Oil on Water

by Helon Habila

  —I wonder what he knows about the kidnapping.

  Zaq allowed me to lead him back into the hut, still grumbling about ghosts. The shrine, as this section of the island was called, occupied the entire waterfront, with the hillock and the sculpture garden intervening between the huts and the water. The huts were arranged as if to form two lines on a rough isosceles triangle, with the sculptures occupying most of the middle space and the beach forming the third line. The first hut facing the statues was a sort of reception room, which was where we had first been hosted. Now we had been moved to another hut, a smaller one, just behind the reception hut. Not too far from us was the worship room. It was bigger than all the other huts, and a single wooden statue stood like a guard before the entrance. I could see men and women in white robes crowding together near the statue, waiting to go in for the evening service. The other side of the island was the village proper, about a mile away and separated from the shrine by a large buffer area of tall leafy trees. The villagers were all connected to the shrine by religion, and the chief priest had authority over the whole settlement. The villagers were fishermen, mostly, making their living on the river that poured its water into the sea, leading away upstream into a hinterland of marshes and forests and swamps.

  As I led Zaq to the hut we would be sharing, we passed close to the worship hut and some of the men and women, now kneeling before the entrance, looked at us briefly as they waited their turn to go in. I wondered idly what religious ritual went on inside the hut, whether the tall impressive priest was seated on a chair before the shrine, handing out Communion wafers or whatever their equivalent of those might be, or whether there were mad orgiastic dances and trances—but I doubted the latter. These people didn’t look like the dance-and-trance type—they appeared remarkably composed and solemn.

  Our hut was as spacious inside as the first one had been, even though it looked deceptively narrow from outside. A mat was laid out for me already, and across from it was Zaq’s mat, with his slippers in front of it and a worshipper’s white robe hanging from a nail above. He saw me looking at the robe and shook his head.

  —I had to change into something. They were kind enough to wash my things for me.

  —What kind of religion is it?

  —No idea. The only thing I’m interested in right now is what their connection is to the militants.

  My mat had a single sheet spread over it and a pillow where my head should rest. I removed my shoes and sat down. There was nothing else in the hut except for a water pot against the wall and a lamp hanging from a hook over the pot. Zaq lay on his mat, his eyes glittering, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. The whiskey bottle was down to half full.

  —So, what news from the city?

  I briefed him on my interview with Floode and handed him his money. He opened the envelope and let the money fall out all over his lap, then he looked at me and shook his head, laughing drunkenly.

  —That is what I call good journalism.

  I TOLD HIM of my visit to his editor, how I got to the offices of the Star very late in the afternoon, confident that no editor would leave the office until the next day’s paper had been put to bed. The office was next to a dump site, and facing it across the road was a police barracks. From the office’s dim and miserable interior one could hear a bugle calling the men to the parade ground, and one could smell the dump site. I found Beke Johnson eating from a lunch box on his desk; the box gave up a strong smell of burned palm oil and onions. A red stain shone brightly in the center of his blue tie. The office was narrow and long, like a corridor, and his desk was at one end, near the window that faced the barracks. On the table were files spilling out papers, an old computer, a stapler and a stone paperweight, all jostling for space with the lunch box. He ate with a loud, wet sound, his mouth open. It was an unremarkable place, with two unremarkable women working in front of two computers at the other end of the corridor.

  The editor looked even more undistinguished in his rumpled, oversized suit and tie; he could be an apparatchik in some gray concrete ministry building. All he wanted to know after I had introduced myself was when Zaq would be returning. When I told him Zaq was ill, he looked skeptical.

  —Tell him to hurry up and get well, otherwise I’ll stop his salary.

  —I don’t think I will be seeing Zaq till he gets back.

  The editor thought about that briefly, his mouth moving mechanically like a masticating ruminant’s, his eyes looking at me unhappily.

  —Well, you must have a means of communicating with him, surely? By phone?

  —No, phones don’t work on the island.

  —Well. Did he give you his piece to bring to me? Nothing? What am I going to publish tomorrow? What kind of a reporter is that? Ah, he still thinks he is a star Lagos reporter. But he is lucky to be working for me.

