A Small Silence

by Jumoke Verissimo

  At first, Desire did not understand what Mama T was asking her to do, until she added, ‘I will finance you into university and even give you feeding money, if you do it well-o.’

  This was when it occurred to her that she was being asked to impersonate Remilekun and get a “scholarship” for her university education in return. Desire didn’t go home to think about it. She agreed on the spot. It did not occur to her that she might be caught or that something could go wrong. Mama T also made Desire a supervisor in the shop. Desire became responsible for counting the bales of cloth brought in and taken out of the shop. The other labourers, realising the difference in the relationship between her and the Madam, stopped sharing stories like how Mama T winked at some of the salesmen. She lost out on their gossip when she gained Mama T’s friendship.

  The plan was straightforward. First, Desire obtained an examination form under a fictitious name. Second, Mama T settled an invigilator. It was this invigilator who arranged the seat numbers at the examination centre to benefit Remilekun and Desire. At the centre, Desire looked around to see if there was a way to identify “their man” but all invigilators seemed more concerned with the students’ fashion sense than even checking their identity.

  ‘This is a mini gown, right? Mini? Do you think you can distract us here?’

  Another of the invigilators said smiling, ‘This one is dressed like an SU, she is a konk, Christian. She is not like all these ones that have come to cheat. Let her go.’

  Desire didn’t smile back at the man who made the remark. She walked towards her seat, holding an umbrella in one hand and her stationery in the other—her avatar was the stereotypical born-again Nigerian Christian. She wore no jewellery and was dressed in a full flower-patterned shirt-waister that swept the ground as she walked. The scarf tied around her head covered her forehead and looking at her could make one wince at the tightness. That singular experience made her realise how the desperation to achieve one’s dream could incur a courage that was never there before. Not once did she look up to see if she was being suspected of anything—until one of the invigilators walked up to her and called her by her real name. She jumped. He smiled. Remilekun cleared her throat.

  The process was easy, whenever Desire was done with a paper in the exam hall, “their man” walked up to her, collected the paper and gave her Remilekun’s. This was how she wrote two candidates’ papers at one sitting—varying her handwriting. When she left the examination hall with Remilekun that day, they nodded and smiled at each other and each departed without speaking.

  They both knew they were different in every way and any desire for friendship was smothered by a mutual shame; one for her impoverished finances and the other for a destitute mind. Still, they smiled at each other through the examination, shifting eyes, watching the other’s movement and twiddling fingers.

  Speaking came seven months later. It was the day they went to the examination centre to check the outcome of the results. ‘I had six As and two Cs. It has never happened before. Thanks.’ They walked slowly out of the school compound where the result sheets were pasted on a notice board.

  ‘How do you read so well? I really want to read and remember, you know, but—’ Remilekun finished her sentence with a laugh. She looked at Desire, expecting her to say something. Desire kept quiet. She walked towards the bus stop, excited more by the promise Mama T made to her, ‘Once my daughter passes, you pass. I’ll see you through the university, so gbo?’

  ‘We have to be friends. I’ll have to learn to read very well when I enter the university. You see, I’ve tried to write this exam four times, but I never remember the things I read.’ Remilekun tapped her on the shoulder, ‘Are you here?’

  ‘Just thinking. Let’s go. In time, we will learn how to remember everything. In time,’ she smiled. ‘We all forget what we read. That’s why some of us keep reading. So we never forget.’

  7

  ‘Open! Open! Open this door!’ Prof’s door shook with each bang. ‘Please, please, open this door.’

  Prof stood in front of the door listening, trying to decide if he should open it. At first, he was dazed by the audacity, but the continuous banging soon became so constant, he immured his thoughts to it.

  ‘Let us talk. At least you can forgive me.’ Pause. ‘See, if you don’t open this door—I will break it-o!’

  In the middle of the screaming and the banging, a loudspeaker sliced the threat with the pump of Angelique Kidjo’s Agolo, and then swallowed everywhere.

