A Small Silence

by Jumoke Verissimo

  ‘She stopped coming and friends went to check her at home but they could not find her. You know, no one knew where she came from… she was playful, yet seemed to carry so many secrets.’

  The first few days after he heard this, he felt like someone who lost the chance to adorn a prized jewel. The years that followed were filled with activity and a simmering on the political landscape, and exceptional moments of sex and good conversation in the archives of several others.

  Many years later when he began his abstinence, Prof remembered those days he went around universities and how on a few of those nights, he might have been careless with women who were introduced as comrade-this or comrade-that, and who lingered in the rooms until the heat in their bodies made sex a vent. These were women, who over bottles of beer offered his obstinate will a weakness with their intellectual debates, which usually led to him trying to break down their mystique into an intense, unforgettable night of submission through sex. As it turned out, these girls broke down his ego. As he woke up most times, he wanted to be under the sheets, as their “conquered” smile and hot breath teased him into quiet.

  ‘Prof, Prof,’ the girl might hail with a chuckle escaping her lips.

  Among these many girls, he always hoped that one could be like Fire. None met her standard. He sometimes felt it was the youthfulness of his mind and his imagination that made her grander in thought than she might have been. Once he realised none of the girls was ever going to be like Fire, it was easy for him to lay claim to an abstinence that gathered the collective anger of the people in his veins.

  There were so many years of sworn secrecy between him and Kayo, and Prof knew that he was the best person to discuss his new speculations of a child with.

  ‘So, what am I supposed to do about this new information?’ Kayo asked.

  ‘To help me find out of if I have a son.’

  ‘And what if you have a son, do you want to meet him in the dark?’

  ‘That’s not the point. I—’

  ‘What’s the point? You really can’t live like this.’ Prof felt the anger in Kayo’s voice.

  ‘I. Can. Live. How. I. Want. Kayo, I really just wanted us to talk, to catch up.’

  ‘So why don’t you switch on the lights?’

  ‘Why should switching on the lights become the problem or the answer to my questions?’

  The pitch of their voices had increased. Kayo stood up, pacing from one end of the room to the other.

  ‘We waited all of these years for you to return. We carried our own pain. Do you know what I went through? Trying to have a family and keeping your mother alive so you could meet her when you return. Do you know what it has been like? No one would give me a job because I was your friend!’ Kayo breathed heavily. ‘They were scared the military boys would come for them,’ Kayo’s voice broke and Prof wanted to stand up and give him a hug. He, however, did not. He remained in the chair and listened to his friend.

  Finally, Prof screamed, ‘I—I—I just want to talk!’ It calmed the air for a few minutes and then Kayo started all over again.

  ‘You don’t think I want to talk. It is always about you! You think you’re better than me, because you went to prison. You’ve always believed you’re better, the good one.’

  ‘Kayo, stop it!’

  Kayo was now at the point where his anger dug into him and reached for any word that could hurt. It was no longer about the discussion at hand. It was about years of feeling like a side-kick, of feeling that he was unappreciated, of a need to spill out whatever tension was inside of him that needed to be expunged.

  ‘You are the holier than thou! Pretending like you didn’t know you had a son somewhere. You have not left this house since you returned, how do you suddenly think of a son? Hahaha, you don’t want to feel irresponsible like your father?’ Prof stood up, holding his head. Kayo’s last words echoed in his head. Desanya, who he had tried to bring back for some time leapt into his head and started crying, ‘No one should tell you that. No one. No one.’

  ‘Get out!’ Prof screamed. His eyes were wet, and he felt he was going to fall as all he could hear was, irresponsible like your father. He felt many voices in his head telling him what to do. He could not distinguish which one was Kayo’s from the others.

  Kayo stood up from the chair laughing, ‘You really need help, and you need help fast.’ He walked towards the door and spat on the ground, ‘Die alone.’

  ‘That’s your best friend leaving you.’ Desanya said. She just came in, when he least expected.

  ‘Who asked you to come here?’ he turned his head to face her, where he sensed she would be in the room. And then, as if he was reminded he was yet to respond to Kayo’s invective, he screamed, ‘You’ll die first! Who knows if you killed your wife? Bloody cultist!’ He didn’t mean to say the words as they came, but once they were out, he looked around, ashamed of everything.

  24

  There was a time Desire could keep her thoughts in her head, unbothered about wanting to speak to anyone. Now, she was used to sharing her deepest concerns with Remilekun, who now spent most of her days with Mr. America. Desire, for a second, thought of calling Basira and asking her about the miscarriage she spoke of and maybe discussing Prof and Ireti. She pushed the thought from her mind and walked into the street, although people were around her, she was oblivious to them.

  A young man in a suit and an unknotted tie jumped in front of her. His shirt was unbuttoned.

  ‘Have a great day,’ he said. She was startled.

  ‘Smile. The day is bright.’ He placed his hand on his waist and said, ‘Smile, I’m waiting.’

