‘What are we looking for?’ she asked.
‘The taxi to Jos,’ I said. ‘Keep a look out for that name. J. O. S.’
A group of children ran past us, shrieking, spinning a metal wheel ahead of them with sticks.
‘But what time does it leave?’ Claudia asked.
‘Whenever it’s ready,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they stick to a timetable.’
There were cars as far as the eye could see. People dashed from place to place, searching for the vehicle that would take them to their destination. Cars trundled by and we were forced to stand to one side.
We found the Jos rank; the obligatory Peugeot station wagon was almost full. Two men leaned against the bonnet. One picked his teeth, the other stared straight ahead.
I asked, ‘You go to Jos?’ not knowing if either was the driver.
‘Eh,’ the tooth picker answered. ‘Fo two of you?’
‘Eh,’ I replied. I had no Hausa and my pidgin was poor.
‘Fifty naira.’ The other man spoke up.
‘Fifty? Fo what?’ I said. ‘Taty naira. No beso?’
The starer turned away. The tooth picker began to converse with him in Hausa. We were two foreigners, Claudia and I, as far as they were concerned, with only a smattering of pidgin, which counted for nothing.
‘Forty naira.’ The starer still did not look at us as he spoke. He seemed cool and unconcerned.
After the flights, I only wanted to arrive in one piece.
The tooth picker pointed to Claudia, then to me. ‘Twenty, twenty,’ and he heaved the suitcase and the rucksack onto the roof of the Peugeot without waiting for a reply.
One of the occupants came out so we could sit in the back of the car. Including the tooth picker, who was the driver, there were six of us.
The air was close in the vehicle. I had worn jeans and a yellow chambray shirt rolled up at the sleeves, but even that was too much. Claudia fanned herself with the KLM magazine. The driver returned with a large, elderly Hausa woman, draped from head to foot in damson. A stick-thin girl sat beside her on the passenger seat. A boy of no more than seven or eight glided by, supporting a round tray of heaped oranges on his head. The Hausa woman stretched out an arm, the material falling round her wrists, and motioned to the child to approach. I didn’t hear her speak, but the boy lowered the tray and withdrew a paring knife. He began to shave the fruit in a circular motion until, in no time, there were four denuded oranges. Claudia reached out of the window and called, ‘Hallo, can we have some of it?’ and the boy started the peeling all over again. As soon as she had paid for the fruit, the car began to move. It was as if we had been idling at the taxi rank for no better reason than to pass the time of day.
In the depot the stationary cars did not want to budge and pedestrians refused to quicken their pace. We reversed and proceeded and then circled the rank, dipping in and out of fissures caused by erosion in the road. At one point the Peugeot lurched forward, bumping a woman carrying a basket on her head. Claudia screamed, but the woman only scooped up her goods and rushed onwards as if the car had boosted her energy.
It seemed an eternity before we were on the highway. The relief of the accelerating vehicle was instant; the warm wind buffeted us, quickly evaporating our perspiration. A young woman in front of me dozed against the side of the door, while the man next to her leaned forward and chatted with the driver. Another man gazed out of the window. The girl in the passenger seat squeezed and sucked another orange as if she hadn’t touched liquid in days. She gave her last orange to the driver, who drove and sucked and talked at the same time. Claudia offered me one, but I refused it. The others threw their remnants to the side of the road, but she held on to her sticky litter after she had finished.
‘It’s very bare,’ she said. And it was true. There were clumps of trees in the hazy distance, and ragged bushes, but the landscape was sparse. It was the claim of the desert. Sand clouds danced, whipped up by speeding vehicles on the highway.
‘It’s different down south; much greener,’ I said. ‘There’s a wind here that blows down from the Sahara – the harmattan. Everything gets covered in thick dust. At Christmas time it’s cooler, but there’s a film of dust everywhere – you have to clean all the time.’
‘Did you see it?’ Claudia asked. ‘When you were younger?’
‘I can’t remember; my brother told me. I think I saw it. I must have.’
