Who Fears Death (20 page)

“It’s still happening!” I shouted at Aro who was outside tending to his goats.

“Did you think it stopped?” he said.

I
had
. At least for a while. Even I’d exercised
some
denial in order to live my life.

“It ebbs and flows,” Aro said.

“But why?? What is . . .”

“No creature or beast is happy when enslaved,” Aro said. “Nuru and Okeke try to live together, then they fight, then they try to live together, then they fight. Okeke numbers dwindle now. But you remember the prophecy that storyteller spoke of.”

I nodded. The storyteller’s words had stayed with me for years. In the West, she’d said, a Nuru seer prophesied that a Nuru sorcerer would come and change what was written.

“It will come to pass,” Aro said.

I was walking through the market, rubbing my forehead, the sun beating down as if to provoke me, when the women laughed. I turned. It had come from within a group of young women. Women my age. Around twenty. From my old school. I knew them.

“Look at her,” I heard one of them say. “Too ghastly to marry.”

I felt it go snap inside me, in my mind. The last straw. I’d had enough. Enough of Jwahir, whose people were as bloated and complacent as the Golden Lady herself. “Is something wrong?” I loudly asked the women.

They looked at me as if
I
were disturbing
them
. “Lower your voice,” one of them said. “Weren’t you raised properly?”

“She was barely raised at all, remember?” one of the others said.

Several people paused in their transactions to listen. An old man glared at me.

“What is
with
you people?” I said, turning around to address all around me. “All this is unimportant! Can’t you see?” I paused to catch my breath, actually hoping an audience would gather. “Yes, I am talking, come and listen. Let me answer
all
the questions you’ve all had about me for so long!” I laughed. The crowd was already larger than the meager gathering that came to hear the storyteller speak that night.

“Only a hundred miles away, Okeke people are being wiped away by the thousands!” I shouted, feeling my blood rise. “Yet here we all are, living in comfort. Jwahir turns her fat unmoving backside to it all. Maybe you even
hope
our people there will finally die off so you can stop hearing about it. Where is your
passion?
” I was crying now and still I stood alone. It had always been this way. This was why I decided to speak the words Aro had taught me. He’d warned me not to use these words. He said I wasn’t remotely old enough to speak them.
I’ll pry your cursed eyes open,
I thought as the words tumbled from my lips, smooth and easy as honey.

I won’t tell you the words. Just know I spoke them. Then I flared my nostrils and drew on the anxiety, rage, guilt, and fear swarming around me. I had unknowingly done this at Papa’s funeral and knowingly done it with the goat. I crossed over.
What will they see?
I wondered, suddenly afraid.
Well, it can’t be helped now
. I dug deep into what made me me and took them into what my mother went through.

I should never have done this.

All of us were there, only eyes, watching. There were about forty of us and we were both my mother and the man who helped make me. The man who’d been watching me since I was eleven. We watched him get off his scooter and look around. We saw him see my mother. His face was veiled. His eyes were like a tiger’s. Like mine.

We watched him ravage and destroy my mother. She was limp beneath him. She’d retreated into the wilderness and there she’d waited as she watched. She always watched. She had an Alusi in her. We felt the moment my mother’s will broke. We felt her attacker’s moment of doubt and disgust with himself. Then the rage that came from his people took him again, filling his body with unnatural strength.

I felt it inside me, too. Like a demon buried under my skin since my conception. A gift from my father, from his corrupted genetics. The potential and taste for amazing cruelty. It was in my bones, firm, stable, unmoving. Oh, I had to find and kill this man.

There was screaming from everywhere, from everyone. The Nuru men and their women, their skin like the day. And the Okeke women with skin like the night. The din was awful. Some of the men sobbed and laughed and praised Ani as they raped. Women called to Ani for help, a few of these women were Nuru. The sand was clumpy with blood and saliva and tears and semen.

I was so transfixed by the screaming that it took seconds for me to realize that it had started coming from the people in the market. I pulled in the vision as one folds up a map. Around me, people sobbed. A man fainted. Children ran in circles.
I didn’t think about the children!
I realized. Someone grabbed my arm.

