His father had great scarifications, noble and impressive like the statues of ancient warriors; he was tall and his spirit was rather terrifying. His teeth were kola-nut-stained and his eyes bloodshot, and he beat his children a lot, in the name of the sternest and most corrective discipline. His voice had a chilling, piercing quality. I didn’t like him much.

Ade took me to his father’s workshop and showed me the tools of his trade – his hammers and tongs, his chisels and boxes of heavy nails, his long work-bench and tables crowded with a mountainous tumble of shoes and handbags, the place smelling of glue and rusted nails and old metal and raw earth and ancient wine spilled on fresh-planed wood. The shadows gave off the aroma of cobwebs and the intense sleep of cockchafers, of fetishes twisting on rafters. The ceiling was dark with a fastness of ancient cobwebs, and lengths of leather hung from the ceiling. The workshop was an exciting place and it seemed I had found an entirely new universe in which to explore and play. We tried on the different shoes, with their incredible variety of sizes and shapes. We hid behind the cabinet. We banged nails into fresh-planed wood. We glued bits of abandoned leather together, trying to create new shoes instantly. We were totally absorbed in our play when his father came in suddenly. He saw us playing, saw the laughter on our faces, and brought out the long whip he kept on a nail behind the door. He thrashed us on the backs and we ran out screaming. I decided not to go there again.

I tried to get Ade to wander the streets with me, but he never went far. He was scared of his parents. If they called him and he didn’t answer he got whipped for it later. I told him to run away from home and to come and stay with us, but he was afraid. He said his father would thrash him and put pepper on the wounds. He showed me his back and I saw the old whip marks along with numerous razor incisions for the herbal treatments he received. I felt sad for him. And because of him I didn’t go wandering for a while. I tried to take him to Madame Koto’s place, but he wouldn’t go there either. His father had told him that she was a witch who supported their political enemies.

Wewereplayingintheforestoneday whenwecameuponMadameKoto.Shelay on the earth, at the root of the legendary iroko tree, her white beads like a jewelled snake in her hand. When sheheard us comingshejumpedup anddustedherself.Shelooked very embarrassed.

‘Who’s your friend?’ she asked, blinking.

‘Ade,’ I said.

She gave him a curious intense scrutiny. Ade said he was going home. He wandered off and waited ashortdistanceaway,watchingusfurtively.MadameKototurnedher disquieting gaze on me. She studied my stomach. The merest hint of compassion crossed her face.

‘So you don’t like my bar any more, eh?’

She smiled.

‘Are you hungry?’ ‘No.’

‘How is your father?’

‘No.’

Shestared at me. Then sheunwound her wrapper and untied thebigknot at theend. I had never seen so much money in my life. She had a thick wad of pound notes at her wrapper end that could easily have choked a horse. She unwrapped several notes and gave them to me. At first, lookingover at Ade, I refused. But shepressed themon me, shuttingmy fingers tightly.

‘If your mother asks, tell her you found them in the forest, eh?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t tell her I gave them to you, you understand?’

‘Yes.’

She touched me gently on the head. For the first time I saw that she had changed. She was now wholly enveloped in an invisible aura of power, a force-field of dread. Her stomach was really big and she seemed very wide. There was a heaviness about her that made her look as if weariness had moved into her face as a permanent condition. Even her shadow weighed me down. Her eyes were distant. They couldn’t come near human beings any more. They had the same quality that the eyes of lions have. Her face was round and fresh and she seemed very well.

‘I am not happy,’ she said, suddenly.

‘Why not?’

She gave me a puzzled look, as if she were surprised that I had spoken. Then she smiled, and turned, and shuffled down the forest paths with the grace that most human beings seldom have. The midges trailed her.

Ade didn’t speak to me for days because Madame Koto had given me money. And when I gave the money to Mum it caused an upheaval in the house. It turned out to be much more money than I had imagined. She made me sit on the bed and spent hours subjecting me to the most rigorous questions about where I had found the money. She feared that it belonged to some trader, to ritualists who could infuse syllabic curses into their possessions, or some powerful figure who might hunt us out and punish us. But it was her suspicion that I had stolen it which annoyed me so much that I burst intoangry weeping.Dadsat inhischair,rockinghimself,smoking.Muminsistedthat I take her to the spot where I had discovered the windfall. I told her I didn’t remember, that I had stumbled upon it as if I were in a dream, and that it was on the ground near some bushes.

‘Are you sure it wasn’t spirits who gave it to you, eh?’ Mum said with more than a hint of mockery.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Then Dad broke out of his imperturbability and threatened to beat me if I didn’t tell the truth. I went on lying. He got so impatient that he slapped me on the face. I stared hard at him. My body suddenly became serene. Then he held me to his chest and swayed and said:

‘Forgive me, my son. I did not mean it. But we are not thieves in our family. We are royalty. We are poor, but we are honest.’

Then he asked me again where I had stumbled upon such an amount of money. Still I went on lying. They gave up trying to get any sense out of me. They had been at it for hours and night had fallen. They decided they wouldn’t touch the money for a weekandifthey didn’thearanythingfromanybody they wouldconsideritagiftfrom heaven. Dad, in a mood of celebration, sent me to buy a big bottle of ogogoro. When I got backhespent anotherhourprayingtoourancestorsandtotheinscrutabledeities. Then heand Mumspenttherestofthenightdiscussingwhatthey woulddowiththe money. Dad wanted to buy all the paraphernalia he needed for boxing. Mum wanted to open a shop of provisions and a boutique. They argued bitterly all night and I fell asleep to the sound of their raging acrimony. When I woke up in the morning they were still boiling with discord. They were both foul-tempered. For three days they went on like that. Another four days passed and they still hadn’t reached an agreement and they quarrelled the whole time, dredging up old memories about a hundred unforgiven matters relatingto money.DuringthattimeDadusedsomeofthewindfall to buy drinks, entertain friends, and to buy a pair of canvas shoes and a second-hand pair of boxing gloves. As it turned out there was more than enough to get Mum a completely fresh stock of provisions for her trade, to buy us all some new clothes, to pay our rent, and to feed us happily for more than a good month.

FIVE

THE DAY OF the great political rally, which had been much talked about and much postponed, drew nearer. The most extraordinary things were happeningin Madame Koto’s bar. The first unusual thing was that cables connected to her rooftop now brought electricity. Illiterate crowds gathered in front of the bar to see this new wonder. They saw the cables, the wires, the pylons in the distance, but they did not see the famed electricity. Those who went into the bar, out of curiosity, came out mystified. They couldn’t understand how you could have a light brighter than lamps, sealed in glass. They couldn’t understand how you couldn’t light your cigarette on the glowing bulbs. And worse than all that, it was baffling for them to not be able to see the cause of the illumination.

Madame Koto, much too shrewd not to make the most of everyone’s bewilderment, increased the price of her palm-wine and peppersoup. Then, for a while, she began to charge a modest entry fee for merely being able to enjoy the unique facilities. She was after all the only person along our street and in our area who had the distinction of electricity. She was so taken in by this distinction that she had her signboard amended to highlight the fact.

The next thing was that people heard very loud music blaring but saw no musicians performing. After that came stories of strange parties, of women running naked into the forest, of people who got so drunk they bathed in palm-wine, of party members giving away large quantities of money to the women whose dancing pleased. There were lush rumours of the things the men and the women did together, screaming into the electrified nights. In the midst of all this Madame Koto grew bigger and fatter till she couldn’t get in through the back door. The door had to be broken down and widened. We saw her in fantastic dresses of silk and lace, edged with turquoise filigree, white gowns, and yellow hats, waving a fan of blue feathers, with expensive bangles of silver and gold weighing her arms, and necklaces of pearl and jade round her neck. When she walked all her jewellery clattered on her, announcing her eminence in advance. She painted her fingernails red. Her eyelashes became more defined. She wore lipstick. She wore high-heeled shoes and moved with an increasingly pronounced limp, walking stick always in hand. She began to resemble a great old chief from ancient times, a reincarnation of splendour and power and clannish might.

Cars began to converge at her place. The lights burned till deep into the night and always from the street I could hear them talking, planning heatedly, and could see their shapes through the strips of curtain. Rumours, always stale, began to circulate that she had joined the most terrifying cults in the land, that she had been accepted in organisations that usually never allow women, that she performed rituals in the forest. I heard of bizarre sacrifices, goats being slaughtered at night, of people dressed in white habits dancing round her house, heard of cries that pierced the ghetto air, of drumming and thunderous chants, but the strangest thing I heard of was the forthcomingbirth of thefour-headed Masquerade. No oneknew what it was.

People came to believe that Madame Koto had exceeded herself in witchcraft. People glared at her hatefully when she went past. They said she wore the hair of animals and human beings on her head. The rumours got so wild that it was hinted that her cult made sacrifices of human beings and that she ate children. They said she had been drinking human blood to lengthen her life and that she was more than a hundred years old. They said the teeth in her mouth were not hers, that her eyes belonged to a jackal, and that her foot was getting rotten because it belonged to someone who was trying to dance in their grave. She became, in the collective eyes of the people, a fabulous and monstrous creation. It did not matter that some people insisted that it was her political enemies who put out all these stories. The stories distorted our perception of her reality for ever. Slowly, they took her life over, made themselves real, and made her opaque in our eyes.

In spite of what people said, however, she prospered, while the rest of us suffered. She opened another bar in another section of the city. She divided her time between both. She opened a mighty stall in the big market where she sold garri, lace materials, and jewellery. She had many servants. Conflicting stories, however, did reach us about her wealth. Some said she wasn’t very rich, that she had too many people to support. Others maintained that she had so much money she could feed the entire ghetto for five years. I heard that she spent endless days counting her profits, that when she went to the bank she needed an armed truck. Then we began to hear of how mean she was, that one of her servants needed money for treating a liver condition and she wouldn’t give him so much as a farthing. On the other hand, we heard that she had given a lot of money to a woman she didn’t even know, whose child would have died from food poisoning if it hadn’t been for Madame Koto’s timely intervention. It began to seem as if there were many Madame Kotos in existence.

Andthenoneday asIwasplayingwithAdewesawseveralpeoplegatheredoutside her barfront. They all stood in the mud. They all wore white smocks and had ostentatious Bibles. Their leader had the biggest Bible of them all. It looked like an instrument of vengeance. He had wild hair and the rough, scraggy beard of a self-anointed prophet. He was barefoot. If it hadn’t been for the authority with which he held the wooden crozier, he could well have been mistaken for a complete madman. A large cross dangled from his neck. The whole group of them, whipped up to paroxysms of denunciation by their leader, constituted the representatives of one of the most influential new churches springing up in the city. The group consisted of prophets of varying ranks and they danced with righteous fervour and prayed with fearful certainty in front of the bar. They evoked visions of fire and brimstone, sulphurandtorment anddamnations.Theyprayedasiftheywerepurgingthelandof a monstrous and incarnate evil. They sprinkled holy water over the ground and threw holy grainsofsandtowardsthebar.Theystayedforalongtime,singingwithbrioand might,inlusty voices,inperfect rousingharmony,chantingandstampinginthemud. Their presence stopped people going to the bar. The women in the bar would occasionally peep out between curtain strips and the leader of the group, the chief prophet, foaming at the mouth, would point a crooked finger at the women and the singing would reach new proportions of intensity. They carried on till nightfall and completely succeeded in imprisoning Madame Koto and her women within the bar, souringtheir business for theday.

The following evening they returned, bringing a larger congregation. We saw them chanting and beating their church drums along the street. It seemed they had an entire orchestra with them. Brass sections pierced the air with their clash and roll, the trumpets blasted thewind,andthedeep voicesoftheprophetsleadingtheway tothe battle against evil woke the street from its mid-season slumber. As the procession approached Madame Koto’s bar the world joined them. They became a great flood of human beings, a surging mass of spectators, like an army of divine vengeance. They sang different songs all at once. They arrived at Madame Koto’s bar and found it shuttered. They sang, played their music, chanted, and stomped. They bellowed and belted out their holy tunes till they were hoarse. Those who had expected something to happen were disappointed. The only thing that happened was that the frustration made factions of the crowd begin to quarrel. Fighting broke out between musical sections, between prophets of differing denominations, between contending visionaries. The head priest was leading a song of exorcism, his staff and Bible high in the air, when the fighting encircled him. He found himself torn between quelling his unruly flock and launching his bitter attack against the scourge of Madame Koto’s electricity. He managed to deliver, in the midst of all the chaos, a tremendous philippic on the apocalypse of science. The shouting grew wilder amongst his congregation. A man was hurled to the mud. Another man was being strangled with thefolds of his smock. Soon everyoneseemed to befightingeveryoneelse.

‘The DEVIL has come into our midst!’ the head priest cried.

No one listened.

‘Let us stand as one to drive out this ABOMINATION!’

No one heard.

‘THEY WILL START WITH ELECTRICITY AND THEN THEY WILL BURN UP THE EARTH!’ he thundered.

No one cared. And then the most extraordinary thing happened. The sky was rent asunder. The air lit up as if an unbearably radiant being was going to descend from the heavens. The light in the sky, flickering brightly, stayed for a long moment. Everyone fell silent and froze in the presence of the unknown annunciation. A terrible enchantment hung over us like a single flashing sword. The wind flowed in silence.

‘GOD HAS ANSWERED OUR CRY!’ said the head priest.

The sky darkened and lowered. The air became full of presence. The wind was still. I smelt, in that moment, all the known and unknown herbal essences of the forest. The world swam in aromas.

‘HALLELU… HALLELUYA!’ cried the head priest.

His congregation picked up the cry, lifted it up to the heavens, and fell silent, waiting.

Then in thedeepestreachesofthesky somethingcracked.Itbrokeloosealtogether. Then it rolled down the unnumbered vaults of the heavens, gathering momentum and great wondrous volumes of sound as it neared us. Then it exploded over our heads and before we could recover from the incredible drama of the universe the sky opened and yielded a river of rain upon us.

The congregation scattered everywhere. The commotion was farcical and wild. People screamed, children howled, mothers yelled. Only the head priest stood firm. Soon the entire crowd, the valiant brass sections and the rousing wind ensemble, fled their many ways, lashed by the torrential rain. I watched them fleeing as if from a burning house. The head priest called to them, denounced them, urged them to have courage and to be steadfast in crisis. He waved his staff and Bible in the air, and thunder cracked above him. But he did not move. He did not give ground. He went on praying with great fervour. He cursed the abomination that was Madame Koto and referred to her as the GREAT WHORE OF THE APOCALYPSE, and he danced and sang alone, while the rain mercilessly drenched him.

He soon became a ridiculous sight. He resembled a monstrous drenched chicken. He shivered as he prayed. His smock clungobscenely to his buttocks. As his passion waned, gradually extinguished by the indifferent rain, he trembled more. Everyone watched him from the cover of rooftops and eaves. Trapped in his solitary defiance, his Bible dripping a second flood, his beard a sad sunken ship upon the waters, his voice disappearing in the din of cosmic events, he had no choice but to continue with his absurd posture. He chanted, shaking at the knees. And as he chanted, railing against prostitutes, science, theories of evolution, the enshrinement of reason against God, and evil women of Babylon, a procession of cars drove down the street. They parked around him. The car doors opened. Men and women in fine attire spilled out. They all had umbrellas. Madame Koto was among them. She wore a massive and dazzling black silk dress, with white shoes and a white scarf, her arms and neck glittering with jewellery. The splendid guests passed the head priest and if they heard his ravings they betrayed no signs of it. The bar door was opened, and they all went in. Only Madame Koto came back to give the head priest her umbrella. Shamelessly, hetook it. Shelimpedbacktoherbar,walkingstickinonehand,whiletheheadpriest resumed his imprecations and denunciations of her. It was at this point that people began to jeer him. When theeveningfell,andthedarknessspread,theheadpriestwas a wreck of a soaked man. Under the cover of darkness, shivering, his voice hoarse, he left Madame Koto’s barfront and made his miserable way down the street. Much later we learned that he had led his congregation against Madame Koto mainly at the instigation of the party supported by the poor. There was also talk of possible charitable contributions to church funds. We were disappointed by their methods.

SIX

AND THEN, TO crown our amazement, the news reached us that Madame Koto had bought herself a car. We couldn’t believe it. No one along our street and practically nooneintheareaownedsuchathingasacar.Peopleownedbicyclesand were proud of them. One or two men owned scooters and were accorded the respect reserved only for elders and chieftains. But it most certainly was news for a woman in the area to own a car. We clung to our disbelief till we saw the bright blue little car, with the affectionate face of an enlarged metallic tortoise. It was parked in front of her bar. We still clung to our disbelief even when we saw her hopeless attempts at driving it, which resulted in running over an old woman’s stall. She promptly had the stall rebuilt and gave the woman more money than she had possessed in the first place. We watched her learning to drive the car. She was much too massive for such a small vehicle and at the steering wheel she looked as if the car was her shell and she merely the third eye of the tortoise. The fact that the car was too small for her was the only consolation that people had. But we were still amazed.

With a man sitting next to her she learned to drive along our street. With a determined, half-crazed look on her face, her shoulders hunched as if her weight somehow helped the car to move forward, she zigzagged down our street. She couldn’t keep the car straight. When she was seen coming a voice would cry out, saying:

‘Hide your children! Hide yourselves! The mad tortoise is coming!’ Then we would see her vehicle, swaying from side to side, scattering goats and fowls, and causing innocent bystanders to flee into the most unlikely places. Her persistence never paid off. Even when she could manage to get the car to travel straight, she was so fraught, working up such a fury wrenching the gears around that the engine would make fearsome coughing noises.

‘The tortoise is hungry,’ people would say.

Then we heard that she had difficulties with the car because of her bad foot. Whenever she applied the brake she did it so abruptly that the man teachingher had his head banged against the dashboard. And because she couldn’t drive it, she left the car for her driver to take on errands.

It didn’t really matter that it was a small car, or that she couldn’t drive it properly. What mattered was that yet again she had been a pioneer, doing something no one else had done. People became convinced that if she wanted she could fly over the ghetto on the back of a calabash.

When the day arrived for Madame Koto to wash her new car, many people came to celebrate the ritual with her. Our landlord was present. People brought their bicycles and scooters. Many came on foot. There were old men whom we had never seen before. And there were a lot of powerful strange women with eyes that registered no emotion. We saw chiefs, thugs, and there were even herbalists, witch-doctors and their acolytes. They gathered in the bar and drank. They talked loudly. Eventually everyone was summoned for the washing. They formed a circle round the vehicle. The great herbalist amongst them was a stern man with a face so battered and eyes so daunting that even mirrors would recoil and crack at his glance. He uttered profound incantations and prayed for the car.

‘This car’, he said, after much mystification, ‘will drive even to the moon and come back safely.’

The people nodded.

‘This car will bring you prosperity, plenty of money. Nothing will touch it. Any othercarthat runsintoitwillbedestroyed,butnothingwillhappentoyourcar.This is what we call superior magic. Even if you fall asleep while drivingthis car you will be safe. Anyone that steals it will immediately have an accident and die. Anyone that wishes evil on the car will die!’

The people assented. Madame Koto, her walking stick in one hand, nodded vigorously. At this point, everyone was more or less drunk.

‘If people want to be jealous of you, let them be jealous. Jealousy is free. People can eat it and grow fat on it if they want. But anyone who thinks evil of you, may this car run them over in their sleep. This car will hunt out your enemies, pursue their bad spirits, grind them into the road. Your car will drive over fire and be safe. It will drive into the ocean and be safe. It has its friends in the spirit world. Its friends there, a car just like this one, will hunt down your enemies. They will not be safe from you. A bomb will fall on this car and it will be safe. I have opened the road for this car. It will travel all roads. It will arrive safely at all destinations. This is what I say.’

The people cheered. Some laughed. The herbalist sprinkled his complex potions and his corrosive liquids on the car. He emptied half a bottle of precious ogogoro on the bonnet. And after the ritual washing was complete, after the old people present, the powerful ones, the chiefs, and the cultists, had made their libations, the gathering got down to the momentous business of getting drunk. They drank solidly. They argued to drink better and they drank to argue better. More people joined them. The prostitutes served palm-wine, peppersoup, fried bushmeat and grilled rabbits. The blind old man turned up and threw himself into the serious drinking and got involved in aheated discussion with achief. Thegatheringgotrowdy.Itwastobeexpected,it was even desired. But suddenly an uproar broke out. No one knew how it started. Birds wheeled overhead and alighted on the roof of the car. The sky darkened. The great herbalist, looking uglier than ever before because of his drunkenness, began to utter the most controversial statements. Then he said something which brought on complete silence.

‘This car will be a coffin!’ he suddenly announced. ‘I have just seen it.’

The people stared at him in utter bewilderment. A strange wind seemed to blow over his head. His eyes became crossed. His twisted mouth gave his utterance the weight of destiny.

‘Unless you perform the proper sacrifice this car will be a coffin! I have to speak the truth when I see it or I will die,’ the herbalist carried on.

The mood of the gathering changed instantly. The old men and women hobbled home with unusual alacrity, disturbed by the mention of the dreaded word. The chiefs and high-level party members got into their cars. The young men and women retired into the bar. Only the prostitutes, our landlord, the blind old man, who carried on his argument with theair as if nothinghad happened, and MadameKoto remained.

‘But if you give me one of these women,’ the herbalist said, lunging at one of the prostitutes, and missing, ‘then I will drive the coffin away from the car.’

He stood, swaying, his eyes bleary and focused on the forest. The birds took off from the car top. The wind fairly howled and whistled along the electric cables. Then the herbalist gathered his potions and staggered past the car and up the street, towards us. When he neared me arid Ade as we sat perched on a branch the herbalist, foaming, drunk, his eyes distorted, said to us:

‘Very soon one of you will die!’

Then he went on towards the forest.

We jumped down and followed him. He stopped to urinate against a tree. His urine was yellowish. When he finished he staggered on, gesticulating, waving his arms, shouting:

‘All these trees will die,’ he said, bitterly, ‘because nobody loves them any more!’

Andthenflinginghisarmsabout heturnedandfacedusandsaid,pointingacharmridden finger at me:

‘You, spirit-child, if you don’t take your friend away from here now – I will turn both of you into snakes.’

We turned and fled. As we ran we heard him wailing in the forest, his voice echoing amongst the trees, rebounding from the absorbent earth. We heard his drunken lamentation, as he cried:

‘Too many roads! Things are CHANGING TOO FAST! No new WILL. COWARDICE everywhere! SELFISHNESS is EATING UP the WORLD. THEY ARE DESTROYING AFRICA! They are DESTROYING the WORLD and the HOME and the SHRINES and the GODS! THEY are DESTROYING LOVE TOO.’

We heard his insane laughter, lacerating the air. He continued with his cries, in a different voice.

‘WHO CAN DREAM A GOOD ROAD AND THEN LIVE TO TRAVEL ON IT? Who can GIVE BIRTH TO HIMSELF and then BE HIS OWN FATHER AND MOTHER? Who can LIVE IN THE FUTURE and LIVE IN THE PRESENT and not GO MAD? Who can LIVE AMONG SPIRITS AND among MEN WITHOUT DYING? WHO can EAT AND SLEEP WITH HIS OWN DESTINY AND still KNOW THE HAPPINESS OF A BEAUTIFUL THING?’

The same laughter rang out.

‘THOSE ARE RIDDLES FOR THE TREES!’ we heard him shout, from a long way off.

Then we didn’t hear his voice again.

When we got to the barfront Madame Koto sat outside, on a cane chair. Her women surrounded her. We watched them for a while. They sat without moving. They sat in completesilence.They wereallstaringatthecar.

SEVEN

DAD’S PUBLIC PERFORMANCES had to take on spectacular dimensions. During the period in which Madame Koto got electricity, and bought her car, people lost interest in his training. They were more interested in the car. In the evenings peoplewenttoMadameKoto’sbarandhungaroundthevehicle,touchingit, marvelling. One night I even dreamt that she drove the car to the moon and couldn’t come back. When her servant drove up and down our street, bringing supplies of palm-wine and food, people stopped what they were doing to renew their wonder at the machine. Children always ran behind the vehicle, cheering.

Madame Koto graduated from palm-wine to beer. There was more money in beer and breweries had begun to be established in the city. Sometimes, after the evening’s supplies of beer had been delivered, she would invite the children of the area for a ride in the car. It increased her pleasure in her own possession and she considered the free ride as an act of charity. Ade refused to have anything to do with the car. His father had warned him that it was the work of the devil. She gave me a ride once, and I never forgot it. She sat at the back. I sat at the front. I couldn’t see the road. It seemed to me that we were driving on the wind. She stopped to give people lifts. When I was the only one left she told the driver to increase the speed. The driver relishedit anddroveat suchnightmarespeedthat Iwascertainwewereflyingtothe moon. When I begged the driver to slow down, because I felt nauseous, Madame Koto said:

‘Faster! Faster!’

And the driver drove like a madman, pressing on somewhat vengefully at frightening speed. I didn’t understand the source of the vengeance. Madame Koto’s face was radiant, her eyes widened, and her massive frame became luminous from the sheer pleasure and the power of acceleration as much as from my own horror. But then the speed and my fear made me throw up. I threw up on the driver and Madame Koto ordered the car to be stopped and gave the driver the sign to bundle me out. The driver did just that. After he had cleaned my vomit off him, using sand and rags, he gave me savage looks. The looks didn’t do anything to me so he sidled over, pretended to touch my head in a gesture of forgiveness, but gave me such a cracking with his bony knuckles that I was too dazed to notice them drive off. I walked the long distance home and I never accepted a ride in the car again.

