Dangerous Love (25 page)

Omovo bore his uncle's words until they got to the wooden bridge. Fortunately for him the two children began to cry. They were hungry and they tugged at their mother's wrapper saying that they wanted some oranges. Omovo bought them four oranges and gave them ten kobo each. They looked at their mother, who nodded, before they took the money. They fell upon the oranges as if they hadn't eaten in days.

After Uncle had paid the fare for their crossing he went over to Omovo, took him aside, and said: ‘We are going to visit another of our relatives. You don't have to see us any further. You have the goodness of your mother. If you have any problems come and see me. And be careful what you eat in that house. God bless you.'

Then he turned and, abruptly seizing one of the children by the hand, began to cross the bridge. For the first time Omovo noticed that he walked with an angled movement. He had some sort of deformity, had suffered some sort of wound, and Omovo had never known about it. He felt a little differently about his uncle when he realised that fact.

His uncle's wife came to say goodbye and as she left she began to struggle with her handbag. Then with an expression of quiet sufferance she gave him a gift of a small measure of cloth, enough to make a shirt, and a loaf of bread.

‘We are poor,' she said, ‘but your mother was a good woman.'

Then she picked up the youngest child, waved to Omovo, and followed her husband over the wobbling bridge of planks.

Omovo watched them go. In spite of being both relieved and moved he knew that it would be a long time before they were going to see him again. He was so disturbed by his uncle that he felt quite shaken for minutes after their departure. His bones ached with frustration, with anger. His fingers trembled and he kept gritting his teeth. To free himself, to loosen his feelings, he wandered round the ghetto without the faintest idea of where he was heading. He wandered through the subdued Sunday noises and the bustling warm life of Alaba. He walked for so long and was so deeply immersed in his thoughts that he ceased to be aware of the lights and the noises and the people. In his profound involvement with the things that he didn't want to face, the wounds he didn't want to look at, he missed most of the finest moments of the changing day. The sky held deep flashes of blue. The clouds took on shapes so splendid that they suggested other countries, suggested journeys to exotic places. The sky was spectacular with oriental red and orange as the sun set over another day. It took the minor drama of bumping into a girl, who pushed him and said: ‘Use your eyes, you idiot!' before he realised with a shock that it was evening. And when he looked up and saw the sky he breathed in deeply. His being trembled like leaves sifting in the wind. When he breathed out he prayed for the day when he could suggest the beauty and the sadness of the cosmic drama in paint on canvas.

The joy lasted for only a moment, for soon he made out the stars of the slowly defining night. Then he realised that Sunday was almost over, that Monday was just around the corner, pitiless and implacable. He felt gloom settling over him with the darkening lights. With his eyes focussed on the road before him, alert to avoid stepping on excrement, and with a cold wind blowing, he made his way back home. And as he went, struck by the fact that the sand was no longer hot, surprised that he hadn't noticed when the blazing sunlight turned and the heat-mists vanished, and musing on how he could have dwelled so long in his mind unaware that time was passing so quickly, as he went he experienced a moment's revelation. And the revelation resolved itself into the thought that he needed to face himself before he could face the facts and the terrors of this world.

When he got home he came upon his father, who stood in the middle of the sitting room, giving vent to monologues about debts, the wicked world, selfish in-laws, uncooperative children. Omovo fled into his room and deposited the bread and cloth on the table. But even in the room he could hear his father droning on about betrayals, injustices, neglect. His father's voice made him restless, frustrated him, communicated failure and despair into his flesh. Omovo could have borne it if his father hadn't come and banged on his door and said, very loudly:

‘And tell your mother's wicked relatives not to come to my house ever again. If they are going to cause trouble. Let the dead stay dead.'

His father paused. Omovo began to sigh, but his father continued: ‘What contribution have they made to anything, eh?'

Omovo needed to escape from his father's tirade. He got out his sketchbook, three pencils, a felt-tipped pen, an eraser, and he fled from the room. As he rushed out his father said: ‘Are you off to draw another man's wife again, eh?'

Omovo had got to the backyard before he realised that being seen with his sketchbook would simply increase the amount of existing speculation. He went to the compound front. He found one of the children of the compound crying because the others said he was too small to play with them. He did four drawings of the crying child. When he finished he felt he had done something worthwhile. He gave the drawings to the child, who took them off to show his mother. She soon came to thank Omovo, saying:

‘They are better than photographs. I will frame them.'

Some of the other children, who were jealous of the boon their outcast colleague had received, cried for Omovo to draw them as well. But he gave them a small amount of money and appeased them by promising to draw them some other time.

He stayed out for a while. The night deepened. The kerosene lights came on at various night stalls. Electric lights came on in the houses. He went into the sitting room. His father had retired for the night. He ate, read some pages of
The Interpreters,
and made a final attempt to organise his table in preparation for the rigours of another week. He was leafing through an old diary, overcome with nostalgia, when a piece of paper fell out. The handwriting on it was strange at first. It was only when he came to the second line that he realised it was one of Okur's poems –the poem that had inspired the painting on the wall:

Little birds of the storm

Struggling in flight

Was your mother cruel

To have pushed you

From such a height?

When he read the poem he thought a little. He shook his head. He didn't want to think. He put out the lights and lay down. He didn't sleep immediately. He was aware of the darkness and the strange sensations closing upon his mind, bearing down on him, blue and alive. Then a sound outside jolted him. He fell back heavily into his body. Then he lightened and the darkness washed over him in irresistible waves and he dissolved into the void that was not really a void.

...and then he found himself in a maze and when he looked up he saw her in the distance, one half of her visible, the other half hidden by the corner. Her eyes were sad and she had a brave smile on her lips. He knew that smile so well. It was the way she smiled when bearing a secret pain. It was her masking of trauma.

