Prince of Monkeys

by Nnamdi Ehirim

  Now my whole face was dread-ridden, and she had the Rhett Butler half-smile on. But while I stayed up with Tessy discussing tapes produced by Lemmy Jackson, I heard Effy plead the blood of Jesus about a million times in her sleep.

  The one thing all Nigerians have in common, regardless of how disparate in culture or location, is religious fervor. There were already hundreds of traditional deities even before the advent of Christianity and Islam, and those two still caught like smoke on cloth and were further tinkered with to create hundreds of other appropriations of faith. So I was not surprised that on Sunday mornings, the whole household took turns ironing the best from the bottom of their clothing boxes.

  “Do you really believe in God?” I asked Effy as she fitted her dress in the mirror; she was barely four feet high, but she twirled every inch of it to dispel any myth that perfection was unachievable. “That out of the billions of people in this world, He chose you to carry out a heavenly plan that could change life as we know it?”

  “Ehn, I do believe in God. As a matter of fact, I think he chose every one of us in this world to execute some heavenly plan that could change life as we know it.”

  “No wonder nothing ever gets done in this Nigeria—we non-citizens of heaven procrastinate too much. Maybe heaven should get busy and stop depending on us to carry out their monkey business.”

  “You need Jesus!” Effy cried, her voice sounded like a puppy yet to be weaned. “I know you probably don’t believe in blasphemy, but I do, so shush. A proper Holy Ghost baptism service would straighten you out.”

  Initially, I thought it was just sarcasm, but by the time the clock struck ten that morning, we were immersed in the desperate congregation, as only desperate people found God. I seemed to be getting a bit desperate myself, but not for God. I was desperate to be back in Lagos, to discuss vanities amid Afrobeat vibes and smoke with Mendaus and Pastor’s son. I wanted Zeenat to exist in her entire person and not in my memories of her voice and laughter, or as skin crawling along my back and up my thigh in the lonely darkness of night. But chickens had not grown horns yet, and goats were not flying, so in church I was, a firebrand Pentecostal church which was just as out of place as a mosque would be in the predominantly Catholic Enugu.

  We had come in together, but Tessy and Effy dropped into the pews in the back, and I followed suit as their parents went farther down the aisle to seek the unadulterated wholesome church experience. The choir’s spirited ministration was still in procession, with occasional spittle-filled interjection from the preacher at the pulpit. And whether you paid attention to the lyrics or not, it was almost compulsory to bob from side to side in a two-move pendulum step just to keep up with the tempo of life in the room. Everything remaining still was inanimate. The violins and pipes could not be seen through the sea of raised hands, but their sounds bounced around the hall.

  “Heaven speaks of your glory!” interjected the preacher, and the choir responded with a loud hum. “And the earth of your beauty!” he continued. “If I dance, it won’t be enough! If I shout, it won’t be enough!” The choir responded with a louder hum, and the congregation joined in this time. I looked at all the manifestations of absurdities around me—the man waltzing to the tune up and down the central aisle, hand in hand with thin air, the woman behind him rotating on a spot at no definite pace and making all sorts of guttural sounds, the elderly lady laying facedown on the floor, speaking into the terrazzo.

  “You are the great and mighty God!” interjected the preacher. “You are worthy to be praised, faithful in all situations!” The choir hummed louder. “The joy of the whole world!” I caught a glance of Effy kneeling before the altar, the single stream of tears on her face reflecting the bright lights from the front of the hall.

  Suddenly, the lead guitarist ripped away from the pendulum pace, and all other instruments faded into a supporting role as the raw sound of electric harmony shocked the congregation into a frenzy. My heart was heavy, acknowledging the presence of a higher power that my base knowledge of physics could not explain, and I felt guilty for not tendering enough consciousness to it.

