by Okey Ndibe
Iyese faced her grandmother in silence.
“The morning seems to have taken away your voice,” observed the old woman. “So, let me tell you why I always remind you that you belong to my womb. It means I will never deceive you. One does not mislead one’s own blood. No! The earth forbids it.”
Under the weight of her grandmother’s eyes Iyese swelled with anger and silently vowed that this was the day when she would break the spell with which the old one ensnared her. But how could she? How, when the bond between them was not of this world, but something forged in the country of spirits?
“The prayer of every mother,” the old one continued, “is for her daughter to have a husband. A good husband, not just any man with a penis dangling between his thighs. A good husband is the pride of a woman. He is a tree on which her family may lean to rest from the hardness of life, a tree in whose shade they may take refuge from the roasting sun or the weeping skies. Are your ears open to my words?”
Iyese nodded, seething.
“Good,” said the grandmother. “I certainly don’t wish to waste the water of my mouth. My daughter, keep your ears open and hear my words. My insides were filled with joy when you told me that you found the man you wished to make your husband. When you told me that the man is a healer, I even danced the dance of my youth, that’s how happy I was. As an old woman with a broken body, I wanted a healer as my in-law. But our people say that to hear is not enough; to see is better. So I said, let me not dance too much and break my legs before I have seen the man who has taken my daughter’s heart. Yesterday I saw him with my two eyes. I thank the One who lives in the sky for giving me two good eyes. My daughter, my eyes did not find satisfaction in what they saw.”
Iyese made to speak but the old one hushed her. “Wait, my daughter, let me finish. My spirit tells me this is not the man for you. Your real husband is still in the hands of the future. You will meet him and you will know.”
In a calm voice that concealed her exasperation, Iyese asked, “Great Mother, what if I know that Maximus is the one?”
“Knowledge comes in different shades. Remember the warning Mother Mouse gave to Baby Mouse about wandering too far afield. Did Baby Mouse listen? No! He knew his way around, he boasted. But one day Cat caught up with him and made a sumptuous meal of him. The ruin of the world is that children no longer listen to their parents. You read one or two books, then think you have fathomed the mysteries of life. A wise child listens to the voice of her parents. We see things that the eyes of youth cannot.”
“Great Mother,” Iyese said, but again her grandmother hushed her with a raised palm.
“I am the mother of your father. He listened with open ears when I talked. But you—you dispute what I say. Please explain one thing to me: This your wisdom, where did it come from?”
Iyese knew that the question was more for effect than in expectation of an answer.
Having established her right to speak without further interruptions, the old woman now spoke in a calm, even voice.
“My spirit does not accept this man. A healer like him should not walk about on foot like a palmwine tapper. No, he should ride in a car. But this man of yours shambles about on foot, the dust accompanying him as it does the village urchins on their way to the stream. Then he tried to cover his shame with lies only an idiot would believe—that in the country of the white man many healers go to work on bicycles or even ride kia kia buses. Did he think he was talking to fools? We have seen other healers who went to the whiteman’s country. They come back with big cars. You heard your man say he prefers poverty to riches. Does a sane man say that kind of thing to his in-laws? How is he going to find food for your stomach? How will he make sure you don’t appear naked in the gathering of women?
“My daughter, the world has changed. This is no longer the time when everyone got the yam and cocoyam they needed from their own farm. The world of today speaks the language of money. You know the burden your mother has carried since your father died and left her with three children to feed. You need a husband who will wipe your mother’s brow and relieve her of some of her load.”
Her eyes fixed on Iyese, the old one said, “There’s another thing, child of my womb. Who cannot see that this man is too old for you? When a man is as old as he and unmarried, something is not right. His people need to take him to a medicine man.”
“Great Mother,” Iyese began, sitting up on the bed so that her eyes met her grandmother’s. “There is no way a sapling such as I can contradict your talk. Who am I but your little daughter who is still learning the way of speech? All my learning is not up to the saliva you spit out in the morning. My wisdom is nothing but foolishness where you stand. Great Mother, I cannot quarrel with your words. I can only try to explain myself a little.
“It is true that Maximus has no car. But that will change. He will buy a car. A very big car, and you will be the first to ride in it. I also know he is much older than I. That was one of the things I noticed when I first met him. But the first thing I saw was his goodness. He is a man of love. His love shines like the sun.”
The matriarch smiled with satisfaction. “My daughter, you have spoken like a child born from a good womb. But I want you to know that love is never enough for marriage. If you were making friendship with this man, then you might feed on love all day and all night. But marriage is different. One washes one’s two eyes in water before journeying into marriage. I don’t want you to run back to this compound tomorrow and say that what you saw in this man you no longer see. Or that you have eaten so much love that it now tastes bitter in your mouth. Do you understand my words?”
“Yes, Great Mother. Maximus and I will have a good marriage. I will never run away like an ogbanje. Maximus will change. Don’t our people say that whenever one wakes up becomes one’s morning? That tree you want him to be, that’s what he will be.”
Later that day, when Iyese’s family met to discuss what message to send back to her suitor, the matriarch stunned the others by speaking in Dr. Jaja’s favor.
