The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Memoir. Aminatta Forna
the dealers at the highest rate. At least eight out of every ten people who passed through our clinic paid nothing, even for their medicines, which my father fetched from the dispensary in the house and handed to them; people who could afford it were charged at the regular rate; and between them the diamond dealers paid for the healthcare of the rest of Koidu and the surrounding villages.
Almost always people who had not been charged came back on another day with something in return: a pair of live chickens, a sack of oranges or a basket of yams.
Late one night we were all woken up by a frenzied rapping on the door of the house, so loud it sounded as though they were trying to hammer their way in. When our father undid the bolts, there on the step was a young man, sweating and teetering on the edge of hysteria: ‘Oh, Doctor, I say do ya help me. I get syphilis.’ He babbled in Creole, fidgeting and jumping, utterly unable to contain himself. ‘I able feel am crawling pan me skin.’ He shuddered at that. We all did. ‘I need tchuk.’ He made the motion of giving himself an imaginary injection in the left arm. Our father, still half asleep, led him through to his surgery and treated him then and there. When the young man confessed he had no way of paying, our father waved him away.
A few weeks later my mother was out at night She had been to a dance at the Diamond Corporation, alone because my father was working. On the way home she drove over a pothole and burst a tyre. The road was dark and empty as the DiaCorp compound was some way out of town; dense elephant grass grew up on either side to well over seven foot. She couldn’t see a single light and within a few moments she began to consider her predicament: a woman, in an evening gown and high heels, without a torch on an empty road in the African bush. She had been there some time when she saw a car’s headlights in the distance. Conflicting thoughts occupied her mind and she prayed that this was someone who would help her, perhaps someone else on their way back from the party.
As the car came closer she saw that it was dented and old, obviously belonging to a local because no European would drive a car in such a state. It drew alongside, slowed and stopped next to her. My mother could see that there were several young men inside.
‘Na de doctor een wife,’ someone announced. It was ‘Tchuk’. He jumped out grinning and proud, evidently in the best of health. Within a few moments Tchuk and his companions changed the punctured tyre and saw her away.
By the time we had been in Koidu a year our father’s name and reputation had spread for miles. As with my mother, everywhere he went people greeted us, yelled and waved at the passing car. Yet to me at that time he was a distant figure.
My days were spent in the house, playing with our dogs Jack and Jim, and being guarded by Big Aminatta. I say ‘guarded’ because that is just about what she did: she pursued her many chores around the house, of which I was just one. Her task was to make sure I didn’t escape or run into trouble. She kept me within the confines of the compound by telling me of the devils lurking in the elephant grass beyond the screen of trees that marked the compound boundary. Devils with faces like gargoyles just waiting for the opportunity to feed on a child like me. At night she got me to clean my teeth with stories of cockroaches that crawled onto pillows and feasted on the crumbs left at the side of a sleeper’s mouth.
At that time we had two Old English sheepdogs. With their heavy coats they were hopelessly unsuited to both the humidity and the ticks that burrowed into their flesh, but they seemed to manage all the same. Given to us as puppies in Freetown, they were at first presumed to be mongrels until they grew into apparently full-blooded Old English sheepdogs. My mother called them Jack and Jim and they were the only pedigree dogs I ever saw or have ever seen since in Sierra Leone. I spent my days tumbling with Jack and Jim in the yard and kissing them on the nose, playing in the dirt until I contracted enormous tropical boils, which my father lanced for me from time to time, and generally ingesting enough germs to give me a lifelong immunity to hepatitis. In the evening our father came back long after we were all in bed. He literally worked every hour of the day.
Mornings, when our father went to the bathroom for his early constitutional, was our quality time together. The three of us followed him to the bathroom, carrying our colouring books, toys and stories. We sat on the floor around him, chatted, finished our drawings, showed him the work we had done the day before or persuaded him to read aloud to us. At some point I suppose he sent us on our way. I don’t remember that, only lying on the lino colouring a picture of a princess for him.
From my three-foot-high perspective, my strongest memory of my father is from the waist down: mid-grey slacks, open sandals. I remember the exact shape and hue of his toenails, his strong, muscular thighs and rounded bottom, but the face on the top remains a blur on top of a vaguely light-coloured, short-sleeved shirt and stethoscope. He had a beard at that time, but my memory of him only truly begins when he shaved it off a few months before we left Koidu for good. Most of the time our worlds barely collided, and those moments when they did were the most memorable.
A deranged woman was brought to the clinic. I guess she must have been in her forties, although she looked much older. She snatched at the lappa she was wearing and at her blouse, screamed and started like a mare, and behaved as though unseen hands were pinching her or, I thought, tickling her armpits and squeezing her sides like my uncles did to me in a way that both hurt and made me howl at the same time. The more I shrieked the more they thought I was enjoying it and continued. The family said she was bewitched and they couldn’t look after her any more, so our father put her in one of the rooms in our house, I think with the intention of sending her or driving her himself down to a mental hospital in Freetown. Later the same day I wandered past the window of the room where she was being held and saw her face staring at me behind the mesh of the fly screen. She shouted and her eyeballs reeled. I fled back to Big Aminatta.
Some time later in the afternoon she escaped. Nobody in the house knew how or when, but she couldn’t have been gone long. My father raced to the car and the three of us leapt in behind him, standing on the plastic seats and blaring at the top of our voices that we were off to look for the madwoman. My father drove at speed telling us to keep a look out; he seemed to be enjoying the adventure as much as we were. Everyone was making a riotous amount of noise and we felt no fear.
We hadn’t been gone long when we saw her. She was standing at the side of the road, on the balls of her feet with her back pushed hard against a tree. Her shoulders were drawn up high and she was shrieking. Above her the tree was in flower, decorated with splendid fleshy, coral heads framed by thick petals that grew upright, like hands reaching to the sky. The orange and pink colours made the flamboyant tree look as if it were alight with burning candles. From a distance I could see the woman was staring at a branch from the tree that was lying in the middle of the road. She seemed to be fixated on it, as though it were alive. When we drew nearer I saw the branch wasn’t what I thought at all, but a snake.
The car went straight over it, I felt the bump under my bottom and thighs. A moment later we were in reverse. My father kept going, changing gears backwards and forwards, until after a while I couldn’t feel the point where the snake’s corpse lay on the road any longer. When we were certain it was dead we felt like heroes who had vanquished a dragon.
In my mind’s eye the snake had been enormous, stretching the entire width of the road. As I grew older I thought perhaps I imagined it: no ordinary snake could really be that long. Now, I realise it was almost certainly a twig snake – six foot long, yes, but absolutely harmless. It wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with the madwoman except perhaps to get past her up the tree to lie in peace on its favourite branch.
We drove home with the mad lady now sitting quite calmly between us in the back. The next day she went off to Freetown. I wasn’t there when she was taken away, and when I discovered she was gone, I missed her.
My mud pies were too dry and the sides were crumbling. I’d sloshed water into the mess and begun to swill it all with a stick when Pa Roke showed up. He was my grandfather. Everything about him – the way he dressed in long embroidered gowns with a matching fez, or skull cap, his solemn