The house had the best position in the whole village: at a right angle to my father’s house, next to the mosque and within earshot of the people who gathered to exchange news after prayers. From the verandah she could watch the comings and goings at the meeting house, too. Together she and I sat and waited for the grounds to settle.
At those times, in the very early morning, she told me things nobody else knew. These weren’t the stories I heard her tell to the other women at the back of the house where they sat on stools in the evenings, their profiles warmed by the yellow light from the palm oil lamps. I remember the sound of their laughter: I thought of it as back-of-house laughter, different from the submerged giggles and half-smiles hidden behind hands at the front of the house.
Once I laughed with them. My grandmother told a story — something about a woman who began to cook for another man while her husband was away. When she had finished, there followed a moment of silence. Next to her, my father’s third wife snorted and laughed, and the laughter passed from woman to woman like an improvised melody. Though I didn’t understand the story, I opened my mouth wide and laughed along with them. The music stopped. Somebody sucked her teeth. My karabom aimed a piece of charcoal at me and it hit me just above the eyebrow.
You, I remember how you talked to your children. You asked them: ‘Do you want this or that?’ ‘Coca-cola or Fanta?’ ‘Front seat or back?’ You drove them around in a big four-wheel as though they were born with no legs. You let them push away the food everybody else was eating and you asked the cooks: ‘What else is there in the kitchen?’ And I heard the way your children answered you. As though the world was upside down, and you were the child, they the adults.
When I was a child I was told my voice smelled of fish. By the time I was allowed to speak I had forgotten how. That is how it was. The way we were raised to be who we are.
Karabom said: ‘Never say “good morning” until you have washed yourself.’ Yet the day I crossed her path in silence because I had not yet been to the stream she swore at me for my insolence. People who grew thin and died were being eaten away inside by witches, she told me on another day. I stared at the necklaces of loose skin around her neck, the empty flaps that hung to her waist. Even her ear lobes drooped; the holes where her gold earrings hung had stretched so I could see right through them. Karabom told me of witches who lured children with gifts of eggs and meat, only to suck their blood and steal their hearts, until one day all you saw running around was the empty flesh.
She pointed to the weaver birds darting in and out of their nests suspended from the branches of a tree, in perfectly spaced rows, as though some hand had hung them there. And she told me the birds were the souls of all the children who had died. Karabom’s lips were black, and when she spoke I could see her teeth gleaming against her dark, tattooed gums. I thought her lips and gums were black because she drank so much coffee.
In the sky the moon faded against the growing blue. There were men whose skins were luminous as the pale shadows of the moon when it dances across bare flesh, she said. Men who sailed their houses across the sea and who were so thin because they ate only fish and drank sea water. When she was my age people told stories of captured children who sailed with them across the sea and were fed to a powerful demon. Men from faraway villages stole the children in exchange for unearthly possessions.
‘Stay away from the footpaths.’ The air whistled in her nostrils and her breath carried the odour of decay, as though her body had become nothing more than a vessel for a mouldering spirit. ‘Only an outsider clings to the path. And run away from strangers. If they come in good faith they’ll reach the village and make their business known.’
After a while my mother would come and tap me on the shoulder. I wanted to ask her whether the stories were true. But my mother was always so busy. Too busy to listen. Busy in my father’s house counting little piles of stones: how many trees we had planted, how much the first harvest might yield, how rich we would surely become. When she cooked, my mother served my grandmother first — always, except when my father ate with us. I was brought up not to question my elders, so I kept the stories to myself. But I wasn’t frightened. To tell you the truth I didn’t believe them. Not so much as you might think. I knew people made up stories to tell children so that we would behave the way they wanted us to.
Hali, but I remember the day I saw one of the moon-shadow men with my own eyes.
I was swift. My mother used me as her messenger. I would run the whole distance — sometimes to the fields, to the herbalist when one of us was ill, to the headman at the next village, it didn’t matter — and I would deliver the message, repeat the reply once, twice and run back. Look at you, so busy writing everything down on pieces of paper. Scraps of paper to lose or put away in a cupboard to grow mildew. Nobody ever bothered to teach me to write. They didn’t need to. Instead I taught myself never to forget. When I was a girl, I could run. And I can still remember. Those times when my mother required an answer urgently she spat on the warm earth by her feet. The saliva began to shrivel at once, like a slug thrown on a fire. I would set off knowing I had to be back before the dark patch was gone.
This day, I remember, Alusani begged to come with me. I knew he would slow me down, but I agreed anyway. We walked in the shade of the coffee trees and entered the forest. Soon we passed the boulder marking the boundary to the village. We stayed away from the path. As we went we played a game we had played many times before. We made up riddles for the Trickster, in case he bounced down from one of the trees and refused to allow us on our way.
‘How do you carry water?’ I asked Alusani.
‘In a fishing net!’ He was quick as that. Then it was his turn to ask a question: ‘What do you pour on a fire to put it out?’
I knew that one, I didn’t need to think. I replied straight away: ‘Oil!’ This was how we always began, posing the easy ones first. The next riddle was one I had been saving. I was certain Alusani would never guess the answer. ‘What do you give a thirsty stranger to drink?’
I marched ahead, swinging my arms, certain of my victory. Behind me Alusani walked on. I knew he was puzzling over my riddle. One moment we were playing a game, the next I saw what I saw and I stopped breathing. I grasped Alusani’s arm. And I swear, if I hadn’t pulled my brother back he might have walked right into the man — right into the man whose skin was as white as day.
The moon-shadow man didn’t see us. We slipped between the roots of a cotton tree and we hid ourselves there, as though we were hiding in our mother’s skirts. We waited and we watched. All I could hear was the singing of birds, sounds of the forest. The moon-shadow man moved about the clearing, in and out of the streams of light, appearing and disappearing before our eyes. I imagined that if I only dared to reach out I could put my hand right through him. People said the Trickster could make himself invisible. But even though I was just a child I did not believe the Trickster was more than a story.
I wanted to whisper to Alusani, but my mouth was dry. I dared not close my eyes even to blink. I turned to Alusani. I felt my own eyes round with fear, but I saw Alusani’s eyes quick and bright as he watched that man.
The man who was made of moon shadows was surrounded by boxes. Boxes made of sticks and bound with wire. They lay scattered on the forest floor. First I had eyes only for the strange man: the way his massive feet crushed the foliage beneath them; his hands the size of palm fronds. He was gathering up the boxes, stacking them one on top of the other. Sometimes he paused, wiped his face against his sleeve, another time he used a cloth. Once he stood and gazed up at the sky. While he worked, we watched him. The air was filled with birdsong, the sound of a thousand birds. And I saw that the boxes were not boxes, but cages. And birds were imprisoned inside those cages: sunbirds whose feathers shimmered like oil across the surface of water, bright blue flycatchers, dark-throated warblers, palm swifts as small as your thumb, doves vividly plumed as parrots, and in one cage an owl’s black-rimmed eyes watching us from inside a white face.