Once, in the hollow of a dead tree behind our home, a wildcat gave birth to her kittens. I used to climb a nearby tree and watch them for many hours, playing outside the den while their mother caught rats and mice to bring back to them. After a few months they began to accompany her on hunting trips in the early morning. In those times she taught them to creep up on a partridge until they were inches away, to avoid the cobra’s lair and to steal the eggs from the nests of birds. The seasons passed, the tree crumbled into soft powder, an aardvark dug a warren beneath it. At night sometimes, rarely, I would catch a glimpse of her and her tiny dark-skinned baby scratching at the termite hills. Another time a she-leopard and her two cubs were mobbed by monkeys on the banks of the stream; the mother fought her assailants tooth and claw, bringing down four or more and lacerating a dozen others before she retreated.
My aunts thought that I was unnatural not to want a man in my life, but to me it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
I said nothing, I watched my aunts’ faces, I nodded and dreamed and at some point my mind travelled back to the day I went walking with my aunt and saw a mambore for the very first time.
From the day a woman joined the men’s society she would be called Pa, give up her creel and learn to use a line and hook, exchange the stool at the back of the house for the hammock at the front, swap her snuff for a pipe. And she relinquished her place in the society of women.
The mambores. The women who lived as men.
My aunts’ voices droned on like flies in the summer. I stopped listening and dreamed. I saw the house that was sometimes round and sometimes square. I saw the fat, happy children. I saw the empty hammock swaying in the early evening breeze.
And in that moment I saw something else.
I saw the hidden path curling between the trees.
My mother was ready. The women had knocked on her door and now she preceded them down to the river. She walked with her chin up, one shoulder bare where her dress had slipped. The silence blew through the gathered crowds like a breeze, people stood and watched in awe.
Women were coming from every direction, out of houses, up the path, through the crowd, women laying down their cooking spoons, women preparing to leave the fires unattended, women squeezing through the people. One, two, three. Ten, twenty, thirty. Seventy, eighty, one hundred. One by one the women fell in behind my mother, from the oldest to the youngest.
Every woman in the village. Except one, and that one was me. I let them pass. I stepped aside to join the men.
Yes, it’s true. I can see you’ve guessed it, but don’t know quite whether to believe it. Me, your own aunty. Well, you’ve guessed right. It was nothing dramatic. I let the men of the society come to me. I let it be known that I would consider relinquishing the birthright of womanhood in exchange for the liberty of a man. And in time they found me. After all, there are few women who would choose such a life. Naturally, there were those things I missed, mostly the company of other women. But I had made the life I dreamed of, and it suited me. I had taken my own path, neither right nor left.
After a while we heard the singing and knew it was over. When the women reappeared their mood was changed, they were dancing, shuffling their feet through the dust, swaying their bottoms. Somewhere in the centre of them all she walked alone. They had dressed her in a new costume made from a heavy blue fabric: a silk damask of four hundred threads, real damask from Syria, double-sided with highlights of silver woven through the design.
I knew because it came from my own store, I had chosen it myself. On her shoulder she wore a sash of the same cloth, her hair was hidden inside a tall headdress. My mother, walking towards an unknown future. As beautiful as a bride on her wedding day.
CONSEQUENCES
14 Hawa, 1991: Sugar
It had rained during the night, an unseasonal rain. In the morning the ground was stained in dark patches, like sweat. The light was dull, there were no shadows at all. And yet the rain had done nothing to clear the air, which was heavy and hot. I woke early, went outside to urinate and afterwards I lay on my bed, looking up at the rafters.
From somewhere in the darkness above me a drop of water fell slowly through the dense air, shattered upon a rafter and showered on to me. I didn’t move. I felt the water sliding down my face. In my mind I saw the next drop, swelling and growing like a ripe breadfruit ready to drop from the tree. Instead of a drop of water I imagined a great fruit whistling through the air, smashing on the rafters and covering me in sticky flesh and juice. With that thought I pulled myself up.
There was a hole in the roof, and by the time the rains came the zinc would have rotted in a dozen more places. I told myself I must remember to tell him when he came home, so he could go and borrow a ladder from my uncle opposite and climb up there to take a look. He would know what to do. He would send into town for a hammer and nails, and some sheets of zinc. Then he would climb up there again to fix it, while I prepared him something to eat. Maybe groundnut stew, which was always his favourite with smoked catfish from the river. Or then again I would have made that to celebrate his homecoming. Maybe a bowl of pepper soup and some coco yams. Or sour sour. Or cassava leaves. There were no leaves left in my plot, I had lost them all to the locusts. I would have to go into town to the covered market, to see what I could find. I would buy only the best: the youngest, sweetest leaves.
Whenever he came home the truck dropped him off at the roundabout in town and he would walk to the house. Not sticking to the road, but in a straight line. Cutting across from one road to the next, through backyards and down the sides of the houses. His walk came from me, not his father. Of course, they taught them these things as well. How to walk in straight rows, swinging their arms and raising each leg up high, holding it there for just a moment, letting the heel drop to the ground so it sent up a little spurt of dust. Not looking this way or that. All the time with their eyes fixed straight ahead. When he came home people looked up to watch him pass. Little boys ran after him, begging to try on his cap or else placing their small feet in the prints left by his boots. Even before I saw him in the distance, I could always tell when he was on his way.
That dark morning I went out to the yard and called for the girl to get on and light the fire, while I washed. I untied my lappa and hung it up on the peg. I stood there for a moment and looked down at a body I no longer recognised. Loosening all over, as though I was shrinking inside. I pulled at a handful of my skin, and felt the flesh slip away from the bone. My body was nearly smooth, the hair no longer had the energy to grow. After all those years spent stripping the hair away. I soaped myself, using the last sliver of the soap my son had brought. Imperial Leather: the soap wore away until all you were left with was the label. And then I doused myself with water from the bucket, dried with the lappa, slipped on my plastic shoes and made my way back inside.