Changer's Daughter (12 page)

“They certainly won’t have,” Lil murmurs, thinking of the satyrs’ aggressively jutting phalli, of the infectious charm inherent in the fauns’ dancing.

“Fauns and satyrs are the original party animals,” Tommy continues happily. “We’ll release
Pan
right before the first show so even the critics will get the connection. What do you think?”

Lil thinks of the fact that more and more single-act arena shows are failing to sell out, of her worry that even with her magical assistance Tommy will fail to be a sensation in this age of video. So much of his charisma doesn’t translate electronically.

And she thinks of King Arthur and how he will react when he learns that his worst nightmare is about to come true.

“I love it,” she purrs. “Let me get on it right away.”

Tommy moves to her side, lifts her from her desk chair, and embraces her, lifting her right off her feet, as happy as a child who has been given a present.

“You love it?” he asks, disbelieving.

“I do,” she answers. “The arrangements will be interesting... I can’t wait to hear what Arthur will say.”

Tommy smiles, innocent of the ramifications of his plan, caught up in the image of what an utterly fantastic concert this will be.

“Tell him he can have complimentary tickets,” he says. “Ringside seats. He won’t miss a moment of the show.”

The sacrifices and ceremonies have been completed and Aduke finds, somewhat to her surprise, that she feels better—more focused, more at peace.

Taiwo, her husband, had driven out from Lagos, where he is confidential assistant to some important businessman, to attend the events, but now he has departed again.

Kehinde, his twin, had also been present. Aduke wonders if anyone other than she had realized that the scholar had concealed a tape recorder in his pocket. He’d really been quite clever at changing the miniature cassettes, but she’d caught him at it.

She hadn’t given him away. In their very different ways, both of the twins are fighting for the survival of modern Nigeria. Taiwo works toward its economic future. Kehinde preserves the foundation of the past. Besides, Taiwo would never have forgiven her. She knows without jealousy that her husband’s twin is the single most important person in his life.

Now the apartment is comparatively quiet. Most of the women have gone to the market, taking with them the noisy brood of children. Aduke had remained behind in order to write some letters for her mother and to deal with some confusing official correspondence. That completed, she paces restlessly, pausing at the door to the bedroom that during the day changes from a nursery to Kehinde’s study.

Within, her brother-in-law is busy transcribing one of his tapes, rewinding and replaying each section as he laboriously scribes not only the words, but the tonal marks without which so many Yoruban words would blend into each other. Easing the door open a crack, Aduke watches him, head bent over a yellow legal pad, pencil resting loosely against the web between thumb and forefinger as he listens to the tape, his lips moving as he sounds out a possible spelling for one of the
babalawo
’s archaic terms.

Someday he hopes to have a computer, but not only would purchase of even a primitive PC put a strain on the family’s finances, the electric power in Monamona is unpredictable at best. Kehinde would need a computer with battery backup. He might as well wish for the moon.

A faint wind touches Aduke’s cheek. Turning away from her watch post, she discovers that Oya has come in. Yetunde’s year-old infant is strapped to the older woman’s back, sound asleep, and her arms are full of bundles.

“Aduke, come and help me with these. Your sister asked me to bring them by so that she could stay in the market. Business is better today.”

Aduke hastens to relieve Oya of her burden, gently closing the nursery door so that Kehinde will not be disturbed.

“My brother is writing,” she explains. “He gets so little quiet time.”

“Life is noisy,” Oya says with a shrug. “If he cannot work with the noise, then he should learn.”

“But the crying of the babies, the squabbles of the little children and the women.” Aduke gestures vaguely to indicate the entire extended family that lives crowded into the apartment as they once would have lived in a more spacious compound. “He is preserving our history for future generations. It is important work.”

“What is the future,” Oya says sensibly, “if it isn’t noisy babies and chattering women?”

“The future is something else,” Aduke says, stowing away a package of crayfish and trying to find words to articulate the concept as she had learned it in the university. “It is something beyond individual people—the sum of promise of what is to come.”

“Bosh!” Oya says gustily. “You’ve been speaking too much English. Remember, in the language of the Yoruba, the future is only separated from the past and the present by what you do with it. It is not some vague thing made up of nebulous people who must be humored or inspired. The ancestral soul is always reborn.”

Aduke considers this as she continues putting the groceries away, folding up bags and wrappings to be used at another time. Oya does have a point—at least about languages. In Yoruban, past and present are not as sharply delineated as they are in English or the other European languages she has learned. Literally, time
is
what you do with it, not what you say it is: “He put on a hat” rather than “He was wearing a hat.”

She wonders where the past had been before the English had arrived to explain it to them. Had it existed at all, a thing unseen but solidly real—like the Himalayan Mountains or the Continental Divide—or was it more like etiquette and table manners, things belonging to each culture and real only within that culture?

Aduke frowns, shaking her head to banish such useless meditations.

“I have been wondering,” she says, automatically starting preparations for dinner now that groceries have arrived, “if I should move back to Lagos to live with Taiwo.”

“Why?” Oya asks. “I thought you didn’t like Lagos. I thought you wanted to be here with your mother and sisters and their children.”

“That was when,” Aduke takes a deep breath, “I was raising a baby of my own. I didn’t want my son to grow up with only his mother and father for family.”

“And so, what has changed? Don’t you want a child anymore?”

“I... don’t know.” Aduke says, knowing full well that she does want a baby, very much, but faithfully articulating the confusion that her
aróso
self has been raising within her.

