Wife of the Gods (18 page)

“Maybe so. I don’t know what evening that was.”

“Friday.”

“She was here many times.”

“Do you remember speaking with her on Friday evening?”

Adzima signaled John, who came over and held a whispered
conversation with him. John nodded, turned, and abruptly asked the
crowd to leave. They looked sullenly at him for a moment and then
reluctantly straggled away. They had evidently been hoping to
witness the entire exchange.

Once everyone had left, Adzima beckoned Dawson and Fiti to come
closer, and then he dispensed with the formality of speaking
through John, although John stayed close by. This was where
Dawson’s ability to speak Ewe came in handy, because he could
address the priest without an interpreter and catch any subtle
shades of meaning.

“So back to my question,” Dawson said. “Did you have any kind of
discussion or argument with Gladys on Friday evening?”

Adzima shook his head. “Why should I argue with her?”

His voice was like the warty, slimy surface of a toad’s back.
Dawson was not enamored of toads.

“Did you have any problems with her?” he asked.

“What kinds of problems?”

“She told you she didn’t like the way you treat your wives,
isn’t that true?”

Adzima shrugged. “And so? I paid no attention to her.”

“She was against you and against the trokosi tradition.”

“Yes, and that’s why she has died.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told her, I warned her – if you try to go against this
tradition that has been in Ghana for so many thousands of years, if
you try to stop it, the gods will take action against you. And you
see now? Look at what has happened.” Adzima shook his finger at
Dawson. “Don’t play, I say, don’t
play
with the words of a
High Priest in his shrine. If I warn you about something, take
heed.”

“Did you tell Gladys that on Friday evening?”

“Not just that evening, sir. Don’t you understand what I’m
trying to tell you? I told her a hundred times! Every time she was
here, I tried to warn her. I told her, look, the gods do not like
this. Be careful. We have a peaceful life here, Inspector Dawson.
We have no problems. We don’t need anyone to come and tell us how
to live.”

“Togbe Adzima, when Gladys left to go back to Ketanu, did you
follow her?”

Adzima looked genuinely surprised. “Follow her for what?”

“Yes or no. Did you follow her back to Ketanu?”

Adzima leaned back and began to laugh softly. “Oh, Mr. Detective
Man all the way from Accra. You are funny. No, I didn’t follow
her.”

“Where were you around that time?”

“I was inside,” Adzima said, gesturing to the house.

Dawson looked at Inspector Fiti to see if he wanted to ask
anything, but Fiti shook his head.

“The girls who are brought to your shrine,” Dawson said, “do you
think they’re happy to come here and be separated from their
families?”

He felt a poke in his side and from the corner of his eye saw
Fiti glaring at him.

“Aha!” Adzima said, smiling crookedly. “I knew you were going to
ask me that, because it’s what you kind of people from Accra always
do. You see, this is our tradition. In our religion, these girls
come to the shrine to learn godly ways, and they are the
blessed
ones. That’s what you don’t understand. And these
white people who come all the way from
abrochi
– Denmark or
U.K. or somewhere – to tell us our customs are bad and the women at
the shrine are slaves and all this kind of nonsense. What about
white people too and their ugly ways? Men having unnatural
relations with other men. What about that, eh?
Kai
, what
nastiness!”

Adzima spat a long stream of phlegm, and it landed on a rock
with deadly accuracy.

“Do you treat your wives well?” Dawson said.

“Oh, yes!” Adzima said indignantly. “I treat them like queens. I
have to. If I didn’t, do you think the gods would not have punished
me by now?”

“I don’t know. You’re the expert.”

Adzima laughed. “True. I am the expert. Look, if you want, you
can come and watch our trokosi ceremony today. I will get a new
wife today.”

He grinned his toothless, red, rubbery smile, and Dawson wanted
to slap it off his face.

“Thank you, Togbe Adzima,” Fiti said.

“But we need to talk to the wife,” Dawson chimed in quickly,
“the one who found Gladys.”

“Efia?” Adzima said. “No problem. I can call her right now and
she can tell you everything.”

“In private,” Dawson said.

“Eh?”

“We need to talk to her in private. Alone.”

