Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [145]
The bodies lay in the dirt. The rest of us shuffled through the checkpoint. On the other side a man in front of me told us that he knew her, the dead woman. Her accuser was a neighbour of his who had once lost a lover to her. Naasu. That was the murdered woman’s name. He had only just realised who she was, now he was certain of it.
Soldiers loaded Naasu’s body, and that of her husband, into the back of a lorry to be thrown over the bridge and into the bay. Much later, when it was dark, the people who lived among the rocks next to the water went out in their canoes, collected the corpses and buried them. The killers, the innocent, and those whose beauty offended, side by side in the same grave.
This was the story I told Adrian Lockheart. By the end he was leaning forward, his eyes glistening, the picture of professional caring. Not that he didn’t care. He just wanted me to be in no doubt about it. But I could read Adrian Lockheart’s mind. I could see the thoughts running behind his eyes. Beneath the still waters of sympathy was a great, heaving tide of relief. His mind was on his wife and his child in the place where he had left them, safe on another continent.
And this is what he was thinking. He was thanking God, thanking him over and over in all his merciful glory, that this would never be them. That he would never be me.
That was the last time I saw him. He wrote a report for my employers. In his opinion I was suffering from post-traumatic stress as a result of the war, the most notable manifestation of which appeared to be the habit of decorating my room in a manner that, while a little bizarre, was completely harmless. There was no reason I should not continue my work as a teacher.
The great Kuru Masaba, of course, the most powerful of them all. Creator of the earth, the skies, the rivers, the forests, the seas and every living creature. Kumba, the rain god who brings the rice harvest. Yaro, Anayaroli, whom they call Mammy Wata, goddess of wealth. Aronson, the hunter. Kassila, the sea god. Those are the only names that survive. The others are lost for ever. Don’t you see? We have forgotten them.
Sometimes I still dream of them, like I used to. Adrian Lockheart taught me how to stop them from taking over my mind, to imagine a row of boxes and to put the things that disturbed me inside and close the lid. But they won’t be contained.
Always it is Kassila who breaks out first and frees the others. Once I dreamed I saw them, strolling between the stars, surrounded by flashes of lightning and the roll of thunder. Cowrie shells and glass beads decorated their hair, gold rings and bracelets adorned their arms, they were wrapped in garments woven from rainbows and embroidered with sunbeams. They had their backs to us, they were walking away, headed to some other dimension.
Free from us, free from our foolishness, our fickleness and petty betrayals. They were arm in arm, laughing out loud. Without a care in the universe.
EPILOGUE
18
Abie, 2003
The Women’s Gardens II
London, November 2003.
During the last days of my stay in Rofathane I decided I wanted to bathe in the river. The morning was cool, a steaming bucket stood outside my door. It was pleasant enough to stand in my palm frond enclosure, and to pour hot water over myself, but that day I wanted the sensation of water gliding over my body. I tied a lappa around myself, searched for the nub of black soap. It was barely light and I passed not a soul on the path through the old coffee groves and the women’s gardens, down to the river.
Slippery mud oozed between my toes, as I waded out into the water. A little further out, where a bed of weeds like tattered ribbons rippled in the current, the river bed turned to sand. Into the deeper water now I released the knot of