by Wole Soyinka
His certitude on this very outcome, the undertaker recounted, had made him offer further advice to Kikanmi on the choice of a coffin. He had taken pains to go into technical details with the real estate dealer: the soil was heavy, he informed him, so it was advisable to choose a sturdy casket that would not be crushed under the weight of earth. The brother, however, had shrugged off all advice. He preferred a coffin made of cheap, low-density wood—his very expression—but with an impressive layer of varnish. As for embalming, he settled for simple facial cosmetics, nothing more elaborate.
The mortician was merely another ring in the circles of the instructed, but Kighare’s instruction was of a different kind. Despite all efforts to ward off the undesired image, Kighare had followed his friend down into that darkness and had witnessed the slow deterioration of his body. He could actually see his face, watch it disintegrate slowly. He felt he could touch his skin. His final brief—phoned to Ekundare at the departure lounge—had been unsparing: First, get the body out of the earth as fast as you can. Immediately. We’ve lost valuable time as it is, but let the mortician see what can be done with the face. Once we get him back, the casket will remain sealed during his lying in state. A tinted window over his face, even frosted, as dark as can be, so there can be some physical outline, a shape that is visible through tinted glass, of the Duyole Pitan-Payne we all knew. That’s the best we can hope for.
Ekundare returned with photographs. The face had indeed begun to collapse. The undertaker promised to do his best but advised that close family should be kept away even from the tinted-glass viewer. Only those with a strong constitution should attempt to look, and even they should be warned to steel themselves in advance. Ekundare assured him that every detail was in competent, even enthusiastic hands—the mortician, undertakers, the parish, the partnering firm, the embassy, everyone was on board. Debbie was on the ground, right in the heart of activities. Menka could finally concentrate on arrangements for receiving the body on home ground, ensuring that Duyole at last received the sendoff he deserved, a sendoff equally craved by those who had stumbled, even by accident and however marginally, into his orbit. Gratefully, he canceled his planned sector of the relay. The embassy would play that role, see the body onto the plane. He would remain on home ground to receive.
Then he received the news from Debbie: her office in the U.S. had ordered her back. She had already overstayed her leave of absence, and her boss refused any further extension. When she had left for Austria, it was to travel onwards to the U.S. after she had seen her father off in Frankfurt. So much for the earlier relief, when Menka had been assured that the embassy would cover his self-assigned role. Now, once again, in an underestimation of his own infection by the bug of possession, he succumbed to a deep distrust inserted into his marrow. Any ensuing internal debate was short-lived—to remain and receive or to travel and accompany? Menka decided to travel to Austria and personally bring the body home. On the one hand, he felt—yes—it promised a therapeutic bonus. But then also—he attempted to appraise himself—was this not an onset of paranoia? He admitted that it could be. It would help if only he could remotely guess at, much less fathom, what it was that motivated The Family. But then, neither could anyone he had encountered within the compass of that death. No option, then, but to project their likely acts as broadly and irrationally inconceivable. At that stage, his grim projections refused to shy away from the possibility of The Family’s obtaining the corpse of some illegal immigrant and bringing it home for a Nigerian burial. It could end up garnished with the famous wiener schnitzel to be served up for a father’s ghoulish dinner.
It seemed the better option to losing more nights of sleep. Menka revalidated his ticket, readied himself for departure. And so once again the unremitting cycle!—a division of labour—with The Family’s grudging, even pointedly graceless acquiescence. Indeed, not unexpectedly, the capitulation of The Family proved to be no more than a posture of public relations. The quartet had retreated only to regroup, recoup, and launch a rearguard action, based on tactics of attrition. Menka realized that he had underestimated the tenacious hold of some kind of mental conditioning in them that was akin to a religious zealotry, involving perhaps an exorcist ritual that had to be conducted from a distance? Had he, perhaps, truncated a family ritual? His mind swept to Selina’s boast of another brother buried abroad. Accident? Or design? Whichever, that made two of them. It was up to The Family to accept that he also suffered from the same affliction, only his operated from the opposite end of the demonic axis. He permitted a grimace, recollecting one of his early rudimentary inductions into the scientific field, a proven fallacy on all grounds but still applicable as a guiding principle: Action and reaction are equal and opposite.
