Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction

by Cole, Teju

  Touting is not a job. It is a way of being in the world, a distillate of pure attitude: the chest puffed out, the body limber, the jaw set to brook no opposition. There is in every tout the same no-nonsense attitude, the quick temper, the willingness to get into a fight over any and all conflicts. There is a strut they do, a swagger. These are the original wiseguys of Lagos; some of them are as young as fourteen. They do not go home in the evening and stop being touts. The thing is bound to their souls. The regular non-tout Lagosian, too, has to share this attitude. The body language as one moves through the street has to be one of undiluted self-assurance. Uncertainty in the face or gait attracts attention, and attention is bad. When you catch a stranger’s eye, the message you send has to be unequivocal: “Trust me, you don’t want to mess with me.” There are many people on these streets who roam around looking for victims. People who, through long practice, can sniff out weakness wherever it is.

  My Uncle Bello, a well-built man in his forties, told me about going to Oshodi market and being accosted. A rough-looking man approached him on the Oshodi overpass and asked for money. My uncle thought about it and gave him two hundred naira. The man was unimpressed.

  —Ah, no o. My money is one thousand.

  Uncle Bello said he had to assess at that point whether to call the guy’s bluff or to cave in to the extortion. He called his bluff. It was a bad move. The guy got extremely hostile.

  —Heh? What do you mean by no? I will waste you. I will waste you. You see this bridge? I’ll dangle you from the edge, I’ll throw you off it!

  My uncle’s options were suddenly limited. He knew that if he gave the thug the thousand naira, his whole wallet could get cleaned out. The man could tell him to take off his trousers and crawl on all fours in the dirt or something similarly humiliating. On the other hand, he really did look like the kind of guy who could make good on his threat of murder.

  Uncle Bello’s instincts told him to fight fire with fire. He had lived in Europe for a long time, studying management in Krakow in the 1980s. In fact he was still fluent in Polish. But he had also grown up in a relatively poor family, and had had to fend for himself from an early age. So he knew the ways of the street. He started shouting at the man:

  —Waste me? Waste me? Are your eyes functioning? Look at me very well before you say another word. You don’t recognize me? I will injure you, I will kill you. You understand? I will kill you! Do you know who you are talking to? Ehn? Do you know me? I will make your wife a widow!

  “But, of course,” my uncle added with a deep laugh, “the whole time I was saying this, I was quaking in my shoes like you wouldn’t believe.” The guy bought the act though, and started begging my uncle to forgive him. Finally, my uncle gave him another two hundred, and they parted ways. About three dollars had changed hands. Both lived to tell the tale. Lagos.

  As I make my way through the crowd at Ojodu–Berger, a cellphone and a small digital camera are in the front pockets of my jeans. My shoulders are dropped back, my face is tensed, my eyes narrowed. It is difficult to keep from overdoing it at first, hard to recall how I had managed all those years ago, but I soon find the right register. The trick is to present an outward attitude of alertness, while keeping a calm and observant mood within. And there also has to be the will to be violent, a will that has to be available when it is called for. I am determined not to crawl on all fours or bark like a dog. I am especially conscious that my light complexion could make me a target out here.

  I easily locate one of the buses plying the Obalende–CMS route. It is neither more nor less rickety than any of the others. They are all in bad shape, but they are all functional. I climb in, squeezed between two men in the back row. One of the men wears a sky-blue baseball cap and has a swollen eye. The other man is older. He reads a newspaper. The bus fills quickly and we all begin to sweat. Someone pushes a window open and a cooling breeze curls around the bus. That is when I see her.

