The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  ‘Give me back my knife!’ he yelled after her, racing into the living room, worried that she would escape through the front door. He collided with her but she didn’t fall; she maintained her grasp on the knife.

  ‘Give it back.’

  Her face was calm and when she spoke it was in this new, steady voice he’d never heard before. ‘I just need it; I will give it back to you.’

  ‘How, ehn? How will you give it back when you have killed yourself? I would remove it from your dead body then police will say I am a murderer abi?’

  ‘I just want to cut my hair.’

  ‘With a knife?’ he cried out. ‘Cut your hair with a knife? How? Which village do you come from? Is that how they do it in your place?’

  ‘I have never been to my village before, my father …’ Her eyes wandered on the wall for a moment then returned to him. ‘You said you don’t have scissors.’

  He looked away. ‘Ehn, I have scissors. Just give me the knife, I am coming. Give me the knife.’ Once she let go of the knife he dashed inside to get the scissors.

  She sat on the ground in the courtyard, her legs in front of her, slightly parted to receive the chops of conditioned hair. He cut the hair because he suspected it was either this or her life. But he asked anyway.

  ‘Won’t your father or husband disapprove?’

  She turned her head back to smile at him. ‘I do not have a father any more.’ Then she bowed her head again. ‘But I almost got married. Seven years ago a man of God said he saw me in a dream …’

  Bodies are heavier at night. It is hard for him to leave her room at 2 a.m. even though she has fallen asleep. When he was finished cutting her hair hours earlier he washed it for her out there in the courtyard and when he was done with the washing and he saw her face he realised she’d been crying. He found himself embracing her. After a while she told his heart, ‘I have never hugged a man before,’ and he held her. ‘I have never used lipstick before,’ and he held her still. ‘Not even eye pencil. But I know how to use it. My father – my father, he didn’t allow it but my sisters, my sisters found a way. I am coming back.’

  She went to the kitchen and returned with a matchbox. She drew out a match and held it before him, looking into his eyes as though she was going to perform a magic trick. Then she struck it against the side of the box. He didn’t look at the flame on the stick, he watched it burn in her eyes. Watched her mouth purse to blow it. When it went out he felt the overwhelming end of something and he didn’t know what it was or what came next. ‘Don’t move,’ she said with an almost smile in her voice. ‘Close your eyes.’

  He tried not to move. Held still when he felt the soft heat of the burnt match tracing his one eyelid, then the second one, first up then down. When the matchstick left his eyes he opened them.

  ‘You have beautiful eyes,’ she said. ‘You should have been a woman. Look at your skin.’

  For the rest of their life together, in anger or in happiness, when they woke in the morning their first ritual would be for her to darken his eyelids with burnt matchsticks.

  At night bodies are heavier, so he closes his eyes in this foreign territory. The room is foreign because her body is in it. Everything is changed; everything, time, is measured in her inhale-exhale. He closes his eyes and lets his heart slow down to this rhythm.

  They were certain that this was how Adam and Eve had done it, with no relative to approve or disapprove. This was how those first humans must have spent eternities which started before time began. For he believed time began only after they were cast out of the garden, after the first scene, after they were permitted to die. What wonders they must have explored in that garden, the privileges of liberal passion. No clothes, no presuppositions of the perfect body, with or without fruits, with or without herbs (which must have heightened or modulated the spectrum and intensity of pleasure), aware of the treasures buried in secret places in the vast topography of their bodies, the secret poses and alignments the human race was yet to discover. What manner of sex did Adam and Eve have outside the confines of time? They must have known, he allowed his mind to stretch even further, they must have known how to stop each other’s bodily processes since they were outside the entrapment of time and consequently there would have been no ovulation period for Eve, no semen production for Adam, only perpetually enjoying their bodies without the interruption of babies.

  That first night he had let his heart slow down to her breathing, he woke up in a hot panic into a blast of daylight and saw her already sitting up, studying him. Her eyes had not lost their other-worldly quality. He asked her what the time was. She picked up a matchstick she’d been playing with and drew something on the left side of his chest.

