My mother, on the other hand, had managed to transform our blatant portrayal of dysfunction into an exhibit of melancholic splendor that ignited curiosity in our gossiping neighbors, something akin to Nicolas Poussin’s representation of the great flood and Noah’s Ark in The Four Seasons. She still wrote her weekly column for the newspaper, but she had also begun putting her doctorate to use by lecturing at the University of Lagos. My mother had quickly become the go-to person for my needs. But she made sure I had my father’s endorsement for anything at all, and she would give him the money to pay for any expense before we left the house. So as in Poussin’s Deluge, the tragedy of the portrait was held at the fore while the scene’s ark of salvation was modestly concealed in the background.
However, the day I was released from prison, the leviathan in my father, which had been subdued as I grew out of childhood, reared its head again. Pastor’s church had matured into a large congregation over the last few years, and the inspector in charge of our case was a devout member. He had contacted certain members of the church as soon as he became aware of Pastor’s son’s involvement in the altercation, and by midday Pastor had bailed us all out. But Pastor could not prevent the gist from floating from the mouth of one church member to another, and then one church member to a non–church member, until my father had heard of it before sunset of the same day! He had stepped out of the house for an hour to read newspapers at the junction, and when he returned, he was a transformed man. The pulsing veins on his balding head did little to tone down his menace, and his oversize shirts extending over his belt and cuffs by a few inches did justice to his hooligan tendencies of the moment. When he spoke, his voice thundered off the four corners of the house.
“Araruola! Abomination!” he shouted, clapping to each word he spoke. “Is this how your mother trained you? To sniff hard drugs, okwia? Is this why I paid for you to go to expensive schools? So you can become a prisoner, okwia? The son of a dog is a dog, and the son of a cow is a cow; your mother and I are not hoodlums, so Ihechi, whose son are you? I will kill you in this house, oh, you cannot set a trap with a chicken and expect a goat to show up.”
He barked rhetorical questions, the pitch of his voice fluctuating as his insults became an incomprehensible psychobabble amid drops of spit jetting out of his mouth. My heartbeat set off mimicking the percussions of a talking drum and my vision spun around like a white-draped masquerade at the Eyo festival. A firm conviction had arrested my heart that the end of the world, as taught to me by the good Christian teachers of my primary school, was upon my deviant soul and my father, the Antichrist sent by the devil himself, was the apocalypse made flesh to dole out retribution. The one-man army of the apocalypse laid siege on my body, raining down blows, kicks, and his metal belt buckle.
My mother came in just as I began tasting the blood between my teeth and scurried me off to the embrace of my bed. The loud voices, his and hers, that spurted through the crevices in the door kept me awake all night. By the time I woke the next morning, my father had already left the house, so I prepared bathwater and breakfast for just my mother. My father did not return home, not that day and not ever again. Every night as she waited for him, my mother locked herself up in her studio and made divinations to the òrisà.
I never really talked about the happenings of my house with Mendaus and Zeenat, but doing so was inevitable after the bruises my father had left on me.
“You know, if this was in America, you could report him to the police. He would have to pay you or the government would give you new parents. This country is so backward,” Zeenat said.
“I’m not sure you’d get money or new parents in America,” Mendaus added. “But I’m sure if you tried reporting in Nigeria, the police would lock you up in prison.”
“Which is why you got beaten in the first place, abi?” said Zeenat as she passed on the joint she was smoking to Mendaus.
But I was not in the mood for either the buzz or the banter. “It’s really not funny,” I said, trying to conceal the sobs that made my voice croak. “I saw him in my sleep the other night. It was nothing terrible, but seeing him in my sleep is creepy.”
“Well, you’re one lucky bastard,” Mendaus replied. “My father has been dead for about seventeen years and hasn’t bothered to show up once in my dreams. And look at you—your ol’ man isn’t even dead, and he’s showing up in your dreams already.”
“It’s not funny.”
“Not funny? So it’s not okay for us to throw jabs at you, but it’s okay when your ol’ man knocks you out?” Zeenat retorted between giggles.
