The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  We reached the fork in the lane. I turned away from Ma’Calico’s and moved deeper into the old village. Amana hesitated and came after me.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she whispered.

  ‘Home.’

  She paused. She glanced backwards, then, when I had walked four measured paces, followed silently.

  I was afraid: that the Mata would die, leaving me to bury the greatest of all Menai alone; that he would live, to judge me for my sins. I was afraid of this darkness crowding in on me, negotiating for my soul. I walked in that fear, investing my entire mind in that dangerous journey home: what to do when I got there and found it occupied by roughboys or unoccupied and in ruins? Where to go then? Mata Nimito’s home was desecrated by the premature funeral. He did not need to see a grave yawning for him. He did not need the zoo of Ma’Calico’s place. He would not abide a hospital. He wanted a place to die in dignity.

  I stood before the Atturk house. The fear settled fully into me, lodging itself as snugly as a limb in a sleeve.

  ‘Where’s this place?’ she whispered.

  ‘Home,’ I said hoarsely.

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Can you fetch a lamp?’

  ‘I’ve got my phone—’

  ‘A real lamp? Please? And some food.’

  I felt her eyes on the side of my face briefly. Then she was gone, her footfalls quick and urgent. The street was dead, from Etie’s old house to Megima’s old house at the junction, and all those in between, including the Atturk house and Sefi’s house. The usurpers of Kreektown had contented themselves with the homes abutting the square, where they had torn up the floors, and eviscerated the family graves, before settling in, for the Sontik were too superstitious to live in homes whose old owners still lay beneath the floors. Only roughboys were heedless of the graves. They would break into a house, stay a week or month, and move on again in their rootless cycles.

  The old man moaned, impelling me forward again. I crossed the road slowly. It would take Amana ten minutes, at least, to get to Ma’Calico’s, another fifteen to return with the lamp. I might prefer to stand forever outside the house, but Mata Nimito had to lie down. I forced myself towards the dreaded darkness of the house; as I did so, something electric seemed to singe my nerve endings. I felt a dizziness that passed swiftly, as a darkness within me embraced the night. Something was wrong, but at the same time, very right. I hadn’t been here in more than six years . . . yet an easy familiarity gloved the scene. My eyes slid, unsurprised, off a wall suddenly green with vines, jinked easily around the strange flare of hedges, and settled on the secured front door. I wondered how I knew about the new nail behind the old hole where the lock had once been . . . it was as though I was coming home from a day at work . . . I tried to stop, but a magnetic field drew me in. Rather than fear I felt a growing exhilaration . . .

  . . . COME UP to the door. It is fast? Put a finger through the crack and turn the nail away. Push in, pass through. It is still a house, but only just. The windows and doors are there. The roof, and the masonry on which it sits. But the furniture is long gone. The kitchen is ripped out. The plumbing and the pipes that led from the well are gone. The family house in Kreektown. Ten metres wide, in its own proud yard, sandwiched between Etie’s and Sefi’s house. A seventy-three-year-old house built back in the day when it was a great and glorious thing to be an Atturk.

  No longer. The last Atturk is not really an Atturk. My colour is wrong, far too light for this nation. My features are wrong. Guess which of my parents must have been unfaithful. It is too dark to see the photos on the wall. They hang there under a six-and-a-half-year-old film of dust, Tume Atturk and his wife, Malian, my mother, who died well before I was old enough to wring the truth of my true paternity from her.

  Come through the threshold rebuilt from the hull of Raecha Atturk’s boat. Step up, pass through. The smell of cassava hits you, doesn’t it? It is a long time since I left, and the village is dead, but the emotional aroma of her kitchen endures. I open the door slowly, with much shaking of the ball handle, so that she gets a chance not to be there in the vent of the courtyard, skinning and chopping and soaking cassava. She never really left, Malian, never quite came to terms with her sudden drowning.

