New York, My Village

by Uwem Akpan

  Naked, I placed my computer on the kitchen table to change my flights and made arrangements for a taxi to drop me at the airport, then forced myself to a marathon of the music videos of Gyakie, Wizkid, and Davido and drank instant coffee till morning. After showering, I dressed up in the baggiest of my jeans because my dick needed room. But the bugs had retreated from the ceiling to I do not know where.

  I texted my neighbors and Molly and Emily to say I was leaving due to a family crisis. “Emily, I’ll definitely call you from Nigeria for an important chat!” I promised at the end of my text. Keith apologized that he could not personally bid me goodbye, for he had lost all his free days to bedbugs. Jeff and Brad said they were around and would stop by. When I called the Bronx and was still blocked, I emailed them, to no avail. Later on, Alejandra and Molly phoned from work to express shock and to say goodbye.

  Emily called midmorning. She said to hug Father Kiobel and Caro tight, but then—as though I might send greetings—announced she had dumped Jack. Relieved, I said she sounded happy. She said actually she was sad because Molly had just told her of all my shit with the Humane Society Two. “Ekong, I’m sickened by their endless bigotry,” she said, her voice breaking. “I’m sorry I just didn’t know of any of this. Please, still do call me from Nigeria, so we can talk, okay? This more than confirms I’ve made the right decision about Jack. Your friendship has been like a safety net for me since that editorial meeting. Do you know that when Jack and I quarreled over the Father Kiobel second clip, he almost beat me up? Ekong, now I realize he’d no business even meeting your people in that first clip.”

  Canepa regretted we would not meet again. When I mentioned the resurgence of bugs, he gasped and quickly said he would spray the whole building next week, whether Lucci let him into the apartment or not. I was so relieved my friends would get a reprieve. He also prayed Nigeria and USA and Italy would qualify for the 2018 Russia World Cup. We laughed as I gave him my home contact information.

  CARO SAID FATHER KIOBEL had called once Usen announced my return to the village. This was how I knew my emails had gotten to the Bronx. But reconnecting with the priest pleased us so much I had no time to mourn the painful demise of my childhood friendship with Usen. Caro said Father Kiobel had apologized he was too depressed to acknowledge our texts and the shame of rejection had only compounded over time.

  Of course, Caro herself said she did not understand my sudden return. She said Molly, Emily, Alejandra, and Father were asking her. “You’ll see the reason very soon on their behalf!” I said.

  When the priest called, I was shambling back from Rite Aid, where I had bought six cans of bedbug spray, to cleanse my entire luggage. “I’m not going to ask why you’re fleeing from America,” he said after pleasantries. “As the ancestors say, if the skies were that wonderful, why would the hawk be searching for food on earth?” I said I would love to listen to the rest of his story someday. He said he was in a better space now, that as frightening as life had been since he had started telling this story, it had strangely given him more peace. “Or rather, I should say, I can glimpse more peace than I’ve even known these fifty years,” he said. “Some of these head voices that have harassed me since the war are gone!”

  I leaned on the fridge as my body softened with joy; I knew a bit about head voices.

  “Ekong, I might as well tell you the rest of my story now,” he said. “Because by the time you arrive, I’ll be away for a month attending the mass burials of the people of your beloved embassy dancer. I don’t know whether I’ll make it home, for the government-backed killers are even spray-bulleting burial crowds!”

  “You shouldn’t go, then!” I said.

  “I must, because I know what it means to bury your beloved alone … The truth is I never joined the Biafran Army. I never killed anybody, as Tuesday’s paid investigators and supporters claim. The truth is, one morning in 1968, less than a year after my father and brother’s headtie burials, shortly before the fall of Port Harcourt, my mother and I were in the fields beside our house when a new batch of Biafran patrols arrived. I’d just turned eleven. I looked more mature and muscular than my age-mates. As a few shots rang out, we took cover on the ground, in between the yam mounds. Afraid of ambush, they were shooting from the low bushes across the road, securing the area from the Nigerian special forces that rumor said had come in from Calabar.

