The girl came on the eve of Ohikwo’s thirty-second birthday, heralded by a pair of little white butterflies. He had been dreading that day as it coincided with the anniversary of his mother’s death. Kande, his fiancée, knew this and had come to help him through the day. She wanted to make it a happy day for him and had been toying with the idea of fixing their wedding for that date. After all, it had been almost two decades since his mother’s death and he ought to have moved on, she reckoned. But that evening, the girl with the butterflies knocked on the door.
Ohikwo was watching football at the time. He was so engrossed in the match, Kande who had been in the kitchen, did not think he had even heard the knock. And since she knew he hated to be disturbed, she went to answer the door. A little white butterfly fluttered across her face. She ducked. The butterfly floated into the room and danced across Ohikwo’s face. He waved it away and it fluttered off, only to end up dancing right in front of the screen. He got up to get rid of it.
Kande turned to the girl at the door. There was another white butterfly flitting about her. She looked around seventeen, five years younger than Kande. Her skin 38seemed soft and her hair was wavy and oily. Her eyes were large and betrayed a sagacity that unsettled him. The light glinted off the sequins down the front of her flowing cream coloured jilbab.
‘Good evening,’ the girl smiled with confidence.
‘Yes, good evening,’ Kande said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Yes. I’m looking for Ohikwo.’
‘Someone for you, honey!’ Kande said over her shoulder.
Ohikwo abandoned his futile pursuit of the butterfly and came to the door, fuming over the interruption. His heart lurched when he looked into the girl’s eyes. There was something familiar about them. He knew he had seen her before – three nights ago, standing across the street from his apartment, watching him as he returned home. He had felt the same tingling he was feeling now. Then too, he had wondered if he had seen her before, but was certain he hadn’t. Now here she was at his threshold.
‘Yes?’ Ohikwo’s eyebrow arched.
‘Can I come in?’ she asked.
He looked at Kande, then made way for the stranger. She floated past him into the living room; her movement was seamless and the translucent veil over her head streamed behind her. The butterfly followed her in. She walked round the room, looking at the framed pictures on the wall. Then she stopped before the portrait of his mother, her back to him. He came and stood behind her. ‘Excuse me, Miss. Can I help you?’
She said nothing, instead walking away towards the television, where she stood observing his picture— the 39one of him as a boy in school shorts.
‘You didn’t join the army after all.’ She was still looking at the picture.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The army. You always wanted to be a soldier.’
He had nursed the ambition of joining the army during the days when soldiers overthrew governments at whim. That had been every child’s dream then. He had wanted to become a great military ruler and perhaps to someday have his face on a banknote. ‘That was a long time ago,’ he said, wondering how she knew.
She turned with a faint smile on her lips. ‘It’s tomorrow, isn’t it? Your birthday?’
‘Yes.’
She sighed. ‘It was always a happy day for you.’ Sadness echoed in her voice.
‘Excuse me! Who are you?’ Kande asked, taking the stance of the belligerent girlfriend. ‘Ohikwo, who is this girl?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said and turned back to the girl, who had her head tilted at Kande.
‘What do you want?’ Kande asked.
She took a step towards Kande and looked at her intently. The brazen examination disturbed the older woman who tried to hold the stare. But Kande was beaten easily and looked down, flustered.
‘She will make a good wife,’ the girl declared, still appraising Kande. ‘Your taste in women is – commendable. As for you,’ she said to Kande, ‘he has a temper. But you know that by now. You must be wise 40and patient with him.’
‘Who are you?’ Ohikwo asked, exasperated.
The girl turned to him. ‘Ndagi,’ she said.
He froze.
It was in the way she said it—just the way his mother used to call him that name, with a slight, mocking lull. He searched the girl’s eyes. They were older than the face that bore them. He looked at her for some time, not knowing what to say or think.
‘Say it,’ she urged. ‘You know who I am.’
She approached him and - placed a palm over his racing heart. There was a challenge in her eyes. He knew the look very well. ‘Your heart is telling you. You just don’t want to believe it.’
‘Wait, this is wrong,’ he said, pulling away from her. ‘This cannot be right. It cannot be possible.’
‘What is going on here?’ Kande asked.
‘Some things are beyond explaining,’ the girl said.
‘You must leave,’ Ohikwo said. ‘I don’t know who you are or what you want from me. Whatever your mission is, you will not succeed.’
‘What is going on here?’ Kande asked again. Still, no one paid her any heed. The girl sighed. The two little white butterflies, having floated around the room, now came and hovered about her. She seemed untroubled by them.
