by Jennifer Juo
Donna poked her head in his office. “Ayo, they need you in room four. Bleeding won’t stop.” Did he ask all his lovers to become volunteers?
He touched Sylvia’s shoulder lightly and left.
Sylvia went to the staff room and changed into a nurse’s uniform. She looked down the hallway. Donna was busy in reception writing down patients’ symptoms in the spiral notebook with the triage nurse, Sylvia’s old job. Sylvia tried to avoid Donna, working instead on attending to the patients already checked in. The lacerations on some of children were grotesque, innocent bystanders in the riots. She helped stitch up some of these wounds as best as she could. Others would require surgery.
“Winston told me you were a nurse,” Donna said, coming in to her room to watch her work on patients. “That’s great that you put yourself to work out here unlike the other wives just sitting by the pool.”
“I’m not much into sitting by the pool,” Sylvia responded as she finished up stitching a girl’s arm.
She hadn’t expected a compliment from her, but then again, maybe Donna did not know they were rivals in any way, or perhaps she didn’t care given her casual attitude toward sex and relationships. But Sylvia still thought to tread carefully as the woman was also Winston’s colleague. The less said, the better, she thought. She ignored Donna and focused instead on another child, picking out pieces of glass from a wound on his leg with a pair of tweezers.
“Well, I can see you’re busy. Just wanted to say I admire your work,” Donna said as she left the room.
***
Later around five o’clock, they all climbed into Ayo’s car. Sylvia never explained that she had foolishly abandoned her car by the roadside. But they didn’t get that far down the road before an angry mob surged forward. Ayo deftly sped the car backwards down the road, but the crowd followed with sticks and metal pipes, whatever they could find. Ayo’s new Peugeot, imported and a sign of entitlement, was an easy target for people angry at those robbing them blind. He swerved backwards into the clinic, honking at the gatehouse. His guards, armed with machine guns, let them in and then quickly shut the gates, dispersing the crowd by firing a few shots into the air.
***
When Sylvia woke up the next morning, lying on the cot in Ayo’s office, the country had changed overnight. She could hear the faint sound of military parade music coming from the next room. She worried about her children. Were they safe? They were supposed to have gone to the New Year’s Eve party at the clubhouse as a family. Had Winston made it back to the compound?
Sylvia looked over and saw the two chairs Donna had slept on were empty. Sylvia hadn’t slept much of the night. She had heard the sounds of Ayo’s voice, low and muted, as he did the rounds in his clinic all night long, but somehow she must have drifted off in the early hours of the morning. She looked at herself in her compact mirror and rummaged through the contents of her purse for lipstick, anything to make her look less tired and disheveled.
“You’re awake,” Ayo came into the room, he seemed worried. “There was a military coup last night. Soldiers descended on the Presidential palace and took over the government, but so far no one has been killed.”
“Can…can we go back?” Sylvia said, her voice wavering. She had heard all those stories about expats in Iran after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, having to flee with whatever clothes they had on them. What about her children? And where was Winston? She felt the juju doctor’s misfortune descending on her and her family.
“Don’t worry. Your children will be safe in the compound,” Ayo said, but he didn’t attempt to put his arms around her and instead kept a formal distance. “We’ll go back immediately. The guards said the streets outside have calmed down since hearing the news. People are keeping a low profile.”
Donna peered in, holding a short-wave radio. “I can’t find any more news except the little we heard on the BBC. All the local stations are just playing military marching music.” Her hair was tied up in the same ponytail, and she wore no makeup.
They got in Ayo’s car again. Donna sat up front while Sylvia climbed into the backseat. Ayo drove through the streets, and everything was eerily quiet. They made decent progress along the road, driving quickly through the empty streets.
“Do you think the people will welcome the military takeover?” Donna said.
“Oddly enough, yes,” Ayo said. “I know it’s contrary to what you think. But honestly, I think everyone is fed up with so-called democratic government. Shegari’s presidency has been the most corrupt ever. People are upset. In spite of the oil, the economy and the ordinary people’s lives are worse off.”
