Prince of Monkeys

by Nnamdi Ehirim

  In the solace of night, when our glasses were dry and our hearts were sober again, I would bother my mind to no avail, trying to figure out how and when things went wrong. But somehow I was sure the end of the truth would eventually spill out of Uncle Adol’s mouth; it was just a matter of how many more bottles of whiskey I would need to suffer before then.

  The rainy season came around; when it rained, we would still drink out on the veranda. Aunt Kosi would come out with Effy because they liked playing with the rainwater. Uncle Adol and Aunt Kosi had picked up from one of the many churches they had frequented over the years that the rain was Jesus’ gift of fertility to the world. They believed that, just as the rain made the outstretched leaves of the plants fertile, so it blessed the human hands. Aunt Kosi would guide Effy’s open palm under the edges of the flooded roof so the droplets would fall into it and prepare her womb for the due time. Effy would give in to the rain because, I think, she enjoyed the attention and not because she actually cared about her due time.

  On the days the rain began very early, it would take Uncle Adol much longer to get home. The day he took the longest, he stepped out of the muddied Volvo just as the cold sweat around the bottles of beer Aunt Kosi had me prepare for him dried up. He announced, before his wife queried him, that a stop at the post office had delayed him. He made his way up the stairs to the veranda and collapsed on the chair that had been set out for him without bothering to remove his damp suit.

  “Ihechi, there was a letter for you,” he said, shaking the bottles of beer as he tossed his briefcase on the table and flipped it open. “If I had known you knew your way to the post office, I would not be going all the way there. Those people give hardworking civil servants like me a bad name.”

  The letter he handed me had no name, but the address was all too familiar. “I think it’s from your mother, okwia?” he asked, and I nodded in reply to keep from telling an outright lie before remembering to utter “Thank you, sir.” I ripped open the letter and held it close enough to avoid any puck-nosing.

  Hello Ihechi,

  How are you doing? It is exactly six months since the bonfire, as you call it, Zeenat’s funeral, as I like to look at it. I remember Mr. Thomas digging mounds in the grass patch behind the house for the maize and pepper seeds when Zeenat and I went running to tell him we would be out at the Afrika Shrine for all of that evening. Since then Mr. Thomas has roasted a whole harvest of maize for the house and has started cooking our stew with his own pepper, and oh yes, I still haven’t heard from you.

  I have been through the most terrible circumstances these last few months, as you would guess, especially considering the fact that no one has been here. After my dad went to cause drama at the police station when Zeenat died, his friend the police commissioner came around and was just giving everyone stupid sarcasm and unnecessary stress. All for me to get into the books, trying to cool off from the protest gizmo that was on television, just to have my mother create a collage of emotional antics all over my sanity because she thinks I’m the cause of Zeenat’s death. I’m sad, disgusted, irritated, annoyed, everything in all.

  Today also makes it two months since Pastor’s son was driven off to a theology college all the way in Hawaii—that’s meant to be somewhere in America. His parents had had enough about the church complaints on his behavior when he was meant to be preparing his white suits to take after his father on the pulpit, so his punishment is this exile till he can find again “the joy of salvation.”

  So, basically, living without you this last year has made me live within myself, my dreams, and my potential. In the fury of all that happened at the Afrika Shrine and to Zeenat, I shelved my admission to do mass communication at the University of Lagos in exchange for political science so I would be eligible to work part-time at this popular campaign group everyone used to talk about—the Democracy Union. Joining the union was the worst decision I could have ever made. I work so hard for so little pay, and all they gather to do is complain. The office is a hellhole; the other executives are devils who orchestrate misery from afar, and the other volunteer staff are little demons whose larking about invades the tiny peace and tranquility I try to muster out of my existence. No wonder why your people say the beautiful ones are not yet born. Nobody bothers for anybody here, they’re all just trying to solve their own personal issues. Everybody’s selfishness has caused us to keep plunging deeper and deeper into futility. It’s just like the story Fela told us at the Shrine about the end of the world: The blind man who hears the chaos but refuses to ask for a guide beside the lame man who sees the chaos but refuses to ask for assistance—they both perish as fools because they refused to work together. And it’s really not that I can’t do anything on my own, it’s just that I can’t do everything on my own. This dream could have been realized so easily if you were all around, together complementing each other. Would it actually have hurt you if you had refused to go to Enugu and hung around when I actually needed you? I’m tired and quite pissed off at you. YES, AT YOU!!! I’m sick of complaining, really, very sick, because it would seem like I’m always nagging, and I never get satisfied. But I’m your friend and I have to be always true to you and this is honestly how I feel, I’m not saying this for pity, so don’t get it wrong.

