The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  He never went to see her, but he never asked me to rent out the flat either. And once, three months on, he threw a brocade fabric on my bedside, saying, ‘See if that old witch likes this.’ I did not tell him that Ruma had traded in brocade and had left the largest collection of uncut brocades at No. 43. It was the thought that counted. Even his ‘old witch’ was not much angrier than the meaningless epithets he uttered in my ear after he switched off the lights at night.

  There was the day she blessed him, too. My driver had taken me to Anam to buy yams. On my return, I stopped by her flat. I stepped out of the car into screams from the hysterical housegirl on the balcony above.

  ‘Which hospital?’ I cried, and she stared.

  I broke into the ward just as he was setting a drip. It was not something he usually did himself, but there he was. As I approached, my mother, who was just about to drift off, took his hands and held them for a silent moment. The bedlam around her ceased for a moment, as though they realised that something significant was about to happen. ‘Simba tulisu. Simba tuala,’ she said, and passed out.

  * * *

  19th December, 2001

  ‘You could have told me she was ill,’ he grumbled, afterwards. ‘We might have been able to save her life.’

  And it was at such times that the wise wife held her tongue, as I did.

  She had started her biweekly dialysis right after her hospitalisation. I had waited patiently, with a small smile and a private bet. Yet my darling husband was a stubborn man, and it took him weeks to, casually, ask—as though it had just occurred to him—‘What was that your mother said when she held my hands?’

  ‘When was that?’ I asked, playing his game. ‘I don’t remember . . .’

  ‘You do,’ he said, irritated. ‘Samba, samba, something.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said innocently, ‘that.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘She blessed your hands,’ I equivocated.

  ‘Yeah? What exactly did she say?’

  At that point I was a little wary, for the words could also be construed as a curse. ‘Until now, they made money. From now they will bless lives.’

  He let that sink in a while, then he snorted. ‘Well, I hope—for our sakes—that they still continue to make a little money as well!’

  * * *

  31st December, 2001

  Rumieta Kroma died on New Year’s Eve. Denle thought we should bury her in Onitsha. We had a small quarrel over that, but it quickly blew over. He had wanted her in his family vault at Onitsha. Non-Kreektowners simply don’t get it. I sent her body home, so she could sleep beside her husband in our empty living room. I sat in the hotel in Ubesia, seeing her sleepcatastrophe rites through my tears. When night had properly fallen, I sneaked into the empty house to say my farewells at her grave, but the floor had not yet been broken. My people had waited, after all. And in the silence of that bereft house I sheathed my knife for good.

  They sent for the Mata, and when he came, they held the second Restoration in the history of the Menai sojourn in Kreektown. Then I joined them in the burial of my mother, Rumieta Kroma, sixty-seventh descendant from Auta, trumpeter of the court of Crown Prince Xera. We moved all the furniture out, cracked the floor, and dug down a tall man’s height in the earth, until soil filled the room. Then we laid Mama to sleep, sans coffin, in a burial shroud freshly woven by Kakandu. At five feet, we spread her bridal brocade. We filled another foot of earth and snapped her nuptial beads into glinting confetti on the red laterite. Then we filled the grave to its lip, packed it hard, and slabbed it over. And as we sang dirges for her sleepcatastrophe, I was mourning Kreektown as well, for I realised that the Mata had finally accepted that our nation was destined to die.

  * * *

  Kreektown | 2nd January, 2002

  When the night was as silent as the living room I went to the Mata’s pavilion. He was sitting, staring at the night sky, and I sat with him. He poured me a drink of water and we toasted. As well-being flooded my body, I poured out the palm wine and we drank. Three hours passed in silence. From a distant oilfield, a single flare stack flickered. Occasionally he clucked at something he saw in the skies. Otherwise it seemed that all was well in the universe; apart from the fact that Kreektown and her last mata were all but dead.

  ‘Suetu maini kpana aiga she?’ I asked, pointing at the clouds.

  He laughed and I laughed with him, savouring a joke I did not yet know. An hour passed and he laughed again, explaining that my grandmother, mother, and I had all suffered eczema, and he did not need the clouds to tell him that my children probably would as well.