When I got home late that evening, Dad was training as if he had gone insane. No one watched him except a boy, two chickens, a goat, and the blind old man. That night, furious at the fickleness of the world’s tastes, angry that people were now bored with his antics, Dad began to rave and storm about the road, issuing challenges to the entire planet. He boasted that he could fight three people at once. No one took up his challenge. Then he insisted that he could beat five men. It was only when he increased the number to ten that people stepped forward from the darkness.

I was exhausted that night. I sat on the cement platform and watched as seven men moved in on Dad. They were load-carriers and part-time bodyguards. I had often seen them among the crowds that studied Dad as he trained. Dad unceremoniously knocked one of them flat out with an upper cut to the jaw. After the man fell he didn’t move. The six other men crowded round him. Dad jumped about, charging himself with recitations of his fighting names, his secret names, the names he had given his spirit. Two of the men rushed in. One of them caught Dad on the head with a roundhouse punch, poorly executed. Dad laughed derisively and executed the very same punch. The man fell brutally. Dad pursued a third man, changed direction, and smashed a fourth man in the solar plexus, then put him out of the fight with a rather cruel-looking left cross. Three men lay on the ground, motionless. The other four fled as with one mind. Dad didn’t follow them. The blind old man clapped for Dad and the boy called out his fighting name. When they came and led the blind old man away we heard the strains of his accordion in the darkness as he went. We were surprised that it sounded rather pleasant.

EIGHT

WE WOKEUP to find theworld staringat us with new respect. It had gone round the globe and even to the world of spirits that Dad had beaten seven men in a fight. Dad, who had become something of an impresario, didn’t train in public for three days. He explained the curious principle to me:

‘When people don’t believe you can do something and you do it, they begin to respect you. That is the time to disappear. The longer they respect you, the better. Then you keep your secret. Their interest grows. Time passes. They get tired of you. They get bored waiting for you. Then they don’t believe in you any more. That’s when you really begin to show them.’

I had no idea what he was talking about. Instead of training at the housefront, he now took to jogging down the street.

‘Black Tyger!’ the people would call.

Hewouldn’t respond. Hewould joginto thedistance, and wouldn’t beseen till nightfall. Hewould jogto thehousefront, shadow-boxfor afew moments in public, and then disappear into our room. The interest in him grew. His name travelled. His legend sprouted into being. Whenever I got back from school there were always some men around making enquiries about Dad. They wanted to know where he trained, who his coach was, and what party he belonged to. In the evenings crowds gathered round our housefront. People who had heard of Dad’s prowess came from the far reachesofdistantghettos,fromremoteplaces.They hungaround,staringatthe house. The neighbours came out early, with their little centre tables and chairs and drinks. Street traders, hawkers, beer-sellers, traders in iced water and snuff, gathered round in anticipation. When Dad got back from work they chanted his name and urgedhimtotrainforalltosee.Herespondedby demonstratingsomepunches,some footwork, and then he would vanish into our room. He didn’t oblige them. He refused to satisfy their fickle dictates. The crowd grew restless, then bored, then disenchanted, then they disbanded. Then the word began to go round that Dad hadn’t beaten seven people at all, that in fact he hadn’t ever fought anybody, and that he was now too scared to train in public.

When Dad heard about these rumours, he smiled mysteriously. He went on jogging off towards the forest, to a place no one knew.

NINE

IT WAS AROUND this time that the political season started up anew. Suddenly one morning we heard amplified voices again. The voices urged us to join the Party of the Rich. The voices told us that they were going to stage the greatest political rally in the world and that the most famous musicians in Africa would be performing on the day and that there would be gifts for children, prizes for women, andjobsformen.Laterintheday wesawthevansdrivingpastslowly,makingtheir extravagant announcements. They had more thugs and bodyguards with them. Big party flags draped the vans and men distributed leaflets. When they first appeared I thought there would be trouble in the area. I thought houses would burn and party vans be destroyed and thugs roasted. I thought people would remember how the very same party had poisoned them with bad milk and had unleashed their rage upon our nights. But people had forgotten, and those that hadn’t merely shrugged and said that it was all such a long time ago, that things were too complicated for such memories, and besides the party had new leaders.

Dad missed the dramatic return of politics to our lives. He kept going off to train somewhere in secret. When he got back the street would be littered with pamphlets, which no one read. He took very little interest in what was growing in the world about us. When we told him about the vans, he blinked.

‘What vans?’ ‘The politicians’ vans.’ ‘Oh, politicians,’ hewould say, his eyes returningto their vacant contemplation. When Mumasked himwherehehad been, thesamethingwould happen. ‘Been?’ ‘Yes, where have you been?’ ‘Oh, training.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Where what?’ ‘Where have you been training?’ ‘Oh, somewhere.’ ‘Tell me.’ ‘What?’ ‘Where?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Haveyou been trainingwith another woman?’ ‘Woman?’ ‘Yes, woman.’ ‘What woman?’ Mum would give up. It became quite exasperating asking Dad questions. He ate as much as ever, and stayed silent most of the time. His being took on a new intensity. Mumtried to start oneor two quarrels, but Dad, deepeningin impenetrability, refused to be drawn into any arguments. It was a while before we realised that a new power was enveloping him. He was becoming a different man. His eyes were harder, like flint or precious stones that can make their mark on metal. He was more withdrawn, as if belonging to a different constellation. His face had become more abstract and mask-like and, curiously, gentler.

One day he said to me:

‘I am beginning to see things for the first time. This world is not what it seems. Therearemysterious forces everywhere. Wearelivingin aworld of riddles.’

I listened intently. He stopped. Then he looked at me, as if pleading with me to believe what he was about to say.

‘I was training yesterday when this old man carrying something invisible on his head came to me. He asked me for money. I gave him all I had. He gave it back to me and said that I was lucky.’

‘Why?’

‘He said if I hadn’t given him any money I would have died in my next fight.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘At first I didn’t believe him. He knew I didn’t. Then he pointed to the sky. There were two birds in the air, fighting one another, making strange noises. Then many other birds flew towards them in the sky. One of the birds fell. Slowly. I ran and caught it before it touched the ground. The bird melted suddenly in my hands, like ice into water. But in this case it melted into blood. I tried to clean the blood off, but it wouldn’t clean. The old man came up to me and spat in my hand. The blood disappeared. The old man pointed again. I looked but I saw nothing. When I looked round the old man had gone. I saw him in the distance and I ran after him and no matter how hard I ran I couldn’t shorten the distance between us. I gave up. I didn’t train any more that night. Don’t tell your mother what I just told you, you understand?’

I nodded. After that he withdrew into his cavernous silence. I too became silent. His story had infected me. Mum found us both unbearable and began to pick quarrels and blame me for things I hadn’t done. But I didn’t say anything. Me and Dad stayed silent the whole night.

TEN

I BECAME VERY curious about Dad’s secret place of training. The next day I waited for him to jog there, so I could follow him. I waited, but he stayed in, sleeping. He was tired. I woke him up and reminded him of his training, but he turned over and went on sleeping. I went outside, stayed close to our compound, and kept watching for him while I played. The air was full of noises. The politicians’ vans rode up anddown,blaringtheirpartymusic,makingtheirinterminableannouncementsand promises. It became quite confusing to hear both parties virtually promise the same things. The Party of the Rich talked of prosperity for all, good roads, electricity, and free education. They called the opposition thieves, tribalists, and bandits. At their rally, they said, everyone would be fed, all questions would be answered.

That evening the van of the Party for the Poor also paraded our street. They too blared music and made identical claims. They distributed leaflets and made their promises in four languages. When the two vans, each packed with armed bodyguards, passed one another, they competed with the amount of noise they could generate. They insulted one another in their contest of loudspeakers; and the heated blare of their music clashing created such a jangle in the air that the road crowded with spectators who expected a tremendous combustion. The two vans clashed twice that evening. We kept expecting some sort of war to break out, but both parties seemed restrained by the healthy respect they had developed for one another. The truth was that the time hadn’t yet arrived.

Madame Koto’s car was seen in the service of the Party of the Rich. She wasn’t in the vehicle. Which was probably why the driver took to showing off. When the driver saw us in themiddleoftheroadhewouldcomespeedingatusasifheintendedtorun us over. We would all flee. Only Ade would remain where he was, unafraid, almost daring the driver to kill him. And always the driver stopped very close to Ade, a big grin on his face. Thedriver developed this tasteforfrighteninguswiththecar.When we saw that he didn’t run Ade over, the rest of us didn’t move either when he threatened us. Terror always seized me though, when the car screeched to a halt and I could smell the engine oil smouldering and could see the driver smiling. Ade, always defiant, never smiled back. He would stop what he was doing, and go home. He was a lonely kid.

When the driver took to showing off with the car, blasting the horn, shouting insults at goats and chickens and passers-by, the people began to dislike Madame Koto very intensely. But it wasn’t her fault that her driver gave lifts to girls and splashed mud on hard-working folk and, whenever he saw the chance, drove at us in his macabre idea of a joke.

Three days after Dad’s encounter at his secret training ground, there was an unusual gathering of people along the road. There were more vans than normal. They made so much noise with their music and loudspeakers that children cried and the rest of us were deafened. We no longer heard what they said. They obliterated their own messages with their noises. That day some men came to make enquiries about Dad. They hung around, waiting for him to return. One of the vans, packed full of party stalwarts, had stopped across the road and had set up a permanent blare of discordant music and meaningless exhortations. They spoke in many languages, in such vigorous voices, that the loudspeaker made complete nonsense of their utterances. Everyone was on edge that day. The hot spells of the seasonal break were quite infernal, the air was humid, and the noise grated on our teeth. There was a feeling that something unpleasant was goingto happen.

When Dad got back from work the men converged on him and asked him questions. He didn’t answer them and he brushed them aside and went into the room. He was catatonic with overwork, his eyes dazed, and his silence was like the mood of an ancient grudge. I fetched him water, he bathed. We placed food before him, and he ate his usual huge quantities. And then he slept. He slept through till the evening. The men outside still waited. Then they left. The van stayed parked and occasionally one of the men would keep up a running commentary on who would win the forthcoming elections. They played their music very loudly. It was not the sort of music we liked. It could only have been the awfulness of the music, its loudness, which angered Dad; for, an hour before his usual waking time, we saw him with a towel round his neck, storming towards the van, his chest bare.

WhenDadgot tothevanthemenwhohadbeenwaitingforhimreappeared.They surrounded him. Dad went to the driver’s door and shouted something. The music got louder. Dad shouted again. I saw him reach for the steering wheel. Suddenly the music underwent a vicious scratching transformation, and then went dead.

‘Trouble has arrived!’ someone said in the new silence.

For a long moment nothing happened. One of the men grabbed Dad round the neck and he lashed out. The man stood still, back against the van, eyes frozen. None of the others moved. Dad stormed back to the house. The man he had struck fell down slowly.

The party stalwarts, the bodyguards, and the thugs came pouring down from the back of the van. They were all mighty men, with muscles of solid teak. Their faces were fierce and some of them carried clubs. The last thug to come down was the mightiest of them all. He wore a tracksuit and as he emerged he took off his top. I had never seen anyone so cramped and crowded with muscles. His eyes blazed and he was rugged and handsome and his face twitched as if an implacable agony was lodged in his brain. The others cleared the way for him. He was obviously their leader. The others ran round him in a kind of obeisance and they pointed to our house. The chief thug gave our compound the contemptuous glance it probably deserved and slowly, with the great dignity of one for whom victory has always been certain, he strode towards our housefront. Crowds trailed behind him. Children cheered. The inhabitants of the street hissed and cursed. The music was resumed on the loudspeaker and someone sangproverbialvariations on thethemeof thetroublethat peoplebringupon themselves.

By the time the chief thug reached our housefront the crowd had formed the perimeter of a ringside. The compound people had brought out their chairs and drinks and sat where they had a clear view of the centre. And then from behind the crowd a voice started to chant Dad’s name.

‘Black Tyger! Black Tyger!’

Thechant waspickedupandgrewinmomentum,tilleveryonewascallingforDad, stampingtheir feet rhythmically.

‘SHUT UP!’ thechief thugbarked suddenly.

A hush fell over everyone.

‘Who is this Black Tyger? Is he not afraid of death? Why did he insult my men and spoil our music? Tell him to come out – NOW!’

The crowd resumed chanting.

‘SHUT UP!’ barked the chief thug again.

He strode around the human ringside, baring his chest, inflating his stature.

‘Do you know who I am?’

‘No!’ replied the crowd.

‘They call me..’

‘Yeeeessssss?’ came the crowd.

‘THE GREEN LEOPARD!’

‘Is that so?’ sighed the crowd.

Then there was silence. His name alone was a myth of terror. He was a legendary personage, the most feared fighter and terroriser in many of the ghettos. He used to be an armed robber, was nearly a world champion boxer, and spent years sowing dread in a thousand streets, making the nights horrifying for women and men alike. His name was always spoken in low tones, for fear that he might materialise behind you, and up till that day no one had seen what he looked like; they had only heard the myth of his terror.

Dad didn’t show his face. The world began to think him a coward. The crowd grew restless. The legendary Green Leopard, who had, it was said, given up his days of armed robbery, stalked the human ringside proudly. They said he was now a proper party man, rehabilitated into the mould of bouncer, bodyguard, and canvasser of votes. He was actually the great bully of the ghetto, and he strode about the place, chest pushed out, arms bouncingat his side.

In the meantime they had wheeled out the blind old man. He fretted excitedly in his chair. He had brought his accordion. He wore a red hat and startled us with his green glasses.

‘Ah, so there is going to be a fight?’ he said in his graveyard voice, laughing, and fretting in his chair like a large cockroach.

‘Ah, a fight, eh? Good, Fisticuffs! Excellent. When I was a youngman…‘ and he pressed strains of music from his accordion.

The beer-sellers, the trinket merchants, the stall-owners, the hawkers of dried fish and roast ground-nuts circled amongst the crowd selling things. Drinks were bought in great numbers. Ade found me and we kept close together and waited. Madame Koto, with her swelling foot, and her black walking stick, pushed to the front of the spectators. We heard her servant blasting the car horn up and down the street. The blind old man had fallen into an argument with someone about who would win. They madeabet. Then thefeverofbettingcaughteveryoneandthefatmanwhoownedthe betting-shop up thestreet went roundcollectingoddsonDad.Mostpeoplefavoured Green Leopard. Dad had stayed inside too long and the feelings of the people had turned against him. Sami, the betting-shop owner, realised while collecting the bets that he needed a bucket for all the money. He bought a bucket. Then he sent for his brothers. Six of them came, with machetes and dane guns, and surrounded the bucket. Then Sami went and spoke to the Green Leopard. He gave Sami a terrible stare and then said, very loudly:

‘If I don’t destroy that Black Chicken in two minutes I will give him one hundred pounds!’

The spectators went wild with cheering.

‘GREEN LEOPARD!’ they chanted.

And still Dad didn’t emerge. I got worried. I went into the compound to see what was happening.

ELEVEN

THEROOM WASDARK.MumsatonDad’schairmendinghisshirt.Dad lay on the bed, snoring. I woke him up and told him what was going on outside. ‘Don’t go,’ Mum said. When Dad heard about the hundred pounds his face brightened. ‘So they are ready?’ he asked. I nodded vigorously. ‘And there are a lot of people?’ ‘The whole area. Even Madame Koto is there.’ He smiled. Then, filtering through the walls of the compound, we heard them chant the chief thug’s name.

‘Who is that?’‘The crowd. They are hailing the man.’‘What man?’‘Green Leopard.’Dad got up. His alacrity betrayed the fact that he was clearly aware of his opponent’s reputation. He began to shadow-box. He stretched his muscles. He limbered up. He was soon sweating. The chanting outside grew louder. He went through his pockets, brought out some pound notes, and gave them to me to go and bet on his behalf.

‘Don’t lose it,’ he said. ‘It’s the last money in the house.’Mumhad amiserableand helpless look on her face, asifsheweregoingtobesick for a long time. ‘So you aregoingto fight him?’ I asked. ‘Don’t,’ Mum said. ‘And beat him’, Dad said, ‘in ten minutes.’ ‘That’s what the man said he would do to you,’ I informed him. ‘Wonderful,’ Dad replied, absent-mindedly.

I left the room. At the housefront the spectators had multiplied. There were faces everywhere. Hungry faces. And now they were hungry for spectacle.

It was a bright evening. The heat alone was enough to make everyone feverish. I went and placed Dad’s bet with Sami. The odds against Dad were high and Sami smiled as he took Dad’s money.

When Dad emerged from the compound I understood why the odds were so high against him. Dad looked puny compared to the Green Leopard. Dad’s appearance drew cries of derision. He came out and jumped around, snorting, shadow-boxing. Green Leopard regarded him with an expression of purest scorn and, in a powerful voice, asked:

‘What is your weight?’‘I have no weight,’ Dad replied.The crowd broke into laughter.‘The man has no weight,’ they said.

Ifelt sorry forDad.IstartedtogoovertopullhimawayfromtheringwhenAde held me back.

‘My father gave me this strong spell,’ he said, waving a dead frog in my face. ‘Throw it into the ring,’ he added, giving it to me.

I aimed at Green Leopard’s head, and threw the dead frog. And missed. It landed on the head of one of his followers, who turned, saw the mischief on our faces, and pursued us. We ran to the burnt van, circled it twice, ducked under a stall, and dashed to the forest. He went back to the spectators. We followed cautiously. When we got to the crowd, and wriggled our way to the front, the two men had begun warming up. Music from the party van was strident over the loudspeaker. Green Leopard had limbered up and worked himself into a great sweat. He was a veritable Titan. He seemed to have been carved directly from the core of a granite mountain. His muscles glistened in the evening sun as if he had bathed in oil. Dad looked lean and tough, but nowhere near as mighty as I had imagined before I had anyone to compare him with. I feared for him and began to feel quite sick.

‘So you have no weight, eh?’ Green Leopard asked, dancingaround heavily, aiming a few trial punches at Dad’s head from a short distance.

‘No,’ Dad said, hopping like a mudskipper, moving like a crab, a defensive animal, ‘but I will beat you and disgrace your philosophy.’

Green Leopard laughed contemptuously again and Dad struck him full in the face with a lightning jab. Green Leopard’s head rocked backwards. His laughter stiffened into a mask of pain. Blood appeared on his mouth. He was completely surprised by the speed of Dad’s jab. The crowd gasped. The loudspeaker fell silent. For a moment the wind howled over our hungry heads. The blind old man fidgeted excitedly on his chair and broke the silence with a few strains from his ancient instrument.

‘The first blow has been struck!’ he said.

Then the Green Leopard mounted a ferocious attack of punches on Dad, swinging wildly, using his elbows, throwing crosses and hooks, shouting. Women in the crowd screamed. Dad disappeared under the fury of punches and was sent reeling into the crowd. The people pushed aside for him and as he got up a few hands propelled him back into the fray. One of the people who had pushed him was our landlord.

‘The first attack!’ cried the blind old man.

I hated him intensely.

‘Have you got another frog?’ I asked Ade.

‘No. But I’ve got this.’

He brought out a catapult. I snatched it from him, found a little stone, loaded the catapult, and fired a shot at the blind old man’s face. I hit his red hat instead. Someone conked me. The old man squealed. The crowd gasped again. Dad had been sent flying with a barrage of crude, heavy-handed blows. The thugs helped him up and, smirking, shoved him back into the fight.

‘Successful attack number two!’ the blind old man announced, and hid his face.

I searched for another stone. Someone snatched the catapult from me. The crowd yelled. I saw Green Leopard staggering backwards. Dad pounced on him and unleashed a cascade, an avalanche of punches so fast his hands seemed like a machine. Dad’s speed was marvellous, his hands were a blur, and the Green Leopard was sent sprawlingon his buttocks. His followers started to move. But Green Leopard picked himself up. The blind old man winced in his chair.

‘Finish him off!’ I cried.

My voice disappeared in the noise and murmurings of the spectators. Dad waited for his opponent to get up. He began to dance, to perform his fancy footwork. He skipped, he even pranced a little. He looked very defined. His power had all of a sudden grown. His skin shone. And there was a look on his face I had never seen before. It was the look of a man at home with the great hinterlands and energies of his spirit. There was no fear on his face. He seemed both serene and insane at the same time.

‘No weight! No weight!’ he cried. ‘But I am the Black Tyger of this forest.’

Green Leopard rushed him. But Dad wasn’t there. So deftly had he jumped out of harm’s way. He stood behind Green Leopard. He waited for the famed terroriser to turn round. Green Leopard was confused. He looked for Dad and couldn’t seem to find him. When he turned round his face was all squashed and swollen, beaten out of shape like a tin car in a bad accident, his eyes narrow, blood streaming from an ugly cut at the corner of his nose. It seemed as if Dad’s fists were made of something more unpleasant than metal. When Green Leopard turned, blinded by his swellings, Dad struck him again. And again. Then proceeded to unravel a combination of hooks, upper cuts, right and left crosses, and body punches, so savage and methodical that the crowd was breathless with amazement at the sheer nerve of the smaller man. Green Leopard looked dazed, bewildered, trapped in the higher mathematics of a thorough beating. Dad, with all of his might, smashed him on the nose. Then ended with a roundhouse punch to the ear. But the Green Leopard refused to fall.

Then suddenly the blind old man let out the strangest laughter that ever proceeded from the mouth of a living human being. Dad stopped. And turned. The blind man grinned.

‘Don’t look!’ I cried.

It was too late. Green Leopard caught Dad with a punch of such malevolent power that I heard bones snap in his neck, I heard the base of his skull protest, and felt his entire world-view undergo several revolutions. Dad was sent flyingand went crashing into the blind old man. The old man and Dad disappeared into the bodies and the feet of spectators. Green Leopard rushedhim,lashingoutatthespectatorsinhisway.He suddenly became uncontrollably mad. He threw people about. He tossed women and children out of his path. He unloaded vicious hooks at shadows and faces. He spat blood on people and cursed and grabbed the blind old man and hurled him into the scattering crowd as if he were a mere dummy. He grabbed the wheelchair, and brutally smashed it to the floor, then he caught Dad by the neck, jerked him up, and proceeded to trounce him with maniacal viciousness. There was wailing and pandemonium everywhere. The fight had lost its rules. It had gone crazy. Green Leopard had swung off into an orbit of purest insanity. He raged, pounding Dad’s body, as if his brain had become flooded with the ecstatic liquids of tyranny. He finished his barbaric attack with a punch to the stomach that should have indented it for ever and again Dad disappeared into the crowd. When he reappeared I couldn’t recognise him. His face was swollen beyond description, bloodied, mashed, and pulped; his nose was cut; blood spurted from underneath an eye; a cut had widened on his forehead; and his mouth was so monstrous it resembled an obscene fruit. Blindly, he flailed about in the crowd, his arms everywhere, his legs wobbly. He kept staggering, but he didn’t fall.

‘Dad!’ I screamed with all the power of my lungs.

He stopped, turned, looked around with eyes that couldn’t seem to focus. Then he vanished. I thought he had fallen. I ran there. The crowd had swarmed the place I had last seen him. We looked for him among the feet of people, among the fallen. He wasn’t anywhere. Green Leopard stood in the middle of the ring, his arms outstretched as if hehad won animportantchampionship fight,hisfacepouringwith blood and a mess of gore.

‘Where is the man with no weight?’ he asked.

The crowd replied:

‘He has run away!’

‘Tell him to run far. Because when I catch him I will..

Suddenly Dad reappeared. He stepped out from the spectators, a ghastly, horrifying sight, an apparition covered in rubbish. From the waist downwards he was pouring with mud and slime. For some reason he had gone into the swamp. He was an ugly sight. He was beyond caring, his eyes were not afraid of dying, he was no longer a defensive animal, and his eyes burned as if he had the sun in them. He had gone back to someprimevalcondition. Hestepped into theringand said:

‘What will you do?’

‘Kill you,’ Green Leopard said.

‘First you have to find me.’

‘That’s easy.’

‘Then promise me that your followers will not interfere.’

Green Leopard looked confident and puzzled at the same time. Then he spoke to his followers rapidly in the only language they would thoroughly understand. His followersprotested,buthespokeangrily,beratingthem,andthey noddedreluctantly.

Madame Koto kissed her teeth and said:

‘Men aremad! I amnot goingto stand hereand watch peoplekillthemselves.’

Shepushedherway outofthecrowd.Iheardhercallingherdriver.

‘Women!’ the blind old man said.

Dad went into the ring. He didn’t dance, or do anything fanciful. He stood, fists guarding his face, ready. Green Leopard danced towards him, swaggering almost, confident, arms at his side. His followers began to chant his name.

‘Green Leopard!’

‘Master boxer!’

‘Destroy the Tyger!’

‘Eat up his fame!’

The music started again from the loudspeaker. The blind old man squeezed additional discord from his accordion. I found a hardened lump of eba on the floor and threw it and this time I didn’t miss. I caught him flush on the mouth. He looked blindly around.Hestoppedplayinghisinstrument.ThenIheardhimsay:

‘Takemeaway fromhere.Thespiritshavestartedattackingmeinbroaddaylight.’

