A Small Silence

by Jumoke Verissimo

  Another time, Desire might have laughed at Ireti. She would have laughed at the way he spouted political rhetoric and sounded like a monologue from a bad play. But now, she watched him as he balanced himself several times on the podium, made from class desks, to avoid falling. The way he moved his hands to stroke his beard and kept a half-moon smile lingering on his face reminded her of Prof. She closed her eyes and opened them again to assure herself she was not dreaming.

  ‘Who is he?’ Desire asked the beanie-wearing boy beside her.

  He turned to look at her, and with a frown, answered, ‘Ireti. The student union presidential candidate.’

  ‘Who is he? What does—?’

  This time, the boy looked at her with thinned eyes before responding, ‘Who is he? What kind of question is this? Can’t you see he’s a presidential aspirant for the Student Union Government?’ And he moved away from her, turning and shaking his head as he did.

  Desire watched Ireti as he slayed the English language with meaningless jargon.

  ‘My fellow comrades, friends, students and highly esteemed associates from other universities, here today. Just as you are here for me, I am here for you. My diaphanous resolution is to protect my fellow students from the incorrigible political campus philistines who want to mortgage and imperil our dream by selling our birthright for a mess of pottage! We, my dear students, will not accept the floccinaucinihilipilification process of our future.”

  The crowd erupted into continuous applause, some shouting “Deep! Deep! Deep!” Ireti waved his hands for them to keep calm, and he continued, talking loudly until the crowd again settled to listen to him.

  “Therefore, I am inviting you to join me in this fight, by voting me as your president for the Student Union Government. I believe in our collective power and what can emerge from it. We are, indivisible, irrepressible, ever articulate and ready for anybody.’

  Ireti paused and the students screamed. He waited briefly for the crowd to calm down before he continued, ‘But before I venture into the calamity we have labelled an education system and its implication on our collective dreams, let me first extend my gratitude for your support and trust. I will not enter into any hokum, but go straight to explain my agenda which is inclusive without being intrusive. I, standing before you, I’m focused on a four-point agenda: the melioration of academics, the security of students, and then, the demobilisation of transport hike and school fees increment.’

  Desire wondered how student politicians managed their academic work with school politics. There were stories of a few student union leaders staying for an extra academic year in school, but there were also those who were incredibly brilliant and topped their class.

  She looked with increasing familiarity at the banner behind him, with an artist’s representation of his headshot and a slogan “Ghandi Reloaded, Your Man” hanging down the tree. How many likenesses of his face had she walked past unknowingly? The many banners and posters were almost a part of the design structure of the campus; they jarred in their announcement of music concerts, religious activities, SUG elections and new eating outlets; wearing the same black ink on fluorescent green or white cotton cloth with two strings attaching them to a tree, and two holding them down with stones.

  Where do they even get the money for all of these posters and banners? she thought. Desire had once overheard an argument between her classmates on how some campus politicians got money from the government and used it to relocate their families to the United States and Canada. Maybe there was little difference between the student politicians and the country’s politicians.

  Desire watched Ireti with renewed focus. She observed the way he thrashed his hands in the air as he spoke, moving his body forward when he needed to modulate his voice. It was clear he knew his crowd. For every word he spoke, even when the students did not seem to understand, the way his body moved seemed to speak more truth than his words. Desire wormed her way out of the crowd. As she walked towards the bus stop to head home, Ireti’s voice lingered in her head, along with his face.

  9

  Outside Prof’s dark room were lights from the amber bulbs and fluorescent lamps of his neighbours. Desire stood by his door. She was returning to knock with the hope that he would see her, and as usual she had not told Remilekun where she was going, but she didn’t think her destination was a secret.

  At first, Desire knocked on the door like a rat nibbling on wood. She considered that he could be asleep, and this meant knocking harder to rouse him, so she knocked on the door like it was about to be pulled down. Yet, the door remained closed. She listened for footfalls. Her ears filled with the congregating sounds of mothers screaming at children, babies hollering for attention, sputtering generators filtering out the monotony of the traffic’s hum and laughter sneaking in and out like the disappearing croak of a frog. It was the second week since power had gone off in the neighbourhood.

  Her legs hurt but she was not yet ready to head back home. She drummed binaries on the door until her knuckles stung. ‘Hello. Hello,’ a gruff voice called to her. She ignored it and knocked on the door with even more vehemence. Although the darkness enveloped him, she could make out that there was a man standing at the foot of the stairs. She also noticed his hands were placed on his hips and his legs spread apart.

  ‘See, woman, if you knock until tomorrow, that man won’t open the door. I don’t know you or where you’re coming from or if you knew him before. I can assure you—you will not know him again. He has changed from human being to something else,’ the unsolicited advisor offered. ‘I see him walk out of his house only at night. So you should appreciate my advice, woman, because that man is not normal again.’ He lingered for a while before walking away.