  ‘I just want to talk to you and clear my mind, please,’ Kayo shouted over the music.

  ‘Kayo, your redemption is in yourself. Go home,’ Prof said as he took a seat.

  ‘I can’t sleep. I can’t. We should talk. It’s one month already and people are asking questions, what do you want me to tell them?’

  There was something in his voice that almost pushed Prof to the door, but he held himself and said instead, ‘Tell them, whosoever they are, that I have no stories from the prison to tell you or anyone of them, Kayo. Go away.’ Prof stood up and walked into the inner room, leaving the knocking to continue.

  ‘Won’t you open the door for him? At least listen to what he’s got to say, he seems desperate,’ Desanya said.

  ‘I won’t. And did I invite you here now?’

  ‘Okay, I’ll leave,’ she said, sulking.

  Prof felt a little sorry at first and then he shrugged and went into the bedroom to sleep.

  ‘Mo ti r’anmo n’Ijare o, ko lo ba mi r’obi bo o, ki n mi mu s’ori pele o, k’eleda ma ma gbabode o…’

  It was when he woke up that he realised it was the sound of someone singing a Yoruba spiritual that had stirred him from his sleep. There was a song, but it was outside his door and not in his bedroom. His mother was outside singing songs of longing to see him. Her voice lowered, and he knew she was going to stop repeating the songs with that porcelain tender voice that made his shoulders wilt.

  For a moment, he wondered if his mother and Kayo came together or whether they planned their visits on the same day.

  ‘You can’t make me go through this, Eni,’ she said.

  Prof listened to her voice. Her pauses. Her sighs. Her shuffling feet made him realise she was tired of standing and waiting for him to open the door, but she was not ready to leave.

  ‘I have the key, but I want you to let me in yourself.’

  Prof listened to the heavy thud which meant she had decided to sit by the door. Hearing her sit by the door outside brought back childhood memories of the two of them waiting together at the bus stop after failing to sell any goods at the market. She would sing as they waited, her hands straying into a gentle caress across his body, his head, his back. They sat, stood, squatted and bent at the bus stop, knowing there would be no food to eat that night.

  She was outside his house now, waiting.

  ‘I have carried too much, Eni. Do I need to carry new ones in this old age of mine?’

  Prof sighed.

  ‘Each time I come here, and you do this, all I can think of is how this house has haunted me. It was here in this house that I was almost thrown down from the window.’ She laughed. It was a high-pitched laugh that brought a chill to the bone. ‘I can still feel how you snuggled on my back unaware of the things that were happening. Your father throwing down all that I owned in life, on my head, in the rain. His new wife laughing… laughing at me.’ Prof heard a sniffle.

  ‘Eni, it was raining. I covered you. I covered you. It was raining, and my things were dropping down from the window. I was rushing up and down these stairs with you on my back covered with a nylon while the rain beat me. I covered you.’

  At first, he was afraid her persistent doorstep drama would stir up some conflict with his neighbours and create a spectacle he did not need. Perhaps someone would request they broke the door. He feared that in a few minutes people would gather in front of his doorstep pleading with her to stop crying, and she would tell them her story, their story, an
d they, now bold enough to confront him, would call out to him to look with pity on his poor mother and stop acting like a bastard son. He thought of all of this as she banged on the door.

  She didn’t cry as he expected she would when she got to this point. Her knocks became gentler. Her voice was calm and low as she recounted a story he had heard often growing up.

  ‘I returned home on that day, the rain washed me so thoroughly I felt I would get a new skin. I returned to my village in Ilese with you. Now, I am here standing in front of the same house…’ She took a long pause before she added, ‘locked out again.’

  Then he heard nothing.

  ‘I will keep coming. You will open this door, I know. Here, take this for your upkeep.’ She slid some money under the door. ‘I will leave provisions by the door, okay?’ she paused as if waiting for some sort of response.

