From
Reading Room/6:
No Reprieves
Julie
Obaso
The day Ben found out he was not from
where he knew what came to him was not a feeling of shock, but
of immediate understanding, a twilight memory, a residual sliver
of some other form of existence that had stayed with him from
birth. An instinct within him that had been keeping a long, low
watch for most of his ten years reared up and said, yes: this
is it.
He’d been keeping a perfect watch, he knew now, as he slid
out of his mother’s arms, away from her moving mouth, to
the door, down the three steps of the veranda, and began to march
toward Modine’s place at the far end of the settlement
in the misty, dusk-smothered tea region of Kericho, in Western
Kenya. He knew that because of the way his short legs sank into
the earth, of the way his heart rang in a strange rythmn that
had been absent for more than two years. Two years spent submerged
in a twilight of altered perception that squeezed everything
into a grinding slowness, and all he saw was the recurring image
of his swamp-drenched flesh, speckled, dog-like fur, the fractured
memory of bared teeth sinking into bone.
Ben pressed his right hand to his side
as he marched rapidly through the tea bushes. The mud was slick
under his feet. He recalled that day when curtains of thin
rain fell in a shroud over the funeral march carrying his father
over the knoll. He remembered crouching by the window, and
how the stump of fatty flesh that passed for his arm had been
so tight he thought it would burst. That brought no pain but
there was another kind of pain. He remembered the thought that
slipped into his mind then, and how he hadn’t understood it. He saw the many
people standing outside in the rain, the haggard-faced Modine,
and the aloof presence of his mother saying – You, stay.
You stay here.
Ben lived with his mother in one of the
white square buildings that were part of the tea farm. The
Highlands were cool and cloudy, and a perpetual drizzle sprayed
a mist over the farmland. Vast tracts of ripening bushes shimmered
greenly around him as he pushed his way through. The deep raw
scent of tea filled his nostrils and the bobbing of the tea-pickers’ baskets as
they returned from work punctuated his vision. Ben’s mother
was a picker, but only for two years now. Back then Papa said
that was something she would never have to do. Those were the
days Papa could still talk, and those were the moments when Ben
thought things might stay the same. It came to him that things
did not stay the same even if you knew them well, and even if
you made yourself forget that you knew them. He hurried on, pressing
his side, as he struggled with the fog that was lifting from
his mind.
Ben approached the Modine’s place. Modine was the tall
skinny Indian who dispensed medicine to the workers at the farm
dispensary. Ben had known Modine since he could remember, and
now he didn’t know why the Indian had kept quiet. He thought
about Modine’s silence. About how he’d always wanted
things to be. He looked around at the peeling buildings. Something
slipped inside him. Ben saw how the back rooms that he and Modine
had added last year before the arrival of Momo were broken down,
leaking. Momo was the young wife Modine had sent for from Calcutta—he’d
seen her in a picture an uncle sent and brought it to show Ben,
who at that time lay subsumed in the constant twilight pervading
his room. Ben gazed indifferently at the grainy photo of a brown-skinned
girl with flowing hair. He said nothing.
A month later Modine bounded up the steps
of the house, past Ben’s mother’s pursed lips and into Ben’s room
where the boy still lay motionless, staring at the shadows on
the ceiling.
“Eh-Ben, it’s done,” he said excitedly, pulling
back the curtains. “Get up, eh-Ben, wake up. It’s
done!”
Ben sat up, shielding his eyes from the
light. “What’s
done?”
“It is Momo, Momo!” Modine threw open the windows,
laughing and clicking his fingers. At that time Ben didn’t
know who she was, but he thanked Momo for making Modine look
like that. Ben saw the change and realized that the Indian had
been walking dead all along. Ben knew what walking dead was.
He knew the tea-pickers whispered about the thing that made Modine
ran away from India and not be a real doctor. But Ben had seen
how Modine brought Papa medicine every day for two years straight.
