Читать книгу The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Memoir - Aminatta Forna - Страница 13

My mud pies were too dry and the sides were crumbling. I’d sloshed water into the mess and begun to swill it all with a stick when Pa Roke showed up. He was my grandfather. Everything about him – the way he dressed in long embroidered gowns with a matching fez, or skull cap, his solemn bearing and formal manners – came from a different age of Africa, one that still existed among the rural people for whom life hadn’t changed in centuries, but was disappearing everywhere else.

Whenever my grandfather arrived he seemed to materialise out of nowhere. Although I’m sure he must have carried his clothes in a bundle, he never appeared to have anything resembling luggage. And when he walked into the compound there was no evidence of the means of transportation he had taken, no bush taxi disappearing in a whirl of dust, no car or bus. Not even a bicycle. He looked as though he had just come from the end of the road instead of Magburaka, where he lived, a whole day’s travel away. By necessity, since there were no telephones and no mail service to speak of, he arrived unannounced and would stay for a few days or sometimes a few weeks.

Because I was the only one at home and he seemed to have little to do during those visits except wait for my father, Pa Roke and I spent our days in each other’s company – although it’s true to say that there was very little contact between the two of us. Pa Roke sat around the house, calling occasionally to Big Aminatta to fetch and carry for him and for the most part ignored me, though it gave me some small pleasure to see Big Aminatta, my own constant nemesis, being ordered around.

Big Aminatta was in awe of Pa Roke, an awe which struck so deep into her core it even altered the way she walked. Usually she swayed her bottom and slid her flip-flopped feet across the floor so that they made an insolent sort of sound, like a market woman hissing through her teeth. In front of our grandfather she took short, fast steps and moved around at quite a clip. She was permanently bent at the waist, as though stuck in a half-curtsy and she never spoke to him, except to say, ‘Yes, Pa,’ keeping her eyes lowered all the while.

I suspect Pa Roke had little time for me. By my age most children were beginning to learn how to be useful. They were started on the smallest of errands, fetching and carrying glasses of water and passing items to their mother. European child that I was, at least in part, I did nothing all day except make mud pies and attempt to divert adult attention. Every now and again I felt Pa Roke watching me, but when I looked at him appealingly I never elicited much by way of response.

In the afternoon Pa Roke accompanied my mother and me on our rounds, taking my place in the front of the car while I was relegated to the back seat. My mother communicated to him using improvised sign language and practising the Temne she had picked up. Her Creole by that time was quite good too, and Pa Roke understood her a little. When all else failed she spoke loudly in English, affecting an African accent, smiling brilliantly. Pa Roke said little but nodded agreeably and smiled back at her, showing the gaps in his teeth, or rather, since he had so few, it would be more accurate to say he displayed the teeth in the gap of his mouth.

He and my mother rubbed along, watching each other through the veils of age, race, gender, language and culture. They seemed fond of each other in the way visitors like the locals in a new place, where everyone welcomes them and people are reduced to cartoons of themselves without nuance, detail or subtlety: a superficial world where everyone laughs and exchanges are full of feigned bonhomie.

When my father arrived home later in the day a transformation came over Pa Roke. He filled out into a real person, talking and laughing, suffering the occasional coughing fit. He even seemed to notice I was in the room and he asked my father about us, pointing in our direction every now and again.

Pa Roke wore mukay, pointed leather shoes, that men used as slippers with the back trodden down. He would slip them off and cross his bare feet at the ankle. Likewise my father took off his sandals. This signalled the beginning of their sessions. They talked for hours together in Temne, who knows what about, since I couldn’t understand a word they said. Perhaps they discussed the cases Pa Roke judged in the villages. My father once took my mother to Magburaka to watch Pa Roke sitting in the barrie and listening to the people’s grievances. One particular case involved a woman and three men. My father explained to my mother that they were watching a paternity suit. My mother tried to follow the proceedings for a while. Then she nudged my father and asked him whether the woman had been asked to name one of these men as the father. My father shook his head. No, he had explained, each of these men wishes to claim the child as his own. No man would ever give up a child that might be his.

