The Power

  Tunde

  It wasn’t hard at first. He’d made friends enough to shelter him as he travelled first out through the city and satellite towns and then towards the mountains. He knows Bessapara and North Moldova; he’d travelled here, researching the story about Awadi-Atif a lifetime ago. He feels curiously safe here.

  And a regime cannot, in general, turn overnight from one thing to another. Bureaucracies are slow. People take their time. The old man must be kept on to show the new women how the paper mill is soused down, or how the stocktaking check on the flour order is made. All over the country, there are men still running their factories while the women mutter among themselves about the new laws and wonder when something will happen to enforce them. In his first weeks on the road, Tunde took photographs of the new ordinances, of the fights in the street, of the dead-eyed men imprisoned in their homes. His plan was to travel for a few weeks, and simply record what he saw. It would be the last chapter of the book that’s waiting for him backed up on USB sticks and in filled notebooks in Nina’s apartment in New York.

  He heard rumours that the most extreme events had been in the mountains. No one would say what they’d heard, not precisely. They talked grimly of backward country folk and of the darkness that had never quite receded there, not under any of a dozen different regimes and dictators.

  Peter, the waiter from Tatiana Moskalev’s party, had said, ‘They used to blind the girls. When the power first came, the men there, the warlords, blinded all the girls. That is what I heard. They put their eyes out with hot irons. So they could still be the bosses, you see?’

  ‘And now?’

  Peter shook his head. ‘Now we don’t go there.’

  So Tunde had decided, for want of another goal, to walk towards the mountains.

  In the eighth week it began to be bad. He arrived in a town by the edge of a great green-blue lake. He walked, hungry, through the streets on a Sunday morning until he came to a bakery with open doors, a fug of steam and yeast leaking deliciously into the street.

  He proffered some coins to the man behind the counter and pointed at some puffy white rolls cooling on a wire rack. The man made the accustomed ‘hands open like a book’ gesture to ask to see Tunde’s papers; this had been happening more frequently. Tunde showed his passport and his news-gathering credentials.

  The man leafed through the passport, looking, Tunde knew, for the official stamp declaring his guardian, who would then have co-signed a pass for him to be out shopping today. He went through each page carefully. Having conscientiously examined it, he made the ‘papers’ sign again, a little panic rising in his face. Tunde smiled and shrugged and tipped his head to one side.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, though there was no indication the man spoke any English. ‘It’s just some little rolls. These are all the papers I have, man.’

  Until now, this had been enough. Usually someone would smile at this point at the absurd foreign journalist or give a little lecture in broken English about how he must be properly certified next time, and Tunde would apologize and give his charming grin, and he would walk out of the store with his meal or supplies.

  This time the man behind the counter shook his head miserably again. He pointed towards a sign on the wall in Russian. Tunde translated it with the help of his phrasebook. It was, roughly: ‘Five thousand dollar fine for anyone found to have helped a man without papers.’

  Tunde shrugged and smiled and opened his palms to show them empty. He made a ‘looking-around’ gesture, cocking his hand over his eyes and miming a scouting of the horizon.

  ‘Who’s here to see? I won’t tell anyone.’

  The man shook his head. Clutched the counter, looked down at the backs of his hands. There, where his cuffs met his wrists, he was marked with long, whorled scars. Scars upon scars, older and newer. Fern-like and coiled. Where his neck pulled away from the shirt were the marks, too. He shook his head and stood and waited, looking down. Tunde grabbed his passport back from the counter and left. As he walked away, there were women standing in open doorways watching him go.

  Women and men who were willing to sell him food or fuel for his little camping stove became fewer and farther between. He started to develop a sense for those who might be friendly. Older men, sitting outside a house playing cards – they’d have something for him, might even find him a bed for the night. Young men tended to be too frightened. There was no point talking to women at all; even meeting their eyes felt too dangerous.

  When he walked past a group of women on the road – laughing and joking and making arcs against the sky – Tunde said to himself, I’m not here, I’m nothing, don’t notice me, you can’t see me, there’s nothing here to see.

  They called to him first in Romanian and then in English. He looked at the stones of the path. They shouted a few words after him, obscene and racist words, but let him go on.

  In his journal, he wrote: ‘For the first time today on the road I was afraid.’ He ran his fingers over the ink as it dried. The truth was easier there than here.

  Halfway through the tenth week came a bright morning, the sun breaking through the clouds, dragonflies darting and hovering over the pasture meadow. Tunde made his little calculation again in his head – enough energy bars in his pack to keep him going for a couple of weeks, enough film in his back-up camera, his phone and charger safe. He’d be in the mountains in a week, he’d record what he saw there for a week more, perhaps, and then he’d get the fuck out with this story. He was in this dream so securely that, at first, rounding the side of the hill, he did not see what the thing was tied to that post in the centre of the road.

