The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  They laughed generously. It was the sport of the season, mocking the Stranger That Refused to Go Home.

  ‘He’s the last of the Menai, isn’t he?’ asked a voice behind me,

  ‘No, there’s Jonszer . . .’

  ‘Jonszer! We’re talking of people and you’re counting Jonszer?’

  ‘And there’s some sick people in their Lagos camp—it won’t be long . . .’

  I rose and took my glass outside, away from their raucous talk. Through the open window the laughter mocked me. I felt the traitor. Jonszer was Menai like me. Now in his fifties, he would have been in his twenties when the Trevi inoculations were administered. They had not bothered to inoculate him, considering their precious vial wasted on the drunk. That mean-spiritedness had, ironically, saved his life. Not that it did him much good. A lifetime of addictions had likely addled his mind: in the last two days, he had passed me a couple of times without recognition.

  As I brooded, a limousine with the number plate “Ubesia 1” pulled off the Warri-Ubesia highway, pausing ponderously at the entrance to Ma’Calico’s. On the bonnet flew the green-crested flag of the Nanga of Ubesia, traditional ruler of the Sontik people. The windows were blacked out, so there was no way of knowing if the traditional ruler was himself in the car, but as I watched, a door opened and a greying fiftyish man stepped out. I recognised Justin Bentiy immediately, cousin and right-hand man of the Nanga.

  I downed the rest of my glass and returned to the saloon as Amana emerged from the freezer with a laden tray, which emptied rapidly as she approached. I took the last bottle of beer, and she raised her voice: ‘Bottle number four for Reverend!’ There was a cheer all round, for I was entering uncharted waters at Ma’Calico’s.

  Justin Bentiy entered. It was a mostly Sontik crowd in the saloon, and they recognised him immediately, greeting him respectfully. He sat with Ma’Calico by her counter and ordered a Sprite, which he drank mincingly. In his expensive damask robe, he looked out of place in that rough bar. Then he sent Amana out to the car with cold water for the Nanga. The realisation that the Nanga of Ubesia himself was in Ma’Calico’s yard hushed the room. The traditional ruler had been bedridden for months. Ma’Calico rose to attend to him, but Justin Bentiy swayed his horsetail quietly and she deferred. Amana hurried out nervously. She was gone a while, and the bar room conversation stayed on the health of the ailing Nanga until she returned. Soon afterwards, Justin rose and left, his bottle barely touched.

  The news of Mata Nimito’s death had breached my carefully constructed distance from Kreektown. Once again I was in the circle of death and loss. Without trying, I was remembering.

  I WAS orphaned.

  The new Kreektown settlers were sharper than knives. I was cut, again and again, and it was to Mata Nimito, hermit cloudcaster and stargazer, that I turned.

  ‘Kiwami ananwusu,’ he had said. ‘You were nurturetaught to live among the People. It’s a new world now. Now, you must not put naked fingers in a crab basket.’

  ‘How can I live in this world, Mata?’

  ‘Practiselearn. The lesson of the crab.’

  ‘What is that lesson, Mata?’

  ‘Carry your truthsweetness inside; but as for the world, show them only your crabshell.’

  And I blended in.

  MATA NIMITO, who had no traffic with the world, the great teacher of that world; Mata Nimito, who lived all those years only to die in the week I returned . . . No one did guilt like Menai. It weighed me down now. I had been close to the old man, until I fled his circumcision blade . . .

  I rose queasily and walked towards the door again. A wave of memory rode me, and suddenly I was a seventeen-year-old, in that same bar, but it was not Ma’Calico’s anymore; it was Cletus’s Motel, and the language was Menai, the people were Menai . . . I fled the room, fearing another vivid hallucination, stopping only on the threshold, where I gasped.

  Amana was right behind me. She was dogging me too often these days. One of these days I was going to come up against the iroko of her mother. There was the usual mischief in her eyes. ‘You’re throwing up!’

  ‘I’m not drunk.’

  She peered into my eyes. ‘But something is wrong. Right?’

  I stared.

