Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [5]
So there was my mother, plastering her house. Alone and painting, no need for anyone else. This is the way she was. When the job was complete she laid the block of wood on the steps of the house and set off to the birth attendant’s hut. By the time she reached the end of the village she was clicking fast. Both hands. It was early morning. The women were sweeping their compounds and the front of their houses. Dust devils danced across the ground. They looked up when they heard the sound of her fingers. Mine was an auspicious birth: my father was already a big man. Every woman who was already a mother laid down her broom and walked. Their fingers picked up her rhythm, until ten, fifteen, twenty women clicked their fingers as one.
I wanted to come to this world, to the place where things happen, I didn’t want to stay where I was. I always had big eyes for this world and I was born with them open. My mother never feared for me. There are some children — you can tell the ones — born with a hunger for life. I was in such a hurry my mother didn’t even have time to drink the infusion of lemon tree leaves. I was born, to the chorus of their fingers, like the sound of crickets announcing the rain.
Afterwards the midwife prepared to bind my mother’s stomach. But my mother kept on clicking her fingers. The midwife pressed ten fingertips into her stomach. Shook her head. Click. Click. My mother asked for some of the tea, and they poured the cool liquid into her mouth. She arched her back. Click. Push. Click.
My brother slid into this world: small, still and silent. At first, they thought he’d gone with the leaves. My mother cradled him and called for him to come back. That was when she took my name away from me and gave it to him. If only he would come back, she promised, he would be the firstborn. She traced his features with her fingers. The baby opened his eyes, black eyes. He stared back at her. And he decided he wanted her. That was how it all began. This thing between him and me. Because his first deed in this world was to take from me what was mine.
We were twins. People thought we were lucky. They used to touch our heads as we passed by. Tap, tap. Stall holders called out to us: ‘Eh, bari!’ Twin! And they offered us delicacies to taste and gave our mother their best price without the bother of haggling. Women bending over their cooking pots lifted the lids and called us over. One month after our birth, our mother made an offering at the house of the twins: chicken eggs and palm wine, foods the spirits like to eat.
When I had three teeth my brother still sucked with his gums. My mother gave me a wooden spoon and a bowl of rice pap. I followed her wherever she went, holding my spoon. One day she sat on her stool and I leaned against her knees. A duck passed us with tiny ducklings trailing in her wake, like porpoises following a fishing boat. Wherever the mother duck walked her babies followed, attached to her by an invisible thread. She stroked my hair: ‘So who is my duckling?’ she asked. Me, I would have cried, if I had known how to speak. She bent down and caught a baby duck in cupped hands; she let me stroke the downy feathers before she released it. The duckling raced, wings flapping, towards its mother. I laughed. But when I saw my brother on my mother’s lap, still suckling with his old man’s gums, stroking her breast and squeezing milk from her nipple, I felt jealous. I wasn’t so pleased to be her baby duck any more.
The women who had witnessed my birth called me Nurr too — because I was the true firstborn, because they had already left the chamber when my brother arrived and didn’t hear my mother make him her promise. They thought maybe I would return. Because that’s what the first child often does. They had forgotten that my mother had children before, when she was married to another man. That happened in another place. They could only see what was before their own eyes. So they called me Nurr, a thing to be discarded, slung on the heap. That’s how people thought then. The