‘Hureira, stop this nonsense.’
‘But Hajiya, I’m being serious.’
‘Stop it, I said.’ Binta stared her down this time. With Hureira’s gaze directed at the open window, her countenance defined by her pouting lips and bland eyes, Binta added, ‘I have had a bad night and I don’t need you and your stupidity causing me more distress than you have already.’
‘Bad night? What happened?’
Binta looked down at her palms. She had been surprised when she woke up and hadn’t seen blood on her hands. ‘Just a bad dream.’ Her voice seemed to echo from another realm, one tottering between dreams and reality.
‘Bad dream about what?’ Hureira placed her hands on her hips.
Binta was still looking at her hands. Her dream had been of Yaro, of her holding his bloodied corpse in her arms and calling him by his given name. But she could not bring herself to tell Hureira that when she had woken up panting, certain she would see his blood on her hands, her first thought had been of Reza, of his face looming before her mind’s eye.
‘Nothing.’ She spoke absently. ‘Just a bad dream.’
Hureira shrugged. ‘Well, I am certain Fa’iza is being plagued by djinns, wallahi. I suggest you call that ustaz of yours to look at her before it gets worse.’
‘Ok, Hureira. Just go now and prepare breakfast, will you, before I starve to death?’
When Hureira got back to the room, Fa’iza was lying in the middle of the dark green rug, staring at the ceiling. Hureira stood by the door, hunched slightly forward while keeping half her body outside. When she called Fa’iza’s name, the girl responded by moving her feet.
‘Hajiya said you should go prepare breakfast.’
For some time nothing happened and then, finally, Fa’iza rolled onto her stomach and raised herself. She shuffled past Hureira, who leaned away from her, and went into the kitchen.
After breakfast, Ummi took the dishes to the kitchen and rushed back to sit beside Binta. She was enthralled by the wildlife documentary on TV, but covered her face with her hands each time a lion pounced on a gazelle or some other hapless prey. Binta herself sat staring at the screen, almost oblivious to the girl moulding her tiny frame into her side.
‘Hajiya, why does the lion kill other animals?’
‘I don’t know, Ummi.’
Hureira, sitting on the rug, made to speak. She looked at Fa’iza, who sat with her hands on her lap staring straight ahead, and shut her mouth.
‘Why are they so wicked? I hate lions.’ Ummi’s eyes were turned to her grandmother’s face.
‘Keep quiet and watch!’ Binta glowered.
Ummi sat still, her eyes darting from Fa’iza’s blank face to her mother’s perplexed one. The noise from the TV filled the room but their own silence grew like cold fingers around their throats.
‘I watched this documentary on TV the other day,’ Hureira blurted. ‘They talked about this stinking flower, the corpse flower. It blossoms only once in thirty years. Did you know about it, Fa’iza?’
Fa’iza looked at her blankly and shook her head.
‘It stinks like a corpse, they said, and it’s huge and ugly. But when it’s blossoming, people travel to see it. You know how these white people are, going to see a flower that stinks like death.’
‘I want to see it, Mommy.’ Ummi sat up and turned an expectant face to her mother.
Hureira laughed. ‘It’s found in Indonesia and other such places.’
‘I want to see it. Will you take me? I want to see it.’
‘Yes, I will since that useless father of yours has bought me a private jet just so I can go globetrotting with you. Aikin banza kawai.’
Ummi now turned a bemused face from her mother to Binta, who had also cast a glance at Hureira, and then Fa’iza. Then she turned again to her mother, who was now scowling at the TV screen.
Fa’iza sighed absently and leaned back into the chair.
‘But you know, I think that flower is special—’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, shut your mouth!’ Binta eyed Hureira. ‘You sit here talking about some useless flower in God-knows-where while your second marriage is crumbling. I wonder what kind of daughter you are. You are so hopeless your husband has not even come to take you back and you still sit here yapping about rubbish.’
This time, their silence was heavy, and they felt its immensity pressing down on their shoulders. Even the noise of the TV seemed to have been subdued, but not Ummi’s spirit. She jumped up and said there was a phone ringing. She ran into Binta’s bedroom.
