And After Many Days

by Jowhor Ile

  “You are not old enough to read that book. Wait until I tell Paul. And by the way, who permitted you to touch it in the first place? Do you want to tear it?”

  “I don’t tear books,” Ajie shot back defiantly.

  “Shut up!” she yelled, and stormed out of the room.

  —

  Before Paul started attending boarding school, the children seldom stayed in their rooms during the day. They would return from school, slip out of their uniforms into house clothes, and then have lunch. Lunch was always eba and soup. It didn’t occur to Ajie then that people could have anything else for lunch on a weekday. Ma served the eba for all three children in one plate. She would part the heap in the center to let off steam, which made it look like a volcanic eruption. She served the soup in three little bowls from which the children chose by order of seniority. There were times when Bibi wasn’t sure which bowl to choose after Paul had taken his. She was certain there was a substantial difference in the quantity of soup or the size of meat in the two bowls, and she wasn’t ready to pass up the benefits of her seniority to Ajie in any way, so she looked carefully. She would tilt the bowl to one side to allow a better look at the chunk of meat, which was otherwise partly submerged in the leafy soup. Ajie would watch her in a slow burn, wanting to run into her like a road accident.

  One afternoon, without even having thought it, Ajie heard himself say, “Touch and take.” Paul was waiting for them so he could start eating; his right hand was already out of the side basin, glistening with water.

  “You should have said it before I started,” Bibi said with vague determination. “You can’t suddenly make a rule in the middle of something.” Reading Ajie’s interference as an indication, she picked the bowl she hadn’t touched yet, certain it was the bigger portion.

  “I think it’s a good rule to adopt,” Paul said.

  “Stop taking sides,” Bibi said.

  “I’m not taking sides. I just said it’s a good rule. Besides, it will apply to all of us,” Paul said, “and why are you so fussy about choosing, anyway? There’s hardly ever any difference.”

  Ajie liked it that the rule actually stood a chance. Only his timing was faulted. Touch and take would become standard practice. No one would question it ever again. Ajie smiled. They always tried to finish their eba. Ma didn’t like to see leftovers in the bin, so they would make an effort to eat up all the eba and soup and then carry on leisurely with whatever chunks of meat came with the soup. The meat was always eaten last. If eba was the labor, then meat was the reward. Ajie would come to think of people who ate or touched their meat before finishing the rest of the food as badly brought up.

  After lunch, the three of them would sit at the dining table to do their homework, then go outside to play within the compound. Ismaila would sometimes let them out to play at Fola’s house.

  When Paul returned from boarding school the first time, he started staying in the room to read. He would lie in bed all afternoon with a book held over his face and come out to the veranda to continue only when it was getting too dark in the room but was too early to turn on the light. He would carry on with his novels while eating, turning pages with his other hand. He also started reading newspapers. One day Bendic was in the parlor having a conversation with Mr. Ifenwa. Ma had gone to the salon to have her hair retouched, and after that, if there was time, she had said to Bendic, she would drop by the market on her way back.

  It was a Saturday afternoon, which was to say the worst time on television. Breakfast TV and Wrestlemania ended at ten A.M., and so the rest of the day was a stint of boredom, all sorts of obscure field sports with rules that never made sense to any of the children no matter how hard they tried to follow. One dull game would follow the other until, finally, the miniseries Things Fall Apart came on at eight P.M.

  When Mr. Ifenwa arrived, the children vacated the sitting area. They idled and thumbed through encyclopedias where they sat in the dining space, behind the room divider, the long back of the TV, the video player, the video rewinder, designed like a miniature piano, the wooden back of the big vinyl stereo, which was seldom played, and then all the plugs and sockets and a mesh of tangling wires. A tennis game was in play as Bendic talked with Mr. Ifenwa. There was the sound of the ball meeting the racquet and bouncing on the lawn court and a voice that kept going, “Fifteen love,” “Thirty love…”

  Paul went to the sitting area and took the weekend Guardian newspaper from the side stool, and as he walked back with it, Bendic said, “Paul, return that when you finish, I haven’t read it yet.”

