by Okey Ndibe
“You don’t understand,” Buzuuzu said in a weary voice. “Communism makes everybody wealthy. Nobody goes hungry. Poverty is swept away.”
“So if I’m hungry . . .”
“You can go to your neighbour’s house and share his food.”
“I like it,” announced Iji. “Where can people find this komanizim?”
“It was invented by a man called Karl Marx.”
“God will bless him.”
“There is no God in communism.”
“Really? No God?”
“No. The people are their own god.”
There was a lull in the conversation. Sipping their drinks, both men seemed to savor the promised sweetness. A moment later Iji turned to Buzuuzu.
“Let me ask you,” he said, his eyes shining with mischief. “Can I go and fuck one of the chief’s wives when you bring this komanizim?”
“No!” snapped Buzuuzu. “Communism isn’t about sex. Sex is decadent.”
Iji looked dejected. “Leave the world as it is,” he said.
This conversation had made a great impression on the mind of the boy I was then, sent to the bar by my grandmother to collect her daily gourd of palmwine. By adulthood I knew that the seeming paradise of communal ownership was no more proof against wickedness and misery and horrible injustice than any other human political system, but I still nursed remnants of my early idealism in my heart.
My father was another reason I was thrilled about the job. My mother had died young. Thereafter my father, who was by all accounts a gifted broadcaster, had given up his budding career and taken a job as a teacher in order to be able to devote more time to bringing me up. Out of gratitude, when I went to university I decided to read journalism.
In my second year I was chosen to edit the departmental weekly newspaper. My father often wrote to me, offering criticisms and praise on my articles. Then in a letter that raised goose pimples all over my flesh, he assured me that my reputation as a print journalist was one day certain to surpass his as a broadcaster. I had hoped he would one day make the connection, that he would recognize my work in terms of his. But, coming too soon, the acknowledgement saddened me. My debt to him was much larger than his letter seemed to suggest.
My father’s mother, Nne, also gave me cause for uneasiness when she foretold that I would achieve success and fame only if I washed my eyes in water, only if I was wise enough to avoid the misfortunes fate would put in my path. I had a dread of my grandmother. My father had told me many stories of her quirky wisdom, her habit of surprising people by divining their innermost thoughts, or their dreams, or foretelling events exactly as they would happen. The day her husband died she had begged him not to climb the particular palm tree from which he would have the fatal fall.
“Why are you speaking like a drunk this early in the day?” her husband had asked. The years he had lived with her had bred in him, not respect for her clairvoyance, but dismissive contempt.
“I saw in my dream a thing so terrible my mouth cannot speak it. That tree is bitter. You must sacrifice a cockerel to it to assuage its anger.”
Her husband had laughed her off. “If that tree wants to eat a chicken, it must go to the market and buy itself one,” he said. One of his customers had ordered seven gourds of palmwine for a marriage ceremony, and my grandfather was not the kind of tapper to promise seven gourds without delivering.
When he set out that morning for his tapping rounds she followed him part of the way, admonishing in proverbs.
“The death that kills a puppy first blinds him. The headstrong who won’t listen will finally obey the summons of the death mat. The housefly who has nobody to advise it follows the corpse into the grave.”
Her husband swaggered on in silence. Later that day, an old man returning from his farm heard muffled groans. Following the direction of the sound, he discovered my grandfather in a heap, blood surging from his mouth, dripping from his nostrils and seeping from his ears. The farmer ran to the village with a speed indifferent to the weariness of old bones. But when a small party arrived at the scene, my grandfather was already dead.
Chapter Nine
I waited until after my first day at work to write to my father with news of the job. It was the chattiest letter I had ever written him, and also the saddest. In it I described my first editorial board meeting.
Far from the solemn atmosphere I had expected, the meeting had shocked me with its frivolity. Most of those present quaffed brandy; the lone teetotaler drank cup after cup of tea. At the slightest opportunity the members abandoned serious issues in pursuit of trivial diversions.
The first such diversion occurred early in the meeting when someone used the word “cocksure.” The only female member, a tall woman with low-cut hair, shouted, “Point of order! I don’t like any cocky words. Don’t insert your cock in my discussion!”
Guffaws went out all around, inspired by the veiled lewdness of the woman’s words. When they died down, the woman and two other members took turns relating more pointed prurient jokes revolving around the word “cock.”
The most spirited baiting came from Soni, a sloe-eyed young man whom everybody called Mr. Ways and Means. It was not long before I knew the meaning of the sobriquet. Whenever the editorial board members were unable, or unwilling, to dwell on a complex issue, they turned to Soni. He would take a moment as if in reflection, then utter his pat cliché: “So so and so”—it could be the United Nations, the government of Madia, the Medical Association or whoever—“should find ways and means of solving the problem.”
