A week after my father’s funeral, I told my grandmother that it was time to leave her and the village and return to my post at the Daily Monitor. She drew me aside and indicated a spot beside her. I sat down on the earthen floor and waited. She lifted her palms to the sun, whistling a melancholy tune. Then with her sun-warmed hands she began to trace the contours of my face.
“You asked me the other day how your spirit smelled,” she said. Her hands were still on my face. She touched now my nose, now my forehead. She felt my ears, then lightly drew her finger across my lips. “Every breathing person has two smells. But the smell of your good spirit overpowers the bad. I’m not surprised that it should be so; you are the son of your father.”
Removing her hands from my face, she placed them softly on her lap. Then she fell into a thoughtful silence, staring into the open space before her. The awkward intensity of her blind gaze amazed me. She coughed, then fixed me with her calm, lifeless eyes.
“I told your father about your quarrel with the big man.”
“The minister?” I asked, animatedly.
“Yes. I told him about it. He was already very sick, but the news pleased him. I know you will ask me how I knew his heart was pleased. If I answer that I saw it in his smile, then you will ask me how my blind eyes saw a smile. And my answer is simple: I see what eyes do not.”
“How did you know about the fight with the minister?” I asked.
“Don’t pester me with your questions. I was the one who asked you to come and warm your back beside me. Let my mouth unload itself.”
She paused again and began to rub her palms together, whistling. From time to time a relative or friend strolled into our compound to find out how we were doing. To their words of commiseration my grandmother would shrug and say, “Death has done his will,” or “We can’t fetch a stick and thrash Death for what it does,” or “Death is like a man who visits your house whenever he pleases. Even when you have barred the door.”
After the last consoler left, she cleared her throat.
“When Chukwu first created the world, Death was a man with two eyes. In those days he would call back to Chukwu’s house only those men and women who had done their work in the world, people who had attained old age. But one day, Death came to call home a strong medicineman. The dibia was at that moment expecting delivery of a gourd of palmwine by the best tapper in the whole village. The old rogue begged Death to give him another day, but Death refused. He then asked Death to tarry and taste of the wine before doing his work. Again Death said no, that he had too much work for that day and that wine would only confuse his eyes. In anger, the medicineman cast a spell of blindness over Death. Since then, Death has taken away whoever he feels with his cold hand. That is why some children these days die before their parents.
“If Death were not blind, then your father would have been here speaking these words to you and I would be the one in the grave. But we cannot go and ask Death why he snatched away your father. Our people say that when a young man is not well girded and goes to enquire about what happened to his father, then what happened to his father will also claim him.
“Your father spoke to you before he went on his journey. You did not hear him. Do you know why? Because young men of today have lost the things of old. You no longer hear the language of things not said with words.
“Your father did not follow death like a lame man. He first wanted to know that you can stand in the world like a man. You must always remember that you come from a line of speakers. Your grandfather was the town crier for all of Amawbia. Your own father could have succeeded him, but he grew up in the age of the whiteman’s rule. So he went to the whiteman’s country and learned to become a new kind of voice, one that was heard far beyond Amawbia. Now you, a child of yesterday, have joined the line. You have begun to do what your father did and his father before him. What you scratch on paper can go and give a headache to a big man. You make powerful men stay awake at night.
“Don’t fear any man, but fear lying. Remember this: a story that must be told never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth’s debt to a story. You came from good loins. Your mother’s breast was not sour when you drank from it. Let the things your mother and father taught you be your language in the world.”
With her hand, she again traced the contours and features of my face. As though pleased with what her fingers detected, she smiled.
“My own end is near,” she continued. “My bones already warn me of death’s approach. Yes, soon you will be left alone in the world. But you don’t have to be lonely. The world teems with people. All you need is to wash your eyes. Learn to smell people’s spirits. Run away from any man or woman whose spirit smells of evil. Find yourself a good wife, the kind your father married. True, your father didn’t have a wealth of children. But look at you. Who can say you’re not worth more than ten children? You must have a house full of children. Yes, have many sons and many daughters. As our people say, when sleep becomes sweet, we start snoring.”
She paused again, to whistle a tune. I thought of my girlfriends, past and present, but saw none of them as the mother of my children. I smiled, reining in a laugh.
“Laugh if my words tickle you,” she said. “But remember what our elders teach: throw me away, but don’t throw away my words. Son of my son, words are finished in my mouth.”
The Monitor was in turmoil when I arrived back at my desk. Ashiki had suggested in his weekly column that the editorial board of the paper should be disbanded. The column exposed the board members as a bunch of overpaid and conceited mediocrities passing off pat formulas as considered opinions.
In public, the other members of the board affected a calm composure, but in furtive conclaves they plotted their revenge. They tried to persuade me to write a reply to Ashiki’s piece, but I excused myself on the grounds of grief over my father’s death.
The truth was that I shared Ashiki’s sentiments. I had another reason, too, which was more pragmatic. My efforts to gain Ashiki’s friendship had so far failed. It was not that he had rebuffed me; his attitude was more passive than that. He seemed to have no enthusiasm for friendship, as though suspicious of the complications of human attachments. Like the snail, he reached out warily, but mostly stayed in his shell. If I stood firm with him, perhaps he would one day relent and let me into that space he so zealously claimed for himself.
I had learned a little about Ashiki from others on the staff of the Monitor. The profile was sketchy yet fascinating, a jumble of facts and fables, exactness and exaggeration, certainty and conjecture.
