A Gift from Darkness Read online

  At that moment I understand. Patience has survived for this little creature—an impression that her account of her experiences will confirm over the next few days. I ask her to tell me her story…

  Back to the beginning

  No one in my village had expected to see me again so soon. In my parents” round hut they were anything but delighted when I was suddenly standing in the doorway.

  “What are you doing here?” my father asked; he had assumed I was in Damaturu, where my husband’s shop was. The town was more than five hours away from Ngoshe by bush taxi. After my wedding ten months ago I had moved there with my new husband. I still remember the day when we had a big celebration in the church of Ngoshe and I—dressed all in white—was entrusted to the hands of his family. After that I hadn’t seen my parents again.

  “Have you had a fight with Yousef?” my father said suspiciously. “Has he been unfaithful to you? All men do that! If you think you can come back to us, you’re wrong. Your place is now in his house. I can’t feed any more hungry mouths here, you know that…“

  “But, Father!” I said at last, finding the strength to interrupt him. “I have no home anymore. Yousef is dead.”

  “What’s that you say?” My father looked at me in disbelief.

  “He was murdered yesterday. My parents-in-law sent me back to you.”

  My father was speechless. He ran frantically past me into the yard between our huts. The idea of a daughter he had already married off coming back home drove him out of his mind. It was also unusual for my parents-in-law not even to invite me into their house during the mourning period. My mother understood very quickly, and began weeping quietly inside the hut. “My poor child,” she murmured. “What will become of you now?”

  I had no answer for that.

  “Will you take me back?” I begged my father.

  “You haven’t even given him a child,” he grumbled. “No wonder your in-laws didn’t want to have you.”

  “A child wouldn’t change the situation very much,” my mother said. And she was right: no one would have been very interested in a girl. But my in-laws would have taken a boy away from me as soon as he didn’t need me anymore. Because a male child assumes the task of overseeing the conversation between future generations and the family ancestors. And that is extremely important.

  Maybe I need to explain that in greater detail: here in Africa time goes backward. By that I mean that we don’t live in expectation of the future, we want to go to the ones who lived before us: to our ancestors. We are descended from them and we move toward them in the course of our lives. We return to them when the earth takes us back. But someone who dies and enters the Zamani, generally understood as the past, goes on existing in the now-time for as long as there are relatives who remember him—male relatives, of course. That’s why it’s so important for a man to leave a descendant. Because without him communication with the ancestors is severed, they fall into oblivion and eventually become ghosts of the Zamani: they can no longer move back and forth between the worlds. This was the fate that now seemed to present itself to my parents-in-law and all their ancestors. And for that very reason it was a disaster for my husband’s family that he had died without issue. They couldn’t console themselves with the Christian promise of heaven either.

  “Be glad that she hasn’t brought a baby,” my mother said to my father. “That would cost even more money.”

  “That would have been the last straw, her turning up with a hungry brat,” he said irritably. But I knew that for my parents the question of a child was only a sideshow. What worried them most of all was that in our culture widows have a terrible reputation: they are generally suspected of yielding to the attentions of men in return for financial rewards. I had heard that often, even though the subject hadn’t affected me. People said bad things about them, even though I’m sure that many of them had no choice but to seek a lover if they didn’t want to starve. Of course I wouldn’t do that.

  “Let’s pray that she doesn’t bring shame on us,” my father said to my mother as if I wasn’t there.

  She ignored him. “Come in for now and let me touch you,” she said to me and pulled me to her on her straw mat. Her hands ran over my face and felt my body. After the birth of my sister Ladi, seven years older than me, she had gone blind. So it was very important for her to touch people. Her hands substituted for her eyes.

  “You’re not pregnant?” she asked.

  “No, Mother. Not that I know…”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “No, I’m not pregnant.”

  I was quite sure, since I’d only just had my period. I told my mother, and she was relieved. But I notice that my certainty made her sad. No, I wasn’t pregnant. I didn’t carry within me the seed of life. And I myself was almost amazed that it mattered so much to me. Because I hadn’t loved my husband particularly. When he chose me as his future wife a year ago and asked my father for my hand, no one had asked me if I wanted to marry. The fact that the applicant had his own shop had been enough for my father.

  Still, in the months during which we lived together, we had got accustomed to one another. Yes, more than that: I had taken pleasure in the knowledge that he was by my side. Because his presence gave me a feeling of security. By day I had worked with him in the shop. In the evening I had cooked for him and at night shared his bed. That was how our whole life should have continued. I was deeply shocked that he was suddenly no longer there. So, secretly, I wished that something of him had survived within me. Something that would outlast his death. A little creature that might ease my loneliness.

  When I lay in my mother’s arms, all of these thoughts ran through my head. Now that I had been widowed at the age of only seventeen, would I ever have children? Or had my life come to an end along with Yousef’s death? Had I missed my chance to found a family of my own? In Ngoshe and Damaturu I had seen widows in the street begging for alms because they didn’t know what to live on. Did that fate await me too? What would happen now that my future had been extinguished only the previous evening?