  ‘Go and look in the mirror,’ she said. He got out of the bed and walked to the mirror. She had drawn something like this:

  ‘I was born at 3 p.m.,’ she said.

  Because they had no carnal knowledge before each other, they were free to invent various ways for their bodies to be together. Free from prior experience they pursued their passions as creatively as their bodies would permit until they got to a point where they stopped slapping against each other, reaching higher and higher for life, lashing like flames in the night. This was the point at which observation began. Observation, which had been his idea, yielded delightful surprises. He discovered that the base of her neck, where her clavicle gently jutted out, was delicious to taste and sharpened her want for him each time his lips touched it. She discovered in turn that he, once a student of the Quranic scriptures, almost a soldier, almost a priest, was incredibly ticklish and that his right nipple was salty and her tongue on it sharpened his ache for her. She would trace intricate invented patterns with burnt matchsticks on his chest in moonlight. Soon he’d rather spend hours contemplating the slope of her back, its varying contours under sunlight, than spend time with his beer-parlour acquaintances. Her body was the end of his tailoring business, because the acquaintances were the only ones who patronised him. Her body, with its wants and temperatures, was like a desert, with golden planes in the morning and silver sand in the night. He was irrevocably lost in it. After three weeks he had become accustomed to her smells: the stale breath and the sour milkiness of her body in the morning, the sweet-sour acridity of her sweat after sex.

  In the twelfth month they divided the house, but only for when he was around. It was her kitchen. His bedroom. Their books. Their house. Together they excavated parts of it he had not explored, sorted through the junk in the storeroom, where they found what seemed to be hospital records dating to the 1920s, tins of oil paint, fishnet hammocks … What sort of house was this? They tied the fishnethammocks to the twin palm trees in front of the house and relaxed in them on hot nights.

  When the children came it was ‘the children’ and they treated them as if Max and André were entirely their own creatures who happened to happen to them.

  Windows open. The yellow of sunlight soaking through, soaking their naked bodies, heavy in the air, making everything pale yellow like an afternoon in a dream.

  They wake into each other’s eyes.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Mirrored smiles. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  They burst into a laugh.

  ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘Having sex.’

  ‘But as what? A couple? Friends?’ She turns to him and supports her head with a hand. ‘Are you having sex with me out of pity?’

  He kisses her forehead. ‘I am having sex with you because I was made to. All those years I spent in the seminary and in the mosque I have never believed there is a God as much as I do now. There has to be a God who fashioned my body to fit into your body.’

  ‘O, God, stop.’

  ‘Your body is my temple. Each time I worship I see God.’

  ‘O, my God, the church would burn both of us alive.’

  ‘I’d die a happy martyr.’

  ‘But we’d hav
e to fix the fridge.’

  ‘Yes, we must repair that fridge.’

  ‘And we’ll stick magnets of watermelon slices and pineapple slices—’

  ‘We’ll decorate the fridge with fruits.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘I should be asking you. Shebi, you are the one who will carry the belle, not me.’

  She gasps and hits him with a pillow. He retaliates and starts running out of the room, guffawing, but her pillow hits him at the door. He turns and picks up the pillow but she has already shut herself in the bathroom. He walks to the door smiling while she slides down to the tiles on the other side of it.

  ‘Promise me just one thing.’

  He slides down to the floor of the bedroom and leans on the door, tuning in to her.

  ‘Promise me that we must be like this, as long as this lasts. We have to be like this.’

  He looks at her brassiere hanging from a cupboard door and smiles.

  Noon

  Today is Saint Valentine’s Day, he tells her, still naked with her in the bed. Do you know his story? St Valentine?

  She shakes her head and squirms in his arms, turning to face him with eyes closed. She has graduated from burnt matchsticks to the oil paint they found in the storeroom. His body is covered in a white labyrinth mapping the thoughts that keep her up some nights when she thinks of the man she was running away from.