The woman who had brought him wheeled him off. When he had gone the mood of the fight swung into a new hemisphere. The Green Leopard lunged in, wading, arms swinging in a curious half-hearted attack on Dad. He was half-hearted, it seemed, because Dad looked finished anyway, he looked wobbly on his feet, a defeated man whom a few ordinary punches would destroy. And that’s why we were all so surprised. Suddenly, from seeming so weak, Dad became rock-like, and charged. He let out a manic scream. Energy, concentrated, glowed from him in an instant. His fists, released from their immobility, shot out in a series of fast, short punches, raining down from a hundred different angles. The punches were blistering, mud from Dad’s fists flew everywhere, and the entire action lasted a short time but the speed of the attack seemed to elongate the moment. It was mesmerising. Dad didn’t rush into an attack. He didn’t move forward. He punched from the spot where he stood, as if he were in an invisible, invulnerable circle of power. A short burst of this close-range fighting ended with an upper cut that travelled from Dad’s solidly planted feet and all the mud of his rage. It connected with Green Leopard’s jaw, drawing a great sigh from the crowd. The day darkened. A cloud passed over the face of the sun. Birds wheeled overhead. The music from the loudspeaker was full of victory and celebration. Green Leopard stood, arms out, as if he had gone deaf, or as if he had been shot from behind. His eyes were blank, his mouth open. A cloud of dust flew up as the great boxer collapsed slowly to the floor. It was like a dream. Dad was on one knee, within his invisible circle. The crowd was silent, stunned by its unbelief.

I let out a cry of joy. Green Leopard’s followers rushed to pick up their man. But he was out cold and didn’t so much as twitch. His mouth flopped open and his body was limp as if he had totally given up on reality. The crowd, profoundly disappointed, spat abuses at Green Leopard and his followers. They showered curses on his reputation. They damned his fame and booed his reputation and they began to leave in utter disgust at the money they had lost betting on a man who was much weaker than his legend had suggested. Green Leopard’s followers lifted up the prostrate form of their chief protector, master boxer, terroriser of ghettos, the orchestrator of their myths of invincibility. They looked overcome with shame. The music died Out and a funereal silence reigned. They carried the horizontal form of their legend, they lifted him high as if he were dead, as if he were a corpse, and they took him to the van. Hurriedly, they bundled him in. Hurriedly, they drove away. Green Leopard did not honour his bet. They left with their philosophy in disgrace. The pamphlets they had distributed, which were scattered about the street, flew all about as the van sped off over them.

No one rushed to congratulate Dad except me and Ade. The crowd were curiously unforgiving of his surprising victory. We jumped around Dad and he lifted us up and carried us in the air and our thin voices rang out his name and sang out his achievement so that the earth and the wind and the sky would bear witness to it even when thespectators didn’t. Thecrowdscatteredinshameathavingbackedthewrong man, in shame for having judged things by appearances, and in bad temper because they didn’t know how to achieve the swift turnaround in appreciation. We were not bothered. Dad’s victory was all the world we needed. And beaten, mashed up, his face broken, he carried us, cheering, towards the room. Then Ade remembered our bets.

‘Sami has run away with our money!’ I cried.

Dad immediately put us down and stormed to the betting-shop. We strode, proudly, behind him.

When we arrived, Sami was counting the money he had collected in his bucket. His hefty brothers sat around him in the shop, their faces glowing with money and the light from the kerosine lamp. Sami sat on a stool, his face covered with sweat, his eyes glittering. When he looked up and saw us his face darkened. Then he broke into a smile.

‘Black Tyger,’ he said, ‘you surprised everybody. Sit down. Have a drink. We were just counting the money. Then we were coming to give you your share. So, what will you drink? This fight of yours has made me more money in one day than I have made in months.’

‘So I see,’ Dad said, refusing to sit.

Westood on either sideof him, his minutebodyguards. Therewas alongsilence.

‘Are you going to give me my money or not?’ Dad asked finally. ‘Or do I have to fight everybody here as well?’

Sami smiled. There was silence. The flame crackled. Then Sami got up, went to the back room, and eventually came back with a thick bundle of notes. He gave them to Dad, who gave them to me. I counted the money. Dad nodded his satisfaction. As we turned to leave, Sami said:

‘Send one of your boys the next time you are fighting.’

‘Why?’

‘We could make more money together.’

Dad said nothing. We left. On the way Ade said he had to go home. Dad gave him a pound noteand Adewent on home, dancingdown thestreet, singingof our triumph.

It was only when we got home that a monstrous exhaustion seized hold of Dad. As weopened thedoor Mumwassittingonastool,withacandleonthetableinfrontof her. She was in an attitude of prayer. She looked up, saw Dad, and rose. Her mouth opened wide when she saw the devastation of Dad’s features. She rushed to Dad and embraced him. She began weeping. Then Dad collapsed on her. It took us an hour to carry him to the bed. He did not stir.

TWELVE

DAD SLEPT, WITHOUT waking, for two days. He was like a giant on the bed. It was a shock to see his bruised feet, the cuts on his soles, corns on his toes. His swollen face grew bigger as he slept. His mouth puffed out, red and frightening. His forehead became almost twice its normal size and the cut on his nose widened. While Dad slept, his face swelling, his eyeballs expanding, blood occasionally spurtingfrom his numerous wounds and lacerations, Mum applied warm compresses to his bruises and treated him with herbal fluids. Mum nursed him, washed him, combed his hair, as if she were nursing a corpse she didn’t want to bury. On the second day we worried about him and tried to wake him up. He turned in our direction, opened his swollen eyes, and threw a feeble punch, clobbering Mum. She went around that day with a swollen jaw and had to hide her face with a headtie. We gave up on waking him and took to watching over him, as if to ascertain that he was still alive. We would sit in the room in the evenings, three candles on the table, our faces long with anxiety. His sleeping form spread a ghostly silence in the room and made the shadows ominous. Occasionally, Dad would mutter something. We would wait and listen. But he would be gone again.

On the third day, in the evening, when the wind started to rattle our rooftops, Dad began to howl in his sleep. Then he kicked and struggled on the bed, and fell down. He jumped up, his eyes big and mad, ran around the room, kicking things over, sowing havoc with his gigantic shadow, wounding himself on sharp objects, and then hecollapsed atthedoorwhilehewastryingtogetout.Ittookusanotherhourtodrag him back to the bed. Mum lit three sticks of incense and stuck them in strategic corners of the room, to ward off evil spirits. Then that evening, as I sat in the room alone, watching Dad heave on the bed as if breath were deserting him for ever, Mum brought three women into the house. One of them was Madame Koto. They were all dressed in black. One of them, I learned later, was a powerful herbalist who had once been a witch and who had confessed in public, and who was stoned. She reappeared a year after her confession, transformed into astrongherbalistwhohadpromisedtodo some good to the community. Everyone feared her and few trusted her.

When the three women came into our room I knew something very serious was happening. I stayed silently in a corner, hidden by clothes. They didn’t seem to mind my presence. I stayed silently in the corner and watched them calling Dad’s spirit back from the Land of the Fighting Ghosts. All through the night they called Dad’s public and secret names in the strangest voices. All through the night they performed their numinous rituals, singing the saddest songs, weaving threnodies from his names, chanting incantations that altered the spaces in the room, that increased the sepia-tinted shadows, that made the cobwebs writhe and flow as if they had become black ancient liquids. The forms of night-birds took shape amongst us, fluttering swiftly over the candle-light; the room filled up with nameless presences, passingthrough the air of burning sacrificial herbs. The black sea-waves lashed on the dark shores of the ceiling as the women conjured a hundred forms to fight the things that prevented them reaching Dad’s spirit in the remotest regions of the human hinterland. The herbalist who had been a witch sweated and performed, conjured and contorted, she changed her guises under the cover of shadows, she fought heroic battles with the spirits we couldn’t see, and she fought them with her frail form, her face crushed and wrinkled like the skin of the aged tortoise which she put on the bed to help her travel faster through those realms where speed is an eternal paradox. Over the door she hung the dried heads of an antelope and a tiger, the skull of a boar and the bristling paws of a lion long dead in its prime. She sacrificed two white cocks. Their blood, mixed with strong smelling potions, was smeared on our walls. The feathers of a parrot and an eagle were burned on our floor and nearly burned down the house. The herbalist made razor incisions on Dad’s shoulders and pressed ground herbs into the bleeding cuts. Dad didn’t move. I watched his blood trickle down his shoulder, black with the herbs. Then deep in the night the women began to dance round the bed, shrieking. A crowd gathered outside our room. Dad began to stir. The wind seemed intent on blowing our houses away. The door was thrown open, all the candles were extinguished, and in the darkness I saw the huge white form of a swollen spirit suspended in the room. I screamed and the form weaved in the air and came falling down at great speed. It fell down on Dad. When the door was shut, and the candles lit, Dad jerked up suddenly, gasping for breath, heaving, his eyes wide as if he had woken from a dream of terrors. The women rushed to him and Dad, not knowing who they were, or whether he had indeed woken up, pushed them aside, sent the herbalist collapsing on the bed, and shoved Madame Koto, who came crashing down on me. Like someone trying to escapefromanightmarehefledout oftheroomandwasseentearingdowntheroad towards the forest.

The three women, Mum, and me, went after him. It was fearfully dark. The three women, faces veiled with shadows, kept changing shapes in the darkness. Madame Koto seemed to have recovered the full use of her bandaged foot. The third woman had a presence so featureless that no one noticed her even when she ran. She was like the air or like a shadow or a reflection. Her presence was important in ways I couldn’t fathom.Thesmallest ofthemwastheherbalistandassheranIkeptnoticingthather hands flapped in her black smock. It came as a surprise, a shock from which I didn’t recover for a long time, to see her lift up into the dark air, as if the wind were her ally. Then the darkness increased round her, became concentrated, like a black smock of cloud, and when the cloud cleared I saw only two women in black running, Mum besidethem.Theherbalist haddisappeared.ThenIheardtheclappingofgreatwings in the air above me and I saw a great eagle, black, with red eyes, take off towards the forest, into the night of mysteries. When we got deep into the forest we found Dad asleep, his back restingon thetrunk ofabaobabtree,withtheherbaliststandingover his haunted form.

‘We must take him back now. Before the spirits of the forest start to smell him,’ she said.

We were worried about how we were going to carry Dad back. But the third woman, who seemed to have no features, and who never spoke, took his arm and pulled him up. To our amazement Dad stood up like a child, his eyes open and vacant. Mum held his other arm; they both supported him. And like a man who is neither asleep nor awake, neither dead nor alive, we led him down the forest paths. When we got home the crowd had gone. We lay Dad on the bed. He refused to sleep. He kept jerkingup, saying:

‘If I sleep I won’t wake.’

The herbalist gave him something to drink. It seemed a very bitter drug and Dad’s eyes widened as he swallowed the herbal draught. Then he got up and sat on his three-legged chair. With his eyes bulging, his mouth big, slurring his words, Dad began to speak. The three women in black sat on the floor. Mum sat on the bed. I sat in a corner and could see Dad’s face, gaunt in the candle-light, his eyes like those of a man who has stared into the deepest pits of existence. At first it was difficult to hear what he was saying, but we got used to it.

‘I have been having the most terrible experiences,’ said Dad, staring straight ahead, as if heweretalkingto someoneintheroomthatwecouldn’tsee.‘Iwassleepingand then I wasn’t sleepingany more. Suddenly I found myself fightingseven spirits. They saidthey hadbeensentby GreenLeopard’smother.Andthey wantedtokillmeinmy sleep so that I wouldn’t wake up. I fought them for a long time. All the time you thought I was sleeping I was battling with them. They fought me viciously and kept trying to come out of my dreams to fight my wife. Eventually I defeated them. Then I tried to rest. And then a seven-headed spirit..

‘No!’ cried the third woman.

‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘A seven-headed spirit armed with seven golden swords came to me and said because I killed his comrades he wants my son’s life in return.’

Thewomen screamed. Mumrushed over and held me, smotheringme.

‘I said NO!’

The women wailed in low monotone. Mum held me tighter. I feared she might break my neck without knowing it.

‘Then the seven-headed spirit attacked me. I fought him for nine nights. I only managed to cut off one of his heads. The spirit was much too powerful for me and there was nothing I could do but run. I ran into the forest. The spirit caught me and tiedmeup withsilverropesandbegantodragmetotheLandoftheFightingGhosts. They are ghosts who spend all their time fighting. The spirit dragged me and I never stoppedresisting,buttheonly thingthatsavedmewas…’

Dadpaused. Thewomen madesad noises, heads craned forward.

‘…was my own father, Priest of the Shrine of Roads. He said the spirit couldn’t pass any road that he has blocked. The spirit fought him. They battled it out for a long time. I didn’t know my father was so powerful. He cut off two of the heads of the spirit. They both became tired. They agreed to make a truce. My father said if the spirit let me go, he would take my place. I didn’t understand what he meant.’

Mum began to wail.

‘Shut up, woman!’ Dad said.

Mum fell silent. I heard her swallow down her tears.

‘And then both of them vanished. I freed myself from the ropes. All of my energy had drained from me. An eagle perched on my head and then it turned into a woman. And then four women, three of them dressed in black, just like you,’ Dad said, pointingat thethreewomen, ‘cameand led mefromtheforest. And then I wokeup.’

We all stared at him in silence.

‘Pour me something strong to drink!’ he demanded.

Mum poured him some ogogoro. Dad finished it in a gulp. The herbalist made Dad drink some more of her herbal draught. Then she got him to bathe in specially treated water. When Dad got back she had prepared another potion for him. He drank it in one and surprised us all by the tenderness of his ravings. He sat on his chair and began to talk about how sweet the black rocks of the moon tasted, and how he drank of the golden elixir of the sun, and of the innumerable geniuses of the future that black peoplewould produce, and of how hesaw Mumdancingnaked in theforest, her hair suspended by the brilliant cobwebs that the gods had spun, and how he saw me walkingbackwards into ayellow river, and of abeautifulyoungwoman hesaw who called him deep into the place where dead bodies grew red flowers from their mouths. And then just as suddenly as he began, he fell silent. His mouth stayed open. His eyes were shut.

‘Thismanhasgotastronghead,’theherbalistsaid.‘My medicineusually puts people to sleep before I count to three. Help me carry him to the bed.’

We carried him. Dad snored. After a while the three women got up. Mum talked to them about money. A small argument ensued. Mum loosened the end of her wrapper, counted out some money, and paid the herbalist and the third woman. Madame Koto said to

Mum:

‘We must continue that conversation of ours.’

‘My husband says no,’ Mum said.

‘Ask him again.’

The three women left. It was the first time in three nights that we got any sleep.

THIRTEEN

WHEN DAD WOKE up the next morning he bustled with energy as if nothing had happened to him. His face was still swollen, his eyes almost invisible, his mouth puffed out, but he swore that he felt twenty years younger. He talked of grand schemes. He talked of buying enough corrugated zinc to roof the whole ghetto. He talked of buying enough cement to build houses for all the large families who lived in oneroom. Hespokeof tarringalltheroads andclearingaway alltherubbishthathad accumulated in theconsciousness ofourpeople.Hedreamtofopeningmassivestores that would sell food cheaply to all the poor people. He got us worried when he began to dream of becoming a professional musician. And we started to think that Green Leopard had dislodged something in his brain when he talked of becoming a politician and bringing freedom and prosperity to the world and free education to the poor. And it was when he began to talk loudly about becoming the Head of State, seizing power from the white people that ruled us, and of all the good things he would do for thesufferingpeopleof theworld, that westopped payingtoo much attentionto him.

Then onemorninghewentfromroomtoroom,knockingondoors,wakingpeopleup, and asking them if they would vote for him. Most of them slammed their doors in his face. It was unfortunate that, to humour him, one or two people said that they would. It gave him greater encouragement. He went from compound to compound. He spoke to stall-owners and provision-sellers. He queried the ground-nut hawkers and the urban shepherds and the amulet traders. He had long arguments with palm-wine tappers. He was seen in bars, at night, talking to drunkards, outlininghis policies for government. A new idealism had eaten into his brain with the freshness of his recuperation. He made enquiries about the cost of zinc. He wondered aloud about how long and how wide the ghetto was. He made extensive, illiterate calculations about how much it would cost to build a house, to build schools, about the population of the poor, and how much money he would need to win an election.

He astonished us with the crankiness of his thinking. He conjured an image of a country in which he was invisible ruler and in which everyone would have the highest education, in which everyone must learn music and mathematics and at least five world languages, and in which every citizen must be completely aware of what is going on in the world, be versed in tribal, national, continental, and international events, history, poetry, and science; in which wizards, witches, herbalists and priests of secret religions would be professors at universities; in which bus drivers, cart-pullers, and market women would be lecturers, while still retaining their normal jobs; in which children would be teachers and adults pupils; in which delegations from all the poor people would have regular meetings with the Head of State; and in which there would be elections when there were more than five spontaneous riots in any given year.

Dad began to spend a lot of the money he had won in buying books. He couldn’t read but he bought them. I had to read them to him. He bought books on philosophy, politics, anatomy, science, astrology, Chinese medicine. He bought the Greek and Roman classics. He became fascinated by the Bible. Books on the cabbala intrigued him. He fell in love with the stories of the Arabian Nights. He listened with eyes shut to the strange words of classical Spanish love poetry and retellings of the lives of Shaka the Zulu and Sundiata the Great. He insisted that I read something to him all the time. He forced me to have a double education. In the evenings he would sit on his chair, feet on the table, cigarette in his mouth, eyes misty, paper and pencil beside him, and he would make me read out loud. Occasionally he would interrupt me for an explanation. Most of what I read made no sense to me. So he bought a large dictionary which must have cost him at least ten mighty punches from the fists of the Green Leopard. Dad’s bloated eye twitched when he opened it out on our table, releasing into the air of our room the aroma of words and freshwood. Like a battered but optimistic salesman, he said:

‘This book explains books.’

His passion began to drive us slightly mad. The room became cluttered with books of all sizes, ugly books with pictureless covers and tiny letters as if intended only for the ants to read, large books that broke your back to carry them, books with such sloped lettering that they strained the neck, books which smelt like cobwebs and barks of medicinal trees and old sawdust after rain. Mum complained and sometimes made piles of the books and balanced her basins and cookingpots on them. Dad got furious at her disrespect and they argued bitterly. Then Dad began to contemplate the notion ofcompulsory military serviceforwomen.Then,lookingatme,heincludedchildren. He saw himself both as invisible Head of State and as fitness master. In the mornings he took to drilling us. Whenever we annoyed him in any way he would wake us up very early and take us through exercise routines. Mum obliged at first, even when she was cooking. That was the first time I saw Mum burn an entire pot of soup. We went hungry that day. Mum became exempt from all drilling. Maybe that was when the future notion of joining the army first entered Dad’s head.

He didn’t go to work for days. He went around, driven by the new lights that Green Leopard had knocked into his head. He spoke to the prostitutes at length. He persisted even when they abused him, even when people began to speculate loudly about his strangealliances. Then hetalkedofgettingadelegationofMadameKoto’sprostitutes to go and protest to the Colonial Administration. For three days Mum refused to cook. And Dad, forced to eat beans cooked by hawkers, and brought down by a bout of stomach trouble, gave up the notion of the Council of Prostitutes. But he created a special place for them in his imagined country.

It didn’t take Dad long to realise that he didn’t know what he was talking about. When he tried to organise the men of the area to start clearing up the rubbish along the streets, he was surprised at the ferocity of their insults.

‘Doyouthinkwehavenothingbettertodo?’they said.

Dad, never to be daunted, took to clearing the rubbish himself.

‘We have to clear garbage from our street before we clear it from our minds,’ he said, echoing something he had heard in one of the books.

But when he had cleared a bit of rubbish, and dumped it in the swamp, people would litter the section he had cleaned up. In one week his efforts seemed to have resulted in there being more rubbish around. The street got worse. People began to think it more natural to dump their garbage on the street. Dad quarrelled with them. Those that might have voted for him, few as they were, publicly withdrew their support. After a while they began to see the possibilities of the swamp. Dad had shown them the way. When the street became too cluttered, they emptied their garbage into the swamp. When the rains fell, the swamp grew and covered half the street.

But it was when people took to bringing their problems to him, when they asked him for money, for advice on everything from how to get their children admitted to hospital to how to get books for their youngsters, that Dad realised he couldn’t be a visible or an invisible Head of State just by himself.

‘A politician needs friends!’ he announced one morning.

And he began to contemplate a new alliance with Madame Koto. He thought seriously of the importance of information and knowledge. First he dreamt of making me a spy. He wanted me to begin to revisit Madame Koto, to listen to the conversations in the bar, and to find out how to become a politician. We were amazed by Dad’s volte-face. Mum, at first, rebuked him, called him a hypocrite and a coward. But, when she had got rid of some of her vengeance, she openly supported the plan. Sheclearly hadinmindthepossibilitiesofmakingmoney cookingforthegreatrally.

Dad’s next idea was that shortly after I had re-entered Madame Koto’s bar, he would begin his reappearance. His intention was to speak to her customers, to her party supporters and colleagues, learn something about how politics worked, and maybe even win some of them over to his philosophy.

‘You used to hate politics,’ Mum said. ‘What has happened, eh?’

‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘So it took Green Leopard to start you thinking, eh?’

‘Where there’s politics, there’s money,’ Dad said. Mum was silent.

‘We can’t remain poor for ever.’

‘Yes, we can,’ I said.

Dad gave me a vicious stare.

‘In this world,’ he said after a while, ‘this is what happens to you every day if you have nothing.’ He pointed to his swollen face, his puffed-out eyes, his bruised lips.

He paused.

‘But while we are doing these things, spying on Madame Koto, finding out everything, I will continue as I was.’

We didn’t understand him. The subtlety of his campaign eluded us. He didn’t explain. And then, slowly, we realised that Dad’s manner had changed. When he pointed at something he did so with authority, as if distinguishing objects in space for the first time. His eyes were still obscured, so we couldn’t see what new lights dazzled in them. But he was no longer like a demented boxer, spoiling for a challenge to prove himself. He was slowly taking on the manner of a soldier, a commander. Me and Mum and anyone that listened to him were his team. It was a small army; and because we were a captive audience, Dad had his secret stage from which to spring. He filled our lives with a strange excitement. At the time we didn’t know it.

‘You,’ he said, pointing at me, so that I felt myself distinguished from everything else in the universe, ‘you can do what you like, but you also do what I tell you. From today listen carefully to what I say, watch carefully what I do. This life is a joke that is not really a joke. Even mosquitoes know they have to survive.’

FOURTEEN

GRADUALLY WE SAW the subtlety of his campaign. We thought he had changed. He had. But to our chagrin instead of saving the money he had made from the fight, as Mum had suggested, he immediately let it be known that he was throwing a party. He invited the compound people, Madame Koto, the blind old man, Ade’s father, and the herbalist who had treated him. The word went round that the man who had conquered GreenLeopardwashavingaparty tocelebratehisvictory.Dadinvited only a few people, but the whole world came.

It was meant to be an intimate party. Dad ordered some drinks and got Mum to fry three chickens. While Mum fried the chicken, coughing from all the smoke, Dad kept appearing and walking off with his favourite pieces. A fourth chicken had to be ordered, which I fried, because Mum said she’d had enough of the smoke. Dad confined himself to a steady consumption of beer.

‘You used to drink ogogoro,’ Mum said.

‘Lifegets better,’ replied Dad, openinganother bottle.

When I had finished with the frying and the burning of the chicken, I was sent to go and hire some chairs. When I came back with the chair-hire man, as we called him, Dad was outside, at the housefront, sweating. He had been training again. We piled the folding chairs in front of our room and Mum, grumbling, paid the chair-hire man, who asked if he too could attend the party.

‘It’s a small event,’ Mum said.

‘Good, so I can come with my wife.’

Mum had no choice but to give her consent. At the housefront Dad had begun to stride up and down the street, bare-chested, his battered gloves on, calling himself the champion of the world, and inviting all challengers. He was quite drunk and he boasted with a fury I never knew he had. He said he could beat five Green Leopards. He said he could kill three lions with his bare hands. He announced that he could knockouttentreesanddestroy abuildingwithasinglepunch.

‘Isn’t that the man who humbled the Green Leopard?’ asked Mr. Chair-Hire.

‘Yes.’

‘Excellent.Iwillcomeandenjoy hisparty.Iwillbringallmy friends.’

And he hurried off to attend to his business. Dad went on raving. He boasted with such ferocity, lashing out with such energy, and sweating so profusely, that his drunkenness soon left him and he had to keep going into the room to replenish his intoxication with bottles of beer. When he returned and resumed his furious boasting Madame Koto’s car drove past. The driver slowed down to listen to him.

‘As I was saying, I can destroy a house with only one punch! I can lift a car with one finger. If the car is coming at me I can put out one hand and the car will stop. I can build a road in one day!’

The driver laughed.

‘I can punch a man so hard’, Dad shouted, ‘that all he will be able to do is laugh for the rest of his life.’

The driver took the hint and moved on. When Dad had spent himself with training and shouting, and no one took up his challenge for a battle, he went in, had a bath, and prepared for the party.

The evening came slowly. On the road I watched as the forest darkened. Flocks of white birds settled on the topmost branches of the trees. Madame Koto and her driver went past severaltimes,carryingcartonsofbeer,boxesofpaperplatesandnapkins.I watched also as the women of her bar helped with pilingup hired chairs. Preparations for the great rally were underway. There was now a general fever of anticipation about the event. Those who swore they wouldn’t attend it had changed their minds. Its promise of spectacle, the numbers of popular musicians appearing, the hints that money would be distributed to the crowd, the talk even of witnessing free films, made the staunchest opponents waver.

