by Wole Soyinka
“No other way, sir.”
“What do you mean, no other way?” Menka gestured in the general direction of the domestic terminal. “It’s the same airfield. The tarmacs open into one another—look, that’s a service vehicle coming in from the domestic. It’s regular traffic. So where’s the problem?”
The soldier’s eyes opened even wider. “You mean…?”
“I mean.” He patted the jeep. “This is one of the patrol vehicles, right? You go up and down, round and round. Even we bloody civilians can see that while seated in the plane. You have your dedicated lanes, and you are actually on duty. That includes emergencies.” He pointed to the stretcher. “Now, that is an emergency! A matter of life and death.”
The soldier’s mouth opened and shut. He took one more look at the stretcher and the burden it carried.
“Jump in, sir.”
They raced along the peripheric lanes, cut actoss tarmacs, and were beside an operational sector of the domestic in no time. As he pulled up outside the commandant’s office, the officer pleaded, “But don’t say I told you he’s here or that he has the papers. He’s been denying they are with him.”
Menka winked. “What do you take me for? Your commandant will be glad that he performed this good deed, I promise. And if you get into trouble, don’t worry, I’ll leave you all my contacts.”
“I’ll park behind this building so he doesn’t see me when he sees you off.”
“If you’d rather not wait, I’ll find my way back,” Menka offered. “He can give his instructions ahead while I fight my way back through regular traffic.”
The soldier grinned and saluted. “I’ll wait right there, Doctor.”
Dr. Menka entered to the sound of bantering, laughing, flirtatious registers—all the accustomed happiness noises not normally associated with the office of a commandant of any national security outfit. An alert corporal manned the reception desk, looked up. Recognition, then disbelief all over his face. He leapt out of his seat, courteous and solicitous. Menka felt himself begin to fill a role, progressively, that was being instinctively accorded him. In as offhanded but businesslike a voice as he could muster, he told the corporal to inform his boss that he, Dr. Menka, was there on a matter of absolute urgency, a matter of life and death, to be understood literally! The corporal leapt into action. At the door he hesitated briefly, then knocked.
A voice from within bellowed with rage: “Who the bloody hell is that again? I thought I told you I was not to be disturbed!”
The corporal turned to Menka with a helpless gesture. The surgeon pushed past him into the office. The commandant stared, ready to explode. The next moment, recognition also leapt to his face. His chair was scraped backwards and he rose in a salute.
“Doctor, very sorry, Doctor, no one told me you were waiting for me.”
“I’ve come about the detained ambulance plane,” Menka announced.
“What plane? Oh…the…that plane. Sit down, Doctor, sit down, please.” He turned to his guests, two women and a male. “Er…excuse me, will you? Come back later, when I’ve finished with the doctor.”
He ushered out his guests, screamed for his assistant, and resumed profuse apologies. “I didn’t know you were involved at all. Nobody informed me…”
“It doesn’t matter. Please, whatever red tape you need to cut, I count on you to do it. My friend’s life is ebbing away, right on the tarmac. We’ve lost nights of sleep over this, over a full week planning, and finally…we end up trying to kill him on your tarmac.”
The commandant blubbered. “They should have told me. No one told me. Hey, you, bring me the file on the detained plane!”
“Sah?”
“The Austrian plane, are you deaf? Which other plane did you detain?”
In another ten minutes Dr. Menka was back on the tarmac, international side, with the clearance papers. Teahole was waiting by the plane with Bisoye. Quickly she explained, “Uncle T. told me about the delay, so I begged to be allowed to remain until it was sorted out. At least I would wave him good-bye. Sorry I looked so washed out earlier, but I’m okay now.”
Menka laughed. “Oh yes, I forgot. You’re the original problem freak. When there’s a problem, then you summon the reserves. Sure. We’ll all see him off together. Everything is now in order. We have clearance. The commandant is issuing necessary instructions.”
