by Jowhor Ile
“Hmm, I don’t know for you-o, Paul,” Fola said.
Ajie wanted to note that its color and placement in a tree weren’t enough facts to determine that it was the venomless tree snake. He knew Paul wanted to climb the tree, so he stayed silent. His mind was changing by the second: Maybe Paul was right and it was just an ordinary tree snake.
Paul was climbing up the tree. Ajie watched as he moved from branch to branch. Soon he was at the very top. He stood on a branch and began to reach out for the fruits. He didn’t ask either Ajie or Fola to join. Just being up there seemed a strong enough invitation.
He sank his teeth into a mango. “Should I throw some down for you?”
“I’m coming up,” Fola said.
“Me, too.”
Ajie stood up and began pulling himself up the trunk of the tree, upward, upward, inch by inch, till he got to the first spread of branches and caught hold of one, then hauled his body up the tree. “If you are afraid, you will fall,” Paul said, looking down at Ajie. “You are not heavy enough to break a branch, just hold tight.”
Ajie could see Paul’s gray T-shirt up there with the green leaves and blue sky. Fola was right beneath him now, on the same branch, his breath heavy and labored. A stiff wind blew through and rustled the leaves, and Ajie’s heart skipped a beat, but he laughed out, “Wow!” On the treetop, they perched on the youngest branches like three little birds, looking down on all the rooftops from here to the expressway, watching cars come and go but without hearing the engines.
“If we climb down to the branch below,” Paul said, “we can jump to the other side of the fence.”
Another gust, stronger than the first, blew and whispered past Ajie’s ears, and he imagined being caught on the barbed wire while trying to jump. He held on tight to the branch beside him and looked across the desiccating swamp, catching a whiff of the muddy stink, imagining his exhilaration at having jumped. It was the present notion of actually doing it that knotted his lungs and made breathing difficult.
Fola was quiet. Ajie wanted him to say something, to discourage his brother. He knew that once Paul jumped, he, too, would have to.
“How do we get back?” Ajie asked.
“We’ll walk all the way around to the gate,” Paul said. He was tapping his foot on a branch, testing its strength to see if it could withstand his takeoff. He must have judged it could: He took off and landed on the other side with a muted thud. “It’s easy!”
Fola went next. He inched forward and misstepped on the branch but held on tight and kept steady for some seconds. His jump was sharp and quick. When he landed, he got up at once and hopped on one foot. Ajie looked beyond the rooftops and slow-moving cars in the distance, all suddenly small as though he were on an airplane. What will it be, then, Ajie thought. He tried to imagine the near future, that evening back in their house, for instance, would it have already happened that he made the jump, feeling proud that he had pushed himself and done it, or would he be nursing his disgrace and cowardice at having chickened out? Would it have happened that he climbed down the tree and walked through the gate to join Paul and Fola on the other side?
“Ajie!” Paul shouted from below. “I’m here, nothing will happen to you.”
Ajie took off without thinking. There was only the slap of wind against his face and nothing else. A quick blur of green, blue, brown. When he landed on the other side, first on his feet, followed by a backward fall on his bottom, Paul pulled him up by the hand.
“Champion. You see, you made it!” Ajie dusted his shorts as they made their way back. Paul dropped a hand on his shoulder.
They walked all the way around to the street, just in time to meet Bibi at Fola’s gate.
“They are looking for you people,” she said, looking only at Paul. “Uncle Gabby is around.” Fola said goodbye and went back into his compound as Paul, Bibi, and Ajie walked back home.
A white van was parked in their driveway. “Is Mr. Ifenwa here, too?” Paul asked.
“Maybe he’s just come. He wasn’t here when I left to find you.”
—
Bendic was in his favorite seat, holding a beer mug in his left hand. “They are back!” he announced to the others. Gabby was sitting next to Bendic; he balanced a bottle of malt drink on his lap. Bendic’s friend Mr. Ifenwa was perched on the edge of his seat, leaning toward a saucer of groundnuts he was shelling and throwing into his mouth.
