By Dr Cherno Omar Barry
I went back to the village in the week after I buried my wife, because grief had taken the walls out of me and I could not stay in the city.
Nobody knew me. I stopped three people on the road to ask for the compound, and they gave me directions the way you give them to a stranger, politely, at arm’s length. A boy of about ten walked me to the turning, and I looked at his face and thought: your grandmother would have known me from the sound of my walk.
Forty years ago I could not have crossed that village without being stopped nine times.
The gate was open because there was no gate. It had gone the way of everything that is not held up by someone who cares.
The yard was high with grass. The mango tree my father planted the year I passed common entrance was still standing, older than both of us now, dropping fruit that nobody gathers. The kitchen roof had fallen in on one side. Somebody’s goats had been sleeping in the corridor.
I stood in the middle of that yard, and I could not make my legs move for a long time.
I remember the day the fees could not be found.
My father did not tell me. I learned it thirty years later from my uncle, at a funeral, in the passing way that men tell each other the things they should have said long before. He sold the last of the cattle. Three animals, which in that compound was not wealth but insurance, the thing you keep so that a bad year does not become a catastrophe. He sold all three, walked to the school, paid, came home, sat in his chair, and said nothing at all.
I was annoyed with him that year. I had asked for a watch, and he had said there was no money.
I remember my mother at the tailor’s, arguing over the price of thread.
She had one pair of good shoes in her life. I know this because they were the shoes she was buried in. She sold two of her wrappers, then said the uniform had to be replaced, and told me the new one had come from a cousin. There was no cousin. I wore that lie on my back for two years and thought myself well provided for.
Then I did well. That is the whole tragedy in four words.
I did well, moved to the city, and acquired a life with tiled floors, and slowly, without ever making the decision, I began to be embarrassed by the people who had paid for it.
I stopped calling. Not all at once. My father used to ring once and cut, so that it would not cost me anything, and I would look at the phone lighting up on the table and think, I will call him at the weekend. He did that for years. One ring, then silence, then nothing, week after week, a man rationing his own longing so that it would not inconvenience his son.
I did not call back. Sometimes for months. I sent money instead and told myself that money was a form of speech.
The last time I ate in that compound was in 1998.
My mother had killed a chicken. I did not know then what a chicken was in that house — I know now, I have done the arithmetic since, and it was the equivalent of a month. She had cooked from morning. She brought the bowl out and set it down on the mat with both hands, smiling in the way she smiled at nothing else in life.
My wife and I had brought bottled water in the car. I remember saying, gently, in the reasonable voice I had learned in the city, that we had eaten on the road. I remember the small basin of water she offered for our hands and the way I looked at it. I remember pouring away the tea because of the milk. I remember thinking the word “unhygienic” and being pleased with myself for thinking it, as though it were sophistication rather than what it actually was.
She did not say anything. She covered the bowl and took it back inside.
We stayed fifty minutes. My father came out to walk me to the bantaba because the elders had heard I was coming and wanted to see me, and I told him we had no time as we had to get back before dark. He said, of course, of course, and stood at the roadside with his hand raised while the car turned.
That is the last picture I have of him standing. A man at the edge of a road with his hand up, getting smaller.
I did not go back. Not for the next holiday, nor the one after. I sent money for the roof, for his medicine, for her operation, and I built, with money, a very high wall between myself and the smell of wood smoke.
I went back twice more. Once to bury him. Once to bury her.
I paid for both funerals generously. I paid for the tent and the cattle and the cement, and people said, look how he has honoured his parents, and I stood among them in good shoes and let them say it.
Her room was the last one I entered on this last visit, because I already knew, I think, and I was afraid.
The bed was made. Under all that dust, the bed was made, with the cloth folded at the foot the way she folded it, and a mat rolled against the wall for whoever came with me. She kept that room ready for a son who had not slept in it since 1994. She dusted it. My aunt told me this at the funeral, and I did not take it in at the time: every week, until she could no longer walk, she swept that room and shook out that cloth, in case.
On the shelf there was a tin. Tomato paste once, washed out, full of buttons. Different sizes, different colours, none of them matching, saved off shirts that stopped existing before I had a beard.
I sat down on that made bed with the tin held in two hands, and I understood, completely and at once and forty years too late, that I had been loved more thoroughly than I have ever loved anyone, by two people whose food I refused.
I have lost a wife, and it is a wound, and it will close in some fashion because the world is built to close such things.
This is different. This does not close. There is no letter to write, no apology that has anywhere to arrive, no year in which I can go back and eat the chicken. The people who could have released me from it spent their lives making sure I never had to ask for anything, and then they died still waiting for a Tuesday I never gave them.
I locked nothing when I left, because there is nothing there to take. I walked back up the road past the boy who had shown me the turning.
He did not know my name.
Neither, by then, did I.
(Story based on fiction and dedicated to those who remember and cared for their parents when they needed it)