“What have you
done?
” Mwita shouted. He pulled me along at such a fast pace I couldn’t immediately answer. People around us were too stunned and shaken to stop us.

“They
should
know!” I shouted, when I’d finally caught my breath.

We’d left the market and started up the road.

“Just because we hurt doesn’t mean others should!” Mwita said.

“It does!” I shouted. “We’re all hurting whether we know it or not! It has to stop!”

“I know!” Mwita shouted back. “I know it more than you!”

“
Your
father didn’t rape
your
mother to create you! What do
you
know?”

He stopped walking and grabbed my arm. “You’re out of control!” he hissed. He threw down my arm. “
You
only know what you’ve seen!”

I just stood there. I was far too defiant and unwilling to own up to the stupidity of my comment and my lack of self-control.

“I will tell you,” he said, lowering his voice.

“Tell me what?”

“Move,” he said. “I’ll tell you as we go. Too many eyes here.” We walked for two minutes before he spoke. “You can be really stupid sometimes.”

“So can . . .” I shut my mouth.

“You think you know the whole story, but you don’t.” He looked behind us and I looked too. No one was following us. Yet.

“Listen,” he said. “It’s true that I traveled east alone until I met Aro. But there was some time there, just after . . . When the Okeke and the Nuru were fighting and I turned myself ignorable to escape, I didn’t know how to stay ignorable for long. Not yet. Only for a few minutes, really. You know how it is.”

I did. It took me a month to sustain it for ten minutes. It required serious concentration. Mwita had been so young; I was surprised he was able to hold it at all.

“I made it out of the house, out of the village, away from the real fighting. But out in the desert, I was soon captured by Okeke rebels. They had machetes, bows and arrows, some guns. I was locked into a shack with Okeke children. We were to fight for the Okeke side. They killed anyone who tried to run away.”

“That first day, I saw a girl raped by one of the men. The girls had it worse because they weren’t just beaten into obeying, as we all were. They were raped, too. The next night, I saw a boy shot when he tried to escape. A week later, a group of us were forced to beat a boy to death because he’d tried to escape.” He paused, flaring his nostrils. “I was
Ewu
, so they beat me more often and watched me more closely. Even with all the sorcery I knew, I was too afraid to attempt an escape.

“They showed us how to shoot arrows and use machetes. The few of us who showed that we had good eyes were taught to shoot guns. I was very good with guns. But twice I tried to kill myself with the one given to me. And twice I was beaten out of doing so. Months later, we were taken into the fighting against the Nuru, the race of people I was raised to live with as family.

“I killed many.” Mwita sighed and continued, “One day, I got sick. We were camping in the desert. The men were digging mass graves for those who’d died in the night. There were so many, Onyesonwu. They threw me in with the bodies when they saw that I couldn’t get up.

“I was buried alive. They moved on. After a few hours, the fever I was suffering from abated and I dug myself out. Immediately, I went looking for medicinal plants to cure myself. And that was how I was able to travel east. I’d spent two months with those rebels. If I hadn’t looked dead, I’m sure I’d
be
dead.
Those
are your innocent Okeke ‘victims.’ ”

We’d stopped walking.

“It’s not as simple as you think,” he said. “There is sickness on both sides. Be careful. Your father sees things in black and white, too. The Okeke bad, Nuru good.”

“But it’s the Nuru’s fault,” I said quietly. “If they hadn’t treated the Okeke like trash, then the Okeke wouldn’t be behaving like trash.”

“Can’t the Okeke
think
for themselves?” Mwita said. “They know best what it feels like to be enslaved yet look what they do to their own children! My aunt and uncle weren’t murderers, Onyesonwu! They were
killed
by murderers!”

I was deeply ashamed.

“Come,” he said, holding out his hand. I looked at it and noticed for the first time, a faint scar on his right index finger.
From the trigger of a hot gun?
I wondered.

A half hour later, I stood outside Aro’s hut. I’d refused to go in.

“Then stay here,” Mwita had said. “I’ll tell him.”

