WE ARRIVE AT OGIGE MARKET, MY MIND FLYING BACK to the horrors of the little cell in the mango grove. Chikelue says the town has changed. It still looks the same to me, though. It’s been just five months since I left home to work on Chikelue’s father’s book. The carcass of the burnt police Hilux still lies in front of NITEL Building. The insignia of Biafra. The ground is still crimson with the blood of those the police murdered on the night I escaped with a broken leg. But the fearless leader of the Biafran separatist group, the Indigenous People of Biafra, the young and revolutionary Nnamdi Kanu, has vowed that the government must pay for the spilled blood, and freedom for the land of Biafra is not negotiable, in a statement that reads as follows:
As they campaign vigorously for elections, you would think they are coming to grow the economy, enthrone justice, breed unity and tolerance, love for one another. No, they are coming to enthrone Hausa/Fulani supremacy, to reposition the security agencies by sacking all competent hands and replacing them with their kinsmen in order to drive their ethnic domination of the south. The Fulani herdsmen will be armed and encouraged to slaughter us with impunity, and their masters will protect them. They are coming to ensure that my people are enslaved forever. Those who do not believe me will soon see it happen before their eyes. The Fulani will take over the entire south as a continuation of their age-long agenda to Islamize Eastern Nigeria. They will brazenly seize our land in pretense of creating grazing fields for the Fulani. Then the conquest will be complete, we will become their serfs forever.
“I broke my leg in that gutter,” I say, pointing out the spot where it happened. “I was full of enthusiasm then, but now I am tired of their rhetoric.”
“I do not think Biafra is mere rhetoric,” Chikelue says. “I recognize a fair amount of truth in what the IPOB leader says. Biafra reserves the ‘Remedial Right to Secede’ in theory and in principle.”
“It will not be achieved easily, assuming secession to be possible in principle.” The intensity of my feelings roughens my voice. I think back to my National Youth Service in the north after my graduation from university. The experience helped me to understand our country better. The trouble with Nigeria was and always has been that of complex. You see it in every detail of your day-to-day interactions, from colleagues in the same orientation camp to the sugarcane vendor or shoeshine mallam on the street, those dangerous feelings of complex and insecurity, which triggered the pogrom that created the civil war.
“Besides,” I say to Chikelue, “we have traitors amongst ourselves, greedy people and cheats who betray the ideals of this struggle.”
Chikelue drives in silence as we both recede into our thoughts.
A scowl darkens Chikelue’s face as we turn onto a dirt road riddled with potholes, the road to my village. I feel guilty each time the underbelly of Babydoll scrapes the hard surface of the village road as Chikelue negotiates a pothole. He says it feels like it is his heart, and not the car underbelly, that is being scraped.
I understand.
The car is barely two weeks old, a birthday gift from his father, George Emerenini. It is a sleek, black, sexy convertible Chikelue nicknamed Babydoll. The road is wet and muddy—it rained recently—and the tyres are rolling with a splosh that angers Chikelue and keeps the scowl on his face. Even when some naked children playing in a village square abandon their play and flee at the sight of the car, skittering away like little black beetles, it doesn’t amuse him.
I remember Ogbareka and the hot chase he gave me for stealing his pods as we drive past his compound, how we went tumbling over farm ridges, getting snagged on brambles and nettles.
“Was he really going to cut you with the machete?”
“He looked mad enough to kill me.”
Driving through village squares hemmed in by squat cement and mud houses, we finally arrive in our compound. We climb down, Chikelue walking around the car and inspecting his fenders and wheels streaked with mud. My eyes travel to the tomb, next to our old mud house, looking abandoned and unhappy. Devoured by woodlice, the windows are gaping at us with hollow, disquieting eyes. A door half wrenched from its hinges is left in its near wreckage like a big rotten tooth. The outer wall is barely hanging, looking like it will fall any moment. I can see the hump of the tomb beneath the avocado tree. The tree is losing its leaves, like an old man losing his hair, shedding on the grave over a long time. The grave is in ruins, covered in mud and grime: the debris of broken slabs.
My father is sitting in the shade of our umbrella tree, and my siblings, Ihebube and Ebube, are playing okoso a few yards away from where he sits. They are watching us with undisguised curiosity as we approach. I know they don’t recognize me. The starched indigo brocade I am wearing fans out around me like a peacock’s beautiful tail feathers.
Chikelue is frowning beyond them to the rusty roof and stark mud-red walls of our house in whose many cracks and gullies lizards and geckos have made their home.
I understand.
I have been in his family’s mansion in Victoria Garden City. It looms white, like a snow-capped mountain, at the end of a long driveway edged with tall palms. I glimpse my mother peeping at us from the side wall leading to the kitchen behind the house under the rust-zinc eaves with a faintly suspicious expression. The sound of the car must have drawn her away from her chore, the same way the noise must have roused Usonwa from her weekend siesta.