A few days into his visit Pa Roke and I had lunch alone together. Everyone else was out: Sheka and Memuna at school; my father had a meal sent to him at the downtown surgery and my mother had plenty of other things to do. Before the meal my grandfather pulled out a small straw prayer mat with a picture of a mosque on it in black and red and laid it down on the ground. His mukay were left discarded on the tiled floor as he stepped onto the mat. He stood still with his hands at his side, his head bent, then he knelt, hands resting on his thighs, palms to the heavens in a gesture of supplication. It was beautiful to watch him kneeling and stretching his body out to touch the floor with his forehead with the grace of a water bird stretching its neck out across the surface of a lake.

A time would come when I would be made uncomfortable if I was caught in a room with someone who was praying, never knowing whether to go about my business and pretend I hadn’t noticed them or keep still out of reverence. My father was a Muslim, yet we had not been brought up in any particular faith. I had a Muslim name and all my relatives regarded me as a Muslim, but I had never been into a mosque or held a Koran.

It happened once that I came across Pa Roke at his midday prayers and the idea lodged in my head that I should be praying, too. So I knelt behind him, copying all his movements with no earthly idea what it all meant. Halfway through I began to feel foolish and decided to extricate myself, but that posed a new difficulty: to sidle away midway through prayers seemed sinful; at the same time I worried my grandfather might think I was making fun of him. I couldn’t make the decision, so I went on, standing, kneeling and bowing for what seemed like eternity. When he finished, he stood up, rolled his mat and walked away without looking back or acknowledging that I was there. I didn’t get the impression he was angry. Rather that he understood, better than I, the struggle that had played out in my young mind.

Pa Roke was used to eating with his hands, although sometimes he used just a spoon. Before his prayers and again afterwards he called for Big Aminatta to bring a basin of water and she held it, bracing under the weight, while he washed his hands elaborately and shook the water from his long fingers. We had a bathroom with running water, but it didn’t seem to occur to him to get up and go and use it He was just used to a different life, one in which one of the young girls in the family fetched him water from the stream every morning.

Lunch that day was groundnut stew and rice, made with plenty of hot cayenne pepper, chicken and beef stewed for hours in a stock thickened with finely ground peanuts, which Big Aminatta roasted and crushed using an empty bottle as a rolling pin. The local chickens were so tough she had to boil them up for ages with onions and tomatoes. But once cooked they were tender and full of flavour. She added small pieces of hairy, cured fish which gave off a strong, smoky taste. Groundnut stew was one of my favourite dishes.

Pa Roke worked his way through the food on his plate until there was nothing left but a small pile of chicken bones. These he picked up one by one, and devoured them methodically. First he bit off the soft tissue and cartilage. Then he slowly chewed the knuckles at either end. Finally, he cracked the fragile, splintering bone with his back teeth and licked out the dark marrow. When he had finished there was nothing, but nothing, left of the fowl to speak of. I had never seen anything like it

I was brought up to chew my bones; they were good for my teeth and the marrow full of vitamins. But I was sickened by the rubbery, slippery texture of the cartilage in my mouth and I left those pieces discarded on my plate. The grainy, soft ends of the bones I liked, but though I usually chewed them I stopped short of attacking the shaft of the bone with its sharp, jagged slivers.

I always called my grandfather Pa Roke. All my uncles, aunts and cousins did the same and even those people who were not related to us. It never occurred to me that this was not his name and I was well into adulthood when I made the discovery that Pa Roke wasn’t a name, it was a title: Pa Roke, Regent Chief of Kholifa Mamunta.

In the 1880s the chiefs of Temneland double-crossed a fearless young warrior by the name of Gbanka, whom they had hired to fight the Mende people and force open the trade routes to the Bumpe and Ribi rivers. Gbanka was born of a Mende mother and a Temne father. When he realised he had been cheated he went to his mother’s people, whom he had just defeated, and allied himself to them. There he swore a bloody revenge upon the Temne people and over the coming years he captured town after town in Temneland.

