A Small Silence

by Jumoke Verissimo

  Prof returned to the room, picking up the conversation as he took a seat on the arm of her chair.

  ‘I heard gunshots on your last visit, some few minutes after you left.’

  Though he did not want his inquiry to feel abrupt, he could sense that it jolted her from whatever daydream she seemed caught up in, when she let out a startled ‘Oh!’

  He waited, wanting to know if there was anything that indicated he had crossed the line by coming to sit close to her, before he said, ‘Now, you see why I think you shouldn’t come here… if you don’t want to.’

  Desire’s thoughts were still on urban legends. ‘What do you think of Anini and women?’

  He paused, ‘Anini and women?’

  ‘Yes, Anini and women. You know they say he loved women and they were his saviour?’

  ‘So, I talk of gunshots and you think of Anini.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  ‘Male armed robbers have always loved women. Female armed robbers are usually wiser.’

  ‘So, you think, women don’t spend on men?’

  Prof guffawed. It warmed the conversation and he was glad it made her sit up in the chair.

  ‘Well, we have women armed robbers, but women have been rather wise about being an unnecessary celebrity like Anini. Actually, I think he didn’t like women. He loved the wisdom of spending his short life with women. He was not a woman wrapper—he wrapped himself around women and the strength they offered his timidity. A man who decides to rob others of their possessions already lives in the fear of lack, women are the only ones who can absolve fear.’

  ‘You don’t seem too interested in him.’

  ‘Why should I be? Oyenusi, you know, was not just an armed robber. He was a philosopher in that trade. You know what he said: “The bullet has no power”. The wisdom in that is everything. It is a regal statement on the powerlessness of the army that disrupted the root of this country for many years.’ His voice had risen as he spoke.

  Not convinced she said, ‘You know that much about women and yet you have none around you.’

  He sighed and tried to understand the comment in the context of his life, the one he believed she understood and the one he knew of himself.

  ‘Women are a source of strength, you know. If anyone decides not to keep that source of strength around them, it’s an acceptance of one’s weakness,’ he paused, ‘I was raised by my mother, you know. Solely by her.’

  ‘How do you mean source of strength? Keep them? Are women artefacts?’ and then she chuckled, ‘Or maybe they are, in the context of your generalisation.’

  ‘I just wanted to—’ Prof paused, ‘I wanted to explain how much support women give to men.’

  ‘There is a way you make one feel that women are meant to be kept for their strength-oozing power.’

  ‘What is it about women that makes you want so desperately to deemphasise the idea of their becoming as an unbecoming?’

  ‘On whose standard is a woman judged? How does she become? What does she become? Prof, listen, womanhood is a process. We have never even been allowed to begin a journey to become. Whatever you have, or think we emphasise is that we are ensuring a presence that will make us become.’

  ‘Hmm. That should be profound, but I have no word to say now,’ Prof said and then sank into a long silence.

  ‘Your mum had…’ she started, and seeing that there was no way to frame the question right, gave up.

  Prof knew her struggle: how do you ask a man like him if his mother was indeed a witch, and if it had in any way made him invincible, until he broke his vows to her and fell out of her favour? She did not appear to believe it herself. Or rather, he wanted to believe she did not think the things he thought.

  ‘My mum…’ he stopped, and moved back into that earlier melancholia she noticed when she first came in.

  ‘My mum is fine,’ he said, adding quickly, ‘You never talk about yourself.’ He was so abrupt with his answer that she did not even have time to think again, to determine if she wanted to ask him anything else.

  Prof stood from his spot on the arm of her chair and remarked, ‘It is one of those rather personal days, mmm?’ Desire did not know how to respond at first. Her visits to Ireti these past days played in her head.

  The last time, she went to see him with pictures of Prof and they spoke for almost two hours in his office, as she no longer visited him at home after their no-sex episode. They talked for so long, he ended up missing his class. When she asked if he had ever tried to see Prof, all he said was, ‘The chance to do so never occurred. He was in prison all the time that I was growing up—you know, when I realised I needed a father.’

  ‘Would you want to meet him now if you had the chance?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘When people say they don’t know they mean they do want it.’

  ‘How would you say that?’

  ‘I say I don’t know all of the time when I’m afraid to examine my feelings. I’m afraid to accept that I’ve made a choice.’

  ‘See, Desire, I really do not know if I want to see him. My life is—’ he paused, ‘My life has a whole lot of its own problems at this time and I don’t want to add to it.’

  ‘Is there something you want to talk about? I might help, you know. I have things I can dig into,’ Prof laughed.

  ‘Nothing exactly, there is so much to learn from you. I’m just thinking on some of our debates,’ Desire said.

  ‘Really? You’ve been quieter than the typical days. Except of course when you went on a woman-theorising presentation,’ Prof laughed, his voice renting the tension in the room into shreds. She relaxed into the chair.

  ‘We should call this session, “Learning at the Master’s Feet” then.’

  Despite the way they laughed and shared small talk, the air in the room still felt heavy.

  ‘How does it feel?’

  ‘How does what feel?’