Ihebube and Ebube, in their early teens, have grown taller. They race into my arms smelling of sweat and grime. My father draws himself up to his full height with a slight stoop. He is tying a dirty wrappa around his thin waist. It is loosely knotted at the groin, such that his pubic hair peeks out. His eyes are puffy, and the sag in his flesh tells me he has been drinking more and more ekpetechi, and he is fast ageing. He has gone completely grey. He comes forward gingerly with his shriveled arms splayed.
“Big motor car, that is. Whose is it?” he whispers, expectation tickling the hairs in his nostrils.
“It belongs to my friend.”
My father withdraws, folding up like one of those millipedes that crawl around, when it is touched with a stick. Obviously he had mistaken the car for mine.
Usonwa flies into my arms. My mother hugs me tight to her bare shrunken breasts and chore grease. I stare at my mother’s leathery neck and hair overcrowded with grey. I did not expect this hero’s welcome. The parting had not been too warm when I left home. Usonwa is a woman now, having completed her apprenticeship, and runs her own braiding shop at Ogige market. Gone is the sharp, defiant look. She is wearing a skewed dress with yellow sunflower blooms embroidered on a faded black background. The dress, which she had worn before I left the village, hugs her tightly, outlining the graceful lines of her new curves. Her hair is braided, her beauty full and spilling. A short wrappa is tied around her slim waist as she walks around the compound swaying her hips, her braids swinging behind her like the tail of a horse. My father says that she inherited her height from him, and her lucent dark skin from my grandmother, my father’s mother. Looking at her, I can’t help but think of the swamp lantern that grows around the creek, attractive to the eyes with bright yellow blooms, but unpleasant to the nose, untouchable.
“Your dress is big and beautiful,” Ihebube whispers to me.
“I like your friend’s motorcar.” Ebube giggles.
Chikelue is watching the drama of our reunion with discomfort. I ponder my family in contrast to his. I am my parents’ first son, their third child. Chikelue is the baby of his family. He holds a bachelor of science degree in economics and a master’s degree in computer science. He has a sister, and he is heir to an inheritance running into hundreds of millions. My father looks frail and old, whereas his father is a large, hairy man who reminds me of a wooly bear, a man so large he must look like a fallen tree trunk when he is sleeping. He is bald while my father has a knot of hair like a white skullcap. His mother is a small, pretty woman who wears a huge wig and lays a neat, jewel-laden little hand on the shoulder of his son’s friends when they visit the mansion. My mother is scrawny and greyed, and her hair flakes with dandruff. His mother uses nail polish and a pink blusher. Sometimes there are black clots of mascara on her eyelashes when she is fatigued. Her perfume combs the hallway, her voice having the same effect in my ears as the languid piano music always tinkling from the mansion’s hallway speaker, but my mother’s cologne is a pungent cassava effluvium. The odour is stronger around the kitchen, where the fermented sieved cassava, wrung of water, lies thick in a bowl.
Machebe is not home.
“He is still at the Mechanic Village,” explains my mother. “Take your friend into the house for lunch.
I lead Chikelue into the cold, bare-walled room with crooked forms and an old wooden table. The earth floor smells of termites, and of fungus growing in wet, hidden corners. Chikelue looks around the room and swallows his spit politely. I completely understand. The mansion has a retinue of household staff keeping it clean and sweet, a large sitting room with big leather seats, and potted flowers in vibrant colours.
My mother pokes her head in and says, “I have a message for you.”
I know she wants a private moment with me. It is only a polite way of calling me aside for one of her endless whisperings. I had caught her eye earlier and seen the clouds gathering in her face, like a sky heavy with rain. My mother lives in the fear that one of us children will get himself into trouble one day and the police will come looking for him with their Hilux trucks and guns.
She pulls me to a corner. “Who is he?”
My family knows about a certain friend of mine who has been helping me, but they have never met Chikelue until now. I tell my mother the truth: I am not as big as my garment. I have a job writing a biography, and Chikelue is my oga’s son, and a close friend.
The clouds fritter away and the sun breaks through in my mother’s face. She moves about as if some tight knots have been loosened, calling out to my siblings to come help her make food for us in the kitchen. My mother makes aribo with empty ohoyi soup. She serves it in the metal plates she uses to serve food to our important guests. It is served on the table that is dark and glossy with accumulated dirt. Chikelue declines to eat the heavy black paste plucked and dunked into plain, watery soup that stretches from the plate to the mouth. Again I understand. This food is muck compared to the mansion’s continental dishes, like the eggs Benedict with creamy hollandaise sauce served in breakable plates, which we had for supper the previous night.
“Shall we go and see the cave?” I note the eagerness in Chikelue’s voice.
“I have barely swallowed my last morsel.”
“I know.” His voice is edged with impatience. “But I want us to check into a hotel in town after we have been to see the cave. We will head back to Lagos in the morning.”
We had agreed to pass the night here in my family house, but Chikelue seems to have changed his mind.
This, too, I understand.