by Okey Ndibe
“Your father spoke to you before he went on his journey. You did not hear him. Do you know why? Because young men of today have lost the things of old. You no longer hear the language of things not said with words.
“Your father did not follow death like a lame man. He first wanted to know that you can stand in the world like a man. You must always remember that you come from a line of speakers. Your grandfather was the town crier for all of Amawbia. Your own father could have succeeded him, but he grew up in the age of the whiteman’s rule. So he went to the whiteman’s country and learned to become a new kind of voice, one that was heard far beyond Amawbia. Now you, a child of yesterday, have joined the line. You have begun to do what your father did and his father before him. What you scratch on paper can go and give a headache to a big man. You make powerful men stay awake at night.
“Don’t fear any man, but fear lying. Remember this: a story that must be told never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth’s debt to a story. You came from good loins. Your mother’s breast was not sour when you drank from it. Let the things your mother and father taught you be your language in the world.”
With her hand, she again traced the contours and features of my face. As though pleased with what her fingers detected, she smiled.
“My own end is near,” she continued. “My bones already warn me of death’s approach. Yes, soon you will be left alone in the world. But you don’t have to be lonely. The world teems with people. All you need is to wash your eyes. Learn to smell people’s spirits. Run away from any man or woman whose spirit smells of evil. Find yourself a good wife, the kind your father married. True, your father didn’t have a wealth of children. But look at you. Who can say you’re not worth more than ten children? You must have a house full of children. Yes, have many sons and many daughters. As our people say, when sleep becomes sweet, we start snoring.”
She paused again, to whistle a tune. I thought of my girlfriends, past and present, but saw none of them as the mother of my children. I smiled, reining in a laugh.
“Laugh if my words tickle you,” she said. “But remember what our elders teach: throw me away, but don’t throw away my words. Son of my son, words are finished in my mouth.”
The Monitor was in turmoil when I arrived back at my desk. Ashiki had suggested in his weekly column that the editorial board of the paper should be disbanded. The column exposed the board members as a bunch of overpaid and conceited mediocrities passing off pat formulas as considered opinions.
In public, the other members of the board affected a calm composure, but in furtive conclaves they plotted their revenge. They tried to persuade me to write a reply to Ashiki’s piece, but I excused myself on the grounds of grief over my father’s death.
The truth was that I shared Ashiki’s sentiments. I had another reason, too, which was more pragmatic. My efforts to gain Ashiki’s friendship had so far failed. It was not that he had rebuffed me; his attitude was more passive than that. He seemed to have no enthusiasm for friendship, as though suspicious of the complications of human attachments. Like the snail, he reached out warily, but mostly stayed in his shell. If I stood firm with him, perhaps he would one day relent and let me into that space he so zealously claimed for himself.
I had learned a little about Ashiki from others on the staff of the Monitor. The profile was sketchy yet fascinating, a jumble of facts and fables, exactness and exaggeration, certainty and conjecture.
In the late 1940s Ashiki had been a student at St. Gregory’s Grammar School in Langa. There he earned the nickname Monsoon by setting a record in the 100-yard dash that would not be broken for twenty-three years. He won a scholarship to Cambridge and after taking a degree in Economics returned to Madia to accept a position in the civil service. He became a notorious reveler, a skilled dancer of the twist, a man much desired by women. One night he got so drunk at a party that he broke the nose of a young man who had made a pass at his female companion. His victim was the scion of a wealthy Lebanese merchant. The aggrieved father put a price on Ashiki’s head. Ashiki disguised himself as a Catholic priest to wait out the merchant’s fury, but when it became apparent that the man was bent on avenging his son, Ashiki sneaked out to Ghana and then flew to Belgium. He ended up staying five years, enough time to earn two masters degrees and to marry (by his own account) a beautiful Belgian woman. After fathering two sons, he got bored with marriage and Brussels.
He returned to Madia on the heels of a huge consignment of stockfish he had ordered from Norway. In those days Madian merchants could make modest fortunes from the dry, nutritionless fish. Ashiki moved into Langa Palace Hotel, a seedy but expensive establishment where rich men could enjoy unhindered liaisons with prostitutes, and began to run through his fortune. Evicted from the hotel after squandering all his money on women and wine, Ashiki began another life as a high-class vagrant, throwing himself on the hospitality of the country’s rich and powerful. It was at a party given by one of his wealthy hosts that he met the publisher of the Daily Monitor and got himself hired as the paper’s economics editor.
A few months after my father’s death, Ashiki and I would finally become friends, brought together by a shared experience of grief. I was mourning my grandmother, who had already been buried by the time I received a letter from the local headmaster, “saddened to convey the tragic news of Nne’s untimely transition.” Ashiki had suffered a far more shocking loss.
It was one of the hottest days of May 1965. I arrived at the Daily Monitor in low spirits, my energy sapped by the sweltering sun. Ashiki looked up as I walked in, and beckoned to me. As I approached he removed his glasses and ran his thumb and index finger over his closed eyes and down his nose.
“Do you remember my sister who was here recently with her two daughters?”