‘R is calling, Hajiya. Who is R?’ Ummi returned with Binta’s phone.
‘Give me the phone, you!’ Binta seized the phone from her. She scrambled to her feet and hurried into her room as she said hello into the speaker. The sound of her door slamming jolted Hureira, who got up and stamped to her room.
‘Yes,’ Binta cradled the phone.
‘Hope you woke up well.’ It was Reza on the other end.
‘Yes.’
‘I want to see you.’
She hesitated. ‘Yes, so you could annoy me like you did last time, right?’ She held her breath.
Finally, he laughed. ‘No, no. I just want to be with you. No talking this time, just action, you understand.’
She smiled. ‘You shameless boy, I am not one of your little girlfriends you should be saying such silly things to, you know.’
‘Just action zalla.’ And he laughed, a deep-throated laugh that rang in her ears and made her face flush.
She drifted, almost weightlessly, in the pungent smell of weed. It was only when she opened her eyes and saw him sitting shirtless by the window, puffing on the joint in his hand, that she realised where she was. Binta stretched and yawned. ‘Hassan, stop smoking that thing in here, you could get arrested. Besides, it’s giving me a headache.’
With his back turned to her, she could not see his face. She propped herself up on her elbows and remembered that she was naked under the sheet. Her clothes were on the chair across the room. She had taken them off one after the other and folded them carefully while he had waited on the bed.
‘Just action.’ She smiled at the now familiar tingling that thawed her insides as she did up the hook of her bra. ‘You must have been on something.’
He turned to her and smiled and she saw how handsome he looked, how his glazed eyes seemed so peaceful and yet so far away, how young he really was.
‘Action zalla.’ He raised his joint at her before putting it back to his lips. He looked at her, then turned back to the window and watched the sprinklers watering the lawn.
‘God, what am I doing?’ Her voice was low because she was addressing herself.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. You are so young, Hassan. I don’t know if this is right.’
‘Why must it be right?’ He spoke with a timbre in his voice that she had come to associate with what she had called his inner self: the dreamy-eyed philosopher awakened by ganja fumes. ‘Why must anything be right or wrong? Why can’t things be just as they are?’
She sighed. ‘When you smoke this thing, I don’t know what it does to you, you just talk rubbish sometimes.’
He smiled and put the joint to his lips. ‘Maybe you should try it.’
‘God forbid! I want you to quit. It’s killing you.’
He shrugged. ‘What doesn’t? I will die when I die. We all will, you understand?’
Binta sighed again. ‘My daughter was saying something earlier today, about some stupid flower that waits a lifetime to bloom. Thirty years, she said. And when it does, after all those years, it smells like a corpse.’
‘Ha ha! What sort of flower is that?’
‘I was just thinking how much like that flower I am. I have waited my whole life to feel … as I do when I’m with you, you know. I shouldn’t be telling you such things but I just need to get it off my chest, you know. No one has ever made me feel this way. But like that flower, after all those years waiting, wh
en I bloom, it doesn’t feel right. I don’t know if you understand me.’
He continued to puff on the joint, looking disturbingly peaceful. ‘You mean it stinks.’
She surprised herself with her laughter. It rocked her. She laughed for a while, sniffling as she did. When she managed to stop, she wiped away the tears from the corners of her eyes. But they wouldn’t stop, even after she no longer felt amused. That was when she knew she was actually crying.
Save the occasional movement of his hand to guide the joint to his lips, he kept still, as if reading the cipher in the curling fumes. It took him a while to speak. ‘You know, when I was young, still a boy, there was this Eid day, and we were so excited with our new clothes. There was this cheap brocade our father bought for us, it was called Shonekan, it was kind of in vogue then, you understand.’
She knew it; she had bought it for her children, too, around ‘93. It had been a fallout from the political campaigns when the borders had been opened to cheap commodities that politicians had used to entice voters. All sorts of things had come in: salt, sugar, strange soaps with too much soda that scalded the hands and bleached clothes, cheap shiny fabrics that coloured the water they were to be washed in; petrol with blue, pink and green hues.
