by TJ Benson
When she woke up she told him she was leaving for a place she didn’t know and he remembered with a loss of breath that she had come three decades earlier, running away from a man. But he also knew that they had all revolved around her, that she had never been out of the house all these years, all these lifetimes, by herself, except when she went looking for André. He was terrified of her leaving even though she left the ingredients for her vanilla sponge cake in their refurbished house, as assurance of her return.
He will always remember the angles of her and think that he will be unable to give himself to another woman the way he has given himself to her, that he will always measure his life in her blood cycle, that he will always think of his time left on earth as twenty-nine days. Even though he is in debt and there seems to be no practical way of supporting his family other than auctioning off her original piece, her only unsold piece, Time.
‘Sir, we are wasting time. If we are not baking this cake we should go and join them outside. You are the one who turned down the British Council’s offer to have this event in Abuja. You are the one who dragged all those dignitaries down here and some of them have an evening flight to catch; some will miss the train.’
‘And the sun is too hot for those canopies. Daddy, talk na, tell us what you want.’
He wanted his boys. He had always wanted them. He hadn’t had any fears about being a father when they came into the world, even though he’d had no practical example to follow. They were his companions, all that had come from him, his semen, his sweat, his blood. So in the months André had gone missing and Sweet Pea had left the house he went to the Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport in Abuja on a hunch in case she had connected with an international gallery interested in her art. With her photograph, he asked the staff at Departures if they had seen her. They wouldn’t give the information at first, until he begged them, said she was his wife and reminded them of the Nigerian law that no woman could fly without permission of her husband. They were on the verge of complying when he saw André in a group of uniformed teens crossing the security barrier to the waiting area. It felt like a dream at first, it couldn’t be real, but then the boy turned to meet him in that second. André looked as if he was about to scream when Shariff saw a middle-aged woman, their teacher perhaps, leading him away. Shariff lost his mind in that instant.
‘My son! My son!’ he screamed.
The staff Shariff had been talking to stopped the security men from grabbing him and explained that they couldn’t let him through without a valid ticket.
‘That woman has kidnapped my son!’ he shouted, but there was no woman or son in sight.
‘They just went into the waiting area! Where are they taking my child!’
‘What is your problem, sir?’ a woman in a pressed shirt and green tie said. ‘First you said you were looking for your wife, now you have a missing son. What kind of family man are you? Can’t you keep your home together?’
Shariff lunged at her but the security restrained him. Someone was kind enough to confirm that his wife had not been to the airport before he was thrown out of the building. Another staff member shared details of the group that was flying to Japan: They have been on TV! They are so talented, I know they will make us proud.’ They belonged to an orphanage in Ibadan and they were to be in Japan for a festival.
Shariff went back home to Kaduna to recover from the episode and decided to go after Sweet Pea next. Now that he had found their boy, she would be more willing to return.
‘That girl na your wife?’ asked a driver in the Kawo bus park the following day. ‘Old man like you?’
He sighed. ‘We have two sons. Our daughter was killed in this market.’
‘Kai, kai kai. Eyah!’ The driver folded his arms behind the steering wheel and shook his head. ‘I carry your wife go Benue yesterday, I bin fear say she done craze sef. She not fit tell me where she dey go.’
Shariff could not help smiling to himself. Sweet Pea had taken a blind trip.
When her body was returned to her family her people said he must be properly wed to her – where did the boys come from in the first place? He asked how a man could marry a dead person. They said if he didn’t come to marry her on the appointed day, her body would be left above the ground. So on October the twenty-eighth, he unearthed the suit he’d bought a decade earlier for the White Wedding they kept postponing. He wasn’t allowed to drive into the compound when he got to the village, so he parked outside and proceeded to penetrate the concentric semi-circular rows of brick buildings to the centre where her coffin rested on a table under a small pear tree, guarded over by a few relatives.
Walking between these rows of houses had given him the faint nostalgia of penetrating his wife and now that he was in her, with her in the centre, he brushed off the thought. He was too weary for memories; he just wanted to be done with this bizarre custom and go home.
Just a few more steps to the bride in the coffin. Children began to pelt him with half-drunk sachets of water, banana peels and balled biscuit wrappers. He clenched his fists and squared his shoulders to steel himself and continued his march. He didn’t recognise any of the men guarding over the coffin. His wife’s mother and sisters had refused to come; for the first time in decades they had managed to align in the same church denomination, all four of them, and the church doctrine forbade burial ceremonies: ‘Let the dead bury their dead’. Well, he had come to marry his.
A hand pushed him on the chest when he got too close to the coffin. He had never learnt her language so he couldn’t understand what the man who had pushed him was saying. He tried to step forward again but was stopped, this time by two hands grabbing his shoulders from behind. They had circled him. ‘Ahn-ahn! Shebi, you people said I must come and marry her again? Allow me!’ he shouted, but they held him tighter the more he struggled, so he stepped back. Once they had relaxed their grip on him he charged forward like an animal, threw open the coffin and found it empty. He turned with eyes shiny wet, eyes filled with molten light.
