a short story.
the boy and the door.
IF YOU ASK HIM — the boy, in a red shirt, with black shorts and brown leather sandals, standing before a certain white door in this big white house — he will tell you that his master, who does not smile, has forbidden him from speaking with you, a stranger. His master, the one whose dark beards flow from his chin to his chest, forbids him from many things, one of which is opening the door he stands before. The door is calling out to be opened, the boy is listening and his master is not home to answer.
1
Aunt Leila was the one who brought the boy to the master. She was not his relative. She was only but a childless woman who took the orphaned boy into her care, and Aunt was just a form of veneration. She had described the master differently from how everyone in the hamlet and neighbouring hamlets described him. She did not describe him as old and grotesque and with eyes that saw deep into your soul, and with teeth like that of a blood-sucking creature. She had described him as gentle and sagely, and said that he loved reading and lived in the biggest house that stood at the village’s border; the entry of the Forest of Atonement, vaguely called the evil forest.
The boy does not know how Aunt Leila knows the master and he does not remember any advertisement requiring a male labourer, but after his last episode, he knew that Aunt Leila would get rid of him. No matter how much she hugged him and told him she loved him. He cost her too much, one too many times, and all in two years — from the day he turned thirteen until a month ago when he moved into his master’s.
He had no friends and anyone who once pitied the boy (because in a way, pity performed a kind of friendship) before his thirteenth birthday vanished when he had his first episode, and the bone of contention around his episodes was his perpetual state of unconsciousness until he was caught. And as fate would have it, he was only caught when he needed to stop, which was when the deed was already done. So, on his thirteenth, after Aunt Leila had baked a big cake for the boy and cooked the most peppery jollof rice, as he oddly preferred it, he announced that he would love to step out for some fresh air. He did not know, but by then, he was no longer himself. Ignorant, Aunt Leila permitted him, only to meet her boy, two hours later, hands tied, legs tied, with a green rope, bloody, being kicked by guards and passersby in the market square. A neighbour had come to get her. Her boy was caught on the farms slaughtering ten white fowls.
“My beautiful white hen,” an old village man cried in his mother’s tongue.
He was no longer The boy. For the first time, he was known to the village as Her boy, and she, Aunt Leila, had to pay the debt.
There were many other times he killed animals after that: bush rats and pigeons; one time, goats, but mostly, fowls, the white ones, and his lucky number was ten. The boy was always killing ten of them and when they observed this pattern, some began to call him Ten after that. The next germane episode was like the others except by this time, Aunt Leila had begun to lose trust in the boy. She could never tell when he was or was not himself. So, again, during the new yam festival when ten — they should have seen it coming — masquerades danced through the market square celebrating the gods and commemorating a new year, it was no surprise when her boy sprung out of nowhere with two long plaited leather whips and struck each masquerade down. With one stroke, they became paralysed and dropped to the ground, void of power, spirit and life. Matter of factly, the villagers could not tell you how shocked they were. They feared the boy much more than the eighteen-foot-wrapped-in-palm-leaves masquerade, and the dwarf one with a raffia cane who flogged children at random, even Aunt Leila who would have to beg the chief priest after.
“He should be banished into the Forest of Atonement,” someone sneered.
Aunt Leila only stared at his face; his beautiful face that calmed her and reminded her of a time when he was no trouble. The face was costing her a lot.
“Where did you find that whip?” she finally asked because she was tired of confronting him with, “Do you want to kill me?” always.
And as usual, her boy replied, “I don’t know.”
The final incident that would send the boy out of Aunt Leila’s and into the master’s had nothing to do with the number ten. Just one over — eleven. It would also send people from his hamlet into neighbouring hamlets for a couple of days. He was an evil omen, some said, and some others, he was possessed. So, on this normal day succeeding a rainy night, with the ground moist and easy to till, the boy set out with a hoe and when at sunrise Aunt Leila did not find him in his bed, she began to pack his clothes into a bag. In all his madness, he had never left the house without her permission. By noon, she found herself at the Palace’s cemetery, holding tightly to her boy with one hand and with the other, the black woven polypropylene bag that contained a few of his clothes and some bananas. Half the village bore witness and her boy being covered with mud, holding her hoe, was evidence that he was the one who dug out the corpse of the previous nine Obas. And the then present Oba and his first son, on seeing the bedlam, slumped and died.
He would have been banished into the Forest of Atonement anyway, so moving into the master’s house at the mouth of the forest was not much of a bad idea.
2
The Forest of Atonement, for the people of this village, was the end of the earth. They could travel north and east and west, but not southward in the direction of the forest; that was where the gods ended the earth, somewhere in the sweeping, dense rainforest. The oldest woman in the village, Iya Agba, says that she met the forest and so did her mother and her mother’s mother, and as the name of the forest implies, that is exactly what the forest is. The forest of atonement swallows the bad and spits out only the good, but it is called the evil forest because more often than not, the forest is always swallowing and never spitting.
“And whose fault is that?” Iya Agba ends her narration before beginning a sermon, seasoned with proverbs, all in her mother’s tongue, about being good.
Only one man in Iya Agba’s lifetime has been spat out, after which no man went into the forest. He went by the name Lagbaja, in her telling of the story, which meant nobody, somebody or anybody, either because she did not wish to disclose his name or, most likely, because she had forgotten, either way, the storytelling had to go on. Lagbaja was an apprentice to the healer of the army and was married to the most beautiful woman in all of the village. He lived a very uneventful life waiting at the border of the village to heal wounded soldiers brought back from war and out of nowhere, on a market day, he was stripped and beaten in the village as ordered by the Oba for treason and banished into the forest.