He wanted to ask Modine what happened over there in India. But
he didn’t. He crawled out of bed, slack and putty-faced,
like a mole coming out of its hole, licked his caked lips and
slunk off to bathe. Then that evening in the twilight the man
and the boy stooped in concentration over the ground behind the
dispensary, marking out with sticks the borders for a room, a
bathroom and a kitchen. The sun sunk. Ben did not ask about the
girl who was coming.
Now, Ben crossed the yard past a dish
of chapati sizzling quietly on the outdoor jiko. Momo fanned
the stove from a squatting position, her orange sari billowing
in the evening wind. The brown flesh on her upper arms squeezed
out from the tightness of her vest. Ben saw the swelling flesh
and thought about how it looked. He remembered when Momo first
appeared at the compound, her face dusty and weary and somehow
gray, and he’d had a thought,
a thought pulling inside him with the dusk falling and the smell
of smoke and leaves and tea; he’d wanted the pallor of
her skin to be different. Ben looked at Modine and suddenly felt
angry. He was afraid. He went down the three steps of the porch
and gave his hand to Momo. Her palms were small, smaller than
his, and for a moment, standing there next to the girl in her
mud-colored sari and golden bangles swaying in the dusk, the
burnt-red smell of sunset and a sudden single cricket chirp,
Ben felt himself sinking into a place he didn’t know.
“Momo,” Ben had said, “come,” and took
her tattered brown carry-bag and walked back through the veranda
into the house. They all followed him into the sitting room where
he was glad he’d fixed the wooden table with good plates
and good spoons. After Momo washed her face Ben saw she was not
gray but smooth, brown, and her eyes glittered with something
that seemed familiar to him though he did not know why.
Two days after she arrived Ben went down
to the infirmary and sat in the yard at the newlyweds’ feet. Momo stood from
her seat and went to the stove and brought some hot, vegetable-filled
pastries. Modine plucked fresh limes from the lime bushes lining
the edge of the tea plantation. Ben squeezed fresh juice over
the samosa and bit into the hotly spiced pastry. His eyes began
to water. Momo squatted next to him and spread out a tray of
coal-blackened chicken pieces that were even spicier than the
samosas. Modine came and stood over them both.
“Eh-Ben, you’re crying!”
Ben grinned and Momo laughed and they
sat on their haunches in the yard with their eyes streaming,
munching samosas and baked chicken washed down with Fanta orange
soda while Modine stood nodding over them. Then Ben sat back
on his heels and gazed into the dying charcoal embers and felt
all at once that perhaps, perhaps this time things were going
to be better.
Today he forgot that, strode past Momo
swiftly up the yard to the doorway where Modine posed slanted
like a haunted shadow of the unknown. Ben planted his feet
in the yard, soldier-like, and hissed in the direction of the
figure: “Modine, you
knew. You knew.”
Modine unfolded himself from the doorway. “Yes, Ben,” he
said unflinchingly. “Yes I knew.”
Ben did not want Modine to say that.
A huge wave built up and began to overpower him. He felt mucus
coming and fought not to cry. He wanted to go up to Modine
and punch him and say why, why couldn’t you stop them why couldn’t you make
it different, why couldn’t you take it away.
But he didn’t.
“Ben, eh-Ben,” Modine said in a voice so gentle it
made Ben look away, “don’t take it like that, you
had a father, you know. You had one.”
Ben dashed his hand across his nose. “Yeh, you know everything.
You just know everything.”
“No I do
not.” Modine’s voice had changed.
He bent down suddenly and put his face close to Ben’s.
There was a smell of onions and a twistedness about him. Ben
was scared. He had never seen Modine that way before. Modine
pushed his face into Ben’s and repeated, “I do not…know…” and
he took a breath and looked like he was about to say something.
Modine opened his mouth to say what wanted
to come gurgling up from the dark, filthy alleys of Calcutta:
burning days of starvation picking through the contents of
festering garbage bins. Returning home to the room and floor
pallet that was a device not of rest but of perpetual torture:
men streaming in all day to be with his mother. That, and the
bruised, dessicated look of her. Then streaking away one night
on a cattle train to Delhi, and how it might have all been
bearable if it wasn’t for the not
knowing. The not knowing and wishing he could go back and say
to her: I really didn’t mean to leave
you, Mamiji.