Ade’s father, his two wives, and Ade himself, were the first to turn up for Dad’s modest celebrations. We opened a few folding chairs for them and poured them drinks. Dad talked to Ade’s father about politics. Mum talked to the wives about opening shops and trading in the market. I talked with Ade about Dad wantingto be Head of State.

Then the blind old man turned up with his accordion and his helper. After them came Madame Koto, her stomach massive, her face sad. And after her were the herbalist and her silent, distrustful acolytes. Behind them came the compound people, with their children. We ran out of chairs. The room was already crowded. People carried on turning up. We didn’t recognise many of them. Traders, lorry-drivers, clerks, stall-owners, hawkers, bicycle-repairers, the carpenter and his colleagues. The party spilled out of the room and into the passage. By this time the room was excruciatingly stuffy and hot. Flies buzzed over the drinks and settled on our sweating brows. Someone tried to open the window, applied too much force, and practically destroyed it. The carpenter promised to fix it for free. The blind old man supplied music from his vile accordion.

Meanwhile, outside, the problem of those who turned up, uninvited, to the party grewworse.They clamouredandraisedaterribledinalongthepassage.WhenIfeltI was going to suffocate inside, from the sweat and the old man’s music, I struggled to get out. I was shocked at the size of the crowd. Dad’s modest party had been overrun by trampswhosehairwasthebreedinggroundofliceandsproutingrubbish,andwho stank; by the wretched and the hungry and the homeless, all of whom had such defiant and intense eyes that I felt they would pounce on anyone who dared ask them to leave; by the deformed, whose legs looked like the letter K, whose mouths always seemed to be dribbling, whose rickety feet were turned somewhat backwards; by weary ghetto-dwellers, people I had seen sitting outside mechanics’ workshops dreaming about sea-journeys, people I had seen in the streets or at the markets, faces worn, eyes yellowish.Therewerehandsomeyoungmenwhobroughttheirgirlfriends, women of unknown histories, old men and women who looked like all the old people I had ever seen. There were people in black habits, with wizened faces, eyes bright like royal jaguars, chests and arms covered with spells and amulets. There were also people long rumoured to be witches and wizards. I could recognise them instantly by their anti-smells and by the way they didn’t want anyone to touch them. They always stayed on their own. I stared at one of the wizards intently. He stared back at me. Then he began coming towards me. When I turned to run, I heard a dog barking. When I looked again thewizard had goneand adogstoodinhisplace.Itwasawhite dogwith green eyes.

‘Kill that dog!’ I shouted.

The dog had an almost human expression of bewilderment on its face. Someone threw astoneatit.Iaimedakickatitsmouth.Thedogfled,howling.MomentslaterI saw the wizard coming down the street. One of his eyes was swollen. He avoided me for the rest of the evening.

Apart from the witches and the wizards, who brought an almost sweet smell of evil to the crowd, there were thugs from both of the main parties as well as some from the lesser organisations. They had come to see what Dad looked like and to pay their respects to the man who had tamed the legendary Green Leopard. The thugs struggled to get to our room, but the crowd was too dense along the passage. So they lolled around the compound-front, flexing their muscles, expanding their chests, and chatting up the women.

Evening fell and more people poured in from all over the place. Boxers turned up in their training shorts, with their boxing gloves on, with towels round their necks. Men with guns and rounds of ammunition also turned up. They were soldiers and policemen, some of them. They strolled proudly into the gathering and chatted with the prostitutes. They, too, had heard of Dad’s feat. They were all ex-ghetto men, who woretheir wretched pastsproudly.They keptaskingforDad,buthewasnowhereto befound.Hewasn’t intheroom,alongthepassage,inthetoilet,oratthecompoundfront.

Then as we were looking for Dad we saw a procession of beggars coming down the road. They wereledby ahypnotically beautifulyounggirl.Therewereaboutsevenor eight of them. Some of the beggars had legs that were limp and pliable as rubber. Some had twisted necks. Others had both feet behind their heads. One of them had one eye much higher up on his face than the other. Another seemed to have three eyes, but on closer inspection it turned out to be a wound like a socket with an eye missing. One was almost completely blind and could see only through pupils so scrambled up and confusing that they seemed like mashed egg yolk. It was when the girl got closer that we saw she was blind in one eye. All the beggars trailed alongthe ground, in filthy clothes, each with sticks and pads of cloth beneath the joints of limbs that scraped on the rough earth. Dust rose with their advance. Then to our puzzlement the beggars, looking up with the bright faces of arrivants, turned into our compound-front. The girl arranged them into a semi-circle. Then I saw that the procession of beggars were a family. The most deformed was the father. He seemed to have all their deformities. As the line went towards the youngest each member seemed to have a peculiar variation of a particular deformity. It ended with the clarity of the little girl’s blind eye. I couldn’t stop looking at the girl. She was extremely beautiful, like a flower whose flaw is its luminous perfection. She was also curiously familiar, like the distant music heard on those afternoons when all the world is resolved into a pure dream, a music without a location, the music of one’s mood and spirit, distilled by a secret affinity. I went over to the beggars and asked who they were.

‘We are from a distant place,’ said the girl, ‘and we heard that a famous boxer was throwing a party for people who are hungry. We have always been hungry and it took us a whole day of travelling to get here.’

I immediately renewed my search for Dad. I found him in the room, surrounded by boxers, all of whom wanted to try their new techniques on him. Dad was in a frantic state. Theroomwasovercrowded.Peoplewerescreaminginterroratthespacesbeing crushed about them. The clothes-line had been pulled down and our clothes lay scattered on the floor and trampled on by mud-covered shoes. The window had been splinteredopenby oneoftheboxerswhowaspractisingasouthpawpunch.Thebed was in complete disarray with children jumping about on it. Our cupboard had been invadedby strangerswhowerehelpingthemselvestoourfood.Therewasnowhereto move in the room. In a corner one of the boxers relentlessly punched the wall with his bare fists. Mum sat where all the clothes had fallen. She had a frightened expression on her face. I couldn’t reach either Mum or Dad. As I fought through it I became conscious that the crowd was actively preventing my entry. I was completely encompassed by witches and wizards. One of them smiled at me and revealed her dazzling white teeth. A tall witch looked down at me. She was very pretty indeed and had an almost royal bearing. Then she got out a pair of glasses and put them on. Her eyes looked monstrous. She laughed. She put her hand on my shoulder. It brushed against my face. Her hand was so cold in that heated place that I came close to fainting with shock. The witches and wizards closed in on me. I felt myself suffocating. Their smells were so sweet, so without sweat, it made me ill. The one with the swollen eye brought out a black sack. I screamed. When I stopped screaming they weren’t around me any more. I found myself surrounded instead by thugs. One of them slapped my head.

‘What’s wrongwith you?’ hesaid.

I made a new effort to get to Dad. I called to him. At the other side of the room I could hear him telling everyone to leave, that the party would be held at the housefront. No one listened. He spoke louder and said he wouldn’t serve any drinks or food if people didn’t leave the room. Gradually they pushed their way out. They were rowdy inthepassage,mutteringtheirdisappointments.OnlyMadameKoto,someof the prostitutes, Ade and his family, and the blind old man remained.

‘What are we going to do?’ asked Dad.

‘Youinvitedthem,’Mumsaid.‘Why areyouaskingus?’

‘I didn’t invite the whole planet!’ Dad said.

‘What’s the problem?’ Madame Koto asked.

‘Not enough drinks, plates, chicken, chairs.’

‘What do you have?’ said the blind old man.

‘Too many people.’

I went up to Dad and told him that some beggars had come to see him. I told him they’dbeentravellingforawholeday andwerehungry.

‘You mean beggars came to see me, eh?’

‘Yes.’

‘And they travelled for seven days?’

‘One day.’

‘And they are outside?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come and show them to me,’ Dad said, staggering.

Then I realised he was very drunk. We left the room. Outside, it was crowded. Dad mingled with the soldiers, his fellow load-carriers, cart-pullers, and boxers. He became very exuberant and talked about political miracles. By the time we got to the housefront, I had lost him. A group of thugs descended on him and they got very animated about some issue. I went over to the beggars. The old man began to sing. The girl stared at me with her sad hungry eye. All around there was chaos, People werestrugglingfor thefoldingchairs. Boxers began sparring. Witches and herbalists convergedandheatedargumentsgrewfromtheirconflictingphilosophies.They had furious rows about the superiorities of their powers and their way, the values of their accomplishments, the extent of their influence in the visible and invisible worlds. One of the herbalists brought out a red pouch, waved it about, and threw it on the ground. A cloud of green smoke rose in the air and hung over the gathering. Another herbalist brought out a bundle wrapped in silver foil, screamed incantations, and threw the bundle in the air. The green cloud dispersed. The soldiers crowded the prostitutes. Madame Koto came out of the room and ordered one of her women to call her driver, whohadbeenseendrivingup anddowntheplace,terrifyingwomen,drunkenly threateningpeoplewho crossed thestreet, blastinghis horn, and shoutinginsults at thosewho moved too slowly. Thethugs crowded MadameKoto and sangher praises. Dad got on to the cement platform and attempted to make a speech. He was very drunk and he weaved about, a bottle in his hand.

‘There is food for everybody!’ he shouted. ‘There are drinks for everybody! Madame Koto has made a generous contribution.’

Silence fell gradually over the noisy celebrants.

‘Today there will be a miracle!’ he announced again.

The crowd roared with anticipation.

‘I amgoingto divideonechicken so that everyonewillhavetheir share,’ hesaid, and left the platform.

The noise started up. Shortly afterwards Mum and Ade’s mother came out and distributed small chicken pieces to the crowd. People complained. Paper cups with small quantities of beer were also passed around. The thugs grumbled that the quantity was an insult to their saliva. Arguments started up. Disagreements flared in the bad-tempered reception of the food and drink. Shop-owners around mingled in the crowd and sold bottled beer and ogogoro. The soldiers and thugs drank a great deal. Dad appeared amongst the beggars. I saw him give them a whole chicken. There was a flash. The beggars fell on the food, rushed it, dismembered the chicken, and ate like famished beasts. Then Dad, standingproudly amongst them, his eyes big, his lips swollen, a bottle in one hand, said:

‘Thesearemembersofmy party.Thisismy worldconstituency,thebeginningof my road. Watch them. One day we will remember their hunger when we are as hungry as they are. These people are our destiny!’

No one listened to him. He went on with his political declaration, untroubled by the fact that no one listened. He criticised the people of the ghetto for not taking care of their environment, for their lazy attitude towards the world, for their almost inhuman delight in their own poverty. He urged them to lift themselves up by their thoughts.

‘THINK DIFFERENTLY,’ he shouted, ‘AND YOU WILL CHANGE THEWORLD.’

No one heard him.

‘REMEMBER HOW FREE YOU ARE,’ he bellowed, ‘AND YOU WILL TRANSFORM YOUR HUNGER INTO POWER!’

One of the soldiers burst out laughing. Dad screamed at the soldiers for carrying guns, for always having weapons, and for their arrogance. Then he launched an attack on all the thugs who went around terrorising people. He abused the government, he denounced both political parties for poisoning the minds of the people. But he reserved his most furious assault for the people of the nation. He blamed them for not thinking for themselves, he lashed out at their sheep-like philosophy, their tribal mentality, their swallowing of lies, their tolerance of tyranny, their eternal silence in the face of suffering. He complained bitterly that people in the world refused to learn how to see properly and think clearly. He swore that days of fire and flood were comingwhen soldiers and politicians would drown in their own lies.

‘He has gone completely mad!’ someone said.

‘No more political speeches!’ someone else cried.

‘Give us food!’

‘Give us wine!’

‘Give us music!’

‘Keep the politics for yourself!’

Dad’s arms flailed. He attempted to answer his hecklers, but the voices cryingout for drinks, the confusion and the arguments, the fury of drunken women and noise of thesoldiers amongtheprostitutes, drowned out his speech.

‘Music!’

‘Food!’

‘Wine!’

Dad was confused. At that moment the blind old man, vaguely resembling a centaur, struck up on his accordion, and altered the mood of the entire party. Music, like the awful sound of wild beasts gnashing and grinding their teeth in the forests, poured from the pleats of his instrument. He played with great abandon, unleashing such discordant notes on the air that it wasn’t long before a herbalist, hand wrapped in a black pouch, slapped one of the wizards. Pandemonium broke over the party, orchestrated by the soaring cruelty of the accordion’s resonant ugliness. A woman screamed. A soldier accidentally fired a shot in the air. The wizard who had been slapped whirled round and round on one spot, arms outstretched, eyes wide open. A witch slapped the herbalist, whose face turned blue and then red where he had been slapped. He began to wail. The beating of mighty wings sounded over our heads. Shadows descended on us. Darkness came on silent wings, filling out the empty spaces. I saw one of the witches struggling with her garment. Her eyes turned blue. Her fingers became claws. Her face became wonderfully pretty. A chair was hurled, which landed on the thugs. The beggars attacked the soldiers. The tramps pounced on theprostitutes. A flashblindedme.Iheardtheblastofthecarhorn,piercingthenight like a forlorn and angry cry. Out of the incandescent flash, human forms materialised in the darkness. Someone caught me as I fell. And when my eyes cleared I saw people fighting, chairs hurling themselves in perfect parabolas through the air, members of the political parties pouncing on one another. Bodies tumbled in bizarre entanglements, fists connected with faces, a woman scratched a man’s eyes, one of the witches had fastened on to the back of a soldier and the soldier howled as if a crudepair of claws hadbeendugintohissoul.Dadvainly triedtorestoreorder,while the boxers and thugs blinded one another with punches.

Bottles broke on heads in the darkness. Yellow birds, like the leaves of fertile trees, scattered amongst us. Another flash startled me. And it was only when Madame Koto’s car shone its garish headlights on us that I noticed the new silent presence of the photographer. And before I could shout him a greeting I became aware that something had gone wrong with the nerves of the world. We heard the whirring engine, heard the possessed cry of the driver, and saw the two arc lights of the car intently bounding towards us, pressing on, growing brighter, flooding us with confusion. Several screams rose at once. There was a moment during which I saw the illuminated face of Madame Koto’s driver. He looked thoroughly drunk, his eyes were barely open, his neck was all tight with tendons, and sweat like melting wax poured down his brow. Then the car swerved. Panic showed on the driver’s face as he seemed to wake up suddenly, and in his awakening he lost control. People fled, disorientated by the yellow birds. In the arc of lights I saw the forms of people leaping into the air, leaping, some of them, into invisibility; leaping, others, into new forms. Finally, the car cut through the crowd, and knocked Ade and one of the beggars sideways. Then the car smashed into the cement platform, into the wall of the compound, and its lights went dead. The engine roared, the wheels turned, churning up the soil. After the tide of shattering glass there was a long moment of silence.

Then the real confusion began. Wailing rose in the dark. Another shot was fired into the air. Dad, who didn’t seem to have registered what was happening, launched into another speech, pouring scorn on all politicians who deliberately keep their people illiterate. I heard someone fall on the blind old man’s accordion. People fought in the darkness everywhere. Ade began crying. Abuse fell in torrents, voices cursed Madame Koto and her doomed ambition, and in the car we heard the trapped driver screaming. The compound women fetched lanterns. The men managed to wrench open the mangled car door and bring out the twisted form of the driver. He had blood all over him. His chest had a weird gash as if he’d been shot there. Broken glass, like the wild spikes of certain plants, had lodged itself in his face. Shards of glass were everywhere, in his wounds, mingled with his blood and scattered on the seats. There was a long splinter in one of his eyes. Wailing and kicking, he was like a man who had woken into a nightmare. Green pus and all the fluids of sight and blood, poured down the sides of his face like a burst egg. They carried him and stretched him out on thecement platform.Oneoftheherbalists,howlingthesecretnamesofarcanedeities, plucked out the glass from his eye and the other herbalists prepared potions to staunch the bleeding and the flow of eye fluids. Not far from them Ade, who had been struck in the hip and had landed on his arm and wrenched it, beat and wailed on the ground. His father held him down and his mother spoke words into his ears, which made him wail louder. A witch pulled at his legs and a herbalist was twisting his bad arm. His father shouted that his son should be left alone. Behind them, the thugs of both parties fought on the mud, fought in the swamp, fought like giants in old legends. Wood broke on skulls. Chairs flew through the air. The family of beggars, led by the beautiful one-eyed girl, had begun their departure. They filed out, the girl in front. She kept looking back. She had no expression or judgement on her face. And behind her

– hobbling and crawling on the earth, each with their unique deformities, twisted legs behind their necks, soft legs uselessly trailing on the ground, heads big and strange with the agony of survival – were the rest of the family of beggars. I wanted to follow them on their journeys, to be with the beautiful girl who had refined all their deformities into a single functioning eye, whose face would pursue me in dreams and loves and music.

But Mum screaming in the crowd, Dad who was caught in a barrage of accusations, Madame Koto who was surrounded by enemy thugs, and Ade who wept bitterly on the ground, held me back and kept me rooted. I watched the beggars leave, and one aspect of my destiny left with them. And as they went I heard the wind rush, laden with all our sorrows, over the branches of the trees. The wind circled our heads. I saw the forms of angels in the dark sky. The yellow birds in our midst, startled by the new horrors of the smashed car, and by the aroma of blood, beat their wings and took off into that night of lamentation. And then, without any heavenly event, the rain began to fall. The rain fell on the devastated car, on Madame Koto who wept openly, on the thugs of both parties as they clashed and wounded themselves over obscure loyalties. The rain poured on the driver, who had now passed out, on the herbalists, who didn’t seem to know what to do, and on my friend, who had now become serene within his own pain. It was not the tragedy of the night that dispersed everyone. It was the rain. The thugs fought themselves right through different stratas of time. The soldiers left as a group, drunk on beer and the smell of cordite. The tramps, who had come because of the rumours of a feast, the people who had turned up to hail their new hero, the wretched and the curious, were all washed away by the gentle flood. Ade’s father left with his wives, carrying my friend away on his back. The chair-hire man stormed up and down the street, cursing Dad for the destruction of his chairs. The witches and wizards simply disappeared. I didn’t see them go. And the herbalists carried Madame Koto’s driver away for proper treatment. As the rain became heavier, the only people left at the housefront were Dad, who was distracted and drunk; Madame Koto, whose wig gyrated in a swirling puddle and who sat on the ground covered in mud; and Mum, who stood beside the car, blood and rain-water flowing round her feet. The blind old man was led home. His mangled accordion dangled at his side, as if it were an instrument that had been destroyed by its own bad music. Immobile and obscene, the car stayed smashed against the cement wall. Nothing could be done about it for the night.

The chair-hire man pounced on Dad. And Dad had to knock him down twice. He rushed off and came back with a machete and he had to be held. Dad swore that he would pay for the chairs or repair them himself. Disconsolate and drunk with rage, the chair-hire man had to be led home by four men. Madame Koto’s prostitutes came and tookheraway,holdingherby botharms,asifshemightdosomethingdangerous.In the distance she could be heard wailing, not about the driver, but about her car.

When everyone had finally gone, Mum went silently into the room. Dad had a long bath. I stayed at the housefront while the rain went on falling, staring at the flotsam of broken chairs, shattered glass, tatters of clothes and feathers, broken bottles, and chicken bones on the road. I think most of our real troubles began that night. They began not with the devastation of voices and chairs and the car, but with the blood mingling with rain and flowing right into the mouth of the road. I heard the slaking of the road’s unquenchable thirst. And blood was a new kind of libation. The road was young but its hunger was old. And its hunger had been reopened. The roads were not even flooded that night although the rain didn’t cease. For a long time I couldn’t see the sky. As I stood there the firm hands of the wind came from behind and lifted me up.

‘Come in,’ Mum said. ‘This is not a night for a child to see.’

Dad was asleep on the bed. I could hear his snores over the rain and the thunder. Mum lit a candle on the table. After we ate we stayed up. Mum said nothing. Both of us stared at the candle, feeling the wind and the thunder banging on our broken window.

ONE

THERE ARE MANY riddles of the dead that only the living can answer.

After the catastrophe of the party, Dad’s philosophy began to expand in strange ways. The spirit encroachment on my life increased. In many respects, and without knowing it, Dad kept the spirits at bay with his battles in different realms. But alongour road, there wasn’t much anyone could do. Fighting broke out all the time. In the morning after thedisastrousparty,MadameKotoorganisedsixthugstocomeandpushhercar to the mechanic’s workshop. We woke to the noise of confrontations. As the thugs pushed the car along a group of opposition thugs ambushed Madame Koto and her protectors and attacked them in retaliation for knocking over Ade.

I returned from school to hear that people were going around armed with clubs. Dad had returned early and was having an argument with the chair-hire man about the number of chairs that were destroyed. Mum also returned early because everywhere she went there were clashes between the warlords of both of the main parties. When the chair-hire man left, with some money, and a little mollified, Dad asked me to read. I read to him from Homer, while Mum vented her anger about the horrors of the celebration. The food that evening was quite tasteless. Dad didn’t notice. He ate with his usual large appetite.

His face had begun to return to normal. A new fierceness had entered his eyes. After I had read to him again from Homer’s Odyssey, Dad wondered aloud about how he was going to be able to do any good in the world if he didn’t learn more about politics, and didn’t infiltrate the existing organisations. It was around this time that Dad conceived the idea of using the ever-approaching rally as the platform to preach his ideas and gather voters. Then heremembered his notion of usingmeas aspy.

‘My son is not a spy,’ Mum said.

‘One way or another we are all spies,’ Dad asserted.

‘Don’t put my son in trouble.’

‘But he will make a good spy.’

‘Why?’

‘You won’t understand.’

‘That’s what you men say when you don’t want to tell the truth.’ Dad kept quiet. Mum complained about how Dad was using me for his mad schemes, about all the money wasted on the tragic party. But Dad didn’t listen. He called me and said he wanted me to resume visiting Madame Koto’s bar. He said he would join me later. I didn’t think he was serious. But later in the evening, as I sat outside watching the world revolve slowly with the movement of clouds, he came and reminded me of my mission. Hetoldmethatnewthingswerehappeningintheworldandinourarea.Was I not curious? I wandered off to Madame Koto’s bar.

Our road was changing. Nothing was what it seemed any more. Some of the beggars that came to Dad’s unfortunate party had set up at the roadside. One of them lay on a mat in front of the blind old man’s house. With his beads between his fingers, the beggar asked me for money as I went past. His eyes were hollow, his mouth was likeacurse. I hurried on. Thebushes alongtheroadsideweregettingwilder.Ayoung tree had fallen between the blind old man’s house and Madame Koto’s bar. The wind rose suddenly and when it lessened I could smell the small things rotting in the forest. As I neared the bar, with its bright new signboard, I heard loud voices and music from within. I stayed at the barfront. I wasn’t sure how I would be received. The car wasn’t there. A man came out of the bar, stared at me, spat generously on the bushes, and went back in. Shortly afterwards one of the prostitutes emerged.

‘What do you want?’

‘Madame Koto.’

‘Who sent you?’

‘My father.’

‘Who is that?’

‘Black Tyger.’

Shegavemealongstare. Shewent in. For awhilenothinghappened. Thevoices became louder. A fight started. Chairs tumbled over. Glasses broke. Women’s voices intervened. Thefight died down with subsidingabuses. Someoneput arecord on the phonographandadeep octavevoice,liftedby brassinstruments,sangoutintothe evening. The wind blew. Trees bowed. A procession of beggars came down the road. They were not beggars I recognised. They stopped in front of Madame Koto’s bar. Then they came towards me. There were about seven of them. Two of them had malformed legs and dragged themselves on the ground like hybrid serpents, with the cushioningaid of elbow pads. Therest of themhad twisted arms, elongated necks. One of them had only one arm, another had two fingers, and another, to my horror, seemed to have three eyes. I tried to run, but I was curiously rooted. Salaaming, bringing with them all the smells of the gutters, street-corners, dustbins, rotting flesh, and damp nights, they pressed on me. Their leader was a man of indescribable age, with a face of wrenched metal, deep eyes, and a crumpled mouth. He came to me, beggingfor generosity, in alanguagewhich seemed to belongto another universe. He crowded me, and the others did as well, till I couldn’t breathe for their smells. The youngest of the beggars laughed and it seemed that a mashed insect fell out of his mouth. I shouted. The oldest beggar grabbed me, with his two fingers, and his grip was like that of an infernal machine. Pressing his face close to mine, so that I was suspended in a moment of fainting, he said:

‘Follow us.’

I kicked out and pushed the beggars away and ran into the bar. The floor was crowded with dancers. The room was full of smoke. I knocked over a bench, and collided with adancingcouple. A woman shrieked. Themusicstopped. And everyone, frozen in their particular motion, as if I had brought an alien enchantment, stared at me.

‘What’s wrongwith you?’ oneof theprostitutes asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘Get out of here!’ one of the men shouted.

I recognised him as just another thug. He had big shoulders and a thick neck.

‘Get out!’

‘No!’

‘Are you mad?’

‘No.’

One of the women slapped my head and I jumped on her and a hand grabbed my neck from behind and lifted me away.

‘If you don’t go I will throw you out,’ a mighty voice said.

‘I will go.’

He put me down. I waited. Then I pointed at the door. They all looked. The strips of curtain were parted. And the old beggar, salaaming, his face weirder in the red lights, came in. Behind him was the train of beggars. They brought with them all the foul, unwanted smells of the world. I went to a corner of the bar, and sat down on a bench. There was a long silence. The old beggar, looking round at everyone with fearless eyes, cametowards me, bringinghis entouragewith him.

