Africa39 (44 page)

Fairy ghostmother.

Had bled out in labour.

A stranger to Fola, no more than a face, so unusually pale that she looked in her portrait as if she’d been born without blood, cut from ice. Still so pretty. Stuff of legend. Local celebrity in Kaduna, Igbo father as famous for his post in the North as for plucking one rose from the grounds of the mission and marrying her, a Scotswoman, auburn-haired Maud. And the rest of it: shame, stillborn son, successive miscarriages, the shaking of heads and the wagging of tongues,
see, the Scotswoman can’t bear the Igbo man’s child,
then the one white-skinned daughter, the magic mulatto. Little princess of Kaduna. Colonial Administrator’s daughter. Won a bursary to study nursing in London after the war, promptly met and immediately married Kayo Savage, Fola’s father, lawyer, late of the Royal Air Force. Felled in childbirth, etc. No one said it. No one mentioned that they never came to see her, Rt. Hon. John and Maud Nwaneri, never called nor sent a gift, but she could guess it: that they blamed her for their only daughter’s early death, as she would come to hate them for his.

But not yet.

First: waking at midnight with space in her chest. Second: slipping down the hallway to her father’s bedroom, vacant. Third: ascending to his empty bed, still warm with scent (rum, soap, Russian Leather) and covering her face with his thick kente blanket, then lying, unmoving, eyes open, heart racing. Still as a corpse, swathed in cotton and sweating, with the A/C not on, with her father not there, gone to Kaduna that morning, having heard from some friends that the Igbos in the North were in trouble again.

‘
Again?
’ she’d sighed, sulking, loudly slurping her breakfast
(
gari
, sugar water, ice), already knowing he was going by his having prepared this. ‘A bush girl’s breakfast’ as he called it, mocking. Powdered yam in ice water, her favourite. If this grandfather of hers was as rich as they said, with his Cyclone CJ and his split-level ranch, then why must her father go ‘check on him’ always, she’d asked, crunching ice, but she knew. He had to go, always, to appease them, to redeem himself, to beg again forgiveness for the death of Somayina (which was, technically speaking, not
his
fault but hers, infant Fola’s, the doctor’s at least, or the womb’s).

‘They’re always in trouble, these Igbos.
Na wow o
.’

‘Your mother was an Igbo.’

‘Half.’

‘That’s quite enough.’ But when she looked he was laughing, coming to kiss her head, leaving. ‘I’ll be back before Sunday. I love you.’

‘
Mo n mo
.’

There was no equivalent expression for
I love you
in Yoruba. ‘If you love someone, you show them,’ her father liked to say. But said it nevertheless in English, to which she’d answer in Yoruba, ‘I know.’

Mo n mo
.

Out the door.

Just like that.

Stood, set down his coffee cup, kissed her on the forehead once, hand each on her Afro puffs, walked out the door. Gone. Woolly hair and woollen suit and broad and buoyant shoulders bobbing, bobbing, bobbing out of view. The swinging door swung open, shut.

Fourth: fourteen hours later in his bed beneath the blanket, sliding down beneath the kente into darkness, absence, scent and heat, a still and silent ocean. And remaining. In the quiet. Lying ramrod straight, not moving, knowing.

That something had been removed.

That a thing that had been in the world had just left it, as surely and simply as people leave rooms or the dust of dead dandelion lifts into wind, silent, leaving behind it this empty space, openness. Incredible, unbearable, interminable openness appearing now around her, above her, beyond her, a gaping, inside her, a hole, or a mouth: unfamiliar, wet, hollow and hungry. Unappeasable.

The details came later – such as details ever come, such as one can know the details of a death besides one’s own, how it went, how long or calming, cold or terrifying, lonely – but the thing happened there in the bedroom. The loss. Later, if ever alone, she’ll consider it, the uncanny similarity between that and this moment: alone in the dark in the sweltering heat in a room not her own in a bed far too big. Mirror endings. The last of a life as she’d known it, at midnight in Lagos, never suspecting what had happened (it simply wouldn’t have occurred to her, that evil existed, that death was indifferent), yet
knowing
somehow.

This was the event for her, the loss in the concrete, the hours in which she crossed between knowing and knowledge and onwards to ‘loss’ in the abstract, to sadness. Six, seven hours of openness slowly hardening into loneliness.

The details came later – how a truckload of soldiers, Hausas, high on cheap heroin and hatred, had killed them, setting fire to the mansion, piling rocks at the exits – but the details never hardened into pictures in her head. So she never really believed it, not really, couldn’t
see
it, never settled on a sight that would have made the thing stick, put some meat on the words (roaring fire, burning wood), put a face on the corpses. The words remained bones. They were no one, the ‘soldiers’.

They were shadow-things, not human beings. The ‘Nwaneris’ were what they’d always been: a portrait on the wall, a name. A pallid cast of characters. Not even characters, but categories: civilian, soldier, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, villain, victim. Too vague to be true.

And not him.

It was him. He was there without question (though they never could confirm it, his bones turned to ashes, in REM, dreaming, his ‘Fola!’ two bubbles), as rampant anti-Igbo pogroms kicked off the war. But she simply couldn’t see him, not her father as she knew him, as she’d seen him from the table, bobbing, bobbing out of view. It was someone else they’d killed that night, these ‘soldiers’ whom she couldn’t see, this ‘victim’ whom they didn’t know, anonymous as are all victims.

The indifference of it.

