And After Many Days

by Jowhor Ile

  A girl in a neatly pressed green checked dress opposed the notion that the schools were to blame. She spoke fast. The words rushed out of her and Ajie’s mind raced behind, grasping them when she was already on to the next sentence. Her hands flew up now and again. Finally, she turned with alacrity toward the rival school and said with defiance, “I hope with these few points of mine, I have been able to convince my opponents that…” A storm of clapping followed when she finished. The moderator called for the second speaker from Baptist High. A boy in white trousers and a long-sleeved shirt moved to the center.

  “He looks a little bit like Paul,” Ma said.

  “No way,” Paul said.

  “He does,” Ma insisted. “You just can’t see it. Look at his nose and forehead.”

  “I don’t agree.”

  “Keep arguing.”

  “Paul will be taller when he gets to that age,” Gabby said.

  “Let’s hear what the boy is saying, at least,” Bendic grunted.

  “Moderator,” the boy began, motioning with a sweep of his hand, “panel of impartial judges, co-debater, accurate timekeepers, viewers at home, good day.” His voice was steady and strong, the cadence of rehearsed thoughtfulness. “I am here to propose the motion that juvenile delinquency is primarily caused by the home. My erring opponent has said—”

  The entire parlor disappeared into blackness. The TV went dead. “NEPA!” someone gasped. “Oooh!” the children moaned. “What kind of nonsense is this?”

  “Bendic, should I ask Ismaila if there is any diesel?” Paul asked, his shadow by the door, ready to leave. Ma’s slippers flapped in the kitchen. Then there was the sound of a match being struck and the flash of flame. She placed the lantern on the dining table and trimmed the light to the desired brightness.

  “While we wait,” Ma said. It was a moving-on kind of voice. While we wait for power to be restored so we can return—if we are lucky—to the tail end of this debate we were just beginning to enjoy. While we wait, here is a lantern.

  “So long as the power situation is not solved in this country,” Mr. Ifenwa said, “we are going nowhere.”

  The metal railings on the veranda rattled. Paul’s voice: “Ismaila said the fuel can carry for some hours.”

  “Okay, let him put it on. Maybe for an hour. Let’s finish the program, at least.”

  “He should watch out,” Ma added, “for when NEPA returns light so he can switch over.”

  They caught the last fifteen minutes of the show. The boy (who may or may not have looked like Paul) was finishing his argument. “Thank you,” he said firmly, then turned around to take his seat as clapping broke out yet again.

  Years later, Ajie would remember this particular debate. He would also remember Paul’s picture coming up on TV, on the two stations in the city, as announcements of his disappearance were being made. Five days after Paul disappeared, Bendic went to the TV stations with Paul’s photograph. He provided them with Paul’s full name, his age, when and where he was last seen, and then there was an appeal for any information that might aid in finding him. By now their earlier feelings of discord between hope and fear had fallen away, and there were just horror and dread. Ajie would remember the boy TV debater and would mix up his face with Paul’s. He would replace Paul’s clothes with this boy’s white and white. It would make perfect sense to him, because at the time of the disappearance, Paul was about this boy’s age, only a little taller.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The seeds of Paul’s disappearance were sowed by his parents. This was what Ajie decided. And who else was there to blame? Not Bibi, she had no hand in the matter. As for Paul, you really can’t blame a person for his own disappearance, at least not while he is still missing and cannot speak for himself.

  To tell Paul’s story, you would have to start from before he was born. The life of Bendic and Ma together was well documented in the framed photographs hanging on the walls of their village home in Ogibah. A house that took five years to build and was finally completed the year Bibi was born. Ma and Bendic were arrayed in various settings in these pictures. The backdrops were wrought-iron gates of colleges in the newly independent Nigeria, stone monuments in gray English cities; they were smiling and holding hands in a pigeon-littered square in Rome, standing with flutes of champagne in their hands at a party in Port Harcourt, leaning on a white Volkswagen Igala on a side street in Lagos.

