AFTER THE closure of the school Mamo found himself with time on his hands and without much means of using it apart from taking long walks in the afternoon. He took walks not only to kill time, but also to avoid his father’s constant looming presence in the house, and the inane laughter of the widows whenever they came to visit. A few times he had contemplated going to his uncle and asking for a small loan to enable him to get a place of his own, a modest room somewhere, but he knew this wasn’t the time to talk to Iliya about a loan, and so he took his long walks. Zara was not around to make the days more bearable; she had left for the state capital a week after the school had closed, promising to return the following weekend, but two weeks later she still hadn’t turned up. Before leaving she had told him she was finally feeling strong enough to bring things to a head between her and her ex-husband. He had offered to help in any way he could, even if it meant asking his father for assistance, but she had shaken her head and said no, “I’d prefer you to keep out of this.”
With no work to prepare for in the mornings, the hours seemed to have grown twice as long and Mamo would sometimes wake up in the morning and almost panic when he thought of the long, lonely day ahead of him—he’d sit on the bed for hours, his back propped up against the wall, watching the thin rays of morning sun streaming into the window. He missed the drab routine of meeting the students and listening to Ms. Lipstick and Mr. Bukar gripe about their lives. Outside, in the yard, Auntie Marina would be talking to the goats and chickens as she fed them. On good days he walked her to her farm and passed the hours under a tree reading a book or sleeping, but often he left her early, before the fresh invigorating morning air had turned hot and painful and hard to breathe.
He waited for something, anything, to happen, and as he waited he measured time in the shadows cast by trees and walls, in the silence between one footfall and the next, between one breath and the next, in the seconds and minutes and hours and days and weeks and months that add up to form the seasons. The rainy season ended in October, the wind turned dry and harsh, the leaves on the trees and cornstalks turned brown and brittle. Farmers brought home the harvest; the hunters set the hills on fire and chased the game up to the summit. At night the hilltops became incandescent with color—like a painting, the fires snaking around the contours of the hills, their orange reflected by the low clouds that hung over the hills like a backcloth.
He took his longest walks in the evenings. In his walks he was in no hurry to go anywhere. He’d go far into the fields, past the farmers grubbing in the dry raw red earth, past the Fulani herdsmen and their cattle and families and tents. Whenever he walked, he felt like going on and on, breaking into a run and flying away—but he always grew tired and returned home slowly, his head bowed and aching.
One day he went to the old abattoir. He felt a strange kinship with the tired, tumbledown building; it reminded him of his brother, and how their childhood dream of running away to achieve fame had burned brightest and then burned out, for him at least, in this dark hall. The building looked even more derelict than he remembered, the fetid smell was stronger, the mounds of garbage and animal droppings had risen higher, the rodents and reptiles had multiplied and the sounds of their scurrying in the dark corners had also multiplied proportionately, goats took afternoon naps in the enclosures and utility rooms. He stood at the window that faced the river—now that the rainy season was over the tall elephant grass had withered and the view to the water was clear. He could see naked children jumping in and out of the water that was growing shallower each year, screaming maniacally with pleasure, their wet brown skin gleaming in the sun. The children rushed out of the water and stood in the sand, pointing up at a plane passing overhead with a white trail following it like a tail.
He walked until he got to the main road, an A Trunk road leading to the neighboring state. He walked by the road, enjoying the violent rush of wind and noise that accompanied each speeding car. He and his brother had once seen a woman drop a handkerchief out of a car window. She was wiping her face with it and the wind had snatched it out of her hand and into the tall grasses. The small red car had not stopped and the twins had broken into a mad dash for the handkerchief, which was once again airborne. LaMamo dived and caught it, and then he stood staring and sniffing at it, as if mesmerized. It felt soft to the touch, light, its sparkling white now turning dirty where their grubby hands touched it. They rubbed it on their sweaty faces, imagining the woman’s softness in its softness.
“Silk,” they whispered.
The radio and books sustained him at night. He’d lie in the dark and listen to the voices from faraway Lagos or London or America or Germany discussing art or politics or architecture. There were also the late request programs when insomniacs like him would phone in with their marital woes, their sexual angst, their clinical depressions, and their congenital diseases. As he listened to the voices, with the moonlight coming in through the window, the loneliness didn’t bite that sharply; he’d feel as if the people on the radio were seated beside him, together forming a community of misfits, freaks, and solitaries, desperately reaching out to touch flesh, to form a cycle of empathy. His bed was a time ship, the radio was a component of it, moving him forward and backward in time, visiting history and people and places, until finally the announcer’s voice lulled him to sleep. Sometimes he’d jerk awake again, the light through the window in his eyes and Beethoven’s Fifth on the radio—but it was not morning yet, it was only the false dawn and it would grow dark again. The real dawn was still hours away. It was at times like this that he’d look across the room to his brother’s empty bed, and his eyes would fill with tears.
Once, Auntie Marina, on the way to the outhouse at three A.M., had found him seated in the living room, in the dark. He had been seated there for hours, staring at a tiny chink of light coming in through a hole in the window. She started when she turned on the light and saw him on the sofa.
“Twin, what are you doing, seated here all alone in the dark, is something wrong?”
“No,” he replied, “I am just waiting.”
“Waiting? For what?”
“Nothing.” He stood up and headed back to his room. “Just waiting, that’s all.”
At moments like this he could actually feel the loneliness curled up like a ball somewhere low in his abdomen. In his room he brought out from under the bed a carton in which he and his brother had always kept their stuff since childhood. It was full of tattered books, most of which had been given to them by Uncle Iliya, or which they had borrowed from friends and failed to return. There were also pocketknives, buttons, and other childhood odds and ends. He unfolded a large piece of tracing paper and spread it on the bed; it was LaMamo’s impression of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which he had painstakingly copied from a history textbook one evening while Mamo lay recuperating from a crisis. The hills were in green, the rivers in blue, the people in pink and brown, the buildings in gray. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and finally, the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Once, they had dreamed of one day visiting all these sites.
He refolded the paper and returned to rummaging. He found the handkerchief, still white, still faintly smelling of the woman’s heady perfume—or maybe it was just his memory of the smell. He spread it out on the bed and his mind went back to the woman. Long after the fleeting encounter they had continued to obsess about who she might be, where she might be going to, and if she was married to the driver. They had taken turns to masturbate in the hankie while images of the woman flashed through their minds. But gradually that fever had abated; she grew blurry and indistinct and finally disappeared.
He raised the hankie and ran his hand absently on it. A few weeks after LaMamo’s departure he had discovered that the material was not really silk, just ordinary muslin. He had felt unaccountably scared after that—scared that all he had dreamt of being, the places he had dreamt of going, might not really exist in real life, they might be only figments of his imagination, like the silk, or the ancient wonders. That day when Zara had asked him what his future plans were, he should have told her, as he had told Auntie Marina, that he was waiting, just waiting. Once he had waited for death, and once he and his brother had waited for fame and adventure, but now he wasn’t sure anymore what he waited for.