by Wole Soyinka
* * *
—
Like the eyes, limbs, low-voiced timbre this other recollection took formal shape, the facility of her mind to accept, evince the minimal surprise and move into grooves of new actualities as though a time had never intervened. There had been that strange view of predestination she held…I on my radials, you on your laterals Ofeyi, we are bound to cross again and again because we are seeking the same goal of quietude, which is the centre of the web. And my only question Ofeyi is when you will tire of it all, when you will turn sharply from the circling laterals and take the slower, quieter path with me. Beyond that first momentary pause of disbelief, she had absorbed their reunion while he still groped for words and pondered what this would mean in terms of his initial quest, alarmed already at the disloyal comparisons his mind had begun between the infectious calm and the turbulent quest which would go beyond even the finding of Iriyise.
Taiila would make the point over and over again, in the midst of a battle in his mind for decision during the encounters of his brief banishment—you wish to fight every inch of the undergrowth when all you need do is step aside onto a direct path to the still centre of peace. And the wise knowing laughter to his scornful retort: who seeks peace? Who has the right to expect peace? You barely avoid the blasphemous equivalent, happiness, do you know that? I know better than to use it with you Ofeyi, she replied, but I don’t really distinguish between the two.
Ofeyi spoke. “This afternoon, we were just turning out of a petrol station when your brother drove past. I saw you but I said, impossible!” There was silence between the two, then he asked, “Why did you come?”
She shrugged. “Why not? Chalil was here. Mother wanted to come and I had not yet taken my vows. There was every chance I might hear of you. You are not a very obscure person by nature.”
“Ah yes, my aura of violent emanations, I haven’t forgotten….”
She laughed. “I didn’t mean that. But I had a feeling….”
“What has become of the nun?” he asked, trying to read into the depths of her mind. She tapped her breast and said, “She is still in here. Almost at the centre.”
Ofeyi felt a sudden, unreasonable anger at her calmness, her floating untouched assurance. “Perhaps you think to reach it sooner out here. You have managed to float above it all haven’t you? Or perhaps you have simply seen nothing.”
She looked surprised. “Oh. Hasn’t Chalil told you what happened here?”
“What do you mean, here? In the city centre?”
“Oh no, I mean right here. In these expatriate reservations…Oh I see, Chalil didn’t tell you.”
He felt his voice fall thin, crestfallen. “What happened here? All your brother did was take us round the mortuary.”
She nodded slowly to herself, withdrawing deeper and deeper into herself. “You must get him to tell you about his houseboy. Our neighbour warned him but no one took him seriously.” Her face was taut suddenly, tired. “What made you think that any spot in Cross-river was exempt from this madness Ofe?”
He stood looking over the sundowner golf-culture preserves which the first colonial masters had created for themselves, far from native smell, protected by distance against the possibilities of sporadic rebellions. The distance warning system had continued for the new white-graded elites like himself, a few Asian expatriates like Chalil. In Cross-river white descendants of that first domination inhabited such isolated areas of gracious living, immune from the squalor and occasional pack wars among the congested rats in the urban tumescence. A shadow of defeat crossed his face. In a sense, Cross-river had been tackled too late. The slit-eyed packs had leant more and more heavily on such white expatriate neutrality and paternalism and, when that source of leavings became gradually depleted the resentful packs were shamed into self-hatred from the long beggar reliance on the alien condescending purses. Nothing to aid the possibility of self-rebuilding, the self that took its place. The new tenants of such preserves simply acquired the shell of distance; the rat-packs waited, ready for revenge and mischief.
Taiila’s voice enquired, “You have many problems Ofe? You have been very unhappy?”
He laughed, self-deprecatingly. “Don’t look for lines of the tragic romance of life on my face.”
Crestfallen, she looked away. “I didn’t mean…”
Gently, he took her hand. “Neither did I. All I meant was…I have been too busy or too wholesomely dissatisfied to be unhappy.”
