The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Memoir. Aminatta Forna

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СКАЧАТЬ trying to make up my mind whether or not to knock on the door and explain to the inhabitants that I had once lived in their house. My drive through the neighbourhood had told me it was poor, but beyond that I hadn’t much idea of what sort of people lived here. I had seen no black or brown faces, but then again there had been few people on the freezing streets. I dithered, folded and refolded my map. I reached for the door handle. At that instant the door of 19 Ardgay Street flew open: a man with a shaved head, holding a piece of wood, stood there and seemed to stare straight at me. A Rhodesian ridgeback bounded past him and up to the front gate. My nerve failed. I started the ignition and drove away.

      Back then we were broke and we were black. We survived on my father’s grant, stretched to meet the demands of each new baby. It was tough to find anyone who wanted to rent us a place to live. Lots of the advertisements specified ‘no blacks’; sometimes it said ‘no foreigners’, which was another way of saying the same thing.

      Searching for a house could be so difficult that one medical student put a large advertisement in the local newspaper in capitals: BLACK DOCTOR SEEKS ACCOMMODATION. He said it cut short the process of going to see apartments which were always gone the moment you showed your face. My father went to Bellshill Maternity Hospital, where he was taking up his internship, found another black doctor who was leaving to go home, and asked him if he could rent his apartment.

      The five of us lived in two rooms in Ardgay Street. The Shettleston house was owned by a couple who ran a driving school and lived in the other wing. Above the door was an inscription to ‘Our Lady of Fatima’. There were times on a Saturday night when a brick would crash through the two windows facing the street; but my mother said it was because they were Protestants and thought we were Catholics, not because we were black.

      The hospital where my father did his rounds and delivered babies was a different world; he was treated with great respect and his patients adored him. People talked about his wonderful ‘bedside manner’. It was years before I understood what they meant. I imagined my father sitting next to his patients, eating from a table elaborately laid with every kind of silverware, de-boning a sole or delicately peeling a peach with a knife.

      When I was six months old a letter came from the family in Sierra Leone. It was from our father’s father. Ibrahim, one of my father’s elder brothers, had died; our grandfather begged Mohamed to come home at the earliest and help take care of the family.

      We sailed on the passenger ship the Aureol. It docked in the Canaries, where the crew filled the pool on the deck with sea water; then we set sail for Freetown. The other passengers were mostly returning former colonials, who played cards, organised a fancy dress party and sat at each other’s tables in the evening without ever inviting us to join them.

      When the ship docked alongside the massive warehouses of the Queen Elizabeth II quay, the first thing my mother saw was the fedora belonging to my father’s friend Dr Panda bobbing in the surging crowds. She stepped off the boat and into the throng of Africans and she was transformed, once again, into a white woman.

      In Freetown people stared at her wherever she went, especially when she rode by on her bicycle. ‘Look! White woman dae ride bicycle!’

      White again, my mother was accepted, on certain conditions, into the ex-pat community in Freetown. She joined a Scottish dancing group that met at the Railway Club and at the exclusively white Hill Station Club. Before independence black people were not even allowed up to Hill Station unless they worked in one of the big houses. A special train was sent down every day to bring the workers up to the hills. Certainly, there were no African members of the Hill Station Club. My mother was popular there: she had grown up performing songs and dances and she entranced everyone with her outgoing personality. Her only disappointment was that at the end of the evening the other members never invited her to their houses for drinks or supper, and she made her way home alone.

      Marriage to my father turned my mother into a multi-hued chameleon. He, by contrast, had been a black man in Scotland and was a black man in Africa. Once I asked my mother how my father regarded her patronage of the Hill Station Club. She said she didn’t know.

      ‘What if he’d wanted to come too?’ I pressed.

      ‘Well, he wouldn’t,’ she replied. ‘He didn’t know the Scottish dances.’ That was the way she thought about these matters. It was as simple as that.

      My father’s visiting brothers were kind to her, especially Uncle Momodu. He had an appetite for all things western and always wore western clothes. He came down to Freetown ‘on business’, he stated enigmatically, and, when he wasn’t at one of his assignations, he flicked through the magazines my mother brought with her from Britain, questioning her about life ‘over there’. Momodu wandered in and out of the house, played with the babies and loved to tease his serious younger brother’s wife. But Maureen felt frozen out by the wives of my father’s friends who, she thought, disregarded her, though she could never quite put her finger on the problem because it lay in what was missing from their welcome rather than what was present.

      Soon after we arrived Pa Roke, my grandfather, came to visit, bringing with him several live chickens, some sacks of rice and one of his junior wives. He cast an eye over my mother: ‘So you went to the sea and turned into a fish,’ he said to my father in Temne. He’d warned his son not to come back with a white wife. There were a lot of local families who would have liked to make a match. ‘How much did you pay?’ He meant how much was the dowry. She was young; her breasts hadn’t fallen yet.

      ‘Ten shillings,’ my father replied straight faced. That was what he’d been charged at the register office on the morning of the wedding. Pa Roke smiled: he was pleased. His son’s wife might be white, but she had come at a good price.

      In Koidu as we passed people waved and called out to my mother and me. Young men offered to carry her packages; shopkeepers ushered her over to look at the latest imported fabrics. Everyone recognised her. She was the doctor’s white wife. And there was only one white woman in Koidu. And only one doctor.

       6

      A few months after our clinic opened a battered bush taxi drew up in front of the house. There were quite a few people crammed inside; at first it was difficult to see exactly how many. They struggled out, among them a woman so emaciated and feeble that she couldn’t walk, as well as a boy of around eight or nine who looked as if he were unconscious.

      Our father came out and helped carry them into the surgery; it was obvious he was upset and angry: ‘Why do you bring them to me when it’s too late?’ No one replied. And he knew the answer: they had nothing, there was no way to pay a doctor.

      The woman was close to death. The boy, who was perhaps her son, had died in the back of the car a short while before: his body was still limp, no signs yet of rigor mortis. My father asked the family about the woman’s and the boy’s symptoms. Were there others? They nodded. Yes, they replied, there were many others in the village, too ill to make the journey.

      My father didn’t have a laboratory but it took him less than a minute to reach his diagnosis: what the people described was a cholera epidemic. He took his bag, swept up armfuls of drugs, threw them all onto the front seat of our Austin and left. The family sat in the back giving him directions to their village, cradling the body of the small boy wrapped in a sheet.

      My father didn’t come back until much later that night, until after he had traced the source of the contamination and persuaded the village headman to stop people using the water. It was never easy; there was often only one well or stream; people didn’t understand the СКАЧАТЬ