Prince of Monkeys

by Nnamdi Ehirim

  Sadly, succor did not last for long. But I would not find that out till the next morning, when Uncle Adol was having moi moi and akamu on the veranda while I washed his Volvo in preparation for the day. Parked at Polo Park, the car had sunk into a soft marsh of grass, and all the tire rims were muddied.

  “I’m sure you would have rather stayed home if you’d known all this cleaning came with a trip to Polo Park,” he said in between bites of moi moi.

  “I enjoyed the drink and the band, and all I have to do is wash the tires,” I replied, wiping beads of sweat off my forehead. “The gains outweigh the losses.”

  “Well, I enjoyed the drink, but I hated the crowd and the band. Your aunt does not like when I talk about the war, because when I do, it’s hard for me to sleep at night. So I took us out yesterday because I was tired of her scolding.” He laughed with his mouth wide open, exposing half-crushed morsels. I could understand her concern. Uncle Adol spoke with a passion I had not witnessed since I’d watched Mendaus speak out on the buses and at the Shrine. Biafra was dead to the world but still very much alive in him. But bitter was the poison of such unrequited love for Biafra, and the burden of harboring something so toxic would have to be shared, ultimately.

  I asked when the laughter quieted, “Do you wonder sometimes how your life would have turned out if you had made it onto one of those planes that flew children abroad?”

  Uncle Adol played with his fork for a while before coming up with an answer. “Yes, I do. But don’t get it confused; some of them faced their own torture, which was worse.” He saw my confusion and continued. “Well, see your father as one. He arrived in London and was placed with a Nigerian family who had escaped before the war got out of hand, a very wealthy family. They were part of a group carrying out campaigns with some ambassadors Biafra had appointed, you know, to help put together money for the people who were not lucky enough to make it out. Your father had just finished secondary school, so he used to go around with them; they would make public speeches and discuss matters with important white people privately, and to be fair, they gathered a fortune.” Uncle Adol’s voice slowed and his eyes narrowed as he spoke. “And then they shared the fortune among themselves. Not one shilling returned to Biafra.”

  “That’s not possible,” I said, and I truly believed it.

  “Well, at that point he could have stayed to make a fortune and tried to save his family, or he could have been honest and tried to save his country—but he had to let one of them die.” Uncle Adol had forfeited the rest of his breakfast at this point. “He left the family and his share of the fortune and tried reporting to the British authorities, but someone must have gotten to them first and told them a different story, because your father was deported right after the war and returned to Lagos to begin his life afresh.”

  My chest was heavy. I exhaled deeply to free the congealing stress in my left breast, and my mind went back to my father, broken in spirit and in mind, exiled from the domain of my concern and love for so many years. I wondered at what point he’d broken finally. Was it a slow and gradual process or a single and fatal fracture of the soul? Could I have helped nurse him back, or had I just trampled on his broken bones all my life? He, as we all are, was just another desperate artist judged not by intentions or gifts he kept hidden but by the colors he eventually lay down to define his existence. He was not of the few lucky artists who would have the colors of their soul come down as presupposed as rain showers on a windowpane. No, he was one of the many unfortunate artists who endured phases of detachment when the colors did not smudge as imagined and nothing about the work went according to plan, just as unfortunate as Mendaus and I were.

  The only thing that could rescue the artist at that point was a fresh pair of eyes to offer a second opinion, and woe betide him if those fresh eyes were jealous or dishonest, laden with ulterior motives. My mother was my father’s fresh pair of eyes when he returned to Nigeria, as Uncle Adol later continued, full of love and good vibes. She was too late, though. My father was already stuck in his ways. Like a sour fruit fallen from its tree days before attaining sweet ripeness, he could never be made better and could only become worse. At best, he could be managed for what he already was.

  Slowly, I began to fear that I was resigned to a similar fate. I had spent my childhood probably as he had: told how important it was to gather wealth, acquire a wife and family, and at the very least make a name for myself. Those were the three hallows of Nigerian manhood. How could a man love if he remained with a barren woman or none at all? How could he follow his passion if he remained poor? How could he be called a man if his name was not respected? All other things were worth considering only if they existed along with the three hallows.

  But I had also wondered: Are there not men created with love and passion for art, beauty, and truth, just the same way there are men predestined for wealth, family, and fame? If there was no one who revered beauty, who would checkmate those who exploited our lands in pursuit of the three hallows? Who would cure those who were afflicted with hate if there was no one who loved? And what else could resurrect the parts of us that die every day if not the cultivated passions of our soul? Surely the balance of society could be shifted if people, whether one or in thousands, were made to cut against the grain of their souls just to find peace with the majority. My father had been frustrated away from his passion when he was deported back to Nigeria. That forced shift in balance, not the war or any other issue, was the juncture of failure in my father’s life, and is the true crisis of Nigeria’s history.

  “Well—” Uncle Adol was about to speak again when Aunt Kosi came out to clear the breakfast table.

  “Ahn di m, was there anything wrong with the moi moi?” she exclaimed. Uncle Adol hardly ever left his meals unfinished.

