by Rob Spillman
“These. Are the. Your papers.” His English was more disfigured than usual. He was soaking wet with the effort of saying whatever it was he wanted to say. “I read. All. I read your file again. Also. You are journalist. This is your second year. Here. Awaiting trial. For organizing violence. Demonstration against. Anti-government demonstration against the military legal government.” He did not thunder as usual.
“It is not true.”
“Eh?” The surprise on his face was comical. “You deny?”
“I did not organize a demonstration. I went there as a reporter.”
“Well . . .” He shrugged. “That is not my business. The truth. Will come out at your. Trial.”
“But when will that be? I have been forgotten. I am not allowed a lawyer, or visitors. I have been awaiting trial for two years now . . .”
“Do you complain? Look. Twenty years I’ve worked in prisons all over this country. Nigeria. North. South. East. West. Twenty years. Don’t be stupid. Sometimes it is better this way. Can you win a case against government? Wait. Hope.”
Now he lowered his voice, like a conspirator. “Maybe there’ll be another coup, eh? Maybe the leader will collapse and die. He is mortal, after all. Maybe a civilian government will come. Then. There will be amnesty for all political prisoners. Amnesty. Don’t worry. Enjoy yourself.”
I looked at him, planted before me like a tree, his hands clasped behind him, the papier-mâché smile on his lips. Enjoy yourself. I turned the phrase over and over in my mind. When I lay to sleep rats kept me awake, and mosquitoes, and lice, and hunger, and loneliness. The rats bit at my toes and scuttled around in the low ceiling, sometimes falling on to my face from the holes in the ceiling. Enjoy yourself.
“Your papers,” he said, thrusting them at me once more. I was not sure if he was offering them to me. “I read them. All. Poems. Letters. Poems, no problem. The letters, illegal. I burned them. Prisoners sometimes smuggle out letters to the press to make us look foolish. Embarrass the government. But the poems are harmless. Love poems. And diaries. You wrote the poems for your girl, isn’t it?”
He bent forward, and clapped a hand on my shoulder. I realized with wonder that the man, in his awkward, flatfooted way, was making overtures of friendship to me. My eyes fell on the boot that had stepped on my neck just five days ago. What did he want?
“Perhaps because I work in prison. I wear uniform. You think I don’t know poetry, eh? Soyinka, Okigbo, Shakespeare.”
It was apparent that he wanted to talk about poems, but he was finding it hard to begin.
“What do you want?” I asked.
He drew back to his full height. “I write poems too. Sometimes,” he added quickly when the wonder grew and grew on my face. He dipped his hand into his jacket pocket and came out with a foolscap sheet of paper. He unfolded it and handed it to me. “Read.”
It was a poem; handwritten. The title was written in capital letters: “MY LOVE FOR YOU.”
Like a man in a dream, I ran my eyes over the bold squiggles. After the first stanza I saw that it was a thinly veiled imitation of one of my poems. I sensed his waiting. He was hardly breathing. I let him wait. Lord, I can’t remember another time when I had felt so good. So powerful. I was Samuel Johnson and he was an aspiring poet waiting anxiously for my verdict, asking tremulously, “Sir, is it poetry, is it Pindar?”
I wanted to say, with as much sarcasm as I could put into my voice, “Sir, your poem is both original and interesting, but the part that is interesting is not original, and the part that is original is not interesting.” But all I said was, “Not bad, you need to work on it some more.”
The eagerness went out of his face and for a fleeting moment the scowl returned. “I promised my lady a poem. She is educated, you know. A teacher. You will write a poem for me. For my lady.”
“You want me to write a poem for you?” I tried to mask the surprise, the confusion and, yes, the eagerness in my voice. He was offering me a chance to write.
“I am glad you understand. Her name is Janice. She has been to the university. She has class. Not like other girls. She teaches in my son’s school. That is how we met.”
Even jailers fall in love, I thought inanely.
“At first she didn’t take me seriously. She thought I only wanted to use her and dump her. And. Also. We are of different religion. She is Christian, I am Muslim. But no problem. I love her. But she still doubted. I did not know what to do. Then I saw one of your poems . . . yes, this one.” He handed me the poem. “It said everything I wanted to tell her.”
It was one of my early poems, rewritten from memory.
“ ‘Three Words.’ I gave it to her yesterday when I took her out.”
“You gave her my poem?”
“Yes.”
“You . . . you told her you wrote it?”
“Yes, yes, of course. I wrote it again in my own hand,” he said, unabashed. He had been speaking in a rush; now he drew himself together and, as though to reassert his authority, began to pace the room, speaking in a subdued, measured tone. “I can make life easy for you here. I am the prison superintendent. There is nothing I cannot do, if I want. So write. The poem. For me.”
There is nothing I cannot do. You can get me cigarettes, I am sure, and food. You can remove me from solitary. But can you stand me outside these walls, free under the stars? Can you connect the tips of my up-raised arms to the stars so that the surge of liberty passes down my body to the soft downy grass beneath my feet?
I asked for paper and pencil. And a book to read.