  “The bullets were still chopping off yam tendrils and cocoyam stalks and snapping plantain and banana trees when Mommy blurted out Arinze’s name. ‘Arinze, my son, Arinze, my son! Barisua’s mother!’ she cried as he buckled and stopped shooting.

  “He put down his AK-47 and signaled to the rest to stop, too. Without his right ear, the left one was very conspicuous, like an overgrown mushroom. When our eyes met, he pointed at me and opened his mouth to call my name. Nothing came out. He choked and felt himself with both hands, like he was searching for my name in his clothes. When he started touching where his ear used to be, Mommy got up and walked out into our driveway toward him, weeping and trembling. She crossed the street. He slowly pulled out of formation and came over, his hands raised in surrender. He was shouting something about my brother and father’s graves. And I was pointing toward the bougainvilleas and ixoras—when his people shot him in the small of the back. He fell forward, almost into her outstretched arms.”

  Kiobel said the orders that she should not touch Arinze rang out, more shocking than that single shot. His mother ran toward the house. When she turned around and went for Arinze again, the neighbors screamed at her not to allow Biafra to orphan me, her son. She stood still, biting her forefinger, her body trembling like a karikpo dancer. Arinze writhed by the roadside. He was gasping and clutching his stomach, the ring of his blood eating the grass, his face jerking toward the sun, his brow shiny with sweat. In between him and the sun, she knelt to make her shadow big enough to embrace his face and torso. And when he finally kicked and lay still, he was on his side, his knees pulled in, his favorite position when he used to spend the night with Kiobel’s family in Sokoto. But his face was still turned awkwardly toward the sun.

  The neighbors led her away. Another group of soldiers arrived; they were in a panic as they relayed news of their losses elsewhere. They hurriedly rid Arinze of his gun and bullet belts and disappeared. Listening all day to his mom bemoan her failure to soak a third headtie in Arinze’s blood, to take to his family after the war, listening to her weep for literally calling him to his death, Kiobel knew she would not survive the war. By sunset, she had descended into partial paralysis. Her right hand could no longer function, and she could barely walk.

  “Still, like Mary, the disabled New Jersey lady who led the protest to Bishop Salomone, Mommy never stopped being her brother’s keeper,” he said.

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” I said when I finally understood the two women’s connection. “May her soul continue to rest in peace!”

  After Biafra had abandoned Arinze in the sun all day, seeing their neighbors did not know enough to sympathize with his execution, after night prayers his mother asked her eleven-year-old son to find a way to wash and pray over and bury Arinze. She wanted it done that night because they were all afraid rumors of Nigerian special forces meant an all-out war was afoot. “If they could recruit my baby son, your brother, Arinze, to hurt us,” she had said, “you’re old enough to cover his nakedness with the earth. Knowing the trauma of being paraded naked, we can’t allow him to roam the lands and markets of the ancestors unclothed by the earth. We’ll never escape the ghost of his twin brother, Barisua. He can’t stare at us like this for another day. It’s his Second Burial. His blood is ours forever. You’re an Ogoni child. We stand together in life and in death. We never forget our people or land or waters or sky. We love fiercely.”

  So, after they had kept vigil till midnight—long after curfew had kicked in—and the patrols had not still made their tour, Kiobel’s mother had hugged him in the dark, like she did not want him to see her tea
rs. But they beat down on his neck all the same before she could cup them with her one functioning hand. “Go and do what you have to do,” she said. “The spirits of your brothers and father shall not abandon you!”

  He recounted how he had slipped out through a side door and locked it and stuck the key in his pocket. There was no moon, no stars, no fireflies, no bombs lacerating the skies of the big cities. It was pitch-dark. It was quiet. He felt he should wait for the patrols to pass and so hid in the farm, lying in between the yam mounds, covering himself with rotting plantain leaves. You never knew from what direction the patrols might arrive, or at what hours, and sometimes they did not use their flashlights. Some nights, they would have passed three times already. Lying there was eternity. It was like all his energy had left his body. Yet, he was trembling so much he thought the patrols would hear the rustle and shoot. “I’d never felt so lonely before,” he said. “I’d never buried even a puppy. I didn’t know where to begin.”

