Chapter 6: Efua's Letters

The letters arrived on Tuesdays and Fridays, because those were the days the international post was sorted at the Royal Mail depot in Aberdeen, and because Efua Asante wrote on Sundays and posted on Mondays, and the airmail from Accra to Aberdeen took five to seven days depending on the connections at Heathrow or Amsterdam or wherever the mail was routed by the system that Efua did not understand and did not need to understand because her job was to write the letter and address the envelope and affix the stamp and walk to the post office on the Oxford Street in Osu and hand the letter to the clerk behind the counter, and after that the letter was in the hands of the system, and the system, whatever it was, however it worked, had never failed to deliver her words to her son.

She had been writing to Kwame since the day he left. Not every week — sometimes she missed a week, when the arthritis in her hands was bad or when there was nothing to report or when the weight of his absence sat on her in a way that made the writing impossible, the pen too heavy, the page too wide, the distance between her kitchen table in Osu and his flat in Aberdeen too vast to be bridged by ink on blue paper. But most weeks she wrote, and the letters accumulated at Crown Street in his absence, and when he returned from the sea he found them on the floor below the letterbox, a small archive of blue aerogrammes, each one a week of her life compressed into the space the aerogramme allowed — one page, folded into thirds, the writing small and precise because the paper was finite and her observations were not.

This is what she wrote:

---

Sunday, 15 March

My dear Kwame,

The rains have started early this year. Auntie Mercy says it is because the government cut the trees on the ridge behind Cantonments and the wind has changed. I do not know if the wind has changed. The rain feels the same to me — heavy and warm and sudden, the way the rains have always been, arriving in the afternoon without announcement and stopping before dark as though the sky has made its point and does not need to continue.

The doctor changed my blood pressure medicine. The old one was making my ankles swell. Yaw took me to the clinic on Tuesday — you know how Yaw is at the clinic, he sits in the waiting room and reads the newspaper as though we are at the barber's, not in any hurry, not worried. I think he does this for me. I think he performs the not-worrying so that I do not worry. He is good at this. He has always been good at this. Your brother carries things quietly.

The new medicine is called amlodipine. It is more expensive than the old one but Yaw says not to worry about the cost and I know he means the money you send, so I am telling you: the new medicine is 85 cedis per month. The old one was 40. I tell you this not because I want you to worry about money but because I think you should know where your money goes. It goes to my blood pressure. It goes to keeping your mother's blood at the right pressure so that her heart does not work too hard and she is here when you come home.

If you come home. When you come home. I have learned to be careful with these words.

Akosua is growing fast. She is in the kitchen now as I write this, eating the groundnuts that your Auntie Mercy roasted this morning. She sits on the floor and puts the nuts in a line before she eats them — one line of ten, then she eats from the right, one at a time. She is very particular about this. Yaw says she gets it from you. He says you used to line up your food as a child — the rice in one area, the stew in another, the meat separate. I do not remember this but Yaw insists. He says you were always arranging things, putting things in order, making the world fit a shape you had decided on. I think this is true. I think you are still doing this. I think the welding is this — putting metal in order, making things fit.

The house is the house. The kitchen tap is still dripping. I have put a cloth under it so the dripping does not keep me awake. Yaw says he will fix it but he is busy with his own work and his own house and I do not press him. He does enough. Your brother does more than enough.

I do not mean this as a criticism of you. I know what I mean and I do not always mean what it sounds like I mean. I mean that Yaw is here and he helps and I am grateful. I also mean that you are not here and I miss you. Both of these things are true at the same time and I am old enough to hold two truths without dropping either one.

Write to me if you can. I know you are busy. I know the sea is demanding. I know you cannot always reach a post office or a phone. But write if you can. A few lines. Your handwriting. I want to see your handwriting. The phone is not the same — the phone gives me a voice but not a hand, and I have learned that I trust a hand more than a voice. A voice can be imitated. A hand cannot.

Your mother, Efua

---

The letter arrived at Crown Street on a Tuesday, nine days after it was written, and it lay on the floor below the letterbox alongside a gas bill, a leaflet from a pizza delivery company, and an envelope from the Divers Medical Advisory Committee reminding Kwame that his offshore medical was due for renewal in April. The letterbox was stiff — the spring mechanism had been failing for two years, and the flap did not close completely, so the letters that fell through it were sometimes damp from the rain that blew in through the gap, the Aberdeen rain that fell on the blue aerogramme and left small marks on the paper, small circles of moisture that blurred the ink at the edges, Efua's words dissolving fractionally where the Scottish weather met the Ghanaian paper.