But the elections had been annulled when the military decided against handing over to the civilians. Instead Shonekan was put in charge until he was upended in a palace coup not long after. His name was given to all the strange commodities that traders had hoarded from the political campaigns and which flooded the markets as soon as politicking was over.
‘Mine was white, sparkling and starched. We had just returned from the Eid and I was going to take it off so I wouldn’t stain it while eating rice and stew, you understand? Then, Aminu, my little brother; my half-brother, accidentally spilled ink on it.’
He smoked his joint until she realised he had finished his story. When he turned to her and saw her perplexed face, he smiled with glazed eyes.
‘We are like clothes, you understand. We get rumpled, and creased and torn, sometimes irreparably. Some of us are stitched up, patched up, others are discarded. Some clothes are fortunate. Others are not. They are born into misfortune and ink spills and whatnots, you understand?’
She rolled her eyes, chasing the meaning of what he said. ‘Hassan Reza, you are high.’
He raised the stub in his hand in acknowledgement and took one long last drag.
‘You really need to give these things up. Be a good man, for God’s sake.’
‘I am what I am.’ He crushed the stub in the ashtray and turned to her.
‘And what about that issue, about going back to school?’
He wagged a finger in front of his face. ‘No talk, just action, you understand.’
‘Seriously, Hassan.’
‘Not now, please. I have an important assignment from my boss. Maybe after that.’
‘What assignment?’
‘Very important, you understand. Very important.’
He sat with his radio pressed to his ear, watching the entrance to the hotel across the street. He had seen her go in four hours before; had seen the boy go in before her. They were minutes apart. Fifteen minutes apart.
Mallam Haruna had even wandered into the hotel premises but unsure what he should be looking for or where, afraid of being harassed by hotel security, he had withdrawn and returned to his spot under his friend Mallam Balarabe’s parasol.
He had noticed Balarabe’s growing coldness since he took to spending most of the day under the old parasol staring grouchily across the street. They had run out of conversation, it would seem, especially as Mallam Haruna had not been forthcoming. Yet he would linger, long past Asr prayers.
But since he first saw her leaving the hotel five days earlier, he wanted to be sure. And then, today, when he saw Reza arrive ahead of her, he knew he was on to something.
It was twenty minutes past five when he saw her emerge through the gate. He stood up. And just as abruptly sat down again.
Balarabe turned to him. ‘Lafiya, Mallam Haruna?’
‘Yes, I am fine.’
He watched Binta flag down a motorcycle taxi and climb onto the pillion. He watched the bike zoom away into the side street that led to her home.
He waited and some fifteen minutes later he saw Reza emerge and look up and down the street before he turned left and walked towards the market at the crowded junction.
21
If nothing touches the palm leaves, they do not rustle
Reza paced the wide living room, his footsteps echoing in the emptiness. It disturbed him, this emptiness. Gattuso, leaning on the window ledge cracking his knuckles, twisting his neck and punching his palm, could feel Reza’s unease. And his anger.
Dogo and Joe came in and stood, one on each side of the door. They too sensed the anger; now swelling almost to a rage.
‘What have you done with her?’ Gattuso barked.
‘Nothing, nothing,’ Joe held up his arms by the side of his face. ‘We just put her in the room.’
When Reza walked up to Joe and stared into his eyes – eyes glazed by inebriation – he could smell the gin on his breath, even though Joe had turned his face away.
Reza slapped the wall beside him. It trembled. Joe cringed.
‘You useless drunk! You had to go fuck it up. You fucking let the guy go, mamafucker!’
‘Reza, Dogo was supposed to cover the guy. You should ask him what happened.’
‘Shut your dirty mouth!’ Dogo bellowed.
‘You shut your mouth!’ Gattuso’s voice resonated off the bare walls.
