“Fine, then you can keep him company. I’m going to kill you. Just let the other members of your family dare try to come and get you. Put this thing in there, Bitchokè’s orders.”
A White man lifts me up like a twig and carries me to the black car. No one in the crowd moves a muscle, other than a middle-aged lady, who asks me softly whose daughter I am. I answer: “Of the husband of the assistant director of nursing. I am Halla Njokè.”
I disappear into the darkness of the hearse, of my obliviousness or my steadfast refusal. Or both.
• • •
My father used to love telling the story of his first encounter with Bitchokè. According to him, it was truly an emotional shock, a flash of lightning. Even though they’d never met face to face, a serious disagreement had already developed between them. Having announced himself as the father of the girl who had been kidnapped that very morning on the main square, my father expected to be confronted with an enraged and veritable ogre, as this famous ultra-powerful one was reputed to be.
It turned out to be one of the rare surprises of his life, for instead he found himself before a human being whose magnetism sincerely overwhelmed him—even more than his first meeting with my mother, the only woman who had shaken him from the very first, he would add.
The man’s provocative look and smile, his royal bearing, the silken hair that seemed to be inviting caresses—it all had the same effect on my father as the most attractive female charms. He felt both ashamed and confused, to the point that he remained standing there, staring openmouthed, for countless minutes. Just as surprised, Monsieur Bitchokè burst out in self-conscious laughter, for he had been expecting a furious reaction. They recovered at the same time and in chorus uttered the same words—“Well now”—then nervously burst out laughing together. Then they stretched out their hands and genuinely laughed at the unexpected collusion.
My father ended up speaking his first coherent sentence: “I am Njokè. I’ve come to fetch my daughter. I believe she’s been mistaken for someone else.”
“Yes, indeed,” Bitchokè responded, and ordered someone to set the prisoner free.
As my father tells it, they had nothing more to say to each other for the time being, but they still managed a final choral reply: “See you soon, and thanks for understanding.”
Laughing loudly, they left each other, and my father led me away, whistling all the way home with interim bursts of solitary laughter and unintelligible monologues. I don’t recall having seen him that excited very often. It really is true that you don’t catch mange on the same day that you eat the panther’s skin.
In those days, the children of Africa’s urban centers were truly God’s little sparrows, who had neither field nor granary. And these children no longer had a clan to back them up, but sometimes only a gang. Yet people were astonished at the violence and delinquency running rampant.
Some parents no longer even wondered how their children lived, as if everything always went of its own accord, as it had in the days that the parent was secondary, and the entire community took responsibility for all its children. Now, the basic rules that used to allow for such solidarity—respect for taboos, for the dignity and general interest of the clan—had been completely flouted. One was under the impression that in this new society, only riff-raff would manage to get somewhere. The family circle was growing narrower and narrower. Systematically and on every level, the population was being materially and spiritually impoverished, while all the essential values of the local cultures were made less and less practicable, especially among the elite.
That is undoubtedly why, having lost their sense of initiative and responsibility, it wasn’t hard for men to grow accustomed to not worrying much about their offspring. So the children lived by their wits in every way possible, and it actually became an ever-growing trend for parents to send their children out begging or into prostitution to feed the rest of the family.
To my great surprise and confusion, my father adopted the same attitude, the way one catches an epidemic disease. He would go out in the morning and come back at noon or later and later in the evening. He’d find his meal on the table, his clothes freshly cleaned, starched, and ironed. He no longer cared who had done this, when or how, or what had happened in his home all day long. I tried talking to him, communicating with him if only with my eyes, but all in vain. Even while he ate he wouldn’t take his eyes off his notebooks or newspapers. He no longer had any ears except to listen to the newscast on every radio station, or to his friends or party comrades, with whom he incessantly discussed politics. Then he would leave with them on propaganda tours or to politically oriented cultural activities, and nothing else existed anymore.
Here, mealtime was no longer the moment of happiness and sharing that my grandparents had made us love and respect so much, like a sacred and festive ceremony, one that inspired us to love cooking. On the contrary, mealtime became a moment when I’d reluctantly dredge up old aggravations and frustrations, a moment that drove me toward some demoralizing conclusions.
I had become the servant in my father’s house without him even realizing it. And so he couldn’t even derive any pride from having an industrious and virtuous daughter who was well brought up, according to custom. He should at least have thanked his mother and given her credit for the fine work she’d done. Our Grand Madja Halla had trained us well, to be responsible in the household from the age of nine, the age of the first female initiation.
Therefore it was completely logical that at age eleven I mastered the skills needed to run our home. Every day, I’d clean the house from top to bottom, do the dishes, wash and iron my father’s clothes and those of his midwife-wife and their three little boys, too. I’d also go to the market that, fortunately, wasn’t very far, barely two kilometers, come back, do the cooking, and make sure everything would be ready at one o’clock at the latest, the time that my husband might be coming home from work and my children from school, the time that my father and stepmother usually came home for lunch and their nap.
Having thoroughly absorbed my lessons as a caramel woman, I always got up very early and finished a good part of the chores—laundry and dishes in particular—before dawn, before anyone else was up. Sometimes I preferred doing these at night before falling asleep. Then I washed and fed my little brothers before my parents left the house in the morning, after their breakfast. In my home I wasn’t going to have to worry about laziness and incompetence. I was always proud of being ready on time. It was my one pleasure, and guaranteed me some serenity.
As a reward for all my efforts there was never a single remark or any encouragement from my parents, especially not from my father. I began to wonder why it had been necessary for him to be assured of his paternity through a ritual blood transfusion, only to ignore it so completely afterward. I figured that even a machine deserved a bit of attention every now and then, a kind of maintenance check. What had happened? Perhaps something very serious had happened to my father, and he was steering clear of me.
Sometimes my stepmother mocked my cooking for being too sophisticated, calling it “grandmother style,” and asking if it was New Year’s Day. Then she’d run her hand through my hair as if I were a cat, make fun of me, and call me “mother-in-law.” It was her way of letting me know that she enjoyed it, but that was as far as it went. In her defense, I realized how worn out she was when she came home, and knew that she, too, could surely use a little more affection; but I couldn’t find the right words or gestures with which to ease the tension and thereby bring us closer.
Poor Mam Naja! Often she’d wait for her husband, checking her watch every few minutes, an atmosphere not conducive to chatting. The new man my father was turning into seemed truly determined to add to the already-tense atmosphere, and thereby made it more frightening for me.
Not able to take it any longer, Mam Naja would sometimes eat alone, stuffing herself like a pig. She’d only leave the table to flop down on the couch, where often she began to snore almost immediately, sometimes until early morning.