by Wole Soyinka
“It’s true Ofeyi, she knows she can’t deny it. Dayisi never knew whether he was married to me or her.”
Ofeyi threatened, “I’ll leave if you bring that up again.”
A matronly servant, one of the many who had begun to hang close when the quarrel rose in volume now entered, her face full of the tearful concern of the faithful poor relation. Relieved, Ofeyi handed over all further ministrations to her and only then did he realize that the room had been empty on their return. The Dentist was nowhere to be found.
He compelled himself to wait a while longer, hoping perhaps that he had merely gone to the lavatory but sensing intuitively that this was not the truth. For the same reason he could not enquire directly about the man with whom he had been seen entering the house. Not that his absence would be remarked if he was compelled to leave without him, but to actually make enquiries would be to draw attention to him—if anything were to occur afterwards. If? Coldly he asked himself what decisions the Dentist could have taken in his absence, experiencing a deep resentment that he had initiated what after all could now only be regarded as a reconnoitering entry into the house. Resentment came from knowing within himself that his intentions had been different. It had been a largely deceitful intent, a form of special plea which came from feeling that only a mercenary assassin would pursue the death of a man whom he had encountered in the most mundane domestic context. After that the victim ceased to be a faceless cipher, a factor in a social equation which must be subtracted for a working formula. The Dentist, he persuaded himself, in spite of the cold rust that seemed to fill his bones in place of marrow, the Dentist was no professional killer.
But where was he and what was he doing now? Most urgently, how was he, Ofeyi, to view his own position if anything took place?
Finally he found his prolonged wait no longer bearable and left the house. He drove out through the gates and, at the end of the long driveway he turned the corner into the public road and a figure stepped out from behind a clump of bushes. He recognized him at once and pulled over, pushing the door open.
The Dentist’s tone was mocking. “And what did you think when you found I had vanished?”
Ofeyi countered by asking what he had been doing.
“I wanted to see if I could leave the house undetected. If I could then I could return the same way.”
“Well?”
The Dentist shook his head ruefully. “No. I was challenged almost at once. I said I was taking a stroll while you were busy with the family. Then I walked towards the stair-shaft and tried to get out that way. Another armed gorilla sprang up from nowhere. I was already so suspiciously close to the fence that I had to undo my zip and take a pee.”
“How did you leave?”
“Through the front gates. Thought I might as well spend the time doing some more viewing from the other side of the fence.”
Ofeyi continued the drive in silence. The Dentist asked, “And how is the Batoki family?”
“Pitiable, as always.”
“What?”
“I wish you had witnessed that shabby family scene…no, don’t waste your time on Batoki. He is not worth killing.”
The Dentist’s face hardened and he turned a faintly supercilious glance on Ofeyi. “Shall I put that another way for you? What about this: the family is suffering already, don’t bring any more misery upon them. Or: their opulence and self-indulgence has brought them no happiness, so let them extort and mutilate those who resist to their heart’s content. Or this one: in spite of the thousand deaths that can be laid at his door, Batoki is a man of deep family attachments….”
“All right, that’s enough. You know nothing of my relationship with that family.”
The Dentist narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Oh, I see. Was that why you took me into the house? To see Batoki en famille? And pity him?”
Ofeyi remained silent, staring straight ahead. The Dentist gave a sigh of one who had been through the dead arguments before and was weary of them. He shut his eyes and flung his head over the backrest. The rest of the drive was taken in silence.
XI
They now began to encounter the fugitive transports in droves. Blank stares, emptied of all self-awareness filled these grossly overloaded trucks which swayed past in twenty contrary motions along different axes of the body. Miraculously the mass remained together. And there were the private cars also, looking as battered as their occupants. These people had a common characteristic: a stare of resigned preparation for just that final unexpected blow.
“We are getting close to the river I think” Zaccheus said. “Near Labbe Bridge.”
