Foreign Gods, Inc.

by Okey Ndibe

  He slammed the door after him. At first, his ears picked up a whimper. Then came the explosion of a funereal wail.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Osuakwu had a kola nut in his hand and was about to say invocations when Ike stooped in through the shrine’s low eaves.

  “My son, the leg that brought you is fine,” his uncle said, waving Ike to the raised platform. There were four other men in the shrine. Ike recognized Iji, Agbusi, and Man Mountain Polycarp, but not the fourth man who sported a groomed mustache and wore a ribbed beige T-shirt.

  “Ngene,” Osuakwu prayed, “we have kola nut in our hands. Take the nut and eat. Spirit of noon, we’re in the crook of your loins. Take the nut and eat. Spirit of morning has carried us, and has now handed us over to your care. While the morning spirit cradled us, we never had strife nor did we hear a wail. So we ask you, spirit of noon, to emulate the morning spirit. Until you put us in the care of the evening spirit, may we not hear a cry and may our heads not hurt.” He raised the nut above his head. “Chukwu who lives in the sky, take the nut and eat it. You rest your head on the cloud while your legs sweep the earth, we ask that you bless us.”

  He broke the nut into four lobes, took one, and then put the others in a bowl. He asked Ike, as the youngest, to cut the lobes into more pieces and serve everybody, starting with the oldest.

  As each man crunched his piece, Osuakwu lowered himself onto his chair. “The den of Ngene never goes dry. There’s nkwu, there’s ngwo, and—for those from the white man’s land—there are drinks that stuff the nostrils and touch the eye. To each man, his own.”

  Ike, remembering the monstrous headache from the gin, decided to go for ngwo, the sweet, frothy palm wine. He poured himself a cup and sat back down.

  A generator buzzed steadily behind the shrine, powering a standing fan that swept from one side to another, blowing bellows of hot air. Save for the drone of the generator, the pant of the fan, and the grunts of men, the shrine was silent. Ike held the cup of palm wine to his lips, his eyes fixed on the statue of Ngene. His heart beat frenziedly. Glancing sideward, he saw the stranger watching him.

  “I’m Ikechukwu Uzondu,” he said, stretching a hand toward the stranger. “Osuakwu is my uncle.”

  “Oh-oh,” Osuakwu said, as if stirring from slumber. “Age is doing things to me. Ike, my son, this man you see here is just like you. He speaks and writes the white man’s words as if he was born with it. His name is Okwudili Okeke. There’s no white man’s country his feet have not touched. He knows so much of the white man’s language that they gave him the title of doctor, even though I hear he can’t cure common headache.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “He’s the man I told you to come and meet.”

  “You wrote a book about Stanton,” Ike said.

  “The white man who perished trying to poke a finger at Ngene,” Osuakwu interjected.

  “You’re the guy from America,” Dr. Okeke said, taking Ike’s hand. He foraged in his bag and brought out a slim book.

  Ike accepted it. He held the book away from his face and then squinted to read the title: Rev. Dr. Stanton: A Missionary’s Misadventures in Africa.

  “How much do you sell it for?” Ike asked.

  “It’s free to you—compliments of the author.”

  “Thanks,” Ike said. Then, as his thought went to Foreign Gods, Inc., his heart leapt with a mixture of excitement and panic. “Wow,” he said, blowing breath.

  “Ngene is no puppy of a deity,” Osuakwu said.

  “Even the British are not in doubt about that,” Dr. Okeke said in Igbo. Then, to Ike, he said in English, “I wrote my book after stumbling upon the diaries of Reverend Stanton at the British archives.”

  Osuakwu smiled. “We sit in this small shrine in Utonki, but the exploits of Ngene have reached the ears of the British.” He smiled as his eyes lingered on the statue of Ngene. Then he began to shower the deity with praises.

  “Ngene, warrior’s penis that sired a warrior! Ngene, your fart is thunder, your breath fire. In the days of brave men, you led Utonki’s men and women in their march to war. Ngene, whenever you appeared in the thick of battle, a shower of lightning heralded you. Ngene, you made your foe beg for the comfort of his mother’s womb! Besieged by your rage, valiant men lost heart. They beckoned on their legs to run, run, run; they ran like deer from a lioness!”

  Ike thumbed open the first page of Dr. Okeke’s book and read.

