by Jowhor Ile
Bendic spent that evening looking through the notes he had taken on his tour of Ogibah. Bendic’s secretary, Ifiemi, had traveled to her village to see her parents, so the next morning Bendic called Paul into his study and asked him to type out a summary he had made of the event.
—
“Anything can happen to anyone,” Paul said to Ajie and Bibi later that evening, after he was done with Bendic in the study.
It was from Paul that they first heard the details of the killing, how, after gunning down the boys they saw idling away in the square, they burned down Mark Alari’s house—the first of many. Old men who couldn’t escape into the bush were manhandled and made to lie on the floor. They took, by force, any woman they came across. Houses were defaced with graffiti, and they shat in the town hall. By the evening, when they were done, a great smoke hung over Ogibah, and the air smelled of burning meat as the soldiers rewarded themselves with any livestock they could find, looting Mercury’s store and rendering all his cartons of beer empty.
“Anything can happen to anyone. What if they come here to take Bendic and Ma, what will we do?” Paul asked.
But who were they? If only Paul could just make that clear. Police, soldiers, or armed robbers? If they came here to take Bendic and Ma, what would you do?
Bibi was silent.
Ajie desperately wanted to supply an answer, but for now he had only questions to ask, so Paul was left to deal with the query all by himself.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Paul spent the rest of the holiday mostly on the veranda, studying for his final exams. Three years earlier, when he was preparing for his junior certificate exams, he had sat on this same veranda before a chalkboard, conjugating irregular French verbs, drawing up Venn diagrams, and locating coordinates on graphs. Paul did not join the other kids who went for holiday lessons in nearby schools. Ma asked a couple of her teacher friends to give him tutorial lessons. Ma and Bendic also read through Paul’s textbooks so they could help out with the exercise. Ajie remembered Bendic ticking off some exercises at the end of a chapter on magnetism and commenting with a pencil, “You must work hard.”
This time Paul said he didn’t want any tutorials from Ma’s friends. Ma tried to persuade him—Mr. Daminabo had already agreed to come twice a week for math lessons—but Paul resisted, telling Ma he was fine studying on his own, and Ma clicked her tongue at Paul’s rebuff, and Bendic said they should let him be.
It was early evening, and SuperTed was on the television, although it was not clear who was watching it. Ajie went out to the veranda and Paul asked, “Have you seen my Ababio?”
Ajie craned his neck into the parlor, leaning backward. “Bibi, Paul wants his Ababio now.” Ajie liked this thing of calling textbooks by the author’s last name.
“You two should leave his books alone, please,” Bendic said. “The young man has an important exam to sit for.”
Later, Ma came outside. “It’s getting dark,” she said, and turned on the light. Paul looked up and returned to his reading. Ma stood for a bit watching him, while Paul pretended he wasn’t aware of her gaze. He had become a bit brittle in those final revision weeks, often aloof, always saying he was fine, yes, their parents should just leave him alone for a while. Ajie sometimes felt Ma even wanted to do Paul’s reading for him. She brought heaps of past exam questions from as far back as 1985. Bendic seemed to be aware that Paul needed some space but couldn’t help himself, either: He would start telling stories about how he prepared for his own finals back in the day, and even Bibi, who enjoyed those stories a lot, would just look at him and want to make him stop.
Ma went back inside the parlor, where Channel 10 was having a break in transmission “due to power failure,” Ma hissed, and flipped to Channel 22, where a newsreader was giving the highlights of the evening in Kolokuma language. Bendic looked up when Paul came back into the parlor with his hand full of books. “So when is your first paper?” Bendic asked.
“The eighth. May eighth,” Paul replied, dropping his books on the dining table.
“Good. What subject?”
“Chemistry practical.” He stretched. “I’m so tired of revising. I want it to come and go quickly.”