  —I can send you a few things—I have some pictures, and a few paragraphs.

  —Well, make sure you do that as soon as you can. I have deadlines. I’m conscious of my obligations, unlike some people.

  I felt sorry for Zaq, sorry that he had to work for such a dull, sour employer, and it was at that time that I realized how colossal Zaq’s fall from grace had been. When I stood up to go, he waved me back into the seat.

  —Where are you going? Sit down. Let me tell you about your friend.

  He pushed his lunch box aside and wiped his hands ineffectually with Kleenex. He leaned forward and once more waved me back to my seat, imperiously, impatiently.

  —Once, he was the best.

  —Yes, I know. He used—

  —No. You don’t know anything. Listen. Did he tell you we were rookies together at the Daily Times? Oh, he didn’t? Then did he tell you that we shared a flat in Surulere for one year? I was twenty-two, he was twenty-one. Ah, I can see us now. Green, wet behind the ears. Of course, there was nothing like journalism school then, you just finessed your way into things. I bet you went to a journalism school, didn’t you? They are useless. You learn nothing there. All you need is to open your eyes, make the right contacts, and be bold. Well, nothing like journalism school for us. You begin as a cub reporter, and if you survive, you become king of the jungle, or at least something high up on the food chain.

  Beke drank from a water bottle, belched, and fished around with his tongue for strings of meat between his teeth. He wiped the sweat from his bald head.

  —Well, Zaq and I were assigned to the news desk. In those days there was no specialization, no one cared if you wanted to cover the arts, or business, or news, the editor simply sent you wherever he wanted. We were assigned to news, but Zaq wanted something different. He was full of ideas, restless. At night he never slept. He wanted to do feature stories about everyday things, ordinary lives. But this was a different age, late seventies, early eighties, things were different then. People bought papers for news only, facts, or at least that was how the editor saw it. But Zaq wasn’t the kind of person to sit around waiting for things to change. He quit, just like that. Even I was taken by surprise. I remember the exact day, in 1982, it was a Monday, usually our busiest day, the newsroom was full, most of us were back from our beat and we were rushing to get our copy ready for the subeditors. The editor was there in a corner, berating one of the reporters, waving a piece of paper about, and then I saw Zaq get up from his desk and walk right up to him and call him by his name. Who dared call the editor by his name? It was unheard-of, and right in front of all the junior reporters and interns. He went right up to him and said, Tunde, I quit! And he walked out. Those days you didn’t need a resignation letter, reporters just wandered in and out of newsrooms.

  —Ah, anyway. He left. He also moved out of our flat while I was at work, with no forwarding address. Just like that. I asked around among our friends, but no one knew where he had got to. I didn’t see him again till a year later, and you know where he was all that while? At Bar
Beach. If you knew Bar Beach in the eighties, which you didn’t, ha ha. You certainly didn’t. Ever heard of the Bar Beach Show? That was in the seventies. The Bar Beach Show. Armed robbers tied to sand-filled tin drums and shot by soldiers right in front of cheering crowds. That was the Bar Beach Show under the military government. In the eighties, it was beer shacks and prostitutes. We had democracy, the dark days of the late sixties and seventies were over, the country was desperate to put the civil war behind it. The victims were just glad the nightmare was over, and the victors—well, what victors? Makeshift barrooms and restaurants were lined up along the beach, and young girls from all over the country went to Lagos looking for opportunity, most of them from respectable backgrounds, but Lagos doesn’t care how respectable you were in your village. Hey, this was Lagos. They ended up as prostitutes on Bar Beach. Some ended up pregnant and homeless on the streets, and they were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones died, their bodies discovered in the water days later, washed up in faraway Lekki. Raped. Brutalized. Strangled. Stabbed. Well, Zaq saw the story in that when the rest of us saw only prostitutes selling sex. Every day he’d be there with those prostitutes, talking to them, and who knows, perhaps sleeping with them, maybe pimping for them. Ha ha. No, just kidding. Come on, young man, lighten up. Some of the girls were really pretty. Regular-looking girls, only they weren’t regular, they were prostitutes. I’d go there when there was no news to chase and I’d sit with him in the shacks and drink beer, and some of the girls would come over and sit with us.

