The Wake

Yaa Mensah had not been to a Ghanaian funeral in twelve years and her body remembered everything.

The smell of the kitchen at 5 AM, palm oil heating, onions browning, garlic bruised against a wooden mortar woke her before the cockerels did. She lay on the iron bed in her grandmother's old room, the one with the green wallpaper that had been green wallpaper since 1986, and she listened. Her aunties were already in the kitchen. They had been there, probably, since 4. They would be there until midnight, when the wake began. And tomorrow, when they buried her grandmother, they would be there at 4 AM again.

This was how Aburi funerals worked. Three days of women cooking. Three days of men arriving in groups, sitting under the mango tree, drinking schnapps from small glasses, paying their respects and their condolences and their fifty-cedi notes folded into envelopes. Three days of Yaa Mensah being looked at gently, but constantly by people who had known her since she was four and who wanted to see what London had done to her face.

She got up.

The water in the bucket beside the bed was cold. She poured it over herself slowly, in the bathroom that was really an enclosed back porch with a drain, because the borehole pump had stopped working again and her uncle had said tomorrow in a tone that meant probably not tomorrow. She had forgotten, in twelve years of London showers, how a bucket bath felt the small splash, the cold shock against the small of her back, the way you have to be efficient because the bucket is finite. She had forgotten and now she remembered, and the remembering was a thing she did not have time to feel.

She wrapped her hair. She put on the black dress her aunty Ama had laid out for her long, modest, sleeved, the kind of black dress that said you are family, you are grieving, do not make us look at your shoulders today. She did not put on makeup. She walked out to the kitchen.

Her aunties looked up. Five of them. Aunty Ama at the fire, aunty Adwoa at the mortar, aunty Esi peeling kontomire leaves, aunty Akua and aunty Abena dicing onions and laughing at something one of them had just said and now would not repeat in front of Yaa.

"Ah," said aunty Ama. "Akwaaba, my baby. You are awake."

"Maakye, aunty."

"You slept?"

"I slept."

"Good." Aunty Ama did not look at her face for too long. She had the same face her grandmother had had the same long Ashanti cheekbones, the same wrist that turned the wooden spoon clockwise and never the other way. Yaa had to look away.

"Sit," said aunty Adwoa. "Eat."

"I'm not "

"Eat, Yaa. We are not having this conversation today."

She sat. They put a plate in front of her: kelewele, fried plantain hot enough to burn the tongue, a small bowl of groundnut soup, half an avocado. She ate without tasting. The aunties watched her eat the way women have always watched the youngest woman in the family eat — with the satisfaction of a job being done, the small relief of seeing food go where it should go.

"Kofi came yesterday," said aunty Akua, casually, not looking up from the onion. "Did he find you?"

Yaa stopped chewing.

"He came when?"

"Late. Around ten. You had gone to bed. He left a message."

"What message."

Aunty Akua looked at aunty Ama. Aunty Ama did not look up from the fire.

"He said," aunty Akua continued, in a voice carefully designed to be heard by everyone in the room and acknowledged by no one, "he said to tell you that the chairs for the wake, the white ones, the ones for the family those will arrive at four. He will be here at three to make sure they are arranged correctly. And he said " a small pause, the kind of pause aunty Akua had perfected over forty years of being the family's reliable carrier of difficult information "he said, please tell her I am happy she is home."

Yaa put her spoon down.

"Eat," said aunty Adwoa, gently. "Eat, Yaa."

She ate.

She did not see him until two in the afternoon, when she walked up the road to the house her grandmother had built the one she had bought with cocoa money in 1979, the one with the blue gate, the one Yaa was sleeping in this week to drop off a tray of empties, and Kofi was there, in the courtyard, in a white linen shirt, directing two young men who were unloading folding chairs from the back of a truck.

He was not looking for her. He was working. He had a list on a clipboard and he was checking things off it, and he had a small frown on his face that Yaa remembered — the one he used to get at sixteen when he was trying not to laugh. The two young men were arranging chairs in concentric arcs, which was wrong, and Yaa could see Kofi was about to tell them so, and she stood at the gate with her tray of empty bottles and watched him work.

He had grown into his face.

