4

THE GOSLING

ANUNGHARINGAOBIALILI, when a man encounters

something that reminds him of an unpleasant event in his

past, he pauses at the door of the new experience, carefully

considering whether or not to go in. If he has already

stepped in, he may retrace his steps and reconsider whether

to re-enter. Like my host, every man is inextricably chained

to his past and may always fear that the past might repeat

itself. So, with Motu still fresh in his mind, my host attended

his desire for this woman with caution. He observed that

she’d changed so much – as if she were not the same

woman who had been mired in grief the night he first met

her, at the bridge. She was taller than he remembered from

that brief encounter. Her eyes were framed by a delicate

arc, and her forehead shone from the backwards pull of her

permed hair.

She reappeared more beautiful than the image he’d

stored in his mind for so long. She came up to him after

fuelling her car and shook his hand and introduced herself

as Ndali Obialor in the language of the White Man, as she’d

done on the bridge. He told her his name, too. He found her

intimidating, not only her presence but also her facility with

this language, which he rarely used. He was curious how she

had been able to recognise him.

‘Your vehicle, the sign on it, OLISA AGRICULTURE ,

’ she said,

laughing.

‘I remember it. I saw you a month or so ago, near

Obi Junction. But you were driving very fast. I just believed Iwould see you again.

’ A car honked for her to step out of the

way, and when it had passed, she said,

‘I’ve been looking

for you. To thank you for that night. Thank you, really.

‘Thank you, me also,

’ he said.

She’d closed her eyes while speaking, and opened them

now.

‘I am going to school now. Can you come to Mr Biggs?’

She pointed at the eatery on the other side of the road.

‘Can you come there by six o’clock today?’

He nodded.

‘Okay, Chinonso. Bye-bye. Good to see you again.

He watched her retrace her steps back to her car,

wondering if all this while he had been looking for her he’d

seen her without knowing it.

He’d seen in the woman’s eyes something – something he

could not himself define. There are times when a man

cannot fully understand his feelings, and neither can his chi.

His chi is often at a loss at those times. Hence this mystery

hung like a small cloud over him as he went home to

prepare for the meeting with her later that day. What was

clear to me and to him was that she was not like anyone

else he’d met. The accent she affected was of a person who

had lived in the foreign countries of white people. And there

was a lushness to her demeanour and appearance that was

nothing like the ramshackle outlook of Motu or the strange

mixture of poise and feistiness of Miss J. And, Egbunu, when

men meet those whom they esteem highly above

themselves, they become measured in their actions, they

check themselves, they try to present themselves before

these people in a way that will earn them dignity. I have

seen it many times.

So when he got home, he spread two sacks on the ground

and poured millet and maize on them, then he unbarred the

coops of the adult fowls. They rushed out and covered the

sacks. In haste, he filled the water troughs and put them

back in each of the cages. He brought out one of the suits

he’d inherited from his father. With a sponge he’d cut a few

days before from a grain sack, he brushed off a stain on thesuit. Then he hung it to dry on a
branch of the tree in the
yard. He washed himself and was about to bring in the suit

when it struck him that his hair was bushy. He had not cut it

in nearly three months, since that day when Motu, insisting

she could do it, cut it with scissors and he swept the yard in

a frenzy afterwards, fearing one of his flocks would eat a

strand of the hair. In haste, he drove to the salon on Niger

Road, where he’d gone since he was a child. The man, Mr

Ikonne, his barber, had suffered a stroke, and the man’s

eldest son, Sunday, now did it. When my host’s turn came

and Sunday began cutting his hair, the clipper went quiet

suddenly. Seeing there had been a power outage, Sunday

rushed to the back of the shop to put on the generator, but

it would not start. My host glanced at himself in the mirror:

half his head was cleanly shaved; the other half was full of

tangled, bushy hair. He gazed about, stepped out of the

swivelling chair, and sat back again. He was in flux, anxious,

for the moving clock – the strange mysterious object with

which the children of the fathers now measure time –

showed that it was close to the hour when he should meet

the woman.

Sunday came in a bit later, his hands black from working

the generator, his shirt soaked in sweat, his trousers

smeared with black dirt.

‘I am sorry,
’ he said.

‘The generator

has developed a fault.

My host’s heart sank.

‘Is it fuel?’

It was not, Sunday told him.

‘It is the ignition. It is the

ignition. I need to take it to a rewire. I am very very sorry,

Nonso, we will finish the haircut any time NEPA restores

power, oh. Or tomorrow after I repair the gen. Bik o eweliwe,

Nwannem, oh .

My host nodded and said in the language of the White

Man,

‘No problem.

’ He turned back to the darkening mirror

and gazed at his half-shaved head. Sunday unhooked a hat

from the many on the wall and gave it to him. He wore it

and headed for the [Link], one of the most striking differences between the

way of the great fathers and their children is that the latter

have adopted the White Man’s idea about time. The White

Man reckoned long ago that time is divine – an entity to

whose will man must submit. Following a prescribed tick,

one will arrive at a particular place, certain that an event

will begin at that set time. They seem to say,

‘Brethren, an

arm of divinity is amongst us, and it has set its purpose at

twelve forty, so we must submit to its dictates.

’ If something

happens, the White Man obliges himself to ascribe it to time

‘On this day, July twentieth, 1985, such-and-such

happened.

’ Whereas time to the august fathers was

something that was both spiritual and human. It was in part

beyond their control and was ordered by the same force

that brought the universe into existence. When they wanted

to discern the beginning of a season or parse the age of a

day or measure the length of years, they looked to nature.

Has the sun risen? If it has, then it must be day. Is the moon

full? If it is, then we must gather our best clothing, empty

our barns and get ready to celebrate the new year! If in fact

the sound we hear is thunderclaps, then surely the drought

must have ended and the raining season must be upon us.

But also, the wise fathers believed that there is a part of

time that man can control, a means by which man can

subject time to his own will. To them, time is not divine; it is

an element, like air, that can be put to use. They can use air

to put out fires, blow insects out of people’s eyes, or even

cause flutes to produce music. This is the same way that

time can be subject to the will of man – when a group

among the fathers says, for instance,

‘We, the elders of

Amaokpu, have a meeting at sunset.

’ That time is

expansive. It could be the beginning of sunset, or its middle,

or its end. But even this does not matter. What matters is

that they know the number of those coming to the meeting.

