Foreign Gods, Inc.

by Okey Ndibe

  The officer regarded him. At last he said, “Next time?”

  “Next time,” Ike echoed.

  As they drove away, Ike reflected that he had not foreseen this form of ordeal. Had Nigeria changed so much since he was last here, or had he grown in innocence in the years he’d lived in America?

  The lobby of Stopoff Hotel was dank and dimly lit. Fuji music blared from a hall to the left of the lobby.

  “What’s going on?” he asked the receptionist, a young man named Segun.

  “Na de nightclub. Today na fuji night.”

  “When does it close?”

  “Till morin,” Segun said in mangled pronunciation.

  “Morning?”

  “Yes. And you can fit to go in.”

  “But how do people sleep?”

  Segun gave a shy smile. “They sleep.”

  “Do you have a bar?”

  “For inside de nightclub.”

  Segun cupped hands over his mouth and shouted, “Tolu!” A young man lying supine on a frayed leather couch in the lobby sprang up, wiped his eyes, and approached the desk.

  “Help oga take him bags to room four-oh-seven,” Segun instructed.

  The hotel’s elevator had been broken down for Segun couldn’t remember how long. Ike, with Tolu dragging his two suitcases, scuffed up several flights of stairs. Alone at last, he sat on the edge of his bed for several minutes. Then he decided to go back downstairs and look in at the nightclub.

  It was a dark hall with dull strobe lights. The music deafened. Cigarette smoke and the reek of beer regaled the air. Clustered around tables, the customers shouted in order to be heard. Women and men flooded the dance floor. The women shook their buttocks. The men rocked their shoulders from side to side in a controlled sway, but encouraged the women’s frenetic gyrations by pasting naira notes on their backsides.

  Ike picked out one of the frenzied dancers. She had Queen Bee’s stature: a flat belly, wavy breasts, and the kind of curved can favored by sculptors. As he watched her, he was transported by transferred desire. His loin stiffened. He resolved to offer her a drink and strike up a conversation. That instant, his mind exhumed the word “Zulu,” a rich and respectable noun that his ex-wife had turned into an execrable epithet. His body shook as if a bucket of ice-cold water had been dumped on him.

  It was as if Queen Bee herself had materialized in a fuji-playing nightclub in a seedy hotel in Lagos. He detested the sound. The writhing, drinking habitués reminded him of the rowdy youngsters outside Cadilla’s store. As outside Cadilla’s, the air turned oppressive, suffused with the smell of alcohol and cigarettes.

  He wanted to flee and ensconce himself in his room. He’d retire with some drinks, in case sleep eluded him. He had a flight to catch the next day to Enugu, on his way to Utonki. He’d been told there was only that one flight to Enugu. It was scheduled for departure at 2:25 P.M., but he had been advised to arrive at the local wing of the airport no later than 11:00 A.M.

  He walked up to the bar and ordered two bottles of Guinness. As he paid, a voice said to him, “Nothing for me?”

  He swirled around to the smiling face of the woman who had reminded him of his ex-wife. He struggled to find words that seemed to scamper away. She said, “If you want, I fit come your room. My name na Bimpe, but my friends dey call me Princess Bimpe. I can do you fine.”

  “Thank you,” he said, “but I’m going to rest.”

  “You no like me?” She cocked her head in Queen Bee’s fashion.

  “I’m traveling in the morning.”

  “I go help you relax well, well. You do me well, I do you well.”

  Ike’s loin went berserk. He pictured her naked, her nipples in his mouth, her head thrown back in ecstasy, her fingernails—he gaped at her fingernails, just like Queen Bee’s!—digging into the soft flesh of his back, scratching, clawing, kneading. Her voice, if she didn’t speak in pidgin, could have been interchangeable with his ex-wife’s.

  “Thanks.” He sounded frantic. “Good night.”

  A bottle in each hand, he ran up the stairs, his chest threatening to burst. Pursued by the canter of his own shoes, he ran as if Queen Bee were on his heels. Then, breathlessly opening his door, he looked behind, ready to shriek at his sex-crazed pursuer. There was nobody.