In the silence, Reza ground his teeth and finally, when he could bear it no longer, he punched Joe in the stomach and kicked him as he cowered. ‘I should never have brought a useless drunk like you on this job. I will kill you and dump you in the gorge, I swear.’
When Reza reached for the gun in his jacket, Gattuso and Dogo jumped in and restrained him.
‘Please, Reza,’ Gattuso looked into his eyes.
Reza eyed their hands on his arms and slowly they let go of him. They remained standing close by, with pleading eyes. Joe sprawled on the terrazzo, looking up to see which way his fate would swing. It occurred to him then to say something. ‘I will find him. I will get him.’
Contempt exploded in Reza’s eyes. When he kicked Joe in the face, there was a crunching sound and he was sure he had knocked out a tooth. He felt pain rippling from his shin upwards.
He walked to the other window and stood staring out at the star-speckled heavens. It was supposed to be a simple mission – wait for the target, the one Moses had pointed out, in the car park of the garden, and then take him. When the young man had come out with a girl after an evening of revelry, and unlocked his car, they had jumped them, armed with chloroform-drenched hankies. The girl had been easy. Gattuso had held her and covered her nose until she grew numb in his arms. But Joe had been tipsy and couldn’t hold down the target. The young man had struggled, pushed Joe aside and taken off. Reza had raised the gun, the one he had got from Moses – something the senator had contributed to the mission — but hesitated. He was not a man of guns but of steel, and a gunshot would have attracted unwanted attention. So he had watched their target bolt, watched their assignment crumble before it had even begun. And so they had bundled the girl into the waiting car and sped off.
He wished he could disappear into the shadows, into the night. But he had to explain what happened so he pulled out his phone and dialled. There was no answer. He dialled again and then finally shoved the phone back in his pocket. Two minutes later, his phone rang. He pulled it out, looked at the screen, then at the boys behind him. Joe was still sitting on the floor where Reza had left him, nursing his bruised jaw. Gattuso seemed to be contemplating the possibility of crushing his own skull with his thumbs and forefingers.
Reza put the phone to his ear. ‘Hello, sir.’
‘Yes.’ Moses, the senator’s PA, sounded crisp, business-like. ‘
Did you get him?’
Reza hesitated. ‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No. He got away. But we got his girlfriend, you understand.’
‘What girlfriend?’
‘The one he was with.’
‘Who gives a damn about her? Your instruction was to get the guy. What the hell happened?’
‘It’s a long story. He got away and we couldn’t shoot him. But we got the girl. We can get him.’
‘You have bungled this job big time. Oga will be very disappointed. Let the girl go. Nobody needs her. And get the hell out of the house. Bloody amateurs!’ The line went dead.
Reza stood grinding his teeth. Finally, he walked across the room, and up the arching staircase.
The girl was in the last room on the balcony, the one in the corner, the one that might host guests when the house was eventually completed. There were three doors before that – all of them sturdy, ornate, with strips of plastic still clinging to them. The green of the doors stood out against the bare, unpainted walls. His footfall sounded off the terrazzo, echoing the emptiness of the large building. He unlocked the door and went in.
The drugged girl was lying on the red and blue plastic mat where she had been dumped, her decency saved by the jeans beneath her knee-length kaftan.
Reza stood a foot away from her and saw the darkened vein that ran diagonally across her forehead. It stood out on her smooth skin, as did the red sore on the back of her left hand where a mosquito had bitten her. She looked so fragile it would be easy to kill her. A bullet in the back of her head. A pillow over her face. Her neck might snap if he clamped his hands around her throat. He could even have her overdose on chloroform.
He marvelled at her hair, silky, unbraided, almost jet black. On her right hand, thrown carelessly beside her head, a ring gleamed. He knelt down beside her and the opulence of her perfume assailed him as he rolled the ring around her delicate finger. Real gold. He took a handful of her lustrous hair and ran his fingers through it, savouring its softness and the smell of luxuriant hair oil. He could not recall what Binta’s hair smelt like but he was certain it did not smell this good.
Season of Crimson Blossoms Page 18
