Freshwater Read online

  Saul had been at the mechanic shop, and when he got to the hospital, Añuli asked him to give her an injection so that she could die. She had heard the doctors say they wanted to amputate her leg, and although she was small, she was already certain of what she could not live in this world without. Saul fought back tears as he reassured her, then he let them draw his blood for her transfusions. They took the Ada home, and for three days, she refused to visit her sister. Our brothersisters were pleased with that. Love for a human threatens the oath and makes spirits want to stay when they owe debts, when they should return.

  Finally, Saachi sat down with the Ada. “Tell me,” she said. “Why won’t you go to the hospital?”

  The Ada started sobbing. “It’s my fault …”

  Saachi looked at her, confused. “Ada, it’s not your fault the car hit her.”

  “I’m the big sister … it’s my j-job … t-to protect her …” She broke down wailing and Saachi put an arm around her, holding the child to her side and feeling the small shoulders curve in as they convulsed. We realized, later, that she was always a little uncertain when it came to her first daughter, what exactly to do with her, how to soothe such a force. It was understandable; it is always like this with ọgbanje, it is difficult for their mothers. If we could go back, we would tell Saachi what she realized only many years later: that none of the ways she tried to take care of this child would ever feel like enough.

  “It’s not your fault,” Saachi repeated.

  The Ada said nothing, but she didn’t believe her. Duties were duties. We agreed with her on this. Over the years that followed, we (the Ada and us) became good at protecting Añuli, except for a terrible oversight in which we failed, for a very long time, to protect her from ourself.

  At the hospital, they cast the amen’s leg in plaster of Paris. They used a mechanical blade to cut the cast open every time they had to change it, then dressed the wound with sugar and honey. The first few times, they gave her narcotics to kill the pain, but then they had to stop, and she would scream and scream until the dressing was done. When it was over, she laughed. She was, to our surprise, not a being that the brothersisters could break so easily.

  Saul’s family came up from Umuahia to the hospital to see her, and old women in the ward drifted from the other beds to stand by Añuli’s.

  “Chai,” they said dolefully. “What a beautiful child!”

  “Ewo!”

  “What a shame.”

  After about a week of this, Añuli turned to Saachi and asked if she was going to die. The human mother stared at her, this little girl who spoke of death so comfortably. We were not surprised, though. Had it not brushed past her on the bloody tar of that road? She was not afraid. Our brothersisters had touched her and she had lived. She asked Saachi that because she thought the visitors were there to mourn her approaching death, and we were impressed by this concept, to grieve the loss of breath while it was still in the body. After all, since we had been born to die, the Ada’s life was a placeholder, an interlude; it made sense to start mourning it now.

  The Ada became a precocious but easily bruised child, constantly pierced by the world, by words, by the taunts of Chima and his friends as they mocked her body for being soft and rounded. Reality was a difficult space for her to inhabit, unsurprisingly, what with one foot on the other side and gates in between. We wriggled deeply in her, reliving the blood of the backseat over and over again till the red was painted all inside. You must understand that Añuli’s accident was a baptism in the best liquid, that mother of a color, then a clotting movement, a scrambled look at mortality and the weakness of the vessel. With our swollen new eyes, we saw the blood and knew it was a mantle.

  We waited.

  Things had not been easy for Saachi. They never are when you are the type of woman who gets chosen—just ask any other mother who has had a god grow inside her before spitting it out into a wild world. When Añuli was first born, Saachi became sick. The Ada was focused on her private mischiefs then—drawing on the walls and destroying the deep brown leather cushions by tugging on their threads. Chima was in school; he’d started Primary One down by Faulks Road. Saachi was drowning in anxiety. It rattled her chest and surged up her throat; it made her hands shake and then she cried and could not breathe. Saul did not help. He was an impatient man, a blind man. The children were always more Saachi’s than his.

  “I can’t stay with you in the house!” he told his panicking wife. “I have work to do. If you have mental illness, then you’ll just have to go to London.”

  That was it. Saachi had to turn to her friends, the women who had been born in other countries and who, like her, had accompanied their husbands to this small, violent town. Her friend Elena came by to check on her and Lisa’s mother sent a girl in the evenings to stay with her, because Añuli was just a baby and Saul would not stay home and Saachi was drowning. Our brothersisters had known this, had known where the weak points in the Ada’s family were, where to best apply pressure for a breaking. This was at Number Seventeen, at the red brick, and the next day, Saachi collected her three children and took them to Elena’s house. She left them there and went to the hospital, where she stayed for two nights.

  The doctors told her not to ingest any stimulants, and when they left her room, one of them, a woman, remained and asked Saachi kindly and quietly if everything was okay at home. Because it was strange, you see, the panic attacks and the way Saul was not there. Saachi said everything was fine. We do not know if she was lying, but the doctor prescribed medications to slow her heart rate, and after the second night, Saachi checked out, collected her children, and went back to Number Seventeen. She told herself that she would never be in that state again. Every day for a month, while the Ada and Chima played by themselves, Saachi would put Añuli down on a woven mat, then lie on the sofa and cover herself with Chima’s akwete blanket, all the way over her head, making a dark cave. The anxiety curled up on her chest like a cat and purred through her bones. She hid and hid, and Saul did not find her because he, as he had made clear, could not be at home with her and therefore was not looking.

