Chapter 29: Efua Writes

The pen was a Bic biro, blue, the same brand she had used for eighteen years, the pen purchased in packs of ten from the stationery shop on the Oxford Street in Osu, the shop run by a Togolese man named Kodjo who had been selling stationery for thirty years and who knew Efua's order without being told — the pens, the aerogrammes, the envelopes for local post, the occasional pad of lined paper when the arthritis was bad and she needed the lines to keep her writing straight, the lines a guide, a structure, the ruled page holding her words the way the aerogramme held her thoughts, within limits, within the space provided.

She sat at the kitchen table. The table was wooden, oval, the surface worn smooth by forty years of use — the meals, the homework, the sewing, the letters. The table had been purchased by her husband, Kofi, in the year of their marriage, 1978, from a carpenter in Jamestown who made furniture from odum wood, the wood heavy and close-grained, the surface resistant to the moisture and the insects and the daily abrasion of a family's life. Kofi had carried the table on a handcart from Jamestown to Osu, a distance of four kilometres, because the carpenter did not deliver and because Kofi was a man who believed that the things you carried yourself arrived in better condition than the things you had delivered, the carrying a form of care, the labour an investment in the object's integrity.

Kofi had been dead for twenty-two years. The table remained. The table was the most durable thing in the house, more durable than the roof, which had been replaced twice, more durable than the wiring, which Yaw had rewired three times, more durable than the plumbing, which leaked in the rains, more durable than the paint, which the sun faded and the humidity blistered. The table endured because odum endured, because the wood was dense and the grain was tight and the carpenter had joined the legs with mortise and tenon joints that had not loosened in forty years, the joints sound, the table solid, the surface carrying the weight of everything that had been placed upon it — the meals, the elbows, the schoolbooks, the letters, the grief, the years.

Efua placed the aerogramme on the table. The aerogramme was blue — the international airmail blue, the colour that she had come to associate with communication, with the act of reaching across the distance, the blue that was not the blue of the sky or the blue of the sea but the blue of the postal system, the institutional blue, the colour of the mechanism that carried her words from this table to a flat in Aberdeen where her son was not.

She wrote the date. Sunday, 22 April. She wrote it in the top right corner, the position where the date belonged, the position dictated by the conventions of letter-writing that she had learned at the Wesley Girls' Methodist School in Cape Coast in 1974, the conventions taught by Miss Abigail Mensah, who had taught English and deportment and the proper form of correspondence, the letter structured as an architecture — the date, the salutation, the body, the closing, the signature — each element in its place, the form a container for the content, the structure holding the words the way the chamber held the atmosphere, within limits, within the space provided.

My dear Kwame, she wrote.

The salutation was the same every week. My dear Kwame. Not Dear Kwame, which was too formal, the English distance too great for a mother writing to a son. Not Kwame alone, which was too abrupt, the name without the prefix too bare, too much like calling across a room. My dear Kwame. The possessive and the adjective and the name, the three words establishing the relationship and the affection and the identity in six syllables, the salutation a compression of everything she felt into the minimum space, the way the aerogramme compressed everything she wanted to say into the minimum page.

She wrote:

I am writing this on Sunday afternoon. It is raining. The rains started three days ago and they have not stopped, the water coming down steadily, not the heavy rain that floods the streets but the steady rain that soaks everything, the kind that gets into the walls and the ceiling and the shoes by the door and the joints of my knees. The joints do not like the rain. Dr. Mensah says the barometric pressure affects the inflammation, and I said to him, Doctor, I do not need the barometric pressure to tell me it is raining, my knees tell me before the first drop falls. He laughed. He is a good doctor. He does not laugh often enough.

She paused. She looked through the kitchen window at the compound. The rain was falling on the mango tree, the drops running down the leaves and collecting at the leaf tips and falling from the tips to the ground, the water following the path that the tree provided, the canopy a distribution system, the rain arriving at the ground not in the random pattern of the open sky but in the directed pattern of the tree's architecture, the drops falling from the points where the leaves pointed, the ground beneath the tree receiving the water in a pattern that reflected the tree's shape, the tree's shadow made visible in rain.

She wrote:

The mango tree is heavy with fruit. It is early for the mangoes — usually they do not come until May — but this year the tree is early, the fruits already large on the branches, the green turning to yellow at the stem end, the ripening beginning, the tree ahead of the calendar. Auntie Mercy says it is because of the rains last year, the rains that were heavier than usual and that gave the tree more water than it needed, the excess stored in the roots and the trunk and released now as fruit, the tree's abundance a delayed response to the previous year's excess. I do not know if this is true. I do not know the science of mangoes. But the tree your father planted is bearing fruit, and the fruit is early, and I thought you would want to know.

