Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [58]
That first night Osman rejected me I was wretched. I cannot tell you. Later, alone, I wept bitterly. Osman was ashamed though he would not show it. The second night I slipped out of my gown and lay naked beside him, I tried to reassure him, stroking him gently. But Osman covered his own shortcomings by blaming me, I was too forward he said. No modesty. On the third and final night, when it happened again he pointed his finger at me and called me a witch.
The next night Osman spent with Mabinty. I sat on my bed. I did not sleep. I stared into the blackness, I tried to see my future but I could see nothing. In the morning my eyes were sore from lack of sleep, I breathed deeply and walked out to the cooking place to prepare breakfast for Kadie. At the door I stopped and stared. There was Mabinty, sitting on a stool, weeping and loudly blowing her nose on her head-tie.
* * *
I lost face and regained my life, but for many years I could not see it. Nor could I see who had helped me do it.
Osman thought it was his idea to end the marriage contract and so there was no question of reclaiming the bride gift. At first I was humiliated, thrown back to my family by my husband like a no-good fish tossed back into the water.
That was the way things were for us in those days. You, I hear you talking to your friends. You have so much, but you don’t even know you are alive. We had to find the answers for ourselves, to fashion them out of the thin air and seize them from the sky.
I felt I had no choice but to remain Osman’s third wife, to be treated by him in any way he pleased. I was a stupid girl who jumped into her marriage with her eyes closed. Afterwards I could see nowhere to run. It took somebody else to open a door and push me out. And that person was Ngadie, once-beautiful Ngadie. In her own fate she could see the future that was waiting for me.
Later I learned to be grateful to her and to love her for what she had done. But in the beginning I was short-sighted, I could not see beyond my own shame to the great vista that stretched out in front of me.
After many years news came that Ngadie had died. For the first time I travelled back to the place where I had been a wife. Shadows still covered the house, nothing had changed. Balia greeted me with some warmth — to my surprise Mabinty, too. Mabinty now with rings of flesh around her waist and her neck. I held no ill-feeling towards her. As for Osman, who rose from his chair on the verandah to meet me, brushing pumpkin seed shells from the front of his shirt and spitting the bits out the corner of his mouth, I felt nothing. I greeted him cordially and the smile he gave me in return was surely all that remained of his blurred beauty.
Ngadie was already in the ground, fleetingly mourned — a woman insufficiently loved as a daughter, unloved as a wife.
But loved as a mother. And loved still. There were Ngadie’s son and daughter. Ngadie in the male. Ngadie in the female. The him and the her, the he and the she of the woman I had known. I watched them. So alike. The only difference was the way the lines of their features had been drawn, finely traced in one, the other roughly sketched in charcoal.
On a stool at the back of the house I sat next to Ngadie’s daughter, untied the corner of my lappa and took out a kola nut. I unwrapped the leaves, broke off a cotyledon — she accepted it in silence, turning the piece over and over in her hand. I glanced up at her, saw the teardrops gathering along the edge of her lower eyelid, waiting to fall.
‘Hush ya,’ was all I said. I laid my hand on her forearm.
I bit the kola nut and helped myself to a sip of water from the ladle at my side. The water tasted fresh and pure — it was the effect of the kola: even brackish water tasted as though it had sprung from a mountainside.
‘My mother once said something about you, about how you loved kola. She said that to you even bitter kola was sweet.’
The words made no sense. One time