by Jowhor Ile
“Bibi,” he said as he came down the steps, “Bibi.”
Bibi did not respond.
“You mean he didn’t say anything at all before he left?” she asked without turning her back. “He must have said something to you.”
Ajie stopped dead in his tracks, and guilt rose like tidewater up to his chest and made breathing very difficult. If anyone could have spared Paul from going missing, it should have been him.
CHAPTER THREE
Paul was four years old when Ajie was born. He often told Ajie that he remembered the day, a blazing hot Friday afternoon right after school. He also said Ajie was as black as charcoal at birth, and had a pair of bright red ears. Ajie had his doubts about this story but didn’t contradict his brother. Instead, he would ask if Paul could remember the day Bibi was born. Was Paul not already two years old then? Were her ears also red? How tiny was her nose? If Bibi was within earshot, Ajie might rephrase the last question or withdraw it (Bibi hated her nose, and Ajie felt that with the way the thing was shaped, no one could blame her). If he was feeling ready for trouble, he would go ahead and ask whatever he wanted.
Bibi was not one to let things lie. She didn’t rush into her battles, either; she courted them with a firm, steady hand. She would first allow her temper to heat up to the degree necessary. “I am warning you now,” she would say, wagging a finger at Ajie, “stop that nonsense.” She would fling him some bait, initiating a countdown. “One…” she would say in a level voice, then fold her arms across her chest and look away.
Once the count had begun, Ajie would find it impossible to resist.
“That is the problem you have, Ajie,” Paul would say as a way of cautioning him, “you don’t listen.”
Ajie would find himself grinning. “Minus joke, Paul,” he would continue. “Okay, let’s just say her nose was not tiny, then…”
“Two?” Bibi would curve it like a question.
“…did her eyes close Chinese-style every time she tried to laugh?”
“Three!”
Bibi would unleash her rage like a whirlwind. Ajie would feel her transform in a flash, twirling and spinning toward him. He would yell, “Cool down! What did I—”
A slap. A knock on the head. Before he could recover from the shock of her assault, she would hold his lips together in a tight pinch, and Ajie would slap at her skinny arms. She would hold firm. A small ridge would form between her eyebrows as she pulled and twisted his lips. “You. Have. No. Respect! You. Have. No. Respect!” Ajie would kick at her and she would let go. Some days he gave slap for slap. If she grabbed him by the collar, he grabbed back, and the veins on their necks would stand out like tiny ropes. Paul would roll up an old magazine to hit them with. “Let go. Let go.” They would dance about until Bibi did her swing—that was her winning move—putting all her weight on one leg, then hurling Ajie, with all her might, across the room. He would fly off, and with his own solid grip on her, she would follow and land on top of him, where it would be left to her to hit and hit. Then Paul would hold her hands and shout, “Bibi!,” dragging her off. Panting heavily, righting her dress, she would snap her fingers at Ajie. “Try me next time.”
“There is nothing you can do!” Ajie would yell back, his ears and cheeks stinging hot with pain.
“Enough is enough!” Paul”s voice would sound grave enough to silence them, at least for a while. They would wait for Bendic to return from work before reporting the case, because Ma had a hurried way of dealing with their disputes that wasn’t worth the trouble. “How can you make fun of your older sister like that?” Ma would cut in. “My friend, let me not hear this next time.” And then, turning to Bibi, “Don’t you have any shame? You shouldn’t be fighting your younger brother. The two of you, apologize.” Bibi would wait for Ajie to go first. Ajie would wait, too, and then Ma would look at the two of them. “I’m not hearing anything, or have I gone deaf? Ajie, you are younger, go first.”
Bendic was more thorough. Ajie would give his version of what happened, then Bibi would give hers, after which Paul would be called in as independent witness. If the stories contradicted each other, as they often did, Bendic would ask if there were parts of their accounts they wished to amend. It was a slow and thorough, courtlike process, but at the end, Bendic always found out who started the provocation. You reported a fight to Bendic only when you wanted your adversary singled out and punished, then yourself vindicated. But there you were, standing, trying to hold on to an aggravation that had long since disappeared. Blinking like a wall gecko.