  It was a man with long, dark hair hanging down over his face. He had been tied to the post by plastic cords at his wrists and ankles. His hands were pulled back, his shoulders strained, the wrists fastened behind him. His ankles were secured in front of him, the same cord run round the pole a dozen times. It had been hastily done by someone inexpert in ropes and knots. They had simply bound him tightly and left him there. There were the marks of pain across his body, livid and dark, blue and scarlet and black. Around his neck was a sign with a single word in Russian: slut. He had been dead for two or three days.

  Tunde photographed the body with great care. There is something beautiful in cruelty and something hateful in artful composition, and he wanted to express both these things. He took his time over it, and did not look around to scout his position or make sure he was not being observed from afar. Later, he couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. It was that evening that he first became aware that he was being followed.

  It was dusk, and though he had walked seven or eight miles on from the body, its lolling head, its dark tongue, were still in his mind. He walked in the dust at the side of the road, through densely clustered trees. The moon was rising, a yellow-clouded fingernail of light between the trees. He thought to himself from time to time, I could make camp here; come on, take out the bedroll. But his feet kept walking, to put another mile, another mile, another mile between him and the curtain of hair falling over the rotting face. The night-birds were calling. He looked out into the darkness of the wood and there, among the trees to his right, he saw a crackle of light.

  It was small but unmistakable; no one would take that particular thin, white, momentary filament for anything else. There was a woman out there, and she had made an arc between her palms. Tunde inhaled sharply.

  It could be anything. Someone starting a fire, lovers playing a game, anything. His feet started to walk more quickly. And then he saw it again, in front of him. A long, slow, deliberate crackle of light. Illuminating, this time, a dim face, long hair hanging down, the mouth a crooked smile. She was looking at him. Even in the dim light, even far off, he could see that.

  Don’t be afraid. The only way to defeat this is not to be afraid. But the animal part of himself was afraid. There is a part in each of us which holds fast to the old truth: either you are the hunter or you are the prey. Learn which you are. Act ac
cordingly. Your life depends upon it.

  She made her sparks fly up again in the blue-black darkness. She was closer than he’d thought. She made a noise. Low, croaking laughter. He thought, Oh god, she’s mad. And this was the worst of all. That he might be stalked here for no purpose, that he could die here with no reason.

  A twig broke close by his right foot. He did not know if it was her, or him. He ran. Sobbing, gulping, with the focus of an animal. Behind him, when he chanced a glance, she was running, too; the palms of her hands set the trees on fire, skittish flame along the dusty bark and into a few crisp leaves. He ran faster. If there was a thought in his head it was: there will be safety somewhere. If I keep going, there must be.

  And as he came to the top of the rising, curved hill path, he saw it: not even a mile away, a village with lit windows.

  He ran for the village. There, in the sodium lights, this terror would be bleached from his bones.

  He’d been thinking for a long time about how he’d end this. Since the third night, when his friends told him he had to leave, that the police were going door-to-door asking questions about any man who was not properly certified with an approved guardian. On that night, he’d said to himself: I can make this stop any time. He had his phone. All he had to do was charge it and send one email. Maybe to his editor at CNN and maybe copied to Nina. Tell them where he was. They would come and find him, and he would be a hero, reporting undercover, rescued.

  He thought, Now. Now is the time. This is it.

  He ran into the village. Some of the downstairs windows were still lit. There was the sound of radio or television from some of them. It was only just after nine. For a moment he thought of banging on the door, of saying: Please. Help. But the thought of the darkness that might be behind those lit windows kept him from asking. The night was filled with monsters now.

  On the side of a five-storey apartment building he saw a fire escape. He ran for it, began to climb. As he passed the third floor, he saw a dark room with three air conditioners piled on the floor. A store room. Empty, unused. He tried the lip of the window with the tips of his fingers. It opened. He tumbled himself into the musty, quiet space. He pulled the window closed. He groped in the dark until he found what he was looking for. An electrical socket. He plugged his phone in.

  The little two-note sound of it starting up was like the sound of his own key in the lock of his front door back at home in Lagos. There. It’s over now. The screen was bright. He pressed the warm light of it to his lips, inhaled. In his mind, he was home already and all the cars and trains and aeroplanes and lines and security that would be needed between here and there were imaginary and unimportant.

  He sent an email quickly: to Nina, and to Temi, and to three different editors he’d worked with recently. He told them where he was, that he was safe, that he needed them to contact the embassy to get him out.

  While he waited for the reply, he looked at the news. More and more ‘skirmishes’, without anyone being willing to call this an outright war. The price of oil on the up again. And there was Nina’s name, too, on an essay about what’s happening here, inside Bessapara. He smiled. Nina had only ever been here for a long weekend press junket a few months ago. What would she have to say about this place? And then, as he read, he frowned. Something felt familiar about her words.

  He was interrupted by the comforting, warm, musical ping of an email arriving.

  It was from one of the editors.

  It said, ‘I don’t find this funny. Tunde Edo was my friend. If you’ve hacked this account, we will find you, you sick fuck.’

  Another ping, another reply. Not dissimilar to the first.

  Tunde felt panic rising in his chest. He said to himself, It’ll be OK, there has been a misunderstanding, something has happened.