“I realize that. But how do you know these guys aren’t going to do the same thing? I mean steal money from the state’s coffers. Especially now since the people have relinquished their right to boot them out,” Donna said.
“We don’t know. In the past, military leaders have set up free elections and given up control. But yes, it’s quite possible, they could hang on, and this could be the beginning of a long line of despots.”
“You’re willing to take that chance?”
“I suppose I’ve lost all my idealism. Not sure if democracy worked. Not sure if military dictatorship worked. They were both terrible,” Ayo said, sounding defeated. “I’m in the business of worrying about the sick, the children, the injured. Nothing seems to improve under either rule.”
Sylvia was quiet, listening to how easily they spoke to each other. She felt jealous and left out of the conversation. She saw something that perhaps Ayo and Donna didn’t know yet. Despite his casual attitude toward Donna, Ayo had found his equal in her, something Sylvia felt she could never be.
“This country has so much potential to be great,” Donna said. “The people are entrepreneurial, and you have some of the best minds in Africa. If only we could stop the few trying to rob it blind.” Donna’s face seemed to light up as she talked about Nigeria.
Sylvia looked over at Ayo. He seemed buoyed by Donna’s enthusiasm for his country. It would bond them in some inexplicable way, she feared. Suddenly, Sylvia felt claustrophobic in the car with them, she had to get out.
***
Ayo dropped Sylvia off first, knowing she was concerned about her children. She got out of the jeep quickly, barely acknowledging Ayo or Donna. The children heard the car pull up, and they ran to the door, looking worried.
“Where were you Mama?” Lila said angrily. “We missed the New Year’s Eve party because of you.” She was eleven years old, and Thomas was nine.
“Madam, we wait and wait for you. But you not come, so I put de children to bed,” Patience explained.
“Winston hasn’t come home yet?” Sylvia said as she entered the living room.
Patience shook her head, and the children suddenly looked frightened. He was supposed to have returned yesterday for the party.
Sylvia looked up frantically at the clock on the wall. It was ten in the morning.
“Maybe he is on de way,” Patience said, trying to reassure her.
Sylvia turned the TV on. But there was nothing on except the usual colored stripes accompanied by loud, military marching music. She left it on anyway.
She picked up the phone and called Richard.
“Yes, I know there’s been a coup…Winston hasn’t come back yet…Yes he was supposed to come back last night…A search party?…Do you think he’s in trouble?…No, I will try not worry…Yes, sit tight.”
She hung up and collapsed on the couch, too tired and anxious to even shower. Patience brought her some tea and toast.
“Madam, you need to eat,” Patience said in a maternal way. “Don’t worry, everyting will be OK. God will be watching over him.”
“Thank you, Patience,” Sylvia said, grabbing Patience’s hand. “What would I do without you?” There were tears in the corner of Sylvia’s eyes as she held Patience’s hand. She had been through it all with her—the baby, the spirits, the unraveling marriage, the affair, the juju doctor’s spel
l. Patience had been her friend, her family, the one person that had remained steady and constant in her adult life in Africa. If Patience left her, she would be at a loss.
“Patience, do you like it here?” she asked, suddenly. “I mean, would you one day go home back to Cote d’Ivoire?”
“I cannot go back dere, eh.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I left to go to school in Abijan. But I failed. Only my people dey don’t know dat. Dey tink I am a successful businesswoman here in Nigeria. Dey tink I have plenty plenty money. I send dem most of my salary. I can’t go home. It’s a lie. I have no money.”
They both were exiled from their homelands, condemned to wandering a stranger’s land.
“You look tired, madam, you should go rest,” Patience said.
“Call me Sylvia, not madam.”
“I can’t, madam, it no feel right eh,” Patience said as if she were wary of crossing the imaginary employer-friend boundary. Sylvia realized Patience was her friend, but was she Patience’s friend? She had relied on Patience for everything in her life, but had Patience relied on anything from her except her salary?
