A Small Silence

by Jumoke Verissimo

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘No?’ he laughed. A short laugh followed by a sigh, ‘You sometimes slip into the quiet of a poet.’

  ‘Really? I feel there are so many things in my head. I’m—I want to listen to them.’

  ‘Hmm. You could try writing poetry. Poetry is the best way to listen to the soul. Well, that’s what they say.’

  Prof sighed. Once he unlocked the door, he stepped back and whispered, ‘See you tomorrow,’ as if she had been there yesterday or the day before, and then disappeared into the room once more.

  ‘Goodnight, Prof,’ Desire said, wondering if she would return the next day.

  10

  The first time Prof’s mother visited him in prison, they sat in silence for one hour before she released a flood of tears. What followed was the sound of her crying becoming a means of communication between them. Prof listened to the sound of her sniffling and tried to understand her sorrow. As they sat facing each other, his eyes stayed on the ground and she, he could guess, guided her eyes to scan the mosquito bites that dotted the skin on his frail body. In the silence, he felt the shame of the moment, she was the last person he wanted to see him in that state. His whole life had been about making her proud of him.

  ‘Maami, see I topped the class.’ Or, ‘See Maami, I will make you happy, so happy.’

  Her other visits to see him in prison went the same way. Silence. Tears. Silence. There was, however, one time that he raised his head to see what she had become. She was looking at him like a woman beholding a dead son she was hoping would rise and walk. It was that hope that now brought her to his doorstep since his return from prison, leaving him provisions and keeping on with her infrequent knocks, which was their new way of conversing. She would knock and chant his praise, struggling with the words which fell from her lips, each syllable dragging the other.

  ‘We used to talk. Let me in.’ He would wait by the door and listen to her recite his praises before she again departed.

  He always wanted to run after her, just the same way he had wanted to hug her the day he left prison. Yet, he had felt a barrier between them. The visits showed their loss, and how, slowly, over the years, their laughter had receded into a vigour for other activities, like activism.

  Prison showed him that life had changed between him and his mother, and it started long before his incarceration.

  Was it because I decided to visit my father in the hospital? He shook his head at the thought. I needed to know my father, I needed to know the man who birthed me. I needed to know. He wrapped his arm around his head as the last sentence echoed in his mind, as he thought of how the hurt sat in her eyes when he insisted he wanted to be brought back to the house he inherited from his father, instead of going to hers. It was the same hurt he saw the last time she had come to see him in prison after someone smuggled her in. For the first time in a long time they had talked.

  ‘I paid over a million to make this two-minute visit possible.’

  ‘Why is it now difficult? Where did you get the money from?’

  ‘Er… the government—they are killing… they killed some activists in the Niger Delta and now it’s getting crazier.’ She took a deep breath before she added, ‘Thankfully, there are people who care about you more than you know.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘Yes, people who support you. They made this visit possible,’ she said in a voice which vibrated through his head again and again.

  ‘You may be placing my life in these people’s hands, stop meeting people to help you see me.’

  ‘How won’t I? You’re my only child.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t ask to be alone.’

  ‘Don’t!’

  Then she stood up from the chair and walked towards the door like she was leaving but returned to the chair again. ‘You won’t die here. My son, you won’t.’

  They fell into a familiar silence as they both became lost in their thoughts. The next thing, his mother leapt up from the bench they sat on. Her eyes burnt with several emotions, and in them he identified pain, fear and anger.

  ‘Oh! Do you think your father would have visited if he were alive? Like he did when he abandoned you?!’

  He said nothing to her, reminded of the time he had returned from school, slinging a bag filled with books down to the ground and plodded into the bedroom, his eyes unable to deny the tears which rushed down his face as he asked her what she did to his father.

  ‘Why does he hate me this much?’ He fell into her arms and they cried together. They lay like this into the night until they fell asleep; to be woken by the morning sun, entangled in each other’s embrace.

