“You are welcome any time,” added Beatrice following Abdul’s breaking of ritual bounds.
“If something pursues us we shall escape but if we pursue something we shall catch it.”
“Isé!”
“As long as what we pursue does not belong to somebody else.”
“Isé!”
“Everybody’s life!”
“Isé!”
“The life of Bassa!”
“Isé!”
“The life of Kangan.”
“Isé!”
AFTER ELEWA’S MOTHER AND UNCLE had left with Aina and Braimoh in the old taxi, the party continued in the quiet and relaxed afterglow of the day’s ritual intensity. But it proved a day extraordinary in stamina and before long a new surge of passion was building up secretly below its placid expansiveness.
It began in ripples of simple reminiscence. Emmanuel, it was plain to see, was rather pleased with himself and so chose to congratulate someone else, Beatrice, on the evolution, as he called it, of the two-headed toast to people and ideas. She, on her part, was a captain whose leadership was sharpened more and more by sensitivity to the peculiar needs of her company.
“I must say I liked your spirited stand for ideas.”
“Mutual Admiration Club forming up again,” sang Abdul.
“And jealousy will get us nowhere,” sang Beatrice.
“But looking back on it,” continued Emmanuel passing up the bait of banter, “I think you taught me something very important by holding out for people. Do you remember the day you told me that Chris had taught me to be a gentleman?”
“It was only a joke.”
“Jokes are serious,” said Abdul impishly.
“Yes they are… That day and again today you were making me aware of my debt to Chris. I don’t know why I never thought of it before but the greatest thing he taught me was seeing the way he died.”
The jesting mood died instantly in the air, folded its wings and fell like a stone; the tributary conversations dried up.
“I was kneeling on the road at his side weeping uselessly. She,” he nodded his head in Adamma’s direction, “was trying to do something. Then I said something idiotic like Don’t go, don’t leave us please. And, I can’t describe it, that effort—you could touch it almost—to dismiss pain from his face and summon a smile and then crack a joke. He called it The Last Grin.”
Beatrice started in her seat.
“Yes I remember,” said silent Adamma. “The last green. But he did not finish it.”
Beatrice rushed away into her bedroom. Elewa followed after her. While they were away nothing more was said. After a few minutes Elewa came back.
“Is she all right?” asked Abdul a little ahead of other inquirers.
“No trouble. To cry small no be bad thing. BB no be like me wey de cry every day like baby wey him mother die.”
“Madam too strong,” said Agatha. “To strong too much no de good for woman.”
“E no good for anybody whether na man-o or na woman-o, na the same thing,” said Elewa. “E good make person cry small… I been try to stop am, I try sotay then I come say no, make you lef am.”
“WHY ARE YOU all sitting in darkness?” she said turning the lights on as she walked back into the room almost half an hour after she had left it. She spoke with great calmness in her voice. She had made up her face, and even tried on a smile as she resumed her seat. Then she said:
“I am very sorry.”
“Well, I am sorry to have raised that matter today. I didn’t…”
“No no no, Emmanuel. I am happy you raised it. In fact you can’t know how grateful I feel. I can tell you I am happier now, much happier than I have been since that day.” She said no more.
Perhaps in spite of this composure she could not continue.
To fill the aching void, or perhaps he was already powerless in the grip of a gathering underflow, Emmanuel began again:
“You see I have been present only at two deaths…”
“Make you put that your useless story for inside your pocket,” ordered Elewa. “Why you de look for trouble so? Abi the one you done cause no belleful you?”
“Leave the young man alone. Emmanuel, please continue.”
“The first death I witnessed was my father and then Chris. Without Chris I could not have known that it was possible to die with dignity.”
“Your father didn’t die with dignity?” asked Abdul quizzically.
“No, he didn’t. Though he was an old man compared to Chris, he had not learnt how to die. He snapped at people; he even cried. He was frightened, scared to death. He ran from one doctor to another and when he had run through them all he took up prayer-houses. He had cancer of the prostate. Every day some vulture would descend on us from nowhere with the story of a prophet or prophetess in some outlandish village and my father would drag my poor mother there the next morning. It was a terrible relief when he died, I am ashamed to admit… But look at Chris, a young man with all his life still in front of him and yet he was able to look death in the eyes and smile and make a joke. It was too wonderful…”
“You don’t know why I went in to cry… That joke was a coded message to me, to us,” said Beatrice, to everyone’s surprise. “By the way, Adamma heard it better. What he was trying to say was The last green. It was a private joke of ours. The last green bottle. It was a terrible, bitter joke. He was laughing at himself. That was the great thing, by the way, about those two, Chris and Ikem. They could laugh at themselves and often did. Not so the pompous asses that have taken over.”