She wrote about the medicine. She wrote about it carefully, with the precision of a woman who understood that her son would worry and that the worry would be amplified by the distance, the information arriving in Aberdeen without the context of her face, her voice, the visible evidence of her condition that a present son would have and an absent son would not.

The doctor changed the blood pressure medicine again. The amlodipine was not enough — the numbers were still high at the last visit, 155 over 95, and Dr. Mensah said we should add a second medicine, a thing called lisinopril. I take it in the morning with the amlodipine and the aspirin and the calcium tablet. Four tablets in the morning. Yaw bought a pill organiser from the pharmacy, the kind with compartments for each day, the plastic box with the letters — M T W T F S S — and I fill it on Sundays and I take from it each morning and the system works, the tablets taken, the body medicated, the pressure managed.

She stopped writing. She put the pen down on the aerogramme, the pen resting on the paper, the ink of the pen and the ink of the words and the blue of the aerogramme all the same colour, the instruments and the medium and the product all blue, the letter a thing made entirely of blue.

She thought about what she wanted to say. She had been thinking about it for three days, since Akosua's visit on Wednesday, the girl coming after school with Yaw, the girl sitting at this table and eating the groundnut soup that Efua had prepared and talking about school and her friends and the teacher who was strict and the boy who was annoying and the song she had learned in assembly, the girl's conversation a stream that ran without interruption and without apparent purpose, the words flowing the way the rain flowed, continuously, the talking not a communication but a condition, the girl's default state, the natural output of a six-year-old mind processing the world by narrating it.

And then the girl had said: Grandma, when is Uncle Kwame coming?

Efua had said: I don't know, my dear. He is working.

And Akosua had said: He is always working.

And Efua had said nothing, because the girl was right. He was always working. He was always in the sea or on the vessel or in the flat in Aberdeen or in the transit between these places, the transit that was itself a form of work, the travelling a labour, the distance a job, the absence an occupation as full-time and as demanding as the diving itself.

She picked up the pen. She wrote:

Akosua asked about you again. She asks every time she comes. When is Uncle Kwame coming. I do not have an answer. I have not had an answer for six years. I tell her you are working, and she accepts this, because she is a child and children accept the explanations of adults the way adults accept the weather — without understanding, without the ability to change it, with the patience that is not really patience but the absence of an alternative.

But I must tell you something, Kwame. I must tell you what I have not told you in eighteen years of letters. I have written about the weather and the neighbours and the medicine and the church and the tree and the price of things and the funerals and the weddings and the births. I have written about everything except the one thing that I should have written about, the thing that I have been carrying in this pen for eighteen years without putting it on the paper.

I miss you.

I know you know this. I know the letters tell you this in the spaces between the words, in the things I report, in the care with which I describe the ordinary details of the life that you are not here to see. I know the letters are themselves the evidence of the missing, the weekly act of reaching across the distance a demonstration of the gap, the letter proof that the gap exists. But I have not said it. I have not written the words. And I am writing them now because I am sixty-five years old and my blood pressure is high and the doctor is adding tablets and I do not want the words to be unwritten if the blood stops finding its way through the system the way the letters find their way through the post.

I miss you the way I miss your father. Not in the same way — your father is dead, and you are alive, and the missing of the dead is a different missing from the missing of the living. The dead cannot return. The living can. And the missing of the living is harder, Kwame, because the missing of the living contains the possibility of its own end, the possibility that the door will open and the person will be there and the missing will stop. The missing of the dead does not contain this possibility. The missing of the dead is settled. The missing of the living is unsettled. The missing of the living is a question that could be answered but has not been.

She stopped. The rain fell on the mango tree. The kitchen was warm. The house was quiet — Yaw was at work, Akosua was at school, the compound was empty except for Efua and the table and the letter and the pen and the rain and the tree and the fruit that was ripening early, the abundance that was a delayed response to the previous year's excess.

She picked up the pen. She wrote:

I keep your room. You know this. I have told you in other letters. The room is clean. The bed is made. The curtains are washed twice a year. The window is opened on dry days to let the air through. The room is kept the way the room was when you left it, the arrangement the same, the furniture in the same positions, the room a container for the person who is not in it, the room holding the shape of your absence the way a mould holds the shape of the thing that was cast in it.