  Harsh knocks stirred him from his sleep now. He listened to the knock as he tried to understand what he felt; he could feel his veins throbbing and his heart beating fast, but he also felt a calmness somewhere inside of him, which wanted him to seek out company. And from the first day, when he realised it was someone else knocking and not his mother or his nosy neighbour at the door, he always rolled his fist and placed it over his mouth when the knocks persisted.

  On the day he eventually opened the door to her, the knocks started from around 9.30pm. He listened to each knock. It stirred up the sound of his childhood frolics; the sound of making music with sticks on tables. He counted the beats of the knocks in his head: one, two. Three, four. Five, six… forty-four, forty-five…

  As the knocking persisted, Prof stood up from the sitting room and walked down the corridor without entering the bedroom and then he returned to the chair a few minutes later. He returned to listening to the sound, which all at once stopped. He became slightly irritated when the knocking stopped. He broke free from the embrace of the chair and with his heart racing, he took quiet steps to the door and unlocked the latch, but no one was there.

  ‘Hello? Who is that?’ His disappointment made his voice lower than it typically would be. Hearing himself speak with hope of a response also surprised him. It felt as if the voice was coming from someone else.

  Prof did not step out of the doorway. He looked in the direction of the stairs but could not see anyone. He was going back inside the house when he heard her steps. He opened the door wider but remained in the comfort of his dark room as she emerged from the benighted stairway and stood in front of his door, trembling. She was not what he had expected: her hair was a little dishevelled from walking about, yet she could still stand out in any crowd. Even after his years in prison, and in the dim lights, he would describe her as beautiful. In her five foot, six inch height and street-lamp thinness, her clear eyes appeared to scan everything in sight. Her eyes shone in the darkness. It was through her eyes that he sketched the rest of her. It was a slow observation, but his eyes soon got accustomed to the dim light in the corridor and he could not take them off her. She stood, legs apart, testifying to her persistence at the door; one who would not budge until answered. He knew, there was something in her to be offered and he wanted to know what it was. He said the first words that came to his head and he did not feel that they could have been inappropriate. He stood there caught in the surprise of a voice different from the ones he had heard in the past days. It begged to be listened to. He did not realise or know what he had expected to meet at the door.

  Earlier that day, he could not remember doing anything different than the usual monotony his life had slipped into since he returned from prison: waking up, rolling over to a side of the bed, dragging himself to the bathroom—brush, bath, cook, eat and evening walks. He stumbled, in, out and around the kitchen for a meal, sat down in the sitting room to listen to the radio whose volume was always so low even he needed to strain his ears to hear it. The habit of straining to listen to the radio was something he learnt from his solitary days in prison. A warder used to patrol the cells with a small transistor radio, and he trained his ears to catch the sound until that warder was moved to another unit.

  When she entered the room, they started with questions which circled for a long
time around introduction. He did not want to scare her away, although he wanted to appear impenetrable. He waited when she spoke and she listened to him even when he coughed. He was relieved to talk to someone, and not listen to the sound of a snuffle. Her voice tinged his feelings with delight. Yet, he could not ascertain what he felt as he spoke to her; and for the first time, he realised that the ability to speak with someone whom one did not need to speak with, was itself a kind of freedom.

  ‘We can talk on the phone sometime. You can call me,’ she said.

  He took a deep breath wondering if his thoughts were audible. Unsure of how to respond to her suggestion, Prof picked up the GSM phone on the table and fiddled with it. He listened to Desire’s breath, which was a way of saying she was waiting for a response.

  ‘Can I have your number?’ she asked.

  ‘I do have a GSM, is that what you call it? But I, er, you may have to check how to make this thing work yourself,’ he muttered, wondering how he had not created time to understand how it worked.

