8

An elephant’s tusks are never too heavy for it to carry

There was a shadow hanging over San Siro. Inside, in one of the rooms the boys shared, the stream of ganja fumes reached up to the bare rafters, where some of the youths had taken to stowing their personal effects: snakeskin amulets procured from shifty marabouts promising protection from the evil eye; bundles of medicinal bark reputed to cure ninety-nine ailments acquired from itinerant medicine vendors who cavorted with live crocodiles and displayed photos of people with disease-ravaged genitalia; and sometimes stashes of cash wrapped in plastic bags.

Dan Asabe lay on Babawo Gattuso’s dingy mattress, staring up at a package squeezed into the thighs of the rafters. He seemed unmindful of the horrified faces looking down at him. When Reza pushed his way through the half dozen bodies and examined the huge machete gash on Dan Asabe’s head, he saw that the blood had soaked up the black powder that Dogo the resident herbalist had administered to stem the bleeding.

‘This thing is poisoning his blood.’ Sani Scholar was squatting over Dan Asabe’s prone figure with a bowl of warm, salted water and a piece of cloth. He still fancied himself the doctor he might someday become, should he ever go back to school.

‘Don’t you lay a hand on him.’ Dogo was sitting against the wall with angry eyes, puffing on a joint. ‘Don’t waste my medicine, you hear?’

The damp cloth in Sani’s hand hung between the bowl and Dan Asabe’s battered head. ‘Your herbs will give him an infection.’

‘What the hell do you know, boy? I said leave him alone.’ Dogo stood up and slapped the dust off the seat of his trousers. ‘That is the problem with this place. Nobody listens. When Dogo says take this for tauri, take this for protection, people say Dogo is high. Now see what has happened.’

‘Dogo, don’t start now.’ Gattuso glared at him.

‘Why not? Before we left for this rally business, I said take this, take this. Reza said no, that nobody would attack us. Now see.’ Dogo had offered, for a fee, of course, some charms and amulets for protection against all sorts of weapons. He had extensively investigated the potency of amulets procured from various mallams, often using himself as the guinea pig. He had dedicated himself to the pursuit of tauri, which would make his skin impenetrable to metal, a useful asset considering the occupational hazards of their existence. The procedure was never clear-cut as Dogo was prone to experiment with mysterious herbs and decoctions of questionable origin and intent, but his dedication to these pursuits had earned him a reputation as the resident herbalist of San Siro, and he was often consulted when there were stomach upsets, fevers or headaches to be remedied.

Dogo’s standing, however, suffered when he had been forced to admit that he had indeed been swindled while trying to obtain an amulet that would enable him vanish in times of trouble. He had stolen from his mother and some of the boys at San Siro and gone on a burgling spree in the neighbourhood. When he had amassed enough money, he went to the travelling mallam and collected the talisman reputed to contain, among other things, the eye of a leopard. For a week he followed the instructions diligently. He refused to come into contact with water or eat anything that had been subjected to the torment of fire; he slept wedged between the wall and some bricks, for the charm demanded he slept only on his back. And he stayed away from babies, whose pee or puke had the power to render the talisman ineffective. After the prescribed seven days of preparations, he put on the amulet and discovered that he did not disappear. And when, in a fit of rage, he shredded the talisman, he discovered it contained nothing but the folded pages of old newspapers.

‘Okay, Dogo, cut the crap. We gave as good as we got.’ Reza leaned against the wall, his voice quietly authoritative.

‘Sure.’ Gattuso punched his palm with his fist. There was a timbre of pride in his voice. ‘Kai! I must have slashed off that boy’s arm—’

Dan Asabe coughed and Sani tried to make him comfortable by prodding the grimy pillow beneath his head. ‘I think we should take him to the hospital.’

Dogo took a long last drag on his roll and cocked his head to one side. ‘Can I get my balance now?’

Reza eyed him. ‘Wait, like everyone else. You saw how the rally was disrupted before the boss settled us.’

‘What do you mean? No balance? Kan buran ubannan! With this broken head and the entire day in the sun, no balance? And I had to travel with my head hanging out of the bus like a travelling chicken, almost grazing my face against the flyover—’

‘Dogo, that’s enough now.’ Gattuso cracked his knuckles.

‘It won’t work, Gattuso, you hear me? It won’t work. I need my money now!’

‘Come and take it then.’ The challenge in Reza’s voice was unmistakable. He looked Dogo in the eye. The tall youth looked away and started rolling another joint, grumbling under his breath.

‘No one has got his balance yet.’ Reza’s voice took in the entire room. ‘I am going to see the boss now about that. Wait until I return.’

