by Okey Ndibe
“Then there was the dream I told you about. For a long time I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. There had to be a meaning to it. Why else would this woman appear in my dream night after night?”
Ask your penis.
“After the dream I went to see her. Just out of curiosity. Also to ask her how the villagers were faring.”
Lame liar!
“She told me she’d dreamt about me, too. And her dream also had to do with the river.”
May you drown in muck.
“I can assure you that this won’t affect our happiness.”
Speak for yourself!
“I told Nnenne that you come first. Always. She’s no threat to you.”
May the evil wind blow you off.
“You have to talk to me. Silence is not the answer. It’s unfair . . . I mean, unnecessary. Yes, it’s unnecessary. Try to express your feelings. Please.”
May the eyes with which you saw this woman be gouged out. May the legs that carried you to her collapse under your weight.
“Yes, even look me in the face and tell me you hate me.”
Why? You must roast in a slower fire!
He fell silent, rose from his seat and began to pace the room. It was only at this moment of mutual speechlessness that the pain began to seep into her, to enter her through all the feeling spots in her body. As it drilled towards the center of her being, she felt the room begin to spin in circles, slowly at first but quickly gathering motion.
The air became dense, blue; his face, before her, appeared to expand and dissolve. The room swam; her head rang with echoes. An anguished groan, involuntary, broke her silence as she slid into unconsciousness.
“Are you absolutely certain this is what you want to do, Mrs Jaja?”
“That is the second time you’ve asked that question,” Iyese said irritably.
“Forgive me,” said the lawyer, “but divorce is a serious matter.”
“And I am not a child!”
“If you were, perhaps my job would be easier. Sometimes adults don’t think things through. Some come riding the tide of some isolated domestic problem. ‘My husband is a smelly goat! I can’t stand him one more minute!’ Or, ‘My wife is a whore. She sleeps with every man who asks! I want to cut her loose. Now!’ There is no domestic scandal I haven’t heard in this office. None! Many have come just like you. Through this same door. Some even tell their shameful secrets to my secretary while waiting to see me. You won’t believe the things I hear. There’s this woman who came—two weeks ago as a matter of fact. Said her husband made love to her only once in two months—if she’s lucky. He’s too busy running after the young girls of the city. Then the last time he made love to her, he gave her gonorrhea! Yes, she came through this door and told me the story. ‘Quick, quick,’ she said, ‘I want a divorce. Don’t waste time,’ she pleaded, as if divorce were a meal you could run into a restaurant and order.
“Her husband is a very important man in society, head of a government department. When he barks orders, his subordinates jump out of their skin. That’s how big he is. And his wife brings me this terrible story about him. Why? Because he gave her gonorrhea and she thought she was through with him. I asked her the same question. I said, ‘Yes, this man has done something terrible, but are you sure you really want to leave him?’ Yes, she said, her mind was made up. I asked her to return the next day to sign some papers.
“Do you know when I saw her again? Four days later at a reception at the Goethe Institute. And she was with this same gonorrhea vendor of a husband! I called her aside and said, ‘Madam, you didn’t keep your appointment.’ She looked at me as if I were a filthy pig and said I should not disrupt her matrimonial peace. Yes, that’s what she said. Matrimonial peace! As if I woke up one morning, put on a jacket and went to her house to sell her the idea of divorce. ‘Okay,’ I said to her, ‘it’s wonderful if you have changed your mind, but I did some work and you owe me money.’ You should have seen how she sneered at me before she shuffled across the room and took her husband’s hand. Tell me, what should I have done? Should I have approached her husband and said, ‘Look, I did some work for your wife and she hasn’t paid me.’
“You do understand my dilemma, don’t you? Every case I take costs me money. But far too many people change their minds along the way. Which is their right, don’t get me wrong. In fact I like to see marriages succeed. But,” he looked intently in Iyese’s eyes, “I also like to get paid for work done.”
“Well, let’s cut things short. I will pay half your fees in advance.”
Iyese took out her check book. “What does it come to?” As she wrote, a strange sense of exhilaration rose up within her, attended by visions of freedom. It was mixed with a faint feeling of illicitness, as if she were about to taste a sweet, forbidden fruit.
Chapter Sixteen
Three short knocks rang sharply on Iyese’s door. Startled, she gazed at the door with a mixture of irritation and anxiety.
She had just finished telling me how, after the sad end of her marriage, she had made an impulsive decision to leave Bini immediately—too many of her dreams were tied to the city, as were the cruelest of her sufferings—and head, not in the direction of her village, where her family would receive her with resentment or pity, but towards Langa, a city she had never visited before but to which she was drawn because of what she had heard—that it was a vast, strange human bazaar where shame had no odor because people lived anonymously, where some of the most beautiful people walking the streets were ghosts and some of the saddest were corpses waltzing to their graves.
Another round of knocks sounded. I picked up my tape recorder, then lifted myself off the floor and onto the sofa. “Are you expecting anybody?”
Iyese hissed with disgust and started towards the door. Another burst of taps exploded before she reached it.
“Who is this?” she asked in a harsh accent.
“Major! Open the door!” cried a man in a raspy voice.