‘Where is my wife?’ he asked the man who had pushed him first, shrugging off his suit jacket, but the man stood still as a statue, staring at nothing, saying nothing. He linked his hands around the man’s neck and asked again; a smile had spread from one corner of his mouth to the other, a tear dropped out of his right eye.
No answer.
He struck the man’s forehead with his and, without waiting for the man to recover, in a flash of motion, pulled him forward and smashed the head on the coffin, releasing a collective noise of surprise and shouts in the language. Why hadn’t she ever taught him her mother tongue? This thought distracted him long enough for the other men to pounce on him, but he easily shook them off with the reflex and verve from his army days. One of them he had thrown to the ground grabbed his legs. He kicked him off and stamped on his hands with his shoe. The man rolled on his back, howling in the sand. Another struck him on the back with firewood. He snapped around, seized the firewood, swung it to the man’s face before bringing it down on the other one still nursing his hand and howling on the ground.
The remaining men had run away so he rushed to the nearest person, a pregnant woman who had pelted him with a half-finished sachet of water.
‘My wife – where is she?’ His voice was soft; his hands weren’t really squeezing her throat, they just hung there loosely as though caressing her, and she started to cry. ‘Where are you people keeping her?’
‘Daddy, stop! Daddy, what is wrong with you? Stop, stop, release her!’ André and Macmillan were running to him, wet faces contorted in anger and shame and worry.
He allowed his rage to wane and let go of the woman. He sat down on the ground next to the empty casket. Everywhere was quiet. Everyone had fled. He covered his mouth with a hand and allowed his body to shiver with sobs. A slight drizzle began to fall but he just sat there sobbing.
He looked up at his sons. ‘Where is your mother?’ He drew up his knees to his chest and linked his hands round them, rocking back
and forth.
Max attempted an explanation. Their uncles had contacted him and asked him to bring André to the airport in Abuja, where her remains had been flown in from India. They asked that he did not involve his father; she had after all returned in pieces. Turns out her remains were never found. Their uncles kept detaining them for one reason or the other, and when Max realised something was very wrong, he used a decoy to drag André away from the airport. The men were probably still there, waiting for them to come out of the bathroom.
‘What happened here, Daddy?’ André asked once Max was done.
Their father stood up and dusted himself off. ‘Let’s go home,’ he said and started walking out of the compound.
André and Max ran after him, shouting that they weren’t children any more, they were capable of handling their mother’s people.
Shariff turned to them when he got to his car, eyes narrowed. ‘Did you bring a car?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Now get into the car.’
André got in the back seat and picked up a newspaper.
‘We are going to finish making your mother’s vanilla cake.’
He wants his boys.
After Sweet Pea returned from Benue he didn’t rest until he was able to track down the orphanage in Ibadan. He rented a cheap room near the establishment so he could figure out how to rescue his son. From the information he got at the airport, he knew they had returned from Japan, but from the police-surveillance activities on the street and security at the gate he knew he couldn’t just dance in and take the boy. He didn’t have a marriage certificate or a birth certificate for him. Taking it up with the authorities was not an option. So he waited. With mad logic, he knew his time would come. His desire was strong enough.
When he saw André crossing the road one night he wasn’t surprised. Shariff had gone to have dinner in a cheap restaurant, and he quietly followed his son. He also wasn’t surprised when the boy turned to walk backwards and he saw that his eyes were closed. André was sleepwalking. When André got to the end of the road, he crossed to a roundabout which had a fading sculpture of a large hand. Drivers yelled and honked at his boy. Shariff smiled as his son climbed into the cupped large cement palm and leant back to continue his sleeping. He crossed the road to the statue and carried his sleeping boy away in his arms, allowing tears to flow freely.
André always returned, no matter what. André returned from suicidal nightmares, from maniacal impulses, from America, from Amsterdam and from four-year disappearances. André, whose life they all believed was too fragile to last long in the world, always returned.
So when Macmillan says that he is dying Shariff sits down on the floor and laughs at the irony. It was Max, his most responsible son, the one who took care of them all, that he should have worried about.
If his life has ever meant anything, well, here it is, the two of them.
Sweet Pea was truly a gift and now she is gone. They are all he has left. He has no pity for anyone else, not his neighbours, not his government. Which is why, when his biological father found his way to their house decades earlier, he had no pity to spare for his muteness; he had lost two fathers already. ‘Come here Max, come. You too, André.’
Max says something about no longer being a child.
‘Did I give birth to you?’ You were mine. ‘Oya, come.’ He pats the black tiled kitchen floor. I would have wrapped you in leopard skin. They kneel on either side of their father and he says, ‘I don’t know why I am alive,’ and puts his hands on their shoulders, pulling himself to his knees. He turns to Max. ‘How long do you have?’
‘Some months,’ he replies, looking away from his father. ‘The doctors said it would be swift, that I won’t suffer for too—’
‘Look at me. I said look at me!’
Max turns and falls into his eyes.
‘You are mine.’
Max laughs and almost turns away, but Shariff follows his son’s face with his own like a wrestler.
