by TJ Benson
‘Are you a Muslim?’ she asked when he returned holding an aluminium cup of water in one hand and a plate of two steaming maize cobs in the other. The hot delicious scent of boiled maize perfumed the living room and she involuntarily swallowed. He smiled and she looked away.
‘Why do you want to know?’ he half-asked, half-chided, never losing his congenial smile as he set the maize on her lap. Receiving the plate with both hands was another involuntary action.
It was hard to be composed with the maize cobs steaming right into her nose. ‘I thought you were Muslim before because of your face, but you are tying wrapper and so I thought you are Igbo.’
‘Because I am yellow, pawpaw, right?’ The smile never wavered. Having placed the plate of maize on her lap and the cup of water by her side, he curled up on the chair beside the stool, legs drawn up under his wrapper, and dropped a pair of black-rimmed glasses on his nose, his other hand reaching for a book he had been reading on his side stool.
‘If you keep looking at me like that I will get shy,’ he said when he caught her eye, almost laughing now, ‘and it is not good for a man to be shy. Plus your maize is getting cold.’
‘This is my house! I just paid the money. I showed you the receipt. Show me proof that this is your house.’
He sighed a long sigh. ‘I was put in charge of this house by the Archbishop of Kaduna North. He took me in like his son when I was in the seminary and—’
‘I thought you said you are a Muslim.’
‘Look, er, what is your name?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Well, if this case gets to court I must still know your name.’
‘As I said, it is none of your business.’
‘You can sleep here if you want. There are three rooms in this house. It seems you have been duped and if that is the case you need time to calm down.’
She would always go back to this first encounter, inspecting it for precursors to the turn of their lives. She would always revisit the conversation and, most acutely, the solitude of the house in those days when there were no children in it and fewer people living in Sabon Geri. She moved into the first room she saw that day and spent the following week cleaning and dusting, deciding what to keep and what to throw away. It was in the hustle of this activity that she discovered the tiny tins of half-used paint and sets of brushes, but they were inconsequential then. It was as if she was the only one in the house; he avoided her and she was glad. She was starting to enjoy herself. The light rustle of the twin palm tree fronds in front at high noon, the murmur of creatures from the forest, the sigh of the kitchen door when she closed it – the sound of something grateful, old and satisfied.
But she quickly realised she needed a job in order to eat so she started scouting around for schools. She knew enough to avoid the major ones because her father had lectured many teachers. St John took her. St John was not too far from the Quarters, the other side of the federal road actually, and by the time she got there they were a floundering institution that relied solely on the National Youth Service Corps the government deployed to teach, so the principal, a thickset woman with Jheri curls and an indeterminable complexion, widened her eyes in disbelief.
‘You say you want to teach my children.’
‘Yes, ma.’
‘You say this certificate you show me is true certificate?’
‘Yes, ma.’
‘Kai!’ She pressed her lips together and shook her head from side to side in woe. ‘This regime, ehn. Forcing young people to fly away from this country because of lack of job. See you now, coming here to manage, beautiful girl like you that should be secretary in ministry in Abuja, ehn. Kai-kai. Now you want to come and suffer with us. Fill in this form. Everything is expensive in this regime – see price of kerosene! Whose daughter are you again? Maybe I know your father. These stupid ants, please don’t mind us. I have been telling Mr Kubusa – ehn, sign there if you are not married shebi, ehn, sign – I was telling Mr Kubusa to sprinkle kerosene, ehn, one litre is how many kobo he cannot remove from his tattered trouser to spend and buy kerosene, waiting for government stipend, hia! Government that paid Igbos how many guineas rich or poor after the war is the same government – ehn, indicate your husband’s address if you are married – the same government Kubusa is waiting to collect stipend from. Abeg I no fit laugh my daughter, God! Go to the VP Academic office next to this one, let him sign; your first cheque comes today. You are teaching science to JSS 1 and 2. Those devils, ehn, you will need a very good pankere cane; some of them their head has died inside.’
She didn’t need a cane. She rearranged the class into a semicircle so she could hear what the little ones had to say. She told them stories she had read in the university library and used them to teach science. She made them bring kites to school and led a legion of them down the main road to teach them air flow. She asked them to bring an animal they were sure another person would not bring for her class on domestic and wild animals. She didn’t believe they would do more than chickens and pigeons and cats and baby goats but some brought earthworms, tadpoles, mosquitoes trapped with butterflies in Vaseline containers, ladybirds lassoed with sewing thread, a baby tortoise found in a forest, a beautiful hare, a rat with feet fractured to keep it from escaping and even a snake egg. She was moved by their efforts but was startled when one of them opened a box he had made of a biscuit carton to reveal a fat black scorpion.
‘It is simple, ma,’ he explained when she asked how he caught it. ‘If scorpion has sting you before it cannot sting you again.’
It was only a matter of time before other teachers began to worry about her teaching methods. They tarried at the principal’s office because they believed her presence on the payment register was the reason their pay had been curtailed but the woman was impenetrable. ‘I like this girl. She is a good girl. She doesn’t come to my office to beg for money or complain about other teachers because she values her time with the children.’
