by Wole Soyinka
* * *
—
The principal motives were unravelled. One was resolved at his first glance through the window onto the scene below. Buried, if need be forever in the heart of lunacy there was no danger that Iriyise would uncover the assault on her nor identify the guilty ones. And there was the likely prospect that she would herself succumb to insanity, the first reality to which she would wake—if she ever did—rendering any future testimony of hers of no consequence if ever that day of reckoning did come.
Ofeyi stood up, knocked on the door and summoned the guard. The man came, leant against the door and demanded what he wanted.
“Water. I need some water.”
“What for?”
“I need some water” he repeated.
The man scowled. “I am not here to fetch you water.”
“I am ill” Ofeyi pleaded. “You can send the trusty for a cup of water, is that asking too much?”
The guard growled. He heard him going away, grumbling at criminals who imagined themselves in a hotel. But Suberu shambled in at last, unbarred the door and brought in the mercy cup. Ofeyi took it and drained the contents while Suberu waited to take it back. He reached the cup towards him, then withdrew his hand, the cup still within it.
“Why do you never speak Suberu? Why is that? You understand everything but you never speak. I want to know why.”
Suberu reached out his hand again for the cup, jingled the keys to indicate that he had to go round the cells shortly, locking up the inmates.
“Cigarette?” Ofeyi offered, patting his pockets only to realize that his pockets had been emptied while he lay unconscious. “I am sorry,” giving him a rueful smile, “I thought I could offer you some but I have none.”
The trusty dipped his hand in his pocket, brought out a packet from which he extracted two cigarettes. He offered both to Ofeyi, brought out matches and lit one for him. Even so, he shouted:
“What can I say to thank you? I am sorry I have nothing at all here with which I can repay you.”
Suberu shook his head, reached out his hand again for the empty cup. Sighing in despair Ofeyi surrendered it, giving up forever all hope of reaching the dark hulk of silence. Even so he shouted:
“I would like to ask you why I am trapped in this place—because that is all it is my friend, trapped! And why this woman is here who should be in hospital, receiving specialized care. Does it not seem strange to you my friend? Or do you see it all as part of ordinary, normal existence I wonder? But you stay dumb. If you could pretend to be deaf I expect you would.”
He shrugged with the hopelessness of it all and turned from him when he saw that the trusty had begun to rummage in some inner pocket of his uniform. He brought out a thick, neatly folded piece of paper, squatted on his haunches and began to unfold it on the floor. It was a poster, one of the very earliest of Iriyise. Shrouded in a filmy gauze which—he grimaced—claimed to represent a milky distillation of the creamy flesh of cocoa seeds, Iriyise was emerging from a neatly cracked golden egg-shape that represented the pod. Suberu pointed to the figure on the bed and, slowly, with laborious gestures, signalled that the figure on the bed was the same as the poster. Taken by surprise, Ofeyi watched the man mime his own enlightenment. The woman’s condition was like that egg and Ofeyi must wait, patiently, for her emergence. Suberu solemnly folded back the poster, restored it to the recesses from where it had emerged, and turned towards the door.
Ofeyi cleared his throat, forced his voice to be as casual as possible. “Why don’t you lock up those lunatics before me. I could use the few minutes to take some fresh air in the yard.” He rubbed the back of his head pointedly and grimaced. “My head…why you had to hit me I don’t know, but it has given me a headache. I am very ill. You owe me the fresh air.”
Suberu considered. Ofeyi moved close against the giant, raised his eyes to his and held them with a desperate earnestness.
“Don’t go yet Suberu, just listen to me for a moment. Damn, I wish I knew how to reach you. I know I can. You proved it just now, fishing out that poster to preach your hopeful message at me. I mean, who would have thought you a man of images?”
A stiffening from the giant alarmed Ofeyi and he sought frantically for a new idiom that would lessen the man’s lifetime habit of suspicion.
“It’s a compliment you understand? I mean, calling you a man of images. Essentially of course you remain a man of action. You grasp a situation of chaos and—bang bang—you impose your own order on it. Rather like those men of uniform who thereby claim to control other lives in perpetuity. Like a bull you quell the tantrums of a quarrelsome herd of females. I mean, I am impressed by your self-sacrificing dumbness, your gladiatorial valour among infectious lepers, who wouldn’t be? The question is Suberu, why are you still here? You’ve served your time, you could have had your parole ages ago. Why are you still kept here?”