  As much as she hated how the young man laughed at her cheerily and with some familiarity, it all felt like a dream. Still, she wanted to tell him to get away from her because the day was not bright. She wanted to tell him to look up at the sky where the sun stayed behind the clouds and gave a dull ambience to the environment. Instead, she took two hurried steps away from him.

  He ran up to her, ‘I won’t leave you until you smile for me.’

  ‘Smile for you?’ Desire was going to say something else, but there was this distant brightness in his eyes. She tried to force a smile, but she could not. She hurried ahead and crossed to the other side of the road, when she heard a sharp scream from the same man who had just greeted her. He was screaming as he pulled off all his clothing. He pulled down his boxers and wriggled his waist at any woman who walked past him. Desire found herself unable to look away, while his suit, shirt, singlet, trousers and boxers lay on the ground, not far from where he now stood, laughing and pointing at the skies. He turned towards Desire and she saw the dry chest and pancake abdomen, which were a contrast to an unusually long penis that swung like the pendulum of a clock as he flounced onward with his briefcase. Desire slowed down as the man reached her and walked past, without recognising their earlier encounter. She looked at him as he flashed that impersonal smile which he was offering everyone who stared at him, like he knew something they did not. She stood on the spot with her mouth agape, her legs wobbling, and her heart beating like rain against a corrugated roof. It was one of those moments when words seemed inadequate to question the absurdity of such things. She was trying to understand what could have happened in those few minutes. Would her smile have saved him from whatever made him pull off his clothes? She thought of her mother and she felt a little fear creep up on her. Desire hurried to board the bus that arrived at the bus stop. She jumped on and it was only when she was seated that she asked where it was going.

  On the bus, there was a talkative man who sat two seats away from her, who started a discussion on how bad the road was and how one day the potholes would become so big they would become gaps that would swallow them.

  ‘See, see, everywhere…’ The other passengers on the bus ignored him. It seemed there was a mutual agreement that it was too early in the day to join in bus conversations, until he declared, ‘I just want all of us to wake up one day and die.’
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  At first, there was silence, and then a rising murmur with one noticeably loud voice—a woman who responded, ‘Abi, this one has gone mad?’

  As the woman mentioned the word ‘mad’ Desire felt her head swirl. She wanted to scream at the man to stop talking. Instead, she simply hoped that her eyes conveyed her irritation. He turned to her, ‘Aunty, you look like a learned somebody. The way you are looking at me, I see you understand my talk.’ He smiled, ‘Se, you are getting me?’

  Desire looked up at the man. She wondered how to tell him how his tanned afro and the folded flesh around his cheeks made her angry. She sighed, dipped her hand in her bag and brought out a book. She bent over it, flipped to a page and pretended to read.

  25

  Prof heard a light movement outside the door and knew his mother had come to drop off his provisions. Desire and his mother came at different times of the day, but he also recognised his mother’s arrival in the way she lingered at the door, not her knocking. Her presence was carried by her long, intermittent sighs and heavy breath. She would knock. Slow and steady until it became an earworm.

  These days, she stayed at his door waiting for him to open for her. Before then, she would knock, then drop his provisions after a performance of his panegyric. But since that time she found herself inside the house, she always shuffled her feet at the door until he opened. The practice was for him to open the door to her and follow behind her as she quietly went to a chair. He then returned to his seat with a grunt. Sometimes he responded to her greeting and followed it with a long silence; the awkwardness of many years of unspoken bitterness, underlined by a devotion based on knowing they both had no one else but each other.

  This time as she sat down, he wanted to talk. He wanted to tell her about Ireti. He wanted to tell her about Desire too, but he thought of Ireti more.

  Maami, do you think I can father a child? No. He thought of another way to ask the question. Did any woman ever come to you saying that I fathered her child? No. He tried to think of another way to frame the question and he could find no better way to explain to her that he felt he might have fathered a child.

  Prof sat in the room with his mother; the breathing between them became a dialogue of their worries, until he coughed while getting up to use the bathroom. He returned to the seat with the hope that Kayo might have hinted at the issue of him being a father to someone, to her.

  There were stories to be told and explanations to be made and the silence was lingering too long. The pain was becoming unbearable. He also realised that he no longer felt angry about the past, he only felt that the anger in his past needed to be understood and that was why he heaved and sighed when she brought him food, hoping she would talk about his father. This visit though, what he wanted to talk about was his son—the son.

  ‘You can’t go on like this. You need to come back to yourself.’

  Prof raised his head in the direction of her seat. He wanted to laugh at the idea of him coming back to himself. He thought of prison and the feeling of himself floating up to the skies. When was he ever himself? How did deciding to live in the dark become the criteria for judging the total life of a man?

  ‘So, you stay here all day and all night with no visitor?’ There was something about the question that seemed based on an assumption of the contrary happening. Yet, he did not say a word in response. He saw it as bait and it pricked his thoughts at first mention.

  ‘I’ve tried to understand you since your release and I know you’re going through so much, but I can only help you if—’

  ‘There’s nothing to understand. I just need to do some thinking — and you can start by telling me who my father is.’ He felt this could be a good way to divert the conversation to Ireti.