“Ah yes…your eternal discontent….”
“Divine. What’s happened since? It used to be divine discontent.”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe that any longer. It threatens to last a lifetime if life is what I observe…what I have observed since I came here. What I still see in you. Nothing that eats the human life away has the smallest touch of divinity. It is all so…insignificant, I mean, ultimately. Well isn’t it?”
They looked down over successive gradients of low-turfed hills onto the distant city. Whatever life it held bore no relation to the privileged preserves. A few ribbons of lights marked the major roads. A will-o-wisp in and out of pools of darkness betrayed a lonely cyclist. The brighter, more powerful lamps moved swiftly, from point to point of safety. Motorists, they felt the most vulnerable even in their lethal capsules of steel.
Gazing at the sky Taiila said, “I used to think, up in the mountains at home, that we had the clearest night-sky in the world. But, just look at that. I swear the stars here actually twinkle. Twinkle! They radiate feelers, you know, like those silk-cotton seeds floating about. And each feeler is differently coloured, blue, green, orange. Look at that one. It really does twinkle, don’t you think so?”
“I am thinking more of the smouldering pockets of terror below us.”
“Let’s go in then,” she said abruptly. “Food is nearly ready anyway.”
A pungent swirl of succulent odours assailed them—okro fingers, chicken, curry, dahl and garden eggs in a riot of permutations. They entered to the querulous voice of Zaccheus offering to fetch them. “I know they have a lot to talk about Mrs. Ramath but I am hungry.”
“You are always hungry Zack. Full stop.”
“There he goes again. Do we have to wait for you all night?”
“Peace” said Mrs. Ramath, and waved them all to their seats.
Zaccheus slipped a casual finger beneath the table. Chalil, pouring the drinks saw him and announced, “Ma, someone means business. The bandleader has just loosened his trouser zip.”
“He’s just a vulgar snoop” Taiila assured Zaccheus. “Take off your trousers if you like. Chalil will lend you the wrap he normally uses when he eats, the hypocrite.”
“That’s a loyal sister for you.”
It is not real, Ofeyi murmured, and inwardly cursed his growing incapacity for immersing himself even in pauses of relief. The feeling persisted and grew that there could be no natural entitlement to this, that the moment’s normality was doomed to be revealed a mere mockery, a sham of a dream. What business had they all with such a mundane activity of life? A foaming mug of beer…he took it from Chalil’s hand, disbelieving in its materiality, sipping a recognizable tang of hops…and the little old lady filling his plate with chicken breast….
“Remember those curries I made for you that winter?” Taiila asked.
He stammered. The mother asked, “Is she setting herself up to be as good a cook as I am?”
“Now let’s see whether you are polite or loyal” Taiila challenged him.
Ofeyi pulled himself together suddenly, raised his beer-mug. “I tell you what. Let’s drink to the greatest contribution to culinary civilization: Indian Curry.”
“Coward!” Taiila sneered.
But Chalil had remained for the past few moments by the sideboard, staring into the darkness to the rear of the house. His voice took on a quiet tautness. W
ithout taking his eyes off from the window he said: “Something is happening in the next house I think.”
* * *
—
They were all huddled together at the window, straining into the darkness. The night shadows had taken on a sinister pulsation, alien to the moments before, an uninvited guest that lay about the sill peering in against gaiety and banter. Under his breath Zaccheus swore and murmured, “There is no peace for the sinner damn it.” The dishes grew cold, forgotten by most.
The quiet, undemonstrative Chalil gasped aloud as a figure stepped out of the front door of the bungalow on which their attention was strained. A fat, paunchy man in a dirty singlet, slouched under a world-weariness and surrender. Nothing had ever so vividly expressed—in the knowledge of all—such a totality of collapse of the human will. His eyes were unseeing, the eyes of a man who had shut his eyes to hope or salvation.
“Look at his eyes” Chalil said. “The man is blank. He has lost his mind.”