  Mother stroked my head and rocked me as she had done when I was still a child. And for the first time since the terrible night I relaxed and began to cry.

  “It’s all right, my child,” she said. “It’s not the end of the world…”

  But I was sobbing so loudly that all our neighbors must have heard.

  “Don’t worry,” she said consolingly. “You’re young and beautiful. The Lord has blessed you with so many gifts. I’m sure a solution will be found for you.”

  The familiar scent of her body gradually calmed me down. She dried my tears with her scarf.

  “I’ll pray for everything to turn out fine.”

  “Amen,” I replied.

  I wasn’t invited to Yousef’s funeral. Among our people that’s an affair for the men. His relatives didn’t think my presence was required. As we had only been married for a short time they still called me his “bride,” and felt no obligations toward me. Particularly where the distribution of Yousef’s property and mine was concerned: the bed we had slept in together was not to belong to me under any circumstances. And neither was the table or the gas cooker on which I had cooked for him. His parents, sisters and cousins grabbed everything they could lay their hands on. But they rejected me as an annoying appendage.

  As a sign of my grief I sat on the ground outside our house—but I didn’t stay there alone for long: my parents and brothers and sisters, neighbors and friends kept me company in turn. That was how they mutely communicated their sympathy. Tradition required me to sit on the ground like that for seven days. From the early morning until deep into the night I squatted there, sometimes with company, sometimes on my own. I only took a break at night. When the time was over all my bones hurt, but I felt relieved. From now on we didn’t talk about Yousef. He had joined his ancestors. My life with him belonged to the past.

  At home with my parents, as I soon established, since I move
d out everything had stayed exactly as I knew it. We lived in modest circumstances. My father grew millet, like everyone in the village. Every family had its own little plot of land. Just before the start of the rainy season we broke up the stony ground with picks and planted the millet seeds in the earth so that it would sprout with the first shower of rain. Because the period of time during which the sky moistened the earth with rain and made it fertile was very short—and seemed to be getting shorter and shorter with each passing year.

  All the family members helped with the work. During the summer rainy season no child from our village went to school, because there was so much to do. The teachers too had to work their fields. If a child did turn up at school, it was told to go and give them a hand. And of course the parents said that in that case they’d rather take advantage of their children’s labor as well. My father said the same thing. So, along with my seven brothers and sisters, off I went to the field every day to remove the weeds that grew just as quickly as the millet, which in the end could be sixteen feet high. And we also had to make a lot of noise to drive away the baboons that wanted to pilfer the millet. There were lots of very cheeky, hungry monkeys in the mountains. They were a regular plague. But no one hunted them because their behavior was too human. No one could bring themselves to.

  In the last days before the rain subsided we couldn’t take our eyes off the field. Even at night my father stayed there to guard the valuable harvest. If we were lucky the cobs were already ripe when we cut them from the stalks. Otherwise they ripened and dried on the roofs of the huts, where we left them for a few days in the sun.

  Then came the threshing, men’s work. My father and uncle joined forces with other men from their initiation group to do this strenuous work together. The men who had been through the traditional rites of adulthood as a group stayed together for the rest of their lives. They stood with their flails in a circle around the big pile of millet cobs, which they threshed in turn to the rhythm of their songs. They spent whole days like that, until all the grains had been threshed from the cobs and the millet had finally been taken to the granary. In our case that was a small, round mud hut with no windows, which stood on oil-soaked feet as protection against vermin. We shared it with my uncle’s family.

  That was our treasure trove. The supplies that we kept in there had to keep us going throughout the whole of the dry season to the next harvest. Quite honestly, that was impossible. Because the yield from our little field wasn’t nearly enough to feed a family of ten. My four brothers in particular were always very hungry. So our supplies were regularly used up sooner than they should have been. Then my mother would prepare a thin broth of fibrous millet stalks and tell us to collect leaves from the trees to bulk it out. At least that way we wouldn’t go to bed hungry.

  My father earned a little extra by making fly swatters. He plucked palm leaves and cut them into narrow strips. For the best possible result the leaves had to be as fresh and flexible as possible when he was weaving them. Once a week he put his products on a hand-cart and went to the market to sell them for 100 naira (about 30 cents) each. If no one wanted his fly swats he came home in a very bad mood. Then he would guiltily ask my mother to beg for alms outside the churches in the surrounding villages so that we wouldn’t starve. Because she was blind, people would always give her a few kobos (small coins). That way the two of them managed to pull us through.

  My family’s economic situation improved a little when my eldest sister, Hannatu, left us. I was still going to school and must have been about eight years old. But I clearly remember coming home one afternoon and seeing my father sitting on the tree trunk in front of his hut, negotiating with a strange man.

  Our home consisted of a yard and several circular huts made of mud bricks. The whole thing was enclosed in a thorny fence. We call a mud-hut yard like that a kral. Often the English word “compound” is used to describe the residential unit of a family or an extended family.