  EIGHT

  The penultimate passenger to enter the danfo at Ojodu–Berger is a woman in an adire blouse. She holds a large book. The book’s dust jacket is off-white, matte. I cannot see her face, though I try to. But, as she sits down, I crane my neck to see what is printed on the book cover, and I catch sight of the author’s name. What I see makes my heart leap up into my mouth and thrash about like a catfish in a bucket: Michael Ondaatje. It was he who had the dream about acrobats in a great house. Now to find a reader of Ondaatje in these circumstances. It is incongruous, and I could hardly be more surprised had she started singing a tune from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

  Of course, Nigerians read. There are the readers of newspapers, such as the gentleman next to me. Magazines of various kinds are popular, as are religious books. But an adult reading a challenging work of literary fiction on Lagos public transportation: that’s a sight rare as hen’s teeth. The Nigerian literacy rate is low, estimated at fifty-seven percent. But, worse, actual literary habits are inculcated in very few of the so-called literate. I meet only a small number of readers, and those few read tabloids, romance novels by Mills & Boon, or tracts that promise “victorious living” according to certain spiritual principles. It is a hostile environment for the life of the mind. Once we pass the overpass at Ojota, the rush-hour congestion eases. The speed we are gathering on the road means the journey is surprisingly cool. The breeze through the open window is constant. The man next to me folds away his newspaper and begins to nod. Everyone else stares into space. The reader, of whom I can see only scarf and shoulders, reads.

  Mysterious woman. The condition of the book, from the brief glimpse I have of it, suggests that it is new. Where could she have bought it? Only in two or three of the few bookshops I know of in the city. And if she bought it in Lagos, how much would it have cost her? More than any normal rider of the Lagos public transportation would consider reasonable, that much is certain. Why, then, is she on the bus? Because it is what she could afford, or is it because she, too, is an eccentric? The questions come to my mind one after the other, and I cannot untangle them. I hunger for conversation with my secret sharer, about whom, because I know this one thing, I know many things.

  —What, lady, do you make of Ondaatje’s labyrinthine sentences, his sensuous prose? How does his intense visuality strike you? But is it hard to concentrate on such poetry in Lagos traffic, with the noise of the crowd, and the tout’s body odor wafting over you? I see all those gathered here, and I believe in you most.

  My mind runs a monologue as I watch the back of her head for the duration of the journey. I hope that she will not get off the bus before my stop at CMS, so that I can hop off as she does, walk alongside her, interrogate her. So that I can say to her, with the wild look common to all those who are crazed by overidentification, “We must talk. We have much to say to each other. Let me explain.” In the last row of the danfo, I work on my courage. Lagosians are distrustful of strangers, and I have to speak the right words to win her confidence. The bus crosses from Yaba over the Third Mainland Bridge into Lagos Island. In the shadow of skyscrapers, half-nude men in dugouts cast nets into the lagoon. The work of arms and shoulders. I think of Auden’s line: Poetry makes nothing happen. The bus comes to a stop. She disembarks, at Obalende, with her book, and quickly vanishes into the bookless crowd. Just like that, she is gone. Gone, but seared into my mind still. That woman, evanescent as an image made with the lens wide open.

  NINE

  There is seating for up to thirty under the white canopy. The program is well under way when one of the last guests finally arrives. She is an ample woman with a regal presence. She is ushered to a seat near the high table, breaking into smiles as she catches my aunt’s eye. My cousins and I are seated several rows behind. I don’t recognize her.

  —Oh, that’s Mrs. Adelaja.

  Mrs. Adelaja? It only gradually becomes clear to me who she is. I have never met her but I know her by reputation: she was a colleague to Aunty Folake for many years. They had worked in the same government ministry, an
d not long after I left, Mrs. Adelaja had become quite a close friend of the family. Muyiwa says:

  —She lost her husband.

  —Oh, yes, that I think I heard about. How sad.

  —Yes, but the really sad thing is the way it happened.

  The rhetoric and rites of the engagement introduction continue around us. Someone in the bride’s family, on the other side of the dais, speaks into a microphone about the couple. The bride-to-be, Alaba, is absent. She is a banker in Cape Town. Her groom, my cousins’ cousin, Dayo, has come with his family to formally present himself to his future in-laws.

  —It was armed robbers, Muyiwa says. It happened in 1998.

  The woman’s skin glows with warm ocher tones, and her eyes flash intelligently each time she speaks or laughs. I observe her intently from where I sit. She must be about fifty-five.