Modine stared at the boy and wanted to
say all that to him. But he didn’t.
“I know some things which cannot be said,” he sighed, “and
I have seen even worse. Go home. Go, and smile at your mother.”
Ben stood still while Modine’s breath washed over him.
He searched his mind for what Modine was saying and could not
find it. But he knew what Modine meant. He felt a sudden sickness
and pushed aside the knowledge. Ben gazed at Modine and wondered
why the person he saw was suddenly not the person he saw. He
looked across the yard at the woman sweeping, and across the
shivering tea plains and thought about once when he imagined
things would get better. He looked back at the man in the doorway.
“Modine,” he whispered. “Help
me. Help me.”
Modine’s face remained twisted, and Ben saw a reflection
of his own impossibilities. Momo came to the door shaking water
from her hands and the droplets sprayed around them. She said
nothing. Her eyes looked at everything. Ben stood there thinking, it’s
cold, and he began to shiver. Momo said, “Chaldi.
Chaldi. Come, little boy.”
She led him out into the yard where they
squatted yet again over the oven. Momo glanced at the darkened
sky and turned the food. Ben stared at the ground. Night settled
in gray swirling waves. From afar came the coarse sound of
bullfrogs. Black swallows plummeted like silent bats dropped
from gunmetal slate only to veer swiftly up the rain gutters
and back into the sky. Modine stood in the shadows in the stoop
and watched. From the corner of his eye, Ben watched him back.
Ben found out that he was different, that
he was from somewhere else, when he heard the clinking of metal
milk-cans, glanced out from the kitchen window and saw that
there was a new delivery man. The regular man always brought
the milk inside because the cans were too heavy for Ben to
lift. But the new guy didn’t
know that, and Ben didn’t say anything to him about anything.
Ben took some money from a drawer and brought out two empty cans
from the cupboard.
There was a cold drizzle. He opened the door
and called out. When the man saw Ben a look crept slowly over
his face. The fog rose in a gray shroud over his towering figure.
A gust of wind lifted the long raincoat he wore, flapping it
about him. Ben shivered. He squinted. He held out the money together
with the clean pails. The man did not move. Ben felt the weight
of the metal buckets straining his arm. The pails got heavier.
He called out again to no avail. The strain in his shoulder became
unbearable and he released both cans so they clanged loudly down
the stone steps. Tiny raindrops settled quickly on the metal.
Air rushed out of Ben’s chest. He bent down at the stoop where the
delivery man had set down the milk and grasped a full pail in
his left hand. Thinking maybe he could drag it in and evade the
strange figure in the doorway, Ben shifted the can and soon realized
his mistake when the weight made him lose his balance and stumble,
bringing both cans crashing onto the cement floor, and the milk
gurgling out like twin white rivers. He stood motionless for
a long moment, ignoring his mother who’d appeared at the
first sound of noise, for something was jogging a pebble lodged
in his mind. Memory washed over him slowly, like the white lake
pooling at his feet. The twilight that had clouded him, confused
him, began to lighten and clear up. He remembered that moment
two years ago when he’d dropped the other can of milk,
the one he was struggling up the same stoop with because his
father couldn’t do it any more, and Mama was in there in
the room with him taking care of things. Ben’s muscles
then were not strong enough to lift even one pail so he half-dragged
it slowly down the corridor to the store-room. Ben was right
there outside his parents’ room when he’d stopped
to rest, maybe, stumbled and spilled some milk onto the clean
corridor floor. He looked down at the liquid spreading stealthily
on the ground. It occurred to him that his father was dying.
He rubbed the floor with his foot, hoping to clear it before
discovery, but what came out was a brownish stain in the cement
that wouldn’t leave no matter how hard he tried. He stood
indecisively, wondering whether to run for a cleaning rag, but
remained rooted by what would happen should the abandoned can,
together with the stain, be found sitting there in the hallway.
