The driver remained kneeling inside while Kolo dropped his rotund figure to its knees and crawled in over the handkerchiefs. As Kolo appeared, a photographer within the hut took a series of quick snapshots of the minister kneeling before the chief. The chief beamed in approval.
“Ah! Minister Kolo. A privilege to see you. Welcome. Please no formalities-I beg you to stand up.”
Kolo stood, his face a picture of serenity as small atoms of rage exploded in every cell of his being. “The privilege is mine. I am so grateful, sir,” he shook muddy hands with the chief, “for this opportunity.” He then opened the bottle of antiseptic and splashed it liberally over his hands, wiping them on another handkerchief and ostentatiously handing the debris to the chief’s aide.
A quiet smile played on the chief’s lips-the smile of a snake in a henhouse.
“I have come,” Kolo pronounced, “to listen, not to talk.”
“Please sit down,” the chief said. He smiled again.
“As I was saying,” Kolo repeated, disconcerted by the chief’s enigmatic behaviour, “I have come to listen, not to talk.”
“Oh, I see!” The chief’s eyes twinkled. “What would you like to listen to?”
Kolo shifted in discomfort. The smell of antiseptic was overpowering. “I have come to consult with you. You are a wise man. In order to move forward, I have to assess where we currently lie.”
“In case the ministry has not informed you, we currently lie with one million dead. Are you not aware of this, sir?”
“Yes, yes, of course, Chief. Of course. However, I need your assistance to move forward from this terrible tragedy.”
“You are a great man,” the chief said with a pleasant demeanour. “You do not need our help. We are only a village.”
Kolo understood what the chief wanted. “Is there any help you need from me?”
“Of course,” the chief smiled. “And for many years we have been asking for it.”
Silence again.
“How much?”
The chief smiled gently. “Minister, I am sure you are not offering me a bribe—you who so strongly oppose corruption!” The chief flicked some flies away with a cow-tail whip.
One of the flies landed on Kolo’s cheek. He shooed it away with his hand, irate, uncomfortable.
“How is your father?” the chief asked after a while.
“He’s fine. Still very active.” Kolo cheered up at this question—he was proud of his father, a former minister of finance.
“Your wife? Your children?”
Kolo stiffened. This question had plagued him throughout his adult life, and it was one for which he could find no “political” response.
They waited. He could not escape an answer. “I have neither.”
Those in the room stared at him as if he had sprouted a crocodile’s tail.
“That is a great pity.” The chief stared at Kolo, flicking the flies. “And your mother?”
Kolo sucked in his breath. No one ever mentioned his mother; few had ever seen her. Kolo could hardly believe the insolence of this uneducated, inconsequential scrap of bush meat. “Better,” he answered, warily.
“Such a pity about your mother,” the chief said, studying Kolo’s shrinking frame.
How did the chief know anything about this most hidden of family secrets? “Do you know my family, sir?” Kolo asked in a voice and manner more of a child than a man.
“Yes, of course. Victoria is from our village. Do you remember her?”
Kolo’s eyes widened, like those of a child seeing a ghost. Victoria had been serving as nanny in his father’s household on the day when the flame in Kolo’s life had been extinguished. “Yes, I remember her.” Kolo trembled. He began to pick his nails. He wanted to leave, to be released from memory’s shackles, yet something about the chief kept him rooted to his seat. “Is she here?”
“Yes, she’s still here,” the chief answered. “Do you want to see her?”
“No,” Kolo replied quickly, panic in his voice. “However,” he remembered his manners, “please give her my good wishes.”
“That is very kind,” the chief smiled.
Kolo left the hut feeling sick, weary, depressed, and with an increasingly desperate hunger for power.
In low spirits, he spent the next few hours on the flight south ruminating. He could picture the face of his beloved twin brother, smiling, at play. He remembered the moment that changed his life, as he and his twin played tag near the swimming pool on a sunny day, with the sweet smell of the mango tree mingling with the water’s stiff chlorine. Kolo pushed his brother from behind, his brother looked back at him with a smile—he could remember the smile—eyes bright with laughter. Then a sequence of random instants of which Kolo had little memory, a series of frozen moments ending in a face distorted by terror. The piercing scream at its highest pitch as his soul’s double tumbled into the water.
The brothers had not been encouraged to learn to swim, as a witch doctor had warned their father that this would bring misfortune.
The sight of his brother, his mirror image, struggling for air, screaming and panicking, had been etched on Kolo’s mind for its eternity.
He remembered his father pulling the body from the water, looking at Kolo in fear, in disbelief. He recalled his mother shrieking as his father gave her the news. She screamed for four days. After that, every time he tried to enter her room, Victoria would gently lead him away, promising him food or toys. He tried to peek in at his mother through her window, but the curtains were always drawn. Eventually, Victoria stopped taking care of him in order to take care of his mother, and he lost the last gentle touch of his childhood. He never saw his mother again.
He thought again of Victoria. Despite her tender care, after the accident he had the impression that she despised him, a feeling that had grown stronger with every passing day. Her furtive glances in his direction implied blame. But how had she managed to escape all condemnation? Where had she been during this tragedy? Was it not her job to watch over them?
