by Chika Unigwe
Lagos na no man’s land, Lagos na waya.
For Lagos, man pikin no get sista or broda.
For Lagos, na orphan I be. Lagos na waya aaa.
She was relieved when the bus doors yawned open and the call was made for passengers bound for Lagos to enter. The driver, chewing gum in mouth, seemed eager to leave. Ama was pleased. She wanted to be as far away from Enugu as possible. The conductor, a thickset man who looked better suited to work on a farm than on a luxury bus, shepherded the passengers in, turning back a man who had a he-goat tethered around his wrist. Mba. “No goats allowed on the bus,” the conductor shouted, halting the man’s progress onto the bus with a palm on his chest. The would-be passenger’s red cap faltered on his head and he held it in place with his free hand, extending his hand upward to ensure that the feather stuck in it was still in place. The goat bleated as if in anger. The man croaked, “I’m a chief. How dare you lay your hands on me? Even if you have no respect for age, show some respect for royalty. See my eagle feather?”
“Royalty, my foot,” the conductor spat out, pushing the man firmly out of the way so that Ama, who was behind him, could enter. “You are the chief of your shitty buttocks. Eze ike nsi. That feather on your cap is a vulture’s!” He guffawed as the man complained that he had paid for a seat, the conductor had no right to turn him back. “This is not one of those nonsense buses where you can come in with your goats and your rams. Bushman. This is eggzecutive bus. Eggzecutive. We don’t want goats and rams shitting all over the place. Does this look like a gwongworo? This is eggzecutive. We’ll give you your money back. Bushman.” There was scattered laughter, and someone made a joke about chieftaincy titles being for sale; even a dog could have one as long as it had an owner willing to pay. Ama felt sorry for the chief, but what could she do? She got in and sat down on the first free seat she saw, grateful to be out of the cold. The conductor stood at the door and shouted that there was still room on the bus. “Lagos. One more nyash! Lagos, one more nyash!” He waited for a minute or two to see if there were any takers. There weren’t. He shut the door and hit the side of the bus, and the driver started to ease out slowly onto the road. Hawkers had milled around the bus as it filled, and when it started to move they chased it, urging customers to buy their wares. Sweetbread. Moi-moi. Special moi-moi. Banana. Buy banana. Peanut. Orange. Honey orange. Most of them were young girls. One or two were women about Ama’s mother’s age. The woman beside Ama stretched her hand out of the open window to take possession of a wrap of akara she had just bought. Her bangles rattled. She smelled of clothes that had stayed too long in a box. It was a mixture of staleness and camphor. The smell irritated Ama, and she began to wish she had a window seat. The bus gained speed, and the depot in Uwani and the hawkers and the people who had come to see friends and relatives off disappeared from view as it rounded a bend and joined the long, slow traffic out of Enugu. Outside the cathedral, the beggars were already up. A woman with a scarf that was going awry on her head held a melancholic baby on her hip with one hand and with the other extended a metal begging bowl toward the bus. “Nyenu m ego. Give me money, please. God go bless you. Chukwu gozie gi.” The conductor screamed at her to get away from the eggzecutive bus. “Ga, go and tell the man that got you pregnant to look after you. Anu ofia. Wild animal. If you spread easily like butter, you get what you deserve.”
The woman beside Ama shouted at the conductor that did he not know it was men like him, men with jobs and homes, who got such women pregnant and left them to their lot? Some dissenting voices rose, and a loud one said that everybody knew men could not control themselves, it was not in their nature. “Umu nwoke bu nkita. Dogs! That’s what men are!” It was up to women to make sure they did not put themselves in a position where they would be used. A woman with a broad face and a huge pimple on her chin, across the aisle from Ama, told of her neighbor’s daughter who was raped. “When they said she was raped, me, I was not surprised. ‘Why would she not be raped?’ I asked the mother. The things she allowed the girl to wear. Tufia! Dresses that showed her thighs. Blouses that stuck to her, hugging her everywhere so you could see her breasts standing at attention, saluting everything that passed by. Why would she not be raped? Biko, let me hear word.”
Voices rose in support. The woman beside Ama tried to shout above the din. Sensing that she was losing ground, she turned desperately to Ama for support. “Oro eziokwu? Is what I’m saying not true? Men cannot keep those things between their legs still. And it is men from homes who do this. You think it’s their fellow beggars who are busy trying to survive that sleep with them? Mbanu. No.”
