“Speaking of heaven,” Aunt Kosi replied. “I wonder how you expect to make heaven after hiding the gospel of amala and ewedu from me all these years. When your mother served it yesterday, I had to use broom and dustpan to gather my senses back.”
“I tried my best with that one,” my mother chipped in as if I were not standing in the room, “a toilet brush is more useful than he is in the kitchen. Like father, like son.”
“I still wonder every night, my sister. You saw all the rich Igbo families in Lagos, the Mbadiwes, the Orizus, and the rest, but somehow you decided to marry into these ones whose elbow cannot stretch out to give a helping hand.”
“The gist that time was that Igbo people like money pass anything, that they have this tree they grow in their backyard where they can pluck a few notes every morning. To be honest, that’s the only reason I got stuck in this palaver. You grew up knowing well that some Igbo men are destined to be church rats. What is your own excuse?”
“My head was washed, I have to be honest with you,” Aunt Kosi said. “I fell for a chewing gum boy, his mouth always moving but never talking about money.”
“Those are the worst! Invictus boys, instead of them to join oil companies and banks, they want to be the master of their own fate and captain of their own ship. When their ship full of containers gets seized at the port, they would now say it is the witches in their village.”
They both laughed a bit too closely for my comfort. My mother dreaded the word “witch”; I never would have imagined her using it twice in the same day. But slander was the universal adhesive among women, as alcohol was among men. She continued, “That’s where these younger girls are wiser. We spent our entire youth waiting virtuously in our fathers’ houses for wonderful young men. But in every hunt, the hunter always has the upper hand, and the prey is handicapped by default because it never knows it’s playing a game till the end.”
“That’s the thing, you have to adapt fast fast! I learned quickly to ask my husband for money as easily as he asked me for sex and refused him sex as easily as he refused me money. After all, marriage is about giving and receiving. My eyes are too open to stand by and get sexually defrauded.” They laughed even louder, till eventually, Effy stirred up from sleep and the budding buddies retraced the dance steps of their youth to the music countdown show that aired just before the nine o’clock news.
My mother broke the tradition of watching the news that night; all the tricks up her sleeve were being rolled out for her guest, who was now as august as she had been unwanted a few hours before. Effy wanted to watch a movie as she ate her dinner, and both my mother and my aunt acquiesced. I didn’t usually lose head or heart over television, but as the title came on, both my head and heart were submersed in a deluge of nostalgia.
A Mercury Production by Orson Welles
CITIZEN KANE
Blood rushed to my face, and my skin tingled all the way from my neck via the left side of my chest to my groin. And I remembered. It was the very text that had flickered on the television screen in the dark living room that afternoon when Zeenat and I shared our first kiss; the ominous score that introduced the cast was the very music that had paced the rhythm of our converged hips as we proceeded to making love. But the only memories I had of the images were as several shades of white light bouncing off Zeenat’s skin in the darkness, outlining her silhouette and highlighting the contours on her flesh when my fingers pressed against it. I wept; silent throes of salient woes crushed my valiant soul.
Zeenat was always very deliberate with the videos she selected to watch with me. She skimmed through the lot in her idle hours, and we watched her favorites together as she explained how the different characters were all so similar to me. Only she could ever justify how one person could be akin to Thomas O’Malley the alley cat, Rick Blaine the soft-spoken nightclub owner, and Manny Ray the suave gangster, all at the same time. And if she had wanted me to see Citizen Kane with her, there must have been a character somewhere in the movie that mirrored me in her eyes. My curiosity indulged her buried intentions. I did not need a soothsayer to know that the character she had in mind was Charles Foster Kane, but I definitely needed one to understand how she would have known all of this. Kane was sent by his mother to live with faraway strangers when he was just a boy, and he grew up to become the publisher of the New York Inquirer, one among many in a newspaper empire and many other industrial empires that he controlled. And in his Declaration of Principles, printed on the front page of the Inquirer, after he took to the helm of affairs: “I will provide the people with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings.”
One of the first proofs of this point was his newspaper’s campaign against the money-mad Public Transit Company that was robbing the people poor, regardless of the fact that Mr. Kane himself was the largest individual shareholder in the company. Ultimately, he died alone in a tomb of amassed treasures, and of his two divorced wives, few friends, and many workers who once admired his principles—some having lent helping hands—none of them were with him at the end; they realized that of all his declared principles and generous opinions and revolutionary gimmicks, the only conviction that Charles Foster Kane ever really had was in his megalomaniac self.
As the final credits ran, I wondered: If I’d died that night, would my final words and thoughts, scenes of the most memorable parts of my life that clung on to my fading consciousness, be allusions to my childhood and the years before I was corrupted by selfish ambition? Would Mendaus attend my burial after all the petty disagreements that had come between us? Would Pastor’s son make prayers by my grave to a God I had so often pushed away? Would Maradona make libations to a friendship I had turned my back on with his backyard brew that I had spat out of my mouth? The major general and his cronies, too, would their world stop spinning or their monies stop minting even for a second? It was then, knowing that I would probably die as lonely and regretful as Charles Foster Kane, that I realized Zeenat’s warning had arrived too late.
