I still went to the store. Adama pushed me in a wheelbarrow. The roads were too rutted to allow a wheelchair to pass. Kadie wanted me to stay home and rest. But I missed the smell, the feel of the place. ‘When did you ever see a mother sleep while her child was crying?’ I told her. There was always work to do. On days when Kadie went to visit our other shops, I worked the till with my one good hand while Adama climbed the stepladder to bring down the cloths.
My sister Hawa came to see me. Looked at me with sad eyes and shook her head. ‘Nothing happens for nothing,’ she pronounced with hidden pleasure. I gave a wave of my good hand, dismissing her. There’s a certain kind of person who can always find an explanation for things that happen. My sister was one of those. Something bad befalls somebody they don’t like and they say that person must have brought it upon themselves. When precisely the same fate comes their own way, this time it’s a spirit bringing bad luck. A person they envy prospers only because that person made a bargain with a powerful spirit. But when they lose their own business, is it because they didn’t work hard enough or because they ate all the proceeds and failed to reinvest them? Of course not. It is a moriman’s curse, purchased by a rival!
The doctor had explained to me exactly how it happened. A blood clot stopped up one of my arteries so the blood couldn’t reach my brain. Like a dam in a river. Even I could understand that. He wrapped a rubber tube around my arm and took my blood pressure, tested my pee for diabetes, wrote a prescription and ordered me to cook with less palm oil.
I took advantage of my state not to offer Hawa anything that might encourage her to stay. She only ever visited when there was something she needed. This time, though, she seemed to want to stay for ever. I peered into her shadowed face.
When had this secret war between us begun? I wondered.
Five months later, though, her words came back to me. Terrible things began to happen to all of us. It was as though the end of the world had come. The earth crumbled, the sky rained down, people fled for their lives. Nothing happens for nothing. I wanted to straighten my crooked body, I wanted to stamp the earth, raise both my fists and scream at the skies.
What in the world had we all done to deserve such a fate?
When I think back now, we kept the knowledge a secret, even from ourselves.
Lorries travelling roads in the South were held up by gunmen who hauled the driver down from his cab, thieved the goods from the back of his vehicle and carried them away into the forest. They set fire to the lorry, sometimes roping the driver to the wheel. Other times slicing off his ears and stealing his shoes before leaving him to walk home. A band of miners were marched away from their workplace and not sighted until months later when they appeared on the other side of the country. Their kidnappers never said who they were or what it was they wanted. There were rumours of tattooed strangers who arrived in towns and moved among the people, members of a secret clan, whose mark was worn by the women under one breast and by the men on the buttock. They looked just like you or I, it was said, some spoke in languages nobody could understand. They disappeared as quickly as they came. There were stories of young men and women who slipped away to join them. The youths’ families claimed their children had been stolen and scoured the countryside. Then there were other stories, ones that made your eyes stretch. Of beings that could become invisible, that could fly, leap over houses, that gathered to dine on the hearts of their victims from whence they derived their supernatural powers. There came a time when everybody had heard these stories, some had even claimed to have witnessed them with their own eyes.
Yet who the strangers were, nobody could say.
Members of the ancient clans, the leopard and the crocodile, outlawed for many decades but still continuing their fearful practices, said some. Others insisted such feats were beyond the power of mortal man. And others still said everybody else was talking nonsense, these deeds were the acts of the Army, devious in their hunger for power.
On the radio a Government spokesman reassured us. Small groups of insurgents were at work in some parts of the country. The Army was involved in a series of mopping-up operations, they said. He made it sound as harmless as spilled milk.
What an insurgent was, nobody knew. Then somebody said it was another word for rebel. Rebel!
People whose children had vanished hid their faces. People reporting fresh disappearances had their homes turned over, the roofs torched. People fell silent, dared not open their mouths to speak. There was a stillness in the air. From the outside it looked like calm, but beneath the surface were turbulent, invisible currents: fear, suspicion, confusion.
Still, life continued, for none of us had the luxury of pausing. For many years that was the way we lived. Finding scapegoats. Turning our faces from the truth.
A rooster used to call false dawns all through the night. I remember because when I woke up his voice was the first sound I heard. By then I had begun to find myself more and more a stranger to sleep. I knew I’d be awake now until morning. It was age, of course, and an effect of my condition. I couldn’t keep my eyes open after lunch, only to be awake in the early hours, lying on my back, alone and floating unhinged upon a tide of darkness. That particular morning I woke with a full bladder. Impossible to wait for morning and Adama to come and help me. I put out my hand, felt for my stick, knocking it to the floor. I groped, found it with my fingers and hauled myself up.
Outside the air was cool, damp. I made my way slowly, inching forward with my now sideways walk, like a crab across the ground.
I didn’t bother to go all the way to the latrine. I urinated out of doors, something I liked to do: the feel of the air on my thighs, the breeze murmuring in the trees, the smell of damp grass, the sound of the night birds interrupted by the hiss of steaming piss. I pulled up my lappa. It amused me to think I was doing something possible only under the disguise of the night. What, I sometimes wondered, would happen if I were to do the same thing in the middle of the day? They would think I had finally gone mad, but men do it all the time, don’t they?
Ah, my eyes, my twilight eyes. But for them I would have noticed sooner.
I urinated with my back to the house. I closed my eyes, savoured the weakness that follows the release. Finished, I opened my eyes and squatted there, in no hurry to go back inside, slowly generating the energy to stand up. My eyes rested on the horizon. I blinked. I squinted. Looked again. Brilliant dancing lights of orange, green and gold in the east. Not the warm glow of a bush fire, these were flashing lights, more like Chinese fireworks. I looked up at the night sky and saw the moon still high above me. I stood up, watched the shifting hues of this unearthly display. For a long time I was still, not knowing what to do.
Inside the house I shook Adama’s shoulder, we were alone, the two of us. I showed her what I’d seen. We did not sleep that night, we kept a vigil on the back verandah, watching the lights on the horizon.
Early prayers and the mosque was full, my neighbour stopped by with this news — for I had long given up going. Afterwards everybody wanted to talk about the omens in the night sky. At ten O’ clock my nephew came and pushed me to town in my barrow. Those days, the effort was far too much for Adama. Twice we had thought her labour was beginning, twice the birth attendant had been summoned. Both times it turned out to be a false alarm. Still, Kadie and Ansuman had delayed travelling to Guinea. In the end, though, Adama had urged her parents to go. Even if the baby came, we would manage.