Listing the responsibilities for Duyole’s homecoming, everything that needed to be done while Dr. Interloper was away, The Family affected a retreat into a junior partnership position of a joint undertaking, seemingly content—not without what could only be described as a mix of scorn and sulking—to let others work themselves to death while they looked on. On appearance, this not merely suited Menka, it served as a palliative for the neglected areas of his existence. It took his mind off the root cause of his displacement from Jos, even though he did make the occasional call to Costello and Baftau—did they need any input from him? They did not. It left him utterly grateful. A reporter from the veteran newspaper The Vanguard had done an extensive interview with him over his work on the casualties from Boko Haram’s bombing spree, and subsequently on his award; he contacted him, linked him up with Damien. Together they would work on the modest amount of publicity that needed to precede Duyole’s arrival, enabling his friends to come and take their final leave of him. The journalist was so thankful to be involved, he offered Damien a desk in his own office so that he had all facilities to hand. Anything at all, just ask, he promised.
As Menka sensibly feared, the capitulation of The Family was only between partial and scheming. Others could work, they would undermine. Every step of the way, the formula had become transparent. Even as Menka’s hastily assembled team moved to implement the agreed arrangements, the implacable, inexplicable, but active hostility from The Family began to dispense with the last vestiges of subtlety. Orders were issued bluntly, largely from the desk of the same Big Brother—Duyole’s homecoming was to be kept as secret as possible. It was back to the Salzburg theology. Deploying every known tactic, The Family resisted all attempts to let Duyole’s people, his acquired family, know that their man was coming home. Damien, appointed Mr. Publicity Co-ordinator, was simply co-opted as arrowhead of deception and manipulation. Bypassing Bisoye, as had now become routine, and against all comers, The Family insisted on a workday, not a weekend, for reinterment. But why? What was it to them? Why a weekday? With Debbie gone and the widow incapacitated, there was only so far that Menka could move. And his main charge, he had decided, was to bring the body home. Even if the weekday chosen was one on which human motion became impossible, leaving no one to accompany the coffin to the graveyard, what mattered was that Duyole should rest eventually within the soil of Badagry. Menka shrugged off a weekday burial, confident that sufficient numbers would sacrifice even a month’s salary to pay homage to their colleague, as long as they knew of the event in advance. The Family caviled over the simple wording of a press release, dismissed, refused, agreed, indeed insisted, on taking on other chores, other functions, for the sole purpose of ensuring that they were never discharged, sabotaged others with brazen declarations that those duties were already fulfilled. Menka shrugged, insisted on only one thing—he would personally ensure that that body entered the plane’s cargo, he would ride on that same plane. He would accompany Duyole home. And he would personally inter his body in his chosen final abode!
It was not altogether adequate but Menka placed a shadow behind every chore that had been appropriated by The Family, including the most basic, mundane, and unskilled roles, which were
suddenly transformed into “Family responsibilities,” too sacred to be left to outsiders. Fortunately, crucial input, such as security, proved their scope of appropriation. There, at least, Menka succeeded in asserting full control, a firm, unscripted KEEP OFF sign on display. All the doctor had to do was deliver a stern, angry reminder of how the outward mission had nearly ended in a fiasco, thanks to Teahole’s vaunted control over the entire nation’s security agencies. “I intend to take care of that myself,” Menka warned quietly, and proceeded to outline methodically a step-by-step schedule of movements. On his way out, he would personally visit his newly acquired friend, the airport commandant. It needed no psychiatrist or soothsayer to predict that a mixture of guilt from two directions—one, his earlier obstructive conduct, and two, news of the eventual death of the patient at the centre of it all—would put even the hardiest gladiator in a compassionate, compensatory frame of mind. Menka resolved to exploit that to the fullest, quite shamelessly. He would insist that a detail of his airmen, together with the Highway Patrol escort from the outward journey, meet the plane on the tarmac, offload its sombre cargo, then accompany the cortege straight from the airport to the family home in Badagry. A motorcade of no more than a dozen vehicles, Menka reassured the shrinking violet of the funeral coven. A vigil would be held in Duyole’s living room, with the coffin lying in state. His widow, her relations, and Duyole’s children would take over for that phase. The following morning, he would personally inter his body in his chosen final abode.
