Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [116]
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.
Once when I was a teenager I accompanied an aunt on an errand to another village. We passed a woman bathing alone in a stream. She acknowledged the two of us by inclining her head.
‘Good morning, Ma,’ I returned.
My aunt shook her head. ‘Good morning, Pa,’ she corrected.
I had heard of women like her, though I had never seen one. They were women who had become members of the men’s society, not like the silly girls who banged the tortoiseshell drum — they were being punished. No, rather these were women who had already married and borne their children, women of age and wisdom, who had earned a certain kind of respect and whom the society honoured with their title. As we continued I turned my head again and again to look again at the woman, standing there up to her waist, alone in the water.
The memory of this came to me as I sat with my mother, Ya Isatta and several of my aunts, among them the one with whom I had walked from one village to the other. They were visiting to congratulate me on the success of Kholifa Turay Cloth Merchants, though in a remarkably short time the talk had turned to my continued unmarried state. My elders had turned out in force to urge me to take a husband. The store was a success, they were pleased at that, naturally. But now I would need a man to help me. I could not see why they should say this. They were telling me to give away what I had worked so hard to build up. Besides, I was happy.
Once, in the hollow of a dead tree behind our home, a wildcat gave birth to her kittens. I used to climb a nearby tree and watch them for many hours, playing outside the den while their mother caught rats and mice to bring back to them. After a few months they began to accompany her on hunting trips in the early morning. In those times she taught them to creep up on a partridge until they were inches away, to avoid the cobra’s lair and to steal the eggs from the nests of birds. The seasons passed, the tree crumbled into soft powder, an aardvark dug a warren beneath it. At night sometimes, rarely, I would catch a glimpse of her and her tiny dark-skinned baby scratching at the termite hills. Another time a she-leopard and her two cubs were mobbed by monkeys on the banks of the stream; the mother fought her assailants tooth and claw, bringing down four or more and lacerating a dozen others before she retreated.
My aunts thought that I was unnatural not to want a man in my life, but to me it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
I said nothing, I watched my aunts’ faces, I nodded and dreamed and at some point my mind travelled back to the day I went walking with my aunt and saw a mambore for the very first time.
From the day a woman joined the men’s society she would be called Pa, give up her creel and learn to use a line and hook, exchange the stool at the back of the house for the hammock at the front, swap her snuff for a pipe. And she relinquished her place in the society of women.
The mambores. The women who lived as men.
My aunts’ voices droned on like flies in the summer. I stopped listening and dreamed. I saw the house that was sometimes round and sometimes square. I saw the fat, happy children. I saw the empty