That was the only honest way to say it. At sixteen, Kofi had been a beautiful boy in the awkward stage too-long limbs, too-soft mouth, the kind of face that promised it would be handsome later. Later had arrived. He was thirty now. He had her mother's height six feet, give or take and the shoulders of a man who farmed twice a week even though he didn't have to. His hair was cut short. His skin was the deep brown that Aburi sun did to people who lived here all year. He did not look like a man who had once written her a letter, in pencil, on a page torn from a school exercise book, when she was eighteen and leaving for London. He looked like a man who would now, if he were to write that same letter, write it differently.

He turned. He saw her.

He stopped checking the clipboard.

He did not smile at first. He looked at her the long look, the one she had been waiting for and dreading — and for a second she could see all the calculations going through his face. How long has it been. What does she look like now. Does she remember. Does she still look at me the way she used to look at me. Is she going to make this hard.

Then he smiled. Small. Careful.

"Yaa."

"Kofi."

He set the clipboard on a chair. He came toward her not fast, not slow, the steady walk of a man who had nowhere else he needed to be and he stopped at a respectful distance and held out his hand.

She looked at his hand.

"Are we shaking hands?" she said.

"I don't know," he said. "What do you want to do?"

She set the tray of empties down on the wall. She crossed the small distance between them. She hugged him.

It was a brief hug. Five seconds, maybe six. He smelled of something she did not recognise soap, maybe, and outdoor air, and the specific dry-grass smell of Aburi in March. He held her with one arm, the other arm half-up, as if he had not been sure she was going to do this. When she stepped back, he let her step back. He did not try to hold on a second longer than she did.

"You came," he said.

"Of course I came."

"I wasn't sure."

"My grandmother died, Kofi."

"I know. I know. But you " he stopped. "I'm glad you came. That's what I meant."

The words were careful. She heard him being careful. He was not the boy who had written her a letter in pencil on a school exercise book anymore. He was a man now, and the man had learned, somewhere between then and now, to choose his words.

"The chairs," she said, "are wrong."

He looked over his shoulder. "I know. I was about to tell them."

"Concentric arcs. My grandmother would have hated it."

"Straight rows. I know."

"You know."

"I helped her with chairs at her sister's funeral fifteen years ago. She made me move them three times."

Yaa laughed. The first real laugh she had laughed in three days. It came out of her surprised and slightly broken, and she put her hand over her mouth, and Kofi watched her laugh with a kind of careful attention, the way you watch someone do something you have wanted to see them do for a long time.

"Three times?"

"She moved me three times. I told her it didn't matter. She said Kofi, it matters. I said yes ma."

"You always said yes ma."

"She made it easy to say yes ma."

They were quiet for a second. The two young men had stopped what they were doing and were watching them not very subtly, and Kofi turned, and the two young men quickly went back to arranging chairs.

"I have to " he gestured at the chairs.

"I know."

"Will you be here later? For the wake?"

"Of course. I'm her granddaughter."

"I know. I meant — will you be " he stopped. He took a breath. "Yaa. I would like to talk to you. When you have time. Not now. Maybe tomorrow, after, after everything. Will that be possible?"

She looked at him.

She looked at him for longer than was strictly comfortable. He let himself be looked at. He did not rush. He did not fill the silence. He had learned that too, somewhere, in twelve years.

"Yes," she said. "After."

"After."

"Tomorrow evening, maybe. Tomorrow evening will be possible."

"Okay."

"Okay."

She picked up her tray of empties. She turned to leave.

"Yaa."

She turned back.

"You look " he stopped. He smiled, small and rueful, the smile of a man who had decided not to say the thing he was about to say. "Welcome home."

"Thank you, Kofi."

She walked back down the road to her grandmother's house, and she did not look back, and she felt his eyes on her back the whole way.

The wake started at 8 PM and ended at 2 AM and Yaa did not sit down once.

This was the family rule, the one her grandmother had drilled into her at twelve years old — you do not sit at a wake, Yaa, you serve. The dead are honoured by the standing of the living. So she stood. She carried platters of food from the kitchen to the courtyard. She poured water into the small glass cups her aunties had washed and rewashed. She kissed the cheeks of women she had not seen in twelve years and accepted the small soft pats on her back from elderly uncles who told her how much like her grandmother she had become — which was a lie, mostly, but a kind one.

Kofi was there.

He arrived at 8:30 with three other men, and they sat in the row of plastic chairs reserved for the village elders and the men who had helped set up, and Kofi accepted a small glass of schnapps and drank it in one motion the way men of Aburi drank schnapps at wakes, and he did not look at Yaa for an hour.

She felt this. The not-looking.

