I had begun reading the story after I returned from work on a Friday evening. Engrossed in its twists and turns I did not stop to eat supper until, in the dead of the night, I read its last strange sentence – and by then a grumbly stomach had become the least of my worries.
I remembered the words of the sorceress I had visited last year in a desperate bid to unearth my biological roots. Like my other efforts, the visit had been a dismal failure – until this story illuminated my past in a way that made my heart tremble. Did the gods wish to punish me for casting a backward glance? For trying to crack open the kernel of forbidden mysteries? There was no immediate answer to these questions: Bande prison was closed to visitors at weekends.
Early in the morning I rolled out of bed and reached for the phone. My adoptive mother picked up after the first ring. Her “hello” was the slur of somebody startled from sleep.
“It’s Femi,” I announced without salutation.
“Is everything all right? Are you okay? You’re not in any trouble, are you?” Four months ago, when she learned about my plan to move out to my own flat, she had cried and cajoled, afraid that something would go wrong: I would not eat well enough, or be able to keep the flat clean.
“Everything is fine. Well, most things,” I mumbled. “I called to ask you a few questions.” Pausing to choose my words cautiously, I heard the quickened rise and fall of her breath. “Did you adopt me from the Langa Orphanage?”
Her reply bore the marks of irritation. “Your father and I went out to a function at the Niger Club last night. Why do you wake me up from sleep to ask a question I have answered before?”
“I’m sorry,” I said formally. “But I really want to be clear.”
“Yes, from there! Could I now return to sleep?”
“Does the name Iyese mean anything to you? Or Emilia?”
Silence.
“Was my mother named Iyese or Emilia?”
A short spell of silence. In the background, I heard my adoptive father’s sleepy voice ask, “Is he starting up with that crap again?” She hushed him. Then, in a hurt tone, she said, “I see I’m no longer a mother to you.”
“I meant my biological mother.”
“I have told you that I don’t have those details.” She sounded impatient.
“Was she a prostitute?”
Silence.
“Was she murdered?”
She gave a long sigh of exasperation. “I really must go back to sleep.” Then I heard the click of the receiver as she hung up. For a few seconds I stared in disgust at the phone in my hand, buzzing with a dial tone.
I went to the wardrobe and rummaged in several trouser pockets until I found the marijuana cigarette I had been saving. Then I groped my way to the door and went outside. The morning was still grey and overcast. I struck a match and, with my left palm, shielded its flickering flame from the breeze while I lit the joint. I drew hungrily, letting the smoke slip down my throat and spread deeply inside me. Exhaling slowly, I was rocked by a sharp nausea. With a flick of the finger I tossed the burning roll onto the dewy grass. A wisp of smoke curled up from it and rose into the air.
I lay back in bed, my thoughts a series of disconnected waves. The only thing clear in my mind was the certainty that I could not bear to see Bukuru in person. A face-to-face would involve too much pain on my part; perhaps too much shame on his. Any further communication with him would be by letter, a less personal device. Without waiting for the outlines of the thought to be filled in, I fetched some sheets of paper. In a shaky hand, I began to scribble a letter I planned to send through Dr Mandi.
*
Monday morning came, but rather than driving to Dr Mandi’s office as I had planned, I found myself heading for Bande prison.
A very different journey from the first. The curiosity I had felt during the earlier visit had given way to a heaviness of spirit. I was grateful for the solitariness of the rough road, the absence of other traffic. My emotions, still very much in a flux, needed a wide empty space within which to sort themselves out.
How was I going to start once I entered Bukuru’s cell? Give him the letter straight away? Let him read it, or read it to him? Perhaps just try to talk, saving the letter to give to him when I left? But would he talk? Under my accusing eyes, might he not clam up and back away? As for me, how much more of my past could I bear to disinter?
The prison superintendent was at a meeting. His secretary welcomed me with a warmth I found sadly ironic, then ran off to fetch a warder to escort me. She returned with a stocky man whose eyes shone evilly.
“Corporal Joshua will take you to the cell,” she said.
Joshua pitched groundnuts into his mouth, chewing with wide movements of the jaw, like a camel.
“You doctors no get fear,” he said outside the superintendent’s office, the smell of roasted nut thick on his breath. “You no fear to enter cell and talk with a madman. I strong, but I no fit talk to crazeman. That one pass me.”
*
Confronted with Bukuru in the pathetic flesh, I was struck dumb by sensations I had no words to express. I avoided his eyes, afraid that engaging them would reveal to me a truth I half wished not to learn.
At length he asked, “Did Dr Mandi send you my story?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Did you find time to read it?”