Oya looks sympathetic. “Are you afraid of being hurt again? That you are indeed doomed to bear a child born to die? The sacrifices did not seem to indicate that such was your fate.”

That would be the easy answer. Say “Yes, that is what I fear.” Let warm, comforting, maternal Oya talk that fear away—because it is a real one.

Yet, that answer would not be completely honest, and now, in the rare moment when the only competition for her attention is the faint drone of Kehinde’s recorder from behind the closed door, Aduke finds she wants to speak her thoughts.

“I was thinking that perhaps I am wasting my talents being a mother. Taiwo could use me at his side. I could be a great help to him.”

“True.” Oya looks at her sagely, even while adjusting the sleeping infant on her back and shifting coarse meal through a bit of screen to remove the grit and gravel. “You could. Are you unhappy with the role of mother?”

“I am not a mother!” Aduke says desperately. “My son is dead. I am just a...”

“Mother. These little ones,” Oya shrugs toward the baby on her back, “don’t care whose womb bore them. They care about having a warm back to sleep against and arms to rock them and, yes, voices to scold them when they are out of line.”

“Maybe.”

“Hm.” Oya chops up some peppers. “How many wives did your father have?”

Despite herself, Aduke is shocked. Hasn’t Oya been an intimate of the household long enough to know that her father had been a superior person, so fully modern that he had believed in education for both men and women?

“One,” she answers stiffly. “My father was a government official, not some bush chief.”

“Sometimes,” Oya says, ignoring Aduke’s pique, “it seems to me that everyone’s father has been a government official. Nigeria has certainly had enough governments these last fifty years. That may explain it.”

“What?” Aduke is confused.

“Why you don’t understand that being a mother is more than wombing a child. You had only one mother yourself.”

Aduke snorts, but Oya continues as if she hasn’t heard.

“Listen to me, Aduke. If you stay here with your sisters, you will be a mother to all of these little ones, and when your next child is born he will have many mothers and many brothers and sisters. Isn’t that why you came here when he was born?”

Aduke nods, realizing that beneath all her westernized talk of “support systems” and “extended family units” what she had really wanted—wanted so much that she had agreed to live apart from a beloved husband—was many mothers and many brothers and sisters for her little boy.

“A lot of good it did him,” she mutters.

“Nonsense,” Oya says briskly. “Now you are being obstinate. Your son had many to watch over him during his short life. If you had been in Lagos, he would have had you and maybe some nurses. That’s all.

“As I see it, the worst thing about modern education is that it stops many good women from doing what they wish—just as the old ways stopped women from being other than wives and mothers. There is room for both ways. If you wish to raise babies, do so! Anyone can have a job. Only a woman can have a child.”

“But can’t any woman bear a child?” Aduke asks timidly.

“Can any?” Oya looks suddenly sad, then wields her chopper with even greater force. “Not everyone is so lucky. Fewer still are fortunate enough to have the gift of being good mothers.”

“But I can read and write and program a computer,” Aduke says, perversely playing devil’s advocate against herself. “I can speak English as well as an Englishwoman and some French as well. I know geography and mathematics and science.”

“So? Is there any reason a mother cannot do these things?”

“But should I do what any breeding animal can do when I can do so much more? Don’t I owe the nation use of my education?”

Oya shakes her head. “You are thinking like a silly girl, not like a woman who has borne a child and suffered his loss. Your education means that you have more to give your children—or to your nieces and nephews if you persist in splitting the family up into little parts. With your example, your sons and daughters will learn to read and write. They will learn hygiene and nutrition, and, when they are older, to understand why the jobs that men like Kehinde and Taiwo do are as important as driving a lorry or hunting in the bush.”

Aduke laughs, knowing full well how glamorous a child would think either of the latter occupations.

“I shall take your advice under full consideration,” she promises. She was about to say more when the door bursts open and her sister Yetunde runs in, a horde of weeping or shouting children surging in with her like foam on a wave.

“Lost! Lost! We are lost!” Yetunde wails dramatically. Before she had given her attention to marketing and raising children, Yetunde had been famed as a singer and performer. Clearly those days are filling her lungs now.

“What are you saying?” Aduke says, automatically gathering two of the weeping toddlers onto her knees and patting them quiet. “How are we lost?”

“The owner of this building,” Yetunde continues, as dramatically as before, “he is speaking to our mother even now, but I have heard enough. News of what the
babalawo
said has come to his ears. He claims to have prayed over the matter at length but in the end he says that he can do no less out of thoughtfulness to his tenants, and so we are lost!”

Oya looks at Yetunde sharply but her expression is free of the rising panic that Aduke feels claiming her.

“Speak clearly, you silly woman! What has the landlord said?”

“He says it is not for him alone, but that other tenants have come to him. That they will leave if he does not do it.”

Oya raises her hand as if to slap Yetunde and the other woman hastens to clarify:

“He does not believe that the evil the
babalawo
has predicted will follow our family has been averted by the sacrifices. Neither, apparently, do our neighbors. Despite eating our food and drinking our beer and wine, they have threatened to move if we are not evicted.”

“Oh.” Aduke can’t think of anything more intelligent to say.

“And no one else will take us in!” her sister continues. “They won’t dare, for then
their
tenants will protest. We will sleep on the streets as the minions of the King of the World flutter through the darkness and breathe fever into our nostrils!”

From the back of the apartment, the nursery door flings open, hitting the wall with such force that the children fall silent as one.

“Can’t anyone give me even a few hours of peace in which to write?” Kehinde shouts angrily. “What is going on here?”