  My eyes fluttered as I fought a barrage of tears and I stood up without touching the bottle Uncle Adol had kept aside for me.

  “Le kwa Ihechi of yesterday, oh!” yelled Uncle Adol as I walked away. “Is that how you stand up and leave when your father is talking to you?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I began, but was more caught up in keeping away tears than fashioning a lie. “My stomach, sir,” I continued just as he was about to speak again. “Purging, sir,” I said, just before I started to appear silly. And then I ran off into the house, nestling in the solitude of the room where sobs would not be heard, to conclude the letter.

  I’m finished being petty, so now, more importantly, I have a few questions I need to understand. So first, I’ll start with a few why’s. I want to know why you agreed to leave even after everything that happened just before and why you stopped communicating. I also need to understand the how’s. How could you ignore the affront in Zeenat’s murder and the need to avenge it in any way possible? How could you go to bed even the first night knowing her body was lying in a gutter? And last, I will need to know the when’s if I’m to ever call you a friend again. When will you be back to Lagos so we can make a difference, for shit’s sake? When will you realize that we can run from our fears forever, that we are all doomed in this country if we sit silently, because a multitude always suffers if one man, any at all, fails to think?

  You know I just realized how much I miss all you guys; it’s saddening. Like it has been six months and I’m still like this! I think the whole not talking to anybody about our gizmo just makes everything worse. IT’S SAD!!! I almost feel like crying, I swear. Atonye still comes around from time to time, but it’s not the same. She met some guy who wants to marry her and take her abroad, so that should explain it. My dad is out on his travels, as usual. And my mother has been around for the past month, playing all these films that Zeenat made me watch on the VCR all evening, and I’m just going crazy . . . yeah, crazily sad. I’m hungry at the moment and I’m having ulcer pain but I’m too depressed to even eat. Oh well, life is unfair.

  Mendaus,

  The pissed and shat on.

  The last words of the letter made my face a waterfall. I had anticipated Mendaus’s reply but had never braced for the impact of its heavy blows. The true words crushed my mind just as the letter itself crumpled into a tiny ball within my clenched fist. I looked up to hurl it away when I saw Tessy wince at the door, as if she feared being my target.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, almost without any feeling.

  I tried to reply in equal calm, but my fluttering eyes betrayed me. “What for?”

  “I’m sorry you’re hurting.”

  “What if I’m not the victim? What
if I’m the one who did the hurting?”

  “That’s unlikely. You’re not smart enough to hurt someone knowingly, even if you wanted to.” I would have felt insulted if I did not believe she was right, and we both laughed it off. “Even if you did, hurting whoever it was obviously hurt you, too. And I’m sorry about that.” She came closer, put her arms around me, and smothered me in a hug.

  “Why do you care?”

  “Ehn, because I’ve taken so much from the men of this world that I feel I have to give something back. You know, like how rich people steal from us and do charity work because they feel guilty . . .” She trailed off into her usual loud chuckle. “Or maybe because I really care for my baby cousin no matter how much he hates to believe it.”

  She made to pry the balled-up letter from my fist; I did not struggle, and so she read it.

  “You know you’re going to make up your mind to return to Lagos sooner or later?” she said when she was finally through. “If you’re waiting for my father or your mother, you’ll be waiting forever.”