  Evening

  In their old fishnet hammock hanging between the two palm trees their children will name when they have children, she recites her favourite words to him like endearments. Latch. To hold on to something. He smiles at the sky, hands behind his head. Her right cheek is on his chest, each word from her lips tattooing itself onto his heart. Serendipity. An unexpected adventure.

  Night

  She is reading by the light of a candle on the shelf; he listens on the ground, legs in front of him, eyes chasing a moth courting the candle flame behind her head as she reads. She is on a high stool and the moth descends from the flame to her crossed legs with the grace of a small war-plane, angling for the best path between her legs. He smiles. He can understand the moth’s frustration.

  With kisses she healed his scars, the places burnt by fire, those welts of memory. She would press her lips to this one and that one without asking the how of them and they would hurt no more.

  He was always wondering how and if it would last, what they had. She was always unknotting his wrapper, kissing his scars. Then one day he came home to see her staring outside, through the kitchen window, one foot drawn up against her thigh, speaking in a whisper as if from far away, ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said, without any emotion, just stating the fact. ‘I wonder if it will be a girl.’ And he understood and he fell to his knees before her and kissed her belly and told who was in there to be a girl, for a boy’s life was hard. He stretched up to kiss her shut eyes and began to tell her about the two fires of his childhood, the first not an accident but a purification ritual to cleanse their land of the abomination committed by his parents, siblings, the abomination of conceiving him, and the second, the fire that had razed the mosque where his imam foster father had been giving him instruction in Arabic. Both fires would last the span of her pregnancy, told to her daily in small morsels.

  A white man driving past in the 1940s had flung his half-finished cigarette out of his car window. It set fire to a patch of grass, then a field, scorching several farmlands, then the whole village. No neighbouring clan admitted guilt so his village people retreated further away from the road, deeper into the Saharan wilds where nobody could disturb them. By the time the Da’wah Muslims brought Islam two decades later the clan had already cultivated a dislike for foreigners; for foreigners who insisted, the clan had only one treatment: arson.

  But at first, it looked as if the Muslims were being tolerated. The people even bought some locally concocted perfume and some tozali for the eyes. The elders gave them a week but the foreigners flashed their silver teeth in accommodating smiles. The elders didn’t know that the imam had picked up an abomination baby they had left to die and handed him over to some of the travelling merchants among them, to be nursed by their wives while the imam established the direction of Mecca from the moon and stars so that construction of the mosque could begin. The baby grew in their care, first learning words and vowels in Arabic before he learnt the nomadic Hausa. In four years they established a mosque but never succeeded in converting one of the locals, but the child grew healthy. Adding fashion and perfume was as far as the Muslims got in influencing the natives.

  Then one November afternoon, as the imam was bent over the Quran on a mat, teaching the little boy he had named Shariff the Arabic alphabet, the atmosphere in the newly finished mosque erupted in brilliant flames so glorious that for a few seconds Shariff believed they had ascended into heaven. On reflex the imam managed to shield the boy as crackling timber from the roof fell in flaming pieces, realising for the first time how much he really cared for this boy. He had planned to train him as a Muslim scholar, even send him to Mecca. If they would not accept Islam from foreigners surely they would accept it from someone carrying their blood, the child they had rejected returned to them whole and grown, proof of the sovereignty of Allah.

  On that fateful day Father Ebube had been exploring the land under authority from the Kaduna State Government, which had given him liberty to pick a plot in the southern region of the state to establish a new cathedral. From the slope he could hear the beating of drums and see people dancing round a burning mosque in the distance. Father Ebube gathered up his robe and plunged deeper into the shrubs to where the building burnt, much to the dismay of his assistant, who had to follow him nonetheless lest he be accused of neglecting the reverend. Of course the secretary, the catechist and several other assistants jogged after them. When they got to the clearing no one was in sight, but the father could hear the voice of a child chanting in Arabic in the heart of the flames. He disrobed and jumped into the burning building even as his assistant shrieked in protest.