Iyese opened the door just enough to put her face through. “Isa, why do you want to break my door?”
The man answered, “You didn’t open, so I knocked harder.”
“I have told you I don’t like the way you knock on this door.”
He laughed. “Is that why you won’t invite me in? You still like the way my gun shoots, don’t you? Let me in!”
Hissing, Iyese made to close the door. The man put his shoe into the opening, wedging open the door.
“Okay, I know why you’re upset,” he said. “You haven’t seen me for a long time. I’ve been extremely busy. Now I’m back, and I brought Major Penis with me. Bigger and better, trust me. And he shoots faster, too!”
Unimpressed, Iyese said icily, “Go back to your wife.”
“Ah, but she travelled to Kano this afternoon. She won’t be back for two weeks. Think of that, Emilia. For two whole weeks, Major Penis will be yours—exclusively!”
“I’m not interested. Whether you call it major or minor penis, save it for your wife.”
“Oooh,” the man said in a soft purring tone. “Why are you treating me like this? Have I not given you good money? Clothes—have I not bought you many clothes, Emilia? Any time my wife is out of town, I take you to stay in my house. Is that bad? Think—what have I not done for you?”
“You have not left my door alone. I’m no longer interested in warming your bed when your wife is out of town. My boyfriend doesn’t want me to be ashawo anymore. Bye bye.”
She tried once again to shut the door, but the man gave it a violent push. The door swung open, sending Iyese reeling backwards until she thudded against the wall. She stood shock-eyed, winded. A stodgy young man bolted in, trailing a scent of whisky. He charged at her, cursing. Then he saw me and stopped. Our eyes met and stayed locked for a moment. Eventually I looked away.
He must have interprete
d this as a sign of capitulation on my part. He turned back on Iyese, raging in a way that made her tremble. I averted my eyes.
“I will kill you without consequence! I will show you that you’re nothing but a common filthy prostitute! Because I brought myself low to sleep with you, you open your dirty trap and tell me you’re not interested. I will show you who is who in this city! You find the mouth to tell me about your boyfriend. Boyfriend, indeed! Has he bought you half, one quarter, of what I have given you?”
Pausing, he looked around the room until his eyes settled on the television set. “Yes, this TV. Who bought it for you? Me!” He ran at the set and gave it a kick that sent it flying onto the floor. In another movement, he closed in on Iyese. He put one hand around her neck and leaned into her, trapping her, his face thrust close to hers.
“Who are you to insult me? Talk before I slap lightning into your eyes! I said, who gave you the temerity to insult me?”
He raised his right hand swiftly. Iyese shut her eyes, wincing. I sprang forward and grabbed his hand just in time. He glowered at me as though taking my measure, weighing an appropriate response.
“It’s enough,” I said, letting go of him. “You have made your point.”
I half expected him to come at me, but thanks to the karate training I had had at university I was ready to disable him with a kick in the groin. He seemed to consider the option of fighting me, but instead he turned and fixed Iyese with a long hard glare, then wheeled around and walked away.
“Who is he?” I asked after he had gone.
“Isa Palat Bello. He’s a major in the army.”
“You have known him for long?”
“I met him the first week I arrived in Langa. The woman I was staying with, a friend from high school, took me to a party at the Officers’ Mess. He was there, hopelessly drunk. I found him charming. I agreed to go to his house. There, I saw pictures on the walls, of him, his wife and their four daughters. The shock hit me: I had accompanied a married man to his house! His wife and their children had travelled to the North to see his father, the emir of Gabira. I said I must leave immediately, but he began to plead. Yes, like a helpless baby. Naively, I agreed to spend the night, thinking, what can a drunk man do?
“He raped me twice that night. When I threatened to report his unfaithfulness to his wife he laughed and said his religion entitled him to four wives and any number of concubines. I became his standby; whenever his wife went away he called me to warm his bed. Then three months ago he told me he had three other daughters by two other women, but that he planned to marry any woman who gave him a son. I told him of my childlessness and he stopped coming around—until today.”
“You bore a grudge, then? You felt he deserted you?”
“Deserted? No! I was relieved. I had tried to break off our relationship once before.”
“And?”
She laughed. “He slapped me until my eyes saw lightning. Then he raped me, laughing.”
“You should have reported him to the police.”
She sighed, exasperatedly. “Don’t you live in this country? The police told me that the law does not cover people like me.”
“What did they mean?”
“They asked if he was my husband. I said no. Was he my sugar daddy? I said I didn’t know what that meant. So they asked, was he married? I said yes. And did he spend money on me? I answered yes, from time to time. Then the officer in charge said, ‘Chikena, he’s your sugar daddy. He can beat you.’ I left the police station in tears.”
“And did he ever beat you again?”
“Many times. He once told me he likes it when a woman cries.”
“A sick man! Why did you stay with a man who treated you like filth?”
“I don’t know the answer.”
“Was it the money? The things he bought for you?”
“After my marriage, material things sickened me. I wish he would set fire to this house and destroy everything he’s ever bought me, even everything I own. Spare my life is all I ask, because I want to be happy again.” She looked at me with misty eyes.