  “Oh.” Paul hesitated for a moment, and Bendic said, “No no no, go on. Just return it once you finish.”

  Mr. Ifenwa, who was laughing through a story he had been telling, waved to Paul to go ahead, as if to say, Don’t mind me.

  Ajie thought perhaps this was what happened to you when you went to secondary school—something flicked in your brain that made you suddenly enjoy reading newspapers.

  “Newspapers are boring, Paul,” Bibi said.

  “Sometimes there are important stories in them,” Paul said.

  “That’s my point: They are only important stories.”

  “And important is boring?” Paul asked without looking up for her answer.

  “Well,” she said, twisting a lock of her hair plaits, “all the newspapers I’ve read are boring, and they were supposed to have important news in them.”

  “As if you’ve read any,” Ajie said. He had never seen her read a newspaper.

  “Look at you,” she said, pointing at him, “you think I’m like you.”

  “Look at you. You think I’m like you,” Ajie imitated.

  “My friend, get out.”

  “My friend, get in.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Shut down!”

  She didn’t get up to slap him, so he didn’t reach out to slap her back.

  On Monday, when Marcus came home to pick up Bendic’s lunch, he handed Paul a copy of the day’s Guardian. “Oga say make I give you.”

  Bibi looked around in mock wonder and laughed, taking the paper from Paul. Paul took it back from her and looked at Marcus as if expecting further instruction from Bendic on what to do with the paper. Marcus carried Bendic’s lunch from the table, and as he drove off, Paul ran out to the veranda and shouted, “Tell him thank you.”

  That was how Ajie got used to seeing Paul read newspapers like a grown-up. Ajie didn’t want to pretend or anything, so he stuck with reading storybooks. The following day, when Bibi joined Paul in the reading of daily newspapers, Ajie just sighed and went outside and started hitting the iron bars on the veranda with a piece of metal until Paul screamed, “Ajie!” and he wanted to scream back “Paul!” but instead kept quiet and went back inside.

  Paul was lying on the sofa reading. Bibi was next to him with a section of the paper he had passed on to her. A wind came through the open windows, billowing the curtains. The paper flapped about, and Bibi held it away from her face with one hand. She was reading the horoscope page. She had read out Ajie’s horoscope for the week and now turned over to the next page, where the cartoons and the crossword puzzles were.

  Ajie lay there on the couch, looking at his brother and sister. Ma’s deep freezer hummed and whizzed in the kitchen like a fat man sleeping. Ajie looked up at the high ceiling of the parlor, at the cream voile curtains, at the dead gray face of the TV, and then at Bibi, who was biting the top of a pencil, frowning at the crossword. When Paul turned a page, the newspaper rustled like a cookie package and got out of shape. He beat it into place with the flat of his hand, straightened it out, and changed to a sitting position.

  “There is a wall gecko above your head,” Ajie said.

  Paul looked up. The gecko was flat on the wall, head down. “They don’t bite,” he replied, and continued his reading. “Serves them right,” he said sharply into the open face of the newspaper.

  “What happened?” Ajie asked.

  It was one of the us
ual stories they’d heard from their parents: A commissioner had been accused of embezzling government funds. Ajie didn’t feel he had to read it to know what it was about. It was the same story every day, with different names and scenarios. But Paul read it with interest, and when he talked about it later, his normally expressionless face would take up shapes and form a picture of seriousness. He told Ajie that it was probably just the case that the disgraced commissioner had crossed someone higher up, and that was why he was being exposed. “It’s not as if these people care about us,” he said.

  Now, this was what Ajie wanted, this way that Paul had of becoming something after he had read about it; this way he had of claiming things for himself. He had joined himself to a we, an us. A corrupt official had been exposed in the papers for misappropriating pension funds, and Paul was expressing betrayal, even anger, about it.

  How do you make yourself do that? How do you learn how to work yourself up over something that’s not directly your concern?