  I fiddled my hands in my pockets, trying to regain my swagger, and felt a cigarette. Without a single thought, I fitted the cigarette in between my lips and made for the church exit. The sound of worship overshadowed my every step, quickening the pace of my heart, and just before I took a plunge into the sunlight outside, I turned back one more time, long enough to catch Effy’s teary face staring at me. I turned away from her, the church, that world, into one I was more familiar with. I pulled a lighter from the back pocket of my jeans as I walked onto the street and fingered the ignition for a bit, to no avail. I stopped midstride in frustration.

  “You’re shaking so much,” I heard from behind me. “Have you never been to church before, or have you never lit a cigarette before?” It was Tessy. She was standing just outside the church gates, right by the side of the road, where a blue sedan was parked; with her was the ugly friend from the window-scaling night. She waved at the blue sedan, and it drove off.

  “I light cigarettes every other day. It’s just that lately, my other days have been few and far between.” The lighter spat a blue flame in time to buttress my point. “I’ve just never been to this type of place.”

  “You complain when they have not even started,” the ugly friend said. “You know how to make moi moi okwia? The level they are at inside is the level of going to buy the beans. They are still going to wash the beans, grind the beans, and wrap the beans inside the leaf before even cooking the beans. So I really can’t understand where you are rushing to.” We all laughed out loud. When we quieted, I offered my smoke to the girls, but they both refused.

  “And both of you who are used to the moi moi, why are you not in there with the rest of them, buying and washing and grinding?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s hard to explain this in terms of moi moi.” It was Tessy talking again. Her voice was lazy, and as she spoke, her left palm floated around her face as if ushering the words out of her mouth. “But let me put it this way: They prepare theirs with chunks of beef mixed with the beans, and I’d rather have mine with chunks of boiled eggs. So at that point of disagreement, we part ways.”

  The ugly friend attempted to reiterate Tessy’s point. “I believe in God, I’ve seen too much to doubt His existence. For sure, He is not my best friend, but we talk every other day, as you would put it. Now, these men of God—apostles, prophets, evangelists, and all other names—a fair share of them have turned Christianity into a business. And since it’s easier to brainwash an audience with one soul and one common need than it is to diversify an audience from different backgrounds with different needs, they carve out a section of the audience and tailor their own gospel to that part of the audience with one need. So now one prophet carries most of the businessmen, because his God is the Jehovah who protects the containers of goods on the high seas, and another apostle carries most of the young people, because his God is the Jehovah who gives university admission and success in examinations. Every problem now has its own man of God ascribed to it. But the saddest part is that half the containers still sink at sea or get impounded by customs at the port, and half the students don’t get admission into universities. That’s not the God I know, and that’s not the God I’m looking for. I’m looking for the God who heals the sick, raises the dead, and answers when those who believe in Him call upon Him with faith.”

  “But if you know this God already, why are you still looking for him?” I asked.

  “It’s a paradox,” Tessy replied. “To know God and still search after Him. If you are searching for God, then it means you already know Him because He is the beginning of all things. He is the one who puts in us that desire to search Him out in the first place.” She added, “You know we didn’t always come to this church. Our fathers were born Catholics. The only reason we still attend this church is because his friend claimed he got a miracle job a month after he began coming here, and i
t worked for my father, too, even though his own miracle job took a year before it came around.”

  “I’m just tired of Christians blaming God and not themselves,” said the ugly friend, who seemed to have put together what was left of her serenity. “Wretchedness is creeping into all our lives, and we are singing and dancing. The church keeps breeding more millionaires to buy more vanities and fewer disciples to preach and pray.”

  “But you can’t make a faithful man out of a hungry man,” I said. “It doesn’t have to do with just religion. No matter what you tell a man or promise him or even put in his hands, if it doesn’t quench his hunger, he will still be forced to do whatever it takes to put food in his mouth before he goes to bed. Faith doesn’t feed a man.”

  “Yes, it does,” Tessy replied. “It just depends on where your faith lies.”

