Eddie Signwriter Read online

  At night, the movement of his body turning in sleep wrung the sheets around him. By day he sat in a deck chair on the balcony in his pajamas, the intention of his thoughts twitching in his fingers. And then after a week he could no longer keep his memory at bay, and the contents of it spilled out, jumbled up and unjoined, but all of it somewhere in there, and every bit as he had feared. It was like light streaming, blindingly white, leveling the world into a single dimension, still, like an unending plane of flooded water.

  The doctor signaled that soon it would be time to bring the teacher home. Not long afterwards he was returned to the town, though it was a further two months before he resumed his duties. During his convalescence an informal routine regulated his waking hours—the visits of the doctor in the morning, a walk before lunch, his afternoon sleep, and then the evening visits, as the prominent people of the town took it in turns to call upon him. Although there was nothing to constrain him during the time of his recovery, he had no desire to disturb the new order into which he had been returned. His life grew back slowly. The gaps filled in.

  There were times still that he asked after Nana Oforiwaa, that he asked after the children. It didn’t matter that they were gone, it seemed; that Nana Oforiwaa was dead; that the boy had been sent away; and that the girl had been removed to Kumasi to complete her education, where she had distant family that would take her. Still he wanted them to visit, and did not understand why they could not. Were there recriminations, was there anger?—he could understand if there were, that he could. But surely nothing that couldn’t be worked out by speaking it all through? Yes, they had all gone a little far in their different ways, even himself. Himself as much as any of them. But the truth was that nobody had meant any harm, none of them, even if they’d been forgetful of themselves, thoughtless, unwise—all those things perhaps, but not to do harm.

  He tried to explain—to the old woman, to the doctor—but didn’t seem to be able to make himself understood. And so for a period he stopped talking at all. He saw no point. He refused to answer questions. Refused even to communicate his own needs—food, water, medication, help in getting up—but instead would point or gesture, and when visitors came around he’d pretend to be asleep, and would listen to them whispering to each other at the foot of his bed.

  A full week of silence gave him time to gather his thoughts, and one evening, as the doctor was showing visitors out of his room, he decided to try again. He waited for the latch to click shut, and then he opened his eyes and called to the doctor, whispering as loud as he could.

  The doctor turned and looked at the patient. The doctor’s hand was still flat on the face of the closed door. These were the first words he’d heard in a while from the teacher, and it made him smile—the teacher, wrapped up in his blankets, calling out to him like a guilty child.

  “Hello,” the teacher whispered.

  “Hello,” the doctor replied, and came to sit on the teacher’s bed.

  The teacher tried to sit up, but only managed to lift himself a little up the pillow.

  “I thought you’d forgotten how to talk,” the doctor said.

  The teacher snorted.

  He said, “Now I am ready to talk. Before I was not ready.”

  “What is it?” the doctor said, picking up a medicine bottle beside the teacher’s bed and reading the label.

  “Kwaku, we need to get the boy. You need to get him here. This is important. Listen—”

  The doctor gave the bottle a small shake, then put it down. “John,” he said, and then he began to explain, as he had many times before, and would many times again. How the boy was gone. How they had to send him away. That they did it on the exact day of Nana Oforiwaa’s death. They didn’t even call his parents, but came to find him in the afternoon, and they took him from the dining room of the school where meals were still being served, and they put him in a taxi and told it to take him back to wherever he came from, with a message to his mother to come pick up his belongings within a week.

  The teacher would listen. He would nod gravely, and seem to understand, but the very next visit he would ask again after the boy. The doctor tried to be patient. He needed to keep the teacher settled, and isolated too until the teacher could better fend for himself. The questions that the teacher asked, with more and more lucidity, were dangerous. They told too much.

  “John, enough,” the doctor replied eventually, allowing his frustration to get the better of him, “For your own good. The boy is gone. Do you understand? I need you to understand.”

  “Kwaku—” the teacher began to plead, but the doctor would not let him continue.

  “John,” he said, and then he hesitated, since they had not talked directly before of what had happened on the day of the storm—“for the memory of Nana Oforiwaa.”

  As soon as the words were out he saw their effect in the expression on the teacher’s face—of slight. As if the words had wronged him. Though a moment later it was gone. And whatever it was inside the teacher that had jumped up and grasped the knowledge fell back again, and all that remained on his face was a look of tiredness, and a few moments later the teacher closed his eyes, and his head went to the side of the pillow.

  Perhaps it was to soften the shock of it, the doctor reflected on what he had seen. How much better it would be if the teacher could just realize one day that something had always been true, without having to encounter it for a first time. But the time was nearing that the doctor would have to start getting the knowledge through, in the way that the teacher now absorbed knowledge—through repetition.

  And so, when he felt the time was right, the doctor raised the issue again, as the two of them sat together outside the teacher’s house in the late afternoon. Cups of sweet tea were on the table between them, steaming, and a soft breeze moved through the canopy in the trees surrounding the plot. The teacher had lost a lot of weight, and the shirt in which he had been dressed was now too big for him. His neck was too thin for the stiff collar, and his hands, sticking out of the ends of his cuffs, sat dumbly on the tabletop, as if they didn’t quite belong to him.