How could I forget? She was a lively and beautiful woman, returning to Madia for the first time since leaving for England seventeen years earlier. In England she had qualified as a dentist and had married and borne two daughters. These two girls she had brought with her to the offices of the Monitor, and the normally unsociable Ashiki had come out of his shell, showing off his sister and two nieces to everybody he ran into, boasting about their beauty and brilliance, jokingly warning me not to stare at the girls because they would marry oyibo, white men, not a bush African.
“Of course I remember her.”
“She’s dead,” Ashiki said in a matter-of-fact voice. I had not quite absorbed the news when he asked again, “You remember her older daughter, the one you fancied for your wife?”
A redundant question; he knew that I remembered.
“She’s dead, too.” The information came in the same anaesthetized tone.
I was confounded. How could this be true? “A car accident?” I asked at last.
“No,” he said. “Her husband.”
The man had hacked his wife to death. Their older daughter had tried to come to her mother’s aid and he had turned on her, leaving her, too, a heap of flesh and blood.
Ashiki would say no more. He reached down beside his desk and brought up a bottle of beer. His Adam’s apple working greedily in his throat, he gulped down its contents. I now noticed that four empty beer bottles already lay on the floor.
My father’s death and my grandmother’s more recent passing gave me some insight into what must be Ashiki’s hideous pain. A thing like this, I thought with anguish, could destroy a man.
Ashiki set the drained beer bottle down on his desk. Our eyes met and he rose from his seat.
“Do you want to get a drink at Mama Joe’s Bar?”
“Yes.”
There were three customers in the bar’s common room when we entered: a man who drank in solitude, slowly running his palm over a bottle of beer, muttering to himself, and a couple seated in a shadowy corner, the bantam man telling his female companion about a street fight in Fernando Po in which he bloodied three men and
sent one of them to the hospital. We exchanged pleasantries with Mama Joe, then passed into the bar’s inner room, called the Executive Chamber. It was every bit as rusty as the outer room, but the customers who drank there paid an extra ten percent—for their vanity.
Ashiki ordered another Heineken, I a large Guinness stout. At first we drank in a strained silence, for tragedy can tie the tongue. Then I found the courage to ask, “This husband of your sister’s, was he crazy?”
“No!” Ashiki said, and began to fill in the gaps in the story. His sister’s husband had lived in England for nineteen years, a beneficiary of one of those scholarships that were once available to Madians just for the asking. He had wanted to train as a chartered accountant, but had continually failed the exams. The man had not visited home since he left for England; he did not want to feel like a dullard in the eyes of his relatives, who would be apt to ask questions about his career. When his wife wanted to take their two daughters to Madia on a short vacation, the man had opposed the idea. They travelled anyway, but upon their return to England, the relationship between the man and his wife went from testy to turbulent—then all the way to tragic one short-tempered night.
A scowl came over Ashiki’s face. “My own sister,” he cried. “Killed like a fowl! Who gave birth to this monkey that shat in the church!” He doubled over and sobbed inconsolably.
We ordered another round of drinks, and then another. After we had finished drinking I told Mama Joe that the bill was mine.
Outside the bar, Ashiki asked me to go on with him to a night club. His sorrow was so raw, his need to escape from himself and his thoughts so desperate, that I could not refuse. He flagged down a taxi and asked the driver to take us to Itire.
Chapter Eleven
There were only a few patrons when we arrived at the Good Life Nite Club and Bar. It was a ramshackle place with a small circular dance floor illuminated by blue and red lights. The air reeked of cigarettes and stale alcohol. The loud music made the furniture vibrate.
We found a place to sit at one of the tables in the drinking area. As we squeezed our way between the other tables one or two customers saluted Ashiki, whose exuberance made it clear the bar was his lair.
Two waiters hurried towards us when we took our seats, arguing for the right to serve us. Ashiki and I ignored their squabble. Presently Ashiki called out to a waitress, a tall bony woman. She beamed a coquettish smile as she approached.
“What will my husband and his friend drink today?”
“I’ll divorce you if you’ve forgotten what I drink,” Ashiki warned her.
“No vex-o, my husband. But wetin your yellow friend go like?”
“I want you,” I said.
“Otio! My husband here is jealous-o,” she said, pointing to Ashiki.
“If I can’t have you then I’ll take a Sprite,” I said.
“Ah, but Sprite be drink for women-o. And children,” she retorted.
“He’ll take a Guinness stout,” Ashiki told her.
“That is more better,” she said, ignoring my protest that I was already too intoxicated to drink more of the Irish brew.
We had just started our third round of drinks when two women drew out chairs and joined our table. One of them reeked of perfume too lavishly sprayed. They kissed Ashiki’s forehead, then began to upbraid him for failing to turn up the day he promised to treat them to drinks.
“I was out of town on assignment,” he said languidly.
“Lie!” shouted one of the women. She was skinny and toothy and chewed gum in a coarse, showy way.
“It’s true,” Ashiki insisted. “I was in Port Harcourt for a seminar on tariff structures.”
“Tariff wetin?” asked the woman in pidgin.
“Structures. You may ask my colleague.”
“Your friend whom you have not introduced,” the other woman chastised Ashiki. She wore a light-green fichu.
Turning to me, she said, “I’m Emilia. She is Violet.”
