Black Sunday

by Tola Rotimi Abraham

  “I am sorry,” he said to me, because I was staring him down. “I just want to be sure this wall is still solid.”

  Father took full advantage of the opportunity to disentangle himself from Grandmother’s arms. He stepped away from her, standing next to the visitor, tapping the wall with a closed fist.

  “Ah! What are you talking about? This is a solid structure,” he says. “Come outside, let me show you some exposed brick.”

  They stood together for a few minutes. The visitor insisted the walls sounded a little hollow. Father countered by pointing out they stood next to a well, that the sound he heard was a small echo from the depth of the well. As they strolled to the gate, they remarked how clean the yard was, everything swept and washed and in the right place. It was only after the gate shut and the car drove off that Grandmother moved from the middle of the living room, sitting again on her recliner.

  Grandmother was restless after they left. She spent the rest of the day staring at the walls. Her face was blank, and even when she replied to a direct question, she seemed absent and confused. She would sometimes begin to ask a question or make a statement, then, in the middle of what she was saying, she would stop and apologize, telling me or whoever else she was speaking with to forget about it.

  When she slept, I watched her for a couple of hours. The rise and fall of her chest was out of rhythm. She was shivering, even though the room was warm and she was wrapped in a blanket. Rapt, I did not notice when the young lady who helped with cleaning walked in.

  The young lady bent low to the ground next to me, watching Grandmother for a few minutes. Getting up, she signaled to me to walk with her to the kitchen. I walked behind her to the kitchen. Her sleek black hair was secure in a tight bun. She had several raised red spots at the back of her neck.

  “Sister mi, is everything all right with Grandma? Why does she cry?” she asked.

  “Crying? She has not been crying,” I answered.

  “Yes, she has,” she said, “her face is wet with tears.”

  I did not tell her that Grandmother had been asleep for more than two hours and that it meant she must have been crying in her sleep. Instead I asked if she could watch Grandmother alone for a little while. There’s an errand I have to run, I said. There’s a prescription for Grandmother’s knees I need to pick up from the hospital before her doctor leaves. She whispered a soft yes. Then she surprised me by hugging me. She was small and wiry. The hug was tight and short. I was calmed and appreciative.

  But the calm did not last long. My daughter dropped her pacifier the moment I placed her in her car seat. She began to scream in uncharacteristic despair. Unexpected tears filled my eyes as I searched all over the back seat for the pacifier. I did not find it; it seemed to have been swallowed up by some dark part of my Honda Civic.

  WE MADE MY daughter on a Tuesday morning in the living room of my grandmother’s house. I had returned to the house three days after taking Grandmother to the hospital for knee replacement surgery, to pick up a change of clothes and a “spicy” meal. Tunde, my boyfriend, a sergeant in the army whom I met in the weekend classes I was taking at Lagos State University, had driven me because I was too sleep deprived to drive myself. Tunde, who had driven the entire way with one hand on the wheel, the other on my thigh, regaling me with pointless Lagos celebrity gossip, was the perfect antidote to all that stress. I remember thinking while we were fucking how intoxicating it felt to do something so teenager-like, many years after I stopped being a teenager myself. I remember instructing myself to do it more often, to be more relaxed and carefree.

  It was in the spirit of being carefree and enjoying a cherished independence that I rejected Tunde’s pregnancy-inspired marriage proposal, choosing to remain with Grandmother to raise my daughter. I was going to school. I had started my own beauty supply store. I bought a car. Every other Saturday, I took my grandmother and daughter to see the newest movies.

  Why was it so easy now for all that to vanish? What chance did Grandmother have against her only child, who had decided he wanted the house for himself? It did not occur to me, as I drove all the way to see Tunde, that he was not at home. He lived in the junior barracks in Sabo, and sometimes overzealous orderlies refused to let guests in if they were not on the circulated list.

