“Make you de chew am for road. Anybody wey see you de knack am so go think say you never chop breakfast.”
The two men behind laughed rather a lot at this and Chris not being sure whether they were people who laughed much ordinarily or hid malice behind laughter cast a questioning glance at Braimoh, even as he reached for the gift.
“Dem two na my people. No worry.”
Chris took the proffered kolanuts, and thanked Braimoh. Then he gave one to the two men behind as though in appeasement and put the others in his pocket. Seeing where they had been fished out of he would need to wash them before eating.
Emmanuel darted out for a quick goodbye and vanished again behind the main house into the Boys’ Quarters. It had been agreed that he would travel separately to rejoin Chris later.
They passed the first three check-points without trouble. The soldiers and police looked tired and waved cars through rather inattentively. Chris was almost certain that Emmanuel’s Gazette story must be more than marginally responsible for thus putting the law off their guard. He was something else, that boy Emmanuel. Why did we not cultivate such young men before now? Why, we did not even know they existed if the truth must be told! We? Who are we? The trinity who thought they owned Kangan as BB once unkindly said? Three green bottles. One has accidentally fallen; one is tilting. Going, going, bang! Then we becomes I, becomes imperial We.
The traffic was beginning to slow down at the big bend in the road just before the Three Cowrie Bridge. Another check-point, no doubt. Stupid fellows the police; they would choose the approaches to a bridge to disrupt traffic! At long last Braimoh cleared the corner, and ran full tilt into it! This was no ordinary check-point but a major combined army and police operation. There were two military jeeps by the roadside and three police patrol-cars flashing their roof-lamps. Ahead, passengers were being ordered out of vehicles.
Braimoh panicked and made the first move of a hasty U-turn, which was a serious error considering the flashing patrol-cars waiting to give chase! The man behind Chris shouted to Braimoh to get back into line, and he promptly complied. But it would seem his ill-considered move had already been noticed.
“Oga come out quick! Make we use leg.”
Chris was out of the car like a shot and so was the man who had spoken. They were on the kerb side of the road, fortunately.
“Quick, make we de go!”
As they walked smartly away from their car towards the bridge the soldier who seemed to have noticed Braimoh’s suspicious move was coming briskly towards them. Chris was watching him through the corner of his eye until they drew level. The soldier stopped.
“Hey, stop there!” he shouted. Chris and his companion halted on the sidewalk and turned to him, standing on the road. His face was scarred by three heavy marks on either side. He had accompanied his order with the unslinging of his automatic weapon. The width of a car separated him from Chris and his companion.
“Where you de go?”
“We de go Three Cowrie Market.”
“Wetin de inside that bag? Bring am here.”
Chris’s companion walked down the kerb between two cars and opened his dirty shopping bag for the soldier to inspect.
“You there, come down here. Wetin be your name?”
“Sebastian,” replied Chris, using the name of his steward from instant inspiration.
“Sebastian who?”
He didn’t know. But luckily he realized quickly enough that it didn’t much matter.
“Sebastian Ojo.”
“What work you de do?”
“He de sell motor part.”
“Na you I ask? Or na you be him mouth?”
“I de sell motor parts,” said Chris.
“How you de sell motor part and then come de march for leg?”
“Him car knock engine.”
“Shurrup! Big mouth. I no ask you!”
But he had already diverted the scorching fire away from Chris and given him a little respite just when he was beginning to wilt and quiver a bit at the knees. His right hand, heavy and idle beside him, stirred into life and went to his trouser pocket where it found one of the kolanuts and brought it out. The soldier’s eye caught it and lit up. Chris split the nut and gave the bigger half to him and put the other into his own mouth. The soldier took the offering eagerly and crunched it with noisy greed.
“Thank you brother,” he said, fixing his gaze on him and squinting in what might be an effort of memory. “Na only poor man de sabi say him brother never chop since morning. The big oga wey put poor man for sun no de remember. Because why? Him own belle done full up with cornflake and milik and omlate.” He resumed his squint at Chris and then tapped his forehead. “I think say I done see you before before.”
“Sometime you buy small something for repair your machine for him shop?” said Chris’s companion.
“Which machine? I tell you say I get machine?”
“Make you no mind. No condition is permnent. You go get. Meself as I de talk so, you think say I get machine? Even common bicycle I no get. But my mind strong that one day I go jump bicycle, jump machine and land inside motor car! And somebody go come open door for me and say yes sir! And I go carry my belle like woman we de begin to pregnant small and come sitdon for owner-corner, take cigarette put for mouth, no more kolanut, and say to driver comon move! I get strong mind for dat. Make you get strong mind too, everything go allright.”
The soldier now wore a wistful smile which sat strangely on his savaged face.
Across the bridge they walked leisurely, waiting for Braimoh and his lone passenger to get through their own ordeal. Chris’s spirits had returned to such a degree that a certain jauntiness was discernible in his walk. He even suggested to his companion that walking through check-points would seem to be their best bet from now on.
“You think you no go forget your job again?” his companion asked teasingly. “When you no fit talk again that time, fear come catch me proper and I begin pray make this man no go introduce himself as Commissioner of Information!”
