A Small Silence

by Jumoke Verissimo

  Prof tugged at Victoria’s hand and dragged her with him, pulling her through the streets without stopping, towards Kayo’s house. Through all of this, she complained about his strange behaviour, and he mumbled something about wanting to see Kayo urgently. The truth was that he never prepared for his mother’s appearance when they planned on bringing Victoria to the house. His mother, however, decided to fall sick that day.

  Years later, his mother would be the one begging him to find a woman to be with.

  ‘Your mates have three children now, and you’re going about living like a lifetime bachelor.’ For his mother, a man needed to be married and with children—that was success.

  He was 27 when he stopped having sex. This was after Blessing, and the numerous girls who came after her unveiled his years of suppressed emotion. So, he stopped having sex. He woke up one morning and convinced himself that he could access self-denial. He was not doing this because he wanted to be like Sigmund Freud who, perhaps, sought to write great books. Perhaps, Prof’s hope was that his abstention would generate ideas on how to win the war of ignominy he fought for his people. There was so much he tried to explain to Kayo, who was the only one he told about his abstinence at the time. He was the one who also told him, ‘Are you mad? Sex is life, man!’

  He didn’t respond. The thought in his mind was simply that nobody feels sensual when they feel cornered and trapped. For one, he could never understand how anyone with a conscience, who had travelled the world and seen the potentials of the country, could still feel sexually aroused, with all the pain the people went through. The pain which was trapped in their eyes, which begged him to fight for them—the tired, hungry mouths which were like locked lips deprived of drinking water. He compared them to lamps burning without oil. He walked the streets, each time convinced he was born to save the people from suffering.

  Once his decision to abstain from sex came, he would excuse himself after the caucus meetings he held with other comrades—which usually led to sexcapades with other activists—to go and think. He left many of the men and women, who had fed each other with looks lingering for greetings and the exchanging of room numbers. He witnessed some hold hands and tickle palms as affirmation of their sexual hunger. Sometimes, when they insisted he should stay around after the meetings, he would mutter something about being too tired or deep in some documents which must be understood before “the next congress”.

  At first, Prof reasoned his abstinence on his rising anger over the state of the nation. He told everyone who cared to listen that the mind was where pleasure and pain lived and one of these emotions would sometimes supersede. His friends joked about how they who were married “cut side shows”, and he was always quick to explain that what they thought was a stifling of heat between the loins of people who were not sexually active, was simply wet coal. For a stove was not hot until lit with fire: you become what you think about. It had already been over ten years of anger taking the place of his sexual desires, pushing his needs down to the dark places, which he now felt were being erupted by a woman whose name sounded like an aphrodisiac.

  21

  In her sleep, Desire heard loud curses and as she turned to move closer to the voice, she opened her eyes to the sporadic thuds against the wall by her bed. This was when she realised that she was not dreaming. She sat up on the bed with her hands cupping her bowed head and listened to the violent exchange between Baba Bolaji and his wife.

  ‘One day, you will realise I am the man in this house.’

  ‘The bastard man, of course.’

  ‘See her, bearer of an evil head.’

  ‘Owner of rags and worms.’

  ‘It is your maggot-infested father and mother that didn’t give you home training that you’re talking to.’

  Earlier in the day Desire had watched their son, Bolaji, as he played with two of his friends, all between the age of five and seven, by her doorstep. They ranted about their favourite cartoon characters, who was taller, and the different contortions they could make with their faces to scare younger children. Their conversations were in the background of other noises in the neighbourhood as she locked her door on her way to the campus, until one of them told the others, ‘My father has bigger wickedness than your father.’ He hopped about with excitement and made faces at the others. Desire turned to look at the boy to compare the enormity of his words with his frame. There was nothing significant about him, no special features, just one of several children in the neighbourhood who, out of many, would not be singled out. He was typical.

  ‘It is a lie! If my father beat you with his cane, you’ll be asking to drink water,’ Bolaji, with a head that reminded one of a yam tuber, said, reeling to the ground.

  ‘Yes now, men are stronger than women,’ the boy who started the conversation said.

  ‘Who told you that? I don’t even know who is stronger in my daddy and my mummy. My daddy can beat, but my mother would beat you so much you won’t talk for many days. Let me show you how she punches my father in the eyes.’ He stopped to demonstrate the punch by wheeling his right-hand several times before he continued.

  The other two boys laughed. Desire fiddled with the door but tried not to interrupt their conversation.

  Bolaji continued, ‘My mummy would then give him blow in his eyes so that it can swell up like watermelon.’

  ‘It is a lie joor! Your daddy told my mummy he was in a car accident when she asked him about his swollen eyes. Your mummy cannot tell lies. Is she not the one who is always saying, “Love you” to your daddy, and she even buys sweet for all the children?’ the other paused and faced each one in turn, as if checking for a contradiction.

  ‘Your mummy is nice. Yesterday, I saw her hugging Temi’s daddy in her shop, and he was crying, while she was saying “Stop it. Stop it.”’