At the bridge Ofeyi pulled the car off the road, wiped his sweat-grimy hands and announced that he would take a swim. It looked safe enough. On the other side they could see the patrols. They stopped each fugitive truck perfunctorily, waved them on again. They looked bored, contemptuous. From time to time one would stroll around a detained vehicle, point nonchalantly at an article that had attracted his greed. A television set perhaps, sometimes a brand-new sewing machine. The driver knew what it meant. He did not even bother to ask the owner. He quickly unloaded it, turned it over. Partly to observe this activity of the soldiers directly Ofeyi walked further up the river, resolved to swim to the other side.
But there was also the need to pause at the formal doorway to the territory of hell. It was a purely formal doorway; the terror had spilled over to outlying villages below the bridge as they had only too grimly discovered on the way. And the plague had been welcomed into the bloodstream of some who shared neither land nor cause with the Cross-river clans, but who, anxious not to be outdone in the predator game, preyed upon the victims as they passed. But Labbe Bridge marked the boundary of organized carnage. A few days before, the bridge itself had been a death-trap for many. The executioners had waited at such obvious points of escape and picked their victims at will.
Thinking of this Ofeyi walked further upriver, making for a tributary whose white sandbanks stood out sharply in his mind from a journey some years before. Coming upon it sooner than he thought he inspected it carefully, sniffed the air and peered into the bushes. It was possible that even this part of the river had shared in the haulage of putrefaction. Still, after this bridge it was even more certain that no stream remained unpolluted, no pool existed in which a man could throw a stone without bursting a bloated skin of decay. Not even the wells, for in their mindlessness the hordes of the Cartel had not refrained from soiling the needs of the living for pure sources. It took no energy to kill or maim, it took much to bury the dead. The wells and inland waters proved receptive, insatiable. When the streets were piled high and the vultures proved too tardy scavengers, glutted beyond their air-borne dreams in this mostly barren landscape, then the trucks moved in, gathered up the gruesome debris and tipped them even into reservoirs.
A train bearing refugees to safety had stopped over a bridge, emptied one waggon full of corpses into the gorge below. When the bolts were first removed the bodies simply fell out, tumbled towards the thin ribbon of water far below the narrow bridge. Then the sanitation men in their brown uniforms, handkerchiefs tied to their lower faces began to haul out the others one by one, prodding through the metal gaps to push into the void those which were caught between the girders of the bridge. Faces of survivors crowded the windows on that side, set faces followed the motions of this parody of acrobats through space and sunshine, the distant thuds of bodies bouncing from crag to crag of the bottomless gully. A child corpse flew right over the steel arch and plummeted down like a plump wild duck. The distant, barely recognizable splashes grew even more beggarly as the bodies dammed the trickle. Then the waggon door was raised, the bolts rammed into place and the train moved on…Zaccheus, fleeing back on that train had withdrawn his head after the first cascade of bodies, contenting himself with observing the changes that were rung in the faces of the hardier wa
tchers. He felt that with most, with the few who stuck it till the end there was an element of compulsion, a resolve to brand the scene on their minds forever, ready for disinterment whenever the time should come….
Scanning the surface of the tributary and around the confluence Ofeyi saw no evidence of such desecration. The sandbanks gleamed spotlessly. Not even the usual patches of drying cassava roots could be seen—the settlements around were mostly alien and they were now deserted. The words of Ahime came into his mind…the earth is our feeding grounds, the rivers our watering places; if we are contemptuous of them we will look to them in real need some day and find we are rejected. Food is sacred….
He shrugged off his clothes and walked through the last yard of tall grass, splashed through a narrow fish-trap and flushed out a flock of egrets. They lifted slowly on astonished wings. Involuntarily he snatched at the nearest over his head, not really thinking he could succeed, the egret pulled away easily and, beneath their concerted wing-beat, invisible strings fastened on his outstretched finger-tips and passed beneath his armpits, lifting his nervous flesh above the water, canopied beneath a hundred white wings towards the ever beckoning peaceful, strifeless, cleansing migratory grounds.
