From this cell thick with the odor of death, my mind drifts back to the lost years on B. Beach. Certain memories are resurrected: the first few weeks of my exile, the last few before my arrest. Much of the rest of that time is blurred, as if the events of those years have slipped beyond the reach of memory into a vast oblivion.
In the first days on B. Beach my fear was raw, on the surface. At night, the sound of the ocean made me shiver. I carried a cudgel, afraid of what might lurk in the dark. Many times, sensing a motion close by, I swung the cudgel against an imaginary enemy.
Sometimes I ached for my former life and considered returning—moving back into my apartment, presenting myself at the office in the hope that no one had been appointed to my desk. It was a ridiculous dream: the door back to that other world had snapped shut never to be prized open again.
For the first three days I went entirely without food. Hunger seared my hollow belly. By the fourth day the pangs had become unbearable. I shut my eyes and bit into a half-eaten sandwich somebody had tossed away. The next day I found some more discarded food. The meat was a little high, so I swallowed it without chewing.
The sixth day, as I walked along the shoreline, I came to a huge boulder, a relic from the days when convicted armed robbers were executed on the beach. Having endured five nights without shelter, I decided to make this granite cairn my refuge. On nights when the air was cold, I leaned on the boulder and let my body draw warmth from the rock.
Other nights, as soon as the bell at St. Gregory’s Cathedral chimed midnight, I began my walking routine. Starting off from the boulder, I walked the two and a half miles to what was known as the European section, close to the washed-up carcass of a ship’s hull. There, I entered one of the sheds made by local entrepreneurs from bamboo stems and raffia fronds and rented out in the day to white clients wary of the sun. I rested until the bell tolled another hour; then I walked back to the boulder. The going to and fro continued till daybreak—a way of passing sleepless nights. When the night was hot, I walked within reach of the waves, letting the foamy water curl and play around my bare feet, relishing the droplets of spray that settled on my body like tiny, weightless darts.
Moonlit nights held a special magic. The face of the moon floated on the ocean’s surface, seeming to sway to some silent but intoxicating music. I grew to love gazing at the night sky, an interminable star-strewn space in which I could lose myself and become invisible.
Six months after Bello’s ascension to power, newspapers reported that ten army officers, including Major-General James Rada, had been found guilty of treason and executed. Reading the story, I wondered how much of Madia’s misbegotten history could be traced to my silence about Iyese’s death.
More such stories reached me through the BBC’s broadcasts, which I received on a portable short-wave radio someone left behind on the beach. I also read numerous accounts in the foreign newspapers discarded by diplomats. The headlines said it all:
madian writer hanged—He was a critic of the dictatorship
madian minister’s death suspicious—
Dictator said to be having an affair with deceased’s wife
120 student protesters reported killed despot canes vice-chancellor in public diplomats say african dictator behind disappearance of opponents—Victims may have been fed to lions
Each headline was a reproach to me for my cowardice. Why had I not mustered the courage to tell Iyese’s story long ago, when it might have made a difference?
The underground opposition press painted a picture that was even more grim: countless men picked up and tortured for saying a bad word about Bello in an unguarded moment in some bar; women, too, detained and tortured; children orphaned by assassins. Bello’s rapaciousness had catapulted him to the front ranks of the world’s wealthiest potentates, behind the Emir of Brunei, but ahead of Zaire’s quick-fingered man-god.
It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that with Madia in such hands, I was better off living as I was. With time I felt less involved in my country’s plight or the history that had led up to it. The past seemed to recede further and further from my thoughts. My nights became more peaceful. Now and again I even managed to sleep. I was confident that nothing from my past would ever trouble my quiet life.
One night last September a woman’s shrieks rent the air. I froze, my whole body compelled to listen. More screams came, shriller. Goose bumps rose all over my skin. A crescent moon hung in the sky, its reflection shifting with the waves. By the moon’s pale light I saw the dim shapes of several figures. I crouched down on the wet sand and began to observe their motions.
One after another, the figures cast off their clothes, then dropped to the ground. At first I thought there was only one woman. Then I heard another piercing gasp, the sound a woman makes when the flesh of her sex is torn. A third woman joined in. Perhaps she was younger than the first two, or else more broken by the tearing of her tissue. Her sound was a low, sustained wail.
Drunken male voices wove in and out of the women’s cries. The men shouted, threatened, cajoled, laughed. In time the female voices quietened to muffled moans, but the men kept up their lascivious energy. Two hours later, finally sated, the men put their clothes back on and made off in a military truck.
The women lay on the sand, not making a sound. An hour passed. Then, certain that the soldiers would not return, I stood up and went towards the spot where the women lay. On seeing me, two of them sprang to their feet and ran away, scrambling into their tattered clothes. But one lay still, her torn garments scattered about her. Kneeling beside her, I looked into her face. Her eyes were shut, her cheeks drawn down in an attitude of pain.