“Oh, no.” Adzima shook his head adamantly and clicked his
tongue. “She is not authorized to talk to you if I’m not also with
her. She belongs to this shrine, and I am the High Priest of this
shrine.”

“But
we
are authorized to talk to her in private,” Dawson
said evenly.

“Authorized by whom?”

“The attorney general of Ghana and every rank below him.”

This did not impress Adzima, who shrugged his shoulders. “I’m
telling you she won’t talk to you if I am not there with her.”

Dawson felt another jab in his side, and Fiti said hurriedly,
“Togbe Adzima, thank you for seeing us.”

“You are welcome.” He stood up. “Just one thing, Detective
Inspector Dawson.”

“Yes?”

“Never underestimate the striking hand of an angry god. No one
can escape, not even you. I hope you will heed my words better than
Gladys Mensah did.”

∨
Wife of the Gods
∧

T
he Trokosi ceremony
would not be for a couple of hours, so Dawson and Fiti killed some
time by returning to Ketanu to get something to eat at a noisy,
popular place called Light Up My Life Restaurant, where Dawson had
spicy hot chicken and rice, and Fiti ordered
banku
and
kontomire
.

“How are we going to talk to Efia alone?” Dawson asked Fiti.
“Any ideas?”

Fiti thought about it while munching on a mouthful of food.
“While the ceremony is on and Togbe Adzima is occupied,” he said at
length, “we will try to talk to her.”

“I don’t want to get her in trouble,” Dawson said.

“We’ll do our best to protect her.”

It was a facile answer that didn’t make Dawson any more
comfortable. Somehow he seriously doubted Adzima’s claim that he
treated his wives like queens.

♦

When they returned to Bedome, the trokosi ceremony had begun. A
large crowd had formed a wide circle, at the top of which three
sweating, bare-chested men were pounding
sogo
and
kidi
drums. A group of women sang, clapped, and swayed in
tight unison.

Dawson and Fiti made their way to the front rows. Togbe Adzima,
dressed conspicuously in white cloth, sat diametrically opposite
the drummers with village elders on either side of him.

The circle broke open, and a slow procession came through toward
Adzima. The girl heading the procession, no older than fifteen or
sixteen, carried a dappled black-and-white stool on her head and
wore a black-and-white cloth bunched above her breasts.

“This will be Togbe’s fifth wife,” Fiti said.

And she’s well into puberty
, Dawson thought, which meant
he might have sexual relations with her as immediately as tonight.
Dawson’s skin crawled at the thought of the hideous little toad
touching this teenager.

Right behind the trokosi, the women of her extended family
brought in cloth, gin –
yet more gin
, Dawson thought – kola
nut, and money in large bowls balanced on their heads, but the men,
solemn and silent, carried nothing.

The trokosi stopped in front of Adzima and curtsied to him as
she placed the stool at his feet. He did not appear moved by the
gesture, nor did he acknowledge the family members as they laid the
bowls of goods in front of him.

All the women began to sing and clap joyfully as the trokosi
performed a ceremonial dance around the circle. From Dawson’s point
of view, she moved as if she had feet of lead. Her face seemed
contorted with sadness. She wept all the way through the dance, but
Adzima watched her with a hint of a smile.

Dawson studied the trokosi’s face and wondered what her name
was. Last week she might have been chatting with her friends the
way all teenagers do, unaware of the fate about to befall her.
Completely innocent, she may not even have known about the family
crime for which she was supposedly the atonement.

Abruptly, Adzima stood up and began to leave the circle,
followed by other priests and half a dozen village elders. The
young woman continued to dance until they were all gone. Then she
stood still while family members crowded around her and unwound the
first layer of cloth from her body, exposing her plump breasts. She
was wearing beads around her waist and between her thighs, and
there were white markings on her legs down to her bare feet.

The family ushered her forward in the direction the fetish
priest had gone, and the village crowd followed.

♦

According to Fiti, the new trokosi would go on to a series of
private shrine initiation rites in the presence of Adzima and a few
other priests. They disappeared into a small, smoky hut reputed to
contain fetish objects before which the wife would bow. The public
part of the ritual was over, and it was Dawson’s and Fiti’s chance
to get to Efia.