He ran to the toilet, knelt down on the floor and vomited.
The plane flew over flooded areas and Kolo saw people still sitting on rooftops, hands extended to him for help. Yet he could picture only his brother, that reflection of himself, begging for rescue, trapped in the all-engulfing water.
By the time he returned to Abuja, it was nearing Christmas-a critical time for his next move. He now concentrated solely on his ascent to the presidency.
The phone rang: Mary Glass, exactly on time.
“Ah, Ms. Glass.” He ensured that his words slipped out with a tone of utter nonchalance. “I thought it only fair to mention that the French are making a bid-their speed vastly exceeds that of TransAqua. And of course, so does the verbosity of their contract.” In-jokes would keep her loyal. “Unless you can assist in …” a judicious cough, “… other matters, we really have no use for you.”
“But we have no contract! How could we make such a commitment without one?”
He spoke slowly, with meaning. “There can be no contract before the act itself.”
“Pardon, sir?”
“Think about who signs the contract. At the moment, I can’t.”
Finally the woman understood. “I will call the ambassador.”
“And what influence does he have?” Kolo drawled. “He’s only a go-between, after all.”
“He’ll call the president.”
“Timeline?”
“This week.”
“Bonne chance, Mademoiselle Glass!”
On the 30th of December, exactly one week after that phone call, Kolo sat chewing his nails in his office at the Ministry for Natural Resources, a small wire leading from a radio on his desk to an earpiece in his ear. At 5:10 p.m., he stopped chewing and jerked into an upright position. His bleached skin brightened, a small flush of pink accentuating the rash on his cheeks.
An hour later, the general marched in, his immovable facial muscles finally allowing him
to form an expression that could be widely interpreted—and Kolo had no doubt that it signalled a final comprehension, myriad recollections, a raw awareness nearing shock.
“A cunning man!” The general’s voice carried admiration, if not a little fear.
“Political life!” Kolo shrugged with apology, as he hid his nails under his agbada. “Will you be able to, ehm, to manage the situation henceforth?”
The general stood rigid and saluted. There was no question that he had to support a man from his own ethnic group.
The next day, the entire nation heard the news that the president’s helicopter had crashed as it carried his entourage back from a meeting with the emir of Kano. Kolo entered the government offices in an agbada in muted green—to reflect the colours of the Nigerian flag—head hung low in mourning. In the corridors of power, colleagues expressed outrage that their president had not left office voluntarily instead of being “forced out.”
“Does the man have to pull the country down with him?” Kolo tutted. “Why couldn’t he have left office gracefully instead of creating this wahala? Every man should know when his time is up.”
On the preferred date for coups in Nigeria, that is to say the first day of January, Ogbe Kolo acceded to the presidency. Citizens greeted each other with the customary salutation for the New Year: “Happy New Coup.”
Kolo’s yellow face was placed in Nigerian embassies and high commissions worldwide. For Kolo, however, this represented a minor achievement compared to his greater ambitions.
NINE
Cocoon
Igwe and his sister Ekwii had stayed with Femi since November, through nights of ghostly screams. One morning they heard a commotion at the top of the apartment building, heard people begging with a woman to come off the roof and heard the thud as her body hit the pavement. The body lay outside the building for a week, tucked into an alleyway, waiting for medical staff diverted to the flooded areas to attend to it, waiting for family killed in the flood to claim her, waiting for space in an overcrowded morgue. As the smell of rotting flesh encased the building, Femi was sheltered and guarded by his two friends. They soon moved him from the sterility of a bureaucratic, preplanned capital to the peaceful, hilly paradise of nearby Jos.
Three months passed, yet he still lay in mourning, cognizant of events yet caring little of their import. He was sealed in the past, living through memories like an epic told backwards. His friends worried that the tales that had taken thirty years to tell might take another thirty to retell and Femi’s spirit would grow younger and younger until he died at the story of his birth. And thus they feared he would walk his first steps, speak his first words, see the first pair of astonished eyes as he slipped back into the eternal peace of the womb.
Femi’s system shut down to a baseline of survival, of near existence—a life of atoms, molecules and cells, of organs and tissue, of mere mechanics. The life of energy, of soul and spirit, of will and whim, of a unique character and its interaction with the world, these vanished as quickly as if death had taken him too. His days no longer contained the joy of living, or even the combat of survival. They were simply existence: the in-breath and out-breath, the feeding of the body and the expelling of that nourishment.
Femi wandered through the vast panoramas of his desolation, unable to find comfort. He pictured his mother feeding the chickens, could even hear the tick-tick-tick of the corn feed as it skipped across the earth, unable to stay put, and the feeling of the ground quaking under her feet. He heard the screeching of the hens, which caused her to look around in panic. He imagined her screams of recognition as the sky turned black, the deafening roar that obliterated everything. He saw his father flung above the water into the air, looking down and seeing the surging swell, tumbling back towards the horror, plummeting towards the chasm. He felt his brother’s anguish as the water crashed down on him, realizing that his days of dreaming had come to an end. He imagined Amos struggling to live, closing his eyes and holding his breath in the hope that he would surface above the waves. He wondered how the water tasted, whether of living things or of death.
