Moving Portraits
A few weeks after her thirteenth birthday, Deola saw a face moving within the walls of a brick house. She was waving at her cousin, who had just dropped her off at school on that cold Tuesday morning, and was turning to enter her school compound when she saw it. There, within the walls of an adjacent building, she saw the moving face of a girl. It looked like a painting come alive, every artist's dream. Deola looked at the animated head for a while and went on to school.
Some days after, she casually mentioned it to her aunt, Aunty Bola.
"I saw a girl moving inside the wall at school."
Aunty Bola stared at her for a full minute, then pulled a chair and sat facing her. She asked her how long she had been seeing the girl and what she looked like. "Did the girl say anything to you?"
"No, she didn't."
Later at night, sprawled on her special couch in the living room, Aunty Bola held long, hushed phone calls with her siblings. As she roamed around the sitting room and pretended to search for the television remote, Deola strained to hear her aunt say, "This is what I have been saying since." She paused to look at Deola and said, 'Maami le le yi.' This is my mother.
Deola knew what she meant.
Deola felt Aunty Bola watch her in the days that followed. She was used to being watched like that. The way she moved while she was in the backyard spreading clothes under the sun, the way she folded her legs as she sat just at the edge of the couch to watch the night's episode of The Gardener's Daughter. Once, while everyone was at the dining table, eating from their plates of Eba and egusi soup, Aunty Bola had stopped all of a sudden to look at the way Deola cut out her morsels of Eba. With a small frown on her face, she whispered to herself, 'just like Maami.' Just like my mother.
Because she knew she was being watched, Deola didn't tell anyone about the dreams; that the girl she saw in the wall in school was now in her dreams. In these dreams, they never spoke to each other; they only played. They would play in the streets of a town she didn’t recognize, chase cars as they sped down the road, chase after a family of birds migrating until they got lost. Some nights, they played in strange streams, bathed in unfamiliar waters.
Then the girl showed up in her dream looking ill, with sunken eyes, and with her skin looking thin and papery, as if her very essence was fading. With each dream, the girl seemed to fade more and more. And then, all at once, the girl stopped coming to Deola's dreams, and Deola feared that something terrible had happened to her. She knew that something had happened. She told no one about the dreams.
Deola knew what her aunt meant by "Maami leleyi." This is my mother.
*
Deola did not have her father's tall build, or his dark skin that shone, or his sparse eyebrows. She did not take after the round shape of his face, she did not have that bounce he had in his steps. Deola did not have her mother's soft voice, or her bright demeanour, or her eyes that were the colour of kolanut. She did not have the sway her mother had in her hips or her mother’s thick, full hair.
It was commonly said in the family that Deola had her grandmother's fingers and her laughter. She took after her grandmother in other things: her slender legs and fragile features, her birthmarks and unpredictability.
On a hot afternoon in September, when Deola was nineteen and sure she had the house all to herself, Aunty Bola had come back home early from work and found Deola on the couch in the living room with a boy, kissing and touching. Aunty Bola shook her head and smiled a sad, knowing smile Deola had seen all her life. Later that night, after dinner, Aunty Bola sat with her and gave her a long look, after which she told Deola she could not be disappointed, as all she did was remind her of how much Deola was like her own mother, two women who were like water, taking the shape of the container they occupied.
*
Deola’s grandmother was a woman Deola had only, until recently, experienced in glimpses, seen in pictures, heard and touched in stories. She had heard how her grandmother had left her father's house because he had told her not to marry the love of her life; she had just taken off one morning with some money she had been saving. The first time Deola heard her aunt tell that story, it sounded familiar, like a faint, distant memory.
Then in the year Deola turned 22, her grandmother asked to come to stay at Aunty Bola's place for a while, and for the first time they were both in the same house together. There she was, the woman with cheekbones and fingers that looked like hers. This woman could barely see but insisted on having her hair braided and her nails trimmed every week. While she sat with her grandmother, Deola would study her body, one she knew was an initial model of hers. They shared a birthmark, a tiny mole that lay at the left edge of both their noses. She studied her grandmother's neck with two identical ink drawings of a rune on either side. The place on her arm where the name 'Omodunni' was inked. A past lover? A nickname? Her white hair, full and frail like her own. Sometimes her grandmother sat for long hours as if waiting, listening for something, for someone. On some days, Deola waited with her.
When her grandmother spoke, it was in what might have sounded like parables, in fragments and half-memories. She spoke with an imperativeness as if the memory she had just remembered had to be told.
Some days her grandmother spoke about the running, how she had been sitting in her textile store in Wase when the civil war broke out. Mr. Hassan, her Hausa neighbour, had come to tell her that a mob of angry men was close by and killing anyone who wasn't of their tribe. She was a member of the community, spoke the language fluently, but she also had two children, so she ran.
Deola's grandmother spoke in a musical Ekiti dialect that should have been difficult for her to comprehend, but like twins, their communication transcended language. Deola longed to tell her of her own running: from herself, from desires and stirrings a woman like her, brought up righteous and devout, should not be having. Must not be having.
Then one of those quiet days, her grandmother started to talk about Omodunni, the friend of her childhood years. They did everything together: chased cars and climbed hills. They went to the ink man in town from time to time to get all kinds of shapes drawn on their bodies. Before she told her, Deola knew: one day, a violent fever came and took Omodunni. There, in her mind, Deola saw how Omodunni had burned up till after a few days the girl from the walls went still.
Deola wanted to ask her grandmother if she knew what this was. How was it that Omodunni was in the walls and in her childhood dreams?? This dissolution of time, this experience of her grandmother’s past in her present, what did it mean?
Months later, on a Sunday when she was back in her university dormitory, Deola had another dream, this one with her grandmother in it. Like that first girl in her dreams, her grandmother had this illness, and Deola knew it was one that would make her fade away, a sickness she would not be coming back from. Three days later, her aunt called, and before she could make out words through her aunt’s gasps and tears, she knew.