  He waited until his panting eased off, then used his teeth to pry off the cover of one bottle. He raised the bottle to his lip and let the liquid surge into his mouth. Fleetingly startled by the sharp bitterness, he drank until his nostrils filled up with heat. He belched away the fume.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The flight from Lagos took off close to forty minutes behind schedule and arrived in Enugu at 4:35 P.M.

  Somebody yelled “Satchmo Americano!” as Ike stepped into the cramped baggage claims section at the airport. It was his nickname in secondary school, earned because he idolized Louis Armstrong. He made a quick scan of the room, but saw no familiar face. Then somebody gripped him from behind.

  Turning round, Ike’s mouth dropped open in disbelief. His hailer was Donatus Adi, a classmate in secondary school, but better known as De Don.

  “Satchmo Americano!” the man cried.

  “De Don Oblangata!” Ike replied in like spirit. The man’s paunchy, filled-out physique advertised prosperity. Ike had heard that De Don had made a fortune after an uncle of his was elected governor. “It has been—how many years?”

  “Please don’t count!” De Don said, embracing him. “I don’t want people to know that I’m an old man.”

  De Don was at the airport to welcome his wife, who had flown to London to give birth to their second child, a daughter. He asked where Ike was headed and then summoned a rheumy-eyed cabdriver named Gabriel. He handed a wad of crisp naira notes to the man and instructed him to drive Ike to Utonki.

  Holding Ike by the shoulder, De Don addressed the driver. “This man you see here is a VIP. That’s why I have paid you extra. He’s not just any VIP, an American VIP. If anything happens to him, the CIA of America will come and ask you about it. Do you know who the CIA is?”

  Gabriel shook his head.

  “They kill people like you who mess Americans up.”

  “God will not allow,” said the driver.

  “So drive carefully.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gabriel said, stealing sidelong glances at Ike.

  “And here,” De Don said, handing more twenty naira notes to Gabriel. “This is to settle police.”

  “Thanks, sir,” said the driver.

  The commute to Utonki took an hour and forty-five minutes. The car squeaked and groaned through long stretches of the highway that were rutted and gutted. Ike counted seven police checkpoints before he stopped keeping count. At each one, the driver wound down his window and held out a twenty-naira note. A police officer would palm the money then say, “All correct!” or “Correct, man,” waving the driver on.

  Ike remained serene through it all, deep in thought. He tried to focus on his mother, but images of his uncle and the shrine continued to flutter at the edge of his mind. Unable to ward them off, he asked the driver if he had any music.

  “Assorted, sir!” the driver answered. “Which kin’ you like, sir?”

  “Do you have Uwaifo?”

  “Victor Uwaifo?”

  “Yes. ‘Joromi.’ ”

  The air-conditioned interior pulsated with the song’s thrilling rhythm, its alternation between slow and soaring notes, and Uwaifo’s dexterous fingers strumming the guitar until its strings seemed to weep for mercy. Stirred by the melody, Ike shut his eyes. The music entered his body, rendered him insensate. Then he startled awake as the music ceased, his mind racing from some dark depths.

  “You think I be twenty-naira police? Ejoo bring correct money. Otherwise come down!” barked a burly man in a police uniform.

  Ike made to speak, but held back.

  “De passenger na VIP,” the driver said, his voice a veiled caution to the officer.

  “Which kin’ VIP no ge
t him own Mercedes-Benz? VIP dey take taxi? Don’t waste my time. Oya, multiply by two and go.”

  The driver added another twenty-naira note, and they were waved on. Ike hissed. The driver restarted the music.

  “Shut it off,” Ike said with a tinge of testiness he had not intended.

  “No problem, sir.”

  In the silence, disquieting thoughts buffeted Ike’s mind. What if his nerves failed him? Or, on the night he was supposed to take Ngene, what if some nocturnal prowler caught him in the act? And what would he do if it turned out that Osuakwu had built a new shrine for the deity, complete with a heavy metal door, a lock and key? He contemplated telling the driver to put in another CD, but couldn’t bring himself to ask.

  Gabriel said, “Very soon, we go reach, sir.”

  Ahead of them was a concrete bridge.

  “Is that the bridge over River Utonki?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Something came over Ike as they drove on the bridge, a sense of entrancement. The bridge seemed to concretize a theme of change.