This
was the problem and would be ever after, the block on which she sometimes feels her whole being stumbled: that he (and so she) became so unspecific. In an instant. That the details didn’t matter in the end. Her life until that moment had seemed so original, a richly spun tale with a bright cast of characters – she: motherless princess of vertical palace, their four-storey apartment on Victoria Island; they: passionate, glamorous friends of her father’s, staff; he: widowed king of the castle. Had he died a death germane to their life as she’d known it – in a car crash, for example, in his beloved Deux Chevaux, or from liver cancer, lung, to the end puffing CAOs, swilling rum – she could have abided the loss. Would have mourned. Would have found herself an orphan in a four-storey apartment, having lost both her parents at thirteen years old, but would have been, thus bereaved, a thing she recognised (tragic) instead of what she became: a part of history (generic).

She sensed the change immediately, in the tone people took when they learned that her father had been murdered by soldiers; in the way that they’d nod as if, yes,
all makes sense, the beginning of the Nigerian
civil war, but of course
. Never mind that the Hausas were targeting Igbos, and her father was a Yoruba, and her grandmother Scottish, and the house staff Fulani, some Indian even. Ten dead, one an Igbo, minor details, no matter. She felt it in America when she got to Pennsylvania (having been taken first to Ghana by the kindly Sena Wosornu), that her classmates and professors, white or black, it didn’t matter, somehow believed that it was natural, however tragic, what had happened.

That she’d stopped being Folasadé Somayina Savage and had become instead the native of a generic war-torn nation. Without specifics.

Without the smell of rum or posters of the Beatles or a kente blanket tossed across a king-size bed or portraits. Just some war-torn nation, hopeless and inhuman and as humid as a war-torn nation anywhere, all war-torn nations everywhere. ‘I’m sorry,’ they’d say, nodding yes in agreement, as one says
I’m sorry
when the elderly die, ‘that’s too bad’ (but not
that
bad, more ‘how these things go’ in this world), in their eyes not a hint of surprise. Surely, broad-shouldered, woolly-haired fathers of natives of hot war-torn countries got killed all the time?

How had this happened?

It wasn’t Lagos she longed for, the splendour, the sensational, the sense of being wealthy – but the sense of self surrendered to the senselessness of history, the narrowness and naïvety of her former individuality.

After that, she simply ceased to bother with the details, with the notion that existence took its form from its specifics. Whether this house or that one, this passport or that, whether Baltimore or Lagos or Boston or Accra, whether expensive clothes or hand-me-downs or florist or lawyer or life or death – didn’t much matter in the end. If one could die identityless, estranged from all context, then one could live estranged from all context as well.

This is what she’s thinking as she sits here, wet, empty, a newly wrecked ship on a beach in the night: that the details are different but the space is unchanging, unending, the absence as present, absolute. He is gone now, her father, has been gone for so long that his goneness has replaced his existence in full. It didn’t happen over time but in an instant, in his bedroom: he was removed, and she remained, and that was that.

That is that.

The Sack

Namwali Serpell

There’s a sack.

A sack?

A sack.

Hmm. A sack. Big?

Yes. Grey. Like old
kwacha
. Marks on the outside. No. Shadows. That’s how I know it is moving.

Something is moving inside it?

The whole sack is moving. Down a dirt road with a ditch on the side, with grass and yellow flowers. There are trees above.

Is it dark?

Yes, but light is coming. It is morning. There are some small birds talking, moving. The sack is dragging on the ground. There is a man  pulling it behind him.

Who is this man?

I can’t see his face. He is tallish. His shirt has stains on the back. No socks. Businessman shoes. His hands are wet.

Does he see you?

I don’t know. I’m tired now. Close the curtains.

Yes,
bwana
.

J. left the bedroom and went to the kitchen. The wooden door was open but the metal security gate was closed. The sky looked bruised. The insects would be coming soon. They had already begun their electric clicking in the garden. He thought of the man in the bedroom, hating him in that tender way he had cultivated over the years. J. washed the plates from lunch. He swept. A chicken outside made a popping sound. J. sucked his teeth and went to see what was wrong.

The
isabi
boy was standing outside the security gate. The boy held the bucket handle with both hands, the insides of his elbows splayed taut. His legs were streaked white and grey.

How do you expect me to know you are here if you are quiet? J. asked as he opened the gate. The boy shrugged, a smile dancing upwards and then receding into the settled indifference of his face. J. told the boy to take off his
patapatas
and reached for the bucket. Groaning with its weight, J. heaved the unwieldy thing into the sink. He could just make out the shape of the bream, flush against the inside of the bucket, its fin protruding. J. felt the water shift as the fish turned uneasily.

A big one today, eh? J. turned and smiled.

The boy still stood by the door, his hands clasped in front of him. His legs were reflected in the parquet floor, making him seem taller.

Do you want something to eat?

The boy assented with a diagonal nod.

You should eat the fish you catch. It is the only way to survive, J. said.

I told him about the first dream but I did not tell him about the second. In the second dream, I am inside the sack. The cloth of it is pressing right down on my eyes. I turn one way, then the other. All I can see is grey cloth. There is no pain but I can feel the ground against my bones. I am curled up. I hear the sound of the sack, sweeping like a slow broom. I have been paying him long enough – paying down his debt – that he should treat me like a real
bwana
. He does his duties, yes. But he lacks deference. His politics would not admit this, but I have known this man since we were children. I know what the colour of my skin means to someone of our generation. His eyes have changed. I think he is going to kill me. I think that is what these dreams are telling me. Naila. I cannot remember your hands.

They lifted the bream out of the bucket together, the boy’s hands holding the tail, J.’s hands gripping the head. The fish swung in and out of the curve of its own body, its gills pumping with mechanical panic. They flipped it on to the wooden board. Its side was a jerking plane of silver, drops of water magnifying its precise scaling. The chicken outside made a serrated sound.

Iwe
, hold it down!

The boy placed his hands on either end of the body. J. slid a knife beneath the locking, unlocking gills. Blood eased over their hands. The fish bucked once, twice. Stopped.