by Jowhor Ile
A white Jeep pulls up right beside him, and Ajie stops walking. A woman in a blond weave sticks her face out the window to ask if he knows the way to Atako Street. He points in the direction of the street, which is in fact the very next turn. After she drives off, he notices a small banner tied to a transformer, fluttering a little in the breeze, and on it a minister with the title “Field Marshal of the Most High,” inviting the public to a night of answered prayers specifically tagged: Lord Give Me a Spouse Lest I Die.
Ajie follows the road heading back to Nzimiro and wonders about Mrs. Braide, their former neighbor from number 6. She used to go to a church like these. When they were children, Ma and most people they knew viewed those places of worship with suspicion. Now, he thinks, there is such a mania for them. When did this change?
Ma said Mrs. Braide had relocated to Abuja after kidnapping got rife in Port Harcourt in the past couple of years. Armed militants who claimed they were struggling to get a fairer deal for the oil-producing minorities who had been neglected by government began kidnapping European oil workers for ransom.
These days, since the number of European workers has dwindled, just about anyone is up for grabs if you are deemed wealthy enough to cough up some money, or your family or friends are. Local criminals have found a new trade.
Ma told Ajie that sometimes the negotiations for ransom scaled down from millions of naira to hundreds of thousands, then down to tens of thousands, when it became obvious the captive’s family really had no money. A band of kidnappers begged a family to send them mobile phone credit, at least, to cover the captive’s call cost and feeding expenses for the two weeks. Sometimes kidnappers just ceased making contact with the captive’s family even when negotiations were going well, and they would later learn or simply accept after waiting for months that their loved one had died from an illness or been shot by accident. Ma warned Ajie to be careful, not to let people know he had come from abroad, since they might think he was rich, and Ajie just looked at her and wondered how he could be kidnapped from his own streets.
As he turns onto Yakubu Avenue, Ajie spots Ismaila and his friend from a distance. They are now two little black things crouched on their haunches, like professional beggars at Garrison Junction. Are they writing on the sand or what? he wonders.
“Madam done return,” Ismaila says to him.
“Oh. Okay. Thank you, Ismaila.”
Ma is in the kitchen, standing over the sink. “You did not eat your food.” She wipes her hand on a kitchen towel and hangs it back on the peg. She uncovers a ceramic bowl on the gas burner, then puts it back. There is boiled yam in it.
“I will eat later.”
Ma opens the fridge and takes out a bottle of Sprite and hands it to Ajie. “It’s Sprite you like, abi?” Then, “Oh, sorry, it might ruin your appetite. Except you want it.” She lets him decide, and Ajie says thanks, that he will have the Sprite with his meal.
“Has Bibi confirmed when she’s arriving?”
“Tomorrow.” Ma runs her hand over the top of the fridge for an opener. “First flight.”
“With her boyfriend?”
“Her fiancé.”
“Boyfriend,” Ajie says. “She hasn’t said she wants to marry him.”
“Fiancé,” Ma says firmly, her mouth about to smile.
Ajie is in her way so that she brushes against him as she passes. He goes into the garden and is confronted with Ma’s expanded taste in plants.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Throughout Ajie’s ten-year sojourn abroad, Ma was always a morning caller. Nigeria and Britain were in the same time zone for most of the year, yet each time Ma called, he felt a lapse he could never explain or shake off, like she was speaking from the past, a gaping void with muted echoes.
After he finished boarding school, he left Port Harcourt for St. Albans, an English city which at first felt to him more like a medieval town, with its stone wall, church bells, and oak doors that give onto the narrow cobbled streets. He attended sixth form there and lived as a boarder in the house of a middle-aged widow, Mrs. Heath. Ma would call on the landline by eight in the morning. “Why are you still in bed? I can hear it in your voice. Don’t you have class today?”
He left Hertfordshire, moved to London to study electrical and electronic engineering at Imperial College, and then began to do the Friday-night pub crawls that left him groggy and hungover until two P.M. the next day. He started missing Ma’s calls. Sorry. Call you back in the evening, he would text her. He wouldn’t return her call, and Ma would ring him again on Sunday morning before heading to church.
Why does she never call in the afternoon or when I’m not in bed?
Throughout his years at university, during his one-year internship, and when he began his first proper job working for a digital media company at Kings Cross, Ma would always ring him twice a week: once on the weekend, and again in the middle of the week.
Last week his phone rang, and Ma’s voice came through: “Where are you?”
“I’m at home,” he replied. He almost joked, “Standing in the kitchenette of my flat in the North London borough of Camden, and where are you?” But something in Ma’s voice stopped him. “I’m at home. Are you okay, Ma?”
“I need you to buy a ticket as soon as you can.”
“A ticket.”
