Voice of America

by E. C. Osondu

  “Up Presido!” the voices around the cell chorused. As Presido spoke, someone fanned him with a square piece of cardboard.

  “Now, all of you line up according to your height and tell us why you should be admitted into this Jungle Republic,” Presido said. The man who was behind Paiko nudged Paiko and whispered into his right ear; Paiko could smell the man’s sour breath amid the general stench of the cell, an admixture of old cigarettes, marijuana, local gin, and decaying teeth.

  “Tell them that you are a notorious armed robber, that you have led many operations and killed many people; they will fear you and give you an important position here in the cell,” the man whispered. Paiko thought about this and shook his head. Something told him not to heed the man’s advice. What he did not know was that the police sometimes locked up one of their own in the cell along with the criminals to help them gather information about robbers.

  The man who had spoken to Paiko was the first to speak. He cleared his throat and launched forth boastfully.

  “My name is Robert, but I am popularly known as Bob Risky. In the daytime I am a motor park tout at Iddo, but at night I am a robber. I have been robbing and killing since I was expelled from Mushin Grammar School in the second form for smoking and selling marijuana. There is no operation that is too risky for me to undertake—that is how I earned my nickname, Risky. I have been detained in almost all the police stations in Lagos, including Isokoko, Panti, Alagbon, Bar Beach, and even the old station on Malu Road. I was drinking in my girlfriend’s beer parlor when the police raided the place and arrested me. They found a locally made pistol in my pocket, and some wraps of marijuana. When they are tired, they will release me. I have no other profession than armed robbery, and as we say, once a robber, always a robber.” As Bob Risky finished his introduction, there was loud applause. Even Presido appeared to be impressed.

  “You are one of us, and you are qualified to be a member of this republic. From today I make you the assistant provost of this republic. Your job is to maintain peace and law and order here and make sure that everybody stays in his position,” Presido said. A cheer went up once again, and everyone in the cell hailed the new assistant provost.

  Many people rose up to speak and talked about themselves and all their achievements in the world of armed robbery. One of them sang a song that he said a musician had composed in his honor. When it came to Paiko’s turn, he became jittery. He opened his mouth to speak, but he only croaked. He swallowed the little saliva in his mouth and started again.

  “My name is Paiko. I was drinking at Jolly Hotel while waiting for my girlfriend Sweet to finish entertaining a customer so we could go home together when the police raided the place and took me to Iloro police post. They told me my case was a simple one and that I would soon be released, but after some time the sergeant spoke with an inspector who told him that some people had robbed a commissioner of his car and that they needed people to parade as the robbers, and they put me in their Land Rover and brought me here,” Paiko said and swallowed again.

  “Ehheeen, so tell us the whole truth and nothing but the truth—were you drinking and waiting for your girlfriend Sweet after you returned from a robbery operation? Is she the one that helps you to hide your Luger? Tell us the truth and nothing but the truth,” Presido said again, and the other voices in the cell echoed after him, “The truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “I am not a robber. I sell used clothing and handbags and shoes at the Alade Market, I am an honest man,” Paiko said.

  “Everybody in this cell is innocent until proven guilty, or is that not so?” Presido asked.

  “We are all innocent until proven guilty,” the voices in the cell repeated. Paiko did not know what made him do it, but he suddenly cleared his throat and began to tell them a story.

  “One day I was in the open ground in front of the market when a customer came to me to buy a handbag. When she opened the handbag, she found two hundred dollars in shiny bills in the bag.” At the mention of dollars, a sudden silence descended on the people in the cell. It was as if a foreigner with a different color of skin had walked in.

  “Two hundred dollars, that is a lot of money—wait, let me convert it—that is roughly thirty thousand naira, eehen, so what happened?” Presido asked.

  “This was not the first time I would find strange things in some of the clothes and bags that I sell. I would sometimes find lipsticks in handbags, sometimes condoms, love letters, a few coins, chaplets, and photographs.”