He handed Teahole the tied-up papers and the salesman broke into a song and dance of praise, the obverse of his sister’s earlier rain of curses on her brother’s tormentors, all interspersed with his accustomed sniffles.
“Enh, aah, Gumchi-man”—sniffle sniffle—“it was God who made sure you were here today.” Sniffle sniffle. “Only you could have done it.” Sniffle sniffle. “They’re all bastards, those soldiers. Do you know, he even threatened to shoot me. Then threatened to impound the plane! As if we don’t know that all he wanted was a bribe. Awon oloshi.”
Now it was only a matter of getting the crew out of their informal confinement, getting the engines started so that Duyole could be lifted into an air-conditioned plane, then sending him off into the stratosphere. Dr. Menka gave last-minute instructions and moved away some distance from the stretcher so that the couple could spend a few moments alone together. Also, he felt a need to savour, all by himself, what he had just achieved for a friend—far more delectable than bumping off one of Duyole’s more expendable siblings—before he lost the taste of its immediacy, even while cautioning himself not to get too used to the convenient status.
* * *
—
Later Menka returned gloomily to his apartment. Desultorily, he attempted yet again to place some order on his junk from Jos, gave up. Instead he simply repacked his travel bag, ready for the summons from Austria, where his friend would undergo his make-or-break surgery. The timing at least was kind, he reflected. He was jobless. His time was his own, and some of that time had to be dedicated to some deep thinking.
It was a habit he could not help, totally involuntary, but then, he did not consider it abnormal, and even if it was, then it was abnormality calling to the abnormal. Once the day had been marked by any event outside the norm, what else could be expected? And so, as he sank wearily into an armchair, he found yet another tiny occurrence, one that he had forcefully dismissed, rising once again to the surface the moment his mind began to review the day’s offerings.
Why would a son refuse to perform such a simple chore? Your father wants his briefcase—well, bring the briefcase over! Even if one item of total insignificance created the need for that suitcase, he—we—asked for the briefcase, not any item inside it. Why go searching for a document within the suitcase instead of just bringing the damned briefcase? Why assume that the man would not ask for something else tomorrow, today, even before your return with this isolated item? Why?
Part II
19.
The Discreet Funeral of the Bourgeoisie
And then, just as it always does, it was all over—hopes, questions, uncertainties. Duyole Pitan-Payne made it to Salzburg, but not past the third day in that city of song.
Suddenly, virtually overnight, the Pitan-Paynes underwent a puzzling transformation. A death in the family, and especially of one who has come to represent the living force of that family—living, that is, not feeding on the past, real or mythical, but alive and breathing, re-creating and socially reinforcing whatever legacy there was or was merely imagined—such a death can prove a most traumatizing event in the self-regard of that family. It went beyond being perhaps even the breadwinner of the extended clan. Like the proverb of the elephant, the event is not only “something that just flashed past—fiiri!” but a sinkhole opened up in the midst of a crowded intersection; the family finds itself teetering on the unstable verge, poised to tip over or regain its balance. How else, Menka asked of his apartment walls—how else understand it? He was only a surgeon,
a spare-parts manipulator where the parts did not involve the brain. And so the Gumchi man felt lost, wished—not for the first time, and from different causes—that he had selected a different specialization. When he tried to formulate the change, he found that the handiest formula was simply to accept that the Pitan-Paynes had chosen to catapult their members from being just a family, even a notable one with a recognized pedigree, to being The Family. Capital letters. Or Dynasty. With perhaps a capitalized first letter as encountered in ancient illuminated manuscripts.
