by Wole Soyinka
VII
The soil of Irelu rose and spiralled in rust, the man who approached wore it on his head, a quiet freak with copper-coloured hair. There was even a patina of rust to his face, a thin layer of dust on fired-clay firmness. At that distance the cicatrice, three horizontal lines on each cheek seemed the handiwork of a light touch tatooist; normal skin growth had encroached on it until all that was left was the bare impression. Ofeyi watched him rise from the small circle of men in the inner-room of the beer parlour, noted his relaxed confidence as he approached his table and occupied the vacant chair. Ofeyi put aside the newspaper he had brought with him but the man took it from him, looked briefly at the date then turned it over to display a picture of the murdered judge.
“I did that” he said.
There was no boast contained in his tone, neither pride nor remorse, there was neither regret nor satisfaction. It was a plain statement of fact, made even more ordinary by his tone. Ofeyi found himself a little surprised by his own self-possession; it was after all the first time he had sat face to face with a self-confessed assassin. “The police haven’t given a very good Wanted description of you.”
“No” he admitted. “They haven’t the faintest idea who they are looking for.”
The man hardly belonged to the pattern of bestialities which had lately sprouted among a people whose character he, among others, had taken so much for granted. One grew immune to shocks, easily. Yet he had a feeling that he was looking at a completely new casting from the foundry of Olukori. Flawed? Or merely stressed to the demands of the time? There was a time when he should have pursued the answer to that. Now it was too late.
The hair held him fascinated. “How do you get around that?” He pointed at it. “It’s turned more coppery since you got back. Is that from being back in the sun? It rather singles you out.”
“Oh one wears a tight-fitting cap. Or dye it if absolutely necessary. I have only had to resort to that measure once.”
It occurred to him then that his unusual hair might even be an asset. Very few policemen, unless they had actually seen it would think of including a copper head of hair in the Wanted descriptions. There was prolonged silence between them, broken by Ofeyi’s embittered sigh. “You have not kept your bargain,” he said.
The man looked puzzled. Ofeyi continued, “Oh, when it became clear that there was actually a lone wolf who handled things—that way, I could no longer pretend to myself that I did not know who it was.”
“I hope you also remember that I am not a mercenary.”
“No. I persuade myself you are still on the side of the angels.”
He smiled at that. “If you mean the ones with the flaming sword, yes.”
“Sitting in lone judgement over lesser mortals?”
“The times make it necessary.”
Ofeyi read in his eyes calm acceptance of his role. A fatalistic complement to the popular insurrection in which feeling and rationality were bound together. Youthful as he looked, a lonely concentration of the will to action within his own person rendered him grave and aged. The picture of the dead judge lay between them and he gave it a long thoughtful study.
“That operation took three months to prepare. Three months is a long time in the urgency of our situation.”
Operation! Usually the word came from the more hardened thugs, the crude strong-armed gangs who roamed the cities creating mayhem in strongholds of opposition. But he made it sound far more diagnostic, an inevitable course for a patient who had gone beyond the stage of simple medications. Nothing would serve now but the operating table, a clean, drastic surgery. Even the venerable vendors of compromise, miscalled peace, had come to recognize the failure of their surrogates. One after another they withdrew into silence, admitting the impotence of their solutions.
Even the churches, the mosques, the far more ancient shrines had ceased to call for the favourite panacea for a week of fasting and prayers, bored with the increasing futility of their pious voices.
Operation. Twenty miles from Irelu a woman was dragged from her bed, sliced open at the belly. She was not even dead when they left her guts spilling in a messy afterbirth between her thighs. A tax assessor, she had beggared many ruthlessly in slavish obedience to the Cartel. In those remote unchampioned villages, a man’s failure to produce a valid tax receipt at the required instant meant seizure of his cocoa farms. Permanently. Then came the turning of the worm. The assailants stuffed her mouth with a roll of the court orders she had served on them and set the grotesque cigar alight.