‘Maybe we failed, maybe we were in no shape to be parents, but your mother – listen to me – your mother wanted you.’
André is crying softly.
‘Macmillan, we named you after our favourite publisher. We saw the twin heads and thought maybe you’d be a sculptor. André, we named you after the wine.’
André stifles a sob with a laugh.
‘And whether it is five months or a day, I don’t care. I don’t give a damn. You are mine. You are mine as long as you live, Macmillan. You are mine.’
He keeps on saying it until Max is forced to look into his eyes again. André is crying on Max’s shoulder and the moment, the afternoon, is as strange as his one-week romance in Amsterdam, as strange as falling into his brother’s dream to rescue him, as strange as that night his father fell asleep in his arms thousands of nights ago as he stroked his beard. And like those strange moments of his life, he chooses to take it without question, allows himself to be hugged, thirty-three years old, bald, dying, by his father whom he has hated and been ashamed of for much of his life.
Just then a boy with skin the colour of sunshine and eyes the most piercing blue runs into the living room, startling them.
‘They calling you, Papa,’ he says to André.
‘Come and meet your uncle,’ André had pointed at Max when he had arrived with the boy. ‘Go on, he is your daddy’s big brother.’
Max had been paralysed. He had turned to André, mouth open, but no words had come out.
‘Yes, it is true,’ André had said, face tightening up the way it did when he had broken something. ‘Happened in Amsterdam. I … this-this was the reason I couldn’t follow you back to Nigeria,’ he had said, stepping back, but Max had lunged after him and swallowed his body into a bear hug. André couldn’t bear the weight so they fell, the boy bursting into a laugh as long and full and delicious in the ear as good music. Max had squeezed his brother on the ground and kissed his face all over and laughed and André had been laughing, eyes wide in surprise and glee, matching his son’s.
‘Don’t mind me, don’t mind us. My name is Macmillan. Macmillan Shariff. Or you can call me Max. What is your name?’
‘My name is Blue.’
Max had looked at André and had shaken his head. André had shrugged and smiled.
‘My daddy says if I don’t like it I can take another one. But I like blue. It is my favourite colour. Like my eyes. Do you like blue?’
Shariff was transported to that first day when André had been presented to his brother as a newborn. Sweet Pea had told him about that day, about Max’s initial disappointment at seeing a baby boy instead of a girl, then the fierce determination to protect, too old for a five-year-old.
When André’s son was born he was already disenchanted with the world because he had been born twice. The first time, at six months when the mother had gone for a final scan so she could inform the father once and for all (she had eaten all her nails in apprehension during the previous months) the doctors at the hospital in Amsterdam had found that there was something growing on the baby, something with a life of its own. The thing seemed to feed on the unborn child and at the baby’s rate of deterioration the specialists were certain it would be stillborn. The best thing was to wait for a miracle. However, she remembered the fables of birth André had fed her on those cold nights after sex, so she turned to a Nigerian doctor who happened to be present and asked if there was really nothing he could do.
He understood her meaning and smiled at her sorrowfully. ‘My great-grandfather was the last traditional healer in my line,’ he said. When his collegues had left he told her she knew what should be done. ‘The baby will die; you would be at risk.’
She told him her life would mean nothing without her baby, that her life would already be lost.
She mustered up the courage to call the father, to say ‘I am pregnant with our baby and he is dying,’ but mercifully he didn’t answer the call so she sent him a text message.
After Andr
é had collected his phone from his brother and asked him to leave, he called her and told her that the doctors should wait for him, that it was his dead twin brother growing in her belly and eating their baby.
He rejected Max’s offer to come back home, then went to the hospital to give his support. The doctor briefed him: a tumour was growing on his son. They would have to deliver the baby prematurely and cut the tumour off before putting it back and closing the womb. It sounded marvellous and impossible but he was as willing as she was.
At his second birth the baby didn’t even open his eyes or cry but the doctors confirmed nothing was wrong with him. The procedure had worked.
The boy grew up being shuffled between dark double-storey apartments never seeing the sun as his mother switched from client to client until she suffered a drug overdose and finally gave up.
André had gone to her apartment to return the baby and found her sprawled on the ground. He tried to look away from his son as he waited for the sound of sirens but the boy played with his father’s face and stared into the eyes, mesmerised by his reflection in the brown balls.
‘Where we going, Papa?’ the boy asked when the ambulance had left.
André smiled sadly. ‘We are going to Nigeria. We are going home.’
On his way to the group of people outside, Shariff stops at the door and turns to watch his sons and his grandson, thinking that all his life has come to this. He feels a strong wave of gratitude and declares the greatness of God under his breath. ‘Allahu akbar, Deus magnus est,’ he whispers, over and over again, thinking of his first father, the imam who had rescued him from the bush, then used his body to shield him from the fire, and whose instructive voice he could no longer distinguish from his second father, Father Ebube, the Catholic priest who had rescued him from the flames. And in his recitation the two become one. Allahu akbar. Deus magnus est. Allahu akbar. God is great.