She felt it the way she had felt his eyes on her back that afternoon, across the same kind of distance, but with the polarity reversed. He was being careful. He was being very careful. And the carefulness was a thing she could feel from across the courtyard, the way you can feel someone holding their breath in a room that is otherwise breathing normally.

At 11 PM her aunty Ama said, "Yaa. Sit. Just for ten minutes. Sit and drink water."

She sat.

She sat in a plastic chair at the far edge of the courtyard, in the half-shadow under the mango tree, with a small bottle of cold water in her hand, and she watched the wake from the outside for the first time. The whole village was here. People she had played with as a child. People who had taught her in primary school. People who had sat in the same room when her grandfather had died fifteen years ago, and who would sit in the same room when her aunty Ama died someday too, and who would sit in some other room when Yaa herself died, eventually, in some year she could not see from here.

This was the thing about Aburi.

This was the thing she had forgotten in London. In London nobody knew when you died. In London your neighbours didn't even know your name. In London grief was a private possession that you carried with you on the tube, alone, and unpacked alone in your flat, with your laptop open and your dinner half-eaten. In Aburi, grief belonged to everyone. Grief was a thing you did with three hundred people in a courtyard.

She did not know if this was better or worse.

She did not know if she wanted it.

She had to look at it now and decide.

Kofi sat down beside her.

She had not seen him approach. He moved like a person who had been moving through this courtyard for thirty years and who knew which paths the elders walked and which paths to take instead. He sat in the plastic chair next to her, not looking at her, and he set his small glass of schnapps on the ground beside his foot, and he said, quietly, in the voice of a man trying not to be overheard

"How long are you here for?"

"I don't know yet. Two weeks, maybe. There is — there is the will. And the lawyer. And the house has to be "

"I know about the house."

She looked at him.

"You know what about the house."

"I know what your grandmother left you."

"How do you know what my grandmother left me, Kofi."

He looked at her. The shadows from the mango tree fell across his face in a way that hid one eye and exposed the other.

"She told me, Yaa."

"When."

"Three months ago. After she came back from Korle Bu the second time."

Yaa's chest did something complicated.

Three months ago. Three months ago her grandmother had been alive and had been making decisions about her death and had told Kofi; Kofi, not Yaa — what she was leaving behind. Three months ago Yaa had been in her flat in Hackney pricing wedding venues for a wedding she would call off six weeks later, and her grandmother had been sitting on the porch in Aburi telling Kofi Owusu about her will.

"What else did she tell you," Yaa said. Her voice was quieter than she meant it to be.

"Yaa — "

"Kofi. What else."

He turned in his chair so that he was looking at her, properly, in the half-shadow, with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped between them.

"She told me," he said, slowly, "that she was leaving you the house. The big one. The one with the blue gate. She told me she wanted you to come back. She told me — " he stopped. He looked at the ground. "She told me that if I had any sense, I would still be here when you came."

The wake noise went very far away.

Yaa heard her own breathing.

She heard the small click of crickets in the dry grass at the edge of the courtyard.

She heard, somewhere very distant, aunty Ama's laugh the high one, the one she did when somebody had said something inappropriate and she was pretending to be scandalised.

She did not hear anything else.

"Kofi."

"Yaa."

"Did you know I was getting married?"

He was quiet.

"Did you know."

"I knew."

"How."

"Your aunty Ama told my mother. My mother told me."

"When."

"Last year. October."

"And what did you do when you heard."

He looked at her. He did not blink.

"I went home," he said. "I sat on the porch of the small house, the one I built behind my mother's, and I drank a beer. And then I drank another beer. And then I went to bed. And the next morning I got up and I went to the farm and I worked. And I told myself, Kofi, this is the right thing. She has had twelve years to forget you. Now she has finally forgotten you. You should be glad for her."

"And were you."

"No."

"No?"

"No, Yaa. I was not glad for her."

She closed her eyes.

She could not do this here. Not in a plastic chair under a mango tree, with three hundred people in the courtyard, with her grandmother's body forty kilometres away in a mortuary in Accra waiting to come home in the morning. She could not have this conversation now. She had said tomorrow evening. He had said okay. They had agreed.

But he had sat down beside her. And she had not stood up.

And now her grandmother — her dead grandmother — was the one who had set this in motion three months ago, on a porch in Aburi, in a conversation Yaa had not been there for. Her grandmother, who had known things. Her grandmother, who had been buying fabric for a future Yaa had not yet imagined. Her grandmother, who had told Kofi Owusu if you have any sense, you will still be here.