  He shrugged and replied, “I cannot spend the whole morning sitting around over food.” He thanked her for the meal with a pat on the top of her head and turned to leave. “The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.”

  I quickly dabbed my dry rag all around the wet car and followed my uncle and aunt into the house, allowing the sun, now fully birthed to the glory of the dawn, to adorn itself on the polished panels of the Volvo. It was almost time for Tessy and me to leave for school, and I had something I had been meaning to do since the previous day, Uncle Adol’s stories making the need all the more urgent. So I got to it.

  Dear Mendaus,

  I have never forgotten you and everyone else and miss all of the best memories—the football, the beach, the shrine, the conversation, and the silences in equal measure. It haunts me that I could never say a proper goodbye, that I could never hold you up when the sorrow was too heavy. I should have put up a fight with Mother to stay, but as I had been all my life, I was a mumu, a zombie. I cannot be sorry enough but I am sorry still.

  I think about Zeenat every day and still see her in my dreams. But I was not as you were. I could never have spoken a word well enough or made an action brave enough to avenge her. If anything, being so far away in Enugu has brought me closer to being the sort of person who could make the kind of difference you seek. In this place, I finally figured out how passive I have been, and even though that’s neither an apology nor a solution, it’s a discovery of the problem, which I think brings me a step closer to redemption. I have never stood up for anything in my whole life, not even myself. I mean, Zeenat would never let anything mess with her happiness, and Pastor’s son would juggle a football in the middle of Third Mainland Bridge at midday without any second thoughts if he felt he had heard God whisper the idea into his ear. My mother has devoted her life and, sometimes I worry, her sanity to Ifá, and I’ve met people in Enugu who would sell the only clothing they had if you promised to fill their pockets with money. But I don’t have any passions. What’s the point? I’m human, so I’d suffer anyway. And till that changes, I’d probably just be like you and believe, with all I have, in better tomorrows.

 
Regarding better tomorrows, making a difference here in Enugu or with you in Lagos, it’s something I want to contribute to. My grandparents’ memories deserve it, my father’s failed efforts and broken dreams insist on it, and Zeenat’s death justifies it. But if there is a god, my mother’s or Pastor’s son’s or any other, I swear to it that I just don’t know how. I saw you on TV that night and still remember your words. I guess you were right—we need someone to carve out a path to salvation. But that also means some of us are destined to wait and follow the well-trodden path after it’s been set.

  Your friend,

  Ihechi, the ashamed.

  Mendaus’s reply took another eternity to get to me. The long wait for the letter coincided with the seemingly longer wait I endured for Tessy to pick the right time for me to return to Madame Messalina, and the weight of it all whetted my doubts. Tobenna had visited in the night twice since the wait began, but on both nights, we were expecting Aunt Kosi to deliver Effy a beating, and woe betide Tessy and me if we were missing. Then one night, Tessy woke me up from sleep, dressed up in one of those many dresses she wore only when Tobenna came knocking at the window, and asked me to put on my clothes quickly. There was no briefing, no preparation, nothing. We escaped the house and compound quietly enough, and then the night was torn mad with our footsteps as I raced after her down the dirt road. Out of the darkness ahead, a pair of vehicle headlights appeared twice, each time for barely a second, and Tessy steered in that direction. She got to the vehicle first and exchanged words with the driver, who asked about Tobenna, and she shrugged off the question. We got into the backseat and nothing was said from then on, even when the driver dropped us off at the large gates I could never forget.

  Madame Messalina’s house was empty as death in the darkest hour of night when we arrived. We accessed the gates and knocked on the door; a dreary-eyed girl, who did not know Tessy by name but knew her well enough to call her madam, answered and asked her to forward her interests to the “Stray Dog.” We moved through the large house, which became less quiet as we progressed, an occasional string of laughter or wave of cheers echoing toward us, till we arrived in a hallway with light and noise at the other end. It all seemed to excite Tessy, who hurried forward and urged me to follow faster.

  The high dome of the room we entered enclosed a circus: unclothed skin with stretch marks by the thighs and dark patches by the knees, birthmarks that would rather be hidden, and scars here and there, skin seamlessly fitted tight around bouncing buttocks and slightly loose around the stomach, skin donned as confidently as the latest fashion. There were three of them moving about the room in whatever direction was pointed out by Madame Messalina, and another three on the floor seated amid Ghana-must-go bags, calculators and notepads in their hands and loosely bound naira stacks strewn on the floor around them.

  Even more curious were the three men positioned around the cash-counting girls on the floor like village masquerades stalking a lost girl who had wandered into the bush at the forbidden hour. Two of the men were seated and had assumed the nature of kindred spirits, frolicking away the night despite being dreadfully watchful, while the last man, pacing and squatting and hoarding all of the tension in the room, appeared to have just broken free from the evil forest. He was short, but somehow his miserly length managed to support an incredible potbelly, leaving little room for his neck and legs. He had incredible discipline over everything that concerned him, be it within or without, except his tongue, of course. I would soon discover that he replied to questions not with answers but with stories.

