Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth

by Wole Soyinka

  The two brothers were among the earliest callers, not long after Menka and the ambulance which he had immediately ordered had left. He declined to await the arrival of the bomb squad as ordered down the line by the police. You do your duty when you can, he said. I’ll do mine, and when is now, and switched off the phone. The bomb squad, the noise and chaos, and the mad ambulance wail to the hospital had roused the entire neighbourhood, most of whom did hear the sound, thought it was yet another petroleum tanker. Or yet another building imploding on itself. These had become the companion sounds of existence. Thereafter the processions began—home, hospital, mortuary, in and out of the famous landmark, the Millennium Towers. At the hospital, only a handful of closest family were permitted anywhere near. Duyole’s business partners, all junior, resented being kept at bay but were mostly understanding. There was Ekete, diminutive Ekete, dapper even in evident distress; Runjaiye, always with an air of permanent bewilderment, yet the stiffening backbone of staff productivity. The loyal caterer and family friend Sisi Sangross arrived accompanied by a maid carrying a headload of fresh catfish, eja osan, right into hospital, unable to understand why she had to be denied entry with her offering, only reluctantly agreeing to redirect her feet to the home instead. Learning that Bisoye had been taken back to the home, under sedation, all resentment vanished and she flew to the house to be by her side.

  At the hospital the trickle became a flood of disappointed callers. It would be another three days before the two girls from Duyole’s first marriage arrived, one from the United Kingdom, the other from the United States. For now it was shocked and sympathizing clients, media snoopers, club members…Sir Goddie sent a special delegation conveying sympathies and a promise of vengeance on the perpetrators. The emissaries specifically asked the son Damien to call on the People’s Steward as soon as possible.

  Estate agent Kikanmi, the Brain of Badagry, felt especially put-upon. He arrived at the house soon after the departure of the ambulance and was instantly joined by the general-purpose salesman. They met an inconsolable Godsown, their ancient steward, seated on the doorstep, both hands holding up his head. He pointed a shaking finger in the direction the ambulance had gone—They done kill oga-o, they done bomb oga finish. Ambulance take in body go, etc., etc. The two brothers joined forces, raced directly to the hospital mortuary, expressed irritation to be redirected to the hospital, then to the surgery theatre, where they were even more astonished at their exclusion from the operating room, being advised instead to return hours later or else wait at the postsurgery anteroom, where they might just obtain a glimpse of the patient being wheeled past. Kikanmi, his nose permanently turned skywards in umbrage at his surroundings, took his plaint straight to the presumed occupant of that space.

  “What a backward country! In other places there is a window through which one can watch the operation.” He returned to his rounds of duty, Teahole to his golf club.

  Within hours the social media was dripping with blood: “The UN Energy Nominee Bombed, Mangled Beyond Recognition.” Yet the same unrecognizable mush was being flown in one of the presidential fleet to New York for treatment, with no one lesser than the nation’s chief of air staff at the controls.

  And the same UFO was wheeled out on a guerney through the double doors of the operating theatre of the University Teaching Hospital situated in southern Nigeria, Dr. Menka pushing at the hand-bar himself. He remained somewhat dazed by the uncanny pursuit of déjà vu, this time seemingly personally directed. He found himself yet again following a familiar routine—left the hospital for his apartment some six hours after the operation, even though he had not physically participated. He went straight into the bathroom and relaxed under the shower. Afterwards, hot coffee with a double dose of milk and sugar, then headed back to the hospital. He stopped at the main house to check on the stricken wife. Godsown had been dislodged from the doorstep but was now seated on the stool normally occupied by the security unit, staring into space. His former position was occupied by a fully armed and kitted detective, who refused him entry. Godsown raced up to explain who he was. The policeman was adamant. Only the listed inmates were allowed entrance—on orders.

  Menka restrained Godsown’s looming outburst. “Just call me Damien.”

  Godsown shook his head. “But Mr. Damien dey hospital.”

  Menka paused. Only then did it occur to him that he had not seen Damien since he had driven off with the ambulance that morning.