Well before the final credits but not long after my tears had dried, my mother and aunt had dozed off in their chairs, stumbling to their beds later on. Effy had fallen asleep on the couch, which was nothing unusual, so I spread a cover cloth atop her and let her be. When the noisy drain of the bathroom by my old room woke me up the next morning, the sun was just rising. Effy nudged me to affirm if I was awake or asleep, and upon concluding the former, she asked me to turn around and face the wall while she dried herself and put on her clothes. I obliged. She updated me on the events of the morning as I stared at the browned wall, my childhood bedtime companion.
“Don’t be in a hurry to get out of bed,” she said. “We are having half-caste ọkpa for breakfast.”
“How do you know if ọkpa is purebreed or half-caste? To be honest, I always thought ọkpa was albino.”
“Not the color of it, oh.” She laughed and threw something soft at the back of my head. “It’s the . . . ethnicity of the ọkpa. Food can have ethnicity, abi? Because my teacher always talks about how she never appreciated palm oil till she tasted Igbo soups, because her ethnic soups never needed palm oil.”
“Well, I think people say ethnic food, but the same food cannot have originated from two different places, you know, so it can’t be half-caste. The same way you can have ethnic languages but not half-caste languages.”
“Okay, that makes sense.” There was a slight pause, as if she was not thoroughly convinced. “Anyway, your mother somehow convinced mine to teach her how to make ọkpa before leaving this morning. The only issue was that your mother didn’t have any breadfruit, so they improvised with regular beans. You have to clap for them because the experiment ended up looking like ọkpa. It’s just that it tastes like moi moi.”
“That must have been a terrible anticlimax, expecting ọkpa and tasting moi moi. Where is my mother leaving to, by the way?”
“It’s not your mother who has to leave early, it’s mine,” Effy
said. “She’s heading back to Enugu. Yours would be taking me back to school by noon, and my mother does not want to wait till then, because that would mean she would have to wait half the day to travel by the night bus.” She heaved in a deep breath. “See, it’s a long story. You can turn around now.” Effy twirled around in a circle and came to a stop with a curtsy, as she would all those years ago in Enugu when we prepared for church on Sundays. Then she returned to the mirror to set her blue beret, the crowning glory of the blue pinafore and checkered shirt that was the Queen’s College uniform.
“I thought you were not leaving till noon?” I asked.
“I’m not. But my mother really wanted to see me in my school uniform.” She was done with the mirror and was tugging on my arm now. “You should come out and say goodbye before she leaves.”
Half-awake and half-dressed, I complied nonetheless. Aunt Kosi’s big box was already by the door, surrounded by little black nylon bags of who knows what, and the scent of moi moi pervaded the room.
“I’ve gotten someone to drop you off at the motor park,” my mother said, walking through the front door. “I’ve sorted him out already, so you don’t need to give him a kobo.”
They hugged tightly. “Thank you, my sister,” Aunt Kosi said. “Oya, Effy, come let us pray so I can start going.” Everyone in the room froze except Aunt Kosi, who was rummaging through her handbag, oblivious to any oddity. Aunt Kosi finally pulled a handkerchief out of her handbag and spread it atop her head. “In Jesus’ name!” she declared. I looked at my mother and caught her staring back at me. “In Jesus’ name!” Aunt Kosi declared again. My mother and I shifted our gazes simultaneously to Effy. There was a long pause with no more declarations. And then Aunt Kosi opened her eyes. “Ephesians! What sort of nonsense is this? Have you gone deaf or what?”
“I’m sorry,” Effy responded. I could hear a parched throat in her voice. If she had stopped at that point, it would have been fine. My mother and I would have offered her cold water as soon as her mother left and teased her about it for a week. But she was a blossoming young Nigerian and, as such, had a natural instinct that forbade her from spurning the slightest opportunity for a confrontation. She continued, “I was planning to tell you. I did not know how to put it. I do not believe in God.” Another pause. “Okay, I do believe in God but not your idea of it. I mean, I have been learning the ways of Ifá, and it has brought me more peace than all my time in church. And it feels so natural. I don’t have to force anything . . .”
My mind zoned out and started processing things to say or do, ways of damage control. Aunt Kosi was a step ahead of me. She let her handbag drop to the floor and, in one swift and single motion, lifted her big box off the ground, hurling it into the air and across the room. Effy met the vertices of the box with her forehead, and the weight of her mother’s clothes and personal effects pushed her back into the armchair. Old and frail as the chair was, it tilted backward, rocked perilously, and then tumbled over, carrying Effy and the big box along with it.
I rushed to the floor where Effy lay. My mother yelled. My aunt was undeterred, picking up one of her heeled slippers and taking aim, but my mother intervened, wrenching her arm and forcing the slipper away from her grasp. I searched Effy’s face and limbs for a cut or bruise and then listened for her breath. Instead, I heard more yells and groans, then a chorus of slaps. Looking up, I saw Aunt Kosi’s arms around my mother’s thigh while she braved a rain of slaps on her back. As if overburdened by the added weight of my gaze, my mother’s thigh buckled and her heel slipped. In a second, she was being raised toward the ceiling. She held on to the ceiling fan just before Aunt Kosi tried slamming her to the floor. I raced toward the circus show at the center of the room, getting there as my aunt yanked at my mother for a second time. Grains of cement fell to my face as I lifted my eyes, and then the ceiling fan gave way on my mother’s head; she swayed in Aunt Kosi’s arms for a second, then crashed down. I tried to break their fall but collapsed under the weight of the twosome, shattering the wooden center table beneath us all.
