by Ben Okri
‘Listen, my friend,’ Mr Babakoko said, ‘you are young and I understand what you need. Just come out straight with me and don’t waste my time. Your friends are straight with me, your manager is straight with me. They get what they want and so do I. Everyone is happy. Fall for me, I fall for you – that’s the game. Don’t be shy about it.’
‘About what?’
‘Tell me what you want and arrange my supplies quickly. Your queue is too long. I have five other companies to get to and I can’t spend all day here.’
There was a moment’s embarrassment. Then Mr Babakoko, drawing up his agbada sleeves, dug his hands into the folds of his voluminous garment and began to struggle with one of his hidden pockets.
‘You are making a mistake,’ Omovo said, moving towards the office.
Mr Babakoko found what he was looking for and, running alongside Omovo, began to peel off notes from the bundle he had in his hand. It seemed like a substantial sum. He attempted to pass it into Omovo’s hand. But Omovo rejected it. All this happened in the corridor, in full view of workers who passed by them.
‘I said that you are making a mistake,’ Omovo said again, stopping to make his point decisively.
‘Don’t be a fool, young man. Take my offer and do my business quick.’
‘You’ll have to wait your turn.’
Mr Babakoko peeled off some more notes. Omovo had a sudden desire to knock the bundle out of his hands. Instead he turned, said something incoherent and insulting, and pushed on. Mr Babakoko caught up with him again. The money had disappeared. He stopped Omovo and with a demonic expression on his swarthy face said: ‘The world is bigger than you. In this place money does all the talking. I feel sorry for you. Very sorry.’
Then he hurried off angrily down the corridor, his agbada fluttering about him like obscene wings.
Omovo watched him go. He remembered what the men of his compound had said about the massive can of worms. He thought about the entanglement of bureaucracy and corruption that had spread throughout society. He thought about the older generation, how they had squandered and stolen much of the country’s resources, eaten up its future, weakened its potential, enriched themselves, got fat, created chaos everywhere, poisoned the next generation, and spread rashes of hunger through the land.
He thought about all these things, and about his confiscated painting, as he stood at one of the large windows of the corridor. The windowpane was very clean and he looked out into the courtyard. The concrete floor was streaked with light and the factory buildings were painted yellow. He stared at hulks of machinery and at the workers in greasy overalls without seeing them. He could feel the sweat all over his body. He felt his face lean, his head bony. He felt exhausted and realised that he was trembling slightly. He made his way up the corridor, away from the office, with the vaguest idea of his destination. He felt fairly certain, however, that trouble was gathering over his head.
3
‘Where can we talk?’ Joe said to him, at the accounts department.
‘Anywhere. Here.’
Joe looked around. ‘It’s not the kind of thing to say anywhere. And certainly not here.’
‘The warehouse then.’
‘Fine.’
‘But be quick about it or the manager will say I’m loitering again.’
Joe was one of the few people in the company whom Omovo liked. He was tall, had a moustache, dressed brightly, looked sharp, modelled himself on film stars, dreamt of going to America, and was easy-going. He used to be in the chemicals department before being promoted. He had joined the company a few months before Omovo.
They went to the warehouse and stood like conspirators behind a stack of chemicals. The smell of all the different chemicals was dense and pungent. Omovo found it difficult to breathe. And when he did the pungencies burnt his nostrils and shocked his brain. The heat in the warehouse was incredible. Green mists hung in far corners and it was as if the sacks, the crates, and the walls were giving off their acrid essences of boiling air. Strange liquids coagulated on the floor. Powders and granules had spilled out of their greasy sacks and changed colours as if their inorganic natures were bursting into flower.
‘What did you want to say to me?’
‘Take it easy.’
‘I am.’
‘How long have you been with the company?’
‘Six months.’
‘How much do you earn?’
Omovo looked at him.
‘Don’t think I don’t know. I work in accounts, remember.’
‘A hundred Naira a month.’
Joe fingered his fashionable tie. ‘Only?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you been confirmed?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I might be. This month.’
Joe laughed strangely. ‘How much overtime do you do?’
‘Depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On if it’s compulsory. Left to myself I don’t care much for overtime.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’d rather go home and paint.’
‘Sure. But does your salary last you until the end of the month? That is after feeding yourself, transport, tax, the national provident fund, the weekend fun, and, of course, things for your painting?’
‘I manage somehow.’
‘Do you have old people in the family?’
‘Joe, where are all these questions leading? You sound like the inquisition.’
Joe smiled, and then lowered his head. ‘I hear things. People talk. They whisper. They say things when you go past. Some people don’t like you.’
‘People don’t have to like me.’
‘Sure. But they say you spoil their “business”. They say you are too proud.’
‘I do my job and go home and paint.’
‘Sure. But that’s why you’re a fool.’
‘Take it easy, Joe.’
‘You think you’re smarter than everybody, don’t you?’
‘I’m balder than everybody.’
‘You think not taking a little harmless bribe makes you special, eh?’
‘No.’
