And After Many Days

by Jowhor Ile

  Today they were honoring an invitation from one of Ma’s colleagues who was having a Thanksgiving service after she miraculously survived a boat mishap on Bonny River. She was one of six survivors out of the initial twenty-two people who had embarked on the journey.

  The church was packed full with people, and music came from a group of keen musicians who wore shiny blue satin tops and black trousers and skirts.

  When the time came, Ma’s colleague stepped out toward the stage. Ma nodded at Bibi when she asked if that was her colleague. The woman’s blouse was the color of egg yolk and had a glazed sheen; her blue wrapper was heavily patterned with sequins, tiny circular mirrors, and dangling beads. As she walked toward the stage, another woman next to Ma shouted, “Hallelujah!” in anticipation of the well-known testimony. Ajie saw raised Bibles in the air, and there were scatterings of applause from different corners of the church. A lancing sound came from the microphone as one of the technical guys handed it to her. He then took it back, tapped on the mouthpiece one, two, gave a nod to the guys at the console, returned the mic to the woman, and then scurried away.

  “Praaaaaaaa-ise the Lord!” She dragged out the words until the congregation was clapping again, standing and lifting their hands in praise, waving handkerchiefs in the air. “If it had not been for the Lord on my side,” she charged, “I say, if it had not been for the Lord on my side, brethren, tell me, where would I be?” Her emotions got the better of her as she choked up, and some people in the congregation sighed. Ajie saw a tall man standing with his arms folded over his chest, his eyes fixed on the stage as if he had been struck by something. Ajie looked at him and thought that maybe he, too, had been saved from a boat mishap.

  “Brothers and sisters, I don’t know where to start.” She took a deep breath to gather up her feelings, then began the story.

  Paul nudged Ajie and told him to tap Ma. He mouthed some words to her and then stood up to go to the toilet. Bibi said she needed to go, too, and Ma refused and snapped, “Pay attention!” and Bibi just put her head down and continued doodling in her jotter.

  “What I know is that one minute I was sitting on the boat, the next I was in the river. I am not the best swimmer in the world, but my God, the God who delivered the children of Israel from captivity, the God who rescued Daniel from the den of lions…” The whole church hall thundered with applause as the woman concluded, “He delivered me. He did not forsake me in my hour of need.” People stood up, waved their hands in the air, and shouted words of praise to God. After a while, the clapping died down, but then an uproar of thanksgiving would erupt from another corner of the church.

  “That is what the hand of God can do!” the pastor said, and this charged the congregation. “He is the I Am that I Am, the unchangeable changer. He has spoken in his word that the sun shall not smite thee by day nor the moon by night.”

  “Amen!” the hall reverberated. The pastor was silent for a while and then started cooing into the microphone in his deep dulcet tone: “Amen, and amen, we bless the Lord. Amen and amen.” And slowly, quiet was restored for the delivering of the Word.

  A male usher in a black suit, white shirt, and red tie hurried to the stage with a fat Bible and a notebook, which he placed on the lectern, performing a slight bow to the pastor before hurrying down the stage.

  Back at home after the service, the Utus had jollof rice and chicken for lunch and soft drinks. Bendic asked Paul to tune the JVC to Radio Rivers 2, where Chinemerem Nwoga was presenting her usual Sunday classical music program. Today’s edition was about the eighteenth-century pianist Chopin. The presenter played her personal favorites from his work and talked about the pianist’s struggle with ill health and the devastating love affairs that might have inspired his music.

  Ajie sat on the floor beside the couch. The cold Sprite burned the back of his throat as he gulped. The bottle made a sucking sound, then fizzled and bubbled as he set it down. “I know it was the price for our redemption and all, but if, according to the memory verse quoted in church today, for our sake, it ‘pleased God to bruise His own son, Jesus,’ does that not then make God a sadist?”

  “What did you say?” Ma’s eyes narrowed. Bendic was sitting in his chair and didn’t lower his newspaper. Ajie’s toes played with the velvet buttons on the side of the couch.

