Chapter 21: The Letters

The flat on Crown Street smelled of absence. Not of neglect — the flat was not neglected, was clean enough, was the flat of a man who was away half the year and who maintained it in the minimum functional state that single men maintained their flats in, the dishes washed, the bed made, the surfaces clear. But the flat smelled of the particular quality of air that accumulated in an unoccupied space over four weeks — the stale, settled, undisturbed air of a room where no one had breathed, where no cooking had been done, where no window had been opened, where the atmosphere had been sitting, motionless, for twenty-eight days.

Kwame opened the window. The Aberdeen air came in — cold, damp, carrying the smell of the harbour and the city and the granite and the North Sea, the compound of scents that was Aberdeen's signature, the olfactory identity of the city he had lived in for eighteen years and that was, in its grey and granular way, home. One of his homes. The surface home.

The letters were on the floor.

They were exactly where he had known they would be — below the letterbox, on the doormat, a small pile of blue aerogrammes mixed with the white and brown envelopes of bills and circulars and the occasional catalogue. The pile had been accumulating for twenty-eight days, each letter arriving at the flat in his absence, falling through the stiff letterbox flap and landing on the pile, the pile growing with each delivery, the blue aerogrammes distributed through the pile like veins of colour in grey rock.

He picked them up. He carried them to the kitchen table — the table that was his table the way the kitchen table in Osu was his mother's table, the surface where the daily business of his life was conducted, the surface where he ate and read and did not write letters and stared at the wall and thought about the things he was not doing.

He sorted the mail. Bills to the left. Junk mail to the recycling bin. The blue aerogrammes to the right, arranged by date — each one stamped with the date of posting, his mother's careful hand recording the date in the upper right corner of each aerogramme, the dates a chronology, a timeline, a record of the weeks that had passed while he was at depth.

Six aerogrammes. Six weeks of his mother's writing. Six weeks of market prices and medication and weather and neighbours and the small events of a life in Osu, the events that his mother selected and compressed into the aerogramme's single page with the editorial skill of a woman who understood that the space was limited and the information was not and that the selection of what to include was as important as the writing itself.

He made tea. He sat at the table. He picked up the first aerogramme — the earliest, dated six weeks ago, the letter that would have been written while he was still on the surface, before the blow-down, before the chamber, before the depth.

He opened it carefully, sliding his thumb under the tape that sealed the fold, the tape that his mother applied because the gum never held in the humidity. The aerogramme unfolded into its single page, the blue paper thin and light, the handwriting small and precise, the sentences aligned on the unlined paper with the care of a woman who had been writing letters for eighteen years and who had refined the practice into something between correspondence and art.

Sunday, 8 March

My dear Kwame,

The harmattan is late this year. Usually the dust winds have stopped by February, but this year they continue, the haze sitting over the city like a cloth, the sun dim behind the dust, the air dry and scratchy in the throat. Auntie Mercy says it is because of the Sahara expanding, the desert sending its dust further south each year. I do not know if this is true. I know the dust is here and the dust is in everything — in the house, in the food, in the creases of the letters I write. You may find dust in this letter. If you do, it is the Harmattan, it is Accra, it is the city sending you a piece of itself.

He touched the paper. He looked at the corner, at the fold, at the crease. He could see it — a faint trace of red-brown dust, the Accra dust, the dust that his mother had described and that had travelled with the letter from Osu to Aberdeen, the particles of the city embedded in the paper, the physical residue of home.

He continued reading.

The market is expensive. Yam is 12 cedis per tuber, which is too much, but what can you do? The rains have not been good and the farmers say the soil is tired and the yam is small this year and so the price is high. I buy what I need and I do not complain because complaining about the price of yam is like complaining about the weather — it does not change the thing and it uses energy that could be better spent.

