The God Child Read online

  THE GOD

  CHILD

  For John Berger

  Contents

  PART ONE 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  PART TWO 9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  PART THREE 15

  16

  17

  18

  PART FOUR 19

  20

  21

  22

  PART FIVE 23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  Appendix The Book of Histories

  Note on the Author

  My mother was my first country,

  the first place I ever lived.

  Nayyirah Waheed

  PART ONE

  1

  I cannot remember how I first knew my life was not my own. It came to me, not at once; not in words, or visions; not in capitals, or in imperatives or assertions; but as a perennial wordless whisper, a stream, whose beginnings were beyond sight, and whose ends I somehow seemed to carry.

  I looked over at him; he was the one they would have chosen for me, and yet I had arrived here by my own volition.

  I had watched in, all these years, on both sides, from close quarters, as if at a poker table, too smoky, too male, too shrouded in codes I had neither the ability nor willingness to understand.

  I had thought of the generation above me as still too tainted by colonial malaise; of my generation as a bridge; of our daughters and sons as the ones to be truly, hopefully, free.

  And yet, quietly, imperceptibly, I had been witness to a transformation; from a narrative too large, too unwieldy, too unconcerned with the small and the human, too couched in arrogance and entitlement – to one of hard work, nobility, loyalty, fidelity.

  Though the clarity, the vision, the truth of it, was not yet apparent, it seemed a certain grace had set in, and that it was all of ours.

  There was tiredness, exhaustion, disillusion, cynicism, mistrust, on all fronts, but strangely, it also felt like something new was beginning, not for one side or the other, but for us as human beings sharing a geographical space, creating a common story.

  All that was missing was the joy, the lightness and innocence, of my mother, her brothers, of Kojo; and yet they had not survived.

  I looked at him now, as he walked towards me – at all of them, they who had finally won – but I was more my mother’s daughter, Kojo’s sister, than theirs.

  Could I look back to that first splintering, that first awakening, and learn?

  Could I win as they had, and still, as they had not, remain open?

  Could I, as my mother and Kojo had not, survive?

  2

  ‘Abele,’ my mother sang at the dressing mirror, as I lay on the satin quilted cover on the bed behind her, watching.

  ‘Abele.’ She danced in her chair, the ends of her mouth turned half downwards in appreciation. ‘It’s a pity my child did not take my beauty,’ she told her reflection, putting cream on her face, caressing it into the softness, surveying the escarpment of cheekbones, the glow trapped in the amber recesses of her skin. She turned to me as if remembering. ‘You must always look more than perfect. Not just good enough, but perfect. You must always be better than them in everything you do, otherwise they will think you are lower.’

  My mother came out, the smell of her powdery luxury encasing me, watering my eyes. I opened them. She walked sideways down the stairs, her shoes clacking against the heels of her feet.

  Would it arrive overnight, the desire to perfection, like the ability to smell expensive and wear fitted petticoats?

  ‘Maya, what is wrong with you this girl? Do you want your father to come home and trouble my life? Ah.’

  I walked down the stairs, slowly, sideways, towards my mother, far like the rest of the world. When I reached her, she buttoned on my coat. My arms stuck out to both sides. I looked past her at my reflection in the mirror, half there, half in another place.

  She was stepping back to look at me, edging towards the open box by the front door.

  I closed my eyes, not wanting to see her fall.

  ‘Aich,’ she shouted.

  I opened my eyes.

  She was not sitting on top of the large new television, but suspended above it, her arms stemmed behind her against the wall, her legs spread out, skirt hiked up.

  I began to laugh.

  ‘Ah!’ This time, her harshness came through her laughter. ‘Kwasea! Come and help me.’

  I pulled her up, her weight threatening to knock me over.

  She looked into the box, turning the corners of her mouth down. ‘Hmm,’ she said, her skirt still hiked up around her thighs, ‘they shall see.’

  I walked next to her, through the more-than-perfect neighbourhood of semi-detached red-brick houses, made only less so by the African family camouflaged within one of them. Less than perfect, but not jarringly so, because he was a doctor and his wife was beautiful and his daughter immaculately groomed. Less than perfect, because they hung their washing out in the garden until the neighbour told them not to. Less than perfect, because their television was propped up with books and not a stand. Less than perfect, because the father deemed the new television with stand the mother bought with his credit card too expensive, and was having it returned. But still, separate from the men that stood huddled outside the Bahnhof and McDonald’s reeking of illegality; the women that sat in the Afroshops chatting in mismatched syncopated chorus as the hairdressers braided hair and the cloth sellers took out dotted, striped, stamped lengths of Dutch wax, like multicoloured species of exotic animals.

  I looked up at my mother talking too loud in her unperfected accent. People looked at her as she walked past, but she did not notice, because even if I had not taken her beauty, she did not understand that, to be better than them, you had to be like them so completely that they no longer noticed your difference.

  I do not know whether it was there from the beginning, this knowledge that I was never just I, myself, but an I that was in me and also outside and that watched and witnessed all I did and everything around. When I later heard in words about the ancestors, I already knew, and when my father gave me the name – ɛno, grandmother – while almost still a baby, it was because he too could see that what I saw and understood was not mine alone.

