THE DECISION by Chris and his two companions to travel to the North by bus instead of Braimoh’s taxi was well taken because a bus was bound to attract less attention to itself than a taxi even when it was as old as Braimoh’s.
The bus they chose was one of a new generation of transports known, even to the illiterate, as Luxurious, so called because they were factory-built and fitted out with upholstered seats. Chris had never been inside a Luxurious before. Indeed his last experience in Kangan buses was years and years ago before he had left to study in Britain. In those days buses were still the crude handiwork of bold and ingenious panel-beaters and welders who knocked any sheet-metal that came to hand into a container on wheels, and got a sign-writer to paint BUS in florid letters all over it.
Before embarking on Luxurious, Chris walked round it sizing it up like a prospective buyer. He felt a curious pride in its transformation which had not entirely abandoned its origins. The florid lettering had remained virtually unchanged by prosperity. Perhaps the same sign-writers of his younger days were still working or, more likely, had influenced generations of apprentices in their peculiar calligraphy. And to think of it, that imaginative roadside welder who created the first crude buses might be the managing director of the transport company that now had a fleet of Luxuriouses! If there had been no progress in the nation’s affairs at the top there had clearly been some near the bottom, albeit undirected and therefore only half-realized.
The sign-writers had long expanded their assignment from merely copying down the short word BUS into more elaborate messages rather in the tradition of that unknown monk working away soberly by candle-light copying out the Lord’s Prayer as he must have done scores of times before and then, seized by a sudden and unprecedented impulse of adoration, proceeded to end the prayer on a new fantastic flourish of his own: For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen!
The sign-writers of Kangan did not work in dark and holy seclusions of monasteries but in free-for-all market-places under the fiery eye of the sun. And yet in ways not unlike the monk’s they sought in their work to capture the past as well as invent a future. Luxurious had inscribed on its blue body in reds, yellows and whites three different legends—one at the back, another at the sides and the third, and perhaps most important, at the masthead, on top of the front windscreen.
Chris, now fully reconciled to his new condition as a wide-eyed newcomer to the ways of Kangan made a mental note of these inscriptions.
The one at the back of the bus, written in the indigenous language of Bassa, concise in the extreme and, for that reason, hard if not impossible to translate said simply: Ife onye metalu—What a man commits. At the sides the inscriptions switched to words of English: All Saints Bus; and in front, also in English, they announced finally (or perhaps initially!) Angel of Mercy.
Chris took a window seat in the middle section of the bus; Braimoh had already secured a place for himself in front just behind the driver; while Emmanuel on an aisle seat at the rear was chatting up a most attractive girl whose striking features had earlier at the ticketing office made not a fleeting impression on Chris himself.
Those three legends now began to tease and exercise his mind; perhaps they came handy as an antidote to anxiety. After the near disaster at the Three Cowrie Bridge he had become persuaded that in moments of stress his face was perhaps too candid a mirror to his mind, and he had set about cultivating what he hoped in future would pass for a relaxed countenance and serve him more prudendy.
But practising deep-breathing exercises and other forms of relaxation therapy in front of a mirror was one thing, and being able to actually look relaxed if a team of vicious security men should for example board the bus now, quite another. To paraphrase a recent wise admonition, how was he to give the impression to the world in such an emergency that this unaccustomed bus in which he now sat nervously was actually his father’s property?
Paradoxically Braimoh who owned nothing to speak of could pass, by the way he sat up there, as the true son of the proprietor of Angel of Mercy, alias All Saints, alias Ife onye metalu.
Glancing back to the rear of the bus Chris saw Emmanuel who didn’t own anything either, at least not for the moment, also pretty much at ease; not to the degree of Braimoh of course, but more so by far than Yours Sincerely who, don’t forget, is one of the troika of proprietors who own Kangan itself! He smiled, bitterly. That Beatrice girl of yours must be closely watched!
If he had a book he could perhaps bury his thoughts in it and escape the betrayal of a tell-tale face. But a man reading a book in a Kangan bus in order to evade notice would have to be out of his mind. So the only reading material he had in his bag were a few unsigned and innocuous poems he had salvaged from scattered papers in Ikem’s house.
So those body decorations and beauty marks on Luxurious rose to occupy his mind. The Christian and quasi-Christian calligraphy posed no problem and held no terror. But not so that other one: Ife onye metalu, a statement unclear and menacing in its very inconclusiveness. What a man commits… Follows him? Comes back to take its toll? Was that all? No, that was only part of it, thought Chris, the most innocuous part in fact. The real burden of that cryptic scripture seemed to turn the matter right around. Whatever we see following a man, whatever fate comes to take revenge on him, can only be what that man in some way or another, in a previous life if not in this, has committed. That was it! So those three words wrapped in an archaic tongue and tucked away at the tail of the bus turn out to be the opening segment of a full-blooded heathen andphony offering a primitive and quite deadly exposition of suffering. The guilty suffers; the sufferer is guilty. As for the righteous, those whose arms are straight (including no doubt the owner of Luxurious), they will always prosper!