“Forget about my father. The issue is that I messed up. We messed up. And it rubs off on our families. If you’re so smart, why is that so difficult for you to understand? Some of us have parents who hold us responsible for what we do!” I regretted the words as soon as they’d left my mouth. Zeenat stared at me, jaw ajar. I stared at Mendaus, and he stared into space.
“I am not a child of a happy family,” he said finally, smiling and appearing to have little or no consideration for my outburst. “I was brought up by books and stories, not hugs and kisses. I might not be able to offer you candor, but my friend, I can offer you truth: Your free will is not an entitlement; it’s the spoils of war. Just as you suck out the buzz from these blunts, you have to force out your free will from the hands you were born into. And if you take too long, the flames of your aspirations will crumble into ashes of regret.” He stood up, buttoning his shirt, and on his way out of the room, he added, “Ponder upon that for a minute. I have an appointment with Atonye, and it will be really shitty if my buzz wears off before I get over to her place.”
The room was dim and silent after he left. Zeenat came close and tried to put her arm around me, but her elbow brushed a bruise. I winced, and she withdrew immediately.
“I’m really sorry about your father,” she said.
“It’s not your fault. We were all in jail together.”
“You’ve never kissed me before, Ihechi,” she observed. My muscles stiffened, and the rate of my heartbeat quickened. “Why not?” she asked.
“What movies have you been watching lately, Zee?”
“That’s not the point. Ihechi, do you still like me?”
“Why are you even asking all these questions?”
“Why? Because Mendaus and Atonye like each other, and they do these things all the time. And they just met a few weeks ago. I know you did all these things with a few girls in secondary school. I hear you and Mendaus whisper. I just want to know why you’ve never tried it with me.”
I could not tell her that all of the things I had told Mendaus were either lies or exaggerations, I could not tell her how shy I was despite how long we had known each other, and most of all I could not bring myself to tell her how much I wanted it.
I replied, “I still like you very much, Zeenat.” I looked away. I did not see the reaction on her face, but I heard her get up to turn on the television. She slipped a video into the system and returned to the couch, where we sat a bit closer, with her leaning slightly in to me. In a few seconds, the television announced in black and white:
A Mercury Production by Orson Welles
CITIZEN KANE
The pictures translated from a wire fence to a lofty steel gate and then a magnificent mammoth of a building with several towers starting at different heights but all desperately stretching to bridge earth and heaven. My eyes were just as unstable, oscillating between the television screen and Zeenat.
I remembered Mendaus’s final urging before he left the room: “Your free will is not an entitlement; it’s the spoils of war.” I shifted my arm to rest just along her shoulder, and in that instant, she slouched in the chair and nestled closer to me. The narrator in the movie had begun telling a tale of irrelevancies as I slouched into the cradle of the chair. Her face was right beside mine. She turned toward me and I could feel her breath on my skin. Testosterone flooded my veins and my groin bulged at the zipper of my trousers
.
The rest of Mendaus’s urging echoed in my head: “And if you take too long, the flames of your aspirations will crumble into ashes of regret.” I closed my eyes and plunged toward her lips. She relaxed deeper into the cradle of the couch and pulled me in, guiding my hands into her blouse. As we kissed, touched, and writhed, an obstinate legion of spirits tugged at the cornerstone of my sanity, blowing aggressive trumpet tunes and banging on drums in declaration of war on my peace of mind. The lyrics of these war songs resembled the very words of Ludwig van Beethoven to his estranged spouse in his collection of letters, Think of Me Kindly. The steps of the war dances mimicked the vain motions of Paris in the battle for the hand of Helen in the film Troy. The fast-paced drumbeats took after the accelerated heartbeat of a virgin bride on her wedding night. The aggressive trumpet blasts were like the cries of Jesus Christ as he died for the world on Cavalry’s cross.
