… And now the times had come round again out of storyland. Perhaps not as bad as the first times, yet. But they could easily end worse. Why? Because today no one can rise and march south by starlight abandoning crippled kindred in the wild savannah and arrive stealthily at a tiny village and fall upon its inhabitants and slay them and take their land and say: I did it because death stared through my eye.
So they send instead a deputation of elders to the government who hold the yam today and hold the knife, to seek help of them.
After Agbata there were numerous empty seats in the bus. Braimoh moved down and sat directly in front of Chris who had been joined by Emmanuel since the girl had deserted him to sit with a fellow student-nurse.
“Young men are not what they used to be,” said Chris. “You mean you let a girl like that slip through your fingers on a bus excursion?”
“I did my best but she wouldn’t bite. And do you blame her seeing these rags I’m reduced to?” He made a mock gesture of contempt with his left hand taking in his entire person decked out in ill-fitting second-hand clothes. “Such a tramp! And on top of it all you should have heard the kind of pidgin I had to speak.”
“Poor fellow,” said Chris with a gleam in his eyes. “I am truly sorry for all this inconvenience.”
“I must confess I became so frustrated at one point I began asking her if she had ever heard of a certain President of the Students Union on the run.”
“You didn’t!”
“No. But I nearly did. It is not easy to lose a girl like that.”
“And under false pretences!”
“Imagine!”
“Sorry-o.”
“Actually she is the shyest thing I have ever met in all my life. I don’t think it was my clothes alone.”
“I shouldn’t have thought so either. Your sterling quality would shine through any rags.”
“Thanks! The real trouble was getting her to open her mouth. She spoke at the rate of one word per hour. And it was either yes or no.”
“How did you find out she was a student-nurse?”
“Na proper tug-of-war.”
“What’s she called?”
“Adamma. Her father is a Customs Officer in the far north.”
“A lot of information to piece together from yes and no.”
They laughed and fell into silence as if on some signal. They had each independently come to the same conclusion that though everything had gone reasonably well so far they must not push their luck by talking and laughing too much. It was in the ensuing reverie that Chris, gazing out into the empty landscape, had become aware of the anthills.
When he had read the prose-poem through and read the last paragraph or two over again he said quietly to Emmanuel: “You must read this,” and passed the paper to him.
It was Braimoh who first drew their attention to a large crowd on the road half-a-kilometre or so ahead. Almost simultaneously everybody in the bus seemed to have become aware of the spectacle so unusual and so visible in that flat, treeless country. Many of the passengers had lifted themselves to half-standing positions at their seats the better to see this strange sight. What could it be? A check-point? The driver slowed down to a wary pace. As the scene came closer, a few uniforms began to emerge out of the dusty haze. There were a few cars and trucks parked this side of the crowd and a bus that was heading South and perhaps other vehicles as well slowly became visible beyond.
The uniforms were greatly outnumbered by people in regular outfits, presumably passengers whose journey had been interrupted, and even by ragged peasants attracted from the arid lives of a few scattered hamlets of round huts dotting the landscape.
The bus continued its progress to this mystery but at a mere cautious crawl. A road accident? No! There was something discernible in the prancing about which did not suggest sorrow or anger but a strange kind of merry-making. And now there was no longer any doubt. Beer bottles could be seen in nearly all hands and the dancing—for no other name seemed better for this activity—was constantly accompanied by the throwing of the head backwards and the emptying of bottles direct into gullets without touching the lips.
The bus pulled up to the side. Some of the crowd were rushing towards it like a tipsy welcoming-party. But the pulling up of the bus and the sudden explosion inside it, like a hand-grenade thrown from the crowd, of the word COUP! came on top of each other. The bus was evacuated like a vessel on fire. The driver, unlike a good and honourable captain, shoved people aside to get to the ground first.
Chris plunged into the crowd looking for someone who might have coherent information. Ultimately he sighted the police sergeant and pulled him aside rather brusquely in his breathless eagerness. The fellow was pleased to oblige, a bottle in his right and a Mark IV rifle in his left.
“Na radio there talk am,” was how he began. There was an unsightly shack of cardboard and metal thrown together to provide occasional relief to the check-point crew from the sun’s onslaught and perhaps also a little privacy for negotiating difficult bribes from motorists. A radio set in there had apparently given the news.
“So at the same time we hear the news this lorry wey dem load beer full up come de pass. So we say na God send am. The driver talk say the beer no be him own, na government get am. So we say: very good. As Government done fall now, na who go drink the beer? So we self we de stand for sun here, no water to drink; na him God send us small beer to make our own cocktail party.”
His laughter was actually quite infectious and the little crowd that had quickly gathered around their story-teller nodding assent and swilling the beer at intervals, joined in the laughter. Even Chris had to laugh, but really as a bribe for getting more information, not from genuine amusement.
“Where is the radio?” he asked, thinking they must be putting out other announcements in the midst of martial music.
“They done thief-am. As we dey for road de drink a thief-man go inside carry the radio commot. This country na so so thief-man full am. But na me and them. They no know me? Before any vehicle can move out from here today I go search am well well and the stupid arm-robber wey hold my radio na him soul go rest in peace, with the President.”