  —One of them would later become famous for her involvement with him. I could tell that day, when I first saw her, I could tell there was something special between them. She was younger than the others, about eighteen. And, thinking about it, he wasn’t all that much older than her. We were very young then, young and stupid and full of dreams. In Lagos you can dream, you see. There are no boundaries, no traditions or family to hold you back. It is that kind of place. Anyway, this girl, Anita, she sat right next to him and didn’t leave us even when the others drifted off to hustle men. And when she heard I was a journalist she said to me, Zaq is writing a story about us. Did you know that? She didn’t speak much, but when she did she spoke well. She was pretty, perhaps the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, and believe me, as a journalist I’ve seen a lot of pretty things. It’s hard to think that way about a prostitute, right? And she had manners, good breeding. I could tell. She had her hands on the table, and they weren’t garishly painted like the other girls’. Her nails were cut short, clean, her makeup was moderate, adequate. She was like a college girl. She seemed lost in that place, out of her element. Yes, I said to her. Zaq told me. Is Anita your real name? She looked at Zaq quickly before she answered, Yes. Why do you want to know? Zaq looked at her and said, Are you sure you don’t want to be going now, Anita? You can’t stay here talking to us all night. He laid a hand on her shoulder as he spoke. I had never seen Zaq like that before, so gentle, so soft and mellow.

  —The fool was in love. I watched Anita wrinkle her pretty nose and shake her head. No. I enjoy being with you. And she stayed with us till we left. I told Zaq, Be careful. I think she likes you. But of course I meant he should be careful not to like her too much. He laughed, confident, arrogant as usual. They’re just subjects for me. That’s all. I’m going to write the most in-depth, interesting feature on prostitutes in Lagos. But who wants to read about prostitutes in Lagos? I asked. That was when he told me Anita’s story. He said Anita had been thrown out of her parents’ house when she became pregnant at sixteen. Her boyfriend couldn’t marry her because he was too young and still in school. Zaq said that in the traditional system her boyfriend would have had no option but to marry her. But now her Christian parents threw her out because she had brought shame upon them. He said that by writing about the girls he would be showing what was happening to all of us, how we were gradually changing as a people. Our values, our culture, our way of life. All changing irrevocably. Think about it.

  —That shows you how ahead of his time he was. Well, he wrote his story. And he got his job back, plus a promotion. You’ve read the piece, I’m sure, perhaps studied it in that school of journalism you went to. “Five Women,” he titled the story. Not “Five Prostitutes,” “Five Women,” you get that? Every weekend he told the story of one of the five. They were all below twenty. And you know what he said? People cried as they read the intimate stories of these girls. The politicians were compelled to act. Governors’ wives started a scholarship scheme to send the girls back to school, they called it “A Better Life for Fallen Women.” Speeches were given on TV, international organizations invited Zaq to talk about his experience of living with the prostitutes in order to write about them. All over the country, charities working with the police raided brothels to save innocent girls from their terrible life, but hey, not all of them wanted to be saved or rehabilitated, they just wanted to be prostitutes! Ha ha.

  —Well, our weekend paper became the biggest-selling in the country. Zaq’s byline became a magic formula. People read whatever he wrote, and he did write great stuff. Crusading kind of stuff, but always from the inside, intimate. But you know what, he told me that with all that success he missed his days at Bar Beach. He missed Anita. She went back to school and actually graduated. And I think it was to forget her that Zaq threw himself into the pro-democracy movement when the military dictators returned in the late eighties. He wrote fiery, fearless anti-military pieces that even our editor was hesitant to publish. Zaq left us and was immediately wooed by all the prominent papers. In the end he became editor of Action! magazine in Ikeja. He did some of his best work then. This was the late eighties, remember, most of us had to maintain two or three addresses just to stay a step ahead of the military goons. But you’ve heard all this before at that school you went to, haven’t you? You have. Well, just humor me, unless you have a wife to go back home to—let me conclude my story, there may be a lesson in this for you. And what is that lesson? Don’t fall in love with a prostitute, my friend—

  —I really have to . . . it’s getting late—

  —Just listen, I’m almost finished.