Suberu shuffled with impatience, his face retained the same mask of blankness that Ofeyi had encountered from the beginning. Desperately he hissed, “Do you know what it means to be exploited? To be kept in a death row all your life? Look, no wait, don’t dangle your keys yet. You think you were reprieved but look what is happening. Look at the woman on this camp-bed. You are after all a dark horse of images so you should understand my meaning. Why can’t you see you’ve been trapped like her in a capsule of death? The milk rots in the coconut if left too long. The child rots in the womb if it exceeds nine months, or else it emerges a monster—isn’t that what your own people say? The life-yolk rots in the shell if it is not opened in time, it creates a poisonous world of fumes and is suffocated in the trap. Haven’t you seen the butterfly struggle like mad out of the coccoon Suberu? What happens if your talisman is buried in rubble by your enemy? Tell me that. Don’t you know that even the kernel in the palm nut turns rancid sooner or later, disease finds the weak eye in its hard shell and rots the inner flesh!”
His voice rose to a shout: “Can’t I reach you at all Suberu? Can’t I reach you in your coffin where you have been forced to lay these twenty years of your short life, responding not even to your own jangling of keys? Have we all wasted time trying to end the deadly exploitation which traps minds like yours in one lifelong indenture to emptiness?” He sighed, turned away “Good-night then. Your companions are waiting and you are the privileged slave who will place manacles on their held-out wrists. But for faithful dogs like you the Amuris of this world could not trample down humanity with such insolence. You snap at the heels of those who would confront them and afterwards you bury their bones in the back garden. But remember this Suberu…” he turned and faced him again, holding the trusty’s eyes in his, “only you can sniff out the spot and root out the bones to accuse them. After the licks and the caresses, don’t complain if the Amuris finally throw you a poisoned bone. Sleep well my friend.”
* * *
—
Ofeyi sat on the edge of the bed, exhausted by the futile effort, his head held between his hands. Suberu remained motionless on the same spot, a film across his eyes, drifting back in time to a buried past. Hard though he tried to hold on to it, an earlier phase of knowledge continued to elude him when life had more volition, was not filtered exclusively through the heavy lenses of his master and the exhalations in dark corridors from adumbrated lives. He failed, but the distant stirrings remained to divorce him from the present.
From far away he heard the voice of the guard calling out his name. He came out of his semi-trance, stirred slowly, turned his head towards the door without really perceiving it. The call came again and he obeyed it at last, but in a slow reflex, a somnambulist following the source of a familiar sound struggling back from a strange, alien territory.
Ofeyi listened to his receding steps, turned his head in a mixture of certainty and misgiving. Suberu had passed through and left the door ajar. Ofeyi glanced briefly at the figure on the bed
, touched her on the forehead and followed the trusty into the night.
He stopped in his tracks as two figures stepped out of the shadows. In the light of the outside bulbs the wiry copper hairs glinted unambiguously and the Dentist’s face confronted his. The second figure he recognized as Chalil but the doctor muttered only a brief greeting as he stepped round him into the room, knelt beside the bed and began to examine the woman.
“Details later” the Dentist promised. “Right now we haven’t much time. Is your head better?”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing much. We merely harnessed chaos to our own ends. Zaccheus brought news you had vanished into the bowels of Temoko. He’s been playing look-out man on one of those trees…”
“Yes, I saw him just now…”
“Oh, he’s back at his post is he? He is far more active than his shape suggests. Oh, I er have to confess I did a bit of eavesdropping just now, before the doctor joined me. Were you really trying to reach that ox?”
Exasperated now, Ofeyi hissed, “Will you just give me some idea…”
The Dentist gestured deprecation. “It was nothing elaborate. We broke in over the wall, under cover of the rioting. You had got yourself knocked out. I took a look at the woman and decided not to take the risk of hauling her out the way we came in. There was no choice but to take the governor under our protection and make him order us a doctor and er—a few other things. Zaccheus insisted on him.” He gestured towards Chalil, then turned to meet Ofeyi’s questioning gaze. He smiled. “Yes, I know it is her brother.”
Ofeyi changed the subject. “Was your raid on the armoury successful?”
“We could not afford another failure. It went without a hitch.”
The doctor completed his examination and rejoined them. His mind was not on the patient however, his eyes ceaselessly roved the interior of the hut. “It was clever” he muttered, “very clever. No one would have thought of looking in the waiting room.”
Impatiently Ofeyi demanded, “What are you talking about?”
“This waiting room, that’s what we call it. It’s never used except on execution days. We all gather here—official witnesses, the magistrate, the governor’s representatives, hangman and assistants, the doctor in attendance. When you work for the government you can be assigned to attend at any time. On those occasions, there is no quieter place in the universe.”