  The last time he was home, the bridge did not exist. Boats powered by small engines ferried people, residents of Utonki as well as visitors, from one bank to the other.

  The bridge! His sister had told him all about it five, six years ago in one of the occasional telephone conversations they used to have.

  For years, the people of Utonki had importuned government after government to build a bridge over the river. Successive governments either gave a deaf ear or made excuses. They pleaded financial constraints or made promises that went unmet.

  It happened that the big man who was then the country’s minister of works had an eye for a dazzling belle from Utonki. When the minister, famous for his harem, proposed to take her as his third wife, the audacious young woman made a request: “Build a bridge for my people.” The minister agreed, for he too loved to bask in pomp and pageantry. He wanted to have his friends (from home and abroad) descend on Utonki to witness the spectacle of his third traditional wedding. So he ordered the contractor to complete the job in record time. The love-struck minister also threw in a new “ultramodern” dispensary to replace the dilapidated structure where a traveling nurse used to stop twice a week to inject anti-malarial prophylactics into the bottoms of wailing children and cringing, snarl-faced adults.

  The people of Utonki gave the bridge a fitting name: Path to a Pot of Sweetness.

  THE CAB IDLED OUTSIDE the old, moss-pocked walls of his mother’s home. Sharp-edged shards of broken bottles, meant to deter burglars, rimmed the wall. Dusk had cast a pall, but a vestige of orange clung to the sky’s western flank. Ike’s heart skittered as he glanced up at the electronic clock on the dashboard. It flashed 6:55.

  He sat stonily, gripping the sides of his seat, a faraway expression on his face. He felt the car’s soft quiver and scarcely noticed the driver.

  “Oga, we don’ reach,” Gabriel said.

  Ike drew a deep breath and gasped. He clasped his hands underneath his chin, like a supplicant.

  The driver whistled in a tuneless, distracted manner, tapping lightly on the steering wheel. When Ike gave no sign of stirring, Gabriel spoke in a piercing voice: “Oga, no be here?”

  Ike silenced him with a glare. A moment later, he unbuckled his seat belt, as if he had been meditating and had just been vouchsafed some insight. Rather than open the door, he sank deeper into the seat. As he gazed out at the landscape, something quickened inside him. He felt overcome by sadness—but for what? Slowly, the mist that enveloped him lifted, and he realized that two tiny teardrops were wriggling down his face.

  Utonki! This was the village that had steeped him in the magic of the earth’s redness and rich scents. Ah, Utonki of the red earth! A surreal redness, as if long ago the soil had wept blood. It was here that his tongue had learned the art of discrimination, able to tell the sweet from the tart, delicacies from bitter recipes. It was in Utonki that his ear had first picked up the sundry sounds of the world, the songs of the wind, the pitchy chirp of birds, the very earth heaving under the sun’s rage. It was here that, on moonlit nights, he had played hide-and-seek with other children or sat on raffia mats, again with other dreamy children, to listen to some elder tell tales about cunning Tortoise and sinister Chameleon and about the irreconcilable feud between Mosquito and Ear. It was here that he had made his first forays into the woods, his first plunges into the river, thrashing against the current until he learned, on his own, to swim. He’d traversed the landscape as an adventurous youth, mastering the smells and secrets of flowers, the stinks and secretions of various insects. It was here that he had mastered the different techniques for climbing a guava or mango tree. It was here he had learned how to aim a sturdy stick at hanging ripe mangoes, ube or udala.

  From inside the idling car, Ike noted the changes. Electric poles dotted the landscape. New houses had sprung up where he remembered farmlands. His mother’s residence, a modest bungalow his parents had finished building in 1964, was now hemmed in and dwarfed by three gigantic three-story buildings, two on either side and an even taller one behind. The house behind seemed to stand on heels and peer into his mother’s backyard. Zinc-roofed concrete houses stood where mud houses used to be. Several buildings sported satellite dishes or television antennas.

  A clicking startled him. He turned in time to see Gabriel the driver alight from the car. The door gave a soft thud as it shut. Gabriel hastened to the back, opened the trunk, and brought out the two suitcases. Then, a suitcase in each hand, he stood outside, staring at Ike.