  It’s like we said—things had not been easy for her. As she was drowning, the years slid past and the Ada’s family moved down the street to Number Three. Then there was the truck and the amen and the impact and the blood. When Añuli could walk again, Saachi said that she would need plastic surgery, skin grafts for the river of glossy scar tissue running down toward her foot. She took Añuli back to Malaysia to consult with some doctors; she left the Ada behind. While on the trip, Saachi spoke to a nursing agent who offered her a job in Saudi Arabia.

  There are many ways of breaking a family and isolating a child—our brothersisters knew this. Saul, for example, cared more about himself, so he was never going to protect the Ada and he was too human to be any kind of threat to the brothersisters. After career setbacks in London, he had been happy to end up in Nigeria, where he was hailed as a big man, coming from abroad with his Benz with the customized plates. He needed people to see him glow; he desired the glory of something. When Saul got his chieftaincy title, it was like he’d been dipped in silver, like he was finally as shiny as he wanted to be. He spent a lot of money on new things for himself, money that he refused to spend in other ways, like on his family. Saachi had to sew her traditional outfit for the ceremony out of an old sari. They’d fought over this and other things, like Saul refusing to buy things needed for the household. As his clinic struggled, Saachi kept transferring in money from her accounts in London. Immediately after the chieftaincy ceremony, instead of hosting the visitors who came to congratulate Saul, Saachi took the children to Onitsha to visit a friend and left a note for her husband.

  “You may be a chief,” she wrote, “but you are not a god.”

  She was correct, even more than she knew. He was not a god. He’d had to pray to one in order to get the Ada; she was not a child he could have created alone. Still, Saachi gave him many chances, windows and windows,
ways he could have been worthy. In Malaysia with Añuli, after she got the job offer, Saachi called him.

  “What do you think?” she said. “Should I take it? Will you be able to look after the children?”

  “Let’s talk about it when you get back,” he said.

  So she flew back to Nigeria with the amen, and by then, the Ada, who had never been without them for this long, almost didn’t recognize them. We, however, knew already that forgetting could be protection.

  Saul had paid for the trip, and when Saachi told him that the doctors had advised against skin grafts for Añuli’s scar, recommending it be left as it was, Saul hissed. “So it was just a waste of my money, a wasted trip,” he said, and then he walked away.

  Saachi looked at his prideful back, then she looked at their bank accounts and at their family and she made a choice. It was easier to get free for the sake of her children than for the sake of herself—she did things for the Ada that Saul would never have lifted a finger to do. We admit, we accepted her because of that. She took the job and left the house at Number Three and as it turned out, she never lived there again.

  Our brothersisters rejoiced from the other side—they had succeeded in chasing her away. No god would intervene, because ọgbanje are entitled to their vengeances; it is their nature, they are malicious spirits. Besides, there were many ways to look at what happened. Our brothersisters broke Saachi’s heart, yes, but they also set her free, releasing her from the akwete blanket that Saul had condemned her to. If they had not thrown her last born into the road, she would never have gotten away. They meant to punish her: they took her children, they filled her mouth with sand. But it is only a fool who does not know that freedom is paid for in old clotted blood, in fresh reapings of it, in renewed scarifications. If Saachi did not know this before, then being a god’s surrogate surely taught it to her. Such lessons are never easy.

  The next five years of her life were contracted away in Saudi Arabia, and when that contract ended, Saachi called Saul.

  “What do you think?” she asked. “Should I come back to Nigeria or should I try London?”

  Saul had already left in all the ways that mattered, so it was not surprising that he said nothing, that his mouth was a gray space. Saachi was alone, and she knew that although Saul hated the money she made, he needed it. We thought he was weak; we knew he was chosen only because he would give the Ada her correct names. We did not pay attention to him.

  In the face of his grayness, Saachi went to London, just to see what it was like and if, perhaps, she could move them all there. But when a depression seized her, she left and flew back to her deserts, to Saudi. By the time her last contract ended, the human mother had spent ten years there, from Riyadh to Jeddah and, finally, the mountains of Ta’if. She returned to Nigeria once or twice each year with suitcases that smelled cool and foreign. She left behind the sacrifice of three children fastened to an altar with thin sinews, and she would pay the costs of that for the rest of her life.

  And this is how you break a child, you know. Step one, take the mother away.

  Chapter Four

  In the old culture, there would’ve been rites and rituals for you to control the gates.

  There were no rites or rituals done to help you control the gates. You are the jewel at the heart of the lotus.

  We

  All the madnesses, each and every blinding one, they can all be traced back to the gates. Those carved monstrosities, those clay and chalk portals, existing everywhere and nowhere and all at once. They open, things are born, they close. The opening is easy, a pushing out, an expansion, an inhalation: the dust of divinity released into the world. It has to be a temporary channel, though, a thing that is sealed afterward, because the gates stink of knowledge, they cannot be left swinging wide like a slack mouth, leaking mindlessly. That would contaminate the human world—bodies are not meant to remember things from the other side. There are rules. But these are gods and they move like heated water, so the rules are softened and stretched. The gods do not care. It is not them, after all, that will pay the cost.