  —The men came into their house at night, an armed gang. Woke up the parents, their children, the house help.

  —And they shot him?

  —No.

  Home invasions were extremely common in Lagos in the 1990s, and they still happen, though less frequently. My own family had two encounters with armed robbers. Once, when I was at Aunty Folake’s place on a long vacation, the men had got into the compound but had been unable to break down the reinforced doors leading into the house. We had all huddled in the bathroom of the master bedroom while the robbers threatened from outside. They kept at it, ramming the massive front door repeatedly, until it was almost the break of day. Only then, thwarted, did they give up and melt away with the shadows. We emerged from behind the barricades long after the sun had risen, and saw that one of the robbers must have been injured scaling the broken-glass-topped fence. We found drops on the concrete all the way along the walls surrounding the house and leading to the front door, the blood he’d left behind like ominous petals.

  These robbers, or some others like them, came back a few years later. This was after I had left for America. This time, they got in. Uncle Tunde had been punched in the face. Muyiwa, who was about eight at the time, had been slapped. All the electronics, jewelry, and money in the house were taken. For many years afterward, Aunty Folake couldn’t sleep through the night. Uncle Tunde bought a gun. It was never fired, not even in practice. It just hung there on the bedroom wall, rusting. It was a mysterious presence in the family home, a Chekhovian prop awaiting its fruition in vain.

  —They cleaned out the house, but when they were leaving, they forced Mr. Adelaja to come with them.

  The master of ceremonies makes a wisecrack that has both the bride’s and the groom’s families convulsed with laughter. The bride’s family has selected a peach-colored theme for the occasion, and all their headwear is of the same fabric. At the laughter, Muyiwa and I both look up, then look down again, and Muyiwa continues his story.

  —They locked him up in the trunk of his car, and drove around to the neighbor’s house. When they got there, they dragged him out and made him speak into the intercom. “It’s your neighbor. Please. I need some help. Please open the gate.” This was at two in the morning. Mr. Adelaja was the kind of man you opened your gate to, at any time of day. A respectable man, well known in the neighborhood, well liked. And that way, the robbers gained access to the neighbor’s place, cleaned out his house. Then, they dragged him along too, left his wife and daughters weeping and pleading. So now, there are two men in the trunk of the car, and they can hear the armed robbers discussing their strategy. They can hear them saying, Well, these guys have seen our faces and heard our voices. We’re going to have to kill them. And then they come round, and they open the trunk, and they shoot Mr. Adelaja twice, once in the stomach and once in the head. The neighbor, they leave alive, hoping to use him as bait for some more houses. They shut the trunk. But not long after that, they run into a police checkpoint. Panicked, they jump out of the car and disappear into the woods. And the police examine the car, and in the trunk they find two men, both covered in blood, one man still alive.

  Muyiwa shakes his head. I look at Mrs. Adelaja again, this woman in whose radiance I can see nothing that looks like grief and nothing that looks like the terrible humiliation in the story. But this is what those bastards have saddled her with for the rest of her life: the memory of the man she loves forever tied to the degradation of that one night. I muse on how they would have gone to bed that evening like any other aging married couple, perhaps with tender words, or perhaps in the midst of some minor tiff, with no thought of the violence that would soon tear them from each other. I imagine her in the weeks and months afterward, her beautiful face disfigured by sorrow. And then the gradual courage to continue, the strength she had to find for herself and for her children. Fortitude beyond imagining. It is a great and painful wonder to me, just at that moment, that there is no trace of it on her face, no visible mark, seven years on.

