Changer's Daughter Page 8

  Aduke considers this as she continues putting the groceries away, folding up bags and wrappings to be used at another time. Oya does have a point—at least about languages. In Yoruban, past and present are not as sharply delineated as they are in English or the other European languages she has learned. Literally, time is what you do with it, not what you say it is: “He put on a hat” rather than “He was wearing a hat.”

  She wonders where the past had been before the English had arrived to explain it to them. Had it existed at all, a thing unseen but solidly real—like the Himalayan Mountains or the Continental Divide—or was it more like etiquette and table manners, things belonging to each culture and real only within that culture?

  Aduke frowns, shaking her head to banish such useless meditations.

  “I have been wondering,” she says, automatically starting preparations for dinner now that groceries have arrived, “if I should move back to Lagos to live with Taiwo.”

  “Why?” Oya asks. “I thought you didn’t like Lagos. I thought you wanted to be here with your mother and sisters and their children.”

  “That was when,” Aduke takes a deep breath, “I was raising a baby of my own. I didn’t want my son to grow up with only his mother and father for family.”

  “And so, what has changed? Don’t you want a child anymore?”

  “I... don’t know.” Aduke says, knowing full well that she does want a baby, very much, but faithfully articulating the confusion that her aróso self has been raising within her.

  Oya looks sympathetic. “Are you afraid of being hurt again? That you are indeed doomed to bear a child born to die? The sacrifices did not seem to indicate that such was your fate.”

  That would be the easy answer. Say “Yes, that is what I fear.” Let warm, comforting, maternal Oya talk that fear away—because it is a real one.

  Yet, that answer would not be completely honest, and now, in the rare moment when the only competition for her attention is the faint drone of Kehinde’s recorder from behind the closed door, Aduke finds she wants to speak her thoughts.

  “I was thinking that perhaps I am wasting my talents being a mother. Taiwo could use me at his side. I could be a great help to him.”

  “True.” Oya looks at her sagely, even while adjusting the sleeping infant on her back and shifting coarse meal through a bit of screen to remove the grit and gravel. “You could. Are you unhappy with the role of mother?”

  “I am not a mother!” Aduke says desperately. “My son is dead. I am just a...”

  “Mother. These little ones,” Oya shrugs toward the baby on her back, “don’t care whose womb bore them. They care about having a warm back to sleep against and arms to rock them and, yes, voices to scold them when they are out of line.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Hm.” Oya chops up some peppers. “How many wives did your father have?”

  Despite herself, Aduke is shocked. Hasn’t Oya been an intimate of the household long enough to know that her father had been a superior person, so fully modern that he had believed in education for both men and women?

  “One,” she answers stiffly. “My father was a government official, not some bush chief.”

  “Sometimes,” Oya says, ignoring Aduke’s pique, “it seems to me that everyone’s father has been a government official. Nigeria has certainly had enough governments these last fifty years. That may explain it.”

  “What?” Aduke is confused.

  “Why you don’t understand that being a mother is more than wombing a child. You had only one mother yourself.”

  Aduke snorts, but Oya continues as if she hasn’t heard.

  “Listen to me, Aduke. If you stay here with your sisters, you will be a mother to all of these little ones, and when your next child is born he will have many mothers and many brothers and sisters. Isn’t that why you came here when he was born?”

  Aduke nods, realizing that beneath all her westernized talk of “support systems” and “extended family units” what she had really wanted—wanted so much that she had agreed to live apart from a beloved husband—was many mothers and many brothers and sisters for her little boy.

  “A lot of good it did him,” she mutters.

  “Nonsense,” Oya says briskly. “Now you are being obstinate. Your son had many to watch over him during his short life. If you had been in Lagos, he would have had you and maybe some nurses. That’s all.

  “As I see it, the worst thing about modern education is that it stops many good women from doing what they wish—just as the old ways stopped women from being other than wives and mothers. There is room for both ways. If you wish to raise babies, do so! Anyone can have a job. Only a woman can have a child.”

