by Okey Ndibe
“Explain it to me.”
“Take me, for instance. My real name is Iyese. The name connects me to the spot where I was born, to my mother’s womb, my father’s blood, my brothers and sisters, my childhood memories. It’s the name with which I get angry or feel happy. With it I smile my true smiles, laugh my deep laughter, shed my real tears. It’s the name with which I sigh at life. When I stand before the mirror, it’s Iyese I see. When I dream it’s the name with which my mother’s voice calls across the valley warning me to run from the demons. It’s the name that flows into my ears as water flows upon its bed of washed stones and white sand. Iyese is the name with which I see the world in the day. It’s the name that reminds me of what contains shame or honor. It’s the name with which I make love, when I do.”
She paused briefly, then continued. “As for Emilia, it’s like a label on a loaf of bread, or the name a vain man gives to his mansion, calling it Paradise or Harmony. Emilia is the name with which I return all the fake smiles that greet me at night. It’s the name with which I utter whispers into men’s ears. It’s the name I use for my made-up moans and my faked orgasms. It’s the name with which I throw my thighs apart for a stranger’s erection and afterwards take his money. All my bruises and soreness I take as Emilia. It’s a name that takes the rapes of my body so that Iyese may go unhurt. It’s a name with which I am connected to the night and nothing else.”
“The false name acts as a shield against your nighttime encounters?”
“Yes. I couldn’t sleep with a customer who knew my real name. I would be totally frigid.”
“Why?”
“Because Iyese is not a prostitute. Emilia is.”
“Do all prostitutes experience this split phenomenon? This idea of being two persons in one? “
“Most, I’d say. There are prostitutes who can’t imagine themselves as anything else. But those are the exception.”
I asked: “How do people become prostitutes?”
“By asking to be paid for sex.” A bitter smile passed across her face, scarcely masking the pain that lay close to the surface.
“How did you become a prostitute?”
She stubbed out her cigarette and swallowed what was left of her Guinness. Her eyes, vulnerable and luminous, reminded me of the moon’s magic when beheld by a child’s eyes.
When she spoke, her voice quavered. “Please turn off the recorder. I want to cry.”
There are tears whose flow ought not to be interrupted—such were Iyese’s then. She buried her head in my chest, wetting my shirt, whimpering. It was some minutes before she grew still.
“You asked how I became a prostitute. It’s a long story, but I will try to tell you.”
She drew her legs up and rested her chin on her knees. “It began twelve years ago when I was a second-year student at Madia Teachers’ College.”
Iyese and her best friend had travelled to a distant village to visit her friend’s uncle, a doctor who had trained in Russia and Yugoslavia and had imbibed as much Marxist ideology as medical training. This strange doctor, Maximus Jaja, at forty still a bachelor, had actively sought a position in a poor settlement that was cut off from the rest of the world. The Ministry of Health posted him to Utonki, a quaint riverine village of several hundred fishermen and peasants. To reach the village one travelled by bicycle for ten miles on craggy footpaths, then spent an hour in a small boat that plodded along a mudcolored, fish-rich river. The life of Utonki revolved around that river and the fish that teemed in it.
Dr. Jaja lived near the banks of the river, in a hut that smelled of earth. Iyese remembered listening at night, half afraid, to the river’s raging voice as it travelled down to meet the big sea.
“What took your friend and you to Utonki?” I asked.
“Money,” she said, laughing. “My friend needed some money for a project. She wanted to get some of her uncle’s monthly salary before it vanished.”
Dr. Jaja gave away most of his salary to the villagers. He had no use for money, he told them. The grateful villagers made up adoring praise-names for him. He was the magician who came by water. Son of the sun. Sun that sweeps the earth. Wealth that has found its way home. They repaid his generosity by adopting him as the ward of the whole community. He ate at different households while making his daily rounds of the village, a routine that started at 5:30 every morning and ended only when there were no more patients to be succored.
Iyese had accompanied the doctor’s niece to Utonki out of curiosity. She had heard many stories about the man and she craved to see him in his strange world, in flesh and blood.
“Something magical happened the moment Dr. Jaja saw me,” Iyese said, smiling distantly, as if the memory filled her with a sweet sadness. The doctor, who had never known carnal love, discovered it in Iyese, and expressed it with touching clumsiness. Iyese was thrilled by his attentions. She was twenty-one years younger than the doctor, but she agreed to take his hand and guide him through the caverns of love.
Dr. Jaja proposed to Iyese at the moment of his first orgasm, and in the afterglow of their love-making she acceded. Later she experienced vague doubts and fears, but she was swept along on the now powerful current of Dr. Jaja’s desire.
Like many who first savor a delirious experience late in life, Dr. Jaja developed an insatiable appetite. During the next two nights they traversed the village and made love wherever he chose. They did it twice on the banks of the river amidst the choral croaks of toads, the chirr of crickets, the chirp of birds, the drone of mosquitoes and the plop! plop! of fish drawn to the bank because the fishermen had withdrawn to their homes to sleep. Once, as they were relieving their passion in the shrine of the sun deity, Iyese saw the sacred python slither in. The python’s eyes glowed on a small head, its richly decorated body radiant in the moonlight. It moved noiselessly, but its entry chilled the moment for Iyese, freezing all her sensations. Dr. Jaja alone exploded in eerie spurts and songs.