“Where do monsters like him come from?” I asked aloud.
“A friend of his—he and Isa grew up together and joined the army the same day—once said to me that Isa has a good heart but a bad mouth. And that whisky causes him to go mad. It was also this man who told me about Isa’s military training in England.”
Isa Palat Bello’s road to a career in the army began the day he went through his father’s photo album and saw a picture that made an impression on his young mind. In it, Isa’s father, resplendent in his emir’s regalia, stood shoulder to shoulder with a white army officer. The whiteman cradled Isa, then a toddler, in his arms. The officer’s name was Colonel Mark Brady, once the British commander of the Royal West African Frontier Force. The colonel’s whiskers were long, his eyebrows thick, his eyes small but bright. Bello was charmed by Brady’s looks, especially his uniform: creaseless and clean, it suggested masculine valor. Brady’s erect posture in the photograph spoke of the Englishman’s power: Isa had seen other photographs in which other whitemen, standing beside his father, drew down their heads or cast down their eyes.
The British officer had encouraged the emir to send his first son to England for military training. The emir was impressed by the colonel’s talk about the powerful role the military stood to play in Madia’s post-Independence history.
“Think what an advantage it would be to have kith and kin in the army, to look out for your interests,” the Britisher told the emir, between gulps of hot tea laced with White Horse whisky.
Isa was a willing recruit. As soon as he was old enough he journeyed to England and, along with five other African cadets from Madia, Ghana and Sierra Leone, began his training at the military academy in Sandhurst. It was there that he first held and fired a gun—and so began to understand the contraption’s awful power and the source of Brady’s confidence.
As a Muslim and the son of an emir Isa was supposed to abhor alcohol. But the unfriendly coldness of England had made him lonely, low-spirited and open to temptation. He began to drink, first in small quantities, relishing the wave of calmness that washed over him after a swig or two of whisky, then less moderately. The liquor did things to him, made him prone to mood swings and bouts of excess, of both niceness and nastiness.
In England the destructiveness of his unpredictable moods was limited. If he was in good spirits he shared the fellowship of the other trainees. When he became surly, he withdrew to his private quarters or visited a brothel and worked off his fury on some poor English prostitute.
By the time he returned from England he was a serious alcoholic. According to the friend who explained this to Iyese, he had also begun to exploit his mood swings to display his power to others. He had fallen in love with the idea of himself as a man from whom people skulked away in dread. Despite his father’s entreaties, threats and the final extreme measure of banishing him from the palace, he went on drinking. He would not change, even after he lost one eye in a fight.
“You knew he would be furious to hear you mention a boyfriend.”
She nodded.
“So why take the risk?”
She glanced up at the ceiling, biting her lip. Then she looked at me and smiled. “Being in love made me daring.”
“Who are you in love with?”
The answer was in her smile. With a sensation compounded of lust, longing, tenderness and vague fear, I went to her. Conjoined at last, we lost ourselves in the unity of desire. We floated on a spumy lake, weightless, two entranced bodies.
Throughout the night our minds discovered new hungers and our bodies, entwined again and again, sated them.
In the morning I fetched my tape recorder, ready to leave. Iyese lay in bed, naked and graceful. While I looked at her she slightly opened her eyes and stretched the sides of her mouth
in a sleepy smile. “When will I see you again?
“This evening,” I said. “I’ll come over after work.”
Chapter Seventeen
I did not return that evening.
At the day’s editorial meeting, my eyes blinked uncontrollably as I struggled against sleep, exhausted by the repeated love making of the previous night. Eventually I nodded off, waking only when my head dropped sharply sideways. Some time must have passed, for my colleagues were gathering their papers and rising from their seats. I picked up my own papers and left, wondering whether I had snored.
I barely stayed awake in the taxi that drove me home. I ran up the stairs to my second-floor flat, kicked off my shoes, and slumped into bed. As I geared into deep sleep my room seemed to rotate in a whirling motion.
A rumbling in my stomach woke me up. It was past midnight. Too hungry to sleep, but too tired to get up and prepare food, I lay in bed and thought about Iyese, which soon became a way of thinking about myself, and about my mother, my grandmother and my father. What would they have thought about my relationship with Iyese? Would they have seen her primarily as a prostitute, and our friendship as therefore profane? Or would they have been moved by her spirit, her struggle for a dignified existence in circumstances so dire and inhuman? Weighing these questions, I lost myself, once again, to sleep.
The next day, on my way to work, I stopped to see Iyese. There was no response to my first knock. I knocked again, harder. Silence still answered me. I gripped the doorknob and turned it. Much to my surprise the door opened.
“Iyese,” I called out, walking in. Hearing no answer, I shifted the partition that led to her bedroom. The room reeked of sweat. She was in bed, naked, spread-eagled, a pillow lodged between her thighs.
“Ah, you’re home,” I said, with relief.
She looked at me with tired eyes, silent.
“I hope you haven’t been in bed ever since I left yesterday.”
Silence.
“I made a total fool of myself at the office. I slept through the editorial meeting. I went home after the meeting for a quick nap, planning to return here refreshed. You can imagine the rest of the story.”
