Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth

by Wole Soyinka

  “All right, I’m a sore loser. That doesn’t mean you didn’t boast you would do it.”

  “Listen to this quack surgeon. I asked her why I would say such a thing—you know what she said? She said she thought I was trying to impress her. That’s a woman for you.”

  Their laughter was interrupted by a soft knock on the door, and Damien reentered. “Nothing in there, Papa. No package, thin or flat. Or brown.”

  Duyole frowned. “You’re sure? It’s impossible to miss it.”

  The young man reassured him. “Absolutely nothing like a package. I looked everywhere.”

  Duyole chewed his lips. “That’s strange. I could have sworn I left it there. Right on that desk. I saw it there early this evening.” He waved his hand in dismissal. “I know. The usual. Picked it up and placed it where I was certain not to forget. All right, thanks. I’ll find it later. Never mind, Menka. It will be delivered to you in the morning.”

  “More likely afternoon. I know I’m going to sleep like a log when we’re done.”

  “I’ll simply sleep forever. All right, thanks, Damien. I won’t bother you anymore.”

  Damien protested in his high-pitched voice, “No problem, Papa. Wake me up if you remember anything else.”

  He left. Duyole scratched his head. “I don’t recall seeing it or setting it down anywhere else.”

  “Forget it. Kilishi doesn’t go bad.”

  Duyole shrugged. “I know. I’ve been browsing around the house all day looking for loose items you might need at the annex. I may have left it in a cupboard or whatever. I’ll find it. Unless you’re dying for a quick taste…”

  “After Bisoye’s goat meat asun? No way. Later for that.”

  “In that case, dish out the full course. What really went over in Jos? Let’s have the full gist. In lurid details. With onions, trimmings, and peppers. Don’t stint. Leave nothing out.”

  Kighare took a sip of his drink, set down the glass with exaggerated care, and leant back in his armchair. “Tumultuous hardly describes it, Duyo. Tumultuous. And weird. Somehow I lost my cool. No other day to touch it since I lost both parents that same day.”

  Pitan avoided his eyes. “I can believe that. Catching you on the phone just when the whole world was banging on your door and screaming for you to get you out—that was the next worst thing to being in a ringside seat. All right, we have all night. Tell!”

  16.

  The Codex Seraphinianus

  Jos did not let the surgeon from Gumchi go quietly—at least, not that newfound suburb that was called Boriga. It followed him into Lagos. Indeed preceded him, if only he had made an effort at recollection of his early days of remote sensing. A flurry of brief forays into Lagos had, however, lulled him into a false sense of security—Boriga had done the rest. Even if the Devil had not actually relocated in Boriga, some of his disciples had. On his own admission, Menka’s mind never did totally abandon Jos—Boriga was unfinished business, and for the proud seasoned professional, unfinished business equaled forgetting a pair of forceps in a patient’s guts, then sewing him up for home discharge. Honours were even. It was the Yoruba saying all over again: the child who swears its mother will not sleep, let it brace itself for sleepless nights. Once settled—within the elastic adaptation of that condition—he would muster forces and cauterize the ulcerous affront to his profession. Ethics could wait. His newly acquired prominence would undergo its first value test—certainly it should provide access to the very highest levels for massive intervention.

  Adjusting to a new culture was his main concern, but not an insurmountable culture shock. Badagry, after all, albeit closely intertwined with Lagos, was still Badagry. Pitan-Payne was on hand, though keeping a frenetic pace to wind up his affairs and proceed to his UN assignment on schedule. The engineer seemed to thrive on interlocking calendars, and in any case, he now had Menka to pick up the loose ends for him in his absence. The timing could not have been more thoughtfully ordained. Indeed—and he leant over to whisper confidentially to the surgeon during one of their meals together—“I did have my suspicions, but now I have solid proof. It was I who set fire to Hilltop Mansion, just to get you down in Badagry.” The unexpected and the planned seemed to dovetail neatly, like the finely adjusted sprockets on his mechanical prototypes. And while Lagos/Badagry lacked the excitement of receiving sudden cartloads of human debris from Boko Haram’s latest efforts to out-Allah Allah in their own image, one could count on the gratuitous equivalent from multiple directions. Such as the near-daily explosion of a petroleum tanker on the expressway or in the city centre. Or a roofless lorry bulging with cattle and humans tipping over on a bridge and dropping several feet onto an obliging rock outcrop in the midst of the river. Sometimes, more parsimoniously, a victim of military amour-propre—in uniform or mufti, it made no difference. That class seemed to believe in safety in numbers, and all it took was for even a low-ranking sergeant to take offence at another motorist, who perhaps refused to give way to his car, a mere “bloody civilian,” never mind that the latter had the right of way. An on-the-spot educational measure was mandated. Guns bristling, his accompanying detail, trained to obey even the command of a mere twitch of the lip, leapt from their escort vehicle, dragged out the hapless driver, unbuckled their studded belts, whipped him senseless, threw him in the car boot or on the floor of the escort van, and took him to their barracks for further instruction. However, the wretch sometimes created a problem by suffocating en route, which left society to develop structures for neutralizing such inconvenience.