I keep the room because keeping the room is the thing I can do. I cannot bring you home. I cannot make the North Sea less deep or Aberdeen less far or the diving less necessary. I cannot undo the scholarship or the welding or the decision you made at eighteen to go, the decision that was the right decision, the decision I supported because supporting it was the right thing to do, the decision that gave you a profession and an income and a life that Accra could not have given you, or could have given you only partially, the way Accra gives everything partially — the electricity, the water, the roads, the opportunities — the city generous in its spirit and limited in its infrastructure, the gap between what the city wants to provide and what the city can provide the gap that your generation crossed by leaving.

I supported the decision. I support it still. I am proud of what you have done — the welding, the diving, the skill that you have built, the man that you have become. I am proud in the way that mothers are proud, which is the way that farmers are proud of the crops that grow in distant fields — the seed planted here, the harvest gathered there, the growth witnessed only in the reports, the fruit tasted only in the stories.

But I miss you. And I am writing it now because the pen is in my hand and the paper is on the table and the words are in my chest and the blood pressure is high and the tablets are four in the morning and the doctor is careful and the knees are bad and the rain is falling and the tree is bearing fruit and I am sixty-five and the distance between us is four thousand miles and eighteen years and I do not want to carry the words any longer without setting them down.

Come home, Kwame. Not forever. Not to stay. I know you cannot stay. I know the sea is your work and Aberdeen is your base and the diving is the thing you do. I am not asking you to stay. I am asking you to come. Come and sit at this table and drink the tea and let me see your face and hear your voice — your real voice, not the voice on the phone that the machines have flattened, not the voice in the letters that I read in my own voice because I cannot hear yours. Come and let me put my hand on your face. Come and let me check the condition of the thing I built. Come and eat the mangoes. They are early this year. They will not wait.

She put the pen down. She sat at the table. The rain fell. The letter lay on the table, the blue aerogramme covered in her small, precise handwriting, the words filling the space the way the fruit filled the branches, the page full, the message complete, the thing she had carried for eighteen years finally set down on the paper, the weight of it transferred from the woman to the page, from the chest to the table, from the unspoken to the written, the words there now, in ink, in blue, on the paper that would be folded into thirds and sealed with tape and carried to the post office on the Oxford Street and handed to the clerk and placed in the international bag and flown to Heathrow or Amsterdam and sorted and forwarded and delivered to a flat on Crown Street in Aberdeen where the letterbox would receive it and the floor would hold it and the table would eventually carry it and her son would read it, would hold it in his hands, would see her handwriting and hear her voice in the words and know that the words had travelled four thousand miles from this table to his table, from her hand to his hand, from the rain to the granite, from the mango tree to the North Sea, from the mother to the son.

She folded the aerogramme. She sealed it with tape. She wrote the address: Kwame Asante, 14b Crown Street, Aberdeen, AB11 6HX, Scotland, United Kingdom. The address she had written hundreds of times, the address she knew the way she knew her own, the address as familiar as the kitchen table, as permanent as the odum wood, the address the destination, the fixed point, the place where her words arrived and waited for the man who was always elsewhere, always at depth, always in the steel, always in the dark, the man who would surface eventually and find the letters and read them and know that the letters had been coming, week after week, the letters arriving at the flat the way the rain arrived at the ground, steadily, continuously, the flow maintained by the source that did not stop.

She placed the letter on the shelf by the door, the shelf where the outgoing letters waited for Monday morning, the shelf the staging area, the letter resting there the way the bell rested on its handling frame, ready for deployment, ready for the descent into the system that would carry it to its destination, the system of post offices and sorting machines and aircraft and vans that Efua did not understand and did not need to understand, the system that had never failed to deliver her words to her son.

She went to the stove. She put the kettle on. She made tea. She sat at the table and drank the tea and looked at the mango tree through the rain, the tree bearing its early fruit, the green and the yellow on the branches, the fruit that would ripen and fall, the fruit that could not be hurried, the fruit that would be ready when it was ready, the tree's schedule its own, the calendar of the tree different from the calendar of the post, different from the calendar of the sea, different from the calendar of the rotation, the tree's time the time of the growth, the time of the root and the ring and the cell, the slow time, the patient time, the time that did not negotiate.

The rain fell. The tea cooled. The letter waited on the shelf. And Efua sat at the table where she had sat for forty years and looked at the tree that her husband had planted and thought about her son at the bottom of the sea and held, in the space between her hands and her chest, the lightness of having finally written the words, the lightness that was not emptiness but release, the pressure of eighteen years of carrying the unsaid finally vented, the atmosphere in her chest equalising with the atmosphere of the page, the decompression of the heart, slow, controlled, the words released at the rate the pen allowed, the rate the paper permitted, the rate that nature, patient and indifferent and perfect, determined.