A Small Silence

by Jumoke Verissimo

  Desire bent over her bucket. She stretched her hands, jutted out her buttocks and spread her legs for balance in order to lift the bucket onto her head, but her eyes found audience with the strangely familiar man. She found herself bent over her bucket, her heart ramming and she did not move.

  The man came closer. Her hands twitched. She forced her eyes to become icy, to hide her mounting fear as he walked towards her. There was something about him that reminded her of someone who meant something to her, someone she felt she knew. Like Prof? She repeated to herself that he could not be her Prof. She shook and looked around her but no one was watching. The street was minding its own business.

  The man still walked towards her. She stood away from the bucket and held the tap tightly, like she could pull it out and hit him with it if he tried something malicious.

  He stood in front of her.

  She lifted her eyes and looked straight into his. He did not react as she expected, so she turned away. Yet, staring at him pulled at her heartstrings.

  ‘What?’ she said. It was a sudden defence and a plea for better revelation.

  The man wiped his hand against his mouth, smiled at her and bent down to the tap. She moved away and watched him wash his face under the running water.

  When he straightened up, she noticed the scars all over his face and on closer study, she realised he was bent to the side, like one leg was shorter than the other. She observed as the crease on his brow folded into haphazard rows as he stood watching her. She suddenly did not wish to know him. This was not Prof. As Desire watched him a little more, bending down and splashing water over his face again, she made up her mind that she would visit Prof that night, more convinced than ever. She was ashamed for him and of herself; that she could compare a vagabond to him, a world-renowned professor.

  She bent over and lifted the bucket of water to her head in one swoop, before he finished washing himself at the tap.

  A few metres away, she thought she heard her name, ‘Desire.’ She turned to the direction the voice came from. The strange man was closest to her, but he did not appear to have said anything. He stared at her with a resonance that shot at her mind. His heavy moustache fell over his mouth, so it was impossible to discern if his lips were curved in a smile or a frown. His eyes carried a distant look, and occasionally they twitched, like they were bothered with what they were seeing in her. She could not get it out of her mind that there was something so familiar about him, and it almost made her go to him and hold his hands. Yet, she remained where she was. She always knew how to read feelings through the eyes—she always believed she did. She looked into the man’s eyes and they held a brief hold—his and hers, and she saw shame and confusion. She turned to go, these were not the ones she had wanted to see. She left him with the feelings she saw in his eyes, too. She understood that when you learn to read a man’s eyes, you must also learn to forget some of the words you find in them. She took one long look at the man and moved away from him.

  34

  Prof stood at the door and watched the neighbourhood briefly, before he walked down the stairs, taking slow steps, with his eyes following the clouds like they were the thoughts floating in his head. He stumbled twice, then he held on to the banister so as not to fall and lifted his feet from one step to another. At the last step, a girl sat with a bag by her side. She turned all of a sudden, as his steps got her attention; then she ducked, as he drew closer to her. He felt shame at the fear he made her feel and so he stretched out his hands and helped her up.

  The girl stammered as she stood with a bend, her weight resting on her right leg.

  ‘Your mother sent me. She said this is for you,’ she pointed to the bag on the ground.

  ‘Tell her I miss her,’ he said.

  The girl looked at him with her eyes enlarged. She was still shaking when he collected the provisions from her grasp, her hands holding on tightly to the bag.

  ‘You bring the food, right?’

  ‘Yes, I drop it sometimes. I knock and run downstairs,’ she said with her eyes on the ground.

  He looked at her. She could not be more than 18 years old. Her skin was the colour of an over-ripe pawpaw, and each time she talked, it appeared she made a desperate effort not to show her teeth.

  ‘Thank you,’ he finally said. ‘You can take it upstairs,’ he extended his arms to return the bag to her.

  The girl did not move. She watched him with a mouth wide open, ‘Upstairs?’

  ‘Yes, upstairs. Where I stay.’

  After what seemed like a considerable amount of deliberation, she dropped the bag, rushed down the road and did not look back.

