Eddie Signwriter Read online

  His parents were married a week after graduation. A government loan helped them to buy a plot of land outside the city, beyond the furthest taxi drop in Nii Boi Town, which in those days was barely established.

  Their road was marked by painted white stones laid out through the bush, the plot that they bought by numbered poles in the earth. But by the time he could remember, there were houses as far as the eye could see, and the water supply was already insufficient to reach the outermost houses.

  His parents had been working barely two years when the world for which their education had prepared them changed suddenly. The first his father knew of it was when he came down for breakfast in the morning. Instead of the regular programmes Colonel Kotoka started speaking on the radio. It was six a.m. The president had been deposed while visiting Asia. Flagstaff House was besieged. Those who remained loyal to the president were overpowered, surrendered, or were killed.

  Though the whole of Accra was rejoicing, his father felt the beginning of something inside him go cold. It was the end of the political kingdom.

  It was also then that his mother began to turn to religion, and throughout his childhood Nkrumah and God were mysteriously but inextricably linked.

  They continued to celebrate Independence Day, 6 March, with the family pilgrimage to Boti Falls. The seven of them wedged into a taxi as they made the journey up to Koforidua. Along the road the tall white trees grew straight and smooth as marble, and in amongst the groves of palm on the sides of the road the palm-wine tappers appeared, blowing coals in the scars carved from the tapped trunks.

  The taxi driver would find a spot in the parking lot in the forest at the top of the falls among the other cars and buses. Slowly the family would make its way down. The children held on to the grasses and strained the roots of the small plants to steady themselves on the steep path. Then they would reach the bottom, and stand in the great hollow made by the mountains, to the applause of the water and the spray. His head would be filled with the thick, furtive smell of the wet ground.

  His mother, directing activities, would stand with her sandals in her hands, her skirts rolled up, her toes in the wet sand, curled from the cold, surveying the appropriateness of everything. Her Bible would be tucked under her armpit, the bookmark sticking out like a snake’s tongue.

  He’d see her smiling, sun streaming in shafts over the falls behind her head—smiling at the world, smiling at him—her teeth, lovely and straight except at the very front, where they seemed to burst from her gums in chaotic astonishment like half-dressed students.

  Then the family would sit down and eat, among all the other families, and his father would begin to tell the story he told every year. Of the petitioners shot down on the street in 1948, where now they’ve built Black Star Square. How Kwame Nkrumah went to prison. How even in jail Nkrumah won the elections, and one midnight in 1957 stood up, it was the moment of Independence, and he said how Ghana would be forever free, he was crying—Lord, how good it was, how proud he was, how full of dignity.

  And then his mother would read from the Bible, always from the end of Exodus: “Then the Lord said unto Moses,” she said, “‘Now shalt thou see what he will do to Pharaoh: for with a strong hand shall he let them go, and with a strong hand shall he drive them out of his land.’”

  His parents worked hard at survival. His mother spent the greater part of the first years of her marriage making, and looking after, her children, and occasionally teaching other people’s if a substitute teacher was required in any of the local schools. His father rose to the rank of head of department at the school to which he had first been assigned as a trainee. But the money that fed and clothed the family came from the private lessons his father gave to the children of the politicians and diplomats, to prepare them for their secondary schools in England or America.

  Having put the children to sleep, his mother would wait for his father late into the evening. She would sit with his father as he ate and ask about the homes he had visited in the airport suburbs.

  Shaking his head, his father would tell her, “If only they were as stupid as they are rich, but many of them are not.”

  Already his father was making his own plans to leave.

  He tries to remember it, quick, before it’s gone:

  The women selling kenke at the last taxi drop, mounds of it in enamel dishes, like a tortoise’s back.

  The storm clouds blooming like carnations.

  The sweet, clear milk of a green coconut after church, the northern boys selling it from brown wheelbarrows on the other side of the road, pangas balanced on their heads.

  He remembers the insects floating in the field behind the house where he played with his friends and his siblings.

  He tries to remember it all.

  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.

  After the coup of 1982 his father left to work in Botswana as a school inspector and designer of secondary-education mathematics syllabi.

  Mathematics, said his father, is true, with or without him. Two and two are always four, no matter who is in power.

  A year into his contract his father flew the family to visit him in Gaborone for the summer holidays. That was the last he would see of Ghana for the next nine years—the coastal plains dissolving in the humidity of an approaching evening storm.

  One night, he lay asleep with his brothers and sisters on the mattresses laid out on the floor of the living room in his father’s rented accommodation in Gaborone. Outside the insects were crackling like fat on a pan. In the next room, his father asked his mother how she was coping with five children, alone in Accra.

  If his father could look after him, his mother said, she could handle the other four. He, she said, was the naughty one. But so that he wouldn’t go lonely, it was decided that his junior sister would stay too.

  This he learned only much later.

  The new arrangements were revealed at the airport, on the day of the family’s departure, when two bags too few emerged from the boot of the car. He saw his mother and three siblings off from behind the metal detectors. He and Leah wept in the back of the car as his father drove back to their new home.