Those who arrive ahead of others wait, talk, laugh until

everyone is there, and that’s when the meeting [Link] was thus following the prescribed tick
of the clock that

she got there before him. She looked even better than she’d

looked earlier, wearing deep red lipstick that reminded him

of Miss J and a dress that had leopard prints on it.

After he sat down and adjusted his cap to make sure it

concealed every part of his head, she said,

‘Eh, Nonso, I

want to ask you: why did you go to that bridge at that very

moment and stop?’ As he made to answer, she raised her

hand, her eyes closed.

‘I really want to know, really. Why did

you go there at that very time?’

He raised his head to look above her, to the ceiling, to

avoid her eyes.

‘I don’t know, Mommy,

’ he said. He picked his words with

care, for rarely did he have to speak in the language of the

White Man.

‘Something just pushed me there. I was coming

from way back in Enugu, and then I saw you. I just say let

me stop.

He glanced out of the window, allowed his eyes to fall on

a child rolling a motorcycle tyre along the road with a stick,

trailed by other children.

‘You saved my life that day. You will never—

The ringing of her phone made her pause. She unwrapped

it from a handkerchief in her purse, and on seeing the

screen she said,

‘Ah! I was supposed to go somewhere with

my parents now. But I forgot before. I am so sorry, but I

have to go now.

‘Okay, okay—

’
‘Where is your poultry? I would like to see it. What street?’

‘It is number twelve Amauzunku, off Niger Road.

‘Okay, give me your number.

’ He leaned in towards her

and listed the numbers in their order.

‘I will come there one

of these days. I will call you, later, so we can meet again.

Because I could see in my host the beginning of the

growth of that great seed that bears strong root downwards

in the soul of a man and bears fruit upwards – the fruit of

affection that becomes love – I came out of him and

followed the woman. I wanted to know what she would do –if she would remain and not vanish,
as the previous woman

had done. I followed this woman in her car as she drove,

and I saw on her face an expression of joy. I heard her say,

‘Chinonso, funny man,

’ and then laugh. I was watching,

curiously observing, when from within her something floated

out, like a thick-formed steam rising. And within the batting

of an eyelid, what stood before me was a spirit whose face

and appearance were exactly like the woman’s, save for her

luminous body, covered with uli symbols, and her

extremities, graced with beads and strings of cowries. It was

her chi. Even though I’d been told many times at the caves

of spirits that the guardian spirits of the females of mankind

possessed more powers of sensitivity, I was astonished at

how it was able to see me while still in the body of its host.

—Son of the spirits, what do you want from my host? the

chi said in a voice as thin as that of the maidens who dwell

on the road to Alandiichie.

—Daughter of Ala, I come in peace, I come not with

trouble, I said.

Chukwu, I saw that the chi, who was clothed in the bronze

skin of light with which you drape the guardian spirits of the

daughters of mankind, regarded me with eyes that were the

colour of pure fire. She had begun to speak when her host

honked and pulled to a sudden stop, shouting,

‘Jesus Christ!

What are you doing, Oga. You no sabi drive?’ The car that

had veered in her way turned towards another street, and

she continued on, sighing loudly. Perhaps now certain her

host was fine, the chi turned back to me and spoke in the

esoteric language of Benmuo.

—My host has erected a figurine in the shrine of her heart.

Her intentions are pure as the waters of the seven rivers of

Osimiri, and her desire is as true as the clean salt beneath

the waters of Iyi-ocha.

—I believe you, Nwayibuife, guardian spirit of the dawn

light, daughter of Ogwugwu, and Ala, and Komosu. I only

came because I wanted to be sure that she desires him, too.

I shall return with your message to comfort my host. Maytheir union bring them fulfilment in this
cycle of life and in

the seventh and eighth cycles of life – Uwa ha asaa, uwa ha

asato!

—Iseeh! she said, and without a moment’s wait, she

returned into her host.

Oseburuwa, I was greatly delighted by this consultation.

And with this confidence, I returned to my host and flashed

it in his thoughts that the woman loved him.

AKWAAKWURU, even with the thoughts I put in his head that

she loves him, he was still afraid. I could not tell him what I

had done. A chi cannot communicate with its host in such a

direct way. The human would not understand even if we did.

We can only flash thoughts in their minds, and if a host finds

these reasonable, he may believe them. So I watched

helplessly as he went about with an increased palpitation,

fearing that, like Motu, she will be gone again. For days he

paid curious attention to his phone, waiting for her to call.

Then, on the fourth day, while he was sleeping on his sofa in

the sitting room, he heard a car drive into his compound

down towards his house. It was after sunset, and the

shadows that had sprouted at the height of the day had

already become old. When he looked through the window,

he saw Ndali’s car pulling to a stop. He cried,

‘Chukwu!’ He

had eaten lunch not too long before, and the plastic bowl

sat on the stool beside him, still containing water in which a

small empty bag that had contained groundnuts and a

plastic sachet of Cowbell powdered milk were floating. He

dropped the bowl in the kitchen sink. Then he ran to his

room and put on the trousers that lay on the bed. He

glanced quickly in the mirror on the wall of his room,

grateful that Sunday had finally cut his hair two days earlier.

When he rushed back into the sitting room, his eyes fell on

the blue box of sugar cubes that sat half closed on the

centre table, beside a globular stain. And at the foot of thetable, on the plastic bag containing
thread, needles and a

small sack of nails. She was knocking while he took these

away. He returned again a moment later and looked about

the house to see if there was anything he could clean, and

when he did not see anything whose oddity he could very

quickly fix, he ran to the door, still holding on to his chest to

stabilise the heartbeat. Then he opened the door.

‘How did you find me?’ he said once she came in.

‘Do you live on the moon, er, mister-man?’

‘No, but Mommy, how? It is hidden, and the numbers are

not even clear sef.

She shook her head, wearing a gentle smile. Then she

said his name with a slow, dragging enunciation, the way a

child learning to speak might say it, No-n-so.

‘Would you give me a seat?’

He threw his eyes about the room again and nodded. She

sat on the big sofa near the window while he stood

transfixed at the door. Then, almost at once, she rose and

began walking about the sitting room. As she did, he

became worried that she would perceive the smell that

hung in the air. He observed her nose for any sign of her

scrunching it or covering it. He noticed then, with even

greater alarm, that there was a clearly perceptible stain on

the wall. He feared it might be chicken shit. He went and

stood in front of the stain, wearing a smile that concealed

his distress.

‘You live alone, Nonso?’

‘Yes, I live here alone. Only me. My sister doesn’t come,

except my uncle who comes sometimes,

’ he said with haste.

