Darkness fell. The stalls were weakly illuminated by kerosene lamps. The sky was clear. There were no stars, no clouds. The sky was a mysterious expanse of blackness.
Omovo listened as the assistant deputy bachelor, whose voice was the loudest and most drunken of all, began to narrate another of his experiences in the compound. He said that one night when he had gone to urinate he had witnessed something. The others quietened to hear what that something was. He said he had heard noises in the bathroom and upon further investigation had found that there were a man and a woman in there.
‘What were they doing?’ someone asked.
‘What kind of question is dat? What do you think they were doing, eh?’
‘You mean they were doing it?’
‘Seriously. You should have heard the woman.’
‘You mean that they were doing it in that stinking place?’
‘You should have heard the man.’
‘Is that so?’
The men laughed a bit, but not as wildly as they had before. The wind blew suddenly. Omovo shivered. The men were silent for a moment. The day darkened in their midst.
‘Who were they?’
‘Nooo! My mouth gum for that one-o!’ said the assistant deputy bachelor, as he refilled Tuwo’s glass.
‘But did you see them?’
The assistant deputy bachelor refused to be specific. He kept drunkenly evading the questions, till the men started to doubt him.
‘Don’t mind our permanent bachelor,’ said Tuwo. ‘He’s never had a woman and he’s beginning to imagine things.’
‘How are you sure it’s not you who caught yourself, eh?’ said one of the men to the assistant bachelor.
‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘I didn’t see them. But if I hear them doing it again I will push open that door.’
‘But what if it’s a husband and wife?’
‘Then they should do it in their rooms. We have one bathroom for all of us in the compound. The door is old and the nail that holds it is weak. If they don’t want to be caught they should do it on their beds.’
Everyone was silent. Everyone was uncomfortable.
‘I have a big bed,’ said Tuwo.
The men laughed nervously. ‘But do you use it?’
‘You want me to show you how weak the springs have become?’
The men began to regain their old form.
‘That former wife of yours,’ said the deputy assistant bachelor, ‘must be...’
‘I will give you her address if you want,’ interrupted Tuwo.
‘Thank you, but I have to concentrate on business.’
‘Let’s give the bachelor a new name,’ suggested Tuwo. ‘Let’s call him Business-Without-Pleasure.’
But the men preferred the former name, which had evolved by communal accretion. They had begun by calling him the chief bachelor and everyone had added gradations of their own.
‘Let’s call Tuwo Pleasure-Without-Business,’ said the assistant bachelor.
But the men didn’t support that either. And after a while, attacked by gnawing suspicions, the men fell quiet. Only the noises of the children, and the sounds of the ghetto, could be heard.
The wind blew over the scumpool, mingling freshness with stench. Omovo felt strangely happy because there was not yet a black-out.
‘But what sort of man,’ said one of the men suddenly, ‘would do it with his wife in that bathroom?’
‘A strange man.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t man and wife,’ said the assistant bachelor.
Everyone was silent again.
‘This is serious, you know,’ said one of the men, looking around as if, suddenly, he was not sure of the company. The men began to look at each other slightly suspiciously.
‘More ogogoro!’ cried the assistant bachelor. Then he said, getting up and sitting down again: ‘If that happened to my wife I will kill her.’
‘They will just lock you up for a long time,’ said Omovo’s father, with unassailable dignity. The ‘Captain’ of the compound had spoken. The other men agreed.
‘Yes,’ said one. ‘They will just lock you up.’
‘For murder,’ said another.
‘Manslaughter,’ said the assistant deputy bachelor.
‘They might even execute you at the bar beach, you know,’ said Tuwo.
‘They don’t execute for murder, only armed robbery and failing to succeed in a coup,’ said Omovo’s father. ‘But if you have a good lawyer,’ he continued, ‘and I know a few, then you might get off for what they call…’
The men listened intently.
‘...Crime of passion.’
‘I know that one,’ said Tuwo. ‘When I was in Britain...’
The men shouted him down. The assistant deputy bachelor took over.
‘Maybe I won’t kill her then.’