  ‘I can’t come back. My heart is here, but I have a husband, I have a life elsewhere.’

  ‘Anodu tuetu siliesi.’ He smiled.

  In the early hours I left him my shopping and returned home to Onitsha, salting away his words: ‘You’re back already.’

  Onitsha | 7th January, 2002

  It was after that visit that I started the Menai Society (MS). My darling husband put down the seed money, but I have raised much more since then. At first it was just the language I was looking at: writing a primer, recording proverbs, idioms, historysongs, things like that. But in going around, in recording the stories, I found that what the Menai needed now was medicine, not tape recordings. The Omakasa Enquiry had found Trevi Biotics not negligent, so funding for medical care was a problem. So the focus of MS changed. We started registering Menai survivors, pairing them with kidney units, buying dialysis time . . . it was about this time that we sued Trevi and Megatum in London.

  ‘We,’ because my husband got involved. I had sued Trevi Biotics in the Federal High Court in Ubesia, and we were limping along, when Trevi found out that Doctor Denle Alanta was our main sponsor. They approached him with fifty times his seed money in bribes. I still don’t know why that turned Denle into a crusader for the town he had once hated so much. As a doctor he loved his money; he charged even the poorest patients his fees and stopped their treatment once they stopped paying. But I suppose he also liked a good fight. That, and concrete proof of corruption, which he had always contested, in the discontinuance of the ’80s litigation filed for the Menai by a medical NGO in London.

  So that day I came in and there were new birth certificates for the children on the bed. ‘Is that how you spell their names?’ he asked, as I picked them up. My hands were trembling: he had added the Mata’s Menai names to our children’s official names.

  ‘How did you know?’ I whispered.

  ‘They told me what you call them—when I’m not around. I thought they sounded quite nice.’

  ‘You’re not angry?’

  He laughed. ‘I’m so angry I’ll leave Eddie in charge of the hospital and we’ll both go to London for the Megatum hearing.’

  ‘We?’

  He showed me the hands that would now bless people. ‘The curse of the dead witch,’ he said.

  Kreektown | 12th March, 2005

  ‘Why this Field of Stones?’ I asked.

  ‘When I rest there,’ said the Mata, settling his hand almost tenderly on the earth, ‘I will end the curse on this land.’

  ‘But you said it’s not even in Nigeria! It’s . . . thousands of miles away!’

  ‘This land . . . this continent . . .’

  Denle arrived with a grim Jonszer behind him. He took one look at the old man. ‘You have to stop now, and I mean now.’

  I raised one finger, shielding the microphone for another five minutes until Mata Nimito slowed to catch his breath. Then I reluctantly clicked my recorder off.

  Denle was standing over us, angrily surveying the Mata’s home. ‘We could build a house without touching the old one, and let him decide if he’ll use it or not.’

  ‘Look at it with new eyes, Denle,’ I whispered. ‘It’s not an old house. It’s history.’

  I remained motionless on the bench, leaving Jonszer to attend to the old man. We’d had a marathon session: four straight hours, our longest yet. Denle always said
the old man would talk himself into the grave if we let him, it was up to me to be responsible. But he saw I was upset, and he took a deep breath and put away his anger.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I don’t want to go to London. You can represent the society at the next session.’

  ‘It’s more than a court case, Shee. You are the Menai.’ He sat beside me. Softly. ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s so much I didn’t know!’ I was near to tears. ‘Behind every idiom, there’s wisdom; behind every word, there’s history! You know, I asked him how come all those years he never used this idiom, that word . . . and he said the miasta . . . the . . . need for it . . . had not come! So many stories . . . we were so blessed, we were so . . .’

  ‘We’ll be back within the month.’

  I whispered in his ear so they could not overhear. ‘I don’t think he’ll wait that long . . .’

  He watched Jonszer bow as he went through the low doorway with the old man in his arms.

  ‘We’ll take him to Onitsha, with the facilities in the hospital . . .’

  I laughed and he grinned with me, until he realised I was now weeping.

  ‘What?’ he asked, holding me.

