A Small Silence

by Jumoke Verissimo

  In the course of their relationship, Remilekun had gotten pregnant by him but never told him. She had cried on Desire’s shoulder every night until she asked if Desire could accompany her to a clinic “to remove it.”

  As Remilekun stepped out of the house, she looked back and said, ‘Should my mum call, spin a story.’

  Indeed, the day after Remilekun left the house, Mama T sent someone to the house at noon. She wanted to know why Remilekun had not come home in two months, especially with the lecturers ready to strike. Desire lied, saying Remilekun was involved in scientific research that involved turning phones off on campus.

  ‘Actually, she has been sleeping in school now for some days.’

  The lies came so easily, and the errand lady went on about how much Mama T always talked about how Desire had changed Remilekun’s life and how God would repay her and bless her with a big future.

  ‘I’ll kill this girl for making me lie to Mama T,’ Desire swore under her breath.

  And then the thought of what could happen if Remilekun failed to return came to mind. Remilekun had never slept at her boyfriend’s houses before. Perhaps, a little late night, now and then, but with Mr. America she sometimes packed like she was going on a holiday. Desire wondered how she would explain Remilekun’s disappearance if she became a victim of the kidnapping which was becoming rampant in the city, or became involved in some accident along the expressway. As the thought crossed her mind again, Desire dialled the phone number Remilekun asked her to call if there was an emergency. She could not get through. She wondered if she should call Mama T. Despite Remilekun’s request, the thought niggled at her.

  She tapped three digits on her phone and stopped. She remembered how Remilekun had returned to the door long after she had said goodbye, popped only her head into the room and said, ‘You don’t have to call my mother.’ She repeated this three times. Desire had nodded in response. There was some sort of unspoken rule between them. When it was time, Remilekun would return to recount the night’s adventures, such as an ex she ran into and who she went to this-and-that-place with, between laughs and excited screams. It wasn’t the first time this sort of thing would happen. She always returned.

  12

  Prof stood up from the chair he sat in waiting for Desire to knock. He paced back and forth. In his head, he rehearsed the words to say to her for keeping him waiting, and then he tried to think of the books he would discuss with her, but both were impossible to do. All he could think of was why she was yet to arrive at a few minutes to ten. He went to the window. His eyes roamed the street, trying to pick her out from the people walking past. The smell of burning wood jarred his nostrils and he closed the shutter. The clock chimed. 11pm, and then 12am. Desire had not come.

  Prof moved back to the chair. He sat down on its edge and imagined Desire in the room and how she would stand up and move towards the door when she was ready to leave, dragging her feet like she was signalling that he could change her mind to stay much longer if he asked her to do so.

  ‘I can’t make you stay longer. It is already late—perhaps too late for you to walk by yourself this night,’ he said to the empty room. The words he always wanted to say when she acted this way. He never asked her to stay longer or stay overnight as that would already imply something other than the friendship she gave, which he was now soaked in. He also did not want her to stay longer, as he still felt the need to be alone; yet each time she stood up and announced her departure, his head swirled, and his heart took on a rapid gong beat. He drew his legs up into the chair and recalled one of her visits, when he started out reciting Niyi Osundare’s Not My Business and she joined in from the second stanza. They called out each word in a chorus, slowing down or speeding up to speak the words in synchrony.

  They picked Akanni up one morning

  Beat him soft like clay

  And stuffed him down the belly

  Of a waiting jeep.

  What business of mine is it

  So long they don’t take the yam

  From my savouring mouth?

  They came one night

  Booted the whole house awake

  And dragged Danladi out,

  Then off to a lengthy absence.

  What business of mine is it

  So long they don’t take the yam

  From my savouring mouth?

  Chinwe went to work one day

  Only to find her job was gone:

  No query, no warning, no probe—

  Just one neat sack for a stainless record.

  What business of mine is it

  So long they don’t take the yam

  From my savouring mouth?

  And then one evening

  As I sat down to eat my yam

  A knock on the door froze my hungry hand.

  The jeep was waiting on my bewildered lawn

  Waiting, waiting in its usual silence.

  He listened to the memory of her voice and her laughter rose into his head like the approach of a distant train. His body drooped, and when the thought of her never coming back crept into his mind, he trembled. Since her visits began, he had denied himself the company of Desanya, his loyal companion. He tried to bring her into his presence now, but he could not will her into a conversation the way he had always been able to. For the first time in a long time, he picked up the phone and called Kayo.

  The knocking came thrice. There was no rhythm to it, yet he hurried to the door only to unlock it with restraint. He stepped back waiting for Desire to come inside and apologise, even if it was not their usual meeting time. He was thinking of how to chide her for coming at a time other than agreed to, but it was his mother’s voice that slipped through the door.

