by Wole Soyinka
“I don’t know much about monkey lore. Are these mini-Tarzans pursuing us supposed to be lucky?”
“I’d like to take a pot-shot at the blasted chatterers” Zaccheus replied. “Just look at those vile bottoms. And who the hell are they baring their stinking gums at anyway? I once went to play at an army camp and I stumbled into their shower-room where the recruits were being de-loused. I tell you if these blasted monkeys knew how closely they resembled those bald-headed bare-arsed shit-scared recruits they wouldn’t be so noisy.”
* * *
—
to damn: read the asymmetric lettering.
The board was nailed to a tree, an arrow by the same amateur effort pointed like a barbed monkey tail along a deep furrowed road, two deep tracks and a middle weed-covered hump.
Ofeyi braked, reversed and re-read the sign. “Must mean Dam. I thought we were close to the Shage project.”
“Do we want to see it?” Zaccheus’ voice was justifiably querulous.
“It may clean my mouth completely of that last encounter.”
“I doubt any work is being done at the moment.”
“No. But the works will be there. I only want to see something our men from Aiyéró have helped build in Cross-river, something to reassure me that all that is happening now cannot add up to zero.”
The monkeys seeing a sudden erratic motion of the car cancelled their escort service, wheeled about and vanished into the forest, dispensing bare-gummed maledictions to the last.
The high-wheel base of earth-removers had created the hump; it threatened to suspend the car and leave the wheels dangling. Ofeyi took a set of wheels onto the hump and the other rode on the shoulder. The forest closed about them, ominously still and silent. Zaccheus voiced his fears.
“Listen man, suppose there are some of these wild villagers about?”
“We are not recognizably from the scapegoat town” Ofeyi assured him.
“But how will they know that?”
“The cicatrice on your face. Why else do you think I reconciled myself to your coming with me. Those horror scars have become our protective talisman. We can move at will.”
Zaccheus thought over this for a long while. “Look, I agree it all sounds okay to you. Only as I keep telling you…”
“Don’t worry. I don’t take foolish risks. Before you made your way back I had already worked it out. If you hadn’t showed up I was going to come anyway, taking a driver with huge tribal marks.”
Zaccheus resigned himself to Fate. “All I know is the scapeclan has expanded to cover just about everyone who doesn’t speak their language. Don’t tell me in this wild outpost…”
“It is not a wild outpost Zaccheus. This is the one place the animals could not touch because the union was strong. They had a meeting here and they decided to suspend work at the first sign of victimization.”
Zaccheus’ face grew rounder with suspicion. “What are you keeping from me man? How come you know so much?”
“I don’t know all that much Zack. Only that we did manage some work before the bloated Corpse exploded. New projects like the Shage Dam meant that we could start with newly created working communities. New affinities, working-class kinships as opposed to the tribal. We killed the atavistic instinct once and for all in new ventures like Shage.” He saw Zaccheus’ bewildered gaze, and he knew he was about to resume the old suspicions. “You helped too.”
Zaccheus exploded. “Leave me out of it. I knew nothing of it and I don’t want to know.”
“Well you did suspect. And more than once. But you helped. Remember when Iriyise danced here? Look at it, here in this forest isolation a new tribe, the working tribe was created, far from the poisonous tentacles of those fogies of clannishness tribal power. Do you see how it was possible to create new entities here which not even the divisive greed of the cities could penetrate?”
Zaccheus shuddered and wound up the windows. “Just the same, I can’t help feeling spooked. I’m not into this thing so I can only tell you I don’t like the scene. Let’s go back before it gets dark or we get trapped.”
Ofeyi looked at him and conceded at last the legitimacy of his fears. “All right, we won’t stop. I shall only drive round the site and I’ll leave the engine running. All I need is a little reassurance that we did not totally fail. Before we get into Kuntua and I lose my faith to the rampant travesties.”
Half a mile before they came on the site Zaccheus said, “I know now why it feels so spooky. There isn’t a living soul within miles.”
“That’s what I keep telling you. The site is abandoned.”
“Then why are the monkeys so damned free of the place? They wouldn’t have spread so far along the main road if the tractors and things stopped only recently.”
Ofeyi explained it patiently. “Listen Zaccheus. They stopped work here days before the troubles began. The Cross-river locals among the workers had been brought into the Cartel plans and they reported it to the Aiyéró leaders. One of our converts was actually in the Zaki’s retinue. But at the time they all thought it was simply an attempt to break their solidarity. The men of Aiyéró decided to stop work so as to anticipate the Cartel’s move. When the locals brought further warnings they made the entire works close down. They all held a meeting and decided to go home. That was two weeks at least before the Cartel turned their jackals loose. Of course the site is deserted!”
They broke into clear ground, nearly plunging through the banks of a vast artificial lake as the road curved sharply along its banks. Above it hovered a low evening mist, pierced by the arm of a single crane. A dangling rope of corded steel with a massive hook at the end seemed to fish in the white, suspended veil.
“It’s a dead place Ofe. Where is all that fog come from?”
“Must be something to do with the closed lake and the steamy forest surrounding it.”