Ama made some noncommittal murmurs that she hoped would satisfy the woman and at the same time stop her from trying to engage Ama in conversation. She had no inclination to be drawn into the argument. She did not want to think of men. Or of rape. Or of her father who was not really her father. As if to signal her withdrawal from the discussion that had taken over the bus, the woman unwrapped her parcel of akara, spreading out the crumpled newspaper wrapping on her lap, smoothing it so that the six bean-cake balls lay displayed, balls of molded gold. Its aroma hit Ama straightaway, intensifying her hunger. “Welu ofu.” The woman offered her a ball. Ama smiled politely and said no, thank you. The woman urged her: “It’s too much for me. O rika. Welu.” Ama kept her smile while protesting that she had no hunger, she’d had a heavy meal before leaving her house. “Rice. You know how rice sits in the stomach for hours.”
“True,” the woman agreed. She prodded the balls with a finger, chose one, and raised it to her mouth. She bit into it, exposing a creamy white inside. “Hmm. O soka. Delicious,” she announced through a mouthful. Ama’s stomach rumbled and she closed her eyes, anticipating sleep to overwhelm the hunger now that the bus had become still again. Sleep did not come, but she resolutely kept her eyes closed. It was a shame that she could not pinch her nostrils shut, too. She heard the woman wrap up her food, and then she asked Ama, “Are you sleeping?” Ama nodded, determinedly keeping her eyes shut still. “You are lucky. I can’t sleep in a moving car. I wish I could. I haven’t slept all night.”
That makes two of us, Ama thought, willing the woman to let her be. She figured that if she kept quiet the woman would stop talking and allow her to sleep in peace.
“I’m going to America. I mean, I’m going to the embassy for my visa interview,” the woman announced.
Ama said nothing, hoping she would catch the hint. The woman did not, for she continued, “But I’ll get the visa. My son says this is just a formality. He knows these things. He knows the Americans. He has been living in America for eighteen years. Eighteen years. He is American now. Even when he talks to us on the phone, I can hardly understand him. Supri supri, that’s how he talks now. Wanna. Gonna. Momma.” She laughed and continued. “Next month I leave for America.”
Her voice rose at “America,” and the passenger in front of her turned back to give her a quick look. America was coveted. It was the promised land that many heard of but only the chosen few got to see. Ama gave up and opened her eyes. She realized that there was no hope of getting any sleep unless the woman fell asleep herself, but the way she was going there was very little hope of that happening. She was one of those who would carry on a monologue with the dead.
As the bus entered Awka and joined the highway to Onitsha, the woman began to talk about her family: her children in America and her husband in the village. She was afraid of going to America. Of the flight. Of going to a foreign country. Of having to stay with her only son and his white wife. What would she eat? What would they talk about? Why had he married a woman whose background they knew nothing about? Whose background they could not check? Nobody knew her parents, what sort of people they were. What if they had been criminals? Lepers? Osu, outcasts, even? Her husband had been heartbroken when the son sent them news of his impending marriage three years ago, enclosing a picture of a woman with hollow eyes who was so skinny that it was impossible to imagine her ever being
able to carry a pregnancy. What had attracted their son to this woman when he could have had any woman he wanted? How could those skinny hips keep a baby? But she had, much to the woman’s amazement, carried pregnancies full-term and delivered healthy babies. She had given her son children. As an only son, he had the duty to perpetuate the family line, to live up to his name, Afamefuna: May my name never be lost. It was his obligation to enrich the lineage with children, but not children from a white woman. In any case, she was looking forward to meeting her grandchildren. It had been difficult for her to accept, but nwa bu nwa. A child is a child. She was going to see all her grandchildren. Her son’s two, Harry and Jimmy. What sort of names were those for boys who would grow into men? And the other eight scattered all over the States. Her three daughters had done well, marrying men from their town, men whose families they knew. If only the son had done the same, she and her husband would have had nothing to worry about. “It’s bad advice,” she said. “Someone advised my son wrongly, and I curse that person, whoever he is. May his eyes never see good. May his stomach bloat until it bursts. May he shit fat worms until he enters the grave.” Her son had always been sensible, right from a very young age, she said, and could not have made such a wrong choice if not for the wrong sort of people around him. “The road is far, uzo eteka,” she added wearily, “or I would have seen to it that the wedding never took place.” Her breath hit Ama in the nose, filling her nostrils with the smell of akara. She could not decide which of the two was worse: the smell of akara or of stale clothes.