On the first night Iyese had been worried that her lover’s ecstatic cries might scandalize the villagers, but the next day she met the village chief, an old hunched man with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. Smirking, he asked her, “Daughter, are you the one making our son a man?”
Embarrassed, she asked, “What do you mean, elder?”
“Every child cries when it is born,” explained the chief. “It cries to announce its arrival. It also cries because of all the evil it sees in the world. But every child has another cry waiting in the future, the cry of love. It is the cry that makes a boy a man, a girl a woman. Last night, we heard our son crying the cry of manhood. It put much happiness in our breasts.”
“Does nobody sleep in this village?” she asked in playful reproach.
“Yes, we sleep,” replied the elder. “But a wise man sleeps with his eyes and keeps his ears awake. Your neighbor might call out for your help at night. There might be a snake snatching your hen. It is the ear’s duty to hear these commotions and to rouse a sleeper. The cry of love delights the ear. May the sun bless you for showing his son the mystery of manhood.”
Two days later Iyese went back to college carrying in her handbag a letter the doctor asked her not to read until she was safely in her room.
“You may read the letter,” Iyese said to me, extracting it from a box-file that was hidden under her bed. “In fact, keep it. It disturbs my nights when I remember it.”
The words sprawled across two pages in a cursive hand that was more like an artist’s than a doctor’s. The language sometimes read like a neophyte poet’s:
Some people are doomed with eyes that see little. I was one such. Some have hearts that know love only by giving, never by receiving. I was also one such. There is knowledge and there is wisdom. Wisdom is to know that eyes are good but seeing is better; that a giving heart is good but the heart that knows how to receive is beautiful and blessed.
H
ow strange that it took somebody as young as you to lead me to these lights. The village chief said you made me a man. How I wish he knew how deeply. Now, I want to be the small seed which dies and decays in the bowels of the earth; dies and decays in order to be resurrected with startling, vibrant, magnificent life.
I wish I had known before now that the magic of the world often flows from the things we account too peripheral. If only I had listened more closely to the wise words of our elders who in their wisdom said, “What one is looking for in Sokoto town is in the sokoto gown.”
A prodigal, I thought the truth lay in what the ancestors of Europe had to say. I searched for the matrix of Marx, embraced the delusions of Descarte, the cant of Kant. I was drawn to Hegel’s heresies, to the fraudulencies of Freud. I dismissed my own patrimony as naive, atavistic and inconsequential. I imagined that all true wisdom existed in the tomes of Europe. I read them voraciously. Through them, I found eyes, but the key to seeing still eluded me. Yes, I harvested knowledge from Europe’s soil but I found little wisdom in it.
I returned from Europe with a grand agenda for our country. But who was going to lend me a hand? Our finest talent, I found, had been consumed by cynicism, the youth had surrendered to despair. I, too, quickly shed the illusion that the world was waiting to be saved—by me and a small band of messiahs. But I truly wanted to serve, and if I could not serve my country I was quite content to seize a small corner and give service. I could live with a small dream; dreamlessness, on the other hand, would kill me.
So I asked to be posted to a small needy community. I asked with love, but the officer who sent me to Utonki did so with a punitive heart. For four years I have spent my revolutionary fevers in this small world. In those four years I have learned that the quality of service is hardly flawed.
Now you have come and opened my eyes to another wisdom: that service is flawed—can only be flawed—when one refuses to be served in return. You could not have come at a better time.
The same blubbery bastard at headquarters who posted me here has of late dreamed up a new way to crush my spirits. He now wants to post me out of here to—a city, of all places! He has written a memo to set off the process. In it he alleged that I have virtually been on holiday here; that no superior officer supervises what I do (or don’t do); that I spread dangerous propaganda among the people, thereby flouting civil service rules (the specific sections and subsections of which he diligently listed). But the most unbearable part of his memo was his argument (and here I must quote him) that, “The rationale for maintaining qualified medical personnel in Utonki does not exist in actuality. The people are accustomed to, and prefer, traditional forms of therapy, viz divination, herbal pharmacology, spirit medium, and other pagan rites. Consequently there are no tenable considerations to support retaining Dr. Jaja in his present post.”
Based on this outrageous memo the Ministry sent one of its officers here to evaluate the situation. A mouth-foaming idiot! The first question he asked me was what did I gain from living in such darkness? A grown man like me, he remarked in astonishment. He said there were “progressive” doctors in cities making good money and building beautiful houses and buying nice, nice cars. It was apparent from his accent that he felt that I had somehow interrupted his rapturous life in the city. When he found out that the salary they routed to me every month was shared with the villagers, he asked, the greedy glutton, could I let him keep some? When I said no, he tried blackmail. Was I aware that it was unethical to relate too socially with my patients? He could recommend that I be disciplined, did I know that?
I laughed in his face. A hard, derisive laugh, in his startled face. Then I told him that he and I spoke two different languages, that no magic of translation could ever bridge the gulf of mutual incomprehension between us.
