Alone in her room, she was dancing. No faltering footsteps, no baby gait. Body curved like a palm tree yielding to the embrace of the wind. One foot crossing the other. Crossing the other. Arms extended. Chin lifted. Head tilted: naked, shaved head. Fingers fanned backwards. Turning a perfect arc. Round and around.
Round and around.
In the end Bobbio, the Boy with No Voice, was the only person who dared to break the silence.
Early evening. The light, heavy with dust, hovered between day and night. I sat on the three-legged stool at the back of the house, filling oil lamps. I looked up to find Bobbio standing close by. Watching me in silence, unblinking. Like a house-child. Like he could see into my soul. That was a thing about Bobbio, I remember. He could hold anybody’s gaze. For him there was nothing to it. Even after they looked away, he just carried on gazing at the back of their head. People learned to avoid catching his eye for fear of inadvertently starting a staring match. In fact, people often pretended Bobbio wasn’t there at all. I knew what it was now to have eyes slide over you, like greasy eggs in a pan.
Bobbio led me by the hand. Down to the river bank. Made me stand on the jagged rocks, pressing my shoulders down with balled fists. Then he stared at the ground, concentrating. He began to stamp and kick, like a cricket hopping about on smouldering grass, pick up stones and throw them over his shoulder. He flung a pebble at the water. It bounced once and sank.
I had never seen Bobbio act this way. Flecks of foam flew from the corners of his mouth. A shiver trickled down my back, a trail of goosebumps in its wake. People said a krifi called Tang Bra lived here. Boatmen told tales of an invisible weight in the back of their boats. The mud dragging at their poles. Nobody came to this place at night.
Slowly the tension came alive, stirring in my belly like roiling eels. I got up to go. Bobbio grabbed my hand. It was nearly dark. Leaning over me Bobbio looked like his own shadow.
Bobbio is standing very close to me. His breathing is loud. I don’t know what he wants. He lets go of my left hand and takes up my right. Turns it over. Palms slide across one another. Something warm, heavy, drops. I am confused, it feels familiar. I squeeze my eyes closed. Feel the weight in my hand. A surface smooth as skin. One, two, three four five. I open my eyes. Strain to see in the nearly-night. There it is. Rippled like the sand on the windward side of a desert dune. A white, five-sided stone.
Now it is I who seizes Bobbio. ‘Where did you get it? Who gave it to you?’ I force him to look at me. I know he understands. He returns my hands to me, waves at me to sit down. Like a spectator at a masquerade I watch while Bobbio tells his story.
And here it is. Together with the little I knew for myself:
The Shekunas forced people to forsake the old gods, learn Arabic and pray in the new way. There were bonfires in every town and village. People were afraid. They carried their prayer mats to the fields, dropped to their knees and touched their noses to the ground every time a stranger approached.
In the first few months that followed the meeting my father became suddenly more devout. Yes, I remember that. I thought little of it. I thought little of anything in those days. Where before he left his wives to their own devotions, during that time he demanded their presence in the mosque every Friday. I wore a head veil and accompanied my mother. We sat at the back of the mosque among the other women. Ya Namina, she took to accompanying him there every day. So did the two youngest wives, keen to demonstrate their obedience.
Any activity Haidera said was haram, our father forbade. No more drinking palm wine in the village. Haram. Instead the old men sat out near the fields late at night passing the gourd from one to the other and wandered back towards the houses on unsteady legs at dawn. All matters connected with the old religion: charms, even the beads mothers hung around the waists of little children. Haram. Offerings of cakes and kola nuts at the graves of the dead. Haram. Dancing, drumming. Haram. The secret gatherings of women. Haram! Haram!
It was our usual habit, on those nights when it was our mother’s turn to be visited by our father, to sleep in the house of Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay. For those three nights we shared mats with their children. It was during one of those times, while he wandered through the darkness, that Bobbio saw them.
A man striding. A woman pleading. Please. Please. Bobbio marches with matchstick straight legs and arms. Begs with a sideways bent body and clasped fingers. Points at me. Cradles an invisible baby in his arms. Your mother. My mother and my father. In the night. Your father is very angry. Hooded eyes, a rigid mouth. Now a sorrowful face. Your mother is crying. Bobbio follows them. At a distance. Ducking in and out of shadows. Down to the river.
I wish Bobbio could speak. I wonder what they are saying to each other. Bobbio stares at me silently. Your mother. Yes? My mother. Bobbio looks around. Points beyond the trees in the direction of the houses. Something about the village? Our house? No! No! Madam Bah’s shop! Now, I am certain. The snuff. Of course. My father found out about us making snuff. Not good, but not so very bad. I let the air out of my chest.
Bobbio shakes his head. Shoulders droop. For several moments we are silent, gazing at each other. My friend drops to his knees, mimes a person praying. The mosque. Praying in the mosque. Your mother. My mother is a Muslim? Shakes his head vigorously and waves a finger. Not. My mother is not a Muslim? Shakes his head despondently. Shrugs. Your mother is not a good Muslim.
That evening my father had interrupted my mother in her room, as she read her fortune in the stones. My mother never looked for trouble, perhaps that’s why she wasn’t more careful. She never believed trouble might look for her. But at that time my father was in the grip of a fever, determined to end all the superstitions that marked us out as half-hearted Muslims. He demanded her stones.
My mother pleaded. Crawling towards him, trying to touch his feet. I watched Bobbio grovel on the ground, holding illusory garments around imaginary breasts. Reaching out to touch invisible feet. O mama! I felt my heart pounding. My father stepped smartly back, refused to allow her to abase herself. Now Bobbio was up, chest out. He pulled her up. Bobbio grabbed me and held me against him. I felt myself go limp, just as my mother had. He threw up his arm. Scattered the stones to the stars.
Bobbio could see in the dark, almost. He noted where the stones had fallen. When my mother and father had gone he went closer, inspected the stones lying on the ground. Saw they were different to the ordinary river pebbles. He slipped back into the shadows. Left them there. That was all.
A dark rock the shape of a man’s cigar. A broken pebble, open like a split plum. A stone with a dimple that fitted my thumb. A twinkling crystal. A pale three-cornered stone. I won’t say I found them quickly. Not at all. Bobbio helped me. But even then, there were some I never found, whose faces I did not remember as well as I imagined.
The Ancestors, she called them. Her murmured chant, once engraved upon my brain, now suddenly was gone. The effort of remembering turned into a great rock. Then, when I finally abandoned the effort, the words appeared, like a sculpture carved out of sandstone. And now I recognise them for what they are.
Names.
The name of my mother’s mother. Of my grandmother. Of my great-grandmother and her mother. The women who went before. The women who made me. Each stone chosen and given in memory of a woman to her daughter. So that their spirits would be recalled each time the stone was held, warmed by a human hand, and cast on the ground to ask for help. And as the names emerged from the shadows, I saw how my father had destroyed my mother.