No matter, whatever it was before, the clan appeared to have finally found itself, dusted up its unacknowledged pedigree and destiny. Normal humanity might undergo the indignity of being buried in natal earth; not so The Family—capital letters. Difficult to deny that once breath is gone, the rest is sentiment. Nonetheless, the entire community around this one individual—business associates, friends, cronies, debtors, beneficiaries—appeared united in the belief that a Brand of the Land, even without recognition in other lands, was simply not donated to other lands in perpetuity even if its purveyor died completely insolvent or had become so ostracized that friends and associates could not bear to pass the hat round to bring him home. Unless, of course, the circumstances of his or her departing were so unspeakable that it made the return to his own earth an abomination. The Family thought differently. When the tally was made in all objectivity, and as amply manifested in the unraveling of events, The Family appeared to consist of just a quartet—the patriarch and the siblings—so Menka took to referring to them as the Otunba Quartet. And it appeared to perform on discordant strings. It did not seem possible, but the quartet was resolved that the life and soul of the family, of Badagry and beyond—Duyole Pitan-Payne, embodiment of an original reading of the spirit of the happiest people in the world—should be buried in a far-off land, simply because that was the place where he happened to draw his last breath. But it was not “simply because.” It was much more, as his bosom friend from the craggy hills of the Plateau was about to discover.
Protestations were predictably instant and pithy, covering every nook of association and even casual encounters. Duyole’s juniors in the firm, Runjaiye and Ekete, led a delegation from Millennium Towers to the Otunba home. They found him unusually minus Mamma Kressy, his toes at peace inside his bedroom slippers. They had protested earlier to Timi, his sense of omnipotency restored. He heard them out, in between sniffles, then delivered a curt message, straight to the point. Mr. Timi instructed the emissary that even the closest colleagues were still outsiders. They had no business in the arrangements for Duyole’s burial. Yes—sniffle sniffle—you are indeed Duyole’s business colleagues—sniffle sniffle—but that relationship ends at Millennium Towers. You are not part of The Family, to whom the ultimate decision belongs. We have taken that decision—interment will be in Austria. Ekete, his voice pitched high in disbelief, gathered the staff together and narrated the one-sided exchange, his already slight frame alarmingly shrunk thinner by the rebuff. The following day he requested a day off.
It was now Menka’s turn, and the doctor posed only one question to the brother: “What does the widow, Bisoye, want?” She had flown out the following night to be with her husband—it proved impossible to restrain her any further—and was at the hospital, but not at his bedside, when he breathed his last. Was it conceivable that she was part of such a decision?
It was difficult to believe, but The Family did not consider the wishes of the young widow of any importance. The Family, it became apparent, did not extend to his widow; neither did it, at that stage, include even the children. The children were apparently conceded a special category of their own, to be courted piecemeal, calculating that the spoils of death would break their ranks and forge new alliances. The Gumchi surgeon found himself in strange waters, floundering. He had of course encountered variations of the same “family culture,” even of more horrifying nature, still in practice. Menka knew of societies where the widow underwent hideous ordeals to prove that she had had no hand in the death of her spouse. In some communities, after bathing the dead man, the woman underwent the medieval torture of trial by ordeal. She was forced to drink the residual slop from the ritual washing of the corpse. If she vomited, then she was a murderess. If she retained the sludge in her stomach, well, too bad. She had to find a way of recovering from the nausea, and even poisoning. By then, of course, her head was already shaved clean, her body subjected to whipping. She was kept locked up in a dark, dingy room in which she ate, urinated, and defecated. She was brought out periodically and subjected to a collective inquisition by the women of the family—what had she cooked for her man that had sent him to join the ancestors? Such sessions were indeed welcomed by the widow, since that was when she enjoyed the luxury of light and fresh air, except of course that such questioning was done at the height of the sun at midday to burn the guilt out of her soul. And so she sat on hot sands in the sun while her interrogators flung questions and accusations at her from the comfort of a shaded verandah. After which, back to her cell and iron rations, a hard baked mud or cement floor, without even a straw mat. But wasn’t this supposed to be Badagry, and a full century at least since the cessation of the slave transportations? Kighare Menka began to wonder which was worse, among the Badagry aristocracy or back in Jos, where at least human remains were treated to commercial respect.