  We were sent through carelessly, with a net of knowledge snarled around our ankles, not enough to tell us anything, just enough to trip us up. There are many neglects like this—little gods going mad around you, wandering the beaches with matted hair and swollen testicles. Unrecognizable, laughing through brown teeth as they grub through rubbish heaps, breasts stretched and groaning. That’s what it looks like when the flesh doesn’t take, when you can see them rejecting the graft of reality. But sometimes the flesh takes too well, like those that came through the gates and went mad in a much saner, more terrifying way, meeting human cruelty with colliding glee, losing themselves in the stringy red of mortality. They did atrocious and delicious things to torn people, to screaming and sobbing children: they broke and buried bodies, they hid in fathers and husbands, in mothers and cousins, they ripped and they used and they were excited. They took it too far. They took it only a god’s length. For reasons like them, there should be a rule against shoving godspawn into a flesh-ridden cage. But they pull us, the humans, they draw us close. They’re so turgid with potential and yet so empty, with spaces under their skins and inside their marrow, so much room for us to yawn into existence. They can be ridden, marked, anointed, fucked, then, sometimes, left.

  Forgive us, we sound scattered. We were ejaculated into an unexpected limbo—too in-between, too god, too human, too halfway spirit bastard. Deity seed, you know. We never used to be alone, not in Ala’s underworld womb, tucked in with the others, the brothersisters. Each time we left, we promised to come back, promised never to stay too long on the other side, promised to remember. We floated smoothly then, like a paste of palm oil, red and thick. Our mother was the world, even as she is now. But then she chose to answer some man’s prayer and our smoothness was interrupted by the grain of his baritone. “Give me a daughter,” he said. “Father Lord, give me a daughter.”

  Sometimes the only god who hears your prayer is the one who intends to answer it. We have never been able to understand why Ala answered this one, this particular request, in the crush of thousands of others; why she paid attention to this wrap of words. Perhaps the prayer caught her eye as it slid from Saul’s mouth; perhaps she picked it on a whim, just to remind the world that she was still there, the owner of men. Since the corrupters broke her shrines and converted her children, how many of them were calling her name anymore?

  We think about this because there has to be a point, a purpose to this, a reason for why we were thrust across the river, screeching and fighting. There must be a thought behind this entrapment, our having to endure this glut of humanity. On this, our mother, Ala, is silent. All we know is that there was a prayer, that the Ada was the answer, that our iyi-ụwa was hidden thoroughly in her body, making her the bridge between this world and ours. The rest is a road that spreads into unknowns. We were sentenced to those yawning gates between worlds, left wild, growing in all directions but closed. Open gates are like sores that can’t stop grieving: they infect with space, gaps, widenings. Room where there should be none. We should have blended into the Ada when she was born, but instead there was a stretch of emptiness between us, bitter like kola, a sweep of nothing. A space like that has no place in a mind.

  We used to be able to ignore it when we slept, but after we woke up in the village, our eyes opened and became swollen worlds with clouds for irises; the pupils, pots with no bottom. We could see everything. When Saachi left, we saw the way her children reeled, the way the Ada retreated deeper into her head, closer to us. She rooted like she’d lost her face, snuffling in the particular heartbreak of a little child, crying for her mother to come back, come back, please just come back. We struggled in response, coming alive not just for ourself, but for her. The Ada was so small, so sad. She should never have been left alone. She came looking for us because she was looking for anyone, because she was pursued by space, gray and malignant, cold as chalk.

&nbs
p; She even tried to pray. They had been taking her to Mass every Sunday, telling her about the christ, the man who was a man and not. She read stories about how he would appear to his followers, the faithful ones, and so she prayed. She asked him to come down and hold her, just for a little bit. It would be easy for him because he was the christ and it would mean so much to her, so very much, just this little thing, because no one, you see, no one else was doing it, holding her. And besides, she loved him and she was a child, and even if she wasn’t, he would love her anyway, but because she was, then it was extra because he loved the children most of all, so why wouldn’t he just come down and hold one of them, just for a little bit?

  We knew him; we knew his name was Yshwa, we knew that he looked like everyone, all at once, at any time. His face could shift like a ghost. It was, we also knew, impossible for him not to hear her. He hears every prayer babbled screamed sung at him. He does not, contrary to some belief, often answer them. Yshwa too was born with spread gates, born with a prophesying tongue and hands he brought over from the other side. And while he loves humans (he was born of one, lived and died as one), what they forget is that he loves them as a god does, which is to say, with a taste for suffering. So he watched the Ada cry herself to sleep with his wrong name and her mother’s held on her lips. He ran his hands along the curve of her faith and felt its strength, that it would remain steadfast whether he came to her or not. And even if it did not hold, Yshwa had no intentions of manifesting. He had endured that abomination of the physical once and it was enough, never again. Not for the heartbroken children who were suffering more than her, not for the world off a cliff, not for a honey-soaked piece of bread. We resented him for it. When his fingers came too close, we snapped our teeth at them and Yshwa withdrew, amused, and went back to his watching.