“Iyese has explained herself to me. The man strums the music that moves her heart. Iyese is the one who will live in the same house with the man. Our people say that the person most close to someone smells the tang of his breath.”
The relatives were lost for words. The person they had chosen as their advocate had betrayed them, and not one of them, man or woman, could stand up and defy her. What they saw as unforgivable treachery Iyese and her grandmother saw as some thing altogether different: the triumph of love. For Iyese it was also something else: the fulfilment of a promise she had made in a moment of ecstasy.
After the meeting the old one drew Iyese aside for a last chat. “My words are not many,” she said, taking Iyese’s hand and walking towards the udala tree in the center of the compound.
“Nobody now stands between you and this man. But I must whisper a small message to your ears. A wise woman can take any man and mold him into the husband she wants. You must mold this man to be a profit to you, to your children and to your family. I know you are a wise woman. I know it in my marrow.”
“Great Mother,” Iyese said, “I understand your words.”
Two years later Iyese graduated from Madia Teachers’ College. Shortly afterwards she and Dr. Jaja were joined in marriage according to the rites of her people.
Unlike the doctor’s first visit to Iyese’s village, his arrival for the traditional wedding was a spectacle. He was preceded by a convoy of eight gleaming cars, their upholstery draped in white. He himself rode in a black sun-roofed Mercedes Benz that brought up the rear. When the convoy approached Iyese’s village, Dr. Jaja lifted himself through the car’s roof. A broad smile adorned his face as he waved to the villagers who stood along the dusty road, awed by the magnificent cavalcade.
The feasting and splendor that attended the event had not been seen in Iyese’s village before, and has not been repea
ted since. Droves of people streamed into the bride’s compound to savor the gay atmosphere, to see the dance troupes Dr. Jaja hired to provide entertainment, to eat and drink, and to gaze at the cars. At the end the oldest man in Iyese’s village poured libations and invoked the ancestors. He asked them to bless the new couple with plenitude, to ensure that they did not want for yam or cocoyam, to favor them with riches, longevity and children. Especially children, he implored, for he knew of the ancient curse that lived in Iyese’s compound.
“Four years have passed since the end of our marriage,” Iyese said, shaking her head. “But one unanswered question still nags at me. Why had he changed so easily? Was it all of his own accord, without prompting from me?”
Looking back she saw how enraptured she had been, too absorbed in events to be shocked by Dr. Jaja’s metamorphosis. Why did he throw away that part of him she had first seen in Utonki? Did it have to do with the bureaucrats who belittled the work he did among the villagers? Was his spirit broken by his colleagues who looked on him as a naive idealist? Or did the change come from something that lay hidden within him all along?
All Iyese could say for certain was that not long after his move to Bini Dr. Jaja began to change. He began to cherish the material things Madians believed to be the spring of happiness: cars, color television, refrigerators. “Especially cars,” Iyese emphasized.
He frequented the Bini public library to borrow automobile magazines. Whenever he and Iyese shared an evening at home, he would steer their talk to cars, reeling off terms that meant nothing to her: combustion, horse power, hydraulic range, thermodynamism. He stopped asking how her teaching was going. When she tried to tell him anyway, he frowned or yawned.
One day Dr. Jaja returned from work and flopped down on their black leather sofa like a man wasted by fatigue. Iyese, who was always home first, walked up to him and kissed his brow. “How was your day?” she asked.
“Tiring and exhausting.” He gave the same response, she told me, day after day.
A moment later he said to her, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe we should go on holiday somewhere abroad. England, Europe. What do you think?”
“Fabulous,” she said, without much emotion. For she too had learned to play the middle-class game. Overseas vacations were part of the package for people in their station, along with cognac, fine chinaware, dinner parties, and the complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica that adorned many middle-class shelves, never opened, gathering dust.
“You know,” and he winked at her, “to work full-time on the p. project.”
“If the reason you want a vacation is to procreate, I’m not going,” she sourly said, walking away to the bedroom.
It was already three years since their wedding and Iyese had never become pregnant. Once she had broached the subject of adopting a child, but Dr. Jaja had been cold to the idea.
“My relatives would think that I wasn’t strong enough to sire children,” he said.
Iyese’s childlessness bred an anxiety that suffocated something inside her. It did not help that her husband had taken to speaking about their love-making as the procreation project. She had been to see several doctors, but none could pinpoint the source of her apparent infertility. One doctor had recommended hormone supplements, to no avail. Another had put her on an eclectic regime of medication and stress-reduction therapy. That, too, had failed. The rest had simply thrown their hands up in despair.
Iyese’s anxiety was caused less by the doctors’ uncertainties than by her own knowledge of the curse that hung over her compound.
Once upon a distant time, the story went, her ancestors had given away a woman of the compound to some colorless strangers in exchange for whisky, tobacco and gunpowder. They knew that Ala, the earth goddess, frowned upon such a sacrilege, but they had proceeded all the same. As the woman was taken away she had rent the air with her sorrows and called down the curse of childlessness on one woman in every generation born in the compound.