  A car drove up. It was Runjaiye from the office. Menka’s face lit up. Seeing the hyperefficient Runjaiye reassured him yet again that there was someone who would hold the fort while the boss was incapacitated.

  “I am not allowed in,” he informed the junior partner. “We’re trying to find Damien. Is he at the office?”

  “No. Isn’t he at the hospital?”

  “No. I was hoping he was at the office.”

  “He did come to the office. I assumed he came to check that everything was all right. He was in Mr. Payne’s office most of the time. Then he left, I assumed for the hospital.”

  Menka shook his head. “I remember now—he did say something to me, but it was all rather chaotic. Naturally all I wanted was to get Duyole in the ambulance and off. Bisoye refused to leave his side. I told the driver to take off at once.”

  Godsown intervened. “He go back inside house. Say he wan’ go lock Master workshop where the bomb blow so nobody can tamper with anything until police come. Then afterwards he drive commot. I think say ’e follow you all go hospital.”

  “All right, let him know I was here. Just wanted to check on Madam. I’ll be at the hospital from now on. Be sure to call me as soon as she wakes up. We gave her some medicine to make her sleep, you understand?”

  “Oh yessah. I see when nurse bring her back. They carry her go bed straightaway. The housemaid dey with her. And Sisi Sangross come stay with her.”

  “Good.” He turned to Runjaiye and pointed at the detective. “Please get hold of this man’s boss and let him know that doctors need to see their patients.”

  * * *

  —

  Menka was still struggling to keep his eyes open and read past the same open page at which he appeared to have stalled since he took up position. At least here he could exercise his privilege as doctor where others had been expelled. It had been a long watch. He was resolved to be present when the slightest eye flicker or muscle twitch signaled a renewed claim on life. Each time his head lolled and jerked him back into wakefulness, he cast a quick look at the bed, hopeful that Duyole had not woken up and caught him nodding. He could already hear the patient’s unswerving rebuke, the same retort whenever Menka warned against driving himself too hard—Physician, heal thyself. Menka felt overdue for ministration beyond rest; some serious healing was definitely on prescription.

  More than keeping watch over Duyole assailed him, body and soul. If only it were all limited to Physician, heal thyself. Menka feared that it actually came down to Physician, know thyself! There was the seeming conversion of his body into a battlefield for keeping nightmares at bay, a fallout from grim discoveries that would forever dog his surgical faith. The award only made matters worse—the public exposure—just when he craved, longed for total anonymity, the best award imaginable, the gift of vanishing…and then, suddenly, a commotion!

  Menka could not believe his ears, but…no indeed, he was wide awake, was not in the middle of a nightmare, and was not hallucinating. Within that clinical, healing atmosphere, nothing less than a violent wind was racing up the stairs in human accents. It approached the final flight, pursued by two, then three pairs of restraining hands and frantic pleading: “Madam, Madam, please, Madam—the patients…” The wind was, however, beyond recall. Menka threw himself out of the chair and raced to intercept it before it arrived at his floor and swept into Duyole’s curtained-off space—he had recognized one female voice and it made him all the more angry. It
was none other than the patient’s younger sister, Selina.

  “Broda mi, broda mi, se’wo l’araiye fe se bayi?”*

  Oblivious to everyone within sight or hearing, she raced upstairs, a clear bottle of water in one hand, executing mysterious motions alternately around her head and outwards in sharp thrusts away from herself in the direction of unseen enemies, the other hand fending off restraint. Simultaneously she ejected a stream of Yoruba maledictions on all those whose envy had presumably organized the assault on the patient: “They will not succeed! You will defeat them all. You will go to the United Nations and you will return unharmed. You will earn greater honours. The world will know the name Pitan-Payne. Those who hate to hear the name will go deaf from the sound of that name in Jesus’s name. The mean-spirited people of this world, envious of the blessed, those who never wish good on those whom they see being successful, whom they see prospering, whom they see doing good to others, showering good on others, those to whom greatness will forever remain an unknown commodity in Jesus’s name since they cannot stand to see it in others, those whose sole goal in life is to cut down others in their prime, to ambush them on their way to glory, to drag others down from the heights of fulfillment, heights attained through the industry of their hands—oh, we know them, we know their dirty machinations, but they will sink down on their knees of failure, never to rise again in Jesus’s name amen. They can pretend to any friendship they like, but God will expose them all. God will finish them off, God will frustrate their plots. I swear it, my brother, none of them will live to see their evil thoughts triumph in Jesus’s name.”

