The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  ‘Zanda.’

  He nodded. ‘You’re not from these parts.’ Coming from him, it sounded like an accusation.

  ‘Neither are you,’ I countered. My mood soured further; I was spoiling for a fight. I was back in Kreektown Primary, where, for six years, a staple playground debate was the identity of Zanda’s real father.

  ‘Exactly.’ He smiled nervously. ‘You wouldn’t know who’s organising this, would you? The old man is not to be buried here.’

  Before I could respond, he spotted a more likely face and moved away, but my mood was already ruined. It had been a mistake to come. In the presence of Mata Nimito’s corpse, my remorse flared. I turned to go, but Amana had reappeared. Her mood had swung around, and she beamed excitedly. I wondered what there was to be excited about, at a burial.

  ‘I’m going to pay my respects. Coming?’

  ‘You didn’t even know him.’

  ‘It’s not as if I didn’t try. I came here a couple of times on my job, but he never spoke to me. He didn’t speak English or Sontik, and I don’t speak Menai. Come.’

  She grabbed my hand, and I followed her through the crowd. There was an air of the carnival. Although Nigerians lived in awe of death, they saw nothing tragic about the death of an old man. Many had come with cans of beer. A grave had been sunk twelve metres from the Mata’s house. The gravediggers sat on the lip of the readied hole, smoking, joking, and passing a bottle of kai-kai around as they waited for the coffin, which had been donated by the Bus Conductor’s Club. I saw how, unless it was relatives who sank the grave, a burial was more waste disposal than funeral. The cheap coffin appeared, precariously balanced on a wheelbarrow. The gravediggers were anxious to be done, but the auxiliary nurse was, for once, out of his depth. They had to wait for a real doctor from the Ubesia council to sign a death certificate and write a burial licence. A bedraggled choir unloaded drums and cymbals from a minibus. The makings of a slapdash funeral were coming together as I stepped onto the elevation.

  This was no way to sing a dead mata’s calamity.

  Two youths emerged from the Mata’s submerged home dragging his mananga. My stomach heaved. That act of desecration swamped the distance I had built and nurtured since my emigration, ‘Hai!’ I shouted, advancing. They looked up and fled, leaving the ancient xylophone on its side.

  Amana looked at me without comprehension. ‘They’re just having fun. The old man is dead; it’s just going to rot there.’

  I kept mute. She was not to know that a mata could not be buried without his mananga.

  As we watched, David Balsam ducked into the house. I turned away.

  I glanced beyond her at Mata Nimito and stiffened. I took two steps closer. Deep breath. Slow exhale. Deep breath . . . I looked around.

  She eyed me curiously. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Look at him!’ I whispered.

  She did so and recoiled. ‘My God! He must have been at least two hundred years old!’

  I exhaled slowly. It was another hallucination, then. I walked slowly up to Mata Nimito, philosopher-guide of Menai, and tried to see what I ought to see. He was so old, so frail, and the muscles of the thin limbs that projected out of the red robe were locked and stiff.

  Miyaka sia Menai! Jonszer wasn’t addled after all. He had recognised me all along. His last words for me were a disgusted ‘See what’s left of the Menai!’

  I wondered what Jonszer would have done.

  I knew.

  It was a breach of the distance I had built, but it was only a small, anonymous breach. No Menai would ever know. I went to the mananga. The arms were missing from their sockets. 3:2:1:2, that was the base rhythm. I had attended too many calamities ever to forget it. I had never wanted to hear that tattoo again, but for Mata Nimito, for Jonszer, I would play it one more time. I turned to the Mata’s home. The exterior of it was a stretched canvas for a mad illustrator: stick figures and savannahs, cattle and pyramids, tableaus painted in indelible red and black and ochre.

  Inside was a large open-plan home, made small by the glut of old, inexpensive things of profound value. Questionnaire was bent over a rack of figurines, circumcisionheads, and carvings by the old man’s bed; he did not hear me enter. A rage flared, but I clamped down on it. Distance. I ignored him. On the wall, I found the mananga’s arms, the hooked mallets that gave voice to the instrument. They were dusty, had clearly not been touched in months. I ducked through the low doorway and stepped outside.