They dipped him gently back in a placid lake, the water lipped him round the chest. He went beneath the cool waters, surfaced, floated towards the confluence and saw the egrets alight on the other side. When they rose again he shut his eyes and indulged in a renewed metamorphosis, merged into their ruminant habitat, a prime patient cattle for their clean elegant gleaning. Lazily he watched them alight on his hide, flicked his tail in contentment as they picked him clean of blood-infesting ticks. The water shut his ears to all cacophony, his nostrils to pollution, transmitting only the rhythms of cropping and quiet germination. An easeful, decay, ingestion, germination and renewal. Egrets feeding on his own skin, fearless.
The sun gleamed orange through his eyelids. The reeds passed him upstream from the banks, reeds in the fingers of an eccentric healer, whispering incantations over a child in agony…a curious breed those healers. Witch-cauldroned from the womb or stressed to a tensile purity by experience, by a slow painful self-crucifying search through life, even to the lethal charge which whitens their hair overnight but fails to kill them. Hands that stretch forth and scatter healing vibrancies as lesser men in their so-called triumphal progress scatter pieces of gold. If they are not found at will then events must bring them forth, the terrible individual needs. Those secretive fingers with the sensitivity of grass, cattle and egrets, of ultimate repose—what chance do they have truthfully, against the tumoured belly of humanity with its periodic seepage of pus and bile into the living streams of earth? Ahime? Healer in magic insulation against such pervasive evil?
He shook his head in denial and to clear it of water, turned at the midstream sandbank which his head had just struck and began to swim back upstream. The water was clear and he could see clearly down to river-bed. No, the multitudinous dead did not seem to have passed or rested this way. The crystalline sands pebbled and broken-shelled seemed to restore a little element of hope, of increasing justification. Stepping out onto the bank his eyes encountered yet another lorry from Cross-river, it looked as if a slum home had been uprooted to its last floor-board and tied onto a bare truck. The residue of disruption. A rolled up blanket peeked out from a discoloured mattress—it hung down the side of the truck like a buffer against surprise. A dangling chamber-pot, a bicycle that had lost a wheel, then the baskets balanced on the pile and the familiar debris of faces stuck among the pieces. The bridge dipped into an abyss of denial.
* * *
—
In the early hours of Sunday they reached Kuntua. Day of rest. The town seemed bathed in the peace of an unspoken truce. A concatenation of church bells drifted over the city roofs, reinforcing a visible peace. They drove in silence, seeking the aliens’ quarter.
Ten minutes later and they would have been part of the victims of the ghetto. The early quiet had bred a seductive sense of security. From a porter in the railway station they learnt that the predatory gangs no longer roved in bold daylight, their activities were confined to sneak murders at night, the unexplained fires and incidental looting. They headed the car in the direction he had given, missed a crucial turning twice and drove up an adjacent hill to survey the entire alien quarters. Straining to pick out the pattern of road ribbons far below in the ghetto a few unusual scurrying motions struck first Zaccheus, then Ofeyi. From their vantage height each building stood out clearly. So did the streets, albeit narrower from that height. A few pedestrians moved normally among the houses.
It seemed at first a normal Sunday morning in the strangers’ district, inhabited mostly by “pagans” and Christians, all aliens to Cross-river. The quiet was accentuated rather than broken by the whinny notes of a pedal organ and the sluggish Sunday-breakfast replete voices of the congregation. They picked out the church building easily, dominated as always by an enormous cross.
“Praising God for surviving” Zaccheus surmised. “And praying for protection for the future.”
Ofeyi added, “Perhaps a few imprecations for their assailants, it wouldn’t surprise me. Not all these denominations hold with the forgiveness doctrine.”