Kwame was at 150 metres. He did not know the letter had arrived. He would not know for twenty-three more days, when the decompression was complete and the helicopter had carried him back to Aberdeen and the taxi had taken him to Crown Street and he had climbed the stairs to his flat and opened the door and seen the letters on the floor — five or six of them by then, the blue aerogrammes mixed with the bills and the junk mail, his mother's handwriting visible among the printed addresses, the small precise letters of her name and his name and the address she had memorised years ago and wrote from memory each time, the address a prayer, a direction, a statement of faith that her son existed at the end of this sequence of words and numbers and that the words she sent would find him there.

---

Sunday, 22 March

My dear Kwame,

I went to the market on Thursday. Auntie Mercy came with me because the doctor says I should not carry heavy things and Auntie Mercy is strong — you remember how strong she is, she can carry a basin of yam on her head that would make a young man's knees shake. We bought yam and plantain and tomatoes and garden eggs and the dried shrimp from the woman on the corner whose name I can never remember but who always asks about you. She says, Where is your son? And I say, He is in Scotland, he is working. And she says, Scotland, is that a place? And I say, It is a place, it is far, it is cold, my son works under the sea. And she gives me extra shrimp because she thinks working under the sea is a thing that deserves extra shrimp and I agree with her.

The blood pressure medicine is working. My ankles are not swelling. The doctor says to continue and to come back in one month. One month is how doctors measure time — in months, in visits, in the intervals between one reading and the next. You measure time in days, I think — the days at sea, the days in the chamber, the days until you surface. I measure time in letters. The time between writing one and writing the next. The time between posting and the time you might read it. The time between your leaving and your coming back, which I have stopped measuring because the number has grown too large for the unit I was using, which was weeks, and I have not found a larger unit that does not frighten me.

I am not frightened. I want you to know that. I am your mother and I am not frightened of the distance or the time or the fact that you work in a place I cannot picture. I have tried to picture it — the ship, the chamber, the bell you described to me once in a letter, years ago, the metal ball that takes you down to the bottom of the sea. I have tried to hold this picture in my mind, my son inside a metal ball in the dark ocean, and I cannot hold it. The picture falls apart. My mind will not believe that my son lives this way, that the boy I carried and nursed and raised in this house, in this kitchen where I am sitting now, is inside a ball of metal at the bottom of a cold sea in a country I have never seen.

So I do not picture it. I write to you instead. I write to you as though you are somewhere ordinary — at work, at a desk, in an office. I write to you as though the distance between us is a bus ride, a taxi, a walk. I write to you as though you will read this tomorrow, sitting at a table, drinking tea, in a room with a window and a sky and the kind of ordinary light that a mother can imagine her son sitting in.

I know this is not true. I know you are in a place without windows and without sky and without ordinary light. But the writing is for me as much as for you, and I need to write as though you are reachable, as though my words will land in your hands the same day I write them, as though the distance is a small thing that the letter can cross in a morning.

Forgive me for this. Or do not forgive me. Just read the letter.

Akosua learned to write her name this week. She writes it very large — AKOSUA — each letter the size of my thumb. She wrote it on the wall in the hallway with a pencil and Yaw was angry but I told him the wall will be repainted and the pencil marks will go but the fact that his daughter wrote her name for the first time on the wall of the house where she was born is a thing that should not be punished but kept. He did not agree but he did not paint over it. The name is still there. A-K-O-S-U-A. Your niece's name on the wall of your mother's house, written in pencil by a four-year-old hand that has your brother's fingers and your father's stubbornness.

Your mother, Efua

---

In the chamber, Kwame did not know about Akosua's name on the wall. He did not know about the dried shrimp woman at the market or the dripping kitchen tap or the new blood pressure medicine working or not working. He knew the things the chamber allowed him to know: the pressure, the temperature, the oxygen level, the CO2 level, the work scope, the weather on the surface (Force 5, gusting 6, the vessel holding station with the DP thrusters working), the time, the shift schedule, the results of the radiographic inspection of his upstream weld (passed, no defects, the weld accepted by the client representative with the two words that constituted the industry's highest commendation: no comments).