“Haven’t seen anything like it since some impresario took my old band for a Christmas–New Year tour of the Scottish Wilds. Do you know the Fifth of Fourth or some funny name like that? They were building a bridge there at the time. That crane reminds me of it. The bridge stopped in the middle of the whole wide fifth or whichever they said it was and there was this crane hanging over the rough end of the bridge dangling into nowhere. You know the place?”
Ofeyi nodded. “That’s a coincidence. I often stood at the top of a hill overlooking the river. That was when the Corpse packed me off on that tour. Ran into a girl, the one I told you about. We motored around a bit and visited the place. Firth of Forth, if you are interested in the real name.”
“Well at least there were cars roaring back and forth on the nearby roads and lots of kilts and bagpipes. I don’t hear nothing but silence here so why don’t we just head out and find people of our own kind.”
“I always thought” Ofeyi commented, “what a pity if the bridge was ever completed. It was perfect as it was, dangling in nowhere. Those painters and musicians who left some works unfinished, I suspect they did it deliberately.”
“My grandfather would rush you to the medicine-man if he heard that kin’ talk from you.”
“It’s quite true, believe me.”
He broke off abruptly, hesitant as he opened the door. His eyes turned towards an incongruous pockmark on the surface of the lake. Stepping out, the stench was first to hit him, a wet slap of putrefaction in the face. Suspicious now he climbed up on a sandbank and stared.
From that height the even mist was shredded, he now perceived, in a hundred places, opening patches of the lake to light, to a display of floating bodies so still that they seemed anchored. There was the marvel, although the bodies were swelled and the faces decomposed there hung about the scene a feeling of great repose. Perhaps the shroud of miasma dulled all sense of horror, or the abnormal stillness of giant machinery made it all a dream, a waxwork display of shapes,
inflated rubber forms on rafts in motionless water, perhaps it all seemed part of the churned up earth, part of the clay and humus matrix from which steel hands would later mould new living forms.
I am lying to myself again he said, seeking barren consolation.
But it seemed vital now, indeed it seemed everything, to know, definitively, if the Cross-river voices that had assured him of their safety had been nothing more than a hoax, if the same voices had lured the victims back to work to await destruction. Unless of course they had been slaughtered in the safety of the new village and brought back, in a gesture of cynicism and contempt, to the lasting monument they had sought to build. Desperately he hoped that the Cross-river comrades were themselves part of the grotesquerie on the lake surface. Great though that loss would be, it was less than the total erasure of the essence of the idea. There was however no way of finding out.
The crane with its low hook seemed poised to fish out the recumbent figures. Ofeyi followed the line of cord to the derrick limb, to its pivot on the roof of a control cabin, down down to its mud-poulticed caterpillar wheels. Concrete mixer cauldrons with their dirt-caked smoke stack…he stopped. It was becoming a habit, running lines in his head to stop the negative flow of implications from stark reality.
Ranged in clearings among the trees—and he recalled with a sense of unreality that Iriyise had danced for the workers in one of these clearings, that the villagers had hung from the trees and applauded in this wilderness—the machinery lay deadly still, their raucous revolutions silenced by mud and rust. Brown claws, dead weights, slack iron jaws of monsters, caterpillar treads had churned and bucked through slag and swamp, angry rhinoceroses charging at prides of the forest, bringing them crashing down one after the other. Always they left the earth a little more naked, a little more exposed than before. The hope was that something took their place, and he meant something beyond the concrete structures. The silence erupted in his ears with the sounds of those iron mastodons in motion, and the army of rubber boots trampling earth into submission, the clangs of picks and shovels, blackskin, whiteskin, red and sweatskin, of levers, bolts and strains, a luscious mudbath for the flesh and metal bestiary to tear up earth and throw it back in stronger, fructifying forms. Underneath his feet sank the inchoate gurgle of electric power….
But all around his immediate presence there was silence. Rust lay on the idle tools, mud had usurped the marked-out line of sluices beneath the artificial lake.
It all remained unfinished, and not sublime. Again, not for the first time in his knowledge the wrong sluices had been opened. It seemed that few enough hands sought the sluice gates of light and life, of truly making grow, turning moist and live. He turned away from this new offering to rejection and hate and descended the earthbank. He wondered now if he had in any case been standing on a hasty burial mound; the miasma which hung over the lake now seemed to seep from a source of hidden putrefaction.
Zaccheus held the car door open. Only then was he aware that he had also left the car and stood beside him on the mound. They drove off wordlessly.
Through his clothes he felt a contagion, as if the fumes had seeped through and had begun to spread a filmy hand over his skin. That, and the silenced sluices lifted his rage suddenly beyond the immediate, confronting the old man of Aiyéró with a rage that dared him to prove that his microcosm held the secret of a living harmony, that when his fingers reached to let moist sluices free onto the land, they overrode fortuitous idiocies of the new land spawns, the bureaucrats, the marionettes of power, soldiers and politicians, the technocrats and currency expounders. Again and again he pitted the mangled wrecks, the buried foetuses of still-forged entities, mothered and fostered in the humanistic will, pitted even their desecration in time against such self-sufficiencies as esoteric hinterlands…the sum was a slight memento, a tracing before his eyes which read: Iriyise danced here.