The only board member who made serious comments and held himself aloof from the silliness was a man called Ashiki, whose bald head, as I wrote to my father, made him resemble a tortoise. His anguished detachment provided something to sweeten the bitterness of my general disappointment with the meeting. Also, I was curious to know how Ashiki managed to stand apart from his colleagues’ foolish conduct, seemingly unperturbed. This Ashiki, I informed my father, was a man I intended to befriend.
Several weeks after sending this letter to my father I had still received no reply. I sent another letter, express. Again, no response. I decided that something must be wrong at home. Perhaps with my grandmother, who had recently suffered a serious illness and virtually lost her sight.
I asked the editor for a week off. The next morning I took a taxi to Ido motor park and joined several other passengers on board a station wagon bound for Onitsha, a commercial town five hundred miles east of Langa.
My mood was nostalgic throughout the seven-hour journey.
Memories of my father floated in and out of my mind. I recalled how he had set off my romance with words, how he had taught me words as sound long before I knew them as meaning. Braggadocio. Hocus pocus. Tintinnabulation. Jiggery pokery. Brouhaha. Words that were magical music to my ears.
The car arrived in Onitsha in the late afternoon. I completed my journey in a cab that ran the thirty-minute shuttle to my village. The driver dropped me off outside the bar in which years earlier I had listened to Man-Mountain Buzuuzu and Iji’s conversation. Walking towards my home, I saw a woman sitting on a wooden ledge in the village square, head lifted to the sky. She called out my name. I started, then recognized my grandmother.
“Nne,” I addressed her. “What are you doing here?”
“Watching the sun go home,” she answered.
“Watching the sun! Didn’t father say . . .” I squelched the indelicate question.
“That I had gone blind? Why should weakness of sight stop me escorting the journeying sun?”
“I was surprised that you called out my name. How did you know it was me?”
“The scent of your spirit.”
“Scent? How does my spirit smell?”
She laughed, a high, full-hearted laughter. “Just like your father’s. A good smell.”
As we made
our way home she said, “Your father is waiting for you.”
“Waiting? But he doesn’t know I’m coming.”
She laughed again. “My son, you and your father carry the same blood in your bodies. He knows you are coming.”
She led the way, neither shuffling nor raising her legs with that exaggerated caution of the blind. Afraid that she might trip, I grabbed her hand. She wrested it free. “You don’t think I know my way?” she fumed.
“I don’t know how you can.”
She jiggled a small dance. “Don’t kill yourself with anxiety, my son. The road takes care of its own. You don’t understand because you’ve travelled too far from your hearth. You know what a big place the world is, but you have forgotten the language of your soil.”
I knew there was no use arguing with her. Not even my father, more skilled than I when it came to disputation, could match my grandmother. A story he once told me illustrated her dominance over him.
Five years after my parents’ marriage, my mother had not conceived. There came a day, while my parents were in the village on a visit, when she complained of a stabbing pain in her stomach. Her condition rapidly worsened. My father, far more shaken up than his wife, got ready to drive back to the city to see a doctor. Seeing his state of panic, his mother laughed.
“Your wife is now two bodies. Take her to lie down,” she ordered. “I’ll go into the bush and get her something to take.”
“What do you mean she’s two bodies? “my father asked.
“She’s pregnant.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m a woman.”
“But it’s not possible.”
“Why not? Are you not a man? Were you not born with seedpods hanging between your thighs?”
“Mother!”
“And have you not been pleasuring your wife with your penis?”
“Mother, please!”
“Because if you haven’t, then another man has done your job for you. Your wife is pregnant.”
“Well, in that case I definitely need to take her to see a doctor.” My father resumed his frenzied packing. His mother laughed at his agitation.
“Just do what I told you. Get your wife to rest. I’ll fetch what she requires.”
“From the bush?”
“Yes.”
“My wife won’t take any of your concoctions.”
She drew herself to her full height. “Why not?”
“I don’t trust that kind of medication.”
“I’m your mother. I took these same herbs when I was pregnant with you.”
“Times have changed. We have real medicine now.”
“Are you saying that roots and herbs which worked yesterday have forgotten their work today?”
“I can’t argue with you when you talk like that, mother. But my wife won’t drink any potion.”
“That’s the talk of foolishness.” My grandmother had already turned away. As she walked off to the bush she shouted her last instructions over her shoulder.
“Get your wife to rest in bed as I told you. Set a fire and boil some water.”
My father obeyed her orders, and within an hour my mother’s pains had been relieved by a dose of traditional herbal medicine.
As soon as I entered the house and smelled the mixture of sickness and quinine that hung in the air, I knew that no such remedies could avail today.
“Father!” I called out. There was no answer. “Father, are you there?”
I turned to my grandmother. Her face was suddenly heavy and tired, as if she had slipped on a mask inscribed with the scars of time. She led me to another room. Here the smell was unbearable. On a low bed lay a man—or a horribly scrawny bag of flesh and bones that had once been a man.
“Father?” I whispered.
The figure wheezed.
I approached the bed and peered into his face. His sunken, immobile eyes seemed to take me in with no greater interest than he took in the void between him and the ceiling.