  The doctor had enquired after the teacher’s health, and the teacher had said how much better he felt, and that the humidity seemed to have departed in the last few days. He never liked the humidity, he said. Neither he, nor Nana Oforiwaa.

  The doctor saw this as an opportunity. He turned towards his patient. “John,” he said, “you know what has happened. You know Nana Oforiwaa is dead.”

  The teacher looked at the doctor. His neck was like a stalk in a pot.

  “I know that,” he said quietly.

  “I’m so sorry,” his friend replied, and put his hand on the teacher’s arm.

  “You don’t have to treat me like a fool, Kwaku,” the teacher said.

  “I know,” the doctor replied.

  Then they fell into silence and the teacher looked away.

  “Let me take you in,” the doctor said at last, and he helped the teacher up. The teacher was leaning on his arm, and when they got to the door the doctor turned to the teacher, and saw that he was crying.

  “But how, Kwaku?” he said.

  “It was an accident,” the doctor replied. He spoke firmly and clearly. “It was an accident—she went out into the rain looking for her niece and she slipped and hit her head and she drowned. That is what happened, John.”

  “And the children?”

  “Celeste is fine. She is in Kumasi with family. One day we shall bring her to see you.”

  “Yes …” the teacher said, “… and Kwasi?”

  “He has been sent away.”

  The teacher asked why.

  “He’s gone,” the doctor said firmly, and the teacher stopped, and though he did not ask, his face asked, and the doctor felt he had to say.

  “People feel that the boy is to blame.”

  “I thought you said it was an accident,” the teacher said quietly.

  “You yourself know what he has done.”

/>   “But that’s not how it was,” the teacher said, and was about to speak again when the doctor stopped him.

  “John,” the doctor said, “I don’t want you to tell me anything.”

  “Kwaku, please.”

  The doctor shook his head.

  “Why?”

  The doctor’s voice was lowered when he answered. He spoke quickly, his face close to the teacher’s, and there was a firmness in his voice that he’d never used before, neither now nor in thirty years of friendship.

  “All I want for you to do is know your own interest. Do you understand? Know your interest,” he said, holding the teacher by the shoulder, and the two men looked each other in the eye until the teacher’s eyes agreed.

  And that, in the end, is what the teacher did. So much so that at times he himself even felt outrage at how the children had behaved and what their behavior had led to. And why not? Were they not responsible for what had in fact happened? Was the drowning of a woman not the outcome of the train of events that their running away had set off?

  Of his own experience of those events, the teacher felt at first nothing, and then later only their shape, but not their immediacy. His nerves were lined with wool. Later, over the weeks and then months and years that followed, they would seep back through the cracks of dreaming, or burst through in a memory and leave him reeling. Still it could rage a war inside him. But now at least there was a territory he was defending, an existence that did not include grief. There was something to be won, if he chose, and was able.

  Day by day he grew stronger. Slowly he learned the place of everything. In that, the place of himself. From the passing glance. From deference in those who could not now meet him as an equal. From the eyes downturned, the voice lowered in the street. From the visits, the long silent visits, in which neither courtesy nor human warmth was passed, as if what people sought was to bind the presence of his body among them, and no more.

  At times he could sense and draw some satisfaction from the order his life had taken on, if he thought not much further than the bounds of his house, the fence that surrounded it, as far as the border of the school and the forest beyond. He taught. He administered. Though even as he began to feel his command return, he remained mindful of his weakness. Mindful that if he stayed whole it was still by the flimsiest of means, as if his life were held together with glue and cotton. But with time he grew steadier, more confident. He began again to trust in the shape of what he saw around him, that things would be tomorrow where he’d left them today.

  In the evenings he would sit on the balcony of his house after dinner, above him the night sky, the stars (he’d think to himself) surrounded by the same darkness that surrounded him, joining everything seamlessly. Nothing between me and infinity, he’d think, though it was not his insignificance that moved him, but the fact of being able to survive it, to face it with calm. Just a soft, small thing, nothing compared with the fire of stars, nothing compared with even a small rock thrown with a little force. But none of that would interfere with him. Despite all the power around him, he would live out his life exactly. And at length he thought: Who are the strong men, really? And he knew it was not the men one is taught to love, nor the men one is taught to follow, nor even the rich, but the ones who keep what is theirs, however small. And that this was what he had to do: keep what was his.

  It calmed him to sit out there in the undependable, fragile pool of light cast by his kerosene lamp, which he’d reach forward to cup his hands around. Not to steady the flame, but to feel the warmth in his palms. Then the light would spill through his fingers, shine red through the soft tissue between the bones, and he’d move his fingers to see the machinery in his hands, and notice their minute shaking, like the wings of insects. People survive everything, he told himself, millions survive every day. And there was no wonder in it anymore: how a person survives with the nerves so shot through and the flesh so riddled with living. How people cut out their own hearts, not to repent or be good, but simply for a little peace, and live twenty years still, or only ten or five, tending a garden, and being kind to dogs and children.

