Prof heard a light movement outside the door and knew his mother had come to drop off his provisions. Desire and his mother came at different times of the day, but he also recognised his mother’s arrival in the way she lingered at the door, not her knocking. Her presence was carried by her long, intermittent sighs and heavy breath. She would knock. Slow and steady until it became an earworm.
These days, she stayed at his door waiting for him to open for her. Before then, she would knock, then drop his provisions after a performance of his panegyric. But since that time she found herself inside the house, she always shuffled her feet at the door until he opened. The practice was for him to open the door to her and follow behind her as she quietly went to a chair. He then returned to his seat with a grunt. Sometimes he responded to her greeting and followed it with a long silence; the awkwardness of many years of unspoken bitterness, underlined by a devotion based on knowing they both had no one else but each other.
This time as she sat down, he wanted to talk. He wanted to tell her about Ireti. He wanted to tell her about Desire too, but he thought of Ireti more.
Maami, do you think I can father a child? No. He thought of another way to ask the question. Did any woman ever come to you saying that I fathered her child? No. He tried to think of another way to frame the question and he could find no better way to explain to her that he felt he might have fathered a child.
Prof sat in the room with his mother; the breathing between them became a dialogue of their worries, until he coughed while getting up to use the bathroom. He returned to the seat with the hope that Kayo might have hinted at the issue of him being a father to someone, to her.
There were stories to be told and explanations to be made and the silence was lingering too long. The pain was becoming unbearable. He also realised that he no longer felt angry about the past, he only felt that the anger in his past needed to be understood and that was why he heaved and sighed when she brought him food, hoping she would talk about his father. This visit though, what he wanted to talk about was his son—the son.
‘You can’t go on like this. You need to come back to yourself.’
Prof raised his head in the direction of her seat. He wanted to laugh at the idea of him coming back to himself. He thought of prison and the feeling of himself floating up to the skies. When was he ever himself? How did deciding to live in the dark become the criteria for judging the total life of a man?
‘So, you stay here all day and all night with no visitor?’ There was something about the question that seemed based on an assumption of the contrary happening. Yet, he did not say a word in response. He saw it as bait and it pricked his thoughts at first mention.
‘I’ve tried to understand you since your release and I know you’re going through so much, but I can only help you if—’
‘There’s nothing to understand. I just need to do some thinking — and you can start by telling me who my father is.’ He felt this could be a good way to divert the conversation to Ireti.
‘Is that a question that deserves an answer?’
The silence that followed was laden with more heavy breathing. He felt a searing guilt and did not know how to ask what could have happened between her and his father that he hated them so much. Why was she without family or friends around her? He could not remember seeing anyone, besides his mother’s colleagues from the market, rally around her. He had always felt guilty each time he attempted independence, and he told her that once. Her response birthed a bitterness in him, when she said, ‘Independence is not about being on your own, it is not freedom from influence. You are truly free when you become the influence of your own life. Sometimes, we are our own problem.’
He waited for her to say something about his father but she did not. She picked herself up from the chair and sniffed—that was when he realised that she had been crying.
‘I was your father, I was your mother, what more do you want?’
‘A child has a right to know his father, does he not?’
‘A child has a right to know he was taken care of, stood up for, and protected by someone who didn’t throw him to the dogs. Of course, you met your father, and even on his dying bed, how much of a father was he to you?’
He thought about Ireti again and wondered if bringing him up at that point was a good idea.
‘Are you really my mother?’
‘Eni, I don’t understand what is happening to you. But I have paid my dues, years of working as a farm labourer so you could feed, and I could become a typist that could afford us better feeding, and you ask me that question?’
‘Is sacrifice all it takes to be a mother? Look at me, Maami, I’m 45 and I feel like…’
She stood up and paced around for some time. And then she laughed, slow and small, and faded off into a sigh.
‘Tell me, what’s bothering you?’