  They returned from England in ’64 and took up civil service jobs in Lagos: Bendic in the Ministry of Justice, Ma in Education. Bendic was sporting a thick mustache, his dark-framed spectacles, and a dark suit. Ma was in a sleeveless shift dress and clunky heels. They both had buoyant Afros and wore bell-bottom trousers in the early pictures. Down the years, Ma’s enormous hair softened into Jheri curls; Bendic’s suits turned beige, and his hair was patted down, looking milder, less radical.

  There were hundreds of photographs stored in the albums in the Formica sideboard. Bibi had this habit then. Each time they were in the Ogibah house, she would point someone out in a group photograph and ask, “Ma, who is this person?” and Ma would ask her to bring the photo closer. Sometimes the name came immediately, often with a side story. At other times Ma would go, “Mmm…is this not…?” and Bendic would help out. Or they might decide it was a friend’s friend they’d met at the dinner party.

  In another photo they were in the foyer of the Cedar Palace Hotel; Bendic was wearing a lace tunic with embroidery around the neck and thick black-framed glasses.

  “I think we had just been to the cinema,” Bendic explained.

  Ma’s hair was tied up in a wrap; she was clutching a clasp purse under her arm, and her skirt was made of aso-oke, darkly striped and very short.

  There was a studio photo in which Ma was sitting on a cane chair with a fancy mat spread underneath it. She was dressed in a loose flowered maxi gown, the hem of which rested on her ankle. Her legs were crossed, showing off clunky wooden heels, and next to her, standing on the mat, was Bendic, slender-hipped, in flared trousers and a patterned shirt; his long-collared shirt was undone three buttons down, revealing chest hair. His left hand was resting on Ma’s shoulder. They wore serious faces and wide dark glasses. Ajie liked this picture more than all the others. It was his firm belief that this was what movie stars of those days looked like. One day he asked Bendic if he and Ma used to be actors, and Bendic answered, “What?” Like someone who hadn’t heard the question, or maybe it was a silly question to ask. So Ajie turned around, brought the picture to Bendic, and pointed. “Look.”

  When their parents talked about their time in Lagos, their voices softened and they spoke as if it were another life altogether, more exciting than the one they had now. Paul, Bibi, and Ajie dubbed the period “Those Days in Lagos,” because Ma always began stories with “Those days in Lagos…” Sometimes it happened when she came across a dress in her wardrobe or something in her trunk box—a purse, coral beads—that reminded her of the time. She would hold the item a little away from her face to get a better look. “Twenty-five Enitan, Ikeja, Lagos. Ah-ah,” she would hiccup, as if there were someone there to disbelieve her. And without looking toward Bendic, she would say, “We lived life then, Ben.” It was something like pride mixed with regret. The war had broken out after the eastern region announced secession from the rest of the country, and they had rushed back home to be close to family. Sometimes a prominent person’s name would come up on the national news, and Ma would say they had known the person back then in Lagos. Was he not such-and-such person’s husband? Or did she not work in the same office with this-and-that person? “We lost touch with so many good friends.”

  That same tone was in her voice one day at the market when she surprised the butcher, interrupting him with her own thundery Yoruba, to the man’s surprise. The butcher had said to his assistant in Yoruba to give Ma a tough bargain, as she looked like she had a lot of money in her bag.

  “Ole Olodo,” Ma fired out. “Stupid thief.”

&n
bsp; The man covered his mouth with his hands in mock wonder, bleated out a nervous laugh, and cowered. “My sister,” he begged in English, “it’s not like that.”

  “How is it, then?” Ma shot back, giving him a mean look. Rather than condemn the butcher for trying to cheat her, she said to him instead in pidgin, “Nearly ten years I live for Lagos,” as if the man’s principal offense were his lack of discernment. She got a discount, and the man, with quick slashes of his knife, chopped up some more of the red meat and threw it all into the black cellophane bag for goodwill.

  “You are my customer now-o, madam,” he said, laughing.

  “Na so.” Ma was either unimpressed or feigning it. She gestured to Paul to pick up the bag, and they made their way toward the hub of women at the end of the market who operated large grinding machines where, at a small charge, you could get your tomatoes blended and the puree packaged securely in a cellophane bag.