  It was an electrifying performance. She seemed possessed, as if there were no other human being in that hospial, with her coming straight from some pool of psychic fortification whose energies—as per instructions—she was to discharge directly at the recumbent figure before their potency became dissipated through delay, through a mundane counteracting motion or spell, such as acknowledging the existence of the surgeon friend who tried to intercept her charge.

  “I want to see my brother. He’s been with you people for two days now. Where are you hiding him? I want to see what the enemy has done to him.”

  “Control yourself, Selina.”

  “Who are you? Don’t you dare tell me what to do about my brother!”

  “Selina, this is me, Kighare—”

  “And so? Are you his flesh and blood? I say I must see my brother.”

  “You will. But you must be quiet. He’s resting. Don’t disturb him.”

  “They’ve killed him. I know they’ve killed him. You are all lying to me.”

  “Quietly, I said. You must be quiet or I’ll throw you out myself. I’ll throw you down those stairs.”

  That appeared to check her in stride. She looked at him in some astonishment. By now visitors to other patients were emerging to watch the commotion. Dr. Menka led her to Duyole’s cubicle and pointed, pulling the curtain further to seal him off completely. Baffled, he watched Selina fall on her knees, bury her face in the mattress, and commence sobbing. It was a dry, racking sob that did not provide a tear. He let it run its course. As if to make up for the drought, she stood up and proceeded to circle the bed, bottle in hand, sprinkling its contents on the floor. That done, she again fell to her knees, this time selecting a position next to the head. Then she began to mouth prayers, exploding into voice from time to time. Dr. Menka signaled to the nurses to withdraw.

  She remained in communication with unknown forces for another few minutes. When she was done, she stood up, smoothed her dress, and looked Kighare Menka over.

  “I warned you not to bring that bastard into the family home. Ill luck, that’s what you brought to the family.”

  She left. Quiet fell over the hospital ward. Dr. Menka checked his patient. There was no change in his condition. He resumed his watch. The interruption had banished all drowsiness and replaced it with a feeling of mockery, the resentment of a self-imposed inadequacy. What was the point of all that training and reputation if he could not even remotely assess the depth of Duyole’s coma? Or connect with him in some way, at some level? To be able to claim with some assurance that the engineer was thinking anything where he was? Surely some effort at recollection was in progress and thought neurons had a way of connecting. Anything shared from the past? Nothing profound or spectacular on demand, just something, any trivia to hang on to, something that ensured that one thread, however frayed, remained unbroken. Then transmission from his own realm of competence could commence. Contact. Gradually that thread would wind his friend back, inch by inch, to real life, across no matter how deep or wide the gulf!

  The specialist surgeon, model of clinicality, set to, trawled his weighted net in a succession of reels, of which there was no shortage. The humdrum was tossed overboard. Duyole’s track was littered with esoteric jaunts on which he would sometimes expend just as much time and energy as on his prized—and lucrative—mechanical inventions. One of that engineer’s pastimes was to fabricate useless but eloquent gadgets, mostly conversions. Disgusted like millions of his fellow sufferers with the ritual failure of the nation’s electricity agency, he once offered the national power agency, known as NEPA, his “masterpiece solution.” This was a gadget which, he claimed, generated darkness outside Nature’s regulation solar hours. He parceled the prototype to the minister of power, Menka providing the accompanying note: This leaves you free to concentrate on the production of light, since Nigerians can now produce their own darkness at the flick of this switch. Neither was willing to risk a bet that a high-placed employee would not race to the Patents Office with the monster trying to pass it off as his own invention. The Kids “R” Us robotic castoff, impressively augmented with silvered bottle tops, broken glass pieces, hundreds of the oblong seeds of the flamboyant tree, spokes from an ancient Raleigh bicycle in flaring circles, all emitting a fearsome roar when wound up, adorns the Patents vaults still today in a section marked energy solutions.

