Don’t bother looking at where you fell, but where you slipped
She first felt the unmistakable pangs of labour on 13th February, 1976. It was a memorable day for reasons quite unrelated to her circumstance. Her siesta had been truncated by contractions that took the form of giant fire ants gnawing at her innards. When the pain eased, she lay on the bed and listened to the voices of children playing in the courtyard. They laughed in more languages than she had ever imagined existed. She spoke Pidgin with her Yoruba neighbour, Mama Bola, who only knew a couple of offensive terms in Hausa. They were five, the women. Each with her husband; each speaking a different tongue. In that big house, mid-morning reveries were often interrupted by excited children who horsed around barefooted in the courtyard.
But that morning it was Zubairu who slipped in, shoulders slouched, his dark face long. She sat up, the springs of the Vono bed squeaking in protest at her movement.
‘They’ve killed him! They’ve killed him!’ Zubairu reached for the radio in the corner.
‘Who?’ Her hand was poised protectively over her belly.
‘Murtala, they’ve killed the Head of State.’ He was fiddling with the knob while static poured out from the radio. When he eventually tuned into a station, martial music blared over the static. Zubairu sat on the plastic carpet, legs spread apart, as if he had been personally bereaved. As if General Murtala Mohammed had been his blood brother. He removed his cap and slapped it on the floor. Beads of sweat dotted his head, scraped clean by the wanzami’s blade.
‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un! Murtala? When? How?’
‘They shot him dead.’
They sat like ancient statues in a forgotten shrine while the Panasonic radio belched martial music. The news spread outside, casting a sullen mist that stretched across the country from the fringes of the Sahara to the shores of the Atlantic, and swallowed the noise in the compound. Children were called away to their rooms by anxious parents.
‘Zubairu! Zubairu!’ Their neighbour Nnamdi’s huge frame darkened the curtain fluttering in the open door. When Zubairu came out, he saw Nnamdi standing, head bowed, hands folded on his abdomen. He had closed his fabric shop at the market, as had other traders, as soon as the news broke.
‘Chei, e be like say na true say Murtala don die o!’
Zubairu leaned on the doorpost and looked down at a spot between his feet.
‘But na Murtala o. Murtala! That man no fit die like that.’ Nnamdi, too, had heard legends of General Murtala Mohammed’s invincibility during the civil war. He had been in Aba, having fled the North, when Murtala’s Second Division was devastating rebel lines in the Mid-west. From the stories he heard, Murtala walked through rains of bullets and swam across rivers of blood, emerging unscathed.
‘Na so I hear am.’ Zubairu’s pidgin, which he had picked up working at the railway corporation, was heavily accented.
‘Chei!’ Nnamdi shook as if rousing himself from an impossible dream. ‘So, wetin go happen now?’
Zubairu shrugged. He sighed because no one knew exactly what was happening, or what was going to happen thereafter.
Joseph Dindam strutted in at that moment. He too, like Nnamdi, towered over Zubairu. He was infamous for his drunken singing, which infuriated the neighbours, and for the racket he made beating up his wife and children, often well after midnight. He had been a policeman until a few months before when he suddenly stopped putting on his uniform. And the drunken brawls became a nightly occurrence.
‘Fellow Nigerians, we are all together!’ Those were the words the coup plotters had used to close their speech after the assassination. And Joseph Dindam delivered them with aplomb and a triumphant guffaw. ‘General Murtala Ramat Mohammed is gone!’
‘Cheiiii!’ Nnamdi shivered.
‘Very good!’ Joseph laughed again.
Zubairu eyed him.
‘You dey look me? No be good thing? No be him dismiss me from police, say I no competent. If to say I see am, I for shoot am to pieces myself.’
Zubairu reached up and struck him on the jaw. It happened so fast that Joseph was momentarily stunned. The brawl that ensued, loud and shocking since it involved grown men behaving like enraged dogs, was, however, short-lived. While Zubairu was striving to break Joseph Dindam’s jaw, at the cost of a bruised lip, Binta’s waters broke of their own accord. Startled by this, she hollered. Her wails reached the men and put an end to their scuffle. The other women came out, led by Mama Bola and Joseph’s battered and scrawny wife, Mama Bulus. It was they who, hours later, received Binta’s first son, covered in slime and shrieking like a furious imp.
Few people were surprised when, a week later, Zubairu named the boy Murtala. But because of kunya, the socially prescribed modesty his mother had to live with, she called him ‘Boy’ instead. And that was how Murtala Zubairu, born on the day a general died, came to be known as Yaro.