“I read it over the weekend. That’s why I’ve come to see you.”
His eyes glowed with the hunger of curiosity.
“It was dispiriting,” I said.
“It wasn’t easy for me to write.”
“Your story ends where mine begins. That’s why I have come today. To tell you my own story.”
“Your own story?” he echoed.
“I told you and Dr Mandi that I was one of life’s underdogs. Remember?”
“Oh,” he said.
“Since twelve, I have been looking for a lost part of myself. For the door through which I came into the world. For the man and woman whose blood mingled to mould me. Simple things others took for granted. Until I read your story, I had no idea at all. I have come because I believe you may know the answers. But I should tell you my own story first.”
I handed him my letter. He furrowed his brows in bewilderment, then began to read.
*
It was only ten years ago that I found out that I was an adopted child. It all began with a fight with my younger sister. When the fight was over, my life had changed. That’s what drew me to the smiling corpse: it reminded me of the mystery of life. My life. I wanted to discover why somebody would die a hard death wearing a happy face.
For ten years I have experienced a recurrent dream in which a couple appear to me, sometimes sad, sometimes happy. Hardly ever in a hurry, they spend a long time with me, playing the games of my choice. When I ask, first the man, then the woman, “Are you my father?” “Are you my mother?” – then they vanish. The man disappears instantly, but the woman always hesitates. When I wake up the tears of my dream are still running down my face.
My life has been a stream cut off from its source, a story without a beginning. You know me as Femi Adero, but I was born with a different name. I was only a few months old when I was adopted into the Adero family. A physician by the name of John Adero became my father. His wife, Margaret Adero – a teacher – became my mother. They gave me the new name that I still bear today. Growing up, I never suspected there were things about my past buried in an unmarked grave and covered with the earth of my new history.
I never knew until I was twelve that I had been adopted.
*
A little over a year ago I received a Christmas card from my then girlfriend, Sheri. My heart fluttered as I slit open the envelope. The card bore a printed message: MERRY CHRISTMAS TO A SPECIAL PERSON. Inside I found a folded blue sheet and spread it out. Then, over and over, I read the short letter, hoping – no, praying – that its words would somehow peel from the page and fly away. Instead they sank deep into my mind, hurting me with a pain fiercer than fire. They still echo inside my head:
Separation is pain. I know how both of us had looked forward to spending our lives together as husband and wife after graduating from university. You also know that I am my parents’ only child, that I am very close to them. I discussed our plans with my parents. Unfortunately, they are adamantly opposed to a suitor for me whose biological roots are uncertain. You must remember I told you how obsessive they are about their daughter pairing up with somebody with, quote and unquote, good genes. It tears my heart to leave you. I truly loved you. But I think it is best to draw back (but remain friends) since I do not see myself going against the wishes of my parents…
How could she so casually write words she must know would deeply wound me? And why wait three years into our relationship? The timing was particularly cruel. I was close to graduating, and looked forward to taking a job with the Daily Chronicle.
Cruel, too, though Sheri could not have known it, was her use of the phrase “good genes”. Genes. That word has haunted me ever since the day I overheard my father use it in a conversation that had to do with me.
I was the favourite target of my four younger siblings – two brothers and two sisters – whenever they hungered for a fight, which was too often. They picked on me because, as the oldest, I had to show restraint in my response. If I lost my temper and manhandled any of them my mother would reproach me for being a bully, for bloodying the nose of a mere child. Sometimes I complained to my parents of the advantage my brothers and sisters took of my tied hands. In fairness to our mother, she always asked them to leave me alone, though to no avail. Our father, whom we all dreaded, chose to make light of my protests. “You can’t handle this small fart of a challenger?” he would ask me, grinning. “You were born with two strong fists. If anybody is looking for your trouble, you should know what to do.”
I knew what to do – only too well! But I also knew the unwritten rule which unfairly required me not to do it. Inevitably, the day came when I snapped.
A couple was visiting our parents from England – a barrister who had been my father’s best friend in secondary school and who later studied law in England, and his wife, an Indian-born English woman. They were in Madia for four weeks and stayed in our house for the first three days before setting out to see the rest of the country. In anticipation of their visit our parents had drilled us on the rules of good comportment. We were not to stare at the visitors. We were not to raise our voices during their stay. And, yes, fights were also outlawed. My father warned that any breach would be severely punished.
On the first day of the couple’s visit, while they and our parents sipped tea and reminisced, my youngest brother sneaked up behind me where I sat reading a book and dealt me a sharp blow to the back of the head. My first impulse was to make a small bundle of him and smash him against the wall. I overcame that temptation. I had little time to weigh the consequences of the next option before I got up and started on my way.