He was removed from the solitary section that day. The pencil and paper came, the book too. But not the one he had asked for. He wanted Wole Soyinka’s prison notes, The Man Died; but when it came it was A Brief History of West Africa. While writing the poems in the cell, Lomba would sometimes let his mind wander; he’d picture the superintendent and his lady out on a date, how he’d bring out the poem and unfold it and hand it to her and say boldly, “I wrote it for you. Myself.”
They sit outside on the verandah at her suggestion. The light from the hanging, wind-swayed Chinese lanterns falls softly on them. The breeze blowing from the lagoon below smells fresh to her nostrils; she loves its dampness on her bare arms and face. She looks at him across the circular table, with its vase holding a single rose. He appears nervous. A thin film of sweat covers his forehead. He removes his cap and dabs at his forehead with a white handkerchief.
“Do you like it, a Chinese restaurant?” he asks, like a father anxious to please his favourite child. It is their first outing together. He pestered her until she gave in. Sometimes she is at a loss what to make of his attentions. She sighs. She turns her plump face to the deep, blue lagoon. A white boat with dark stripes on its sides speeds past; a figure is crouched inside, almost invisible. Her light, flower-patterned gown shivers in the light breeze. She watches him covertly. He handles his chopsticks awkwardly, but determinedly.
“Waiter!” he barks, his mouth full of fish, startling her. “Bring another bottle of wine.”
“No. I am all right, really,” she says firmly, putting down her chopsticks.
After the meal, which has been quite delicious, he lifts the tiny, wine-filled porcelain cup before him and says: “To you. And me.”
She sips her drink, avoiding his eyes.
“I love you, Janice. Very much. I know you think I am not serious. That I only want to suck. The juice and throw away the peel. No.” He suddenly dips his hand into the pocket of his well-ironed white kaftan and brings out a yellow paper.
“Read and see.” He pushes the paper across the table to her. “I wrote it. For you. A poem.”
She opens the paper. It smells faintly of sandalwood. She looks at the title: “Three Words.” She reaches past the vase and its single, white rose, past the wine bottle, the wine glasses, and covers his hairy hand with hers briefly. “Thank you.”
She reads the poem, shifting in her seat towards the swaying light of the lantern
:
Three words
When I hear the waterfall clarity of your laughter
When I see the twilight softness of your eyes
I feel like draping you all over myself, like a cloak,
To be warmed by your warmth.
Your flower-petal innocence, your perennial
Sapling resilience—your endless charms
All these set my mind on wild flights of fancy:
I add word unto word,
I compare adjectives and coin exotic phrases
But they all seem jaded, corny, unworthy
Of saying all I want to say to you.
So I take refuge in these simple words,
Trusting my tone, my hand in yours, when I
Whisper them, to add depth and new
Twists of meaning to them. Three words:
I love you.
With his third or fourth poem for the superintendent, Lomba began to send Janice cryptic messages. She seemed to possess an insatiable appetite for love poems. Every day a warder came to the cell, in the evening, with the same request from the superintendent: “The poem.” When he finally ran out of original poems, Lomba began to plagiarize the masters from memory. Here are the opening lines of one:
Janice, your beauty is to me
Like those treasures of gold . . .
Another one starts:
I wonder, my heart, what you and I
Did till we loved . . .
But it was Lomba’s bowdlerization of Sappho’s “Ode” that brought the superintendent to the cell door:
A peer of goddesses she seems to me
The lady who sits over against me
Face to face,
Listening to the sweet tones of my voice,
And the loveliness of my laughing.
It is this that sets my heart fluttering
In my chest,
For if I gaze on you but for a little while
I am no longer master of my voice,
And my tongue lies useless
And a delicate flame runs over my skin
No more do I see with my eyes;
The sweat pours down me
I am all seized with trembling
And I grow paler than the grass
My strength fails me
And I seem little short of dying.
He came to the cell door less than twenty minutes after the poem had reached him, waving the paper in the air, a real smile splitting his granite face.
“Lomba, come out!” he hollered through the iron bars. Lomba was lying on his wafer-thin mattress, on his back, trying to imagine figures out of the rain designs on the ceiling. The door officer hastily threw open the door.
The superintendent threw a friendly arm over Lomba’s shoulders. He was unable to stand still. He walked Lomba up and down the grassy courtyard.
“This poem. Excellent. With this poem. After. I’ll ask her for marriage.” He was incoherent in his excitement. He raised the paper and read aloud the first line, straining his eyes in the dying light: “ ‘A peer of goddesses she seems to me.’ Yes. Excellent. She will be happy. Do you think I should ask her for. Marriage. Today?”
He stood before Lomba, bent forward expectantly, his legs planted in their characteristic A formation.
“Why not?” Lomba answered. A passing warder stared at the superintendent and the prisoner curiously. Twilight fell dully on the broken bottles studded in the concrete of the prison wall.
“Yes. Why not. Good.” The superintendent walked up and down, his hands clasped behind him, his head bowed in thought. Finally, he stopped before Lomba and declared gravely: “Tonight. I’ll ask her.”
Lomba smiled at him, sadly. The superintendent saw the smile; he did not see the sadness.