Prof stretched and sat erect in his chair when she said that. He watched her outline swimming back and forth in the room. For a few, very brief seconds, he relived a time when he was a 15-year-old desperate to get an answer from her about who his father was.
He had entered her room with a knife in his hands, and with his muscles vibrating. He ran towards her.
‘You have to tell me who my father is today or I will kill you,’ he said between tears, still shaking, with sweat rushing down from the centre of his head. ‘That man can’t be my father. He hates me so much.’
She had looked at him hard and said with a calmness he had never seen her display, ‘Tell me, what’s bothering you? Is being called a bastard the worst thing in the world? What would you do if you were called a thief or a murderer—you should decide what you are, what you want to be. See, if you leave the world to name you, all of your life would be in the hands of strangers. If you let people determine who you are, by the time you need to be someone and it matters that you are, you’ll realise you’re a nobody.’ And then, she stretched out her hand and said, ‘Put the knife on the table, go into the room and stare at the face of your father’s photo on the table—and you should make sure you are far from it, in behaviour—and promise never to be an idiot.’ She then walked out of the room, unafraid that he could stab or kill her from the back.
Prof was not holding a knife in his hand this time, and even though he had met his father before his death, he still felt a perverse desire to make his mother feel guilty for his father’s absence in his life.
‘Talk to me, is this question about your father related to something bothering you? Talk to me, my son.’
He did not wait for her to destabilise him with her analysis, so he asked, ‘My father denied me until his death, and when I thought I was accepted, I felt even more shame. Don’t I have a right to know?’
He waited for her, but all she did was take a deep breath before she returned to sit on the chair.
‘Your father—see, how do I tell you this story? You’re 45, forget.’
‘Is it possible to forget what one does not know?’
‘There are no reasons why marriages dissolve—infidelity, anger, pain, bitterness—it just has to be tied to something, but if we could forget, there really are no reasons for breakups. For instance, was there a reason for your father to leave?’
‘You tell me. I still want to know.’
‘He was convinced I slept with his boss and he threw my things out.’
A silence that was lengthier than whatever had existed between them before, climbed on board.
‘Did you do it?’
‘Your father asked me to, and I said no, I wouldn’t, and he cried, saying it was his only way of getting a promotion. The man requested I come. Anyway, I went there, thinking I could persuade him somehow, and I returned home, smiling and eager to tell your father nothing happened between his boss and me. Yet, my crime was accepting to go to see the man. Your father said I must have been unfaithful to him before then, that was the reason I accepted the offer to go without thinking twice. What was I to do? You should have seen the way he was rolling all over the floor begging me, that his life depended on it, our future would be better for it. This one and that one…And so I went to his boss that day feeling like a barter. It was the most horrible feeling in world. From that day, your father started to beat me. One day, when I could not take it any longer, I took a ladle and hit him on his penis, making sure he felt the pain many years after.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your father was told he would never have a child after the blow. So, you see, you’re actually your father’s only child, in a way. I discovered I was pregnant after the supposed plan for me to sleep with his oga, and he couldn’t—you know…So, he believed you were not his.’
‘But I saw his children that time I went to his house, when I ran away from Ilese to Lagos, to see him.’
‘Only he and I know he can no longer have a child. His wife—the new wife knows too. Perhaps she discovered. I don’t know how she did it, but those children are bastards. But which Nigerian man, especially one like your father, who suddenly finds some social standing wants it known that he can’t father a child? Those are not his children.’
‘But, am I really his?’
‘What do you think?’
She walked towards the door and stopped, not opening it, ‘I gave birth to you, and I showed you your father. He denies you and humiliates you, even in death. You should believe what you think makes you happy.’
He felt every part of his body singe, as he could not understand why she was being calm while he brimmed with anxieties.