Even before her marriage, Iyese often wondered, in dread, if she would be the childless one among her generation.
Now the remembrance of this curse gave her a desperate sense that something ominous—an indeterminate darkness—was hurtling towards her. For months she endured the most wretched misery of her life. Her health, too, suffered: her body burned with strong fevers and a hellish ache pounded in her head. Friends, even strangers, noticed her dulled eyes, but not Dr. Jaja, who seemed to glow with a vitality she could not comprehend, much less share.
One day, convinced that she was dying, she decided to try to penetrate the mystery of his happiness.
“I notice that you carry on as if there were no clouds in your life,” she said to him one evening as he sat in a rocking chair pouring himself wine from a carafe.
“Do you believe in dreams?” he asked her.
“Only those with lots of flowers. My grandmother told me their meaning.”
“How about water?”
“I’m not sure, but I think water is a bad omen in dreams,” Iyese answered.
“Some months ago I dreamt the same dream over three nights. There were minor variations here and there, but it was the same dream in all important respects. For three nights!”
“What happened the fourth night?” she asked.
“It was dreamless. But on the fifth day I knew the meaning of my dream. I was in the bathroom when the meaning came.”
She listened, quietly disgusted, as he described the dream.
He is out fishing. He has gone far out to the river’s deepest parts which are ominously calm and quiet, unreached by the cacophony of birds and crickets and toads. These depths teem with the strangest variety of fish, but they are also the river’s eating mouth, thick with the odor of death. Only fishermen initiated into the magic of the river can broach these parts and still find their way home.
He is alone, casting nets, catching nothing, cursing his luck. A multitude of fish slice through the river or break through the surface and leap clear through the air, but all of them elude him. Suddenly, with no warning, darkness falls, impenetrable. How is he to find his way?
Instinct becomes his eyes, fear, his hands. The fisherman’s anxiety not to become food for the fish; the predator’s prayer to be spared the fate of the preyed-upon. In that instant of blind withdrawal he discovers that his net has trapped a heavy thing. He drags his belated prize onto the canoe and paddles feverishly in the direction in which his instinct points him. He paddles until his hands become numb with pain, the darkness in his head denser than the night that envelops him, then he abandons the canoe to its course. All along he has the sensation that the fish trapped in his net is observing his dread with fierce eyes.
Soon the canoe drifts to an area of dazzling light. The brightness rocks him, and he is so afraid he cannot cry out. His catch is thrashing about in the bottom of the boat. He looks at it, then freezes at what he sees, the huge eyes, almost human, down the length of the scaleless body. Murderous eyes, blood gurgling within them.
The canoe begins to sink, softly, surrounded now by thick algae and water weed. The monster-fish breaks loose, begins to swim menacingly around him, teeth bared. He knows there is no need to struggle, there is no escape.
The inevitable moment comes; the monster-fish lurches with its fang-like teeth. He closes his eyes, visualizing the world in vivid crimson. Instead his falling body is caught by human hands, a woman’s soft, rescuing hands. He begins to ascend slowly, like a bubble rising up through the water. The resurrection is in slow motion, as if time had found a new way to mock human misery. His body, mildewy, rises, yearns for a sunbath, rises. The hands resurrect him, delicate but determined, raising his body towards the sun and safety.
Only when he has reached firm land is he granted a sight of the woman who has saved him. Tall, beautiful, black, pink lipped, she is smiling at him—his benefactor.
At
this point the dream peters out and he wakes up, a man trapped in the half-way house between remembrance and forgetting, a struggle to remember that merely leads to frustration because this, like most dreams, is inchoate.
The meaning came on the fifth day. Lying in the bathroom, submerged in warm water, lathering his body, his mind at rest, he recognized the face of his rescuer. Nnenne, the daughter of the chief elder of Utonki. The village elder had once tried to talk him into marrying Nnenne, a nurse who lived in Bini.
Whenever Nnenne returned to the village she put on an air of shyness, a false front through which her lack of innocence was apparent to those who knew how to see such things. It was said that in the city she was by no means an angel, that she wore thigh-revealing skirts and high-heeled shoes and painted her eyelashes with mascara. Some said she went to parties wearing no bra, so that her supple breasts heaved wickedly when she danced, tempting even the impotent.
Nnenne had schemed to capture his affections, but in those days his mind was not on marriage. And yet the idea had sometimes tempted him, especially during the harmattan season when he woke up in the morning, alone and cold, curled up like a widower, his member swollen with desire.
Dr. Jaja’s affair with Nnenne had gone on for ten months before he told Iyese. By then Nnenne was more than three months pregnant.
“I still love you,” he said midway through his confession. “Believe me.”
Iyese remained silent. She knew that in his rehearsals of this scene he would have pictured her throwing a tantrum, would have planned how to control her outburst. Anger was easy enough to deal with. Silence was more difficult.
“Believe me,” he repeated, prodding for a reaction.
I blame myself for marrying scum like you.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you. But I’m not getting any younger. And our childlessness has become difficult.”
May she bear you a monster!