  “But can’t any woman bear a child?” Aduke asks timidly.

  “Can any?” Oya looks suddenly sad, then wields her chopper with even greater force. “Not everyone is so lucky. Fewer still are fortunate enough to have the gift of being good mothers.”

  “But I can read and write and program a computer,” Aduke says, perversely playing devil’s advocate against herself. “I can speak English as well as an Englishwoman and some French as well. I know geography and mathematics and science.”

  “So? Is there any reason a mother cannot do these things?”

  “But should I do what any breeding animal can do when I can do so much more? Don’t I owe the nation use of my education?”

  Oya shakes her head. “You are thinking like a silly girl, not like a woman who has borne a child and suffered his loss. Your education means that you have more to give your children—or to your nieces and nephews if you persist in splitting the family up into little parts. With your example, your sons and daughters will learn to read and write. They will learn hygiene and nutrition, and, when they are older, to understand why the jobs that men like Kehinde and Taiwo do are as important as driving a lorry or hunting in the bush.”

  Aduke laughs, knowing full well how glamorous a child would think either of the latter occupations.

  “I shall take your advice under full consideration,” she promises. She was about to say more when the door bursts open and her sister Yetunde runs in, a horde of weeping or shouting children surging in with her like foam on a wave.

  “Lost! Lost! We are lost!” Yetunde wails dramatically. Before she had given her attention to marketing and raising children, Yetunde had been famed as a singer and performer. Clearly those days are filling her lungs now.

  “What are you saying?” Aduke says, automatically gathering two of the weeping toddlers onto her knees and patting them quiet. “How are we lost?”

  “The owner of this building,” Yetunde continues, as dramatically as before, “he is speaking to our mother even now, but I have heard enough. News of what the babalawo said has come to his ears. He claims to have prayed over the matter at length but in the end he says that he can do no less out of thoughtfulness to his tenants, and so we are lost!”

  Oya looks at Yetunde sharply but her expression is free of the rising panic that Aduke feels claiming her.

  “Speak clearly, you silly woman! What has the landlord said?”

  “He says it is not for him alone, but that other tenants have come to him. That they will leave if he does not do it.”

  Oya raises her hand as if to slap Yetunde and the other woman hastens to clarify:

  “He does not believe that the evil the babalawo has predicted will follow our family has been averted by the sacrifices. Neither, apparently, do our neighbors. Despite eating our food and drinking our beer and wine, they have threatened to move if we are not evicted.”

  “Oh.” Aduke can’t think of anything more intelligent to say.

  “And no one else will take us in!” her sister continues. “They won’t dare, for then their tenants will protest. We will sleep on the streets as the minions of the King of the World flutter through the darkness and breathe fever into our nostrils!”

  From the back of the apartment, the nursery door flings o
pen, hitting the wall with such force that the children fall silent as one.

  “Can’t anyone give me even a few hours of peace in which to write?” Kehinde shouts angrily. “What is going on here?”

  Aduke replies with a calm that amazes even herself.

  “It seems, brother, that we have been evicted.”

  The children begin to cry again. Bending to comfort one, Aduke takes a peculiar satisfaction in seeing that her educated and sophisticated brother-in-law looks like little more than a child himself.

  5

  It seems as though I had not drunk from the cup of wisdom but had fallen into it.

  —Soren Kierkegaard

  Sobering up Dakar Agadez proves to be more of a job than Eddie and Anson had bargained for. The morning after they carried him from the bar, he awakens with such a hangover that Anson carefully measures out just enough palm wine to take the edge off Dakar’s headache.

  Later, when he and Eddie leave to talk with one of the street children Anson had paid to find news of his missing friends, Dakar locates the rest of the palm wine and drinks it. After that, they are careful not to leave any alcoholic beverages in the hotel room.