He left Utonki, I am sure, with the echo of that laugh ringing in his ears. I know that he is going to be dangerous once he has ascended the throne in the miniature kingdom of his office. I can almost picture him in the chagrined thrill of meager power, his quivering hand penning the verdict: “After a thorough and exhaustive consideration of all the extant facts pertaining to the above subject, bla bla bla, I have come to the conclusion that Dr. Jaja’s posting in Utonki is not consistent with the Ministry’s objective of optimizing healthcare delivery. Bla bla bla.”
What options am I left with in this unfair situation? To ignore my redeployment and stay back? It’s the option that most appeals to my idealism. But stay back and do what? The ministry would quickly withdraw all medicines and other supplies. Idealism—even I must concede—cannot synthesize drugs. Rather unfortunate; but without drugs a doctor becomes a mere bogeyman. I cannot operate in a situation where all I can offer my patients is the arbitrariness of miracles. I am left, then, with a choice that sounds to me like a betrayal. But, as I think about it, the betrayal is not mine but that of small men who would rather be gods!
As I brace to depart from these people, I am filled with great hope—that the inner energy and natural cunning of all who dwell among forests are going to keep them one step ahead of their worst troubles.
As for my own situation I can only say this: my going to the city will not optimize healthcare delivery. But it will bring us closer to each other. Not a bad punishment, if you ask me! I used to think of marriage as something peculiarly absurd which only fools inflicted on themselves. That changed when I asked and you said yes. Now I am filled with a great longing.
I will keep you apprised of the situation with the chaps at headquarters.
With my bottomless love,
Maximus
Dr. Jaja was eventually posted to Bini, a city less than an hour from Iyese’s college. Still, he cried as he climbed on to the old boat that was to take him away from Utonki. All the adults and children of the village stood on the bank to bid him farewell, in silent tears that came from a deep region of their hearts.
Chapter FIFTEEN
Three months later Dr. Maximus Jaja, escorted by seven of his relatives, arrived in Iyese’s village to see her family and formally express his intention to take her, with their approval, as his wife. The short ceremony was called “knocking on the door.”
“Neither Maximus nor myself was allowed to say anything,” Iyese told me. The oldest man in Dr. Jaja’s party spoke for him. The only time Iyese was invited to join the circle where Dr. Jaja’s relatives and hers drank and bantered was when she and five other maidens were asked to line up so that her suitor could identify her as the one he had come to talk about. Since Iyese’s father had been dead for a few years, his eldest brother spoke on behalf of her family. As the day wore on and the gathering began to drift into revelry this uncle of Iyese’s cleared his throat and addressed the suitor’s party.
“I thank our visitors who have come to us from a far place. The message you bring pleases us. Your son who wants our daughter seems to us a good fellow. A bad man only asks his relatives to escort him to a fight, but your son invited you to lead him to the house of the woman he desires as his wife. You who have come with him are also good people. The day may come when we know one another better and I can call you not visitors but friends. For today we must release you. Your home is far and you must set off before the sun goes home and darkness swallows your path. If you were already our in-laws we would ask you to stretch out your legs and be comfortable and when sleep troubled your eyes we would show you where to put down your heads. But we don’t know you that well, yet; nor do you know us. That is why we say to you, we have heard your knock on our door. We will put our heads together and discuss what you have told us. Then, whether we like our daughter to live among you or not, we will send word to you. We will do our work quickly. For now, you must hasten home so that nightfall does not catch you on the road.”
Despite her uncle’s genial tone, Iyese knew that her relatives were not in the least enthusiastic about Dr. Jaja’s suit.
“Tradition forbade m
y people from saying a straight no to a suitor who came to announce his intention. But the strained look on my grandmother’s face and a coldness in my mother’s eyes told me more than words could tell.”
The following morning Iyese was still under the spell of sleep when a light hand touched her leg. Waking with a start, she saw her grandmother perched at the foot of the bed.
“My child,” her father’s mother said. With sleepy eyes Iyese looked up at the old one. Her grandmother asked, “You are the child of my womb, are you not?”
Warily, Iyese nodded.
The old one touched her belly. “Yes, you are,” she said to Iyese. “You belong to this womb.” She cast her head down and fell silent, like one who had lost her way around words. The pause was only for effect, to increase the impact of what she had come to say.
Iyese knew that the visit and the talk had to do with her suitor. Her grandmother had not come creeping into her room this early in the morning in order to exchange the fables of Tortoise and Hare. The relationship between her and her grandmother had been special ever since the day Iyese came into the world.
“I was told that as a baby,” Iyese said to me, “I would sometimes cry for no apparent reason. Nobody and nothing would console me until I heard my grandmother’s voice. Sometimes I would refuse to sleep until she picked me up and rocked me on her shoulder. Other times, I would not smile until I peered into her eyes—and then I would not stop smiling. My grandmother had been born a twin, but her twin sister had died. Our people said I was that twin sister come back to life. As I grew older, people marveled at how closely I resembled my grandmother. They said I was the picture of how she looked in her youth, just as she was the image of how I would look in my old age.”