  She paused for a long time before she said, ‘The GSM is useful, but you don’t have to use it. Let’s see how yours works.’ Prof smiled. He respected how she volunteered to help him with the phone. He stayed silent for some time before moving from his chair with the phone in his hand and squatted beside her. As his arm brushed hers, they both pulled away in a reflex then apologised in synchrony, ‘Sorry’. By the time he returned to his seat he laughed so hard that he fell into it.

  And again, he felt ashamed of what he felt. The emotions that were rising inside of him were not familiar to him any more.

  It was only when the clock chimed at 12 that she expressed her intention to leave. He knew she must return, and he said it as best as he could to hide his fears of her not returning, ‘See you tomorrow?’

  Prof leaned on the door and listened to Desire’s footsteps until they faded. He could not stop the tingling which ran up and down his spine when he finally moved away from the door. He felt relief as she left. It felt like watching himself being pulled from himself, but what he would always remember about that first visit was how he stumbled and fell over a stool in the kitchen thrice in one day of opening the door to a stranger. He felt relieved. It felt like slow, unhurried sex that begged for intensity after long years of abstinence. He felt ashamed but at the same time, he felt unwound.

  11

  ‘Prof’s light is never on. Do you think there could be some reason—some scientific reason for him putting the lights off?’ Desire asked with a yawn.

  ‘Let’s talk common sense. You mean you’ve been meeting someone in a dark room, day in day out, doing what? And you’re looking for science? Are you alright?’

  ‘We just talk. We talk about books, politics, everything,’ Desire said in a low voice.

  ‘Just talk? Books?’ Remilekun chuckled and winked before standing up to place the empty bowl in her hand on a table.

  ‘Yes, just talk,’ she replied with a straight face, recalling her time alone with Prof, and how the grandfather clock always signalled a departure once it struck 12. Prof would stop talking at the chime of the clock. He would clear his voice, change into the drawl of a bored, underpaid actor who forgot his cue.

  ‘Eh… I think you should be on your way, uhn?’ he would say, and she would walk towards the door.

  Remilekun stood up from her side of the bedroom and came to sit on Desire’s bed. She placed her hand on Desire’s left shoulder.

  ‘I was here last night waiting for you until I fell asleep, just like it has been some six or seven nights now, and you are here talking nonsense. Don’t you think there’s a problem here?’ Her voice was now lower than when she had started out.

  ‘I think it’s… it’s… it’s…’ But even then, words failed her. She could not describe what it was.

  Remilekun finished the description. ‘It is a fetish. You have dark-room fetish. That’s all. It is man-in-the-dark-room fetish.

  Haven’t you heard that some people are attracted to shit?’ She paused to exhale, and then added, ‘Your visit to see that mad Prof in the dark is the same. It is like shit-fetish. I don’t know who is mad, you or him. I am certain of one thing though; there is madness between you two.’

  ‘Attraction to shit is called coprophilia! And it’s an entirely different thing. Anyway, you can’t understand.’

  ‘I can’t understand what? See, if you people want to fuck, just do it. No need for all this darkroom preparations. Okay, okay. Some people like sex in the dark though.’ she laughed, ‘Oh, please, take candles the next time and pretend it’s romantic.’

  Desire shook her head and Remilekun squalled, flapping her legs.

  Desire thought of her last visit. She recalled how she had walked down the stairs listening to the jangling of metal as he fastened the locks and retreated into the dark. She wanted to tell Remilekun how she always felt a strong urge to light up the room and look into his face and speak the first words that entered her head when her stomach would turn. Instead, she would move her childlike frame to the edge of the chair, fold her hands below her abdomen and lean forward to press them down. These were the times she swung herself back and forth and let his voice bounce off around the room, imagining them as echoes in an empty hall; and if he changed his position so that there was a slight and brief brush of his skin against hers, her heart flipped and the silence that prevailed in the room became almost suffocating until he exhaled.

  Desire reclined on the bed, moving her hands about as if she was again in Prof’s room, feeling for the wooden arms of the chair. She could again feel him bent beside her as he handed her his phone, the tepid air escaping his nostrils to tickle her skin, until capsules of sweat hurried down her armpits and teased forks down her back.