“Yes, if possible for tomorrow—you can tell them at work that it’s important. A man has just left here, says he’s a pastor. It’s about your brother, Paul. Can you get a ticket? I have sent for your sister, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“It is not enough to confess your sins and receive forgiveness from God,” the man sitting before Ma began. “Even though the blood of Jesus washes your slate of sins clean, you have to go back to the people you’ve wronged in the past and try to make things right. Some Christians these days believe this is some obsolete Old Testament doctrine, but it’s not. A true believer must make restitutions for his or her wrongs. The Bible shows us ways of doing this; this is not about trying to pay people off, no. If, for instance, you steal something from someone and you one day repent of your sins and God forgives you, shouldn’t you go to the person you stole from, apologize, and then give back what you have stolen?”
Ma waited to see where it was all going. She had been in her back garden, weeding, when Ismaila called out to say she had a visitor. It could have been anyone, relatives always dropped by. Perhaps it was someone from Ogibah who would want to spend the night, or one of Bendic’s former colleagues. Once someone had come in to inquire if she was looking to sell the house, and Ma didn’t know how to respond, so she just said no, as if it weren’t such an unusual question to ask in the first place.
Ma came inside through the back door and let the man in. He was dressed in a black suit, red shirt, and black tie. There was something captivating about the way he went about what he had to say. Every word seemed completely needful, every sentence; the way he enunciated some words, gesturing with his hands in order to illuminate them; it was as if the turning of the world depended on the things coming out of his mouth.
“I used to be a mopol,” he continued. “For six years, I did mobile police work. Between 1994 and 1995, they stationed me in Port Harcourt. I want you to take what I’m going to say calmly. God sent me here to come and make peace, because I saw something, and I think it’s only right that you should know about it.”
Ma, looking a little alarmed: “What is this about?”
The pastor hesitated, inched closer to the edge of the sofa, and linked his fingers together. “During the student riots that year, ’95 to be exact, an accident happened with a boy. He was not among those rioting, but one of my colleagues stopped to search him. It was just the work of the devil.”
“What are you saying?” Ma shot to her feet. “What are you saying?” Ismaila, who had been eavesdropping in the veranda, was now standing by the parlor door. Ma picked up the vase on the center table and hurled it at the pastor. “My son! My son!”
She grabbed the man by his black tie and slapped him all over the head and shoulders. “My son! My son!” she kept shouting as Ismaila rushed to her side, trying to restrain her. “Madam, wetin him say happen?” Ismaila turned around to shout questions at the pastor, but the pastor just held his hands together in a quiet demeanor, his face placid, his eyes gentle like a dove’s.
—
The student demonstration had been peaceful all morning. It was raining, and most of them had gotten drenched in the downpour. At about midday, the sun came out and warmed up their enthusiasm. More students arrived. The mobile police, who were there to keep a close watch on the demonstration, had received strict instructions to keep things under control at all cost. Word circulated that another group of students had burned two government cars near Eastern Bypass.
Some students began to hurl stones in the direction of the police. The police shot some tear gas canisters and some bullets into the air to disperse the crowd.
That was when one of the corporals saw a boy who could have been a university student; he was carrying a knapsack. The area was deserted now, and the boy was walking briskly between the stones and the tear gas. The corporal thought he looked suspicious. His inspector had gone to ease himself in the nearby bush, so the corporal beckoned to him. “Hey-shhh, come here.” The boy acted like he didn’t see or hear the corporal. “Hey-shh, you there carrying bag, come here now!” The boy kept walking. The corporal rushed toward him in a fit of rage and whacked the boy from behind with the butt of his gun at the base of the neck, and the boy went down at once. “Bagger!” the corporal barked as the boy’s body dropped to the ground.
“Wetin be that?” the other colleagues questioned him.
“I dey ask this bastard to come, him dey ignore me.”
One of them went toward the boy lying on the ground and stooped over him. “Wetin you do am? E be like say you don wound the boy-o.”
A constable joined them to lift the boy as they put him in their van. They tapped him on the cheeks, shouted things at him in order to revive him.
The inspector came back and asked what was going on. They said the boy looked suspicious and they had tried to stop him. He wouldn’t stop, and a little accident occurred when the corporal went over to accost him. The inspector bent over the unconscious boy in the back of the van and was the first to notice the trickle of blood from his ears and nose. He turned around and spat abuses at the corporal. He threatened to ensure that the corporal got sacked if things turned for the worse. “You have injured an innocent boy! Let’s hope nothing happens to him. What do you mean, he looked suspicious?”
By the time they decided to take the injured boy to the military hospital near Rumuola, he had stopped breathing.
At about two-thirty P.M., the superintendent placed a call to his elder brother, who was the chief superintendent in charge of the Port Harcourt area. He went about everything with a calmness that suggested he might have done this many times. They searched the boy’s bag in hope of seeing anything that might incriminate him, but they only found cassette tapes, comic books, a Sony Walkman, and a video club card with a name and address on the back: Paul Utu, 11 Yakubu Gowon Avenue, Port Harcourt.
By evening, the affair was concluded, and they penned down a report: The boy had been caught looting a shop during the demonstration, an officer tried to stop him, and he assaulted the officer with a knife. A struggle ensued, during which the suspect went for the officer’s gun. Unfortunately, there was an accidental discharge and a bullet struck the suspect, killing him instantly. The two-page report was filed away.