  “So what happened?” Presido asked.

  “The woman, who was still haggling with me about the cost of the bag when she discovered the money, said the money was hers. I told her the money was not hers because we had not yet agreed on a price, and she had not paid me. I told her to give the bag to me, that I was no longer interested in selling, but she refused. We began to struggle for the bag, and a fight broke out.”

  “Stop right there,” Presido said. “Jungle Republic legal adviser, where are you? Come out here and give us your advice.” A wiry young man stepped forward. He was not a real lawyer but was known in the cell for his argumentative abilities. He gave advice and sometimes uninformed legal opinions to the detainees who were awaiting trial.

  “Since they had not yet agreed on a price, and the woman had not paid for the bag, then she could not take the money; as a legal adviser, I make bold to say that there was an invitation to treat but an offer had not been agreed upon,” the legal adviser said.

  A voice suddenly began to speak from the rear end of the cell close to the open-pit latrine. “A man once bought a bottle of 7 Up for his girlfriend, who had come to visit him on a Sunday afternoon. It was during the 7 Up millionaire promotion—if you discovered any amount of money written on the crown of your soft drink, you won. The girl peeled the crown and discovered the amount of five hundred thousand naira written on the bottle crown. She told the man that the money belonged to her and not him,” the voice said, enjoying the story.

  “Who asked that man to speak? Did he raise his hand to ask permission before speaking?” Presido asked, sounding quite enraged. “Assistant Provost, help me give that foolish loudmouth three hot cups of tea.”

  The newly appointed assistant provost dragged the man out and delivered three very hot slaps to the man’s face. “Now go close to the latrine and put your face there, abi—you think this is the outside world where there is no discipline and you people do whatever you like?” Presido commanded.

  “Eeeehen, continue with your fine story, my innocent trader.”

  “The woman and myself were both taken before the leader of our market, Alhaja Isiwa. She gave the lady fifty dollars, fined me fifty dollars for fighting in the market, and gave me the remaining hundred dollars.”

  “So what did you do with the hundred dollars?” Presido asked.

  “I gave half of the money to my girlfriend Sweet and invested the remaining fifty in my business.”

  “Your girlfriend must have given you special service that night, eh,” Presido said smiling.

  “She kissed the money, placed it on her breast, and told me that one day she too will start earning dollars.”

  “That your girlfriend, sef, don’t forget that a beautiful woman is like delicious soup, everyone wants to get a taste of it. Now tell me, does your market leader know that you are here?”

  “No, I have not been able to call anybody since I was arrested,” Paiko said.

  “I will help you—you are a good hardworking man, and you are a good storyteller. Someone call the corporal on duty and tell him we want to hire his cell phone,” Presido said.

  PAIKO WAS ABLE to get through to Alhaja Isiwa, and she raised money from other traders at the Alade Market and used her influence to bribe the police. Paiko was released after a few days and went back home.

  All the while that Paiko was in the cell, he had been thinking of Sweet and why she had not bothered to come and see him, and what he was going to tell her when he set his eyes
on her. The evening after his release, he took a shower, dressed up, and went down to the Jolly Hotel. He ordered a bottle of Star lager beer and sat on a stool sipping it slowly as he waited for Sweet to come out and wrap her soft, sweaty hands around his eyes, a game that they often played.

  “Where is Sweet?” Paiko asked the barman.

  “Ah, you have not heard?” the barman asked.

  “Heard what? Did something happen to her?” Paiko asked.

  “Yes, something good happened to her—she has gone to Italy.”

  “To Italy—what has she gone to do in Italy?”

  “What else? Haba, are you not living in this country? She has gone to continue the business she was doing here and earn dollars.”

  “When did she leave?” Paiko asked.

  “The day after our hotel was raided by policemen,” the barman said. “But don’t worry, women come and women go, but Jolly Hotel remains. There is a new girl that has just arrived, her name is Beauty and she is a real sweet sixteen. Should I go and call her for you?”