After a mental pause Chris began to smile again not at the outrageous theology he had unmasked but at the hard-headed prudence of the owner of Luxurious who had the presence of mind to ring his valued property around with a protective insurance from every faith he knew so that if one should fail to ignite the next might be triggered off. He went one better than the pessimist holding up his trousers with a belt as well as a pair of braces; he added a girdle studded liberally with leather-covered little amulets!
17
The Great North Road
THE KIND OF PEOPLE—local bourgeoisie and foreign diplomats —who sidle up to you at cocktail parties to inform you that Bassa was not Kangan are the very ones who go on behaving as though it was. Why? Because, like the rest of the best people, they have never travelled by bus out of Bassa on the Great North Road. If they had, even once, they would have believed and stopped prating! But they always proffer the excuse that it is too dangerous, too sweaty and, above all, too long a journey for busy people.
Now, as the overwhelming force of this simple, always-taken-in-vain reality impinged on each of Chris’s five, or was it six, senses even as hordes of flying insects after the first rain bombard street lamps, the ensuing knowledge seeped through every pore in his skin into the core of his being continuing the transformation, already in process, of the man he was.
What would happen now, he wondered, if the wheels of fortune should turn again and return him to the very haunts of his previous life, to the same cocktail circuits, those hollow rituals which in fairness to him, he always loathed for their sheer vapidity and perhaps even more for the physical pain they caused him? For being somewhat weak of hearing he was forced by the cumulative drone of a hundred or more conversations into an aural blockade in which he could do no better than wander aimlessly from one set of moving lips to another, hearing absolutely nothing, smiling idiotically. What would he do if—but make God no ’gree—he should find himself again in that torture chamber? He would pray for courage to tell each pair of lips and set of teeth before moving on to the next: “Yes, but do you know that although you say so, it is actually true?” And for his courage he may perhaps be rewarded with the rare pleasure of seeing, since he could not h
ear, one vacuous idiot after another shut his trap for a few peaceful seconds in total mystification, because his piston lips may only have asked: “How the go de go?” Beatrice was of course absolutely right about never going to cocktail parties, but then Beatrice never had the misfortune to be Commissioner for Information. No, Bassa was certainly not Kangan. From this authoritative windowseat in Luxurious Chris could now vouch for that!
The impenetrable rain forests of the South through which even a great highway snaked like a mere game track began to yield ground most grudgingly at first but in time a little more willingly to less prodigious growths; and a couple of hundred kilometres further north, unbelievably, to open parklands of grass and stunted trees. The traveller’s spirits rose in step with this diminution of forests which gave the eye a heady facility to roam freely and take in wide panoramas of space stretching to a horizon where tiny trees on distant hills and against clear skies formed miniature Japanese gardens.
Even the asphalt on which Luxurious sped towards the North told its own story of two countries. Thickly-laid and cushiony at first it steadily deteriorated into thin black paint applied with niggardly strokes of a brush over the laterite beginning to break up and reveal, as the journey progressed, more and more of the brown underlay, forcing the elegant and beautiful Luxurious to lurch from side to side in order to avoid the deepest ruts and potholes. But Chris welcomed this disappointment of comfort for the blessing it had in tow, for it curtailed the recklessness of Luxurious which had been conducting herself like a termagant of the highway treating her passengers’ safety cavalierly and bullying every smaller vehicle she encountered clean out of the way as though traffic rights were merely a matter of size. Broken roads and bumpy rides had their uses, thought Chris.
The lifting of his spirits which had enabled him to indulge himself in every kind of visual and intellectual conceit was due to one great and happy fact. Once Luxurious had left the metropolis of Bassa and headed into the forest tunnels that eventually led into the open country the security checks took a dramatic change for the better. For a while they continued to occur at about the same intervals of distance and were manned by about the same kind of strength. But their purpose had changed. They took hardly any notice of the passengers but concentrated on demanding and receiving gratification from the bus operators. Even when on one occasion a particularly fierce-looking policeman ordered all passengers to disembark it turned out to be no more than a clever ruse for extracting a bigger toll from the driver, and the few passengers including Braimoh who had actually disembarked were smilingly asked to resume their seats. So it was not only the magic of the countryside, though it did play its part, which enabled Chris’s mind, so cramped lately, to float away over this wide expanse of grass-covered landscape with its plains and valleys and hills dotted around with small picture-book trees of every imaginable tree-shape and every shade of green. This flight from danger was taking on the colours and contours of a picnic!
The towns and villages on the Great North Road responded in appropriate ways to the general scaling-down in the size of structures as one pushed out of the rain country slowly towards the land of droughts. The massive buildings of the new-rich down the coast gave way to less imposing but still iron-roofed and cement-walled houses, in much the same way as the giant forests of iroko and mahogany and other great hardwoods had given way to flowering trees like flames-of-the-forest.
As the bus lurched from one side of the road to the other trying to avoid the sharp edges of washed-out bitumen Chris noticed that the same iron roofs were now borne more and more on the shoulders of mud walls plastered over with cement. But in due course this pretence was dropped and the walls owned up frankly to being of reddish earth. The march-past of dwellings in descending hierarchies continued until the modest militias of round thatched huts began to pass slowly across Chris’s reviewing stand.