  Her imagination took a leap at his words. She pictured Prof opening the door the two of them standing opposite each other without words passing between them. Clods of blood stuck to the hairs of his full beard like the plastered look of unkempt dreadlocks left to define their own destiny. She imagined the way he arched his lips into a crescent, a gesture meant to be a smile but was more of a grimace. She saw the blood between his teeth again and how everything contrasted with his peanut-shaped eyes which were not bloodshot but the white of coconut meat. He would not say a word, he would not laugh. He would bare his teeth at her. She was about to scream when she snapped out of her daydream. She caught her breath and looked in the direction of the passer-by to find him gone.

  She took the first step and scanned the environment. She took another step and it felt heavier than the first. She hated herself for coming to see him. She took each step, each one feeling heavier than the previous one until she reached the last step.

  Clang!

  The sound of the door struck her. She froze. She placed one leg on the last step and the other on the next-to-last. She was afraid that if she turned towards the door, she would realise that she had only imagined the lock unhinging.

  The voice came to her, wafting into her ears like the rustling of leaves in the wind.

  ‘Yes? How may I help you?’ the voice said to her. It was the same voice she remembered from her childhood. The one that turned to speak warmly to her after spilling several angry words into the crowd. The voice that boomed from a speaker but spoke softly into her left ear, those words she never decoded.

  Desire walked to the head of the stairs stiffly. She fidgeted as she tried to meet his eyes. She felt the brightness of his bead-like eyes swallow the darkness in the room. She stopped by the door and looked at the door handle and then down to her legs.

  Prof opened the door but remained inside. She studied what was his face hidden in the shadows and tried to smile, but all she could do was pull her mouth into a wide stretch that hurt her cheeks. Her lips trembled in their half-moon position.

  ‘My name is Desire. I know you. I mean, I have—you see, I-I live around here.’ She took a deep breath and started all over again, ‘Sorry, I was going to say “Good evening, sir.”’

 
; The Prof before her did not wear dreadlocks the way she expected. The years in prison had left him with some hair, but it was not locked. Desire waited for him to say something, like, ‘I remember you, the young girl from Maroko,’ or something that could lead to her falling into his arms and sobbing between masticated words.

  Desire shifted her feet on the ground. She turned to look at the stairs and then at the door.

  ‘Are you here to see me?’ he uttered. He spoke so softly that she strained to hear him.

  She froze as his eyes caught hers. She turned away and stared at the ground again. She considered telling him she came to the wrong flat.

  ‘I – I – I came—need to talk. To you.’

  ‘Me? Need? Why? Uhn?’

  She was stiff. Her throat grew narrow. She remembered nothing. She shook as she thought of being accused of trespassing. She turned around to face him, but his intense gaze made her assess herself.

  ‘What do you want?’ he probed again.

  This time confidence rose from inside of her as she noted the uncertainty in his voice. She sensed an expectation in the way he responded although he tried to conceal it with rashness. ‘I came to know you, to see you…’ she paused long before she added, ‘sir.’

  ‘You came to know me?’—he snorted— ‘What are you?’ He spoke with such softness she felt the need to be careful.

  He paused and made an attempt to talk louder but his voice still sounded like a whisper, ‘What exactly do you do?’ He cleared his throat and sniffed. Something she would come to know as part of him.

  ‘Sir, I am a student. At the Lagos State University. LASU. My name is Desire Babangida Jones,’ she repeated her name with some hope that he would remember. ‘Desire,’ she curtsied. She still faced the floor as she spoke to him.

  ‘Babangida?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m not related to that former head of state Babangida, although my mother said they named my father after a man who got his father—my grandfather—a job at the railway while he was in Minna.’

  And just when she did not expect any conviviality, he said, ‘Stop sir-ing me-o. Or I will call you big madam! You’re not in the army, are you?’ he guffawed, ‘Er… Madam Desire of LASU, okay. You can call me, er… Prof—my title—or Eni, if you are brave enough to call me by my first name.’

  She could tell he was enjoying the conversation more than she was. Her hands tingled. Desire bit her lips. She was now unsure if she would ever get a chance to enter the house.

  ‘Come in,’ his voice took the quiet tone that startled her earlier, once again. ‘Oh!’ Prof unlatched the lock and flung the door open. He disappeared into the room and left Desire to walk into the flat and find a place to sit. The sitting room’s darkness stirred up the anxiety in her. She entered the house, acknowledging the fugitive silence that would become a major guest in their many conversations when Desire became a regular visitor. She took a seat, hands clasped between her thighs.

  ‘You kept knocking even when I never opened the door. Why?’

  He had recognised her knocks, then. She clutched the arms of the chair, welcoming the darkness and how it kept the secrets of her fidgets.

