Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [92]
Yes, the doctor told me. The operation was reversible. Not easy, but possible. Even after that there was a chance I still might not bear children. I ignored the last part of what he said. I felt the hope begin to crystallise again. I was sure after all this time I was to be rewarded with some good luck. After all, hadn’t I seen the sea?
But a moment later, I felt all the same newly formed crystals of hope melt, drain away out through the ends of my fingers and the soles of my feet. He told me the cost. Six pounds!? I had never even seen so much money.
I returned home on a different bus. All the time I barely lifted my head to look at the landscape. I set my mind to thinking. I would write to my brothers. Perhaps they would help. I only had to work out how to ask them for the money in a way that meant they couldn’t refuse me.
These thoughts were still chasing each other in my mind as I walked the last of the way home. Too late, I realised I had forgotten to think up something to tell Khalil about my trip to see my sister.
The house was quiet. There was my son standing outside my neighbour’s house. I knelt down and stretched out my arms to him, and he ran to me, throwing himself against me. I lifted him up and held him to my chest, pushed my nose into his hair and breathed his good smell. I walked up the path.
The house was empty. No cooking smells. No children. Something strange. Where were Khalil and Zainab? I turned around and around on the same spot. Okurgba laughed as if this was a game. I set him down. I thought many things. Somebody ill? One of the children? I never imagined what was to come. I opened the door of my room. Everything was exactly as I had left it. One by one, I pushed open the doors of the other rooms. Khalil’s. Zainab’s. Empty. Just walls and a floor. Sleeping mats rolled up in the corner. Pegs bare. All gone.
They had left me.
The neighbour informed me of the manner of their departure. They had left my three sons with her. She relished my discomfort and the petty power her knowledge gave her, that much I could see. Watching me with gleaming eyes and a curved smile like that cat of hers. I half expected her to lick her lips as she spun the story out to see my reaction. I emptied my face, simply to deny her the satisfaction. But it came down to this: they left no forwarding address; hand in hand, they ran away like children.
When she had finished she pretended to comfort me, inviting me to sleep in her home, but I brushed her aside. I had only one question. When? I asked her. When did they go?
And she told me. Later on the same morning, the very morning that I had left for the city. At almost exactly the time I first laid eyes on the sea.
II
Mariama, 1970
Other Side of the Road
In the village where we lived people didn’t always greet each other in the usual way. Often they just said: ‘Baba?’ Like that, with a question in the word. A pair of doves somehow escaped from their locked cage and flew away, and people smiled knowingly: ‘Baba.’ If the bucket had been left at the bottom of the well, they said the same: ‘Baba.’ Or if a young girl had been made love to by some man whose name she refused to call, the other men nudged each other while the women spat into the dust. ‘Baba!’
When I was perhaps ten I asked Ya Sallay — who by then had become my mother: ‘Who is Baba?’ And she told me that she had asked the very same thing soon after she had married my father and come here herself. She was told there was once a man who went by that name. Babatunde was an unreliable type of person, the kind who would borrow something and not bring it back. This man owed money to everybody in the village, and was never ready to repay it. So his creditors decided to hold a meeting and sent a message telling him to attend. But Baba somehow got