  WHEN A CRICKET CHIRPED and a bullfrog mooed, a flashlight stabbed the night. Father Kiobel said he had lain still. The glare revealed four men. They circled a neighbor’s home. Then everything returned again to darkness. Their running footsteps told him they were already in his driveway. They cocked their rifles and circled the house, checking the doors. “They were stamping their boots like they wanted to wake my mother up, till they finally receded and went to stand over Arinze by the roadside,” he recounted. “The beams of their flashlights slashed his body, picking out his face. He was still looking up, like he was waiting for sunrise, like he would see me if he opened his eyes.”

  Then Father Kiobel said, after they switched off the lights, one of them bragged about how this was the best punishment for Arinze’s folks because he had heard of their obstinate anti-Biafran position. Someone else said the parents and their followers had been variously locked up and flogged and warned it was treason to openly denounce Biafra even as bombs rained on Igboland. “They’re termites eating the wood from inside,” another said, “so their ramshackle synagogue had to be burned down. If not for marijuana, Arinze himself would’ve run AWOL a long time ago!” As they spoke their Igboaccented English, three Nigerian bombs had gone off far away, the lit clouds stagnant smoke plumes. The Biafran soldiers complained that the nonstop bombing of Igboland was against all laws of proportionality, nothing compared to the one rusty little thing Biafra had dropped near Yaba Market in Lagos, around my visa interview hotel. The soldiers were still committing the war to Our Blessed Virgin Mary when the commander received a radio signal about Nigerian special forces. He panicked and told the rest there was no time to bury Arinze.

  I WAS SO MAD at the Biafrans, ukpa-agwo-k’ikwa mad, that I sat down on the stupid bed like I had been hit in the groin. I knew I would be haunted for a while by those voices floating over Arinze in the dark, cavalier as the sound of Jack’s street phone call to Chad. I put the phone on speaker and set it on my lap because my fingers were trembling, my palms sweaty. I spat on my powdered floor. I felt they should have evacuated the body of their fellow soldier—even if they had no loyalty to him as an Igbo, a fellow Catholic or Jew or human, no matter their fear of ambush.

  This was not the burial story Kiobel was supposed to tell Arinze’s mom after the war. I was livid that these soldiers were more discriminatory than Father Orrin in that sacristy.

  “Ekong, yes, you truly understand what I felt that night!” Father Kiobel said to calm me. “There’s was no terror the Igbos didn’t deploy to force the minorities to accept Biafra. There’s nothing they didn’t do to break our Ogoni or Annang resilience. Listening to them talk about Arinze was my first moment of pure anger in my life. When they killed my dad and brother, I felt loss and anger. When they abused my mom in Aba, I felt shock and anger. Even when they stripped us naked, I felt fear of madness and anger. Ekong, it’s difficult to describe pure unalloyed fury, except to say it drove me to track the soldiers on the straight road to the edge of the village, where they turned onto another road.” Knowing they still had three more villages to get to their post, Kiobel had turned around and run home, stumbling and crashing, his energy harnessed by that limitless fury, till he spotted the lantern by his mom’s window. Inside, he had gathered a flashlight, a bucket of water, a towel, and a bar of soap. His mother was hard at prayer; he whispered loudly her son was almost at rest. He had neither time nor words to form any prayers himself, for, even kneeling on Arinze’s dried hardened cold blood, he refused to believe he was dead.

  “In that darkness, I rolled up Arinze’s khakis and washed his face and feet and hands of his blood, since there was no time to wash the whole body,” he said matter-of-factly. “I cleansed him twice, so he, too, could wash Barisua when they met. I added a third wash for Daddy. It seemed like the right thing to do. Then, with all the energy in my body, I grabbed the guy’s head with two hands. I sharply twisted it back to align with the rest of the body. His weight and tucked legs swung me like in wrestling. I went with the momentum, rolling over. When I sat up and reached for him, he wasn’t there. ‘Lu’ wa, Barisua, owa do wa?’ I said in Ogoni, bemused. ‘But it’s not really funny.’