  “I know. But I just don’t know how.”

  “Well, for a start, you’re going to need some money.”

  We stared at each other silently for about a minute, and I was sure we had been thinking the same thought all the while when she smiled after I asked, “Is it still possible to go back to Madame Messalina?”

  Uncle Adol neither spoke to me nor permitted me to have drinks with him for the following week, but Tessy told me not to bother. It was an unwritten decree that whenever he was angry with whomever over whatever, he would go an entire week without speaking to his victim; if it was Aunt Kosi, the punishment would include his eating outside the house for the week. True to Tessy’s word, after the week of silent punishment was done, we resumed booze and banter as if the calendar had simply omitted a week of the year. I asked him about the happenings leading up to the civil war, the stories Aunt Kosi had told me of my grandmother’s death, and how they survived through it all. He would dodge my questions when he could and at other times blatantly refuse to recall, so I relented.

  The next day, however, Uncle Adol did not bother to get out of the Volvo when he returned from work and asked me to get into the passenger’s seat. When Effy tried to make a fuss about coming along, he said we were making a “quick dash to church,” and she quieted as he pulled out of the compound before Aunt Kosi had even made it out of the kitchen. But we drove past the church and, in due course, onto the main Obiagwu road. I peeked into the wide-open doors and windows of the Siamese-twin-styled bungalows. Petty traders conducted business, groups gathered around black-and-white television sets, lovers groped each other: People were engrossed in their own worlds with such blissful inattention that I thought maybe that was exactly how all lives should be lived. There was the mouth of a dirt road after every few blocks, lined with furious okada riders and careless bare-bottomed children, leading to who knows where, and each one mystified me differently. We drove past it all and past the dreaded road that led to the 82 Division military barracks, past the state museum Tessy had warned was not worth my time, past the wired fence of the Polo Park, then turned onto the road where the fence met with the arched gate. The grass on the large field was slightly overgrown, but little children still chased through it, while furious boys gathered to kick footballs around. The only ones who appeared concerned about the overgrowth were the grazing horses, but all their diligence made little difference.

  Uncle Adol guided me to a large canopy that watched over huddled tables and chairs. The waitress, wearing a straight single-strapped dress with bright yellow flowers, despite the tender chill of the early evening, smiled at our table and brought a bottle of something from the bar without being told, and Uncle Adol smiled back. Then he rushed down two glasses of the whiskey before our chairs got warm, and he brought up the previous day’s discussion of his own volition.

  “You know, this matter always turns my belly. But if I don’t tell you these things, nobody will,” he started. “I am sure they would never teach you these things in all those schools in Lagos.”

  “I have learned more about Nigerian history from Fela records than from school,” I replied, and he shook with laughter, spilling the whiskey in his glass.

  “You know, if the lion never learned to tell his own stories, the story of the hunt would always glorify the hunter. In fact, these hunters have cleaned their hands and wiped their mouths and would prefer the hunt to be forgotten altogether.” He laughed heavily once more, slowing into a loud wheeze before beginning his story.

  Shortly after my grandmother died, news spread quickly that the Nigerian army was closing in on Enugu. My grandfather, already engulfed in despair and in no condition to put up a final stand with any of their zealot neighbors, took his two sons and headed toward Abakaliki in Ebonyi with the intention of sneaking over the border into Cameroon.

  “You know the worst thing?” Uncle Adol asked with his bottom lip still pressed on his glass. “The worst thing was not even our war. Almost all of us in Enugu had lived there all our lives. Same as Nsukka, Umuahia, Aba, Owerri, in fact almost all of us living in Igbo land. We had not offended anybody. Few people had or even wanted office jobs back then. People just wanted to farm the land their fathers passed on to them and feed their family. But instead we were witch-hunted from our own very land, and our farms were burned.”