  For us, mud huts are like the rooms of a big house: my sisters and I slept in one hut, my brothers in another, my mother in yet another. My father had a hut to himself as well. Their roofs were covered with millet straw that we regularly had to replace so that water wouldn’t drip in during the rainy season and turn the earth floor into a mud bath.

  The kitchen was outside, under a spreading neem tree. We lit the cooking fire between three stones. Next to it stood a small table with our crockery: three pots, a few plates and cups. That was it. When it rained, we stretched tarpaulins over everything so that nothing got wet.

  We didn’t have a “bathroom” or “toilet” in the European sense. But my father had dug a ditch behind the huts. It was covered with wood. In the middle of the cover was a hole for us to do our business, which we then covered with a lid. Beside that convenience was a bucket of water, as well as a piece of soap and a stone for rubbing off the calluses from the feet—everything you needed for a thorough cleansing.

  We girls in turn fetched the water for washing and cooking from the well in the early morning. In the hot and dry season, however, it sometimes ran out, and then we had to walk all the way to the spring in the mountain. It spilled from the ground high in the hills, in a little low cave that you could only enter by bending your back. The path up there was steep and led past lots of rocks that you could only negotiate by skipping carefully from stone to stone with the twenty-liter bucket on your head. Of course that was very tiring, and took up almost half a morning.

  As custom decreed, I brought my father and his guest some water to drink. As I did so, I heard them haggling. “I’ll give you a cow for her,” the stranger said.

  “A cow and a goat,” my father said.

  “That’s too much.”

  “Just a mark of acknowledgment for the fact that I’ve kept her fed for you for over ten years.”

  They reached a deal. On the evening of the same day my father told Hannatu that she was going to get married: he had found a good husband for her. Hannatu had no objections, as all her friends were getting married. Father spent the next few days building a little stable. Even before we celebrated the wedding, the man brought a cow and a goat, both of which had just given birth, and therefore gave milk. My father delightedly took delivery of the animals. Although he had to sell the cow soon afterward to tide us over, he was now one of the cattle-owners of the village—and our food situation began to improve slowly but surely.

  About a year later Father married off my second-oldest sister, Ladi. And the same sequence of events repeated itself: for Ladi he got a cow and a goat once again, the standard price for a young girl. Two years later, when the time came to marry my third sister, Tani, five years my elder, the little stable was barely big enough, even though my father had occasionally sold animals in the meantime. I was very sad about Tani’s marriage, because she was the nearest one in age to me and had almost brought me up. I loved her delicate, peaceful nature. When she left us, my father converted the hut where we had slept into a stable. I moved in with my mother. But as soon as I had reached the appropriate age, Father swapped me for a cow, a calf and a pregnant goat. That was a very good price.

  The animals were still in the stable when I came home from my brief excursion into marriage. I had been catapulted back, as if by time machine, into a life that I had thought was a thing of the past. The situation was a bit too much for all of us, particularly my father. He didn’t really seem to know what to make of the fact that I was suddenly back. He thought about what to do with me for a few days, and consulted his brother, who lived very close by. Then he made his decision.

  One evening, when the sun set behind the mountains and our huts cast long shadows in the remaining light, my father and uncle called me in. They sat on the tree trunk in front of Father’s hut and said they wanted to talk to me about my future. I became quite frightened when I saw their serious expressions. I nervously joined them.

  “You know our family isn’t rich,” my father began.

  I nodded.
/>   “You are now an adult. It is very unusual for a married daughter to come home again…”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “But since it is so, you should make yourself useful and earn your own living. I can’t afford to have you just living at my house and eating. After all, I spent a lot of money on your wedding. Money some of which I still owe your uncle.”

  I didn’t know exactly what Father meant by that. As I had only gone to primary school for five years and hadn’t learned a trade after that, he could hardly demand that I go after a job outside the house. And within our household I had always made myself useful: I had cooked, cleaned, looked after my mother…What else could he demand of me?

  “From now on I would like you to go working in your uncle’s house,” he said. “He will pay for your keep and feed you.”

  And the matter was decided. I wasn’t asked if I agreed. My mother told me not to complain, because it could have been much worse. “Your uncle is a good man. You should be grateful to him. As a widow you should be glad that someone has taken pity on you. You shouldn’t make too many demands on life.”

  I didn’t. Without complaining I became housemaid to my uncle and his wife, but went on living with my parents. I don’t know exactly why, but my uncle was financially a little better off than we were. He too was a farmer, but he had leased a more fertile field than my father. He also bred chickens, whose eggs he sold at the market. He owned an old moped that he was quite proud of. But at the moment he couldn’t ride it. As the terrorists of Boko Haram traveled on motorbikes, our state government had imposed a complete ban on the use of them. He still had his mobile phone, with which he organized the sale of the eggs, among other things. As there was no electricity in his huts, he regularly had it charged in a shop. His three sons used the phone a lot as well. Two of them were still bachelors; the third lived with his wife and her baby in a hut of their own in the same compound. His daughters had already married and gone to other villages. That was why there was now a shortage of female labor.