The antelope’s hoof, symbol of the Cartel manipulated party, Jekú, inspired the idea for amputations of their agents in Aro-oke. They were hunted down one after the other, a foot was hacked off at the ankle and stuffed into their mouths. The insurgents then carved a crude crutch from the nearest tree and sent their victim hobbling on his way—keep that message in your mouth they said, and deliver it to Chief Batoki.
A family of twenty, three generations in all wiped out in a noon of vengeance. An agent on the run from mob rage had fired wildly into his pursuers felling two, fled and barricaded himself in his own house. He was still scrabbling for more cartridges when they came upon him, a huge wave borne solely on pain and rage. Up the stairs fled all the inmates of the house, seeking imagined safety. The mob set the stairs alight, shot and cut down every being in the house who leapt or tried to creep into the safety of the bushes even on broken legs. A nursing sister, niece of the agent drove into the blood-crazed arms of the mob as she returned from work. Recognized, the yet unsated avengers raised her, she flew from arm to arm, was swung back and forth and into the flames. They howled and raged until the fires died down, running in blood circulations. They waited until the flames crouched lower and then razed the shell, tore brick from brick with peeled and scalded palms, tore off the iron sheets and bore them far from the scene. They wanted nothing left behind of that ill-famed mansion, nothing but the charred earth, the bones and blacked rectangles of mortar, nothing but the scorched imprint of the awakened beast of revolt.
Operation, the elastic word. It covered the seven-year-old son of a Returning Officer, subverted by the Cartel, a child left carelessly behind in his father’s car outside his office while he took a secret footpath to the home of Chief Batoki to receive his ten pieces of gold. He came back to the burnt shell of his motorcar, the charred remains of his son in it and an impassive crowd gathered at a distance observing him. In his hand was the tell-tale envelope filled with soured five-pound notes. The crowd left him untouched.
It began with the slaughter of innocents by the Cartel’s para-military troops, intimidating volleys loosed on markets and schools, slaying at random and spattering schoolroom walls with brains hot from learning. It turned into the fate of such licensed killers who ventured foolhardily into seemingly soft villages, found them deserted, demolished the huts and fired the crops then returned to their vehicle and drove back to report success. Only, in a mysterious fashion their skins had begun to burn beneath their uniform and, when they leaned forward in their seats a searing pain tore through their backs; they could not budge. No one could rid them of those uniforms, the cloth took off strips of their skin in the attempt. They died in great agony, nor could the government analysts identify what manner of lethal paste had been smeared on those seats while they were out destroying the crops.
The self-confessed assassin was saying, “There is a pattern even to the most senseless killing. All that we must do is take control of that violence and direct it with a constructive economy. Our people kill but they have this sense of selectiveness. They pick the key men, but they also kill from mere association. An agent is marked down for death. An informer is butchered. We cannot stop it even if we want no part of such righteous vengeance. But we must also set up a pattern of killing, the more difficult one. Select the real kingpins and eliminate them. It is simple, you have to hit the snake on the head t
o render it harmless.”
Abruptly Ofeyi asked, “What do they call you here? I know you have all sorts of names with the police.”
“The Dentist” he admitted, with a wry smile.
“And afterwards,” Ofeyi demanded. “What do you envisage?”
“Envisage?” His tone rose in protest. “Why do you want me to envisage anything? Is that my field? I thought it was yours.”
“Surely, when you—eliminate, you have in mind something to follow, something to replace what you eliminate. Otherwise your action is negative and futile.”
The Dentist sighed. “Why do you people, you intellectuals or whatever you call yourselves impose on us burdens to which we lay no claim. I am trained in the art of killing. I utilize this acquisition on behalf of my society. In what art are you trained? I have watched your cocoa campaigns, I have followed your troupe about and I concluded that your mission is indeed to educate. Right? You stir up a dangerous awareness in our people—the mass is your self-imposed constituency—isn’t that right? Self-imposed mission. But we have spoken of this before, you know where I stand in the struggle. I cannot shoot issues or mount physical guard over them. I take a simple view, but it happens to be the result of my experiences. You know what they are. I agreed for us to meet because I have a most important question to ask you. An opinion if you like. But not to answer questions which are outside my field. Don’t ask me what I envisage. Beyond the elimination of men I know to be destructively evil, I envisage nothing. What happens after is up to people like you.”