  Prof picked up the bag of provisions as he watched the girl disappear. He muttered prayers for his mother, as he once again remembered a time he stayed on at the university instead of going home for the holidays. At the time, he made himself believe he was trying to earn himself some of the independence he believed she took away from him. He had no money on him, and though he could do with some money from her little earnings as a teacher and market trader, he told himself he would survive without her. One day, as the strike action intensified and his fellow comrades in the student union left for their different homes, things became more dire, as he didn’t even have anyone to turn to for assistance with the transport fare. She came searching for him. He was outside on that day, calculating what he needed to do to raise money for his trip home, when he saw her walking towards the hostel with a big bag on her head.

  ‘Maami! How—’ his shame and totally dishevelled look kept him from looking at her as she reached him. His eyes could not hide his joy.

  ‘My son, Abiyamo kì í gbo ohùn omo re ko ma tatí wére.’

  A true mother she is, whose ear hearkens to her son’s agony, he thought again, as he walked back into the house with the provisions the girl brought, before deciding on his next point of action. He rummaged through the bag and realised that his mother had also put a small purse with money inside. He shook with sobs, left the bag with the purse in the sitting room and hurried out of the door and down the stairs.

  The rows of blocks and different activities perplexed him—hawkers, laughers, pedestrians—all of them assured him of how difficult it would be to know where Desire lived in the estate. Where does one start knocking in an estate with over 150 houses, each housing over 12 blocks of flats? It was a daunting task.

  ‘I just need to tell her the room is lit. That’s all,’ Prof muttered to himself. He calculated the number of days he would spend going around, and how many flats he needed to visit.

  He walked down to the block closest to his. The block was one of the few painted ones in the neighbourhood. It was painted in many colours; each flat was painted according to its resident’s discretion. Prof walked to the flat by the right-hand side on the ground floor. He knocked on the door of the flat like someone who had come for a bad debt. A woman in a hijab peered through an opening, and before he could say anything, slammed the door in his face. On the third block, a few metres away from his, was a flat where the doorway was protected by a wooden door that looked like a single kick could blow it open. When a woman came to the door to open it, she remained still and mute for about five seconds. He watched as her eyes roamed over his body, from top to bottom, until he gulped the big blob of phlegm that had lodged in his throat. As he was deciding to state his reason for coming to her doorstep and break the silence between them, she screamed in a way that brought the rest of the family running to the door. Prof watched them gesturing wildly and speaking in an unfamiliar Nigerian language he couldn’t place.

  He stood by the door thinking of how he had assumed his knowledge of languages was vast, while also taking in the shock on their faces, before he said to her, ‘Hello.’

  He stopped when he said it. It amused him even when he didn’t intend to, to see the sudden flicker in their eyes, and he caught a spark of surprise in there too. This was an emotion he couldn’t understand, though. He ignored the disbelief
in their eyes and continued, ‘I’m looking for my friend, Desire. Her name is Desire Babangida?’ he continued, and then he went on to explain. ‘I can’t describe her face. We always sat in the dark. But I know how she laughs, she laughs like a car spurting. Her voice is not thin, but it sounds thin because she speaks in a pitch.’ He paused for the woman to talk, unsure if he was making sense to her. The neighbour simply shook her head and slowly shut the door in his face. He moved away from the door, backing away slowly, before he walked on, unsure of what to feel about the way he was treated. He continued his search.

  Prof ignored the fingers that pointed at him as he walked the streets. It never occurred to him that he looked strange and considerably different from his earlier pictures. In this kind of neighbourhood, where the blocks were interlocked, their lives would be chained into a flow, also, of gossip. In a place like this, rumours would have flown around about him and Desire’s frequent visits, and now, his sudden search for her. He noticed how surprise evolved into disgust in the way in which they looked at him when he arrived at each doorstep, bearing his mission. He was unwelcomed at one house after another—each dismissal more painful than the next. Prof put his hands together and put on as much of a pitiful look as he could. He pleaded with everyone he met, as he described her in detail, as far as his idea of her and intuition could take him, with as much embellishment as his imagination could conceive. It was when he got to the fourth house, and he was about to knock on the door that it suddenly hit him, that he knew more of her voice than anything else. In all his asking, he had made no description of her features. Each time he met a new neighbour, he felt he saw it in their eyes that they knew who he sought, yet they weren’t ready to tell. It seemed like it was a communal decision to save her from him. Still, he persisted in his inclination to find Desire and tell her of the now lit room.