“Why is he here?” Mrs. Ramath demanded. “I thought you said he had left. I thought the house was empty.”
“So did I” Chalil muttered drily.
“He’s lost weight” Taiila said. “He is only half his weight,” she insisted.
Ofeyi demanded, “Who is he?”
“The mining engineer I told you about, our neighbour. He assured me he was packing out. I don’t understand how he comes to be here.”
The eyes of the man who walked between the rows of croton hedges were those of a man dead to the world. He shuffled slowly forward, hesitated, turned and looked back towards the house and shuffled forward again. “It is as if he has leaked. Leaked through his trousers. He’s only half his size Chalil.”
It never occurred to any of his neighbours to call to him. In the outer encirclement of the light pool which the man had created by switching on his porch light—the abnormal event that had first attracted Chalil’s attention—there hung a menace that communicated itself even to Ofeyi and Zaccheus who were strangers to the neighbourhood. They waited and watched.
“You say you can use a gun?” Chalil half-turned towards Ofeyi.
“Yes.”
“Semi-dozen left a double-barelled shotgun with us. It’s hanging on…”
“Yes I saw it. You want me to get it?”
“Please. I am useless with those things. There are cartridges in the cardboard box on the chair.”
Ofeyi moved swiftly in the direction of the gun.
“But how can a big man leak out like that? Just like that! Within a few days.” Mrs. Ramath continued to wail.
“What was he doing in there all this time, that’s all I want to know. I thought he had left.”
Ofeyi returned with the gun, broken at the breech. The brass cups of two cartridges gleamed in the breech. “Listen” he began. “Just give me a vague idea what is happening.”
Chalil’s finger circled to indicate the cashew and bougainvillea trees surrounding the house. “I’ve only just understood it myself.” There were flutterings of white among the green branches, sharp gleams of eyes. “But I still don’t understand why the man is still here. Or why he has chosen to commit suicide.” He turned to his sister. “Do you understand it? You were here when he brought his things to us for safe-keeping. Was there anything he said I might have missed?”
Taiila thought it all over…the big extrovert voice, downing one bottle of Guinness Stout one after the other, casual, relaxed. She had looked for a hint of fear in his face but there had been none. Drank his stout the way he always did, one bottle a gulp, rest, talk, laugh, the huge booming voice all over the house, his generous paunch overflowing the brevity of his evening singlet…what on earth could have gone on in his mind on that last visit! She saw him walking in through the front door, hearty, beefy and confident, not like this caricature of his former self now slouching to certain death between the crotons…“aha-a-ah! Thought I was gone didn’t you? Fooled you, that’s all I did. Planning to give you a surprise that was all your old Semi-dozen was up to. Neither more or less, like my faithful semi-dozen. I just stocked up, made everyone believe I was leaving and then lay low until the damned foolishness blew over. Only came out ’cause I was getting lonely with no one to talk to over my evening semi-dozen, what’s wrong with that?”
A heaving belly of which he was so proud…when the insects swarmed in the wake of the rains he would shake with laughter…“no, they won’t stay long around this body of mine. They know I make them sea-sick when I gulp down one of my nightly six. No, they won’t sting me. It’s you Doctor they’re after. You’re so thin they mistake you for a landing strip.” The asbestos ceiling shook with his bellow. And the unfortunate sausage fly with curling sting really found itself hanging from the underlip of an enormous wave, dizzy and shaken, flying off to find a more secure base for the night’s excursion….Had there been an uncomfortable feeling about his gaiety that night? An excessive tone that bordered dangerously on a collapse?
“Oh Dr. Chalil I feel so light-hearted tonight, light in spirit, light in heart and impossibly light in the belly…yes, I saw them all off this afternoon, saw them off at the garage. By now they should be half-way home to safety. Tomorrow morning I follow them. Had to see to the final tidying up. You sure you don’t mind looking after these heavyweight nuisances for me?”