She of course never knew this. She was too busy with the children. She found herself using too much detail in her drawings of amoebas and insects and sections of trees, with coloured chalks to distinguish parts. She wasn’t interested in their examinations; what was important to her was that they discovered the world as she had discovered it through books. In books they could forget where they had left to come to school. So she didn’t leave the school because of the other teachers. She left because one day, as she explained water flow with the aid of a tea-juggling mai shai she had invited to the class from nearby, her father’s voice found her in the class. She didn’t let the pure fear paralyse her; she just felt weightless, overcome with the urge to fly out of the classroom.
‘Look what happens when I jump out of this window,’ she told the class. She jumped. ‘Gravity,’ she said once she was outside. ‘This is important in water flow. I will be back. Finish drawing what you see on the board.’ She gathered up her full, billowing skirt and ran into the bush without looking back.
As she ran, dark clouds stretched over everything like an omen, thunder crackled and lightning unfurled itself in the sky. By the time she got home – she was calling the last house on the right on Freetown Street home now – she was soaked with rain and grief. At the door she reminded herself that her file at the school didn’t contain her real address. This did not console her. This did not return those seven holy years she had wasted in waiting. The door opened and he took her inside and helped her cut her hair because she had complained about wanting to cut it off. In the clear light of after-rain falling onto the veranda she considered his chest, thought of her coloured chalk going round his pink nipples in concentric circles. Days later she remembered the tins of paint and brushes she had found in the room and turned them to his body. In decades to come a curator at an exhibition would ask her what her first material was and she would reply, ‘My husband’s body.’
She painted heartbreak once in those early days, probably her first canvas; a calm centre of vibran
t red exploded with shards of black matter into a jubilee of colours radiating outwards.
The nights were warm. They slept together in the bedroom, bodies separate on the bed at first but inevitably rolling into each other in the fog of slumber at some indiscernible hour of the night. They could never find sleep until his arm circled her belly and clutched her to him or until her leg draped over his thigh.
One night, her body pulls her out of a dream to discover he is gone. She stands up from the bed and feels the walls for him in half-sleep and doesn’t know when she falls back into slumber. She wakes up on the bed alone in the morning and all of it, the hours of searching for him in the dark, feels like a dream. She cannot ask him why he left her, just as she had not asked him to come to her in the first place, the same way she had not asked him to cut her hair. So she says nothing. The next night her body wakes her, and she staggers to the bathroom in half-sleep to have a pee without colliding with the wall or striking her feet against the dressing table, her body having adjusted to the spaces between things in the house, unaware that he is not in the bed. When she is done she walks quickly, her body craving to lie down on something horizontal, unaware that she isn’t returning to the bedroom but navigating sure-footed, eyes closed, to the living room where his body dead in sleep has been waiting for her on the couch. Her body falls into his body the way it would have fallen into bed. Promptly his arm circles her waist and her right leg stretches backwards to drape over his thigh.
This is how their first time happened. The only way it could happen. She told him one morning that she had a craving for meat. It was some time after he had helped her shave her head. Now she knew that he was broke and worthless and perhaps, as she would consider years later, her demand for meat that Saturday morning was a challenge to his masculinity. He climbed out of the bed and left her there without disturbing the pleasant milkiness of the morning. She heard him make his way to the kitchen and got there in time to see him leap over the fence in the backyard, her heart lurching as he disappeared into the bush. She had been drying the curtains in her room over that fence a few weeks earlier when she had seen three long-haired naked men tearing a live chicken to pieces and chewing it down. They had darted into the forest when they saw her.
Eleven o’ clock and he wasn’t back. Wasn’t back at twelve. Or two, three, four. By five she put down the plate of boiled yams she had been forcing herself to eat and surrendered to panic. She took her first shower of the day and curled up on the bed in their room just as the sun began to go down.
She woke suddenly to the slam of the back door with no memory of falling asleep. She rushed out of the room but stopped in the corridor when she saw him lay down a hairy animal he’d been carrying around his neck on the kitchen floor. She walked to the kitchen, holding her body from running to him, then asking so that she would not cry, ‘Is it a goat?’
‘Look at the face. Does it look like a goat?’
She came close and cocked her head at the face too beautiful and narrow for a goat’s, calm as though asleep. ‘It’s an antelope.’
He didn’t respond. He strode past her to the storeroom and came out with a machete. After rinsing it in the sink he said, ‘Shift back’. She straightened up and stepped back, way back to the kitchen door. He set the animal’s ankles on the terrazzo floor and began to strike them with his cutlass. ‘Sorry I didn’t come back early,’ crracp-crracp-crrrip-crracp, ‘I had to go deep into the forest.’
She wanted to help him skin the meat but he refused. ‘You just had your bath,’ he paused to say, then continued disembowelling the antelope and soon the body had been cut up and pieces placed in the biggest pot in the house. She followed him out as he carried the sheets of skin in the next biggest pot to dry on the fence. The fence at the back of the house was higher than in the front so he had to stretch and stand on his toes to spread the skin. She fought her heart to be still as she watched the muscles of his back twitch on either side of the hollow that ran into his wrapper, under which his buttocks stiffened each time he had to stretch on those toe tips. ‘They will dry in the sun tomorrow,’ he explained to her without turning around. ‘It will be easier to smoke it then.’