Her nod did not translate into attention, for as he spoke,

she stepped into the kitchen. The state of the kitchen made

his heart sink. The arches around four sides of the ceiling
had cobwebs that were blackened with soot, making it look

as though spiders nestled in them. The sink was full of dirty

plates, on one of which was a sponge hewn from a plaited-

thread sack, a shrivelled green piece of soap trapped in its

netting. Even more shameful to him was something he wasnot immediately responsible for: the
tap on the sink. It had

long atrophied into disuse, and its head had been removed

and simply replaced with a piece of a black polythene bag.

His kerosene stove, too, was dirty. It sat on a blackened slab

of wood. It wore the singed skin of the chicken he’d roasted

on its top levers, and around its top perimeter were grains

of dried rice and what looked like a dried tomato skin. Even

worse, at the far corner, behind the door that led to the

yard, was a dustbin full of rubbish from which a putrid smell

simmered.

Egbunu, he would have died if she’d lingered in the

kitchen for a moment more after she turned on the light and

roused the thread of flies gathered around the stack of

unwashed plates. He was relieved when he saw the net door

open slightly and its spring give way, creaking as it opened

into the backyard.

‘You have many chickens!’ she said.

He walked up to her. She had one leg on the threshold,

the other in the yard. She leaned back into the kitchen

towards him.
‘You have many chickens,

’ she repeated, as if in surprise.

‘Yes, I’m a poultry farmer.

‘Wow,

’ she said. She stepped out into the yard, staring

wide-eyed at the coops. Then, without saying a word, she

returned to the sitting room and sat back on the sofa beside

her purse. He followed her and caught a glimpse of her

underpants as she sat down, briefly spreading her legs. He

joined her, frightened because of the things she had seen.

She did not speak for a while but kept looking at him in a

way that so discomforted him that he wanted to ask her if

she despised him because of the state of his house, but the

words lay loaded in his mouth like a fodder in a cannon,

awaiting the signal to fire. To prevent her from looking

around the house again, he sought to engage her in

conversation.

‘What happened to you that night?’ he said.‘I was going to die,

’ she said and dropped her eyes to the

floor.

Her words softened his shame.

‘Why?’

Without hesitation, she told him she’d woken up the

morning of the day before to find the world she’d so

carefully built crumpled into dusty ruins. She had been

crushed for two whole days by an e-mail from her betrothed,

which had announced that he had married a British woman.

The blow, she told him, was unbearable because she had

given that man five years of her life, gathered all her

savings, and even stolen from her father to help him

achieve his dream of getting a degree in film directing from

a school in London. But barely five months into this move to

Britain, he was married. With a voice filled with so much

pain my host could feel it, she explained how nothing had

prepared her for the blow she felt.

‘Nothing to hold on to, nothing to even – nothing.

Throughout that day before I saw you on that bridge, I was

tired because I had tried, tried, tried to reach him, but

nothing, Nonso.

She had gone to the river not because she had any

strength or will to kill herself but because the river was all

she could think of after reading the e-mail for the

umpteenth time. She did not know whether she would have

jumped off the bridge if he had not come.

My host listened with a keen ear to her story, only

speaking once – to ask her to ignore the chickens that had

begun to squawk plaintively.

‘What happened to you is very painful,

’ he said, although

he’d not understood all of it. Her command of the White

Man’s language contained more words than he could

comprehend. His mind had hovered, for instance, over the

word circumstances like a kite over a gathering of hen and

chicks, unable to decide how or which to attack. But I

understood everything she said, because every cycle of a

chi’s existence is an education in which a chi acquires theminds and wisdom of its hosts, and
these become part of

the chi. A chi may come to know, for instance, the

intricacies of the art of hunting because once, hundreds of

years before, the chi inhabited a host who was a hunter. In

my last cycle, I guided an extraordinarily gifted man who

read books and wrote stories, Ezike Nkeoye, who was the

older brother of the mother of my present host. By the time

he was my current host’s age, he’d come to be familiar with

almost every word in the language of the White Man. And it

was from him that I acquired much of what I now know. And

even now, as I testify on behalf of my current host, I wear

his words as well as mine and see things through his eyes as

well as mine, and both sometimes meld into an

indistinguishable whole.

‘It is very painful. I am talking like this because I have

suffered too much also. I no have father and mother. In fact,

no family.

‘Ah! That is very sad,

’ she said, putting her hand over her

wide-open mouth.

‘I am sorry. Very sorry.

‘No, no, no, I am now fine. I am fine,

’ he said, even though

the voice of his conscience was tugging at him for having

left out his sister, Nkiru. He watched Ndali rest her weight

on her thigh and tilt her body towards the small table

centred between them. Her eyes were closed, and this

made him think that she was sinking into pity for him, and

he feared that she might cry for him.

‘I am fine now, Mommy,

’ he said even more resolutely.

‘I

have a sister, but she is in Lagos.

‘Oh, junior or senior sister?’

‘Junior,

’ he said.
‘Okay, why I have come is because I have come to thank

you.

’ A smile washed across her tearful face as she pulled

her bag up from the floor.

‘I believe God sent you to me.

‘Okay, Mommy,

’ he said.

‘What’s this “Mommy” you keep saying? Why do you say

it?’Her laughter now made him conscious of his own feral

laughing, which he’d tried to contain to avoid embarrassing

himself.

‘Really, it is strange oh!’

‘I don’t have a mother again, so every good woman is my

mommy.

‘Oh, so sorry, my dear!’

‘Am coming,

’ he said and went to the toilet to urinate.

When he returned, she said,

‘Did I forget to say that I love

your laugh?’

He looked at her.

‘I do. Seriously. You’re a beautiful man.

’

He nodded hastily as she rose to leave and let his heart

take temporary flight at this extremely unexpected outcome

of what he had been certain would be a disaster.

‘I have not even offered you something.

‘No, no, don’t worry,

’ she said.

‘Another time. I have

tests.

He thrust his hand out to shake hers, and she took it, her

face wide with smiles.

‘Thank you.

Guardian spirits of mankind, have we thought about the

powers that passion creates in a human being? Have we

considered why a man could run through a field of fire to get

to a woman he loves? Have we thought about the impact of

sex on the body of lovers? Have we considered the

symmetry of its power? Have we considered what poetry

incites in their souls, and the impress of endearments on a

softened heart? Have we contemplated the physiognomy of

love – how some relationships are stillborn, some are

retarded and do not grow, and some fledge into adults and

last through the lifetime of the lovers?