I never spoke again about the early-morning living room incident. Not with Effy, even when she regained her senses and tried to figure out why the center table was destroyed. Not with my mother, even when the doctor had asked how she had broken her arm. Not with Aunt Kosi, even when Uncle Adol tried to find out why she refused to talk about her trip to Lagos. And not with Tessy, who desperately tried to calm my brooding by cooking all sorts of soups for me weekend after weekend.
I was angry at everyone involved in the squabble, but more than that, I was confused by them. And it was the confusion that stomped me, because I had seen it rear its head time and time again as people all around me, who were bound within the borders of Nigeria by intertwined ancestral origins, continuously stretched the limits of their wits and brawn in search of a reason not to get along with a neighbor. Aunt Kosi justified her fruits of discord with religious differences, although sometimes she preferred to incite chaos from the infallible wings of intertribal grievances. My mother did the same; she was stuck in her traditionalist ways of doing things. Mendaus despised the traditionalists and looked to Western cultures and theologies for answers. Maradona did not care about the traditionalists or Western ideals; all he knew was that the rich were the scourge of the earth. They all sought after a reason to hate.
This whole nation-building affair I was tensioning my nuts for was just a pointless charade, and I decided to put it behind me. I just needed to find the right time to make my intentions known to all involved, including the major general and his friends. As with all other things—except the early-morning living room incident, of course—I talked to Tessy about it, but she was hearing nothing of it.
“Stop?” she screamed. We were at the Stray Dog, the large room with the great dome in Madame Messalina’s house, and her voice echoed above the classical music playing from the invisible stereo system. “You know why you can’t stop? You can’t because you’re almost there, Ihechi. And it’s not even the chance of your success that should keep you going. It’s the fear of failure, failing the ones who tried before you and the ones who would try after you.” She giggled uncontrollably, as if privy to a joke I had missed. “Okay, let’s say you’re a ninety percent success so far. That means you’re also a ten percent failure, right? You’re a ten percent failure because some half-genius and half-junkie of a revolutionary who was so close to greatness failed somewhere along the line and quit. You can’t stop because this race might not be yours to finish, and if you stop, the next guy you hand the baton to will never be able to win. You can’t be the next half-genius and half-junkie of a revolutionary who failed his cause. You cannot afford to have the blood of an aborted dream on your hands. You get?”
I smiled at the thought of being considered a half-junkie; it had been years since I’d dropped the habit of lighting smokes. It was still not as ridiculous as being considered a genius. I had not contributed anything to the world to deserve such a title. Geniuses were Mozart or Beethoven or whoever composed the classical music that was playing, and as far as I knew, geniuses were defined by the spirits that possessed them. And not the sacred spirits of creation that guided their hands, but the spirits of deception that worked to direct their wandering minds. Despite my efforts to build a world worth living in, my own world kept crumbling, and I had begun dreading the road ahead, the very path I was paving, because it seemed like this road to nirvana was also the road to my personal perdition. I was coming to terms with knowing that, whether possessed by Beethoven’s or Mozart’s spirits, whether damned from within or without, geniuses were born to suffer. In that context, maybe I was a genius.
“My nerves are as fried as potato chips,” I said finally. I poured myself some whiskey at the bar and sipped, cringing before it even touched my tongue.
“In that case, I should give you some ketchup to go with that.” Tessy smacked her bloodred lips and stained my cheek with a kiss.
“Thank you, thank you,
and thank you. But I’m a true Igbo man, so I’d rather have hot pepper over ketchup, because I’m never scared of the heat. And I’m not scared of the major general; I’ll talk to him today.”
“He’s hotter than most,” Madame Messalina said. I had not noticed her enter the room. Alhaji had also come in, beside a skinny young man with ultra-fitted clothes doting on him, along with the major general’s other friend—a large, quiet man with a dark face marked like the Ife bronze heads. “You know the major general is a Yoruba man, and all his hard-guy-ness aside, he is a very . . . strong-handed man.”
“My mother is Yoruba as well,” I retorted. “Trust me, they aren’t the spawn of the devil, as you all like to think they are.”
“True enough, but he is more traditional than most. And among the Yoruba people in the olden days, when an insolvent debtor leaves a household or dies in more unfortunate circumstances, the Baale of the household was required by law to pay the debtor’s debts. And whenever an insolvent debtor was sick, he would be taken away from the household by his own family members and abandoned in the bushes—a gesture of disownment. Ihechi, my dear, you are as insolvent a debtor to the major general as debtors come. Do you really want to end up in the bushes of this political community?”
“Who is throwing whom into the bushes? Why does anyone have to go into the bushes?” Alhaji inquired with a large grin betraying his faux rage. “What’s going on? The only time I can stand talk about bushes is if it’s going to end up with bush meat.”
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