  ‘Being out of prison. Staying here all alone by yourself. You know, we have a democracy with Obasanjo on his second term. Don’t you feel you want to meet and talk to people, your friends, about what they think about him?’

  Prof did not respond. Desire did not know how to pick up the conversation again and she waited, hoping that he would break the tension.

  He started to talk when she was lost in thought and certain they were going to spend the rest of the night in silence, ‘They took me away. I am not the one in this body any more. They took me away.’ His voice became crusty and he tried to speak slowly so the words wouldn’t bear the weight of him crumbling with the pain of those past years.

  Desire did not know how to help him gather his emotions. She had assumed that his prison stories were under his control.

  ‘There would be a time when a man loses his body…’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said, finally.

  He sighed, and like he was not the same person who spoke earlier, he said, ‘Let’s say, I feel like a lighter without a flame. It’s time,’ he added in a low voice. ‘Yes, we should talk about something else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Your name. You know you never told me why you are called Desire?’

  She sighed. He continued, ‘Usually, it is our relatives from the south-south that make a history lesson of their children’s names. The Yoruba and Igbo on their part are typically mundane philosophers,’ he said with a laugh. ‘I once met an Ijaw man called Government. So, tell me, what’s the story behind your name?’

  ‘Should there be a story behind every name?’

  ‘I have a feeling yours is not just any name and it has a story.’ ‘Well, my mother told me my father wanted a boy desperately and when he didn’t have one, he gave me the name “The Undesirable Element”, after a Pacesetters series novel my mother said she was reading at the time.’ Prof chuckled. ‘My birth certificate carries the name Undesired. My mother renamed me Desire, like it was the shortened version of the name.’

  ‘Hmmm, I’m called “The one
God created”—Eniolorunda, but my many imperfections offer doubt to that name.’ He cleared his voice after a small laugh, and followed it with a question, ‘You should tell me more about your family, your father, your mother—’

  She switched the topic and using the tangent of his question, she said, ‘You never talk about anything except old politics and maybe your mother dropping off food now and then.’

  They both became silent. She realised that this was the first time they would introspect their lives without giving attention to politics. This time, she felt naked.

  There appeared to be some mystique—created or assumed, that brought them together, yet it was apparent they were yet to find it. Suddenly, she found that she did not want to ignore the noise of the outside—it was there when she first stepped into the room. It existed as she sat in the room listening to him as he talked, but with the weight of the unspoken lingering around, she listened more to the humming of the generator and distant traffic, like that was what she needed to converse with.

  ‘You don’t want to go into the past, right?’ She did not respond.

  ‘Right?’ he asked one more time, and she responded with a grunt.

  The clock chimed.

  ‘I hope to see you tomorrow,’ he said as he locked the door to the lightless room.

  16

  Ireti sat on a wooden bench in front of a kiosk painted the cherry-red of Coca-Cola. There was a young girl on Ireti’s lap whose cheeks were rounded like she stored sweets in them. He and the girl appeared like effigies, facing the street. Desire walked towards him with a frown. Her muscles tightened as she drew closer to him. From that distance, she could not tell if noticing her facial expression was what caused him to jump from the seat and drop the girl on the bench, or something else. Ireti walked towards her smiling, with open arms.

  ‘The madam herself. Coming to see me in this hot sun,’ he laughed. It felt forced, and he suddenly turned sombre, ‘Thanks for coming to see me.’

  Desire was angry. She walked ahead of him towards his house, stomping her feet on the ground. She wanted to turn to see what his eyes looked like as he inspected her walking before him. As she reached the main door of the house, she stopped and turned to face him, ‘Your friends are shadowing me all over the campus.’

  He frowned, deep gullies forming on his forehead.

  ‘Can you imagine? The four of them just stood by the window of the classroom looking like people who want to steal a fish from the fishmonger?’

  Desire couldn’t find the words to describe the intense choreographed look that had kept her neck stiff and straight all throughout class, while she fought to listen to the whispers passed around the classroom about who the boys were there to “shadow”. She felt some point at her with their quick glances—although she did not catch anyone looking directly at her.

  The professor continued to teach. He behaved as if he was unaware of the situation, although everyone could see how he also stammered and fidgeted as the boys fiddled with their hands in their pockets and coughed to be noticed—either by her or by the lecturer, or perhaps as a warning to any boy who might be interested in her. At a time when cultism was rife across Nigerian universities, only a few university lecturers would have dared to play Superman when a performance like this was enacted.

  As the class ended, and one of the boys came up to her, calling ‘Our wife’, she clenched her jaw. Quivering with rising rage, she hurried to the student union block to talk to Ireti and didn’t stop even when they called out to her. She felt irritated. The more she thought of the Ireti she was left alone with in the bedroom, the one whose penis followed the direction of his eyes, downwards, and the one whom these boys here were displaying machismo on behalf of, the more she felt a deep growl forming within her.

  ‘He’s at home,’ a teenage boy with a cackle for a voice told her at the student union building. She rushed off to see him, her anger boiling. She planned to attack him with a barrage of questions about what rights he had to monitor her around the school, but this went up in smoke.