“Say that again!” said Emmanuel.
“You know why I cried? Chris was only just beginning to understand the lesson of that bitter joke. The bottles are up there on the wall hanging by a hair’s breadth, yet looking down pompously on the world. Chris was sending us a message to beware. This world belongs to the people of the world not to any little caucus, no matter how talented…”
“And particularly absurd when it is not even talented,” said Abdul.
“It was the same message Elewa’s uncle was drumming out this afternoon, wasn’t it? On his own crazy drum of course. Chris, in spite of his brilliance, was just beginning to be vaguely aware of people like that old man. Remember his prayer? He had never been inside a whiteman house like this before, may it not be his last.”
“And we said Isé!” said Abdul.
“We did. It was a pledge. It had better be better than some pledges we have heard lately.”
“Isé!!”
At last the prodigious passions of that extraordinary day seemed at an end. Silence descended as completely on the party indoors as had darkness outside. Ama whom Beatrice nicknamed Greedymouth having drunk both from the bottle and from Elewa’s breast, pendant like a gorgeous ripe papaya on the tree, was sleeping quietly in her cot.
No one spoke or stirred. No one sought another’s eyes. Beatrice sat erect, her arms folded across her chest…
Then at last, like one just returned from a distant journey of the mind bearing a treasure in her eyes she murmured, to a welcoming party? merely to herself? Beautiful! And she said it a second time even more softly: Beautiful!
The rest had now turned their faces on her. She alone gazed still at something remote—a third party invisible to the rest, a presence to whom she had spoken her quiet apostrophe?
The change in her when it came was sudden. A deep breath audible through the room and a melting down of the statuesque told of her return…
“I can’t thank you enough, Emmanuel, for being there and bringing back the message. And you too, of course, Adamma.” She looked at each in turn with a strained smile on her countenance. “Truth is beauty, isn’t it? It must be you know to make someone dying in that pain, to make him… smile. He sees it and it is… How can I say it?… it is unbearably, yes unbearably beautiful. That’s it! Like Kunene’s Emperor Shaka, the spears of his assailants raining down on him. But he realized the truth at that moment, we’re told, and
died smiling… Oh my Chris!”
Two lines of tears coursed down under her eyes but she did not bother to wipe them…
“BB, weting be dis now?” Elewa remonstrated, showing her two palms of innocence to the powers above. “Even myself I no de cry like dat! What kind trouble you wan begin cause now? I beg-o. Hmm!”
About the Author
Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930. He was raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the first centers of Anglican missionary work in Eastern Nigeria, and is a graduate of University College, Ibadan.
His early career in radio ended abruptly in 1966, when he left his post as Director of External Broadcasting in Nigeria during the national upheaval that led to the Biafran War. Mr. Achebe joined the Biafran Ministry of Information and represented Biafra on various diplomatic and fund-raising missions. He was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and began lecturing widely abroad.
From 1972 to 1976, and again in 1987 to 1988, Mr. Achebe was a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and also for one year at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.
Characterized by the New York Times Magazine as “one of Nigeria’s most gifted writers,” Chinua Achebe has published novels, short stories, essays, and children’s books. His volume of poetry, Christmas in Biafra, written during the Biafran War, was the joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Of his novels, Arrow of God is winner of the New Statesman-Jock Campbell Award, and Anthills of the Savannah was a finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize in England.
Mr. Achebe has received numerous honors from around the world, including the Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as eleven honorary doctorates from universities in England, Scotland, the United States, Canada, and Nigeria. He is also the recipient of Nigeria’s highest award for intellectual achievement, the Nigerian National Merit Award. In 2007, he won the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction.
Mr. Achebe lives with his wife in Annandale, New York, where they both teach at Bard College. They have four children.
Copyright © 1987 Chinua Achebe
Anchor Canada edition published 2010
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eISBN: 978-0-385-66836-1
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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