  Under the white canopy, the bride’s family has begun to serve soft drinks and jollof rice and moin-moin. I look around at the groom’s family, my family. The men wear purple aso oke caps, the women shiny purple geles. My family, all of whose lives time has altered inexorably. Each face on which my eye rests brings me up short. I see Aunty Arinola, Uncle Tunde’s older sister, whose husband collapsed at a market in Benin City, his corpse ignored by the public for hours. Two seats from her is the jovial friend of the family, Mr. Hassan. He is my cousin Adebola’s godfather; his wife of twenty-seven years was killed in a car crash last year. And I consider myself, consider my own loss, too. Father’s memory has already become so insubstantial, fixed to a few events only: a birthday party, a day at the beach, a discussion one evening in the kitchen while I cleaned a fish and he sat at the dining table looking over some notes from work. I cannot even remember what we talked about that night. All I have is the memory of sawing away at the gills while he looked up intermittently from the stack of reports in front of him and talked to me. Sometimes I try to make a mental image of his face at that table on that night, and I fail. I still have photographs, but I no longer know what my father looked like.

  The air under the canopy is full of the aroma of food. We pass plates of rice and chicken down until everybody has one. The invisible past, on this day of celebration, as on every day:

  And there, behind it, marched so long a file

  Of people, I would never have believed

  That death could have undone so many souls.

  TEN

  Pastor Olakunle strides up and down the stage. He is all energy. He stops, peers into the camera, holds up his Bible, and breaks into a wide white grin. He breathes heavily into the microphone: God is good. God is gooood. Pastor Olakunle is delivering a teaching to the faithful. This is a mighty word that the Lord has laid on his heart, praise the Lord. God doesn’t want you to be sick, God doesn’t want you to die. If only you would believe. You. Shall. Be. Healed, praise the Lord. Our God is not a poor God, nor is he wretched. His true followers can be neither poor nor wretched.

  Pastor Olakunle is attired in a silk suit. His shoes are of fine Italian leather, his accent is American, as befits a prosperous man, praise the Lord. Pastor Olakunle is intoxicated with the joy of the Lord. He jumps up and down. One more thing, he says, and this is wonderful: once you are walking in faith, you shall never be sick again. Yes, you heard it right. The Lord will banish all sickness from your life. Healing is yours, in the mighty name of Jesus.

  Pastor Olakunle owns several Mercedes-Benz cars. It is not clear if he is living as victoriously as Pastor Michael, who, as is well known, owns both a Rolls-Royce and a Lear-jet, praise the Lord. But who also, inexplicably, has just died. The Lord moves in mysterious ways. Nevertheless, our God is not a poor God, and Pastor Olakunle does very well. The Church of the New Generation is filled to the rafters, praise the Lord, and when he gives the word about permanent healing, a woman in the audience raises her hand in awe and adoration of the mighty name, rises to her feet, swoons.

  ELEVEN

  Adebola, Muyiwa’s brother, had just been b
orn when I left home. Now he is in Class Two of the senior secondary school, thinking about going to university in a year or two. He is a bright boy, ranked in the top twenty in a class of over 250. He is thoughtful and good-natured, and attends Mayflower School in Ikenne, Ogun State. Mayflower, one of Nigeria’s most reputable boarding schools, was founded by Tai Solarin in 1956. Solarin was a maverick, much persecuted by the successive military juntas that misruled the country. He died in 1994, and many Nigerians continue to hold him in highest esteem. One reason for this is that, for most of his life, he led the campaign to make elementary education free and compulsory in Nigeria.

  —Tai Solarin was a humanist, Adebola says.

  —That’s right, I reply. And do you know what a humanist is?

  —Yes, of course. A humanist is someone who doesn’t believe in God.

  —Oh no, Adebola. That’s not the definition of a humanist.

  —Tai Solarin is a humanist. And Tai Solarin doesn’t believe in God.

  —Both of those things are true. But neither follows from the other. A humanist is someone who believes in humanity, someone who celebrates human ability and potential. That’s where we get the word “humanities” from. A person who doesn’t believe in God is an atheist.

  —A humanist is someone who doesn’t believe in God. That’s what we were told at school.

  TWELVE

  One goes to the market to participate in the world. As with all things that concern the world, being in the market requires caution. The market—as the essence of the city—is always alive with possibility and danger. Strangers encounter each other in the world’s infinite variety; vigilance is needed. Everyone is there not merely to buy or sell, but because it is a duty. If you sit in your house, if you refuse to go to market, how would you know of the existence of others? How would you know of your own existence?