  ‘You sit in the dark with a man, and you tell me you’re just talking. Talking about what? The size of his prison-wilted penis?’ Remilekun stood up from the bed to remove a towel from the hanger and walked towards the bathroom laughing, ‘Let me go and shower, I will return to this.’

  Desire tossed and turned on the bed, the thoughts in her head flirting between Prof and the assignments she was yet to do, and suddenly, she remembered Ireti. She had not seen much of him campaigning around school lately.

  Remilekun stepped out of the bathroom cutting into her thoughts, and picked up the conversation as though there had been no break.

  ‘Hear yourself, Desire, you just talk with a man who has stayed in the prison for how many years without seeing a woman… just talk?’

  ‘Yes, just talk.’

  ‘It is okay if you don’t want to tell me you met this bobo who is shagging you every night. But, if it’s really that psycho man you’re going to meet, please, stop. It is madness!’ Remilekun threw her hands in the air, before she turned to Desire, jutting her chin forward. She took a deep breath and dabbed some perfume behind her ears; yelping and contorting her face as the alcohol waters stung broken skin. ‘See, you’re the one who is always asking for scientific proof, but I have it as an unreliable scientific proof. Here it is; when men stay too long in prison without sex, they develop a wilted penis syndrome. They may leave their before-prison wife to marry one with no knowledge of their sexual performance and some just never have sex with a woman again. They claim asexuality or spirituality. You get?’

  Now dressed, Remilekun walked to the door, then swung around suddenly and said, ‘I’ll greet Mumsie for you. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re going to your mother’s house, the way you’re pancaking your face with this much powder?’

  ‘And where else would I go?’ Remilekun went to the curtain and the sun’s light swept the room with brightness.

  Desire smiled and looked up, so they faced one another directly, ‘Okay, greet your mum.’ She then sat up on the bed and turned to the cupboard that housed everything they were ashamed to leave about the room or felt too lazy to pack properly.

  Remilekun took the half-used toilet roll in the cupboard
and made a display of pushing it into an already full handbag. Seeing that as an opportunity to get back at her, Desire, asked, ‘Are you stopping over at a shitting or semen wiping competition?’

  Without looking up from the bag, Remilekun concentrated on the task of pushing the tissue into the bag. In the process an object popped out and dropped from the bag.

  ‘What’s that? Are you sick?’

  ‘It’s multivitamins!’ Remilekun snapped and picked up the pack of pills in a hurry. She tucked it into her bag

  ‘Hmmm. The doctor!’ Desire said. ‘I think someone is going h-o-m-e,’ Desire said with a giggle.

  ‘I am going home, okay?’

  ‘Yes, you’re going home.’

  Remilekun muttered a few inaudible words at her and Desire laughed at the way her upper lip formed a spear.

  From the way her friend’s nerves jumped at every word, she knew the visit was to see Mr. America; a name she used for a lover who she operated a “you-see-me-you-see-me-not” relationship with.

  Mr. America shuttled between Ghana and Kenya, yet returned to Nigeria, speaking in muddled American slang and British cuss words, interjecting every sentence with, ‘In abroad—’ He travelled out of the country for a few months and when he returned, he phoned Remilekun for nights out. ‘Be careful,’ Desire then raised her voice a notch higher, ‘at home.’

  Desire had made it plain to her friend several times that she didn’t like Mr. America. But Remilekun appeared to follow the logic of a popular Fuji artist who sang that, “The one whom I was ridiculed for is the one I will eventually marry.”

  Mr. America was a man who loved to have a good time but Remilekun took him too seriously. He once told Remilekun on their first date that if she ever got pregnant by him, he would punch out the foetus, or if she succeeded in giving birth to the baby, he would cut it up and sell it for blood ritual, as he needed to find out if indeed people made charms from the body parts of a baby. He then told her it was a joke.