  ‘Your food is by the door,’ she said. He listened to the sound of her feet, her small pleas for him to please open the door and the surprised gasp at the slight creak of the door when she leaned against it. She staggered into the room upon realising that the door was unlocked, and he wondered if she would think about whether it was probably never locked the previous times, when she came to deliver his provisions. Prof stretched out his right arm to keep her from falling. His mother fell into his arms, her body rigid, more from surprise than anything else. She froze in his arms and began to cry. Once she finished crying, she stood up straight to face him.

  ‘Eni, Kayo said you called him last night?’ she asked. He did not say a word. He freed himself from her grasp; she steadied herself and scanned the room from the door.

  When she failed to step further into the house after a long time, Prof said, ‘Enter.’ This was the only word he said to her. He returned to his seat, and she found a chair and they sat together in the darkness, savouring the moment of being together in the room. The moment of his opening the door to her since the first day she brought him from prison with Kayo. Since his decision to start to live alone and without lights.

  Despite this, all he could think of was Desire and her absence. Why did she miss last night’s visit?

  ‘You need someone around you, maybe a woman,’ she said. ‘Have you heard anything?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Prof sighed and then became silent.

  ‘You know, you raise a child and offer them all you think is the best. And then you push them and say, “I want a grandchild; child, you need a wife,” and we talk about how these are the fruit of our labour.’ She laughed, ‘These are things many parents pray for—a grandchild, a wife for their son—until they find out they are about to lose their child.’

  She moved to the window and looked outside, adjusting the curtains as she returned to sit down in the chair.

  ‘Life is better now. Seeing you walk out alive from that prison made life brighter,’ she gave a short laugh, ‘But now, you have made me alive. You need to live. You are not a shadow.’ She stood from where she sat, the place Desire sat when she visited and walked about the room, muttering under her breath. Prof caught a single word, “Blessing.”

 
Prof raised his head to look at her; he said nothing, but his mind remembered all he wanted to forget.

  Blessing, with the mole on the left part of her upper lip. His secretary. She made his life as a university professor and an activist almost too easy, always keeping the appointments apart and making sure he was abreast of issues in the country. He was so fond of her ways that she earned the nickname, “Compu”, a shortening of Computer, from him. She was one of the people he tried to forget, because he always felt she was an interlude that was supposed to be an episode in his life.

  Her skin was the colour of a ripe mango, contrasted with dark lips raised into an insolent sneer. These were things he only noticed later as he was always too engrossed in his work to notice anything else, and her efficiency and dedication to the job endeared him to her. He finally noticed her as a beauty by his side when one of his colleagues’ attempt at a compliment turned sour.

  ‘How do you carry all of this beautiful institution behind you on this small frame?’ the colleague moved towards Blessing and attempted to brush her buttocks. Blessing slapped him. As Prof intervened that day, he noticed how her five foot eight frame sat well on her. She became something more than a secretary from then on.

  Before that day, Prof was aware that fellow comrades and friendly faculty members cleared their throats and threw jibes at him whenever he and Blessing walked together. Although he assured them that nothing amorous existed between them, no one believed him. He tried to continue to see her for what she was hired to be, his secretary, who would help with the work before him, but his feelings controlled him. He didn’t want to hurt her. From watching his mother’s struggle, he had made up his mind, as a child, never to marry. Seeing his mother’s plight, he feared he would only be another villain in the life of a woman of promise. He was also too passionate, too deep in his love for the people to give out a part of himself to a woman.

  He once warned Blessing, ‘I could torture you as a husband.’ That day, she had come to him and asked, ‘What about us, Prof? Where are we headed?’ It was obvious she was thinking of marriage, as she believed their relationship was gathering attention and had become the subject of speculation by family and friends. She would wait for him after his lectures and struggle for his bag, along with admiring students. She brought food to his flat in the mornings and watched him eat. He didn’t want to accept these meals, but being tired and hungry, he was always too glad to be fed. He also knew she was not being herself. She was trying hard to fit into the role expected of her from family, who she once told him asked her “to act like a woman” when she decided she wanted a child and not a man.

  ‘Then don’t get married.’

  ‘It would kill my mother.’

  ‘Balderdash! If your decision makes you happy and brings no bodily harm to anyone, do it. Or else, you’re on your way to the grave. It is also called slow death.’

  ‘Prof, don’t talk like that. My family… I would like a proper wedding, then children. Not a born-by-mistake.’

  ‘You create your own universe, sing your song.’

  ‘Okay, Prof, but you know I may get pregnant. We should use protection,’ she said in exasperation and he suddenly declared that the next time she repeated that statement, he would not only stop seeing her, he would also lay her off.

  ‘You are a human rights activist, Prof. Did you just say that?’

  Prof moved away from her and turned around, ‘I didn’t really mean that.’

  Blessing ignored him and then started to talk, ‘You should meet my people. Prof, we are so close, yet you don’t even know my people. What if we decide to marry?’

  ‘There should be more to loving than ending up as a married couple. You don’t even want to get married. Are you living to please yourself or others? What makes you think I’ll be a good husband to you?’