“Me Commissioner? At all. Na small small motor part na him I de sell. Original and Taiwan.”
“Ehe! Talkam like that. No shaky-shaky mouth again. But oga you see now, to be big man no hard but to be poor man no be small thing. Na proper wahala. No be so?”
“Na so I see-o. I no know before today say to pass for small man you need to go special college.”
His companion liked that and laughed long and loud. “Na true you talk, oga. Special College. Poor Man Elementary Cerftikate!”
They walked along merrily discussing in confidential tones their recent success. Chris wondered why the soldier had stopped them in the first place. Had he noticed them get down from the taxi?
“At all!” Said his companion. “Make I tell you why he stop us? Na because of how you de walk as to say you fear to kill ant for road. And then you come again take corner-corner eye de look the man at the same time. Nex time make you march for ground with bold face as if to say your father na him get main road.”
“Thank you,” said Chris. “I must remember that… To succeed as small man no be small thing.”
16
THE JOURNEY to the North began five days later. The choice of Abazon as sanctuary came quite naturally. At the purely sentimental level it was Ikem’s native province which, although he had rarely spent much time there in recent years, still remained in a curious paradoxical way the distant sustainer of all his best inspirations, so that going there now in his death became for Chris and Emmanuel something of a pilgrimage.
Then it was a province of unspecified and generalized disaffection to the regime. One could indeed call it natural guerrilla country; not of course in the literal sense of suggesting planned armed struggle which would be extravagantly far-fetched as yet, but in the limited but important meaning of a place where, to borrow the watchword of a civil service poster, you could count on having your secrets kept secret.
And lastly, Braimoh’s w
ife, Aina was, as it turned out, a native of southern Abazon and Braimoh had volunteered to personally escort the distinguished refugee and hand him over to his in-laws up there for safe-keeping.
All these attractions of Abazon had of course to be set against the one considerable disadvantage of being a place where the regime might be sleeping with one eye open especially since the death of Ikem and the ugly eruption of a new crisis over the government’s refusal to turn over his body to his people for burial under the provocative pretext that investigations were still proceeding into the circumstances of his death!
The night before the journey had been quite extraordinary. Beatrice, at her own insistence, had been brought by Braimoh in a friend’s taxi through devious routes to say farewell to Chris. She wore for the occasion long-discarded clothes fished out of a big, red canvas bag in which she threw odds and ends awaiting the visit of the Salvation Army collector. With her came Elewa. It was to have been a brief visit after which the two young women would take another taxi to Elewa’s mother’s place a couple of kilometres away and spend the night there to avoid a late journey back to her flat at the GRA which might attract undue attention.
But the strain and the confusing events of recent days and nights which Beatrice had borne all on her own with such intrepidity seemed all of a sudden to assume an unbearable heaviness on her shoulders at this tantalizing reunion. Why should she accept this role of a star-crossed lover in a cheap, sentimental movie waving frantically from the window of an express train at her young man at his window in another train hurtling away on opposite tracks into a different dark tunnel? And so she rebelled with a desperate resolve grounded on a powerful premonition that Chris and she had tonight come to a crossroads beyond which a new day would break, unpredictable, without precedent; a day whose market wares piled into the long basket on her head as she approached the gates of dawn would remain concealed to the very last moment.
And so, timidly for once, Beatrice chose to hang by a thread to the days she had known, to spin out to infinite lengths the silken hours and minutes of this last familiar night.
“I shall stay here till morning,” she pronounced from that rocklike resolve just as Braimoh peeped through the door a second time for instructions about a taxi. Glances were exchanged all round but no one dared to demur. Rather, new arrangements were quickly taken in hand, debated and concluded around Beatrice’s now-aloof stance while she, immobile as a goddess in her shrine, her arms across her breasts, stared away fixedly into the middle distance.
She heard the debate and the conclusions remotely: Elewa would take Emmanuel to her mother’s place in the taxi; Braimoh would pack the five children off to sleep in a neighbour’s house…
“Oh no no no!” said Chris suddenly out of a reverie, stamping his foot firmly on the linoleum-covered floor. All eyes turned to him but he merely went on shaking his head for a while longer before saying quite decisively that the children must not be moved. The thinking which had produced this sharp reaction had gone somewhat as follows: I arrived here and failed to prevent Braimoh and Aina his wife from abandoning their matrimonial bed to me and going out every night to sleep God-knows-where. I’ll be damned if their five children will now be ejected from their floor because of Beatrice.
He leaned over and explained these thoughts to her in excited whispers. Her response was instantaneous. Her mind and all her thoughts had been so totally focussed on Chris’s metamorphosis from disembodied voice back into flesh and blood that she had left herself no room whatever to consider such things as beds and floors and at what and whose cost. Now she spoke as firmly as Chris in favour of the children. She went further to say, in sincere atonement, that as far as she was concerned the chair on which she sat was all she needed for the night.