“Good. And that’s the last of the six for tonight. No, not another bottle for Semi-dozen. That’s where the trouble begins. I never exceed my semi-dozen per night. After the regular, I stop. Then I start all over again ha, ha ha ha! No, but not tonight. Last-minute packing to be done….”
And then he had looked up suddenly and seen Edwin.
She shivered, her eyes shut tight in recollection of the horror that had overtaken them because they ignored his warning.
“Edwin is still here?”
Chalil, complacently: “Oh yes of course. The safest place for him is here.”
And Semi-dozen had shaken his head. “No no no no, send him away quickly. Quickly. There is another airlift tomorrow, get him on that. Don’t even send him by road.”
“We can protect Edwin” Chalil said. “But in any case they won’t come this way at all. They haven’t attacked any of the expatriate reservations.”
“I’ve…I’ve sent my family…away,” Semi-dozen repeated. And his voice sounded slurred, more slurred and drunken than they had ever known it. “I’ve sent them all home…safe.”
“Sure” Chalil had replied. “Best not to take chances. But Edwin is quite safe here.”
The big man lumbered up, put his hand to his eyes and wobbled about on his feet. Chalil sprang up, thinking he would collapse. He waved him aside. “I am all right…quite all right. I think I’ll go to sleep now.”
“I’ll walk you across the lawn” Chalil offered.
The big man had brushed him savagely aside, wordlessly. Then staggered home.
* * *
—
“What is he doing now for god’s bloody sake?” Zaccheus had ceased to make sense of it all.
The man with a flapping jacket over a dirty white singlet stood at the little wicket-gate that led into his garden. Shadows cast by the retreating porch-light created deeper shadows in his ample cheeks than seemed normal, even for those who had never met him. And then, to successive gasps from the dining-room, figures dropped from the hovering branches, the shrubbery sprouted heads, then shoulders; silent figures emerged from the shadows and converged on him.
Semi-dozen stared stupidly, then began his retreat towards the house, blinking. He retreated two or three steps to only one of his stalkers’, they seemed concerned not to panic him, merely to close in on him, enjoy the sight of the big man breaking and pleading for his life.
Semi-dozen broke and ran. His pursuers responded by merely fanning round the house, surrounding it completely. The engineer ran into
the supposed safety of the house. The watchers heard the rapid slam of bolts and locks. Then silence.
“Fool!” Chalil muttered aloud.
Zaccheus wrung his hands, slumped into a chair and wailed, “We can’t just leave him there. I know the swine. They will break in any moment and butcher him.”
What they had thought, the stalkers who had waited so long in the shadows was that the man had emerged to yield himself up for orderly slaughter. A change in their mood now took place, as if this was not how they had expected the game to be played. Suddenly the crash of stone against glass pane broke the momentary stillness, then another, and another. Ofeyi fingered the guard of the double trigger and admitted frankly, “I don’t know what to do. What are we supposed to do in God’s name?”
Zaccheus leapt up suddenly. “The telephone! Why haven’t we telephoned the police?”
Chalil shook his head. “There is no telephone.”
“But you are a doctor. This is medical quarters. What do you mean there is no telephone?”
It was Taiila who explained. “The house had one. They tore it off the day they came for Edwin—Chalil’s houseboy. They killed him on our doorstep.”
A long silence filled the room.
“We had no choice” Taiila went on. “Chalil had to give him up. There were over a hundred of them. We could do nothing.” She broke down sobbing. The mother, straight-faced and riddled with the hurt of recollection told the rest of the story. “We had hidden him for the whole day. They simply waited. We couldn’t leave the house. Chalil tried all he could, pleaded with them, and threatened. He defied them and…for that, they made us watch. Forced us to stand there, on the gravel path, while they cut his throat.”
Ofeyi rose out of the silence. “It’s dark. They don’t know that anyone will come to his aid. But I don’t know the neighbourhood very well. If you could just give me a layout of the place. There must be a backway to the house….”