Paul returned to school one week before Ajie and Bibi. He needed to settle in before his paper, which was due the first week. By early June he had written all nine papers but spent an extra week in school because it was hard for him to say goodbye to his friends and everything he had known for the last six years of his life. He had told Bendic not to send Marcus with the car to fetch him, that he would board a bus and come home on his own, maybe in the company of some of his friends.
He was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows when he returned, with a traveling bag slung over his shoulder. He was almost taller than Bendic. Ma said he looked like a university student already, and Bendic agreed.
By August, when Bibi and Ajie were making preparations to return to school for a new session, Paul had bought and completed his JAMB forms, and when Ajie asked him what universities he had picked, he simply replied, “UP and UI.” Bendic wanted Paul to go to Ibadan, where he himself had gone. Ma thought staying at a university in Port Harcourt was a better idea, but they worried about the strikes by lecturers. Most universities across the country closed down so often, it was normal for students to spend two to three extra years to complete their courses.
That August, they talked about the student riots, the lack of funding for universities, and how lecturers had to go on strike when their salaries didn’t come. They moaned about “this government’s complete disregard for education.” It was as if the head of state were doing these things to thwart them in particular—he was in direct opposition to Bendic and Ma’s happiness. This criminal in an army uniform and sunglasses, he was a complete maniac. He was destroying this country and its future; the only place he deserved to be was in a high-security jail. If you called at 11 Yakubu that August, you would have thought Bendic and Ma were speaking of a very personal enemy.
They talked in low tones sometimes about sending Paul somewhere abroad to study. “At least we can be sure of the quality of education he is getting.”
“But where is the money, eh?”
Ma said Paul was too young to be sent abroad, she wanted him close by. Bendic said he still had friends in England who could act as guardian should the need arise.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mr. Ifenwa came before dinner that Sunday. He did not come in with his usual dramatic flourish, hailing Bendic’s college nicknames, his voice booming from the driveway. He did not come flinging jovial insults and accusations with a newspaper in his hand and an unfinished argument from the last time, wagging a finger at Bendic and saying, “This boy, this boy.” He came in under a pile of papers held together in files bound with jute ropes, his face tired, his weak eyes gathering bags beneath them.
“I need to finish marking these papers. I haven’t had electricity in over a week, and I’m so busy in the day,” he moaned at Ma as soon as he walked into the parlor. He sat down and pushed the files onto the table. When Bendic walked into the parlor, Mr. Ifenwa looked up at him. “At least here is something you can contribute to the common good. I’m hoping if NEPA cuts the power while I’m here, you will turn on your generator so I can finish the work. Let us benefit a little bit from your bourgeois largesse.”
“Oh, Ifenwa, be quiet and let me hear something.” Bendic laughed and sat down.
“Nne, thank you,” Ifenwa said to Ma as the drinks arrived. “I didn’t mean you.”
“I know.” Ma laughed. “Once you put me in that talk, I’ll start keeping my cold beer to myself.”
He was marking an English exam, and Ma suggested they split the papers between them. They were multiple-choice questions and they could be done in an hour, Ma said. Ifenwa said, “You are a godsend, my sister.” He slid some of the papers her way with a copy of the answers.
The telephone r
ang for Bendic, and he took it in his study and came back a few minutes after. Paul turned up the TV volume and flipped back and forth between the two channels, hoping something interesting would begin on one. Channel 22 was showing a sitcom set in a chaotic house where Chief, his four wives, servants, and innumerable children lived, the sort of house you were never really sure how many people actually slept and ate there. Chief’s wives took turns fighting him, and once, when he’d annoyed everyone, all his wives and children came together to beat him up. He looked ridiculous, threatening them afterward, pointing and huffing. Ajie thought the program stupid and not funny at all.
“The roadblocks are worse today,” Mr. Ifenwa said, placing a marked script on the increasing pile to his left. He and Bendic began to talk wistfully about the kind of student protest they had in their day, their student union governments, and what they were able to accomplish. “What would you do”—Mr. Ifenwa turned his gaze on Ajie—“if you were the president of this country?”