  ‘He said he won’t die in a zoo, and he’ll be buried in the original homeland of our ancestors from centuries ago.’ I wiped my tears. Soberly, I added, ‘He’s made me promise to take his body back to the Field of Stones, and . . . and I don’t have a clue where that is.’

  HUMPHREY CHOW

  Lower Largo, Scotland | 15th March, 2005

  Rubiesu simini randa si kwemka.

  Something queer happened early this morning to put me off Chinese takeaways for good. As I recall, I was alone when I retired after dinner yesterday, and I haven’t drunk alcohol in days. Yet at 4:00 a.m. I woke up with a full bladder, only to find a bearded stranger snoring on the bed beside me.

  Now, there are queer things and there are urgent things: I quickly used the bathroom, running a numbing jet of cold water over my head. When I shut off the tap the small room was silent. Except for the rhythmic crashing of waves on the beach outside, the gurgling as my water funnelled to its death by sewerage . . . and a ragged snore from the bedroom.

  I looked carefully in the mirror, and they were there, all right: the two loneliest eyes in the world, staring back at me like solitary inmates in their psychiatric wards. ‘Not so lonely now, are you?’ I muttered.

  He was still there when I returned, a large heavy youth lying face up in a grey trench coat. His great boots hung over the edge of my bed. A pervasive smell of stale fried chicken hung in the air. The situation was getting queerer and queerer: I snuck downstairs and found that both doors were firmly locked against the Scottish cold. The windows were fast, and there was no sign of a break-in. This was no burglar—although realistically, what burglar would stop halfway through a heist and opt to grab a snooze alongside his victim?

  Now, I am a reasonable man. (My wife would argue, too reasonable. Upon stumbling across a fellow breaking into my car the other day, I’d tapped his shoulder and asked if he had mistaken my car for his. In a similar situation, Grace had broken a teenager’s nose with her handbag, but I’m a reasonable man.) I made a very hot cup of tea and took it upstairs. A kitchen knife wasn’t exactly my style. A scalding cup of tea was an urbane prop that could turn from beverage into portable biochemical deterrent if an Unidentified Sleeping Person turned violent.

  I shook him awake, and he sat up on the edge of my bed. He looked at me. The only emotion I could see on his face was the irritation of a man shaken awake—say, on a public bench—waiting to find out why his sleep had been disturbed.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked eventually.

  He yawned and sleepily pulled a black bandanna from his pocket. As he tied the angry declaration across his forehead, I gasped. ‘A suicide bomber!’

  ‘That’s what I am,’ he said impatiently, ‘not who I am. I am Dalminda. Dalminda Roco, ex–law student.’

  Tradition is a terrible thing. ‘Humphrey Chow,’ I said, ‘short story writer.’

  He extended his hand for a handshake and when that was done, took my cup of tea with a God, I needed that!

  He caught my surreptitious glance under the bed. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Are you off-duty?’

  ‘Christ! I was sleeping, wasn’t I? Do I look the sort of fanatic who carries his work to bed?’ He braved a sip of the scalding tea and made a face. ‘Black and bitter,’ he grumbled. ‘What’s the point?’

  That was my cue to tell him that the tea was for pouring rather than drinking. I missed it. He plunked down the cup on the bedside cupboard, spilling a dash on the wood and possibly rendering some of my holiday deposit unrecoverable. ‘Chew,’ he said, apparently making conversation. ‘You don’t look very Chinese. In fact, you look definitely . . .’

  ‘Chow,’ I told him shortly, not believing the conversation was happening. ‘And it’s a long story.’

  ‘There’s black in you, definitely,’ he persisted. ‘Your hair . . .’

  ‘I said it’s kind of a long story.’