  It began to rain. She wrapped me close to her, her pea-green silk raincoat giving shelter to us both as we ran.

  We reached the department store and rode on the escalator up past the electronics, the cosmetics, the household goods, and underwear, to the women’s designer section. It was almost empty. Outside it was getting dark and the Germans were sitting down to their Abendbrot.

  The sales lady looked us up and down as we passed, still dripping. My mother was weaving in and out of the racks, like a person drunk, her hands scanning silks, polyesters, sequins and feathers, taking down one after the other, until her arms were full, clothes trailing behind her on the floor.

  The saleswoman stood behind us now, but my mother still did not notice.

  ‘Kann Ich helfen?’ she asked in a thoroughly unhelpful tone.

  My mother turned around now and laughed. ‘Ich will Alles kaufen,’ she said, ‘Alles. Hier hilf mir.’ She addressed the woman in the familiar Du, not the formal Sie, and handed her the clothes. She looked vaguely left then vaguely right, brow furrowed as if concentrating, but her body movements betrayed no focus at all. She dropped her scarf behind her.

  I looked at it on the floor, looked at the woman’s frowning face as she bent to pick it up and followed my mother
like a lady’s maid. I turned towards the children’s section. I ran my hands through the clothes like my mother, stopping at velvets and soft dark cords. I closed my eyes and saw myself in the cords: a perfect German girl, a young Romy Schneider running through the forest, arms outstretched towards a fenced-in deer, smiling like the girl on the Rotbäckchen six-fruit juice bottle, cheeks apple-red to match the kerchief on her head.

  ‘Guck mal! Guck mal der Neger!’

  It was a little girl’s voice behind me. My hand stopped on the wine-red velvet dress. I looked up to see who she meant, then turned towards her. She was pointing at me. She had mistaken me for a boy. Her mother looked at me angrily, took the girl’s hand and walked away. I stopped to look in the small full-length mirror on my left. My hair was in four large plaits. It was true I was wearing trousers, but how could she mistake me for a boy? My father always told me to wear earrings and I did not. I touched my ears.

  ‘Beautiful,’ I heard behind me. ‘Yes.’

  My mother was picking up the red velvet dress and another, peach with white lace ruches and a satin band. She was picking out white shoes and a white dress with strawberries on the left breast. She was picking cord dungarees and a matching shirt.

  ‘Ich bin Prinzessin, wissen Sie?’ she was saying to the saleswoman. ‘Prinzessin Yaa.’ She was telling her that where she came from her clothes were made of lace and gold and that she had servants and grew up in a palace.

  The woman was looking a little frightened now.

  My mother went into the changing room and I followed, to be turned into a little princess-in-the-making, beauty’s heir.

  When we left with five plastic bags, there were four saleswomen tending to my mother. She paid with my father’s credit card. They walked with us. They patted my hair. They helped my mother onto the escalator. ‘Tschüss Prinzessin Yaa. Tschüss.’

  She did not look back. Her eyes were fixed downwards. I followed them and saw what she saw: a large cupboard full of plates of all sizes and depths; white plates with solid ink-blue borders and swirls of gold that nestled inside the borders like gold-tipped swans at the edge of a lake, bewitched.

  We reached the ground floor and she headed towards them, not straight, but walking in a kind of zigzag. I looked around. No one was watching. She stood in front of the cupboard, and this time a man came to her side.

  ‘Ja?’ he said, his eyebrows raised.

  ‘Wie viel?’ she asked.

  ‘Wie viele Teller?’ he asked the eccentric woman wanting to know the number of plates.

  ‘Wie viel kostet sie?’ She pointed at the plates.

  The man looked confused. Did she want to know the price of one plate?

  ‘Sie will wissen wie viel alles zusammen kostet,’ I offered.

  ‘Ah,’ the man said, and went to the counter and opened a book. He came back with it and showed my mother, silently, looking up.

  ‘Ich kaufe,’ she said.

  His eyebrows moved up higher. He closed the book and led us to the counter.

  My mother handed over the card and told the salesman that the plates must be delivered during daytime before six and not at weekends. She did not want my father to see.

  ‘Natürlich,’ the man said, smiling tightly. He handed her the receipt and looked down at me. ‘Du sprichst aber gut Deutsch,’ he said, not a compliment so much as a statement of fact.

  It always surprised them that my German was fluent.

  I put on my broad little-girl smile and shrugged my ‘I don’t know how it came to be so fluent either’ shrug, my apologetic and surprised by my own ingenuity shrug, so that he would not realise that I had worked at the mastering and not, as they assumed, acquired it by accident or oversight. I smiled the smile that was rose-patterned wallpaper over the extant unpapered cracks through which, if they looked hard enough, they might have seen a room within a room. A bulb, naked and alone. A bare table, covered in layered faded scrawl, its wood splintered and creviced. An empty chair. Against the wall a shadow of something or someone that had already long left. And at the far end, barely visible, but there, an open door.