  The contradicting, ironic sequence occurred to Menka only for the first time. Yes, come to think of it, the military hardly ever recorded a fatality—once or twice, maybe even three times in a month. Yes, the accident of excess did happen, but mostly such terminal disposal was left to the police, whose favourite execution site was a roadblock, legal or moonlighting. Perhaps a recalcitrant commuter or passenger-bus driver had refused to collaborate in providing a bribe on demand or insulted the rank of the demanding officer with a derisive sum. And it did not have to be the original offender but some too-know grammar-spouting public defender who had intervened on behalf of the potential source of extortion. The outcome was predictable—victim or Good Samaritan advocate instantly joined the statistics of the fallen from “accidental discharge.” The expression was still current, but often it was anything but. Accidents had become infrequent and unfashionable. Oftener to be expected was that the frustrated, froth-lipped police pointed the gun, calmly, deliberately, at the head of the unbelieving statistic and pulled the trigger. Again, the inconvenience of body disposal.

  But then the community of victims themselves—what a fascinating breed of humanity! The roles, it constantly appeared, had become gleefully, compulsively interchangeable. Allowing him only a few days to “catch your breath and get your bearings,” Pitan-Payne lost no time in taking him to inspect the land designated for the Gumchi Rehabilitation Centre, for victims of Boko Haram, ISWAP, and other redeemers—nothing like striking while the iron was hot! On their way, the familiar sight of crowd agitation—how would the day justify itself without some kind of street eruption somewhere, wherever? Trapped in the chug-stop-chug of traffic, the favourite commuter distraction was to attempt to guess what was the cause, and even place bets on propositions. That morning, Menka’s first in nearly a year down south, did not disappoint. But for the milling blockage by intervening viewers, they could have claimed the privilege of ringside seats. Compensating for that obstructed viewing, however, was the sight of men and women trotting gaily, anticipation all over their faces, towards the surrounded spot of attraction. From every direction they came, some vaulting over car bonnets, squishing their legs against the fenders, squeezing through earlier-arrived bodies, or simply scrabbling for discovered viewing points. They climbed on parked vehicles and the raised concrete median. Commuter buses slowed down and stopped, keke napeps pulled aside, driv
ers and passengers alike rubbernecking on both sides of or in the direction of a wide gutter that sank into a culvert. The lights changed to green and Pitan-Payne drove on, their last shared image a pair of muscular arms raised above the bobbing heads, clutching an outsized stone and slamming that object downwards into the gutter. Very likely a snake, Pitan suggested. With the rainy season, quite a few sneaked through the marshes into culverts and slithered their way into parking lots and even offices.

  A police van came racing down the road against the traffic, strobes flashing and sirens blaring, so Menka looked back, saw the crowd drawing back and drifting reluctantly away from the uniformed spoilsports. This opened an avenue just in time for Menka to obtain the briefest glimpse of an object slumped over the rim of the gutter, once human, but not any longer. Indeed, the only human identity left him was his iodine-red tunic and black trousers, still recognizable as the uniform of a LASTMA officer, an unarmed unit whose function was simply to unplug traffic, stopped as readily by truculent drivers as by the roadside markets, vendors of all the world commodities who had taken over the streets, haggled, negotiated, delivered change and goods at their own pace. If the activities delayed movement over half a dozen changes from red to green and back again, it did not concern them in the least.