“All right. What did you want from me?”
The man stood up. “First I want to take you on a tour.” He smiled. “A local one this time. I am trying to bring you in, not chase you out. The sights will be familiar to you but I think that few of you have really gathered what is about to happen soon. I want to introduce my constituency the only way I can. I have satisfied myself about your activities by the way, so it only remains for you to accept the fact that we are still allies.”
“What activities do you know of?”
“You have been planting men from Aiyéró all over the country. That was a deep scheme, really far-sighted but it does not interest me. I know all about that piece of anachronism.” He shrugged. “In my opinion you are all woolly-minded idealists but we can work together to destroy the Jekú. My contribution will be to lower your handicap.”
He looked more like an executive civil servant than a killer, with a loyal squad of thugs at his command. They rose from the inner room as he stood up but a glance from him returned them to their seats. Only the very observant would have noted the co-ordinated motions of the men, and it sent a thrill of optimism up Ofeyi’s spine. The Dentist seemed outside of it by his appearance, but the half-dozen men who had risen and sunk back into their beer so unobtrusively were a recognizable part of the increasing stream-lining of assassinations which in turn appalled and uplifted him. But the accusing fact remained however, that it was the lesser agents who perished. The masters remained inaccessible, heavily protected, flitting from hide-out to fortified rat-holes, playing a waiting game and callously buying time with a hundred lives and mutilations.
“I shall take you through this town, and a few others. Then we shall make a tour of Curfew City. Is that all right?”
“How shall we do that?” Ofeyi demanded. “How does one break the curfew?”
“Don’t worry about that. First, my base. It’s my home town.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Where else could I move so freely? If anyone gave me away here…no, no one could think of it!”
Such confidence seemed fatal. Ofeyi felt some surprise and showed it. The Dentist had suggested a far sharper awareness of human nature. However he continued, “My father was some kind of politician—in those days of kingship you understand? When kingship really meant something. Well, his history is not easily forgotten. We don’t breed traitors here any more.”
And beyond that he would say no more.
The city was baked bright clay from its laterite soil. It was startling to come upon a mammoth breadfruit tree full-leaved and in fruit in the midst of so much red dust and the general drought of Harmattan. The Dentist led him through a cutting which broke briefly onto a motor-road, untarred. They crossed it onto a footpath and were closed in by drying ears of elephant grass.
“The Harmattan” the Dentist commented, “is the right season for insurrections. Fires burn faster, the winds fly drier, a people’s anger spirals swifter in the dust of those miniature devil-winds building up into the cyclone that must sweep off their oppressors. I like the Harmattan.”
“So do I” Ofeyi conceded. “But only because it brings me a feeling of euphoria, why I don’t know. The flux of dust and light I suppose, when it isn’t actually in your eyes, the dust that is, I get stings and prickles all over my skin. My body becomes pounds lighter.”
“That is because you lose moisture. Look, here is one part which never quite feels the dry season. If you knew how much bloodshed that piece of land caused some fifty years ago. Can you sense change in the air?”
Abruptly the warm brittleness of Irelu had changed into humid air. Ofeyi sniffed greedily, glancing ahead to detect the possible presence of a stream.
“This area is so fertile, two villages fought constantly for it. Kejàse claimed that that road behind us marked the boundaries of the two settlements; Irelu said no, the boundary was further ahead, right up a fair length of the main stream which waters the valley. Such a stupid and unnecessary quarrel. There was enough water and land for every mouth in both villages.”
“How was it finally resolved?”