Tuwo got up. Waving his hands, slashing out as if with a big and clumsy instrument, he said: ‘I will kill him. If I caught them I will kill him. I will cut off his prick!’
The men fell about laughing at his exaggerated passion. He began to laugh as well. He laughed as he dramatised how he would chase the man, pursue him through the compound, and slash him down.
‘And,’ he said loudly, ‘the police won’t be able to do anything to me.’
‘Why not? Are you God?’ said someone.
‘God doesn’t fuck people’s wives,’ said another.
‘Because,’ said Tuwo triumphantly, ‘it’s a crime of passion. Didn’t you hear what our captain said?’
‘I have thought about it,’ said the assistant deputy bachelor. ‘Being a man of God, I won’t do anything to either my wife or the man.’
‘You can say that because you don’t have a wife.’
‘His wife is business.’
‘So if someone wants to steal your business, won’t you defend it?’ asked Tuwo.
‘My business is not my wife.’
‘I agree with the assistant bachelor,’ said Omovo’s father. ‘One must learn forgiveness.’
‘Don’t let your wife hear you,’ someone said.
‘What sort of forgiveness is dat? You mean if you catch them you will forgive them like dat? No, I don’t believe you,’ said one of the men, made bold by drink.
‘Look, my friend,’ said Omovo’s father, turning to the man, ‘I will be angry, but there’s no need to kill anyone and spend the rest of your life in prison. There are plenty other women in the world.’
‘You can’t get a woman in prison,’ said the deputy bachelor.
Omovo’s father continued: ‘I won’t take her back, and she will never set foot in my house again, but I won’t kill anybody. Only fools and criminals do that sort of thing.’
‘It’s true,’ someone said.
The men nodded drunkenly.
‘But it’s enough to drive a man mad though,’ said the assistant bachelor, waving his empty glass. ‘I know of a man who caught his wife in bed with another man. He didn’t do anything. They ran out of the room. Later his wife came back with relatives and elders to beg him. But he didn’t say anything. The wife left and didn’t come back. To this day the man doesn’t talk.’
‘It’s enough to drive a man mad.’
One of the younger married men of the compound said: ‘I have heard that there is a medicine that can be applied to a woman…’
‘To make them do it better?’
‘No. When you use this medicine, if another man does it to your wife they will stick together, unable to separate...’
‘Like two dogs.’
‘...Until the husband releases them. I even know a native doctor who makes this medicine.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Tuwo said loudly. ‘I could not bear it. Why would a man want to catch his wife and another man naked, eh? I would prefer not to know. It’s too much for me.’
‘What’s the address of this native doctor?’ asked the assistant bachelor jokingly.
The men laughed again. The women teased a
nd mocked him.
‘Don’t laugh,’ he said. ‘As for me, if I use the medicine and caught them I tell you – I will tie both of them up and throw them in the nearest river.’
Omovo grew restless and uneasy. His sense of guilt made him melancholy. The children came to play with him. But he was not really with them and they sensed it. They soon ran back into the compound and crowded outside the window of a neighbour’s room to watch television. Omovo’s melancholy only increased his desire to see Ifeyiwa.
Tuwo, louder than ever, was still speaking:
‘In England, though, they don’t mind these things. They have something called wife-swapping. They have these clubs where married people share their wives and husbands.’
‘Is that so?’ someone said.
‘How do you know, eh, Tuwo?’ came the assistant bachelor.
‘Did you join them?’
‘Of course not. But I know. I have even heard of some Englishmen who like to watch another man doing it to their wives.’
‘NOOO!’
‘Yes.’
The disbelief spread. The discussion widened. The men drank solidly, laughing into the ghetto night. The women, no longer content to stand listening in the outer circle, began to tease the men. They had developed their own punishments for husbands caught being unfaithful.
Omovo, feeling restless and desolate, moved away from the compound front. He went past Ifeyiwa’s husband’s shop twice. She was not there. He saw Takpo counting his money and arguing with an old man about change. Omovo went back home. Most of the men and women had gone in. Only the younger ones were left. They carried on the arguments and discussions. Standing a good distance from them, Omovo watched Ifeyiwa’s house. The mosquitoes came at him. The darkness mellowed.