‘I want that boy,’ hesaid loudly, pointingat mewith acrooked finger.

As he moved into the bar the darkness came with him. The darkness was a wind that blew from their crowding of the doorway. When one of the prostitutes saw the collective deformities of the beggars, she let out an anguished cry. Suddenly, with no one activating it, the music started. The bravest of the thugs yelled. The beggars brought a ferocious unbending force into the bar. They imbued everything with their smells. One of the younger beggars, who had no legs and moved on low crutches of uneven lengths, climbed up on the table where most of the clientele were gathered. For the first time I noticed that the thugs and warriors of grass-roots politics were afraid. Theprostitutes retreated, holdingtheir noses.

‘They sentmetobringthatboy,’theoldonesaid,movingsteadily towardsme.

‘Who sent you?’ I asked.

All the faces in the bar turned to me. One of the beggars laughed. Another one picked up a calabash of palm-wine and drank it all. As if on cue the rest of them suddenly noticed the drinks and the plates of peppersoup on the tables and, discarding their crutches, fell on all the available food. The ones without legs propelled themselves up on powerful hands. The ones without hands leapt up and, with the expert grip of their teeth, seized the peppersoup bowls and drank. Soup ran down the sides of their mouths and on to their filthy clothes. The old beggar, standing still, his eyes burning on me, remained apart from the mêlée, his battered frame twitching, a strange smile on his lips. He stood still, and so did everyone else. The music stopped. Plates had been turned over; the beggars drank soup and ate the meat and bones from the table tops. The thugs and other clientele were transfixed. A beggar boy began to choke. Another one laughed. The old one rushed at me. When I fled amongst the prostitutes gathered at the door, it seemed I released the spell hanging over the place. Suddenly the thugs lashed out at the beggars, kicked them, threw plates at them. The beggars ate and drank as though untouched. When the wine had been emptied from the cups, the soup all consumed, the bones cracked, the marrow sucked out of them, the beggars – amazing in the virtuosity of their incomplete limbs – jumped on the thugs. The prostitutes fled outside. The thugs also panicked and ran. The old one sat down beside me. I did not move. He surveyed the chaos of bones beingthrown, tables overturned, glasses breaking, and then he said:

‘How many eyes do you have?’

‘Three,’ I replied. He stared at me.

‘How many ears?’

‘One.’

‘Why?’

‘I hear things.’ I continued. ‘Voices. Words. Trees. Flowers.’

He laughed.

‘They sentmetobringyou.’

‘Who?’

‘Your friends.’

‘Who are you?’

He looked around and waved his hand over the bar. The darkness cleared. He hit me on the head and I heard the cry of a cat. A dog’s eyes stared into mine. Water poured over me. I did not flinch. An eagle flew in from the door and landed on the old one’s head. He touched the eagle with his good hand and a black light shot into my eyes. When I opened them I saw that I was in a field. Around me snaked a green river. I looked up and saw a blue mountain. Voices called my name from the river. A cat jumped right through me. I moved. The beggar laughed. I turned, looked at him, and screamed. He had four heads. One of them was the head of a great turtle. I tried to move but he held me. Spirits, shrouded in sunflower flames, rose from the ground about me. The field shook. The river hurled its waters on the coral shores, the water turned into spray, and in the spray I saw my spirit companions, all of them holding bluemirrors over theirheads.My friend,Ade,wasamongthem.Ididnotgetachance to recognise the others because in a flash, in which all the lights converged in the mirrors, the spray dissolved. A loud voice disturbed the mountain. I fell, and woke to find myself lying on a bench. I sat up. It was dark. Fishes swam in the black lights of the bar. I stayed still. When I surveyed the place I noticed that there was another person in the bar. Someone brought a lantern through the door. The yellow light obliterated their form. I waited. The form put the lantern in front of me and said:

‘You were lucky today.’‘How?’‘I failed, but after me comes the spirit with five heads.’

‘Why?’ ‘To take you back.’ ‘Why did you fail?’ The lantern flickered. The other person in the bar, a massive figure, stirred. She liftedup herswollenface.Shehadthesaddesteyes.They werebigandlonely. ‘Madame Koto!’ ‘Don’t call my name!’ ‘Why not?’ She was silent. Her eyes changed. They became a little menacing. ‘There are spirits in the bar.’ I looked for the form behind the lantern. The form was gone. I noticed something moving behind the lamp. I looked. Writhing, its head green, its eyes scaly, was a large lizard. I moved slowly, felt for an object on the floor, touched a stone, and struck the lizard on the head. The lamp went out. A blue wind whistled in the bar and crashed at the door. I edged my way to the backyard. Madame Koto caught me in the dark and said, in the voice of an old bull:

‘Why did you bringthem?’‘Who?’ I cried.‘Your friends.’‘Which friends?’‘The beggars, the spirit.’‘They are not my friends.’

‘They are your father’s friends.’‘No.’‘He is their representative, not so?’‘I don’t know.’‘He has gone mad with politics.’‘I don’t know anything.’‘What did the spirit say to you?’‘I didn’t hear.’She let go of me.‘You want some peppersoup?’‘Yes,’ I said.She went out and left me in the strange darkness of her bar. I wondered about what had happened to the electricity. I began to smell the corpse of the lizard, as if it had accelerated in its decomposition. The front door opened. The curtains parted. I smelt boots, restless energy, and saw a form at the doorway, the odour of mosquito coils precedinghim.

‘Dad!’ I said. He lit a match. His face was long, his eyes bright and deep-set, a cigarette in his mouth. The match went out. He sat. I listened to him thinking. Then he laughed airily and said: ‘A man can wander round the planet and still not move an inch. A man can have so much light in his mind and still not see what’s right in front of him. My son, why are you sitting like that?’ I didn’t know what to say. He chuckled in the dark. ‘A man can carry the world and still not be able to bear the load of his own head.’ ‘What load?’ I asked. ‘Ideas,dreams,my son,’hesaid,alittlewearily.‘SincefightingtheGreenLeopard the world has changed. The inside of my head is growing bigger.’ After a while, he said: ‘Maybemy thoughtsarebeginningtosmell.’

‘There’s a dead lizard on the table.’

‘Who killed it?’

‘Me.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a spirit.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The spirit spoke to me and then changed.’

‘Don’t kill lizards.’

‘Why not?’

‘They are messengers. Sometimes they are spies. My father once sent a lizard to warn me.’

‘Of what?’

Dad was silent. Then he said:

‘Someofourenemiesweregoingtopoisonme.Thiswasinthevillage.They put poison in my soup. I was about to drink when I saw this lizard shakingits head at me.’ ‘That’s what lizards do.’ ‘You are a goat, my son.’ ‘So what happened?’ ‘I ignored the lizard and was about to drink the soup when the lizard ran up the wall. I watched it, fascinated. Then it fell into the soup and died.’ I thought about what Dad had said. Outside I heard loud drunken voices from the forest. ‘Where is the lizard?’ ‘On the table.’ Dad lit a match. ‘There’s nothing here.’ The match went out. ‘Maybe it went back to the land of the spirits.’

‘Don’t talk about spirits.’The voices outside grew louder.‘Someone gave the beggars wine to drink. I’ve never seen beggars so drunk. They are all members of my party.’

I could hear them laughing, cursing, fighting amongst themselves.

‘They see me as their leader,’ Dad said. ‘And I have no money to feed them. But I will build them a school. You will be one of the teachers. Is there any palm-wine? Where is Madame Koto?’

‘In the backyard.’

‘Go and call her.’

I went out through the back door. It was very dark and I saw the prostitutes on stools or standing around, smoking in the night. When they saw me they kissed their teeth. The thugs and other clientele had gone. I went and knocked on Madame Koto’s door. After a while she opened. She had a lamp in one hand, a wig in the other. Her stomach was very big and wide, her face was swollen, as if someone had been hitting her. Weariness weighed on her eyes.

‘You bad-luck boy, what do you want?’

‘My father..’

‘What father? Leave me alone. My business was doing well, then you went and brought all those beggars and drove away all my customers.’

‘I didn’t bring them.’

She stared at me a long time. She looked quite frightening. She gave me the lamp to hold and then put on her wig. She shut her door and went to the backyard and asked theprostitutestogoforthenight.They grumbledaboutnotbeingpaid.

‘I will pay you tomorrow, when this bad-luck boy is not here.’

One by one the prostitutes got up. Grumbling, cursing, they went out into the darkness of the housefront. Madame Koto sat on a stool. There was a large green pot on the fire-grate. Frogs croaked in the bushes. From the forest a bird piped three times and stopped. The crickets trilled. Mosquitoes bit us. After some time one of the prostitutes came back.

‘What’s wrong?’ Madame Koto asked.

‘Those beggars are drunk.’

‘On my wine.’

‘If we don’t get rid of them our business will fail.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense. Go home. Come tomorrow.’

She went. We listened as the beggars called out to her. She cursed them. The beggars laughed raucously. ‘Those friends of yours broke all my glasses,’ Madame Koto said. ‘And my plates.

Abused my customers. Broke two chairs. Who will pay, eh?’

‘My father wants to talk politics with you.’

‘Who?’

‘You.’

Madame Koto reached for a stick and began to hit me. I didn’t move. She stopped.

‘You and your father are mad.’

‘We are not mad.’

‘I’m not well,’ she said, in a different voice.

‘What is wrong?’

‘Money. Politics. Customers. People.’

I was silent.

‘What does your father want?’

‘Palm-wine.’

She gave a short laugh.

‘I gave all the palm-wine to the beggars.’

‘Why?’

‘They werecausingtroublesoIgavethempalm-wineandthey left.Itoldthemto go far away, but they went to my frontyard.’

‘They want to vote for my father,’ I said. Madame Koto stared at me.

‘Your father?’

‘Yes.’

She laughed again.

‘Only chickens and frogs will vote for him.’

‘What about mosquitoes?’

‘Them too. And snails.’

‘He said I should call you.’

‘Where is he?’

‘In the bar.’

‘So he has come back to my bar after calling me a witch, eh?’

‘He wants politics.’

‘Go and tell him I’m coming.’

When I went back into the bar Dad was asleep. He slept with his head held high, as if he were in a trance. I drew close to him and listened to him grinding his teeth. Fireflies lit up the darkness. A yellow butterfly circled Dad’s head. I watched the butterfly. When it landed on Dad’s head I could suddenly see him clearly in the dark. A yellow light surrounded him. The light was the exact shape of Dad and it rose in the air and came down and began to wander about the bar. I watched the light. It kept changing colour. It turned red. Then golden-red. Then it moved up and down, lifting up in the air, and bouncing on the floor. It went round Dad as if looking for a way to get back in. Then the golden-red light came and sat next to me. I started to sweat. I cried out. The light changed colour. It became yellow again, then a sort of diamond-blue. When I touched Dad the butterfly lifted from his head and disappeared through the ceiling. Dad opened his eyes, saw me, and gave out a strange cry. Then he looked around as if he didn’t know where he was.

‘You’re in Madame Koto’s bar,’ I said.

He stared at me, lit a match, and when he recognised me he blew it out. He drew me close to him. I could smell his frustrated energies, his mosquito-coil fragrances. He lit a cigarette and smoked quietly for a moment.

‘A man can wander the whole planet and not move an inch,’ he said. ‘My son, I dreamt that I had set out to discover a new continent.’

‘What is it called?’

‘TheContinent of theHangingMan.’

‘What happened?’

‘When I landed with my boat I saw mountains, rivers, a desert. I wrote my name on arock. I went into thecontinent. I was alone. A strangethinghappened.’

‘What?’‘You’retoo youngto understand this.’‘Tell me.’‘As I went I started to dream the place into existence. I dreamt plains, forests, paths, great open spaces, spiked plants, and then I dreamt up the people. They are not like us. They are white. Bushmen. They advanced towards me. They wore strange clothes and had precious stones round their necks. To the eldest man, I said “What are you people doinghere?”

‘“What about you?” he asked.

“I have just discovered this place. It is supposed to be a new continent. You’re not supposed to be here.”

“We’ve been here since time immemorial,” he replied. ‘And then I dreamt them away. And then a shepherd came to me and said:

“This continent has no name.”

“It’s called theContinent of theHangingMan.”

“That’s another place,” he replied.

“So why doesn’t it have a name?”

“People do not often name their own continent. If you can’t give it a name you can’t stay here.”

‘The continent vanished. I found myself on a strange island. The people treated me roughly. They were also white. Unfriendly people. Unfriendly to me, at least. I lived amongthemformany years.Icouldn’tfindmy way out.Iwastrappedthereonthat small island. I found it difficult to live there. They were afraid of me because of my different colour. As for me, I began to lose weight. I had to shrink the continent in me to accommodate myself to the small island. Time passed.’

Dad took adragfromhis cigarette. His eyes werebright in thedarkness. ‘Then what happened?’ ‘I began to travel again. I travelled on a road till I got to a place where the road vanished into thin air. So I had to dream a road into existence. At the end of the road I saw a mirror. I looked into the mirror and nearly died of astonishment when I saw that I had turned white.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So what happened?’ ‘Theneverythingchanged.Iwasinabigcity ontheisland.Iwasanews-vendor, sellingnewspapersoutsideatrainstation.Itwasatemporary job.Ihadbigger plans. It was very cold. There was ice everywhere.’

‘Ice?’

‘Yes. Ice fell from the sky. Ice turned my hair white. Everywhere ice.’

‘Then?’

‘Then one day you came to buy a newspaper from me. You were a young man. When you gave roe the money it burned my hand. I started to run away when you woke me up.’

We sat in silence. Dad creaked his bones for five minutes. Then he stretched. Then he banged the table and said:

‘Where is the wine, eh?’

The electric light came on in the bar, driving away the shadows, rendering the objects curiously flat. Madame Koto, two bottles of beer in one hand, a bowl of peppersoup in the other, hobbled over to our table.

‘Finish this and go,’ shesaid, bangingdown thebeer and soup.

‘The Great Madame Koto, aren’t you pleased to see me, eh?’

‘After you called me a witch?’

‘That was your palm-wine talking, not me.’

She hobbled away. Her foot had grown worse, and had been rebandaged. She went to the counter, sat behind it, and put on some music. Dad drank the soup hungrily. He gave me some meat. He opened the bottle of beer with his teeth.

‘No wine?’ he asked.

‘I gave all the wine to your friends.’

‘What friends?’

‘The beggars,’ I said.

‘They brokemy platesandglasses.Why didyouhavetobringthemhere,eh?’

‘I didn’t bring them.’

‘Why did you invite them to your party?’

‘I didn’t invite them.’Madame Koto stopped the music. Dad finished the first bottle of beer and startedon the second one.

‘Madame Koto, I want to talk politics with you.’

‘Why?’

‘Out of interest.’ ‘For what?’ ‘People.’

‘Who will you vote for?’ ‘Myself.’

‘I hear you want to start your own party, eh?’

Dadsaidnothing.Ilookedup atthepostersofthepoliticalparty thatMadameKoto supported. I studied the pictures and almanacs of their leaders. She said: ‘Don’t bringmetrouble. Takeyour beggars away. I don’t want to losemy customers.’

‘Beggars also vote.’

‘Let them vote for you, but take them away.’

The wind blew at the door. Then we heard a curious drumming on the roof. The bulb kept swaying. Someone came in. At first I could not see them.

‘Get out!’ Madame Koto shouted.

Then I saw three of the beggars at the door. Two of them were legless and moved on elbow pads. The third one had a bad eye. They came into the bar and gathered round Dad’s table. Dad finished off his beer.

‘If you get rid of them,’ Madame Koto said, ‘I will forget the damage, and you and your son can come here to drink anytime you want.’

The beggars played with the empty beer bottles. Dad snatched the bottles from them and stood up.

‘Let’s go,’ he said to me.

Wewent out andthethreebeggars,chattering,pawingDad’strousers,followedus. Along the street other beggars were asleep. The three beggars followed us till we got to our place. Dad turned to them and waved them away. They stopped. We went on. I looked back and saw the three beggars, crouched in the darkness, staring at us with odd eyes.

TWO

THEWIND AND thunder werehard thatnight.WefoundMumsittingon Dad’s chair, amosquitocoilonthetable,atatteredwigonthebed.Mumlookedtired. She didn’t say anything when we came in. She was rocking back and forth, while the wind blew over our roof and thunder rumbled above us. Things were changing, the room looked strange, and Mum sat there staring straight ahead as if down a long unfinished road. The candle had burned low, mosquitoes whined, a moth circled Mum as if her head were a flame, and her eyes became very bright.

‘What happened?’ Dad asked, sittingon thebed.

Mum was crying. She made no sound, her eyes were bright, she stared straight ahead as if into the wind, and she was crying. I went over to her and put my head on her lap and she didn’t move.

‘Go and buy ogogoro,’ Dad said to me gruffly.

He gave me money and I hurried across the road. Some of the beggars were gathered at the mouth of our compound. They were crouched in groups. I bought the ogogoro and on my way back I saw that they were now at our housefront. They lay down on mats, under theslopingzinceaves, eyeingmeas I went past.

When I got back to theroomMumwas sittingon thebed and Dad was on his three-legged chair. The smoke from the mosquito coil formed blue spirals round his head. A new candle had been lit. Dad stolidly smoked a cigarette. He snatched the ogogoro from me, poured himself a generous quantity, and drank. Mum watched him. I brought out my mat. I told Dad about the beggars.

‘Nextthingthey willtakeoverourroom,’Mumsaid.

‘I’m going to build a house for them,’ replied Dad. ‘I’m going to build them a school. Azaro will teach them how to read. You will teach them how to sell things. I will teach them how to box.’

‘Who will feed them, eh?’ asked Mum.

‘They will work for their food,’ said Dad.

Mum stretched out on the bed. She was silent for a while. Then she sat up and began to complain that her stall had been taken over at the market, that she had been hawking all day and had sold very little, that her feet were swollen, her face raw from the sun, and that the chair-hire man had come by and she had given him the little money she had.

‘You must pay me back,’ she said.

‘I will pay you double,’ Dad replied.

Mum went on about how she went hawking and was selling provisions along the main road when she saw a classmate of hers. They used to be in primary school together. Her classmate now had a car and a driver; she looked ten years younger than Mum, and she wore rich clothes. Mum sold her oranges and the woman didn’t recogniseher. Mumdidn’t sellanythingelsethat day;shecamestraight home.

‘This life has not been good to me,’ Mum said.

‘Your reward will come,’ Dad said, absent-mindedly.

‘I will make you happy,’ I said.

Mum stared at me. Then she lay down. Soon she was asleep. The wind blew in through all the cracks in the room and made us shiver.

‘Somethingis goingto happen,’ I ventured.

‘Somethingwonderful,’ Dad said, rockinghis chair expertly.

The wind blew hard. The moth circled the flame. Then suddenly the candle went out. We stayed still in the darkness. The room was quiet.

‘I miss hearing the rats,’ Dad said.

‘Why?’

‘They made me think. Everything has to fight to live. Rats work very hard. If we are not careful they will inherit the earth.’

The silence grew deeper. I lay down and listened to Dad thinking. His thoughts were wide;they spunaroundhishead,bouncingoffeverythingintheroom.Histhoughts filled the place, weighed me down, and after a while I was inside his head, travelling to the beginnings: I went with him to the village, I saw his father, I saw Dad’s dreams runningaway fromhim.Histhoughtswerehard,they bruisedmy head,my eyes ached,andmy heartpoundedfastinthestiflingheatoftheroom.Dadsighed.Mum turned on the bed. The room became full of amethyst and sepia thoughts. Forms moved in the darkness. A green eye regarded me from just above Dad’s head. The eye was still. Then it moved. It went to the door and became a steady tattoo on the wooden frame. The wind increased the sound. Dad creaked his bones. When the knocksbecamelouderIsmeltsomethingsoprofoundly rancidthatIsatup.

‘What’s wrong?’ Dad asked.

‘Somethingis tryingto get into thehouse.’

The knocks sounded on the window. I opened it; the wind came in and blew me towards the bed. Mum sat up and went to the door. She opened it and gave a low scream. Dad was still. The smells of death, of bitterness, of old bodies, decomposing eyes, and old wounds, filled the room. Then several eyes lit up the darkness. There was laughter; and from their breath came the bad food and hunger of the world. They came into the room, surrounding us. In the darkness, a bitter wind amongst them, with the calm of strangers who have become familiar, they sat on the floor, on the bed, on my mat. We couldn’t breathe for their presence. One of them went and sat at Dad’s feet. She was a girl. I could smell her bitter beauty, her bad eye, her unwashed breasts. They came amongst us not like an invasion, but like people who have waited a long timetotaketheirplaceamongtheliving.They saidnothing.Mumstayedatthedoor. All the exiled mosquitoes came in; the fireflies looking for their illumination clustered round the figures in the room. A red butterfly circled the girl’s head and when it settled on her the room was faintly lit up with a ghostly orange light that made my eyes twitch.

‘Who are you people?’ Dad asked, in a voice devoid of fear.

There was a long silence.

‘Azaro, who are they?’

The girl stretched out her hand and placed it on Dad’s foot. Then she began to stroke it. She stroked his feet gently, till they too caught the orange light, and looked burnished, separated from the rest of his body in the dark.

‘My feet are burning,’ Dad said, ‘and I feel no heat.’

‘Who are you?’ Mum shrieked. ‘Get out, now! Get out!’

There was another silence.

‘They are the beggars,’ I said.

Mum caught her breath. Dad pulled his feet away and sat up straight. The orange light died in the room. I heard Dad fumbling for the box of matches. After a moment the match was lit, but not by Dad. The beggar girl held the flame up in the air so we could see. Shelooked so wonderfulsittingthereatDad’sfeet.Herbadeye,inthedeceptive light, had turned a curious yellow colour. Her good eye was almost blue, but it was full of the deepest sadness and silence. Her dress stank. Her face was serene like that of a spirit-child. Without taking her eyes off Mum the beggar girl lit the candle. We looked round and saw them, seated peacefully, as if at a village council meeting, on the floor, their backs against the wall, on the bed, each of them fertile in deformities, their wounds livid, the stumps of missing arms grotesque, their rubber-like legs distorted. There was one with a massive head like a great bronze sculpture eaten by time. Another had a swollen Adam’s apple. Yet another had two of the most protruding and watchful eyes I have ever seen. They seemed to have been made by a perverse and drunken god.

Mum cried out and charged at the beautiful beggar girl. She seemed quite demented. She grabbed the girl by the hair and tried to pull her up. The girl didn’t move,didn’t utterasound.Mumseizedherarmsandtriedtodragherout.Mumwas screaming all the time. We all seemed in a trance. We all watched her without moving. Mum tried to shift the girl, but it was as if she were struggling with an immovable force. The girl’s eyes became strange. She took on a great weight, as if all her poverty and her suffering had invisibly compacted her like a dwarf star. Mum began shouting:

‘Get out, all of you! Get out, you beggars! Can’t you see that we too are suffering, eh? Our load is too much for us. Go! Take our food, but go!’

She stopped shouting suddenly. In the silence that followed, the curious spell was lifted. I breathed in the deep fragrances of wild flowers, of herbs beaten to the ground by rain, of clouds and old wood, of banana plants and great open spaces, of verdant breezes and musk and heliotropes in the sun. The fragrances went. Then Mum turned on Dad, pounced on him, and began hitting him uncontrollably. Dad didn’t move in the chair. Soon he was bleeding from a scratch right next to his eye. Then Mum tore at his shirt and when all the buttons flew off she woke from her fever. She stopped again and went to the beggar girl. She knelt in front of her. The beggar girl began to stroke Dad’s feet. Mum, weeping, said:

‘Ididn’t meananyharm.Mylifeislikeapit.Idigitanditstaysthesame.Ifillitand it empties. Look at us. All of us in one room. I walk from morning till night, selling things, praying with my feet. God smiles at me and my face goes raw. Sometimes I cannot speak. My mouth is full of bad living. I was the most beautiful girl in my village and I married this madman and I feel as if I have given birth to this same child five times. I must have done someone a great wrong to suffer like this. Please, leave us. My husband is mad but he is a good man. We are too poor to be wicked and even as wesuffer our hearts arefullof goodness. Pleasego,wewilldosomethingforyou, but let us sleep in peace.’

A long silence grew in the wake of Mum’s speech. The beggar girl stopped stroking Dad’s feet. I began crying. Dad lit a cigarette. He poured himself more ogogoro. He gave some to the beggar girl. She drank. Dad downed what was left. The girl coughed.

‘Did you hear me?’ Mum asked.

‘She’s a princess,’ Dad said. ‘They travelled for seven days to come to my party. I did not invite them but they came. A river does not travel a new path for nothing. The road gave them a message for me. Can’t you see that they are messengers?’

‘What is their message?’ Mum asked.

‘What is your message?’ I asked them.

All the beggars turned to me.

‘Andwhereisyouroldone?’Isaid,rememberingmy encounterinthebar.

Dad looked at me.

The beggar girl got up. The other beggars changed their postures. Then, without speaking, taking their deformities and their wounds with them, but leaving their vile smells behind, they filed out of the room. The girl was the last to leave. She stared at meintensely,thenat Dad,andshut thedoorbehindher.Iheardthemshufflingupto the housefront. Dogs barked in the distance. Fireflies, mosquitoes, and moths, died on the table and floor, killed, it seemed, by the smell in the room. Dad drank steadily, weaving his head round and round as if he were in a profound dream. Mum leant over, slapped her foot, straightened, and in a low voice, said:

‘They brought fleas and left them to eat us. That is their gift. You are crazy, my husband.’