  My skin is taut with gooseflesh. The walls of my ancestral home lock me in. Suddenly I understand why deep sleep exhausted me, why strange ATM withdrawals showed up in my statements from towns I had never visited. It was as though my reconciliation with the Mata was reconciling my fractured halves. I stand still; the darkness soaks into my skin. Slowly, knowledge sinks into my mind. How I love the dark. Hold still, let your eyes adjust. There are broken parquet sections all around, but even so, the floor is mostly sound. It is ironic, isn’t it, that a house founded on wealth from the seas would fall into such landed ruin. Nobody will remember when this was the wealthiest house in the village or when it was the home of Tume Atturk, Mata-in-waiting. History and memory die together with their owners. Here is the hall. Over there’s the kitchen of the making of both our laughter and our tears too. Beyond is the yard. Watch out for the low ceiling. Old Raecha Atturk was short as a stump and has given his descendants a stoop from growing up here.

  I’ll set you down here in the old lounge, Mata Nimito . . . I’ll see that all is well.

  My favourite room: Mum and Dad lie beneath. The Menai do not do cemeteries, that taking of dead relatives out with the trash. We do not tip the late into pretty landfill sites. It’s their house, after all, so we rest them in it. Home burials mitigate loss: the homestead stays whole, even after the catastrophe of the long sleep . . . they continue to be privy to the family’s jokes and tears. My parents drowned on a market day in 1991. I was eleven. Kreektowners were watching when their canoe capsized five metres from the jetty. They had waved and shouted excitedly for a while. The Menai on the beach had waved back self-consciously, disapproving of such boisterousness from grown-ups, it not occurring to them that somewhere on GodMenai’s Earth were adult men and women who actually could not swim. Although born Menai, Dad had been raised in Bida. Like Mum, he had never learned to swim . . .

  * * *

  I FROZE.

  A sound had broken my reverie. I listened closely. It came again, the weakest of buzzing. Half cricket, half . . . telephone? I crouched and left the house, entering the courtyard that was the old kitchen. The noise faded, and I retraced my steps, following the sound to the storeroom. There was a fresh mound raised in the centre of the floor, a spade still in it. The sound ceased, but I pulled up the spade all the same. In the darkness, I carefully began to move the earth. After a few scoops, the ringing began again, the sound fainter but more urgent. I put the spade down and dug with my hands. I found the Nokia in the first pocket I searched, on the last legs of its four-hundred-hour standby lifetime. I sat on my heels, my back against the burnt-brick wall. I opened the phone. There was the pinging of a battery warning, then an agitated voice.

  ‘Hello? Papa?’

  ‘No.’

  Anxious: ‘Who is this? Where is . . . ?’

  ‘He’s dead. You know that.’

  A tinny, female scream. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Badu,’ I said, as the battery died.

  I sighed and broke up the phone. I restored Omakasa’s mound, wondering how the body had lain undiscovered with his phone broadcasting. Badu wasn’t as smart as the media gave him credit for. Neither were the police.

  Then I returned to Mata Nimito. His presence seemed to swirl me until I could almost touch Justice Omakasa’s killer, opposite the pillar from where I stood. When I whipped around, when I tried to catch him out, he was pirouetting just as fast, but when I shut my eyes and did not even try, I was knowing what he knew, feeling what he felt . . . without ceasing to be who I was.

  I pulled up the bundled sack from the dry well in the courtyard, not wondering anymore how I knew it was there. I made up a thin bed in my old room next to the courtyard and moved Mata Nimito there. I stood motionless in the k
itchen for a minute, unafraid, wearing the darkness like a second skin. I shook my head. I had done it on my own. Night was now friend, not foe.

  I heard the knocking on the door.

  I opened the door for Amana and an effulgent lantern. ‘There’s a Tobin Rani looking for you at Ma’Calico’s. He was looking for Hundredyears as well.’

  Tobin Rani. The name grazed the surface of an old memory, but no face came up. ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘The police were there as well,’ she said tautly. ‘It’s the madman, Sergeant Elue. I don’t know what they want, but it can’t be good.’

  I took the bag from her. I switched off the lantern gently. The darkness reclaimed us. ‘There are no curtains on the windows; we’ll be seen from the street. Shut your eyes and open them again. You’ll see enough.’

  ‘I thought you hated the dark.’

  ‘Not anymore.’

  ‘I’m . . . scared . . .’

  ‘Don’t be.’ I took her shoulder and drew her close.

  ‘. . . of you . . . you’re different . . .’