  The heyday of Ngene was many, many moons ago, before the white man came and turned the world on its head, made today into yesterday, and decreed the cohabitation of lion and lamb. These days, many an elder of Utonki, thinking back to the days of valor, would sigh and grumble that the world was no longer what it used to be. “Greatness has vanished from the world,” such a man might say, depths of sadness etched on his brow.

  Once upon a time, Ngene was unrivaled in the lands of Olu and Igbo. Yet, the deity’s appearance was unremarkable. Its carver seemed to have set out to achieve an odd discrepancy between reputation and appearance. Any trained eye that fell on the statue was struck by its ambiguous motifs. They were etched in the deity’s every gesture—and stipulated in its size.

  Rising only to an average man’s thighs, the wooden statue is dominated by a stylized, androgynous figure delicately seated atop an orb. The deity’s hands are spread out in a posture that suggests splayed vulnerability. Seen from a different angle, Ngene seems frozen in the pose of an embracer yearning to be embraced in return. From yet another angle, its gesture is proprietary, as if it were gathering the entire universe onto the arc of its dominion. In one hand, the deity holds a short spear; in the other, a large round object. The object’s size and roundedness bring to mind a giant egg. But if food-minded villagers are to be believed, it’s not an egg but a mound of pounded yam. “Look at its mouth,” they’d challenge a doubter. The deity’s mouth is shaped into an exaggerated gape. “A mouth like that shows a deity whose appetite roars.”

  In long-gone days, when lizards were in ones and twos and Utonki was the terror of its neighbors, the deity’s mouth inspired dread. It belched thunder, claimed its worshippers, and flashed lightning. Those who still venerate the deity would boast that those were the days when men were men, and warriors were known for the valor of their arms. Then that world fell on its face, ruined by the rule of white men who made wimps of warriors and haughty warriors of cowards.

  These days, the elders would look at the deity’s mouth and tremble with sorrow. They would say the once-thunder-belching mouth has been reduced to a pout. Rather than evoking fierceness, the deity’s expression now suggests archness and anguished despair. For some elders, the pout resembles a famished yawn. Others say it’s a sign of boredom, or a child’s bewildered wail.

  The statue was hewn out of the bulk of an oji tree. When first sawed, the oji tree glistens, its exposed skin aglow with whiteness. Then, as the sun beats it, the skin turns a peculiar hue, a cross between brown and red. In the pantheon of trees, nothing is sturdier and heftier than oji. Nor is any tree more steeped in folklore. In some stories, its tip is deemed to be halfway between earth and sky. It was on such a tree that the cunning Tortoise and his dupes, the overtrusting Birds, perched for their last discussion as they headed for a feast in the sky. In carving Ngene out of such a tree, the artist realized the ultimate ambiguity. The statue conveyed an impression both of solidity and dynamic energy.

  By stifling the old order, the colonizing white man robbed Ngene of its once-unchallenged perch. When he outlawed wars and disarmed warriors, the white man stripped Ngene of its offices. Had the deity been a mere puppy, instead of the former scourge of enemy cavalries, the white man might have banished it altogether.

  Ike paused, sipped his ngwo, and exhaled. Glancing up, he saw Dr. Okeke pulling at his mustache, looking at him with interest.

  “This is wonderful.” Ike shook the booklet. He pictured Mark Gruels reveling in it. “Fantastic!” he cried, to calm his quickened heart.<
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  “I went deep, deep into the British archives to dig up the story. And then I came here to interview Osuakwu and other elders.”

  Ike gulped down the ngwo and wiped off the froth from his lips. Something about the air in the shrine made him uneasy, panic stricken. He wanted to sneak away. Perhaps, in the quiet of his room, he would be at ease, able to wade into the rest of the book.

  “Osuakwu,” he greeted.

  “Eh, my son,” his uncle said.

  “I meant to stop in and greet you quickly.”

  “It’s fine, my son. Go, but always return.”

  Ike took his leave. He walked home in quick, long strides. Alice met him as he entered the house.

  “Your food is ready, sah.”

  “I’m not hungry yet,” he said, then swept past her to his room. He lay across the bed and opened the booklet.

