Season of Crimson Blossoms (5 page)

The boy ran after her and caught hold of her jilbab by the door. ‘Mother.' He was uncertain, scared. ‘Take me with you?'

She looked down at him, a hint of sadness in her eyes. She bent down and gently, very gently, loosened his grip on her dress. Her fleeing footsteps echoed in his memory amidst the swirl of musk, the gleam of gold in her teeth and her beautiful face shimmering like an image under water.

‘Reza.' A boy burst into the room while Reza was tossing on the mattress, his face buried in the pillow, absorbing the smell of his own sweat.

‘What?'

The teenager, who heard only a mumble, waited for Reza to look up.

‘Sani, what is it?'

‘You said to tell you if Ibro came back. I just saw him heading to the teashop.'

From the compound, excited voices streamed into the room. The concrete-weighted dumbbells the young men were lifting thudded on the ground, signifying someone's capitulation, an occurrence always greeted with great euphoria.

Sani stood rubbing his palms together.

Reza grumbled some more. ‘You can go now. I'll see you later.'

Sani shrugged and left.

Reza looked at his face in the fragment of a mirror he kept by his mattress and wiped the dampness from his brow and chin. He put on his shirt and strolled out of the door. In the compound,
Babawo was lying on a bench, lifting weights, his muscles rippling. A group of five surrounded him, goading and cheering. Reza walked past them and out onto the market road.

‘Do you want me to come with you?' Sani had broken away from the crowd and was looking hopefully at Reza.

Reza regarded him and saw why the boy's mother's incessant lamentations were often inspired by his waif-like frame. These doleful monologues were a great irritation to Sani especially when he had to endure them as he helped her with her business of making and selling kosai by the roadside. It was not something he enjoyed doing, this business of tending to open flames and frying bean cakes that he thought was best suited to girls. But his upkeep depended on it. Having his mother point out how thin his arms were to strangers coming to buy kosai did not endear him to the task either. It seemed she had conveniently forgotten that Sani's late father had been pint-sized as well.

When he was not fending off his mates, who taunted him for doing sissy chores, one could see in his eyes the wistful look of a boy who wanted to be someone else, somewhere else. But he had been trapped by the death of his young father years before, and a mother determined to live for her son. She wanted him to become a doctor or an engineer someday. He wanted to hang out with Reza and make the occasional quick buck.

Reza patted him on the shoulders. ‘No, I should be back soon.' He noted the disappointment in Sani's eyes and sighed. ‘There are things I want you to do for me later.'

In the gathering dusk, Reza walked past the bleak police post. The new commanding officer, Dauda Baleri, sat on the bench by the entrance, caressing his moustache and looking up and down the road. Reza turned his face the other way and walked on. He walked past Sani's mother stoking the flame in the hearth before her as she prepared for the evening sales. He walked past the mosque where men were gathering, performing ablutions and awaiting the muezzin's call for Maghrib prayers. He turned into a tapered alley and took several shortcuts that brought him to the tarred street. After a short stroll, he was soon in front of Mahmood's teashop.

Looking through the large glassless window, he saw the men
seated around the table crammed with loaves of bread and huge tins of beverages and milk. When he saw Ibro among them, lifting a steaming mug to his lips, Reza went in.

Some of the men mumbled greetings. Others looked down into the mugs before them or at the open flames on which Mahmood's mammoth teapot was boiling.

‘Mahmood, give me a mug.' Reza sat down next to Ibro.

Mahmood was deftly flipping hot tea from one cup to another. He shoved the mug to a waiting customer and started scooping powdered milk into another. Mahmood had been at this spot, doing this, for as long as Reza could remember. ‘Tea or Bournvita?'

‘Tea, Mahmood. Tea.'

Reza watched him fetch hot water, pre-boiled with ginger-spiced tea, into his mug from the great teapot hissing on a tripod. Then he turned to look at Ibro, hunched forward over the table, shoving bread in his mouth, his dim bleary eyes staring straight ahead.

‘Reza.' Ibro, still unsmiling, put down his mug on the old, scratched-up table and stretched out a grease-stained palm to him. Reza slapped it. Ibro's hand, much bigger than his, felt hard from all the years spent taking apart generators and putting them back together.

Reza's smile was a brief flash. ‘Back from your trip already?'