These were the facts of his life at depth. These were the data points. They described a world that was complete in its own terms — a world of pressure and procedure and precision, a world where the variables were controlled and the outcomes were measured and the performance was evaluated by instruments that did not lie and by engineers who did not flatter. In this world, Kwame was competent. In this world, Kwame was valued. In this world, Kwame knew exactly where he stood — at 150 metres, at 15.2 bar, on the seabed, beside the pipeline, with an arc burning and a weld forming and the darkness held back by the light he made with his own hands.

But the other world — the world of the letters, the world of Osu and Accra and his mother's kitchen table and his niece's name on the wall and his brother's quiet anger and his uncle's welding shop and the dried shrimp woman at the market — that world continued without him, and each day it continued was a day it changed, and each change was a change he could not witness, and the changes accumulated the way the letters accumulated, building a record of a life he was not part of, a history he would have to reconstruct from the evidence when he surfaced, reading backward through the aerogrammes to understand what had happened while he was at depth.

He was an archaeologist of his own family. He excavated the past from the letters his mother sent. He pieced together the events from the fragments she provided — a new medicine, a dripping tap, a name on a wall — and assembled them into a picture that was always incomplete, always delayed, always the shape of what had been rather than what was.

This was the cost. This was the cost of the depth, the distance, the pressure, the steel, the helium, the career that took him to the bottom of the North Sea for twenty-eight days at a time and returned him to the surface with money and skills and a body saturated with inert gas and a stack of letters he could not read until the decompression was complete.

---

Sunday, 29 March

My dear Kwame,

Pastor Mensah asked about you at church today. He always asks about you. He says he prays for you, for your safety, for your work under the sea. I told him thank you and I meant it. I am not sure I believe that prayer travels under the sea — I think prayer travels through air, through the kind of air that is between a church and the sky, not the kind of air that is inside a metal chamber at the bottom of the ocean. But I did not say this to Pastor Mensah because he is a kind man and his prayers are sincere and perhaps I am wrong about how prayer travels. Perhaps it goes where it is sent, regardless of the medium.

My knees are worse. The arthritis is in both knees now and the stairs are difficult. The house has twelve steps from the ground floor to the first floor — you know this, you grew up with these steps, you ran up and down them as a boy and I shouted at you to be careful and you were never careful. Now I am the one who is not careful. I hold the railing and I go slowly and some days I go up once in the morning and once in the evening and I do not go up again because the going up costs me something I cannot name, a willingness, a confidence in my own body that is leaving me the way tenants leave a house — gradually, taking things with them, the house becoming emptier with each departure.

I do not want you to worry about this. The knees are the knees. The arthritis is the arthritis. The doctor says to keep moving, to take the ibuprofen, to use the railing. I use the railing. I take the ibuprofen. I keep moving. I move from the kitchen to the bedroom and from the bedroom to the kitchen and from the kitchen to the market and from the market to the kitchen, and the moving is enough, is all I need, is all that a woman of sixty-four requires — the kitchen, the bedroom, the market, the kitchen. A small circuit. A small life. But mine.

Yaw says I should move the bedroom downstairs. He says the parlour is big enough and he can put a bed in it and I can sleep downstairs and not climb the steps. I told him the parlour is for visitors and he said, What visitors, Mama? And I did not have an answer because he is right — we do not have visitors, not the kind that need a parlour, not the kind that sit in the good chairs and drink the good tea and talk about the things that parlour visitors talk about. We have neighbours who come to the kitchen door and Auntie Mercy who sits at the kitchen table and Yaw who has his own key and lets himself in and Akosua who runs through every room without discrimination because she is four and does not understand that some rooms are for living and some rooms are for keeping.

But I did not agree to move the bedroom downstairs. The bedroom is upstairs because the bedroom has always been upstairs. The bedroom has the window that looks over the compound and the street and the mango tree that your father planted the year you were born, which makes the tree thirty-six years old, which makes it your age, and from the bedroom window I can see the tree and know that it is your age and think of you, and this is a thing I will not trade for the convenience of avoiding twelve steps.