What is happening to me, he thought. He had never felt like this before, never felt so crossed, so much a victim of his own perverse love. He thought he knew the limits: that she was Takpo’s wife. But still he could not understand what was happening inside him, what was pulling him, crushing him with unbearable anticipation.
He began to convince himself that she wouldn’t show up, and that it was all for the better, when a figure waved in the distance. He shivered. A light flashed through him. His senses came alive. The figure waved again. It was her. It was her all right. He looked around. No one was watching. He began walking, slowly. He felt wonderful. He felt nothing could touch him, or alter the destiny of his desire. He thought: ‘I can see the distance clearly. The night is so beautiful. I will do some painting when I get back. The air is so sweet.’
9
As soon as he set out after her the wind blew hard. Sand and dust were whipped up in the air. Dead leaves circled the street. The wind blew him backward and he lowered his head, for the sand was blinding him. He pushed against the wind. Leaves rose to his face, roused by the gale. The pages of newspapers, turning, were propelled towards him. An open page of lurid news-stories stuck to his head. When he tore it off and let it be blown behind him, he became aware that people streamed all around him. The street was full of people going in all directions, rushing past him. He pushed through the women on their way to the night-market. He pushed through hawkers and street-traders, children and herbalists, night-workers and sellers of charms.
The roadsides were crowded with the people of the area, men and women outside their over-populated compounds, children playing and fighting. A group of young men pursued a little girl round a stall. The evening was lit here and there by the orange of kerosene lamps. Some of the street-traders dozed on their wares. Others dispiritedly called the world to come and buy their goods. Omovo passed the zinc-roofed huts, the unpainted bungalows, the uncompleted tenements with aluminium water tanks standing on blocks of crumbling cement.
Ifeyiwa walked at a speed calculated to be just ahead of him. He could barely make out her yellow outline in the shadowy crowd. He hastened, fighting past the crowds, to keep her in sight. He got to the intersection when a ramshackle lorry, weighed down with bags of cement, nearly knocked him over. Omovo ran back and the driver shouted at him. The lorry drove on into the street, blasting its infernal horn and sending up fountains of dust and cement. When Omovo started to cross, the lorry suddenly began to reverse. Omovo had to run back again. The lorry kept reversing and going forward, for no reason that was comprehensible to Omovo, effectively blocking the street. Its wheels, clogging in the sand, raised dust in Omovo’s face, blinding him. Clouds of cement settled on his head. Some men screamed abuse at the driver’s family, while others shouted at him to reverse this way and to cut the steering wheel that way. The lorry eventually got stuck and had to be pushed. Omovo, freed from the obstacle, ran past. He looked for Ifeyiwa in the crowd and couldn’t find her. The fear that he had lost her plunged him into a frenzy. He looked everywhere for her till his head began to whirl. His agitation exhausted him. He became confused by all the motions on the street. His eyes began to hurt. Then he stopped looking and stood still and breathed gently. A star pulsed in the sky. He stood apart and let the agitation flow from him. As people brushed past him, crisscrossing his vision, he felt amazed at the simplicity of his feelings. All he wanted at that moment was to be with her, to be in her presence.
The simplicity of his desire, and his stillness, were rewarded. From under she shadows, under the eaves of the deserted blue shed, a voice called out to him. The blood pounded in his ears. The sudden realisation that she might have been watching his agitation confused him and made him stumble as he went towards the voice. He found her leaning against the rough wooden frame of the shed, a miracle of the ghetto night.
She was wearing a yellow dress, with a white belt around her waist, and white shoes. Her hair had been tied back with a red ribbon. She had a white head-tie round her shoulders, like a miniature shawl. She looked as if she had stepped out of a bright magazine. She looked both beautiful and a little awkward, as if she had borrowed someone else’s clothes.
