THEY HAD decided a long time ago to make life hard for their father. He had broken their mother’s heart, and though the twins had not been born then, some women in the village still hum the song, popular many years ago, about Lamang’s philandering before and after he had married their mother. The song, a ballad that grew in detail and complexity with each rendition in the moonlit village square, called Lamang the “King of Women / Owner of ten women / In every village from / Keti to the state capital.” The refrain described how women stood longingly on their doorsteps as he passed, and how mothers locked up their daughters at night to save them from “the handsome ravisher,” and ended with the lines:
Mother sighing with longing
Daughter sighing with longing
Ah, King of Women, show some mercy
The song mentioned one woman especially by name, Saraya, the “black beauty.” She was his first love, but she had married someone else, a distant cousin preferred by her family to Lamang’s penniless charms. But according to the song, and to village gossip, the relationship had not ended with her marriage—there were trysts in neighboring villages, secret visits at night, suspicious shadows behind the compound wall. Saraya’s husband, a truck driver, died in a road accident one year after the wedding.
The twins were almost thirteen when they first heard the stories of their father’s early love life, and their mother’s heartbreak. They overheard two of their loquacious aunties whispering about how the twins’ maternal grandfather, known by all as Owner of Cattle because he owned more head of cattle than any of his neighbors, had called Lamang into his room one day and asked him to marry his daughter, Tabita.
“Musa,” the old man said to Lamang, which was Lamang’s first name, though everyone called him Lamang because of his striking resemblance to his grandfather of that name, “marry my daughter and I promise you will not regret it.”
Tabita was the most beautiful maiden in the village, but her beauty was marred by a sickly disposition. She had been born a twin, but her twin sister had died at birth, then her mother had died when she was only five, and now her father thought the best way he could make her happy was to marry her off to the most sought-after bachelor in Keti. Owner of Cattle had no male child, and Lamang, a shrewd businessman even then, had immediately seen the financial benefits of such a marriage. He said to the old man, “I love your daughter, I will be happy to marry her, but I am only a poor student, how can I take care of her in the style you’ve brought her up in?”
First the old man waived the bride-price, which Lamang wasn’t in a position to pay anyway, and then he gave him twenty head of cattle as a wedding gift, and promised to make him his heir. A month later the marriage between the beautiful but sickly girl and the village playboy was solemnized in the village church.
There were other versions of the story, but though the details varied—some said more head of cattle might have been involved as dowry, others said less, some said Lamang had actually seduced the poor girl and got her pregnant and that was why her father agreed to pay him to marry her, to avoid the scandal—what all the versions agreed on was that the wedding made Lamang a rich man. Five months after the wedding his in-law died, leaving him everything, over a hundred head of cattle. Lamang promptly left the Teachers’ Training College where he was a student and went into business as a cattle merchant, buying cattle cheap from the nomadic Fulani herdsmen and transporting his live cargo to the big coastal cities, Lagos and Port Harcourt, where he sold it at more than four times its cost. Before long he was among the richest men in the village.
Fifteen months after the wedding Tabita died. Many years later, when he wrote his mother’s story in his book of biographies, Lives and Times, Mamo, the elder twin, tried to capture in words the night she died—it was also the night he was born.
He wrote of the darkness, and the rain that fell for two days without abetting, of the cornstalks in the yard shaking and sinking to the muddy ground under the weight of the fierce wind and the rain and darkness, of the small square room in which Tabita lay in a narrow bed, sweaty, fainting, her hands grasped tightly by the midwife who was seated on the edge of the bed. A single lantern, fighting valiantly against the wind that leaned with both hands on the wooden door and the darkness that advanced and withdrew playfully in umbra and penumbra, revealed the other occupant of the room: Auntie Marina, who had arrived two days earlier from a neighboring village to be a witness to the birth of her brother’s first child. Lightning flashed through the window like a camera capturing this grim tableau of parturition and expiration. Tabita screamed and thrashed about and in a lucid moment just before she died, she contemplated how life had given her all she had wanted with one hand and then taken it away with the other: she had married the man of her dreams, but he was in love with another woman, and life had given her a child, but she knew she wouldn’t live to see it grow and run in the field, like other children, seeking the sun.
She died without knowing she had given birth to not one child, but two children. Mamo came out first, then his brother LaMamo, who had to be dragged out by the midwife. This accounted for his slightly elongated head.
The shrill cries of the babies above the rain and thunder brought Lamang from the next room, where he had been pacing, waiting. He stood at the entrance, his eyes taking in his wife’s sprawled motionless figure on the bed, the petrified midwife whispering, “She is dead, she is dead,” and the twins in Auntie Marina’s hands. She lifted the bloody bundle and approached her brother with it, but he lifted his hand, stopping her. With one last look at the sweaty, still figure on the bed, he pushed open the door and walked out into the rain.
Poor Tabita was buried the next day, under a baobab tree in the village burial ground. It was a lonely burial. Lamang did not turn up—most people assumed he was too heartbroken to come, but some, those who still hummed the song about the King of Women, said he might have been with his lover Saraya, and couldn’t be bothered.
In her retelling of the same events to the twins, Auntie Marina never dwelled too much on the unhappy aspects of the story; she had a light touch, skimming and flying over the surface, always aiming for the folktale’s happy reversals of fortune and resolutions. And so the sound of thunder that roared outside as Tabita’s spirit left the room became angels’ trumpets welcoming the ascending spirit; the furious flashes of lightning became guide angels’ torches lighting the path to a new celestial home. Then there was the dramatic run in the dark—not desperate and clumsy as in real life, but a dignified hurry, with the twins swaddled and cozy in a blanket, all the way to her brother’s, Uncle Iliya’s house, where she first broke the sad news to Auntie Amina, Iliya’s wife. She then gently revealed the mewling contents of the blanket and said to Auntie Amina, “Take them, poor orphans, they are now yours. If only I had any milk in these shrunken breasts, I’d take them with me.”
The twins stayed with their uncle Iliya for the first three years of their lives, believing him to be their father, his wife their mother, and their cousin Asabar, whose meals they shared, their brother. But after three years Lamang came and shattered their illusion, he took them away—that was the day the seed of their hatred for him was planted, and when they grew older and began to hear the song about the King of Women, and about his maltreatment of their mother, the seed sprouted into a tree.
Lamang, for his part, never took much interest in his children; he left them in the care of their aunt Marina, who had been staying with him since the breakup of her marriage, and the village widows who occasionally dropped in to help with the housework and to generally advertise their availability to the once again eligible Lamang. He smiled at the widows and flirted with them, but he remained single. He couldn’t marry his Saraya because after her husband’s death she had suffered a stroke that destroyed her memory, leaving her only sporadic recall of the faces around her: her daughter, her brothers and sisters, and Lamang himself. Sometimes she’d look at him as though he were a perfect stranger, smiling politely at his words, but her eyes would be blank. It seemed fate, for once, had taken Tabita’s side.