  ‘My mummy is strong, and see—’

  Desire locked the door and walked towards the boys, who stopped talking and muttered greetings as she reached them. She took some time to look at Bolaji and saw a noticeable resemblance between him and his father. It was the same kind of uncanny resemblance they said she had with Babangida, but for her complexion.

  It was also interesting that Bolaji’s parents were known for the legendary length of their sex bouts, as their noises could be heard in the passages some afternoons, when she returned early. Sometimes, it was difficult to know if they were engaged in a fight or sex. When they fought, Bolaji’s mother, being one not to forget the scars on her, fought back like her life depended on it, and most times it did. Theirs was not the relationship where one person beat the other. They fought, and each day, a new winner emerged.

  ‘I am a real woman, not road-side, walk-past-her-woman. If you show me one, I will show you one to ten!’

  And then there were those days, predawn, when Desire would hear moans and screams which were always loud enough to wake her. Screaming, ‘Ma pa mi—okay, kill me. Just kill me and let me know I am dead.’ It took a while for her to realise that this was only make-up or till-death-do-us-part sex and not one of their fights. The days when they had sex, one would see them the following morning, wearing each other’s arms around their necks on the balcony, shouting endearing words loudly for the benefit of anyone who gave them attention, ‘Love you so much, baby! Mwwwah!’

  When they first started to live in the neighbourhood, Desire once told Remilekun that she feared she might break down their door and kill them because of what they made her remember, her parents. It was however not the same. The difference between Bolaji’s family and hers was that her father beat her mother. He beat her anytime he returned home drunk. Her own mother waited to be beaten. Desire’s mother was nothing like Bolaji’s mother, whose screams alerted the neighbours that they were about to fight. Once Desire heard, ‘I am battle-ready for you today. I am a woman! I am a woman and I can stand on my own,’ she knew that a fight was ready to begin between the husband and wife.

  Desire’s mother was not ready for anything but hope th
at her husband would change and love her again. Desire remembered those mornings when she woke up to Babangida beating her mother until she was arranged like a torn puppet on the floor. The room filled with the smell of weed soaked in kai kai, the local gin.

  ‘He is not my daddy. My real daddy is in the village,’ she remembered telling one of the other children.

  She told this story so often to the children she played with, and they saw her and her mother as victims of a wicked stranger. And he was a stranger.

  She went to Oshodi after she gained admission to the university and tried to locate the house she had lived in with her parents. It was no longer there. The place had been replaced with a fleet of small shops where traders sold lace fabric. Desire stood in front of the shops that day trying to remember the smelly gutters and her father on the balcony, smoking. She saw him trampling over her head on the mat as he entered the sitting room and then stumbling into the bedroom, with the lingering smell of alcohol following him as he went past her to the toilet.

  Her mother remembered him differently. ‘Tall man, and very handsome. You have his face,’ she said to her, on one of those nights she reminisced about their earlier days. Before she started talking to her shadow.

  ‘I don’t look like a gorilla!’

  Her mother stood up from the mat she was on and opened an old purse she kept photographs in.

  ‘See. That is Babangida and Sarjee, your father’s friend. That man—’

  ‘That man what?’ Desire asked, watching her mother take a deep breath without saying a word.

  The friend—Sarjee, a corrupted form of Sergeant, was one of the few whose names she surprisingly remembered. The picture had not been among the others she originally kept in the purse. She found it stuck between the pages of an old exercise book with names of those who owed her money in Oshodi.

  For the first time, her mother spoke up. ‘That man was a bad influence on your father,’ her mother finally said. Her index finger touched the tip of her tongue, and she raised it to the skies.

  ‘True.’ Desire kept the old photograph for a long time but lost it on her matriculation day in university.

  Sarjee was Babangida’s sidekick, or, perhaps it was the other way around. They were always together for as long as Desire could remember. She could not remember seeing a relative coming around to the house, or visits to see grandparents anywhere. Sarjee was the one who came around to visit, and considering that he slept in the house sometimes, he was not only almost like a relative, but literally a part of the house’s furniture.

  He was unforgettable for many reasons to Desire, but there was first his physique; his body was a signpost of human oddities. This made him quite memorable. His body carried a form that was difficult to miss: a big head, a blackened lower lip that drooped like an overwatered cocoyam leaf, a nose that reminded you of rat holes and his stained incisor teeth that were shaped like shovel pans. His friend, Babaginda, the man whom Desire insisted she would never call Father, was a big contrast, his features were forgettable. Although people sometimes commented on him being a handsome man who destroyed his looks with his excesses, Desire always struggled to remember the things that were striking about him, and found it quite difficult to recall even moments spent with him that were not marred by his alcohol induced anger. Little things like lounging in the sitting room with her on his lap, sharing fatherly moments, seemed to have never existed. Whenever she thought of Babangida, she recalled flashes of him relaxing on a wooden stool with a bottle of dry gin and a chewing stick at the side of his mouth in the mornings: sometimes sharing truck-horn laughter with Sarjee, or alone, passing comments on neighbours who hurried past him.