  Prof walked into the corridor and closed his eyes. He was afraid of the things he was hearing in his head. But he immediately returned to the sitting room and leaned against the door to listen to her recite his praise-poetry while his body swayed as her voice droned on. He waited for half an hour when he suspected she might have left, before he opened the door to pick up his supplies and take them to the kitchen. There was a part of him that wondered why she didn’t defy him and unlock the door with her extra key.

  He wanted her to come in and confront him. He wanted to resist being confronted for not opening the door, for choosing to put the lights out. He wanted to stop thinking about her hurt, all the pain she was revealing, one day at a time, at his doorstep. It was not unfamiliar to him. He knew the pain she was talking about and he had tried to shield her from some of it. When his father had requested he should come to see him by his bedside, Prof had gone alone. This was after many years of his father denying paternity and failing to support his mother in his upkeep. There, bloated on his deathbed, the man stopped denying his paternity.

  Prof watched the face of the man who for many years made him tell his friends he was fatherless. If he had not seen evidence that his mother legally married him—photographs of an elaborate wedding complete with a smiling couple at the centre—he could have believed he was an accident. This was worrisome for him in his early years in school, and for many years he struggled to come to terms with how the union of two people who fell in love could suddenly dissolve into unresolvable hatred. A hatred which asked that a son should be forgotten or effaced from memory. He stood at the side of the bed and watched as the man struggled with words to fill in for his absence of many years. Prof watched his drooping eyes, thinking of those times when all he had wanted was a recognition as “son”, someone to call “Father”. He stood over his father’s deathbed, lost in the sight of several tubes running across the disappearing body of the man whose attention he had begged for most of his life. Prof listened to the intermittent breathing that came as “Father” struggled to spew out the heavy stories of his absence.

  ‘Dariji mi. Jo, you can only forgive an old man who was too young to know the meaning of focus,’ and then he slumped. Prof stood by the bed, unsure of how to react to the suddenness of being called “son”, while watching the doctors and nurses rushing in; calling, screaming and darting up and down the ward for one instrument or the other to save the man, his father. He stood there unnoticed. His head swirled with confusion as he tried to process his father’s last words which remained silenced on slightly parted but still lips. Prof wondered how his father would have recounted the abandonment and neglect as the bidding of death lingered before him, he wondered how he would have been asked to forget that he was a son who grew up feeling he was never wanted by his father.

  The lawyer who had brought him to see the dying man, handed him documents of two houses, one in Lagos and another in Kaduna, and said, ‘He would have preferred you didn’t come for the burial.’ Prof stood, looking at the lawyer, who looked at him like one who expected to be challenged with a barrage of questions, his thoughts stuck on those final words.

  ‘You’re sure? He asked me to—’ he paused and said instead, ‘I mean, everyone knows he’s my father—he was legally married to my mother for one year… he spoke to me now, he—’

  ‘For your father’s sake, just take what he left for you and leave. Forever.’ The lawyer made sure they locked eyes before adding, ‘Help sustain his memory—his legacy.’ Prof looked at the ward and the swarming teams of doctors, the hurrying feet of unfamiliar half-sisters, half-brothers and relatives. He snatched the documents from the man’s hand and walked out of the hospital wondering if there was any difference now that he could say, ‘My father—is dead,’ with a true sense of ownership, without feeling guilt, fear or shame. Although, there was a part of him that knew he could never tell his mother; in death, his father’s legacy ensured he felt his place: a bastard.

  ‘He said he loved me. Very much,’ Prof told his mother later when he recounted the event.

  ‘He did? Bread-for-brain idiot,’ his mother said without any emotion.

  Prof moved through the rest of the day after his visitors departed, catching up with the part of his daily routine he had missed while they tried to get his attention. He sat by the radio at 5.45pm although there was no power to listen to the network news. He sat down by the radio in silence. He then went to his bedroom for a short nap. While he waited for sleep to take hold of him, he listened and identified his neighbours and what they were doing at that time of the day. He knew his neighbours’ voices. He knew some of their names from the way they called out to each other.

  He woke up screaming.