  I had tried to figure her out, without much luck. She was sprite-like in many ways, liberated from the very real things that weighed people down. Her fellow villagers discounted her from the scheme of things, as though they understood that she was outside their norm. Even the dreaded roughboys seemed to hold her in some reverence. When she scolded them, they smiled bashfully, and they brought their quarrels for her opinions. If she had a boyfriend, he did not live in Kreektown, but she did disappear behind the treeline several times a day with a variety of men who emerged, angry and frustrated, while she followed, beaming with a transcendental contentment.

  That morning, she had disappeared with a woman, Fati, for the first time.

  She looked right and left now and winked conspiratorially. ‘This is a secret, okay? Ma’Calico will kill me if she knows.’ Then she turned for the trees.

  I hesitated. I had seen Ma’Calico’s hands at close quarters. They were old, far older than she was: her face looked fifty but her hands were sixty. Those hands had scraped and peeled, had squashed and soaked and burned—and they had done all that in the wet and dry, in the hot and cold, in the smoky blaze. She did not boast often, that iroko, but when she did it was always about her smart Amana, who at twenty-six would still have been station manager of DRCD’s Kreektown base if rioters had not burned it down the very day she arrived from Abuja to begin her posting, and Ma’Calico’s eyes would soften.

  Amana reached the line of trees. She turned and gestured impatiently, and the memory of Ma’Calico waned. I followed. We walked briskly into Kreektown’s shroud, which could make dusk of a brilliant noon. A clump of trees. A timeless peace. The hard-packed earth softened. I followed her. I knew the land but not the lie of it any longer. A lot had changed in a decade. We walked in long shadows, but daylight held its own—which was just as well, for I loathed the dark. Then, barely three hundred metres from her mother’s parlour, we arrived at Amana’s redoubt. It was a long, comfortable bench in a grove with associated creature comforts, which she clearly frequented. There was no time to talk, and she straddled the bench with an urgency that telegraphed. She spread a red velvet cloth between us, pulled out her purse, and produced a deck of playing cards.

  She stared as I redid my top buttons. ‘What style do you prefer?’ she asked guardedly.

  I was breathlessly silent.

  ‘Okay, let’s play Red Bushmeat,’ she volunteered. That turned out to be a variation of a card game popularised by motor-park touts across Nigeria. I was no virgin myself and determined to teach her a painful lesson. I doubled her opening stake, and we played passionately for thirty frenzied minutes. Every time I lost a game, a grunt of frustration would slip my iron control, but her delight was ever bubbling under the surface. She had quick fingers and dealt with a croupier’s skill. She had eyes only for her cards. After thirty minutes I was hooked.

  Although I was sweating liberally, I could have played a few more rounds, but she was the daughter of Ma’Calico all right. A seam of discipline underpinned her greed. She reined in her flushed abandon with a sigh of satisfaction and gathered up her winnings. She folded up her red velvet cloth, her purse bulging with my money, and then she fixed me calmly with perhaps the first serious look I had seen on her.

  ‘Do you have something to tell me?’ Her voice was very polished, very much the station manager’s.

  I stared with angry frustration.

  ‘I can keep a secret,’ she assured me.

  I rose. ‘I’m sure you can,’ I said, still smarting from my earlier misapprehension. ‘I’m a journalist; I have a burial to cover.’

  ‘I’m going as well.’

  ‘Why?’

  She shrugged. ‘He’s the last of the dead people.’

  It was
my chance to own up, but instead I said, ‘There’s still Jonszer . . . and—’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Irritably, her accent plunging from station manager to agbero, she allowed, ‘Second-to-last.’

  We were walking back now. As we reached the treeline, she paused. ‘Honestly, I can keep a secret.’

  ‘That’s very good for you,’ I told her.

  * * *

  AT MA’CALICO’S, I went up to my room and waited for evening and the burial. When I shut my eyes, the dead Menai I had known swam in and out of my tipsy vision. I sat up and reached for Palaver. A trucker passing through to Warri had left his copy for me. Badu was still front-page news; this time, it was the fact that he had done nothing for all of four days. I turned to page seven. My column was gone, despite the standby pieces I always kept on file. It was replaced by a shameless pastiche of those same standby pieces by Patience from Motoring. Oddly enough, she had a picture on her new byline, a courtesy Patrick had denied me throughout the over one hundred iterations of my column. There was no chink in the paper caused by the absence of Roving Eye. The ease with which I had dropped out of my old life—and the swiftness with which I had been replaced—depressed and frightened me. I was like a stunted shrub: a couple of tugs and up came years of growth, yanked out of the soil with one hand. I had written for Palaver for two and a half years, but I had dropped out and that was that. I put away the newspaper. This was, after all, how I wanted it: there was no one in my life whose loss could really hurt me.