  The oddest thing about all that worrying is that, although I knew in the back of my mind that I had just seen the man who left us more than fifteen years before, my mind had yet to fully comprehend it. Ariyike, my sister, brought that to the fore when I called her from Tunde’s apartment.

  “Bibike! What did you say? You saw our father?” she screamed. “When? Where? Today?”

  Tunde’s apartment was dimly lit. It smelled like cigarettes and beef stew. I placed the receiver down to open the windows, my sister still going on and on. She knew our father was still alive. The Lord had promised to preserve him. She knew a family reconciliation was imminent. That was what happened when you trusted in the Lord and made him your restorer.

  “He brought some investor to look at the house. I think he means to sell it. He really upset Maami,” I said finally, interrupting her.

  “That old house? Someone wants to buy that thing? How much can he even get?” My sister laughed a little.

  “I am not going to let him do this,” I said. I was angry at my sister for laughing. She was not laughing at me, but it felt that way. I was angry that she was so far removed from all this and she did not need the house in the same way I did.

  “Well, he is her only child, and she is so old she is barely functioning. That house is technically his,” she said.

  “So he should be allowed to disrupt her peace?” I asked.

  “Don’t get in the middle, Bibike, try to get on Father’s good side, you need a man in your life, after all,” she replied.

  If Tunde’s apartment had been anything like Grandmother’s house, after ending the call with my twin sister, I would have at that moment gone into the backyard and walked up to the guava tree. I would have grabbed the thickest branches my arms could reach and shaken them so hard, daring them to break off. Instead, I paced the length of his living room, my fingers interlocked and cradling the back of my neck.

  “I am not going to let him do this, Tunde,” I said. “I swear on my grandmother’s head that I will not let him do this.”

  There were many options open to me, Tunde observed. He was supportive and available to help, he reminded me. He could take us to the State High Courts, for example, and then Grandmother and I could swear to an oath before a judge that she did not want to move, and she wanted me to stay with her. It was all very easy and straightforward the way he explained it.

  In the past, I had fought with Tunde for the way he took charge of everything, treating my whole life like a problem needing his intervention. I realized then that my daughter, Abike, was lucky to have that in her father, someone so comfortable with responsibility that he’d take on more without being asked.

  WE WERE LONGER than we needed to be getting home. Tunde had asked for a few minutes to shower before going back with us, but showering required clothes coming off and he did not know how to take off his clothes around me without dancing and making a production out of it all.

  It was half past eight when all three of us got back to Grandmother’s house. The night was dark and humid, and so even though I could not make out the faces of most of the small crowd gathered around my house, I could smell them. It was the smell of a poorly ventilated molue bus stuck in traffic for hours. The crowd was bustling, noisy. Our living room was the nucleus of this diseased cell.

  My grandmother was spread out on her daybed, her body straight like a ruler, covered with a long linen cloth. I knew she was gone before anyone said anything. Her body was lying so straight and stiff, stripped of all that mesmerizing unease she carried with her. Grandmother’s body was always moving; even when she was still, her finger would twitch for no reason. You would be in another room and hear her bones crack as she stretch
ed.

  This old house, the house my grandmother died in, was built in a hurry. That explains the reappearing wall cracks and the fact that the door spaces have always been just a little too wide for regular doors. It had two different sets of builders. The first, a set of German contractors who were in Lagos to help the Nigerian federal government get ready for some international sports or arts festival. The year was 1976 and the Nigerian federal government was building five thousand houses in a hurry to accommodate visitors for this arts/sports festival being held in Lagos. This festival was an ambitious, hurried project, and by the time all the dancers, boaters, singers, thinkers, and artistes had begun to arrive from all over the world, this old house was one of the few hundred yet to be completed.