  Their tears disturbed his father. His father had never had to deal with the prospect of their unhappiness before.

  In bed he would stay awake into the early hours of the morning, listening through the wall to the radio of the old woman next door, who forgot to turn it off when she went to sleep, or didn’t hear it herself in her deafness.

  Later he learned to sleep through it too, letting the deep frequencies of the male announcers’ voices mix with the sound of the distant highway and become the sound of a sea breaking far away.

  When finally the old lady died and her radio was taken away, he couldn’t sleep for two weeks, the silence was so loud.

  In his first months in Gaborone his father showered him and his sister with gifts. His father took them to the lion park at Saint Clair, and to see the vultures at Manyelanong. His father pampered them. He read to them, he bought them a great book from the nursing college, full of pictures of the inside of the human body.

  He watched them playing together with puzzled concern.

  One weekend they went to a safari park, where they sat at a trestle table in the sun, barely protected by the thorn trees, while his father read aloud from the guidebook about how to recognize different kinds of antelope. He and Leah listened quietly as their father’s voice grew softer and softer, sapped by the heat and the sun and dust.

  Then his father stopped and they all sat looking at the tall grass that could equally be hiding something camouflaged, as emptiness for miles. His father had forgotten to bring anything to drink. His father took a deep breath and that was all. He knew that his father was alone and felt sorry for his helplessness.

  At night his father would come into the children’s room after they’d pu
t themselves to bed. His father would sit beside him and his sister on their bed, and touch their heads with his fingers, or their arms if they were outside the sheets, as they lay looking up at him. It was as if his father were assuring himself of their reality, touching the weight of his responsibility.

  “How many degrees in a triangle?” his father would quiz them, or “What is the capital of Burkina Faso?”

  His father’s fingers smelled of his pipe, of sweet tobacco, and his clothes had a smell that was all of his own—smoke, the mothballs with which he protected his suits but which got into everything else, and something that smelled always of wool, and his own body, like salt and dry meat.

  “But Daddy,” Leah told him, “you already asked us that last night.”

  “Ha, but I’m asking you again,” his father said.

  “Ouagadougou,” he and his sister answered the third time his father asked, the two of them exploding simultaneously with the answer, pronouncing it oo-ga-dou-gou—they’d gone to the encyclopedia at school and looked it up.

  “Wa-ga-dou-gou,” his father said, correcting them, and made them repeat it after him.

  “Ah, very good,” his father said, clapping his hands as once he had on Accra Sundays, making them laugh.

  And so they forgave him.

  He became happy for his father’s sake, then forgot why he was happy. He went to a new school, began a new life.

  Emotionally his father came closer only slowly, ultimately incompletely. There remained something of an abstractness in his father’s love, an overconcern for his happiness that he sensed concealed a fear of really knowing him.

  There was a great deal that they all felt was true, and beautiful, and always there when they were together, but for which there were no words—mutual recognition, different kinds of gratitude, gentleness, it seemed, on his father’s part.

  They were tied together by deep silences. After Nii Boi Town, Gaborone was a place of empty space and time, and it nurtured things that could not be said.

  His father’s job in Botswana changed the family fortunes. Savings, in pula and pounds, were enough for his father’s own household and his mother’s in Accra.

  The house in Nii Boi Town was reroofed—he saw it years later on his first visit home. His mother had bought a cast-iron gate. She had painted above the verandah, in letters visible to all the neigbourhood, “My father’s house has many rooms.” Looking up at it he felt the first stirrings of his rebellion against religion.

  Though half a continent away, his mother was not entirely absent. Nor was Ghana. So that none of them forgot their roots, she sent them parcels of dried fish and gari that would arrive regularly at the central post office. Although the parcels were intended as treats, he came to resent these rationed offerings from home, which his father shared among them on special occasions with great show and fanfare. He didn’t want his food dry, smelling of envelopes and sealing wax and plastic. He wanted to walk down to the Nii Boi Drop and buy it himself from the ladies at the bottom of the hill beside the reeds, eat it still steaming in the hand.

  But he had been the naughty one and somebody had had to stay behind.

  Years later he’d dream of Gaborone.

  Of opening the gate to the house, the gate turning in its hinge like bone grating in its socket.

  In his dream he’d step into the house, cool as water, deep with shadows. Light would shine through the coloured square panes of the door set in the yellow pine, varnished like molasses.

  His father would be standing in the hall. He’d sense that his father had been there a while. He’d greet his father and his father would nod in acknowledgement.

  Often his father called him “my friend,” but it was a reflection of goodwill between them, not intimacy.

  “Why not bring Mama and the rest of the family to come to live with us here?” he asked his father a few weeks before his mother’s last visit, attempting to intervene in the great silence that had befallen his home.

  His father did not reply, looked straight through him.

  His father, the creature of the house.

  He’d think: Would it have always been like that?

  Or was it Gaborone? And the sense that he had—for all of them—of not being anywhere?

