The past is always a place to look for directions for tomorrow. This was Prof’s thought when he requested to see Kayo. He picked up the phone his mother had left for him and called the only number on it.

‘I want to see Kayo,’ his voice was steady, and he did not say more as he held onto the GSM. His mother’s silence made him fidget. He listened to her deep breaths on the other side and then she cut off the call. He tried to call her again, but the line wouldn’t go through. He tried throughout the day. He did not go for his usual nightly stroll.

The next day Kayo sat in front of him. There seemed to be so much to say but it was evident they both felt there was no adequate way to start. Prof wanted to start by apologising but he did not know where to begin or what to apologise for. So instead he said, ‘How’s your family?’

Kayo did not answer him and he repeated the question. ‘My wife died in an accident on the day you went to prison, with our only child.’ His voice dropped so that Prof needed to strain to hear.

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Yes. That’s not the type of news you offer a man in prison or on the day of his return.’ He knew that Kayo was trying to bring up the way he was treated by Prof when he returned from prison.

‘I am sorry.’

He bowed his head and thought of Kayo living without his wife. She was one of those women who never seemed bothered by anything, and Kayo always seemed like a school boy around her. She was his student, and one of the brightest minds he had ever met. She came to his office on one of those days that Kayo visited him on campus, and he did not introduce them. So, it was almost a shock, later, when Kayo said he was ready to marry, and she turned out to be the bride-to-be. Even all that time, Kayo was the one who was excited by the idea of marriage, she just wanted to live in the house with him.

‘So Kanmi is dead,’ Prof murmured to himself.

‘Yes. She died in an accident. But it’s a long time ago now.’ Kayo said. He leaned forward and asked, in a voice filled with anxiety, ‘I have a new woman now. How are you?’

‘Good.’ Prof said, surprised that his voice was stuck in his throat as he tried to make it louder. He could not look Kayo in the eye any more.

Then he turned to Kayo, ‘Kanmi is really dead?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded and said, ‘A lot happened in my absence. Anyway. I’m glad you are…I mean, that we can talk again, after a long time.’

‘You’re talking strange, man. You are my man.’

Prof ignored him and stood up from the chair. ‘Do you want some water?’ he asked as he reached the door.

‘I’m fine. I want light,’ he paused before he added, ‘I want to see your face when I talk to you.’

‘Power is off in this house,’ Prof said and moved into the kitchen to get water.

He returned silently and the quiet between them grew slow and stately, until it rested on them so much it expanded into a vacuous state of mind. Not knowing where to start his conversation, he said, ‘Do you think I have a son?’

Kayo, at first, held a long pause, which was spat into a spurting, loud laugh.

‘How would I know that?’ There was a slight irritation in Kayo’s voice.

‘I need to know if one of those girls from the past had a son for me.’

‘What’s with this sudden search for a child? You who choose to stay in the dark?’ he said with a sneer.

Prof ignored the lowered voice that followed the second statement, or the snigger which he could hear behind it.

‘Do you know where Blessing is?’

‘Blessing?’

‘My secretary, the one you said I should marry. She was also a student then, but she worked for me.’

‘Oh, that nice lady? No.’ There was a silence which left room for more words, and Kayo filled this with, ‘Why are you asking me this now?’

‘Why? Something happened, but I don’t think that is what I want to dwell on now.’

‘Okay. If you say so.’

Kayo knew him, as much of him as the girls he slept with before he began his abstinence. They talked about the most likely person to have given him a child, Blessing, his secretary.

‘I don’t know but they said she has a partner, but was yet to have a baby.’

‘She is the only one that will keep my baby, or what do you think?’

‘She left angry,’ he said. ‘Consider you activist people slept with each other a lot.’

‘I never—’

He then remembered one night in his final year in the university.

 

He was at a congress meeting with leading activists from different parts of the country. All of the comrades who mattered in Nigeria were at the Obafemi Awolowo University to strategise on how best to weaken the obsessive, oppressive nature of the then military government to cut the academia down to size. He was the representative of student leaders across the country.