As he stepped out into the compound and stood studying the battered bus parked out at the front, Gatttuso caught up with him.

‘Reza, we need to get Dan Asabe to the hospital.’ Gattuso rolled his head. ‘This thing doesn’t look good.’

Reza thought for a while and hissed. ‘Have you not lived through worse?’

‘A lot worse.’

Reza examined the huge spiderweb crack made on the windshield of the bus by a rock missile. ‘Next time, don’t bring this dan daudu to any rally. He doesn’t have the stomach for it.’ He took a final look at the battered vehicle and walked away, the light of the evening sun in his eyes.

Reza reached the huge fenced house in Maitama, where peacocks walked the lush lawns. He was ushered into the anteroom where several other people, mostly elderly men, were waiting. A large flat-screen TV showed Barcelona in battle with Osasuna. He leaned against the wall and watched.

‘The senator is in a meeting, you have to wait.’ A man grinned toothily at Reza as if he had known him all his life. Reza smiled back.

‘You know, elections are drawing close, he will be busy seeing all these people.’ The man continued to smile as if imploring Reza to say something.

Reza said nothing.

‘This is politics!’ The man’s voice made the seven heads in the room turn to him, glaring. When he said nothing more, the men turned back to the screen. The man drew close to Reza. ‘Tough rally this afternoon.’

This time Reza deigned to look at him. The man adjusted his zanna cap, which had seen better days. The red and the blue and the yellow yarn embroided into it had washed out and there were strands of thread coming undone.

‘Yes,’ Reza nodded.

‘All these people trying to cause trouble for the senator’s candidate will be put to shame insha Allahu!’ The man adjusted his old cap again. ‘Did you know they tried to disrupt the rally? If not for Allah’s favour, I tell you wallahi—’

The account the man gave of the rally, embellished with choice onomatopoeic expressions for effect, could have been plucked straight from a blockbuster. Reza, despite being a principal actor in the whole melodramatic episode, did not remember it that way. He did not even exist in the man’s account. One of the other waiting men, probably as irritated by the man’s incessant chatter as Reza was, said it was time for prayers and rose. The others followed him out to the mosque.

‘Shall we go to the mosque then?’ The man with the old cap stood uncertainly.

‘You go ahead. I will be along shortly.’ Reza slid onto a leather seat one of the men had vacated and threw one leg across the other. He turned his face to the screen but out of the corner of his eye he could see the man hovering by the door before he eventually went out.

When the men returned, Reza did not give up the seat and the man who had been sitting on it before stood deliberately over him until he noticed the scowl on Reza’s face. He moved away and perched on the armrest of another seat occupied by his friend.

Men emerged from the adjacent room periodically and, each time, a young man in a shirt and tie would poke his head round the door and scan the faces. He would then point at one of the waiting men and usher him in.

By the time the match on the TV ended, Reza had given up trying to suppress his yawns. They came at regular intervals, and each time he felt more exhausted and leaned further back into the seat. He thought of Hajiya Binta and her long gone clumps of ancient pubic hair, and her gold tooth. It was then he allowed himself to think about the woman who had ridden towards him on a scented breeze, whose gold tooth still gleamed in the dimness of reminiscence.

He had been seventeen in 2003 when he next saw his mother. He was playing football with the other boys on the plot down the lane when she came. Because the field was small with a huge rocky outcrop in one corner, they played ‘monkey post’, with four boys on each side trying to sneak the ball through a pair of stones placed three feet apart at both ends of the field. Reza’s team was playing skin, their bare torsos glistening in the dimming sun.

She must have been standing there for a while, behind the rock where the other boys sat waiting their turns, because when Reza looked up to pass the ball, he saw her. It was the radiance of her flowing, silky white jilbab with sequins down the front, like little mirrors catching the sun, which first arrested his attention. And then he saw her face, and the pride beaming from it. He made the pass and stood indecisively.

She was smiling when he finally walked towards her, stopping by the rock to collect his shirt. The boys watched, and as soon as he walked past them, the whispers began.

She was as beautiful as she had been seven years before but the years had added crow’s feet around her eyes when she smiled. The fingers of musk wafted in his direction, drawing him to her. He resisted and stared down at his dusty feet.

‘You play well.’

He looked up and saw she was smiling and then looked down again at his feet, grinding his teeth.

‘My father used to do that a lot. Grinding his teeth like that when he was angry. You are not happy to see me, are you?’

‘What do you want?’