‘Listen. I’m telling you this for your own good. Your boss doesn’t like you.’
‘I know.’
‘I overheard him talking about you in the canteen.’
‘What were you doing in the senior staff canteen?’
‘I have my plans.’
‘Sure.’
‘Your colleagues don’t like you either.’
‘I know.’
‘You keep too much to yourself.’
‘I’m left out.’
‘You don’t give people a chance to get to know you.’
‘I try.’
‘The job you do is important.’
‘Is it?’
‘Of course. That’s why when you were interviewed for the job the manager asked you if you would be co-operative. You said yes, didn’t you?’
‘I had to. I didn’t know it also meant taking bribes. Besides, how do you know what went on in my interview?’
‘I have my ways.’
Omovo looked at him again and saw him differently.
‘Listen. All of us went through that. You have to co-operate. Look at your mates. Go and see Johnson’s place. It’s in Ajegunle, but it is virtually a palace. Mark you, he’s a clerk like you. Or notice how well Jack dresses. Or look at Simon. You think he is a joker, don’t you? But he’s building a mansion in his village, and planning to buy a car. Now look at you.’
It was Omovo’s turn to smile. Joe looked him over with vague, if affectionate, disdain.
‘Your clothes are in bad shape. Cleaners and messengers look better than you. And to make matters worse you went and shaved your hair when there is no death in the family. Do you belong to a secret society?’
‘Sure.’
Joe flashed him a glance and decided he was joking. He continued. ‘So, like I was saying. How do you think peopl
e make it in the company when the salary is so wretched?’
‘Hard work, tailored spending. I don’t know.’
‘Look man, it doesn’t mean anything to take a little bribe. It won’t stop you being the person you are. It doesn’t stop Chako from being a fervent Christian, does it?’
‘Doesn’t seem to.’
‘If you don’t want to do it then at least don’t make it difficult for others. Don’t block people’s way. The life is hard enough as it is.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘The right hand washes the left. The left hand washes the right. Both hands are clean.’
‘You’re a philosopher.’
‘I heard Babakoko complaining bitterly about you. He said you insulted him.’
Omovo began walking away. He walked over a burst sack of yellow granules.
‘Omovo, I haven’t finished.’
Omovo went out into the fiery glare of the sunlight. He went past the stacks of alloprene, the yellow liquid-chlorine drums, past the noisy machines, and nodded at the drivers who were arguing in a truck. The heat was merciless. The sunglare crowded out his thoughts, deadened his pores, saturated his clothes with sweat. The multiple lights flashed at him from all the metal and the windscreens. He brought out his handkerchief and wiped his face. Joe caught up with him.
‘Omovo, don’t be a fool. As a friend, I am the only one who can tell you these things.’
‘Thanks for telling me.’ Omovo stopped to wash his face under the tap outside the canteen.
‘Listen man, you are not indispensable in this company.’
‘Nobody is.’
‘You are a nothing.’
‘At least I can’t get worse.’
‘If you leave nobody will notice, nobody will feel it.’
‘You care too much about what people think.’
‘Sure. But you are unimportant. They can spit you out just like that.’
‘Leave me alone, Joe.’
‘You’re nobody. They can just spit you out.’
‘Leave me in peace.’
Omovo bent down, threw his tie over his shoulder, and splashed water on his face. The water was cool at first and then it became lukewarm. Joe sucked his teeth in exasperation and contempt. He made a gesture which Omovo didn’t quite catch. After a while Omovo heard his shoes grating on the cement floor in a supposedly significant exit.
When Omovo got to the office the supervisor said: ‘Why haven’t you been attending to all these customers who are waiting, eh? Have you no pity? They have been sitting here all morning.’
Omovo said nothing.
‘I’ve seen you loitering about in the warehouse, chatting with Joe. Just watch it-o! So please attend to the customers now.’
Chako said: ‘Omovo, the manager wants to see you.’
The supervisor said: ‘Attend to these tired customers.’
Simon said: ‘Omovo, take these papers to accounts.’
Omovo stood bewildered.
The phone rang and Simon picked up the receiver.
‘Hello. Ah, na you. Okay. I’m sorry. Omovo? Okay. He will do it soonest.’ Simon looked up. ‘Well, painter, our boss in the other office wants you to make him some coffee.’
Omovo stared at Simon. He knew that when one request for coffee was made, others would follow till he had made cups for the entire office and even the customers. He said: ‘It’s break time.’
‘So what?’ came Simon.
‘I’m not doing anything.’
Chako shouted from across the office: ‘Omovo, the manager wants to see you now!’
The supervisor, banging on the table, said: ‘Won’t you attend to the customers?’
‘What about the coffee?’ Simon demanded.
Omovo went to his table. He felt himself trembling slightly under the attack of the conflicting orders. He felt the sweat running down his back. The air conditioner droned. He sat. He thought about the absorption of working, the curious pleasure of losing yourself in business. He also thought about how insidious, how deadening it was to work at something you found neither interesting nor creative. After a moment he got up, brushed past Chako, and knocked on the manager’s door.