‘Every semester, not less than four or five student leaders go missing or die from accidental discharge. These students are the future of this country. Many of them are learning to become the enemy’s spy. They will rather sleep with the enemy than lose their lives. We need to fight against the corruption of the future of this country…’ Prof was the youngest at the meeting, but they listened to him. He gained respect for his introspection on issues. Many of them always forgot that he was not even out of the university yet at the time. They always treated him like he was already a professor. He was leaving the staff club of OAU, where the meeting was held, when he noticed her. She stood with legs astride, biting her fingers and this disgusted him in an instant.

‘Beautiful woman like you eating your nails as if it is sugarcane.’

‘And how is the biting of my nails of more concern than the sorry state of our country?’ Her tone made him feel as small as he had felt that night—standing right in front of a man like Prof Soyinka, whose feet he worshipped at as a student union leader. He stood there for a while. Finding no immediate words to respond to her, he found himself laughing.

‘Comrade, oh, have you met—’ He didn’t pick up her name and throughout the night, he called her “Fire”, which she giggled at, because he did not want her to realise that he could not remember her name or had not listened when they were being introduced.

After her sharp response, she offered to help him with his books to his guest house room, and after a back and forth of ‘Not necessary’ and ‘Prof, it’s not a bother,’ he let her follow him.

She sat on the edge of his bed before she was offered a seat and then she started a conversation. At first, he wanted to tell her he was tired and needed to get as much sleep as possible, but she wove one interesting topic into another, and it amazed him that a mind that intelligent and beautiful, could also say some of the craziest things with a straight face.

‘You think stopping coups and military rule in Africa will change our lives,’ she said.

‘It is one step towards it. I know that these leaders, change from military to civilian and remain in power…’

‘You have answered yourself. See, Prof. It is the West calling us to join their train and that we “need” to fall into the democracy league.’

‘You don’t think democracy works.’

‘I don’t believe in democracy, Prof. We never had democracy.’

‘The Igbos were a democratic…’

‘Prof! You shouldn’t be saying this. We have categorised the Igbo form of rulership into democracy based on the structure expected of us. While I do not have a name for it, it was certainly not democracy. Not like America’s.’

‘I’m trying to understand you. You want this military rule to continue or what?’

‘Prof, I don’t care. See, coups and military rules may no longer be in fashion, but the dehumanisation of human beings is dateless. It never goes archaic.’

She moved on to dissecting global politics and just as he was thinking that they would spend the whole night talking, she jumped up on the bed and threw a pillow at him. It thawed the tension of the past hour they had spent in intense argument. She laughed like a child being tickled. She dissolved into a familiarity that amazed him into believing such a moment of intensity, following introductions that were made barely four hours before, could exist. The more she talked, the more he realised that “Fire” was what was meant when people talked about how a beautiful mind washed out all forms of physical beauty. Were it not for the university rounds they were to go on the following day, he would have asked her to stay in the guest house with him, so they could talk and laugh and talk and top it off again with sex. Prof lost interest in what she looked like and even after that experience, which he described to Kayo—the only one he told of how he would not have minded bringing her to Lagos sometime for some more intimacy—he could not describe her.

He gave her Kayo’s landline number and the best time she could reach him. Kayo was already working while he was in school. Most times, Prof went to his office to wait for calls on the rotary dial telephone whose ring was always so sudden, he jumped. The first few days after their meeting, his body felt giddy whenever he remembered the moments he spent with Fire. He wondered if she would call or seek him out. He wondered if she would dislike him if she discovered he was not a young professor but just a student union leader, who was well liked by the older activists.

It was in December, during a meeting to call off the strike action of teachers across the country, that one of the more senior comrades who was at Ife told him of how she had just disappeared from the campus and no one could trace her.

‘Disappeared? What do you mean disappeared?’

‘She stopped coming and friends went to check her at home but they could not find her. You know, no one knew where she came from… she was playful, yet seemed to carry so many secrets.’