‘Yes.'

‘So how are your folks?'

‘Oh, they're all right.'

Mahmood placed a hot mug before Reza and handed him a thick slice of bread.

Ibro put down his mug. ‘Well, I'm done. Will be heading home now.'

‘Why don't you stay a little, mhm?'

Ibro made to rise but Reza put his palm firmly on his thigh. ‘Stay, mhm? I'll pay for your tea, you understand?'

Ibro sat still, his eyes turned from one corner of the shop to the other, his hands tucked between his knees. When Reza was done, he paid their bills and together they went out into the falling dusk. They stood side by side, Ibro taller, darker, in the evening breeze, watching the midges caught in the yellow glare of passing vehicles.

‘What about the phone I sold to you?' Reza patted Ibro on the back.

‘It's working fine.'

‘Do you have it here?'

Ibro frowned down at Reza, his large nostrils flaring. Reza, unfazed, stretched out a hand and Ibro grudgingly reached into his pocket and handed over the phone. Reza examined it. He shook it as if to weigh it and satisfied, switched it off, removed the battery and the SIM card, which he handed back to Ibro.

‘I'll give you back your money. I just need the phone, you understand?' Reza put the phone back together and shoved it in his pocket.

‘But I'm using it.'

‘I know, I know.' Reza looked up at the star-speckled sky and back at Ibro's grumpy face. ‘Ok, don't worry. I'll get you another one. See me tomorrow'

He shoved his hands in his pockets and headed into the night, leaving a bewildered Ibro watching his silhouette, cast with lavish abundance on the street by the lights of passing cars.

He scaled her fence, as he had done twice already, at a quarter past eleven because he knew that if she had not gone to the madrasa, she would be alone. Having gone round to the front, he peeked from behind the wall and saw her watering the beds of petunia that had not been there the last time he had taken the liberty to invite himself in. He watched her scooping water from a yellow bowl and sprinkling it on the plants. She put down the bowl and straightened up, one hand on her back, the water dripping from the fingers of the other. She turned and their eyes met. He came out from behind the wall and she threw an arm across her breasts.

‘Good morning.' His voice faltered, but he bowed briefly and held up his hands in front of him.

She placed a hand over her thumping heart.

‘I, uh, I just brought back your phone, you understand. As promised.' He reached into his pocket, his other hand still held
up, and pulled out the device. He held it up for her and she considered it for a while. She nodded. He moved forward, extending the phone to her.

‘Sorry about … everything.' He watched her run her thumb over the phone as if to reassert her ownership, marking her possession like an animal would with its scent. ‘I don't usually do this, you know, going into peoples' houses … you understand. None of my guys will ever bother you again,
insha Allah
.'

She looked up at him and, because she was thinking of Yaro, there was a watery glint in her eyes. ‘Thank you.'

He nodded and turned to leave.

‘Wait.'

He turned to face her.

‘Your name? You didn't tell me.'

‘Reza. They call me Reza.'

‘Reza?' She rolled the word on her tongue like one savouring the taste of a new meal. ‘You must have a real one?'

He had had a real name, once. His lisping teacher with narrow shoulders used to call it every morning when he took attendance. ‘Hassan Babale.' The name sounded like an echo from his memory. ‘But everyone calls me Reza now.'

‘Hassan. I will remember that.'

He nodded, mumbled something and made to leave again. She was fidgeting. Then she ran her fingers over her temple.

‘Would you like to … have some water or something. I mean, I'm all alone, here … for now.' She was looking down at the damp bed of petunias Hadiza had so lovingly planted to add colour to the yard that hosted little birds at sunrise. That was the precise moment, Binta would reflect later, that the petals of her life, like a bud that had endured half a century of nights, began to unfurl.

She first felt the unmistakable pangs of labour on 13th February, 1976. It was a memorable day for reasons quite unrelated to her circumstance. Her siesta had been truncated by contractions that took the form of giant fire ants gnawing at her innards. When the pain eased, she lay on the bed and listened to the voices of children playing in the courtyard. They laughed in more languages than she had ever imagined existed. She spoke Pidgin with her Yoruba neighbour, Mama Bola, who only knew a couple of offensive terms in Hausa. They were five, the women. Each with her husband; each speaking a different tongue. In that big house, mid-morning reveries were often interrupted by excited children who horsed around barefooted in the courtyard.