  “I said, eh, does it make God a sadist then, since it pleased Him to bruise His son?”

  Ma’s slippers whizzed across the parlor but missed Ajie’s head by a wide mark. Ajie sprang up. Ma followed, caught him by the arm, and gave him three clean slaps on the back, tai! tai! tai! They stood there before each other, stunned. Ma could have given more slaps had she wanted: Ajie’s feet were glued to the floor like those of an animal dazed before the full beam of a car. He did not know how to run from the hands of his parents. They had never hit any of the children before.

  “What’s going on?” Ajie could hear only Bendic’s voice. He heard Paul open the door to their room and come out. The slaps had carried through the house. Ajie didn’t feel any pain—like everyone else, he heard only the sound of the slaps; still his eyes clouded, and the solid edges of the tall room divider became wobbly. He sat down behind the sofa so nobody would see.

  “We need to instill the fear of God into these children,” Ma strained at the top of her voice. Ajie didn’t hear Bendic say anything back.

  The next day Bibi dropped one of the dinner plates and stepped right onto a sharp edge that cut through her foot. Later that week, Ma saw Paul with a James Hadley Chase novel and made it clear that she disapproved of the blonde on the cover whose back was turned, showing part of her buttocks, with a holstered gun stuck in her pink lacy panty hose. Paul tried, but Ma closed her face to his explanation that it was just a detective story.

  That weekend Bendic called them together and said, “Your mother and I are traveling to America for a few weeks. We don’t know if your uncle Gabby will be off work so he can stay with you, but we have spoken to Tam and his wife, and they are happy for you to stay with them while we are away.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “I ran into a pothole,” Uncle Gabby said as he walked into the house, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief and thumping his boots on the raffia foot mat by the door. “I ran into a pothole near Timber, and my car nearly fell down around me.”

  The children crowded the door to welcome him. “Just one pothole?” Ma was standing behind the children, smiling and looking Gabby up and down.

  “You should have seen the depth of the thing.”

  “Your car is not made for our roads,” Ma replied. “And you are not looking bad at all, Gabby. Money is beginning to touch your hands!” She let her hand drop from his shoulder. “What were you looking for near Timber, anyway?” she continued.

  Gabby paused for a moment, frowned, and then said with vague inconsequence, “One girl like that,” and Ma thumped his back with her clenched hand, and he ducked a little too late.

  “Come and sit down, I beg,” Ma said, then moved toward the empty seat right opposite Gabby’s. “So you went to see a girl before coming to see us, eh, Gabby? How many months since you last came into town, and a girl—near Timber of all places—matters more?” Ma rumpled her face in mock rancor.

  Paul put his hand in Gabby’s breast pocket and took out the car keys. “Don’t try any rough play,” Ma shouted after Paul. “You know you can’t drive.”

  “I know,” Paul said. “I just want to check out the inside.”

  Bibi still held on to Gabby. Paul went to his room to get his bag of mix tapes. He jiggled the car keys at Ajie. To Gabby, he said, “I’m sure your sound system is powerful.”

  “Paul!” Ma turned to Gabby. “It’s like you want them to spoil something in your car.”

  “Let him go.” Gabby laughed. “I’ll go out to check what he’s doing.”

  Paul jiggled the keys again at his brother. “Ajie,” Paul said with mock impatience, “follow.” They hurried out to the driveway, and there
was the blip from Gabby’s car unlocking. Bibi joined Paul and Ajie in the car but soon heard Ma calling her name, so she went back into the house.

  This was a year before the afternoon when everything changed. Before normal life, like a scammer, stooped, touched a finger on the sand, and vanished, and it was hard to imagine it had been there in the first place. The absence of Paul would come to project itself, harsh and relentless, like a whistle at midnight. It would be the question mark hovering above the sentence of their lives, never knowing where to settle.

  “So when am I going to see this Timber girl?” Ma asked. “Or is she so ugly that you have to hide her from us?”

  “It’s nothing serious yet. When I’m off work next, I will come with her,” Gabby said.