Akosua has started school. Nursery school, at the church. She comes home every day with drawings — yesterday she drew a house. It was a square with a triangle on top and a circle for the sun and two lines coming from the sun, which she said were the sun's arms. The sun has arms, she told me. I asked her what the arms were for and she said, For holding. The sun holds things with its arms. She is four years old and she understands already that holding is what the big things do — the sun holds the earth, the earth holds the house, the house holds the people. She understands holding.

Kwame put the letter down. He put his hands flat on the table. He breathed. The Aberdeen air came through the window, cold and damp, and the letter lay on the table, and the dust of Accra was in the paper, and his mother's words were in the ink, and the words described a child who understood holding, a four-year-old girl who had figured out that the sun's purpose was to hold, and Kwame sat at the table in his flat in Aberdeen and he thought about holding and about what he had held and what he had failed to hold and what he was going to hold when he went home.

He read the second letter. The second letter was about the clinic visit — the blood pressure stable on the new medication, the doctor pleased, the numbers in the right range. His mother wrote about the numbers the way Sarah Webb talked about the numbers — with the precision of a person who understood that the numbers described the conditions of survival, the blood pressure numbers as critical to Efua Asante's survival as the PPO2 and CO2 numbers were to the divers' survival, the numbers a language of life spoken by the people who watched the gauges.

He read the third letter. The third letter was about Palm Sunday at the church, the procession with the palm branches, Pastor Mensah's sermon about the entry into Jerusalem, the entry that was also a return, the king returning to the city that would reject him. His mother did not draw the parallel explicitly. His mother rarely drew parallels explicitly. She placed the facts on the page and trusted the reader — trusted Kwame — to see the connections, the way a welder trusted the inspector to see the quality of the weld, the evidence presented without argument, the judgment left to the person examining it.

He read the fourth letter. The fourth letter was about rain — the first heavy rain of the season, the rain that ended the harmattan and began the wet season, the rain falling on Osu with the particular intensity of West African rain, the drops large and warm and percussive, the sound of the rain on the metal roof of the house a sound that Kwame remembered — remembered with the body rather than the mind, the sound stored in the part of him that stored the sounds of childhood, the rain on the roof, the thunder, the way the compound flooded briefly and the water ran red with the laterite soil, the red water flowing through the compound and into the street and down the hill toward the lagoon.

His mother wrote: The rain came at 3 in the afternoon and I was at the market and I did not have my umbrella and Auntie Mercy did not have hers and we stood under the awning of Mrs. Adjei's fabric shop and we waited for the rain to stop, and the waiting was not unpleasant because the rain was warm and the awning was dry and Mrs. Adjei gave us kenkey and fish while we waited, and the waiting was a kind of pause, a rest in the middle of the day, the rain giving us permission to stop and stand and eat and talk and not do the things we had been doing, the rain a parenthesis in the sentence of the day.

Kwame read this sentence three times. The rain as parenthesis. The pause in the middle. The permission to stop. His mother understood pauses. His mother understood that the things that interrupted the routine — the rain, the waiting, the standing under an awning with a friend — were not interruptions but part of the routine, part of the life, the parenthetical moments as important as the main clause.

He had not had parenthetical moments. His life at depth was all main clause — the work, the chamber, the bell, the pressure, the decompression. No pauses. No rain. No standing under an awning with a friend eating kenkey and watching the water run red.

He wanted the pauses. He wanted the rain. He wanted the parenthetical moments that his mother described in her letters, the small ordinary interruptions that made a life a life rather than a procedure.

He read the fifth letter. The fifth letter was about Kwame's room.

I cleaned your room today. I clean it every Monday. I wash the bedspread and I dust the shelves and I sweep the floor and I open the window to let the air circulate. The room is the room. The books are the books. The trophies are the trophies. Nothing has changed in your room since you left, and I keep it this way not because I am sentimental — I am not sentimental, I am practical, I keep the room because a room that is not kept becomes a room that is not, and I want your room to be, to exist, to be ready, because you will need it when you come, and you will come.