  It was just a few minutes after nine o’clock. He stood up from the bed and wrapped himself up in his usual burqa style, with his bed sheet, for a stroll through the streets. Prof became a ghost as he floated in and out of the night. He loved that the power was off in the area and he walked through the streets in slow and unhurried steps. He could tell that people avoided him from the rustle of their hurried feet disappearing behind him, to those approaching veering onto another path, as he walked in their direction. There were, however, a few times one or two bold ones would walk past with a hard stare. He didn’t mind that people moved away from him. He didn’t look up to confront them. He took his steps, one, and then two, and then paused. He stared around and started his walk again, one, and two and three and pause. ‘The darkness in the house sometimes bothers me,’ Desanya said to him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Maybe you should let in some light then. Do you feel it encroaches on the light outside? I mean—the darkness in your room?’

  ‘We do not see in the light; we see in the dark.’

  ‘Are you listening to yourself? What are you saying?’

  ‘I never saw in the light. We need to be in the dark to see. I need to be in the dark to see better.’

  Prof turned away from her and eyeballed those passers-by who shook their heads as they wondered who he was speaking to. He considered what to do, and asked Desanya if he should return to his room.

  Once he stepped into the house though, he was struck by thoughts of how living with lights could take him into an unimaginable gloom.

  8

  Desire walked towards the university’s main gate, burdened by the books in her arm. She ran into a pop-up sale of second-hand books by the Yakoyo canteen.

  ‘I’ll come back for this one later,’ she said, pointing to Nawal el Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero. The bookseller nodded. There was a distant look in his eyes, and she felt he would have already sold it when she returned. It made her sad. On the days she got a good price for books, from authors she loved, she walked with a bounce, but today she could think of nothing but her intention to visit Prof again that night. It was going to be her seventh night knocking at his door since Remilekun had told her about him. Prof never answered.

  A coursemate waved and ran towards her, exclaiming, ‘You look like a walking library! Are you not coming to the rally?’

  Desire nodded, although all she wanted at that mo
ment was to go home. She found herself pulled towards where students gathered under the canopy of neem trees, a popular hangout spot between classes. It was a large crowd for an impromptu meeting. She walked towards the front in unhurried steps, as her coursemate disappeared into the moving crowd. Most times, she tried to avoid the student union gatherings that imitated political rallies. She stopped behind the crowd and watched for several minutes as students backslapped, laughed and talked amongst themselves, as the student leader climbed onto the makeshift podium. She found herself moving further into the crowd for a convenient spot.

  The young man on the podium stood silent as Desire tried to settle in the crowd. After a few pushes and uncomfortable jabs from others, she found a spot where she could get a better view. Someone stepped on her foot and she turned, expecting an apology, but the girl simply pointed to her own feet, ‘Someone marched on my foot too. This is a rally not a parlour.’

  Desire shook her head and faced the podium. This was when she caught him, squatting and talking quietly to some of his colleagues. The white, well-starched shirt and khaki trousers he wore brought an image of him to her mind—a mummy’s boy perhaps, chubby-faced and with lips that pouted from regular sulking as a child.

  The young man stood up from his tête-à-tête and faced the crowd again.

  ‘He looks—’

  ‘Shhhhh! Ireti is talking,’ a student beside her said.

  The voice booming from the speaker into her ears sounded familiar.

  ‘Greatest Nigerian students. The one standing before you today is Ghandi Reloaded. Here is the voice of Comrade Iretioluwa Durotimi. You, my friends, call me Ireti, a.k.a Ghandi Reloaded. I’m your man! Your 2011 presidential aspirant for the SUG, the one who will detoxify this campus—’ Desire focused on Ireti, the student leader with a full afro on his head. As he turned in her direction and waved to the crowd, she gasped. She turned around to look at the other students, and returned to study his face, carefully. Several beads of sweat formed on her nose—his face, his nose, his hairline. It looked familiar. Desire squeezed herself forward through the crowd until she was right in front of him. Her eyes scanned Ireti’s features once again; the eyes, nose and mouth; she was right. Yes, they were like Prof’s.