‘You remember that time,’ she began in a distant voice that echoed with reminiscence, ‘when you saw the snake in the bathroom? You wouldn’t tell your father about it, but you told me the snake had sparkling fangs. 41Remember? You tried to run away from it and skidded on the slippery floor. You broke your arm right … here.’ She touched his left arm lightly.
He stared at her, wide-eyed.
‘Remember how I applied snake fat to the arm after we had taken off the cast? The fat was stored in a little bottle of Robb and you remember it was the first thing you read on your own and you were so proud of yourself? I was so proud of you, Ndagi.’
He felt the tinge of melancholy in her voice but did not realise there were tears in his eyes. When he did, he wiped them away with the back of his hand.
‘Someone should explain all this to me, because none of this is making any sense,’ Kande almost shouted.
Too overwhelmed to address his fiancée, Ohikwo addressed the girl. ‘You said my arm was in a cast. What kind of cast? Where did I get it from?’
One of the butterflies perched on the girl’s shoulder and slowly flapped its wings. Then it took to the air, dancing woozily towards the ceiling.
‘It was not a cast really. It was more like a bandage,’ she said. ‘There was this traditional bone setter in Nasarawa, near the market. He worked in his courtyard. He set your arm in splinters and wrapped it with a piece of cloth. We went there several times until he thought it had healed enough to take off the wrappings.’
It was true. He remembered the old man with the mean grin and the bright orange residue of chewed kola about the corners of his lips. He had been terrified of the man and had screamed while the bone was set. Only 42his mother had been there to calm him. His father was away, as usual. His father usually made an appearance twice a year, during the Eids, arriving with a ram for the slaughter and new clothes for his son. Ohikwo had been very young then and this girl, with her entourage of butterflies had obviously not yet been born. She could not have been born, he assured himself. This was just an elaborate ruse.
‘Look, I think you need to go now,’ he said. ‘This is a really bad joke. You need to go now. And whoever sent you … tell him … this is really wicked.’
The girl nodded. Her butterflies hovered on either side of her. She stopped before Kande. ‘You have my blessing.’
Kande’s jaw dropped.
The girl walked past but turned when she reached the door. ‘You remember the tree where we used to rest on our way back from the bone setter? I will be there tomorrow. You know the time.’ She stepped out and closed the door behind her.
Ohikwo stared at the door for a long time. Then he heard Kande move behind him.
‘Who was that girl?’ she asked in a frightened voice.
He sighed. ‘I think that was my mother.’
Ohikwo wondered what he was doing there. The tree had been cut down several years before and someone had started building a house, which for nearly a decade had remained uncompleted. He wondered how the girl knew about a tree that had been chopped down when 43she would have been an infant. He arrived early, walked up the street and waited at a vantage point from where he could see when she arrived, if she arrived.
He thought about his forebears, who had believed so strongly in reincarnation that they had named their newborns after deceased relatives. But this mysterious girl could not be the reincarnation of his mother. She might have been born around the period of his mother’s death but did that mean anything? How had she come across intimate details about him—things that only his mother had known? These questions had occupied him the last twenty-four hours. But he did not believe in reincarnation, which was why he’d come, to prove that the girl’s act was just a bad, tasteless joke.
A little white butterfly fluttered about his face and he looked up to see the girl standing before the uncompleted building, smiling at him. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to twelve—the time of day when his mother had died.
‘I didn’t think you would come,’ she said when he reached her.
He nodded.
‘The tree used to stand here, didn’t it?’ she asked, looking around her.
‘What kind of tree was it?’
‘I don’t remember, but it was huge.’
‘You know what time this is? What happened at this time?’
She smiled.
He repeated the question.44
‘You know,’ she said.
They were silent for a while.
‘Who are you, really? What do you want?’
‘You know who I am, Ndagi.’
‘Say it!’ he demanded.
She never said she was his long dead mother and he wanted to hear her say it.
‘Say it!’
‘Life is a mystery, Ndagi,’ she began, ‘there are things we long to know, questions begging to be answered, but sometimes, we never learn the truth of what we so desire to know. I cannot pretend I have all the answers because I don’t. How did this come to happen? How is it that I am here now? Why? I can’t tell you. All I know is that life is a mystery in motion, like twilight and mist, here now and gone again.’
He shook his head. ‘Things don’t just happen. There must be a reason.’
‘Perhaps we can learn that in time?’
‘I don’t even know who you are.”
‘I know how difficult this is for you.’