  They thought they had taken all of Dakar’s money, too, but apparently he had stashed a few naira. When Eddie and Anson return from tracking down the useless lead they find Dakar out cold, reefed about with beer bottles. After that, Eddie stays with him and Anson goes out alone.

  Dakar is no great companion. At first he is nearly unconscious. When the hangover claims him, he huddles on one of the beds, his face to the wall, whining whenever even the slightest amount of light is shown. Eddie humors him, curtaining off the bed with a sheet and reading local newspapers near the window where a small amount of light penetrates the closed Venetian blinds.

  What he reads is no great comfort. Apparently, some government official has declared a news blackout regarding the smallpox epidemic, but the evidence of its effects is there in the length of the obituary columns, notices of shop closings, and advertisements for patent medicines. However, disturbing as the news is, it is preferable to Dakar’s company, especially when, after two days, he quits sulking and starts fuming.

  Eyes ruddy as old coals gleam demoniacally against the deep blue-black of his skin when Dakar emerges from behind the makeshift curtain. His huge fists are clenched: massive bludgeons of meat and bone anchored at the end of arms muscled not from working out in a gym but from swinging a hammer in war or in peace. Naked except for a pair of khaki shorts badly in need of a wash and mend, Dakar looks like what many have called him, a god forged of black iron and polished with oil.

  Folding his paper and leaning back in his chair, Eddie is glad that he and Anson had anticipated this reluctant resurrection and had taken steps to prevent Dakar’s departure.

  Dakar glowers at Eddie. “I’m going out.”

  “If you say so,” Eddie says, a small teasing note lurking beneath his level tone.

  “I am, and you’re not going to stop me, little man.”

  Eddie is hardly a “little man” by most estimations. Although not strikingly tall, his natural build is thick and solid, almost blocky. Since the Yoruba are also a solidly built people on the whole, he had not needed to trade his preferred shape when designing his disguise. Moreover, Eddie has been a warrior from his earliest years—for so long that it takes more than taunts to fire his blood.

  “Go then,” Eddie says to the glowering god, and leans back in his chair to watch the fun.

  Somewhat unsteady on his feet, Dakar goes over to the door. He wiggles the knob to see if it is locked. It is.

  “Give me the key, or I shall twist the lock out of the door.”

  Eddie digs the key from his pocket and tosses it to Dakar.

  “That would be a pity,” he says. “Good locks aren’t easy to buy these days.”

  With some effort, as if he is still seeing double, Dakar fits the key into the lock and turns it. There is a click as the mechanism releases, but when Dakar tries to pull the door open it won’t budge.

  Sweat streaming down his face—the temperature is in the nineties although the dry season humidity is barely above fifty percent—Dakar pulls again. The door remains not only closed but immovable. Dakar tugs, the cables of muscle in his back standing out in high relief. He applies enough force to lift a bull out of a mud wallow, to raise a truck off a flat tire, but the door does not move.

  He stomps around to face Eddie and the Summerian-born athanor shrugs.

  “Maybe it swelled shut in the heat?”

  Dakar actually considers this for a moment before realizing that he is being twitted. Then he smashes his fist against the door panel. The force of that blow should have shattered even the solid, well-seasoned hardwood. Instead, there is a dull thud followed by the snapping of teeth meeting as the force of the blow communicates itself up Dakar’s arm with sufficient energy to force his head back.

  Angry now, Dakar tries to pull his hand back for another strike, only to find that his fist remains stuck to the door.

  “Africa has its ‘Nansi stories, doesn’t it?” Eddie asks conversationally. “Some of the same ones that found their way to America as the tales of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. I think Caribbean folklore has them, too, or am I mistaken?”

  His fist still adhering to the door panel, Dakar turns his red gaze on Eddie.

  “Spider.”

  “Yep. He didn’t want you leaving before he had a chance to talk with you, so he sealed the door with webbing and left a bit to hold you.”

  “How dare he!”

  “He’s only thinking about your well-being,” Eddie replies. “You were in pretty bad shape when we met up with you.”

