I seized Alusani’s hand and we crept out from between the roots of the tree. We tried to be quiet, but the fear refused to be bound and scattered suddenly. And so we ran. I didn’t see him. I didn’t dare turn around. At first I didn’t even hear him, my heart thrummed in my ears. I felt him. I felt the moon-shadow man look up, begin to come after us. I scraped my shin on a fallen log; my footsteps crashed through the undergrowth; cobwebs snatched at my face as I dragged Alusani after me. But in the end we were helpless as beetles at the mercy of a cat.
He didn’t touch us, Alusani and I.
He stepped in front of us.
We stopped. We did not move.
We waited.
I looked at him and beyond him, for a way past. He crouched down; he put his hand into the folds of his trousers. From his outstretched hand he offered us a gift. At first I was transfixed by those luminous eyes, such a colour: the colour of water. When I did look down I saw in his hand a peeled egg. The man reached into his pocket and brought out a packet, of paper instead of leaf. He opened it and sprinkled a little of what was inside on to the top of the egg. Salt. Just salt. The man held it out in front of him and uttered a sound like the noise a donkey makes — though not so loud as that. Still, it caused me to jump backwards. He pulled his lips back and showed us his huge teeth: ‘Hee-ah,’ he said, ‘hee-ah!’
I tried to warn Alusani. But he was less fearful than I, although I had never once thought so before. He reached out his fingers and he took the egg from the moon-shadow man.
It has been such a long time. In all that time I never spoke to anybody about what happened that day. Except now. Except to you.
Sometimes, when I used to remember, when I thought back to the beginning of what happened next, there was only one thing of which I was sure. That everything started with the man whose skin was like the shadows of the moon. The man who was busy filling cages with the souls of children.
My mother beat me for failing to deliver her message. I returned to her empty-handed long after the spit had dried on the ground. Worst of all I had taken Alusani with me into the bush. My brother tried to beg for me, but my mother was deaf, her anger like a whirlwind inside her skull, going round and round, her mouth pursed and tight as though someone had sewn it shut and pulled the thread.
Maybe in time, when I had acquired some wisdom, I would have come to laugh at my childish fantasies. Perhaps I would have thrown away the memory of the moon-shadow man along with all the other unimportant thoughts I never bothered to cherish. Maybe. Who is there that knows the answer? As it was I came to hold myself responsible, to believe what happened next came as a punishment. I took Alusani there. Alusani took the egg and I could not stop him. The memory stayed with me for ever.
Alusani began to visit the place of the spirits.
It was dawn. I ran to fetch my grandmother. I did not bow my head or greet her respectfully first. There was no time for it, no time for her to be angry either. She followed me to where Alusani lay on the cot we shared. His eyes rolled backwards into his skull. His back was arched, his body vibrated like a plucked string. Karabom heated water to prepare a poultice. My mother held Alusani on her lap and massaged his limbs until his joints unlocked and the light came back into his eyes. In time he drifted into a deep sleep.
In those days there were those people who had ‘four eyes’ — two to see the human world and two eyes on the backs of their faces, eyes that can see beyond what is here. People said twins had four eyes. Ours was a spirit so powerful it required two bodies. Sent by the ancestors, they said. Only, I didn’t have four eyes. I never saw a devil or a spirit or a ghost, though there were times I was afraid I might.
At night I pressed my ear against the inside wall of the house, imagining I could hear the spirits of the dead trapped in the space between the inside and the outside wall. That’s how we built our houses in those days: with two walls and two doors. The doorways were offset — to confuse spirits who wanted to come back inside into the warm. The blacksmith’s uncle died: a dried-out old man with a wheezing cough and a voice like a cracked flute. My mother and grandmother went to cry at his funeral. Late that night I listened for him, for the sound of his woman’s voice calling from the other side. And I pictured his sightless ghost wandering from house to house, trying its luck, banging into the walls and groping for the door.
Maybe Alusani really did have the gift. To this day I can’t tell you. I only know that once he started to visit the underworld he kept going back. Pa Yamba, the diviner, went into a trance and followed him as far as he could into the land of dreams. But Alusani was going further, he was crossing to the land of spirits, where he had been befriended by a man and a woman — a husband and a wife. The woman, especially, liked Alusani. Trapped in the land of dreams, Pa Yamba couldn’t get close enough to see who she might be.
The whispers rustled through the houses, like wind through the tops of the trees. People came to wait outside our compound bringing gifts: bowls of white kola nuts, embroidered cloths, leather pouches of precious salt. Maybe Alusani’s spirit woman had something to tell. Or maybe she planned to give him special powers. That happened a lot. People befriended by spirits used their knowledge to amass great wealth. Others could see into the future or hold conversations with the dead. At mealtimes my mother fed Alusani from her own plate and she passed his chores to me.
When he saw the attention he received, Alusani began to repeat demands from the spirits: rice bread, sugar cane, sweet potato cakes, steamed coco yams and eggs. Everyone knows you shouldn’t give eggs to a child, it spoils them. But my mother and grandmother were very afraid. They preferred to go without themselves than to upset the ancestors who might send a cloud of locusts or a bush fire. After three rainy seasons our coffee trees had reached twice the height of a man. In two more seasons the beans would be ready to pick.
Slowly Alusani became the opposite of himself. Where once he had been fine to look at and sweet-natured, now he was bloated and angry. The expression on his face was as bitter as the coffee grounds themselves and when he spoke his voice was sour with sarcasm. As often as I could I stayed away from him. Down among the groves I wandered between the rows of coffee trees growing side by side with the banana trees. I imagined my brother and I were like these trees, growing together but not the same at all.
My brother acted like a warlord. At supper he complained the soup was too peppery, so I left my place to fetch fresh lime for him. The sack in the storeroom was empty; I ran to the lime tree in the garden at the back of the house but by the time I returned he complained the soup had cooled. My brother looked at me with scorn. As though I was his servant. Day after day my dislike for him grew. I hated my mother, who had given away my birthright. And I was angry with my grandmother who ordered the cooks to prepare sweetmeats for my brother, and no longer let me sit with her when I brought her coffee in the morning.
Maybe today we would guess Alusani had a tumour growing inside his head like a kola nut, and take him to the Chinese doctors at the hospital. But people didn’t know these things then. People believed there was a reason for everything. Nothing happens for nothing, that’s what they said then, and still do say.