by Helon Habila
I paused when I heard Zaq snoring. He had asked me the question that had started me on this memory-rummaging, and he hadn’t waited to hear the answer. But I was happy to see him sleeping. I was a bit nervous about what the test results would be tomorrow. I turned and faced the open window of the shed, gazing at the sky, unable to sleep. The memories were like floodgates, easier to open than to close.
Here I was with my certificate, going back home, leaving Port Harcourt for good, I hoped. But when I at last located my family, it was not where I had left them, in the town where I was born and raised. I found out that after moving to a succession of smaller houses, they had finally moved to a place called Junction, whose economy rode on the back of the two asphalt roads that neatly divided the town into four equal parts. My mother looked thinner, tired, and she didn’t talk very much. She had appeared briefly excited at my return, hugging me and asking me questions about my time in Port Harcourt; then, as if that display of emotion had drained her of her little reserve of energy, she retreated to the kitchen, not to cook but to stare into the flames in the hearth. My father, on the other hand, was full of energy, almost fidgeting with it, unable to sit still.
—Come.
He took me to a large barn at the back of the house. Even before he opened the door I could smell the petrol, and when he turned on the light I saw more than ten drums, most of them empty. We sat on two wooden stools in a clear space between two drums.
—Now that you have your certificate, what are your plans?
He hadn’t even touched the certificate. He had only glanced at it and nodded distractedly.
—I don’t know. I’ll look around and maybe open a photo shop—
—No, not in this town. There’s nothing here.
He pointed at the empty oil drums.
—This is the only business booming in this town. I buy from little children. I buy cheap and I sell cheap to the cars that come here at night. Emmanuel, John’s father, is my partner. You remember your friend John? Well, Emmanuel has proved himself to be a true friend. He’s the only one of my former colleagues whom I can still call a friend. He came up with this plan. We started the whole thing with his savings. It’s not a bad business, really. We get by, we give the police a little something to look the other way, but sooner or later they’ll get greedy. They’ll arrest us, or take over the whole business themselves. I don’t want you to be here when that happens. There’s nothing for you here. Go back to Port Harcourt. You’re smart. Talk to your master. You’ll find something. And when you do, don’t forget us. Don’t forget your mother, and especially your sister.
All I could ask, after he had finished speaking, was, Where do the children get the petrol you buy from them?
—They come to me with their little gallons and I don’t ask them where they get it.
In the two days I spent at home before returning to Port Harcourt, I saw how much my father had changed. He had turned his back on religion, and now smoked and drank ogogoro almost nonstop. He left home early in the morning in a pickup truck to go to the bush, where he and his partner bought the petrol from the kids, and he returned home only after midnight, often drunk. The house stank of petrol and cigarettes. He said he smoked just to kill the smell.
I fell into journalism out of necessity, not because I had proven talent like Max Tekena, or vision, or any ambition to be the next Zaq. I just walked into a newspaper office in Port Harcourt and presented my photography certificate. I returned to Port Harcourt, but I did not take my father’s advice. I did not go back to Udoh Fotos of Creek Street, Diobu; instead I went to the offices of Whispers magazine. It was a small monthly magazine whose photography editor had sometimes bought pictures of street scenes and the waterfront from my master to fill up empty pages, and I’d been the one who took the pictures in a brown envelope to his office. Now he listened to me and when I was through he shook his head.
—How old are you?
—I’m eighteen.
—I’ll give you a job, but on a temporary basis. Have you ever thought of becoming a journalist? Not just a photographer, but a real reporter. You could go to school in Lagos. I have a form here: fill it out and post it. They give scholarships. Give it a try.
I gave it a try, and for six months, as I waited to hear back from the Ikeja School of Journalism, I did odd jobs at Whispers, cleaning the office in the morning, washing the managing editor’s car once a week, running errands, and taking pictures of hawkers and fishermen and market women for the “Pictures from the Streets” page. In return I was paid a thousand naira a month, and was allowed to sleep in the office. That was how I became a journalist.
Zaq snored on. I wanted to ask him how he became a journalist. What inspired him. If he enjoyed being one, and if there were moments when he felt like giving up. He had looked close to giving up when I met him that day at the waterfront, the day we set out on this assignment.
7.
We left the oil-company jetty early that day, six of us, five reporters including Zaq and myself. The kidnapped woman’s husband, James Floode, and two other white men were there to see us off. He looked distracted and after a brief address to us, in which nothing new was said apart from an exhortation to be careful, and during which he kept turning to whisper to one of the men, he said nothing more. Our guide wore a gun on his waist and his green shirt and blue trousers and calf-length boots had the semblance of a military uniform. Although he looked physically intimidating, over six feet tall with a clean-shaven pate, my hope was that he was good with that gun. There were men wearing similar uniforms all over the oil-company premises, some with machine guns that they kept shifting from hand to hand, as if itching to use them.