I have given much thought to these things and know that

when a man loves a woman he is changed by it. Although

she willingly gives herself to him, once he marries her she

becomes his. The woman becomes his possession, and he

becomes her possession. The man calls her Nwuyem, andshe calls him Dim. Others speak of
her as his wife and of

him as her husband. It is a mystifying thing, Egbunu! For I

have seen many times that people, after their beloveds

have left them, try to reclaim them as one would attempt to

reclaim property that had been stolen. Wasn’t this the case

with Emejuiwe, who, one hundred and thirty years ago,

killed the man who took his wife from him? Chukwu, when

you laid down your judgment after my testimony on his

behalf here in Beigwe, as I am doing now, it was sad but

just. Now, more than a hundred years later, when I saw my

current host’s heart lit with similar fire, I feared because I

knew the potency of that fire, that it was powerful, so

powerful that in time nothing might be able to quench it. As

he walked her to her car, I feared it would push him in a

direction in which I might be powerless to stop him from

going. I feared that when the love had fully formed in his

heart, it would blind him and make him deaf to my counsel.

And I could see already that it had started to possess him.

OBASIDINELU, oh what substance does a woman bring into

the life of a man! In the doctrine of the new religion the

children of the fathers have embraced, it is said that the two

become one flesh . What truth, Egbunu! But let’s look at the

times of the wise fathers, how indispensable the great

mothers were. Although they did not make the laws that

guided society, they were like the chi of society. They

restored order and equilibrium when order became broken.

If a member of a village committed a spiritual crime and

vexed Ala, and if the merciful goddess – in her rightful

indignation – poured out her wrath in the form of diseases or

drought or catastrophic deaths, it was the old mothers who

went to a dibia and consulted on behalf of the society. For

Ala hears their voices above those of the others. Even when

there was a war – as I witnessed one hundred and seventy-

two years ago, when Uzuakoli fought against Nkpa and

seventeen headless men lay in the forests – it was the

mothers on both sides who marched and restored peace andpacified Ala. This is why they are
called odoziobodo . If a

group of women can restore equilibrium to a community on

the verge of calamity, how much more one woman can do

to the life of one man! As the great fathers often say, love

changes the temperature of a man’s life. Usually, a man

whose life was cold becomes warm, and this warmth, in its

intensity, transforms the person. It grows the small things in

his life and puts shine on the spots in the fabric of his life.

What the man did every day, now he does more cheerfully.

Most people in their lives would come to know that

something in them had changed. They may not need to

speak of it to anyone. But their faces, the most naked of all

features of human physiognomy, begin to wear a hue that

anyone who pays attention soon notices. Say, if a man

works in the company of other people, one of his colleagues

may pull him aside and say to him,

‘You look happy,

’ or

‘What happened to you?’ The stronger the affection, the

more obvious it will become to others, and my host’s

affection for Ndali was tempered by his fear that he was

unworthy of her. He resolved that if she ever gave in to him,

he would give her the fullness of his heart.

In lieu of human co-workers, the fowls bore witness to my

host’s metamorphosis. He fed them ecstatically after the

woman left his house that day. He found the sick rooster

who’d developed a wry tail and took it to the edge of the

farm, in front of the house and away from the sight of other

fowls, and slaughtered it. He let its blood drain into a small

hole in the earth, and then put it in a bowl and kept it in the

refrigerator. After he’d washed his hands in the bathroom,

he swept the large pens that were parted into halves by

wooden walls. He chased a particular kind of lizard which

the fowls did not like, the green-headed lizard, into a hole in

the ceiling. Then he climbed up a ladder and stuffed a

bunched-up rag with palm-oil stains into the hole. When he

was done with it, he noticed that the chickens had upturned

the basin of water from which they drank, and now it lay,

leaning against the thatch wall, an eye-size pool of wateranchored in it. Within the puddle lay a
patch of sediment

that stared back at him like a pupil. As he walked towards

the bowl, he stepped on something he discovered to be the

rib of a feather. It slid down in a straight line through the

muddied earth, tripping him. He fell against the other empty

basin, and it balled up into the air and emptied its contents

– a mass of dirt, feathers and dust – on to his face.

Chukwu, if the chickens were humans, they would have

laughed at what his face became afterwards: a rich patch of

dirt and mud on his forehead and over his nose. Were I not

myself a witness, I would have doubted what I saw in my

host that day. For, despite his pain and feeling the spot on

his head with his fingers repeatedly and looking at them to

see if the wound would bleed, he was happy. He rose,

laughing at himself, thinking of how Ndali had sat on the

sofa and called him a beautiful man. He looked down where

he’d fallen and saw a shaved part of the floor, which his
shoes now wore like an encrustation. On the other side of

the pen stood a hen on which he’d almost fallen. It had leapt

hysterically out of his reach as he fell, raising dust and

feathers with its violent wings flapping. He recognised it as

one of the two hens that laid grey eggs. It stood crowing in

protest, and others had joined. He left the coop and washed

the dirt off himself, and all the while, even when he lay in

bed later, Ndali remained in his mind.

Once he slept, as it often happens when he goes into the

unconscious state of sleep, I became stripped of the barriers

of his body. Even without stepping out of it, I am often able

to see that which I’m not able to see while he is awake. As

you know, you created us as creatures for whom sleep does

not exist. We exist as shadows which speak the language of

the living. Even when our hosts sleep, we remain awake. We

watch over them against the forces that breathe in the

night. While men sleep, the world of the ethereal is replete

with the noise of wakefulness and the susurration of the

dead. Agwus, ghosts, akaliogolis, spirits and ndiichies on

short visits to the earth all crawl out of the blind eyes of thenight and tread the earth with the
liberty of ants, oblivious

to human boundaries, unaware of walls and fences. Two

spirits arguing may struggle and tumble into the house of a

family and fall on them and continue to wrestle through

them. Sometimes, they merely walk into the habitations of

men and watch them.

That night, like most others, was filled with the din of

spirits and the brass drum of the sublunary world, a

multitude of voices emitting cries, shouts, voices, howls,

noises. The world, Benmuo and Ezinmuo – its corridor – were

soaked in them. And from a distance, the riveting tune of a

flute riffled through the air, pulsing like an animate thing. It

remained like this for a long time when, around midnight,

something shot through the wall with uncanny speed.