  The air was noisy with the chatter of a hundred souls. The clouds were low and swift. I wondered what the Mata would have cast from such a sky.

  ‘Zanda?’

  I turned. Amana was watching me curiously.

  I addressed the mananga. It was a monster of a xylophone: three dozen uniquely sized, weighted, and tuned wooden panes, built in an arc around the player. It measured five feet from end to end. I wheeled it up to a rattan bench and sat, my back to the Mata, facing the bulk of the sightseers, most of whom now watched me. Anuesi gubu anueso gudabe: the day’s for the dead, but the dance is for the living. The tanda ma. It was the basic beat every Menai had to learn. It was the frame to which Menai history was set. Slowed down, it was also the frame on which the calamity, Menai’s dirge, was hung. It surged in my heart, but I clamped my teeth on it. I would not speak or sing Menai. From the corner of my eyes, I saw her, the very arch of her body, a question; I shut my mind and my eyes and let my fingers and ears rediscover the tanda ma. The voice of the xylophone drew down a silence on the pavilion. I felt curious eyes on me.

  ‘Amie Menai anduogu . . .’

  Memory flooded me.

  ‘It is of Menai stock I speak,’ I began to play.

  Near the peak of Arrawadi

  is the plain of our Kantai . . .

  I had not played a minute when I felt the whoosh of air. My hands faltered and I opened my eyes; for a disoriented moment I was back by my primary school locker, letting out the snake. Then I came back to the present: around me surged a stomping mob struggling to escape. Inside me, a floe of fear coalesced. A woman the size and weight of Asia plunged wordlessly past me, crushing my foot under one of her flip-flops. Suddenly the carnival was gone, leaving the enclosure like a many-limbed creature, breaking bottles, chairs, and saplings. The cheap coffin was splintered and crushed, the drums were punctured, clothes and shoes littered the Mata’s enclosure, but a tinny voice nearly deafened me, and it came from right behind me. I put away the mananga’s arms in their sockets.

  I turned, light-headed. His voice was a note higher than I remembered. He had barely stirred, but he was coming fully out of the trance. It was no hallucination, then. I abandoned the mananga and scrambled up the embankment on my hands and feet. From the Mata’s house, a thunderstruck Questionnaire emerged, bearing two singate heads like holy relics. I looked at the Mata. It seemed evil to call a man this old back from the grave. His eyes were milky, almost undifferentiated between pupil and whites. I searched the drawn face for a familiar expression. Then he spoke, and it was Mata Nimito of the Great Calm. It was not evil, then, it was right, to live.

  ‘Worie.’

  ‘Dobemu,’ I replied.

  He fell silent at my voice. Then he asked, ‘Ama Zanda mu chei?’

  ‘Zanda mu chei.’

  His eyes closed, and he was breathing regularly again. I bowed, condemned by the silence. When I left, he’d had a Menai nation to care for him. I had not meant for this to happen, that the Mata would face his death alone, among strangers so impatient for him to go.

  ‘My apologies,’ said Questionnaire. ‘You’re certainly not a stranger to the old man.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, not looking at him. ‘And where you were grave-robbing before, now you are a common thief.’

  ‘You misunderstand me completely. Listen, this is extremely important.’ He was climbing up to us. ‘I’d like to talk to the old man about these. Can you interpret for me?’ He took my shoulder to turn me around. I resisted, protecting my tears from s
ight, but he was strong, and I turned with him, pushing him away, sending him tumbling down the pavilion, bronzes flying. I wiped my cheeks and bent over the old man.

  ‘Jons miena qua?’

  ‘Jonszer amie gonzi.’ There was no point in hiding anything from the Mata. ‘Minsa qua na Agui.’

  He turned towards the tidal creek, which sat lower in its bed than I had remembered. He looked at me. His eyes were so milky, I wasn’t sure, now, how much he could see. ‘Amazi manasi ungheu.’

  I felt the shame but no surprise at his perfect recollections, for he carried millennia of Menai history in his head. I was away for six and a half years and he picked up as if I had just returned from the stream. His eyebrows lifted, and I followed his eyes to the huddle of wine gourds assembled for the burial. He could see well enough, then.