  Outside, Paul and Ajie listened to track after track from the mix tape. They knew every word of Salt-N-Pepa’s “Shoop,” and they sang and rapped along as it played. “All That She Want” by Ace of Base, coming through Gabby’s speakers, made Ajie shut his eyes and sway his head. Paul was sitting nearly sideways in the car with his elbows turned out, as he rapped later to Coolio’s “Fantastic Voyage.”

  Night fell, and they turned on the interior light to read the labels on the cassettes. They reclined the seats as far as they would go when the slow tunes began, and looked like two middle-aged laborers, taking a rest after a full day of carrying blocks on a building site.

  “Water Falls” by TLC was playing when Bendic drove in, and they took a break to greet him and take his briefcase and newspapers inside. He asked what they were doing in Gabby’s car. They replied, “Nothing,” and went back outside to sit in the car.

  Bibi came out again to join them. “Gabby can’t take time off work, so we are going to stay in Uncle Tam’s house for the rest of the holiday,” she told the boys.

  “Why can’t we stay here on our own?” Paul hissed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  By Thursday their bags were packed and ready for their two-week stay with Uncle Tam, who lived on the second floor of a two-story building at D-Line. The house was close to a railway track, and near the track was a hub of women who sold roast plantain and fish, corn and pear in their season. There were always people on the streets here, and kiosks were rampant. Some walled compounds had faucets sticking out of block fences where borehole owners sold water to their neighbors.

  Ma had given them little lectures on how they should behave. Dishes must be washed right after meals and beds made on waking up. The children were also expected to sweep and keep the house clean. Ma counseled them to ask permission before touching anything and not to oversleep. Bibi would give Auntie Leba a hand in the kitchen, while Paul would supervise the cleaning of the house and the conduct of his younger siblings. “As for you, Ajie,” Ma demanded only one thing: “be obedient.”

  Bendic said he didn’t really need to advise the children. They knew what was right and how they ought to behave. However, they were to observe how their hosts did things and try to follow. “Every house has its own culture and pattern of doing things,” he said. “When you go there, watch. If there is a table clock that is kept facing east, when you clean the table, don’t leave the clock facing west. Pay attention, but enjoy yourselves. Tam and his wife are happy that you are coming.”

  —

  When Marcus dropped them off on the narrow, tarred street, he waited for the gate to be opened before he drove off.

  In all the lectures they received, nobody had bothered to mention that Uncle Tam had a house girl. She now appeared to receive them, since she was the only one at home. As far as Ajie was concerned, such an oversight by his parents was significant. It just confirmed his misgivings about grown-ups, how they constantly missed the point.

  The girl held the gate open for them and didn’t say a word. Her hair was cut short, like a boy’s. She was wearing a long black pleated skirt that was too big for her. She held it up from the wet ground with one hand. She wore white bathroom slippers and no earrings. Ajie was still taking all that in when she said, “I have been waiting for you people since morning. I could have gone to the market and returned by now.” She waited for them to file into the compound before closing the pedestrian gate behind them and bolting it shut.

  “Is Uncle Tam not at home? Or Auntie Leba?” Paul asked, attempting to take charge of the situation.

  “They have gone to work,” she replied with a quizzical look, as if Paul should know better than to expect people who worked to be at home at that time of day. “But they told me to wait for you people and show you everything until they return.”

  The stairs were steep, the banisters rusty and riddled with holes, waiting to drive splinters into any hands running over them.

  She walked quickly ahead of them and opened the door that led to the flat, holding the curtain out of the way. The house smelled of scented soap, and the living room flooring was of plain terrazzo. In front of the set of wooden sofas, a small TV was placed on a sideboard by the wall.

  “Uncle said you should relax and feel at home until he returns, and that I should show you your rooms.” She looked at Bibi. “Me and you are staying in the same room, so wait.” Then to Paul and Ajie, “Two of you, come.”