“Good. You are happy. I am happy too. I’ll send you a packet of cigarettes. Two packets. Today. Enjoy. Now go back inside.”
He turned abruptly on his heels and marched away.
September
Janice came to see me two days after I wrote her the Sappho. I thought, she has discovered my secret messages, my scriptive Morse tucked innocently in the lines of the poems I’ve written her.
Two o’clock is compulsory siesta time. The opening of the cell door brought me awake. My limbs felt heavy and lifeless. I feared I might have an infection. The warder came directly to me.
“Oya, get up. The superintendent wan see you.” His skin was coarse, coal black. He was fat and his speech came out in laboured gasps. “Oya, get up. Get up,” he repeated impatiently.
I was in that lethargic, somnambulistic state condemned people surely fall into when, in total inanition and despair, they await their fate—without fear or hope, because nothing can be changed. No dew-wet finger of light would come poking into the parched gloom of the abyss they tenant. I did not want to write any more poems for the superintendent’s lover. I did not want any more of his cigarettes. I was tired of being pointed at behind my back, of being whispered about by the other inmates as the superintendent’s informer, his fetch-water. I wanted to recover my lost dignity. Now I realized that I really had no “self” to express; that self had flown away from me the day the chains touched my hands. What is left here is nothing but a mass of protruding bones, unkempt hair and tearful eyes; an asshole for shitting and farting, and a penis that in the mornings grows turgid in vain. This leftover self, this sea-bleached wreck panting on the iron-filing sands of the shores of this penal island is nothing but hot air, and hair, and ears cocked, hopeful . . .
So I said to the warder, “I don’t want to see him today. Tell him I’m sick.”
The fat face contorted. He raised his baton in Pavlovian response. “What!” But our eyes met. He was smart enough to decipher the bold “No Trespassing” sign written in mine. Smart enough to obey. He moved back, shrugging. “Na you go suffer!” he blustered, and left.
I was aware of the curious eyes staring at me. I closed mine. I willed my mind over the prison walls to other places. Free. I dreamt of standing under the stars, my hands raised, their tips touching the blinking, pulsating electricity of the stars. The rain would be falling. There’d be nothing else: just me and rain and stars and my feet on the wet, downy grass earthing the electricity of freedom.
He returned almost immediately. There was a smirk on his fat face as he handed me a note. I recognized the superintendent’s clumsy scrawl. It was brief, a one-liner: Janice is here. Come. Now. Truncated, even in writing. I got up and pulled on my sweat-grimed shirt. I slipped my feet into my old, worn-out slippers. I followed the warder. We passed the parade ground, and the convicted men’s compound. An iron gate, far to our right, locked permanently, led to the women’s wing of the prison. We passed the old laundry, which now served as a barber’s shop on Saturdays—the prison’s sanitation day. A gun-carrying warder opened a tiny door in the huge gate that led into a foreyard where the prison officials had their offices. I had been here before, once, on my first day in prison. There were cars parked before the offices; cadets in their well-starched uniforms came and went, their young faces looking comically stern. Female secretaries with time on their hands stood in the corridors gossiping. The superintendent’s office was not far from the gate; a flight of three concrete steps led up to a thick wooden door, which bore the single word: SUPERINTENDENT.
My guide knocked on it timidly before turning the handle.
“The superintendent wan see am,” he informed the secretary. She barely looked up from her typewriter; she nodded. Her eyes were bored, uncurious.
“Enter,” the warder said to me, pointing to a curtained doorway beside the secretary’s table. I entered. A lady sat in one of the two visitor’s armchairs. Back to the door, her elbows rested on the huge Formica-topped table before her. Janice. She was alone. When she turned, I noted that my mental image of her was almost accurate. She was plump. Her face was warm and homely. She came halfway out of her chair, turning it slightly so that it faced the other chair. There was a tentative smile on her fa
ce as she asked, “Mr. Lomba?”
I almost said no, surprised by the “Mr.” I nodded.
She pointed at the empty chair. “Please sit down.” She extended a soft, pudgy hand to me. I took it and marveled at its softness. She was a teacher; the hardness would be in the fingers: the tips of the thumb and middle finger, and the side of the index finger.
“Muftau—the superintendent—will be here soon. He just stepped out,” she said. Her voice was clear, a little high-pitched. Her English was correct, each word carefully pronounced and projected. Like in a classroom. I was struck by how clean she looked, squeaky clean; her skin glowed like a child’s after a bath. She had obviously taken a lot of trouble with her appearance: her blue evening dress looked almost new, but a slash of red lipstick extended to the left cheek after missing the curve of the lip. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, tapping the left foot on the floor. She was nervous. That was when I realized I had not said a word since I entered.
“Welcome to the prison,” I said, unable to think of anything else.
She nodded. “Thank you. I told Muftau I wanted to see you. The poems, I just knew it wasn’t him writing them. I went along with it for a while, but later I told him.”
She opened the tiny handbag in her lap and took out some papers. The poems. She put them on the table and unfolded them, smoothing out the creases, uncurling the edges. “After the Sappho I decided I must see you. It was my favourite poem in school, and I like your version of it.”
“Thank you,” I said. I liked her directness, her sense of humour.