  He looked up his own name in the paper. There was an obituary. His obituary. It was long and full of slightly back-handed praise for his work in bringing news to a younger generation. The precise phrases implied very subtly that he’d made current affairs appear simple and trivial. There were a couple of minor mistakes. They named five famous women he’d influenced. The piece called him well-loved. It named his parents, his sister. He died, they recorded, in Bessapara; he had been, unfortunately, involved in a car crash which left his body a charred wreck, identifiable only by the name on his suitcase.

  Tunde started to breathe more quickly.

  He’d left the suitcase in the hotel room.

  Someone had taken the suitcase.

  He flipped back to Nina’s story about Bessapara. It was an extract from a longer book that she’d be bringing out later in the year with a major international publishing house. The newspaper called the book an instant classic. It was a global assessment of the Great Change, based on reporting and interviews from around the world. The stand-first compared the book to De Tocqueville, to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

  It was his essay. His photographs. Stills from his footage. His words and his ideas and his analysis. It was paragraphs from the book he’d left with Nina for safekeeping, along with parts of the journals he’d posted to her. Her name was on the photographs, and her name was on the writing. Tunde was mentioned nowhere. She had stolen it from him entirely.

  Tunde let out a noise he had not known was in him. A bellow from the back of the throat. The sound of grieving. Deeper than sobs.

  And then there was a sound from the corridor outside. A call. Then a shout. A woman’s voice.

  He didn’t know what she was shouting. To his exhausted, terrified brain, it sounded like, ‘He’s in here! Open this door!’

  He grabbed his bag, scrambled to his feet, pushed open the window and ran up on to the low, flat roof.

  From the street, he heard calls. If they weren’t looking for him before, they were looking at him now. Women in the street were pointing and shouting.

  He kept running. He would be all right. Across this roof. Jump to the next. Across that roof, down the fire escape. It was only when he was into the forest again that he realized he’d left his phone still plugged in, in that empty store room.

  When he remembered, and knew he could not go back for it, he thought his despair would destroy him. He climbed a tree, lashed himself to a branch and tried to sleep, thinking things might look better in the morning.

  That night, he thought he saw a ceremony in the woods.

  He thought that from his high perch in the tree; he was awakened by the sound of crackling flame and felt a momentary terror that the women had set the trees on fire again, that he would burn alive up here.

  He opened his eyes. The fire was not near at hand but a little way off, glimmering in a forest clearing. Around the fire there were figures dancing, men and women stripped naked and painted with the symbol of the eye in the centre of an outstretched palm, the lines of power emanating sinuously around their bodies.

  At times, one of the women would push a man to the ground with a blue-bright jolt, placing her hand on the painted symbol on his chest, both of them whooping and crying out as she showed her power on him. She would mount him then, her hand still in the centre of him, still holding him down, the frenzy of it showing on his face, urging her to hurt him again, harder, more.

  It had been months since Tunde had held a woman, or been held by one. He began to yearn to climb down from his perch, to walk into the centre of the rock-circle, to allow himself to be used as those men were used. He grew hard, watching. He rubbed himself absently through the fabric of his jeans.

  There was the sound of a great drumming. Can there have been drums? Would it not have attracted attention? It must have been a dream.

  Four young men crawled on all fours in front of a woman in a scarlet robe. Her eye sockets were empty, red and raw. There was a grandeur to her step, a certainty in her blindness. The other women prostrated themselves, kneeling and full body, before her.

  She began to speak, and they to respond.

  As in a dream, he understood their words, although h
is Romanian was not good and it was impossible they were speaking English. And yet he understood.

  She said, ‘Is one prepared?’

  They said, ‘Yes.’

  She said, ‘Bring him forward.’

  A young man walked into the centre of the circle. He wore a crown of branches in his hair and a white cloth tied at his waist. His face was peaceful. He was the willing sacrifice that would atone for all the others.

  She said, ‘You are weak and we are strong. You are the gift and we are the owners.

  ‘You are the victim and we are the victors. You are the slave and we are the masters.

  ‘You are the sacrifice and we are the recipients.

  ‘You are the son and we are the Mother.

  ‘Do you acknowledge that it is so?’

  All the men in the circle looked on eagerly.

  ‘Yes,’ they whispered. ‘Yes, yes, please, yes, now, yes.’

  And Tunde found himself muttering it with them. ‘Yes.’

  The young man held out his wrists to the blind woman, and she found them with one sure motion, gripping one in each hand.

  Tunde knew what was about to happen. Holding his camera, he could barely make the finger on the shutter-release press down. He wanted to see it happen.

  The blind woman at the fire was all the women who had nearly killed him, who could have killed him. She was Enuma and she was Nina and she was the woman on the rooftop in Delhi and she was his sister Temi and she was Noor and she was Tatiana Moskalev and she was the pregnant woman in the wreckage of the Arizona mall. The possibility has been pressing in on him all of these years, pushing down on his body, and he wanted it done now, wanted to see it done.