Binta finally made up her mind to be more adventurous after their second son, Munkaila, was born. They had been married three years then and that was enough for her regardless of what Dijen Tsamiya, the marriage counsellor of Kibiya, had told her on the day of her wedding.
‘When he’s done, always put your legs up so his seed will run into your womb.’
Binta, shocked, had looked at the woman’s rheumy eyes and shrunken jaw. She had wondered how many other young brides of Kibiya Dije had so pragmatically dispensed this knowledge to on their wedding eves.
When Dije smiled, her toothless mouth was like a cavern leading into her antiquated interior. No one, it seemed, remembered what Dijen Tsamiya’s married life had been like. Her husband had died many years ago and the last of her three children had passed on a decade before.
Dije had slapped her playfully, her frail hand like a cow whisk on Binta’s shoulder. ‘See how you look into my eyeballs. Don’t look your husband in the eyes like that, especially when you are doing it. Don’t look at him down there. And don’t let him look at you there, either, if you don’t want to have impious offspring.’ She removed a piece of kola from the knotted end of her wrapper, threw it in her mouth and proceeded to crush it with her gums. Binta watched her jaw move from side to side as she knotted back her wrapper with trembling hands. ‘And don’t go throwing yourself at him. You wouldn’t want him thinking you are a wanton little devil now, would you?’
Binta had shaken her head, resisting the urge to cry. The prospect of being intimate with any man, particularly one she hardly knew, was far from comforting.
‘And don’t forget what I told you about searching the pockets, mhm. The loose change could amount to something if you are thrifty, kin ji ko? You could buy your mother something decent.’
When Binta gaped at her, Dijen Tsamiya clucked at the back of her throat. ‘Young people, they think they know everything.’
Three years, in her estimation, had surely earned her a licence to be licentious, with her own husband of all people. But then on the night she made up her mind, Zubairu returned home with a torn kaftan and another bruised lip. She was sifting garin tuwo in the courtyard when he had breezed in, anger radiating from his flaring nostrils. He sat down on the raffia mat in the corner of the room and turned on the radio. Binta went in after him and sat by his side.
‘What’s wrong?’ She wiped her hands on her wrapper, the white of the cornflour rubbing off on her Ankara fabric.
He shook his fist at her. When she leaned away, his fist came down on the mat with a thud that almost woke the little boy wrapped in a fluffy shawl on the bed. When the boy stopped wriggling and resumed his slumber, Zubairu sighed.
‘I lost my job.’
‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji un!’ Binta slapped her palms alternately. ‘Maigida, how come?’
‘I beat up my boss.’ The words tumbled out as if racing with each other. ‘He called me a goat and I hit him and broke his nose.’
‘But Maigida, you could have—’
‘I could have done what?! What?! Don’t you tell me what I could have done, you don’t know the first thing about this so just shut your mouth, you hear me! Wawiya kawai!’
Munkaila started wailing, kicking away the shawl with his tiny feet. Binta crossed the room and sat on the bed. She picked him up and shoved a nipple in his mouth. The boy turned his head this way and that, screaming. She put him on her shoulders and burped him. Then she positioned him and again tried to breastfeed him. He turned his head away but would not stop screaming.
‘What the hell are you doing? Do you want to kill him?!’
She wiped away the tears that streamed from her eyes and hoisted the boy onto her shoulder. His screams filled her ears. Zubairu hovered for a while and then stormed out of the room. Moments later, he stormed back in, his furious presence startling her. He went to his clothes hanging on a rack and changed his kaftan before heading out again.
Two nights later, when he was tossing and turning on the bed next to her, she knew he would nudge her with his knee and she would have to throw her legs open. He would lift her wrapper, spit into her crotch and mount her. His calloused fingers would dig into the mounds on her chest and he would bite his lower lip to prevent any moan escaping. She would count slowly under her breath, her eyes closed, of course. And somewhere between sixty and seventy – always between sixty and seventy – he would grunt, empty himself and roll off her until he was ready to go again. Zubairu was a practical man and fancied their intimacy as an exercise in conjugal frugality. It was something to be dispensed with promptly, without silly ceremonies.
She wanted it to be different. She had always wanted it to be different. And so when he nudged her that night, instead of rolling on to her back and throwing her legs apart, she rolled into him and reached for his groin. He instinctively moaned when she caressed his hardness and they both feared their first son, lying on a mattress across the room, would stir.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ The words, half-barked, half-whispered, struck her like a blow. He pinned her down and, without further rituals, lifted her wrapper. She turned her face to the wall and started counting. The tears slipped down the side of her closed eyes before she got to twenty.