Instantly, it ringed itself into a luminous coil that was

greyish and almost imperceptible to the eyes. At first it

seemed to rise towards the roof, but slowly it began to

diffuse and elongate like a serpent of shadows. Then it

morphed into a most frightening agwu – with a roachlike

head and a portly human body. I lunged forward at once and

ordered it to leave. But it gazed at me with eyes filled with

hate, then stared mostly at my host’s unconscious body. Its

mouth was sticky, glued together as if by some purulent

secretion. It kept pointing at my host, but I insisted it leave.

When it did not so much as stir, I became afraid that this

evil creature would harm my host. I trailed into an

incantation, fortifying myself as I invoked your intervention.

This seemed to stop the being in its place. It stepped back,

let out a growl, and vanished.

I had encountered spirits like this in my many cycles on

earth, and I recall most vividly, while inhabiting Ejinkeonye

during the war, that he’d slept in a half-destroyed,

abandoned house in Umuahia, and while he was asleep, a

spirit materialised with such swiftness that I gave a start. I

looked, but it had no head. It was waving its arms, stamping

its feet and gesturing at the stump where its head had been.

Egbunu, not even an akaliogoli, those creatures of dreadfulforms, had inspired such terrors in a
living spirit like me.

Then, by some transmutative power, the creature’s head

emerged and hung in mid-air, its eyes glancing about. The

headless creature would try to take the head with its flailing

hands, but it would swerve that way and the other way, until

finally the head floated away the way it had come, and the

spirit followed it. I would find out the following day, through

the eyes of my host, that the man had been an enemy

soldier beheaded while raping a pregnant woman, and had

become an akaliogoli. My host, Ejinkeonye, would watch the

body of the man being burned the following morning,

unaware of what had happened the night before.

I leapt up presently and tried to catch up with the spirit, to

find out why it had targeted my host, but I could not tell

which direction it had gone. I found no trace of it on the

plains of the night, no footprints on the track of the air, no

footfalls in the dark tunnelling beneath the earth. The night

was full mostly of bright stars in the sky, and a multitude of

spirits were about their business around the vicinity of my

host’s farm. No humans were about, nor was there even any

trace of them except for the sound of cars racing past along

some road in an unknown distance. I had the temptation to

wander a bit, but I suspected that the agwu I had seen was

a vagabond spirit in search of a human vessel to possess,

and it could return to try to inhabit my host. So I made my

way back to the compound as quickly as I could, projecting

through the fence in the backyard, then through the wall

into the room where my host lay still deep in sleep.

AKWAAKWURU, he woke to the wild noises of his crowd of

fowls the following morning. One of them was crowing

without cease, letting its voice ebb at intervals, then

beginning again in a higher pitch than before. He pushed

aside the wrappa he’d covered himself in and was starting

to step out of the door when he realised he was naked. He

put on shorts and a wrinkled shirt and went to the backyard.

He emptied the last contents of a bag of mash into a bowland set the bowl at the centre of the
yard on an old

newspaper page. When he unlocked one of the cages, the

birds flung themselves at him at once, and in the batting of

an eye, the bowl was covered in a goo of feathery beings.

He stepped back, his eyes scanning them for signs of

anything out of the ordinary. He watched one of the hens

especially, the one whose wing had caught an errant nail

sticking out of one of the cages. The bird had tried to pull

itself away from the nail so hard that it had almost ripped

out its wing. He’d stitched the wing with a thread the

previous week, and now the bird participated in the

scramble for the mash with cautious gait, the red thread of

the stitching visible beneath its wing. He picked up the hen

by its legs. He checked its wings, tracing his fingers around

the veins on the end. As he made to drop it, his phone rang.

He ran into the house to get it. But by the time he got into

the living room, the ringing had stopped. He saw that Ndali

had just called him and sent a text message. He hesitated

at first to read it – as if he feared that what he would read

on the screen would remain for eternity unerasable. He

dropped the phone back on the dining table, placed his

palm on his forehead, and gnashed his teeth. I could see

that he had become sick from the head wound of the

previous day. From the top of the refrigerator, he took a

sachet of paracetamol and ejected one of the remaining two

tablets into his palm. He placed the medicine on his tongue,

went into the kitchen, and washed it down with water from a

plastic jug.

He picked up the phone again and read the message:

Nonso, should I come and visit you in the evening? Chukwu,

he smiled to himself, pumped his fist into the air, and

shouted ‘Yes!’ He dropped the phone into his pocket and

was almost back in the yard when he remembered he’d

merely answered in speech as if she were there with him.

He stood by the net door to the yard and typed ‘yes’ into his

[Link] with the prospect of meeting Ndali, he gathered some

eggs and placed them in the egg-shaped holes on a plastic

crate. Then he took hold of the wounded bird once more. Its

eyes blinked with fear, its beak opening and closing as he

rubbed its head and examined its wings to see if it could

accommodate flight. He cleaned the mash tray and placed

some mash on it. Something like a half-broken toothpick

stuck out of the feed. He picked it up and threw it behind

him. Then, on second thought, fearing one of the fowls

might find it there and swallow it, he rose and began looking

for the stick. He found it just near one of the cages, the one

for the small chicks. The stick was on the wet edge of the

slab of wood on which he’d placed the cage. He picked it up

and threw the stick over the fence into the dump outside his

compound. Then he tucked the tray of mash into the bed of

one of the two cages.

By the time he finished feeding the poultry, his hands

were almost black with dirt. Dark grime lay in his fingernails,

and the flesh of his right thumb looked barbed and was lined
with welts. One of the eggs he’d picked was coated with a

stiff encrustation of faeces, which he tried to scratch off with

his fingers, and it was the crust of faeces that he now

carried in his fingernails. As he washed his hands in the

bathroom, he was thinking about how odd his work was and

how lowly it seemed to be to one newly encountering it. He

feared that Ndali may not come to love it or might even be

irritated by it if she came to really understand the nature of

his work.

Chukwu, as I said before, this kind of fear-induced

rumination often occurs when people have been made self-

conscious by the presence of others whom they hold in high

esteem. They assess themselves by focusing on how others

would perceive them. In such situations, there may be no

limit to the self-defeating thoughts that may form in the

person’s mind, which – no matter how unfounded – may

consume them in the end. My host did not, however, dwell

on these thoughts for too long. He was, instead, in a hasteto prepare for Ndali’s visit. He swept
the house and the

balcony clean. Then he dusted the cushions and sofas. He

washed the toilet bowl and sprayed Izal into it and cleaned

out the rat faeces behind the water drum. He threw away

one of the plastic buckets, a paint bucket that had cracked

in several places. Then he sprayed air freshener around the

house. He’d just finished bathing and was creaming his body
when, through the window, he saw her car coming towards

the house, flanked on both sides by the plantations.