  When my grandmother bought it, the house was halfway completed and abandoned. She finished up one room, the main bedroom, and moved in with her son. She spent the next five years fixing it up little by little, room by room. This is why some rooms have white ceilings while others have gray. Some rooms have those eighties’ interlocking rubber tiles, and others have laminate flooring. The one bathroom has had several incarnations. At first, it was nothing but a latrine with a hole in the middle. After Bankole got out of school, he added a water closet, bathtub, and tiled the walls. When Grandmother fell in the kitchen and had surgery on her knees, my sister, Ariyike, had someone take out the old bathtub to install a walk-in cubicle with a custom-made chair. The new bath has a wide swinging door that smells like burning rubber when you take a hot shower.

  It was in this new bathroom that I hid to weep. My chest had exploded into several million burning pieces.

  A NEIGHBOR I do not know knocked on the door.

  “Please do not cry,” she said, “Maami has lived well, now she’s gone to rest.”

  The crowd swelled around me like a sick stomach, bloated and moaning, talking in loud whispers to one another, repeating the same questions over and over like an unending chorus.

  “Maami die? What happened?”

  “Her son came here?”

  “What did he do when he came?”

  “They say he pushed her.”

  “No, I heard he shook her like a tray of picking beans.”

  “Where has he gone now?”

  “Who knows where he is?”

  “Who will go searching?”

  My Tunde with his eager baritone uncharacteristically somber-herded the crowd away from the center toward the gate. The skin was broken, and the pus flowed freely. Our neighbors were weeping loudly and with abandon as they went home. Just like that, the spectacle of the strange death was over, and the mourning began.

  In this house my grandmother built, on a short stool in the corner of her room, she has her ere ibeji shrine. There are three small wooden effigies at the center of the shrine. Their bodies are short, about four inches high. They have elongated skulls, exaggerated faces. The oldest one, the one who Grandmother washed, bathed, and sang to regularly, is female. She is dressed in a white dress, doll-sized bangles in each hand. She is Grandmother’s twin, who died when they were toddlers, when Grandmother was too young to realize that there were two of them. The other two are identical, Grandmother’s first children, dead within months of each other before their first birthday.

  The older Yoruba believed that identical twins shared a soul before birth, that the length of their lives was nothing but a conscious uncoupling of souls. When one twin died young, they believed the living twin was in danger of dying as well.

  I picked the effigies up, one after the other, wiping them with the hem of my dress. I wished Grandmother had talked to me about them. She did not practice many rituals of Yoruba traditional belief but these effigies she loved. These she bathed and dressed in hand-sewn clothes. I realized then that it was more about grieving than religion. These figures were a testament to her loss.

  Tunde walked into the room as I was cleaning. It was his first time in there. If he was startled by the shrine, he did not show it.

  “I have called your sister and sent emails to Peter and Andrew. An ambulance is coming to take her away,” he said.

  The young woman who helped with Grandmother came in with my daughter in her hands.

  “Auntie, Abike won’t stop crying. I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  They were looking to me for direction, reassurance, something. I did not have it to give.

  “WHAT HAPPENED HERE?” I asked her.

  “Am I not dreaming?” I asked him.

  They had the same look of pity when they looked at me.

  The house had emptied out, leaving only a couple of people, one woman who had worked with Grandmother and another woman, the mother of the young help. They were eating puff-puffs and drinking juice out of wineglasses. I had no idea where the food came from.

  “Come with me,” Tunde said to me.

  We walked out of the house and got in my car.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “DO YOU THINK he may have sold the house already?” he asked.

  I had not thought about it again. It was strange how little I cared about this old house now. It was Grandmother I wanted to be around, the mellow person she became in the last five years.

  I missed her already. How everything my daughter did made her laugh so hard. How she hoarded the Maltesers that Andrew brought the last time he visited. How she took to wearing sneakers for the first time in her life because Peter gave her Nikes for Christmas.

  “You can come live with me,” Tunde said. “You know I want nothing more.”

  “That barracks is no place for a child,” I said. “You know that.”

  A couple of luxury SUVs pulled up outside the gates as we talked.

