Ten days later Dr. Mandi phoned me at work. In a broken voice, he asked me to drive over to his office. “Immediately, if you don’t mind the short notice,” he said.
I arrived in about an hour. Corporal Joshua was there, sunk in a low chair, a file locked under his arm. Dr. Mandi looked like a caricature of himself: ravaged, thin and sickly, his face dark and stretched.
“You must sit down,” he said. “I’m afraid Joshua here has brought some terrible news. Tell him, corporal.”
“He done die,” the warder said.
“Who?”
“The suspect. MTS 1646.”
Dr. Mandi caught my eye and gave a sorrowful nod.
With nervous speed my eyes travelled from the psychiatrist to the warder. “How did it happen?” I asked.
Joshua didn’t speak, so Dr. Mandi said, “Suicide. He hanged himself.”
“I don’t believe it!” I shouted.
“I saw him only yesterday and there was no indication at all,” said the doctor. “I actually thought his spirits were quite good. I told him I had finally met his old friend, Ashiki. We even discussed the possibility of my coming with Ashiki to see him next week. But now . . .” He threw his hands up in despair.
“I don’t believe it,” I said again.
“Exactly my first reaction, too,” Dr. Mandi answered. “But it’s true, I’m afraid. In fact, Joshua has brought a sort of suicide note. Addressed to you.”
Joshua heaved himself up and handed me the file. The handwriting was familiar. At the top of the first page was the caption,
final silence.
Dear Femi,
I had wanted some time to reflect on our last painful meeting. But soon after your departure a powerful silence engulfed me. A monstrous and greedy silence, swollen with memories, it displayed before me my array of dead things: people betrayed, hopes dashed, dreams unfulfilled, roads forsaken, paths not taken.
Swish . . . wish . . . ish . . . sh! I felt a tremor in the still air, then dead quiet. A ghost’s entrance into the membrane of silence. Whose ghost was it visiting me, I wondered, on this dark day? My father, perhaps. Then why did he not speak? He, a man who once dazzled me with the music of words? Speak, I whispered to the ghost, if you are my father. Say one of your strange words again. Braggadocio, again. Tintinnabulation. Hocus pocus. Brouhaha.
Are you my grandmother? I asked of the ghost. Or my mother? Or Iyese, returning to reproach me for a desertion of so long ago? Perhaps you are the drowned prostitute, pleading too late to be rescued—or come to summon me to another place.
Perhaps the visitor was a stranger’s ghost, one of the multitude who had lived and died in this very cell. Died with their eyes wide open, their death unwitnessed, their last groan swallowed by the surrounding silence. Was it one such cellmate—one such soul mate—haunting the cell again to witness my own life slowly draining away?
Femi, I began to think about you. I felt a tightening in my chest and interpreted it as grief. But grief was at once too complicated and too simple a word for the tearing I felt inside of me, the sense of being riven, sad and angry at the same time.
Could it be true that you are flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood? That we are linked, you and I, by a strange intersection of fate and probability? I have tried to imagine you as Iyese’s son, to decide if you resembled either of us, or both. But I could not tell. Every familiar thing has become strange. Still, are not all humans, at bottom, mirages and mirrors? Mirages of faces in constant transfiguration, endlessly forming and reforming into multiple images. Mirrors of one another, reflecting now this stranger, now that, becoming one with every living person.
“Could you be my father?”
That was the question you asked me. I evaded it, but I should have given a simple answer: “Yes. I am the man who abandoned you on a rainy day in a room where blood flowed from your wounded leg.”
Even if it was not you in that room. Even if I was not the baby’s father. Whatever the complicated facts of biology might be, I should have been that boy’s father that day. I should have tried to save him—you—as a father would. Or any decent human being. But I didn’t. I was too afraid of involvement in others’ intimate pain.
I live with the shame of that abdication in this cell. I am here because many years ago I fooled myself that the counterfeit coin of silence was good enough to buy peace of mind. I forgot my grandmother’s wisdom, that the mouth owes stories the debt of speech.