Everyone declared he had grasped his or her part—what to do when Duyole finally arrived home. Almost with a light heart, Menka finally flew to Frankurt, then Salzburg. The mystery of Family attitude remained a nagging point, but not one that he permitted to disturb his newly obtained tranquility of mind. Tranquil, yes, and yet neither the plane nor the train could move fast enough to deposit him in Salzburg. His first stop, even before checking into the hotel, was the funeral parlour. He met the mortician. The exhumation had been carried out without a hitch, he again assured his visitor. He only lamented that it was not how he would have wished the body to leave his clinic. Menka questioned him about his exchanges with members of The Family, what advice he had given over embalming and the choice of a casket. The undertaker confirmed every detail of Dr. Ekundare’s report. It was an unrelenting chorus—he had yet to encounter such a perverse attitude in his entire career. Well, he gestured, he had done what he could. Would Menka like to see the body? The surgeon told him that he had already seen the body. The man looked startled. “Surely you remember me? I was the one who refused to enter the cemetery on the day of the burial.” Yes, now the man recalled. “Well,” Menka continued, “I have never left my friend since that moment, and I know how he is now. I know exactly how he looks. I’m a doctor, a surgeon. I also viewed him when he was laid out in your chapel before the burial, but I have already decided on our parting image and see no reason to efface that image. You want to know what that is?” The mortician nodded. “A foaming beer tankard at Oktoberfest.”
Kighare received a check in his headlong careering, something about the laws of other lands. No, he could not travel to Frankfurt from Salzburg across the Austro-German border with Duyole’s casket as his luggage; the laws of both nations appeared to frown on such quirks. The transfer of custody to the airline commenced at the mortician’s and would be relinquished only in Lagos. Sealed and delivered, Duyole became the airline’s responsibility. So the doctor took an earlier train to Frankfurt airport to await his friend, tracking his move every inch of the way until he arrived at the Customs warehouse. So, my friend Duyole, you are now designated freight? That would have tickled you no end. Knowing that this was how, more or less, everyone ended up anyway did not make it any easier. Duyole as freight! But the surgeon had become far too immersed in procedure to permit himself to dwell too long on such travesties. He operated as an automaton. His task was to ensure that the freight did not get left behind for any reason. Menka followed every bureaucratic demand and advice. He obtained a copy of the freight’s waybill and, from his base at the Sheraton Airport Hotel in Frankfurt, continued to monitor every movement of the freight, ensuring that the coffin was actually loaded into the cargo hold. From freight to waybill, his bosom friend, Duyole? He was not even permitted into the warehouse to check—just the alphanumeric identity substituted for Duyole Pitan-Payne. The documentation now reassured him that Duyole was not being jettisoned for some more urgent freight, perhaps furniture for a newly completed mansion for a politician or businessman. Calmly settled into his flight seat, he felt he should have realized, perhaps, that there was actually no cause for concern. This was not the kind of freight that airlines liked to have on their hands one moment longer than necessary, and in any case the much-touted Germanic efficiency had taken over.
