Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [83]
After each child my husband left me alone for a while. When in time he ventured near me I told him I was too tired. At that he offered to help me with my chores. I insisted I could manage. Whoever heard of such a thing? Gradually he left me alone more often, but never quite enough.
The next child came early and nearly killed me. The doctor at the clinic smelled of tree sap, of indigo dye and starched cloths. He asked me how many children I had. ‘Six,’ I replied, counting them all: the living and the dead and this one.
They put a needle in my arm and sent me to sleep. In my dreams I laughed and danced to flute music as they pulled the dead baby from inside me. I woke up and wished I could sleep to dream those dreams again. I never asked whether it was a girl or a boy. After two days I went home. The months passed and I did not conceive again. I soaked bitter roots and cooked our rice in the water, my husband and I dipping our fingers into the pot to eat together. The months came and went. My breasts and my belly remained flat. At my husband’s urging I went back to the clinic, to see if the doctor had other medicine, stronger than ours.
I remember how I stood and waited in front of the wooden desk while the nurse searched through the drawers for my records. Ah, yes, she said presently, pulling a brown envelope from among many others. She bent her head to read what was written there.
‘Tubal ligation.’ I didn’t even know what the words meant.
‘Your tubes have been tied. So you won’t have any more children. It says here you have six already.’ She pointed at the words on the paper. Six! The way she said it sounded like an accusation.
While I listened to flute music in my dreams, while they pulled the dead baby out. This is what they had done to me.
Oh, I know what you would have done in my place. You would have talked about rights and consent: small words with big meanings. But I did not know how to think that way. I did not even insist she call the doctor for me. I asked no questions. I nodded as though I knew this already, accepting her words. I turned around and went home. Who was I to argue? In my mind I thought the doctor, whose qualifications hung on the wall behind polished glass, must have known better than me.
I told myself I still had three children. I had Okurgba, my youngest. And when I told my husband, no more children, I was thinking that perhaps then he might leave me alone.
And so my life continued. It was not the life I had chosen for myself, not the life that should have been mine. But I lived it anyway.
One day I saw the woman who had my life. She passed me, followed by a servant girl carrying a stack of differently coloured cloths. She did not recognise me. Why should she? She didn’t know I existed or that I had once been betrothed to her husband. I followed her to the tailor’s shop where I watched the owner jump up from her seat to greet her. I stood in the shadows of the entrance, next to a pile of offcuts. I bowed my head and pretended to search among the scraps. But I need not have worried, for nobody came to serve me.
I watched how they attended to her, flattering, praising her taste, holding samples of embroidery under her chin. She ordered maybe six or seven gowns, I never heard the cost discussed once.
Above me a shelf held stacks of coloured threads. Music from a plastic radio buzzed like a swarm of bees around my head. The sound of the treadles drummed in my ears. I wanted to knock the radio and spools from the shelf, upturn the Singer sewing machines, tear up the paper patterns. I wanted to run away as far as I could. But I did none of these things.
Instead I watched this woman through the half-light of the tailor’s shop. This woman living the life I should have lived. I knew I was no beauty. But I was prettier than this one. Maybe you wouldn’t believe it to look at me now? But then I possessed a complexion