As the form pressed itself into me, it began to rain outside and I became calm. It rained steadily. The wind kept rattling the corrugated roof and driving in water through gaps in the window frame. It got cold. I turned and faced the wall. When I realised I could move I got up and sat on the bed. The ghost of the boy was up on the ceiling, like a perpetual bluish haze. Thunder growled above the house and lightning cracked. The rain poured down and the wind, faintly howling, banged away at the window. Lightning struck again. It seemed intent on the house. The whole place, the window and the room, lit up in a candent flash. After a while I smelt smoke drifting in from under the door.
The smoke filled the room and I began to cough and when I ran out I was barely able to see. The smoke was very thick and when I made it to the kitchen, coughing and smarting in the eyes, I discovered that the place was on fire. I banged on the doors and the officer came out, his stomach sagging, his eyes red.
‘There’s fire in the kitchen,’ I cried.
As we fought the fire with buckets of water, the ghosts stood around watching us. The woman kept weeping. The man cursed. The rain intensified. The kitchen became thoroughly wet. Rain poured in under the sitting room door and soaked the carpet. The wind broke a window and slugs and hairy caterpillars were blown in. Little snails appeared on the walls. Thunder clapped outside. Inside, the ghost of the boy wandered around the house, wandered right through his parents, without recognizingthem, and without being affected by their distress.
After we had successfully fought the fire and mopped the soaking floor, everyone went backtobed.Iheardthemtossingandwhisperingallnight.Ididn’tsleep.Inthe early hours of the morning, before dawn had broken, and when night was beginning to change mood, there were urgent knocks on the door. The door shook and the banging became so wild and erratic it seemed as if the wind and thunder wanted to be let in. I hurried out of my room, towards the door, but the man got there before me. I moved closer. There was a woman standing in the doorway, her hair bedraggled and wet, her eyes distracted, her neck strung, her feet bare. The rain poured down on her mercilessly. There were dead cockroaches about her feet. I saw a rope round her neck, connecting her to the sky. The rope transformed into a thread of lightning. For a moment I thought I had known her in another life or in the world of spirits. I pushed past the officer. I stood on the threshold. Then, with light in my head, and hunger in my voice, I cried:
‘Mother!’
At first she didn’t move. She didn’t seem to recognise me. She stared at me with empty eyes. After a short silence she suddenly dropped all the things she had been carrying, and embraced me, without uttering a sound. Then she lifted me up into the air and held me tightly to her warm, wet body.
EIGHT
I WAS AWOKEN by voices in the dark. I was on Mum’s shoulder and I saw faces of women in the rain, faces lit up by lightning flash. They crowded us, arms outstretched, eyes warm. We were surrounded on all sides. The women touched me and looked at me as if I were a wonderful thing that had fallen from the sky. They fondled my hair, rubbed my skin, and felt my bones as if, in being lost and found, I belonged to all of them. I had brought with me a new hope. They too became reasons for stayingon this earth, to sometimes tastethejoys of homecoming.
Mum put me down. My legs were weak. Everything looked strange. Our new compound looked very odd indeed. I walked on shaky feet, staggering, and Mum took my hand and steadied me. Then she led me to a room, opened the front door and, pointing, said:
‘Your father is waitingfor you.’
There was a man asleep on the chair. I didn’t recognise him. He had a bandage round his head and his left arm was in a dirty sling. He was unshaven and his bare chest heaved as he snored. The room was very small. It was full of the mood of his sleep, of hunger, and despair, sleepless nights and the gloom of candle smoke. On the centre table, in front of him, there was a half-empty bottle of ogogoro, an ashtray, and a packet of cigarettes. There was a mosquito coil on the table as well and its acrid smoke filled the air. The man sleeping on the chair was like a giant in fairy tales. His big feet were on the table. He slept very deeply, frightening me with the great movements of his chest.
When lightning flashed outside, and the downpour increased, the man woke up, a stern look in his eyes. Then his eyes changed. They became big and bloodshot. Bewildered, he gazed around the room as if he had woken up into an alien world. Then he saw me in the doorway. For a long moment he stayed like that, caught in an enchantment, his arms stretched out. Jumpingup suddenly and with such energy that he sent the chair flying from underneath him, he rushed towards me. I ran round the table.Hepursuedme,but Irantheotherway,keepingthetablebetweenus.Ihadno idea why I was running away from him or why he was running after me. When I found an opportunity I fled screaming towards the door, out of the room, but he caught meinthepassage,underthetorrentialrain.Hollering,hekeptthrowingmeup in the air, filling me with dread. And when he held me to him firmly, so that I was overwhelmed with his great bristling energies and his quivering heart, I burst out cryingwithout knowingwhy.
When the rain stopped, Mum stripped the dead boy’s clothes off me and later burned them with kerosine and herbal fluids. The clothes burned for longer than expected. Hereyesbright withsuperstitions,shekeptfeedingtheyellowandblackflameswith kerosine. When the clothes burned down to curlicues of ash she gathered them into a newspaper and went out in the dark towards the forest.
On her return she seized my hand, pushed me to the bathroom which had millipedes on the walls, and made me bathe from a bucket of specially treated water. I had to use a brown soap which produced little foam. As I struggled to wash myself, Mum stayed outside the squalid bathroom, and told me all that had happened since the night of the riots. The way she told it filled me with wonder about her.
That night, when the crowds separated us, the unleashed Masquerade had pursued women across streets because they were not supposed to see its terrifyingpresence. She looked for me in every corner, under every car, had shouted my name where houses were burning. And when she went back home, hoping I might be there waiting, she learned that Dad too had disappeared.
‘In one night,’ she said, ‘I lost my only child and my husband.’
She stayed up the whole night, outside the burnt compound, with all our possessions scattered about the street. In the morning the tenants moved to new compounds. to different ghettos.Mummanagedtodistributeourpropertyamongrelations.Thenshe went to all the hospitals and police stations she could find. She walked the whole city, inconsolable in her loss. And when she was about to succumb to despair, in a last effort she went to a police station in the centre of the city and was told that Dad was there, imprisoned for taking part in the riots. She managed to see him. He had been beaten by the police and there was an ugly cut on his forehead, bruises on his face, and his arm hung. beside him like a diseased appendage. The next day, after much begging and some bribery, Dad was freed. He went to work that day and found that he had been sacked. During that time Mum had succeeded in finding a room for us to rent. She had also found a way to pay a month’s rent in advance. Dad came to his new home bad-tempered and in a violent mood. He fell ill that night, muttering about insane soldiers who had killed white men in wars across the seas.
Mum was frantic over my disappearance. Her friends suggested consulting a herbalist.At first shewasdoubtful;butaftershehadtriedeverythingandfailed,gone to police stations and hospitals, and been unable to find me, she relented. She was taken to a herbalist. There was a mound of broken glass in front of her hut. Mum had hardly stepped in when the herbalist, a fierce-looking woman with one eye that glittered more than the other, told her from the shadows that she knew the purpose of Mum’s visit.