“Ogugua,” I said, nodding slightly. Emilia’s hair, parted in the middle, made her seem at once comely and domestic. She looked faintly familiar, but my mind was too blurred. I wanted to acknowledge Violet, but her eyes were cold.
“Yes, Ashiki was away in Port Harcourt,” I confirmed.
Violet glanced sternly at me. “You too be journalist, abi?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you be liar.”
“Because I’m a journalist?”
“Yes. You journalists have sugar mouth but no truth inside.”
Emilia cast her a contemptuous look. “You can’t call the man a liar when you don’t even know him.”
“Who says?” asked Violet in a raised voice.
“I say!” replied Emilia.
“Who born you?”
“You’re crazy, Violet. That’s your problem.”
“Who crazy? Na you be crazy! You and your mama and your papa be crazy!”
“Enough, girls!” Ashiki broke in. “We want to drink in peace, please! Keep quiet. Or leave us alone.”
“You should talk to Emilia,” said Violet. “She . . .”
“Shut up!” Ashiki snapped, frustrating her attempt to sneak in the last word. She rose and went to join two other men.
“I didn’t mean to spoil your evening,” Emilia apologized to Ashiki and me.
“It’s okay,” said Ashiki.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said.
“I’ll understand if you want me to leave too.”
“No.” Ashiki placed a hand on her arm. “I need to talk to you.”
When he told her the news of his sister and niece, she began to sob, asking questions through her tears. Ashiki’s eyes too swelled with tears. He dropped his head in his cupped hands and began to shake.
“Take it easy, Ashiki,” I said, but he was already crying and fleeing in the direction of the men’s toilet. I followed him. The stench of stale urine, sour vomit and unflushed waste overpowered his grief. He hurried back to the crowded bar, passed our table, and went out into the crisp air of the streets. He turned around and seemed surprised that I had followed him outside.
“I’m all right,” he said once we were out in the dark street. “Go and keep Emilia company.”
“I don’t think she’ll die of loneliness.”
“I hope not. You know, she reminds me of my sister. Not so much in looks as in the way she speaks. Exactly the way my sister spoke. It makes it seem somehow incestuous, the lust I feel for her.”
“You’ve slept with Emilia?” I asked a little too excitedly.
“Almost. The first day I came here Emilia and I talked for a long, long time, over many drinks. I asked her to come home with me. Of course, I was planning to ravish her. But by the time she had got undressed I was already snoring. I woke up early in the morning and saw her still naked, sleeping beside me. Strangely, I didn’t have a desire to make love. Instead, I felt the shame of a man waking up to the sight of his naked sister. I covered her body with a sheet. From that day on, I came to look upon her as my absent sister. Some days I would come here simply out of a need to see her—or to see my real sister through her.”
A brief silence fell between us, then Ashiki said, “Take good care of Emilia. I’m going to take Violet home with me. I can’t face the night alone.”
I returned to our table. Emilia sat composed, gazing at her glass of gin and tonic. She gave me a long smile. I took my seat and leaned towards her so that my arms touched hers. “Ashiki has left,” I said.
“I know. With Violet. He told me.” She paused, then added, “I hope she is good to him. Death is not a small thing.”
We sipped our drinks. After a moment I asked, “Do you want to dance?”
“No. Let’s sit and talk.”
“I don’t have much to say,” I said. “I don�
�t know you that well.”
“All the more reason to talk. So we can know each other better.” She gave me a shimmering smile.
“I like your smile.” The compliment sounded awkward, gauche.
“What do you like about it?”
“It’s the kind of smile you associate with temptresses in films. But yours is real.”
“How do you know?”
“I can tell.”
“Was Shakespeare wrong, then?”
“Shakespeare?” I had not expected Shakespeare to enter the talk.
“Didn’t he write that there was no art to find the mind’s construction on the face?”
“He did,” I said. “But he obviously didn’t have the privilege of meeting you. He might have known better had he seen your smile.”
“Oh, stop. You dangerous flatterer.”
For a moment we remained silent. Then I asked, “Do you like Shakespeare?”
“I taught his plays.”
“You were a teacher?” I was embarrassed to hear the surprise in my voice.
She nodded. “For almost four years. History, Geography and Literature.”
“Did you like teaching?
“I enjoyed teaching History the most. Literature was more demanding. Geography was a chore.”
“Why did you leave teaching?”
“It’s a long story. And not a story you tell in a noisy bar.” She looked gently into my eyes. “My flat is around the corner. If you come with me, I will make you some coffee.”
Her flat was a tasteful play of white and black. White walls, a black two-seater sofa made of fine leather, two white poufs with Arabic patterns, a black dressing table on which stood an ornate Indian vase containing fresh hibiscus flowers. Around the vase, bottles of perfumes, powders, lipsticks, nail polishes were arranged in a way that suggested a desire for symmetry and order. On one wall, just above the table, hung a black-and-white photograph of herself, taken when she was much younger. The picture’s background was delicately darkened, so that her smiling face seemed poised to break through the glass in the frame. Her kitchen, to the left as one entered the room, was meticulously clean, like a decorative unit, not a place where cooking was done.