Then Ben heard what would change him, what would lodge in his
understanding and change the things that moved and breathed around
him: his father’s voice, weak, too weak, saying, Yes,
yes mama, I know. I know he’s not our son, I know Benny is
not ours. Mama, what we did was wrong. It was me, mama, me. It
was my fault. But it’s over now. Benny is my son. Benny
is my son. Take care of him …care…and his mother’s
voice saying no he’s not and with things like this maybe
I’ll have to take him back, I can’t bear it. Then
his father groaned as though someone ripped something out from
inside him and said yes, yes mama and Ben thought: he’s
dying. He’s dying. At that moment Ben ran to the kitchen,
got the rag and went on his knees to clean the floor but the
stain would not come off. He thought about what he’d heard
and filed it in the deepest compartment in the area of his mind
where he forgot things. He was specialized in that. But this
time the forgetting was different. The secret was so large it
pushed out other things hidden there. Ghosts plagued him at night
and soon he found he could not stand daylight. His eyes began
to perceive a perpetual twilight. He took to his bed for weeks
and refused to speak to anyone except Modine, and even Modine
could only get so far with him. He lived with the feeling that
he was avoiding something but was too terrified to turn and meet
it. The words he’d heard slunk away and crouched, waiting,
hidden in the crevices of his palpitating memory banks. Things
ground to a mindless slowness. He did not pick up a book or a
pen or look his mother directly in the eye. The world turned
ashen, became barren, with every moment more cruel than the last.
Momo came, and that moved him out of bed, but it was as though
it were not he but a watcher, an imposter mimicking his own movements.
When his mother entered his room to bring him food or to beg
him to talk, or bathe, at least, he stared at her and wanted
to say, Bring him back. Bring me my father. But the words stalled
on his cracked lips, and he looked away and said nothing.
Ben stood for a long moment gazing at the white lake gurgling
forth its memories. Remembrance rushed forth like water thundering
down a cliff. The twilight had lifted. A cold dread settled in
his chest. He retreated into the house and began to walk to his
room. At the door he stopped and turned and went back to where
his mother stood.
“What’s my name?” he whispered harshly.
“What?” She gave a shallow laugh.
“What is my real name?”
Ben’s mother put her hands to her face for a long time
then dropped them.
“Ben. We didn’t do anything bad. We loved you. We
wanted you.”
She came to him and put her arms around him.
He closed his eyes and sighed. It had been long…a long time. He smelled the
sweat in her armpits, a ripe fruity scent. That smell had been
absent for a long time too, so when she urged him to sit in her
lap as she had many years ago, he agreed, sitting carefully,
she would want him to be careful. She hugged him and he slipped
his head onto her shoulder and he felt lighter and younger and
very, very tired.
“I want to tell you a story.”
He nodded. She began to speak. She spoke for
a long while, and all that time he was aware of her mouth moving,
her chest going up and down. The words poured over him, deadening
him with their meaning. He began to understand the vast darkness
in him and it was then that he recognized the real threads of
her voice. Was it his voice, he wondered, could
it ever be? Even
Modine had known. In his awareness the words churned out of her
like greased bearings that were able to quietly and smoothly
roll him out of her arms and down the three steps of the veranda,
on to the trail leading him to Modine’s house. His feet
sank heavily into the earth. He pressed his arm to his side.
In the path the sound of crickets exploded from the underbrush.
From somewhere came the low moaning of frogs. He was tired. He
approached the yard and passed the girl fanning the stove. Tired,
tired. He placed himself in front of Modine, facing him, soldier-like.
You knew, he snarled. Words poured out. Momo came and said chaldi, and took him to the oven to warm his hands. His heart tolled
strangely. Bat-like creatures plummeted from the sky. Darkness
fell as heavy as the dread in his chest. He knew quite purely
that nothing would get better.
The next day Modine took him to the General Hospital through
the crowds of sick people where the Indian spoke to a thin-faced
doctor for many minutes. After some time the doctor disappeared
to return with a large, dusty records ledger. Modine turned several
pages and ran a finger in the center of the book. He examined
it for several seconds then nodded.
Ben said, “What’s there, Modine?”
“It is here.”
Modine wrote something on a piece of paper.
Back outside the boy shaded his eyes and looked up at Modine.
“I want to go alone.”
