Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [132]
Later I realised it had been haunting me, stalking me all that day: the steel-grey light — I would forever see the world in shadowy twilight. A doctor was called, a quack who gave me headache pills. Then a proper doctor who had studied in China. And he told me I had had a stroke.
I still went to the store. Adama pushed me in a wheelbarrow. The roads were too rutted to allow a wheelchair to pass. Kadie wanted me to stay home and rest. But I missed the smell, the feel of the place. ‘When did you ever see a mother sleep while her child was crying?’ I told her. There was always work to do. On days when Kadie went to visit our other shops, I worked the till with my one good hand while Adama climbed the stepladder to bring down the cloths.
My sister Hawa came to see me. Looked at me with sad eyes and shook her head. ‘Nothing happens for nothing,’ she pronounced with hidden pleasure. I gave a wave of my good hand, dismissing her. There’s a certain kind of person who can always find an explanation for things that happen. My sister was one of those. Something bad befalls somebody they don’t like and they say that person must have brought it upon themselves. When precisely the same fate comes their own way, this time it’s a spirit bringing bad luck. A person they envy prospers only because that person made a bargain with a powerful spirit. But when they lose their own business, is it because they didn’t work hard enough or because they ate all the proceeds and failed to reinvest them? Of course not. It is a moriman’s curse, purchased by a rival!
The doctor had explained to me exactly how it happened. A blood clot stopped up one of my arteries so the blood couldn’t reach my brain. Like a dam in a river. Even I could understand that. He wrapped a rubber tube around my arm and took my blood pressure, tested my pee for diabetes, wrote a prescription and ordered me to cook with less palm oil.
I took advantage of my state not to offer Hawa anything that might encourage her to stay. She only ever visited when there was something she needed. This time, though, she seemed to want to stay for ever. I peered into her shadowed face.
When had this secret war between us begun? I wondered.
Five months later, though, her words came back to me. Terrible things began to happen to all of us. It was as though the end of the world had come. The earth crumbled, the sky rained down, people fled for their lives. Nothing happens for nothing. I wanted to straighten my crooked body, I wanted to stamp the earth, raise both my fists and scream at the skies.
What in the world had we all done to deserve such a fate?
When I think back now, we kept the knowledge a secret, even from ourselves.
Lorries travelling roads in the South were held up by gunmen who hauled the driver down from his cab, thieved the goods from the back of his vehicle and carried them away into the forest. They set fire to the lorry, sometimes roping the driver to the wheel. Other times slicing off his ears and stealing his shoes before leaving him to walk home. A band of miners were marched away from their workplace and not sighted until months later when they appeared on the other side of the country. Their kidnappers never said who they were or what it was they wanted. There were rumours of tattooed strangers who arrived in towns and moved among the people, members of a secret clan, whose mark was worn by the women under one breast and by the men on the buttock. They looked just like you or I, it was said, some spoke in languages nobody could understand. They disappeared as quickly as they came. There were stories of young men and women who slipped away to join them. The youths’ families claimed their children had been stolen and scoured the countryside. Then there were other stories, ones that made your eyes stretch. Of beings that could become invisible, that could fly, leap over houses, that gathered to dine on the hearts of their victims from whence they derived their supernatural powers. There came a time when everybody had heard these stories, some had even claimed to have