* * *
—
It was early evening and already dark when the plane landed in Lagos. All were on the alert, the airport commandant in his element. He met Kighare right at the plane doors, in the company of the head of the luggage handlers and the most senior Customs officer on duty. Nothing was permitted to go wrong on this return of the son of the soil, the people’s unaccredited ambassador to the United Nations, accompanied by no less than the winner of the National Pre-eminence Award. Together they descended the side gantry down to the tarmac, to take charge of the freight as it was offloaded. The hearse this time, not an ambulance, waited on the tarmac. It drove up to the hold of the plane to receive its august occupant, pulled up close to the offloading bay. It felt only mildly déjà vu in reverse rewind. All proceeded smoothly. The Customs officer had already taken possession of the waybill. All that was left was to fit the number to the package. His men, alerted to the nature of the freight, kept turning over labels, comparing, moving from one to the next likely shaped object below the belly of the plane. Impatient now, Dr. Menka joined them, the commandant assisting. As Menka straightened up once to look around, he saw an unscheduled observer at the proceedings—the Brain of Badagry, Kikanmi standing aloof, arms folded, his lips curled in the familiar lofty detachment, even disdain, his posture ostentatiously disclaiming any connection with the obscene activity around him. Menka felt like lunging at him. Why the presence? he asked himself. His chores did not involve his presence at the airport—indeed, he had made it clear that he would rather not take part in receiving his brother’s corpse. So why had he put in an appearance, if all he planned to do was stand and survey the scene with such obvious, condescending composure? Was this some macabre game of which non-Family were kept in ignorance?
Minutes passed. The luggage hold was emptied. Then came the moment of panic. The casket was nowhere among the pieces strewn all around the bay.
Menka waded through various packages of likely sizes, all taken out of the hold under his own eyes. But of the casket there was no sign. He withdrew a little, tried to cast his gaze around and attempt to buttonhole any Lufthansa ground official. It was then that he heard a voice, laced with the deepest scorn, behind him: “Yes, what else can one expect? Too many cooks.”
He turned round. He had not realized that the brother had shifted position. The estate agent was not turned in his direction, but he had no difficulty in scanning the indescribable sneer on his face as he turned away to contemplate more elevating activities around the tarmac.
With difficulty, Menka turned his concerns to their original intent—finding the official handler for Lufthansa. He saw the Customs man coming towards him, the waybill flashing in his hand.
“I think there has been a mix-up, sir. There is a case over there with the right number, but it’s not what we are looking for.”
Dr. Menka looked in the indicated direction, and then suddenly it struck home. Of course! There it was, sitting conspicuously on the tarmac! He had got them all looking for a casket, they had all been looking for a casket shape, but since he had last glimpsed it on arrival from Salzburg and driven into the airline ware
house, it had been repackaged in a plain cardboard container, disguised to look like any other outsize freight. Passengers, he recalled, do not like to travel on a plane containing a corpse; maybe even flight crews balk at it, for all he knew. Hence this final camouflage work on a plain casket. As Menka pointed with relief at the correct freight, a movement caught his eye, and he turned just in time to see Big Brother turn his back and walk away, illumined by the spotlight that was played on the patch of activity. He got into his car and left the scene.
* * *
—
The crucial vehicles—Hearse, pilot car, security—were lined up, but where was the rest of the reception line? During the frantic two days of planning, the number of friends who had announced their intention to come to the airport to receive Duyole numbered over forty. Duyole’s return had been planned as a triumphant reentry, triumphant but not carnivalesque—the motorcade was reduced to a maximum of twelve. Now Menka saw only three or four cars of private ownership. The smell of sabotage rose rampant. However, he did feel a twinge of pity for The Family saboteurs—insistence on a dozen as the minimum had come from others, the children especially. For once he found himself sympathetic to The Family side. No matter in whatever direction from the airport, traffic remained a nightmare, and fewer cars meant less disruption by the already problematic convoy. Even so, it was clear that something was amiss. These were friends who, if they had known that Duyole would actually be buried in Austria, would have flown there on their own—most could afford it. Some could not but would have traveled anyway. They simply had not imagined such a possibility, and the deed was over before they could improvise. The moment they learnt of the final homecoming, however, they made arrangements to come to the airport, swearing to remain not too distant until his final interment. So where were they?