Ben Okri - The Famished Road

‘Go away!’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t want people to know I’m in.’

‘Why not?’ ‘Just go!’

‘What if I don’t go?’

‘I will knock your head and you won’t sleep for seven days.’ I thought about it.

‘Go!’ he cried.

‘What about the men?’

‘What men?’

‘The three men?’

‘Have you seen them?’ he asked in a different voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘They weretalkingwithMadameKoto.’

‘That witch! What were they talking about?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When did you seethem?’ ‘Not longago.’

He shut the door quickly, locked it, and then opened it again.

‘Go!’ he said. ‘And if you see them again come and tell me immediately.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Kill them or run.’

He shut the door finally. I stood there for a while. The image of his frightened face lingered in my mind. Then I left his compound and went and sat on our cement platformandkept asteady watchoverallmovementsalongthestreet.Thesunmade the air and the earth shimmer and as I kept watch I perceived, in the crack of a moment, the recurrence of things unresolved – histories, dreams, a vanished world of great oldspirits,wildjungles,tigerswitheyesofdiamondsroamingthedensefoliage. I saw beings who dragged clanking chains behind them, bleeding from their necks. I saw men and women without wings, sitting in rows, soaring through the empty air. And I saw, flying towards me in widening dots from the centre of the sun, birds and horses whose wings spanned half the sky and whose feathers had the candency of rubies. I shut my eyes; my being whirled; my head tumbled into a well; and I only openedmy eyesagain,tostop thesensationoffalling,whenIheardtheshatteringof glass. The noise woke up the afternoon.

Across the street three men were smashing the photographer’s glass cabinet with clubs. Then they hurriedly removed the pictures on display. People of the street, awoken by the noise, came to their housefronts. The men, in a flash, had snatched the pictures and had gone into the photographer’s compound. The people who came out looked up and down the street and saw nothing unusual. The action had moved to the photographer’s room. I rushed across the street.

When I got to the room his door was wide open and the men weren’t there. Neither was the photographer. His window was wide open, but it was too high for me to look out of; I ran to the backyard. I saw no one. But I noticed that the backyard led to other backyards. I followed a route past the bucket latrine alive with flies and maggots. The smell was so bad I almost fainted. Another path led to the swamp and marshes and the forest of massive iroko and obeche and mahogany trees. There were deep footprints in the soft soil behind the houses. I followed the footprints, sinking in the mud, till the soft soil shaded into marshes. There was rubbish everywhere. Strange flowers and wild grass and evil-looking fungal growths were profuse over the marshes. Bushes were luxuriant in unexpected places. A wooden footbridge was being constructed to the other side. The footprints merged into many others on the soft soil. Some of them went into the marshes. I looked around, couldn’t find anyone, and gave up the search. I went back home, washed the mud off my feet, and resumed watch over the street. Nothingunusual happened.

In theeveningMumreturned and was surprised to seeme.

‘So you stayed home? Good boy. I thought by now you would have wandered to Egypt,’ she said.

She was back earlier than usual because she hadn’t gone to the market that day. She had gone hawking. Her face was sun shadowed.

That night I was listeningin my childhood hour of darkness. I was listeningto Mum’s voice and Dad’s songs, listening to stories of recurrence told down through generations of defiant mouths. In that hour laced with ancient moonlight, I was listening to tales of inscrutable heroes who turned into hard gods of chaos and thunder

– when dread paid us a visit. The night brought the dread. It announced itself through piercing voices from the street, crying out in lamentation at the repetition of an old cycleof ascendingpowers.

We rushed out into the blue memory of a street crowded with shadows. Wild men were wreaking devastation on windows, wooden doors, and human bodies. We rushed out intothehaze,intothesmellofburninghair,intotheacridyellowsmokefromthe barber’s shop, into the noises of corrupted ritual chants and caterwauling and machetes givingoff electricsparks, cryingfor medicinalwar.

The voices howling for vengeance stampeded the street. The green bodies bristling with antimony sweated animal blood from their naked chests. They were a river of wild jaguars. Their deep earth songs overwhelmed the wind and came from everywhere, from the stars and the broken flowers. They chanted for destruction. Their whooping filled the night. Their sweating bodies flashed in the lamplight. Their murderous utterances washed over our forgetfulness.

It was impossible to tell who they were. Their chants erupted from crowds gathered outside compounds, from people who we thought were familiar, whose shadows changed beside us into a dreaded heat, whose screechings broke into weird bird-cries. Even amongst us people were answering the call of old bloodknots and secret tidal curfews.

In great numbers the thugs and ordinary familiar people alike poured over the road of our vulnerability, wounding the night with axes, rampaging our sleep, rousing the earth, attackingcompounds, tearingdown doors, destroyingrooftops. In thewound of our cries we did not know who our enemies were. From the darkness figures with flaming faces attacked us, descended on us with sticks, stones, whips, and wires. It was some time before we realised that we were in the grip of an act of vengeance, a night reprisal, with the darkness as our antagonist. One by one the lamps were extinguished. The darkness conquered our voices. A great cry, as of a terrifying commander ordering his troops, sprang into the air. There was the silence of deep rivers. Everything became still. It was as if the night had withdrawn its violence into itself. The wind breathed over the houses and howled gently through the trees. The whisperings of spirits flowed on the wind. The voices of water and slow footsteps floated towards us. It was as if thewind itself werepreparingfor afinalonslaught. Then the stillness was broken by the panic of the innocent. There was another cry, not of our antagonists, but of a woman who had seen something wonderful and monstrous. The cry started it all. The innocents turned and with one mind tried to flee back to their rooms. The panic crossed our paths, and collided our bodies in the solid darkness. All over, women wailed for their children. I moved amongst the shadows and ran out into the homeland of darkness, across the street. I thought I was headed for safety. I couldn’t see where I was going. Then voices all around me began shouting:

‘Kill the photographer!’‘Beat his photographs out of him!’‘Finish him off!’‘Blind him.’‘Blind our enemies!’‘Destroy them!’‘Teach them a lesson.’‘Show them power!’‘Break their fingers.’‘Crack their heads!’‘Crush the photographer.’‘And leave his body in the street.’‘Let the birds eat him!’‘For mockingour party.’‘Our power!’‘Our Leader!’

Their chants intensified. Their footsteps became voices, became one, and then multiplied, like fire. The dead rose under the weight of such footsteps, under such voices, under such intent. I banged my head against something solid, scraped my elbow against the jaws of the dead, clawed my way through jagged rust, and discovered I had reached the safety of the burnt van. I hid in the driver’s seat and watched, in that night of blue memories, the drama of the Living that only the Dead can understand.