“Where did you two escape to?” Bendic asked, almost as if addressing the whole room. They greeted him and Mr. Ifenwa, and Paul stood behind their uncle Gabby. Gabby was Ma’s young cousin. He had lived with them once for about a year, while preparing for his O levels, and now that he was in university, he came down sometimes to spend weekends with them.
“I think you have grown taller since the last time I saw you,” Mr. Ifenwa said. “No, I mean you.” He gestured toward Ajie, then emptied the contents of a groundnut pod into his mouth. Not true, Ajie thought. It was Paul who always grew taller. Visitors never failed to comment on it. To Ajie they said things like: So, what class are you in now? Already? Wonderful. What do you want to be when you grow up? A lawyer like your father?
“Lawyers are liars,” Mr. Ifenwa sometimes said. “Let the boy study what he wants, when the time comes.”
“There was a bank robbery near Eleme Junction,” Gabby was saying now. “I heard it on the bus as I was coming.”
“You don’t say,” said Ma.
“The operation lasted a good two hours; the police were nowhere.”
The remote control was resting on the arm of Ma’s chair, and Bibi took it without her noticing, then flipped back and forth between the two channels. She would pause for a few seconds on one and then the other. Ajie saw that Paul was conversing with Gabby in hushed tones. He was trying to get Gabby out of his seat to the dining area, where they could talk freely.
Gabby, the connoisseur of ghost stories. (“Last week, when I was on my way to visit a friend near Wimpey, the taxi driver picked up a woman by the cemetery near Hospital Junction; each time the driver looked in his rearview mirror, he saw a coffin where this woman sat. He would turn his head only to find the woman on her seat, smiling meekly at him. His eyes went up to the rearview mirror, then back to the woman. At the third glance, he stopped the car in panic and ran out, shouting, ‘Jesus! Jesus!’ We looked and the woman had vanished, leaving a white hankie behind.”)
Gabby, master of high farce. (“A heavily pregnant woman was knocked down by a bus as she tried to cross the road at Rumuola. As the car hit her, the child—a boy—evacuated her womb at once and made his way straight into GRA via Presidential Hotel. The police are in full search for him right now, as we speak.”)
A thin, shiny scar ran across Gabby’s scalp, just above his left earlobe, which confirmed him as a man who frequently had dangerous encounters. Gabby had come down to Port Harcourt from the village to sit for his WASC exams. This was in 1984, when the military regime had imposed a nine P.M. curfew. Gabby was walking home from his evening preparatory lessons when the police stopped him. “Come here, who are you, do you have any ID on you, where are you coming from, where are you going,” and Gabby answered these questions, he was only a few minutes’ walk home, there was more than enough time before the curfew began. “Wait here,” one of the policemen ordered, then ignored him until it was nine P.M.
“Are you not aware there is a curfew from nine?” the policeman returned to ask Gabby. “What is it by your time now?” Gabby couldn’t help laughing. Was this man serious? Gabby couldn’t imagine how to react to the scene unfolding before him, so he laughed again as the policeman made a show of the gravity of Gabby’s offense.
“Oh, you are laughing, eh?” the policeman charged. “I will show you today.”
“Just let me go home, I beg you,” Gabby said, gesturing to the nearby street, but the policeman kept him there for another hour and then told him he was being arrested for breaking the curfew. He radioed his colleagues for a van, which t
hey pushed Gabby into. He was being driven to the station for questioning, they said. By the time he was released the next morning, they had somehow managed to break his head in the process of interrogation.
Bibi had joined Paul and Gabby at the dining table. “I can set the tennis board if you like,” Paul said to Gabby. “This time you won’t even get up to ten points before I trash you. I can give you five to start with.” Gabby had beaten Paul at table tennis during his last visit, months ago. “Or do you want ten points to start off with? I can give you that, don’t be afraid. Get up.”
“It’s late,” Ma said, her attention swinging from Bendic’s conversation with Mr. Ifenwa to Paul’s. “Gabby is tired.”
“Tomorrow, Paul,” said Gabby.
“Ohhh,” the children groaned.
“I’m sure Ajie can beat you. Even with his left hand, his loop is something else,” Paul said. “And he stands on a tire to play.”
“That’s because he is a dwarf,” Bibi said.