Love is a force of passion, and like all other forces, it is neither created nor destroyed; it only changes from one form to another. The overloaded passion that Zeenat and I shared that day must have been sourced from my house, because over the following days, the force of passion that held my family together appeared to dissipate completely. My father’s presence was sparse, and whenever he did manage to come around, he reeked of alcohol; in the manner of King Midas, all he touched was reborn as a symbol of filth. He brought a brutal silence with him. Brutal in the way it isolated each member of the family, as if daring and goading any one of us to make any ridiculous statement and risk being smitten. My father was the only one who spoke at ease, and when he did, everyone shuddered. Not at his words, because he was barely ever audible, but at the ferocious pulsation of his hands and the undulating tone of his voice when he spoke. Sometimes he would break away during meals into conversations with thin air.
“Nno nwoke m!” he would always begin, welcoming his imaginary friend and proceeding to offer him a portion of his meal, “bia n’anu nri.” His voice would trail off and then, from the ignominy of the brutal silence, burst out harshly: “O di egwu! You are a fool! I nugo! Did I not warn you? How many times did I—” Then my mother would reach out to him to calm him down. Other times, while going about his business in the house, he would suddenly start singing, in a recklessly hoarse tone, songs that little boys always sing: “Nzogbu nzogbu enyimba, enyi . . . enyimba, enyi.” Eventually, he would burst out again, “Fool! Lekwa! Look at what you’ve done. Didn’t I warn you?”
I had never seen my father experience such severe loss of composure. But his problem was now our problem. We were one family, each of us a different color that together formed a single portrait. As in all portraits, each individual color affected the perception of the others. Taking a lighthearted tone might have reinforced his doubts that we were not taking him seriously enough, while a darker shade of behavior probably would have intensified his frustrations. We helped him bear his cross with the only tool we had: the gray of silence.
“You know your father. All he was ever good at was expressing disappointment,” she told me when we were alone at home during one of those days. “It’s not so bad to see him mumble about other things nowadays.” Her gaze darted around the room just like mine would whenever I was struggling to keep my emotions in check. I moved closer to her and gave her a half embrace, just as she would whenever she noticed I was struggling to keep my emotions in check.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. But then I corrected myself after a few seconds: “It’ll be okay.”
“You know your father loves you, abi?” she continued.
“Mummy, saying all these things out loud wouldn’t make them true.”
“Don’t ever think like that, Ihechi.” Her eyes had regained focus and now they were fixed on me. “Dark clouds come into our lives. We do our best, but they don’t go away. At times like that, we should remind ourselves, no matter how dark and heavy the clouds are, no matter how they cover the sun and prevent us from seeing it, the sun is still there, shining as brightly as if there were no cloud there.”
We spent the next afternoon in the studio, our skin marked in white spots, our bodies robed in scarlet and bent toward our little altar, making pleas to the òrisà. She began reciting verses from the Odu of Ifá; they were words she had taught me many years ago, just after my initiation. It told of how Ifá said the faithful would receive blessings of joy, joy springing forth from provision and provision in excess. It told of how the faithful’s recent experiences had been a labyrinth of intersecting paths of fortune and misfortune causing the faithful to lose hope and now question opening the door of his life to anything new, even though it was now joy and not despair knocking. I spoke the words with my mother, but I could not generate the same conviction that resonated through her every word. To me the words were religious, but to her, they were spiritual.
I understood my mother’s convictions, but with each divination we made, it became clearer to me that it was her conviction alone and not mine. I understood Ifá was the way of her fathers and those before them, that the traditional religions were very much bullied by Christianity and Islam. I understood that other people now had no regard for the gods of their fathers. But these people had no obligation to worship certain gods because their fathers did, just as they had no obligation to wear bubba and sokoto instead of shirts and jeans, and neither did I. I had every obligation to conform to whatever allayed the distempers of my soul, because ultimately, it is people who define culture and not the other way around. But I could not bring myself to express my convictions aloud and unashamedly, as my mother did.