  Later that evening, television narrated the full story. After futile spurts of preventive measures, Authority had commenced arrests of vendors and seizures of their wares. The LASTMA team, their van parked in a side street, had pursued several such malfeasants. In a desperate attempt to escape capture, one ran straight into the snout of a speeding vehicle, was tossed up, landed with an ominous thud on the sidewalk, and remained there, unmoving. In a trice, a mob had gathered. They set the parked LASTMA vehicle on fire and worked up further appetite for vengeance. The unarmed officers had already fled. A hunt party pursued and eventually brought down a scapegoat, quite some distance from the actual scene of the crime. They proceeded to the ritual battering of their catch. He broke free, ran into the gutter, tried crawling into the culvert for safety. They dragged him out by his feet, trunk and head smeared and reeking from the accumulated sludge of the blocked tunnel. Passersby, totally ignorant of the beginning or midact of the mayhem, refused to be left out. They grabbed the nearest assault weapon to hand and joined in the gratification of the thrill for the day, a new-breed citizen phenomenon. The massive stone, raised above a throng of heads, quivered lightly against a Lagosian skyline of ultramodern skyscrapers before its descent onto bone and brain. It took on an iconic dimension that stuck instantly to Menka’s surgical album of retentions, a rampant insignia of the transfiguration of a collective psyche.

  “I envy you,” Menka remarked the following morning as they confronted the printed media coverage, their scalding coffee no match for the nausea aroused by the photograph sensationally smeared across the front page. “You are going away for a while. You’ll be spared such sights.”

  “I feel guilty,” confessed Duyole. “Guilty, but yes, that is one spectacle I shall not miss.”

  “Careful!” Menka quickly cautioned. “They have their equivalents over there. Ask the black population.”

  “No. Not like this. Occasionally, yes, there does erupt a Rodney King scenario. Or a fascistic spree of ‘I can’t breathe.’ America is a product of slave culture, prosperity as the reward for racist cruelty. This is different. This, let me confess, reaches into…a word I would rather avoid but can’t—soul. It challenges the collective notion of soul. Something is broken. Beyond race. Outside colour or history. Something has cracked. Can’t be put back together.” And then Pitan-Payne gasped, paused, folded over the pages, and passed the newspaper to Menka. “Take a look at this. Not that it changes anything, but…here, read it yourself.”

  There was a chastening coda. It altered nothing. The fleeing vendor, whom no one had even thought to help, was very much alive. He had picked himself up, salvaged most of his scattered goods, and found his way home despite a sprained ankle and some bruises. Most of the spectators had retreated to a safe distance. They continued what they had been doing earlier—filming the action with their phone cameras. The police did, however, capture the Goliath with the terminating stone, who had administered the coup de grâce. He remained on the spot, to all appearances admiring the evidence of his work.

  He vehemently protested the injustice of his arrest: “I thought he was an armed robber.”

  * * *

  —

  It was Baba Baftau who brought Jos to Menka in his own person, accompanied by Costello. No notice beyond a phone call to let him know they were in Lagos and would like to stop by and say hallo. Touched and delighted, Menka gave them the address. He received them in the jumble of his apartment, feeling overwhelmed most especially by the Old Man of the Desert. At his age, traveling all the way from Jos. And by road!

  Baftau waved off the engineer’s protestations. “It was nothing. Costello’s firm ordered him to Lagos, so I asked him for a ride.”

  “You know I work for a construction firm, Doctor,” Costello elaborated. “Had to inspect some of our projects en route. So I have no choice in the matter. It’s always the road.”

  “And I am jobless,” Baftau reminded Menka. “Not merely jobless but clubless. No more Hilltop Mansion. Since I have nothing more to do with my time, I inflict myself on our friend Costello.”

  “But that road is dangerous…oh, of course.” Menka had suddenly remembered his position within government hierarchy, albeit retired.

  Baftau’s face grew combative. “I admit to being old and pensionable, not foolish or ready to be disposed of. If you look outside, you’ll see what accompanied us from Jos. Let any kidnapper try his nonsense.”

  “You wouldn’t know it, Doctor, but Baftau is on our board. And he enjoys going round the sites.”

  “After fifty years just sitting behind the desk, should that surprise anyone?”

