Stars of the New Curfew Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ben Okri

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  In the Shadow of War

  Worlds That Flourish

  In the City of Red Dust

  Stars of the New Curfew

  When the Lights Return

  What the Tapster Saw

  Copyright

  About the Book

  To enter the world of Ben Okri’s stories is to surrender to a new reality. Set in the chaotic streets of Lagos and the jungle heart of Nigeria, all the laws of cause and effect, fact and fiction, are suspended. It is a world where the lives of the powerless veer terrifyingly close to nightmare. In rich, lyrical, almost hallucinatory prose, Ben Okri guides us through the fabulous and the mundane, the serene and the randomly violent. The unrelenting Nigerian heat and the implacable darkness of the black-out and the military curfew are the backdrops for his characters each finding their own ways to survive. We witness their dogged resistance to impotence, their unquenchable humour and their insistence on the possibility of love in the face of terror. Written with the lucid clarity and logic of dream, Stars of the New Curfew is a book of visionary imagination.

  About the Author

  Ben Okri has won several awards, including the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour Prize. He is vice-president of the English Centre of International PEN and was presented with the Crystal Award for outstanding contribution to the Arts and to cross-cultural understanding by the World Economic Forum. As well as fiction, he has published a collection of poetry, An African Elegy, and a volume of essays, A Way of Being Free. He was born in Minna, Nigeria.

  Also by Ben Okri

  Fiction

  Flowers and Shadows

  The Landscape Within

  Incidents at the Shrine

  The Famished Road

  Songs of Enchantment

  Astonishing the Gods

  Dangerous Love

  Infinite Riches

  Non-Fiction

  Birds of Heaven

  A Way of Being Free

  Poetry

  An African Elegy

  Mental Fight

  We carry in our worlds that flourish our worlds that have failed

  Christopher Okigbo

  IN THE SHADOW OF WAR

  THAT AFTERNOON THREE soldiers came to the village. They scattered the goats and chickens. They went to the palm-frond bar and ordered a calabash of palm-wine. They drank amidst the flies.

  Omovo watched them from the window as he waited for his father to go out. They both listened to the radio. His father had bought the old Grundig cheaply from a family that had to escape the city when the war broke out. He had covered the radio with a white cloth and made it look like a household fetish. They listened to the news of bombings and air raids in the interior of the country. His father combed his hair, parted it carefully, and slapped some aftershave on his unshaven face. Then he struggled into the shabby coat that he had long outgrown.

  Omovo stared out of the window, irritated with his father. At that hour, for the past seven days, a strange woman with a black veil over her head had been going past the house. She went up the village paths, crossed the Express road, and disappeared into the forest. Omovo waited for her to appear.

  The main news was over. The radio announcer said an eclipse of the moon was expected that night. Omovo’s father wiped the sweat off his face with his palm and said, with some bitterness:

  ‘As if an eclipse will stop this war.’

  ‘What is an eclipse?’ Omovo asked.

  ‘That’s when the world goes dark and strange things happen.’

  ‘Like what?’

  His father lit a cigarette.

  ‘The dead start to walk about and sing. So don’t stay out late, eh.’

  Omovo nodded.

  ‘Heclipses hate children. They eat them.’

  Omovo didn’t believe him. His father smiled, gave Omovo his ten kobo allowance, and said:

  ‘Turn off the radio. It’s bad for a child to listen to news of war.’

  Omovo turned it off. His father poured a libation at the doorway and then prayed to his ancestors. When he had finished he picked up his briefcase and strutted out briskly. Omovo watched him as he threaded his way up the path to the bus-stop at the main road. When a danfo bus came, and his father went with it, Omovo turned the radio back on. He sat on the window-sill and waited for the woman. The last time he saw her she had glided past with agitated flutters of her yellow smock. The children stopped what they were doing and stared at her. They had said that she had no shadow. They had said that her feet never touched the ground. As she went past, the children began to throw things at her. She didn’t flinch, didn’t quicken her pace, and didn’t look back.

  The heat was stupefying. Noises dimmed and lost their edges. The villagers stumbled about their various tasks as if they were sleep-walking. The three soldiers drank palm-wine and played draughts beneath the sun’s oppressive glare. Omovo noticed that whenever children went past the bar the soldiers called them, talked to them, and gave them some money. Omovo ran down the stairs and slowly walked past the bar. The soldiers stared at him. On his way back one of them called him.

  ‘What’s your name’ he asked.

  Omovo hesitated, smiled mischievously, and said:

  ‘Heclipse.’

  The soldier laughed, spraying Omovo’s face with spit. He had a face crowded with veins. His companions seemed uninterested. They swiped flies and concentrated on their game. Their guns were on the table. Omovo noticed that they had numbers on them. The man said:

  ‘Did your father give you that name because you have big lips?’

  His companions looked at Omovo and laughed. Omovo nodded.

  ‘You are a good boy,’ the man said. He paused. Then he asked, in a different voice:

  ‘Have you seen that woman who covers her face with a black cloth?’

  ‘No.’

  The man gave Omovo ten kobo and said:

  ‘She is a spy. She helps our enemies. If you see her come and tell us at once, you hear?’