I found a letter under the mattress. Not a letter from me — a letter you wrote. You must have written it years ago, before you left. It is a letter to your father. You wrote to your father, Kwame. You were fourteen or fifteen and your father had been dead for a year or two and you wrote him a letter. I did not read it. I folded it back and put it back where I found it, under the mattress, where you left it. It is there. It is waiting for you, the way everything in this room is waiting for you.

You wrote to your father and you did not post the letter. You put it under the mattress. I wonder if this is the same thing you do now — the writing and the not-sending, the words formed and then held, the letter written and then kept, the communication attempted and then abandoned. I wonder if you have been writing letters your whole life and putting them under mattresses and never sending them. I wonder if the notebook you keep — you mentioned a notebook, once, years ago — is full of letters to people, letters that will never be posted, letters that are not silence but speech that has not been released, words that are waiting for the pressure to change, the way the gas in your body waits for the pressure to change before it can be released.

Kwame put the letter down. He sat at the table. He sat for a long time.

The letter to his father. He had forgotten it. Or he had not forgotten it — he had placed it in the category of things he did not think about, the things stored under the mattress of his consciousness, the things written and not sent, the things felt and not expressed, the accumulated drafts of a life lived in the gap between the feeling and the saying.

His mother had found it and had not read it and had put it back. His mother had found the evidence of his pattern — the writing and the not-sending — and had not commented on it except to observe it, to note it, to place it on the page the way she placed all her observations, without judgment, without reproach, the facts presented, the connections left for the reader to draw.

He drew them. He drew the connection between the fourteen-year-old boy who had written to his dead father and put the letter under the mattress and the thirty-six-year-old man who had written in notebooks for twelve years and sent nothing and the man who had, on rotation forty-two, at 150 metres, at 15.2 bar, finally sent a letter, finally released the words, finally allowed the pressure to change.

He had decompressed. Not fully — not yet — but the process had begun. The letter to his mother was the first release. The phone call to Yaw was the second. The reading of the letters was the third. Each one a stop on the decompression schedule, a point at which the pressure was allowed to equilibrate, the gas to diffuse, the body to adjust.

He read the sixth letter. The last letter, the most recent, the one that had arrived at Crown Street perhaps two days ago, the letter that his mother had written after receiving his letter, the letter that was her reply.

He knew before he opened it. He knew from the weight of the aerogramme — slightly heavier, the writing denser, the page more full. He knew from the tape — applied more carefully than usual, the seal precise, the fold exact. He knew from the handwriting on the front — his name written with a pressure that he could see in the depth of the ink, the pen pressed harder, the letters darker, the name weighted with something that was not emphasis but intensity, the intensity of a woman writing to a son who had, for the first time in eighteen years, written back.

He opened it.

My dear Kwame,

I have received your letter. I have read it. I am holding it in my pocket as I write this...

He read her reply. He read it slowly, the way she had read his letter — once for the words, once for the meaning. He read about the pocket, the carrying, the seven readings. He read about Uncle Kofi. He read about Yaw — Thank him. When you come, thank him. Not with money. With words. He read about the bed, the good sheets, the room ready, the house ready, the mango tree in the window.

He read: The house is sound. The joints are holding. The structure is intact.

He read: Come and see.

He put the letter down. He put all six letters in a stack, in order, the chronology complete, the archive of the twenty-eight days assembled, the record of his mother's life during his absence collected and read and known.

He sat at the table in the flat on Crown Street and he looked at the stack of letters and he looked at the window where the Aberdeen sky was visible — grey, luminous, the simmer dim — and he looked at the table where the letters had accumulated for twenty-eight days and for six years and for eighteen years, the table that was the receiving end of his mother's correspondence, the terminus of the postal route from Osu to Aberdeen, the surface on which the blue aerogrammes landed and waited and were read, eventually, in batches, by a man who was always arriving late, always reading the past rather than the present, always playing catch-up with the life he was supposed to be part of.

No more.