But that morning it was Zubairu who slipped in, shoulders slouched, his dark face long. She sat up, the springs of the Vono bed squeaking in protest at her movement.

‘They've killed him! They've killed him!' Zubairu reached for the radio in the corner.

‘Who?' Her hand was poised protectively over her belly.

‘Murtala, they've killed the Head of State.' He was fiddling with the knob while static poured out from the radio. When he
eventually tuned into a station, martial music blared over the static. Zubairu sat on the plastic carpet, legs spread apart, as if he had been personally bereaved. As if General Murtala Mohammed had been his blood brother. He removed his cap and slapped it on the floor. Beads of sweat dotted his head, scraped clean by the
wanzami
's blade.

‘
Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji'un
! Murtala? When? How?'

‘They shot him dead.'

They sat like ancient statues in a forgotten shrine while the Panasonic radio belched martial music. The news spread outside, casting a sullen mist that stretched across the country from the fringes of the Sahara to the shores of the Atlantic, and swallowed the noise in the compound. Children were called away to their rooms by anxious parents.

‘Zubairu! Zubairu!' Their neighbour Nnamdi's huge frame darkened the curtain fluttering in the open door. When Zubairu came out, he saw Nnamdi standing, head bowed, hands folded on his abdomen. He had closed his fabric shop at the market, as had other traders, as soon as the news broke.

‘
Chei, e be like say na true say Murtala don die o
!'

Zubairu leaned on the doorpost and looked down at a spot between his feet.

‘
But na Murtala o. Murtala! That man no fit die like that
.' Nnamdi, too, had heard legends of General Murtala Mohammed's invincibility during the civil war. He had been in Aba, having fled the North, when Murtala's Second Division was devastating rebel lines in the Mid-west. From the stories he heard, Murtala walked through rains of bullets and swam across rivers of blood, emerging unscathed.

‘
Na so I hear am
.' Zubairu's pidgin, which he had picked up working at the railway corporation, was heavily accented.

‘
Chei
!' Nnamdi shook as if rousing himself from an impossible dream. ‘
So, wetin go happen now
?'

Zubairu shrugged. He sighed because no one knew exactly what was happening, or what was going to happen thereafter.

Joseph Dindam strutted in at that moment. He too, like Nnamdi, towered over Zubairu. He was infamous for his drunken singing, which infuriated the neighbours, and for the racket he
made beating up his wife and children, often well after midnight. He had been a policeman until a few months before when he suddenly stopped putting on his uniform. And the drunken brawls became a nightly occurrence.

‘
Fellow Nigerians, we are all together
!' Those were the words the coup plotters had used to close their speech after the assassination. And Joseph Dindam delivered them with aplomb and a triumphant guffaw. ‘
General Murtala Ramat Mohammed is gone
!'

‘
Cheiiii
!' Nnamdi shivered.

‘
Very good
!' Joseph laughed again.

Zubairu eyed him.

‘You dey look me? No be good thing? No be him dismiss me from police, say I no competent. If to say I see am, I for shoot am to pieces myself.'

Zubairu reached up and struck him on the jaw. It happened so fast that Joseph was momentarily stunned. The brawl that ensued, loud and shocking since it involved grown men behaving like enraged dogs, was, however, short-lived. While Zubairu was striving to break Joseph Dindam's jaw, at the cost of a bruised lip, Binta's waters broke of their own accord. Startled by this, she hollered. Her wails reached the men and put an end to their scuffle. The other women came out, led by Mama Bola and Joseph's battered and scrawny wife, Mama Bulus. It was they who, hours later, received Binta's first son, covered in slime and shrieking like a furious imp.

Few people were surprised when, a week later, Zubairu named the boy Murtala. But because of
kunya
, the socially prescribed modesty his mother had to live with, she called him ‘Boy' instead. And that was how Murtala Zubairu, born on the day a general died, came to be known as Yaro.

Binta finally made up her mind to be more adventurous after their second son, Munkaila, was born. They had been married three years then and that was enough for her regardless of what Dijen Tsamiya, the marriage counsellor of Kibiya, had told her on the day of her wedding.

‘When he's done, always put your legs up so his seed will run into your womb.'