  Omovo refused the money and went back upstairs. He re-positioned himself on the window-sill. The soldiers occasionally looked at him. The heat got to him and soon he fell asleep in a sitting position. The cocks, crowing dispiritedly, woke him up. He could feel the afternoon softening into evening. The soldiers dozed in the bar. The hourly news came on. Omovo listened without comprehension to the day’s casualties. The announcer succumbed to the stupor, yawned, apologized, and gave further details of the fighting.

  Omovo looked up and saw that the woman had already gone past. The men had left the bar. He saw them weaving between the eaves of the thatch houses, stumbling through the heat-mists. The woman was further up the path. Omovo ran downstairs and followed the men. One of them had taken off his uniform top. The soldier behind had buttocks so big they had begun to split his pants. Omovo followed them across the Express road. When they got into the forest the men stopped following the woman, and took a different route. They seemed to know what they were doing. Omovo hurried to keep the woman in view.

  He followed her through the dense vegetation. She wore faded wrappers and a grey shawl, with the black veil covering her face. She had a red basket on her head. He completely forgot to determine if she had a shadow, or whether her feet touched the ground.

  He passed unfinished estates, with their flaking ostentatious signboards and their collapsing fences. He passed an empty cement factory: blocks lay crumbled in heaps and the workers’ sheds were deserted. He passed a baobab tree, under which was the intact skeleton of a large animal. A snake dropped from a branch and slithered through the undergrowth. In the distance, over the cliff edge, he heard loud music and people singing war slogans above the noise.

  He followed the woman till they came to a rough camp on the plain below. Shadowy figures moved about in the half-light of the cave. The woman went to them. The figures surrounded her and touched her and led her into the cave. He heard their weary voices thanking her. When the woman reappeared she was without the basket. Children with kwashiorkor stomachs and women wearing rags led her half-way up the hill. Then, reluctantly, touching her as if they might not see her again, they went back.

  He followed her till they came to a muddied river. She moved as if an invisible force were trying to blow her away. Omovo saw capsized canoes and trailing waterlogged clothes on the dark water. He saw floating items of sacrifice: loaves of bread in polythene wrappings, gourds of food, Coca-Cola cans. When he looked at the canoes again they had changed into the shapes of swollen dead animals. He saw outdated currencies on the riverbank. He noticed the terrible smell in the air. Then he heard the sound of heavy breathing from behind him, then someone coughing and spitting. He recognized the voice of one of the soldiers urging the others to move faster. Omovo crouched in the shadow of a tree. The soldiers strode past. Not long afterwards he heard a scream. The men had caught up with the woman. They crowded round her.

  ‘Where are the others?’ shouted one of them.

  The woman was silent.

  ‘You dis witch! You want to die, eh? Where are they?’

  She stayed silent. Her head was bowed. One of the soldiers coughed and spat towards the river.

  ‘Talk! Talk!’ he said, slapping her.

  The fat soldier tore off her veil and threw it to the ground. She bent down to pick it up and stopped in the attitude of kneeling, her head still bowed. Her head was bald, and disfigured with a deep corrugation. There was a livid gash along the side of her face. The bare-chested soldier pushed her. She fell on her face and lay still. The lights changed over the forest and for the first time Omovo saw that the dead animals on the river were in fact the corpses of grown men. Their bodies were tangled with river-weed and their eyes were bloated. Before he could react, he heard another scream. The woman was getting up, with the veil in her hand. She turned to the fat soldier, drew herself to her fullest height, and spat in his face. Waving the veil in the air, she began to howl dementedly. The two other soldiers backed away. The fat soldier wiped his face and lifted the gun to the level of her stomach. A moment before Omovo heard the shot a violent beating of wings just above him scared him from his hiding place. He ran through the forest screaming. The soldiers tramped after him. He ran through a mist which seemed to have risen from the rocks. As he ran he saw an owl staring at him from a canopy of leaves. He tripped over the roots of a tree and blacked out when his head hit the ground.

  When he woke up it was very dark. He waved his fingers in front of his face and saw nothing. Mistaking the darkness for blindness he screamed, thrashed around, and ran into a door. When he recovered from his shock he heard voices outside and the radio crackling on about the war. He found his way to the balcony, full of wonder that his sight had returned. But when he got there he was surprised to find his father sitting on the sunken cane chair, drinking palm-wine with the three soldiers. Omovo rushed to his father and pointed frantically at the three men.

  ‘You must thank them,’ his father said. ‘They brought you back from the forest.’

  Omovo, overcome with delirium, began to tell his father what he had seen. But his father, smiling apologetically at the soldiers, picked up his son and carried him off to bed.

  WORLDS THAT FLOURISH

  I WAS AT work one day when a man came up to me and asked me my name. For some reason I couldn’t tell it to him immediately and he didn’t wait for me to get around to it before he turned and walked away. At lunch-time I went to the bukka to eat. When I got back to my desk someone came and told me that half the workers in the department had been sacked. I was one of them.

  I had not been working long in the department and I left the job without bitterness. I packed my things that day and sorted out the money that was owed me. I got into my battered little car and drove home. When I arrived I parked my car three streets from where I lived, because the roads were bad. As I walked home the sight of tenements and zinc huts made me dizzy. Swirls of dust came at me from the untarred roads. Everything shimmered like mirages in an omnipotent heat.