  The stories in the newspaper sounded more interesting when Paul talked about them. Ajie never would have been interested in artificial fuel scarcity until Paul explained it to him and Bibi. Or Paul’s bizarre theories about the bloody conflict between the Tiv and Junkun communities in the middle belt state of Benue. Ajie didn’t care about those, either, but he listened. He enjoyed more than anything else the giddy warmth, the moral high of when Paul said “us,” including him as part of the masses. This was something true and important, and it heated Ajie up.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Paul said, stopping much too soon that day. He picked up an enormous Harold Robbins novel he had started reading; on the cover was a green-eyed brunette who had red luscious lips and a fur coat draped around her shoulders.

  What is that book about? Ajie wanted to ask Paul, but on occasion even he felt reluctant about being a constant nuisance to people, and he could see Paul didn’t want to be disturbed, so he went into the kitchen to get some ice cubes to chew. When he returned to the parlor, Bibi had put aside the newspaper and was reading a shoddily printed copy of Efuru that they had found while rummaging through Fola’s garage and were now taking turns reading by order of seniority.

  “When are you going to finish the book?” Ajie asked Bibi.

  “Just about five pages left.” Bibi thumbed through what was left of the book, “it’s sooo interesting, should I tell you the story?”

  “No.”

  “You can be so grumpy sometimes. Why?”

  “I don’t want to hear,” Ajie said, and then threw the second ice cube into his mouth and began to crunch it.

  Bibi couldn’t hold herself back. “It’s about this marvelous Oguta woman…oh, I really like her. She was very beautiful and loved by her husband, but she was barren, and her mother-in-law didn’t want her.”

  “You are just looking for trouble,” Paul said to Bibi.

  “It’s not as if I’m going to spoil it for him. It’s so tragic,” Bibi purred, and sank back into the sofa. “Okay, I’ll just say this one thing and leave it there: I think someone dies at the end.”

  Ajie looked at her. He would refuse to read the book just to spite her. He would fling it back at her and tell her to return it, since he didn’t want to read it anymore. He imagined she would feel something as sharp as pity mixed with guilt, and she would try to make it up to him somehow, but he wouldn’t give her the chance.

  “Do you know,” Bibi was already saying to Paul, “that in France, crimes of passion are forgiven? I read something like that in one of Bendic’s journals. There was a woman who killed her husband with a fork during an argument, and she wasn’t jailed for murder.”

  “Temporary insanity,” Paul said, “but it depends on the circumstance and on many other things.”

  “Port Harcourt is not Paris,” Ajie quipped at Bibi.

  “True.”

  “Nigeria is not France.” Like he hadn’t made his point.

  Bibi threw him a glance and held his gaze for a moment, “Can’t you just stop being annoying sometimes?”

  Ajie yawned with his mouth wide open, covering it with his clenched hand.

  Years later, each time he heard crime of passion, he would think of a woman in Paris with a fork in her hand, but more than that, he would think of the woman in a story Ma had told them. A story that sounded like it happened in the olden days but which Ma said only took place after the war. She said she knew the family, and that after the tragic event, a ballad was composed that spread through all of Ogba land and didn’t go out of season for many many years.

  There was this woman from Erema who would leave her husband and move in with a man whose house was on the farther side of the same village. As was the custom, leaving your husband in that way was an accepted (if reproachable) way for a woman to initiate divorce. After that an amicable settlement could be reached, and the legal aspects of ending the marriage would be embarked on. This involved returning the bride-price paid by the husband’s family.

  This woman would leave her husband and stay with the second man for many days, sometimes a whole year, and each time her husband would go to her people to plead with her to return to him. Her people would put pressure on her and she would return to her husband, but soon after, the affair would resume. Her husband sent emissaries to beg the man to leave his wife alone, but nothing changed. One day the husband took a machete and chopped off the head of his wife’s lover. Then he carried the head and walked the whole length of the village, and each time he met someone, he asked, “This thing I have done, is it good or is it bad?,” and the person would answer, “It is right what you have done, it is good.” And when he reached the end of the village, he killed himself: exactly what was expected of a man who had taken the life of another.

