She nodded.
‘She looks quite alive to me; why would you hold her funeral?’
She opened her hands. ‘It has nothing to do with me. It is custom. It is all right for her to marry a foreigner—we encourage our daughters to marry foreigners—but they must take your name and come and live in Kreektown. That is our custom.’
‘Otherwise you apply the emotional blackmail of a symbolic funeral?’ I shook my head gently, as nonjudgmentally as it is possible to be without partaking in stupidity. ‘This is 1994, you know, not 1794. We have laws, federal laws. And what does your husband have to say about this?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You don’t mind if I have a word with him? Is he in the square, partaking of this lu—of this custom?’
‘He’s inside, but . . .’
‘Oh, don’t worry.’ I smiled. This is one thing that thirty years of senior medical practice gives you: the ability to say grave and serious things with a smile. People are used to accepting tough news from doctors. Anyone else brings the news and they go to pieces, or go ballistic, but a doctor—with the experience—breaks it, and you see the difference. I pushed past the woman—now, this is not something I would normally do, pushing myself so precipitately into private affairs, but the things one does for one’s nation . . . I stood in the middle of a large living room—desperately poor, of course, by my standards, but in the context of Kreektown, quite middle-classy, really. There was a colour television, a fancy sofa, and most bizarrely a chest freezer; and in the middle of all that sat a sad-looking man in a wheelchair. ‘Good evening, sir,’ I began.
He just leered at me. I began to feel vexed. I normally would not have given him a ‘sir’ but for the wheelchair.
‘He hasn’t said a word since his stroke in 1989,’ she said, from very close behind me.
Munificent God! This guru thing was quite exhausting.
She continued without a break: ‘He has nothing to do with this; it is custom. He himself is an Igarra man. We married in February 1973, and he moved here in April of that very same year. Since then he only visited his own town in Igarra maybe five or six times before his stroke. Is what I told Sheesti . . . Is it cold enough?’
I touched the bottle of wine she had produced for my inspection from the chest. There was a strong smell of goat meat from the exterior of the bottle, but the cork seemed intact.
‘It’s very nice, thank you.’
She opened it and poured me a glass, talking all the while, as her physical proximity forced me backwards and heavily onto her sofa. ‘Is what I told Sheesti, I told her, “Marry him and bring him here, like I did with your daddy,” but no . . .’ and she went on and on.
I sat there sipping the wine, ignoring the smell of meat, and trying hard not to stare at Sheesti’s father. The mother was clearly a woman’s woman; her English was as fluent as her Menai and her sentences flowed steadily, brooking no interruption. She manifested the Menai custom of aggressive hospitality, which I was prepared to indulge in this case, since her offering was a sealed, if pathetically cheap, bottle of wine. A few weeks earlier I had been forced to reject an unhygienic offering of locally brewed gin invested with an eye-watering reek, only to observe the subsequent hostility and animosity, which forced my visit to end rather more precipitately than I planned.
The eyes of Sheesti’s father seemed quite alive, despite the long dribble that led down from rubbery lips to a wet shirt. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from this Igarra man who could not attend the funeral of his Menai daughter who was not yet dead. Yet I was a scientist with a job to do. I turned to his wife, feeling the Igarra eyes burning paralysing lasers into the side of my head. ‘Who is behind this thing?’ I asked, firmly, cutting off her chatter. ‘Who organized this funeral?’
‘Excuse me,’ she said, and disappeared into the house, apparently to produce some documentary evidence. This was the good thing about dealing with people of a better quality than the Jonszers of this world. Documentary evidence would go down very well on a presidential report. In the meantime, I was forced to return to the scrutiny of the ‘master’ of the house. I wondered whether to attempt a one-sided conversation in which I would supply commentaries, questions, and suggested answers. This was usually not a problem for me. With my thirty years’ experience, armed with a treatment chart, I can hold a ten-minute ward-round conversation with a comatose patient, particularly with a dozen student nurses and doctors clustered around me, trying to pick up useful hints for their viva exams. But there was something about that Kreektown parlour that threw me off my stride. This did not seem the proper forum to review the pessimistic prognoses of cerebrovascular accidents.
Then she returned. She did not have any facts, figures, or documentary evidence, but she had painted her face, and although she still looked like my mother’s marginally younger sister, she no longer looked like the mother of a woman whose funeral dirge we could hear from the square. Then she came and sat next to me on the sofa, close enough for me to perceive a rather rancid variation on the eau de parfum theme. ‘As I was saying,’ she began, and there was something else in her voice, which was when I looked at the sadness in the eyes of the Igarra man and realised that, president or no president, this fieldwork was ending right there, right then.
‘By the way,’ I interrupted kindly, ‘what’s your name?’
‘Ruma,’ she simpered.
‘Ruma,’ I said, ‘good night.’
SHEESTI KROMA-ALANTA
Kreektown | 19th April, 2000
Ruma aged suddenly and it took the villagers by suprise. It happened in the weekend her headmaster husband died. He had not said a word in the twelve years of his stroke, in the twelve years of his retirement from Kreektown Primary. He was a presence in the house that many imagined she was better off without. Yet once he died she went to pieces, weeping without a break, in spite of how old it made her look.
I came alone for the burial, without my children and my husband. I stayed at the Kilos Inn at Ubesia, missing most of the silly ceremonies. In the evening when he was already buried, I slipped in to comfort my mother and to leave her the provisions I had bought. Then I left for home.
I had buried him a long time ago, after all—before his stroke, in fact, on that day that he flogged me after hearing about my kissing the son of Lazarus. After the things he himself had done to me.
And that would have been it: one more attachment to Kreektown pulled out of my life, leaving just that shrivelling root of my mother. One final visit left to pay . . .
And then I had the strange meeting with Mata Nimito.
* * *
THE DRIVER had been driving fifteen minutes towards Ubesia when I remembered the ukpana leaves. By this time my anger was gone, the anger I needed to walk coldly through my old haunts. The anger I needed to look boldly at my flesh and blood, who had buried me alive.
Our first son, Moses, was prone to eczema. It had defied Denle’s creams, and I had had a bet with him: Menai children did not live with eczema; they had a weekly bath with ukpana leaves for a couple of months, and that was that. Yet I did not have the Igbo word for ukpana, or the English word either. Didn’t have a clue how to ask for it in any herbal market in Onitsha. I just knew where the ukpana bushes grew in Kreektown, near the abandoned church.
I had Razak turn around, and we returned to my old hometown. I could not stop thinking of my mother. We had probably had all of an hour together. Ruma had gone from dressing up in skirts to pining for her grandchildren. She did not say a word, but I knew it, now that I was a mother as well. She had made three clothes for them. She had never made me clothes and the lack of practice showed. I