There was an irreverence in his tone that made her flinch. He wished his anger had reached out and smacked her in the face, because he could not do that himself. He wanted her to understand that he wasn’t the meek boy she had seen back in ’96. He had grown past the age of becoming and Reza had swallowed whole the puny Hassan Babale who had clung to her jilbab all those years before.

She sighed and adjusted the headscarf that framed her face. ‘It’s been a while.’

‘Were you deported again?’

She held her breath for a moment. ‘No, I wasn’t. I came back to see you.’

He looked up at her and their eyes met.

‘I went to the house and they told me I could find you here.’ She glanced about her at the boys in the field. ‘Look, let’s leave this place.’

He turned back and saw that the boys were gazing at them. They must have figured out who she was by then, the great whore of Arabia who had birthed him and abandoned him to scorn. He walked with her up the lane, away from the football field to the mango grove some distance away. They stopped, as if by unspoken agreement, under a tree. He kicked away a fruit that birds had half-eaten and left to rot at the foot of the trunk.

‘So, you’ve finished school?’

He scoffed.

‘What happened?’

The concern on her face seemed genuine to him. He turned his head this way and that. ‘I was expelled.’

She sighed. ‘What for?’

‘I was caught selling weed to some students and I broke a teacher’s jaw.’

‘Ya Salam! Why on earth did you do that?’

‘Because I wanted to, you understand.’ This time he held her eyes until she looked away and hugged herself, as if a cold gust had rattled her soul.

‘Hassan, my son …’

‘Don’t call me that.’

She swallowed hard. ‘Hassan. You have every right to be angry, I know. Whatever happened between your father and me was not your fault and it was wrong of me to make you suffer for it. But I am still your mother and …’

He dug his fingers into the bark of the tree and peeled off a chunk, exposing a colony of ants to the mild glare of the sun. The dazed creatures ran about chaotically while he broke the bark into tiny bits that fell to his feet. ‘I have to go now. You go back to wherever you came from, kin ji?’

‘Wait … please.’

Beneath the desperation in her voice, he felt an emptiness that might have hounded her across the desert and brought her running to him. But the anger he had lived with since the day she unclasped his little fingers from her jilbab devoured any sympathy he could have felt for her.

He glowered at her mouth, which was moving, trying to form words. She wanted to say something important. He could see that in her tear-filled eyes. But he was not interested. Not any more. ‘If I had known you were coming I would have brought your stupid ring along.’

As he hurried away, he heard her calling his name. The voice reached out and yanked at his heart. He sprinted, as far away as he could get from the haunting hollowness in her voice and the whirl of musk that had lingered for so long in the recesses of his mind.

The young man beckoned at Reza from the door, before noticing that his eyes were closed. ‘The senator will see you now.’

Reza opened his eyes, looked at his watch and then at the young man. Why would anyone be wearing a tie at a quarter to midnight? He rose and followed the smartly-dressed man into the senator’s study. The old man was sitting on an exquisite leather settee positioned before a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. He was peering at a file on his lap through the glasses on the bridge of his nose.

Reza knelt and greeted the man. The senator held up a hand and the two younger men waited. Reza scanned the books’ spines and spotted titles on politics, philosophy and civil engineering. On the wall, there was a painting of the Eiffel Tower, from a period when men donned top hats and carried walking sticks and the women on their arms wore long extravagant dresses and dramatic hats. On the other wall, there was an exquisite painting of a semi-nude girl. He was haunted, not by her jauntily poised breasts but by her eyes, and the innocence they exuded.

Senator Buba Maikudi, who was a professor of civil engineering and owned Bulwark Construction, a company that had enjoyed favourable contracts under several governments, patted his stomach beneath his white babban riga and adjusted his glasses. He shifted his slight frame on the leather seat and rubbed his nose before putting away the file.

‘Reza.’ He looked over the rim of his glasses at his guest, as if just realising he was not alone.

Reza greeted him afresh, more reverently, but the man leaned forward and extended a hand. His grasp felt weak and Reza wondered, for an insane second, what it would be like to crush the hand of this powerful man. He was small, and he was getting old too, old enough to put wrinkles on his face, grey in his eyebrows and a quaver in his voice. He was sixty-nine. But his beardless face was still boyish and his eyes, above the rims of his glasses, were lively even this late in the night. Reza wished he could grow old in money like this man. He pushed away the image in his mind of his ageing one-eyed father.

‘Ah, Reza,’ the senator’s voice perked up. ‘Busy day at the rally, ko?’

‘Yes, Alhaji.’ Reza settled down on the rug.

‘But how come you allowed the situation to get out of hand like that?’