  The children named her “the love woman,” even though Ma never mentioned the word love. Ma always rendered the account in a few sentences, just as it had happened. She seemed to be in awe of the story each time she told it, as if saying to her children, “This is something that has happened in the world. This is what can happen in the world.” It was Bendic who called it a “costly affair.” It was Bendic who once said with a sigh, “Desire is blind.” It was also Bendic who wondered aloud about which was the worse punishment for their affair, “to be the one beheaded or be the one who survived to live through the aftermath?”

  But whatever there was to know about desire and its costs was beyond Ajie then. He was at that time completely passionate and pure. He imagined himself, his brother, and his sister to be people who would shoot into the world and burn, fiery arrows set free by their parents from their home here at number 11. They would love greatly and do useful things. Bibi would become rich and important and build houses and hospitals for the poor. Paul would simply change the world.

  But what would that cost?

  As for desire, Ajie knew well about animals mating, he had read about and fairly well understood the mechanics of human sex, but this was before that holiday when Ma and Bendic had to go to America for two weeks and sent them to spend the time with their uncle Tam, who lived in D-Line. It was in that D-Line house that he had his first intimations of desire. It was in that house, in an upstairs room with netted windows that gave onto a moss-covered fence where an Agama lizard watched and nodded, that he, Ajie, lay beside Barisua, Uncle Tam’s house help, who was breathing softly after he had touched her and she had touched him back.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The blue Peugeot 504 station wagon moved slowly down the narrow road. A woman on a bicycle coming from the opposite direction paused to make way, one foot on the ground. She leaned into the bush and peered into the passing vehicle. There was hesitation, then the quick light of recognition catching on her face. She waved, shepherding her bicycle out of the bush as the car passed.

  “Slow down,” Bendic said to Marcus as they approached the bend. Stalks of grass slapped against the car window. Damp leaves clutched and slid past like hands. Two children ran onto the road, rolling an old c
ar tire. They sighted the station wagon and stood for a while in their underpants to watch it pass.

  “They should have done bush cutting by now,” Ma said, looking out the window to the high thicket on the roadside. “OYF is not serious anymore.” By which she meant the Ogibah Youth Front, whose obligations included road clearing and other maintenance work around the village, especially during preparations for the festive seasons.

  The two children by the road waved, then ran back the way they’d come. Ajie’s eyes followed them as they ran rolling their tires, but the narrow path and clustering trees made it hard to see the house they disappeared into at the end of the path: a mud house, he imagined, built of mud, wattle, and wood beams, plastered and smoothed with clay; there would be an open veranda with a bench on it, an airy front room with benches and stools where the man of the house would remand a reclining chair for himself; a kitchen by the side constantly exhaling wood smoke. And beyond all that, at the far reach in the back, an orchard of orange trees, tangerines, sour sop, ube and kola trees, a pit latrine with a neat clearing around it.

  They drove past the cemetery where Christians were buried. No headstones, just knee-high grass. Nwokwe’s house was one of the few that stood clearly visible from the road. A visitor to town would be mistaken to count these houses and then decide on that basis there weren’t many people about. At a moment’s notice, a band of able-bodied youth could appear from nowhere: to answer a distress call, to question a suspicious stranger, or to welcome someone long forgotten who had returned home. Stooping beneath and behind this moist August greenery, on both sides of the road, were century-old homesteads, each a thatched fiefdom within its rights, laden with legends of its own survival.

  “Ogbuku has reroofed.” Ma’s eyes followed a flash from the new roofing, reflecting in the sun. Paul was sitting in front with the driver and rested his head on the window. Ajie knew he wasn’t sleeping. Bibi sat in the back with Ajie, her eyes scanning the space from the front to the middle row, where their parents sat. “It’s beautiful,” Ma said of the stylish maroon-colored corrugated roofing.