Disappointed, Sylvia retired to her room. It had been a long day. Sylvia drifted into a quasi-sleep state and had terrible nightmare. It was about Winston. There was blood everywhere. It was another terrible hallucination, one of the many that had seemed to haunt her recently. When she woke up, she felt sick to her stomach.
***
Winston did not sleep much that night. His two companions, a giant flying cockroach and a tailless lizard, kept him awake much of the night scuttling around in the cement cell. The lizard chased the cockroach, hoping to make a meal out of it. He listened in the darkness to their battle. He heard the crowd fighting in the cell next to him. Was his armed guard in there too? He knew the prisoners had been crammed together in that tiny cell to accommodate him, an O’Ebo. Yet he still wasn’t about to open up his cell to them either.
Sometime close to midnight, he heard people cheering outside. He thought it was just the usual New Year’s revelry. He didn’t know the military had just captured the President and set up shop in the palace. At sunrise, he heard the roosters crowing, and someone opened his cell door.
“It’s time to celebrate, ma friend.” A man he didn’t recognize dressed in civilian clothes came in, smiling, giving him a cold beer for breakfast.
He led him out of the cell. The Captain was nowhere to be seen. The cell next door was empty of its prisoners, the iron door left open.
“Where is everyone?” Winston said as he drank the beer eagerly.
“Everyone is happy. Dat President Shegari robber has been overthrown,” the man continued. “De Captain and his soldiers are loyal to Shegari. Dey fled. Before de military come and arrest dem.”
Winston nodded, stunned at his sudden freedom.
Winston slowly made his way to the door outside. He figured any sudden movement might cause fingers to bear down on triggers.
“I need my passport,” he said, looking through the papers on the Captain’s desk. Some beer had spilled onto the passport, but otherwise it was mostly intact. Winston put his passport back into the front pocket of his shirt. He thought a passport from Taiwan held no currency in the counterfeit passport business. Who would want to go there? If it had been an American or British passport, it would not have made it through the night simply lying on the Captain’s desk.
“Your man is waiting outside for you,” the man said, pointing to his now unarmed guard waiting by the big tree. Winston was relieved to see him.
“My jeep?” Winston asked the man.
“Oh dat, I dunno what happened to it. I tink the Captain and his men take it when dey run in de night.”
It didn’t matter to Winston, at least he was alive, nothing had happened to him. If it hadn’t been for the coup, he wasn’t sure what Oluwa and the Captain might have had in store for him. He was safe and free for now. He and his guard managed to find a ride home on the back of a local pickup truck, sitting on top of a mound of cassava tubers.
PART THREE
1984-1986
SYLVIA
Chapter 28
Ayo tried to get in touch with her after the coup, but Sylvia never returned his calls. As the year went by, Ayo and Donna became a full-fledged couple, with Donna moving into Ayo’s apartment on the compound. Sylvia had recommitted to Winston, but nothing had changed between them, in fact, he distanced himself even further as if protecting himself from her. Her—she had become that kind of woman, an adulteress, but she had nothing to show for it. The love of her life had moved on. Meanwhile, her husband spent more time on the road, far away from her, the curse still looming over his life, not that he seemed to care. But she tried her best to make sure her children were safe. Her daughter was growing up, and as each year went by, Lila moved one step away from the spirit world until one day she finally severed her ties.
When Lila turned twelve in 1984, she became more brooding, sulky toward her mother. Sylvia found her looking through her drawers, perhaps searching for a piece of evidence, any clue about her real father. Lila clearly didn’t buy the Portuguese ancestor story Sylvia had spun all those years before to explain her different looks. But Lila’s search for her father would change her relationship with the spirit world and this Sylvia welcomed.
