Prince of Monkeys

by Nnamdi Ehirim

  Phantasmagoric scenes of Zeenat being trampled into a roadside gutter, Mendaus and Pastor’s son scurrying among the human avalanche to escape the burning Shrine, and my mother’s manic threats played through my head as I slept. Their voices echoed in my conscience, growing louder as I moved farther away, and their surreal arms strangled the air from my lungs as I tried to escape the torture of the dream, writhing in the dirt and sweat of the sweltering bus.

  Not often enough, I was awakened by a barrage of knocks and backhanded jabs that would have been nothing short of bloody murder save for the glass windowpane between my assailants and me. My would-be assailants were children, of an age more suitable for classrooms than interstate highways, hawking cassava sleeves with coconut, banana bunches with groundnuts, oranges, and bread of all colors and sizes.

  By sunset, the transition of scenery at the start of the journey had begun to reverse, till we eventually arrived in Enugu. My uncle Adolphus was already waiting at the bus station; he seemed to recognize me as soon as I dropped down from the stairs of the vehicle. He had my father’s face, which, in a way, was my face. But his was neither as clear and calm as mine nor as bruised and bitter as my father’s; his was wrinkled and worn, yet it brimmed with life. And, of course, you couldn’t help noticing his big, round belly. On that day, he was profoundly immersed in a short-sleeve suit, looking set to occupy my just vacated seat on its return journey and take Lagos by storm.

  “Ihechi, yes?” he asked, placing a heavy right hand on my shoulder.

  “Yes, sir. Good evening, Uncle Adolphus.”

  “Hian! That’s not me,” he sneered. “I am Adol, Uncle Adol. It is those who were born yesterday or those who are going to die tomorrow that you call by their full name.”

  “Yes, sir. Good evening, Uncle Adol,” I corrected.

  His frown somersaulted. “Your mother says there’s nothing but a sack of sawdust between those ears,” he declared in a thick accent quite unfamiliar to me. “Is your mother a liar?”

  “No, sir. No, Uncle Adol.” I had found my huge box among the disembarked luggage and was now following his lead to his parked car.

  He stopped and turned to me; his frown had returned. “No to your sawdust or no to your mother?”

  It was a no-win question, so I chose the safer defeat. “No to my mother, sir, my mother is not a liar.”

  “Oh, you’re a failure! I’m sure your mother is a liar. Trust me, I knew her before you. At least now I know you’re a liar, too. A hen cannot lay guinea fowl eggs, after all.” He was smiling once again; it was difficult for me to keep up. “Or should I blame your failure on your sawdust?”

  From that moment, I decided the only safe choice for his no-win questions was no choice at all. Throughout the car ride to his place, he pointed at different buildings, speaking of them with a staunch surety that I had read about them in books or magazines in Lagos; Sunshine Guest House, the old government house, Polo Park.

  As we drew closer to the house, he spoke more of its majesty. The house had originally belonged to my grandfather. It was my grandfather’s prized possession partly because he was the first person from the Igbokwe clan to acquire a house in the then-blooming town of Enugu, but also partly because it was his only possession of any actual value. When my great-grandfather died, my grandfather sold off his inheritance, which was an enormous acreage of land, as soon as the burial rites were over, and married his teenage sweetheart before migrating from the rural life of Udi to partake in the urbanization of the state capital powered by the coal boom. But since his parameters for success were outlined by the shortsightedness of his rural upbringing, the pinnacle of his luxury was a nightly gourd of palm wine and a nose full of nicotine. My father, Cletus, was the second fruit of the newlywed couple’s youthful exuberance, coming only eleven months after the first boy, Adolphus. It was shortly after Adolphus’s birth that they moved into the great house.

  But alas! My grandfather apparently shared his miserly parameters for success with his sons. I had observed that my father proffered many apologies and yet few solutions. He had definitely inherited that trait from his father, because my uncle had greatly exaggerated: The house was an apology of a shelter, the perfect illustration of my observation. Its mud brick walls were the physical manifestation of the fallen legacy of the British colonial era from whence it originated. Its cubic frame was fashionably misplaced in time, and it stuck out of the wide expanse of dusty ground like a lone piece of meat in a barren pot of soup.

