Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [112]
An old man stared at me through watery eyes, squeezed my breast with trembling fingers and told me to be at his house in the morning.
The sabu who was representing the next suitor gave me one week to make up my mind. She had another prospective bride in mind. After three days she returned and told me to hurry up. Their number two choice was now in receipt of a rival offer.
The fourth man had dead eyes and a shadow that seemed to follow him, hovering behind his shoulder. When he sat down he was entirely still, all except for his leg, which jigged up and down as though it had a life of its own.
I turned them all down, but it seemed as though every time I answered the door another one fell over the threshold.
* * *
Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay did not sit on the mat. They stayed only a few days and returned to the house they had continued to share in Rofathane, coming back to help with the preparations for the forty-day ceremony.
I watched how alike the two sisters had grown over the years. Throwing their heads back and clapping their hands when they laughed and they laughed easily, the same phrases, in the same lilting voice, the same gesture, wiping sweat from their foreheads with the insides of their wrists.
Their father had been counsellor to the chief of a neighbouring chieftaincy. Jeneba and Sallay were the daughters of the same wife, belly sisters. Jeneba the eldest by about thirteen years. Their mother died before Sallay was old enough to remember her. And though she was wet-nursed by another of the wives, it was Jeneba who cared for her sister. Carried her everywhere, played with her, plaited her hair, bathed her and slept with her at night — like a favourite doll. Nobody called Sallay by her name, instead they called her Baby Jeneba. Jeneba’s marriage to my father was a dynastic one, agreed by the families. When the time came for Jeneba to leave for her new home, Sallay ran after the hammock bearing her sister away. She ran and ran until somebody picked her up and carried her back. She would not stay, so they tethered her to a tree by one leg like a goat. The child sat down and refused to eat or drink, or speak. Nobody had ever witnessed such stubbornness in one so young. Some wondered if she wasn’t one of those children who could exist on nothing but air. Whatever, if she took no food or water she would become a spirit one way or the other. The trouble was that every time they untied her, she ran away down the path and into the trees to find her sister.
So they sent her to live with Jeneba. Such arrangements were not uncommon. When Sallay reached marriage age, the two sisters wept anew at the thought of being separated. So another solution was found. Sallay became my father’s wife.
While I searched for ways to forestall my fate, my daughter seized her own destiny. She had chosen her husband: a young man from a family of bakers, softly spoken as a result of a cleft in his palate. Towards me he kept his eyes lowered, but when he looked at Kadie his gaze burned with such intensity I half expected to see my daughter swallowed up in flames. He brought her sculptures made from dough. One was fashioned as a pair of doves, another a cat curled up asleep. As his wooing grew more determined so the sculptures became more elaborate: a deer standing between the trees, a man and a woman sitting side