Read Online Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna - Free Book Online Page B

with dust, hovered between day and night. I sat on the three-legged stool at the back of the house, filling oil lamps. I looked up to find Bobbio standing close by. Watching me in silence, unblinking. Like a house-child. Like he could see into my soul. That was a thing about Bobbio, I remember. He could hold anybody’s gaze. For him there was nothing to it. Even after they looked away, he just carried on gazing at the back of their head. People learned to avoid catching his eye for fear of inadvertently starting a staring match. In fact, people often pretended Bobbio wasn’t there at all. I knew what it was now to have eyes slide over you, like greasy eggs in a pan.
    Bobbio led me by the hand. Down to the river bank. Made me stand on the jagged rocks, pressing my shoulders down with balled fists. Then he stared at the ground, concentrating. He began to stamp and kick, like a cricket hopping about on smouldering grass, pick up stones and throw them over his shoulder. He flung a pebble at the water. It bounced once and sank.
    I had never seen Bobbio act this way. Flecks of foam flew from the corners of his mouth. A shiver trickled down my back, a trail of goosebumps in its wake. People said a
krifi
called Tang Bra lived here. Boatmen told tales of an invisible weight in the back of their boats. The mud dragging at their poles. Nobody came to this place at night.
    Slowly the tension came alive, stirring in my belly like roiling eels. I got up to go. Bobbio grabbed my hand. It was nearly dark. Leaning over me Bobbio looked like his own shadow.
    Bobbio is standing very close to me. His breathing is loud. I don’t know what he wants. He lets go of my left hand and takes up myright. Turns it over. Palms slide across one another. Something warm, heavy, drops. I am confused, it feels familiar. I squeeze my eyes closed. Feel the weight in my hand. A surface smooth as skin. One, two, three four five. I open my eyes. Strain to see in the nearly-night. There it is. Rippled like the sand on the windward side of a desert dune. A white, five-sided stone.
    Now it is I who seizes Bobbio. ‘Where did you get it? Who gave it to you?’ I force him to look at me. I know he understands. He returns my hands to me, waves at me to sit down. Like a spectator at a masquerade I watch while Bobbio tells his story.
    And here it is. Together with the little I knew for myself:
    The Shekunas forced people to forsake the old gods, learn Arabic and pray in the new way. There were bonfires in every town and village. People were afraid. They carried their prayer mats to the fields, dropped to their knees and touched their noses to the ground every time a stranger approached.
    In the first few months that followed the meeting my father became suddenly more devout. Yes, I remember that. I thought little of it. I thought little of anything in those days. Where before he left his wives to their own devotions, during that time he demanded their presence in the mosque every Friday. I wore a head veil and accompanied my mother. We sat at the back of the mosque among the other women. Ya Namina, she took to accompanying him there every day. So did the two youngest wives, keen to demonstrate their obedience.
    Any activity Haidera said was
haram
, our father forbade. No more drinking palm wine in the village.
Haram
. Instead the old men sat out near the fields late at night passing the gourd from one to the other and wandered back towards the houses on unsteady legs at dawn. All matters connected with the old religion: charms, even the beads mothers hung around the waists of little children.
Haram
. Offerings of cakes and kola nuts at the graves of the dead.
Haram
. Dancing, drumming.
Haram
. The secret gatherings of women.
Haram! Haram!
    It was our usual habit, on those nights when it was our mother’s turn to be visited by our father, to sleep in the house of Ya Jenebaand Ya Sallay. For those three nights we shared mats with their children. It was