  My uncle circled the anthill in front of the house and managed to fit his Volvo in the little space between the anthill and the house. A woman came through the doorway and descended the stairs, which seemed a more recent part of the building and accommodated the devilish slope carved out by some form of erosion. She helped my uncle’s door open and kissed him on his cheek: my aunt, I assumed. She was taller and heftier than he was, yet she eased into his arms as hot omelets would ease into a fresh loaf of bread. It would take me some time to get used to her toothy smile, but eventually, it would become my fondest memory of her. Two more people appeared at the doorway: One came closer, but not as close as my aunt, while the other stayed fastened to the doorpost like a hinge.

  “Eh, Ihechi, this is your aunt Kosiso,” my uncle announced as if her mere presence was a trophy being awarded to me, “and eh, these are your cousins, Thessalonians and Ephesians—that is, if your mother ever mentioned them to you.”

  My mother had actually spoken of my cousins quite often. She would always ask my father who had just finished which level of school, and who was writing which exam, and who was receiving which government scholarship, and then she would relay the information to me with the confidence of the newscasters on the network news, as if the òrisà required her declaration to permit these events to come to pass. But she had always spoken of my cousins Tessy and Effy, never of Thessalonians and Ephesians.

  “Nnọ, oh. Welcome,” Aunt Kosiso said, “oya, Tessy, come and help your brother with his load.”

  Tessy was the one who had been standing at the summit of the steps. She waited for me to lug my box up the stairs before sharing the weight, while Effy was still role-playing the door hinge; her eyes remained fixed on me as I walked past. She looked a few years younger than Tessy, who was probably around my age.

  The sun set after it confirmed we were all safely indoors. When I returned from a shower, Aunt Kosiso had served out a feast of eba and ofe nsala. Everyone was invited to eat in the parlor and even washed hands in the same bowl, unlike my house in Lagos. There was a television in the middle of a collage of framed family photographs on the wall, but we watched a foreign show that had English subtitles, not the network news, even when nine o’clock arrived. Uncle Adol would laugh till he choked and then beat his chest furiously. Aunt Kosiso would scurry across the room to lift his cup of water, which was right in front of him, to his lips. Tessy would laugh as loud as her father, though not as deep-toned. And Effy only smiled occasionally. They all had audaciously chiseled bodies and moved around the house half-naked, draped in loose ankara wrappers. And though I fell asleep for the first time in Enugu among mere men, I perceived, within my dreams, myself floating with higher powers. The Igbo language they spoke was familiar but indiscernible, their bold and everlasting laughter pulled at the seam of the four corners of the house, the majesty of their poise in action was seemingly rehearsed, and they constantly acknowledged the unquestionable superior among them all—the father, to whom homage was paid in all speech and deed.

  My mother had not told me how long the dream was going to last—it could be a month, a year, or whenever I became old enough to be responsible for all of my choices. I just wanted the dream to fast-forward through its scenes and hurry me to the end, like the phases of a trance, so I could be woken up at the end, when I could return to Lagos and rummage around for Zeenat through the carnage of the riot, feel for her through the gyration of the Shrine faithful who would surely gather again when the mourning and
protests were over, seek her among the faces of the millions of strangers in Lagos, taking solace in every unseen face as each upheld an extra probability of Zeenat being alive, to the very end, where I could share smoke and once-in-a-lifetime cocktails achieved by trial and error with Mendaus and hoist him up on my shoulders when he got fired up, so the whole room could watch him declare the injustices of a generation of Nigerian leaders, while Pastor’s son echoed the final word of his every sentence in drunken passion. But that night I nestled into a comfy sleep because I knew that despite my desperation, there was no way the dream would end on the other side of midnight.

  Every man had to love peppered snails. A little boy may be pardoned, but for a Nigerian man of full growth, justified by the drop of his pockets as much as the dropping of his testicles, an endearment to peppered snails is a scientific constant, just like the speed of light, and if I was expecting anything near to a tangible inheritance, I could have sworn by it all that my thought would soon be backed up by some kind of biological research. I had made brisk acquaintance of all pepper matters during my visits to the Shrine: Alcohol and pepper were hand in glove.