The woman was still talking two and a half hours later when the bus stopped in Onitsha to pick up some more passengers. Ama wondered where the three women who had entered would sit, as all the seats seemed occupied. She watched as the conductor hauled three squat stools from somewhere under the bus and set them at the back in the aisle. She had not thought that Ekene Dili Chukwu did attach, too: Passengers paid a fraction of the full fare for the privilege of sitting on those stools, earning the driver and the conductor some extra money. Ama wondered if the stools were not uncomfortable. As if in response to Ama’s unasked question, one of the three attach passengers stretched her legs out in front of her and was scolded by the conductor, who told her that she was not in her kitchen or in her bedroom. “This is eggzecutive bus!”
When the bus stopped at its Benin depot, the woman beside Ama finally ceased talking. Ama was grateful for the quiet. Perhaps now she could squeeze in some sleep before they drove into Lagos. But a young bald man joined the bus. He stood in front beside the driver, a traveler’s bag hanging from his shoulders, and began to preach. He reached into the bag and brought out a leather-bound King James Bible. His voice, even without a microphone, carried into the crevices of the bus so that it was difficult to escape. “If you love Jesus, raise your hands.” A few people raised their hands; the rest ignored him.
“I said, if you are not ashamed of Jesus, raise your hands. Hallelujah!” He got a stronger response this time. Ama’s neighbor woke up and raised up both hands, keen to show how extreme her love was. Ama shut her eyes. She had had enough of preachers and pastors. By the time the man opened his Bible and started to read a passage, he had lost Ama.
Yesterday still seemed surreal in the way that dreams sometimes did. But it happened. If it did not, she would not be in this bus, on her way to her mother’s cousin in Lagos, beside this woman who smelled of akara and stale clothes and camphor.
Ama still could not tell what had possessed her to talk to her father the way she did. Maybe it was her frustration at not passing her JAMB, the university entrance examination that would have enabled her to leave Enugu, to seek her future at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, where she had applied to study laboratory science. All her life she had dreamed of going to university, somewhere outside Enugu but not too far that she could not see her mother often. And then getting a job and cutting herself completely off from her father’s whiteness. She would still come home to visit her mother, no matter where she lived. She sometimes felt sorry for her mother, the way she had to boil the clothes the assistant pastor on his way to becoming pastor had to wear so that his purity glowed, the way she walked with her back hunched when the clothes did not come out clean enough and Brother Cyril, who did not tolerate shortcomings and wanted them all “to make it to heaven,” expiated her sin with a beating. Ama wished there was a way she could free her mother and herself from the house in Enugu with the thirty-two steps leading up to heaven. Even though it had been years since he stole into her room, searching in the dark for her breasts that were not yet fully formed, the image still tormented her. He had stopped coming when she started her period at eleven. Although she hated the bloody discharge every month and the accompanying ache in her back, she was grateful for the respite from her father. It made the pain of her period worth it.
She had sat and passed her SSCEs two years ago, but two years in a row she had failed to score high enough on the JAMB examination to get a place at the university of her choice. If she had the money to pay someone to take the examination for her, she would have. Everyone was doing that. She knew people less deserving of a place at the university who had either bought examination papers from corrupt JAMB officials and practiced at home, or who had paid others to sit the examination for them. Ogonna, the dullest girl in her class, entered the university straight out of secondary school. Yet everyone knew that Ogonna could not even write her own name without misspelling it. It was not fair at all. Not after all the studying and the praying Ama had done. She had spent the entire morning locked up in her room, crying and cursing the world for its unfairness. In the afternoon her mother had persuaded her to eat some lunch, reminding her that she could always try again next year. “It’s not the end of the world.” But as her mother spoke, all Ama saw ahead of her was a one-way tunnel and her, stuck in the middle of it, going nowhere. It was the end of the world.