He followed her through the maze and she kept eluding him, kept disappearing around corners just as he caught sight of her. And because he couldn't reach her he spoke to her, saying:

‘O mother who suffered so much in such silence, why did you travel without teaching me how to reach you? Stop escaping from me, stop running from me. Come and comfort me, come and fondle my hair the way you used to when I was a child.'

She stopped and for the first time in his life he saw her with adult eyes. She was smaller than he remembered. Her face was full of wrinkles, her jaws hollow, an old woman with the sad eyes of a bewildered child, wide open and bright as crystals.

‘Don't just stand there looking at me,' he said approaching her gently.

He noticed that her feet were covered in a white mist. When the mist cleared he saw that the ground he walked on in the maze was covered in broken glass. Her feet were bleeding and raw. He saw the scar over the shin-bone on her left leg. It had been caused the day his father, beating her in the kitchen, had accidently pushed her. She had staggered, turned and fallen into the fire. He couldn't remember why his father beat her in the first place. He was so young then, with his mother always carrying him, that he sometimes became part of her beatings.

‘Mother, I need you. I need your spirit and your warmth, for I am lonely. I am in danger of getting lost. Guide me through this maze.'

But she stayed still and said nothing.

‘What must we do to save ourselves from the termites and maggots that eat at our dreams?' he asked.

He began to approach her more hurriedly. From the distance she made a sign. Was she making a gesture of benediction or was she waving goodbye? Then he realised too late that the more he followed her the farther away she seemed. Darkness fell gently over everything and he started to run after her frenziedly. He got to the end of a passage and found himself at a place where five roads met. She was at the end of all of them. She had stopped making signs at him: he had not understood the signs when she made them. And, confused, he went down all five roads, feeling a curious serenity and love guiding him. It was only at the end of the last road that he might have found her waiting. But the darkness turned her face slowly into an illuminated hardness. And when the transformation was complete all that was left of her was a mask unsupported in the air, a mask he had never seen before. It had big lips, rugged cheeks, and the eyes were unbearably tender. Feeling protected, he touched the mask. In the flash that followed he saw his mother disappear into the maze, lost to him forever, and he was afraid...

When he woke the night was darker than he had ever known it to be. There was something unnatural about the darkness. It admitted no light. He yearned for living colours, landscapes vibrant with harmonies. He yearned for art, for sustaining memories, for memories of vision. But the night was too dark and it confounded his mind because he could perceive nothing.

Frustrated, drawn by the pull of black streams, he felt himself submerge, felt himself journeying at a strange speed through primeval caves, accompanied by shadows. And as he sank into the new darkness he prayed that he could reach greater powers, greater visions and the intimations of a greater life that flowed somewhere in the landscapes within.

He woke up with the feeling that his face had become like a mask. The mirror did not wholly undeceive him. His bony head with its growing bristles, and the wrinkle on his forehead, which he had not noticed before, made him feel like an old-eyed, lean-jawed stranger.

He took his towel and soap and made for the bathroom. A slight mist covered the compound. The cold air made him shiver. The compound had the muted busyness of an early Monday morning. A cock crowed somewhere in the distance and a child imitated its sound. The men prepared for work, combing their hair and chewing their chewing sticks at their room-fronts. Children were dressing for school. Women swept the corridor, warmed stews in the kitchen, and fetched water from the well.

In the bathroom, fooling around for many minutes, tentatively getting his body used to the iciness of the water, he began to take his shower. He was covered with soap, and was singing, when he heard her say from the adjacent bathroom compartment:

‘Is that you, Omovo?'

‘Yes.'

‘I could tell by your towel on the door.'

Omovo stopped singing. He also stopped the shower. He suddenly had an overpowering sense of his nakedness. He found it odd that, separated by the mucus-infested wall, he was still disturbed by her proximity.

In a voice that was both sweet and strange, she said: ‘I'm sorry about yesterday.'

‘It wasn't your fault. I should have known better. What happened afterwards?'

‘He threatened to cut my face with a razor.'

‘Why?'

‘So men wouldn't bother me and so he can have some peace. And then he whipped me.'

‘I'm sorry. I should have been more careful.'

‘Don't be sorry.'

They were silent. After a while she asked: ‘Did he destroy all the drawings?'

‘Yes. But it doesn't matter.'

‘Why not?'

‘What I drew will stay with me forever.'

‘But he destroyed all of them?'

‘Yes, but I can paint you now without them.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes.'

‘I do love you so much,' she said simply.

In the midst of the scum and mucus of the bathroom, and in spite of what she had suffered, he felt himself getting warm. He said nothing. Her voice was different when she said: ‘My dreams are getting very wicked. I might do something bad. I feel sorrow hanging over me. 1 don't want to bring you any unhappiness.'

His head cleared.

‘I must see you soon,' she added.

Heavy footsteps approached the bathroom. She stopped talking and began to fetch water from the tap. He resumed his shower and washed the soap from his body. The man who had been approaching banged on the bathroom door, almost bursting it free from the nail which kept it shut.

‘Who is there?' asked the assistant deputy bachelor.

Omovo, grumbling, showed a soap-laden hand over the door.

‘Be quick, man. I'm late for work.'

Then the assistant deputy bachelor went to the toilet. Omovo listened as he urinated for an unusually long time. Then he began singing in a hoarse voice. When he had gone, Ifeyiwa turned off the water faucet and said, almost desperately:

‘Omovo, I must see you when you return from work in the evening. I'll be watching for you and I'll make the same sign. I have to go now.'

There was another silence. Omovo waited. The door to the adjacent compartment opened and shut. And then she was gone. For a moment he felt confused, hollow, guilty. The assistant deputy bachelor returned, banged on the door again and shouted:

‘Be quick, be quick! Why you dey baf like woman? Baf like a soldier! Honestly!'