Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [47]
Tiny Ya Memso is asking far too many questions. The words jostle and barge each other on their way out of her mouth. She moves around the room, flapping her hands like a pea-hen trying to get off the ground.
Brought back, we were, as though we had been accidentally taken in the first place. Goods discovered in the bottom of the basket at home. Shoved there by a gluttonous toddler or a batty grandmother who keeps pinching things. So sorry, a mistake. Here you are. Won’t happen again. Sorry, sorry.
And by now we call him the Cement Man, because we have worked out a thing or two. And so have all the other children.
They sing a song. The last line goes like this:
Bo, hide them, hide them all, O Chief,
For he is coming, the Wife Thief!
Shame bubbles up and pricks at the underneath of my skin. And the tune hangs around like the smell of smoked fish. At night I can’t sleep, I hit my head to try to knock the melody out.
Patterned cloths of green and blue, waxed and beaten. The palms of her hands are stained green and blue, and the edges of her cuticles, too. Blue-green crescent moons. Now she is a business-woman, with a business making gara cloths. Ya Memso, as excited as a child, has already hidden hers in the bottom of the trunk where she hoards things for the day the sabu comes to ask about her daughters. My own is lying a thousand miles away on the other side of the room on my mother’s lap.
I watch her and wish she would just go away.
In time my wish came true. This time she headed to the South. We saw her again, from time to time. Always when my father was away. She never did pay him back. She was in debt to him for the rest of her life, like the men whose lives he owned, unable to marry again until such a time as she repaid her bride price.
As for me, I no longer wanted her for my mother. I could not bear to be reminded of that awful time, I just wanted everything back the way it was before. Ya Memso treated us well. She even started a marriage box for me, with the cloth my mother brought. And gradually she added things she made herself and things she bought.
In the beginning Yaya talked about her a lot, wanting to know whether I remembered this or that. Like the way she could fold her tongue in two. The way he could and I couldn’t. Once he asked me to sing a song, a lullaby. I told him he was far too old for such things. Next he wanted us to go out to the main road and find a lorry to take us south. It was foolishness.
People change as time goes by. As you change yourself. I wish she were here, so I could tell her the things I understand now that I didn’t then. You look a bit like her, around the eyes. Maybe the shape of the face. Yes, an oval face — your father’s. People sometimes thought she came from somewhere else.
For a long time I would not let myself think about her. The years passed. A question sat itself down on the edges of my mind. Just beyond my subconscious. Like a patient pet waiting to be noticed and allowed inside. And the question was this. Why did she refuse to swear? Why did she turn away and refuse to swear her innocence?
Well, did they or didn’t they? The Tenth Wife and the Cement Man?
‘Guilty,’ cried the elders one, two and three. Obvious to anyone but a fool. But a time came when that wasn’t enough for me. She insisted my father had threatened her. I thought about it for a long time.
She could have worn the clothes of the victim. She could have pleaded and begged. But she refused. When the moment came she saw her choices, she could not betray herself, seeing what her life would become. She told the elders she was faithful. But when the people from his village brought the sassa forward and demanded she vow on her own life that there was nothing, in that moment she saw the starkness of her choice.
In the game of warn an opponent faced with losing must sometimes sacrifice in order to win.
She didn’t shrink from it, the way Soulay told us. Rather she refused it. Turned her back on one life, turned the corner to a new one.