  Once they were in his room, Ireti leaned on her and his high-pitched cry had her stuttering, ‘Are you okay? What happened?’

  The next few minutes were spent consoling him while she remained baffled, until he finally uttered the words that cleared the air, ‘I lost my mum this morning.’

  ‘Your mum?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why I was trying to reach you. I sent my boys. I only asked them to tell you I needed to see you.’ He unhinged his arms from around her neck and moved to sit on the mattress.

  ‘You could have sent a text message or called! Ireti, we have spoken almost every day since we met. You talk to me about your day and I tell you about mine.’ Then she paused to think, ‘Well, maybe not too well in the last two days because I have had to complete some course projects.’

  Ireti attempted a smile.

  Desire stared at him in annoyance. His swift change of mood from the carefree tenant sitting outside chit-chatting with the round-cheeked girl, to this whimpering man inside the room, irritated her. Desire’s throat bobbed as she swallowed. She was still irritated by “the boys” and their ways. She placed her hand on her waist and made sure their eyes met, before she asked, ‘Why didn’t any of them think of asking permission to speak to me outside and say something like, “I think Ireti needs to see you urgently”? Why would they act like idiots?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Desire. I have been so busy with this campaign thing and when I tried to call you these last two evenings your phone was off.’

  ‘I was busy!’ she snapped.

  The more she thought of their actions, the more she concluded it was not her problem that his mother died. She raised her eyes to look at him. The sight of his head thrown forward with grief made her feel a touch of guilt at her coldness. She moved closer to him, lifted her hand and placed it on his shoulder, caressing it gently before tightening her hands around his shoulder blade.

  ‘I sometimes wonder if my mother wanted me to meet my father,’ he said.

  Desire squirmed in the chair. She could feel his muscles stiffen under the surface of his skin.

  ‘Would I offend her spirit if I meet a man who I bet wouldn’t care about me? How do I even know where he is?’ he threw his head back and sighed, puffing his cheeks. ‘I mean, I know he’s out of prison, but where do I go looking for him? Does he even know I exist?’

  It seemed rather strange at that point, that this boy she had met only a few weeks before could trust her with his pain. As she watched Ireti, and thoughts of Prof crossed her mind, her eyes watered and she let the tears run. She slipped her hand down from his neck and slowly stroked his back.

  ‘How long have you known about him?’ That didn’t sound quite right, so she asked again, ‘How did you know?’

  Grief was not enough to make him less of a storyteller. Ireti varied his tone of voice to capture the different emotions that he felt at each phase of the life he described.

  ‘For a long time, I didn’t know who my father was because it was something that I learnt early never to discuss. As I grew, I observed that once the news came on, and Prof was on screen, my mum’s mood changed immediately, and she always walked out or switched off the TV. When she returned, I could tell she had been crying.’

  As each word fell from his lips, he appeared to grow smaller: he was a boy, lost in the city, looking for direction. She listened to him, waiting for a time to come in, to intervene and help him find his way as he told her of how he moved from Benin to Lagos because his mum kept hoping that his father would find her.

  ‘Did she leave when she found out she was pregnant?’

  ‘I’m not sure. She only always said, she left because it was the best decision. And considering that many years since that day, he never married or fathered a child—at least from what we hear… She left, perhaps, when she realised she could be pregnant—I really don’t know.’

  ‘At least you are not an orphan. You still have a father.’<
br />
  ‘He fathered me. It’s better not to have a father, or to have one that disowned you, rather than a father who doesn’t know you exist. How do I go to a man fresh out of prison and ask him to claim paternity?’

  ‘Maybe, it’s not that hard. Maybe it is. One has to try,’ she bit her lower lip as she struggled not to tell him that the reason her phone was switched off every night was because she was with his father.

  ‘You know, the name on my birth certificate reads: Eniolorunda Iretioluwa. I was Eni all through my secondary school, I changed to Ireti when I was admitted into the university. Some people still comment about the resemblance, but I always shrug it off as happenstance.’

  ‘It is uncanny,’ Desire said. ‘Don’t you want to meet him now? At least you could use your mother as an excuse. You may want to break the news of her death—’

  She looked at Ireti and seeing how he couldn’t meet her eyes as he spoke, she looked at the floor.

  ‘My mum always said my destiny was in my hands. Meeting or not meeting my father wouldn’t change the fact that I can be whatever I want to be. Instead, it can affect the course of my life.’

  ‘These things depend, you know,’ Desire said.

  ‘When I came out top in my exams, my mother woke me up in the early morning. She does—did—sorry.’ His lips shook, but he continued, ‘She always woke me up in the early morning when she wanted to tell me something important, or at least, she felt was important. She said, “Even when one doesn’t have an arm, he devises a way to put food into his mouth.” She told me that my father’s absence should never be an excuse for truancy or underachievement.’

  Desire listened to him as he spoke of how Prof being in prison for the most part of his growing life, did not make it easy to even brag that he was his father, even if he wanted to do so. It was as though his mother’s death had given him permission to unearth his long-suppressed impulse to talk about his father.