3
It was dinnertime when the call came from a cousin who’d walked four miles from Prama to a pay phone. When Wasik answered, an angry evening wind whipped the palm trees surrounding the house, creating static on the line. “Hello?”
“This is Djiimy.”
“Djiimy?” Wasik moved the phone to his other ear. “Djiimy?” he echoed shakily, already sensing the bad news.
“Your papa has passed away,” Djiimy stated thinly.
Outside, the wind whipped again and lightning flashed across the sky.
“Hello? Djiimy? Hello?” Wasik cried into the receiver.
The line crackled and went dead.
The next day he packed his family into the car and drove to Prama. The trip took four hours and when they arrived, the Mercedes was covered in red dust. As they entered the village, a group of children—the boys indistinguishable from the girls—began running alongside the car, tapping the windows and waving.
When they reached the hut where Wasik had been born and raised, they found his mother seated outside on a stool, picking through a gourd filled with dried peas.
Wasik leaped from the car and bounded over to her, wailing, “Mama, oh Mama!”
Abeo’s visits to Prama had always been filled with delight and discovery: the wonder of watching a goat give birth, fetching freshly laid eggs from the chicken coop, drinking warm milk straight from the udder of a cow. But she sensed that this visit would be different. The frenzied excitement that normally accompanied the preparation and four-hour journey was marred by her father’s dark melancholy. At the petrol station on their way out of town, Wasik, who was sitting behind the wheel waiting for the attendant to finish filling the tank, suddenly melted into uncontrollable sobs. This frightened Abeo because she had never seen her father—or any man—cry.
Abeo now climbed from the car clutching her Walkman protectively to her chest. The circle of children closed in, pointing fingers and probing.
“What is that?”
“Can I have it, sister?”
“What is that? Did you bring one for me?”
“What is that, sister?”
Abeo broke free, fled to her grandmother, threw her arms around her neck, and inhaled a sour mixture of sweat and grilled meat.
The old woman squeezed Abeo, kissed her cheeks, patted her backside, told her that she was too thin, offered her a mango, eyed the silver-and-black contraption the girl held in her hands, and shook her head in dismay.
Grandmother’s home was a three-room, thatched-roof mud hut. The front room held two metal chairs with tattered green cushions and one short square table made of wood. A yellowed calendar depicting the deceased prime minister Mbeke Kjodle hung on the wall near the door. The back rooms were furnished with twin-size beds, grass sleeping mats, and nothing else. The cooking area was located behind the house and consisted of three piles of stones beneath an awning made of grass. There was no indoor plumbing, just a standpipe in the middle of the compound where the women lined up daily to fill their buckets with water for cooking, drinking, and bathing. Not too far from the standpipe was the communal toilet, which was little more than a concrete box with a hole in the ground.
In the days leading up to their father’s burial, Wasik and his brothers were fitted for the special funeral garments—red-and-gold dashikis. While the tailor labored away, the carpenter constructed a coffin from a forty-year-old walnut tree. An artisan was hired from the neighboring village to carve the coffin with details that reflected the senior Kata’s life as a farmer, husband, and father.
The cost was high, a staggering three thousand cendi. Wasik’s brothers grumbled at the price, but Wasik said he didn’t care if it was thirty thousand cendi; his father deserved the best.
The nights in Prama were long and black. Strange sounds echoed in the darkness and turned sinister in Abeo’s imagination. Mating cats became feuding lions; the patter of feet—a charging elephant. She pressed her trembling body against the bulk of her grandmother until the music of the old woman’s heart lullabied her to sleep.
On the day of the funeral, large black-and-red tents were erected at the graveyard. Vendors sold handkerchiefs and beer to the mourners. The village elders beat their breasts and wailed. Sitting to the right of the coffin were long tables draped in red cloth piled high with offerings of money, food, and liquor. The funeral attendants distributed laminated programs that pictured the deceased Kata. Abeo stared down at the photograph of her grandfather; his black eyes watched her from beneath his furrowed brow. She had been fond of him, but did not feel sadness because her young mind could not comprehend the fact that death was final. Even as he lay stiff and cold in the open casket, she watched him expectantly, anticipating the moment when he would sit up and ask her to fetch his smoking pipe.
The interment of the body marked the end of the mourning period and the beginning of the celebration.
Slowly, people pushed their sadness aside, gathered around the tables, and piled their plates high with red-black, fungee, fried fish, pepper stew, bread, and fresh fruit. Libations were spilled in honor of the deceased, and then consumed.
Soon, the mourners were laughing and dancing to the syncopated rhythms of bola drums and kazoos.
Abeo, fairly satisfied with Ismae’s explanation as to why her grandfather had been placed in a box, joined her cousins in a game of hide-and-seek, while the adults drowned themselves in plum wine and schnapps.
The merriment went on until the darkness seeped from the sky and a new day was upon them.
In the tiny bed Abeo’s parents shared, Wasik turned to his wife and mumbled something.
Ismae giggled. “What did you say?”
Wasik’s eyes rolled drunkenly in his head. He cleared his throat and repeated, “I will bring Mama to stay with us for a little while.” The words dripped like sap from his mouth.
Ismae stroked his forehead. “Of course, Wasik. Whatever you think is best. Now sleep, sweet husband, sleep.”
4
To Grandmother, Port Masi smelled of smoke, steel, and shit. She thought her son’s house was too grand and reminded Wasik that he was not a king or a chief, so the number of rooms was unnecessary, especially for a family with just two children. She had raised eight children in her modest hut.
“And why is the food cooked inside the house?” she barked, turning her nose up in revulsion.
Wasik bought a television and placed it on the small wooden chest in her bedroom. Grandmother eyed it suspiciously. The last time she’d watched television had been a decade earlier when she’d visited her daughter-in-law’s family. Wasik proudly handed her the remote control to the TV. She looked at the little white object and then back at Wasik. “What am I to do with this?”
The next day Wasik bought her a radio.
Grandmother spent her days roaming the house, examining the souvenirs that friends had purchased abroad and given as gifts to the Katas: a white man on a surfboard, a pointed tower, a grand clock. The words stamped on the souvenirs—Hawaii, Paris, London—meant nothing to Grandmother because her language was Wele and her English was limited to hello and goodbye.
In Abeo’s room, Grandmother picked up and then tossed down the stuffed animals that were neatly arranged across her bed. She reached for the snow globe on the nightstand, shook it, and watched the bits of white plastic swirl and settle on a tiny castle. She pressed her fists into her hips and stared at the poster of a galloping pink horse with a large spiral thorn jutting from the center of its