Ijango-ijango, my host felt his body lit with admiration at

her appearance that evening. Her hair was dressed in a way

the great mothers would have found strange but which

made it shiny and attractive to my host. He gazed closely at

the neatly permed hair, her wristwatch, the bangles around

her wrist, the necklace with green beads that reminded him

of his own mother’s sister, Ifemia, who lived in Lagos and

with whom he’d long since lost contact. Although he’d

already begun to feel unworthy of Ndali because of his lack

of exposure (he had never been to a club before, or to a

theatre), he sank even lower in his own estimation when he

saw her that evening. Although she engaged him with

utmost geniality and affection, he stood with a strong

feeling of unworthiness. So he attended their conversations

like one forced to be there, saying only what was needed

and what was prompted.

‘Did you always want to be a poultry farmer?’ Ndali said at

one point, later than he’d expected, deepening his fear that

in the end, she would not give herself to him.

He nodded, then it occurred to him that that might be a

lie. So he said,

‘Maybe, no, Mommy. My father started the

idea, not me.

‘The poultry?’

‘Yes.

She gazed on at him, a restrained smile on her face.

‘How? But how?’ she said.

‘It’s a long story, Mommy.

‘God! Ah, I want to hear it. Please tell me.

’He looked up at her and said,

‘Okay, Mommy.

Ebubedike, he told her about the gosling, beginning with

how it was caught when he was only nine years old, an

encounter which changed his life, and which I must relate to

you now. His father took him from the city to his village one

day and told him to sleep, that in the morning he would take

him into the Ogbuti forest, where a species of wool-white

geese lived near a hidden pool in the very heart of the

forest. Most hunters avoided this part of the forest for fear

of deadly snakes and wild beasts. The pool was a tributary

of the Imo River. I have seen it many times. Long ago,

before Aro slave raiders began sweeping this part of

Alaigbo, the river used to flow. But it was cut off by an

earthquake which separated it from the rest of the river and

made it into a stagnant body of water that became the

home of the white geese. They had lived there for as long as

anyone in the nine villages that surround the forest could

remember.

When my host and his father, who carried a long Dane

gun, got to this spot, they stopped behind the stump of a

rotting fallen trunk covered by grass and wild mushrooms.

Two stone throws from the trunk was the dead pool, half

covered with leaves. Beside it was a riparian stretch of

matted, damp land strewn with splinters of wood. It was

here that a flock of white geese was gathered, grazing. As if

alerted to the human presence, most of the flock whipped

their wings and flew into the denser part of the forest,

leaving only a mother goose and her offspring and another

big goose in the field. The third goose leapt a few times and

began floating across the distant waters until it reached the

reef, then it vanished into the greenery. My host observed

the mother goose with fascination. Its plumage was rich and

its tails serrated downwards. Its eyes were wide and it had a

brown beak with nares. When it moved, it spread its wings

into a cascading flourish. The gosling beside it was different:

its neck was longer and bare at the top, as if plucked. It

tottered forward on its tiny feet after its mother, who’dbegun moving away from the nestling. My
host’s father had

brought his gun to bear and would have shot it if a

perplexing vision had not suddenly presented itself. The

mother goose, who had stopped in a place of soft earth so

that her feet sank into the mud, was now waiting with her

mouth wide-open. The gosling, clattering, approached and

buried its head into the waiting mouth till part of its neck

disappeared.

My host and his father watched in wonder as the gosling’s

head and neck probed into its mother’s mouth. As the child

fed, its mother struggled for balance. She dug her feet

deeper into the clump of mud, fluttering her wings violently,

stepping back with steady haste, her claws folding and

unclasping. For a moment, it seemed to my host that the big

goose’s throat might tear open as the little bird gorged

greedily within it. The movement of the gosling’s beak could

be glimpsed through the pale skin of its mother’s throat. It

came almost as a surprise to my host when the gosling

disentangled itself and began sprinting away, fluttering its

wings and full of life like one reborn. Its mother turned her

head, gave a cry, and seemed to fall on her legs. Then she

rose, caked in a half cloth of mud, and began racing in the

direction where my host and his father were crouched.

The bird was close when his father took aim. The shot
flung the goose backwards with a loud noise, leaving in its

wake an explosion of feathers. The forest erupted into a

hysteria of fleeing creatures and a chorus of fluttering

wings. As the feathers settled, my host saw the gosling

hurrying towards its mother’s body.

‘I did it, I finally shot an Ogbuti goose,

’ his father said, as

he stood up and began running towards the dead goose. My

host followed at a cautious pace, speechless. His father

picked up the dead goose, exhilarated, and began walking

in the direction from which they had come, the blood of the

dead goose marking his trail. His father did not notice the

gosling scampering along after him, making a shrilling

sound which, many years later, my host would realise wasthe sound of a weeping bird. He stood
still, listening to his

father talk about how for years he’d longed to catch an

Ogbuti forest goose –

‘always said no one knew where they

lived. How could anyone know? Only a few people will ever

venture this far into the Ogbuti. People only saw them in the

air. And, you know, it is very hard to shoot something in the

air. This—

– until his father, turning abruptly, saw him

standing back, afar.

‘Chinonso?’ his father said.

He looked up with a pout, his eyes near tears.

‘Sir,

’ he

said in the language of the White Man.

‘What? What is it?’

He pointed at the gosling. His father looked down and saw

the gosling moving its legs in the swamp, its eyes fixed on

the two humans as it wept for its dead mother.

‘Heh, why don’t you pick it up and bring it home?’

My host walked towards his father and stopped behind the

bird.

‘Why don’t you keep him?’ his father said again.

He glanced at the bird, then at his father, and something

lit up in him.

‘Can I bring it to Umuahia?’

‘Uh,

’ his father said, and turned back again to the path

from which they had come with the dead goose, whose body

was now half covered in crimson in his hand.

‘Now catch it,

and let’s go.

With hesitation, dragging his feet, he dived forward and

caught the gosling by its thin legs. The bird mourned

plaintively, beating its wings against the tender hands that

held it. But he tightened his grip around its legs as he lifted

it from the ground. He looked up at his father, who was

waiting, blood dripping from the dead goose in his hand.

‘It is yours now,

’ his father said.

