by Rob Spillman
But how could she be sure she remembered this correctly?
He was her father and the coffin held all that was left of her mother, Abigail. This much she was sure of. However, judging by the way everyone spoke of Abigail, there was nothing of her in that dark iroko casket. But how do you remember an event you were not there for? Abigail had died in childbirth and she, Abigail, this Abigail, the daughter not the dead one, the mother, was a baby sleeping in the crook of some aunt’s arm completely unaware of the world. She looked up. Her father stood in the doorway to the kitchen and the expression she saw on his face wasn’t a lie.
“Dad,” she said.
He stood in the doorframe. Light, from the outside security lights and wet from the rain, blew in. He swallowed and collected himself. She was doing the dishes buried up to her elbows in suds.
“Uh, carry on,” he said. Turning abruptly, he left.
The first time she saw that expression she’d been eight. He had been drinking, which he did sometimes when he was sad. Although that word, sad, seemed inadequate. And this sadness was the memory of Abigail overwhelming him. When he felt it rise, he would drink and play jazz.
It was late and she should have been in bed. Asleep. But the loud music woke her and drew her out into the living room. It was bright, the light sterile almost, the same fluorescent lighting used in hospitals. The furnishing was sparse. One armchair with wide wooden arms and leather seats and backrest, the leather fading and worn bald in some spots. A couple of beanbags scattered around a fraying rug, and a room divider sloping on one side, broken. Beyond the divider was the dining room. But here, in the living room, under the window that looked out onto a hill and the savanna sloping down it, stood the record player and the stack of records. Her father was in the middle of the room swaying along to “The Girl from Ipanema,” clutching a photograph of Abigail to his chest. She walked in and took the photograph from his hands.
“Abigail,” he said. Over and over.
“It’s all right, Dad, it’s just the beer.”
“I’m not drunk.”
“Then it’s the jazz. You know it’s not good for you.”
But she knew this thing wasn’t the jazz, at least not the way he had told her about it on other countless drunken nights. That jazz, she imagined, was something you find down a dark alley taken as a shortcut, and brushing rain from your hair in the dimness of the club found there, you hear the singer crying just for you, while behind her a horn collects all the things she forgot to say, the brushes sweeping it all up against the skin of the drum. This thing with her father, however, was something else, Abigail suspected, something dead and rotting.
“Shhh, go to bed, Dad,” she said.
He turned and looked at her and she saw it and recognized what it was. She looked so much like her mother that when he saw her suddenly, she knew he wanted her to be Abigail. Now she realized that there was also something else: a patience, a longing. The way she imagined a devoted bonsai grower stood over a tree.
E. C. OSONDU
• Nigeria •
VOICE OF AMERICA
1.
WE WERE SITTING in front of Ambo’s provision store drinking the local gin ogogoro and Coke and listening to a program called Music Time in Africa on the Voice of America. We were mostly young men who were spending our long summer holidays in the village. Some of us whose parents were too poor to pay our school fees spent the period of the long vacation doing odd jobs in the village to enable us to save money to pay our school fees. Someone remarked on how clear the broadcast was, compared to our local radio broadcasts, which were filled with static. The presenter announced that there was a special request from an American girl whose name was Laura Williams for an African song and that she was also interested in pen pals from every part of Africa, especially Nigeria. Onwordi, who had been pensive all this while, rushed to Ambo the shopkeeper, collected a pen and began to take down her address. This immediately led to a scramble among us to get the address, too. We all took it down and folded the piece of paper and put it in our pockets and promised we were going to write as soon as we got home that night.
A debate soon ensued among us concerning the girl who wanted pen pals from Africa.
“Before our letter gets to her, she would have received thousands from the big boys who live in the city of Lagos and would throw our letters into the trash can,” Dennis said.
“Yes, you may be right,” remarked Sunday, “and besides even if she writes you, both of you may not have anything in common to share. But the boys who live in the city go to night clubs and know the lyrics of the latest songs by Michael Jackson and Dynasty. They are the ones who see the latest movies, not the dead Chinese kung-fu and Sonny Chiba films that Fantasia Cinema screens for us in the village once every month.”
“But you can never tell with these Americans, she could be interested in being friends with a real village boy because she lives in the big city herself and is probably tired of city boys.” Lucky, who said this, was the oldest among us and had spent three years repeating form four.
“I once met an American lady in Onitsha where I went to buy goods for my shop,” Ambo the shopkeeper said. He hardly spoke to us, only listening and smiling and looking at the figures in his Daily Reckoner notebook.
We all turned to Ambo in surprise. We knew that he traveled to the famous Onitsha market, which was the biggest market in West Africa, to buy goods every week; we could hardly believe that he had met an American lady. Again, Onitsha market was said to be so big that half of those who came there to buy and sell were not humans but spirits. It was said that a simple way of seeing the spirits when in the market was to bend down and look through your legs at the feet of people walking through. If you looked well and closely enough, you would notice that some of them had feet whose soles did not touch the ground when they walked. These were the spirits. If they got a good bargain from a trader he would discover that the money in his money box miraculously grew every day, but any trader who cheats them would find his money disappearing from his money box without any rational explanation.