“Eh-Ben. You will be all right?”
Ben shrugged. “I will be…I think.”
“I will wait for you then, by the road. We will take the
bus back together.”
“Okay.”
Ben watched Modine go and sit on a stone by
the side of the road that was the bus stop. He turned and went
the opposite direction to the settlement that was the home of
the man who was really his father.
Modine sat on the stone that was lukewarm
from the late afternoon sunshine. He watched the boy disappearing
into the distance and thought how thin and flat he looked.
How little. He was reminded of an even thinner, hungrier boy
on the streets of Calcutta, long, far back in a time he thought
he’d erased for ever…
He sank into a deep state of brooding and only
realized it was night when a hand tapped him on the shoulder.
“Eh-Ben.” Modine looked up. “Took a while.”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
Ben was silent.
“Did you see him?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“He’s not there.”
“You didn’t wait?”
“He’s not there.”
“Not there, eh.”
Ben nodded.
Modine took the boy’s hand. “Eh-Ben. Lets go home.”
The bus came by and they both entered. It was
late, and they easily got seats. Ben sat by the window and watched
the blackness speed by. He felt a sense of gathering familiarity.
All at once he thought about Momo’s eyes and what he had seen there
that first time. He knew now why he recognized the look in her
face. The bus arrived. They walked the distance from the main
road to the compound. At the gate Modine stuck a hand in his
pocket and said goodnight. Ben said goodnight. He went to his
room without talking to his mother.
Late that night in bed he thought about
what he’d seen
and wondered whether to tell Modine or to forget it. He’d
become good at forgetting, an expert, and it was good not to
remember, to be a great gray sponge that swallowed things immediately
they came upon it. He liked that. But he wondered how he was
not going to remember seeing his real blood. He wondered how,
in the halls of his mind, he would not relive the story that
resonated within him as though from some distant, precognitive
memory. This time he was afraid he could not file it away, for
his mind was getting crowded with forgetting. Sleep and swirling
ghosts quarreled within him. Altered images pushed themselves
out of his head. Black spaces were forming around him. His mind
seemed to erupt from him, like jellied matter impaled upon a
rod. There were no surprises, the words were in him, shivering,
more unforgettable than his mother’s cold smile. And himself,
earlier that evening, walking back from the shack that stank
of defeat and poverty, back to the sensation that raced so sharply
through his nerve endings that the blades of grass brushing his
feet turned to cutting objects put there simply to state one
thing to him: live. He moved away from that, from the stained
mattress on the floor, the dividing curtain hung so threadbare
there was no point to it, his legs moving from side to side,
his footprints multiplying like mutant foot-buds sprouting a
matrix through which rose the tyranny of his own nature. There
it sat, stagnant as the illicit brew steeped heavy into his father’s
face, the eyes turned inward mourning some irredeemable absence,
deep battle lines and deep illusions stating Ben’s existence
was only an abstraction, an impulse, accident perhaps, a result
of no further options, a whim, all drenched in the sullen old
stench of backyard liquor.
Ben understood it all without knowing what
it was that settled through him as though through blotting paper.
The blades cut his shins and he wondered how
he was not going to remember the cracks in the wooden table filled
with old substances, table tilting from a broken leg, the sunlight
sagging in through the kanga hung in the middle. How to forget
that light of another source, the source of surrender, charred
as the lips of the old man leaning toward him, spittle-flecked
and no teeth, pinning him down with the gaze turned inward which,
to Ben’s shock,
was like looking straight into his own eyes as he had seen them
ten thousand times in the raging mirror. How could he get rid
of that dragging light, light of no nature which promised nothing,
amplified emptiness, a simmering glimmer bouncing off the tenacious
spider weaving in the corner whose zeal was the only life force
there, Ben saw. How could he forget that, and the gum-blackened
opening that was the old man’s mouth saying: “It
was the dry season when you were born. We were going through
bad times. The crop failed and there was nothing to pick. We
were living in the heart of tea land and we could not even get
a cup to drink. Heh. I told your mother that we should move to
Nakuru where I could find something but she refused. She told
me she wanted to stay here. I thought she liked it here with
your grandmother and our people. But she wanted to stay here
so she could leave. Me, I didn’t know that. I thought she
was just tired so I stayed, I tried to find something, some work.