Binta, shocked, had looked at the woman's rheumy eyes and shrunken jaw. She had wondered how many other young brides of Kibiya Dije had so pragmatically dispensed this knowledge to on their wedding eves.

When Dije smiled, her toothless mouth was like a cavern leading into her antiquated interior. No one, it seemed, remembered what Dijen Tsamiya's married life had been like. Her husband had died many years ago and the last of her three children had passed on a decade before.

Dije had slapped her playfully, her frail hand like a cow whisk on Binta's shoulder. ‘See how you look into my eyeballs. Don't look your husband in the eyes like that, especially when you are doing it. Don't look at him down there. And don't let him look at you there, either, if you don't want to have impious offspring.' She removed a piece of kola from the knotted end of her wrapper, threw it in her mouth and proceeded to crush it with her gums. Binta watched her jaw move from side to side as she knotted back her wrapper with trembling hands. ‘And don't go throwing yourself at him. You wouldn't want him thinking you are a wanton little devil now, would you?'

Binta had shaken her head, resisting the urge to cry. The prospect of being intimate with any man, particularly one she hardly knew, was far from comforting.

‘And don't forget what I told you about searching the pockets, mhm. The loose change could amount to something if you are thrifty,
kin ji ko?
You could buy your mother something decent.'

When Binta gaped at her, Dijen Tsamiya clucked at the back of her throat. ‘Young people, they think they know everything.'

Three years, in her estimation, had surely earned her a licence to be licentious, with her own husband of all people. But then on the night she made up her mind, Zubairu returned home with a torn kaftan and another bruised lip. She was sifting garin tuwo in the courtyard when he had breezed in, anger radiating from his flaring nostrils. He sat down on the raffia mat in the corner of the room and turned on the radio. Binta went in after him and sat by his side.

‘What's wrong?' She wiped her hands on her wrapper, the white of the cornflour rubbing off on her Ankara fabric.

He shook his fist at her. When she leaned away, his fist came down on the mat with a thud that almost woke the little boy wrapped in a fluffy shawl on the bed. When the boy stopped wriggling and resumed his slumber, Zubairu sighed.

‘I lost my job.'

‘
Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji un
!' Binta slapped her palms alternately. ‘
Maigida
, how come?'

‘I beat up my boss.' The words tumbled out as if racing with each other. ‘He called me a goat and I hit him and broke his nose.'

‘But
Maigida
, you could have—'

‘I could have done what?! What?! Don't you tell me what I could have done, you don't know the first thing about this so just shut your mouth, you hear me!
Wawiya kawai
!'

Munkaila started wailing, kicking away the shawl with his tiny feet. Binta crossed the room and sat on the bed. She picked him up and shoved a nipple in his mouth. The boy turned his head this way and that, screaming. She put him on her shoulders and burped him. Then she positioned him and again tried to breastfeed him. He turned his head away but would not stop screaming.

‘What the hell are you doing? Do you want to kill him?!'

She wiped away the tears that streamed from her eyes and hoisted the boy onto her shoulder. His screams filled her ears. Zubairu hovered for a while and then stormed out of the room. Moments later, he stormed back in, his furious presence startling her. He went to his clothes hanging on a rack and changed his kaftan before heading out again.

Two nights later, when he was tossing and turning on the bed next to her, she knew he would nudge her with his knee and she would have to throw her legs open. He would lift her wrapper, spit into her crotch and mount her. His calloused fingers would dig into the mounds on her chest and he would bite his lower lip to prevent any moan escaping. She would count slowly under her breath, her eyes closed, of course. And somewhere between sixty and seventy – always between sixty and seventy – he would grunt, empty himself and roll off her until he was ready to go again. Zubairu was a practical man and fancied their intimacy as
an exercise in conjugal frugality. It was something to be dispensed with promptly, without silly ceremonies.

She wanted it to be different. She had always wanted it to be different. And so when he nudged her that night, instead of rolling on to her back and throwing her legs apart, she rolled into him and reached for his groin. He instinctively moaned when she caressed his hardness and they both feared their first son, lying on a mattress across the room, would stir.

‘What the hell are you doing?' The words, half-barked, half-whispered, struck her like a blow. He pinned her down and, without further rituals, lifted her wrapper. She turned her face to the wall and started counting. The tears slipped down the side of her closed eyes before she got to twenty.