In the late 1940s Ashiki had been a student at St. Gregory’s Grammar School in Langa. There he earned the nickname Monsoon by setting a record in the 100-yard dash that would not be broken for twenty-three years. He won a scholarship to Cambridge and after taking a degree in Economics returned to Madia to accept a position in the civil service. He became a notorious reveler, a skilled dancer of the twist, a man much desired by women. One night he got so drunk at a party that he broke the nose of a young man who had made a pass at his female companion. His victim was the scion of a wealthy Lebanese merchant. The aggrieved father put a price on Ashiki’s head. Ashiki disguised himself as a Catholic priest to wait out the merchant’s fury, but when it became apparent that the man was bent on avenging his son, Ashiki sneaked out to Ghana and then flew to Belgium. He ended up staying five years, enough time to earn two masters degrees and to marry (by his own account) a beautiful Belgian woman. After fathering two sons, he got bored with marriage and Brussels.
He returned to Madia on the heels of a huge consignment of stockfish he had ordered from Norway. In those days Madian merchants could make modest fortunes from the dry, nutritionless fish. Ashiki moved into Langa Palace Hotel, a seedy but expensive establishment where rich men could enjoy unhindered liaisons with prostitutes, and began to run through his fortune. Evicted from the hotel after squandering all his money on women and wine, Ashiki began another life as a high-class vagrant, throwing himself on the hospitality of the country’s rich and powerful. It was at a party given by one of his wealthy hosts that he met the publisher of the Daily Monitor and got himself hired as the paper’s economics editor.
A few months after my father’s death, Ashiki and I would finally become friends, brought together by a shared experience of grief. I was mourning my grandmother, who had already been buried by the time I received a letter from the local headmaster, “saddened to convey the tragic news of Nne’s untimely transition.” Ashiki had suffered a far more shocking loss.
It was one of the hottest days of May 1965. I arrived at the Daily Monitor in low spirits, my energy sapped by the sweltering sun. Ashiki looked up as I walked in, and beckoned to me. As I approached he removed his glasses and ran his thumb and index finger over his closed eyes and down his nose.
“Do you remember my sister who was here recently with her two daughters?”
How could I forget? She was a lively and beautiful woman, returning to Madia for the first time since leaving for England seventeen years earlier. In England she had qualified as a dentist and had married and borne two daughters. These two girls she had brought with her to the offices of the Monitor, and the normally unsociable Ashiki had come out of his shell, showing off his sister and two nieces to everybody he ran into, boasting about their beauty and brilliance, jokingly warning me not to stare at the girls because they would marry oyibo, white men, not a bush African.
“Of course I remember her.”
“She’s dead,” Ashiki said in a matter-of-fact voice. I had not quite absorbed the news when he asked again, “You remember her older daughter, the one you fancied for your wife?”
A redundant question; he knew that I remembered.
“She’s dead, too.” The information came in the same anaesthetized tone.
I was confounded. How could this be true? “A car accident?” I asked at last.
“No,” he said. “Her husband.”
The man had hacked his wife to death. Their older daughter had tried to come to her mother’s aid and he had turned on her, leaving her, too, a heap of flesh and blood.
Ashiki would say no more. He reached down beside his desk and brought up a bottle of beer. His Adam’s apple working greedily in his throat, he gulped down its contents. I now noticed that four empty beer bottles already lay on the floor.
My father’s death and my grandmother’s more recent passing gave me some insight into what must be Ashiki’s hideous pain. A thing like this, I thought with anguish, could destroy a man.
Ashiki set the drained beer bottle down on his desk. Our eyes met and he rose from his seat.
“Do you want to get a drink at Mama Joe’s Bar?”
“Yes.”
There were three customers in the bar’s common room when we entered: a man who drank in solitude, slowly running his palm over a bottle of beer, muttering to himself, and a couple seated in a shadowy corner, the bantam man telling his female companion about a street fight in Fernando Po in which he bloodied three men and sent one of them to the hospital. We exchanged pleasantries with Mama Joe, then passed into the bar’s inner room, called the Executive Chamber. It was every bit as rusty as the outer room, but the customers who drank there paid an extra ten percent—for their vanity.
Ashiki ordered another Heineken, I a large Guinness stout. At first we drank in a strained silence, for tragedy can tie the tongue. Then I found the courage to ask, “This husband of your sister’s, was he crazy?”
“No!” Ashiki said, and began to fill in the gaps in the story. His sister’s husband had lived in England for nineteen years, a beneficiary of one of those scholarships that were once available to Madians just for the asking. He had wanted to train as a chartered accountant, but had continually failed the exams. The man had not visited home since he left for England; he did not want to feel like a dullard in the eyes of his relatives, who would be apt to ask questions about his career. When his wife wanted to take their two daughters to Madia on a short vacation, the man had opposed the idea. They travelled anyway, but upon their return to England, the relationship between the man and his wife went from testy to turbulent—then all the way to tragic one short-tempered night.
A scowl came over Ashiki’s face. “My own sister,” he cried. “Killed like a fowl! Who gave birth to this monkey that shat in the church!” He doubled over and sobbed inconsolably.
We ordered another round of drinks, and then another. After we had finished drinking I told Mama Joe that the bill was mine.
Outside the bar, Ashiki asked me to go on with him to a night club. His sorrow was so raw, his need to escape from himself and his thoughts so desperate, that I could not refuse. He flagged down a taxi and asked the driver to take us to Itire.