Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [59]
Some days later I went home. I never returned to that place. The years slid past. I watched Kadie grow alongside the next generation of coffee trees, and I grew too. In this way slowly I found myself again. Memories of Ngadie, of her daughter’s words, fell out of my mind. Not for any reason. Only because they seemed to be words spoken at a time of grief, wrongly remembered. I did not believe they held any meaning for me.
One day, I found myself passing down a street in a part of the town I had never been to before. The houses had two storeys, the streets were narrow. Two women were leaning out of the shuttered windows above me, drawing their washing in from the line that hung from one window to the next. Wisps of conversation fluttered down. The women were careless, not worrying if they were overheard.
‘His tinder was wet.’
I heard the laughter that followed, coarse laughter. Shocking laughter. I walked on, the phrase wound itself after me, bringing back those awful nights — those last nights I shared with my husband when I had failed to arouse him. I remembered the state to which he had reduced me — so nervous I burned the rice.
Ngadie had offered to cook.
Three nights in a row.
His tinder was wet.
To her even bitter kola is sweet.
You see, if I hadn’t become lost, I never would have walked down that street. Nor heard a woman talk about her husband’s performance in that vulgar way. That started me thinking. People believe that bitter kola has the power to wet a man’s tinder. Did you know that? I thought about Ngadie, of how she had offered to cook for me on those three nights and I pondered the meaning of what she had said to her daughter.
Three nights in a row.
Maybe there was a reason things happened the way they did with Osman on those three nights.
In my seat in the poda poda I sat with my basket of shopping on my lap, crushed by other people’s bodies, all the time turning the thoughts around and around in my head, the way I examine a pawpaw before I buy it in the market.
To her even bitter kola is sweet.
And I saw that it had been Ngadie’s doing.
I laughed out loud: a laugh like the one I had just heard. I laughed until the tears poured down my cheeks. At first the people around me wondered what was my problem. But they saw my joy was real, I was no crazy person. My laughter even became infectious, people began to giggle and before long the whole bus was laughing without even knowing why.
And through the people’s laughter I heard another sound that came from far away: the strains of a simple melody. It grew louder and louder, filling my head, pushing out all the bad feelings, the anger, the resentment that had been locked inside for so many years. I became quiet, I listened. Though I had never heard it before, there and then I recognised it. And it was beautiful. The sound of Ngadie laughing in her grave.
7
Mariama, 1942
Kassila the Sea God
High on the hill, up above Old Railway Line on the road that winds down to the city. That’s where I saw her. Walking with her hand on her hip. Sashaying. Like a woman who has just seen her lover coming down the street. Her felt hat was pushed back over her head, swinging by the cord around her neck. Her socks crumpled around her ankles. She placed one foot directly in front of the other. Like so. The hips swung, the hat bounced along behind her. It was her. I knew it at once. The jolt it gave me was like an electric shock, a flicker of heat across my skin that brought me out in a momentary sweat.
I tried to turn around to see her properly, but I was caught between the women on either side of me in the taxi. I felt a twinge in my neck. The pain pulled me back, as if to say — what foolishness is this?
Of course I knew it wasn’t her. I never really thought it. Just the fleeting glimpse of a silhouette that reminded me of her. And as the taxi