  I listened, even though I knew the rest of the story. A major part of Zaq’s life, because of the sheer brilliance of it, had been lived in full public view. At a certain point he stopped being the man behind the news and became the news. He reached the height of his fame during the worst years of the dictatorship—the Abacha years, from 1993 to 1998.

  —After the dictatorship most people, including myself, expected him to join the new government, but he kept his distance. He went back to his former paper, Action!, and continued his in-depth, weekend-style features. But not with the same conviction. By then he had started drinking heavily. His editorials became increasingly critical of the new government that he and his pro-democracy pals had worked so hard to bring to power, but then in 2003 he joined the government. He became an adviser to the information minister, a tough guy with many enemies in the cabinet.

  —Well, it was at this point that Anita miraculously reentered his life. Only this was not the same awkward young girl he had written about in his famous “Five Women” article. This was a grown woman. Poised. She had been to university, she had a good job with a bank in Lagos, but of course her veneer of respectability didn’t stop the gutter press from tagging them “the Prostitute and the Radical.” There were pictures of them together at fancy parties, book launches, media events.

  I remembered, this was in 2004, the year I first met Zaq, the year he gave the lecture at my school, the year his heavy drinking began to finally take its toll on him.

  —A wedding date was announced. Later, the papers said that he went to London against his better judgment. Anita wanted her trousseau from only the best stores on Oxford Street, and the minister was kind enough to offer to foot the bill as his wedding present. He took the couple along with him when he went to a Commonwealth ministers’ conference in London. Only the
y never got past customs. Cocaine was discovered in Zaq’s toilet bag, among his shaving things. At the trial he said he had no idea how it got there. The papers back home suddenly turned vicious on him, some implying that he’d been carrying the drugs for the minister. Others, who took the time to investigate Anita’s background, discovered that while at university she’d had a series of liaisons with very rich men, some of them associated with the drug world. At the trial, he said not a single word against her, his only plea being that the minister shouldn’t be associated with the story. But of course the minister was sacked, and Zaq’s Lagos career came to an end. After a year in a UK prison he was deported back to Nigeria, where he was set free after serving only a month in jail. And after his jail term, he disappeared from Lagos.

  I stood up.

  —Thanks, Mr. Johnson, but now I—

  —Okay, okay. You really have to go. But tell Zaq to get back here as soon as possible. Tell him not to try me, tell him not to force my hand, or else . . . from tomorrow no pay. Tell him that.

  —But what if—

  —Just tell him.

  11

  Zaq had fallen asleep while I was talking, his whiskey bottle, now three-quarters empty, clutched tightly in his hand. I went out and walked up the hillock, and suddenly I was facing the water over the top of the scanty trees. The wind from the sea blew into my face, fresh, moist, and I was instantly filled with an unaccountable exhilaration. I felt free. With my back against a tree, I faced the water, and when I got tired of staring at the water I opened my book. But as I bent my head to read I noticed a white shape in the distance, many white shapes, a procession coming out of the line of trees on the path that circled the hillock, leading to the sea. They were each holding a staff, and toward the middle two men were bearing what looked like a body covered in a white sheet on a stretcher. I thought I was about to witness some kind of sea burial, and I debated whether to dash back to the hut to get my camera. But I decided against it; I didn’t want to miss anything. A low chanting reached me faintly where I sat. When they got to the edge of the water, they put down the stretcher and then the corpse threw aside the white sheet, miraculously sat up and started to crawl on all fours, its robe dragging in the wet sand, till its knees and arms were in the waves, and then it sat in the water. The others gave out a loud sigh and joined the sitting figure, forming a semicircle behind it, their backs to me, facing the huge dying sun, their arms outstretched, supplicatory, and their sighs suddenly turned into loud wails. They went on like this for a long time, swaying rhythmically, imitating the movement of the waves, and then one by one they came out of the water and headed back to the huts.