There seemed to be a mirage ahead – a crowd in the distance. As we drew nearer a great herd of cattle was traversing the road. Ours was the only car. We slowed and then stopped. Immediately, the wind died and we began to perspire again. I accepted an orange from Claudia and was surprised at its sweetness.
The scrawny cows straggled by. The herdsmen – mere boys – were indifferent to the highway. I wondered about their lives: where they slept, how they eat, their pastimes, what they did when they longed for a woman. I thought of the apartment in Berlin, the Atlantic, the Rio, the crammed supermarket shelves; how easy everything was and yet not easy.
One of the men got out of the car and walked to the edge of a bush at the side of the road. He hitched up his caftan and squatted. The other man followed, but ventured further away from the road and remained standing as he sprinkled the ground. The Hausa woman left the car to exercise. The child remained. When everyone had returned, the last of the cattle were still on the road. Claudia wiped her forehead and the skin beneath her eyes with a tissue, and began to sip from her bottle of water. The car crawled around the final cow.
‘I’ll get used to it in some moments,’ she smiled. Her face was puffy and flush from the flights and the heat.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We’re nearly halfway there. It’ll be cooler when we get to Jos.’
She nodded and looked out of the window, but the landscape had not changed. ‘I wonder what my mother does now,’ she said. ‘Making baskets or sitting in groups. Talking about things. Problems.’ She threw her orange pulp out of the window. It was odd, hearing her speak English. It was like getting used to someone all over again.
‘Your uncle, Julius – were they close?’ I asked.
‘I suppose. Once, when they were kids, but not so much any more. He was, he is four years younger. When he moved to Frankfurt and he was married, he did not communicate so much with us. His wife cannot have children.’ She stopped abruptly as if she had said too much.
The sun withdrew, although the heat remained, and then it grew darker still, like an instant nightfall. A sudden, fierce thunderstorm began, and lightning danced upon the land around us. It became stuffy in the car with the windows wound shut. The driver slowed, but only marginally, and I feared we would plough into a hidden pothole. I could feel the anger begin to flush through my veins, something unstoppable rising to the surface. Those lazy, pothole-riddled roads. Within ten minutes, the rain had vanished as if it had been an apparition, and once again the earth was arid.
‘This was the road where it happened,’ I said.
‘What road? What do you mean?’
‘This highway, where my parents died. They were driving the same way. Look! Look at that man!’ I pointed. A Medusa-haired wanderer meandered along the centre of the road, naked. He carried no belongings. The filthy matted hair that hung down his back and face seemed his only accessory. The driver braked and swerved to avoid him. As we overtook him we could see his skin, painted with dust. He didn’t notice us. His mouth moved rapidly.
No one said anything. Even the driver stopped talking. As we began to accelerate again the car filled with the noise of the wind and the engine. The man in the caftan spoke and the driver roared, but I didn’t understand what they were saying.
‘Was it bad for you when it happened?’ Claudia asked.
‘I don’t remember. It was too long ago,’ I said. ‘I can’t remember much from that time, only that it was here, this road.’
She nodded and the girl in the passenger seat turned and they smiled at each other. There were mor
e cars now, and tiny satellite villages. One of the byroads led to my grand-mother’s village, but she was long-since dead.
I said, ‘We went to live with Uncle Raymond and my Aunt Ama. It was okay. We didn’t stay for long.’ I gazed out of the window.
We sped through Dutsan Wai and then began the slow ascent to Jos. We stopped to eat a late lunch – steaming parcels of eba and egusi soup washed down with Star beer – at a roadside buka. The driver bustled us back into the car to ensure he would arrive before dark.
‘I went to visit my father once,’ Claudia said when we were on the road again. ‘In Atlanta. In Georgia. I was thirteen years. It was not so bad. But my mother, she did not want me to go.’
‘Why did you go?’ I asked.