‘You have saved it. Take it

and let us go.

’ Then turning, his father began walking back

to the village, and he followed.

He then told her about how he loved the bird. The bird

often flew into moods of rage, then calmed and lifted itsspirit. It would sometimes make a mad
dash towards

nothing, perhaps intent to return to the forest from which

it’d come. And when it saw no chance of escape it would

circle back in defeat. He watched over it closely, with

anxiety. He lived in perpetual fear that something bad would

happen to the bird or that it might some day escape from

him. This fear was most pronounced in the times when the

gosling would, in anger, begin dashing about the house,

from wall to wall, trying to break through it and flee. And

after every such struggle, it would return to a chair or a

table, its head bent as in some kind of prostration. It would

hold its wings suspended as it cawed in fury or frustration.

‘Yes,

’ he said in answer to her question: there were times

the gosling was calm. He knew that it was in the nature of

earthly creatures that even the most wounded of them is

sometimes peaceful in captivity. These were times when the

gosling slept in his bed, by his side, as though it were a

human companion. When he first came to Umuahia with the

gosling, the children of the neighbourhood flocked to see it.

At first, he guarded it jealously, not allowing anyone to

touch the raffia cage in which he kept the bird. He would

even fight with some of his friends who lived around the

neighbourhood and played football with him if they tried to

touch it without his permission. One of them, Ejike, with

whom he’d been best friends, was particularly enamoured of

the bird. Ejike sought it more than the others, and, in time,

my host allowed him to play with it often. Then one day,

Ejike asked to take the gosling to his house so he could

show it to his grandmother, saying,

‘For five minutes, only

five minutes.

’ Oseburuwa, I had seen the look in the eyes of

this child, and I’d feared that in them, deep within, I could

see the small flame of envy burning. For I have seen it many

times in the children of men: that negative side of

admiration that has caused many murders and dark

conspiracies. I flashed it in my host’s mind that he should

not give away the gosling. But he would not hear me. Hegave the bird to his friend, confident no
harm would come to

the bird.

Ejike took the gosling away. When by sunset he still had

not returned it, my host became anxious. He went to Ejike’s

house and knocked on the door of the flat Ejike and his

mother occupied, but heard nothing. He called Ejike’s name

many times, but received no answer. The door was bolted

from within. But from the outside, he could hear the bird

squawking and the sound of its wings as it glided about

even with the twine that was wound around its legs. He

rushed back home and sought his father. Together they went

to the house, but even though this time Ejike’s mother

answered the door, she denied that they had the gosling.

This woman, whose husband had died, had once lured his

father into her house and they had copulated. But not

wanting to fill the place of his loving wife, for whom he

would grieve for the rest of his life, his father had refused to

continue the relationship. And this had put a wedge

between him and the woman. Although my host did not

know this, I did, for I’d heard his father talk about it to

himself while my host was asleep. And one night, I’d seen

his father’s chi – a carefree chi who often floated with

etheric flamboyance while lurking about the house – and it

told me that it had left the body of its host because he was

about to have sex with the neighbour. It said my host’s

father and the woman were fondling at the back of the

house, in the yard. I had come to know this guardian spirit

very well, as one often knows the guardian spirits of other

members of a household. Peer into a household at midnight,

and you’ll find guardian spirits – usually of males –

conversing or simply moving about the house, often

developing a bond with each other over the lifetimes of their

hosts. This is how I came to know a great many guardian

spirits of the males and females of mankind.

So on this day, perhaps because of the hurt she still

harboured, the woman slammed the door in the face of my

host and his [Link] was nothing my host could do to Ejike and his

mother after that. He was stunned for days and would

sometimes descend into uncontrolled rage and dart towards

the neighbour’s house, but his father would call him back

and threaten to whip him if he went back there. He listened

every minute for the gosling, refusing to eat, and hardly

sleeping at night. It was difficult for me, his guardian spirit,

to watch him suffer. But there is nothing a chi can do to help

a man in a circumstance such as this, as we have

limitations. The old fathers, in their wisdom, say Onye k a

nmadu k a chi ya , and they are right. A person who is

greater than another is also greater than his chi. Thus, there

is little a chi can do for a man whose spirit is broken.

Egbunu, Ndali was moved by this part of his tale. Although

she spoke throughout his story, asking questions (‘He said

that?’; ‘So what happened next?’; ‘Did you see it?’), I’ve

decided not to relate them, as I must focus on this tale

about this creature to whom my host once gave his heart.

But in light of the things that have now happened and the

reason for which I stand before you to testify about my host,

I must relate her speech at this point in the story in which

my host’s desire to get back that which belonged to him had

sent him to the edge of madness. Shaking her head wearily,

she’d said,

‘It must be very sad, a bird that is yours, which

you suffered for, taken away just like that. It must be

painful.

’ He merely nodded and continued. He told her that

by the fifth day, he’d become desperate. He climbed the

tree in the backyard, and from there he gained a view into

the compound of the neighbour. He saw Ejike seated on a

stool behind their fenced house stroking the gosling. At first,

the goose had appeared dead, then he saw its wings flutter

as it tried to fly away from its captor who quickly stamped

his foot on the red leash fastened to its leg. The gosling

struggled, raised its leg again and again and flapped its

wings, but the twine held it still. It was as my host watched

this that the cruel idea came into his [Link], the moment I glimpsed the design of his
heart, I

contested it. I flashed the thought in his mind to think of the

devastation and pain that would come to him should he

proceed. He considered it momentarily and even imagined

the bird bleeding from the gash inflicted by the stone on its

head, and it frightened him. Yet he brushed the thought

away. But as you know, a chi cannot go against the will of its

host, nor can it compel its host against his will. This is why

the old fathers say that if a man is silent, his chi also

becomes silent. This is the universal law of guardian spirits:

a man must will for his chi to act. Thus was I thrust into a

difficult situation in which I would watch helplessly as he did

something that would bring him anguish in the end. He

returned with his catapult, sat on a bowed branch, and

concealed himself in its foliage. From there he saw the bird

fastened to the leg of the stool on which Ejike had sat only a

moment before going back into his house.