“Did they say anything about the President?”
The sergeant looked at him suspiciously. “Why you de make all this cross-examination? Wetin concern poor man like you and President, eh? I say wetin concern vulture and barber?” He was clearly enjoying the attention. “Anyways, the President done disappear. They no fit find am again. They say unknown persons enter Palace and kidnap am. So make everybody de watch proper for this check-point.” He burst out into another peal of laughter taking his willing hearers. “This our country na waa! I never hear the likeness before. A whole President de miss; like old woman de waka for village talk say him goat de miss! This Africa na waa!”
“No be you tell whiteman make he commot?” asked somebody from the crowd. “Ehe, white man done go now, and hand over to President. Now that one done loss for inside bush. Wetin we go do again?”
“We go make another President. That one no hard,” said a third person.
“He no hard, eh? Next tomorrow they go tell you say your new President climb palm-tree and no fit come down again,” said the second man to a tremendous outburst of laughter. He was obviously a wit to reckon with, and knew it.
“So wetin we go do now?”
“Make every man, woman and child and even those them never born, make everybody collect twenty manilla each and bring to me and I go take am go England and negotiate with IMF to bring white man back to Kangan.”
Chris had detached himself from this bizarre group to look for Emmanuel.
“Can you make any sense of this?” he asked when he found him.
“Not yet, sir. Except it appears His Excellency was kidnapped last night and the Chief of Staff has sworn to find him but has meanwhile taken over the reins of government.”
“We must head back to Bassa. Right away. Where is Braimoh? Get our thin
gs out of the bus.” His obsessed seriousness was a rebuke to Emmanuel’s faint-hearted sarcasm and he went away to his assignment somewhat chastened.
Chris plunged into another section of the crowd which was fast degenerating into drunken mayhem. Bottles were smashed on the road after they were emptied and sometimes before, and more than a few unshod feet were already bleeding. Any promising informant he approached was too drunk and, what was more, critical of him for asking sober questions amounting almost to mental harassment of his victims.
“Go and have a drink,” one of them said to him, like a man who, before his present state, had been used to exercising authority.
“I have had a drink. Several drinks,” said Chris, sounding superior without perhaps intending to.
“If you have drunk… As I have drunk… why are you standing straight like that? Or is it my eyes.” The fellow’s head was going from side to side like an albino, though he was shiny-black like ebony.
“I am not standing straight,” said Chris, unaccountably mesmerized by this highly articulate drunk.
“No, it is not my eyes… You are not standing… I mean to say, you are standing as straight as a flag-pole. You get me? My difficulty then is: if as you say you drank as much beer as myself, why are you standing straight? Or put it another way. If two of us ate the same palm-oil chop, how come one of us, i.e. yourself, is passing black shit? That is what I want to know, mister. Two people ate palm-oil soup…”
“OK, we will talk about that later.”
“Later? Why? Procrastination is a lazy man’s apology.” Hiccup! “As my headmaster used to say.” Hiccup! “He loved big words; and something else he loved, I can tell you… His cane…”
“Thanks! See you,” said Chris wrenching himself away.
The girl’s desperate shriek rose high over the dense sprawling noises of the road party. The police sergeant was dragging her in the direction of a small cluster of round huts not far from the road and surrounded as was common in these parts by a fence of hideously-spiked cactus. He was pulling her by the wrists, his gun slung from the shoulder. A few of the passengers, mostly other women, were pleading and protesting timorously. But most of the men found it very funny indeed.
She threw herself down on her buttocks in desperation. But the sergeant would not let up. He dragged her along on the seat of her once neat blue dress through clumps of scorched tares and dangers of broken glass.
Chris bounded forward and held the man’s hand and ordered him to release the girl at once. As if that was not enough he said, “I will make a report about this to the Inspector-General of Police.”
“You go report me for where? You de craze! No be you de ask about President just now? If you no commot for my front now I go blow your head to Jericho, craze-man.”
“Na you de craze,” said Chris. “A police officer stealing a lorry-load of beer and then abducting a school girl! You are a disgrace to the force.”
The other said nothing more. He unslung his gun, cocked it, narrowed his eyes while confused voices went up all around some asking Chris to run, others the policeman to put the gun away. Chris stood his ground looking straight into the man’s face, daring him to shoot. And he did, point-blank into the chest presented to him.
“My friend, do you realize you have just shot the Commissioner for Information?” asked a man unsteady on his feet and shaking his head from side to side like an albino in bright sunshine.
Emmanuel and Braimoh, carrying the bags they had retrieved from the bus, arrived on the scene as Chris sank first to his knees in a grotesque supplicatory posture and then keeled over sideways before settling flat on his back. Emmanuel went down and knelt beside him and the girl knelt on the other side fumbling with the wounded man’s shirt-front to stop a big hole through which blood escaped in copious spasms.
“Please, sir, don’t go!” cried Emmanuel, tears pouring down his face. Chris shook his head and then seemed to gather all his strength to expel the agony on his twisted face and set a twilight smile on it. Through the smile he murmured words that sounded like The Last Grin… A violent cough throttled the rest. He shivered with his whole body and lay still.