  That was why I had fled Kreektown all those years ago. I closed my eyes and tried not to remember the ninth of December, 1998. Tried not to remember every wrinkle on every lost face, every accent of every lost voice . . .

  * * *

  I WAS orphaned.

  The short hawker arrived at Kreektown Square just before noon and began to set up his stall. It was the perfect timing for an entrance. The other traders had settled into their own routines. Sisi Mari’s sewing machine was singing its monotone, and the middle-aged Ruma was already yawning seamlessly. By Ntupong’s gin joint, I killed time with a pack of cards and a complimentary shot while I watched for a shoeshine prospect. There were hundreds of filthy shoes in Kreektown, but few of their owners were prepared to have them shined, for a fee. My business day was half gone, and I hadn’t even opened my shoeshine box.

  The hawker set his portmanteau carefully on the ground. At first sight there was nothing remarkable about him. He was young and slight, the sort of man a large snake might swallow and soon afterwards go hunting rats for dessert. But he did carry his portmanteau with extreme care—that was the rather remarkable thing.

  A portmanteau was no novelty in Kreektown. It was the care with which it was handled that caught the eye; that, and the very idea that a petty trader’s stock-in-trade was so precious as to be ferried to market not in an oily carton or mildewed sack but in a portmanteau.

  Utoma stopped ogling Etie in the adjacent stall and watched the short hawker with the suspicion reserved for a rival. It would have been rather silly, carrying eggs in portmanteaus, but Utoma sold eggs; that was the thing. He had lost a kidney and half his weight in the eighteen years since his Trevi inoculation, but he was the last surviving member of the modest Egg Sellers Association of Kreektown Market, a rather lucrative position. So he turned away from Etie’s cosmetics stall and glared at the hawker.

  Since his arrival, the hawker had dispensed a ‘good-morning’ each to the traders on either side of his stall, so he couldn’t very well be called arrogant.

  Yet it was a close thing.

  They didn’t call Etie ‘Man-Magnet’ for nothing and she would have felt the loss of Utoma’s attention immediately. She glanced towards the distraction without skipping a strand in the hair she was braiding. The sneer she’d prepared for a woman faded. When the hawker lifted his portmanteau tenderly onto a bench, her fingers grew rigid in her customer’s hair. There was one calamity Etie had lived in dread of: a real cosmetologist setting up in Kreektown.

  Etie was my neighbour and fellow orphan. She was six years old at the time of the Trevi inoculation and had coped well until her mother died of kidney failure and she had her first seizure.

  She held no certificates, but in her small shop on Crown Prince Street she stocked a variety of nail varnishes and lipsticks—and she regularly succeeded in plaiting a hundred and fifty Bob Marley braids on Letitia’s head, which was not much larger than a grapefruit. Any other village in the world would be glad for her talents, but she knew the new Kreektown girls very well. That she was Menai counted for nothing with the new Kreektowners. Any quack with the gumption to put cosmetologist on a signboard would kill her business. The new Kreektown didn’t have enough business for two cosmetics stalls.

  Kreektown’s traders watched the hawker narrowly. He had a fetish for the colour red. It was the colour of his clothes, his portmanteau, and the plastic tablecloth he spread on the rack to display his goods.

  That tablecloth seemed to incense Ruma. Her merchandise was the most expensive in the market, yet she laid her fabrics out, Menai weaves and ankaras, brocades—even her imported ten-thousand-naira-per-yard Hollandis—she laid them all out directly on the wooden panels of the stall. She muttered, and it was handy that there were now so few of us who spoke the tongue in the market, ‘Ayamuni jakpasi! Just who does this upstartchild think he is, to spread a red clothshrine for his stock? Is he selling gold fabric? Or did he import his own brocades from the land of ancestorsMenai?’