“Father,” I said in a quietly earnest voice.
He wheezed more roughly.
“Why? What is this?”
“Tra-ns-mu-ta-tion,” he brought out painfully.
I put my hands under him and lifted him in my arms, cradling him as one would an infant.
“I got a job. I wrote two letters to tell you . . .”
“He knows,” my grandmother told me. “That’s why he agreed to go on this journey. He wanted to see you on your way in life before leaving. This sickness had been skirting around him for so long, but he had wrestled with it.”
“Are you sure he understood about my job?”
“He smiled.”
“Does that mean he understood?”
“Look! He’s talking to you.”
I looked. His lips moved, soundless.
“He can’t talk,” I said to my grandmother, frustrated.
“You can’t hear. He wants you to be like the wind. The wind travels wide and far; the wind has no enemies. And like the sun. The sun lives far away, but his warmth touches friends and foes alike.”
I turned to my father for corroboration. The faintest blink of his eye would have been enough, or the slightest movement of his lip. But his face was blank.
“Father,” I said.
A shudder ran through his body. Then he lay still.
My grandmother’s voice became graver. “The journey has taken the journey man,” she said in Igbo.
“He’s transmuted,” I said.
I gently lay my father back down and went outside to suck in fresh air. I thought about the meaning of what had just happened. My grandmother and I present at the end of my father’s life. Stunned witnesses. What must it mean to her, his mother, who was also present at the beginning of his life? How strange, I thought, that at the final moment I should speak so like my father. I was astonished, too, by the fact that, perhaps for the first time in my life, I had spoken English words whose meaning my grandmother had no problem grasping. A magic of communication, I mused, achieved at the mouth of the grave.
The world, too, seemed dead. The earth appeared unduly hard and dusty. A light breeze soughed through the leaves, which were yellow, like piss after a bout of malaria. A high odor hung in the air. The sun, also a pale yellow, was being swallowed by huge clumps of clouds, the firmament turning dull and grey.
I was racked by uncertainty. Had death truly entered every thing or was it my loss that had colored my eyes, disfiguring whatever they fell on? I walked back to the room where my father lay. His mother sat beside him murmuring a soft dirge about a fame borne on air, a courage that tamed tigers, a love so mighty it forsook the world, a spirit that traversed seven seas and seven wilds, demolishing demons in its way. For a while I listened to her voice weave words of tears, then I broke down and cried.
Chapter Ten
A week after my father’s funeral, I told my grandmother that it was time to leave her and the village and return to my post at the Daily Monitor. She drew me aside and indicated a spot beside her. I sat down on the earthen floor and waited. She lifted her palms to the sun, whistling a melancholy tune. Then with her sun-warmed hands she began to trace the contours of my face.
“You asked me the other day how your spirit smelled,” she said. Her hands were still on my face. She touched now my nose, now my forehead. She felt my ears, then lightly drew her finger across my lips. “Every breathing person has two smells. But the smell of your good spirit overpowers the bad. I’m not surprised that it should be so; you are the son of your father.”
Removing her hands from my face, she placed them softly on her lap. Then she fell into a thoughtful silence, staring into the open space before her. The awkward intensity of her blind gaze amazed me. She coughed, then fixed me with her calm, lifeless eyes.
“I told your fa
ther about your quarrel with the big man.”
“The minister?” I asked, animatedly.
“Yes. I told him about it. He was already very sick, but the news pleased him. I know you will ask me how I knew his heart was pleased. If I answer that I saw it in his smile, then you will ask me how my blind eyes saw a smile. And my answer is simple: I see what eyes do not.”
“How did you know about the fight with the minister?” I asked.
“Don’t pester me with your questions. I was the one who asked you to come and warm your back beside me. Let my mouth unload itself.”
She paused again and began to rub her palms together, whistling. From time to time a relative or friend strolled into our compound to find out how we were doing. To their words of commiseration my grandmother would shrug and say, “Death has done his will,” or “We can’t fetch a stick and thrash Death for what it does,” or “Death is like a man who visits your house whenever he pleases. Even when you have barred the door.”
After the last consoler left, she cleared her throat.
“When Chukwu first created the world, Death was a man with two eyes. In those days he would call back to Chukwu’s house only those men and women who had done their work in the world, people who had attained old age. But one day, Death came to call home a strong medicineman. The dibia was at that moment expecting delivery of a gourd of palmwine by the best tapper in the whole village. The old rogue begged Death to give him another day, but Death refused. He then asked Death to tarry and taste of the wine before doing his work. Again Death said no, that he had too much work for that day and that wine would only confuse his eyes. In anger, the medicineman cast a spell of blindness over Death. Since then, Death has taken away whoever he feels with his cold hand. That is why some children these days die before their parents.
“If Death were not blind, then your father would have been here speaking these words to you and I would be the one in the grave. But we cannot go and ask Death why he snatched away your father. Our people say that when a young man is not well girded and goes to enquire about what happened to his father, then what happened to his father will also claim him.