  Bibi pointed out a woman in the fish section and whispered to Ajie that the woman was an actress in a television drama. “Nchelem. Don’t you know her? From Willi-Willi…Hot Cash.”

  “It’s not her,” Ajie said, and looked in another direction to insist on his point.

  “Stay out of the way,” Ma said to the two of them. “Come this way.” She pulled Ajie close as a shirtless, sweaty man pushed past them with a wheelbarrow loaded with sacks of onions. Paul handed the bag of fresh tomatoes to the woman behind the grinder, who started the noisy engine and then began yelling prices at Ma.

  When they got back to the car, Ma said she had taught the butcher a lesson. She seemed pleased with her performance. Paul said it didn’t really matter; the man would cheat someone else who didn’t understand the language.

  “Egg zatly,” Bibi said. Ajie sniffed, because Bibi always wanted to have some input in every discussion.

  “That’s his business if he doesn’t want to learn,” Ma insisted, bent on making a lesson for her children, “but at least this should show you can’t always judge people at face value.”

  “Face value,” Paul echoed, and Ajie wondered about Face Value as the car made its slow, bumpy exit out of Oroworukwo onto Aba Road, and as it climbed the low hillock at St. John’s and descended toward the traffic lights at Garrison, where, to their right, scaffolding had gone up outside the Hotel Chez Therese, but there were no workmen about. On the island between the express lanes, in the traffic controller’s booth, a madman in long brown dreads stood, frantically motioning to cars, and his enormous scrotum dangled and jiggled from the effort. The lights turned green and their car sped toward home, while Ajie still mulled over Face Value and the madman’s morbidly enormous balls and the butcher’s knife. Ma honked as they approached 11 Yakubu. Paul got out of the car to help Ismaila open the gate.

  —

  Paul was born in the year Bendic became a Christian; that was why they gave him the name. “After the apostle formerly known as Saul,” Bibi would always say with glee, marveling at her own wit. It might be more accurate to refer to this period as the year Bendic renewed his Christian commitments. His father’s being a churchman would have made it unlikely for Bendic to have escaped a Christian upbringing altogether.

  Bendic was the sixth of eight boys and the only one to live past the age of nineteen. The others drowned, fell off a tree in those early days of timber trading, got bitten by a snake. One strong-headed one went to the farm on a sacred day of the bush and saw Erusumini the beautiful, the serpent goddess, glowing in the lonely afternoon light. He ran home and collapsed, hot with fever, then convulsed and died that same night, frothing at the mouth. The second set of twins weren’t only drowned at birth; the man whose family duty it was to carry out the task—having great pity on the mother, who had now suffered the abomination twice—pierced the eyes of the boys as their lungs filled with water. He would blind them from seeing their way back to this same family to cause sorrow.

  Everything that came to Bendic’s parents through birth seemed shy of adulthood except Bendic. And by the time Bendic had his own children, he was old enough to be a grandfather.

  In the years that followed Paul’s birth, the years before Bibi and Ajie were born, Bendic’s brief spiritual revival had mellowed, so he gave the two of them Ogba names that had nothing to do with God. He didn’t bother with a Christian or English middle name, as was the fashion then among the educated classes.

  On a cool March morning in 1978, Bendic got baptized at Idu waterside. His father had died a few weeks earlier, and Ma had just found out she was pregnant for the first time.

  “The world is such a funny place,” Ma would say later to her children, “my mother-in-law, your grandmother, would have been the happiest woman in the world to hear the news. But she was in her grave before her time. When I first realized I was pregnant and thought of how happy she would have been, it made me sad to know she had missed all of it.”

  The children knew little about Bendic’s mother except that she died of heartbreak during the war. Bendic hardly ever spoke about it. Ma one day told them the story. She said it was unfair for them to ask their father.