  “Not in the least,” Menka admitted. “No wonder you remain so agile. I thought all you did was sit in Hilltop Mansion and reminisce over the good old days.”

  “And escape my wives,” the Old Man roared. “Ask Costello. He visits sometimes. At my age, you’d think they’d have learnt to leave me in peace. Not they. They still want me to settle their quarrels. But now, see, our sanctuary is gone. And you know, as a good Muslim, I must not be seen in bars. So what am I supposed to do?”

  Costello winked. “Pay no attention to him. He’s kept himself busy. Very busy. That’s what brought him.”

  “Us!” the Old Man corrected. “Yes, Doctor, we have been busy. You left us a very big challenge. You embarrassed me, Doctor, me especially. Inside my own native corner. You deprived me of sleep. So after the fire I called Costello—we are old friends. I said, let’s go and find this place.”

  Menka sat up. “You found the place? Boriga?”

  “Where else? Yes, in Boriga.”

  “And still operating?”

  Costello said, “We found it, but then again we did not.”

  Menka did not ask for elaboration. Instead his mind flew instantly to the final encounter the night before the fire. It was more to himself that he said, “That character knew what he was talking about.”

  The callers looked at each other, their faces expressing the same question. Menka took a deep breath and carefully recounted his encounter with the stalking figure, the one who had assured him of the closure of the meat mall. So who was he? A floating club member? Or maybe even a ghost?

  That was a mystery neither of them could solve. Old Man Desert threw up his hands. “It was you he haunted. I never even noticed any stranger all that night.”

  Costello mused, his face increasingly creased, “I believe I saw the figure you’re talking about. He caught my attention very briefly—yes, in the billiards room. I was on my way to the toilet. But I soon forgot all about him. I was there to celebrate, nothing else. Until you l
aunched your bombshell.”

  Menka looked slightly embarrassed. “So virtually overnight that elaborate establishment disappeared? Or was it burnt down like Hilltop? By the way, any clues? Any known arsonist been named?”

  “One at a time, Doctor, one at a time. Now, the fire. I happen to believe it was a distraction. It was to keep us busy while the supermarket was evacuated. It was a well-rehearsed operation. Costello feels the same way.”

  “Very elaborate.” Costello nodded. “So elaborate that in my view it was all planned. That is, they had a fall-back plan. At the first signal of danger, they would evacuate. They would transfer into a prepared warehouse, or another sales emporium. Set up, equipped in advance. Ready for occupation at a moment’s notice.”

  The Old Man nodded sagely. “I am inclined to that view. I believe they merely moved somewhere else.”

  “Within Jos?”

  Costello shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. You see, Dr. Menka, they are crafty in this business, but you know, they cannot totally cover their tracks. They were in a rush. I am a builder, as you know. I go round the buildings. Incomplete, abandoned, occupied, prefabricated—every kind. Even sites still under demarcation. It becomes second nature. So I am pottering around. And I find something of great interest.”

  Costello reached for his briefcase, opened it, and extracted a partly burnt notebook. He handed it over to Menka. “Do you know anyone who knows cryptography? Look at it. It is very much in code.”

  Old Man Desert giggled. “Me, I can’t make head nor tail of it. But Allah is great. Imagine if I had not gone with Costello.”

  Costello nodded. “I am Italian. And what they do here is to adopt something that was invented by an Italian—it is called the Codex Seraphinianus. So I could pick up a word here and there. Not many. But I read names of human parts of the body, and then there are brief comments. I could make sense of what this is all about. Just small-small. And these sheets belong to a larger documentation. Is like notes going into bigger work. When people move, they burn. If you like to poke nose and look place where people just leaving, you will find burning spot, not merely of paper. When people move, they burn. So, Dr. Menka, let me tell you straight. We are not dealing with one shop only. There is a network. Boriga is just one section. They are here in Lagos. There are addresses here, but I cannot read. We need a specialist to help us, someone who knows how to break into this special language. This notebook give many clues. Boriga is just one place. When I look at this diagram, I think it is telling what cities. One thing I read—here, I show you—they are developing software to make operation smooth. Very smooth. And foolproof. If you look closely, you will see that some pages look draft for ledger sheets. Another one is like order forms. It’s there, in plain Italian. So I link some facts, some images and diagrams, and it all bring us close to full picture. But we must find a professional.”