There was nothing. Inside her it was you and your sister, growing.
Twins. How did I know? Your grandmother put her hands over the
belly and she felt it. I was worried. But I was happy.” The
old man shook his head and took a sip of liquor. “Your
mother wasn’t happy. She kept saying it’s over, it’s
over, and me I kept saying what, what.” The old man cackled
and took another sip of his drink. “She meant she was leaving
me, and me I thought it was craziness, the crazy pregnant woman.
When you and your sister were born,” his face changed, “when
you were born she did a bad thing.” What? Ben whispered
fearfully, thinking, what could it be, he was alive after all. “After
you were born there was no food. She was very hungry, we were
all hungry but she, more than anybody because her body wanted
to feed both of you. It was too much for her. She started eating
soil, because I could not buy enough food. I got worried. I thought
her mind was going. One day I saw her talking to a man outside.
I went there and asked him what he wanted with my wife. He said
he had known her for while before she gave birth. He said he
had come to collect his children. I said what do you mean, these
are my children. They are mine. I want my money, he said, or
my children. He was not the real father, he knew, but he had
paid your mother some money for the children, and he wanted them,
he had paid for them. Heh. I felt as though something great rushed
out of me. I became great. I got a panga and was going to kill
your mother. I told her I would cut off her breasts with that
panga. I was going to do it, I was about to kill them both. But
the man stopped me. There was something in him…I could
tell. Something. I stopped. So he said that he would take just
one child and educate him and feed him for a while and then when
we were ready we could come and take you back. I thought it wasn’t
so bad, for you to have something to eat. You were so thin. And
this man, standing there, looking like that. Just looking at
you like that. So you went, and I let you go. I was going to
come and get you, but your mother left the next day. She left.
I was coming to get you, but I was waiting for me to find something,
find some work. I was coming to get you.”
Ben nodded. Outside an owl hooted repeatedly.
There was the cackling of hyenas in the distance. A sound at
the door and a girl appeared, about his age, but much smaller,
and thin. She had on a garment that hung badly off her body and
no shoes. She moved slowly, heavy-limbed with a look in her that
struck the young boy. Huge wrist knuckles held in tight by skin,
eyes dull with hunger and swiveling in their sockets as though
on the axis of some other need. Ben saw that and how thin she
was, bones coming out of her cheeks. He felt ashamed, suddenly,
of the meal he had eaten that was still full in his belly. He
wished desperately for something. He looked fully at the girl,
intently, and it was as though he were there besides himself,
a double, a small walking shadow. Feminine features, lines softer
yet gaunt, how gaunt, her entire physical hollowness gnawed at
him. He wanted to stop this, the hollow space, but this was something
he’d not learned how
to forget. A substance filled up his chest and leaked out, pooling
around his feet. He felt a crushing desire to be back in his
clean house in his clean room with the ghost of his father who
was not his father who was his father swirling around him. He
felt guilty at the gladness rising in him that he was not of
here, of the old man with the rotten teeth, and the ghastly skeletal
being that was his twin. He turned to leave.
“Wait!…son…” His father put his face
close to Ben’s and Ben saw the old man was not really old,
just looked that way. Ben glanced at his sister who returned
the gaze silently and he thought of the crushing pull in the
dark of the night, and understood it. Ben turned his back and
walked out of the door and began the long walk back to the bus-
stop where Modine was waiting for him.
Now in bed sleep was a gathering storm rushing at him. He was
sinking. He wondered what that could be, that furious, relentless
pounding. Blades cut his legs. He looked down at the shimmering
lake that had collapsed at his feet. Substance leaked everywhere.
He bent down to gather it, with the good and the broken, to bring
it back home to his chest. It slithered through his hand, trickled
between his fingers. He could not hold it. He could not grab
it. He could not grasp it, no matter how hard he tried. And in
the distance Modine was saying, a while, Ben-eh Ben. Took a while,
Ben.
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