My parents and their visitors were laughing over some joke when I appeared in the doorway. Stopping sharply, I faced them, determined. For some time they continued to laugh, hardly seeming to take in my presence. Then they gradually wound down and focused their eyes on my face.
“I will kill Soochi if you don’t stop him annoying me!”
“He will do what?” asked the lawyer as I made off through the door that led to the porch.
“Kill Soochi, I think he said,” his wife replied.
“But why?” asked the lawyer. “Don’t the other kids accommodate him well enough?”
“Of course, of course,” I heard my father say. “But I warned Margaret early on that genes can be a most troublesome thing.”
“John, please!” my mother rebuked him. “This is no time!”
I had made no sense then of the exasperation in my mother’s voice. Genes had sounded in my ears as jeans, and I had been wearing a pair of jeans at the time. I sat outside the door sulking like an orphan, wondering what jeans had to do with it. Then my perplexity was replaced by a dread of the punishment that lay ahead for me – in two days, after the visitors had gone.
For the next two days I said little to anybody. I merely grunted in salutation whenever I encountered the adults. My parents accepted my terms; they grunted in return. My father averted his eyes whenever our paths crossed, his lower lip clenched between his teeth, a man trying hard to contain his anger. The lawyer, too, was pretty taciturn, absorbed in his eternal tea-sipping. His wife, however, seemed to take my silent withdrawal as a personal challenge. One night, she drew me into an unexpected hug as I muttered a grudging good night. The following morning I made sure this time to keep my distance from her, wanting no repetition of her stifling hug.
One week after the visitors departed, the same heavy silence still pervaded the house. I was neither spanked nor scolded. My parents’ faces wore a terrible scowl that seemed a cross between a grimace and a grin. In the tenseness of the silence I walked about the house with the guile of a cockroach, keeping to dark corners.
One morning my father called me as he got ready to go off to his clinic. With slightly shaky legs I entered the living room where he stood waiting.
“Good morning, Daddy.”
“Morning, Femi. I was wondering if my small man would help me carry my briefcase to the car?”
It was like the old, wonderful days once again! Carrying his briefcase to the car was an honour bestowed on me as the first child. Before getting into his car my father hugged me, then lightly kissed my forehead. He had done it countless times before, but that day it seemed to contain a special meaning. Tears of relief streaked down my face and my lips quivered with joy. I turned and walked back to the house. My mother stood in the centre of the entrance hall, a wide smile spread across her face.
“The praying mantis!” she said. Praying mantis – the playful name she called me whenever I was in a petulant mood. Smiling through my tears, I ran to her for an embrace. It was perhaps the happiest day of my life. I did not suspect that my saddest day lay not far ahead.
*
On 4 May 1978 I had a bloody fight with my immediate younger sister, Eda. That fight keeled my life over and took away everything that had kept me safe and stable.
Eda, who is a year and a half younger than I, had a diabolical hunger for fights. She would goad me at every opportunity until I obliged her with one. At last, the day came when I ran out of patience with her. Give her one real fight, I told myself, and she would learn her lesson.
The fight started with her favourite joke – to call me “elephant ears”. After that she improvised a song about my large ears and sang it in her high unmelodic voice. I let her carry on for a while, but her long tuneless singing finally frayed my nerves. I responded with my own stock insult: “Your mouth is wide enough for a rickety molue bus to drive in.”
She stopped singing and charged at me, landing me two punches on the chin. The pain spread all over my face. Enraged, I unleashed blows of my own. At first she was shocked and puzzled. Then a demented smile lit her face and she flung herself at me, missing most of her punches. The ferocity of my blows soon overwhelmed her, and in spiteful frustration she shouted, “Bastard!” I heard the curse only faintly, still hitting. Defenceless against my knuckles, she cried again, “Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!” Eventually her cries jolted me out of my possessed state. Her battered face horrified me. Her upper lip was split open, her right eye swollen shut. A slow stream of blood flowed from her nose. A terrible fright shook my whole body. What would our parents do when they came home that evening and saw the wreckage I had made of my sister?
Eda touched her face and, in horror, inspected her blood-stained finger. As if she had seen the very picture of her own death, she squawked, then let out a fresh torrent of curses. “Bastard! Son of the gutter! Wait till my parents come home. Today is today. You have to go back to the goatshed where you were born! Bastard picked up from the latrine! Evil child who entered his mother’s womb through the back door! Today, you’ll be returned to the gutter where you belong!”