When he saw her he was astonished at her transformation. Her presence disturbed the air. All his doubts, all his guilt awakened by the men’s talk, were dispelled by her presence. On her face was the brightest and saddest smile he had ever seen. Her perfume was new to him. She looked happy. He didn’t know what to do with himself, what to say. She disturbed him. If she had not dressed the way she did, had not embodied her own transformation, he would never have been able to see that she could look so beautiful, and in her beauty so alien, so untouchable, so mysterious. He followed her silently. She led him into the ghetto night.
They went up the street and came to another intersection. He stopped. She went on and stopped further up when she became aware of his absence. She turned and looked at him quizzically, as if she had been gently awoken from a dream. He ran up to her. For a moment they stood close together. Then he drew up to her until her breasts were touching his chest. The confused motions of people milling about made him feel as if the world were closing in on them. She was very still, except for the gentle heaving of her breasts, and there was something sensual and coiled about her immobility. He felt her presence so intensely that his legs began to quiver. He wanted to kiss her, but he couldn’t summon the courage. He didn’t know why.
‘Let’s walk on,’ he said, his voice thick. ‘It’s cold here.’
But when he moved he felt as if his legs wouldn’t bear him.
‘You’re like a dream,’ he said, his voice weak. ‘You’re so beautiful.’
She stayed silent. She didn’t even smile. As they came to the hotel, the silence grew between them. The hotel was noisy with hi-life music and the shouting clientele, and prostitutes strutting about. A powerful smell of stale beer, of stale sex, and of sweat, came out of the open hotel door. As they passed the hotel, prostitutes with strangely distended bellies called out to potential customers. One of them said loudly to Omovo:
‘Shine-shine head, leave your woman and come with me.’
The other prostitutes laughed.
‘Sweet time with me,??
? she said again.
Omovo was embarrassed. Ifeyiwa, walking fast, leaving him behind, hurried on ahead. Omovo tried to keep up with her, but she half ran, and the laughter of the prostitutes rang out harshly behind them. When Omovo caught up with her she had taken the head-tie off her shoulders and was tying it into a knot. He touched her arm and she shook away his hand. He slowed down. As he walked behind her, his eyes fixed on the movements of her hips, they passed men sitting on hard stools outside their houses, drinking ogogoro and laughing. The men were silent as Ifeyiwa went past. They watched her. Then one of them blew a wolfwhistle. Another said:
‘Woman, don’t run from me, marry me or I die.’
Ifeyiwa rushed past them. Omovo ran and caught up with her and put his arm around her shoulders. She rested her head slightly on him as they passed children who screamed at the roadside as if they were utterly lost. Their sullen fathers smoked cigarettes while their harassed mothers, who sold cheap provisions, attended wearily to customers. Omovo smelt the burning wick of their kerosene lamps on the night air.
Ifeyiwa turned suddenly down a street without a name. It was a dark street and the houses had no electricity. The air was filled with the sounds of night insects. Ifeyiwa slapped her arm. They walked on in silence and Ifeyiwa kept turning into nameless streets, areas that were alien to Omovo, places where the houses were squat and unpainted, where the electric cables sagged on the wooden poles. Omovo began to feel lost. He felt as if he had been led into another dimension, a foreign country. He knew the desolation of the Amukoko ghetto, but he had never known that there were places as desolate, as garbage-ridden as the streets Ifeyiwa led him into. Deeper and deeper into the ghetto they went. It frightened Omovo that desolation could seem to have no end, no boundaries.
‘Do you know where we are going?’ he asked her.
‘No,’ she said.
They passed a rough graveyard that shaded over into a wasteland where garbage was piled high. Crude gravestones, cheap wooden mementoes of the dead, cement crosses with one arm crumbling, jutted out of the earth. The forest, breathing the potencies of nocturnal vegetation, was dark around them, noisy with insects. They passed a blue mosque, with its fading paint, as a cracked voice intoned the evening prayer over a loudspeaker. Through the open door Omovo saw the Moslems on their mats, beads between their fingers, their mouths working in prayer. Omovo stared at them and at the curiously beautiful Arabic lettering on the mosque’s signboard.