  I hated the fact that there was a crowd around my table, and a hungry lot at that, so I stole away with my plate of peppered snails and watched from the corner of the hall as people danced to no music at all. The faces were blurry, and all but the location seemed vaguely familiar. No Mendaus and no Pastor’s son in sight, but then again, I suspected it was the peppered snails playing tricks with my mind.

  I clenched a fat piece of the rubbery flesh between the hinges of my jaw and tugged fiercely, all to no avail. The pepper remained rigid, chiseling away the caves of my molars instead of dissolving into the saliva, and the snail itself was throwing musty knockout jabs at my nose.

  My eyelids bolted open, and I spat Effy’s big toe out of my mouth, cursing through the viscous drool. I had spent five days in Enugu and had suffered one dream or another every single night. There was a power outage again, and the bedsheet was damp with sweat, which would add another layer of tint to the brownish-white color of the sheets by morning. I adjusted my sleeping position so our heads and feet aligned each with the other, and then my mind tried to clasp on the images of my dream before it diffused into obscurity.

  I was not certain if it was because of the pepper from my dreams or some other machination of my past, but the very moment I caught up with fleeting sleep, I heard whispers by the window. My head bobbled around in the darkness, and that continued even as I opened my eyes and struggled for focus. Before I could pinch myself, Tessy had risen up from the bed we all shared and unlocked the window latch to let in what looked like a girl. I could not believe anyone had the boldness to climb through windows in the dead of the night. Such possibilities were confined to the crazy people in Zeenat’s movies. I refused to believe windows existed without burglary-proof steel bars in the death trap that is the Nigerian night. But of all the possibilities I refused to believe, none compared to the ugliness of the girl Tessy had let into the room as I flicked on my torch in her direction. Bidding good morrow to lies and deception, she was by far the most unattractive girl I had seen in a while. Her disproportionate eyes bulged so much they were almost falling out of her head, which sat atop the broadest of torsos tapering down to the narrowest of hips. She seemed to have accepted the verdict of nature’s condemnation, as she’d made only a haphazard attempt at looking presentable in her body-hugging red dress.

  “Idebe ya, keep it,” said Tessy in a hushed scold, “ọsọ ọsọ.” I turned off the torch quickly and withdrew into the corner.

  “Is that the Lagos bobo?” asked the stranger.

  Tessy nodded, and they both giggled. Tessy untied her wrapper and began replacing it with a black dress the stranger removed from her back.

  “Don’t you know better than to look at a girl’s nakedness?” Tessy asked, her voice still hushed but not as harsh, more tease than scold. I flushed with shame and lay back on the bed.

  “He’s a Lagos bobo,” added the stranger. “He’s probably seen it all before.”

  I had not seen it all before. I had not seen it before or after Zeenat. And the thought of Zeenat had me wrought with collywobbles. The girls tugged and pinned their dresses into a perfect fit and then painted and patted at their faces as they giggled some more. Slowly but surely, Tessy transformed from mgbeke to ọmalicha, local girl to fair lady. No word seemed worth the effort; she was finer than my finest compliments. And without a word from anyone else in the room, Tessy opened the window again, and they both went out just as the stranger had come in.

  As she had every day since I arrived, Aunt Kosiso came in to wake us up just before daybreak. My eyes were smoky, so I rubbed them with my hands. As things got clearer, I saw Tessy yawn and stretch in her night wrapper, and when Aunt Kosiso left the room, she brought out two fifty-naira notes from the fold of her wrapper and squeezed them into my palm. That was the first bribe I ever received in my life.