That evening, our mother burst into tears as I recounted what had happened. She and our father had listened wearily as I described the trivial events that led to the fight, but when I told how my sister had called me a child of the gutter she began to cry. Confused, I looked at our father, but his face bore an expression of stony distance. I glanced at Eda. Her head was bowed. I knew she was avoiding our parents’ eyes.
Then the meaning of this incident began to take a shape in my mind. Slowly at first, then at a shattering speed. The rush of knowledge became unbearable. I felt myself swooning. The room swirled out of focus. Then my legs disappeared from under me.
Why had I never noticed the differences between my siblings and me? It was not only the fact that I was light-skinned while they had a darkness of complexion obviously inherited from our mother. Or that they were rotund, while I was tall and skinny. Or that my eyes were deeper and more intense – and my ears larger. It was something else: our parents’ odd counsel at family pep talks, their unfailing admonition to us, their children, to remember that we were equal in their eyes, none of us loved less than the others. That need to spell out something that should be obvious, why had I not been struck by the awkwardness of it? Why had I waited until this moment to be told by my mother’s tears, my father’s brooding muteness?
For the next few weeks I tried in many silent ways to get my parents to explain my past to me. My eyes held questions seeking answers. My parents saw them, but chose to respond with a stolid silence. Far from diminishing, my need to know increased, grew into an obsession. One day, alone with my mother, I decided to broach the taboo subject explicitly.
“Mother,” I said, for the first time feeling the word heavy in my mouth. “Who are my real parents?”
She looked at me sharply. Then she gave me a nervous, uneasy smile. “Don’t you feel loved in this house? Are we now strangers to you?”
“Please!” I cried. “I feel at home here. But I now know that you’re not the mother who gave birth to me. I want to know the rest of the story.”
“You have been hurt,” she said. “But love will heal your pain.” She came up and tried to cuddle me.
I pushed her away. “If you love me, tell me what I ask.”
“Do you doubt that I love you?” she asked, stung by my words.
“No!”
“Because if you do, you mustn’t. I love you.”
“A little thing is all I ask of you,” I pleaded.
“I don’t have the information you want.”
“Tell me what you know. I’ll go to Father for the rest.”
“He knows even less.”
Despite my disappointment I decided to approach my father. Early the next morning, while he was listening to the news, I joined him.
“Good morning, Dad.”
He turned, surprised. “Morning, Femi. You’re up early. How are you?”
“Bad.”
“Bad?” He fixed me with a perplexed look. “What is the matter?”
“Who are my real parents?”
He swiftly turned off the radio. Then he regarded me with a cold, pained stare. At any other time those eyes set on me in that fashion would have taken away my courage, but not that day.
“I see,” he said finally, throwing his head upward. “I see that we’re no longer real enough for you. Your mother and I are now fake, eh?”
“I want to know who gave birth to me. Just to know.” I hated the shy sound of my voice.
“Listen, Femi. This is your home. We’re your parents. We love you. Very much, if you need reminding. We’ll support all your healthy pursuits. But searching for what is better left alone is not a healthy pursuit.”
The finality of his tone did not deter me. In the months that followed I pestered them with more questions, all of which met silence. Whenever they went out I pried through their papers. In vain. I went searching for the Langa Orphanage, but learned it was long closed. I wrote letters to several newspapers, but no responses came. The few clues I ever got were from my mother, tidbits that were of little value, tiny specks of light in the vast night of my ignorance.
As time passed I became resigned to not knowing. With other interests to occupy me in the present, the desire to dig around in my past fell dormant. I was ill-prepared when it flared up again at the beginning of my second year at Madia University.
*
I met Sheri in poetry class and fell in love, first with her poems, then with her eyes and the lilting voice that gave a seductive melody to her speech. She returned my interest with a charm and enthusiasm that flattered me. On our first date she led me to a wooded area behind her hall of residence. It was there, while we cuddled and kissed, that I told her about myself. Motivated by a desire to hide nothing, I related the story of how I found out that I was adopted and the pain of my fruitless search for my biological parents.
She assured me that none of this need be an obstacle to our relationship. Relieved, I let myself fall deeper and deeper in love.
I became worried when Sheri went home several times without discussing me with her parents. But she promised to talk to them as soon as we were sure about the direction of our relationship. In December 1986 I told her of my desire to marry her. She went to spend the holiday with her parents. From there she sent me a Christmas card and a letter with words that tore my heart out.
*
Two days after receiving Sheri’s letter I travelled to Jesha, a small dusty town forty miles outside Langa, to meet a famous sorceress. A friend of mine had sworn that this woman had the power to commune with the past and the future.