At this point in his story, my host saw that he was about

to tell Ndali that he was capable of serious violence, so he

paused the narration to lie to her and say that he’d stopped

loving the gosling because it was no longer his. He told her

that because it was attached to Ejike, he’d thought of killing

it as revenge against its new master. When she nodded and

said,

‘I understand, go on,

’ he told her about how he shot at

the bird with the stone without missing. It hit it on the

shank, then it fell and let out what must have been a cry of

pain. He rushed down the tree, his heart having become a

beating drum. He ran into his room, and later, Ejike came

rushing down with the bleeding bird, crying that it was going

to die if it did not get treatment. Indeed, days later, after he

had reclaimed the bird and brought it back into his house,

he woke to find the bird lying in the centre of his room on its

back, its small wings clasped tightly against its body, its

head slumped by its side. Its two legs were firm and lifeless,

their claws curving downwards with the early strain of rigor

[Link], the death of the bird disturbed my host

very much. He told Ndali how he’d mourned the loss and

had become so harsh on himself that his father was forced

to punish him. But it yielded nothing. Complaints began to

tide in from his school of his inattention and constant

truancy. Such was his revolt that he acted to provoke

punishments, and he took them – especially the floggings –

with a masochistic indifference that alarmed his teachers.

They sent word to his father, who by then had grown weary

of punishing him because he had changed from being a

plump boy to a slender one. One day, in a desperate

attempt to save his son, his father took him to a poultry

farm outside the city. My host described the big farm to

Ndali in detail: the hundreds of birds before his eyes –

domesticated birds of different kinds. It was here, among

the smell of a thousand feathers and the clucking of

hundreds of voices, that his heart finally lifted within him

and came back to life. His father and he returned with a

cage full of chickens and two turkeys, and the poultry

business began.

EBUBEDIKE, after he rendered the tale, they said nothing for

a while. In silence, he riffled back through the words he had

said to see if there was something that could cast him in a

bad light. And she sat there in deep thought, perhaps

judging his words. Discretion was at the centre of his self-

esteem. It was what must be kept alive to maintain him. It

was therefore paramount that he keep most of the details of

his past hidden and that his tongue retain its poverty even

in the face of pressure. Pricked that he’d told her so much,

he let his thoughts shift to the tomatoes he’d planted the

previous week, which he had not yet watered, when she

spoke suddenly.
‘It is a good job,

’ Ndali said after what seemed like a long

contemplation.

He nodded.

‘Do you like it, Mommy?’‘Yes, I do,

’ she said.

‘You miss your family? In fact, what

about your sister?’

Simple as this question was, it took him a long time to

produce an answer. I have dwelt amongst mankind long

enough to realise that they do not store information about

those who have hurt them as they do others. This kind is

kept in tightly sealed jars whose lids must be opened to

remember them. Or, in the worst cases – like the memory of

his grandmother’s rape by enemy soldiers during the war –

the jar must be smashed to bits. Thus all he said was: ‘She

lives in, erm, Lagos. Me and her, actually, we don’t talk. Her

name is Nkiru.

‘Why?’

‘Mommy, she left home before Papa died. She, you know,

she – how I should say it? – abandoned us.

’ He looked up to

meet her fixed eyes.

‘She left because of a man no one

wanted her to marry because the man is very old, old

enough even to be her father. In fact, he take more than

fifteen years to senior her.

‘Ah-han! Why did she do that?’

‘I don’t know, my sister.

’ He gave her a sharp look to see

if there was a reaction to what he had just called her. Then

he said,

‘I don’t know, Mommy.

Egbunu, although this was all he’d tell her about his sister

for the time being, when one prises such a lid open, one

sees more than one can account for. There is often no way

to stop this.

‘Why would a child reject her parent?’ his father

would ask him, and he would say he did not know. To which

his father would blink slow-moving tears. His father would

shake his head and snap a finger over it. Then he would

gnash his teeth tightly, making the sound of ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.

‘It is beyond me,

’ his father would say with even more

bitterness than before.

‘Beyond any man at all – dead or

alive. Oh, Nkiru, Ada mu oh!’

Because the memory of what he’d recollected weighed

heavily on him, he wanted to change the line ofconversation.

‘I will get you something to drink,

’ he said,

and rose to his feet.

‘What do you have?’ She stood with him.

‘No, you sit down, Mommy. You be my visitor. You suppose

sit don make I feed you.

She laughed and he saw her teeth – how tender they

looked, lined up almost delicately, like a child’s.

‘Okay, but I wan stand,

’ she said.

He shot a glance at her and arched his brow.

‘I didn’t

know you can speak pidgin,

’ he said and laughed.

She rolled her eyes and sighed in the manner handed

down from the great mothers.

He brought out two bottles of Fanta and handed one to

her. He still bought crates of these drinks they call Fanta and

Coke, as his father used to do for guests, even though he

hardly ever had any guests. He stored some of them in the

refrigerator and returned the empty bottles to the crates.

He pointed to the dining table, surrounded by four chairs.

A half-burned candle sat on the used lid of a Bournvita tin,

reshaped by a waterfall of wax that washed down the tin

and formed a coating at its foot like the gnarled roots of an

aged tree. He pushed this to the edge of the table by the

wall and pulled out a chair for her on the side. He saw that

she was looking at the calendar on the wall that had an

image of the White Man’s alusi, Jisos Kraist, wearing a crown

of thorns around his head. The inscription beside the raised

finger of Jisos marched on her lips but did not become

audible. He’d opened the drink when she sat down, and as

he made to return the opener, she grabbed his hand.

Ijango-ijango, even these many years later, I still cannot

fully comprehend all that transpired in that moment. It

seemed that by some mysterious means, she had been able

to read the intents of his heart, which had all along cast

themselves upon his face like a presence. And she had

come to understand, by some alchemy, that the smile he’d

carried on his face all along was his body’s struggle to

manage the solemn intransigence of its volcanic [Link] made love so heartily, so
beauteously, for nearly an

hour with a rare kind of energy. He was driven by a strange

mix of unbelief and relief, and she by some feeling I cannot

describe. You know, Chukwu, that you have sent me out

many times to dwell in people, to live through them, and to

become them. You know that I have seen many people

unclothed. But still the ferocity of their encounter alarmed

me. It may have been because it was their first time, and

they both could tell – for this was indeed his thought – that

there was something ineffably deep between them, and

indeed I was reminded of her chi’s words: ‘My host has

erected a figurine in the shrine of her heart.

’ It must be why

at the end of it, when both of them were drenched in sweat

and he saw tears in her eyes, he lay by her, saying words

which – although she, he and I alone could hear – were also

heard in the realm beyond man as thunderous acclamations

meant for the ears of man and spirits, the dead and the

living, for the moment and for ever: ‘I have found it! I have

found it! I have found it!