“She was wearing an ordinary Ankara skirt and blouse made from local fabrics and had come to buy a leather purse and hat from the Hausa traders, she even exchanged a few words in Hausa with the traders. The way she said ina kwu ana nkwu was so sweet and melodious it was like listening to a canary singing.”
“She was probably a volunteer schoolteacher in one of the girls’ secondary schools around Onitsha and has lived here for so long she does not count as an American. We are talking of a real American girl living on American soil.” Jekwu, who said this, was Ambo’s adversary as a result of a dispute over an old debt and was permanently on the opposite side of any argument with Ambo.
“Well, what I was trying to say was that she may be interested in a village boy. Like the one I saw in Onitsha who was wearing a local dress and spoke Hausa, I am sure she will be interested in a village boy,” Ambo said and buried his head in his Daily Reckoner.
Someone ordered another round of ogogoro and Coke and we all began to drink and became silent as we thought our own thoughts. The moon dipped and everywhere suddenly became dark. One by one we rose and left for our homes.
2.
We were sitting in Ambo’s shop one evening when Onwordi swaggered in holding a white envelope with a small American stamp which had an eagle painted on it on its side. He waved it in our faces and was smiling. He called for drinks and we all rushed to him trying to snatch the envelope from his hands.
“She has replied,” he said, looking very proud like a man who had unexpectedly caught a big fish with a hook in the small village river. The truth was that we had all forgotten about the announcement on the radio program and I had actually washed the shorts in whose back pocket I had put the paper where I jotted down the address.
Onwordi began to read from the letter to us. The girl’s name was Laura Williams. She had recently moved with her parents to a farm in Iowa from a much larger
city. She had one more year before finishing high school. She was going to take a class on Africa, Its People and Culture in the fall and was curious to know more about African culture. She wanted to know whether Onwordi lived in the city or in a village. She also wanted to know if he lived close to lots of wild animals like giraffes, lions and chimpanzees. And what kind of food did he generally eat, were they spicy? and how were they prepared? She also wanted to know if he came from a large family. She ended the letter with the phrase “Yours Laura.”
“Oh my God,” Lucky said, “this is a love letter. The American lady is searching for an African husband.”
“Eehen, why do you say that?” Onwordi said, clearly very excited about such a prospect. Though he had read the letter over a hundred times and was hoping for such a stroke of good fortune, he had not seen any hint of such in the letter.
“See the way she ended the letter, she was practically telling you that she was yours from now on.”
“I think that is the American way of ending letters,” Dennis said. He was the most well read amongst us, having read the entire oeuvre of James Hadley Chase and Nick Carter. He used big words and would occasionally refer to some girl in the village as a doll and some other as a dead beat floozy.
“But that is not even the main issue; she can become your girlfriend in due course if you know how to play your game very well. You could tell her that you have a giraffe farm and that you ride on the back of a tiger to your farm,” he continued.
“But she is soon going to ask for your photograph and you know we have no giraffes here and the last we heard of a lion was when one was said to have been sighted by a hunter well over ten years ago,” Jekwu said. “You should ask her to send you a ten dollar bill, tell her you want to see what it looks like and when she sends it we can change it in the ‘black market’ at Onitsha for one thousand naira and use the money for ogogoro.” Jekwu took a drink and wiped his eyes, which were misting over from the drink.
“If you ask her for money, you are going to scare her away. White women are interested in love and romance. Write her a love letter professing your love for her and asking for her hand in marriage, tell her that you would love to come and join her in America and see what she has to say to that,” Dennis said.
“Promise her you’ll send her some records by Rex Jim Lawson if she can send you Dynasty’s ‘Do Me Right,’ ” Lucky added.
“A guy in my school once had a female pen pal from India, she would ask him to place her letters under his pillow when he slept. At night she would appear in his dreams and make love to him. He said he always woke up in the mornings exhausted and worn out after the marathon lovemaking sessions in the dreams. We do not know how it happened, but he later found out the girl had died years back.”
We were all shocked into silence by Dennis’s story. Ambo turned up the volume of the radio and we began to listen to the news in special English. The war in Palestine was progressing apace, Blacks in South Africa were still rioting in Soweto and children were dying of hunger in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Onwordi said nothing. He smiled at our comments, holding the letter close to his chest like somehow hugging a lover. He thanked us for our suggestions and was the first to leave Ambo’s shop that night.
3.