  The people of Utonki often ululated on sighting a long-gone visitor. The first person to see you would ask, “Is it Ikechukwu, the son of Uzondu, that my eyes are beholding?” The rhetorical question would be followed by a short song: “What have my eyes seen? They have seen Ikechukwu Uzondu! Ikechukwu, the traveler, is back!” The refrain would be taken up by others. Before long, a crowd would gather, just as it had happened years ago, on the banks of River Utonki, when he had returned for his father’s funeral.

  Ike was too tired to face crowds now. He saw only a scrawny dog stretched out in the dust under a shadow cast by a fruitless orange tree. He stepped out. The air was mildly warm, the retreating afternoon heat tamed by the waft of breeze from the river. The sun had tucked itself in under a fluffy, lolling mass of clouds. The evening had the same charmed, eerie feel to it that he remembered from years ago.

  He inhaled until his lungs ached, his nostrils picking out the faintest whiff of something—like grass—burnt. Slowly, deliberately, he exhaled—and walked with long, quick strides toward his mother’s home. A blustery breeze started up as if to stall him. It swept up dead leaves and whipped up a small twirl of dust and seemed intent on crashing into him. He turned away from it as it gathered speed, twirled and twisted with fiercer force. He covered his eyes, smiling. As granules of sand blew into his mouth, he spat and grimaced.

  His grandmother, Nne Ochie, floated into his mind. She who held Wind and Sun in conversation, who discerned the spirit of things—she would have described the vigorous wind as a dance of welcome.

  Once inside the walled compound, Ike looked right, to the grave where his father lay, the white marble now tarnished, spattered with sand. He felt a longing to stand beside the grave, lower his head in sorrow, and make the sign of the cross. But some part of him knew the act would not be solemn enough without his mother there to witness it. He walked toward the door but stopped outside, on the veranda with its peeled blue paint and smudges, slightly trembling.

  The last time he had seen his mother was at his father’s funeral. One image of her stood out among many: her face disfigured by rivulets of tears, mucus dripping from her nose, unwiped. What was the chance that joy, some measure of joy, had found its way back to that face mauled by grief?

  He shoved aside the blinds, brown and frayed, their once-colorful embroidery tamed by dirt. He peered into a dusky living room.

  “Mama?” he said in a choked,
muffled voice. Nothing but the muted echo of his own voice answered him. He batted his eyelids, but the room remained wreathed in darkness.

  “Is Mama in?” he asked in Igbo, half expecting an answer from the void. He raised his voice a notch. A tangle of smells hung about the room. Unable to recoil, he sniffed deeply, seeking to draw out each individual smell. He detected the liquid smell of sweat, the cloying aroma of crayfish, dawadawa, ogili, and other condiments, the awful pungency of sour food, the fester of fish offal, the clingy tang of goat meat, the stink of unwashed laundry, and sheer fetid air. There was something else, a faint, elusive odor, hard for the nose to grasp.

  Ike shifted his head from side to side, sniffing the air, seeking to discern the inscrutable smell. As he was sniffing, he had a sudden intuition that somebody had sidled up and stood behind him. He swung around. A gangly girl stood in the veranda, her face smeared with perspiration. She wore a checked olive-colored school uniform.

  “Good evening, sah,” she said in a shy, high tone.

  “Kedu?” he asked, stepping away from the living room. She giggled, as though surprised that he spoke Igbo.

  “Odi nma.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Alice.”

  He gasped in surprise; she was his niece, his sister’s daughter. The last time he saw her, during his father’s funeral, she was a tiny, suckling baby.

  “Alice? You’ve grown so big.”

  She nodded, wringing her hands, eyes averted.

  He took in the compound’s cemented grounds where he and his friends used to kick around balls, their skins glistening with sweat. Thin metal clotheslines ran between three rusted steel posts that formed an indifferent triangle, the dry clothes swaying in the modest breeze. A hen waddled in through the gate, trailed by four chicks.

  “God almighty!” Ike said, fixing his attention back on his niece. “The last time I saw you, you were like this.” His hands defined a small, curved shape. “Do you know who I am?”