Her appearance was more bewildering than anything I had imagined, the most striking thing about her being her mammoth size. She sat on a wide wooden chair, her face lit with an expression of eternal patience. She could have been sitting there, on that one spot, since the beginning of time.
She watched with dark eyes as I stooped through the low wooden door and entered her shrine. The shrine was simple, clean and uncluttered, far from the jumble of roots, herbs, beads and animal hides my mind had pictured. The air was perfumed with incense and scented candles. The white garment worn by the sorceress gave her a chaste, holy look.
“Son,” she said without seeming to stir her body. “You have come with a heavy load. Sit down.” With her eyes she indicated where. I sat down, wishing I had not come, hastily rehearsing how to make my excuses and flee.
“Son, your trouble is strong, but you have come to the wrong place. It is not for me to answer your questions.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because the answer you seek is small.”
“It isn’t small to me,” I said. “I wish to know who my natural parents are.”
“The ancestors who are wiser than all of us said a long time ago that a basket cannot cover a pregnancy. They spoke the truth for yesterday, today and tomorrow. If your trouble were as big as a pregnancy I would see the answer. But the answer you seek is like a pebble thrown into the belly of the big sea. I don’t have the magic to recover such a pebble. None but the gods who inhabit the depths of the sea can do so. The gods have marked you out for great things, but they have also withheld the small things from your knowledge.”
“Why is that?” I asked in a vexed tone.
“Son, I am not privy to the decisions of gods.”
“But why can’t you give me some light yourself? Why must my past be overcast?”
“Son, I have only this light to shed: don’t let your spirit collapse over the small things. If you live long you’ll be a great man and the small things won’t matter any more. A great plan is laid out for you. None but yourself can derail it.”
I rose to leave, my face clouded with disappointment. She motioned me to sit back down.
“I speak to you now as one who could have been your grandmother if the gods had not decided that my womb would bear no children. Don’t wrestle with fate, my son. To know is sometimes good, but to have the wisdom to accept what you cannot know is better.”
“You’re saying that I’ll never know about this? Never?”
“Who am I to say that? I am just a poor childless widow who fetches firewood for the gods. I am less than the fart from their rumps. Not even the gods speak the language of never. They only set the price for the choices we make.”
“If the answer to my past can be bought at any price, I am ready to pay it.”
“You speak with the voice of the young. You will grow to learn that knowledge is sometimes a weight to be borne. That’s why a palmwine tapper never tells everything he sees from the high branches. He takes some of it to his grave. Go home, son.”
*
That is my story. I am a man searching for his lost pebble. I am a stream cut off from its source. Tell me, if you know: where does such a stream go?
*
Handing the sheets of paper back to me, Bukuru avoided my eyes. A fit of anger stirred inside me.
“What kind of man would abandon his child?”
He coughed lightly, but did not speak. We stood in silence. Then, feeling myself reeling, I spoke again.
“You’re certain Iyese’s son was removed to the Langa Orphanage?”
“Yes,” he answered. His voice was husky, like a man fighting a lump in his throat. “That’s what Violet told me.”
“I was adopted from that orphanage,” I said, as if he could have overlooked this detail in my account!
He made a nasal sound, but kept a wary silence.
“Isn’t Ogugua an Igbo name?” I queried.
He grunted his affirmation. “Why do you ask?”
“My adoptive mother said I had an Igbo name when they adopted me. That’s one of the few things she told me. She didn’t say what the name was.”
“What are you suggesting?” His tone, to my shock, was less a question than a rebuke.
“If my mother was a prostitute, that might be a reason my adoptive parents would withhold information from me.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“If they knew my mother was murdered, then perhaps they wouldn’t want to tell me.”
“This is mere guesswork. There’s no evidence at all. The connections are not there.”
“You wrote about a gash in the baby’s right leg. I carry the scar of such a wound.”
“A coincidence,” he said, still evading me.
Exasperated with this dodging and weaving, I began to soliloquise, addressing myself in a detached, disinterested voice. “Your mother was a prostitute. You may never know your father because your mother slept with many men. She was raped and then she was murdered. You were found lying on top of her, a blood-spattered baby. You were taken to an orphanage from where you were adopted. You became Femi, a child forbidden to visit his past because it was full of terrors. You were warned, but you persisted. You wanted to find out what it was in your history that nobody would talk about. Now you know.” Pausing, I forced Bukuru to look me in the eye. “Could you be my father?”
He leaned against the wall and shut his eyes. Silence. That familiar cop-out. Silence – again!