We got as far as the car could go and I told Razak to stop. It did not occur to me to ask for his protection. Safety was not something one ever thought about in Kreektown. Even in these days of the roughboys, I am not really bothered. I was nearly raped once, outside Kreektown, but he ran away when I lied about my AIDS status. Anyway, the ukpana bushes were still some distance by footpath, so the quicker I left, the better. And I wanted to walk out the silly feelings in my head, not sit in a car and let them fester.
I saw his singate even before I saw him. He stood in the path, on the bend just before the first clump of bushes. Behind him was the purple-blue of the ukpana sprays, but there he stood, not quite blocking the way, though his presence was enough to have turned me around, had I not walked so far already. Here then was the man I loathed most in the entire world.
Leaving the People for marriage was not the great unnameable offence it used to be. Too many Menai had died; the end was clear. I had had measles during the Lassa fever outbreak of the ’80s and so did not get the vaccine that had doomed my people. It was obvious that I had to make a future with someone outside my dying nation. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to have looked the other way with Denle and me, but no, he had to bring the weight of our archaic traditions down on the life I could have had. And that was the first nineteen years of my life excised . . . and now here he was, before me.
The anger blinded me to the obvious questions: what was he doing there, why was he without the helpers who took him around in these latter days of his ancientness? His eyes were shut, as well they should be. His Menai heaven would probably fall at the taboo of a mata locking eyes with a ‘dead person.’ I steeled myself and walked up to him and started past him.
‘Sheestumu?’ he whispered. I froze. Mata Nimito named all Menai. He was an old man that the town mostly forgot, until there was a need to remember him: burials, namings, disputes . . . Nobody would ever consider him a friend. There were too many generations between him and us. But he did have that playful way with my name. He let his singate fall and lifted his arms . . . raising the bag of ukpana from his red robes, the leaves plucked just below their nodes, to preserve their potency. I took them, too. It did not seem likely he had a problem with eczema. I put his ceremonial staff back in his hand. His eyes were pinched so tightly shut I wondered if he were now blind. ‘Eniemute?’
A warm glow started in me. The love for a husband comes from a region of the mind. The love for a father comes from another. There is no crossover. I felt a glow building from a hearth I had thought was terminally broken. I told him of my children, their names. He shook his head impatiently. ‘Eniemute!’
With a dry mouth, I described Moses: the long limbs he owed to his father, his quick temper . . . Ameizi, he said. I described Cynthia, who looked so much like my baby photograph . . . Anosso, he said, and then I described my baby, Patricia, who had the nurses pledging their sons in marriage . . . Ogazi, he said.
The naming was complete.
Then he began to sing my torqwa! I that was dead to Menai! I fell on my knees, enthralled again by the antiquity of my lineage. I knelt there, streaming tears as the poetry of my identity bore me from the caravan of the exiled crown prince through the dunes and the deserts and the savannahs and the forests and creeks of their sojourn. I listened to the descendants of young Auta, trumpeter in the court of the crown prince, Xera, and his wife, Aila, daughter of Numisa, until
Rumieta Kroma the trader of cloth
married Teacher Gaius from Igarra
to birth Sheesti, little mother
who, with Denle, son of Alanta,
scion of Esie, built pillars for Menai:
three pillars of Ameizi, fierce athlete,
Anosso her mother’s cunning vomitimage
and Ogazi the fair, for Menai without end . . .
I gripped my nose, as I rose, caught my breath so tight . . . Only now, hearing my torqwa in the Mata’s voice, did I realise the darkling power of my funeral . . . For the first time since the arrival of my children, I felt they were not stillborn. They were named, properly named from the font of all Menai. I may still languish in that never-never world of a Menai who is neither dead nor ancestor, but in the land of ancestorsMenai, my children were known. Denle could not, could never know the burden of the crush of death.
I probably thought the Mata was going to fall, for he did sway, and fragile, fragile was the rag of bones and flesh that I grabbed as I found my feet, and held, but fierce, fierce was the grip he locked me in. How long we stood there, racked by dry spasms, I don’t know, how long I stood, crooning over the man I hated most in all the world, until with a long breath he was stilled and the old body became rigid like a trunk. His arms fell away, but for a thin finger pointing at the singate he had dropped once again to hold me.
My eyes were red, and I was grateful he was being blind. His onion-thin skin was dry. He smelled of roasted corn. Freshly roasted corn and aged palm wine. He stood erect, implacable, like a sentinel from the past. There was no other word, no bon mots and no goodbye, but I knew it was time to go. What had happened was something that had not happened, could never have happened, but I was gifted with a memory of it.
I turned and fled to the car, back to 43 Lemue Street in the old village. She did not argue, and I felt like the mother packing the little girl off to college. She packed her property slowly, touching things that would not fit into the car, like she was saying goodbye. Without the anger in my eyes I saw more of her, and although she had never said it in her letters, I knew now that she was dying—for her to leave the living Menai and go with her dead daughter. To break so unceremoniously with tradition. She began to pack her thirty-year-old crockery, the set so special that she never used it, and I sighed and stood up firmly. Ten minutes later we were ready to go. We shut down our Kreektown house for good and went to mine.
* * *
Onitsha | 10th September, 2001
My darling husband did not throw me out, but it was a near thing. He ran his own private hospital with a businessman’s flair. Even before we got married he had built two houses from his steep fees. With me there, less of the fees ended up buying female handbags, and we had added a couple more. Managing tenants and children was enough work for me. He did not talk to me throughout that week I brought my mother home. All he muttered, again and again to my hearing, was ‘Blood is a terrible thing!’ So I moved her to one of our empty flats. That compromise seemed to work.
He never went to see her, but he never asked me to rent out the flat either. And once, three months on, he threw a brocade fabric on my bedside, saying, ‘See if that old witch likes this.’ I did not tell him that Ruma had traded in brocade and had left the largest collection of uncut brocades at No. 43. It was the thought that counted. Even his ‘old witch’ was not much angrier than the meaningless epithets he uttered in my ear after he switched off the lights at night.
There was the day she blessed him, too. My driver had taken me to Anam to buy yams. On my return, I stopped by her flat. I stepped out of the car into screams from the hysterical housegirl on the balcony above.
‘Which hospital?’ I cried, and she stared.
I broke into the ward just as he was setting a drip. It was not something he usually did himself, but there he was. As I approached, my mother, who was just about to drift off, took his hands and held them for a silent moment. The bedlam around her ceased for a moment, as though they realised that something significant was about to happen. ‘Simba tulisu. Simba tuala,’ she said, and passed out.
* * *
19th December, 2001
‘You could have told me she was ill,’ he grumbled, afterwards. ‘We might have been able to save her life.’
And it was at such times that the wise wife