  In Oshodi, in place of a park, the streets or compounds became the playground for the children. There were those who pushed and chased after abandoned tyres with sticks, like they were driving cattle. Some bent low over tops, throwing them to cemented grounds. There were those who played football on the streets, creating goal posts with stones or sticks. Of all these, what Desire loved most was playing with rubber bands, although they never allowed her to join in because she was too young. She still stuck around, because she noticed that some of the players were her age mates. She learnt to ignore the other children who showed that they had been warned by their parents to stay away from the policeman’s daughter. She stayed close enough to see what they were doing, but at a slight distance, to avoid getting humiliated. She smiled and laughed at the fun while never really understanding what the game was about, other than it involving looping rubber bands onto signed marks on the ground. She also tried to believe that she could not join in because she was not old enough to join them. She learnt to ignore those ones that told her, ‘Please we don’t want your father’s trouble now.’ But as they were always in need of rubber bands, she developed the habit of gathering the objects—begging for them, seeking for them, stealing them, and then offering them to the friendliest of the older children who courted her friendship. At other times, she wore the rubber bands on her wrist like bangles—sometimes she doubled them on her wrist and they were so tight, that her veins stuck out and her skin darkened around this region. Her mother did not like this, and always warned her against it. Sometimes, she threatened not to give her food, or even report her to Babangida, but at these times, Desire would laugh and run away.

  So, on one of those days that Babangida was in a bad mood, he called out, ‘Mama Undee—’ as he would typically call out to her, and she, according to him “counted his voice, and waited for him to call more than once.” As Desire’s mother moved close to him, his hand bound into the air, landed on her face, and returned to his side. Just as she was going to ask what she did, he lifted his hand in a fist and landed it on different parts of her body, like a hammer driving a nail into wood. Babangida staggered about throwing his punches on a woman who waited for the blows to descend on her, so she could move on to other things. He screamed, ‘Bringer of bad luck and a lack of promotion at work!’

  Desire also already knew the landlord would not come to rescue her mother. Some of the tenants rushed about, seemingly more busily, to start their day. Not one stopped or offered to stop the beating because they were used to seeing this happen. Desire watched it all from a corner of the house, her hand in her mouth to choke the cries that wanted to come out. Over time, she had practised stuffing her mouth with a handkerchief. She moved to the wall, and pressed herself against it, trembling as she listened to Babangida’s friend, Sarjee, who held a roll of marijuana between his fingers, laughing like a bad car spurting, screaming, ‘I will help you drop her down from the balcony. Sebi, you want to kill the woman?’

  ‘Gerrout! Bag of bad luck!’ Babangida screamed at his wife, then turned to Sarjee, who was going about the compound in his typical manner, neighing and saluting the neighbours who condoned his jokes in amusement. He walked down the corridor of the tenement building like he owned the house, and when he felt he had greeted every person, he moved towards the gate. The people mimicked the police salutation in response, ‘Ah-ten-shun, sir!’ He laughed and responded to everyone the same way, followed by, ‘How bodi? How life?’

  The scent of the gbana, which he smoked openly, diffused into different rooms as he walked to sit on a raised platform on the veranda. That distinct smell of weed: deep rust, was familiar to her, as it always indicated that Sarjee was getting ready to go home. Once the show had ended, the children gathered to resume their play. Desire walked briskly to join them. She dangled the rubber bands on her wrist like bangles, so the other children would see them and try to gain her favour. Instead, it was Babangida who turned to her and shouted at her as he walked to meet his friend by the gate, ‘You better go and throw away that rubber nonsense in your hand.’

  Desire walked away with the intention to obey him, but when she saw he was no longer watching her, she picked up the rubber bands again and wore them on her wrist. She soon joined the children who gathered around Sarjee, and clapped excitedly over how the puff of
smoke from his nostrils formed a cloud as he smoked his gbana.

  While Sarjee entertained the children with the smoke, their parents shuffled around; only a few were bold enough to drag their wards away from him, except a few who screamed for their children to come away from the group. Sarjee puffed long and blew into the air so that the children named an object that they thought the smoke resembled, ‘Ball! Car! Man!’ He puffed again, they shouted, ‘Boat!’ This was how the smoke moved from the abstract and became concrete objects.

  Desire, in later years, never met anyone whose whiffs of smoke came out like cotton solids and floated slowly into the air until they formed different objects like his. Sometimes, when she saw someone smoking, she would look out for objects, and usually, there were none.

  Babangida sat at a distance and smoked without the distraction his friend enjoyed. Desire was losing interest in the smoke game and stooped to pick a rubber band from the floor when she felt a strong hand on her arm. Sarjee sprung from the raised platform he sat on with Babangida and grabbed her hand. Desire was so shocked she did not know whether to cry or laugh. The other children ran away. It was, however, the next thing that Sarjee said, that made her scream. This brought her mother rushing out from the room.

  ‘Na today, I go marry you. Good, good, yes-yes that is her mother coming.’

  She could not remember the expression on her father’s face, but it appeared laced with gratitude. She watched with shock as her mother, who had been an object of pity only a few minutes earlier, took sides with Sarjee. Desire begged her with her eyes as she approached the two friends. She struggled to release herself from Sarjee’s hold.

  ‘You remember that we said, it is the day she wears a rubber band on her wrist, that we will marry her off to Sarjee.