  For a moment, the anger fades and is replaced by sorrow.

  “I found death in the streets and my shrine covered with prayers I couldn’t answer.”

  “So you got drunk.”

  Eddie’s evident scorn reawakens Dakar’s rage. With a tremendous effort, he wrenches his hand free from the door.

  “I’ll go out the window if I must!” he roars.

  This is not a contingency either Eddie or Anson had anticipated. Rising to his feet, Eddie moves to intercept Dakar. “We’re five stories off the ground, you ass!”

  Dakar roars inarticulately and charges.

  Eddie has little choice but to intervene. Even an athanor can be killed by a five-story fall. Dakar may have some trick of which Eddie is not aware, but Eddie isn’t going to gamble. Right now, the African athanor seems enraged enough to jump out a window without considering the consequences.

  All of this flashes through Eddie’s mind in the space of time it takes for Dakar to roar his challenge and lumber forward. Unimpeded by his thoughts, Eddie lifts the small table on which he had been resting his newspaper and flings it into Dakar’s gut.

  Dakar fails to block and bends in half, his breath knocked from him. Unfortunately, he recovers before Eddie can do more than take a few steps toward him. Now Eddie must dodge as the same table comes toward him. He does so and there is the sound of breaking glass as the window behind him shatters.

  “Damn!” Eddie curses under his breath. Then he does what might seem foolish to those who do not know him. He charges directly at Dakar and wraps his arms around the larger man’s waist.

  Dakar is taller than Eddie by as much as five inches. However, in build they are alike, though again Dakar both out masses Eddie and is in better training.

  Eddie, however, is very old. When civilization was young he had come forth from the wilds to challenge and later befriend a king called Gilgamesh—known also as the Wrestler. Arthur might have left those days behind him, but something of the Wildman lurks behind Eddie’s reasoned exterior. Indeed, one of the bonds he shares with Anson is a passion for professional wrestling.

  Moreover, Eddie has never ceased to study hand-to-hand combat. He views himself as Arthur’s bodyguard, and in modern days he cannot always carry a weapon.

  Dakar breaks fro
m Eddie’s hold. Then he swings his fists with such force that more than one missed blow (for Eddie wisely chooses to dodge rather than block) leaves a hole in the wall. Running with sweat, he begins to pant but his fervor is undiminished.

  From outside the door they hear shouting. Eddie, dodging blows and landing an occasional one himself, all the while keeping himself between Dakar and the broken window, manages to shout an answer to the queries.

  “No, no. We don’t need help. Everything is”—he dodges a fist and slows Dakar with a kick to one kneecap—“under control. My brother has had too much to drink, and the wine demons are chasing him.”

  Eddie hopes his explanation fits the local mythology. He doesn’t really have time to look things up.

  “The window? Oh, we’ll pay to repair the window!”

  His words remind Dakar of that potential exit. Eddie curses himself and flings a heavy leather-bound chair at Dakar. There is more shouting from without.

  “Yes, yes! And the table.”

  Dakar hefts the leather-bound chair in preparation for a throw, but its smooth upholstery slips against his sweat-slick skin, and he drops it on one foot. His howl of pain seems to intimidate the interrogators, or maybe they have been satisfied by Eddie’s answers for the hubbub without falls silent, and Eddie is able to concentrate on Dakar.

  Taking full and unfair advantage of Dakar’s smashed foot, Eddie knocks him down. He stands with a foot on the other man’s broad chest and makes a pointed poke at the injured member.

  Dakar growls but seems almost grateful for an excuse to stop struggling. He doesn’t surrender, however, and it is in this pose that Anson finds them when he dashes in a few minutes later.

  “I was only a few blocks away when the table came out the window,” he explains, shutting out the curious onlookers who have followed him up, “but I gotta fight through the crowds downstairs. You are lucky that the manager is greedy. He doesn’t want to share the dash we gotta pay him with the local police or right now you’d both be on your way to prison.”