  ‘Is that a question that deserves an answer?’

  The silence that followed was laden with more heavy breathing. He felt a searing guilt and did not know how to ask what could have happened between her and his father that he hated them so much. Why was she without family or friends around her? He could not remember seeing anyone, besides his mother’s colleagues from the market, rally around her. He had always felt guilty each time he attempted independence, and he told her that once. Her response birthed a bitterness in him, when she said, ‘Independence is not about being on your own, it is not freedom from influence. You are truly free when you become the influence of your own life. Sometimes, we are our own problem.’

  He waited for her to say something about his father but she did not. She picked herself up from the chair and sniffed—that was when he realised that she had been crying.

  ‘I was your father, I was your mother, what more do you want?’

  ‘A child has a right to know his father, does he not?’

  ‘A child has a right to know he was taken care of, stood up for, and protected by someone who didn’t throw him to the dogs. Of course, you met your father, and even on his dying bed, how much of a father was he to you?’

  He thought about Ireti again and wondered if bringing him up at that point was a good idea.

  ‘Are you really my mother?’

  ‘Eni, I don’t understand what is happening to you. But I have paid my dues, years of working as a farm labourer so you could feed, and I could become a typist that could afford us better feeding, and you ask me that question?’

  ‘Is sacrifice all it takes to be a mother? Look at me, Maami, I’m 45 and I feel like…’

  She stood up and paced around for some time. And then she laughed, slow and small, and faded off into a sigh.

  ‘Tell me, what’s bothering you?’

  Prof stretched and sat erect in his chair when she said that. He watched her outline swimming back and forth in the room. For a few, very brief seconds, he relived a time when he was a 15-year-old desperate to get an answer from her about who his father was.

  He had entered her room with a knife in his hands, and with his muscles vibrating. He ran towards her.

  ‘You have to tell me who my father is today or I will kill you,’ he said between tears, still shaking, with sweat rushing down from the centre of his head. ‘That man can’t be my father. He hates me so much.’

  She had looked at him hard and said with a calmness he had never seen her display, ‘Tell me, what’s bothering you? Is being called a bastard the worst thing in the world? What would you do if you were called a thief or a murderer—you should decide what you are, what you want to be. See, if you leave the world to name you, all of your life would be in the hands of strangers. If you let people determine who you are, by the time you need to be someone and it matters that you are, you’ll realise you’re a nobody.’ And then, she stretched out her hand and said, ‘Put the knife on the table, go into the room and stare at the face of your father’s photo on the table—and you should make sure you are far from it, in behaviour—and promise never to be an idiot.’ She then walked out of the room, unafraid that he could stab or kill her from the back.

  Prof was not holding a knife in his hand this time, and even though he had met his father before his death, he still felt a perverse desire to make his mother feel guilty for his father’s absence in his life.

  ‘Talk to me, is this question about your father related to something bothering you? Talk to me, my son.’

  He did not wait for her to destabilise him with her analysis, so he asked, ‘My father denied me until his death, and when I thought I was accepted, I felt even more shame. Don’t I have a right to know?’

  He waited for her, but all she did was take a deep breath before she returned to sit on the chair.

  ‘Your father—see, how do I tell you this story? You’re 45, forget.’

  ‘Is it possible to forget what one does not know?’

  ‘There are no reasons why marriages dissolve—infidelity, anger, pain, bitterness—it just has to be tied to something, but if we could forget, there really are no reasons for breakups. For instance, was there a reason for your father to leave?’

  ‘You tell m
e. I still want to know.’

  ‘He was convinced I slept with his boss and he threw my things out.’

  A silence that was lengthier than whatever had existed between them before, climbed on board.

  ‘Did you do it?’

  ‘Your father asked me to, and I said no, I wouldn’t, and he cried, saying it was his only way of getting a promotion. The man requested I come. Anyway, I went there, thinking I could persuade him somehow, and I returned home, smiling and eager to tell your father nothing happened between his boss and me. Yet, my crime was accepting to go to see the man. Your father said I must have been unfaithful to him before then, that was the reason I accepted the offer to go without thinking twice. What was I to do? You should have seen the way he was rolling all over the floor begging me, that his life depended on it, our future would be better for it. This one and that one…And so I went to his boss that day feeling like a barter. It was the most horrible feeling in world. From that day, your father started to beat me. One day, when I could not take it any longer, I took a ladle and hit him on his penis, making sure he felt the pain many years after.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your father was told he would never have a child after the blow. So, you see, you’re actually your father’s only child, in a way. I discovered I was pregnant after the supposed plan for me to sleep with his oga, and he couldn’t—you know…So, he believed you were not his.’

  ‘But I saw his children that time I went to his house, when I ran away from Ilese to Lagos, to see him.’

  ‘Only he and I know he can no longer have a child. His wife—the new wife knows too. Perhaps she discovered. I don’t know how she did it, but those children are bastards. But which Nigerian man, especially one like your father, who suddenly finds some social standing wants it known that he can’t father a child? Those are not his children.’