  I filled two brown glasses and brought them over. He stared. I remembered and scrambled for water. Water was primal, water was first. I gave him a gourd, which he took with a hand that trembled. ‘Amis andgus.’

  ‘Andgus ashen,’ I replied and drank from the same gourd. I drank deep, quenching a sudden thirst not for water but for custom. It was true, then: all the healing in the world was in the gourd of water.

  ‘This is old water,’ I said in the Menai equivalent of small talk, dodging the weighty things that had to be said.

  ‘The sky pissed it when the world was young,’ he agreed.

  An age passed. The sun was going down, so I pivoted the sun shelter until he was looking into clear skies. His hand—leathery, insubstantial—fell on my head, and a shroud of gooseflesh wrapped itself around me, stubbling my skin. I began to remember. Flakes of memory began to coalesce around the water in my guts. I served his wine and joined his eyes in the skies.

  There was no ‘ordinary’ sky. Each one was unique. Every hour’s pattern was a perfect, never-to-be-repeated arrangement of shades, wisps, and auguries. For a cloudcaster like Nimito, a sky—day or night—was not just a densely scripted tome to be studied, deciphered, and decoded but a backdrop on which to project and encode a mata’s legendary memories of the past and deductions of the future. For me it was just a ceiling for life, but in his presence it acquired a grandeur that it normally lacked.

  I found myself stealing glances at his riveted face, trying to glean something of the psychosis that had kept this man so long and consistently in this groove. His eyebrows were the most animated part of him, the one organ that seemingly refused to atrophy, gaining, instead, a second sight that stymied the first. The muscles of the brows were still as limber as a tongue. I watched the emotions course through them. A flash of sly. A pucker of small surprise. And then—thirty-five minutes after our ritual drink of water—an electrifying dilation that swamped the orbs and spread, through stiffening, corded muscles, through his wasted body.

  His face fell slowly from the skies until his eyes held my gaze. There was a look of ineffable sadness in them. I knew it was time to mourn Jonszer. Yet by killing himself he had fallen foul of the great taboo. The Mata could not sing the tanda ma of his man Friday.

  I went to the mananga, wondering whether I dared.

  Jonszer’s last words came back to me, his disgust amplified by the pathos of his suicide, by the passion of an excellent swimmer who dived into a creek with a cord and roped himself to a mangrove root under the surface.

  A nervous hand hovered on my shoulder, and when I turned, Amana was standing there. Her clothes were soiled and her hair generously supplied with twigs and burrs. She was looking at the old man, who had fallen back onto the platform. I put away the mananga’s arms and gathered him up carefully. He was breathing lightly, his body weighing little more than old rags. He smelled of childhood memories and brackish creeks.

  I stepped down from the embankment with my burden. As I turned away, Questionnaire was emerging from the Mata’s house, without the bronzes, his lips a thin, angry line.

  She swallowed. ‘Where are you taking him?’

  ‘Home,’ I said.

  ‘But Ma’Calico—’

  ‘Home,’ I repeated.

  MATA NIMITO

  Kreektown | 18th March, 2005

  Aiyegun Yesi Yemanagu

  You see that nation in the mists

  among the hills, beside the scented trees.

  You see her maidens’ comely walk,

  her handsome sheep,

  her finely sculpted men.

  You hear the long language that comes like song,

  and love her pleasant ways,

  and do not know her name?

  Her name is Menai.

  We are Menai.

  Our land is lost.

  Our love, our soil, our soul.

  But we’re one clan, one nation, and one folk,

  pulled by the root from the soil of our hearth.

  And we are not made any more for planting towns.

  We are one folk, one cloth, one destiny, one kin,

  pulled by deceit from the soil of our hearth.

  We are not made any more for planting towns.

  Living lightly on the land,

  planting crops for trees

  and tents for houses . . .

  Our hearts are planted

  in the country that we lost,

  and we will return.

  We are Menai.

  HUMPHREY CHOW

  London | 18th March, 2005

  ‘This could have been great, Humphrey,’ said Malcolm Frisbee.