‘Alhaji, they came at us. They just wanted to disrupt the rally—’

‘Yes, that was their objective. Yan iska kawai! I know who is behind this and we will be dealing with them soon, don’t worry.’

‘Anytime you give the word, Alhaji.’

The senator leaned forward as if to confide a secret. ‘You see,’ he whispered, ‘politics is a tricky business. And you have to play your cards well. You know, this rally, ehm? I organised it to know exactly who is with me and who is against me. What do you think I would do with a House of Reps seat? You know I’m bigger than that.’

Reza nodded.

The senator leaned back and cleared his throat. ‘I have been a senator twice and a minister three times. I am almost seventy; I am too old for this. That is why I said let that young man go to the House, because he is reasonable, is that not so?’

‘Indeed he is.’ Reza had never seen the man, Audi Balarabe, before the rally. He had heard that the man was a cousin of the senator.

‘Come, Moses,’ the senator beckoned the young man who had retreated to a corner of the room and stood against the wall, arms folded. ‘You know Audi. Is he not a reasonable young man?’

‘He is, sir.’

‘You see.’ There was triumph in the senator’s voice. ‘The problem with this country is that we don’t want to make way for the younger ones to come in. That is the problem. Especially in our party. That is why you had these miscreants coming to disrupt our rally. But we will deal with them. Shegu! Is it not me they want to challenge?’

‘How do we deal with them, Alhaji?’

‘Reza, Reza.’ His laughter belied his size. ‘That is why I like you. You are always ready for action. But don’t worry. When the time comes, ko?’ He patted his pockets and looked around. ‘Moses, ask Musa to get me some tea. You will have some tea, Reza, won’t you?’

‘Oh, no, Alhaji—’

‘No? You are not married yet, are you?’

‘Not yet, Alhaji.’

‘So, why not stay to have some tea? It will be good for you, ka ji ko?’

Moses went to fetch Musa. Alhaji Maikudi stood up, stretched, and walked round the room.

Reza worried that the man showed no intention of retiring for the night. And the boys were waiting at San Siro.

‘Alhaji, there’s something.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes.’ He returned to his place on the settee. ‘What is it?’

‘The little … something for the boys. Because of the skirmish, we weren’t sorted out—’

‘Oh, yes. But I thought, ah, I thought I asked … well, never mind.’ He reached beyond the armrest and pulled up a briefcase. He snapped it open and pulled out a wad of notes.

‘One of the boys was badly injured, Alhaji. We need to take him to the hospital.’

The senator looked at him over the rim of his glasses and added one more bundle. ‘You know, Reza, you don’t come to me unless you are having troubles.’

‘You are always too busy, Alhaji.’

‘But we’ve been together for how many years now? All the politics, is it not to help you, our people? I am already rich, you know, and I am old. This entire struggle is for people like you, ko ba haka ba ne? We are just unfortunate to have terrible leaders in this country. But you don’t even call to say, senator, sannu da aiki, except when you have troubles.’

‘I call, Alhaji, but your people won’t put me through.’

‘My people? Sometimes you speak and I don’t understand what you are saying, wallahi. Are you not one of my people? Or are you no longer with me?’

‘Haba Alhaji, of course, I am.’

‘Good. Good.’ He handed over the wad of bills to Reza, who shoved them into his pockets. ‘And how is your policeman? I hope he’s not troubling you anymore.’

‘Not so much. He just raided our place and took our stuff and sold it to other boys.’

‘You see the injustice we are fighting?’ The senator threw open his palms as if to receive an affirmation. ‘That is why we must never give up.’

‘Exactly, Alhaji. The man is new in the force.’

The senator snapped shut the briefcase and placed it back by the settee. ‘They are just recruiting illiterates in the force, and yet there are qualified people out there looking for something to do. When you called me that time, I called up his boss immediately and said his boys should stop harassing my boys. If he disturbs you again, let me know. Aikin banza da wofi! You see now what I am talking about? They don’t want the masses to eat, eh?’

Musa, a young man in his early twenties, came in with the tea and set the tray on the footstool by the settee. Moses was standing by the door waiting. He closed the door after Musa stepped out.

‘Yes, Moses, give Reza my direct line. He is one of my good boys.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Moses whipped out a card from his pocket and handed it to Reza.

‘If you call this number, Moses will take the call. Moses is my P.A. He is always with me.’

Reza thanked the senator, sat down for tea, wondering why anyone would want it at midnight, and listened to him talk as if the night was just beginning. When he eventually left for San Siro, it was a quarter to one in the morning, long after the dogs had tired of howling.