The first few days after he heard this, he felt like someone who lost the chance to adorn a prized jewel. The years that followed were filled with activity and a simmering on the political landscape, and exceptional moments of sex and good conversation in the archives of several others.

Many years later when he began his abstinence, Prof remembered those days he went around universities and how on a few of those nights, he might have been careless with women who were introduced as comrade-this or comrade-that, and who lingered in the rooms until the heat in their bodies made sex a vent. These were women, who over bottles of beer offered his obstinate will a weakness with their intellectual debates, which usually led to him trying to break down their mystique into an intense, unforgettable night of submission through sex. As it turned out, these girls broke down his ego. As he woke up most times, he wanted to be under the sheets, as their “conquered” smile and hot breath teased him into quiet.

‘Prof, Prof,’ the girl might hail with a chuckle escaping her lips.

Among these many girls, he always hoped that one could be like Fire. None met her standard. He sometimes felt it was the youthfulness of his mind and his imagination that made her grander in thought than she might have been. Once he realised none of the girls was ever going to be like Fire, it was easy for him to lay claim to an abstinence that gathered the collective anger of the people in his veins.

 

There were so many years of sworn secrecy between him and Kayo, and Prof knew that he was the best person to discuss his new speculations of a child with.

‘So, what am I supposed to do about this new information?’ Kayo asked.

‘To help me find out of if I have a son.’

‘And what if you have a son, do you want to meet him in the dark?’

‘That’s not the point. I—’

‘What’s the point? You really can’t live like this.’ Prof felt the anger in Kayo’s voice.

‘I. Can. Live. How. I. Want. Kayo, I really just wanted us to talk, to catch up.’

‘So why don’t you switch on the lights?’

‘Why should switching on the lights become the problem or the answer to my questions?’

The pitch of their voices had increased. Kayo stood up, pacing from one end of the room to the other.

‘We waited all of these years for you to return. We carried our own pain. Do you know what I went through? Trying to have a family and keeping your mother alive so you could meet her when you return. Do you know what it has been like? No one would give me a job because I was your friend!’ Kayo breathed heavily. ‘They were scared the military boys would come for them,’ Kayo’s voice broke and Prof wanted to stand up and give him a hug. He, however, did not. He remained in the chair and listened to his friend.

Finally, Prof screamed, ‘I—I—I just want to talk!’ It calmed the air for a few minutes and then Kayo started all over again.

‘You don’t think I want to talk. It is always about you! You think you’re better than me, because you went to prison. You’ve always believed you’re better, the good one.’

‘Kayo, stop it!’

Kayo was now at the point where his anger dug into him and reached for any word that could hurt. It was no longer about the discussion at hand. It was about years of feeling like a side-kick, of feeling that he was unappreciated, of a need to spill out whatever tension was inside of him that needed to be expunged.

‘You are the holier than thou! Pretending like you didn’t know you had a son somewhere. You have not left this house since you returned, how do you suddenly think of a son? Hahaha, you don’t want to feel irresponsible like your father?’ Prof stood up, holding his head. Kayo’s last words echoed in his head. Desanya, who he had tried to bring back for some time leapt into his head and started crying, ‘No one should tell you that. No one. No one.’

‘Get out!’ Prof screamed. His eyes were wet, and he felt he was going to fall as all he could hear was, irresponsible like your father. He felt many voices in his head telling him what to do. He could not distinguish which one was Kayo’s from the others.

Kayo stood up from the chair laughing, ‘You really need help, and you need help fast.’ He walked towards the door and spat on the ground, ‘Die alone.’

‘That’s your best friend leaving you.’ Desanya said. She just came in, when he least expected.

‘Who asked you to come here?’ he turned his head to face her, where he sensed she would be in the room. And then, as if he was reminded he was yet to respond to Kayo’s invective, he screamed, ‘You’ll die first! Who knows if you killed your wife? Bloody cultist!’ He didn’t mean to say the words as they came, but once they were out, he looked around, ashamed of everything.