  She opened the door to a room and walked right to the center of it. The room was spacious, with high ceilings, filled with the sharp light of afternoon. The curtains were all drawn and tied to a knot. “This is the boys’ room,” she pronounced with a wide sweep of her hand, as though she were a monarch bequeathing a kingdom to some deserving warriors. Ajie gave Paul a telling look. Bossiness was an instant offender. Paul acted like he hadn’t noticed Ajie’s face but immediately asked just as she was leaving the room, “So, what is your name?”

  She turned around, and a fleeting gentleness crept into her face. “Barisua.”

  Paul nodded. “My name is Paul.”

  “I know your names,” she responded.

  —

  That first night, Uncle Tam made it clear that he didn’t mind where they had their dinner.

  “I eat in front of the TV all the time,” he said. “You are free to join me if you like.” So they sat with their plates of rice and stew in their laps, watching a fictional cast of family members scheme against one another on Checkmate.

  Uncle Tam held a drumstick in his left hand, having rested his spoon, and tore at the meat with his teeth. His maroon socks were pushed down to a fold near his ankles. He hadn’t taken them off when he changed from his work clothes. His blue shorts ran way up his thighs, and just above, there was the heaving mound of his belly and the carpet of hair that continued to his chest.

  Auntie Leba was still in the kitchen with Barisua. Because it was their first night, she said, they ought to be given a treat. She had a print wrapper tied over her breasts, and the tiny straps of her chemise showed off her surprisingly slender shoulders and smooth back.

  “Dumle was at my office today,” she said to Uncle Tam as she came back into the parlor carrying a tray with bowls of fruit salad. “Did I not mention it already?”

  “Dumle? What did he want?”

  She passed a bowl of the fruit salad to him, and he lapped up some of the juice with a spoon, then put the bowl down on the side stool.

  “Dumle can go to hell, as far as I’m concerned. Now that they have seen how powerless we have made them, they are tiptoeing back. What did he say?”

  “Nothing, really. He said that he was passing by and stopped to say hello. He said I should extend his greetings to you.”

  “Indeed.” Then he said something in their native Ogoni. Auntie Leba said something back, and Uncle Tam frowned and Auntie Leba laughed.

  —

  “Dumle used to be a friend of my uncle and auntie,” Barisua said to Bibi as they went about cleaning the house the next morning. “Every Sunday after church, he would come here to eat jollof rice and salad. Every Sunday.”

  Ajie was listening in, waiting to hear what this man had done.

  “But now he has become a b
etrayer.” She spoke of him as if he were a family member who had engaged in misconduct and tarnished the family name.

  Universities had closed for the semester, but Uncle Tam and Auntie Leba still went out every morning. One day just after they had gone to work and Barisua had done the laundry out on the balcony, she said, “Don’t be there thinking that as they go out every day, it’s all work they are going to,” her voice decidedly casual.

  “Okay.” Paul nodded.

  “They go for secret meetings, too,” she said, again in the same tone, as if it weren’t a big deal for her to know, although it should definitely be for them. There was an important man from their village, she continued, who had been arrested by the government and kept in detention for over a year now because he had told the government and the oil companies in their village to come and repair the damage they had caused or leave.

  Paul’s ears flicked. “What was the man’s name?”

  When Barisua said who it was, Ajie was disappointed. The whole buildup she gave to her story, only to tell them about someone they all knew about. A man who was frequently in the news and whom Bendic and Ma often discussed with their visitors. Bendic had even met him several times in the High Court premises. Barisua flapped a pillowcase, and droplets of water landed on Ajie’s cheeks.

  “Oh, we know him,” Bibi said, but Barisua didn’t look like she had heard and began singing an Ogoni chorus that sounded mournful and celebratory at once.

  Ajie took exception to Barisua’s attitude, the tone she put up to exclude them, as if she knew things they didn’t. Her haughtiness and self-righteousness were barely concealed, the manner with which she went into Uncle Tam’s room and came out with a pile of clothes for washing, as if to say she was just the sort of girl whose place in the world it was to carry out such tasks.

  When Paul asked her if there was anything they could do, she replied, “Yes. Yes, of course. But nothing really to do for today, maybe tomorrow.” Bibi stayed with Barisua and helped her spread out the bedsheets on the line.