The Tomorrow-Tamer Read Free Page B

accidentally on the street in Accra. He had grown thinner and was dressed very neatly now in white shirt and grey flannels. He looked disconcertingly serious, but when he smiled it was the same grin and for a moment I thought it was going to be all right. But when I gave him the Twi greeting, he did not reply to it.
    â€œSo you have come back after all, Matthew,” he said finally.
    â€œYes, I’ve come back.” Perhaps my voice was more emphatic than I had intended. “This is where I belong.”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œOr perhaps you don’t think so–”
    Kwabena laughed. Africans quite often laugh when they are not amused.
    â€œWhat I think,” he commented, “should not matter to you.”
    â€œFor heaven’s sake, Kwabena,” I demanded, “what’s wrong?”
    â€œNothing is wrong,” he replied vaguely. Then, with a show of interest, “Well, are you with government, as you used to say you would be?”
    â€œYes. Administration. They’re not taking on new European staff any more–I only managed it because I speak Twi. And you?”
    â€œOh, I am a medical orderly.” His voice was bitter. “An elevated post.”
    â€œSurely you could do better than that?”
    â€œI have not your opportunities. It is the closest I can get now to real medical work. I’m trying to get a scholarship to England. We will see.”
    â€œYou want to be a doctor?”
    â€œYes–” He laughed in an oddly self-conscious way. “Not a ju-ju man, you understand.”
    Suddenly, I thought I did understand. With me, he could never outgrow his past, the time when he had wanted to be another kind of doctor–a doctor who dealt in charms and amulets, in dried roots and yellow bones and bits of python skin. He knew I would remember. How he must have regretted betraying himself to me when we were both young.
    I wanted to tell him that I knew how far he had travelled from the palm hut. But I did not dare. He would have thought it condescension.
    He was talking about his parents. Kwaku, he said, was working in Takoradi. He was getting old for domestic work, but he could not afford to retire. None of the sons or daughters had made or married money.
    â€œAnd your mother?” I asked him.
    â€œShe died three years ago. She had hookworm for years. She was a Christian, as you know, but she still bought bushmattermatter medicine and charms instead of going to a doctor. I couldn’t persuade her. She became very weak. When she got typhoid she didn’t have much chance.”
    For a moment I could not speak, could not believe that Yaa was really dead. It seemed wrong that I should learn of it this way, so long afterwards. And wrong, too, that I had thought of her these past years as unchanged, as though I had believed she would keep on during all my lifetime, shouting her flamboyant abuse to the sellers in the market, and gathering each successive generation of children into her arms.
    â€œI–I didn’t know,” I stumbled. “No one told me–”
    â€œWhy should they tell you”–he smiled wryly–“if an old African woman dies?”
    Pain and anger spread like a bloodstain over my whole mind.
    â€œYou know as well as I do,” I replied harshly, “that she was more mother to me than my own mother.”
    Kwabena looked at me as though he hated me.
    â€œYes,” he said. “I shared my mother with you, in exchange for your cast-off khaki shorts.”
    There was something in it that shocked both of us, and we were uncomfortably silent.
    â€œI did not mean to say that,” Kwabena said finally, and there was shame in his voice, but no withdrawal.
    I could not help thinking of the two boys who had both been born on a Tuesday, and of the woman, immense, bad-tempered, infinitely gentle, who had said, “You are brothers anyway.” I found I was not angry at Kwabena any more.