  3

  England was always the place we dreamt of. I dreamt of a room of my own and midnight feasts and tuck boxes and girls called Gwendolyn and Catherine and of school uniforms. My father dreamt of the great halls of Cambridge to which he might have gained entry if only he had not been too nervous and overslept his exams. My mother dreamt of piano lessons and riding lessons for me and of the dreams of her father for herself. My room was filled with English books and at breakfast we drank milky light brown sugary tea and ate soft soggy white bread with margarine and marmalade we got from the English shop near the English army barracks, where my father took me to see my first films on a big screen, E.T. and The Jungle Book. Both E.T. and Mowgli were like us, far away from home. They were also like the characters in one of the books on my father’s shelf, The Three Sisters, forever dreaming of returning to Moscow, except the three sisters did not return in the end.

  Which were we like, I wondered, Disney or Chekhov? I went up to get The Three Sisters, and put it on the kitchen counter in front of my mother.

  ‘What am I going to do with this?’ she asked. ‘You and your father and your book learning.’

  I did not mention the Danielle Steel romance novels I took from her bedside shelf and read by the light of a torch under the covers.

  She picked up the Chekhov and threw it back down. ‘All these books he brings back from his “medical conferences”. Why? Hmm? Does he tell you where he’s going? Does he tell you about his girlfriends? What bookshops are there at medical conferences? That name of yours. Maya… Is anybody in his family called Ma-ya? Hmm? Go and look back at his ex-girlfriends and see.’

  I took the book and wiped off the stew she had fingered it with. I was in the hallway and she was still talking. I went and sat at the top of the stairs and opened the book, her voice and the air, peppery with chicken stew, rising up, as I waited for my father, for the sound of the key in the lock, the metallic rotation of comfort, of confirmation.

  He had already sent a Peugeot 304 back, along with other things we would need for our return home. The only memories I had were of what my mother told me and of the village my father threatened to send me to when I did wrong, and they were second hand. Abomosu. It sounded like the Timbuktu that the cats in Aristocats had been banished to in my favourite cartoon, a dusty, arid place beyond the edge of imagination. I longed to ask him how it could be so bad if it had brought forth him; if the place we were going back to was the same place as that of punishment, but I would have been too known. And I was to arrive a young lady, who knew how to say please and thank you and pardon me like the English and not speak like the Germans who had no manners and were rude.

  My father told me that Dr Lartey’s son had gone to school in Oxford, and now he played professional tennis in his spare time and sang for his school choir in red and white gowns just like they wore in Cambridge. So I began going to English classes after school, to learn the difference between my th’s and my s’s, to say think instead of sink. But the lessons only confused my tongue and gave it a lisp, an almost imperceptible protest at the excess of words, of things.

  Finally, the click. I got up and dangled my foot over one step and then lowered my full weight onto it, step after step. He took off his coat, put down the black briefcase browned at the creases, which held his knowledge, stethoscope, pills and injections. I reached his side as he put his feet still in their socks in the brown leather slippers that had shown me, when I looked down that Christmas, that Santa Claus in the white plastic mask and beard was only my father. I had not told him about this discovery, just as I had not told him that I always won at Snap because I could see the doubles of the cards from underneath our glass table, nor that when I had shouted, ‘Moonlighters,’ at the sight of a keyboard player in the pedestrian area of our town, it was because I had learnt the word on Sesame Street that day, and not because I recognised Mozart
’s sonata, as he had so proudly thought.

  ‘Boys will not like you if you are too clever,’ he told me when I argued with him and would not let go, which made me fill inside with tears.

  I led the way down to the cellar and turned on the light behind the bookshelf, which was filled with medical encyclopaedias, novels, and boxed classical music records. This was our world, his and mine. My mother never came down, except to clean. He sat in the leather swivel chair. I waited for him to look up, to give me the codes, the metallic click in the door.

  ‘So?’ he asked.

  ‘I read the book,’ I said. ‘The children climb up a magic tree and there are all kinds of strange creatures there. And there is a dream where they are in a giant bed, so they are dreaming in their dream and…’

  He was not listening. He was looking beyond me into space and he was not listening.

  ‘I got ten out of ten in English dictation,’ I said, ‘and an eight out of ten.’

  ‘Why eight out of ten?’ He frowned. ‘Why not ten out of ten? You must always do your best. Do you understand?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, what?’

  I hesitated, not wanting to subject to this meaningless wordplay that I knew was his father’s, because it was not in his own voice that he asked.

  ‘Yes, what?’

  ‘Yes, Daaad.’ I got up to go. There were no answers here. But, maybe… ‘Do I have to go to school tomorrow? I’m not feeling very well.’ It was not even a full lie.

  His look focused. ‘Oh yeh,’ he said, pronouncing the ‘yeh’ like the Germans said ‘oh weh’ but Ghanaian-Anglicising it. ‘How do you feel?’

  I opened my mouth, not knowing what would come out of it. ‘I have a headache and I feel sick… And dizzy, like I’m going to fall down, like I’m going to fall down all the time, and as if there’s something heavy in my stomach, painful,’ I said, and tried to act out the symptoms in my face; not too much, just enough.