My great-grandfather Pa Morlai was a Loko and a warrior from Bombali. At the time Loko fighters were amongst the most skilled in the land. They had long-standing connections to the Mende people and an interest in the lucrative trade with the Europeans who sailed their ships far up the rivers into the interior looking for gold and ivory. When the Temnes fought back against Gbanka’s war boys, the Loko were drawn into battle on the side of the Mendes.

Pa Morlai captured and became commander in charge of the town of Mamunta, in Tonkolili, deep inside Temneland. When finally Gbanka was captured and imprisoned by the British, who soon tired when the fighting began to disrupt trading, Pa Morlai left Mamunta to return to his village. Matoko was on the other side of the Katabai Hills and when Pa Morlai entered the home of his birth he was a wealthy man, bearing the spoils of his war, including a sizeable retinue of slaves.

Among those wearing the round wooden collar of the enslaved was a young girl of twelve or thirteen called Beyas. Pa Morlai presented Beyas as a gift to his mother Ya Yalie to raise – a companion who would help her around the house and in the fields.

Beyas was the daughter of Masamunta Akaik, literally Chief Big Beard, of the Kamaras, one of the ruling families of Mamunta. As a slave with an aristocratic bloodline she was a trophy. And as she went about her tasks she impressed Ya Yalie with the delicacy of her demeanour: one day, when Beyas was about fifteen and was maturing into womanhood, the older woman went to her son and suggested that he take Beyas as one of his wives.

Beyas and Pa Morlai had four children together: three sons and one daughter. The years passed but Beyas, now called Ya Beyas by everyone in recognition of her status as a mother, never grew accustomed to her life. For all that she was married to a big man, she was still a slave.

One day, more than twenty years after Ya Beyas arrived in Matoko, a trader appeared at the marketplace selling round baskets of different sizes. They were woven out of coloured raffia and known as shuku, which people used to store clothes or pack their belongings for journeys. At the sight of him Ya Beyas became distraught and none of her children, who had accompanied her that day, could fathom what had upset her so much. Ya Beyas waved them away; refused their solicitations. She wanted to talk to the basket weaver alone. For a few minutes the two conferred, then Ya Beyas, seemingly much recovered, returned home and did not speak of the matter again. In time the incident was completely forgotten – by everyone that is, except Ya Beyas.

The weavers of Mamunta are renowned for their basketry. Ya Beyas recognised the intricate weave, the bands of turquoise and mauve that made up the design, which came from her home. Secretly she had sent a message with the trader to take to her brothers (she was certain that by now Masamunta Akaik was dead), telling them she was enslaved in Matoko. She begged them to find her and redeem her.

It took a whole year for the basket seller to complete his travels and return to Matoko. When she began to expect him back Ya Beyas invented every kind of excuse to go to the market by herself. Eventually one morning she saw the man sitting behind his huge pile of shuku and her heart lifted. But the trader had failed in his task. He had nothing to say for himself except that he had somehow forgotten.

Not one of my elderly aunts, who recounted the story of Ya Beyas to me, could tell me how or why he should do so. But they were clear: he had forgotten. He had not been waylaid or confused, found her family had disappeared or never returned to Mamunta. He forgot. Perhaps, I thought to myself as I listened, he drank too much omole.

Again Ya Beyas begged him to take a message and the trader promised that this time it would get there. In the meantime she resigned herself to twelve more months in Matoko.

The trader was true to his word. Some months later two of Ya Beyas’s brothers, Pa Santigi Kamara and Pa Yambas Sana, arrived in Mamunta, splendidly attired in gold-embroidered robes as befitted their status, followed by retainers carrying everything required to formally redeem their stolen sister: a barrel of palm oil, a sack of rice, a cow, a sack of pure salt, a tie of tobacco leaves, one woven country cloth and four silver shillings. These gifts they presented in the barrie before the paramount chief, the elders and Pa Morlai. When the ceremony was over Ya Beyas was a free woman.

Ya Beyas wanted nothing more than to go back to Mamunta to see her family, but Pa Morlai was loath to allow her to leave. She might no longer be a slave, but as his wife she had to obey her husband. A sore on her foot had turned septic, and Pa Morlai insisted that she stay under the care of his healer until she could walk properly.