  “I think that is your sister and her husband,” Tunde said. “You should go talk to them. Just wanted to let you know that I can go get those papers back. Grab a few friends from the barracks. We will find him in this Lagos.”

  My sister had arrived, but her husband was not with her. I watched from inside my car as she, together with two other women, walked into the living room, then reemerged a couple of minutes later. They seemed confused, out of place and unused to feeling that way. They were dressed in formal black attire like they thought it was already a funeral. My sister had a fascinator with a lace side piece hanging over her right eye.

  “I am not ready to leave this house, Tunde,” I said.

  “You will not have to leave, I promise you,” Tunde said.

  The next morning, we were intertwined in my bed. It was still dark outside when Tunde whispered in my ears.

  “I’m not leaving, I’m coming,” he said.

  Sometimes when we are leaving, we say I am coming. It is the influence of Yoruba on our spoken English—instead of goodbye, we say till next time, we say we will see each other again.

  It is morning and it hits all over again like a fresh blow. I’m thinking about Grandmother and the death she desired. I think she wanted to die slowly, with time to send for the boys, time to hand over her shrine and trinkets and aso-ofi, time to get a priest to say prayers, to give one last admonition.

  I think she died from shock—the shock of Father’s brutal attack, and then the shock of her own fragility. I think she died sad and afraid.

  When Tunde leaves, I pick up a broom and begin cleaning the house. I know daylight will bring with it a new set of visitors needing to be watered, fed, consoled, and listened to.

  My daughter’s father gets in my car and drives away. He will go to the noncommissioned officers’ mess, find two or three sergeants given to drink. He will buy them bottles and bottles of beer. He will describe my father, the suspect—tall, yellow skin, balding. He will tell them what he did—an old woman shaken to her death, her property documents taken away by force. They will promise to find him, it’s easy, they insist, they know most of the unscrupulous banks who buy disputed property in this part of Lagos.

  Tunde tells me
nothing at first. The days go by faster than a dream. We plan a wake. It is well attended. Then the internment. We get a Catholic priest. Then traditional burial rites. Andrew and Peter fly in from Chicago.

  Two weeks later, the officers will find Father’s house in Abuja. They will arrest him and bring him back to Lagos to answer for his actions. Father follows peacefully. He tells his wife and kids not to worry, he has done nothing wrong.

  Somewhere along the Ore Highway, when the military van is stuck in traffic so bad no sirens can help, Father asks to pee in the bushes. He is given permission. A boyish officer walks with him to find a spot. Father hops off the van and limps down the road, the tar hot like coals on his feet. He follows a path through the trees, stopping at a little clearing under shade, away from the gaze of other stranded motorists. The young soldier looks away for a second—there is a Toyota HiAce bus, and the driver is playing a taped recording of a live comedy show. A young woman in a blue shirt pokes her head out a window. She is pouring water from a bottle over her head and face. The water makes a sizzling sound as it drops to the hot ground.

  A short distance away, my father makes a dash for it. Four or five steps, maybe, before the young soldier notices. The young soldier calls out to him, but my father ignores him. He is running toward the center of the forest. The soldier runs after him, repeating the order to stop. The soldier shoots three quick shots, and two miss. One gets him in the underarm. It’s a nick, really, a tickle. Father does not stop. The soldier shoots again. Drivers along the road are panicking and he can hear his superiors running up behind him.

  This bullet goes right through his back. Father falls forward. He tries to stand again, dragging his upper body a few inches before falling again. There is a tree stump in the cleared path, and he does not see it. He trips over it. The sound his knee makes as it strikes the dry wood is a loud cracking sound. The young soldier does not know what he has heard. He thinks he is being shot at, so he shoots again, two shots to the head.

  When Tunde tells me how my father died, I am sitting in the large living room of my twin sister’s home. We have escaped the chaos of Grandmother’s house for a few hours. Distant relatives we barely remember have camped out, demanding ceremonial displays of justice. It had become unbearable, the unending demands, the constantly flowing suggestions of how to grieve.