  “Groping around, I found him. He had tumbled and rolled. Now he was propped up on his knees and forehead, a Muslim touching the earth with his brow. I knocked him over and locked down his legs like in a tackle and levered and pushed and pulled and heaved to straighten them out. Then I dipped my thumb in palm oil to trace the sign of the cross on the boy’s forehead, his palms, his feet, and his chest. I also repeated this anointment twice and whispered closely in his two ear holes to share with his twin and daddy in the grave, to tell them we’re sorry we couldn’t fight over or wash their bodies until now.

  “My most difficult task that night was dragging him across the field to our family cemetery. When a headlock didn’t work, I pulled him by his epaulets. Getting there, I asked him to stay calm, and I turned on the flightlight. The risk made me dig that shallow grave like a madman. When I switched off the flashlight, finally, I sat down and wept. First, it was relief the soldiers hadn’t seen me and then that my two brothers and father were gone. I hadn’t cried for them. I didn’t want to cry for them. But I guessed it was one thing to bury a headtie, a body another.” Then he had rallied his spirits to disguise the new grave with wreaths of dry leaves and cassava stems. When he opened the door, he bumped into his mother, who had been waiting for him. He assured her it was done and helped her back to her room and disappeared into his, afraid his sadness might have completely paralyzed her. Kiobel said that night an angry rain had flushed the tracks Arinze’s body had made on the field, releasing the fresh scent of the queen-of-the-night.

  I WAS CAUGHT UNAWARES when my friend suppressed a laugh as he recounted the dawn visit of Father Flannery, the priest who had interred his father and brother’s headties. I raised my hands in Hell’s Kitchen as though I wanted to gag Kiobel, but then I reckoned he might have been healing his heart with the balm of self-mockery. He said the white man had taken a liking to him after the headtie burials a year before and given him shiny George Best and Bobby Charlton trading cards. This was how he became a die-hard Manchester United fan.

  The war had turned this gentle Irishman into a drunken skeleton, his frothy blond hair mushrooming into a dirty Afro—a shadow of the ebullient priest whose Honda and yo-yo had been stolen in Ikot Ekpene Stadium. Kiobel said he hated his friend’s overgrown nostril hairs, which tangled together and made it look like he had one nostril. And rumors said some days he was so drunk he gave absolution to the Biafrans—and later to the Nigerians—before they even committed atrocities. Some said he just entertained them with stories and stats of European soccer.

  The Irishman had arrived at their home that rainy morning with a few things, as though he would stay the night. Before the mother could say what Kiobel had done, Father drunkenly said he had come to protect them because he had failed to secure amnesty for those who buried Arinze from the angry patrols who could not find the
body of their fellow patrol. “They searched for his corpse in the rain to bury,” he said. “I’m afraid they might be back to ask questions!” He stuck a rosary in Kiobel’s hand and, dodging his eyes, told him to scram.

  Yet, before the child wrote down his mother’s directions to her friend’s place among the beautiful creeks of Oron, the man had folded himself onto the couch and fallen asleep. “I cried, as I did not want to leave Mommy,” Father Kiobel told me. “But she wept bitterly that she didn’t want to lose her third and remaining child.” She could not rouse Father to bless him, though. The boy himself shook him like a rag and even poured water in his left ear till it overflowed down his neck and into his dirty white soutane, but this human sacrament of protection was still snoring. Knowing the soldiers would not touch her with the priest around, he ran away, for as they say, the tears of a mother are deeper than prayers.

  He returned from his refuge in Oron to hear she had died within three weeks. “Maybe someday Tuesday will realize that both of us were victims,” he said. “Maybe we can hear each other for the first time. And, these days, I’m driving long distances, not to buy more clothes, but to see a shrink to stop dreaming about being paraded naked, to stop hearing the children chant, ‘Sabos of Biafra.’ This is key to ending my clothing obsession. Though I’m from another ethnic group and tongue, I’m entrusting you with these personal stories, my truth, my life. Not to discourage you, not to rile you up, either, but to open up paths to healing our peoples—in case I don’t return from the Tiv burials.”