“So why didn’t you wait to report this, Bibi? Instead, you took laws into your hands and attacked your brother.”
“But he looked for my trouble first.”
“Where did you keep it?”
“What?”
“Your trouble, where did you keep it?”
Ajie could see the heat Bibi was coming under and hid his smile, looked down and held his hands together. Too much happiness can make you uncomfortable.
“Are you saying you can’t control your anger?”
“I can,” Bibi answered, her face thorny, like an open sack of nails. Her eyes reddened and began to fill up.
Then it was Ajie’s turn, and you could easily see Bibi unknot as his motives were interrogated. The hem of her pinafore lifted and danced a little as she moved her weight from one foot to the other.
Even Paul never got off easy when he was a witness to a fight. “So, Paul,” Bendic would say, now a bit weary but resolute, “you think it’s fine to stand by and watch as your siblings pummel each other to death?”
“No, sir.”
“Then what? Was there nothing you could have done to stop this silly argument from resulting in a fight?”
A long silence followed.
“Are you deaf, Paul? Or am I not speaking loudly enough for you?” The doors creaked at the harshness of Bendic’s voice, and the parlor filled up with smoke.
Ajie could feel the blood pounding inside Paul’s head, the mad beating of his temples, and the roaring going on inside him: I didn’t do anything! It’s not my fault!
Bendic restrained his anger, reined it in with a deep breath, his voice mellowed. “Okay, explain yourself.”
“It was supposed to be a joke, but Bibi wasn’t finding it funny, and she warned Ajie to stop. Ajie didn’t, so she tried to make him.”
“Make him what?”
“Make him stop, maybe.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure. She grabbed his neck.”
“She grabbed his neck,” Bendic echoed. “And you sat and watched?”
No answer.
“Yes or no?”
“Well, yes. I tried to stop them, but I wasn’t quick enough.”
“I’ve said it many times in this house, that you are responsible for the actions you take as well as the actions you should—or could—have taken but didn’t. What would have happened if you had injured yourselves in the process?” Bendic continued. “You think your mother and I would be happy to find you wounded or constantly replacing torn clothes? You think this is what we like to return home to every day?”
One particular evening while they were having an after-fight session, Paul walked over to where the clothes were lying on the floor—a pile of evidence—between where they stood and where Bendic sat in the puffed leather chair in his study, and picked up the clothes. “I will mend them,” he said.
Paul was able to do this type of thing. He could muster the courage and take the initiative, and it would seem natural—like this was what people did or were supposed to do: They stepped forward before judgment was passed on them; they accepted the blame and decided all by themselves what amends they would make.
Ajie tried to copy this code once, and it backfired. He had broken a new boy’s pencil at school by accident, and the boy had gone to complain to the teacher. When Ajie was summoned and interrogated, he told the teacher that it was an accident, he was sorry and planned to replace the pencil the
next day. The teacher looked him up and down and asked who he thought he was to talk like that. “You go about destroying people’s property and then tell them you can replace it? Ajie Utu!” She reached down for her cane, asked Ajie to stretch out his hand, and delivered three stern strokes. His school report at the end of that term said, “Should learn to respect the property of fellow pupils.”
In the year Bibi turned nine and Ajie seven, their fighting stopped. Bendic, working on what he said was a very serious case, had come home straight from court and witnessed the final stages of a major brawl. The living room furniture was in disarray, books scattered about the floor, slippers came slicing through the air. Bendic’s voice boomed from where he stood by the door and knocked the fight out of them. Ajie had scratches all over his face; Bibi had a bruised lower lip.
“It will never happen again,” was how Bendic put it. “Not in this house…to return and hear that there has been a fight.” He didn’t let anyone take his briefcase from him, or the black gown held in the crook of his arm. He stood there in the middle of the mess they had made. “You are both old enough to resolve your differences without having to resort to blows.” There was no room for courtroom dramas that day, no careful interrogation and weighing of actions. Bendic was fed up with the fighting and simply outlawed it.