He shook in his chair and thought of how every fight in his primary school resulted in a song, ‘Show us your father.’ How everyone got to know he didn’t have a father always baffled him and it was that anger in him that he transferred to fighting bullies; that he soon became known as a saviour of soft boys. And then, he read, and read, and read, and found himself believing he was made to fight for the causes of the oppressed. Even Kayo became his friend because he had stood up for him when a teacher called him ‘a blockhead who could never make it in life.’ He stood up and narrated how his mother and himself carried heavy baskets of cocoa from the farm to the market, before she became a typist. He told them how it appeared like he would never sleep on a bed when they slept on a mat, ‘My mother could barely read when she decided to become a primary school teacher. Ma’am, if my mother could do it, why can’t Kayo?’
He was the eight-year-old who wanted the world in his hands at the time. It was also an open secret that Kayo was a scoundrel who could be found on every wrong side of the law. On that day, Kayo stood head straight, his eyes turned to him in full gratitude. Their friendship began. Even though Kayo continued to do things which made the adults throw curses at him; looking at women taking their baths in the stream and rushing off with their wrappers or inviting other young boys to peep at adults as they made love. Kayo was everything a parent wouldn’t want in a child, or a friend a mother wouldn’t encourage her son to keep. Yet, their friendship endured—until he went to prison.
‘Eni, I—we suffered. Your father decided his path, and when I look back, I wish I never listened to his plea to go to his boss, so he could get a promotion. Even though I never slept with the man, my crime was that I agreed to his request. How could I have known I was not to accept? How could I have known that he would turn into a beast? He threw me out of the house at just a few minutes to 3am.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this earlier—45 years, and now? How do I authenticate this, this—fable? Do you know how I struggled to know him—the little of him I knew? Do you know what it means to—what do I know? I’ve never even met your relations.’
There was a tear in her voice when she said, ‘But you know I am an orphan. I was raised in the Methodist Church.’
‘Yes. You’re so good at stories. Who are you really?’
‘I’m leaving. It is better to leave now.’ There was not only a note of finality in her voice, her voice shook, and though he couldn’t see her, he was certain she trembled as well. At that moment, he was past caring.
‘Leave! Leave and never come back again. Ever! I’ve known more sorrow in years. I see why you always wanted me near you like a loincloth tied around your waist. I see why I could never find a reason to settle down…you are a—’ Not finding the words, he said, ‘Leave!’
‘Eni…’ her voice was calmer now.
‘Leave! I don’t want you in my life any more. Ever. If you come to this house, I don’t know what I’m capable of, if you return,’ he said. And in a voice meant to hit her in the hardest of way, he said, ‘Why do you keep coming to me? Why do you hold on to me if you don’t have an agenda?’
‘I’m your mother, Eni. You’re my son. A good mother won’t give up on her child, even when they choose darkness over light.’
She sighed, and he imagined her shaking her head as well. Standing by the door, he saw how desperate he was to have her tell him something from her past. The few facts he knew about her were from unfinished notes in diaries, photos with dates and names behind them, and addresses to places about which he spent his younger days wondering, what happened there?
From Ilese, when he could spell suffering back and forth with the hard life they lived there, while she went to study for her teacher training, to the move to Lagos, when he thought he was now closer to his father, and could perhaps enjoy the benefit of having one, his mother’s silence remained, and the few times she spoke, it was like his life would remain a search for puzzle pieces. She always left something unsaid, something left to be found out.
Prof took a seat and contemplated how his life was surrounded by a grief that invented him again and again. Perhaps, he thought, if Desire came to see him, he would share this part of his life with her. He wondered if he should run after his mother and invite her back into the room so that he could tell her that he never felt present in his own body all those years—and his fights for people were a fight for himself. For every fight he won, he felt like someone who had surmounted a demon that reduced his identity, his achievements, and his hopes into one word: bastard. He knew she felt he did not need to feel like one, but how could she know what it was to feel what you had not carried? She was no longer outside when he checked from the door, and he went back into the house. With his lips trembling, he finally let out a muffled scream, ‘Maaaaami!’