  ‘We get along. Not like—’

  ‘See madam, marriage is not my thing. It is not your thing. And even if we want to make a baby, it is our decision. We. Decide. Not your mom. Not mine. Okay?’

  Blessing turned and looked at him for a long time before taking a deep breath. She became kinder to him after this. He was the one who soon began to feel uncomfortable after his outburst as it made him ashamed afterwards, but he did not tell her he was sorry over the several months they remained together.

  ‘I may get pregnant,’ she said again one day.

  ‘I enjoy sex better without a condom. I don’t trust all these condoms they say feel like skin.’

  ‘Professor!’ she yelled. Perhaps, it was the shrillness of her voice that amused them both, but they both began laughing.

  ‘I can just… with the thing, you know withdrawal method,’ he said, seizing the change in the mood to explain himself.

  ‘Listen to yourself, Prof,’ she said, amused. ‘Withdrawal method, are you in depression? Where are you withdrawing to? A whole Professor Eniolorunda!’

  He spread out on the bed, his satisfied self, staring and smiling at the ceiling, breathing heavily while she lay by his side in silence for a while, before she drew a long breath and stood up from the bed, knocking off the pile of books on the bedside table in anger.

  Still wearing a smile, a finger on his stomach, scratching idly, he had believed they would make up afterwards. He returned from a tour the next week to find her resignation letter on the table. He couldn’t forgive himself for a long time when she disappeared. He tried to search for her, but between the activism and university work, he found little time to dedicate to finding her. Slowly, his pining to see her again faded away. The years that followed Blessing’s departure were a chain of flings with women whose names he never recollected the next day. They were often university undergraduates finding a voice in activism, many of them giving themselves to him as a show of strength. To honour his time with Blessing, he offered protection to every woman whose body he would take. It was their body, it was their decision to do whatever they wanted with it. It however continued to interest him that in prison when he thought of the possibility of dying, Blessing did not even cross his mind.

  His mother was the second person that week who reminded him of Blessing. Desire was the first. At their last meeting, she asked him if he had ever fathered a child. It was the most unlikely question that could have come up in their conversation. As they began to shed the skins of their personal lives, slowly at first, and without pain, she dropped the question.

  ‘Do you want a child?’

  He did want a child. He wanted a child when he tricked Blessing into using the withdrawal method. He however wanted it to appear like a favour if she got pregnant; like an I-told-you-before-hand, in case, he wasn’t a good father. Sometimes, he wondered if there was something generational about absent paternalism in his lineage. He wasn’t keen on marriage. His mother had shared similar thoughts—in moments of frustration at his infrequent visits and days of intense loneliness—on how his duty to his causes had eclipsed all else.

  ‘You chose your father’s innards and not mine! His lineage is known for abandoning loved ones, they always push those they love away! Is this what you are?’ she spat out in Yoruba. Those words had stayed with him, even after his mother apologised—You chose your father’s innards and not mine!

  Rather than tell Desire what he really wanted, he turned to her and without thinking it through, gave the same response he gave to Blessing many years back, ‘Do I want a child? To want a child is pure selfishness. It spells narcissism and only goes as far as to replicate man’s perpetual want to transcend the ordinary. Once you become a parent, your narcissism doubles, doesn’t it?’ He meant for his last sentence to shock and he waited for another question, but Desire fell into a long silence. The intensity of the silence hit their thoughts, until Desire heaved a deep breath and laughed heartily.

  ‘Are you rendering a theory, Prof? You shouldn’t forget to live.’

  ‘Look who’s talking!’ he said, a little peeved.

  The sound of his mother clearing her throat
took him away from his thoughts.

  ‘When is this going to end?’ his mother asked, ‘Are you going to return to a normal life?’

  ‘What is a normal life?’ Her question pierced him like a dagger, compelling him to respond against his wishes.

  ‘You are not a shadow. I will keep praying for you.’

  The image of himself as a shadow echoed in his head long after she departed. Those words were in his mind as he stood by the window watching the traffic of people and cars moving about. He wondered if Desire didn’t come because she felt he was a shadow. He did not know what to feel, which was the hardest part of it all. He knew what was happening inside of him was some form of emotion, but he was certain it was not the type of feeling his mother and other people wanted for him.

  He switched on the radio and reduced the volume to the point where he strained his ear enough to listen to the boring social analysis of a radio presenter, who stuffed his poor grammatical and bad arguments in a pastiche of terrible American, British and Nigerian Englishes. Once the presenter felt he was struggling to make sense, perhaps, even to himself, he engaged in a reel of laughter at his own joke and played several pop songs, which Prof believed was meant to soothe the frustrations of listeners like himself until he fell asleep.

  The radio was on when he woke up at 2am. It was louder now because of the quiet. He turned off the sentimental croon of Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You. He listened to the night: night guards blowing their whistles to stagger the silence of space. He coiled into a knot on the chair and waited for sleep to return.

  13