  Paiko did not respond. He remembered when he had handed the fifty-dollar note to Sweet, and she had kissed it and placed the money on her breast and said one day she too would start earning dollars. He had assumed that she meant that she would start going to nightclubs and dating the expatriate oil workers. He recalled what Presido had said in Jungle Republic about a beautiful woman being like delicious soup, and everyone wanting a taste. He took a sip of his beer and turned to the barman.

  “Call that new girl for me.”

  Welcome to America

  When I first came to America to attend graduate school I lived in what was considered a rough neighborhood, but I did not know it then. Having recently arrived from Africa, I had seen images of hoodie-wearing, gun-carrying figures on television and assumed my neighbors were the normal people one expected to see in America. We lived in an old hotel, built probably in the 1960s but now converted into one-bedroom apartments and efficiencies. Because you could sign a three-month lease with those who managed the apartments, a large number of the people who lived in the apartment block were transients. There were also a few international students from Asia.

  In my early days in the building, I would occasionally see a bespectacled Asian-looking girl wandering around the countless dark passageways. I would sometimes smile at her in the tight lip-twitch style favored by the Americans who passed me on the street. Was it possible that the bespectacled lady was actually the ghost of a female student from Asia who had lived in the apartment next to mine a few years back? Her story had been told to me by an African student from Kenya who lived in the same building.

  She was pursuing graduate studies and had also been a teaching assistant, just like me. Her mostly young white American students gave her a hard time in class. Her accent stood in the way of her teaching, and her students spent all her teaching time correcting her pronunciation of common words. She would come back to the apartment weeping. In addition to her problem with her students, she had an equally hard time understanding her professors and would go to class with a midget tape recorder with which she recorded her lectures. She would spend the night trying to transcribe the tapes—rewind, transcribe, rewind, transcribe … until she fell asleep on the kitchen table where she studied. When she stood before her students the next day to teach, her nerves shot to pieces and her raw eyes hidden by her glasses, she would become nervous, and her words would run together, making her accent worse. At the end of the semester she performed very poorly, and because of this, coupled with her students’ horrible evaluations, the university asked her to leave. She had been shattered. She came back to her apartment and hanged herself. Was it possible that her ghost was wandering the poorly lit passageways?

  The man who lived next door to me smoked marijuana; the smoke floated into my apartment as I lay on the couch studying. The quantity of smoke was so great, I would become stoned merely from inhaling the secondhand smoke and doze off on the couch. My wife would lift me and carry me to the bedroom.

  While I was growing up in Nigeria, one of my uncles, an ex-soldier, had a large marijuana farm. On occasion when we visited the farm we would see snakes, antelopes, and cane rats lying around the farm, happily stoned from eating the marijuana leaves and seeds. We would pick them up and take them home to cook them in the pot. Every time my wife carried me into the bedroom, I felt like those animals.

  This same neighbor who smoked marijuana would knock on my door every other day to borrow bathroom tissue, a dollar, or ice cubes. I had once foolishly offered him a bottle of beer; every evening after that he would he would knock on my door and ask me, “Say, yo’ still got some of that wonderful beer you gave me the other night?” One cold winter night I came back from classes and found the entire apartment block cordoned off by police. My wife and daughter were standing outside. The police had come to arrest him for a burglary at the nearby shopping center for which he was a prime suspect. When the police knocked on his door, he told them to leave because he had twelve kinds of guns on him. The entire apartment block was evacuated. He screamed at the police for hours and then became silent. Finally, a member of the Special Forces had gone in through the ceiling. They found him lying on his bed, stoned and sleeping. He went to jail and would write me begging letters, asking for a ten-dollar loan.

