Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [91]
How I wished I was still that girl, to be able to make bad things better so easily. I stood in the place where I stepped off the bus for a long time, summoning the courage to move. Dust and people and terrible noises swirled around me, lashing me to the ground like ropes. I wanted to hold my breath until it all went away.
The first people I asked directions answered in a language I couldn’t understand. By chance the fifth person I turned to happened to be a townsmate. What luck! He carried my box on his shoulder while he showed me to the place I needed. ‘Watch yourself, sister!’ he told me as he set down my box.
Five days I was in that city. Five days that seemed like five months! It was already late afternoon when I arrived. I sat on my box and waited as the light dwindled. Two men playing a game of chequers on an upended crate threw glances at me in between games. In time one of them came over and asked me my business. I explained to him. I pointed at the building. He turned to his friend, who shook his head. Together they made me understand the address I had been given was the wrong one.
What was I to do? I had no relatives in the city. In those days there were no such things as hotels, and even if there were I could never have afforded to stay in such a place. I was stranded. The men seemed to understand this. One of them beckoned me to follow him. I suppose I should not have trusted a stranger so easily, but what choice had I? Besides, in those days it was different. People helped each other. Not like now. I followed him through the streets, long straight ones that soon became narrow and short. Here the houses were small and wooden, built side by side with no room in between. On the steps a woman braided another’s hair by the light of an oil lamp, a man sat in front of a python skin for sale, a thin puppy licked the dirty water from the puddles. We passed piles of stinking refuse and gutters foaming with filth. Next we were in an open space with a big cotton tree, children playing with a straw ball in the dusk. And presently we reached a small house where a woman sat next to a candle on a saucer, with a child sucking at her breast. From the way they greeted each other I did not imagine the man and she were very closely related to each other.
In exchange for a sum the woman gave me a place on the floor to sleep, yams and pepper soup with skimpy shreds of meat to eat. Later I lay listening to the sound of a man and a woman arguing in the street. My nostrils were filled with the stench of the pit latrine outside my window. I lit a small stick of incense. I dreamed and woke and for a moment imagined I was somewhere else.
In the morning the landlady taught me some words to use to find my way around. But the words were not enough. I went from one place to the next, grinding the stones of the streets into dust beneath my heels, while the sweat poured off me. Each day I exchanged a little more of my money for the woman’s food and a place to sleep, subtracting what I had spent from the little I had left.
All the time I felt the hope in my heart growing smaller and smaller, like the first piece of ice I held in my hand and watched melt away, until the last sliver disappeared and the enchantment was gone.
Still I persisted. You see, I had come to that city for a reason. I had to find the doctor, the one who had tied my tubes. To ask him if he might undo what he had done, so that I could bear children again. It was the only thing I could think of to stop Zainab from replacing me.
Maybe you think I was stupid to go to a city full of strangers, in search of a man whose face I couldn’t even remember. Only his hands and the certificates on his wall and the smell that clung to his clothes. But as it happened, on the fourth day I passed a building and I smelled that same odour. Something like starch and indigo dye and wood resin all rolled into one. I followed