  “But you know,” I tried to offer from my shallow pool of knowledge amassed over the years from rivers of adult conversation never intended for my ears, “they said the Igbo people . . . they said we were greedy and overambitious, trying to get our hands on everything. And that’s why other people hated us.”

  “Who was greedy and overambitious, Ihechi?” he asked in all seriousness. “Is it the innocent farmers in Ikeduru or the drunk palm-wine tappers in Udi or the traders in Onitsha who were greedy and overambitious? It was the deserters! The ones who left us to go and find money in Lagos and then avoided their people back home like cockroaches once they started earning peanuts! The ones for whom the cooperative society in the villages gathered money to send abroad but refused to come back to develop the community after they collected their education abroad! Some of them even felt too big to take a wife from the village that brought them up! It was when their so-called paddy mi and aboki started calling for their heads that they remembered they had family back home. It was their war, not ours, but they put the target on our heads.”

  As my grandfather and his sons scurried to leave Enugu with the herd of fleeing Biafrans, they were blocked by a troop of army recruiters. My father escaped amid the terrified women and children as they scattered into the bushes, but my grandfather and Uncle Adol were not as lucky. A few weeks later, Uncle Adol was deployed to the Biafran marines stationed in Port Harcourt, while my grandfather was deployed to the military remaining in Enugu to hold off the impending Nigerian army. That was the last thing known of my grandfather and everyone else known to have stayed behind in Enugu.

  More drunkards had started trooping under the canopy: the idle townsmen who came to sample the fresh palm wine tapped in the mornings and afternoons and the old men, who were most likely unemployed degenerates but maybe were retired gentlemen, discussing the newspapers over dark foaming beverages brought in from town. A live band had begun performing under the next canopy. Uncle Adol looked disgusted by all the loudness. Me, I did not mind the music. I was not used to highlife, but it was genius. The keyboardist directed the flow of the music as the men with the Ogene, the Igba and Udu, and the other contemporary percussion maintained a steady tempo, playing with the music only at the end of a repetition, allowing the bass guitarists to infuse unpredictable oddities that made the ear squint in craze. The whole performance was orchestrated by the lead performer, who meandered through the merry band of drunkards as he blew on his saxophone. His voice was not perfect, a strained baritone that seemed to imitate the verbosity of sexual climax, but in its imperfection, it captured the very passion that was high
life.

  “If a people loses its brothers, that’s a tragedy for one generation,” Uncle Adol said as he struggled to stifle a tear for the first time. “But if a people loses its humanity, that’s a tragedy for eternity. Anyone who survived the war would tell you we were not defeated by human beings. Human beings could not have put their brothers through what they put us through, when our only crime as a people was refusing to lay our heads on the guillotine in the north and the west.”

  “And the world did nothing? They let you get forced into sleeping in the same bed as your father’s murderer? Into letting it all go just like that, without holding anyone accountable?”

  “There’s a limit to what can be achieved by force. You cannot murder or torture or bomb away hatred from the hearts of people gathered under the banner of a mutual grievance. You can keep their mouths silent but never their hearts. And hope the hatred gets buried with them and not shared among their children.”

  About five years after they had been separated, well after over a million Biafrans had perished, General Ojukwu—the Biafran arch-secessionist—had gone into exile, and General Yakubu—the Nigerian head of state—declared, “No victor, no vanquished.” Uncle Adol came to answer a knock on the door of the house just a few months after he had moved back, the only house on the street that had made it through the war unscathed, only to open the door to my father, Cletus. My father had gone with the fleeing women and children to a makeshift refugee camp set up on the grounds of a large Catholic church by a white priest. Out of sheer luck, he had made it into the care of one of five Catholic priests in Biafra at the time who knew of the Caritas International Biafran refugee project. Before the week was out, Cletus and more than fifty young Biafran refugees were airlifted by Dutch mercenary pilots to Britain from a landing strip tucked in the valleys of the hilled city of Enugu. It was the second time in the first six months of the war that he had found succor in the arms of the Catholic Church.