  The building next to us was occupied by a motley crowd, middle-aged men and women who sat on camp chairs all day, smiling vaguely and smoking. My daughter would wave to them from my kitchen window, and they would wave back at her and ask her to come over. She was two years old at the time and enjoyed playing with people’s glasses and touching long curly hair. We would let her go and join them sometimes, and she would come back home smelling of smoke and loaded down with candy. My wife and I speculated about who they were. She said they must be members of a religious cult, since they all lived together. I told her that they were likely to be relations living in their family’s house. In the early 1940s in Nigeria, my grandfather had made his fortune from being the sole distributor of Crocodile machetes. From the money he made, he had built a four-story house on the mainland part of Lagos, which became known as the family house. The house was occupied by all kinds of distant relations—uncles, cousins, no matter how distantly removed they were from us. Our people who lived in the village would wake up one morning and pick up their bags and start heading for Lagos. When asked where they would stay, they would mention the family house. And indeed, whenever they arrived, room was found for them. If they were young enough, my grandfather would take them to his sprawling machete store to work as attendants.

  While growing up, I spent all my summer holidays in the family house. My grandfather insisted that all his grandchildren should spend their long summer vacation in the family house. Our parents would drop us off, and we would change into buba and sokoto made from local cotton fabrics. None of my relations who lived in the house spoke English, so we learned to speak the vernacular. By going to the shop, we also learned to haggle and count money. Grandfather’s rule was that all the children should eat from the same large basin. At mealtimes, we all dipped our hands into the same plate, from the oldest to the youngest, and if you did not grab enough, well, too bad. It was one of the first houses to have a television set. Children and adults would stand by the mosquito netting on the window and peer at the screen in the living room. “How did they get them into the box?” they would ask nobody in particular. Grandfather told us that when he first bought his large radiogram, a neighbor who had come to visit had sat listening to the voices on it for a long time. Finally summoning courage, he had asked Grandfather, “These people in the box who talk all day and are always happy and singing and dancing, what do they eat?” “Eggs,” Grandfather replied. From that day on, the neighbor would bring a basket of eggs to Grandpa and whisper into his ears, “For the people in the box.”

  It was many years later that I came to know that the occupants of that house next to us were not the members of a family in
the sense in which I knew it. It was what was referred to as a halfway house, a house for drug addicts in recovery. The twitches that my wife had mistaken for religious ecstasy were actually the jouncing of addicts suffering withdrawal symptoms.

  On the other side of the old hotel lived an old woman who looked a hundred years old. Her name was Jane Kelly. She loved my daughter and would tell me that her Jim would really love my daughter when he visited. She said she was expecting him to come home from the hospital during Thanksgiving. Jim was her husband, who had passed away ten years ago. She would grab my hands and ask me to tell her stories about Africa. “I love animals,” she would whisper, “tell me about giraffes and tigers and lions.” I could not tell her that the only time I had seen a lion was at the university zoo. This lion at the university zoo would become famous years later when it ate a man who called himself Pastor Daniel. The self-styled pastor had prayed and fasted for forty days and had gone to the lion’s den with his followers to prove to them that he was like the biblical Daniel. The lion had of course eaten him. The lion’s picture made the front page of the national dailies the next day.

  One day, as we sat in Jane Kelly’s apartment, looking out her window, we saw two black squirrels running on the telephone lines. I turned to her and said, “Squirrels are enjoying American freedom—where I come from, some people trap them and eat them.”

  “Say that again,” she said, turning her ears to my mouth.

  “The squirrels are enjoying American freedom,” I said; she grabbed my hands and laughed out loud, stamping her thin legs on the wooden floorboards. Thereafter each time I visited, she would grab my hands with her soft small hands and scream, “Squirrels are enjoying American freedom!” Her apartment was filled with all manner of knickknacks, and she always had a gift for my daughter. No matter how much I tried to convince her to the contrary, she would always turn to me and say in sympathy, “There is a war going on in Africa, right?” I stopped trying to convince her after some time. She had a home aide who came in to take care of her. After some time she could no longer afford to pay the aide and was moved to a nursing home. I never saw her again. But whenever my daughter saw a white-haired old woman, she would point and scream, “Jane, Jane!”