Later, she had to be summoned several times by Chris before she left that chair and, stepping over the sleeping children, hung her head-tie on a nail driven into the wall and went over to the bed. She was still suffering a sense of shame for her thoughtlessness. But how was she to have known that by simply obeying an impulse to stay close to Chris this one night before a journey into the unknown she was selfishly putting out a poor family? Why did no one tell her? Or was she, as her people say, just to sniff her finger and know? Then who was to tell her? Braimoh? Look, Miss, my wife and I go out to pass the night on a neighbour’s floor while our five children sleep here on this floor; so you can’t stay here. Or Chris? Yes, Chris the Information man should have informed, not after but before. But how was even he to know the impulse bubbling inside her and erupting in her pronouncement? The fault is then hers. Although she had not consciously thought about it she must have made the assumption in some inattentive zone of her mind that one or two of all those doors that gave into the long odoriferous corridor running through the belly of this airless block-house must lead into other rooms used by Braimoh and his family. Why did she make that assumption? Surely everyone had heard that large families of the urban poor lived in single windowless rooms. Did she imagine then that for her that piece of information would stay in the domain of hearsay, that it would never fall to her luck to encounter it in a living family and even share its meagre resources for a single night?
Chris called out again to her from the bed screened by two large curtains of cheap cotton print hung on a rope that stretched from one wall to the other with a sag in the middle that made one want to get up and pull the rope tighter around the nail on which it was fastened.
She picked her steps carefully through the confusion of young sleeping bodies on straw mats on the floor and gained the bed. She had brought pyjamas in her picnic bag but had left the bag unopened beside her chair. Sitting now on the edge of the bed she took off her blouse and hung it on the sagging curtain-rope. She then loosed her lappa from her waist and retied it above the breast and lay down beside Chris.
Their love-making that night was cramped by distractions. At least two of the children lying on the floor beyond the cotton screen—a boy and a girl—could easily possess enough stréet-lore to know if something was going on and what. Then there was the multiple-pitched squealing of the bed at the slightest change of position.
There was one door to the room; it led into the long central corridor and was bolted from inside. There was also a tiny plainboard window which gave directly on to the bed and opened out to a huge, choked and stagnant drain. So it had to be kept shut at all times to keep down the smell and the mosquitoes.
But enough of both still got in. As soon as the lone lightbulb in the room was turned off the mosquitoes began to sing to the ear which was always worse than their bite and, some would say, even worse than the bite of bedbugs which soon followed the mosquitoes in a night-long assault on these smooth-skinned intruders from the GRA. No wonder Chris looked so haggard and worn-out, thought Beatrice.
But although these specific distractions surely must have worked their own havoc on the rites of this closing night to a long drama that had drawn together more than these two survivors in enactments of love and friendship, betrayal and death, there was something deeper than the harassment of heat and bugs laying a restraining hand on the shoulder of the chief celebrant.
Chris had noticed it from the very moment she had walked in that evening that she carried with her a strong aura of that other Beatrice whom he always described in fearful jest as goddessy. And then lying in bed and summoning her to join him and watching her as she finally rose from her chair in the thin darkness of the room she struck him by her stately stylized movement like the Maiden Spirit Mask coming in to the arena, erect, disdainful, highcoiffured, unravished yet by her dance.
She did not rebuff him. But neither did she offer more than the obligatory demands of her ritual. He understood perfectly and soon afterwards led in an effort to divert their minds to childhood fable. The mosquito, which Chris repeatedly but unsuccessfully tried to swat with an old shirt he had brought to bed for the purpose, was taunting the ear in revenge for the insult with which his suit had once
been rejected.
“What’s the bedbug’s excuse,” asked Beatrice “for biting without bothering to sing first?”
“Her story is that man once tried to destroy her and her new-hatched brood by pouring a kettle of hot water on them. Her little ones were about to give up the struggle but she said to them: Don’t give up, whatever is hot will become cold.”
“And so they survived to bite us tonight.”
“Exactly.”
“I wonder what she will tell them after a good spray of aerosol insecticide?” Which led her to ask Chris why he had not thought of buying himself a can of Flit since getting here.
“I thought of it actually the first night but then decided against it in the morning.”
“What?”
“You see, Emmanuel made the point that since aerosol was a remedy our host could not himself afford it was perhaps better not to insult him by introducing it into his household. I was stunned by that argument, and he handed back to me the money I had given him to buy a canister at the petrol station.”
Beatrice was silent for a while. Then she said “What a fellow, that Emmanuel of yours! Still I am glad I won’t be spending five nights here.”
Their low-toned conversation was abruptly interrupted by a major disturbance on the floor. One child, it appeared, had urinated on his brother. The remonstrance, sleepy at first, quickly sharpened into clear-eyed accusations and a general commotion in which someone soon began to cry, calling on his mother. Click! went the switch and the single naked bulb hanging down the centre of the ceiling flooded the room with light. Chris and Beatrice remained still and silent like a couple of mice interrupted far from their hole and sheltering behind utensils in a crowded room.
“Shush!” It must have been either the biggest of the three boys or the bigger of the two girls taking command. Nothing more was heard after that. They were probably speaking by signs and with their eyes, no doubt pointing to the bed and its distinguished occupants. The switch went click again and darkness returned, broken for a while by discreet whispers; and then silence.