  Later in the evening I went out to buy some cooked food. On my way back a neighbour came to me and said:

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure you are fine?’

  ‘Yes. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well,’ said the neighbour, ‘it’s because you go around as if you don’t have any eyes.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Since your wife died you’ve stopped using your eyes. Haven’t you noticed that most of the compound people are gone?’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Run away. To safety.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t ask me.’

  ‘Why haven’t you gone?’

  ‘I’m happy here.’

  ‘So am I,’ I said, smiling. I went to my room.

  Barely two hours after the conversation with my neighbour there was a knock on my door. I opened it and three men pushed their way in. Two of them carried machetes and the third had a gun. They weren’t nasty or brutal. They merely asked me to sit quietly on the bed and invited me to watch them if I wanted. I watched them as they cleaned my room of my important possessions and took what money they could find. They chatted to me about how bad the roads were and how terrible the government was and how there were so many checkpoints around. While they chatted they bundled my things into a heap and carried them out to their lorry as though they were merely helping me to move. When they finished the man with the gun said:

  ‘This is what we call scientific robbery. If you so much as cough after we’ve gone I will shoot out your eyes, you hear?’

  I nodded. He left with a smile. A moment later I heard their lorry driving off down the untarred road. I rushed out and they were gone. I came back to my room to decide what next to do. I couldn’t inform the police immediately because the nearest station was miles away and even if I did I couldn’t really expect them to do anything. I sat on the bed and tried to convince myself that I was quite fortunate to still have the car and some money in the bank. But as it turned out I wasn’t even allowed to feel fortunate. Not long after the thieves had left there was another knock on my door. I got up to open it when five soldiers with machine-guns stepped into the room. Apparently the thieves had been unable to get away. They were stopped at a checkpoint and to save their own necks they told the soldiers that I was their accomplice. Without ceremony, and with a great deal of roughness, the soldiers dragged me to their jeep. Visions of being executed as an armed robber at the beach filled me with vertigo. I told the soldiers that I was the one who was robbed but the soldiers began to beat me because it seemed to them I was trying to insult their intelligence with such a transparent lie. As they took me away, with their guns prodding my back, my neighbour came out of his room. When he saw the soldiers with me he said:

  ‘I told you that you don’t have eyes.’

  Then he went to one of the soldiers and, to my astonishment, said:

  ‘Mr Soldier, I hope you treat him as he deserves. I always thought something was wrong with his head.’

  The soldiers took us to the nearest police station and we were all locked in the same cell. The real thieves, who seemed to find it all amusing, kept smiling at me. At night the soldiers came and beat us up with whips when we refused to confess anything. Then in the morning some policemen took us outside and made us strip naked and commanded us to face the stre et. The people that went past looked at us and hurried on. I shouted of my innocence and the policemen told me to shut up. We stayed out facing the whole world in our nakedness for most of the day. The children laughed at us. The women studied us. Photographers came and flashed their cameras in our eyes. When night fell a policeman came and offered me the opportunity to bribe my way out of trouble. I burned all over and my eyes were clogged with dust. I told him I had to go to the bank first. The thieves paid their dues and were freed. I stayed in a cell crammed with men screaming all night. In the morning one of the soldiers accompanied me to the bank. I drew out some money and paid my dues. I went home and slept for the rest of that day.

  In the morning I went to have a shower. Going through the compound I was struck by the absence of communal noises. No music came from the rooms. No children cried. There were no married couples arguing and shouting behind red curtains. There were chickens and rats in the backyard. My neighbour came out of the toilet and smiled when he saw me.

  ‘So they have released you,’ he said, regretfully.

  ‘You are a wicked man,’ I shouted.

  ‘People don’t go out anymore,’ he said, coolly ignoring me. ‘It’s very quiet. I like it this way.’

  ‘Why were you so wicked to me?’

  ‘I don’t trust people who don’t have eyes.’

  ‘I might have been executed.’

  ‘Are you better than those who have been?’

  I stared at him in disbelief. He went and washed his hands at the pump and dried them against his trousers. He pushed past me and went to his room. A moment later I saw him going out.

  I still felt sleepy even after my shower. I went to my room and got dressed. Then I went to the front of the compound. I sat on a bench and looked at the street. The churches around were not having their usual prayers and songs over loudspeakers. The muezzin was silent. The street was deserted. There were no signs of panic. The stalls still had their display of goods and the shops were open, but there was no one around. There were a lot of birds in the air, circling the aerials. Somewhere in the distance a radio had been left on. Across the street a goat wandered around the roots of a tree. The cocks didn’t crow. After a while all I heard inside me was a confused droning, my incomprehension. Something had been creeping on us all along and now that the street was empty I couldn’t even see what it was. I sat outside, fighting the mosquitoes, till it became dark. Then it dawned on me that something had happened to time. I seemed to be sitting in an empty space without history. The wind wasn’t cooling. And then suddenly all the lights went out. It was as if the spirit of the world had finally died. The black-out lasted a long time.