Ajie laughed.
“Yes, tell me,” Mr. Ifenwa said, his eyes still on him. Then he looked at Bibi and at Paul in a way that made it obvious the question would be coming to them, too. Ajie didn’t know what to say first. He wanted constant power supply, but saying that would make him sound self-serving. Okay, he would give jobs to the jobless; he would try to make poor people not poor, and to pay lecturers so they wouldn’t go on strikes anymore. He definitely wouldn’t send a letter bomb to kill any journalist who wrote things about him he didn’t like. He would not make people disappear, as the current head of state was known to do. But he didn’t say any of these to Mr. Ifenwa.
“I’d make sure the roads were well maintained so they didn’t cause accidents,” Ajie blurted, and regretted the words immediately because he’d just remembered that Mr. Ifenwa’s wife had died in a car accident.
The parlor went quiet. Ma’s hand floated midair with the paper she was about to put aside; Mr. Ifenwa blinked behind his oval lenses, and Bendic cleared his throat, and the air in the parlor lurched back into gear.
“I’d send the military back to the barracks and return the country to democratic rule,” Bibi said.
Bendic hummed as if unsatisfied with the answer. Ma circled a number for Mr. Ifenwa’s attention and then passed the paper to him. “I would sack all the ministers and military administrators. They are all corrupt,” Paul said.
“Just that?” Bendic asked.
“And throw them in jail.”
“Without a fair trial first?” Bendic asked. “Sounds authoritarian.”
“Sounds like the kind of revolution we need, if you ask me,” Mr. Ifenwa said without looking up from his work. “How much evidence do we need that our leaders are corrupt?”
“I mean,” Bendic continued, “the problem is obviously systemic, and resolving it will require more than the actions of one good man or removing people from positions. It’s about developing processes, checks and balances, and organizing ourselves in a good way.”
Mr. Ifenwa’s nostrils flared and he gave out a sigh of frustration. “It makes me a little crazy when you keep saying systems. You have that maniac in power, murdering ordinary citizens, people are disappearing every day. Someone should first make him disappear, and then we can talk of moving this country forward!”
Bibi was bristling on her seat; Bendic and Mr. Ifenwa had hijacked the conversation instead of letting her expound on how she would make Nigeria better, so she began to flip the channels but kept the volume low. Ma asked Paul to bring her handbag from her bedroom.
When Paul came back to the parlor, Ma had brought up the case of the mysterious disappearance of a journalist who was a colleague’s relative, and Bendic said that perhaps it was high time everyone took to the streets, or else they ran the risk of being plucked off in isolation one by one.
Bendic and Mr. Ifenwa talked into the night, long after Ma had done most of the marking and teased that Mr. Ifenwa had just brought the work for her while he spent the time arguing with Bendic. Bibi had fallen asleep on the couch, and Ma shook her gently and asked her to go to bed. She sat up quickly with her back straight and said she wasn’t sleeping. Paul was sitting beside her. His eyes were on Bendic saying something about “street politics.”
They stood up to escort Mr. Ifenwa to the gate, except for Bibi, who had fallen asleep again. Mr. Ifenwa kept saying, “Nne, thank you,” to Ma, and said he should hurry home now, as it was late. “Friday,” he said.
“We are here,” Bendic replied.
After they had said good night and Mr. Ifenwa had walked down the road, Ismaila came and locked the gate for the night with a heavy iron chain and a big padlock.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Bibi saw the crowd first and then leaned out of the car to get a better look. A slow line of traffic was building up in the other lane. Ma didn’t tell Bibi to get back into the car and not waste the coolness from the air conditioner. She was way too tired from all the haggling and trekking about the market and was in no mood for talk, so she switched off the air conditioner so they could all feel the heat, and maybe Bibi would behave herself and shut that window.