  No sooner had Kighare Menka launched himself on that reverie than he found himself shutting it off with a shudder. The doctor was not superstitious—at least he tried to persuade himself he was not—but this was no time to invoke darkness, even in jest, not while it was the crowing usurper of Duyole’s consciousness. He scrambled desperately for a replacement—something no less manic, perhaps, also spelling mischief, laughter, certainly a swarming human concourse, a rain of bright pebbles that would land on Duyole’s head and provoke him into wakefulness from wherever he was presently trapped. His mind wandered to shared Oktoberfests; together they had ploughed their way through the beer gardens of Bavaria. The raucous, high-decibel yodeling was soon silenced by recollection of the family feud—place of origin of the out-of-wedlock-son affair—and Menka just as quickly segued into the more neutral operatic arena, definitely a Pitan-Payne favourite roost. It was far more comfortable, but not where Menka could immerse himself for long with the mandatory concentration, since the doctor was notoriously tone-deaf and would sometimes loudly wonder why serious actors should choose to warble dialogue when they could simply talk like normal beings. He continued to rifle the warehouse—well, a halfway house perhaps? His favourite mix—the arts, yes, but business bordered, eating as the primal art, and what of healing and culture?

  From this had sprung the alternative medicine phase—A first step, of course, just the first step—always a first step with Pitan-Payne, groundbreaking for something bigger, grander, more elaborate, more intricate. That was where his blithe spirit found sufficient roving space, in a geodesic bubble mind which, unlike the rolling stone, gathered moss of the most nutritious kind. Look, you butcher, where there’s traditional disease, there must be traditional cure. Look at Lassa fever—man can’t even eat bush meat anymore. One day the hunters will rebel and I’ll join them. Those oyinbo people have left us to solve it all by ourselves—why not? And that Ebola? How do we know the solution is not here? I
mean, in traditional medicine. They claim it’s our disease. Who cares? It’s who cures it! It all boils down to a choice between the laboratory and the mortuary.

  Kighare flinched at the word but this time refused to back off, shaking his head defiantly and compelling the reel to continue. The aggravated exchange over Duyole’s instinct that Gumchi held the key helped. Now, a pristine village like Gumchi—just the place to research trado-medicine. Unspoilt. Close to Nature. And Menka’s own screaming reservations: Can you get this into your head? I am only a surgeon. My specialization is to cut people up, after others have recommended that course of action. Enter the aggravating pause and the practiced shock of innocence. Oh? But doctor is doctor, once it’s not a PhD. Wait, wait, not so fast. Let’s backtrack. I knew it! Thought you’d got away with it, didn’t you? I knew I’d heard that before—Muhammad Ali, that’s who—What do I do for a living? I beat people up. You stole his line—shame on you!

  Menka, the triggering intent forgotten, remained wrapped up in a long-distance FaceTime call on Gumchi airwaves. Like a divination tablet, Duyole’s jotting pad had emerged, jumped into place on his lap as they argued in his workshop, his enthusiasm blotting out everything else. The pencil began to flash all over its glossed surface. An hour later they had reached the stage of sealing the deal with his ritual prize libation, the single-malt Laphroaig, fifty years fermenting in the barrel, donated by that effusively satisfied client—remember him? That dangling project, the work-in-progress always on the mind, abandoned, retrieved, revisited, revised, rebuking, beckoning—surely that hyperactive brain would recall it all, fight to retrieve it, reinvest it where it belonged. It had to arrest his flotation in directionless space, reactivate the glint that had seemed glued to his retinas from birth, a glint also of uninhibited self-mockery. Menka continued to track that glint as it shifted purpose wildly, its owner picking up a phone in his presence to shut down the office early so as to lead his staff to a child-naming ceremony, join in a clan reunion or a retirement party of the gardener or security guard, chuckling, “You know, it’s embarrassing, but I think we’re getting the better part of the bargain—much too much. Did you see their faces when we turned up? Just seeing how they sparked, and I felt ready to dash to the workshop and put in another eight hours solid. It’s unfair.”