The Dentist smiled. “By an act of God; at least so it was interpreted. One thing our people are good at is the formula that leaves no side of a quarrel in prolonged resentment. Today—worse luck for them—those who occupy such hallowed positions—well, wouldn’t you call it that?—signs, omens, oracles, or the written law—their interpreters are a device society creates to safeguard justice which alone holds society together. Do you agree? So when those who are entrusted with that task betray it and sell their voice to corrupt forces…”
“Like the judge?”
The Dentist paused. “Of course. But I wasn’t thinking of him in particular. Do you think I was trying to justify to you why he had to be eliminated.”
“Weren’t you?”
He shook his head. “I told you I am taking you on a tour of inspection. The past is still here with us, our history is preserved in these blooded streams. Tell me, when in those days a king betrayed the collective trust of his people what happened to him? Was it not usual to summon him, present him with a calabash of poison and invite him to retire to his chamber?”
“I’d like to see you inviting Batoki to take a pinch of cyanide.”
“No. That is why it is necessary to force it down their throats. By whatever means we can find.” His face twitched a little in distaste. “But they make their exit so undignified.”
The judge in his terror, before the final payment was made…ducking down below the bench as a car backfired outside his court. The regulation issue of revolver had provided only a shred of comfort. It lay constantly in a half-open drawer below his desk but such was his fear that in those moments of imagined menace when his hands sought it, his fingers could hardly close on the butt. He ordered even his own state prosecutors searched. His thrice weekly tennis was first to go, then the Sunday worship. Then he gave up his Rotary Club dinners but not even this ultimate sacrifice was the one that he was called upon to make. In those early days, at the commencement of his sanctification of crimes from the bench, even of murder, obeying a call on the telephone or a whisper from the leader of Jekú he had earned the inevitable name of Daddy Cowboy—a gun had fallen from his pocket at a public function and the guests roared with laughter at his clumsy effort to retrieve it
and return it into his pocket. Months passed, Daddy Cowboy was no longer seen at state functions, at charity fetes, he delegated his inspection of the guard of honour to others at the opening of Assizes, his greatest tool for destroying the enemies of Jekú and enriching their agents by unprecedented levels in awarding costs….
“It was simple in the end, but it took three months of waiting, watching. And now the others are even more cautious.”
They came to a curve in the stream. Across it lay a tree which served for a bridge. The Dentist stopped. “This was the act of God. At some point in their stupid battles there was a storm and this tree fell across the stream. A priest from Kejàse contacted his counterpart from Irelu and asked him if his kernels had divined the same meaning from the event. Naturally it had. The elders on both sides met and agreed that heaven willed it that the tree should bridge both villages in amity. End of war. Now they share everything in common. After three generations of polygamous birth increase there are still acres of uncultivated land.” He kicked a stone into the stream. “The stupidity of human greed!”
He led across the bridge into Kejàse, pointing out the shells of the police station and the provincial courts. They were gutted by fire and stood stark against the fertile surrounds of the village itself. The pattern was all too familiar. These villages were not peopled by the same breed as occupied the commercial cities. For those, even the bark of a guard dog was a depressing sound, since they were never asleep, never ignorant of the intrusion of night marauders in their midst. Their only prayer as their eyes shut tighter was that the raiders would complete their mission quickly and peacefully, clean the house of their possessions but leave them in peace. When the steps grew menacingly close, they snored loudly, abjectly. And even when, growing ever bolder, the robbers left huge gashes on their flesh as a memento of their visit they would pretend that they had slipped on broken glass. The land-worker was beyond such surrender. Even when his lips were compelled by a superior force to stay shut his wide-open eyes spoke clearly, saying, I take note of this event. Bound to earth in a visceral bond he could not conceive of existence compounded by self-betrayal. The act of arrogant, alien mouths gorging the product of his sweat, consigning him to rinds in punitive taxation, dispossessing him of land at a neutral stroke of the pen or a pronouncement of suborned judges could result only in one form of response. It built up slowly, flared into those sporadic flames as had begun to gut symbolic presences of the oppressing force. It had begun to mass together in a concerted sweep.