He pictured his brother lying with legs splayed, naked, in a final humiliation. He pictured his father’s corpse hundreds of miles from the place that had nurtured him, wrenched away from his ancestors, lying alone in some foreign land. He imagined unearthing his mother and witnessing the bewilderment in her eyes.
Time slowed, moments condensed, squeezing ferocious despair from each articulation, as one instant crept onwards to the next.
Femi began to detest his very being. He could not understand why he alone had been spared, of his entire village the most worthless of all. He wondered why his friends continued to take care of him. He was certain that, in the dark corners of the rooms they shared, they whispered his name with loathing, detesting a character afflicted with such a selfish lethargy. He abhorred the fact of his presence.
Femi did not have the energy to bathe. He could hardly stand up to go to the bathroom. His friends tried to feed him, but he found it tiring to sit up. He felt no hunger, and the small amounts of food he ate made him feel sick. The sensation lingered for hours as he lay on his mat, too tired to vomit, too exhausted to digest. He lost weight. His strength drained away. He felt close to death-it festered within all his thoughts and its cadence invaded his body.
Sometimes he woke up, nauseated by an odour, rancid and putrid. He felt certain it was his body, emanating a vile stench that wafted through the entire room. He was convinced that his friends wished to rid themselves of this burden, yet to his face they would smile and soothe him like the useless animal he was.
He noticed that, when he lay in a certain corner, a nail stuck up out of the wooden floor beneath the linoleum. He felt it on his back, on his arm. He would grind against it, causing it to pierce his skin. For hours, he would rub against it, small movements against its sharp surface, bringing pain to his body, causing wounds that baffled his friends. The pain brought much relief to him—a brief but insistent connection with his body—but unlike the intense, biting pain of happier days.
Once, some fleeting words managed to drift through the miasma of bewilderment.
“Femi,” Ekwii tapped him on his shoulder. “Kolo has been elected president.”
He searched for an appropriate response, but her words echoed around the hollow that should have been his presence. He thought of his mother swallowing great gulps of water, thrashing about in the flood’s raging torrent. “That’s terrible,” he finally replied, but in truth, he could not remember who Kolo was.
He thought he had said the right words, but the concern in Ekwii’s face indicated that something troubled her. He shut his eyes again and lay back down on the mat.
As the weeks passed, he achieved small victories. At his friends’ insistence, he would swallow more food, pretend to listen to the radio or hold his head up from its slump when they talked. He could not wrest himself from an overwhelming despair, knowing how vast a distance lay between his dreams and the bleak terrain of his reality. His friend Ubaldous paced in erratic circles, scolding himself—Femi wondered why his mentor did not direct his words at him instead.
“Did you hear that?” Igwe asked, squatting down by Femi. “One hundred thousand have now died of water-borne illness. Can you believe it?”
Femi looked into his friend’s eyes. How Igwe must detest him. “Really?” he answered. “That’s a lot of people.”
Igwe frowned at him—not with anger, but with query. “It is a lot of people,” Igwe said softly, putting a gentle hand on his friend’s head. “Do you want some orange drink?”
Femi stared at Igwe and remembered Amos looking up at him as they walked through the fields to school, how he often touched his brother’s head in the same way. Though these dear memories had not been fiercely imprinted during the routine of life, now that all was gone he could not escape them. Tears sprang to his eyes. He lay back down on his mat and cried.
TEN
Flo
wer Power
Buoyed by her career prospects, Barbara decided to pamper herself. She ran a bath. Despite the astronomical cost, the water would calm her down.
The water stopped before it filled the tub. She had forgotten to pay her water bill. Irritated, Barbara sat in the bath, feeling it lap across her body, watching her breasts bob above the water line. They looked young again. She wondered if Archimedes had chanced on this same phenomenon.
After her bath, she wrapped herself in a robe made partially of hemp and called her parents.
“Hello,” her mother answered. “Glass household. Hello? Who’s speak—… Oh heavens, Ernie! Get the other phone! Quick! It’s Barbara. No, upstairs. Barbara, we thought you’d been killed!” Her mother sounded almost disappointed. “We phoned all the local hospitals.”
“No, I’m alive.” She hunted for her water bill.
“Has Mary been in contact?” her father asked.
“I don’t want to work for a corporate oppressor!”
“See what you get for letting her study English at university?” her mother whispered to her father.
He attempted to be the voice of reason. “Look, your sister has agreed to find you some work with her company, but first you’ll have to apologize to her for your comments—”
“What? At Thanksgiving? What’s her prob—”
“Don’t you dare raise your voice in this house,” her mother snapped. “We are your parents, after all. We will not tolerate anger, do you understand?” Barbara heard a click on the other end of the phone.
“Do you see what you’ve done now?” her father asked. “Is it too much to ask you to keep your temper in check?”
“But, Dad—”
“Now just phone your sister and apologize. She’s very upset. Barbie, pride comes before a fall.” The monk put down the phone.
Barbara lit her Himalayan salt candles, sat in lotus position and meditated in front of her shrine for a few minutes, her temples throbbing. She spotted a photograph she had placed there of the two sisters as children.
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