‘He wanted to see me and I wanted to see America,’ she laughed. ‘New York, California. I wanted to visit him also, of course. I took more classes, to speak English better. My mother tried to stop me – she bought the aeroplane ticket, but she said he would try to keep me there. She said his wife – she was American – would be cruel to me. I think she was only afraid that I would like it there and I would like to stay.’
‘I thought your mother didn’t divorce him?’
‘No, they never divorced, but he married this woman anyway. Two wives. I think, maybe there was another woman after that, but they did not marry. Anyway, I went to this place, Atlanta. They had a small house outside of the city. Three children already. When I telephoned to my mother I did not tell her about these children. One baby girl. Two boys. And my father already not so young.
‘I always thought he was a very big man when I was a girl, but when I saw him again I was almost the same height with him. It was all right, but he could see I was already too much like my mother – too far from him to make things easy. The woman – his wife – she was okay. But she was very quiet. That’s how he liked his wife to be, like a mouse. My mother is not a mouse,’ she laughed. ‘Sometimes they would fight, this woman and my father. And then the oldest boy – he was five or six – he would take the other boy and the baby into the road to play. No garden. But where they lived there were not many cars. The road did not lead to anywhere.
‘Sometimes I waited at the door. It had – what do you call it? Wires? A screen? I listened to their fighting. Wild fights. She threw things at him – pots, bottles, garbage. She wanted to kill him. Always it was because of another woman or not enough money. He would spend money on these other women. It would go round and round, this fighting.’ Claudia drew a circle in the air.
‘I had only a small taste of it, but it was exhausting. I wanted to remember these fights so that I could tell my mother when I came back to Berlin, so she would not be sad that he had left her. But I never told her. It was too awful, that life. I wanted to forget it.
‘I did not go back to visit them. I wrote to my father sometimes, but he never wrote back; he liked only to talk on the telephone and my mother did not allow him to call her house. It was a mess, the whole business, and it was bad for my mother because her family had told her not to marry him. And they were right.’ She smiled, but it was not a smile of happiness.
‘I always remember those kids playing in the dirt, in the road, and the shouting inside the house, and I was standing there at the screen, listening between them.’
‘What happened to the children?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I suppose the mother took them somewhere else after my father died. Maybe they stayed in that house.’ She turned to me. ‘You think it’s awful, that we did not care to communicate?’
‘No, not really,’ I said. ‘You were only thirteen. You were all just children. It’s no one’s fault.’
‘I felt guilty, but I did not want to know them any more,’ she said. ‘Anyway, it’s ten years ago. It’s in the past.’
It was strange to see people in Jos wearing coats and sweaters when it still seemed warm to me. It was cooler here, but only fractionally. At the depot we changed taxi and drove to the address Matty had given me. I had never been here before. Uncle Raymond had moved to Jos after retiring. All my links lay in another part of the country now. The houses Matty and I had lived in, the schools we had attended, the neighbourhoods in Lagos – all was left behind. It was like Claudia and the American family; there was no connection. If you left it too long it had no hold on you. Something was broken, and there came a stage when it ceased to mean anything.
A megadi at the entrance scowled at us before dragging open the metal gate. He padded to the house in bare feet to report on the arrivals. I hadn’t expected a bungalow. Uncle Raymond could have chosen something grander – a two- or three-storey affair modelled on the houses he had lived in during his travels. But this was an old colonial-style bungalow decorated with orange, guava and mango trees and an array of flowering bushes that lent the compound the air of a botanical garden. The light was fading fast, but it was impossible to miss the fact that it was well maintained.
I thought Uncle Raymond’s would be the first face I saw, but after the houseboy opened the door, it was Asa who came running towards us.
‘It’s Uncle, it’s Uncle!’ he announced to the house, jumping up and down. ‘Mummy, it’s Uncle and a pretty lady.’ He attempted to lift Claudia’s suitcase and failed and the houseboy snatched it away from him.
‘They’ve gone out,’ Peju said, waddling towards us. ‘We weren’t sure when to expect you. We drove to the airport yesterday and this afternoon to check. We were going to try again tomorrow. How did you come?’