  The ash of my cigarette fell onto my fingers; I had not noticed it smolder away, since I had left it unromanced, and I made no efforts to blow it off. The spark Tessy had lit was burning in me hotter than anything on the surface could. My understanding of faith had been wrong for too long, but Tessy had finally gotten it right. It was not faith that fed a man but, rather, what kept him searching for that fruit tree in the wilderness. It was that urge in the wanderer to keep searching for the footpath through the steep valleys and the impetus in a drowning soul to keep his eyes fixed above the waves. It was not Mendaus’s faith in Nigeria that would change the lot of the people, but it was what gave him the courage to challenge the authority that fashioned the lot of the people. Just as there was no way Zeenat’s faith in me alone could have made me a better person, unless her faith acted in tandem with my desire to justify her love which her faith in me created. Faith in Ifá was not what gave my mother any victory but what kept her fighting, and the loss of faith in everything was what had knocked my father out of his own battles. I was more like my father than I would have been eager to admit; I had no faith in anything, I had no conviction, I was a fickle shrub with no roots holding me firm to anything, an impending tale of woe if perchance the wind of desolation crossed my path.

  I had never witnessed the manifestation of masculinity in such a real form until the day Uncle Adol bought a generator. He drove into the compound unannounced, with the machine bound to the Volvo, half out of the vehicle trunk like an erect penis peeping from its trap at the beginning of a porn flick. He strode out of the car as ego-pumped as a Mandingo. Not expecting to hear the hum of his engine so early in the afternoon, Aunt Kosi had rushed from the kitchen at the back of the house to the front veranda, past Tessy and me lazing in the living room, clutching only her wrapper to her chest. We caught up with her making her way down the front stairs, gaping awestruck at the equipment her husband was packing. After we unpacked it and turned it on, Uncle Adol’s chest puffed as if the loud roar of the generator were adulation, the solution to our every problem, as if its noise did not make us shout so we could be audible in conversations, as if the energy required to pull the ignition cord would not ordinarily sustain me for a year.

  Unlike Tessy and me, who got around more, Aunt Kosi had never seen a generator, only having heard testimonies from her braggadocio market-going mates. Now, understand she never put pressure on her husband to buy one, not necessarily because she was content or incapable of sufficient nagging but because a generator was one of those things you never needed until you had it. I mean, why would Aunt Kosi need to put on the generator so she could pick beans under a ceiling fan in the living room while watching television, when all her life she had been fine picking beans while listening to BBC broadcasts over the radio and sitting on the veranda in the evening breeze? It was simple: The luxury of ignorance catered to the absence of all other luxuries.

  Depending on whether you decide to recognize the glass of water as half full or half empty, you could also recognize that as ignorance is the greatest luxury, so is knowledge the greatest misery. It was this misery that appeared to plague Effy. Ever since the night I’d told her the true nature of the figurines, the night she had proved so unbothered by the consequences of her theft, she had become a fragile pile of nerves that crumbled into a trembling avalanche of tears and terror at any mention of the gruesome. When she was reading the abridged version of King Solomon’s Mines for her English class, she screwed up her face at any mention of Gagool’s magic, and if the pastor in church spoke about hell, she wept fire and brimstone.

  I had no clue her fear would drive her to get rid of the figurines. I did not notice when she bundled them up in a worn-out rag and threw them over the fence, and when I asked her why she was crying in the evening, tucked away in the bedroom while the rest of the family was watching television after dinner, she was not willing to confide that the figurines had somehow made their way back to the spot where she had hidden them before. I was not even aware when she left the compound the next day, going as far as the garbage dump three streets away to leave the figurines, and when I asked her why she was crying for a second consecutive evening, she hinted that she was having menstrual cramps. Not even Esu himself could have drawn my mind to think that she was crying because the figurines had found their way once again to the place where she had hidden them. And I never would have guessed she’d have the guts to douse the figurines in kerosene the next day and set them ablaze in the bush behind the fence. But when the figurines survived the fire and made their way back still, she cried to me, setting all of the truth free, so in turn, the truth could set her free.