She followed him back into the kitchen and watched him wash the meat. Then he used the knife to scrape the brown skin off a few fingers of ginger, even to scale the film from a clove of garlic. He sat in the doorway of the storeroom and turned the ginger, garlic and some fresh pepper into a shallow mortar. When he nestled the mortar between his thighs, locking his legs around it, she caught herself heaving for air. To watch the sun set on him like this – gold rays falling on him through the window as the muscles of his chest clenched and unclenched as he thrust his pestle into the mortar over and over again – was too much.
She breached the five-foot distance they had always kept unconsciously and grabbed the pestle mid-air.
‘What is it?’ he asked, but she looked at the ground. She removed the mortar from between his legs and sat on his lap, her back to him so that she wouldn’t have to face the confusion and questions on his face, delirious there on his thighs, bold and terrified at the same time. After a long moment in the unbearable crushed ginger and garlic atmosphere, a moment in which neither of them moved, wondering what the hell the other was doing or thinking, she turned back and put her lips on his. A question. His eyes widened and she did it again, taking his lower lip in hers, turning in his arms that had tried to restrain her but were now embracing her, pushing her away and pulling her to his body as she struggled to trap his tongue in hers for a flash moment, the slippery animal, to taste the roof of his mouth and swallow his hot saliva with its concentrated pungency of a day’s stale breath; if this was a kiss, if this was disgusting she didn’t know or care – she wanted all of this man inside her. She, the twenty-seven-year-old Christian virgin: where had she learnt this kind of passion? And he, stranger to this ritual to which his body was responding with alarming familiarity, gasped for air and for reason, his manhood throbbing painfully as if it would explode beneath his wrapper. When she crushed his head to her breasts and straddled him proper on the kitchen floor, he cried out, ‘The meat … the meat … the meat,’ but soon the only sounds that escaped his mouth were muffled groans of pleasure.
Ugwan Rimi Holy Ghost Seminary
Day One
Good morning, madam, you are blessed. Are you the new tailor?
No, father. I am looking for my husband.
O, are you sure he is a staff member with us?
He is a seminarian, father.
If it is the devil who sent you—
I want to see my husband.
Security! Security!
I want to see my husband.
What is going on here?
Ah, Rector, you are here. She accuses a brother of—
I am not accusing him of anything. I just want to see my husband.
What is the brother’s name, the man you accuse?
Brother Shariff.
Do you know who that is? The adopted son of the father in charge of this place. False accusation is satanic and you can end up in jail. Go home, my daughter.
Day Two
Good morning. You were not on duty on Monday but they told me to come back today so I travelled all the way from Sabon Gari to—
How did you pass the security gate, madam?
As I said, brother, I have already come before. I came to see my husband.
Your husband, madam?
Yes, my husband.
This is a seminary, madam. The only men you will find here are consecrated to the Lord.
Just go and tell Brother Shariff that he is going to become a father.
I will have to ask you to leave now.
Just go.
Security!
When Shariff opened the door to the last house on the right she flew into his arms. He didn’t say a word. He was wearing his white regalia and a rosary hung down his neck. ‘You came back,’ she said to his heart.
‘Yo
u said we are having a baby.’
‘Shariff—’
‘I just came to beg you to let me go. I should never have left the seminary in the first place. What we did, on the kitchen floor, when you took me – I can’t – just please don’t come back. You can take the house.’
‘I don’t want the house, Shariff. This place is terrible. How did you live here alone? Who really lived here, ehn? Disgusting nyama.’
He smiled. She tickled him and he caught her hand and begged, ‘I have to go, I have to go.’
She let go of him and rushed to the nearest chair and threw it upside down. She picked up a side stool and smashed a window. Something had unravelled inside her. He rushed to grab her before she could push down the shelves of books.
‘Leave me! Leave me! Go to your god,’ she shrieked and fought him. ‘Since he has decided nothing can belong to me, you too go!’
‘Stop it.’
They did their dance of violence round the living room; she would bite his arm and escape, fling herself to the window, and he would catch her by the leg. It would have seemed comical to a passer-by, a drama of a robed reverend father wrestling an evil spirit. He finally caught her from behind and wrapped his arms around her waist, both of them panting for air, and she could feel the heat of him, the frustration in his breath.
‘Not everything – not everything in life comes to you, not everything—’
‘You think I don’t know that? I am a twenty-what unmarried Nigerian woman who ran away from home, and you think I don’t know that?’
She pulled away from him and went to the bathroom to cry. After a long shower she went to her room and slept an entire day. When she woke up, she tiptoed to the living room and saw the mass of white on the chair pulsing with breath.
He was still there.
He shared what he knew about the Madhouse a week after he returned. They were both naked on the bed, dappled with the morning sunlight. He shared his suspicion that the place was probably a little asylum for the colonial masters, where they were kept from going crazy, mad with homesickness, malaria or the hot sun, with sedatives and books.