  Yet this was meant to be a short story. I was at the end of a two-week writing break on the east coast of Scotland. Mission: write the kind of offbeat stories that had so excited my new agent when she read the manuscript for my novella two years earlier. I had done several short stories since then, but none had remotely interested her. ‘Can’t you write something like Blank?’ Lynn would ask after spiking yet another clutch of tales. Finally, I had booked the same holiday house in which I had written Blank in December 2003. I had come alone, in the same cold. All that remained was to remember the particularly atrocious takeaway I had eaten the day I wrote my best story ever. The food had given me a bad case of diarrhoea, and I had woken at 4:00 a.m. in a foul mood and written Blank. Lynn fell in love with the story, and I lost my peace of mind. I was now on the last day of my writing holiday. I had eaten dozens of different takeaways, chewed through a packet of antacids, but none of the half-dozen stories I had written was even remotely passable.

  ‘What are you doing in my bed?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘Sleeping.’ He yawned and went back to sleep.

  * * *

  RUBIESU SIMINI randa si kwemka!

  In moments of stress, Menai proverbs sometimes popped into my mind. When I was ten, a quiet, intense African stopped for a meal at Miss Chow’s takeaway and stayed for dinner. Thirty months later, he was still there. It was a happy time, I guess; but it was not to last. It came to a head when Mr. Chow arrived from Shanghai unannounced and found Tobin Rani in his wife’s bed. There was a fight, all now rather murky in my mind, and Miss Chow paid for her months of happiness with her life, Yan Chow got a kitchen knife in his back, Tobin moved into prison, and I went back on the queue for yet another adoption. He had good English, that African, but with me, he doggedly spoke his strange Menai language. I was a stubborn kid back then and was equally determined not to learn it, but Tobin was interested in me in a way no other man had been. Besides, thirty months was a long time in days, and . . . urubiesu simini randa si kwemka! There were things that really had no translation in English. They just sat there in the mind in a self-sufficient Menai phrase.

  By dawn, I was reconciling myself to the possibility that I was losing my mind, again. I needed help, but the only psychiatrist I knew was my mother-in-law, whom I hadn’t seen professionally in a couple of years. If I phoned to explain that I had woken up with a man in my bed in the middle of a private writing holiday, it was entirely possible that a divorce would be in progress before I returned to London.

  I had to confront my demon personally.

  But I was scared. I had experienced discontinuities before: I would occasionally remember something that clearly could not have happened, like me dancing in carnivals, which I wouldn’t do in a few hundred years. I called those false memories my sub stories—since my subconscious seemed to be dabbling in the fiction business as well. But Dalminda was no su
b story scripted by the deranged mind of a short story writer.

  Dalminda Roco was in my bed.

  ZANDA ATTURK

  Kreektown | 15th March, 2005

  The expression on the dead man’s face was mild surprise, as though his assassin had started off with a spot of poetry. I had travelled many miles for this rendezvous with the smuggler, Korba Adevo, at a large, circular tent staked out on the grassed riverbank where the mangrove forest met Agui Creek. The tent was maybe forty feet from corner to corner and furnished like a permanent, if ramshackle, residence. The tarpaulin had been mended in several places. The ferocious dog he’d warned me about was sprawled in a broken heap by his feet, its days of ferocity very much a thing of history. Adevo’s fixed eyes stared at me through the clotting blood from a head wound. He was a fresh corpse, too, with an interrupted plate of starch and banga still floating an aroma in the air. He was dressed in a lace agbada that was fashionable a decade ago, its bloodstained peak cap on the floor beside him. He sat there, alone, in his disordered tent. I let the flap fall and inched backwards into the evening sun.

  Outside, my hired horse switched its tail, raising a plume of flies attached to the ulcer on its rump. An old generator sulked nearby, tethered to the tent by its cable. I looked around the mud flats skirting the creekline, searching reeds and mangroves for something out of place. Everything seemed strange and out of place: a boat berthed on mud, a jeep loaded with merchandise on a narrow beach served only by footpaths. The harmattan frisked the trees and the horse’s mane. The wind was shiver-cold, but inside me, a low-grade fever boiled.

  Adevo’s text message that morning had just one word: Badu. Every now and again someone chose my number from the bylines on Palaver’s pages to send some bit of news or another, but this was the working journalist’s dream scoop: information about the most hunted man in Nigeria. I had called immediately.

  ‘Badu?’ I had asked.

  ‘How are you?’ came the guarded voice. ‘Is about that your Pitani man . . . Is Korba Adevo here . . .’