He picked up his phone. He opened the browser. He searched for flights: Aberdeen to Accra. The results appeared — routes through London, through Amsterdam, through Istanbul. He chose the first available: Aberdeen to Heathrow, Heathrow to Kotoka International Airport, Accra. Departing in four days. He booked the flight. The confirmation appeared on his screen. His name, the flight number, the dates, the route.

Aberdeen to Accra. The direction reversed. The current flowing the other way. The letter followed. The body following the words.

He stood from the table. He went to the bedroom. He opened the wardrobe and took out a bag — not the kitbag, not the offshore bag, but a different bag, a smaller bag, the bag he used for travel, for shore leave, for the rare occasions when he left Aberdeen for somewhere other than the North Sea. He placed the bag on the bed and he opened it and he began to pack.

He packed light. He packed the way his mother wrote — only the essentials, nothing wasted, each item selected for its purpose. Clothes for a week in Accra — light clothes, cotton, the clothes he did not wear in Aberdeen because Aberdeen did not have the heat that required them. A gift for Akosua — a stuffed animal, a Highland cow, bought months ago at the Aberdeen airport on an impulse he had not acted on until now, the toy sitting in the back of the wardrobe waiting for the visit that had been deferred and deferred and that was now, finally, scheduled, confirmed, four days away.

He packed the Achebe. He would finish it in Accra. He would finish Arrow of God in the place where the arrow pointed — in West Africa, in the world the novel described, in the world that his mother occupied and that he was returning to.

He packed his notebook. The notebook with the entries from rotation forty-two, the entries that tracked the decompression of the distance, the words that recorded the journey from silence to speech, from the sealed to the open, from the depth to the surface.

He stood in the bedroom of his flat in Aberdeen and he looked at the bag on the bed and he thought about the last time he had packed this bag, six years ago, for the last visit, the visit he had not known would be the last, the visit he had treated as routine — a week in Accra, a few days with his mother, a few days with Yaw, the visit a scheduled maintenance, a five-year inspection of the family, the diver descending to the structure and examining it and recording the conditions and ascending and leaving and not returning for another five years, except that the five years had become six, and the six years had become the distance, and the distance had become the pressure, and the pressure had built and built until the letter released it.

The letter was released. The flight was booked. The bag was packed. The decompression was proceeding.

He went back to the kitchen. He sat at the table. He picked up the stack of his mother's letters and he held them — the six aerogrammes, the blue paper, the handwriting, the tape, the stamps with Kwame Nkrumah's face, the dust of Accra in the folds. He held them the way his mother had held his letter, the way she was holding it now, in her pocket, the paper against her dress.

He held the letters and he thought about the house in Osu and the kitchen table and the twelve steps and the mango tree and the room upstairs with the bed made with the good sheets and the letter to his father under the mattress and the name on the wall — AKOSUA — written in pencil by a four-year-old hand, and he thought: four days.

Four days and he would be there. Four days and he would walk through the door and into the house and the house would receive him the way the chamber received the diver — completely, without judgment, the atmosphere adjusted to his presence, the space accommodating, the system making room.

Four days.

He put the letters down. He drank his tea. The tea was good. The tea tasted like tea.

The Aberdeen sky was grey and wide and full of the light that was neither day nor night but the between, the simmer dim, the light of the city he had lived in for eighteen years and that he would leave in four days and return to in a week and that was, in its grey and careful way, the place he had lived and worked and been alone and accumulated the distance that he was now, finally, crossing.

The flat was quiet. The air from the window was cold. The letters were on the table.

Kwame Asante, thirty-six, saturation diver, welder, son, sat in his flat in Aberdeen and breathed the air of the surface and thought about the air of Accra and felt, for the first time in six years, the pull of gravity in the right direction — not downward, not toward the depth, not toward the bottom of the pressure curve, but outward, toward the world, toward the place where his mother waited and his brother waited and his niece waited and the house waited and the tree waited and the door was open.

The door was open.

He was going through it.