He would come out seven days after without a scar to hear that his wife, whom the king coveted and as rumoured, had slept with, had gone into the Forest of atonement a day earlier to find him. And he, Lagbaja, would sit at his window and watch and wait for her all his life but the insatiable forest would not spit out the meal.
3
The boy’s master was a hairy uncommonness with eyebrows that dared to meet at his temple. He made the boy know what he liked and did not like and what he permitted and forbade. He liked his hot cup of freshly brewed bitter leaf tea every morning, and he liked silence. He was always listening to the quiet for the chirping of birds. He did not however like to find himself calling out to the boy more than once and somehow, he never did. Even when he was rooms away. All he did was say the boy’s name, and the boy would hear. He would ask the boy to take a sip out of the freshly brewed bitter leaf tea which the boy always politely declined. He also let the boy run in the garden and take evening walks with him, but what he did not permit was the boy stepping outside the gates. His master went to the market to get all they would need, but on rare occasions because he had a farm beside the garden. Most importantly, there was this door he was forbidden from opening.
As if rehearsed, the master had shown the boy all the rooms, all of which had white doors and looked alike, but on the second floor, at the end of the corridor stood a door that the master did not open up for him. “You are forbidden to open this door,” a simple command.
The boy’s master was an alchemist of some sort and he smoked a lot of cigars. They smelled pleasant. When he was not observing silence, looking out the window as if waiting for something or someone, he was creating a concoction in his little cauldron. Later, he revealed to the boy that he was indeed not mad but only desperate to discover something new and rare.
The master performed his alchemy on the first floor, the same floor where he had his bedroom. The exception was that his potion laboratory was at the end of the corridor underneath the forbidden room, and his bedroom was beside. The master was obsessed with making potions. Whenever he could not sleep at night, which was almost every night, he would slip out of his bedroom and into the lab, and the boy whose bedroom on the ground floor was underneath would hear the doors of both rooms crying as he closed one and opened the other.
The laboratory was not in any way fancy. The floorboards were old and ugly and creaked under pressure, and the white-painted walls were greying from soots from the cauldron. The laboratory was illuminated with kerosene lanterns at the corners of the room, and the windows were, from the outside, covered with vines that ran across the walls. When the sun shone through the windows, they cast disarranged shadows across the room which the master hated.
“This is my lab, lair, den or whatever you choose to call it,” The master showed the boy his first day in his house. He was standing behind the boy. “You will tell no one about this,” he added before urging the boy to explore the lab. It resembled a U-shaped kitchen with a counter at its centre, and on the low countertop was a kerosene stove and a cauldron on top. There were too many jars on the shelves, most of which contained leaves, and some amber jars that collected liquid, but the boy’s eyes caught the jar with glowing frogs.
“Are you a witch?” the boy blurted.
“Yes. There is my broom, grab it and sweep the floor,” the master pointed to the besom lying against the wall. The boy could perceive satire, but to think that his master could have any response other than blandness had him confused, so he obeyed and reached for the broom. He was not a witch, the master later explained himself as the boy swept.
“You are not to touch this jar,” the master interrupted his sweeping, pointing at a clear jar with a dark viscous liquid. And without letting the boy wonder why, he added, “This is the blood of pure ones, good ones. Very rare to find.”
“Like a baby’s?”
The master chortled. “If you choose to believe such, so be it.”
The boy reminded the master of his younger self. He wore a confused look all the time, and the master took advantage of that. If the boy walked into his room and wore his confused look, he would tell the boy to sit on his bed and deliver him from all that uncertainty and confusion, but of course, this was only an illustration. The master had never let the boy into his room. He had been admiring his vertical garden in the yard one day when he heard a knock on his gate. Nobody in the village had ever visited him, except the chief priest who feared him, so he was curious to know who was knocking ever so violently.
He answered to find a woman in a black blouse and a Buba wrapped around her waist, crying. The master only let her in because she looked troubled and something about her was familiar. She would then explain to him, after she had gotten the chance to catch her breath and keep calm, about her troubled boy who was occasionally doing evil and how she felt the worst was yet to come. She did not want him in the Forest of atonement, atoning for what she believed was an evil spirit possessing him. She loved her boy too much.
“Wonderful. Pureblood. See that he finishes his mission then bring him to me,” the master said to her before sending her on her way. This had been the same way his mother had sent him off, too. Days later, after his last episode, the woman, Aunt Leila, brought the boy in. But who was to say that he had finished his mission?
4
So, if you ask the boy, the one whose name is Kadara and whose fingers now wrap around the knob of the forbidden door, who he is, he will tell you only what he knows — that his master, who has gone to get some leaves from the forest, has forbidden him from speaking with you, a stranger. Matter of factly, he does not know who he is. To know who one is, one must first know those before them. So I will tell you that the boy whose name means destiny is the son of Lagbaja, his master, but genuinely, the son of the Oba, born of the fairest woman in the land and delivered by the insatiable spirits of the forest of atonement, possessed by them. The same ones the last good man fought, conquered and trapped behind a certain white door in a certain white house.
The boy who doesn’t know that his destiny was written by these spirits opens the door. Kaabọ, he says, welcoming the spirits of the Forest of Atonement into the village that is now no more.