  He found a little boy bent over the imam, reciting a prayer over him, blind to the fire, chanting ‘Hasbunallahu wa ni’mal wakil, Hasbunallahu wa ni’mal wakil’ over and over to the man as the flames lapped around him, soaring to the falling zinc roof. The boy didn’t let go of the imam easily. The reverend returned for the imam after taking the boy outside but he was already dead. The boy was shuddering when the reverend’s staff surrounded him, muttering ‘Hasbunallahu wa ni’mal wakil, Hasbunallahu wa ni’mal wakil’ over and over. The reverend herded everyone back to the car at the top of the slope, carrying the boy himself, forgetting his robes behind him, never looking back. He took the boy to Kaduna and refused to change the boy’s name, to the chagrin of the assistant.

  ‘His family has been burnt to death; his name is the only thing he has in the world that belongs to him.’ The reverend reclined in his office chair and took off his glasses to stare at the assistant standing by his door. ‘Do you want to take even that from him?’

  ‘No, father. But what incantation has the boy been chanting? Sometimes he chants in his sleep. The sisters are worried.’

  The reverend put on his glasses and returned to the paperwork for the Daughters of Charity mission. ‘Tell them not to worry. Allah alone is sufficient for us, and He is the best disposer of affairs, is what the boy said,’ he replied, the steely authority in his voice intact. ‘It is Arabic, not witchcraft,’ he added when the shock didn’t wash from his assistant’s face.

  And so the priest brought up the boy but didn’t tell him his story at first. Not even about his real father, who would one day enter their lives. He would feed the man who, followed by his mother, had pronounced, ‘We reject you’ and had left him by the roadside – screaming and bleeding from the chest wound that had been inflicted to prevent him from reincarnating, as was the custom – to die.

  By the light of a single candle Shariff bathed Sweet Pea at night, reciting Arabic words from his childhood delicately as
he sponged her pregnant belly. ‘Nutfa. Alakh. Mudgha. Stages of creation.’ She giggled in the bathtub as he enunciated each word in the balmy bathroom air, heavy-sweet with heat and intimacy.

  ‘Nutfa.’

  ‘Not far,’ she smiled.

  ‘Semen mixed with blood. Or small seed. Alakh.’

  ‘Alack.’

  ‘Blood clot. Or zygote. Transforms from semen after forty days. Mudgha.’

  ‘Mud—,’ she laughed but saw the seriousness in his face and tried, really tried to pronounce the word even though her throat refused to yield the last syllable. So he leant down to her in the tub to lubricate her mouth with a long, deep kiss.

  ‘Now Mudgha.’

  ‘Mudgha,’ she replied, breathless.

  ‘Good.’ His hand abandoned the sponge and started travelling down her belly even as his eyes narrowed at hers. ‘It means flesh.’

  She leant back and shut her eyes.

  How had Shariff found his real father? Enter philosophy exams, third year in the seminary. Shariff is twenty and full of promise. Everyone says so. Served as altar boy longer than the others. Starched clothes (he presses his clothes right after pressing the reverend’s), devoted child. As far back as he can remember his soul has been white as snow. Has harboured no curiosity about the sisters’ underwear. He has tried to replace his childhood Arabic with Latin. Deus magnus est for Allahu akbar. But the half-forgotten Islamic prayers remain in his head. But now he is before Father Ebube in his bedroom, a wooden Jesus is crucified on the wall, and the time is two o’ clock.

  ‘You are twenty years old,’ begins Father Ebube. ‘Twenty and full of promise. Tell me what you know about your parents.’

  Shariff is paralysed for a full minute before words return to his mouth. ‘You adopted me, Father.’

  ‘Yes, but before that.’

  He shifts in his chair. He has never had cause to worry about his origins until now. Father always made sure his needs were taken care of and there was always work to do in the parish and books to read to distract his mind. ‘My father was a Muslim. Fire burnt our mosque one day.’ He looks up at the reverend. ‘You saved me.’