  Acquiescing to her bidding, I followed her to the other side of the fence with a shovel in one last attempt to get rid of the figurines. She picked a hard area of the ground—the harder it was for the figurines to get in, the harder it would be for them to get out—and I dug while she urged. I was exhausted at one foot deep, but she was not satisfied till I got to two. I finally stopped three feet down, not because she insisted—the slightly burned parts of the figurines, which I had never seen before, cleared any doubts I had about the veracity of her claims. I had become as terrified as she was.

  Effy placed the figurines in the hole, keeping a steady gaze as I covered the hole with large fragments of caked sand and little pieces of coarse stone. And when we were done—me with my shoveling and Effy with her scrutinizing—we waited for a while.

  “You only told me about the one with the beads and wide smile who used his cap to destroy a whole town,” Effy said as we were stripping the leaves off branches of the tree under which we had found shade, almost daring the figurines to unearth themselves and fall under the wrath of our fear. The sun was pitilessly low, as if stooping to pay particular attention to our plight. “You never told me about the other figurine.”

  I remembered the carving of Yemoja, not the one that had been buried in the hole but its lookalike, albeit larger, that had sat in my mother’s shrine from as far back as my memory served: the double-tailed mermaid, a tail held in each hand, with long thick locks that ran from her head into the hollow of her back and over her breasts to clothe her in the immaculate way that tears clothed sorrow. I could feel my mother speak through me as I explained the mother òrisà. “Yemoja—queen of all mothers and protector of all children, calm as the tides but furious as the sea storm, she alone is the womb of the world.”

  Effy looked straight at me, unsatisfied. “But what’s her story? The way Esu has his double-colored cap—how does she destroy people?”

  “Not all òrisà destroy people, Effy.”

  “So why did we bury her with Esu? I thought they were both evil.”

  “They’re not both evil. Even Esu alone is not evil . . .”

  “But he destroys people, and destroying people is evil.” She seemed more confused with each query.

  “It’s hard to explain. Òrisà are neither good nor evil. They have both good sides and bad sides. Esu destroys people but also helps carry blessings to people. And Yemoja is calm and kind, but when she’s upset, she can destroy things.”

  She cracked a smile, and then it grew i
nto a soft laugh which gratified me. “Your òrisà behave like human beings. They can’t seem to decide if they want to be good or evil.”

  “Well, you can look at it that way.”

  “Then why do you people treat them like gods?”

  “Who says gods never had weaknesses?”

  “I don’t know about your gods, but mine doesn’t.”

  I looked to the buried earth, and her gaze followed suit. Confusion resumed on our faces, and once again, our worries were at par. That night, the figurines did not return.

  1993

  Money is an unstoppable torrent of wind, and the wind blows all sails, whether slave ships or missionary ships, emissary boats or war vessels. That much I learned when Uncle Adol called me on a Sunday evening, not too long after I had arrived in Enugu, to let me know I would be resuming at the Enugu State University of Science and Technology the following day. I had finished secondary school just before I left Lagos, and all my university applications had been to schools in and around Lagos. But now I was in Enugu, and Uncle Adol had friends in the university who needed money to buy fuel for their cars and biscuits for their children, so I was given admission to study computer science. There had been no application on my part or consultation of my opinion, just a stern instruction from my uncle to put in my best effort, because securing my admission two weeks after the session resumed had cost him a lot.

  Tessy, who was in her second year at the university, and I left home early every morning, when the mist stretched its hazy legs on the ground, leaving its footprints of morning dew on the grasses. It was a long walk to the main road, where we could get a bus to the university, up and down the little hills our fathers before had traversed, arriving at the road just as half of the yellow sun was lighting up the horizon. The house was not too far off from the 82 Division military barracks, and so the streets would often be recklessly littered with neat-pleat army gentlemen hurrying to whatever assignment they had been posted to within the city. Even though they seemed more easygoing than the Lagos zombies, having so many of them within close proximity was threatening enough.