One night, Lila had a strange dream. On this particular nightly sojourn to the spirit world, Lila told Sylvia she met a crocodile spirit, half fish and half snake. When she met him, he was angry. Along his river, they were building a modern dam. Its construction would drown the surrounding villages that worshipped him. The crocodile spirit attacked the dam. Several construction workers were buried alive within the dam wall after falling into the wet concrete. But eventually the dam displaced the crocodile spirit and all he stood for. Lila watched as the water rose—people and animals, whole species—were drowned in an effort to bring electricity to darkness. Some tribesman had stayed behind not believing the waters would truly rise. Lila screamed as water filled the lungs of the village children. Lila felt the water rising quickly around her until only her head was free. In a matter of minutes, she feared she would be completely submerged. In his anger, the spirit and his fellow crocodiles feasted on all the corpses left behind.
Suddenly, her father appeared, but the man did not look like Winston, only a hazy version of a stranger whose face she could not see, but somehow Lila knew this man was her real father. The man held his arm out to her to save her from the rising waters. She kept trying to look at his face. Perhaps Lila wanted to see her biological father’s face so much she wanted it to be real, and in that moment, Lila realized she was standing in a dream.
It was then that Lila woke up in her bed, drenched in sweat. Sylvia heard her screaming, and like many nights before, she came to her daughter. But something about that night seemed different. Sylvia had come to Lila when she was a young child, hoping to wean her from the visits to the spirit world but to no avail. Tonight her daughter was sitting up in her bed, wide awake.
“I thought I saw my real father,” Lila said in a far-off voice. “But it was only a dream.” She explained pieces of her dream.
Sylvia held her daughter in her arms. She lay down next to her, holding her until Lila finally fell asleep. Sylvia had waited twelve years for this moment. When a child could finally separate dreams from reality, this was when the child lost all connection and consciousness with the spirit world. Finally, Lila’s dreams started to peel away from her reality and with that, at last, the spirit world began to fade away. From that moment on, Lila was no longer a changeling who could move freely between the earthly and spirit worlds. She was fully grounded in this life. The spirits would no longer be able to lure her back to the afterlife. She had grown up.
Sylvia welcomed this shedding of her spirit side with a mixture of relief and apprehension. She was relieved to be rid of the spirits’ hold on Lila’s life, but at the same time, she was afraid of what had ca
used it. The timing of it clearly had something to do with her growing suspicions of her biological father.
***
With the spirits vanquished, Sylvia seemed to drop her guard. As the weeks went by, Sylvia woke up with dark circles under eyes and wandered around all day in her nightgown. When Winston was away, she didn’t bother to cook. Her children ate Skippy peanut butter and passion fruit jam sandwiches for dinner every night while she had nothing but cups of dark coffee. She was overly anxious and erratic, telling her children one minute not to play on the grass outside because of the snakes while the next minute, she sat on the sofa, staring into space, not noticing if they went outside at all. What was wrong with her, she wondered? Was she pining away or was it something worse, a tropical fever of some sort?
“You sick, madam, you need to go to doctor,” Patience said, worried.
“I went to the doctor. They can’t cure it,” Sylvia lied.
“You need to go to Ayo doctor.”
“No. Don’t you contact him, you hear?”
Sylvia stopped going to the clubhouse and other compound social events or dinner parties. If Lila and Thomas wanted to go swimming, Sylvia sent Patience and the armed guard with the children to the pool. Since Lila had severed her ties with the spirit world, Sylvia was less worried about the threat of water.
The only thing Sylvia did on a weekly basis was to shop at the market in town. She borrowed videos from a makeshift rental place at the back of a furniture store run by an Indian family. In between the Bollywood musicals, the shelves in this small backroom were stocked with TV or rerun movies on blank tapes with hand-written labels, recorded from BBC or ITV by the owner’s cousin in the UK—plenty of James Bond, Grace Kelly, and Peter Sellers. She would watch movies all day dressed in her nightgown and robe. VHS had just been invented, and television-starved expats all over Africa were the first to adopt it.