  He stopped to watch a group of boys playing two-a-side football. Although he focused on the game, it was not out of a sudden interest in the sport, but as an interlude during which he could strategise his next move in his search for Desire. After a few moments of “ooh-ing”, and “ah-ing” over the way the boys played, he walked over to them, who awaited their turn in the game, and spoke to the slim boy who stood against a power pole with his hand shading his eyes from the sun.

  ‘Do you know Desire?’

  ‘Desire?’ the boy repeated and then shook his head, ‘What kind of question is that? Do I know “desire”?’

  Prof thought of a way to clarify it to the boy, whose eyes, though attentive to Prof’s every move, were also on a mission of inspecting Prof’s entire body. Prof, repeated, ‘Desire,’ and after a short pause, said, ‘it is someone’s name. Just tell me if you know a woman with that name. She’s a student in LASU.’

  The boy shrugged off the hand of the friend who tapped him on the shoulder, to talk to Prof.

  ‘Ha, I don’t know-o. Do you know her block, and the flat number?’

  Prof shook his head in the negative.

  ‘Ha! That one is hard-o. Where would you see her in this estate, without an address?’ he said with a little chuckle in his throat. He eyed Prof from his head to his toe once again, and then said, ‘You will search far-o.’

  Another boy came to him, and pulled him by the shirt and ran off, screaming, ‘Kolo! He no well-o.’

  The others made signs to the boy, who listened, and he looked at Prof’s eyes and said, ‘Sorry. I can’t help. You talk so well, I didn’t realise…’

  ‘Realise what?’

  The boy was soon pulled away by his friends—whose impression of his assumed condition rested on the contempt which was openly displayed on their faces—and he ran to join them as they decided on the new set of players for the next game.

  He resumed his search from one block to another. And at the last floor of Block Four, he stopped when he reached flat number 12. He slipped his hand into a space between the iron burglar-proof to reach the wooden door which had a sticker that said: “2005, MY YEAR OF TOO MUCH MONEY.”

  He knocked at the door, and then waited for almost two minutes before a squirrel-toothed woman opened the door, still chuckling from some inside joke. Her eyes opened wide, wider and then wider still as she looked him down from his bushy uncombed hair to his uncut toenails sticking out of his rubber flip-flops. She stopped laughing as their eyes met. Prof noticed that her cheeks assumed a puff, although she tried to put her laughter in check. Her eyes retained a certain glimmer though, and this brought to futility her struggle to appear stern and impatient. She stepped outside the room, but made sure a noticeable distance remained between her and Prof. All this time, her left hand remained on the door handle.

  ‘What happen?’ she asked.

  He was going to tell her about himself, when a voice called from inside the house

  ‘Maria, come see… come now! This show is just funny mehnn!’ A slight pause, and then the voice spoke again, ‘Answer the person at the door quick nah?’

  ‘I dey come,’ she shouted, and then she turned to him, her eyes scouting him so much that he felt her pick on every part of his body, reminding him of how he did not bathe for three days at a time. She didn’t say anything to him except through the eyes on his body, keeping her gaze from his face, not in avoidance but in a settled conviction to avoid contact. She then seemed to remember there was something she was missing indoors.

  ‘Can I help you… S-sir?’

  Prof cleared his voice to state the reason he was at her doorstep, but she did not let him express himself further before she muttered, ‘I think you should try the next flat, they are the ones that trade old stuffs.’