The sergeant had dropped his gun and fled into the wild scrubland. Braimoh had raced after him past the clusters of huts and, a hundred yards or so beyond, had wrestled him to the ground. They rolled over and over sending up whirls of dust. But Braimoh was no match for him in size, strength or desperation. The crowd on the road saw him get up again and continue his run, unattended this time, into a red sunset.
18
BEATRICE HAD DECIDED on a sudden inspiration to hold a naming ceremony in her flat for Elewa’s baby-girl. She did not intend a traditional ceremony. Indeed except in name only she did not intend ceremony of any kind. It seemed to her unlikely from the look of things that she could face anything remotely resembling a ceremony for a long, long time.
But a baby had to have a name, and there seemed nothing particularly wrong in giving it one in the company of a few friends, or doing it on the seventh market as tradition prescribed. Every other detail, however, would fall into abeyance, for this was a baby born into deprivation—like most, of course; but unlike most it was not even blessed with an incurably optimistic sponsor ready to hold it up on its naming day and call it The-one-who-walks-into-abundance or The-one-who-comes-to-eat or suchlike and then blithely hand it back to its mother to begin a wretched trudge through life, a parody of its own name. No, this baby would not lie in cushioned safety from the daily stings of the little ants of the earth floor. Indeed it was already having to manage without one necessity even the poorest may take for granted—a father (even a scarecrow father would have sufficed) to hold it in his hands and pronounce its name on this twenty-eighth day of its life.
Beatrice had asked the same handful of friends who had kept together around her like stragglers from a massacred army. That she even managed this residual relationship was a measure of the change she had begun to undergo even before the violent events of the recent past; that she did it in virtual silence an eloquent tribute to the potency of lost causes.
In earlier times she would have responded to Chris’s death by retreating completely into herself, selecting as wild beasts often do before they die a dark, lonely corner of the forest, distrustful of the solace of their fellows. But the weeks of ill omen presaging the bloody events of November had already thrown her into a defensive pact with a small band of near-strangers that was to prove stronger than kindred or mere friendship. Like old kinships this one was pledged also on blood. It was not, however, blood flowing safe and inviolate in its veins but blood casually spilt and profaned.
In spite of her toughness Beatrice actually fared worse than Elewa in the first shock of bereavement. For weeks she sprawled in total devastation. Then one morning she rose up, as it were, and distanced herself from her thoughts. It was the morning of Elewa’s threatened miscarriage. From that day she had addressed herself to the well-being of the young woman through the remaining weeks to her confinement. When she first attempted during those weeks to resume contact with the desolation inside her heart she was surprised to find that she already felt stronger on her feet and clearer in the head.
She could now return less and less timidly to relive aspects of the nightmare and even begin to reassess her reflexes, feelings and thoughts. Was she right, for instance, to turn down the new Head of State’s special invitation to the state funeral he ordered for Chris? Did she hurt her duty to his memory more by keeping away than she honoured it by showing her mistrust of his enemies? Twenty-four hours after the coup d’état, before the news of Chris got to her, she had watched with utter revulsion a lachrymose Major-General Ahmed Lango suddenly surface and make his “pledge to the nation to bring the perpetrators of this heinous crime quickly to book.” Even the gullible people of Kangan, famous for dancing in the streets at every change of government, were asking where this loyal officer was hiding in the first twenty-four hours after his Commander w
as kidnapped from the Palace by “unknown persons,” tortured, shot in the head and buried under one foot of soil in the bush. But by the time Kangan was asking these questions Beatrice had heard the news of Chris’s murder and lost contact with everything else.
The news was brought to her by Captain Abdul Medani. He was in mufti and came in a taxi. But his face had become so deeply etched in Beatrice’s mind during the weeks he played the mystery voice that in spite of his dress and the dark glasses she had immediately recognized the officer who had led the search of her flat. And she had read his countenance and deciphered the disaster before he opened his mouth. He said he just wanted to be sure she did not hear it on the air, and left immediately. An hour later it was broadcast on the national radio. Later that evening Emmanuel and Braimoh arrived back.
In the weeks and months that followed, her flat became virtually the home of Emmanuel and Braimoh and the girl Adamma. The Captain also came quite frequently. Sometimes, especially at weekends, they would all be there together and discuss the deepening crisis in the country. At first Beatrice heard the voices and the arguments around her as though they came from an adjoining room behind a closed door. But slowly she began to pick out the words out of the muffled sounds, then snatches of sentences and finally even the occasional joke forcing a faint smile like a twitch on her slow-thawing face.
The door had slowly opened and the words and snatches of sentences coalesced into spirited conversations and even debates mostly between Emmanuel and Abdul. But although Beatrice did seem to hear what was said she still did not take part in the exchanges. She still steered her own thoughts as carefully as she could around them. But there were collisions nonetheless which could not but alter now and again, however slightly, the speed and drift of her own silent activity.
“… And what I want to know from you is how this latest blood-letting has helped Kangan in its historical march as you call it. The blood of His Former Excellency and the blood of his victims—if indeed they were his victims…”