I tried to cover my nervousness at this open show of firepower, but I could see I was not the only one feeling nervous. The other reporters kept glancing at our guide’s gun as well. The oil company had decided to replace two Port Harcourt reporters with two from Lagos, and I felt surprised and pleased that I wasn’t one of the two dropped. Perhaps they wanted someone young, with a fresh perspective, or perhaps my photographer’s credentials had secured me a place, but it didn’t matter. The Lagos reporters were dressed in suits and ties and soft city shoes, as if they were going for a press briefing in a conference room in Ikoyi. They were sitting on the front bench, right next to our guide, who was hunched over the wheel. They hadn’t introduced themselves, so I had no idea what paper they worked for. One of them was trying to make notes in the open, windy boat, pressing down his notebook with one hand; the other was shouting into his mobile phone, battling against the engine’s roar and the increasingly poor service.
I sat next to Zaq and introduced myself, shouting over the loud noise of the boat engine.
—Rufus, from the Reporter.
—A good paper.
After that he went quiet, his arms tucked under his orange life jacket, his red, teary eyes focused on the vast blue water leaping toward us. Clearly he didn’t remember me. I hid my disappointment, and reminded myself it had been five years since that day at Bar Beach, and five years since I made my phone call to him. I wanted to compare views with Zaq, to see if he thought we were in any danger from the kidnappers, but he kept his eyes on the water, appearing at times to be sleeping, his face lowered into his bulky life jacket. He looked queasy, already seasick. Looking at him—the curled gray tufts in his hair, the thick midsection resting in his lap, a testament to his love affair with the bottle—I found it hard to believe that this was once the most famous reporter in Lagos, and probably in all of Nigeria.
We headed south. I turned and looked back at the receding waterfront and the swath of white foamy furrow following in the boat’s wake, curving when we curved, a soothing and mesmerizing sight that for a moment took my mind off whatever awaited us at our rendezvous. Soon we were out of the open water and into the narrow channels that were like valleys bordered on both sides by den
se palm plants or sometimes by unexpected cliff faces. Here the going became slow, and after a few hours the city lay far away behind us. There were no people or houses to be seen on either bank, only birds jumping out of the tall thin trees and flying away in a flutter of wings and leaves as we approached. Even the Lagos journalists had stopped their loud, self-important whisperings and were listening to the increasingly desperate attempt by our guide to make radio contact with the kidnappers. When we asked him what was going on, he admitted he had no idea where we were going; he had been instructed to head for a general direction and at a certain point to call a particular frequency on his radio to be guided in. Now we seemed to be going about in circles, and we could hear the rising frustration in his voice as he screamed into the radio while maneuvering the wheel with one hand. No one was responding on the other end.
—I am here now, I need a contact. Over!
—What’s going on?
Nkem, the reporter from the Globe, stood up and went closer to the guide, shouting his question into the wind and water spray. The guide waved the radio over his head, as if aiming to throw it into the water, or at Nkem. The channel had become narrower and by now I wasn’t sure if he knew exactly where he was. I knew the general geography of this area, and I knew how confusing and indistinguishable from one another the interconnected rivers and creeks could be, which was why, I was sure, the militants had chosen it for this meeting. The waters were inconstant, and could change from the clearest, friendliest blue to a turbid, unknowable gray in a minute; every tree on the banks and every turning looked like the one before it. We had been circling for about half an hour now and still we had not made contact. We made a turn and suddenly we were in the open water again. I could see the relief on the journalists’ faces: better to be here, where we could see for miles ahead, and away from the hot, claustrophobic mangroves and the ominous swamps that had seemed to be closing in, bearing down on the boat. We went fast and straight for about thirty minutes and suddenly we could see a chain of islands in the distance ahead of us: the tall oil palm trees were like flags waving us in. We passed the first island and as we approached the second one we saw a fire burning on the beach, right by the water. At first we took it for some kind of beacon signal meant for us, but, as we got nearer and could see past the trees, more fires appeared, and they were random and out of control. The whole island was aflame. The journalists stood up one after the other, holding the sides of the boat for balance, trying to look beyond the trees on the beach.
A wooden boat was responsible for the fire on the beach; it was broken to bits, probably from a direct hit by a rocket. Inland, the smoke rose like a tornado into the sky, high over the savaged, seared trees. Our guide circled around the burning boat, the sweat running down his egg-clean head and into his shirt, and he looked uncertain as to what to do next.
—This doesn’t look good.
He turned to us, his expression half apologetic, half puzzled, uncomprehending. He shouted again into his ineffectual radio, but only static, then silence, greeted his effort.
—Can we go down? We must take some pictures.
Nkem was already clicking away. The others also took out their cameras and started jumping into the knee-high water. I was impressed when I saw the Lagos reporters also jump into the water, suits, ties, soft shoes and all. I hopped into the water and waited for Zaq, who was elaborately folding up his trousers before getting down. He took no pictures; instead he made notes in a tattered notebook as he walked around, raising his legs high over the wet undergrowth, sweating, breathing hard through his mouth. I stayed close to him, observing him as I took pictures.
—You don’t have a camera.
He shrugged and said nothing.