  The old house, which still felt very much new to me even after I had been there almost a year, gave me new memories of old feelings I had not experienced in a long time—as far back as primary school, before my father lost his job and his spirit broke like a calabash, before my mother’s fervent attempts to soak up his hopes and happiness lest the earth dry him out and he return to dust, before my mother became so fixated on lifting him up that she was unaware how much her tensed grip strangled me. I did not have to proofread my thoughts before replying to questions in this old house because they communicated with words, not silent grudges and sudden bursts of aggression. Uncle Adol adamantly corrected me into calling it my home whenever I referred to it as his house. Tessy, on the other hand, suggested that I call it my house, since the house was going to be passed down the Igbokwe bloodline somehow, and Uncle Adol had no sons. Aunt Kosi did not have opinions on such issues. She would rather pun on the idea that I preferred to use water to clean my buttocks instead of toilet paper and call me into the living room when her friends visited so she could have them ooh and aaah as I habitually pressed my forefinger to the ground to greet them in the Yoruba way.

  The Yoruba greeting was the least obnoxious takeaway my mother had sent with me to Enugu—there were the òrisà figurines she had sneaked into my travel bags. I had always despised the way she and my father carelessly shunned my opinion and casually forced their opinions on me. But I had taken after them, slowly growing into exactly what I always despised, in the manner by which I casually shunned my mother’s figurines and her opinions on spirituality. And even though I had not formed a complete opinion on spirituality, I knew enough to know what I did not want, part of which was Ifá. Neither did I subscribe to bastardized versions of other foreign religions that exploited our diversity. Classism and tribalism were peddled with subliminal subtlety underneath the religious propaganda. And more than anything else, religion served as a hallucinogen for the poor and desperate who needed an excuse to live, hoping one day they would find solace in the realization of their dreams, and for the lazy who needed an excuse not to work hard, hoping some figment of their imagination fashioned of the supernatural sort would miraculously make an interrealm deposit into their purses. And for the dishonorable who had been caught in the act, hoping mercy would prevail against the thought of their bodies swinging loose and lifeless from the prison yard’s mango tree. Religion was not for people like me, who were really just trying to find God.

  I had witnessed people around me pursue different gods to different ends, and I had come to understand the kind of relationship I would want with my God, even though I had not found Him yet. I wanted to have the devotion of a Muslim: to awake with fervor by five every morning to whisper my loyalty to my God and at least four other times in the day without my spirit ever getting weary of it. I wanted to feel as inclusively as a Christian: to love those who agreed with me as much as those who disagreed, to love selflessly, which is to live above greed. To love enemies as mercifully as friends, never
believing I was the hand of God to mete out judgment on His behalf, and even if the hand of God fell off by whatever incidence, I would not be a worthy replacement. I wanted to communicate as personally as an Ifá faithful: not strictly adhering to the black and white of religious diktats, but being aligned with the spirit of my God, hearing His whispers in the sway of trees, the colors of the sky, and the patterns of cowries, just as He heard the whispers in the groans of my heart, the worries of my mind, and the madness of my methods. There were more things I thought I wanted, more I thought I needed, and even more I was sure I could do without, of which the first was following a religion simply out of pity. I buried my mother’s figurines at the bottom of my box. And when Effy came across them in an episode of mischief, I denied their original purpose with the calm shrug of a man who would deny having anything more than a platonic relationship with a woman who seemed underwhelming to his friends.

  Still, I treaded carefully. Effy’s episodes of mischief were never standalone incidents, always occurring in a series until she was thwarted by Aunt Kosi, who was as clever as a Baudelaire orphan. I had already heard of the infamous affair when Effy soaked the bottom of her school uniform in red palm oil, claiming she’d menstruated for the first time in class and was having cramps. Aunt Kosi allowed her to stay home from school for a whole week. The hoax was uncovered when she claimed to be menstruating barely two weeks later, and Aunt Kosi discovered she had learned about puberty in integrated science class and was exploiting the perks of her newfound knowledge. The week I arrived, Effy had stolen a few pieces of meat from the pot and insisted that she never would have done it if not for the voice of the Holy Spirit that had urged her on. Knowing that Uncle Adol would never tolerate any brutality on his children, Aunt Kosi had mastered the art of sneaking into her children’s room in the dead of the night to enforce discipline, and the night Effy stole meat from the pot was not a shade different. Aunt Kosi huffed and puffed and slapped and knocked, and Effy cried quietly, mucus hanging from the cliff of her philtrum and threatening to skydive every time her body quaked in sorrow. Neither Tessy nor I dared to make a sound.