When her father came home from work to be confronted with the JAMB result, he had accused her of not studying hard enough. “If you had spent some time studying for your exams instead of floating around the house like a ghost, you’d have passed! You are just lazy. Plain lazy. Period!” He had thrown the white officious-looking paper at Ama and asked for his food. “Get out of my face, you lazybones, and help your mother in the kitchen. Idiot. You crawl around like a lizard, ngwerre, how do you expect to pass JAMB? You think passing JAMB is drinking akamu? Get out of my sight, ka m fu uzo, let me see the road.” He hissed and half pushed her away from where she stood, in front of him, as if there were really something behind her she was blocking from his sight.
Ama staggered back but found her balance almost immediately. Anger spasmed through her body and exploded from her mouth. “You call yourself my father?” Later, she would think it was the reference to her floating like a ghost that tipped her and spilled the words. “You call yourself my father? You call yourself a pastor? You disgust me! I na-aso m oyi.”
Her mother ran into the sitting room where they were. “Shut up, Ama! Shut up. Mechie onu.” She tried to drag Ama out of the room. The daughter resisted, pulling her wrist away from her mother’s hand. She was stronger and had no problem disengaging herself from the older woman.
“Mba. No. I will not shut up. Mama, do you know what he did to me when I was little? He raped me. Night after night. He would come into my room and force me to spread my legs for him. Remember when you always thought I had Apollo?”
Ama’s mother lifted a hand and slapped her on her mouth. “How dare you talk about your father like that? What has taken possession of you? I fe o na-eme gi n’isi? Have you gone mad?”
Brother Cyril’s voice cut into her mother’s, slashing off her words meant to be placating him, words meant to be asking him not to listen to Ama, to ignore her. “No. Let her talk. Ya kwube. Let her spew her venom. See the kind of child you brought into my house? See? I fugo ya nu? In fact, open the windows so that our neighbors will hear. Let our agbataobi come and hear your child’s nons
ense.”
“Mother, you have to believe me,” Ama begged. “I’m not lying. He raped me. Eziokwu, Papa raped me.”
“Do not call me that. Do not call me Papa. I am not your father, you stupid lying girl.” Each word, carefully enunciated, rolled out in claps of thunder.
“Not now, Brother Cyril. Please?” Ama’s mother was on the floor, kneeling, hands stretched out in front of her, palms outward: the same position she assumed when she prayed and called on her God to forgive her, a poor sinner. There was something deeply shaming in her posture, and Ama wanted to drag her up.
Brother Cyril laughed and unfolded himself from the chair he had been sitting on, waiting for his supper. He planted himself in front of Ama, his toes big and masculine, sneering at her from his leather sandals. “I am not your father. You hear that? I took in your mother, and this is all the thanks I get. All the thanks I get for saving you from being a bastard. All the years I raised you, fed you, this is all the thanks I get. You know what happens to children without fathers? Children who are born at home? Father unknown. Ime mkpuke. I want you out of my house. I want you out. Tata. Today! As God is my witness, you shall leave my house today!”
“Whatever your problems are, bring them to the Lord today. Hallelujah!”
“Amen,” the bus chorused.
Ama, lost in thought, was momentarily dragged back to her present. She had never been to Lagos. How would she survive there? It was the only place her mother had thought of sending her. It was far enough away from Enugu and the people they knew. Ama wondered how they would explain her absence to everyone. Would her mother tell them she had gotten a job in a different city? Gained admission into a university? What? She could not believe that the circumstances surrounding her birth had been kept a secret from her all these years. How could they have done that? She had a father she knew nothing about. Last night she had felt relieved that Brother Cyril was not her real father. When she thought of it now, she felt gratitude, a thankful relief that her father was a better man than Brother Cyril. He had to be. She willed it. But the relief was short-lived. It was soon replaced by the nagging question of who her real father was. What did he look like? Where was he? What was his name? How tall was he? How short? Did he have a beard? A mustache? Did she have another family? Brothers? Sisters? What did they look like? Did they know about her? Questions grew wings and flew around in her head, knocking against her skull so that she soon developed a headache. She rubbed her temple. In an instant her life had crumbled. Her solid life had disintegrated, and she no longer knew who she was. It was like being thrown out of a cage only to land on a bed of thorns. She could not decide which was better, the claustrophobic cage or the scratchy thorns. At least, she thought after a while, she could get up from the thorns and walk away. Her thoughts returned often to her father, her biological father. It was impossible for her to imagine that her mother had ever been with someone else. That her mother, quiet and obedient, a Christian man’s wife, had actually had sex outside of marriage!