Even though Ajie didn’t particularly mind that she had said that, he waited for an opportunity in the conversation that would allow him deliver a sharp retort.
Mr. Ifenwa poured his Guinness into a large mug and placed the bottle back on the table with a gentle thud. He clinked glasses with Bendic, who was browsing through a magazine. “Ah, thank you, my sister,” Mr. Ifenwa said to Ma after taking a sip of the cold drink. “This is what someone needs on a day like this.”
Ma smiled and waved him off. “Thank me for what?” she said, as any gracious host would.
“How do you get your drinks so cold with NEPA and their manic power cuts?” Mr. Ifenwa asked.
“We are supposed to get power every other day, but sometimes we don’t see any light for three days in a row. We have to run the generator to keep our food from going bad,” Ma said.
“It’s wonderful,” Mr. Ifenwa said, but it was unclear if he meant the cold beer or the constant power cuts.
“Ifenwa, so how are you getting on with your school?” Bendic asked. “Have any students enrolled yet?”
“Nearly fifteen,” he replied with a glow of pride.
“Really?” Ma said, her voice a little louder. “Where did you find them?”
“I recruit from everywhere,” Mr. Ifenwa said, scratching his head and then straightening up. “Some are my neighbors. You know those mechanics by the junction to my house? Two of them have joined.”
“You don’t say,” Bendic’s voice was barely louder than a mumble; his eyes traced the magazine left to right and back.
“Have you given it a name yet?” Ma asked. Mr. Ifenwa shook his head.
“Ifenwa School of Adult Education,” Bendic suggested without missing a beat.
“Spoken like a true bourgeois,” Mr. Ifenwa responded, about to smile. “Why must it have my name?” Then the almost-smile disappeared.
Bendic and Mr. Ifenwa were schoolmates and had become so deft at sparring in this way that you had to listen hard to catch that it was only amicable rivalry. Mr. Ifenwa wore egg-shaped lenses with thin silver frames that looked transparent. He used to live in America with his wife, Celia. They had returned to Nigeria one December for the holiday when Celia was killed in a car crash as they drove from their home village, Nnobi, to Port Harcourt. A broken-down trailer had been abandoned by a bend in the road without any warning signs to oncoming vehicles. She slipped away before they got to the hospital, and Mr. Ifenwa never returned to America. Although Ajie had never heard Mr. Ifenwa and his parents discuss his dead wife, and even before Ajie grew to know the story, it never left him—the death of his wife. It was an old musty smell of a cupboard seldom opened. His two sons still lived in America. One taught at a college in Boston, the other did something at a medical research center.
Now Bendic was saying something to Ma that Ajie hadn’t heard. Bibi skipped off from the dining area and hurried out of the parlor. She returned with Paul’s Walkman with the headset on, nodding a little as she listened, walking toward Paul’s outstretched hand. Paul took the tape out, turned it over, and put on the earphones. He listened for a few seconds to make sure it was the song he wanted before passing it to Gabby, watching his face for a reaction as he put it on and listened.
Ma took the remote control and flipped the channel, and there was Georgie Gold, a flamboyant local singer who wore her hair in a startling blonde, swinging her hips this way and that in her heavily sequined dress, belting out a tune Ma apparently didn’t care for. Ma seemed frustrated by the lack of choice on TV, but she may not have realized it, as Ajie watched her drop the remote control back on the arm of her chair in weary surrender. Ajie went to the dining area, where Gabby was telling Paul and Bibi a fantastical story about a village he once drove past. It was a land of only women. They never grew old.
“Oh, Benedict, you can do better than that.” Mr. Ifenwa’s voice came from across the room. Bendic responded: “We can get opinions by the dozen, but I want the facts. Give me something research based, then I will listen.”
Ajie knew they were having yet another argument. Sometimes Bendic called Mr. Ifenwa a “Communist,” and he called Bendic a “decadent bourgeois.” When Bendic said the military had brought Nigeria to its lowest point yet in history, Mr. Ifenwa would add that direct action was the only way out. In Mr. Ifenwa’s opinion, Nigeria was comatose, nailed shut in a coffin slowly moving toward a furnace.