Ajie and Bibi never fought each other again, at least not in their usual physical ways. They invented other methods of combat.
Ajie, however, carried on fighting at school. Twice that term, at least. Nnaemeka Anigwe, an overweight boy with breasts, knocked the biscuit out of Ajie’s hand during break time and ran off with it. Ajie chased after the boy, tripped him, and they both crashed on the ground. They struggled. Ajie tried to pry the boy’s mouth open to force out the brown mash, but he bared his teeth and swallowed again and again, determined to seal his victory. So now what? Ajie wondered. Was he to let this boy get up, dust himself off, and walk?
Then there was Lara Gasper, who pointed at him one afternoon, covering her nose with her other hand, and then told the class he had farted. All eyes turned to Ajie. He hadn’t even been aware anyone had farted. And now that all of Primary 3B was looking at him, should he glare about in clear-conscience surprise and say, “No, I didn’t fart,” “It wasn’t me”? Or yield his rear for them to sniff his shorts? Ajie was still pondering his options. He didn’t know when he slapped Lara hard across the face. He simply heard the sharp ring of the slap and the dead silence that followed, as if every other sound had been sucked out of the classroom. He looked around and saw the gasping students, the shock on Lara’s face, and realized what he had done. He stilled himself from an instant show of regret. Why should she go about bearing false witness? he thought. Lara grabbed his shirt and rained some quick slaps on his chest, but her eyes were brimming, so she ran off to complain. The teacher, Mr. Dike, made him face the wall, kneel down, raise his hands, and apologize after he had spent all of the free period on his knees. Ajie felt sorry and did apologize, but the stupid girl, Lara, said she couldn’t quite hear him. “Audible!” Mr. Dike bellowed from the back. “I said, be audible!” So Ajie said the words again, this time loud and slow. “I am very sorry, Lara. I will never, ever do that to you again or to anybody else.”
As he walked back to his seat, he wondered if this incident would get into his end-of-term report. He imagined the hurt in Bendic’s eyes. You hit a fellow pupil, what are you turning into? Right under my roof. Bendic’s disappointment, anger, and concern all rolled into that unreadable, serene quality that could be mistaken for leniency. Ajie resigned himself to fate. The worst could happen: Bendic would hear of his misconduct and then use him as an example for his siblings. He might flog Ajie (something he had never done), or he might stop paying his school fees, send the money to a child in the village or one of those boys who hawked meat pie and bread on Aba Road; a child who, because of what he had suffered, would better appreciate a good education and show some gratitude for it. My hands are tied, Ajie imagined Bendic saying, but this is the only way you can learn.
For the whole of that afternoon, through social studies lesson and composition exercise, Ajie planned his defense. He would beg. He would plead momentary anger; it wasn’t really a fight, he didn’t know when it happened, he lost his temper, the slap slipped out of him, and there was no way to take it back. Give me one more chance, please, Bendic.
Years later, in boarding school, when Ajie fought again, it was with proper blows, kicks, and tumbles in a rough circle of cheering boys in shorts and checked gingham shirts. He couldn’t recall all the details of this fight. He remembered the boy, whose father, it turned out, died later that term in a car crash on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. He could not remember what led to the fight.
—
After Bendic walked in on Ajie and Bibi’s skirmish and outlawed fighting in the house, he dropped his briefcase on the dining table and walked into his room. No one spoke or moved for a while, and the house settled into a deep silence and near-evening shadows. The power outage had stretched for hours. Their parents’ bedroom door was left wide open for air. Bendic was taking a nap, lying almost spread-eagled on the king-size bed. The curtains were hiked up and tucked in severely on the rails, the French windows pushed out so that the room was filled with the waning afternoon light. Paul walked along the passage on the balls of his feet. He turned the doorknob to his and Ajie’s room, slowly, to suppress the click. Ajie followed in slow motion, stepping high on his toes. Paul pulled out the side drawer by his bed and got out a comic book he had borrowed from Fola, slim and glossy, with speech balloons floating about the front page. He rolled up the book and put it in his pocket, though most of it stuck out on the side of his T-shirt.