The seasons had run through twice more by the time Ya Beyas wore her husband down. He seemed to find an unlimited number of new reasons why she should stay in Bombali and he obliged her to do his bidding. At last he relented and agreed to the journey. Ya Beyas wanted her daughter Hawa to accompany her, but Pa Morlai imposed his will one last time and refused to allow it, for the young woman was betrothed to a youth in Matoko. He suggested she travel with their second son Saidu instead.

Pa Morlai waited in his house in Matoko for Ya Beyas to return, but the rains came and went and there was no sign of her. Unlike his wife, who had learned patience, Pa Morlai was not born with a great deal and his small store soon ran out. One morning he rose, walked to the door of his house, snapped his fingers to summon his retainers and ordered them to begin preparations for a journey. Within a short time he and his entourage were ready and they set out, back across the Katabai Hills to Temneland, carrying with them a large calabash.

In Mamunta Pa Morlai stood before Pa Santigi’s house, knocked and waited. After a few moments he knocked again. The third time the door was answered and he entered.

In front of him walked a delicate girl, his youngest niece, who carried the tremendous calabash on her head. Under the weight of it her neck swayed like a pawpaw tree overburdened by fruit. The room within was full of people. Trembling, the girl laid the calabash at the feet of Pa Santigi, who sat cross-legged on a low stool. He looked inside and helped himself to a few of the cola nuts before passing the rest around the assembled company. After a few moments he looked expectantly at Pa Morlai, the conqueror now turned supplicant, who cleared his throat and announced his business.

‘I have seen a flower,’ he said, using the customary words of a prospective bridegroom in the house of his beloved. ‘And that flower is growing here, in the house of the Kamaras.’

Pa Santigi gave a signal and three girls were brought forth. The first one advanced and stood before Pa Morlai. Her face was covered by a cloth and he carefully raised it. No – he shook his head. Each woman was presented and each time, even though they were fresh and lovely, he looked at the woman he had been offered, declined and waited.

The three young women left through the door and stood outside, where their muffled giggles could be heard in the stately silence of the room. A fourth figure appeared at the door: rings of age thickened her waist and her neck; as she moved she dragged her foot slightly. Pa Morlai had no need to raise the cloth that covered her face. He nodded. ‘Here is my flower.’

In front of her gathered family – elders, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces – Ya Beyas paused; then she bent and picked up the calabash. With that gesture she accepted Pa Morlai as her husband, not as a slave, but as a free woman. She sat on the floor next to her elder brother with the calabash containing her dowry on her lap.

Inside Ya Beyas’s wedding calabash were cola nuts, a symbol of friendship; bitter cola nuts to represent hardship; a prayer mat; a head of tobacco for the elders who would counsel the couple through the highs and lows of married life; atara alligator pepper which, if the seeds were kept in the pod, would for ever bring peace to a union; and a needle and thread, to remind the bride of her wifely duty. And finally, at the bottom of the pot, in gold, silver and precious stones was the measure of her worth as a woman.

A few days after the ceremony Pa Morlai prepared to leave Mamunta for Matoko. He went to Ya Beyas and told her he planned to leave. He assumed she would accompany him, but he was careful to couch his command as a request. ‘So, Beyas, it’s time for you to say goodbye to your family. We should leave for Matoko in a few days.’

Ya Beyas looked at her husband. Pa Morlai was nearly seventy, an old man, and she was already middle-aged. She let her eyes linger on his face, his eyes, his mouth. He was her captor, her owner, her husband and the father of her children. She looked down and replied slowly, barely audibly: ‘No, my husband. I will not.’ This was Ya Beyas’s sole act of defiance in her entire life: a life lived as a daughter, sister, slave and junior wife.

And so Pa Morlai returned alone to Matoko, where he died some years later. Ya Beyas stayed in Mamunta, with her son Saidu. And no one knows, to this day, whether Pa Morlai and Ya Beyas ever laid eyes on each other again after their wedding day.