  Except also he knew that the heart is never truly out. It regenerates. That somehow inside it starts beating again, growing itself from the ragged arteries, and beating, with all its wiliness and trickery, but also—surprisingly—with generosity, kindness, with a conscience. And if anything had really surprised him it was this: how compassion could still exist, even alongside the instinct for self-preservation. Compassion—that was hardwired so deeply that he would have said to the boy, if only he could have chosen the manner and the time, “I did not forget you. I did not leave you.” That if he ever chose a thing, it was not to choose, with Nana Oforiwaa dead a few weeks, and the boy long since sent away from the ridge, the girl sent to the convent school in Kumasi, and nothing to confront the world with but his feeble body weakly beating. To obliterate the possibility of choice, like the faithful who believe without choice in their unknowable gods. That he too submitted, not as a man, but as a child submits to the only language it knows, who has no choice but to find the world self-evident and natural and knowable through words. Bear this grief, the people said, show us it is true, make us believe, and we promise that will always be how it was. Which is what he’d done, as he would have done whatever they said, and did.

  KWASI EDWARD MICHAEL DANKWA

  OF ALL HIS PARENTS’ CHILDREN, Kwasi Edward Michael Dankwa was the only one delivered in a hospital. When he was born he came out of his mother’s womb backwards. The doctors said that he would be the last.

  Leah was born the next year, but already it was too late. “This will be the naughty one,” his mother said as his father handed him to her in his blanket.

  His father chose the name Edward, after the doctor who saved his mother’s life. His mother chose Michael, after Saint Michael, protector of the holy church, the children of Israel, and patron saint of sick people, mariners, and grocers.

  Born on a Sunday, he was Kwasi.

  Kwasi Edward Michael Dankwa, the naughty one—every one of his mother’s children had to be something. A mistimed somersault in utero sealed his fate.

  His father, however, hardly distinguished among his five offspring. Without particularly knowing them his father looked on his children with benevolent, distant affection. They were his people.

  Every Sunday morning, while his father read his newspaper on a chair in the sun, the children would line up before him, scrubbed, polished, and ready for church. “Ah, very good!” his father would exclaim, putting down his paper, and he’d look the lot of them over, like the cloth merchants inspecting bales in Makola, before clapping his hands together, raising himself from his chair and leading them, their mother at his side, the two blocks down the road to the King Jesus Is Our Saviour Church of the Pentecost.

  He is, in the beginning, his first memories of home:

  Four concrete walls, a red zinc roof, wood fence, cats in the front yard, chickens in the back.

  A home porous to the world. Full of neighbours, siblings, an ever-extending family that appeared and disappeared with little warning.

  Where in the afternoon the butterflies jumped through the leaves of the banana trees, and the adults drank tea, and later it grew less hot, and the flies began to settle and jump away, settle and jump away, while children were passed from adult to adult.

  For a week each year his grandfather would visit from the village. Once he was a fisherman but now he was old. By day he slept, waking only in midafternoon, when he’d take his meal, and walk the yard in a string vest, ironed trousers and belt, his pectoral muscles parting either side of his rib cage like deflated balloons.

  When his grandfather smiled, his head opened with happiness along the wide hinge of his mouth. His tongue was like a cross-section of cured pink ham. His laugh—hí–hí–hí–hí–hí—was a long stutter of happiness. And when he sneezed, his mother said, his grandfather’s friends in the next village would send their sons
to bless him.

  At the bottom of the hill, at the end of his road, was an open field, embroidered with paths marked by the feet of people walking the same way over the dry season. As a child he played football there, with a ball made of rolled-up plastic bags. When the ball unraveled the game had to stop until they could bind it again.

  Beyond the field, beyond the Fish Pond Drop, was the end of Nii Boi Town, from which suburbs he did not know stretched out to the sea, where the children of the fishermen caught fish on long lines threaded with baited hooks, attached at one end to a length of driftwood.

  He remembers seeing it. How first the strongest boy would take the line beyond the breaking waves. Then the smaller children would reel it in, fish hanging from it like disks of tin which, left in the sun, would slap the sand softly until they died.

  What place was that?

  Nii Boi Town.

  But not Nii Boi Town. Somewhere more complete, more capable of containing the world. A place without an outside, somewhere disallowing the existence of everything else.

  Throw up a handful of stones and you catch only the largest stone.

  Step outside and it becomes a mythology. Try to step back in and it disappears.

  His father, born in 1942, was fifteen when the British left Ghana. His father’s father was a gardener. His father’s mother was a cook. His father, however, was the child of Independence.

  Independence—that gave his father an education, a profession and a wife.

  His parents met as trainee teachers in Cape Coast. His father, arriving with two pairs of long trousers in his suitcase, and two shirts, was not much more than a boy. Photographs show unassuming looks, an earnest smile, a pair of wire-framed glasses fastened to his skull.

  He cannot remember a time he did not associate his mother with the smell of soap. His mother is both louder and larger than his father. She has hips strong and wide as a horse. As a young woman her girlish enthusiasm, touched already with officiousness, awoke in his father an attitude of wry indulgence that soon turned to tenderness.