I had never heard Mum sound so harsh. She went and sat on the bed. Dad’s wound bled freely. His eyes were intense, his jaws kept working. Then he said:

‘They were once a great people. Hunger drove them from their kingdom and now the road is their only palace. I will build them a school. I will teach them to work. I will teach them music. We will all be happy.’

Mum went out, fetched some water, and disinfected the room. The disinfectant, sprinkled thickly everywhere, stung my nostrils. Mum changed the bedclothes. Dad sat there, his eyes dreamy, a rough growth of beard on his face, blood drippingdown the side of his face and thickening on the shoulder of his torn shirt. Then Mum came and dressed the cut and put a plaster on Dad’s face. She went and lay down on the bed. Dad mumbled drunkenly for a long time. He talked about building roads for the ghetto, about housing projects that would lift up the spirit of the people, about the need for world inspiration, about sailors without ships, priests without shrines, kings without homes, boxers without opponents, food without stomachs to eat it, gods without anyone to believe in them, dreams without dreamers, ideas without anyone to make use of them, peoples without direction. He made no sense to us. The candle burned low. He got up and, still muttering, came and stretched out on the floor beside me. He had the smell of a great animal, a lean elephant, the smell of too much energy, too much hope, too much contradiction. His eyes kept rolling. He muttered incoherently and soon he was grinding his teeth. When he was deeply asleep the candle burned high, it flared, as if Dad’s sleep somehow allowed it more oxygen. Mum got off the bed, asked me to move, and then she did something strange. She sat astride Dad and began to hit him. She punched his face, hit his chest, beat a manic rhythmon his stomach, kickingand hittinghimwithallhermight,screaminginalow frighteningmonotoneallthetime, hittinghimunceasingly, tillher hands gave.

‘I think I’ve broken my bones on his jaw,’ she said.

Dad didn’t stir. Mum glared at him as he slept with his mouth open. ‘Why is it that when I am happy rats die all over the floor,’ she said. I was silent.

‘Go and sleep on the bed,’ she commanded me.

Then she blew out the candle and lay quietly beside Dad in the airy darkness of the room. Soon I heard her sleeping. The world turned round. The night filled the room andswept overus,fillingourspacewithlightspirits,theoldformsofanimals;extinct birds stood near Dad’s boots, a beautiful beast with proud eyes and whose hide quivered with gold-dust stood over the sleeping forms of Mum and Dad. A tree defined itself over the bed where I lay. It was an ancient tree, its trunk was blue, the spirit sap flowed in many brilliant colours up its branches, densities of light shone from its leaves. I lay horizontal in its trunk. The darkness moved; future forms, extinct tribes, walked through our landscape. They travelled new roads. They travelled for three hundred years and arrived in our night-space. I did not have to dream. It was the first time I realised that an invisible space had entered my mind and dissolved part of the interior structure of my being. The wind of several lives blew into my eyes. The lives stretched far back andwhenIsawthegreatkingofthespirit-worldstaringatme through the open doors of my eyes I knew that many things were calling me. It is probably because we have so many things in us that community is so important. The night was a messenger. In the morning I woke early and saw one of its messages on the floor. Mum and Dad, entwined, were still asleep. There were long tear-tracks on Mum’s face. I slept again and when I woke the sun was warm, Dad’s boots had gone, and Mum had left an orange for me on the table.

THREE

THE BEGGARS WHO had gotten drunk on Madame Koto’s wine had unleashed the fury of their hunger at night while the world was changing. They had broken stalls, torn down Madame Koto’s signboard, shattered windows, and had finally lodged themselves in an unfinished house on the edge of the forest. The inhabitants of the street had risen up against them. Madame Koto had sent her party thugs to drive them away. I saw limbless beggars, the one-armed, one-eyed, legless, all along the road, scattered, in disarray, bruised, and beaten. They clustered under the trees overlooking Madame Koto’s bar, armed with pathetic-lookingsticks. They were a sorry army. I didn’t go into the bar. I saw her sitting outside, on a high stool, surrounded by her prostitutes and the thugs. The beggars abused me as I went past.

When I got home the door was locked. Ade was playing on the broken political vehicle. He looked lean and was happy to see me. He told me about how the van of therich people’sparty hadcomealongandbeguntobundlethebeggarsaway.Butthe beggars kept coming back. There had been much fighting. Many had been wounded. Ade spoke hoarsely, his voice was weak. The sun was intense that afternoon. The chickens lay silent in street corners. The dogs were listless. We played around the van and when we heard screams from Madame Koto’s bar we hurried over and saw that the thugs were beating up the beggars again.

In the afternoon a tall man in an immaculate white suit came looking for Dad. He was very tall and he had sunken eyes and his head was small. He stood under the fierce sun, resting on his walking stick of a shadow. He complained of fleas. He went and bought abottleofogogoroandstoodat ourhousefront,drinkingpatiently.Hedidn’t speak to anyone. His face was relatively long, and he blinked away the sweat that poured into his eyes. After a while he stood very still and when we went over to him we found he had fallen asleep standing up. We touched him, and he woke up with a start, and he went up the street, towards the main road, and disappeared.

In the evening Dad appeared with the beggars who had come to our room the other night. With the abundant energies of a man entering a new destiny, Dad led them up and down the road. He tried to organise them to clear up the rubbish, to sweep the road, to paint the stalls, to plant flowers near the gutters. Bristling with great enthusiasm, wearing his torn shirt, the plaster flapping on the side of his face, Dad went from house to house asking people to vote for him. He outlined his plans for a school, he suggested to people that they contribute to the beggars’ upkeep, and everywhere he went people cursed him for bringing more trouble into their lives. The beggars cleared the rubbish from one end of the road and dumped it at the other. They crushed the flowers they tried to plant. And because Dad could not afford the price of paint sufficient to give colour to the monotonous brown of stalls and the sun-bleached reds and blues and yellows of the houses, the beggars stood around most of the time with useless paint-brushes in their hands. The beautiful beggar girl followed Dad everywhere he went. When he went to another set of beggars they fell into mischief as soon as he turned his back. They turned stalls over and didn’t straighten them. They tramped around in the swamp. Near the wooden bridge they found a mattress that was overgrown with fungus and mushrooms. They beat the bugs and numerous infestations from the mattress. We watched strange forms take off into the air. The beggars intended to make the mattress a bed that they could all share. The photographer appeared, brief as a flash, and took pictures of them. He fled in such a hurry it was as if his enemies might emerge at any moment from the long shadows of evening. I didn’t even get a chance to speak to him. He had become mysterious and irritating.Dadwentup anddowntheroadshoutingaboutthepoverty ofourwill.And while he went up and down the place shouting, the second wave of our transformation was takingplace.

FOUR

THAT EVENING THERE was the most fantastic gathering at Madame Koto’s bar. There were yellow vans everywhere. Curious perfumes floated over the road. A great number of cars were parked along the lanes and side streets. Music rocked all night, making the houses tremble along the road. Women were attired in matching lace, in identical handwoven materials. Their imitation gold bangles and necklaces, brooches and rings of cheap rubies, their indispensable high-heeled shoes, glittered under the lights. The women were all over the place, bursting with scandalous sexuality.

Short, powerful men with chieftains’ beads round their necks and fans of eagle crests in their hands; men with big feet and white shoes; men with bulbous ancient eyes and protruding stomachs, who moved with the lumbering gait of unalterable clannish power; men who were almost giants, with thick necks and sweating thunderous brows and thighs of timber-like virility; all were there. They were the inheritors of titles and extensive acres of land.

There were children in red, whole families in matching silk materials, an old man with a parrot, herbalists, ritualists, cultists, and a short man with a white cap and a string of goats for the great sacrifice. I saw them bring in a strange-looking animal, a duikerwithpenetratingeyes.They allclusteredinthebar.

Outside, we heard rumours that the party was being thrown to celebrate Madame Koto’s attainment of new powers, the installation of electricity, the consolidation of her party connections, and to widen the sphere of her influence in this and other realms. It could be said that it was an event meant to seal her entry into the world of myths. The most bizarre rumours circulated about what had been really happeningat night when we slept, and during the day when we, as always, were unaware of the changes taking place in constellations of energies and alignments. New spaces were being created while all we saw were the mundane events of thugs and canvassing vans and the violence of political struggles. New spaces which we couldn’t name, and couldn’t imagine, but could only hint at with unfinished gestures and dark uncompleted proverbs. The rumours invested everything with a higher significance. Fabulous noises floated on the air. Ground-nut sellers, corn-roasters, fortune-tellers, tyre-menders, beer-traders, all gathered outside the bar, looking in from a respectable distance, doing business, while the bar resounded with drinking noises and laughter and theoccasionalpiercingritualcries.

Then to our amazement electricians and carpenters, mechanics and sundry workers arrived on the back of a lorry and connected silver cables from the electric pole to Madame Koto’s bar, or so it seemed; they connected cables from the ceiling to the front where the signboard used to be; they rigged up wires and brought the wonder of multi-coloured bulbs, lighting up the night. The chair-hire man, in his element, brought fifty-six chairs. Under our astounded gaze the workers rigged up a great tarpaulin tent of red and yellow. Fire-grates, surrounded by sweatingwomen, crackled with the oil of spit-roasted goat-meat and rams’ meat and antelopes’ flesh. Great quantities of beer were carried in crates with numbers and the names of the newly famous breweries. And for the first time we saw how public music could be. The sound of fiendishly virtuoso drummers, the flaming melodies of tubas, the slippery tones of clarinets and the octaves of bass saxophones, the nasal voices of syncopating musicians, the bells and gongs, made the air vibrate and the earth quiver and the feet of the spectators outside twitch with yearning. We watched the silhouettes of dancers under the tent. The light bulbs of blue and yellow and orange, the brilliant fluorescent tubes on poles drew the midges and the moths into a frenzy of dancing, their wings beatingin violent rhythms.

The inhabitants of thearea, who had no hopeof beinginvited into theparty, put on their best clothes and hung around the tent, hoping to catch a glimpse of the wild celebrations, hoping still more for a chance encounter, a ticket from the outer darkness where we all watched and whispered about Madame Koto’s abnormal pregnancy. They said her time was drawing near. Some people made it sound almost apocalyptic. The beggars, a good distance from us, also gathered outside the tent. The delicious aroma of goat-meat and antelopes’ flesh, of bean-cakes, fried plantains and rich stews made us salivate, made us curse with greater bitterness the poverty and outer darkness to which we seemed for ever consigned.

In the midst of all this Dad tried to get the other beggars to work. They had lost interest, it seemed, in his schemes. Dad began to shout along the road. Disillusion was beginning to burst in his veins. His sadness accelerated my understanding. Only the beggar girl, guiding her father around with a stick, still followed him. Dad shouted:

‘We can change the world!’ People laughed at him.

‘That is why our road is hungry,’ Dad hollered. ‘We have no desire to change things!’

One of the men outside the tent, inhabitant of the outer darkness, said:

‘Black Tyger is mad!’

Dad rounded on and chastised the man. The inhabitants of the area jumped on Dad. They were already exasperated with his antics. The beggar girl screamed. She threw stones at his assailants. One of the stones hit Dad on his wound. The inhabitants in their fury at being left out of the glittering celebrations, turned on the beggars. The beggars fought back, lost the initial battle, and fled into the tent. The thugs threw them out. The thugs and bouncers had horsewhips. After they had tossed the beggars out they stormed on us, lashing out in all directions, indiscriminately whipping the inhabitants and the beggars as if we all, finally, belonged to the same fraternity. The thugs whipped themselves into future eras. They whipped themselves into future military passions. They thrashed the women and the children alike. The wind blew us all together. They flogged us and we ran howling, scattered and confused. Under the intoxication of all the ritual chants unleashed on the unsuspecting air of the area, under the fevers of their new ascendancy, the certainty of their long future rule, and their inevitable transformation into men of power, the thugs made the air crackle with their contempt for those of us in the outer darkness, whose faces all seemed like one, and who threatened the party with nothing but chaos. And then Madame Koto came out. She saw the commotion, and screamed. She screamed for order. Her bouncers and thugs recovered their senses instantly. Madame Koto was resplendent in golden volumes of lace attire, feathers in her headgear. She had a new walking stick with a metallic lion’s head. Her foot had grown large. Her stomach had swollen. Her face was bunched, antimony shimmered on her eyelids. She looked glorious. Her presence alone, already legendary, made us silent in the darkness where we had been scattered. She begged us to leave her party alone. She promised us our own celebrations, a party that shewouldthrowtoshowherrespectforus,andhergratitudeforsupportingher politics. She ordered her temporary new driver to give us drinks and left-over food. She hobbled back into the tent.

The beggars and the inhabitants alike struggled for the food and drinks. The thugs and bouncers stared at us. Then they mocked us in songs. They got drunk on their mockery. Dad swore at them and stormed back to the house, the beggar girl following him at a distance. I followed her. Dad went into the room and the girl stayed outside. The compound people whispered things about us. I couldn’t hear what they said. The beggar girl turned to me with her strange eye. I didn’t listen to the whispers any more.

‘What is your name?’ I asked her.

‘Helen,’ she said.

‘Do you like my father?’

She said nothing for a while. Then, as I was about to move, she said: ‘Maybe it’s you that I like.’

I didn’t understand. I went into the room. Dad was dressing up in his black French suit. He had three plasters on his face. He had daubed the dreadful Arabian perfume on him. He put on his old boots, combed his hair, and parted it. I told him about the man in white.

‘A white man?’ Dad asked in an excited voice.

‘No,’ I said.

‘What did he want? Does he want to vote for me?’

‘No.’

Dad stamped the boots on the floor. When he was satisfied with their occupation by his feet, he said:

‘All kinds of people are interested in me. From today I keep my door open.’

‘What about thieves?’

‘What thieves? What can they steal, eh?’

‘Mum’s money.’

‘Does she have money?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Good. Weneedvotes.I’mgoingtoMadameKoto’sparty.Dressup.Goandwash your face. You are going to be my subaltern.’

‘What about the girl?’

‘What girl?’

‘Helen, the beggar.’

‘She will be my bodyguard. All beggars are my bodyguards. I will build them a university.’

‘When?’

‘After you wash your face.’

I went and had a hurried wash. When I got back Dad was gone. The beggar girl was at the housefront. I led her beggars to Madame Koto’s party.

FIVE

OUTSIDE THE TENT Dad was struggling to get in. ‘I am a politician!’ he said.

‘We don’t want politicians like you,’ said one of the bouncers.

‘Why not?’

‘Go away. If you are a politician you won’t gatecrash.’

‘Did I crash your gate?’ Dad replied indignantly. ‘I don’t have a car.’

‘Just go away.’

Dad began to shout insults. He made such a fuss that the bouncer sent for the thugs. They came and bundled Dad out and dumped him near the forest. He came storming back, his jacket covered in mud, dried leaves in his hair, his plaster flapping. He went to the bouncer and knocked him out with a single roundhouse punch.

‘Ifit’sonly gatecrashersyourespect,thenIamcomingin,’Dadsaid.

The thugs fell on him. He threw one of them on the bonnet of a car. He winded a second with apunchtothesolarplexus.Hewasquiveringwithenergy;hiseyeshada manic glimmer. Someone screamed. Madame Koto came out, saw what was happening, told the thugs to stop fighting, and very politely asked Dad to come into the party. I followed him. The beggar girl followed me. At the door I encountered the blind old man. He had a new instrument, a harmonica. He wore yellow glasses and a red hat.

‘What do you want?’ he asked me.

‘To come in.’

‘You can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘You ugly child. Show me your friends and I will eat them.’

I pushed past his wheelchair and went into the celebrations. There were actually fewer people at the event than it appeared from the outside. Or maybe they were all somewhere else, at the event behind the event. The noise from the musical equipment was very loud. I saw giants and midgets. I saw a white man with silver eyelashes dancing with a woman whose abundant breasts brought flames to his face. The long tables tumbled with fruit and fried meat, rice and platters of sweet-smelling stews, vegetables and plastic cutlery. Everywhere I looked the lights affected me. Crowded spaces suddenly became empty. And in the emptiness I saw the ghost forms of white men in helmets supervising the excavation of precious stones from the rich earth. The excavation was done with spectral machines. I saw the ghost figures of young men and women, heads bowed, necks and ankles chained together, making their silent procession through the celebrations. They kept moving but stayed in the same place. Over them the celebrants danced to the music of a new era that promised Independence. The men of politics, the chiefs, with their wrappers, their agbadas, their fans, the women with lace and red shoes, the paid helpers, the praise-singers, all danced vigorously, sweating, smiling. Madame Koto wandered in agony through the celebrants, her bad foot weighing her down, her head slumped to one side like a disconsolate Masquerade, her face shining with good living. It was strange to see her grown much more beautiful as she got more swollen. An expression of profound disdain hung involuntarily on her lips. An orchestrator of fantastic events, she walked right through the forms of the enchained procession and began sneezing so hard that she twisted her neck. Her women came and led her into the inner sanctum of the bar.

Dad went around talking politics. He looked miserable in his black French suit. Everyone he talked to looked at him quizzically and took a handkerchief to their noses. The women refused to dance with him. Dad paused at a corner, nibbling a piece of goats’ meat, looking confused. I wandered amongst the large parrots in cages, saw featherless chickens twitching on plates, and encountered a duiker tied to a post. It kept staring at me. Its eyes were big and changed colour and it had a white bib of beard reaching down to its haunches and it had a powerful smell and it stood still while everyone danced under the heat of the tent. I saw men dancing with political erections. Sweat and sexual potency filled the air. Dancing women generated heat-waves with the gyrations of their bottoms. At one end of the party a chained monkey kept snatchingoffthewigsofprostitutes.Apoliticianwascontemplatingawoman’s quivering buttocks when the monkey snatched the piece of fried antelope from his hands. The monkey hid. The politician looked round. He fetched himself another pieceoffriedmeat andresumedhiscontemplation.Thesamethinghappened.Heleft with the woman soon afterwards. Then I noticed hands crawling under the tables. The music became louder. Someone gave me something to drink. It was very strong and I drank it all and had some more. The earth quivered under the assault of music and dancing. The multicoloured bulbs swayed. Beneath the tables hands with three fingers, legs with two wide-spaced toes, wandered around without touching the ground. Buckets of food floated through theair with no onecarryingthem.Thefood vanished beneath the tables. When the music stopped a midget came to the platform and sang the praises of the eternal Party of the Rich. Then he proceeded to swallow cowrie beads and bring them out of his ears. The blind old man played on his harmonica, green liquid dripping from his eyes. The people clapped and cheered and drank to the health of the party, to its long future domination of the nation, and to Madame Koto. The music was resumed. The blind old man staggered all over the place, very drunk, guided by a woman in a blue wrapper and matchingblouse. When he banged against people he would pull up stiffly and say:

‘Ah, a party!’

When he staggered into women he would laugh and stick out his bony hands, searching for their breasts. The women paid him much attention. He was led to his chair. He danced there like an overturned centipede. The women kept bringing him drinks. He drank heavily, looking through his yellow spectacles at the celebrations, occasionally saying:

‘Ah, Ladies of the Night!’

The parrots squawked noisily in their cages. The duiker eyed me. I stared back into its eyes of deep colours. I stared into its hypnotic eyes and felt myself beingdrawn into its consciousness, I felt myself filling with unease and anxiety. When that moment passed,nauseaandbilerisinginmythroat,Ifoundmyselfinayellowforest, bounding through the emerald spangles of cobwebs. Stars fell from the night sky, plunged into the forest earth, and formed deep pits. I galloped in dreams of abundant energies through the great jungles, bristling with the freedom of the wind and four feet and the soaring spirit that disintegrates the frames of all night-runners. As I bounded along I saw the forms of serene ancestors, men and women for whom the stars were both words and gods, for whom the world and the sky and the earth were a vast language of dreams and omens. I passed the stone monoliths of the deep nights of transition, when the beings of an earlier time were creators first before they were hunters; I passed the clusters of the abodes of spirits. I was the messenger of the wind. The spirits rode with me, played with the language of my speed, the riddles of my words. They looked deep into my eyes and I understood. I ran through the night forests, where all forms are mutable, where all things exchange their identities, and where everything dances in an exultation of flame and wisdom. I ran till I came to the Atlantic, silver and blue under the night of forests. Birds flew in the aquamarine sky. Feathers gyrated on to thewaves.Thesky wasfullofdensewhitecloudsmovinglike invading armies of mist and ghosts over the deep serene blue and under the regenerative stars. The ghost ships of centuries arrived endlessly on the shores. I saw the flotillas, the gunwales, the spectral great ships and the dozens of rowing boats, bearing the helmeted ones, with mirrors and guns and strange texts untouched by the salt of the Atlantic. I saw the ships and the boats beach. The white ones, ghost forms on deep nights, stepped on our shores, and I heard the earth cry. The cry scared me. Deep in the duiker’s eyes, I ran through the yellow forests, through deluded generations, through time. I witnessed the destruction of great shrines, the death of mighty trees that housed centuries of insurgent as well as soothing memories, sacred texts, aichemical secrets of wizards, and potent herbs. I saw the forests die. I saw the people grow smaller in being. I saw the death of their many roads and ways and philosophies. Their precious stones and rocks of atomic energies were drawn from the depths of their ancestral memories. I saw the trees retreat screaming into the blue earth. I heard thegreatspiritsofthelandandforesttalkingofatemporary exile.They travelled deeper into secret spaces, weaving spells of madness round their arcane abodes to prevent humans from ever despoiling their transformative retreat from the howling feet of invaders. I saw the rising of new houses. I saw new bridges span the air. The old bridges, invisible, travelled on by humans and spirits alike, remained intact and less frequented. As the freedom of space and friendship with the pied kingfisher and other birds became more limited with the new age, something died in me. I fled deep into the salt-caves of rocklands. Hunters with new instruments of death followed. When human beings and animals understood one another, we were all free. But now the hunters pursued me in the duiker’s eyes. And as I escaped into the forest of thunder, whose invisible gates are sealed with seven incantations, a knock crashed on my head. A flaming star spun me round. Laughter rocketed me into a silver emptiness. I opened my eyes and found myself cradled by a female midget. Her eyes were enormous and sad. I tried to get up and shake the confusion from my head, but she held me down tightly. Eighteen eyes regarded me. Beyond the eyes I saw the duiker gazing at me intently, drugged on its captivity, gazing at me as if my freedom lay in freeing it from imminent death, from being sacrificed for the opening of the road of Madame Koto’s destiny.

SIX

‘OH, MY FRIEND, you’ve woken up!’ the female midget said to me.

She wore a white dress with lace frills and imitation sequins. I had seen her before. She had a demented smile stretched tightly across her face. Her eyes were moon-like and when I looked into them the insides of my head kept shifting. The eyes of the duiker pulled me. Warm, old, magnetic, they spoke a language of mood and blood.

‘I asked you to dancewithme,butyourefused,’themidgetsaid,flashingherweird animated smile.

She took my hands and placed them on her big frantic breasts. They palpitated like two mighty hearts. The female midget quivered, the smile became fainter on her face. She stared at me with such frightening tenderness and longing that I broke out in a sweat. She dragged me to the dance floor, and amidst bemused laughter from the other celebrants, drew me into the pounding rhythms of the music. She held me tightly to her breasts and drenched me in the strange sexuality of her soft body and before I was aware of it I was swirling amongst the sturdy legs of adults. She turned me round, threw herself at me, shook her breasts in my face, and clasped my young bottom, and clung to me, made me dizzy, and dissolved things around me, in her torrid dance. She kept spinning me, filling my head with bizarre potencies of desire, her smile widening. She held me so tight that the blood threatened to burst drunkenly in my ears. Red lights flooded my brain and when my eyes cleared, the smells of a thousand perfumes, of wild sex on hot illicit nights, of vaginal fluids, of animal sweat, overpoweredmy senses.Intheterribleheat ofthedanceIsawthat,amongtheerotic dancers, the politicians and chiefs, the power merchants, the cultists, paid supporters, thugsandprostitutes,allmovingtothebeat ofthenewmusic,amongthemall,there were strangers to the world of the living. I saw that some of the prostitutes, who would be future brides of decadent power, had legs of goats. Some of the women, who were chimeras and sirens and broken courtesans, had legs of spiders and birds. Some of the politicians and power merchants, the chiefs and innocent-looking men, who were satyrs and minotaurs and satanists, had the cloven hoofs of bulls. Their hoofs and bony legs were deftly covered with furry skin. Fully clothed, they danced as men and women when in fact they were the dead, spirits, and animals in disguise, part-time human beings dancing to the music of ascendant power. Everythingaround me seemed to be changing and yielding its form. I cried out. The female midget swirled me round. Tables flew towards me. They flew through me. And I was twirling, dizzy, my being in disintegration, dancing not with a female midget but with thefour-headedspirit whohadbeenbidinghistime.Iwasfallinginlovewithlifeand the four-headed spirit had chosen the best moment to dance with me, turning and twistingmethrough strangespaces, makingmedancemy way outoftheworldofthe living. The lights turned violet. Still in a dance which I couldn’t control, I found myself in a desert waste where shadows were real things, where the sand blew in the air and fixed into the shapes of fabulous glass monsters. The four-headed spirit led me in a dance through the desert, holding me in an iron grip. The harder I fought the tougher the grip became, till my arms turned blue. He danced me through the desert winds, which concealed the forms of master spirits and powerful beings who borrowed the sandstorms to cloth their nakedness; through the striated sands, over the vast desert worms, through the mirage cities in which the liquid apparitions of air concealed cities throbbing in rich bazaars and marketplaces and dens of hallucinations; he danced me through the mirage cities where tall women had breasts of glass and beautiful women had the phosphorescent tails of cats, over the wells, past the oasis where obscure figures turned silver into water, through the streets of the elite quarters where people cried out for love, past the slave alleys where innumerable souls had written their names on the walls with their flesh, along the precincts of drugged soldiers, the garrisons of slave towns, into the heart of forgotten civilisations where Pythagoras came to learn mathematics, into the sacred groves of desert gods, and the empty houses of reincarnated prophets, and the great wastes of desert stretches which werein fact populated with adventurous tribes and warringbeings and people who had become their own stone carvings, through it all the four-headed spirit led me in its dance of death. I beheld the Sphinx, with its original black face. I was plunged into sandstorms and whirlwinds, the sands howling, and I saw the invisible trees and plants, the meadows of flowers with passionate calyxes, all ghosts of the vegetation that used to be there. And I was thrust up through the burning vents of sandwhorls and I felt so hot, my head bursting with fires, my eyes full of steaming sand, and when I cried out the music of the desert gods drowned my cry. I fought to escape. I struggled, I kicked. I did not want deserts in me. And as we neared the scorching centre of the desert, where a ship in full mast waited to set sail, the four-headed spirit said:

‘That ship will take us home to your companions across the oceans of sand.’