“Let’s go.”
“I’m coming,” Ajie said, changing quickly into a fresh T-shirt.
“What’s Bibi doing?”
“I don’t know.” He didn’t care.
Fola’s father was not back from work when they got to his house. “Let’s go to the back,” Fola said after he met them near the gate, “my mother is with a visitor.”
Paul handed him the comic book.
“I have others. I went to Leventis with my father on Saturday. I got four more,” Fola said.
“Ask me a capital,” Ajie interjected as they walked past the septic tanks. After the afternoon’s ordeal with Bendic, he was determined to lighten his own mood.
“State or country?” Paul asked.
Fola’s house help must have spent the morning washing bedsheets and towels. They ducked their heads under the line sagging with clothes long dried. Two blue pillowcases and something with bold stripes had fallen to the ground, crisp.
“States are easy,” Ajie said. “I have the highest score in my class in general knowledge.”
“If you want to do something difficult,” Fola said, “try the thirteen times table.”
“We do fourteen times tables first thing every morning now,” Paul said. “Our new teacher is Ghanaian. He is very serious. If he catches you hesitating or chewing your lip, he”ll single you out to recite it in front of the class. Olumide got six strokes today for getting three answers wrong.”
“Ask me any country’s capital and I will tell you,” Ajie said, bringing them back to where they started.
“Namibia.”
“Windhoek,” Ajie answered.
“I just gave you an easy one. Wait, let me think.” Fola paused. “Mmm…El Salvador.”
“San Salvador.”
“Suriname?” Paul asked this time.
“What?” Fola made a sound between mockery and surprise. “Is that even a country? Okay, answer that.”
Ajie stood still, eyes distant, moving his lips a little as if muttering to himself.
“You don’t know it!” Fola chirped.
“Paramaribo,” Ajie exclaimed, and then walked on.
“Did he get it?” Fola asked, looking at Paul.
Paul nodded. “Good one.”
“Another?
”
“Iceland,” Fola said, distracted.
“Reykjavík.” The answer came before Fola finished.
“Is that how to pronounce it?”
“Rei-ka-vik. And I can spell it if you want.”
“Let’s do something else, please,” Fola said, unable to suppress his boredom.
Behind Fola’s house was a sloping field cut to a low brush. A small house that was formerly the servants’ quarters stood at the corner by the fence. They sat by the barbed wire fence that separated the house from the mangrove creek where flying insects appeared all at once. The boys flapped their hands in the air and slapped some against their bodies.
Paul stood up and walked toward the mango tree by the fence. He jumped up, caught a branch, and clambered up the tree.
“Our gateman killed a snake from that tree last week,” Fola said apprehensively. “He was shaking it for ripe mangoes and a big snake fell down.”
“Really!” Paul said with wide eyes, looking down at Fola from the tree.
“I’m serious,” Fola said, sounding ominous, as though a slither of snakes might just descend upon them at any moment.
“What color was the snake?” Ajie asked.
“What?”
“The snake your gateman killed, what color was it?”
“Green.”
Paul had jumped down from the tree, rubbing tree bark from his arms. “How long was the snake?” he asked.
“As long as this.” Fola stretched out his right hand, and then with his other hand, he picked a region near the center of his chest. “Or even longer. Our gateman buried it right there.” He pointed at a spot near the fence.
“It’s probably a tree snake,” Paul said after a while.
Ajie knew then that Paul would be going up the tree anyway.
“You know tree snakes don’t bite,” Paul said, looking at Fola. “You said it was green, right?” He was engaging his expertise on snakes, an expertise gained solely by looking through Ma’s encyclopedias and watching the occasional wildlife documentary on TV.