She began making the sacrifices, by far the largest I had ever seen. Pigeons and hens, a catfish, and a rat were laid on the altar, all doused in palm oil. I did finally remember one of my mother’s convictions that I shared: “In the end all a man has is his god and his dreams.” I looked at the way her life was set up and knew that if her words were right, then there was a problem with either the dreams she pursued or the god she chose. I was determined to make better choices.
Mendaus’s parents were in town for a while, and both my parents were out for most of the day, so we shifted the location of our afternoon loafing to my house. It was the first time we’d all been under the same roof since the police prison cell sheltered us for a night. Even Atonye was around. She demanded we give her the gist of that night, since Mendaus had been hoarding the tale from her, hoping to barter it for an under-the-sheets favor.
“What about Fela Anikulapo Kuti?” she asked, sitting up from her slouched position beside Mendaus on the chair my parents usually occupied.
“I just always assumed that guy was a basket full of booze and smoke,” Pastor’s son replied from the other side of the room, at the table where I had dinner and observed my parents from.
“I thought he’d be much taller and built . . .” Zeenat said.
“. . . just like me, abi?” I added. She made some sort of sarcastic exclamation and leaned in to me before withdrawing herself again.
“That guy knows his stuff,” Mendaus said, finally agreeing to open up. “He quoted Adam Smith like it was his wife’s birthday wish list.”
“Well, if I had all the dancers on that stage, having a wife would be the last thing on my wish list,” said Pastor’s son. Everybody paused to stare at him, and then we all burst out in laughter.
“You know, we could do it all over again,” Mendaus started again. “Atonye says Fela performs live every Thursday, but this week is even going to be bigger because they’re celebrating the release of his brother Beko and those other guys, Fawehinmi and Falana and the rest, from military detention.”
“The old pastor hasn’t even recovered from that other night,” replied Pastor’s son. “My mum said he was saying his morning prayers when the news got to him. When he heard I was in prison, he choked on his Holy Communion.”
“It’s just my father I have to worry about,” I added. “We really have to pray he makes it home drunker than I do that night, if he makes it
home at all.”
“Atonye, what about you?” Zeenat inquired. “Your parents won’t mind your being gone with the wind till after midnight?”
Mendaus tried to mumble out an answer on her behalf, but his thoughts staggered and fell too many times till she eventually rescued her rescuer. “My mum used to dance for Fela around the time he first started. The last time I let her know I was going to be chilling there, she had me handing out notes to her old friends like a postman around the whole bloody place.”
Zeenat stood up and asked for the bathroom, breaking the awkward silence, and I pointed her in the direction of the corridors and doorways she would have to navigate. Our eyes stayed fixed on each other as she walked away, and even when she left the room, my thoughts escorted her. I could hear Atonye say something in the background, something about garden eggs and gin, and the other boys started laughing again. I looked around and saw Atonye trying to stifle her giggles and maintain her composure as she prepared to say something else. Mendaus was already teary in the corners of his glasses, while Pastor’s son had cackled his breath away and was now wheezing animatedly. For that brief portion of time, I knew we were victorious over all of life’s tribulations. For that moment in my living room, we had paid no regard to rolling the dice of fate; instead, we had tossed the game board into the air and sent the little totems hurtling into the face of our fears. For that while, no spirit from our torrid pasts, reckless presents, or uncertain futures could stand unbowed before us, because we had found happiness in each other.
A loud, guttural scream echoed around the house. We all fled in the direction I had pointed Zeenat. But even before we got to the bathroom, I saw her standing in the corridor, in front of the wrong door, and I understood. The same fear that had possessed her a few seconds ago arrested my will and brought me to a standstill as the others ran past me to meet up with Zeenat. They, too, on getting to the door, stood in shock as they looked through the doorway of my mother’s studio: the scarlet drapes and the decorated altar, the craven images of the òrisà, and the sacrifices my mother and I had offered to them the day before. As if still being orchestrated by that same screaming fear, they all turned to stare at me inquisitively at the same time, except Zeenat, who started throwing up.
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