Bibi was still looking outside. “It’s like the riot is happening in front,” she said, and Ajie put his head out the window to get a look. “I won’t be surprised,” Ma responded, looking up as the lights turned orange. “Let us pick up your skirt and get home, then they can riot all they like.” The family had just left Mile One Market after half a day of trudging stalls and bargaining for school supplies. “I hope you are both settled for school now. Anything you haven’t mentioned will have to wait till when you come home on your midterm break. No more buying. I think we’ve done just enough.”
The students swamped the lane as they marched so that cars couldn’t go through. Some had placards held up high with sticks, while others pinned them on their bodies. Hawkers solicited from the sidelines with trays of mangoes, baskets of oranges, and soft drinks. A small group of students gathered around a hawker who had set down his basin for the students to take water tied up in clear freezer bags about the size of a big fist. The line of cars held up by the protesters stretched the entire length of Aggrey Road. A young man jogged ahead of the crowd. He waved his hands like a traffic warden and shouted something to those nearest to him. Then they all started moving to the right and formed a dense pack on one side of the road, giving way for the traffic to flow.
“It’s a peaceful demonstration,” Ma said to Bibi, “not a riot.”
“I hope they burn some government cars,” Ajie said.
Ma turned her head to face him. “What do you mean by that?”
“They should burn some government cars, destroy a few things, then they’ll get some attention.”
“Have you seen the mobile police waiting to pounce?” Bibi offered.
“Let him sit there and talk nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense. If my school were in town, I would join.”
“You will not join in anything like that.”
“They are university students, anyway. Can you see your age mates there?” Bibi said.
“Paul is entering university soon.”
“You are not Paul.”
“Doesn’t matter. If he joins, I can follow.”
“Yaya yaya ya, talk talk talk.”
“Quiet, the two of you!” Ma shouted. “Let me hear something, please.”
Green leaves were stuck onto car fenders to show solidarity with the students. Some drivers shouted support from their windows. A bus driver held out a clenched fist. His bus had not just green leaves but a young tree branch. It tilted forward each time the bus slowed, as if bowing down to the road. A loud Oliver De Coque tune blared from his windows as he drove past, leaving behind an air of jubilation.
They got to Borokiri, and it was time for Ma to wonder aloud if the tailor had finished making Bibi’s skirt. Twice she had failed to have the skirt ready on the agreed date. With only a few days remaining before their return to sch
ool, Bibi’s wraparound sport skirt was the only item left to tick off on their list.
“What is it with tailors?” Ma parked the car a block away from the shop. “Bibi, pass me my handbag.” She opened the door and climbed out of the car.
They walked down the block and crossed the concrete slab over the smelly gutter and stepped into the tailor’s shop. A young woman was working the sewing machine with her hands and feet. “Welcome, madam.” She stopped pedaling when she saw them. “My madam no dey, but she keep something for you,” then she went into a back room.
Several almanacs of women dressed in different styles were hanging on the wall. One almanac was captioned First Ladies’ Designs. A model was pictured in all the shots, sampling Ankara fabrics. Ma took a seat as they waited, and Ajie wondered if the model sampling all the different Ankara designs had taken all those pictures in one day.
Ma stood by the curtain while Bibi tried on the skirt. Ma kept asking, “How does it feel? Is it tight? Is it comfortable? It’s sportswear. You should feel free and relaxed in it,” Ma went on, even after Bibi had indicated it fit her well and that she was comfortable.
—
The next morning, Bendic and Ma left early for work. The rain came down heavily from dawn till about midday. When NEPA restored power, Ajie went to the parlor and turned on the radio. As he lay on the sofa, his mind was filled with the mix of fear and excitement that he had always associated with returning to school. He made a mental list of the things he needed back in school, legal and contraband. He thought of how school life might change for him now that Paul wasn’t there. Ajie could hear Bibi talking to Paul in the corridor and Paul was saying, “I have no idea where it is.” He heard Bibi go into the bathroom, and after a while came the whirring sound of Ma’s hair dryer.