  Then he was lost in the story of that famed missionary named Stanton, a man who made a sport of punching and slapping his interpreter at will, a man whose fierce bouts of temper drove away some of the converts that his theatrical personality had drawn to him, a giant of a man whose small, uncircumcised penis was the object of lewd jokes, a creature of habit who trudged to the banks of the river each morning, and removed everything but his underwear, indifferent to the scandalized stares of onlookers, and dove in for a swim. One day, with his mission thriving, converts arriving in droves, Stanton took ill, his condition worsened, kept him homebound, indoors, a wrecked man gripped by fever, at night his booming voice chastising the demons only he could see. When everybody thought the man a hopeless case, he’d ventured out of his hut. The next morning, he had dragged himself to the river, stipped naked for the first time, and plunged. He neither surfaced nor was his bloated corpse ever spat out by the river. Then the people of Utonki said that the white man who came by the river had taken a trip home by the same river.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The night when Ike planned to snatch Ngene seemed to steal upon him. Yet he was steeled, ready.

  His first seven days in Utonki had seemed a whirl, rapidly passing into oblivion. He’d been too involved in a flurry of activities to keep a firm grip on time as it slipped away. It was only on that decisive day, amazed at how soon it had come around, that he sat down and attempted to look back. Even so, he was able only to resurrect fragmented accounts of how he had spent his days.

  He remembered the steady retinue of near and distant relatives who came to see him, their pleas for cash prefaced by grim tales of woe. He’d been at one traditional wedding, two funerals, and a child-naming ceremony. He remembered each event for its ritual and color, its dizzying sounds and movements. He recalled how each ceremony lasted long, accommodating his people’s knack for talk—meandering, circumlocutory, proverb-laced talk.

  The rest of his time had gone into a routine he’d set by his third day. It included daily visits to see Osuakwu, Nne, and Iba. Each evening, he walked to Uvunu, the stream where, long ago, Regina and he had made their rendezvous of youthful love. He went because the brook’s sights and sounds calmed his nerves. He would sit on the ledge, shaded from the waning sun by the shadows of the trees, then sway his dangling legs while delighting in the ambience.

  Uvunu offered a rich banquet of colors, varied scents, and seductive music. All around him, the scenery seemed to ooze with sensuous life. Reclined on the ledge, he opened himself. He let his eyes feast, permitted the sounds to pour into his ears and pores, and allowed the scented air to saturate his lungs. The panoply of plants filled him with wonder. He marveled at the creepers that matted the ground. His eyes traced a vine twined over the stem of a tall tree, before reaching out for one of the tree’s branches and losing itself among the foliage. He saw brambles and cactuses that stood in ambush for careless wanderers. Butterflies, some radiantly colored, others less so, fluttered about or perched on flowers. The wind made a rustling sound, and the leaves swayed in a lazy dance. Toads croaked. Crickets chirred. Decayed leaves and moldered stumps diffused an oaken scent in the air while flowers countered with their intoxicating aroma.

  But hard as Ike strained his ear, he could hear no echoes of the sound he came to seek, to tease back from years past. It was the sound of moans that gurgled in Regina’s throat during those callow escapades in love’s name, then slipped out in calibrated songs. It seemed lost forever—that cry of desire that once hushed the world’s other clacks and clangs. Regina’s elusive love song was a heady, sibilant displacement of air.

  What a pity that Regina was now a ragged apparition. The greater pity was that the trees had forgotten how to sing her moans.

  CHIEF TONY IBA, ALIAS Tony Curtis, had decided to prolong his stay in Utonki, but only after he had made Ike promise to visit every day. The arrangement suited Ike rather well. He talked with the habitués who gathered at Iba’s each evening to watch reels of old American sitcoms, movies, and sports. Whenever Iba dozed off for his incessant short naps, Ike sneaked out to see the TV watchers. He nagged them with questions about their American fantasies. From them he spooled reams and reams of anecdotes.

  Iba himself was the source of a particular brand of comic relief—the more poignant for all his efforts to dispel any suggestion of levity. Twice each day, at 9:00 A.M. and then at 9:00 P.M., Iba’s servant rang a bell and then bellowed, “Tea is served!” Then he appeared, butler-like, in one hand two spotless, pressed cotton napkins, a tray aloft in the other, with crackers, three varieties of cheese, gold-plated teacups and spoons, and two ornate crystal containers, one for milk, the other for ground sugar.

  Wherever Ike went in Utonki, he opened his ears to stories. He also opened his lips, determined to drink until he was drunk. He drank whatever was offered—nkwu, ngwo, or bottle after bottle of beer at Osuakwu’s shrine, or, at Iba’s, glass after glass of wine mixed with tall shots of cognac or liqueur. He drank until his mind became a blur, an insensate bubble afloat in a whirlpool.