  He was breathing heavily as he approached the end of his exertions. It was the week after my return from Scotland, and we were dining in the seventh-floor restaurant of Tate Modern. His final forkful of lamb paused on the lip of its plate, in the midst of the wreck of our lunch. With his other hand he tapped the plastic folder that contained my short story, which had lain bereft on one side of the table while the main business of the food was sorted. On the folder was stencilled the famous red and black initials IMX. He ate the last of his lamb and sighed regretfully. ‘It could have been really, really great.’

  I poked miserably at the remains of my Cornish haddock.

  We occupied a table for four, whose surface was barely enough for the main courses that had eventually sated Malcolm’s appetite. Malcolm stood six foot three in his socks and weighed a hundred and forty kilogrammes. He had won the Booker Prize at twenty-six with his first novel, Sundance. That early coup made his reputation, but it also put him under immense pressure for a second book worthy of a Booker Prize winner. In the six desperate years following Sundance, he suffered acute literary agonies, which ended in a writing vacation on a remote Greek island, where he ate a poisoned crab. He was in a coma for weeks. When he recovered, it was without his midterm memory, which elevated the challenge of a second Malcolm Frisbee novel to the level of the scaling of the Pennines by a heavily pregnant amputee.

  It would have been another Greek tragedy, except that all that had taken place thirty-six years ago. Malcolm was now chairman of one of the most successful literary agencies in Europe. He was reluctantly approaching seventy but still had two unrelenting passions: the love of a good story, and a regularly indulged love of good food. In his career as a literary agent, he had represented eighteen Booker and six Pulitzer Prize winners.

  He brought his passions together in his business model. Few London executives could rival his entertainment budget. He was on a first-name basis with celebrity chefs up and down the country, for he had the sort of appetite that reverberated from restaurant floor all the way to the nerve centres of the most distinguished kitchens. Malcolm snared his authors over expensive, languid dinners and sacked them over courteous, cheap lunches. In between, there were restaurant sessions to mark new books, new prizes, and the opening of promising new eateries.

  For the past year I had been steeling myself to turn down a Malcolm Frisbee invitation to lunch. I was married to Grace Meadows, his favourite agent, but even that connection had its limitations. My first and only book, Blank, had been booed by the critics
and shunned by the bookshops, but I had been picked for the Richard and Judy Show and notched up pretty good sales on Amazon. Had I received a lunch invitation during the barren months that preceded my Scottish writing retreat, I’d have declined and sent in a letter quitting Malcolm’s agency with some dignity. It wasn’t that clear that morning when Ruby, one of the clutch of personal assistants that he called his memory bank, phoned me to schedule an ‘eat with the boss.’ For one thing, Grace would have warned me if my representation was on the line. For another, Lynn had liked my bomber story. It worried her, but she was sure she could sell it.

  She had also told me, confidentially, that Malcolm liked my story as well. Because I had written two IMX agents into my story, it had gone round in a viral e-mail on the IMX intranet. The word was, the chairman had actually read—and liked—it! When the lunch date was made, I had thought I’d written myself back into the good graces of the most aggressive literary agent in London.

  Just then, it was beginning to look like his traditional terminal lunch.

  ‘Lynn said you liked it,’ I ventured.

  Four fat fingers shooed away the very thought. ‘I’m not in this business to like stories, Humphrey Chow. I’m in this business to sell ’em.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘And to sell a story, I have got to love it. Like is nothing. Comprehend?’

  I nodded silently, filling my mouth with food, so I didn’t have to say anything. Through the clear plate glass of the restaurant was a view of the Thames on a sunny day, but it was lost on me. Although I knew the score, that didn’t make it any easier to bear. Literary agents needed working writers: young writers who were actively writing or older writers with a decent backlist. I had to accept Grace’s jibe: IMX had kept me on their books because I was married to her. Presently, the plates were cleared away and I helped Malcolm drain a second bottle of a bland 2001 Gigondas.

  ‘You must be wondering why I asked you to lunch, and here of all places,’ he said finally, staring with the vague disdain of a sated appetite at a tray of steamed mussels proceeding by waitress to a patron at the far end of the busy restaurant.