  Eventually, the short hawker was satisfied with the symmetry of the tablecloth. He placed an envelope on it and opened the portmanteau reverently.

  Even the customers sensed something momentous in the offing and loitered around the red stall. Oga Somuzo, having haggled Ma’Bamou’s size forty-eight jeans right down to a desperate four hundred naira, refrained from paying—confident that a better bargain would emerge from the red portmanteau.

  What did emerge was a carton, which contained a smaller package wrapped in layers and layers of old newspapers. A drift of newsprint slowly massed around the hawker’s feet as he carefully unfurled the contents of the carton. The scent of camphor filled the air. Nobody was expecting the old pair of shoes that eventually stood, pompously, in the centre of the red tablecloth.

  Saint John scratched his forehead. Lesser mortals could scratch their heads and armpits, but Saint John did things his own way—and frequent perplexity, coupled with his unfamiliarity with the nail clipper, had left him with a forehead more ravaged than his fifty years would have portended. ‘Ezitatu?’ He spluttered, ‘All this potmanto palaver for the sake of one common pair of secondhand shoes?’

  ‘That are not even polished,’ I added, hinting heavily.

  There was something like pity in the hawker’s eyes as he glanced at us. He probably didn’t see anyone worth the trouble of puffing his goods to, because without a word, he bent over and began to gather the newspapers strewn about his feet. This was probably the moment most of us decided he was a pompous little imp.

  Ma’Bamou had the only secondhand clothes shop in Kreektown. She brought in her stock of okrika monthly in huge bales that travelled six hundred circuitous smugglers’ kilometres from Cotonou Port in the back of Tamiyo’s Peugeot. She walked mincingly over to the portmanteau with the aid of her iron walking stick. It was really empty. There was just that arrogant pair of shoes, which to her professional eyes would have seemed grade B. She sniffed, a sound balanced delicately between relief and contempt, and returned to her stall; there was no need for a word. Oga Somuzo followed heavily, clearly aware that his old bid for the jeans was history.

  Yet they were the only ones who walked away. Even Etie and her customer, whose hair was half in braids and half-afro, joined the crowd around the red stall. Kreektown might have been a village, but it was no ordinary place. We were more than most towns and cities—we were an entire nation, the last stronghold of Menai in the world. This was certainly not so inconsequential a place that a dirty
pair of shoes should cause a stir.

  So it caused a stir, the very nerve of a hawker who came to Kreektown Market just to sell an old pair of shoes. To whom did he plan to sell them? Did he take the Menai for mugus? The cheek of it! We milled angrily around the stall, although there was no violence in the air. We did not manhandle idiots of any stripe, but we did know how to ridicule a fool so well that when he got home he’d look himself very well in the mirror.

  ‘Where the rest of your market?’ began Jonszer mildly enough. A knowing wink flickered in his left eye. He knew every excuse in the book. ‘They steal it for bus, not so?’

  ‘Me, I’m not a trader,’ said the hawker, pulling an affidavit out of the envelope and showing it around, ‘I’m the son of Doctor Nnamdi Azikiwe’s former houseboy.’

  This sort of boasting was new to us. It was one thing to boast about wiping a big man’s toilet seats for a living. But no, this young man was far more superior than that to an ordinary trader: he was the son of a man who wiped a big man’s toilet seats for a living.

  We were going to have fun that afternoon.

  Yet around me was gathering the largest crowd Kreektown had mustered in months—which had not come for a sleepcatastrophe. It was my best marketing opportunity yet: to publicly transform a lacklustre pair of shoes and remind Kreektowners that a shoe-shiner of distinction lived amongst them.

  The downside to my plan was the free shoeshine for the arrogant hawker, but it would only cost a smear of polish anyway. I sat on my shoeshine box and took the left shoe.

  The hawker did not notice.

  ‘I use to know one trader’s apprentice like that,’ Mukaila whispered to Saint John, in a voice that carried. ‘One day like that, he miss his bus at Onitsha Motor Park, and he begin to chitchat this very nice lady . . . then they branch inside hotel . . .’

  ‘Ajajaa!’

  ‘. . . when they finish, the apprentice try to go but she hold him by the belt. He said he thought it was girlfriend-and-boyfriend matter, she said no, it was business.’