One difference. Our mother has no longer been with us. She left us. She didn’t stay. And in that time everything has changed.
Now, from where I stand blocking the light from the door, I watch her. She looks different and the same. Oddly familiar. Like a feeling of déjà vu. We have embraced. A spontaneous rush forward transformed into an awkward clutching. And now we face each other from opposite sides of the room.
Not so Yaya, who sits by her feet, refuses to leave her surrounds like a dog by the warmth of a fire.
Yaya remembers nothing of the journey home. We wrapped him in all the clothes we possessed. He was shivering, his insides pouring out like brown tea and the colour leaching from his face as though his spirit were draining out. And the other passengers in the mammy wagon complained, but then said sorry. Again. Sorry, Ma. When they saw how ill the woman’s son was. And might die. That would bring them bad luck, without a doubt. So they became solicitous and offered us the food they had wrapped in cloths and banana leaves, pieces of sticky sweet rice bread and pepper chicken. It was the first real food I had had in days; I crammed it into my mouth. Afterwards I felt nauseous and had to hold on to the sides of the truck. One lady who knew about herbs made the driver stop by a guava tree. She picked the leaves and made some tea for Yaya. We were let down at the footpath to the village. And somehow we stumbled the last miles home.
Tiny Ya Memso is asking far too many questions. The words jostle and barge each other on their way out of her mouth. She moves around the room, flapping her hands like a pea-hen trying to get off the ground.
Brought back, we were, as though we had been accidentally taken in the first place. Goods discovered in the bottom of the basket at home. Shoved there by a gluttonous toddler or a batty grandmother who keeps pinching things. So sorry, a mistake. Here you are. Won’t happen again. Sorry, sorry.
And by now we call him the Cement Man, because we have worked out a thing or two. And so have all the other children.
They sing a song. The last line goes like this:
Bo, hide them, hide them all, O Chief,
For he is coming, the Wife Thief!
Shame bubbles up and pricks at the underneath of my skin. And the tune hangs around like the smell of smoked fish. At night I can’t sleep, I hit my head to try to knock the melody out.
Patterned cloths of green and blue, waxed and beaten. The palms of her hands are stained green and blue, and the edges of her cuticles, too. Blue-green crescent moons. Now she is a business-woman, with a business making gara cloths. Ya Memso, as excited as a child, has already hidden hers in the bottom of the trunk where she hoards things for the day the sabu comes to ask about her daughters. My own is lying a thousand miles away on the other side of the room on my mother’s lap.
I watch her and wish she would just go away.
In time my wish came true. This time she headed to the South. We saw her again, from time to time. Always when my father was away. She never did pay him back. She was in debt to him for the rest of her life, like the men whose lives he owned, unable to marry again until such a time as she repaid her bride price.
As for me, I no longer wanted her for my mother. I could not bear to be reminded of that awful time, I just wanted everything back the way it was before. Ya Memso treated us well. She even started a marriage box for me, with the cloth my mother brought. And gradually she added things she made herself and things she bought.
In the beginning Yaya talked about her a lot, wanting to know whether I remembered this or that. Like the way she could fold her tongue in two. The way he could and I couldn’t. Once he asked me to sing a song, a lullaby. I told him he was far too old for such things. Next he wanted us to go out to the main road and find a lorry to take us south. It was foolishness.
People change as time goes by. As you change yourself. I wish she were here, so I could tell her the things I understand now that I didn’t then. You look a bit like her, around the eyes. Maybe the shape of the face. Yes, an oval face — your father’s. People sometimes thought she came from somewhere else.
For a long time I would not let myself think about her. The years passed. A question sat itself down on the edges of my mind. Just beyond my subconscious. Like a patient pet waiting to be noticed and allowed inside. And the question was this. Why did she refuse to swear? Why did she turn away and refuse to swear her innocence?
Well, did they or didn’t they? The Tenth Wife and the Cement Man?
‘Guilty,’ cried the elders one, two and three. Obvious to anyone but a fool. But a time came when that wasn’t enough for me. She insisted my father had threatened her. I thought about it for a long time.
She could have worn the clothes of the victim. She could have pleaded and begged. But she refused. When the moment came she saw her choices, she could not betray herself, seeing what her life would become. She told the elders she was faithful. But when the people from his village brought the sassa forward and demanded she vow on her own life that there was nothing, in that moment she saw the starkness of her choice.
In the game of warn an opponent faced with losing must sometimes sacrifice in order to win.
She didn’t shrink from it, the way Soulay told us. Rather she refused it. Turned her back on one life, turned the corner to a new one. Because she had nothing left to lose.
Or so she thought.
This was what I believed for a long time. Then another day I looked again and found there was a different thought sitting in the exact same place I found the last one.
At the river, that day — the day Yaya and I swam with the Cement Man — my mother sat on the bank and watched us. And she saw in him the same thing we had seen. A man who wasn’t like other grown-ups. A man with pink-splashed lips. Orchid petal lips. And she could not bring herself to swear because she knew something.
She knew that in her heart that she had wished it.
DREAMS
6 Asana, 1941: Bitter Kola
My mother told me: ‘Before you are married keep both eyes open and after you are married close one eye.’ But when I was young I closed my ears instead. I refused to listen to my mother. All I wanted was to get as far away from her as I could, you understand? And so I did the very opposite. I knew that in so doing I might hurt myself, but it mattered more that I hurt her.
Where to begin? I gave myself away. That’s the beginning and end of the same story, the whole story, start and finish. Not to become a first wife, no. Nor even a second. I threw myself away to become some man’s third wife. And would you think perhaps that man came from a ruling family, or was rich, or respected, or held an honourable position in the men’s society? I would understand why you might think so.
But, no. It’s true to say Osman Iscandari was none of those things.
After I married I learned a lot. I did not learn so much about men — after all, Osman Iscandari was not all men. Rather I learned about myself. I learned about us. I learned about women — how we are made into the women we become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.
The day I married I rode to my husband’s home on a maka carried by four makamen dressed in tunics and trousers edged with green and round felt hats with long, black tassels. They jogged barefoot. At times lifting me up over roots and stumps, at other times raising me high above their shoulders as they waded through streams. I lay back and dreamed in the silence. The makamen were graceful as mimes. I admired this about them as I swung under the shade of the canopy towards the border of our chiefdom: away from my home and towards a new life with my husband.