I had hoped that telling my story would pacify the demons that inhabited my memories. Then your story shattered my illusions: now I know that my story was unfinished. “Could you be my father?” Henceforth, that question will haunt every breath I draw.
Do my genes flow in you? And if they do, would Sheri and her parents consider them good genes or bad genes? Good genes; bad genes. These are meaningless conceits, Femi, cloaks for human vanity. Only the mean-spirited make such anxious distinctions between the legitimate and the illegitimate, the chosen and the damned.
Dr. Mandi came to visit me this morning. Joshua brought him to me (after a difficult beginning, Joshua and I have reached a strange sort of accommodation), but I was unprepared for the shock of what I saw when he shuffled in. Before me—after an interval of so few days—stood a drastically changed man, his eyes too large in his taut face, his body emaciated, his muscles wasted.
“My God!” I exclaimed. “What happened to you?”
He told me that he is afflicted with a disease, as yet unidentified, that is eating him away.
“It must be scary,” I said with a shudder.
“Not at all,” he answered. “Actually I am calm about it. I joked to my wife that at this rate she may find no body to bury when I die.” He laughed loudly. In my mind I pictured him dead, and in the picture he resembled my father.
“Let’s not talk about death,” I said. “I have been present at too many deaths.”
“All right, then. Let’s talk about you.”
“What is there to talk about?”
“I finally met Ashiki. He appeared in my office yesterday. Quite a fellow.”
Stunned by the news, I asked, “How does he look these days? What does he do?”
“You will find out for yourself. He wants to come and see you, if it can be arranged. You know, he refused to shake my hand when he entered my office, but when he left, he slipped me a note. It said, ‘I will be in court on 15 March. Your testimony may or may not earn you my handshake.’ Which brings me to another subject.”
“Yes?”
“Your case. Illness has forced me to consider what is important and what is merely expedient. I have decided not to bear false witness in court.”
“But that means signing your own death certificate.”
“Either way, I’ll die. I might as well die a death that will earn me some dignity. It is the least I owe to myself.”
He extended his hand for a parting handshake. I took it firmly, then relaxed my grip, alarmed by the frailness of his hand, the feel of his fleshless bones. No, I did not attempt to dissuade him. What was the use when he is caught in a system that requires of a man that he lie or die? Lie and die.
After his departure I calmly surveyed my future. What I saw was pitiful. In a few weeks a ride in a Black Maria back to Justice Kayode’s courtroom. From the vehicle’s barred window, a view of the crowd come to witness the resumption of something misnamed a trial. Inside the hot courtroom, sly prosecutors and suborned witnesses. Justice Kayode’s judge’s robe and gavel, his easy lies, his deceits and conceits that masquerade as law, order and justice.
The court would go through its motions, then deliver a guilty verdict. I would be sentenced to a term of imprisonment. Then, after months, perhaps only weeks, of incarceration in a sunless tomb—when it was safe to assume the world had forgotten about me—I would be disposed of once and for all, my dead body silently entombed.
Was that, I asked myself, a fate worth waiting for? Worth cutting Dr. Mandi’s life short for? Even if I were released today, how would I gain freedom from the ghosts that haunt me? From the memories of the many victims of my silence? From the guilt of turning away from a sleeping, bleeding child?
“Could you be my father?” you asked me, Femi. I don’t know. I know I am a man who ran away from duty and love. A man who must point a finger at fear and say: this is what drove me to do what I did, the dreadful god in whose name I slayed my voice.
My grandmother was right: stories never forgive silence. My silence has no hope of redemption. It is too late in the day for me to look for grand insights. What I know are simple truths. I know that the fabric of memory is reinforced by stories, rent by silences. I know that power dreads memory. I know that memory outlasts power’s viciousness. I know—as a man accused of rapes and murders I didn’t commit—that a voiceless man is as good as dead.
It is better, I have decided, to go away quietly, and soon. I will ask Corporal Joshua a final favor, to carry to Dr. Mandi a file containing this letter, these words addressed to you.