While Mwita and Aro talked, I was glad to be alone because . . . I was alone. I kicked the hut’s wall with the heel of my foot and sat down. I scooped up some sand and let it run through my fingers. A black cricket hopped over my leg and a hawk screeched from somewhere in the sky. I looked to the west where the sun would set and the evening stars would rise. I took a deep deep breath and held my eyes wide open. I stayed very still. My eyes grew dry. My tears felt good when they came.

I stood up, took off my clothes, changed into a vulture and rode the late hot afternoon air into the sky.

 

I returned an hour later. I felt better, calmer. As I was putting my clothes on, Mwita poked his head from Aro’s hut.

“Hurry up,” he said.

“I will come when I please,” I mumbled. I straightened out my clothes.

As the three of us talked, I found myself getting riled up again. “Who’s going to stop it?” I asked. “It won’t stop once the Nuru have killed all the Okeke in their so-called land, will it, Aro?”

“Doubtful,” Aro said.

“Well, I’ve decided something. This prophecy will come true, and I want to be there when it does. I want to see him and I want to help him succeed at whatever it is he will do.”

“And your other reason for going?” Aro asked.

“To kill my father,” I said bluntly.

Aro nodded. “Well, you can’t stay here anyway. I was able to stop the people from coming after you before but this time you dug your talon into a sore part of Jwahir’s psyche. Plus your father is expecting you.”

Mwita got up and without a word walked off. Aro and I watched him leave.

“Onyesonwu,” Aro said, “it’ll be a harsh journey. You have to be prepared for . . .”

I didn’t hear the rest of what he said, for one of my headaches began to throb in my temples, increasing with each thump. Within seconds, it felt as it always eventually did, like stones hitting my head. It was the mixture of Mwita’s leaving the hut, knowing I was to leave Jwahir, the images of violence still swirling around my mind, and the face of my biological father. All those things triggered my sudden suspicion.

I jumped up and stared at Aro. I was so pained, so flabbergasted, that for the second time in my life, I forgot how to breathe. My headache increased and everything tinted silvery red. The look on Aro’s face scared me more. It was calm and patient.

“Open your mouth and take in air before you pass out,” he said. “And sit down.”

When I finally sat back down, I started sobbing. “It can’t be, Aro!”

“All initiates have to see it,” he said. He smiled sadly. “People fear the unknown. What better way to remove one’s fear of death than to show it to him?”

I pressed my temples. “Why will they
hate
me so much?” Somehow I would end up being jailed and then stoned to death and many people would be very happy about it.

“You’ll find out, won’t you?” Aro said, solemnly. “Why spoil the surprise?”

I went to see Mwita. Aro had instructed me on several things, including when he thought I should leave. I had two days. Mwita sat on his bed, his back against the wall.

“You don’t think, Onyesonwu,” he said, looking blankly straight ahead.

“Did you know?” I asked. “Did you know that it was my own death that I saw?”

Mwita opened his mouth and then shut it.

“Did you?” I asked again.

He got up, took me in his arms and held me tightly. I closed my eyes. “Why’d he tell you?” he asked, his lips near my ear.

“Mwita, I forgot how to breathe. I was so stunned.”

“He shouldn’t have told you,” he said.

“He didn’t,” I said. “I just . . . figured it out.”

“He should have lied to you then,” Mwita said.

We stood like this for some time. I inhaled Mwita’s scent, noting that this was one of the last times I’d be able to do this. I held him back and grasped his hands.

“I’m coming with you,” he said before I could say anything.

“No,” I said. “I know the desert. I can change into a vulture when I must and . . .”

“I know it as well as you do, if not better. I know the West, too.”

“Mwita, what did you see?” I asked, ignoring his words for a moment. “You saw . . . you saw yours, too, didn’t you?”

“Onyesonwu, one’s end is one’s end and that’s the end of it,” he said. “You won’t be going alone. Not even close. Go home. I’ll come to you tomorrow afternoon.”

 

I got home around midnight. My plans didn’t surprise my mother. She’d heard about what I’d done at the market. All of Jwahir was buzzing about it. The gossip carried no details, only a hardened sentiment that I was evil and should be jailed.