Then a new music, composed entirely of desert vowels, poured over me and filled mewith anguish. I called out to thegreat kingof thespirit world, but hedidn’t appear. And so I called out, with all my being, for Mum. Out of the stillness of a strange love, I saw her in a tattered wig, a pair of blue glasses on her face, bangles on her arms. She wore a bright wrapper and a blouse blinding in its whiteness. She stood over me and lifted me up. The desert burned its way into my brain, scorching my head. The calmness of cool water flowed down my face and Mum, in the gentlest voice said:

‘Azaro, why are you crying?’

She held me gently. The midget had gone. The four-headed spirit had evaporated into the mysteries of dance. I couldn’t see the giants any more, or the hoofs of part-time human beings, those who would wreck our hopes for two generations, or the bird-feet of strange women. Forms had lost their mutability.

‘What’s wrongwith you?’ Mumasked.

I held on to her. She wiped the tears from my face. My throat was dry. I stayed silent for a long time. Occasionally a cool wind blew in from outside. Mum gave me some iced water to drink. I drank it all and had some more. Then after a while, when I began to feel a little better, I looked up at her. She smiled.

‘We watched you dancing, my son. You danced like your grandfather. And then you fell. Are you all right now?’

I didn’t answer her question.

‘Why areyouwearingthoseblueglasses?’Iaskedher.

She laughed.

‘I will tell you later. It’s a good story.’

‘Tell me now.’

‘There’s too much noise. Where is Madame Koto?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘If you help me find her, I will tell you the story when we get home.’

I set out to search for Madame Koto. Everyone I asked said they had just seen her. The beautiful beggar girl, sitting under a table, watched me as I went up and down. I was about to ask her a question when she motioned me to be quiet. She pointed. I followed her finger with my gaze and saw that the beggars were carrying out a complicated stealing operation. They grabbed fruits and fried meat and bowls of stew and plates of rice from the tables and passed them on in a relay of hands. The food disappeared beneath the tent. Helen was their watch-woman.

‘Do you want me to help?’

She waved me on.

‘Can’t you talk?’

She stared at me mutely and then, gently, pushed me away.

SEVEN

ONEOFTHEpoliticianswasplasteringmoney onthesweatingbreastsofa woman who had danced with unbounded sensual ferocity. Dad was having a heated argument with a man in a red hat. The man kept pushing Dad away and Dad kept coming back. Mum went over to him and held his fists and soon they were dancing together. It was the first time in a while that I had seen them dance. I continued with my search for Madame Koto. In the bar the women were serving bowls of steaming peppersoup. I was given a plate and I drank hurriedly and had to have some palm-wine to extinguish the heat the pepper generated in my brain. The wine swam in my eyes. I staggered to the backyard. The duiker held me with its brilliant eyes. The eyes held me fast and I carried on walking while still looking at it and I crashed into a woman bearing a tray of food. The plates fell everywhere, the food tumbled to the ground. The beggars materialised from the night and scraped together the fallen food and vanished again. The woman swore at me. I swore back at her. She picked up a piece of firewood and chased me all over the backyard. I ran into the bushes and into the figure of Madame Koto. She started and stood very straight. Her eyes were blurred, as if she were in some sort of trance or in a moment of passionate anguish. She stank of odd perfumes, queer aromas, of flint and hyena-hides, feathers and old trees.

‘What areyou doinghere?’ sheasked. ‘Go to your father.’

I backed away.

‘My mother is lookingfor you.’

‘Go away!’ she shouted.

I retreated. I hung around the fire-grate. I hid behind the earthenware pot that had been brought outside. I watched her. She remained still. Behind me the celebrations raged, the music shook the vegetation, loud voices cavorted in the night air. Then she came out of the bushes. She came towards me. She stretched her hands upwards in a dramatic plea, and then she sighed. I caught the green glint of the duiker’s eyes. The green glint stirred something in my brain. I scurried from behind the pot and hid near the duiker. Madame Koto turned to where I had been, but she saw nothing. She was still again. The moonlight touched her eyes. The duiker pawed me and drew me into itself and the wind blew a curious darkness from my consciousness and water flooded my ears and I found myself in the eyes of the magic animal, looking out for a brief moment into the reality that it saw. There were forms everywhere, the humped shapes of writhing animals, eyes floating on the wind, organic houses that behaved like carnivorous plants, flowers with worms in them, worms with flowers in them, silver cords lighting up the air. And I saw that Madame Koto was pregnant with three strange children. Two of them sat upright and the third was upside down in her womb. One of them had a little beard, the second had fully formed teeth, and the third had wicked eyes. They were all mischievous, they kicked and tugged at their cords, they weretheworsttypeofspirit-children,andthey hadnointentionofbeingborn.Iheard a terrible scream. Something knocked the curious darkness back into my consciousness. Madame Koto was bent over. I backed away from the duiker. Madame Koto straightened, came over to me, and said:

‘Why wereyoustaringatmy stomachlikethatwithyourbad-luckeyes?’

‘I wasn’t staring,’ I said.

She hit me again. It didn’t hurt. Then she put on her moonstones, cursing and muttering about the pain in her stomach. She went to her room and soon re-emerged with a fan of peacock feathers. She walked with great dignity back into the celebrations.

The politicians pasted money on her forehead when she performed an impromptu dance; the praise-singers sang of her accomplishments; women clustered round, showering her with compliments. Mum went over and they talked and pointed at the food. MadameKoto seemedtobetellingMumwhotheimportantpersonalitiesatthe event were. Mum looked lean and famished besides Madame Koto. Her wigwas in a sorry state, as if it was something she had rescued from the roadside. Her blue sunglasses made her look slightly mad. And her copper bangles had turned greenish from rust and all the water that dripped in from our roof.

While they were talking the blind old man started shouting in his chair. At first no one thought anything of it. He kicked and struggled drunkenly and then he got up and staggered to the middle of the dance floor. He turned one way, then another. Then he fell on his knees and crawled around on the ground and he kept shouting:

‘Thieves! Thieves!’

Madame Koto, ever the attentive host, was the first to take note of his inexplicable agitation. Waving the fan across her face, hobbling through the weaving crowd of dancers, she went to the blind old man.

‘I see food floating under the table,’ he said in a cracked voice.

‘Where?’

‘Everywhere. Since when did fried goat fly?’

MadameKoto, humouringhim, tried to get himto stand up. Herefused.

‘You haverats under your table. I sawabigrat.Ithasonly oneeye.’Theblindold man stood up, adjusted his yellow glasses, and started to jump up and down, squealing like a demented sorcerer. Then he brought out his harmonica and played during the silence between two records. Some of the people dancingpoured scorn on him.

‘Take your dirty music somewhere else,’ someone said.

Madame Koto was leaving when she saw a flash behind the blind old man. A bowl ofpeppersoup wasfloatingabovethetable.Sheleaptinthatdirectionsuddenly,onan impulse, and hurt her foot, and fell to the ground. Her bodyguards rushed to her and helped her up. When shewas standingagain, shepointed, shouting:

‘Get those thieves! Flog them! Bring them here! Let me teach them a lesson!’

The place erupted with her fury. She shouted, she threw plates and food on the ground. Themusicstopped. Sheweavedabouttheplace,wavingherarms,lashingher minions with her walking stick. The thugs rushed outside. Amid the general confusion Madame Koto saw the beautiful beggar girl sitting mutely under the table and ordered her to be caught. The thugs soon came back in, dragging some of the beggars into the tent. They had incriminating bowls of food in their hands. Madame Koto made them carry the bowls on their heads. The celebrants laughed. With the full vengeance of her stomach throbbing with the abiku children, with the agony of her swollen foot and twisted neck, she ordered the bodyguards to thrash the beggars. There was silence. No one moved. The strange duiker looked on with impassive eyes. The bodyguards, one by one, said they wouldn’t whip the beggars. Madame Koto burst into such a rage, hobbling around with her lion-headed walking stick, lashing her bodyguards on the back, screaming at them to thrash the beggars as a public lesson. The beggars gazed at her without emotion. They were silent. Legless, one-armed, one-eyed, soft-limbed, they gazedat herwithbigandplacideyes.MadameKoto,stillhobbling,transforming her agony into rage, began to push her employees out of the premises, out of the tent, shouting for them to leave her service, to return to the festering gutters from which she had plucked them. Then one of the prostitutes cut herself a cane in the bushes and, crying as she did so, proceeded to whip the beggars. She whipped them hard, on their backs and on their wounds, on their faces and on their bad limbs. The bodyguards changed their minds. That night a new order of manifestations appeared in our lives. As the thugs thrashed the beggars a curious dust rose from their backs, rose into the air, and when the dust touched the lights midges multiplied everywhere. The dust turned into flying insects; the insects grew in size and soon the tent and the fluorescent lights bristled with a host of green moths.

When Dad became aware of the beatings he ran over to the thugs and snatched the whips from them. They jumped on him and held him down. Madame Koto, still in agony, ordered that the beggar girl also be flogged. The prostitute whipped the girl. Helen bore the whipping and did not move or cry. She stared at Madame Koto with gentle eyes as they whipped her. The gentleness in her eyes made Madame Koto madder. Mum went to her and said:

‘Tell them to stop. You don’t know who that girl is.’

‘She is a thief.’

‘She is not a thief.’

MadameKotobellowedsomethingat Mum.SheinsultedMumloudly,sayingthat Mum too was a beggar. She gave vent to such a torrent of anger and bitterness that Mumwas stunned. ThenMumdidsomethingquiteodd.Shetorethewigoffherhead and threw it on the floor. She took the blue sunglasses off her face. Then she stormed out of the disrupted party uttering the direst curses. The wind blew again when the whipping of the beggar girl was resumed. It was a strident wind. Slowly the beggar girl sank to the ground under the brutality of the whipping. Dad strained furiously against the people holding him down. The duiker let out a low snarl. The beggar girl began to bleed from the mouth. Blood dripped down her lips and fell in drops on the ground. I began to weep. Someone hit me. It was the blind old man. He started playingon his harmonicato thesound of thethrashing.

‘A good whipping, eh,’ he said every now and again.

The wind lifted the edges of the tent. The beggar girl crouched on the floor in a foetal position. I went round the gathered resplendent celebrants. They were fanning themselves. Their faces were animated by the new spectacle. As I pushed through them I again noticed their hoofs, their goat-legs, their spidery legs, and their bristly skins. I crept towards the duiker and untied it from the pole and released it from its sacrificial captivity. A mighty wail erupted from Dad. He stood up in a great burst of manic energy and sent the men flying. The duiker bounded from the backyard into the tent. And as the wind made the tent sway, as the lights began going on and off, a frightening cry rose from the bewildered crowd. The duiker bounded amongst the dazzling array of celebrants, scattering the bird cages, overturning the tables, stampingon thefood, upsettingbasins offriedmeat,mashingthefruits,crashinginto the cage of large parrots, shattering the tables with beer on them, and sowing pandemonium. The parrot beat its wings against the limitations of the tent, the monkey escaped and fled off with its hand full of fruits, the loudspeakers fell with a crash, people trampled on one another, howling and confused, the thugs chased the duiker, trying to recapture it, Dad hurled himself at the woman whipping the beggar girl and pushed her away, Madame Koto knocked Dad on the head with the metallic end of her walking stick, the blind old man squealed in his weird sorcerer’s delight, theduikerleapt out throughthetent openingandthewindburstinandtiltedthetent to one side, and Madame Koto ordered everyone to be calm. The parrot flew out through agapingholeinthetent.ThethugsturnedonDad,andwereabouttodescend on him and beat him to a mash when a voice amongst the celebrants, profound with an unearthly authority, said:

‘Stop!’

Everyone froze as if in an enchantment. Then slowly they turned to see who had spoken with such power. The wind calmed down. The voices had stopped. Most of the motions in the tent ceased. And then the tall man in a white suit who had been waitingfor Dad stepped out fromtheexpectant crowd.

EIGHT

‘LEAVE HIM TO ME,’ he said in his thin ghostly voice. ‘I will thrash this BlackTygerwithoutevenstainingmy whitesuit.’

The blind old man played a strain on his instrument.

‘Ah, lovely, a fight!’ he said.

And before we could register what exactly was happening the man in white struck Dad in the face and sent him reeling. Dad fell on to a table. He didn’t move for fifteen seconds. No one saw the jab that did the damage. The celebrants, awoken from their enchantment, clapped. The old man played a tune. The beggars shuffled and crawled out of the tent. The beggar girl stayed crouched on the ground. Someone poured water on Dad. He jumped up quickly, looked around, and kept blinking.

‘Where am I?’ he wondered out loud.The celebrants burst out laughing. Dad staggered around. Then he fell. He got up again and reached for a cup of palm-wine and drank it down. I went over to him.

‘What areyou doinghere?’ heasked severely.

‘The man in white hit you.’

‘A white man?’

‘No. Him.’ I pointed.

Dad went all over the place, drinking all the cups of wine he could find. Then he shook his head to clear away the thick cobwebs, howled a war cry, and rushed over to the man in white. Before Dad could do anything the man unleashed a whiplash of a punch. Dad crumpled into a heap. He writhed and twisted on the ground like a lacerated worm. I rushed over to him again.

‘Let’s go home,’ I said.

‘Why?’ he yelled.

‘Theman is beatingyou.’

‘What man?’ I was taken aback. Dad seemed to be in an unreal land, a mythical land. He didn’t seemto know what was happeningto him. His facehad broken out in two monstrous purple bruises as if under the chastisement of an invisible sorcerer. I couldn’t see his right eye. I never knew that a jab could inflict such punishment, such disfigurement, or such disorientation. Dad’s eyes were dazed, slightly crossed, and his lips kept moving. I leant over to hear what he was saying.

‘This is an excellent party,’ hesaid weakly, slurringhis words.

‘Let’s go.’

‘I’menjoyingthis dance,’ hesaid. ‘You’renot dancing.’

‘What am I doing then?’ ‘Losing a fight.’

‘Fight? Black Tyger? Lose a fight? Never!’

He got up, weaved, staggered, and fell on the beggar girl. He stayed down for a while. The music started. The man in white dusted his hands. Madame Koto took an immediate interest in him and sent intermediaries to make enquiries about him. Party chiefs, power merchants and warlords, always seekingnew additions to their ranks of warriors and hired protectors, sent their men to ask who he worked for and if he would enter their services. Thugs surrounded him, asking who he was, where he came from, offeringaspecialplacein their organisation. Theprostitutes and thelow-life courtesans also took a great interest in him. The praise-singers invented names and fabulous deeds for him. The beggar girl, bleeding from her mouth and nose, got out from under Dad. As she got up I noticed that her bad eye was open. It was yellowish and tinged with blue. Sheshook Dad. Thecelebrants jeered. Dad sat up, holdinghis head. When he saw the beggar girl he smiled leeringly, grabbed her, and began to embrace her. The beggar girl freed herself from his punch-drunk embrace. Dad’s face had taken on the softness of an abandoned lover and any moment it seemed he would burst into a grotesque and sentimental love song.

‘My wife, where are you going?’ he asked of the beggar girl. The girl got up and brushed the sand from her hair. Her back was a mess of flesh and torn cloth. Her hair fell from her head as if it were a wig dissolving back to its original constituents.

‘A magician!’ the blind old man said, and played his harmonica.Dad stood up. The girl backed away. Dad followed her.‘Let’s go!’ I cried.‘After I’m married,’ he said, wobbling.

Then he stopped, looked around, and noticed everyone staring at him with amused smiles on their faces. He noticed the man in white and looked at him as if for the first time. He looked at the green moths and the midges and the multicoloured lights and the chaos of overturned tables and trampled food and at the dimensions of the tent. Then he said:

‘I thought I was dreaming.’‘You’re not,’ I said.‘I thought I was in the Land of the Fighting Ghosts.’‘He is a Fighting Ghost.’‘You mean I wasn’t dreaming?’‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re losing a fight.’‘You’re drunk,’ said the blind old man.‘Punch-drunk,’ said one of the thugs. Dad touched his face. He winced.‘So they were real blows?’‘Yes,’ I said.‘Who did it?’

‘The man in white.’

Suddenly, with his curious ability to reach into deep places in his spirit, a ferocious energy swirled around Dad.

‘Hurry, go and call Sami, the betting-man,’ Dad said, awakening. ‘We will make money from this and build the beggars a school.’

I rushed out and, with Ade, went to fetch Sami. When I got back Dad had taken off his shirt, and was shadow-boxing, working up a sweat. He seemed wide awake now. Methodically, he shook his head, did some press-ups, and practised the most amazing exercises. He creaked his joints, limbered up, stretched his muscles, did his special movements, breathed deeply, swelled up, and let out howls of energy. He was very impressive. The crowd watched him disdainfully. Only the inhabitants of the area, who had now ventured into the tent in the wake of the commotion, called out his fighting name and cheered him on. The blind old man was seated on his wheelchair, his harmonica in one hand, a fried piece of antelope meat in the other. Occasionally he kicked his feet in the air and like an over-excited child would say:

‘A prize fight! Very good. Where is the betting-man?’

The man in white, tall, lean, with an air of extraordinary detachment, a small head and pinpoint eyes, stood on one leg. He was very still. His eyes were positively reptilean.Hewasvery disturbingtolookat.Noonelookedathimforvery long.

Sami arrived with his bucket and his small army of protectors. He went round taking bets. The odds were against Dad. One of the politicians brought out a great wad of pound notes and said:

‘I have heard too much about that Black Tyger. He is a buffoon. From today I rename him the Black Rat.’

There were bursts of laughter and guffaws all around. Celebrants laughed themselves into contortions. The politician made the odds very low against Dad. Everyone was excited about the outcome. Sami, sweating, went from group to group, from person to person, jotting down their names and their odds and collecting their money in the bucket. Soon another bucket was needed. All the women, the prostitutes, the low-life courtesans, the casual onlookers, brought out their money. Sami sent for more protection. His entire compound turned up, armed with clubs and dane guns. When he had finished, he was drenched in sweat. He was drenched in the horror of his utter financial ruin, instant and complete liquidation, total poverty and homelessness. Hewent over to Dad. Pleadingreverently, moppinghis brow, hesaid:

‘If you win this one you can build a university.’

‘A school for beggars,’ Dad said, correcting him.

‘Whatever you like. Just win, you hear? Or I will be a poor man. My children will starve. My wife will go mad. All my money, all the money I could borrow, all the money I don’t even have, is on this, eh. Win!’

Dad pushed him away. The fight began. Dad circled the man in white. Dad rushed him, but the man wasn’t there. The blind old man, chuckling, waving a chicken bone, said:

‘That is what we call magical boxing, eh.’

I loathed him. Dad went on rushing the man, throwing wide swings, wild flurries of punches which only dazed the green moths and confused the midges, but he couldn’t touch the man.

‘Don’t you want to fight?’ he asked in frustration.

The man cracked Dad with a punch so fast that it was only when the women hurled Dad back into the arena that we registered its effect. The man went on striking Dad with electric punches, his fists were so fast that it seemed he was completely still the whole time, while Dad’s head kept snapping backwards, as if the air, or an invisible hand, were responsible. His nose became swollen, the bridge broke, blood spurted out. Dad tried hard not to breathe in his own blood. When he breathed it was in excruciation and fatigue. Suddenly, he seemed terrified of pain. The man would move his shoulder slightly and Dad’s head would jerk backwards. The man jabbed Dad at will, with cold menacing indifference. I couldn’t bear it. The man went on pounding Dad’s nose, extending the territories of his bruises, discolouring and generally realigning Dad’s face, altering his physiognomy, disintegrating his philosophy, dissolving his reality, dislodging his teeth, and sapping the will from his sturdy legs. Every time Dad took a punch a searing light from another planet shot through my skull. Blinded by the beating Dad was taking I went out, found Ade, and asked him to give me the lizard spell his father had made.

‘It doesn’t work when theopponent is wearingwhite,’ hesaid.

‘Get away from here!’ I screamed at him, and went back in.

Dad was absorbing monstrous punishment. The blind old man kept chuckling. Whenever Dad mounted another futile attack the blind old man would make a curious sound, a dissonant croak, distracting and discouraging Dad. He did this many times. Soon the celebrants took up the dissonant croak as a sort of dampening anthem. I decided to get rid of the old man. I went out and begged Ade to come and help me. We stole back in and, very gently, wheeled the old man’s chair out of the tent. In the intense excitement and concentration, no one noticed us. When we got out we wheeled him fast, shouting for people to let us through, saying that the old man was ill. He kept screaming and threatening us with curses. His frenzy only seemed to convince people that they should get out of the way.

‘A wizard is carryingmeoff!’ hehollered.

No one believed him. We wheeled him up the road, along paths, deep into the forest, and when we stopped his glasses fell from his face.

‘What has happened?’ he shouted.

His blind eyes were ugly in the dark. They had a curious light in them.

‘I can’t see!’ he cried, making our flesh crawl.

As we were about to leave he caught Ade’s hand and wouldn’t let go. I banged him on the head with a stick and he relaxed his grip and protected his head and uttered low cries. Me and Ade fled from him, with the noise of his wail amplified by the forest.

When we got back to the tent the fight was turning. Dad had crossed the desert of his exhaustion, had found new springs and oases of energies. He was covered in sweat and bruises. His head was firmly tucked behind his fists and his shoulders hunched. He had become more rock-like, like one who was thoroughly resigned to taking punishment as a condition of survival. There was something strange about the way he accepted his beating. He didn’t seem so afraid of every bone-grinding punch the man threw at him. Dad kept staggering, wobbling, under the man’s methodical, scientific combinations. It was astonishing to see that the man still hadn’t worked up a sweat. Dad went on wobbling, his legs watery, and I was sure he was pretending. I shouted:

‘Black Tyger, dirty his suit!’

All heads turned towards me. The man in white looked in my direction. In the brief moment of his distraction, Dad worked swiftly. He caught the man’s collar and with an insane howl ripped the coat. The man tried to protect the suit, but Dad abandoned allknown rules of fightingand concentrated on extendingtherippage.Hegrabbedthe torn bits of the coat, he spun the man round, and with the help of a foot to the small of the back, tore the coat off the man. Then Dad pursued him and completed the rippage, snatching off bits of white cloth clinging to his arms. Beneath the coat, there was a shirt, and Dad, with terrible persistence, tore off the shirt and tie as well. Beneath the shirt and coat the man was bare-chested and hairy. He had curious tattoos on his stomach and amulets round his neck. He had a hollow chest and a deep hole of a navel. He was so hairy, and his hair was so much like that of a bush animal that the spectators gave a shocked cry when they saw how inhuman he looked. The man began to cower. Dad feinted a punch to his head, the man blocked his face with both hands, and Dad grabbed his trousers, tripped him, and tore the trousers off him. He had long thin legs, the legs of a spiderous animal. His eyes filled with fear and shame at being unmasked. People backed away, gasping in horror. Sami, the betting-shop man, sent the buckets of money home with some of his protectors. The beggar girl began to cheer. Thewomen’s mouths hungopen.

The man got up, enraged. He had on the weirdest underpants. He rushed Dad and couldn’t find him. He rushed again and stunned him with a flurry of solid punches. They slogged it out for ten minutes. Dad kept hitting him, but he wouldn’t fall. The man caught Dad with an upper cut and rocked his head.

‘Punch his chest, Black Tyger!’ Ade screamed.

Dad paid no attention. His exhaustion had returned. He puffed, he weaved, his punches had no power. Theman began thelongarcofafearfulswingingpunchwhen the wind blew, shaking the tent, and the lights suddenly went out. They came back on again and the man stood disorientated, hand in the air. Dad, calling on his own name, charging his Own spirit, released one of the most destructive punches I’ve ever seen and sent the man flying right through the tent. Tables, plates, and fried meat, crashed around him. Dad stood, weaving, bobbing, waiting. We all waited for the man to get up. He didn’t. The prostitutes tried to resuscitate him, but he couldn’t move. They couldn’t carry him either. We heard them saying something about him being too heavy. His inert form remained outside the tent, in an outer darkness. We never saw him again.