A chill hung about them until Ofeyi pointed at the figure on the bed and demanded, “The patient, doctor, what about the patient.”
“Oh yes your friend’s guess was accurate. A very deep coma. As for this trek…”
Ofeyi felt increasing annoyance at the Dentist’s habit of taking matters in his own hands. “Why have you been taking medical opinion on that?” he snapped. “We have not decided anything yet.”
“Of course not. But it saves time to ask these questions ahead. What do you say doctor?”
Chalil looked uneasily from one to the other. “Well, it won’t do her any harm. It could, on the other hand, result in bringing her out of the coma. Medical science is usually at a loss over this particular condition.”
Ofeyi walked away from them, stopped and stared into the sky over the walls. The Dentist left him alone until he had assisted Chalil in dismantling the stretcher part of the bed and strapping Iriyise securely onto it. Then he went out and stood behind Ofeyi.
“I have to think of practical things. Our safety margin is wearing down fast. I also promised to overtake the rest of the camp before midnight. You have to decide.”
Ofeyi turned round. “You are mistaken. I was not struggling over any decision, only with the past. I am ready when you are.”
They rejoined the doctor. The Dentist and Ofeyi took up the stretcher, Ofeyi at the head. Suberu, who had been waiting for them at the inner gate fell in ahead of them and the procession passed through the sleeping yards. Nothing in Suberu’s face indicated if he knew that the new orders which he now carried out for his master had been issued under duress. They passed by the office where the hapless keeper sat at his desk, mentally composing his report on the night’s events.
At the gate, there was not even a guard. “You seem to have every detail well under control” the doctor remarked.
The Dentist shook his head. “It doesn’t take much to organize a riot. We have enough of Chantal’s army locked in here. They only await their opportunity to strike back at their tormentors.”
They had expected Suberu to turn back at the gate but he stepped outside with them, bolted the gate behind and walked steadfastly ahead.
“Where is he going?” the doctor demanded.
“I think you’d better ask Ofeyi” the Dentist replied.
More men emerged from the shadows and fell in with them. The two men were relieved of the stretcher and, with the doctor they drew aside into a shadow of the walls. Zaccheus, slightly winded, soon joined them, self-conscious as he received Ofeyi’s greeting.
The doctor spoke. “Remember you are not to worry about my part in this. You’ve made sure I am well covered.”
“Just don’t lose the governor’s written instructions” the Dentist cautioned.
“After the trouble you took to get it out of him? Not likely.”
“Good-bye then.”
They shook hands and the Dentist strode swiftly away, gaining fast on the distinctive back of Suberu. The file had turned into a footpath and the figures vanished one by one into the bushes that bordered the path. They watched the Dentist as he gained the opening, his copper hair glinted for a moment and then he was gone.
“How to say thank you…” Ofeyi began.
“Don’t.”
“Is Taiila alright?”
“Of course. She wanted to come but I felt that the evening might turn dangerous.”
“You were right. Tell her…well, tell her we’ll meet again at the next intersection. She’ll understand.”
“I do” the brother replied.
Temoko was sealed against the world till dawn. The street emptied at last as the walls and borders shed their last hidden fruit. In the forests, life began to stir.
pantheonbooks.com
ALSO BY
Wole Soyinka
THE INTERPRETERS
They are the interpreters. Drawn together by their hopes, loves, dissatisfactions, and the daily lives and deaths around them, five young Nigerian intellectuals evoke a new lost and found generation. From their wild drinking bouts at the Club Cambana to their individual pursuits of personal and professional integrity, they simultaneously find themselves as seekers and prophets as they attempt to define their identity in a world where their cultural past and Western-influenced present are brought into conflict.
Fiction
AKÉ
The Years of Childhood
A dazzling memoir from Nobel Prize–winning Nigerian novelist, playwright, and poet Wole Soyinka, Aké: The Years of Childhood gives us the story of Soyinka’s boyhood before and during World War II in a Yoruba village in western Nigeria called Aké. A relentlessly curious child who loved books and getting into trouble, Soyinka grew up on a parsonage compound, raised by Christian parents and by a grandfather who introduced him to Yoruba spiritual traditions. His vivid evocation of the colorful sights, sounds, and aromas of the world that shaped him is both lyrically beautiful and laced with humor and the sheer delight of a child’s-eye view.
Memoir
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available wherever books are sold.
www.vintagebooks.com
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