After Celia died, Mr. Ifenwa spent the following years as a one-man campaigner for road safety: He wrote letters to the ministry of Works and Transport, he wrote articles that were published in the Tide newspaper and sometimes the national Punch. Many times he pinned placards on his body and stood before the Federal Secretariat. He had abandoned his job in the U.S., and even though his children pleaded with him many times to return, he didn’t. Two months earlier he had started a school for adult education. “The number of people I meet who have been to primary school but can’t read well is just alarming,” he had said.
“What about school fees?” Ma was asking now. “Are you charging yet?
“Not yet, my sister.”
“We can brainstorm, think up a suitable name. It’s really admirable, this idea. No joke, you must give me some advisory role in it,” Bendic said.
Mr. Ifenwa said, “There is no money to share here, Ben.”
“Me? Ifenwa.” Bendic was perched on the edge of his seat, pointing his fingers at his own chest. “Me, share money?” He shook his head and laughed like a bad man in a film. “I have suffered. Anyway, my dear friend,” he continued, “when you do decide on a name, avoid anything that has People, Masses, or Common Man.”
“It is cynicism that has kept the country in this state, Benedict.”
“I’m just saying, coming from you, it would be a bit of a cliché, don’t you think? It could only be worse if you gave it a Pentecostal Christian name, like, say…El-Shaddai Cradle of Learning,” and they burst into laughter.
“Or Divine Grace Group of Schools,” Ma added.
Mr. Ifenwa piped up. “I’m thinking of a name like No Condition Is Permanent. The ethos is clear enough. Anyone, regardless of current literacy level, can come and change for the better.”
“I know, I know,” Bendic said. “But that phrase is written on every bus or truck plying Aba Road.”
“And that’s exactly why it’s the right name: nonexclusive.”
“Hmm, I see your point,” Bendic mused. “It might work. In fact, I think it will work,” he said with certainty.
“Ol’ boy,” Mr. Ifenwa’s voice dipped from that cultured mix that had as much of Igbo in it as English, “so the name don win you over!” His English was of a kind that Ajie recognized only in people of his parents’ generation. They said perhaps instead of maybe. Peradventure was a word that occurred in regular conversations. Ajie was with Ma one day at Savannah Bank, and Ma told him to sit in the lobby while she went inside to speak to her banker. Ajie overheard a woman say, “Good a thing the government paid us when they did.” He
turned his head to find the owner of the voice, and there she was, standing with three other women who might have been ex-colleagues. “If not that one has children who are able to augment one’s pension…” She let the words trail off like someone reluctant to show off her own good fortune. The four women kept vigilante eyes on what was going on at the front of the line. Pensioner types who probably ran into each other only monthly at the bank or whenever their payments came through. Although the woman Ajie heard speaking looked better dressed than the others, there was an austere neatness to her. Her skirt and blouse were made from reddish Ankara print; she wore Scholl slippers on her feet. Slung on her left shoulder was a puffy handbag from which the black head of a small umbrella stuck out. Her hair was evenly gray, freshly combed, tightly curled, and gleaming. When the fluorescent tube right above began to blink, for a moment her hair looked like a dark halo around her face. Ajie couldn’t make up his mind if she looked dignified, or poor, or both.
“So you are not charging any fees at your school?” Ma asked Mr. Ifenwa.
“I will charge for study materials, but not yet. For now I need to encourage people to enroll. The notebooks and stationery you sent will go a long way.”
Ma stood up, collected the empty bottles from the table, and went into the kitchen.
Bendic turned on the television and asked Mr. Ifenwa if he’d read a particular story in the Vanguard. It was about a director in the Ministry of Education who’d claimed there were no funds to pay pensioners for the past three months, but there were now allegations that he had put the money on a fixed deposit to make interest on it, and yesterday a large crowd of pensioners gathered in front of his office at the state secretariat, demanding to be paid at once.
Two local schools were dueling on a debate program on TV. Baptist High and Oromineke Girls. The topic was juvenile delinquency: Who was to blame, the parents or the school? The studio audience members were mostly students from both schools, seated on opposite sides. The students from Oromineke Girls were dressed in checked green uniforms, and the Baptist boys wore white shirts and white trousers. The panel was seated at the center.