  Of there being just them and the land and the sky, the soil from which nothing of his had ever grown; the overwhelming presence of space, that sends you into the world knowing that even when you are most happy, even with the woman you love most in the world, even when you are in that woman, you are still alone?

  In his dream he’d step out onto the stoep of his father’s house.

  The sound of the road would be like a river, flowing and flowing.

  The moon would be so high up. Beneath it, a thin, angled plane of clouds would move across, tracing the roof of the sky, filling the world with a sense of its emptiness.

  That great hollow place hypnotized him with its dimensions, drained the spirit, numbed the senses. It was something that could not possibly be owned, he thought—at least it had never been his, and it made him wonder what ever had.

  He slept in Leah’s room on the night before his mother’s last return. They stayed up late, talking. What had their mother said to her in her last letter? Would their oldest brother have a beard? What would their mother bring?

  They drew and coloured in a “Welcome Mama” banner that they hung across the entrance hall.

  He doesn’t know why he was afraid of that night, of what real thing. There was a wind, lifting the curtains up from the window—it was cold, especially early in the morning—and the bobble at the end of the curtain cord tapped against the windowpane.

  (But he knew wind. He knew cold.)

  It didn’t matter that the windows were closed (in the early hours of the morning the two of them got up and fastened each one in the house)—the air was coming in somewhere. The stronger gusts he could hear in the rafters, like the sound of a sheet shaken out. Maybe that was what frightened him—not so much that the wind was there, but that he couldn’t keep it out.

  At different times during the night he knew that he was still awake.

  Then asleep.

  The crickets started and it was six a.m. He saw the light of the sun rising over the veld, thin and cold, and come like a knife sideways into the room. He could feel the cold of the morning in his nostrils.

  He wanted his sister to be awake, to share it with her. He wound the knots of the blanket tighter around his feet, pulled it up to his ears, and watched from the envelope of warmth, the regular movement of her breathing, her shoulder rising and falling. She faced into the wall—that was how they both slept.

  And then he fell asleep again and somehow nobody got him up in time. When he woke up the room was full of a strong yellow light from the thin curtain, which made a transparent screen and trapped the heat of the morning. He heard his sister and got up on his elbow, his body still moist with warmth in the stuffy room. He heard the hadeda’s hard cry pitting the sky (he realized he’d been hearing it for some time in his sleep). Then the blaf-blaf of the city dogs. Then he lifted the curtain and saw Leah outside the window, running toward the house in thick woolen stockings under a summer cotton dress—“Papa, Papa, they’re here!”—and shortly after that the door to the room opened, and there was his mother’s shape in the doorway, and he got up and ran into her arms, and his father stood behind her, smiling as he had not for many months, saying, “Ah, very good!”

  That night he sat with his siblings watching the snowy programmes on South African television. His father called him into the study, where his mother sat on the windowsill with her hands folded in her lap. His father went to sit next to her at his chair. Both of them wore the expression of people with news to deliver.

  Then his parents told him that when his mother left he would be going back with the rest of the family to Ghana.

  “Why, Papa?” he asked.

  “To finish your schooling there,” his mother said.

/>   “And to teach you to become a Ghanaian,” said his father.

  HIS PARENTS SENT HIM to a boarding school not far from the village in which his father had been born. Accra was an hour away. Nii Boi Town an hour more.

  On his last night in Gaborone his father said to him, “When you go home it will be for all of us. That is our place.”

  They were sitting on the bed in the room he shared with his sister. Then his father left the room to let him finish his packing.

  He began to cry.

  Partly he cried out of sadness, to be leaving the house, and his father and sister. Partly out of gratitude to his father, for giving him the thing his father wanted so much for himself but could not have—to go home, when his father could not.

  “You will be so happy,” his father told him as they said goodbye.

  “I will, Papa,” he’d replied.

  But he wasn’t.

  His first few weeks in his mother’s house, before school began, were an unexpected shock. He grew fat from the kenke at Fish Pond Drop. But most of his childhood friends had grown up and left. They’d built houses on the football pitch. His grandfather was dead. The electricity never lasted for more than a few hours. He was bored. He missed his sister and father, he missed the life they’d had, even out there in the desert where the emptiness never stops threatening and safety feels temporary even if you are with people.

  When they sent him to school the water made him sick for a week. He did not speak the language well, he was used to his privacy, he was used to quiet, and a feeling soon came over him, of disaffection and despair that softened his will and made the world lose its shape, and as a consequence many things happened at that time that should not have happened, and would not have happened except for that.

  This was in the town of Akwapakrom, on the Akwapim Ridge, in the mist and the thin, crisp air, and the weather that can hide behind mountains and appear from anywhere, and is always unpredictable and forever changing. The missionaries chose Akwapim when they came to Ghana because it was too cold for the mosquitoes that killed them down on the coast. And though they’re now gone, the ridge is filled with churches and schools, and the old buildings they left behind, falling to ruin slowly.