  My hand dropped to my side, and she stepped back, haltingly. ‘You are Menai?’ She made it sound like a disease. ‘This is your house? Your father’s house?’

  ‘Arue su gamu diene zi.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a Menai blessing: May your children walk over your grave.’ I pointed. ‘That’s Dad’s grave. Tume Atturk. He was buried above his granddad. There’s space for me, too. It’s a Menai thing.’

  She clicked on the lamp. She hugged herself. ‘It’s illegal.’

  ‘It’s right.’

  ‘This is one of the . . . home cemeteries?’

  ‘Come, I’ll show you round,’ I said, taking the lamp. ‘This is one of four rooms. Funny how rooms shrink on you. I remember when I needed fifteen paces to cross this. Now I can do it in five.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘You wanted my secrets,’ I reminded her. I could hear a noise on the street but could not clearly say it was not in my head. She was there, I thought. Yet there was a weariness in me that wanted quits with this world, where I never really knew what was there and what was an elaborate hallucination. More than anything else, just then, I wanted her to be real. More than anything else in the world, I wanted Badu to be a dream, but I knew why there was a body in the earth of my house that was no Atturk. The knowledge of a prisoner crowded in on me, a captive waiting for Badu’s interrupted death sentence. I gripped my head . . . I was swirling again . . .

  I was the fist of Menai Vengeance, the spirit of the Crown Prince. I was lighter than air. I crossed without boats. I read the night skies. He confessed on tape. The Crown Prince passed judgment. Pitani would die. Badu would kill. I lifted and hefted Utoma’s machete. I started down towards his front room.

  Emeigu tunoma. I froze. The voice and the spirit of Menai’s Mata. It cut through judgment, fell like The Fisher’s net over Leviathan. I was fire. I was stone. Nothing could break the power of Earth; but Tide could cover her for a time. Badu won’t kill. I tempered judgment. I laid down machete. His voice, his counsel . . . emeigu tunoma. I left.

  Cold awareness fell on me, separating me from all dreams of normalcy. I turned away.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘You said I could trust you.’

  ‘You didn’t . . . then . . .’

  ‘I’m telling you now. I’m remembering things that I . . . don’t remember doing . . . about Badu—’

  She turned away abruptly, a flat palm in the air like one that took an oath. ‘It’s too much for me, now.’

  My hands curled into fists. In the other room, the Mata was singing. My guilt cried out for silence. I suddenly pined for the dowry of normalcy that she could bring into my life. I whispered, ‘Help me, please.’

  She took an indecisive step towards the door. I let her out, turned off the lamp, and went in to Mata Nimito. He took a few spoons of jollof and pushed the food flask away. He hummed to himself. I sat next to him in the darkness. We spoke quietly, and the trickle of hesitant language inside me became a nostalgic stream. I was remembering. It was his voice and his counsel, emeigu tunoma, which had pulled me back from the brink of Badu. It had saved Charles Pitani’s life. It was history repeating itself, the peaceful counsel of the Mata against the bloody justice of the crown prince.

  ‘He’s not hungry?’ she asked from the opposite corner where she sat, hunched on her own.

  ‘Not really.’ I watched a gecko catch a moth on a moonlit sill. ‘Why did you come back?’

  Her teeth gleamed in the moonlight. ‘I guess the graves here spooked me. I think it’s a Sontik thing. I just stepped outside and I was like: “Amana! This is what you wanted!” You wanted help . . . I’ve called a doctor friend . . .’

  The Mata coughed. His voice was low, and I had to lean over. I scratched my head.

  ‘What did he say?’

  I fudged. ‘Many things, but he also wants us to bury him somewhere.’

  Her eyes rounded in horror.

  ‘Not alive, silly.’

  * * *

  THE STRANGER approached the house, making no effort to be either silent or discreet. We stepped away from the door as he pushed his way in, clicking on a torch as he did so. A bluish light bathed the room. He had the heavy, drawn features of the sickly Menai, but he stood erect. He wore a fringe of grey beard.

  ‘Mr. Rani! You followed me!’

  ‘I didn’t need to,’ he said to Amana, without shifting his gaze from me. ‘I know this house. Worie.’