The manager harangued him. Omovo received his monologue calmly. The manager, sipping his coffee and not looking at Omovo, kept rambling, kept waving his hand in the air. Omovo noticed his gold wrist watch. The manager said he wanted the department to achieve the highest sales figures of the season. He warned Omovo against insulting important customers; they were the backbone of the business, and the company worked by their consent.
‘I don’t want anyone to spoil this year for me, you hear?’
Omovo nodded.
‘Have you taken in what I said?’
‘Completely.’
The manager studied him. With a doubtful expression on his face, he waved Omovo out of the office.
During the office break everyone tried to pressure Omovo to go buy meat pies from the Kingsway. He absolutely refused. He sat at his desk, brought out his drawing pad, and started a series of sketches. He began with attempting to draw a section of the office. Simon, Chako, and the supervisor sat round a table deeply involved in one of their interminable discussions about pay increases. He decided to draw them. But he ended up with a set of caricatures. He made Simon’s face look like a fractured calabash. He exaggerated his wrinkles as if life had not exaggerated them enough. He drew Chako as a mean-faced old man and gave him a comically long nose. And then he depicted the supervisor as a frustrated man and made his wiry beard into something resembling barbed wire and his ears into coins.
When he finished the sketches he began to laugh. His colleagues looked at him without saying a word. He stopped laughing and closed his drawing pad. They went on with their secretive discussions about pay increases, their plans, and their overtime.
Then, remembering Da Vinci’s face-studies, his masterly drawings of old men, of powerful men, Omovo decided that it was too easy to satirise the powerless and the weak, to laugh at them rather than face them, ghetto-dwellers that they were, each face imprinted with its own hardship. He decided to draw his colleagues as they were, to test the edges of his craft by drawing what he saw without being sidetracked by his ego, by his ideas and opinions, his dislikes, and to do this within a limited time. He found their faces difficult to capture and found immense depths of shadows, of tenderness, that he hadn’t noticed before. He felt a little ashamed.
Drawing made him think. He thought about Joe, about his lost drawing, his seized painting, about Ifeyiwa. The cold office made him think of a second-rate film he had seen some time ago. The film was about a kind of Shangri-la. Images from paintings he had done, canvases that he had rejected, rose to his mind. He remembered a song from the film. The words were idealistic but at that moment they found sympathy in him: For your reflections reflect on the things you do. And the things you do reflect on you –
He shut his eyes and began to meditate. He remembered another song from the film: There is a lost horizon waiting to be found...
He pondered the words, slipping deeper into a curious serenity. The words grew in his mind. They turned into other words and gave way to images, states of being, and landscapes of possibilities. The strangest flowers opened up to him. As the sound of his colleagues faded, and the drone of the air conditioner receded, he experienced a sudden sufflation, an expansion of being, and he had a momentary wordless sensation of the underlying unity of all things.
Chako, blowing his nose, disturbed Omovo’s meditation. He opened his eyes, shut them again, and heard, as clearly as if it had come from behind him, his brother reciting the words from his own poem:
But I found sketches on the sand
While voices in the wind
Chanted the code of secret ways
Through the boundless seas.
Omovo’s heart palpitated with a wild joy. He felt his being include all that was hidden and radiant in the world. The feeling came unexpect
edly, like a revelation. Then just as unexpectedly his meditation changed. He remembered the girl in the park. He imagined himself as the victim, imagined himself dead, his organ defiled, lying dead and unidentified in a park. Omovo felt as if he were trapped in a hole, in a well, in a pocket of terror lurking in his mind. He couldn’t get out. Then suddenly in the darkness he had another vision. He saw the nation in riot, in the grip and fever of revolution. He saw flames everywhere, saw structures tumbling down, ghettoes burning, towers crumbling, saw people in masses casting about, wailing about their burdens, saw children weeping, women with charred hair, ashes on their faces. He felt the land overwhelmed with desperation, as if living were a kind of inferno, a kind of hell, life as the purgatory of the poor. When he eventually escaped the vision and surfaced to the reality of his office environment he felt tears in his eyes. He brushed them off and carried on with work.
Weighed down with his vision he found the second half of the day’s work harder than usual. He felt his vitality being sapped out of him in trivial chores. He also felt joyful to be alive and working in the world, but this didn’t stop him being a little resentful of the moments when he felt the overwhelming need to paint, to draw, wasted in performing tasks anyone could do.
Towards the closing time, however, he could not help noticing a young man sitting near Chako’s desk. Chako and the others were a little deferential towards him. Omovo later discovered that he was the manager’s nephew who had failed his school certificate exams. He was seeking a job in the company. As Omovo went up and down the corridors, sweating under the weight of numerous chores, he could not help feeling that someone’s job in the company was about to die.
4
The day’s work ended and Omovo went home. The others stayed behind for overtime. They mostly did their own private business. As always Omovo found the struggle to get home worse than that of getting to work. The exhaustion, the heat, the frustrations and attritions of work made people that bit more ferocious.