—So what do you think happened?
—This thing is so uncomfortable.
He took off his cumbersome life jacket, which we had all been advised to wear but which only Zaq had actually worn, pulling at the straps impatiently, turning a full circle like a dog chasing its tail, all the while cursing. When I repeated my question he turned his puffy, bloodshot eyes to me and shrugged again.
—An ambush, obviously. Someone must have informed the soldiers about this meeting.
—You mean, someone in the kidnappers’ camp?
—Maybe. But certainly someone who knew where and when.
The island looked like a midway stop where traders met to buy and sell, and travelers picked up supplies, rather than an actual village. Now it was deserted: the people, with their chickens and goats and pots and pans, must have escaped rippleless down the river in their dugout canoes after the first shot was fired. We moved inward gradually, pushing aside wet leaves and slimy tendrils, looking at the signs of carnage. Trees lay on the ground, cut in half, dripping vital sap. The smell of burning hung in the air. In the center of a compound a hut had been hit square on its conical roof, causing the thatch to cave in, and now the grass and the rafters all lay in a big pile of ash in the middle of the hut. Zaq was kneeling in the bush behind a hut, talking to the guide, pointing at something in his hand, and when I joined them I saw that he held a spent cartridge.
—What kind of gun would you say?
The guide took the cartridge from Zaq and tossed it up in the air and caught it again. He seemed happy to find something he could be authoritative about.
—This is a seven-point-six-two-millimeter-by-thirty-nine-millimeter shell, fired from an AK-47, most likely. The militants use it a lot.
—So there was definitely a gunfight?
—Not much of a fight, obviously. They didn’t know what hit them. They were taken by surprise by a gun helicopter, or more likely a gunboat. The boat on the beach must have been the first to go, and then the huts.
One of the men gave a shout from behind a tree, and when we went to him we found the journalists in an excited huddle, cameras flashing. A body in a torn blue shirt. It was half covered by bamboo leaves so that the torn stomach was only partially visible, but even that was too much. Undigested food mixed with blood covered the grass around the corpse, flies hovered and descended, oblivious to the clicking cameras and the sound of retching going on all around. The face was squeezed in a grimace of pain, the mouth open in a voiceless howl; he must have seen the gun raised and pointed at him just before the bullet ripped into him. He looked young, not more than twenty. There was a trail of blood that started from the body and disappeared into the grass, indicating how he must have dragged himself after being hit, only to collapse where he now lay. Not far from him, two more bodies lay in a bush, bloody, broken and twisted. I moved away from the group and faced the smooth rippling surface of the water visible in the distance; I took a deep breath. Zaq was bent over in a bush not far from me, retching his guts out. He finished and stood up, his face wet with sweat, wiping the vomit from his mouth with a white handkerchief. He saw me looking at him and managed a weary smile. He lifted his hand weakly and pointed toward the boat.
Zaq was facing me in the boat, raising a hand to protect his puffy face against the wind that would suddenly surge, then subside over the water. From behind the trees we could hear the excited voices of the reporters as they took more pictures. I could imagine them jostling each other, changing positions, trying to get a better and an even better shot of the dead bodies. Zaq was sitting on the same seat he had arrived in, but this time he was leaning weakly against the side of the boat, taking deep gulps of air, still recovering from his retching fit. He had taken out a whiskey flask from his pocket and was sipping from it. I sat facing him, draining the water from my shoes. Zaq grew suddenly talkative, perhaps a nervous reaction to the gruesome spectacle we had just witnessed. The waves gently raised and lowered the boat, the motion calming my frayed nerves. He lit a cigarette and offered me one. I didn’t smoke, but I took one anyway. He blew smoke into the air.
—I used to know your editor, Dan. We were reporters together in Lagos,
a long time ago.
—You may not remember me, but we have met before. Five years ago, in Lagos. I was a student at the School of Journalism, and you came to give a lecture.
—I’ve given many lectures in my life. At one time I was giving almost two every week.
—And you helped me get my present job. You gave me your number and I called you. I still have the number . . .
He looked a bit uncomfortable, turning away partially from me, but I went on, hoping he might remember if I jogged his memory hard enough.
—In that lecture you talked about journalists as conservationists . . . that we scribble for posterity . . . and you said most of what we write may be ephemeral, a note here about a car accident, a column there about a market fire, a suicide, a divorce, yet once in a while, maybe once in a lifetime, comes a transcendental moment, a great story only the true journalist can do justice to—
—I see. Well, your memory is better than mine. It was a long time ago. I was giving a lot of lectures at that time.
I saw no point in going on, though I wanted desperately to ask him if he thought we were pursuing just such a great story, and what it would take to do justice to it. In his lecture he said that the mark of a great journalist is the ability to know a great story when it comes, and to be ready for it, with the words and the talent and the daring to go after it. Nothing must be allowed to stand in the way. Now he looked as if the only thing he wanted to do was go back home. I wasn’t sure he still believed in what he taught.
—SO, WHERE DO YOU think she might be?