The body of the deceased was quickly designated to the fate of armed robbers: A hole was dug at the back of the mopol station, and the body was tossed inside. It got dark quickly that day, well before six o’clock.
—
Of everything Ma had fought through in her life—the challenges of her childhood, her education, her early marriage, the birth of her children, her husband’s illness—there was no time she fought harder, more viciously, and with more focus than she did in the days after the ex–mopol pastor came to reveal what had happened to Paul.
She was on the phone early the next day, making arrangements. By eight A.M. two days later, she was waiting in the anteroom of the governor’s office, having secured an appointment with the help of former colleagues and friends. By the Thursday before Ajie arrived, she had obtained permission to dig in search of Paul’s body in the plot of land behind the fence of the police station. Colleagues and friends rallied around her, offering all kinds of assistance. Someone drove down to the family’s former dentist in Bolokiri to get Paul’s records. Someone else had a relative who worked at a new hospital in Abuja where a DNA test could be done to confirm whether the bones they had exhumed were Paul’s remains.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The taxi driver has no change, so Bibi runs inside while her boyfriend stands beside their bags. She shouts at Ajie to give her two hundred naira; she grabs the money from him and tosses a thousand-naira note at him. “Look at you, looking so proper!” she says to him with a twinkle in her eyes.
Ajie follows her outside. Bibi says, “This is my runaway brother you have heard so much about. Dotun, Ajie.”
Ajie and Dotun nod at each other and shake hands. Dotun lifts the two suitcases and leaves Bibi with only her handbag; Ajie takes one of the suitcases from him, and they make their way into the house.
Dotun seems eager but relaxed. Ajie looks at his carefully brushed hair and the sharp creases at the back of his striped shirt and decides that Dotun might have had a strict upbringing. He must have been raised by the sort of parents who were excessive with discipline but generous, however, with any sort of expenditure relating to schooling, self-improvement, and getting ahead in life. He fabricates Dotun’s family history even though he knows little about him. Bibi mentioned she met Dotun in the medical school library at the University of Ibadan, where they both studied. Seeing him, Ajie decides even that minor fact seems fitting. Dotun is the kind of boy who meets a girl at the library and then finds himself years later halfway across the country in order to meet her family.
Dotun steps into the parlor first and almost collides with Ma, who is coming out to meet them. She is startled and then beams at him, saying several welcomes, touching him by the shoulders, and asking how he is. The Utus have never been a family of huggers or kissers, but Ma falls into Bibi’s arms once she sees her, and Bibi wraps her arms around her, too, and it looks as if they will remain so forever.
—
The next morning at the funeral home, the undertaker leaves them alone in the room and shuts the door. Ma picked the casket herself. It is nothing flashy, just dark polished wood. The inside is padded with red velvet, and there are silver handles on the sides and the lid.
They have waited many years for an answer, and one has finally arrived, dry and diminished, resting inside the wooden box before them, and not one of them in the room knows how to approach the coffin. Ajie feels it’s his place to take the lead; he steps forward to the casket and opens it. When Ma draws close, he holds her hand while Bibi looks in from the other side of the casket. He holds Ma’s hand tight but can still feel the tremor running through it. These bones formed inside her, Ajie thinks. Bibi is the one who has received training over the past seven years on how to handle a human body. She must have spent enough time seeing how the human body can go wrong, how it can turn against itself, how it heals, grows, rots, and what it looks like once the flesh has fallen away. It is Bibi who leans close and touches Paul. Ma has informed the undertakers that they would prefer to arrange what is left of the body themselves.
—
“Lock the gate,” Ma goes outside to tell Ismaila after they get home. “If anyone comes, tell them we are not available. They can come back next week.”
“Yes, madam,” Ismaila says.
Ma joins everyone else in the parlor and sits down. Her face is still puffy and damp, her hands still tremble. Her eyes
are welling up with tears again. Bibi’s face is turned toward Dotun, who has pulled his chair back a little bit.
“Whatever Paul went out for that day,” Ma continues, “it’s fine. I have settled it with my God. I mean, he was a child, and maybe he just wanted to go out and see. What I’m saying is that I don’t think he would want us to sit and mourn.” Dotun is nodding gravely and looking at Ma as she speaks. Ajie looks at Bibi and can’t read her at all—her eyes look tired but placid.
Ajie picks up a newspaper and goes to sit in the dining area. It is left to Dotun to initiate a conversation. He is mourning with this grieving family, but he also wants to take their minds off things.
“How is the work going?” he asks Ma. “Bibi said you have been working on a book about plants.”
“What?” Ma asks, looking like she’s been startled out of sleep.
“The book you are writing.”
“Yes, yes. It’s a scrapbook. I’ve been collecting some plant samples,” she says. “They are all probably going to go extinct from the area in a few years.” Her face comes alive. “I have a friend at the University of Port Harcourt who is typing it up and converting the pictures to electronic files.”
Ajie props the newspaper before him. How should he read it? He flips past a story about a Briton who was kidnapped by gunmen who are now demanding a ransom. He skims through the business page and reads an interview of a man who began the first online shopping business in the country, and it is all talk of markets and huge potential and challenges.