I am stubborn. You know this. I know this. Stubbornness is the thing I gave you that I did not mean to give. I meant to give you good sense and courtesy and the ability to write a letter. The good sense you have, though you do not always use it. The courtesy you have, though I hear it only in the money you send, which is a courtesy of distance, the kind of courtesy that can be performed without being present. The ability to write a letter — this I gave you and you have not used. You do not write. I write to you and you do not write back and the silence on your end is not a silence I can interpret because silence can mean many things: that you are busy, that you are tired, that you are at the bottom of the sea, that you have nothing to say, that you have too much to say and cannot find the words, that you have forgotten me, that you have not forgotten me but have put me in the place where you put things you cannot deal with, the place I imagine as a room in your mind with a closed door and a lock and a pile of blue aerogrammes growing higher with each week.

I do not believe you have forgotten me. A son does not forget his mother. But a son can put his mother aside. A son can place his mother in the category of things that are important but not urgent, the way the doctor says the arthritis is important but not urgent, a condition to be managed rather than resolved, attended to but not cured.

I am not a condition to be managed, Kwame. I am your mother. I am sitting at my table in my kitchen writing to you with a pen that is running low on ink and I am asking you, not for the first time and not for the last, to write to me. A few lines. Your handwriting. The shape of your letters, which I have memorised from the few letters you have sent over the years, which I keep in the drawer of the bedside table upstairs, in the bedroom I refuse to move downstairs, where I can take them out and look at them and see your hand in the words and know that my son has hands, has a hand that holds a pen, has a hand that can form letters, has a hand that somewhere in Scotland or under the sea or in the bell or in the chamber is doing something — welding, gripping, holding — that it could also be doing here, on a page, for me.

Write to me.

Your mother, Efua

---

The letter arrived at Crown Street on a Friday. It lay on the floor with the others. The letterbox did not close completely. The rain came in. A small stain of Aberdeen weather appeared on the corner of the aerogramme, blurring the stamp — a Ghanaian postage stamp bearing the image of Kwame Nkrumah, the name that Kwame Asante shared with the first president because his mother had believed that naming carried weight, that a name was a first letter, a first sentence written on the body of a child, and she had written Kwame — born on Saturday, a day name, an Akan name, a name that located her son in a tradition and a calendar and a culture that he would carry with him wherever he went, even to the bottom of the North Sea, even inside steel, even into the helium atmosphere where his voice changed but his name did not, the name she had given him remaining constant at every pressure, in every atmosphere, at every depth.

The stain spread. The ink blurred. The letter waited.

In the chamber, Kwame ate his dinner. He did not know his mother was asking him to write. He did not know his niece had written her name on the wall. He did not know the kitchen tap was dripping, or that the mango tree was his age, or that his mother counted the twelve steps to her bedroom and climbed them anyway because the window at the top showed her the tree his father had planted.

He knew the pressure was 15.2 bar. He knew the oxygen was 0.4 bar partial pressure. He knew the weld had passed inspection. He knew that tomorrow he would descend again, to the downstream joint, and weld again, and the arc would burn again, and the light would push back the darkness for as long as the rod lasted.

He knew these things. They were the things the chamber allowed him to know. The chamber was a filter — it admitted the data necessary for survival and excluded the data necessary for living, and the difference between survival and living was the difference between the pressure gauge and the letter, between the number that described where he was and the words that described where he was not.

He lay in his bunk. The lights dimmed. Mac snored. The ventilation hummed. The chamber held its pressure and its atmosphere and its six men, and above them, above the steel and the ocean and the vessel and the sky, the mail system carried Efua Asante's letters across continents and oceans and time zones, the blue aerogrammes moving through the world the way the bell moved through the water — slowly, steadily, carrying their cargo of words from one pressurised space to another, from the kitchen in Osu where the pressure was the pressure of love and concern and the daily weight of a mother's attention, to the flat in Aberdeen where the pressure was the pressure of absence, the letters accumulating unopened, unread, their contents unknown to the man they were addressed to, the man who was at depth, at distance, in the between.

Kwame closed his eyes. He did not dream of the letters. He dreamed of the arc — the bright point of light at the bottom of the sea, the weld pool flowing, the metal joining, the work that he could do and that he did and that was, for as long as the rod lasted, enough.