‘You drove to Kano?’ I asked.
‘No – there’s an airport here,’ she laughed. ‘Ah, ah! – don’t tell me you came by road?’
I stared at her.
‘Oh dear. Don’t you know, every state has an airport now?’ Peju continued. ‘Soon you’ll be able to fly to the villages, I’m telling you. Don’t worry – you can catch the domestic flight on the way back.’
The bungalow was larger than it appeared from the outside; the sitting room had been divided into different sections: lounge, dining room, television area. They had been watching a film and the screen had frozen the characters of an animation into a single frame. The top of the television, the side and coffee tables, were covered with lace doilies – Aunt Ama’s touch. I noticed a stone fireplace in the centre of the room. For a moment I wondered whether it was used to offset the chill of the air conditioning.
‘It gets cold here?’ Claudia asked.
‘Sometimes – later in the year,’ Peju said. ‘It used to get really chilly in the old days, years ago. Now it’s the same as everywhere else. I don’t know why.’
Peju guided us along a corridor parallel to the sitting room, to the bedrooms at the back of the house. The corridor spilled into a hallway almost as long as the sitting room itself, and again there was another passageway after that. There were tributaries that fed into hidden areas.
‘I don’t know what he wants to do in such a big house,’ Peju said, ‘when it’s only the two of them.’
Asa skated up and down the smooth stone flooring and threw open a door and called, ‘Uncle, this is my room! Come and see!’
We peered inside a large room with two metal trunks against one wall, a double bed and toys scattered on the floor, and a view of the driveway. Claudia and I were placed in adjoining rooms. Aunt Ama was everywhere: in the tasselled bedspreads, the lace on the dressing tables, the ornate chest of drawers, the heavy floral curtains. When we were alone in Claudia’s room, I sank to the edge of the bed.
‘I can’t stay here for long,’ I said. ‘I’ll suffocate. I haven’t even seen the old goat yet.’
Claudia came and sat beside me, and then lay back.
‘You all right?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘Only tired. I need a bath.’
I lay on my side, looking at her. I was glad she had come in the end. I closed my eyes and thought of nothing. I heard a car pull up and my heart sank. Claudia was still looking at me. Had I slept or had
I only closed my eyes for a moment? I sighed.
‘I think it’s the old goat,’ she said.
24
SHE WAS LIKE a bird, a red-throated bee-eater, swathed in snatches of blue and yellow and green. When I held her I was afraid my embrace was too robust. She said, ‘You have grown so much! You are taller than your brother. Imagine!’
I had been taller than Matty for over ten years, but I didn’t tell her that. Aunt Ama wore a cheap green and yellow head-scarf, like a woman selling peanuts in the marketplace. She had thrown a pink smock over sky-blue cotton trousers, as if she had recently been gardening. When I hugged her I felt how much she had shrunk, or I had grown, or both. I couldn’t tell.
She led Claudia and me from the hallway into the sitting room. Asa had commandeered him; they both stood trans-fixed in front of the television screen. I saw him then, an empty shell. The bones so near to the surface. I couldn’t breathe.
Asa’s eyes left the television for a microsecond and then returned to focus on the film. He said, ‘Look Grandy, it’s Uncle and the pretty lady,’ as if he were talking about the characters on the screen.
When he saw me he arched his eyebrows as if he were mildly surprised. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t move. Then darkness arrived. I wondered if I had passed out. Uncle Raymond called, ‘NEPA!’ in a voice so strong, I was convinced he would be his younger self again when the power resumed.
Matty laughed and Aunt Ama called out, ‘Musa!’ but the houseboy was already drifting along the hallway with a lighted candle. I could hear generator motors churning into action throughout the neighbourhood, but the bungalow remained shrouded in darkness.
‘Your first day and they take the light,’ Uncle Raymond bellowed. ‘Nigeria, we hail thee!’
Goodbye Lucille Page 20