Later, I heard voices. Two men were shouting, and a thinner voice was protesting its innocence. The voices got closer, louder, and then moved away, became distant. And then, from the backyard, the voices sounded again, swelled by multitudes. Many people, it seemed, were in argument and disagreement. The thin voice cried out, the noise of multitudes drowned it under. I hurried outside and saw that the two thugs had caught the man. They had dragged him through the passage and into the backyard. The thugs held the man’s arms and he let them hold on to him while he meekly protested his innocence. Some people in the crowd surrounding them kept asking what the man had done. Madame Koto came out of her room, saw the thugs and the unfortunate man, and hurried back in again.
The crowd and the thugs created a frightening din. The man’s voice became thinner, his protestations feebler, and his face was pathetically contorted as though he wanted the world to know that he had accepted his fate.
Then he began to plead. He pleaded with the men, begging them to leave him to go free, that he would never oppose them again, that he had been blind. Then he begged the crowd to help him. The crowd was becoming increasingly divisive about their response to his fate when the man suddenly bolted. He pushed his way through the crowd, shovingasideamother and child,accidentally hittingapregnantwomaninthe stomach with his elbow, and he ran into me with such frightened force that I fell hard on the ground and banged my head on a thick block of firewood.
‘Catch him! Catch him!’ the thugs shouted.
‘Hold him! Hold the traitor!’
‘Thief! Thief!’
They boundedafterhimandthesmall-eyedthugdivedandcaughttheman’sfeetin a flying tackle. The man went down and the two thugs set on him and kicked him and slapped him around and hit him in the stomach. He collapsed on his knees and the two men went on unleashing a barrage of blows and kicks on him. He folded himself into a ball and still they went on, inventing new forms of beating, new kinds of hand-chops, knuckle-cracks, jabs and elbow attacks, enjoyingtheir invention.
‘That’s enough,’ Madame Koto said from the crowd, without much conviction.
The thugs ignored her. They went on beating up the man to their satisfaction. Then they dragged him up. He was weeping and trembling, his nose ran, his mouth quivered, hebled fromoneeye, his facewasallbruised,hehadcutsinsixplaces,and the crowd merely looked on. Then someone began to plead for him. The woman spoke of mercy, kindness, God’s love, Allah’s compassion. The two thugs, switching methods to suit the mood of the crowd, said that the man was a vicious creature who had beaten his wife unconscious and abandoned his three children. They were starving and his wife had been in hospital for seven days. His wife, they said, was their sister. The crowd was enraged by the man’s wickedness. And as the thugs dragged him away the women all knocked him on the head and rained curses on him for his cowardice and brutality.
The thugs led the man towards the forest. His clothes were torn. His head hung low. He walked with the submissiveness of a man who is soon going to die.
When the thugs and the man disappeared, the crowd dispersed, but the compound people remained. In their poor clothes, with their hunger, their pain, their faces stark with the facts of their lives, they stood outside the bar and stared at the forest as though it were about to release an ominous sign, or sound, or yield its awesome secrets.
They did not move, even when they heard the innocent cries of the man echoing through the trees.
It was Madame Koto who broke the stillness. She went to her stack of firewood and began to prepare her fire, as if acknowledging the fact that there are few things that happen which can make it impossible for life to continue.
The women looked at her as she started the fire. I looked at all of them. Madame Koto, in her activity, seemed apart from them, different, separate from their fevers. A formation of birds, densely clustered, and consisting of a fast-changing set of geometricpatterns, circled thesky,spreadingtheirshadowsontheburningearth.The compound people melted back to their rooms, to their disparate occupations.
I went inside the bar and lay on a bench. I shut my eyes. I heard Madame Koto come in. She said:
‘If you misbehavethesamethingwillhappen to you.’
‘What?’
‘The forest will swallow you.’
‘Then I will become a tree,’ I said.
‘Then they will cut you down because of a road.’
‘Then I will turn into the road.’
‘Cars will ride on you, cows will shit on you, people will perform sacrifices on your face.’
‘And I will cry at night. And then people will remember the forest.’
Shewas silent. Ididn’topenmy eyes.Iheardherliftingtheearthenwarepot,heard her pouringwater out of it, heard her leaving.
The heat changed the colours in my eyes. Lying on the bench, within the shade of the bar, with birds calling outside, an immense space of peace opened inside me. It spread deep. It lowered the heat on my skin.
Soft voices sang from the bushes. I listened to the muezzin. I listened to myself faintly snoring. A strange shape, like the body of a mythical animal grown rotten on the path, burst into my mind. I sat up. My feet didn’t touch the ground. I looked about me and saw a lizard staring at me as if I were about to break into song. Outside, birds piped their indecipherable melodies.
I lay down again, listening to the voices of school-children, shrill with the joy of play and encounter. I listened to the many voices in me. The bench bit into my back. I shut my eyes and, within, everything was black. A deeper shade of black unfurled within the blackness. I was drawn into a vortex. I reached out; the blackness was light, like air. And as I floated, transfixed, captive, a face – luminous with emerald brilliance, its eyes a deep diamond blue, its smile that of an unhappy man who had died at the right moment -openedontomy gaze.Washeanincarnationofthegreatkingofthe spirit world? He stared at me and as I tried to look deeper into the mysteries of his faceIfeltmyselffallingintolight.My eyesopenedoftoomuchbrightness.
Ishut themagain.Iheardasuddensound.Acuriousterror,likearmsgrabbingyou from out of a trusted darkness, swept over me. I didn’t move. I felt no fear. Then I saw the elongated faces of spirits, with blood pouring out of their eyes. My mouth opened into a scream, and the faces changed. Then a bald head turned round and round under my gaze. On all of its sides were sorrowful eyes. It leant towards me, then bowed, disembodied; and on its scalp opened a mouth which spread into an ecstatic, elastic, smile. I woke up suddenly. I saw glimpses of wise spirits in a flash beforeIsawMadameKoto’sruggedface.Shecaughtmy flailinghands,andsaid:
‘Get up. Customers are here!’
And when I sat up and looked around I knew we were in the divide between past and future. A new cycle had begun, an old one was being brought to a pitch, prosperity andtragedyrangoutfromwhatIsaw,andIknewthatthebarwouldnever be the same again.
It wasevening.Outside,throughthecurtainstrips,Icouldseebirdswhirlinground and round in the air, as though marking, with the centre of their circle, the spot where a comrade had just fallen. The sun was an intense orange, a molten object strangely unconnected with the cooling breeze of the forest. Madame Koto’s face had broken into the smile she reserved for the customers who spent the most.
There were a lot of people outside. They were elegantly dressed in bright kaftans and agbadas and safari suits. They laughed and talked in animated tones. There were many women amongst them. The strong scent of their perfumes was heavy and inescapableon theeveningair.
The two thugs who had earlier led the man away stepped into the bar. They surveyed theplaceasiftoascertainwhetheritwasbigenoughforthecelebrationthey planned. They did not look like thugs. In spite of the bandage and the animal expression in their eyes, they looked like modern businessmen, contractors, exporters, politicians. Dressed in lace kaftans, with matching hats, they were wonderfully high-spirited. They went out, came in again and, walking towards Madame Koto with the dignity of honourable crooks, said: