Ghana Must Go Read Online Free PDF Page B

there
. Mr. Lamptey tapped his forehead and pointed at Kweku. Kweku grew uncomfortable and shifted on his mat. “If you mean ‘where did I design it,’ I designed it in med school.”
    “In med school?”
    “Yes. Medical school.”
    “But why would you do that?”
    “Design a house?”
    “Go to medical school.”
    “To become a doctor.” Kweku laughed.
    Mr. Lamptey laughed harder. “But why would you do that?”
    Kweku stopped laughing. “Do what?”
    “Become a doctor. You’re an artist.”
    “You’re very kind.”
    “I’m very old.” The man winked. He held up Kweku’s napkin. “And these? All of these rooms? They’re for all of your children?”
    “No.”
    “Patients?”
    “Just me.”
    “Hmm.” He turned over the napkin as if looking for a better answer.
    Kweku said quickly, defensive, “There’s nothing else.”
    “Just you.” Another puff. Mr. Lamptey pointed to Kofi. “And him.” Held up the napkin. “And this. ‘Nothing else.’”
    Kweku got up. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at . . .” Mr. Lamptey exhaled a curling little tendril of smoke. But said nothing. “But I’m looking for a builder, not a Buddha.”
    “And have you found one?”
    Kweku faltered. He said nothing. He had not.
    This was his eighth such encounter and counting. The plot had been vacant for over a year. He looked at the carpenter, the “old man,” this Mr. Lamptey, there cross-legged and cloth-clad, the six-pack contracted, the cataracts glowing bluish like the bellies of candle flames. He looked like some bizarre sort of African Gandhi. With ganja. Nonviolent. Nonplussing. Triumphant. Kweku wiped his face, took a breath as to speak. But for the first time since arriving noticed the
shhh
of the waves. So fell quiet. And stood there, feeling foolish now for standing, his head a few inches from the thatch roof above.
    He considered the thatch pattern, which was vaguely familiar (though the memory was too heavy to catch up from behind: rounded hut in Kokrobité not an hour from this treehouse, its roof, also thatch, much, much higher than this one, conceived of by an eccentric not so different from Mr. Lamptey, absent father, wheezing sister: heavy memory, too slow).
    A second breeze, smelling of a pyre of twigs.
    Someone burning something somewhere.
    Kweku suddenly felt tired. “If you can build it, by all means the project is yours.”
    Mr. Lamptey said simply, “I can and I will.”
    •   •   •
    And did, in two years, arriving each morning at four, not a moment before or after, while the sky was still dark, to do sun salutations on the then-empty plot, sixty minutes more or less, until sunrise.
    Kweku—afraid that his materials would be stolen, by appointment if he got a watchman, by yard boys if not (and they were costly materials, imported marble, slabs of slate; it wasn’t cheap establishing order in overgrown grass)—slept in a tent in those days, the one Olu had forgotten, wiry Kofi keeping guard with their adopted stray dog. Around a quarter past five they’d be woken by the racket song, hammer banging nail, handsaw moving through wood, both more swiftly than a seventy-year-old should have been able to manage, and more elegantly than any blade he’d managed himself. Indeed, six months in he took to shadowing Mr. Lamptey once a week for an hour, sipping coffee, hanging back. Mr. Lamptey, who sang, but never spoke, while he was carpentering, consented to be watched but refused to be helped. So Kweku loitered, attentive, with his Thermos, in his glasses, not helping, merely observing with mounting jealousy and awe, trying to learn what he could of the eyes-half-closed
calm
with which the man made incisions. “You should’ve been a surgeon,” he’d say.
    Mr. Lamptey would suck his teeth, spit, answer opaquely, not pausing his sawing to puff on his joint. “I should have been what I was destined to be. I should be what I am,” and on. But he built the house perfectly,