"Kofi."

"Yes."

"I am not married."

He was quiet.

"I called it off in November. The wedding. There was no wedding. I — " she stopped. She did not know why she was telling him this. She had not told anyone in Aburi. She had not told her aunties. She had told her mother and her best friend and one therapist in London, and that was all. "I'm not married, Kofi."

He did not move. He did not look at her. He did not turn toward her or away from her. He sat very still, with his hands clasped between his knees, and he said —

"I know."

"You know."

"Your grandmother told me that too."

She made a small sound. Not a laugh. Not a sob. Some smaller sound, somewhere between the two, the sound of a woman who has just realised that her dead grandmother had been three steps ahead of her for three months and was now, from beyond the grave, watching her sit in a plastic chair next to a man and not stand up.

"Kofi."

"Yes."

"This is not the conversation we said we were going to have tomorrow."

"I know."

"We said tomorrow evening."

"I know, Yaa. I'm sorry. I — I saw you sit down. I didn't think. I just — I saw you sit down and I thought, now. So I came over. I'm sorry. I will go back."

"No."

He turned his head, just slightly, toward her.

"Don't go back."

"Okay."

"Just sit. Don't say anything else right now. Just sit beside me."

"Okay."

He sat. She sat. The wake went on. Aunty Ama laughed her high laugh again somewhere across the courtyard. Somewhere a child was crying because it was past midnight and no one had taken her home. Somewhere two old men were arguing in Twi about something that had happened in 1981. The mango tree dropped one fruit, very softly, onto the dirt beside Kofi's foot.

He picked it up. He turned it in his hand. He set it on the arm of his chair. He did not say anything.

After a while — Yaa did not know how long, ten minutes, twenty, an hour, time was doing something different tonight — she reached over without looking at him and took his hand.

She did not hold it the way you hold a man's hand on a date.

She held it the way you hold a hand at a wake. Tight. Gripping. The way her aunty Ama had held her own hand at her grandfather's funeral fifteen years ago, when Yaa had been fourteen and had not yet understood what grief did to your fingers. Hold tight, my baby. Hold tight. The dead are watching.

Kofi did not look at her.

He turned his hand over in hers, palm up, and laced his fingers through hers, and held on.

They sat like that, for a long time, in the shadow under the mango tree, in the middle of three hundred people, and nobody saw them, and they did not speak, and her grandmother's house, the one with the blue gate, the one her grandmother had bought with cocoa money in 1979 and had left to Yaa, sat fifty metres away in the dark with all its windows lit.

At 2 AM the elders left.

The aunties began the long ritual of clearing the courtyard. The plastic chairs went back into stacks. The small glasses went back into the kitchen to be washed. The fire under the cooking pot was banked for tomorrow. The mango tree dropped two more fruit onto the dirt. The sky was beginning to think, faintly, about morning.

Yaa stood up. Kofi stood up.

Her hand let go of his hand because her hand had to. She had aunties to help. He had chairs to count.

He walked her to the kitchen door. He did not touch her.

At the door he said, "Tomorrow evening."

"Tomorrow evening."

"I said the same thing this afternoon."

"I know."

"I did not mean to say it again tonight."

"I know."

"Yaa."

"Yes."

"Thank you for sitting with me."

She looked at him.

She was very tired. She was very young, suddenly, in a way she had not felt in years — the youngest woman in the family, the one her grandmother had been planning around for three months without telling her. She was very alone. She was not alone.

"Goodnight, Kofi."

"Goodnight, Yaa."

She went inside. She did not cry. She washed her face in cold water from the bucket. She lay on the iron bed in the green room and she did not sleep for a long time, and when she finally did, she dreamed about her grandmother sitting on a porch in Aburi, drinking tea from a chipped enamel cup, smiling at someone Yaa could not see, and saying — if you have any sense, you will still be here.

Outside, in the courtyard of the big house with the blue gate, Kofi Owusu was stacking the last of the white chairs by himself, in the dark, very slowly.

And somewhere in London, in a flat in Hackney that Yaa was paying rent on for another four months, a phone was ringing in an empty room, and the voicemail was filling up with messages from a man who had not yet accepted that the wedding was off, who would, in the morning, book a flight to Accra without telling her.

But that night, in Aburi, Yaa slept.

And in the morning, when she woke, the kitchen was already loud.

Module 03 drops next Friday.

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