Two weeks later, Onwordi walked into the shop again smiling and holding an envelope with an American flag stamp close to his chest once more. We circled him and began to ask him questions. She had written once again. She thanked him for his mail. She was glad to know he lived in a village. She was interested in knowing what life was like in a typical African village. What kind of house did he live in, how did he get his drinking water? What kind of school did he attend and how did he learn to write in English? She said she would love to see his photograph, though she did not have any of hers that she could share with him at the present time. Postal regulations would not permit her to send money by mail but she could take a picture of a ten dollar bill and send it to him if all he really wanted was to see what it looked like. She also said she was interested in knowing about African Talking Drums, did they really talk? She said she looked forward to hearing from him again. We were silent as we listened to him and then we all began to speak at once.
“I was right about her being interested in you; otherwise why would she request for your picture without sending you hers?”
“This shows that women all over the world are coy. She was only being cunning. She really wants to know what you look like before she gets involved with you.”
“You should go and borrow a suit from the schoolteacher and go to Sim Paul’s Photo Studio in the morning when he is not yet drunk and let him take a nice shot of you so you can send it to her.”
“How about you borrow the schoolteacher’s suit and Ambo’s shirt and Dennis’s black school tie and Lucky’s silk flower patterned shirt and Sim Paul’s shoes and tell the schoolteacher’s wife to lend you her stretching comb to straighten your hair if you can’t afford Wellastrech cream; then you’ll be like the most handsome suitor in the folktale.”
“Who is the most handsome suitor?” Onwordi asked. “I have never heard that folktale.” Jekwu cleared his throat and took a sip from his ogogoro and Coke and began his story.
“Once in the land of Idu there lived a girl who was the prettiest girl in the entire kingdom. Her beauty shone like the sun and her teeth glittered like pearls whenever she smiled. All the young men in the kingdom asked for her hand in marriage but she turned them down. She turned down the men either because they were too tall or too short or too hairy or not hairy enough. She said since she was the most beautiful girl in the kingdom she could only marry the most handsome man. Her fame soon got to the land of the spirits and the most wicked spirit of them all, Tongo, heard about her and said he was going to marry her. Not only was Tongo the most wicked, he was also the most ugly, possessing only a cracked skull for a head. He was all bones and when he walked his bones rattled. Before setting out to ask for the hand of the maiden in marriage, Tongo went round the land of the spirits to borrow body parts. From the spirit with the straightest pair of legs, he borrowed a straight pair of legs and from the one with the best skin he borrowed a smooth and glowing skin. He went round borrowing body parts until he was transformed into the most handsome man there was. As soon as he walked into Idu on the market day and the maiden set eyes on him, she began following him around until he turned, smiled at her and asked for her hand in marriage. She took him to her parents and hurriedly packed her things, waved them goodbye and followed the handsome suitor.
“On their way to his home, which was across seven rivers and seven hills, she was so busy admiring his handsomeness that she did not grow tired and was not bothered by the fact that they were leaving all the human habitations behind. It was only when they crossed into the land of the spirits and he walked into the first house and came out crooked because he had returned the straight legs to their owner that she began to sense that something was wrong. And so she continued to watch as he returned the skin, the arms, the hair and the other borrowed body parts so that by the time they got to his house, it was only his skull that was left. She wept when she realized she had married an ugly spirit but she knew it was too late to return to the land of the living so she bided her time. When Tongo approached her for lovemaking, she told him to go and borrow all the body parts he had on when he married her. Because Tongo loved her headstrong nature, he agreed. Each time they made love he went round borrowing body parts and when they had a child, the child was a very handsome child and grew into the most handsome man.”
We all laughed at the story and advised Onwordi to work at transforming himself into the most handsome man. Ambo advised him to dress in traditional African clothes, that, from what he knew about white people, this was likely to appeal to her more.
“So what are you going to do?” we asked Onwordi, but he only smiled and held his letter tightly as he drank.
The next time Music Time in Africa was on t
he air, we had our pens ready to take down the names of pen pals, but the few that were announced were listeners from other parts of Africa and we all felt disappointed.
We waited for Onwordi to walk in with a letter but he did not for quite some time. We wondered what had happened. When he finally walked in after some days, he looked dejected and would not say a word to any of us.
“Hope you have not upset her with your last mail?” Lucky said. “You know white people are very sensitive and you may have hurt her feelings without knowing it.”
“This is why we told you to always let us see the letter before you send it to her; when we put our heads together and craft a letter to her, she will pack her things and move into your house, leaking roof and all. As the elders say, ‘When you piss on one spot, it is more likely to froth.’ ”
“But exactly what did you write to her that has made her silent?” Lucky asked. Onwordi was silent but he smiled liked a dumb man that had accidentally glimpsed a young woman’s pointed breast and ordered more drinks. “Or have you started hiding her mail from us? Maybe the contents are too intimate for our eyes. Or now that you have become closer has she started kissing her letters with lipstick-painted lips and sealing the letters with kisses?” Ambo teased. But nothing we said would make Onwordi say a word.
Onwordi walked into Ambo’s shop after a period of three weeks holding the envelope that we had become used to by now and looking morose. We all turned to him and began to speak at once.
“What happened, has she confessed that she has a husband or why are you looking so sad?”