“Can you hear me?” I murmured.
Her body shook with a spasm of dread. She half-opened one eye and dully took me in. I burrowed my hands under her body. As I lifted, her weight dragged down my arms, heavy like a corpse. I maneuvered her on to my shoulder and gathered up what remained of her clothes. Then I trudged with her towards the waves.
A faint sun was already peeping out of the sky when she regained consciousness. Attempting to raise herself up on her elbows, she winced with pain and fell back on the sand.
“Are you okay?” Responding to the gentleness of my voice, she told me what had happened. Her name was Tay Tay. She was a prostitute. “But not,” she said, “a real prostitute.” Her voice was low, like one muttering something improbable to herself. I was silent, not wishing to intrude into the dialogue she was having with her soul.
“I am not like Lovet and Tina,” she said. She turned her head towards me. “What happened to them?”
“The ones who were with you?” She flicked her eyelid in response.
“They ran away when they saw me,” I replied.
She grunted and shut her eyes. I read the details of her face, the child-like amplitude of her cheeks, the clean line of her nose, the arc of her forehead, her upper lip, projected outward, like a sulker’s. The thought that she was Iyese, wearing the body of another woman, visiting me from the past, filled me with an urge to leave her. I resisted the urge to run away from this woman I had brought back from the dead.
“I am not like Tina and Lovet,” she repeated.
“I know,” I said.
“I don’t like standing beside the road,” she said. “Tina and Lovet go out every night. I join them only when things are hard. For one night; at most two. Just to make quick money.” The heaving of her breasts drew my eyes to the imprints of her attackers’ hands, their scratches and teeth marks. She gritted her teeth and paused.
“I heard your screams,” I said. “And I saw the soldiers. What did they do to you?”
A line of tears streaked down the side of her face. “Who are you?” she asked.
“I don’t know any more.”
She regarded me with sorrowful interest. “I sometimes feel the same way. I am lost in an endless dream and I can’t remember my name. Or my face.”
“In my case, it’s what I remember that reminds me that I am lost.”
“Tell me why you helped me,” she demanded.
“Again, I don’t know. Maybe I was trying to save myself. From my past. But I want to know about you. Tell me what they did to you.”
She covered her face with her hands and began to cry. I saw a cut on her left arm, swollen and caked with blood.
“We stood at the Ojuelegba bus stop, looking for customers. That’s where we usually stand. Tina and Lovet stand there every night. Myself only when things are hard. Suddenly, there was a big commotion. People scattered in every direction. Tina and Lovet and myself thought armed robbers were raiding the bus stop again. So we stood still because it’s not good to panic when there’s confusion. We know a woman who ran without looking and landed in the hands of the robbers. They made her eyes see pepper.
“By the time we saw the army people, it was too late to run. At least ten of them surrounded us. One of them pointed his gun at us and shouted, ‘Freeze or you’re dead!’ They slapped us, twap! twap! Stars flew from my eyes. Blood filled my mouth. I was so afraid of losing it that I swallowed it. The soldiers made us jump like frogs to where their trucks were parked. There were three trucks in all, and they arrested seven girls.
“One of the girls kept shouting that she was not a prostitute. The commander of the troops slapped her until she collapsed. Then he stood over her. Smiling, he said, ‘If you are not a prostitute, that means you’re fresh meat. That’s the kind I like. I will make you a prostitute tonight.’’’
Her voice trailed off and her breath came in gasps as she relived the dreadful memory.
“The soldiers put Tina, Lovet and me in one truck. Five soldiers were in the back with us. They smelled of ogogoro and wee wee. They called us bushmeat and boasted how they would show us “army fire.” Until the truck stopped here, we didn’t know where they were taking us.”
She strained against the glare of the sun and looked into my eyes, as if to say that I knew the rest of the story.
Silence enveloped us. Looking out to the waves, I thought about her story and about Iyese. The past seemed to intermix with the present. Iyese’s image, dulled by time, regained clarity. I remembered the emptied look in Iyese’s eyes the day she was raped. My flight from her. Her letters to me, full of hopeless longing and mild reproach. Then her murder on a day arrows of rain pelted the earth.
Tay Tay stared at me, perhaps wondering what I thought about her, now that she had unmasked herself to me. How I judged her in her nakedness. Little did she know that a man such as I could not judge anybody.
“How many of them raped you?” I asked.
She let out a burst of laughter. “How do you expect me to know that? After the first two, I stopped counting. It could have been one soldier tearing my thighs apart. Or all the soldiers in the world. What does it matter? The pain was the same. It was . . . There’s no way to describe it.”
“I am sorry,” I said.