TIRED FROM TRAVELLING, WE GO TO BED EARLY. THE moon has risen. I spend a brief time on the back balcony, a solitary figure gazing as far as I can over the waters, savouring the faint iodine smell of the sea and thinking about George Emerenini’s biography. I have collected his genealogical data and finished with the thesis. I intend to spend the next couple of months here working on the book. I can hear mountain-high waves crashing against the sea wall as I rejoin Chikelue in bed. The tide is still wailing as the party draws to a slow end. I can hear the guests leaving, cars starting outside, and the gate opening and closing. And then Chikelue’s mother comes into the room to check on him. We pretend to be asleep. She leans over him to kiss his forehead.
“Good night, Papam,” she whispers, smelling of champagne, sweat, and tiredness.
This action is repeated twice before we finally fall asleep, of her coming in softly, standing in what seems a quiet reflection and deep thankfulness for a lost-and-found item, and then leaning over to wet Chikelue’s forehead with a kiss and a softly whispered “Good night.” We lie side by side under lime-green Armani coverlets as if we had all along been siblings. I imagine how Chikelue’s mother would frequent his grave with tears and flowers if he were to die of his strange illness. I wake up to see her again walking quietly out of the room and shutting the door behind her with a soft click. I can’t help but admire this act of motherhood. This beauty of motherhood. I lie awake for a long time thinking of Eke’s mother with a cold clutch to my heart.
We are left out of the morning prayers, perhaps to give us enough time to rest. I can hear Chikelue’s mother singing in a loud voice, thanking God for saving him: Imeela Chineke muo . . . I can hear Dili, the housemaid, calm and dutiful, making breakfast. I can hear the vendor arriving.
“Good morning, sirs,” Dili says as we come out to the lounge room. She always bends her knees when she greets. Her hair is cut short, her gown a light shade of red against her dark skin.
The room is impossibly clean, no traces of last night’s party—no half-eaten plates of food, half-drunk champagne bottles, or dirty glasses. Household staffers are moving about briskly, nodding or genuflecting.
While Chikelue is having some private time with his mother, I watch the play of sunlight upon the water from the back balcony. The sky is flushed with the gold of a new dawn. The air smells clean, and the sea seems lulled after last night’s tides. When Chikelue finally shows up at the balcony he is in a low mood, with a palpable sense of dejection. He invites me to take a stroll outside.
“This is the third day of the sacred bath.” He heaves a deep sigh as we walk towards the garden past a light green fabric awning sheltering more than half a dozen cars. “I can’t believe I am cured. You saved me, Dimkpa, so no one has a right to interfere.”
He makes me feel even. “You saved me first. My father was impossible to live with, especially after my youth service. A few weeks after returning home, he was already hounding me to go get a job. He always had a partner in my brother. It became unbearable, and then you came into the picture, but I don’t blame him. He sold our only heritage, a piece of land, to pay my fees.”
We walk by the garden.
“No one has a right to interfere,” he reiterates.
I am lost.
“I have a bad feeling.” His voice is shaky, growing faint.
“You have had a long and tiring week,” I say.
“Yes.” He leans over to admire dewdrops on white frangipani blossoms. “I wanted you to be the brother I never had. I wanted us to live as brothers. We should reclaim the land your father sold and help him acquire many more lands, as many as he wants. We should build them a bigger house in the village, and give them a better life.”
He leaves me speechless, more confused than ever.
“That cobra!” he says with a shudder as we step into the lawn. “I had to shut my eyes tightly while it slithered all over the place. The memory still makes my flesh creep.”
“It will go away in no time, the trauma.”
He plucks a hibiscus bloom and sniffs at it. And then he laughs, a dry laugh. “That boy, the attama; he is something else, the image of nonchalance.”
“It was foisted on him. He never wanted it. The priesthood of Ezenwanyi is passed on to male firstborns. The boy inherited it from his father at the age of sixteen. He was born an only son in the twilight of his father’s life.”
“No one has a right to interfere.” The hibiscus bloom slips out of his hand to the ground. He makes a huge task of picking it up. “Why didn’t you tell me about ohu ma?”
I take two quick steps back.
A black bird, a crow, arrives on top of the fabric awning. Crows are harbingers of evil in my village. I turn from the bird in time to see Chikelue slide to the ground. And then he is kicking violently and rolling around. I watch him, stunned, as he gets caught again in the familiar bloody struggle. I grab hold of him and manage to drag him under a hibiscus bush, holding him tight until the daemons take leave of him in a spurt of blood that slithers down his chin. Panting from exhaustion, I wipe sweat from my forehead and throw glances up at the balcony to see if anyone is watching us. The house is full of people. Chikelue and his family occupy the top floor. The ground floor is reserved for the household servants. His father has a coterie of staff who occupy the large cream-and-brown duplex on the other side of the large compound. He is a big importer of plumbing materials and electronic gadgets. So the compound is crawling with human ants, but we are well out of sight. The same building also houses the library that George has equipped for me, a downstairs cloakroom I use as a study to write his biography. He is going into politics.
This relapse in Chikelue’s health must be hidden from his family. No one must know what happened this morning, not after the party last night. It will give his mother a heart attack. A plan is already shaping in my mind, to sneak Chikelue into his room after he recovers, help him with a bath, and try to sneak him out. We will hit the road again and continue our quest for a cure. He is out for about twelve minutes. And then he stirs and opens his eyes. More crows are arriving on top of the awning. There are so many of them, perhaps fifty or a hundred, making an uproar all over the awning, and over the roof of the house.
In another half hour we are back to the road. What went wrong? The question rages in my head, unanswered, as Chikelue fires away at the car engine. We must get to the attama as fast as possible, the lanky boy, master of the crowing crested cobra, to get an answer to this question. If he can’t furnish us with an answer, we will ignore him and further our quest.
“No one has a right to interfere,” Chikelue hisses again from the driver’s seat. “My mother and I had a talk about you, and about my healing. When I mentioned Ezenwanyi she recoiled. The colour drained completely from her face. I have never seen my mother look so agitated. She told me about Ezenwanyi’s outcasts. She says you are cursed and forbade me from associating with you or anyone related to you to avoid a curse following me. I insisted, and we argued. She went hysterical and threatened to kill herself if I disobeyed her.”
It is beginning to make sense.
“I have never disobeyed my mother, but no one has a right to interfere in the friendship between you and me.”
I entreat him to slow down: “Be careful.” He is driving too fast.
“I don’t care,” he snaps.
I fear for our lives. At the rate we are travelling, Chikelue could lose control of the wheel. There is no emotion in his countenance. He looks calm in the face of imminent death.
“No one has a right to interfere. We have come a long way,” he reiterates.
I stare ahead, wondering at what the cruelties of life are capable of doing to a man, deciding I will go with Chikelue to the ends of the world, the farthest reaches of the universe, as, moving with terrific speed, he grips the wheel tightly, fury in his right foot, the gas pedal floored like a long-standing enemy that must be crushed even if it takes two lives to achieve that purpose.
I reach out and grab the wheel. The car careers dangerously across the road as I wrestle it from Chikelue. The engine wails and the tyres plead the course of the car. The tarmac spreads then lengthens. A long truck zooms past and leaves Babydoll dancing in the wind, missing her by the whiskers. I clench the wheel tighter, because I am taking back my life, our lives. They had our poor little lives all figured out for us. My father could not be village head. My mother starved us, her children, to pay tithe. I have lived my life trying to be the person Machebe and my father wanted me to be. And I had to put my family history aside to write the biography of a rich man. Chikelue has driven all his life, and I am only a rookie, I know, but I am taking over the wheel.
And that’s how things will stay.