Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [19]
Haidera. Haidera. Haider Spider. Haidera Kontorfili.
Haidera Kontorfili said he could turn the sun into the moon and the moon into the sun. He could tell whether an unbroken egg would hatch a rooster or a hen. Every living creature knew his name. Whoever did not obey the rules of Annabi would one day be put to death. Unmarried women were Black Dogs. One day fire would come like rain and plague, would strike the unbeliever down.
He told us we should not fear the Europeans or pay the potho’s taxes. And of all the things Haidera said, it was this last one that brought the trouble down upon his head.
We are to go to the prayer meeting. The preparations take two days. Mutton roasted. Yams baked. Whole fishes fried. Ginger pulped for ginger beer. Black-eyed beans skinned, mashed, wrapped in banana leaves for oleleh. Sleeping mats, country cloths, canvas tents. A stove to boil water for coffee. The men haul sacks of rice and cut down great hands of bananas and plantains. I chase after high-stepping hens, push them into a basket, from where they protest in indignant tones.
The town is no more than the headquarters of one of the country’s poorest provinces. And yet I fear becoming lost. Noise pounding my ears, dust dry in my throat, air too hot to breathe. Looking this way and that. We huddle together, suddenly diminished. The streets are wide as rivers. The houses have rooms built one on top of the other. I watch as people walk up outsidestaircases. They look as though they are stepping through the air. Walking on air. Why doesn’t someone build a staircase all the way up to the sky, I ask myself? To find out what is really there.
We cross the street at the roundabout: cracked concrete covered in yellow grass gone to seed. Two men heave a handcart, one pushing, one pulling. Their naked muscles glisten and flash with sweat. A man with a monkey on a chain. It lurches forward, startling me — a tiny, wizened, old man’s face and a baby’s cry. Hawkers selling food. A man standing next to a barrel of water. A tin cup dangles on a string. My father calls him over. ‘Sssss!’ We wait while the man lugs the heavy barrel over. It takes a little time. My father drinks first and then the rest of us, one after the other.
In the main square a hundred families jostle for space. Men in inky-black robes stroll through the crowds or stand in pairs around the perimeter. One of them greets my father and directs us. We settle, light fires, spread mats, erect screens and awnings. The sun is high, our shadows like small pools of black wax. In the shade of the canopies we rest, we wait.
I am sure I am too excited to sleep. I put my head in my mother’s lap, breathe. I feel her stroking my hair, her fingers rustle when she touches the rim of my ear. Dream fragments float past behind my eyes. A bird woven out of string. Crows that shift shape into blackclad men. Staircases leading from cloud to cloud. And I sink through air as heavy as water, as if weighed down by sodden wings.
I am woken by a sound like a buffalo’s roar. All around me people are standing, getting to their feet. I scramble up, crane my neck. Nothing. I am too close to the ground.
‘Haidera! Haidera!’
Now I see him. Standing high up above the crowd on a platform: a man whose robes billow around him, even more full than those of my father, but plain, entirely unadorned. He wears a white turban. Around his neck an amulet swings on a leather cord.
‘Allahu Akbar!’
‘Akbar Allahu!’
People bow down, snatch handfuls of sand from the ground, rubbing their hands one over the other as though in water. Ahead I see my father wipe his hands across his face. He bows, kneels. My mother next to me, she does the same. I keep my eyes fixed upon my father as we pray under Haidera’s command: standing, bending, kneeling, stretching our necks like herons to touch our foreheads to the ground. The movements, the pattern, the rhythm, they are just like a dance.
Now we stop praying and listen to Haidera, whose voice is as thin and high as a bird’s, and like a bird’s it floats across the air so that even the