  Prof found himself staring at a shut door, mumbling to himself. He stood, arms akimbo, for some minutes, before he decided there and then that it was time to go back home and re-strategise on his “Desire mission”. He leaned against the banister and shut his eyes. While he tried not to worry, his mind remained heavy—as it consumed the honks from vehicles, the screaming kids returning from school and hawkers shouting their wares. The countless activities going on around him clouded his head in that moment when he shut his eyes. It took the place of that which he wanted but could not have. It filled his mind gradually and he felt as if something inside him would soon explode. When he opened his eyes and looked down the stairs on which he would walk, back to his now lit room, he felt heavy. Prof descended the stairs with a bowed head and weighted feet. Drops of sweat dribbled after one another from the middle of his head down his sideburns. He wiped the sliding water off with the back of his left hand.

  ‘Desire?’ he thought to himself as he walked home. He lifted his face to view the block of flats and tried to work out again how he would tackle his search the next day. But the magnitude of what he was trying to do hit him just as he looked straight ahead at the houses which stretched down into a fading perspective in front of him. It chipped away at every bit of optimism he had built, and he shook his head.

  He broached the thought of going to the LASU campus to find Desire, but it didn’t take long for him to push that thought away. He didn’t want people hovering about him, asking him questions about life after prison. He could almost determine the outcome of such a visit. Me? I will never go back there, he thought to himself. His former colleagues, students and God-knows-who would come before him, to see that renowned troublemaker. He pictured himself walking onto the campus, and students rushing down to catch a glimpse. Prof shook his head, No. I can’t do it. Not even for Desire. Yet, he knew that his longing to find her ate up every other thought in his head. There was no conviction there.

  Prof stroked his beard, lost in thought, when the loud wail chorused by passers-by, traders and men and women on the veranda of their houses stirred him from his reverie. His mind processed the unsettled ripples in the muddy water in the pothole, the passers-by uttering obscenities after the fading back of the danfo, to the animated looks of the few faces he caught trying to regain their composure. He touched his wet trousers and tried to rem
ember what had happened to him. It seemed he had wandered onto the road or a car wandered into him. Prof didn’t know what to think, especially with the sympathy the onlookers gave in his favour. He decided a car almost ran into him. He blew air from his mouth in exasperation and bent down to brush off the muddy water splattered on his striped cotton trousers. His concentration on this singular activity stole him from his absent-mindedness. He stood up straight, turned his head to the left, only for him to see that an orange seller was actually the one people were concerned about. He stood watching the audience given to the girl for a while and turned to move on. That was when he saw her—the woman by the public tap at the other side of the road, who looked like one capable of helping.

  Mindless of the road which divided them in space, there was a momentary lightness in his head when he looked into her eyes. This was followed by stiffness in his chest which left him breathless for a moment. Just looking at her, for those brief seconds, left him fazed; he forgot about Desire. He felt something had indeed happened between them, or was it just his imagination? That “something” was heightened by the inappropriateness of his feelings. And with this thought in his head, he faced the disturbed waters in the potholes, and thought to himself, It’s the shouting that is having an after-effect.

  But he lifted his eyes to steal a glance at the woman by the public tap and again his eyes met hers, or so he thought; but that instantaneous feeling of some mutual knowing floored him and disrupted him for a while.

  ‘That is Desire.’

  He was sure. The woman by the tap carried a sense of familiarity that made his heart leap. He slowed down his steps, standing in one position, like he was observing something around the place. He stood and watched her. Slowly, he defined her classic guitar-shaped body structure, under the white T-shirt she wore with brown combat shorts. Her arms and legs, which exposed her skin, were for him iridescent against the sun sinking into the clouds. Prof savoured what the darkness in the room had hidden from him again and again. He studied the way her nipples poked against her T-shirt. They sprouted from her breasts, outlined under her T-shirt, which stood on her chest like twin hills. He stood without moving, and kept staring, until she stood up from the concrete built around the public tap, to lift the bucket onto her head. His eyes stayed on her as she bent forward and attempted to lift the bucket onto her head again. Her breasts shook and leaned forward with her in a cultured elegance, as she bent over. He stared at her, at her chest, without shame or guilt. He wanted to walk up to her and hold her in a tight embrace. The type long lost friends gave each other. He wanted those breasts of hers to breathe next to his chest.