Aminatta Forna - Ancestor Stones

All morning it took for the ship to dock, my stomach flipping like a beached fish every moment. Despite the tea, my lips were parched and flaking. The salt glistened on my skin like powdered diamonds. My clothes, which had been soaked and dried several times, were now stiff as paper. Still, my discomfort was soon forgotten as I followed Madam Turay through the streets of the city.

Lagos! It smelled quite like our city, and it looked and sounded a bit like it, too. But, oh, in every other way the difference between them was immense. Our city was a simple melody, whistled by a solitary man. Lagos was one hundred pipes, horns and drummers. There was so much to see, I can’t tell you. What I can tell you is the thing I remember most. The women! So tall and proud (and frequently hard faced), who wore their headdresses as high as the roofs of the houses.

Madam Turay worked fast and I followed at her heels, my ears, eyes and brain absorbing everything. Shop owners pulled out bolt after bolt of fabric at the wave of her hand: Dutch Wax, batiks, prints. And other fabrics, delicate to the touch: cambric, georgette, crêpe de Chine, organza, brocade. Still others I had never heard of: shantung, duchesse, bombazine. The shopkeepers who were sometimes Indians and sometimes Syrians indicated which cloths were currently in fashion among the women of Lagos. Prices were agreed with a barely perceptible nod of the head. At night we returned to the house where we stayed with four other women. Two from Ghana. One from Guinea. Another from Upper Volta. All doing the same thing we were doing. All traders. Some buying. Some selling. The Ghanaian woman showed us some samples of cloth, heavy machine-loomed cotton in green, yellow and gold. She told us we could order in any colours we desired, for she was the owner of the factory where the cloth was made.

Within two months of our return all the cloth we had bought was sold. Madam Turay was delighted. She had given me thirty lappas , each measuring two yards, to sell initially. She offered me a ten per cent commission, we agreed twelve. One evening I cooked and invited a number of women round to my house. After we had eaten I opened my chest, the big one my mother had once owned, and I displayed the lappas . For those who bought three I discounted the last. I encouraged the women to return the next week and bring a friend. Whenever a woman introduced me to a new customer she was rewarded with a discount on her next purchase.

I followed Madam Turay to Lagos and then to Accra. Four months later we went into partnership and I began to make the trips alone. The following year we opened a store right in the centre of town, close to the Agip petrol station and the place the long-distance buses arrived and departed. On the morning we raised the sign ‘Kholifa Turay Cloth Merchants’ there was already a sizeable crowd outside, we could only allow six inside at a time while the others waited outside, some under the shade of the awning, the ones at the back sweating in the sun.

To my house I added a two-room extension for Ansuman and Kadie, who by now were expecting their first child. And one Friday, after prayers, we moved them in together with their small amount of furniture. Ansuman brought me a gift, a dough sculpture. It was a house, with a roof and a door and windows that opened to reveal children peeping from within.

Later the same evening, long after the two had gone to bed, I sat outside on my stool at the back of the house fingering the keys on the belt around my waist, watching the patterns in the darkness, thinking about my dreams. Along time ago I learned how to read my dreams. Not in the way you’re imagining, with some kind of magic, but to look at them in such a way as allowed me to read what was in my own heart.

In my dreams I lived in a house. A small house, not too big. Sometimes a round house, like the kind I was brought up in when my grandmother still lived. Whitewashed with painted shutters and a place to grow vegetables at the back. Other times a square townhouse with a new wing, like this one. In my dreams I lived in this house with my children, everybody fat and smiling.

One day I noticed something about this dream, which I had had a great many times before. Something missing. I stood back and looked at my dream, the way you might look at a painting or a view. I looked everywhere, from the path leading up to the door, to the empty hammock swinging at the front of the house, I even searched the corners of the rooms. Nowhere. You see, in my dream there was no man. Just me and my house and my children.

And I knew I was as happy as I ever would be.

On the final day of my father’s forty days, my mother stood alone and naked in her room, waiting for the women to come who would wash her. The house had been swept, the drapes removed from the windows, shutters opened, mirrors revealed, the pictures of my father gone, too — given away to friends and relatives as keepsakes. All but one: a photograph taken before his slow death began. It showed my father standing alone in front of his house. Whenever he was photographed, which was not often, it was alone. Always. Except for the picture of him sitting alongside the other advisers to the obai , the one you once showed me in a book written by an American academic who came here as a young Peace Corps. He was leaning slightly forward, unsmiling, gazing with a terrible intensity into the camera lens as though he was trying to look into the future. Either that, or he had some unspoken dislike for the photographer.

The clothes she had worn during her mourning were gone too, with the exception of one simple house dress left for her to wear. It lay across the bed behind her.

My father would be my mother’s last husband. There were no brothers for her to choose a new husband from, the way she had chosen him. Maybe a cousin or a nephew could be brought in to take care of her. Maybe she would become a praying wife, join a household run by another woman. But in my heart I knew my mother would never be capable of living like that, she who had always been a head wife.

Outside, smoke from a charcoal pit drifted across the compound. the carcasses of a sheep and a goat hissed on their spits. Vats of rice bubbled on a row of three-stone fires. Women called to each other, lifted lids, passed wooden spoons from one to the other, heaved huge pots, cuffed a child here and there or clapped hands at the dogs who wove their way through the fuss. There would be prayers, then libations performed in my father’s honour by members of the society, heedless of his Muslim faith.

I should not have looked in at my mother, but I did. Hidden where she couldn’t see me, behind the shutter of the open window. In all my life I cannot remember having seen her naked except that one time. I had never even seen her without her hair covered.

There she stood, in the centre of the room, like a child waiting for her mother to come and dress her. Arms by her side, palms turned out, staring into the shadows. Folds of empty skin at her belly. Long, flat breasts. Her hair white and soft as the clouds.

Her lips were moving, a murmured prayer. In less than a minute the women would arrive to lead her to the stream. She knew what was coming, she’d been through it before. They would remove the last mourning dress, would wash her arms and hands, her body and her face. They would give her water to rinse and spit. They would wash away her old life and warn my father’s spirit from coming back to her. For she was no longer his.

Then I realised she was not staring into the shadows, but at the portrait of my father. And though I couldn’t hear what she was saying I realised she was not praying, but talking to her husband one last time. Once she gestured with her right hand and as she did, offered a glimpse of her face to me. I saw the grief and the love there. And suddenly I felt hot with shame for spying on her. I turned and walked away.