* * *
I lost face and regained my life, but for many years I could not see it. Nor could I see who had helped me do it.
Osman thought it was his idea to end the marriage contract and so there was no question of reclaiming the bride gift. At first I was humiliated, thrown back to my family by my husband like a no-good fish tossed back into the water.
That was the way things were for us in those days. You, I hear you talking to your friends. You have so much, but you don’t even know you are alive. We had to find the answers for ourselves, to fashion them out of the thin air and seize them from the sky.
I felt I had no choice but to remain Osman’s third wife, to be treated by him in any way he pleased. I was a stupid girl who jumped into her marriage with her eyes closed. Afterwards I could see nowhere to run. It took somebody else to open a door and push me out. And that person was Ngadie, once-beautiful Ngadie. In her own fate she could see the future that was waiting for me.
Later I learned to be grateful to her and to love her for what she had done. But in the beginning I was short-sighted, I could not see beyond my own shame to the great vista that stretched out in front of me.
After many years news came that Ngadie had died. For the first time I travelled back to the place where I had been a wife. Shadows still covered the house, nothing had changed. Balia greeted me with some warmth — to my surprise Mabinty, too. Mabinty now with rings of flesh around her waist and her neck. I held no ill-feeling towards her. As for Osman, who rose from his chair on the verandah to meet me, brushing pumpkin seed shells from the front of his shirt and spitting the bits out the corner of his mouth, I felt nothing. I greeted him cordially and the smile he gave me in return was surely all that remained of his blurred beauty.
Ngadie was already in the ground, fleetingly mourned — a woman insufficiently loved as a daughter, unloved as a wife.
But loved as a mother. And loved still. There were Ngadie’s son and daughter. Ngadie in the male. Ngadie in the female. The him and the her, the he and the she of the woman I had known. I watched them. So alike. The only difference was the way the lines of their features had been drawn, finely traced in one, the other roughly sketched in charcoal.
On a stool at the back of the house I sat next to Ngadie’s daughter, untied the corner of my lappa and took out a kola nut. I unwrapped the leaves, broke off a cotyledon — she accepted it in silence, turning the piece over and over in her hand. I glanced up at her, saw the teardrops gathering along the edge of her lower eyelid, waiting to fall.
‘Hush ya,’ was all I said. I laid my hand on her forearm.
I bit the kola nut and helped myself to a sip of water from the ladle at my side. The water tasted fresh and pure — it was the effect of the kola: even brackish water tasted as though it had sprung from a mountainside.
‘My mother once said something about you, about how you loved kola. She said that to you even bitter kola was sweet.’
The words made no sense. One time I had split kola with Ngadie. After we had become friends. Of course it hadn’t been bitter kola. There was bitter kola in the calabash containing my bride gift. Kola for the good times. Bitter kola to mark the bad.
Some days later I went home. I never returned to that place. The years slid past. I watched Kadie grow alongside the next generation of coffee trees, and I grew too. In this way slowly I found myself again. Memories of Ngadie, of her daughter’s words, fell out of my mind. Not for any reason. Only because they seemed to be words spoken at a time of grief, wrongly remembered. I did not believe they held any meaning for me.
One day, I found myself passing down a street in a part of the town I had never been to before. The houses had two storeys, the streets were narrow. Two women were leaning out of the shuttered windows above me, drawing their washing in from the line that hung from one window to the next. Wisps of conversation fluttered down. The women were careless, not worrying if they were overheard.
‘His tinder was wet.’
I heard the laughter that followed, coarse laughter. Shocking laughter. I walked on, the phrase wound itself after me, bringing back those awful nights — those last nights I shared with my husband when I had failed to arouse him. I remembered the state to which he had reduced me — so nervous I burned the rice.
Ngadie had offered to cook.
Three nights in a row.
His tinder was wet.
To her even bitter kola is sweet.
You see, if I hadn’t become lost, I never would have walked down that street. Nor heard a woman talk about her husband’s performance in that vulgar way. That started me thinking. People believe that bitter kola has the power to wet a man’s tinder. Did you know that? I thought about Ngadie, of how she had offered to cook for me on those three nights and I pondered the meaning of what she had said to her daughter.
Three nights in a row.
Maybe there was a reason things happened the way they did with Osman on those three nights.
In my seat in the poda poda I sat with my basket of shopping on my lap, crushed by other people’s bodies, all the time turning the thoughts around and around in my head, the way I examine a pawpaw before I buy it in the market.
To her even bitter kola is sweet.
And I saw that it had been Ngadie’s doing.
I laughed out loud: a laugh like the one I had just heard. I laughed until the tears poured down my cheeks. At first the people around me wondered what was my problem. But they saw my joy was real, I was no crazy person. My laughter even became infectious, people began to giggle and before long the whole bus was laughing without even knowing why.
And through the people’s laughter I heard another sound that came from far away: the strains of a simple melody. It grew louder and louder, filling my head, pushing out all the bad feelings, the anger, the resentment that had been locked inside for so many years. I became quiet, I listened. Though I had never heard it before, there and then I recognised it. And it was beautiful. The sound of Ngadie laughing in her grave.
7 Mariama, 1942: Kassila the Sea God
High on the hill, up above Old Railway Line on the road that winds down to the city. That’s where I saw her. Walking with her hand on her hip. Sashaying. Like a woman who has just seen her lover coming down the street. Her felt hat was pushed back over her head, swinging by the cord around her neck. Her socks crumpled around her ankles. She placed one foot directly in front of the other. Like so. The hips swung, the hat bounced along behind her. It was her. I knew it at once. The jolt it gave me was like an electric shock, a flicker of heat across my skin that brought me out in a momentary sweat.
I tried to turn around to see her properly, but I was caught between the women on either side of me in the taxi. I felt a twinge in my neck. The pain pulled me back, as if to say — what foolishness is this?
Of course I knew it wasn’t her. I never really thought it. Just the fleeting glimpse of a silhouette that reminded me of her. And as the taxi turned down King Harman Road I looked around, not to double-check exactly, but to see the disappearing figure just once more.
The other girls nicknamed her Marie Palaver. Over time a syllable slipped out unnoticed: Marie Plaba. She was troublesome. Cussed. She was my first friend. And I couldn’t believe my own good fortune. To some people we were an odd couple. I could see as much reflected in Sister Anthony’s smile, though she encouraged the friendship between us. She thought I was a good influence.