Thus commenced an emotionally bruising saga, a plunge into family intrigues that made him seriously consider seeking delivery at the hands of Papa Davina, or indeed any handy divine. He could no longer resist a strong suspicion that either The Family was possessed by demons or he was. For the moment, however, he contented himself with consulting a medical colleague, checking his blood pressure. As he had begun to suspect, all the symptoms for stress were superabundant. Duyole’s constant caution reached out to him from the void: Physician, heal thyself. It compelled him to douse all rousing emotions, return to basics. Calmly he asked himself, just what did the code of the Gong o’ Four demand of him in such a pass? The answer was straightforward: Bring Duyole home. Take him to Gumchi, if that was what it meant, and bury him there. It emerged as a quiet, fussless resolution, taken in the conviction of what Duyole himself would have done if he, Menka, had been the object of a morbid tug-of-war. You don’t want him? Very well, I’ll keep him.
Menka drove the thirty miles of gutted road into Lagos, indifferent to the jolts of new pits that had not been on that route even twenty-four hours earlier. He found Teahole at his desk, his confidence restored with his apparent designation as principal facilitator and family spokesman. Mr. Timi was expansive. Death was a robe that was several sizes too large for the general procurer, but he strove valiantly to fill it. He was on the phone to Austria, dictating funeral arrangements to the Austrian undertaker. If Teahole felt any grief, none was in evidence—but then, Menka admitted, neither were his own emotions on display. It was not the time, and there was no immediate cause to yield some space to grief. It was sparring time, and the outsider was ready to take on the entire clan of Pitan-Payne impostors, one by one or all together.
“Timi, you know why I’m here. Just let me have a straightforward answer. Whose decision was it to have Duyole buried abroad?”
Teahole exuded pure, undiluted confidence. It was the decision of Pop-of-Ages, but one with which The Family fully agreed.
“I know you have your reasons. May one share, so we can all be on the same wavelength?”
Teahole settled fully back in his chair. “Ah, Gumchi-man”—sniff, sniff—“you know our people, they like noise. They love ostentation. All they want is an opportunity to make a show. They’ll come from far and wide, everyone wants to put in an appearance, but”—sniff, sniff—“eh, a-Gumchi-man, which of them are really grieving? How many in that crowd have merely come there to be seen? To show off? Vulgarity, that’s the problem with our people—not so? You know that, don’t you, eh, Gumchi-man? People like you will understand. Yo
u are a surgeon. You lock yourself away upcountry, attending to victims of Boko Haram. Until this recent award, did anyone know you? Did you care? No. That’s your style. You detest ostentation, that’s why you are different. Most of these people, all they’re interested in is the ‘see me here’ part of it. How many of them really care for Duyole?”
Menka listened, disbelieving. He failed to grasp the relevance. In any case, he could only marvel—could this man have failed to recognize himself, his values, in the very social type he was denouncing? Not that it inserted any rational validity, but could he really fail to recollect that he, Mr. Teahole Procurer for high society, was the prop of the emptiness, the vapidity, the falsity of values and exhibitionism of the soufflé society he was decrying? His gorge rose. Duyole had been a crowd man. Selective, yes, but he loved company. He loved people, just loved to be with people. Was this impertinent hustler criticizing his friend? Did he dare? Menka’s fingers itched. He breathed in and out. It would be healthier to change the direction of the exchange, and he prepared to leave.
“I take it, then, that the decision is final.”
“Definitely. It is the decision of The Family. And it’s not as if Austria is strange to The Family—in fact, we consider Salzburg almost a Family extension.”
“Because Duyole studied there? Because he graduated there?”
“More than, Gumchi, more than. Pop-of-Ages—you may not know this—he has long had business connections with them over in Austria. We’ve made friends. The Lindtz people know us. We know them. They’ve visited here, you know. I’ve taken them round Nigeria. They know their way around here, maybe even more than you do.”
“What does that prove, Timi? What is all that to the widow, for instance? To the children?”