‘If this is a joke, I will skin you.’ He meant it.
They were silent for a long time.
‘So, tell me, what did you get me when I read my first word?’
She thought for a while. ‘I can’t remember, but I think it was some whistle sweet.’
‘That was for the quiz.’
‘Quiz?’
He looked at her. ‘The school quiz, when I won.’45
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘How could you not? You were so proud of me. Then you carried me on your back, even though I was so huge.’
She said nothing.
His eyes clouded, disappointed she could not remember his favourite gift—she had bought him a pair of size seven Adidas boots and they had been real leather too. He had worn them to school every day and had been a star among the boys, most of whom played football barefoot. She had made him stand out amongst his peers. But in retrospect, he realised those boots were the last thing she bought him before her death. She had been drenched by the rain on her way back from the market with the boots in her bag. The resultant cold led to pneumonia, which eventually claimed her life.
‘What was my father’s favourite colour?’
She thought for some time and shook her head. He nodded, as if affirming that he had known she was a fraud all along.
‘There was this time you had nightmares,’ she began. ‘It had something to do with a lizard.’
He thought hard, frowning, chasing the memory in his head.
‘I don’t remember the details,’ she went on, ‘but I think you shot a lizard with a catapult and I warned you that it would haunt you in your sleep.’
‘Oh, not that!’ he exclaimed. He remembered and told her more about the incident. She chipped in several details and their accounts blended. She also mentioned an incident at school when he got into a fight and broke 46a boy’s nose. She told him how she had taken him to their room and knocked him on the head several times, and how he had refused to eat in protest afterwards. He remembered that too.
‘How do you know such things?’ he asked her, amazed.
She shrugged and looked at the butterfly perched on her shoulder. ‘I don’t know how,’ she said. ‘I just know, I guess.’
But when he showed her an old group photo of his extended family, she could not recognise his father. She pointed at the wrong man.
‘You don’t know my father?’ He was incredulous.
She squinted at the photo awhile and finally shook her head. ‘I don’t remember his face.’
He snatched the picture from her and got up, angry that he had started to believe that some unexplained mystery had restored his dead mother to him.
She bowed her head, away from his icy glare.
‘You little cheat!’ he snarled. ‘If I ever set eyes on you again, I will snap your skinny neck!’
He started off.
‘Life comes like a shadow,’ she began, ‘but it is nothing but twilight and mist.’
He paused when he heard those familiar words.
‘Those were your father’s words when he felt like philosophising. You remember, don’t you?’ He did. Several times his father said those words to him when he did something wrong. But Ohikwo kept his back to her so she would not see his face.
‘When you go by the old market, go down the road. 47There is a little house with an avocado tree in front of it. Ask for Ozioma. They will bring you to me.’
He swiped at one of her butterflies as it darted before his face. ‘I don’t have time for your silly games. I shall not come.’
‘Remember, twilight and mist.’
He marched away into the gathering dusk.
He kept wondering how she knew such intimate details about him. He wondered for two long weeks.
Kande could not make sense of the changes in him. She couldn’t understand why he was eating less and was distracted. Eventually, when he told her what he feared about the girl with the butterflies—that she could be his mother returned from the dead—she laughed it off. But when she learnt the details of their rendezvous, she too fell silent. She did not know how to support him.
He struggled to keep his curiosity in check and not give in to the temptation luring him to the mystery of the girl, like the butterflies that had orbited around her. Each time he thought about the girl’s intrusion into his life, he could not help hoping that a connivance of circumstances had restored his mother to him, even if in the body of a child-woman. And then he would scold himself for this secret desire, for wanting what he knew could not be.
One evening, as he ambled past the old market, pondering on the girl with the little white butterflies, he came upon a house with an avocado tree in front of it. He stood there a long time before he went up to the 48entrance.
Ohikwo was received by an elderly woman whose greying hair peeked from beneath her scarf. She offered him a seat in the courtyard.
‘Are you Ndagi?’ she asked.
He nodded. She went to the room and came back with a parcel.
‘Ozioma, my daughter, said you would come,’ she said. ‘She asked me to give you this. That you will know what it means.’
‘Can I speak to her?’
The old woman shook her head sadly. ‘She roamed the markets looking for this thing she wanted you to have. She had an accident on the day she found it. We buried her a week ago.’
He was so shocked he could not utter a word.
‘She was adamant that you should have the parcel,’ she went on. ‘She spoke about you a lot, mumbling something about twilight and mist.’
Ohikwo opened the parcel. In it lay a size seven Adidas boot.