Ben Okri - The Famished Road

‘We want some peppersoup, please.’I ran out and told Madame Koto.‘Leave me alone, I’m coming!’ she said.I went back in. The tall couple had seated themselves at my table. They sat straight and their knees were awkward underneath the table and I noticed that they had the longest necks I had yet seen on any human being. ‘Are you politicians?’ I asked. ‘What?’ asked the man, in his child’s voice. ‘Politicians.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘You’renot politicians,’ I said, closingtheconversation.

They kept glancing at me and I found their faces very disconcerting. I tried to sit there without noticing them when the woman brought out a feather from her wrapper and offered it to me.

‘No, thank you,’ I said. She smiled and put it back. Madame Koto came in with the gourds of palm-wine and voices erupted in weird jubilation. I fetched glasses and cups and distributed them round. When I gave the cups to the men with dark glasses they grabbed my hand and said: ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Why?’ ‘We like you. We want to take you with us.’ ‘Where?’

‘Wherever.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

I tried to wrench my hand free but their grips were very strong and their bony fingers bit into my flesh.

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

I pulled again but my flesh bruised and began to bleed. I screamed, but the voices in the room were so loud they cut off my screaming. I kicked, missed, and hurt my toes on the foot of the table. Then I scratched one of them in the face, and snatched off his glasses. Both of his eyes were totally white. They could have been made of milk. They were white and blank and unmoving, as if they had been stuck there, malformed, in the empty sockets.

I opened my mouth to shout, but the man laughed so powerfully and his mouth was so black that I froze in my attempt. I couldn’t move. I felt transfixed, as if I were suffering a living rigor mortis. Then a searing pain went up my spine, ended in my brain, and I woke up to find myself in my usual corner, with the tall, small-eyed couple staring at me. Everyone else was drinking. Steaming bowls of peppersoup were in front of all the customers. They drank steadily and talked in curious voices.

Thetwo albino menkepttwistingandjerkingasiftheirbodieswereuncomfortable. They were silent. The toothless man was also silent. They all kept looking at me. More customers came into the bar. There was a man with a head like that of a camel, a woman with a terrible hip deformation, another man with white hair, and a midget. The woman had a large sack on her back, which she gave to the albinos. The albinos unfurled the sack, shook it out, sending dust clouds into the air. They glanced at me furtively, and hid the sack under the table.

The four people who had come in looked for places to sit and then crowded my table. I had to get up for them. I fetched a little stool and sat near the earthenware pot and watched the bar become overcrowded.

Amidst all this Madame Koto was radiant with her necklace of white beads. As the eveningprogressed shegot darker, moredignified, whiletheclientelegot rowdier. She was untouched by it all, even when the men teased her. The original man with the bigeye, which got morebloated as hedrank, as if his eyewereastomach allto itself, said:

‘Madame, come and sit on my lap.’

‘Let’s see if you can carry your wine first, before you carry me,’ she replied, with great dignity.

‘This madame is too proud,’ said another man in the identical group.

‘Proud and strong,’ she said.

‘Come and sit with me, let’s talk about marriage,’ said the man whose head was like a tuber of yam.

‘Marry yourself.’

‘So you don’t think I amman enough?’ asked theoriginalman, wavinghis three fingers for more wine.

‘No,’ she said.

The bar rocked with the oddest sounds of ironic laughter. The men with dark glasses laughed very hard and banged away at the table.

‘Maybethatboy isherhusband,’saidoneofthem,takingoffhisglassesand polishingthem.

His white eyes didn’t move. They were so birdlike, so ghostly, that I couldn’t tell what or where they were looking at.

‘That’s my son,’ she said.

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you sell him to us?’

The bar suddenly became very quiet. Madame Koto stared at the two men with dark glasses. All the other customers watched her carefully. Then she turned to me, a curious gleam in her eyes.

‘Why?’

‘So we can take him with us.’

‘To where?’

‘Many places.’

‘For how much?’

‘As much as you want.’

‘You have plenty of money?’

‘Too much.’

The silence in the bar was incredible. Then the midget laughed. He laughed like a goat. The tall man with small eyes laughed as well. He sounded like a hyena.

‘Name your price, Madame.’

Madame Koto looked at the customers as if seeing them for the first time.

‘Any more palm-wine for anybody?’

‘Palm-wine!’ they cried in unison.

‘And peppersoup!’

And they all burst out laughing and resumed their vociferous conversations as if nothinghad happened.

MadameKotoservedthemandthey drankandateandkeptaskingformore.They drank a great deal and didn’t get drunk. They sat, all of them, drinking and talking as if the wine were water. It was only the two men in dark glasses who got drunk. They kept polishing their glasses. One of them even brought out an eye and polished it and blew on it and dipped it into his palm-wine and pushed it back into his red eye-socket. Then he put his glasses back on. They chewed and swallowed their chicken bones. They ate and drank so much that Madame Koto began to despair. She had run out of wine and food and the night hadn’t even properly set in. As she bustled up and down, starting a new fire, making hurried arrangements for more palm-wine, the midget cameup tome.Smilingvery expansively,hesaid:

‘Take this. You might need it.’

It was a little pen-knife. I put it in my pocket and forgot all about it. Then he went to the backyard. I heard him urinating in the bushes. He came back, smiling, and left without a word, and without paying. I told Madame Koto about it and she said:

‘What midget?’

I went back to the bar. I sat down. The tall man said:

‘Come with me.’

‘To where?’

‘I will take you round the world. On foot. I make all my journeys on foot. Like a camel.’

‘No.’

‘If you don’t come with me I will take you by force.’

‘You can’t.’

He smiled. The woman smiled as well. I decided they were more drunk than I had thought and ignored them.

The bar was so full of people that there were no seats left. Some of them sat on the floor. I was nudged off my stool. The smells in the bar became terrible and strange, the smells of corpses and rain and oregano, of mangoes and rotting meat, of incense and goats’ hair. And then, suddenly, I found I could no longer understand what anybody wassaying.They allspokeasifthey hadknownoneanotherforalongtime. They spoke in alien languages and occasionally pointed at Madame Koto’s fetish. It seemed to amuse them. Then they glanced at me, made calculations with their fingers, laughed, drank, became solemn, and looked at me again.

Madame Koto came in and announced that her supply of food and wine was finished. She demanded that they pay up and leave her bar. A great chorus of disappointment rose from the clientele.

‘Pay andgo,’MadameKotosaid.‘Pay up andgo.Iamclosingup forthenight.’

No one paid her much attention. Her temper rising, she stormed out of the bar. The voices grew rowdier, wilder. Previously I had heard the voices before the people had materialised. Now, I heard the voices but, as I looked round, the customers were vanishing. I shut my eyes in disbelief. When I opened them the bar was completely empty, and completely noisy, except for the two albinos and a beautiful woman whom I hadn’t noticed before. On the far table were the two pairs of dark glasses. The original man with the bloated eye, the group that looked like him, the tall couple, the two white-eyed men, were all gone. The bar was silent and everything was still and the wind whistled faintly on the ceiling, as if a hurricane had passed and hadn’t been noticed.