Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [50]
My mother had said to me: ‘When it is over you stand up and you walk.’ I promised myself I would do that. I pushed a cloth hard between my thighs. My legs trembled. I gasped for air. The pain rose in waves, crashing into me. I concentrated only on one thing — walking away from that place. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other.
Twice we are made women. For the first time when we are initiated. And the second time when we go to our husband’s room. With Osman there was tenderness, yes. And pleasure, too. I wanted to go to him. I longed for it.
Osman came and went a great deal leaving me with plenty of time to myself. I was waiting to conceive. Not so easy with a husband who is never there. Balia and Ngadie, my co-wives, had their own children. Balia’s children had left home, except the youngest who was already able to help her with the cooking. Ngadie had two. A girl and a boy, who were so alike I could barely tell one from the other, they flitted about silent as shadows.
I began to dream of my own children who were waiting to be born. Of course I must have sons to take care of me when I was old, but most of all I longed for a daughter — a girl whose face I might look in to see my own secrets. I began to choose names, then worried it might bring bad luck. I picked leaves from the gbono gbono tree and stirred them into my cooking so that, with God’s blessing, I might fall pregnant the next time Osman was home.
There was less to do in this place than in Rofathane. There was a well for water and only a small vegetable plot. Osman earned money working as a road inspector. The colonials were busy building roads and railways up and down the country. To the big mines and down to the coast where ships waited to carry the loads away. Osman talked a lot about his job and with pride. The new roads were built of tar and as smooth as the floors in a house. People liked to spread their laundry out upon them to dry, as well as their rice and grain. Osman told me how he confiscated their washing, threatening to burn it, and swept the grain away.
Balia and Ngadie’s daily routine did not alter to include me. I had no chores. Well, I didn’t mind. Wasn’t I the lucky one? I’d heard the tales of junior wives who found themselves pounding rice late into the night, minding other wives’ small children, working long hours in the vegetable plot. With so little to do I spent my time on petty vanities. When I grew bored of those I began to look around me, searching for ways to distract myself.
A wasp with black and yellow-striped forelegs building a nest held me captive for a long time as I watched her rolling tiny balls of mud from the edge of a puddle and flying away with them to build a nest in the branches of a tree. Another day I noticed the funnelshaped spiders’ webs that blossomed in the grass every morning, sparkling with dew and lit by the sun. On another afternoon it was the fluttering black crest and blue feathers of a plantain eater — hopping up and down next to his nest, calling for his mate to come back. ‘Kooroo kooroo ko ko ko ko.’
Gradually I began to notice other things.
Early in the morning I gazed out of my window. There was Ngadie walking towards the house from the direction of the grain store. The next morning I saw her again, and the next. I wondered what she could be doing there so early. The way she walked, with a great deliberateness, placing one foot in front of the other, like a person walking on the ridge between fields of crops. She didn’t notice me watching her.
The next morning I woke before the light. I hurried down and hid behind the grain store. After a short time Ngadie passed by, eyes darting from side to side to see