* * *
—
The trees began to dwindle fast, the leaves grew scrawny, the sky scorched to hot winds, locust bean trees sprouted occasionally among ant-hills which now rose to heights of scrubland trees. Drought pursued them in clouds of dust, twitched the stunted branches like predators’ tails.
From a charred, barkless height, a kite rose from its watch-tower and circled the sky, gaining the rarer regions on invisible windstreams. Zaccheus had taken the wheel, Ofeyi leant back and tried to borrow eyes off the kite, scan the distant city for the object of quest. Foiled he turned his gaze on the gorges whose precarious sides sheered into the netherworld, a network of canyons and ridges writhed into a sunset-gory horizon, giant troughs whose linear base seemed pocked by tumours of dislodged boulders. Ofeyi found that he had begun to fill these chasms with people, the Anubis-headed multitudes of his dreams. They poured into the abyss from all sides, swarmed over the rim and raced downwards towards a promised feast, a coalescence of that feast whose sated aftermath he had just witnessed at the dam. Slavering on the bait-trail of the putrescent tumour they rushed dragging their young brood with impatience, abandoning them in headlong plunge towards the scent of an inhuman banquet. Drowsed by the hum of the engine a sensation close to what he had experienced in Iriyise’s room came over him, that of being alone in the world. Only this time, he saw where the rest of mankind had rushed, and now his was the only consciousness observing the dark pulsating chasms of tearing, grasping, clawing, gorging humanity. He stood on the humped ridges, the proud-horned bearers of the healing elixir whose bronzed torsos reclined above the laden troughs. And there in his hand, Ahime’s scalpel of light. The bulls did not await his command, his barely breathed, “Plant the horns.” They turned their throats to the sunset and awaited the moment of sympathetic bleeding. With barely a gesture he moved from bull to bull, the fountains leapt up and rushed down the chasms of unbeing, rushed towards the banqueting ravines and inundated them from end to end.
He looked upwards at the shifting cloud-humps in the sky as yet undarkened by a hint of rain and muttered—When again?
X
Were these payments for the days of evasion? The price for his own private pity seemed inordinate. Unjustifiable even if proven.
A round concrete tower encased the fire-escape. Tiny air-vents which offered no handhold whatever, it would take more than mere miracle to score a direct hit with a grappling-hook before the scrape of iron attracted attention from a numerous household…the details and prospects flashed through the Dentist’s mind as he surveyed the sprawling mansion bathed in powerful arc-lamps. Only the stair shaft was in partial darkness, monolithic and impregnable.
He pointed in that direction. “I could plant a heavy charge through the lowest of those vents but then it might simply destroy the building without so much as touching my man.”
“He sleeps on the fourth floor” Ofeyi murmured.
“What wing?”
“That side. Next to the stair shaft.”
The Dentist sighed. “What do they want with such excessive structures. Look at it! It is bigger than that Hilton mess in Gosara. How many live in it?”
“Just he and his family. Plus a few hangers-on.”
“And bodyguards?”
“Of course.”
Chief Batoki, Western arm of the Cartel Axis relaxed only when he was on the fourth floor of the house. Below him were three layers of safety, each guarded by beefy thugs armed to the teeth, though camouflaged in the normal uniform of house-servants. Above him was a half-open terrace patrolled by guards loaned by the Commandant, swinging itchy sub-machine guns. It would be a suicide-bent assassin who tried to break into his country fortress.
“This man has deserved death a hundred times over.”
“What makes you so certain of what you are doing?” Ofeyi demanded. “What makes you so sure of what you have just said?”
The Dentist turned from their hiding-spot and put away his field-glasses. The inspection was over for hi
m. An idea occurred to Ofeyi—why not bring about a confrontation?
“Wait. Why don’t we simply go in? Perhaps you ought to meet him first.”
The Dentist turned querying eyes on him but Ofeyi nodded. “Yes, why not? I’ll take you in.”
“You know them that well?”
“We are…not exactly friends now. But I was very close to the family once. I am always welcome there.”
“All right.”
“But don’t take…”
“What do you take me for? Of course not.”
They retrieved the car and Ofeyi took the wheel saying, “It is easier if I drive. The gatekeeper knows me.”
He swung the car back onto the main road and brought it to the outer iron gates. Before they reached the sentinel box he could see the gateman already speaking into a telephone.
“I shall simply ask for the daughter” Ofeyi said. “We can wait in her private reception room while she arranges for us to meet the father.”
“What will you say you want him for?”
“I won’t need a reason. Until the whole thing goes up in flames and every man’s position is boldly lit they will continue to hope for conversions. A visit like this would only mean I am coming to my senses. The whole family will rush out to welcome the prodigal son. By the way who are you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean, who do I introduce you as?”
“Oh. Well, I’d better use the name on my passport. Call me Demakin. Isola Demakin. And say I have just come back from studies in the States.”
“Have you studied in the States?”
The Dentist gave a faint smile. “I have studied everywhere.”
They were met by Biye in the anteroom to the second-floor lounge. She looked at Ofeyi for a long time, keeping his hand in hers, then shook her head sadly.