Frowning now, Ofeyi observed the commencement of jarring motions in the streets. From odd shadows, corners and even from behind a few hardly noticeable trees figures began to emerge. They moved like ghosts, swift and co-ordinated, silent and clothed in the familiar dusty travesty of white robes. It was evident that they were no Sunday worshippers.
More sinister however were the opposite (or complementary) movements which had also commenced. A handful of policemen who had been posted around the ghetto began to move outside the ghetto walls. In a few moments not one of them remained. The movements of the flitting dirty-white wraiths now became a rush. There was no longer effort to conceal the weaponry of matchets, bows, arrows and daggers. And a number of cans whose purpose the watchers could not yet define. A short while later, these apparitions had surrounded the churchyard. As if by prearrangement, a detachment of them rushed the church itself.
The action unravelled with chilling clarity. It had a definable beginning, a middle and an end. It began almost as a game, with the weaving and dodging among the houses and passages, expanded into a co-ordinated sweep as the hide-and-seek was jettisoned and the mob rushed into the churchyard, made instantly for doors and windows and began to slam them shut. The pious hymning changed abruptly to screams and even this new change was snuffed out, replaced by blows of hammer on nails brought from the clothing of the unbidden worshippers. Each move seemed choreographed, even to the last detail. Planks were raised, laid across the slammed windows, held in position by others, and hammered in by pre-selected groups. So efficiently was the manoeuvre carried out, so quickly was it over that it struck the watcher that could not be the first exercise of this nature by the group. One moment, all twenty, thirty windows and doors of the church were wide open, a minute later the church was tight sealed on the worshippers.
“The police!” Ofeyi muttered urgently. “Get in the car Zaccheus, get them here fast.”
Zaccheus shook his head dubiously but Ofeyi pushed him behind the wheel. “You saw them leave,” Zaccheus continued to insist. “It will only be a waste of time. And it’s Sunday—you know what they are!”
“Don’t go to the local stations. Go to the National Police. Drive directly to their headquarters and demand to see the highest officer. Hurry man!”
Nothing that they had heard so far indicated any connivance on the part of the National Police. The local constabulary had their dirty blue uniforms dyed in blood as deep as the red sash that they wound round their ungainly knickers. The soldiers did not bear thinking about. Hopefully, he waited. He thought of the Dentist at this moment with his rifle and telescopic lens and longed for his precise solutions. If even one or two were pic
ked up from this distance, the rest would abandon the attack and flee.
A window was violently smashed from within, its sound carried crisply up the hill and ended the distanced wishfulness. He looked down to see a pew protruding from one window. Used as a battering ram, it had smashed a jagged hole through the planks but without forcing the window itself open. The end of the pew served only to block the hole it had made. Nothing could pass through. Not that it mattered in the least, for any would-be escapee would have been cut down with ease. To ensure that such a meaning was made plain to the trapped worshippers the nearest assailant loosed an arrow at the aperture. It embedded itself in the wood, at least half its length penetrating through to the church interior. Only then did Ofeyi observe that ladders had been put up, reaching to the roof, in those brief moments he had spent talking to Zaccheus.
Each act progressed from the last with bewildering precision. Distance turned it into a deadly mural, activated by nothing more sinister than an illusionist trick. A relay worked with smooth efficiency, passing the mysterious cans up to three or four men on the roof. They sprayed the contents all over the roof, found cracks and poured the liquid into the captive space beneath the roof. A different group performed a like ritual around the windows, splashing fluid on all wooden surfaces of the church. A third directed motion came from another group which piled wood and rubble of all descriptions against the two main doors into the church. Ofeyi knew for certain in what fluid the building had been soaked.
The deadly libation was soon over, the priests withdrew, waited for the trio on the roof to descend. They poured the last few drops from their cans onto the ladders and left them there. Ofeyi did not see the actual lighting of the fire, only the sudden inferno that leapt up where the church had been, and the ring of watchers around it stepping further back as the heat raged fiercer and black smoke began to obscure their vision.