  ‘I got tired of wondering who it was, so I considered opening the door today.’ His voice was so soft she needed to sit on the edge of the seat and pay full attention to hear him. He laughed, ‘I have some other people—they are my people. They knock regularly, so I wanted to know who this new person was.’

  ‘Who comes?’

  He ignored her question. ‘Do you know this story in the Bible, of the man who kept going to his friend’s door to lend three loaves of bread, in the middle of the night, for his visitor?’ He waited to see if she was going to respond, before continuing, ‘Anyway, the profundity there is in this line; “I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity, he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.” I mean who goes to knock on a man’s door at midnight for bread to feed a friend?! The story is about persistence. I think it is in the Gospel of Luke, you could read it up.’

  ‘I know the passage. I’ve read everything I could find. The story is in the Book of Luke and my favourite passage is “For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”’

  ‘The door will be opened ehn? How convenient!’ Prof said and started to laugh. His laughter was soft at first. He then rushed into a soft monotony of rippling laughter that grew in tempo until it sounded like a chorus she was required to join. She laughed, hiccup-like at first, and then she found herself letting loose.

  On that first visit, she was not bothered by the way the room was lit by reflections of light from the outside. Her eyes wore the room’s shade, familiar with the absence of light she thought a result of the general power outage. When shouts of ‘Up NEPA’ rang through the neighbourhood, signifying that power was back, she wondered why his lights did not come on. Yet she did not ask him to put his lights on because she welcomed the darkness, which covered her unease. She said nothing. As her eyes became familiar with the room, making the dull, dark shapes into tangible objects, she recognised how the room was both sparse yet full at the same time, as if it used to have more. She identified that there were three chairs in the room, the one she sat in, which was by the door, and the one Prof sat in and then another which leaned against the wall. There was nothing on the walls. They were bare but for a grandfather clock she did not instantly take notice of until it chimed in a loud tone behind her some minutes after she entered the house. It was 10pm.

  Desire looked straight ahead at what appeared to be a curtain in front of her. The rectangular shape and the way its shadow draped made her conclude it was a door that led into other parts of the house. In all her observations, Prof did not make a sound. It was almost as if she was alone in the room, all by herself. She began to fear a conversation might never start between them until he cleared his throat and said, ‘You’re from LASU, uhn? I think there is more to that university than is known. Anyway, I had to move to the university in Ibadan and er… you know… you know… never mind anyway.’

  She wondered if the “never mind” was linked to the story of how he was denied a place in the Arabic Department because he was not practising any religion. She had heard different stories of him from the men at the newspaper stand. It was from one such debate that she had learnt of how he was sacked because he rebuffed his colleagues, telling them they could not see how an academic paper differed from a religious text.

  Desire was attentive to everything in the house, so much so that she could even tell when Prof moved to the edge of his seat or relaxed against the backrest. She followed the faint white of his eyes which were comparable to candlelight striving on a windy night. She stayed quiet, sometimes missing his cue for her to contribute to some of the things he said.

  ‘Many of the professors and many professionals left the country to begin a new life abroad in the 1980s. These men carried the remains of what was home with them in their hearts when they left. They were dejected in their chosen exile for many years, not because they left, but because they knew when they returned home to rest from their sojourn, even the faint idea of home they left with, would no longer exist. Many of these professors returned from some of the world’s most prestigious scholarships to serve their country, and again left, forever haunted by the inability to serve in their home.’

  ‘They had a choice. You didn’t leave.’

  ‘They didn’t leave, it was not based on choice, and they were driven by the conditions around them. Don’t you understand? And I was not… I mean I didn’t have the… I was not a professor then.’

  There was silence again.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ Desire asked.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Do you ever wonder why the president didn’t release you during his first term? I mean, they released many people, so why not you?’

 
Prof pondered the question for a while. He had realised that something was different when they stopped moving him from one prison to another, as well as no longer asking him to confess to one thing or another. He woke up one morning and learnt that Abacha was dead and there was a new head of state, who released Obasanjo from prison. Later, they told him there was an election and Obasanjo was now the head of state. He woke up each morning filled with the hope that he was going to be released soon. They never did. The warders became nice to him for a while, and then, when they realised that he was not going to be released, they just treated him as their mood dictated.

  ‘I don’t know, Desire. I just know I left prison when the president desired a second term. I am one of those who he granted mercy.’ He puffed and laughed, then repeated, ‘Mercy?’

  ‘Well, isn’t that what it is?’

  ‘I was traded for something.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Prof did not answer her question, instead he asked, ‘So, how is it that you make it here in the night? This is Lagos, you know.’

  ‘Well, I live somewhat close. I live in the estate.’

  They talked into the night and Desire only realised she had spent almost three hours in the room when the grandfather clock struck 12. She stood up and walked to the door. Prof followed behind her.

  As she stepped out of the house, he said, ‘Do you write poetry?’