Sami rushed into the middle of the arena and declared Dad the winner of the contest. The inhabitants of the area, who had been outside looking in, surrounded Dad. The beggar girl, me, and Ade kept touching him, wiping the great flow of sweat from his body. Overcome with the horror of his victory, and with fatigue, Dad sank to the ground. We tried to revive him, but we couldn’t. No one else came to help us.

While all this was happening the blind old man had found his way from the forest and back into the tent. He was raving about wizards and bony demon children. He ran one way, then another. His helpers tried to restrain him but he threw them off. His rage was frightful.

We tried to get Dad to stand up. He was out cold. The beggar girl got the other beggars to comeand help. WhileweweretryingtoreviveDadtheblindoldmankept pursuing me round the tent. No one could control him. I ran under the tables. I threw things at him, but he pressed on, he followed me with nightmarish persistence. I ran back to Dad, tried to wake him, but the old man came at me like a demonic sleepwalker, his hands stretched out in front of him. Then suddenly he turned away from me and with the quick movement of a snake striking an unsuspecting prey, he grabbed hold of Ade and wouldn’t let go.

‘Ah ha, so it’s you, theflyingwizard!’ heshouted triumphantly.

Ade screamed. I clubbed the old man. His helpers rained knocks on me. I threw bones and sticks at them. Then the old man, tightening his grip on Ade’s arm said, in a screeching ugly voice:

‘Let me see with your eyes!’

Thestrangest thinghappened. Adebegan to twist, to jerk, contortingin spasms. His eyes swam around their sockets till only the whites were visible. He opened his mouth, his tonguehungout, and hegasped, and madechokingnoises.Peopletriedto free Ade from the old man’s grip. I jumped on his back and he shouted.

‘Get off my back!’

‘Leave my friend alone,’ I said.

‘You’re too heavy, you spirit-child!’ he cried.

I bounced on his back, his bones digging into me. I hooked my arms round his neck and tried to strangle him, but he kept tossing. I attempted to scratch his eyes, but he bit me and threw me off with the strength of five men and I heard his neck creak and was sent flying and when I landed amongst broken tables and the mess of fruits and bean-cakes, everything had cleared. The old man stood, swaying. Ade jerked in a weird epileptic fit. The crowd had mostly gone. Madame Koto was nowhere around. Theloudspeakers hadbeenpackedaway.Theprostitutessatonfoldingchairs,glaring at us. The old man picked up his yellow glasses and played on his harmonica. His helpers led him away. I got up. The beggars, Sami and his protectors, people from the area, and Helen lifted Dad up on their shoulders as if he were a king fallen in battle and carried him out into the night. I helped Ade up. He stood, twitching, his mouth feverish. His fit had receded and he walked as if his legs were made of rubber. As we left the devastated tent the prostitutes abused us. I heard the blind old man’s dissonant harmonica in front of us in the dark. We were at the rear of the procession that bore Dad on their shoulders. He faced the stars. And, as we went the sound of the flapping tent made me look back.

The wind had risen. I realised that the party had blocked the road. The cars were leaving. The trees creaked their limbs. The anti-music of the harmonica faded into the wind, blowing eerie harmonies over the bushes. The wind’s counterpoints whistled along the electric cables. The bright yellow and blue bulbs kept going on and off. Then they stayed on. Ade said, in the voice of a cat:

‘Somethingis happening.’

The wind stopped. It swelled again. Then I saw the tent tilt sideways, and lift up in the air. It rose, it turned on its side, and the wind hurled it over the houses, its voluminous cloth flapping, its form billowing, and it blew over, turning on rooftops, and the sky cracked, two lights flashed, and rain swept down. The rain poured down, the earth swam in mud, dogs barked, the smell of burning rubber filled the air, and we heardabriefrendingcry fromMadameKoto’splace.Thenallthelightswentout.

NINE

THE DARKNESS WAS full of voices. The beggars and Sami carried Dad to the house. When we got to our room Mum was in a frenzy. They laid Dad out on the bed and covered him with a white cloth. The people were gone, but I could hear them singing low heroic melodies down the street. Dad’s mouth was twisted. There was a white scar down the side of his face. His eyes had disappeared beneath his bruises. His lips were like swollen flowers. He was in a far worse condition than in all of his fights put together. He didn’t move. He didn’t even seem to breathe. Mum kept wailing. The beggar girl lit three more candles. Sami sat on Dad’s chair. The beggars sat on the floor. I made Ade lie down on my mat. Apart from Mum, everyone was silent.

Mum rushed out, boiled water, came back, and applied warm compresses to Dad’s face. It never occurred to her that his bruises needed something cold. The beggar girl stroked his feet. No one else moved. After a while Mum rested. She looked round at all of us.

‘Get up from my husband’s chair!’ she shouted at Sami. He jumped up as if a snake had bitten him. He stood near the window. Then he came to me and whispered: ‘When he has recovered, call me. I have all the money. I will get him the best herbalist.’ Then, as if he had been caught stealing, he crept out of the room. ‘And all of you, go!’ Mum screamed, at everyone else. The beggars shuffled. The beggar girl got up, touched me on the head, making my flesh bristle, and led the others out of the room. They left silently. Ade lay down on the mat, his eyes swimming. Occasionally he twitched. He had a wan smile on his lips. I leant over him.

‘I am going to die soon,’ he said.‘Why do you say that?’‘My timehascome.My friendsarecallingme.’‘Whatfriends?’‘In the other world,’ he said. We were silent.‘And what areyou two whisperingabout, eh?’ Mumasked.‘Nothing.’‘What happened to him?’‘He’s not well.’‘What about his father?’‘I don’t know.’‘God save me,’ Mum cried.The candles went out. Mum shut the door and searched for the matches.‘This life! No rest. None. A woman suffers, a woman sweats, with no rest, no happiness.My husband,inthreefights.Godknowswhatallthisisdoingtohisbrain. This lifeis too much for me. I amgoingto hangmyself oneof thesedays,’ Mumsaid. ‘Don’t do that, Mum,’ I said. ‘Shut up,’ she said. I was silent. Deep in me old songs began to stir. Old voices from the world of spirits. Songs of seductive purity, with music perfect like light and diamonds. Ade twitched. The floor began to shake. I could hear his bones rattling. Mum lit a candle. Shesat on Dad’s chair, rockingback and forth, her eyes fixed, her faceunforgiving. I feltsad.Adesmiledstrangely again,sinkingdeeperintohisweirdepilepticecstasy.I leant over him.

‘Trouble is always coming. Maybe it’s just as well,’ he said. ‘Your story has just begun. Mine is ending. I want to go to my other home. Your mother is right; there is too much unnecessary suffering on this earth.’

His voice had taken on the timbre of an old man. Soon I recognised it. A snake wentup my spineandIcouldn’tstop shivering.Hewenton,speakinginthecracked sepulchral voice of the blind old man.

‘My time is coming. I have worn out my mother’s womb and now she can’t have any more children. Coming and going, I have seen the world, I have seen the future. TheKoran says nothingis ever finished.’

‘What will happen?’ I asked him.

Quivering, bitinghis lips tillhedrew blood, hesaid:

‘There will be the rebirth of a father. A man with seven heads will take you away. You will come back. You will stay. Before that the spirits and our ancestors will hold a great meeting to discuss the future of the world. It will be one of the most important meetings ever held. Suffering is coming. There will be wars and famine. Terrible things will happen. New diseases, hunger, the rich eating up the earth, people poisoningthesky andthewaters,peoplegoingmadinthenameofhistory,theclouds will breathe fire, the spirit of things will dry up, laughter will become strange.’

Hestopped. Therewas alongpause. Then hecontinued, frighteningme.

‘There will be changes. Coups. Soldiers everywhere. Ugliness. Blindness. And then whenpeopleleast expect it agreat transformationisgoingtotakeplaceintheworld. Suffering people will know justice and beauty. A wonderful change is coming from faraway andpeoplewillrealisethegreat meaningofstruggleandhope.Therewillbe peace. Then people will forget. Then it will all start again, getting worse, getting better.Don’t fear.Youwillalwayshavesomethingtostrugglefor,evenifitisbeauty or joy.’

He stopped again. And then his fever changed gear, his voice quivered, his eyes were calm.

‘Our country is an abiku country. Like the spirit-child, it keeps coming and going. One day it will decide to remain. It will become strong. I won’t see it.’

His voice changed, became more natural, almost gentle.

‘I see the image of two thousand years. I drank in its words. It took many centuries to grow in me. I see a great musician in a land across the seas. Nine hundred years ago. The musician was me. I see a priest, I see a ruler of gentle people. The priest was me, the ruler was me. I see a wicked warrior who killed many innocent people and who delighted in bloodshed. I was him. There was once a soldier stoned to death and fed to the crocodiles in Egypt. I was that soldier.’

‘You’re talking nonsense,’ I said.

He laughed, coughed, and went on talking. His voice got lower and lower. His mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear him any more. His limbs went into spasms. I smelt burning wood. Smoke gathered round his hair. For a moment I thought his fit was burning him up. I touched him. His forehead was cold. His eyes were open, but he didn’t see me. I looked up and saw that Mum had fallen asleep on Dad’s chair. I lay down, shut my eyes, and sleep came to me in the form of green moths. I followed them into Mum’s dreams. It came as a shock to me to find myself in her dreams. She was a young woman, fresh and beautiful, with a white bird on her shoulder. She had antimony on her face, magiccharms round her neck, and apearlon astringround her left ankle. Shewaswanderingthroughasepia-tintedvillage,lookingforDad.Shesawhimup a tree. She climbed the tree, but Dad jumped down and ran to the river. Mum came down fromthetreeand sangasongfromher childhood, serenadingDad’s spirit. She sangto Dad, askinghimnot to go away, begginghimto return, in thenameof love. The river turned a brilliant green colour and the maiden of the water, green, with sad eyes and lovely breasts, with the face of Helen the beggar girl, embraced Dad and took him down to the bottom of the river where there was an emerald palace. Eagles drank wine from silver goblets. Swans told stories beneath the great silk cotton tree. A black tiger with a prince’s crown and the eyes of my grandfather roamed the city precincts, recitingverses fromancient epics, sacred texts that could alter thenatureof things. The maiden took Dad to her palace and washed his feet. In the great hail the frozen figures of warriors followed Dad with their fearless eyes. Antelopes with flowers round their necks came and sat at Dad’s feet. The maiden changed Dad’s clothes and dressed him in rich aquamarine robes. Then a mighty lion roared from the secret chambers. All the statues in the hall began to move. The warriors woke from their enchantment and marched into the secret chambers. The statues were beautiful. Their masks were beautiful. The statues had strange human faces, some had large pricks, some had wonderfully rounded breasts with proud nipples, and many of them had the paws of the Sphinx. Masquerades danced into the hall and presented Dad with gifts. Then Dad was led outside where a car was waiting for him. Dad got into the car. Mumstoodattheriver-bank,preparingtojump inwhenItouchedher.Shewasangry and said:

‘Getoutofmy dream.I’mtryingtodrawbackyourfather’sspirit.’

I didn’t know how to leave. The sun burned down on us and the white bird on Mum’s shoulder flew into the water and Mum disappeared and it grew so hot that my hair became singed, the trees burst into flame, giving off a bright yellow smoke. Butterflies multiplied everywhere, they came from the sun, and they flew round my face, filling me with vertigo and as I coughed they flew into my mouth and I sat up and saw that our room was filled with smoke and when I shouted and chokedAdesmiledoddly inhisjerkingsleep andMumjumpedup andsaid:

‘Azaro, get up! Thecandleis burningour table!’

I recovered quickly and fetched water from our bucket and poured it on the table. Ade sat up and smiled at me.

‘I’m well now,’ he said.

Mum whipped the table with a wet rag, as if it had annoyed her. When the flame had been put out she came and sat on the bed and held my face between her hot palms and said:

‘My son,whatwereyoudoinginmy dream?’

I said nothing.

‘Answer me,’ she said.

‘It wasn’t your dream. It was Dad’s dream.’

Mum sat up. I couldn’t see her face in the darkness. Her sadness made the night quiver.

‘Your father got into the car and went to the village. Your grandfather treated his wounds and soothed his spirit. Then he travelled to Ughelli to buy the perfume that would get rid of the bad smell of poverty. Then he went to the moon. Then he travelled to the land of spirits far away. Many lands. I heard his voice crying out in the sky. They refused him entry to heaven. They sent him past hell, past spirit lands where our ancestors ask one another impenetrable riddles all day long. He came to a country full of palaces, a country of dreams, where the people are invisible, where wisdom and joy are in the air. He went to the law courts of the spirit worlds. I heard him crying for answers. Then he came back and a war broke out and they shot him on the road that he had built.’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘So liedown and sleep. This is astrongnight. I must protect your father’s spirit orit will go away.’

I lay down.

‘Your father is playing a flute,’ Ade said in his own voice. ‘It is sweet music. I didn’t know he could play so well.’

Then the room was silent. Sleep stole over me and I resisted it. Mum ground her teeth on the bed, struggling with Dad. Ade began to quiver again.

‘I’mgoingslowly,’ hesaid.

‘Shut up,’ I said.

Mum was still. I heard her snoring. Sleep came to me in the form of white birds and I saw MumfightingDad in his dreams, tryingto get himto gatecrash his body. Adelay next to me, twitchingthrough thenight in his fits. And his spirit, swirlingand turbulent with blinding energies, began to affect mine. We swirled in the sweet savage torrent of his epilepsy and travelled the red roads of the spirits and arrived at the Villageof Night, wherebirds werelayingout electriccables, whereMasquerades were alchemists, where the sunbird was priest, where the moonprince was a foundling, and where the tortoise was a wandering griot who warned me at the roadside that no story could ever be finished. As dawn approached the Village disappeared and I heard the songs of my spirit companions. In flames, the great king of the spirit world flashed past my eyes. The mountain heaved. I saw a black cat at my feet and I fed it bean-cakes. Ade lay quiet beside me. His past lives had begun to conquer him. I saw that he had not told me the whole truth. I saw his other images. I saw amurderer in Rome, apoetess in Spain, afalconer amongtheAztecs, awhorein Sudan, a priestess in old Kenya, a one-eyed white ship captain who believed in God and wrotebeautifulhymns and who madehis fortunecapturingslaves in theGold Coast. I even saw a famed samurai warrior in ancient Japan, and a mother of ten in Greece.

Then, in the middle of the night, when I was still amongst the images, a mighty cry woke us up. I looked and in the darkness I saw Dad’s face. Then it vanished.

‘What did he say?’ Mum asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You didn’t hear?’

‘No.’

‘I did,’ Ade said in the dark.

‘What did he say?’

‘He said: “OPEN THE DOOR.”’

Mum rushed from the bed, tripped over my foot, and hit her head against something. She didn’t cry out. She opened the door and went back to the bed. Mosquitoes and night-moths came in. We slept but Mum got up and woke us, saying:

‘No onemust sleep. Wemust bringback your father’s spirit.’

TEN

WE SAT STILL. The wind blew in leaves. The air smelled of the forest and the sleeping ghetto. Strange dreams, floating on the wind, looking for dreamers, drifted into our room.

‘Tell us a story,’ I said.

Ade sat up. His limbs were peaceful.

‘Tell us the story of the blue sunglasses.’

‘Okay.’

We waited. Mum went and sat on Dad’s chair. She rocked back and forth. I saw Dad’s spirit hovering round her. Then it entered her and I heard Mum shiver. She got some ogogoro, made a prayer and a libation, and we drank. As if Dad’s personality were taking her over, she lit a mosquito coil and a candle. Then she lit a cigarette. She rocked back and forth in Dad’s restless manner of a great lion in a man’s body. Her face serious, her features altered, she began to speak.

‘Oneday Iwassellingmy provisions.Iwentfromstreettostreet.Thesunwasvery hot, there was no shelter in the sky or anywhere. I was tired. I began to see things. I began to complain, weepingabouthowhardthisworldis.ThenIcametoacrossroad. I saw a tortoise crawling out of the bushes and crossing the road and I was about to pick it up when it spoke to me.’

‘What did it say?’ I asked.

‘On another day I was hawking things in the city when a white man came to me. He had on the blue sunglasses. It was very hot. The sun and the dust made my eyes red. The white man said: “If you tell me how to get out of Africa I will give you my sunglasses.”

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said, “There are many roads into Africa but only one road leads out.” He said: “What road?” I said: “First tell me what the tortoise told me.” He was confused. “I don’t know what you aretalkingabout,”hesaid. So I told himthat I wouldn’t show him the only road out of Africa, Then he told me his story. He had been here for ten years. For seven of those years he was an important man in the government. Then all the Independence trouble started and for three years he tried to leave but kept failing. Hecouldn’tfindaway out.Every timehepreparedtoleavesomethingcamealong and prevented him. He even got on a plane but the plane went round the world and when he got out he found himself here, in the same place.’

‘So what happened?’

‘So I made him buy all my provisions. Then I asked him to tell me what the tortoise said. Hestopped and thought for alongtime. Then abus went past slowly. It had a motto written on its side. The white man laughed at the motto and read it out and I said that’s what the tortoise told me. ‘What?” he asked. ‘All things are linked,” I said. ‘What has the tortoise got to do with it?” he asked. I said: ‘If you don’t know you will never find any road at all.” Then he gave me the blue sunglasses and before he left he said: ‘The only way to get out of Africa is to get Africa out of you.”

‘Then what happened?’

‘On another day I was selling fish in the market. A strange Yoruba man came to me and bought all my fishes. When his hands touched them they all came alive and began to twist in my basin. I threw the fishes on the floor and they wriggled and I started to run away, but the man held my hands. ‘Don’t you remember me?” he asked. He was a black man but he was familiar in an odd sort of way. “I gave you the blue sunglasses,” he said. Then I remembered him. But it took some time, and I first had to turn and twist my mind around. He was the white man. His face and his nose and everything was exactly the same except that now he was a Yoruba man with fine marks on his face. “I met you five hundred years ago,” he said. ‘I discovered the road.” ‘What was it?” I asked. Then he told me his story. “When I left you,” he began, ‘I became feverish in the head and later in a fit of fury over a small thing I killed my African servant. They arrested me. I sat in a cell. Then they released me because I was a white man. Then I began to wander about the city naked. Everyone stared at me. They were shocked to see a mad white man in Africa. Then a strange little African child took to following me around. He was my only friend. All my white colleagues had deserted me. Then one day my head cleared. Five hundred years had gone past. The only way to get out of Africa was to become an African. So I changed my thinking. I changed my ways. I got on a plane and arrived in England. I got married, had two children, and retired from government service. I was in the Secret Service. Then before I turned seventy I had a heart attack and died. They buried me in my local parish cemetery with full national honours.” “So what are you doing here?” I asked him. I was afraid now. I was very scared. He said: “Time passed. I was born. I became a businessman. And I came to the market today to buy some eels and I saw you.” I said:

“But I only met you two weeks ago.” “Time is not what you think it is,” he said, smiling. Then he left. That is the end of my story.’

There was a long silence.

‘Strange story,’ I said.

‘It’s true,’ Mum replied.

The wind blew the floating dreams into our room. The yellow light of the candle fluttered. The candle had burned low. I felt I was in another place, a country of white fields.

‘Look!’ Ade said.

The wind had blown the dawn into our room. At the door, sitting on its tail, was a black cat. We stared at the cat in silence. It stared at us.

‘The world is just beginning,’ Mum said.

The cat turned and went back out of the door. We all got up and followed the cat. Sitting outside our door, her wounds still livid, was Helen, the beggar girl. We stared at her in puzzlement. Then she got up and went to the housefront. We didn’t follow her. When we went back into the room Dad was sitting up on the bed like Lazarus.

‘KEEP THE ROAD OPEN,’ he said, and fell back into sleep.

We touched him and he didn’t move. Mum was happy. Ade kept smiling. Mum was happy because Dad had begun to snore. Ade kept smiling because he could hear his father’s weary footsteps, as he made his long journeys, like an ancient hero searching for his son. Ade heard his father’s footsteps, heard the anxious hypertensive beat of his heart, and was following him through his guilt and confusion, as he made his way to our house. But Ade also smiled because his father had been delayed gettingto our place by a funeral cortege. It was not a big procession, and there were only a few mourners at that hour, all of them prostitutes, except for Madame Koto, who wore dark glasses and a black silk gown, and who was thinking about the money she could make from the fabulous political rally rather than about the prostitute whose body lay charred in the cheap wooden coffin and who had died from electrocution after the wind blew the tent away.

ELEVEN

THE FIRST THING that woke us in the morning was wailing from the road. Someone knocked on our door and when I shouted for them to come in we saw Ade’s father. He was very tall, his head was bowed, and his face bore the misery of a night-longvigil.

Ade got up instantly and rubbed his eyes. They were bulbous and inflamed. He had grown paler and more beautiful overnight. His smile had gone. When he saw his father at the door he didn’t move or render a traditional greeting.

‘How many times can a man be reborn in one miserable life?’ his father asked the room at large.

Mum was not on the bed. There was food for us on the table. She had left before we woke and her hawker’s basin was not on the cupboard. Dad was still asleep on the bed, his biglegs sprawled apart, his armdanglingover theside.

Ade’s father looked terrifying.

‘Where have you been all night, eh?’ he asked his son. ‘Why didn’t you come home?Your mother is almost illwith worryingabout you.’

A dark glow surrounded him. He came into the room. Ade retreated to the window. His father sat on the bed. I could smell the frustration and the anxieties in his night-long sweat. His spirit had the potent odours of one who has been making ritual offerings, talkingtohisancestors,tryingtocommunicatewiththegods.Hisspiritwas charged and deep. He filled the room with terror. Ade, standing at the window, seemed radiant with the glow of his father’s temper. He did not appear repentant or even rebellious. He held his head firm, and his face had the impassivity of one who knew that his father could no longer dare to beat him or make him cry. There was something cruel about my friend’s spirit and I understood why spiritchildren are so feared. Faced always with the songs and fragrances of another world, a world beyond death, where the air is illuminated, where spirit companions know the secrets of one’s desire, and can fulfil those desires, every single one of them, spirit-children do not care much for the limited things of the world. Ade did not want to stay any more, he did not like the weight of the world, the terror of the earth’s time. Love and the anguish of parents touched him only faintly, for beyond their stares and threats and beatings he knew that his parents’ guardianship was temporary. He always had a greater home.

I never knew how different we both were till that morning when his father began his long tirade, his complaints, all designed to make his son feel guilty. Ade, his head held lightly, with his eyes fixed on ghosts, simply left the window and went out of the room as if he were sleepwalking. His father followed him, caught between anger and despair. I followed his father. The world was old that morning. Out in the street his father caught him and lifted him up and Ade began to cry unbearably as all the murky lights from the ghetto and the filthy untarred road and the broken-down houses and the ulcerous poverty converged on him. His father tried to console him, threw him up towards the sky and caught him again. But Ade only cried more and in that sound I knew he wasn’t crying because of his father’s love, or his own guilt, or his mother’s illness, but becausethepressureof timewas tighteninground his neck.

TWELVE

THE SPIRIT-CHILD IS an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into thedreams of thelivingand thedead.Thingsthatarenotready,notwillingtobe born or to become, things for which adequate preparations have not been made to sustain their momentous births, things that are not resolved, things bound up with failure and with fear of being, they all keep recurring, keep coming back, and in themselves partake of the spirit-child’s condition. They keep coming and going till their time is right. History itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake of the condition of the spirit-child.

There are many who are of this condition and do not know it. There are many nations, civilisations, ideas, half-discoveries, revolutions, loves, art forms, experiments, and historical events that are of this condition and do not know it. There are many people too. They do not all have the marks of their recurrence. Often they seem normal. Often they are perceived of as new. Often they are serene with the familiarity of death’s embrace. They all carry strange gifts in their souls. They are all part-time dwellers in their own secret moonlight. They all yearn to make of themselves a beautiful sacrifice, a difficult sacrifice, to bring transformation, and to die shedding light within this life, setting the matter ready for their true beginnings to cry intobeing,scorchedby thestrangeecstasy ofthewillascendingtosay yesto destiny and illumination.

I was a spirit-child rebelling against the spirits, wanting to live the earth’s life and contradictions. Ade wanted to leave, to become a spirit again, free in the captivity of freedom. I wanted the liberty of limitations, to have to find or create new roads from this one which is so hungry, this road of our refusal to be. I was not necessarily the stronger one; it may be easier to live with the earth’s boundaries than to be free in infinity.

Given the fact of the immortality of spirits, could these be the reason why I wanted to be born – these paradoxes of things, the eternal changes, the riddle of living while one is alive, the mystery of being, of births within births, death within births, births within dying, the challenge of giving birth to one’s true self, to one’s new spirit, till the conditions are right for the new immutable star within one’s universe to come into existence; the challenge to grow and learn and love, to master one’s self; the possibilities of a new pact with one’s spirit; the probability that no injustice lasts for ever, no love ever dies, that no light is ever really extinguished, that no true road is ever complete, that no way is ever definitive, no truth ever final, and that there are never really any beginnings or endings? It may be that, in the land of origins, when many of us were birds, even all these reasons had nothing to do with why I wanted to live.

Anything is possible, one way or another. There are many riddles amongst us that neither the living nor the dead can answer.