  —

  An Ogibah man had gone to report to the Biafran authorities that Bendic was a saboteur, that he was a supporter of and a spy for the Nigeria side. It was nearly a year since the war began. There were rumors everywhere, about how Oguta had fallen, how Port Harcourt was soon to be captured. Prominent members of non-Igbo minorities were being seized and thrown into detention on suspicion of sabotage. Soldiers came one afternoon and arrested Bendic. They said they were taking him away for questioning, nothing to fear, if he was innocent he would be returned. Two days after they took him, Ma borrowed a bicycle and set out to look for him. Another Ogibah man, whom she said she would never forget, rode with her on the journey. His name was Ireju. They got to Ahoada, and the people there said the soldiers had carried the detainees to Elele. They got to Elele and were told they had moved them that afternoon to Isiokpo. At Isiokpo, the soldiers there said they had been taken to Umuahia. She gave them Bendic’s full name, she described him, she told them he was her husband, that his parents were very old. Then she told them he was not a saboteur, that this was just the handiwork of enemies in the village. That day, people in Isiokpo began to pack and run away, since there was news that Nigerian soldiers were approaching and shelling villages as they went.

  She rode back to Ogibah with Ireju, thinking of Bendic in a darkened cell, being tortured to give some information he didn’t have. When she thought of the people she had heard being killed on suspicion of being saboteurs, her heart sank to her stomach, but she told herself that Bendic would not be taken from her permanently.

  Two months later, the same wicked man who had reported Bendic to the authorities, this man whose name Ma refused to mention to her children, returned, as he claimed, from “headquarters” and reported that he had seen Bendic being executed. He claimed he had been standing right there when they put a rifle to Bendic’s head and blew it away. Neighbors gathered around Ma’s locked door as she screamed in her room and banged on the wall.

  Bendic’s mother didn’t weep or blame anyone for her son’s death—not the Ogibah man who made the false report, not the soldiers, nor the war. She spoke quietly of her own folly. Her regret was simple: She should have made the soldiers take her along when they came to arrest Bendic, or provoked them to shoot her and her son right there. Instead, what had she done? She had begged them like the wretched woman she was. She had sworn to them that her son had done nothing wrong; she had pleaded with them to sit down to eat, to put something in their stomachs for the long journey they had ahead. Hadn’t they traveled far to get here? She told them she was Biafran, not Nigerian; she spoke the little Igbo she knew, but it did not do. They ate her food and carried her son away. Now that they had murdered him, was her suffering not far worse than death?

  Four days later, when she did not get up in the morning, everyone knew she couldn’t really have been expected to survive such a blow.
<
br />   The war came to an end the following month, and Ma ambled about the house like a dark hen. A not so young widow with an old father-in-law and no children to speak of. Weeks passed, and then one day she got word from an old friend in Port Harcourt that detainees had been released and people were finding relatives they had thought were executed. The government had dumped them at the Municipal Primary School in Diobu, announcing over the radio for people to go claim their relatives. Ma made her way to Port Harcourt that same afternoon. She said her spirit told her that Bendic was among them. That he was alive.

  “Nobody there looked like Ben,” she told her children. As she had turned to leave the school grounds, covered with sick, dying men, she heard the whisper from a body lying on the ground next to her feet, a quiet voice saying her name. She looked at the shrunken body. The gaunt skull looked too heavy for his neck to carry. She looked in his eyes and knew it was him. She carried him on her lap, weeping all the way as the taxi took them home.

  —

  Eight years after the war, the children’s grandfather passed away. He was aged eighty-one and died of natural causes, as they say. Something happened to Bendic right after, and he became a Christian. Their grandfather died in January, Ma got pregnant in February, Bendic got baptized in May, and Paul was born in November.

  Ajie remembered this story one day and then sat in his room feeling sad for Bendic because he was an orphan. Ajie had always known his grandparents were dead, but it never occurred to him to think of it in those terms regarding Bendic. Things were going well between him and Bibi, so he confided in her.

  “Don’t be foolish,” Bibi said, laughing, “grown-ups can’t be orphans.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me.”

  “If Ma and Bendic have an accident now, God forbid, and die,” she further explained, “we can become orphans. They’ll probably take you to a motherless babies’ home. Me and Paul to a remand home, I think. That’s where they normally take the youths, because we are more difficult to handle.”