  ‘Dobemu,’ I replied cautiously.

  ‘Enieme kwaya Mata.’

  I led him into the Mata’s room. Even then I could feel the tension between us. He went forward to the Mata as though in a trance, and I stood there, with Amana, for several minutes as they communed in low tones. When he rose to face me, I saw that he was struggling to control himself.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’

  I nodded. The memory had returned slowly, owing more to my journalism than our common heritage. ‘Tobin Rani. The Menai Legacy Group. You filed one of those cases against Trevi . . .’

  He waved that connection away impatiently. ‘Not that. Further back, twenty years ago, when you were a boy . . .’

  ‘No.’

  He looked up at the ceiling and down at Amana. ‘Can you wait outside?’

  She hesitated, glancing at me. I remembered my grand declaration. ‘This is my house and she’s staying.’

  He smiled. His voice was gentle. ‘Asie wu simini.’

  ‘And we’re speaking English.’

  His smile grew, and he took a step closer to Amana. When he placed his flat palm on her stomach, she was too surprised to react. ‘Are you pregnant yet?’ he asked softly.

  She slapped away his hand, and he turned to me brusquely. ‘If she’s the one you keep no secrets from, I totally approve.’ He came closer. ‘We are Menai, and we don’t have time to beat about the bush. Zanda, I know you’ve always wondered why you look like you do, despite having Malian for a mother and Tume for a father.’

  I took a step forward. He raised a finger and pointed at the Mata in the corner. I took a deep breath, beginning to wish I had let Amana go outside.

  ‘They died before they would have told you the truth: your birth mother was a Yorkshire girl called Laura Fraser. She’s dead now.’

  The earth beneath me gave a seismic heave.

  ‘Who’s his father?’ I heard Amana ask.

  ‘I am,’ said Tobin Rani, as I struggled to breathe, ‘—but don’t take my word for it, Zanda, talk to Mata Nimito. Come, Amana, let’s leave them now.’

  After turning off the lamp, he took her arm and led her, unresisting, out into the courtyard. The ground was still rolling, and I, dizzy, staggered forward, falling to my knees before the Mata. I heard a distant siren from the direction of the square.

  ‘Gerai torqwa mu,’ I mumbled, eventually.

 
He began my praisegenealogy, sixteen hundred and five years long, from the common ancestry of all Menai, the court of the exiled crown prince, Xera, cheated of his kingdom by his younger brother. I had started him off rashly and though the information I wanted was an hour away, and my mind was roiling with Tobin Rani’s revelations, there was no stopping him now. There was no rushing his cadenced recital either. I sat back, thumbing on the recorder on my phone to capture a history my mind was in no state to process, just then. It was going to be a while.

  The siren passed the darkness of the house and faded. I heard the barking of dogs. The minutes passed, and the Mata kept talking. I heard voices in the hallway: Tobin’s voice, Questionnaire’s voice.

  Mata Nimito chanted on, stringing his narration with anecdotal nuggets on illustrious ancestors. His voice calmed me. I had forgotten the antiquity of the Menai heritage and the power of a recital to bring it to life. As he progressed I was moved from the apathy of my six-year exile. As the room teemed with their names, I began to care for these ancestors who had lived and died hundreds of years ago. The longer he went on, the more rooted I felt, the more I felt like . . . someone.

  Deep into his recital, I was no longer alone in the room with him: Amana was sitting on her heels, as was Professor Balsam. I was past caring, seduced into another world by the song of the Mata. I knew I was probably hearing the last torqwa anyone would ever hear in this world. Mine. And it was by no means clear that the old man would have the energy to finish it.

  His voice transported me. It dissolved the shroud of the years. I was borne away into the forests of our sojourn, through the deserts and the savannahs. Through his voice I slipped into the age that moulded not just Mata Nimito but his predecessor, Mata Doa, and his predecessor, Mata Djani—right up to the illustrious first mata, Mata Nara, boon companion of Xera, crown prince of the Kingdom. Mata Nara, whose praise songs fortified the devastated crown prince on the first leg of the sojourn of the People that would become the Menai. Mata Nimito’s voice strengthened with pride as his narration proceeded, buoyed by the excellence of his recall.