  The alcohol sedated his spirit. It steadied his nerves and kept him from shaking in the presence of his uncle and the deity. Inebriation enabled him to keep his mind limber, free from agitation over the mission that inspired his return. It gave him the advantage of shadowing his uncle’s deity without feeling a tinge of remorse. Tipsy, he was able to circle his quarry without betraying signs of undue anxiety. He drank to lure his mind to forgetfulness. He feared that remembrance could paralyze him. It could cost him his resolve. On the other hand, forgetfulness would steel him.

  Ike spent the early afternoon of the seventh day packing. Then, as the sun began its lumbering descent, he set out to make farewell visits to Osuakwu, Nne, and Tony Iba. He asked Alice to tell his mother that he would come home well after dinnertime.

  He was unusually quiet and withdrawn. At each stop, he drank slowly, absentmindedly. At the shrine, he sat in pained rigidity, knees drawn close to him, clasped in place by the bow of his entwined hands. He freed his hands only to take liberal swills from his beer-filled mug. He set his head at a stiff, cocked angle, dreading to cast even a furtive glance at the statue. The compound was even more noisy than usual. When Osuakwu remarked on his unaccustomed taciturnity, he shrugged it off.

  “It’s the sorrow of the traveler about to leave home,” his uncle pronounced with an infallible air. The other men nodded or muttered their agreement.

  Nne, too, noticed his wistfulness. “My son,” she said, rubbing her palms, “your spirit is quiet. Your voice also sounds mournful. Is it me you mourn?” When he said nothing, she continued: “Have you realized, as I have, that you’ll never see me alive again? Is that what sags your spirits?” She paused again, raising her head to reveal a neck gnarled with wrinkles. She seemed to listen to the birds twittering from the branches of the frangipani tree to the left of her hut, next to one of the mango trees. A startled look came over her face, as if the birds had confided some secrets. “Something ails you,” she said, her tone portentous.

  “I’m fine, only tired from getting ready for my trip tomorrow.”
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br />   Head raised, she regarded him with a blind glare. He looked away, disturbed by the intensity of her sightless stare. Her palms, rubbed slowly, penetrated his consciousness with their soft, faraway whistle.

  “Something other than the weight of departure ails you,” she insisted. “I know it, yet I remain blind to what it is. Tell me, my son: is it because soon you will look and not find me? If so, I say, brighten your face. Am I to sprout roots on this earth? Don’t grieve for me, my son. I’ve lived. I’ve lived so long that the very ground sings me to my every destination. My feet in turn have mastered the shape of each path I walk. The earth knows the tread of my feet. Years ago, a black coat fell over my eyes. I stopped seeing as I used to. Yet, I started seeing in a new, deeper way. I now see even the things masked by the night. That’s why it troubles me that I cannot see this thing that has darkened your voice. Is it fear for me, Son? Is it my death? Whatever it is, I beg you to sweeten your face. Remember that your heart is still young. It’s too young to bear a sad weeping.”

  He drank the potent nkwu she offered him in a gourd. As he rose to leave, he slipped a wad of naira notes in her palm. She raised a cry that moved the air with its joy, momentarily silencing the birds.

  Leaving her, he headed for Tony Iba’s mansion. His gait was a slow, shambling roll, like a drunk’s. He ambled along, dreaming of the drinks that awaited him.

  By the time he left Iba’s home, at 10:36 P.M., he had drunk so much that he felt ready.

  KNOWING THAT OSUAKWU RETIRED each night around 10:00 P.M., Ike staggered into the open, dark shrine with the swagger and abandon of a burglar breaching a house whose occupants he had spied taking off on a long vacation.

  Yet, something about the ease of his entry stirred up a rogue dread. As he fumbled toward the statue, he heard the awful dissonant sound of his uncle’s snoring. It cackled to a crescendo, then snapped. As if ambushed by the sleeping chief priest, Ike stood in the shrine, unable to move a limb. His heartbeat became so cranky that he feared he was going to fall flat on his face. He was assailed by some heaviness in the air and a stink that was indefinable. The drink that had fortified him moments ago seemed to have drained away, leaving his mind lucid, a prisoner to a welter of emotions.