Ben Okri - The Famished Road

Ade sat up. His limbs were peaceful.

‘Tell us the story of the blue sunglasses.’

‘Okay.’

We waited. Mum went and sat on Dad’s chair. She rocked back and forth. I saw Dad’s spirit hovering round her. Then it entered her and I heard Mum shiver. She got some ogogoro, made a prayer and a libation, and we drank. As if Dad’s personality were taking her over, she lit a mosquito coil and a candle. Then she lit a cigarette. She rocked back and forth in Dad’s restless manner of a great lion in a man’s body. Her face serious, her features altered, she began to speak.

‘Oneday Iwassellingmy provisions.Iwentfromstreettostreet.Thesunwasvery hot, there was no shelter in the sky or anywhere. I was tired. I began to see things. I began to complain, weepingabouthowhardthisworldis.ThenIcametoacrossroad. I saw a tortoise crawling out of the bushes and crossing the road and I was about to pick it up when it spoke to me.’

‘What did it say?’ I asked.

‘On another day I was hawking things in the city when a white man came to me. He had on the blue sunglasses. It was very hot. The sun and the dust made my eyes red. The white man said: “If you tell me how to get out of Africa I will give you my sunglasses.”

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said, “There are many roads into Africa but only one road leads out.” He said: “What road?” I said: “First tell me what the tortoise told me.” He was confused. “I don’t know what you aretalkingabout,”hesaid. So I told himthat I wouldn’t show him the only road out of Africa, Then he told me his story. He had been here for ten years. For seven of those years he was an important man in the government. Then all the Independence trouble started and for three years he tried to leave but kept failing. Hecouldn’tfindaway out.Every timehepreparedtoleavesomethingcamealong and prevented him. He even got on a plane but the plane went round the world and when he got out he found himself here, in the same place.’

‘So what happened?’

‘So I made him buy all my provisions. Then I asked him to tell me what the tortoise said. Hestopped and thought for alongtime. Then abus went past slowly. It had a motto written on its side. The white man laughed at the motto and read it out and I said that’s what the tortoise told me. ‘What?” he asked. ‘All things are linked,” I said. ‘What has the tortoise got to do with it?” he asked. I said: ‘If you don’t know you will never find any road at all.” Then he gave me the blue sunglasses and before he left he said: ‘The only way to get out of Africa is to get Africa out of you.”

‘Then what happened?’

‘On another day I was selling fish in the market. A strange Yoruba man came to me and bought all my fishes. When his hands touched them they all came alive and began to twist in my basin. I threw the fishes on the floor and they wriggled and I started to run away, but the man held my hands. ‘Don’t you remember me?” he asked. He was a black man but he was familiar in an odd sort of way. “I gave you the blue sunglasses,” he said. Then I remembered him. But it took some time, and I first had to turn and twist my mind around. He was the white man. His face and his nose and everything was exactly the same except that now he was a Yoruba man with fine marks on his face. “I met you five hundred years ago,” he said. ‘I discovered the road.” ‘What was it?” I asked. Then he told me his story. “When I left you,” he began, ‘I became feverish in the head and later in a fit of fury over a small thing I killed my African servant. They arrested me. I sat in a cell. Then they released me because I was a white man. Then I began to wander about the city naked. Everyone stared at me. They were shocked to see a mad white man in Africa. Then a strange little African child took to following me around. He was my only friend. All my white colleagues had deserted me. Then one day my head cleared. Five hundred years had gone past. The only way to get out of Africa was to become an African. So I changed my thinking. I changed my ways. I got on a plane and arrived in England. I got married, had two children, and retired from government service. I was in the Secret Service. Then before I turned seventy I had a heart attack and died. They buried me in my local parish cemetery with full national honours.” “So what are you doing here?” I asked him. I was afraid now. I was very scared. He said: “Time passed. I was born. I became a businessman. And I came to the market today to buy some eels and I saw you.” I said:

“But I only met you two weeks ago.” “Time is not what you think it is,” he said, smiling. Then he left. That is the end of my story.’

There was a long silence.

‘Strange story,’ I said.

‘It’s true,’ Mum replied.

The wind blew the floating dreams into our room. The yellow light of the candle fluttered. The candle had burned low. I felt I was in another place, a country of white fields.

‘Look!’ Ade said.

The wind had blown the dawn into our room. At the door, sitting on its tail, was a black cat. We stared at the cat in silence. It stared at us.

‘The world is just beginning,’ Mum said.

The cat turned and went back out of the door. We all got up and followed the cat. Sitting outside our door, her wounds still livid, was Helen, the beggar girl. We stared at her in puzzlement. Then she got up and went to the housefront. We didn’t follow her. When we went back into the room Dad was sitting up on the bed like Lazarus.

‘KEEP THE ROAD OPEN,’ he said, and fell back into sleep.

We touched him and he didn’t move. Mum was happy. Ade kept smiling. Mum was happy because Dad had begun to snore. Ade kept smiling because he could hear his father’s weary footsteps, as he made his long journeys, like an ancient hero searching for his son. Ade heard his father’s footsteps, heard the anxious hypertensive beat of his heart, and was following him through his guilt and confusion, as he made his way to our house. But Ade also smiled because his father had been delayed gettingto our place by a funeral cortege. It was not a big procession, and there were only a few mourners at that hour, all of them prostitutes, except for Madame Koto, who wore dark glasses and a black silk gown, and who was thinking about the money she could make from the fabulous political rally rather than about the prostitute whose body lay charred in the cheap wooden coffin and who had died from electrocution after the wind blew the tent away.

THE FIRST THING that woke us in the morning was wailing from the road. Someone knocked on our door and when I shouted for them to come in we saw Ade’s father. He was very tall, his head was bowed, and his face bore the misery of a night-longvigil.

Ade got up instantly and rubbed his eyes. They were bulbous and inflamed. He had grown paler and more beautiful overnight. His smile had gone. When he saw his father at the door he didn’t move or render a traditional greeting.

‘How many times can a man be reborn in one miserable life?’ his father asked the room at large.

Mum was not on the bed. There was food for us on the table. She had left before we woke and her hawker’s basin was not on the cupboard. Dad was still asleep on the bed, his biglegs sprawled apart, his armdanglingover theside.

Ade’s father looked terrifying.

‘Where have you been all night, eh?’ he asked his son. ‘Why didn’t you come home?Your mother is almost illwith worryingabout you.’

A dark glow surrounded him. He came into the room. Ade retreated to the window. His father sat on the bed. I could smell the frustration and the anxieties in his night-long sweat. His spirit had the potent odours of one who has been making ritual offerings, talkingtohisancestors,tryingtocommunicatewiththegods.Hisspiritwas charged and deep. He filled the room with terror. Ade, standing at the window, seemed radiant with the glow of his father’s temper. He did not appear repentant or even rebellious. He held his head firm, and his face had the impassivity of one who knew that his father could no longer dare to beat him or make him cry. There was something cruel about my friend’s spirit and I understood why spiritchildren are so feared. Faced always with the songs and fragrances of another world, a world beyond death, where the air is illuminated, where spirit companions know the secrets of one’s desire, and can fulfil those desires, every single one of them, spirit-children do not care much for the limited things of the world. Ade did not want to stay any more, he did not like the weight of the world, the terror of the earth’s time. Love and the anguish of parents touched him only faintly, for beyond their stares and threats and beatings he knew that his parents’ guardianship was temporary. He always had a greater home.