Police and army checkpoints came and went fairly regularly and had dropped their pretence of looking inside the bus from the forward door. Now they took their money openly from the operators with seeming good humour on both sides. But the driver and his mate never failed to grumble and curse the fellows soon afterwards.
“Make your mother hair catch fire,” prayed the driver on one occasion as soon as he had pulled away from a policeman with whom he seemed to have had a few initial problems.
The bus had been travelling for a little over five hours when it pulled up in the famous dusty and bustling market-town of Agbata, rather large and active for that part of the country. It was the main watering-place of the Great North Road beloved of seasoned travellers on this route. The passengers were glad to escape from the stagnant, cooped-up heat inside the bus into the dry hot waves of the open air. As they disembarked they kicked the cramps out of their leg-joints and sought out what privacy they could find in that unsheltered, sandy terrain to ease themselves. Proprietors of eating-houses and other shacks had regular running battles with every batch of freshly disembarked passengers especially the women eyeing their backyards in spite of many bold scrawls: DON’T URINATE HERE. Most of the men emboldened by tradition and regular travel did not wander around to the same extent like a hen looking for a place to drop her egg but simply picked a big parked truck, moved up close enough and relieved themselves against one of the tyres.
The next concern, food, was more readily available. Scores of little huts with grand names competed for the travellers’ custom with colourful signboards backed up with verbal appeals: Goat meat here! Egusi soup here! Bushmeat here! Come here for Rice! Fine Fine Pounded Yam!
The word decent, variously spelt, occurred on most of the signboards. Chris and his companions settled for Very Desent Restorant for no better reason than its fairly clean, yellow door-blind. In the bus the three had prudently behaved like total strangers. But the last hundred and fifty or so kilometres had shown that they did not need that level of caution. And so now they sat boldly at one table and ordered their food; rice for Chris, fried yam and goatmeat stew for Emmanuel and garri and bushmeat stew for Braimoh.
They still did not talk much among themselves and could quite easily have passed for three travellers who perhaps knew each other slightly or even struck up acquaintance in the course of the journey.
The waitress brought them a plastic bowl of water to wash their hands and a saucer with caked soap-powder. It was clear the water had not been changed for quite a while and a greasy line of palmoil circled the bowl just above the murky water.
Chris to whom the water was first offered looked instinctively first at his palm and then at the water and shook his head. Emmanuel also declined. Braimoh, boldest of the group, asked the young lady to change the water, which immediately brought in the smiling-eyed proprietress who had been presiding from a distance.
“Change the water?” she laughed. “You people from the South! Do you know how much we pay for a tin now? One manilla fifty.”
“And the tankers have not come today,” chipped in the waitress still holding her bowl of dirty water.
“No,” said her mistress. “The tankers have not come. Those people you see over there are selling yesterday’s water at two manilla.” She pointed through the window to a man carrying across his shoulder like a see-saw a stout pole at each end of which was tied a four-gallon tin. There were two or three others like him manoeuvring their heavy and tricky burden expertly through the crowd.
A FEW KILOMETRES north of Agbata there was a fairly long bridge over a completely dry river-bed and beyond it a huge signboard saying: WELCOME TO SOUTH ABAZON. It was amazing, thought Chris, how provincial boundaries drawn by all accounts quite arbitrarily by the British fifty years ago and more sometimes coincided so completely with reality. Beyond that dried up river there was hardly a yard of transition; you drove straight into scrubland which two years without rain had virtually turned to desert.
The air current blowing into the bus seemed to be fanned from a furnace. The only green things around now were the formidably spiked cact
us serving as shelter around desolate clusters of huts and, once in a while in the dusty fields, a fat-bottomed baobab tree so strange in appearance that one could easily believe the story that elephants looking for water when they still roamed these parts would pierce the crusty bark of the baobab with their tusk and suck the juices stored in the years of rain by the tree inside its monumental bole.
At the provincial boundary Chris suffered a recurrence of sharp anxiety at the sudden sight of a vast deployment of police and troops larger than any they had encountered since leaving Bassa. But they took no interest whatsoever in the passengers, neither did they delay the driver who went down and across the road to see one of them. As he returned to resume his driving-seat he waved to them in what seemed to Chris like a very friendly goodbye. But no sooner had he driven clear of their road bar than he broke into loud and unrestrained complaints about their greed and finally called down the curse of fire to scorch their mothers’ bushes.
Security forces! Who or what were they securing? Perhaps they were posted there to prevent the hungry desert from taking its begging bowl inside the secure borders of the South.
As the bus plunged deeper into the burning desolation Chris reached into his bag and pulled out Ikem’s unsigned “Pillar of Fire: A hymn to the Sun,” and began to read it slowly with fresh eyes, lipping the words like an amazed learner in a literacy campaign class. Perhaps it was seeing the anthills in the scorched landscape that set him off revealing in details he had not before experienced how the searing accuracy of the poet’s eye was primed not on fancy but fact. And to think that this was not the real Abazon yet; that the real heart of the disaster must be at least another day’s journey ahead! The dust had turned ashen. A man on a donkey was overtaken by the bus, his face a perfect picture of a corpse that died in the harmattan.