  “Major General, are you having any issues?” Madame Messalina asked from afar as he quibbled with a girl who had taken him a drink.

  “I want a straight straw,” he replied, pointing at the pink loopy straw that floated from the cup on a tray. “With a straight straw, when I sip my drink, it gets to me right away, but with these fancy straws, it takes about five seconds going around these loops before getting to me.”

  “But it’s more fashionable. When last were you in Lagos?” one of the seated men countered. “I thought you liked ethics? Or attics? What’s your word again?”

  “Aesthetics?” Tessy suggested

  “Aesthetics!” he echoed. “Of course, yes!”

  Tessy faked a sigh. “And what would you ever do without me?”

  “It won’t be the end of the world. I’d masturbate.” Everyone laughed, even the girls counting money in the middle of the room. “But you see, more than I like aesthetics, I like to get my drink exactly when I want it. Not a second more, not a second less. It’s too stressful to have to remember to sip my drink five seconds before I actually want it, don’t you think?”

  “I think you should be more open to new things,” Madame Messalina replied. “You’ve been wearing starched shirts and leather loafers every day since I met you over twenty years ago.”

  “It’s called structure! I live a well-structured life. If I woke up today without planning to meet the love of my life, and by divine providence I came across an angel of a woman, I’d tell that angel that she would be the love of my life, but she would have to book an appointment to meet me like everyone else, because everything, even love, has to be structured.”

  “That’s the major general, paranoid as a housewife,” Tessy whispered into my ear underneath the laughter that had engulfed the room. “He can’t trust a log of wood alone in the same room with his money.”

  “I can’t trust my money alone with itself; I didn’t pluck it off the tree,” the major general boomed across the room. “It’s the dividends of independence my father debated the British for while the rest of the country was tilling soil. So you haven’t seen me in how many weeks, and you’re still gossiping there? C’mon, do that thing on my neck that you used to do.”

  “Aburo, don’t be angry,” one of the seated men said, looking in my direction. He was the only one without a girl. “When I was in school, we used to say, ‘If you’re old enough to go with a girl to a party, then you’re old enough to have your girl taken from you at a party.’”

  “Alhaji, you never went to school,” retorted Madame Messalina, and everybody laughed out loud.

  “Aburo, leave these people alone. Come and sit down on my lap, let me tell you about law and medicine and engineering.”

  “Alhaji, he’s not a chewing gum boy,” Madame Messalina intercepted again. “This is the boy who is meant to go on your excursions to Lagos.”

  “No, nah!” he shouted. “This one would be a waste if police caught him and hung him naked from the fan to—”

  “No one is catching or hanging anybody, Alhaji,” said Madame again. She seemed to be the conjunction between everyone’s sentences. “Allow this one; your own is coming later.”

  “I thought you said he objected to the idea,” Major General said.

  “Well, I hear he wants to honor the memory of a girl,” Madame replied.

  Major General’s pupils widened, and he clapped his hands with each question: “You want to do this for vagina? For pussy? For toto? For punani? Oh, you little ignoramus, there are a million places in Nigeria you could get punani, a thousand places you could get free punnai, and hundreds of places you could get free quality punani. So, you can’t be actually making life choices over simple punani?”

  Alhaji nodded in agreement.

  “Major General, you do realize there is a difference between a girl and her vagina, okwia?” Tessy said. She might have noticed the shame in my face at the thought of Zeenat, or maybe it was the shame she felt from knowing I was aware she had told Madame Messalina as much as I told her in confidence.

  “Let the boy speak for himself.” This voice was different. It was the third man, who had been silent all night long. He looked toward me. “We don’t care what you do, just as you shouldn’t care what we do. But you have to understand why we need to know you’re here for the right reasons. You know they say, ‘If the forest lets in the ax just because it is made of wood, the forest will fall.’�
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  I remembered my conversation with Tessy that had led to my second chance at working for the major general; I was silent and thoughtful for a while. “I am here to make some money so I can move back to Lagos.” The room remained as if I had not said a word: All mouths remained shut and all eyes remained fixed on me. Alhaji said something inaudible; Major General grunted in response.

  “Alhaji believes there is no point in hiding from you what you will know eventually,” said the major general. “All you will be doing for us is delivering packages, sometimes letters and other times parcels, sometimes to Lagos and other times to Niger. All in all, you will be our messenger, and you will be made fat for it.”

  He sounded way too cool, in way too much control over the room. He was the person in charge, regardless of whether the other gentlemen in the room chose to call themselves his acquaintances or subordinates. I tried to match his aura, so I played the coolest move I knew: nodding slowly as he spoke and brushing the back of my fingers on the side of my face, just as Marlon Brando did when acting as Vito Corleone, the godfather, in deep thought.

  “How regularly do your shave your face?” Alhaji asked.

  My hand subconsciously stopped moving against the virgin stubble on my chin and cheeks that had started growing out only a few months ago. “About once a month,” I replied.

  “Ah! Aburo, never again,” Alhaji rebounded. “You look like a teenager.”