They circled the perimeter of the village, and under cover of
the bush they spotted the “old” trokosi wives preparing Adzima’s
wedding feast behind a cluster of huts. Some were pounding fufu in
large mortars to the rhythm of their singing, others were stirring
soup in pots over woodstoves. The children played with one another,
and undernourished dogs hovered for scraps.

“That’s Efia over there,” Fiti said, pointing one of the women
out. She was in the center deftly slicing plantains with a large,
sharp knife. “And that one, the old one, that’s Nunana. She’s been
here a long time.”

“We have to get Efia away from there, but how?” Dawson said. “A
diversion – that’s the only way.”

Fiti thought about it for a second. “I know what to do. I’m
going to the other side. Once I cause a commotion, go and get Efia.
You have to be fast.”

Dawson nodded. He was ready.

Fiti disappeared, and Dawson waited and watched for him to
reappear somewhere, but he didn’t show. Dawson frowned. Where was
he?

Suddenly Fiti’s voice shrieked from somewhere in the bush,
“Snake! Snake!
”

Dawson had to admit it was brilliant. Nothing created more
pandemonium than a long, slithery reptile with no legs. In seconds,
men came from all directions yelling and waving sticks and
cutlasses. Some children and women scattered, but a few were drawn
to the direction of the screaming man.

“Snake! Help! Snake!
”

Dawson kept his eye on Efia. She was moving back and forth and
peering up and down, apparently searching the stampeding crowd for
something or someone. The minute she spotted what she was looking
for, she sprang forward, and in seconds she had extracted a girl
from the mayhem and pulled her away. As she withdrew with the girl,
she became relatively isolated and Dawson saw his chance.

He didn’t run because he didn’t want to alarm her, but he moved
quickly, with an extralong stride.

Efia and the girl looked up at him, and he realized they were
mother and daughter.

“Ndo, Efia.”

“Ndo.”

“Don’t stand here,” Dawson said. “The snake might get you. Come
with me where it’s safer.”

Efia hesitated for a moment but then followed him with her
daughter in tow. He moved quickly behind the cover of some trees,
where they wouldn’t be observed.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, fine, thank you, sir.” She spoke softly. Her voice was
like the gentle stirring of air on the skin, light as the tone of a
flute. Her shoulders were bare, and she wore a long, wrinkled, dark
blue cloth bunched above her breasts and a curious necklace made
out of straw. She was one of the loveliest women Dawson had ever
seen.

“My name is Dawson,” he said. “I’m from Accra.”

“You are welcome, sir,” she said with a hint of a curtsy as they
shook hands.

“This is your daughter?”

“Yes, this is Ama.”

He shook her hand as well. “How are you, Ama?”

“Fine, thank you.”

Dawson could hear the men still beating the bushes hunting for
the elusive snake, but he knew he had to hurry. “I work in Accra
for the police, and I’m here in Ketanu to try to find out what
happened to Gladys Mensah.”

Efia’s eyes widened.

“Don’t be afraid,” Dawson said. “I just have some simple
questions to ask you, and I will never tell Togbe, okay?”

She nodded uncertainly.

“Was Gladys a good person to you?” Dawson asked.

Her eyes were downcast. “Yes.”

“She wanted to help you.”

Efia nodded and looked up at the sky while she tried to blink
tears away.

“I’m sorry,” Dawson said.

Ama was holding her mother’s hand. Efia tried to pull herself
together.

“I know Togbe doesn’t want you to talk to me,” Dawson went on,
“but I’m begging you to help. If we’re quick, you can go back to
the cooking and no one will know I spoke to you. Can you help me?
Not just for my sake, but for Gladys’s and her family’s.”

Efia touched Ama’s shoulder. “Go and stand over there and wait
for me.”

Her daughter obeyed and walked out of earshot.

“The morning you found Gladys Mensah, can you tell me what
happened?” Dawson asked Efia.

She told him how she had been going to pick plantains for Togbe
Adzima. “That’s when I saw her lying there.”

“Did you see anyone else around?”

“No, no one, sir. I was shouting for help, but…no one. Only
after I came running out of the forest did I see Mr. Kutu.”