The search for a black goat should start way before nightfall
Binta patted the bundle of Dutch wax on her lap. For a while she allowed herself the luxury of losing her thoughts in the intricate yellow-tinted horseshoe patterns scattered on the blue background of the fabric. She raised it to her face and buried her nose in it, filling her nostrils with the smell of new cloth.
‘It’s beautiful. But I can’t accept it.’ Her voice sounded muffled from behind the material.
Reza raised his head from the pillow and looked at her. ‘What?’
‘I can’t accept it.’ She placed the cloth on her lap once more. She wished she had said no from the beginning, when he first presented the gift. But she had been full of desire then. Now the footprint of that desire had been calligraphed into the bed on which they lay. And inside, she felt the tender incandescence that she now knew came from sin.
‘You don’t like it?’
‘No, no. I do. It’s so lovely. I just feel it’s wrong to—’
‘I bought it for you, you understand? For you.’
His caramel eyes, with their imploring look, sucked her in and teleported her back to that day, so long ago now, when she first looked into her son’s little brown eyes and swooned in the cascades of maternal adoration. It disturbed her, this constant reminder of her son when she looked at Reza. But Reza was not Yaro. He was her lover. She sighed. It was the first time she had thought of him using that specific term – lover.
‘You understand, I just want you to have it.’ He was sitting up on the bed now.
She shifted her eyes from his and found herself gazing at his modestly built chest. She turned away when she saw that he was looking at her looking at him.
‘All right, Hassan. Just this once. But I don’t want you bringing me presents.’
‘I bought it, you understand. I bought it. I didn’t steal it.’
‘Oh, no, I never said anything like that. I just meant you must have your mother who needs—’
‘I don’t have a mother.’
Their eyes locked – hers startled, his defiant. She got out of the bed and started dressing, picking up her clothes from the floor: her brassiere at the foot of the bed, her panties half-hidden under it and her wrapper close to the door. She looked around for her scarf.
He found it under his body, where his sweat had dampened it.
She accepted the scarf from him and tied it around her head. ‘It’s all right if you don’t want to talk about your mother.’ She sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘I understand.’
Reza nodded and reached out for her hand. It was warm. ‘Your hands are soft.’
Binta smiled and looked down at his fingers intertwined with hers. She closed her eyes and savoured the strength in his hand. Then he got up abruptly and started looking around for his own clothes.
‘I don’t want what happened the other time to happen again, you understand.’
‘Oh, I always lock the gate now.’
He went to the mirror and patted the little anthills on his head. He tilted his face for some different perspective and, satisfied with his looks, turned back to her. The smile on her face pleased him and when she indicated the space next to her, he came and sat down.
‘There’s something on your mind, isn’t there?’
He pulled out a wad of notes from his pocket and held it out uncertainly. ‘I want you to keep this for me.’
‘Hassan.’
‘It’s just for a while, you understand. I just need somewhere safe to keep my money.’
‘It’s not safe here. It’s not safe keeping money at home.’
‘It’s not safe at San Siro either. This useless policeman is bugging me. I’m not sure what he’s planning next. So I need to keep some money somewhere, in case.’
‘You should open a bank account.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. You should think about it. You can save some money and go back to school.’
‘School?’
‘Yes, Hassan. Don’t you want to?’
‘It’s strange the way you say my name. Nobody calls me by my name anymore.’ He was grinning. Then he remembered the last time she had called his name all those years before, his mother, with a gleam of gold in her teeth. He turned his face away from Binta.
‘It’s all right if you don’t want me to.’
He shook his head. ‘You understand—’ he stopped to clear his throat, ‘you, you are different. I respect you.’
When he thrust the money at her, she took it. She sat there on the bed, feeling her insides dissolving.
She opened the lowest drawer on her dressing table and found the leather-bound photo album. Tenderly, she brushed away the film of dust and pressed the album to her bosom. The dust of memory stirred and she could almost smell the times gone by. She could, she imagined, taste the briny tears and visualise the smiles, the cryptic winks and the little fragments of daily life that had coalesced into treasured memories.
She sat on the bed and flipped through the album. Halfway through the laminated pages, she found the picture. The four of them, her children, in 1987, lined up against a pocked wall, staring into the lens as if startled by their own existence. The photographer, a Yoruba woman, had strolled from house to house; a troubadour of images, scribbling memories with the ink of light.
Hadiza, at four, stood fingering her cheap beaded necklace, an Eid present from her father, the thumb of her other hand stuck in her mouth. Hureira stood next to Munkaila in garish make-up; startling red lipstick and three dots of eye pencil on her forehead, while Munkaila hunched forward, staring into the lens as if daring it. And, over his shoulder, her Yaro standing as if stealing into the shot, eyes wide and asking questions of life, arms hanging uncertainly by his sides.
She ran her thumb over his face, a reflection of her mother’s, that demure Fulani woman of Kibiya. That day, after the picture had been taken, he came to ask her for Cafenol pills. She had turned her back on him. ‘Why on earth are you standing there asking me questions? Go pick them up from the drawer.’
When he downed the pills, he sat down by the door staring into space, looking as if he wanted to be somewhere else, someplace where the warmth could seep into his heart. Across the compound, Hureira and Hadiza sat playing house with their plastic doll.
When she emerged from the bathroom, Binta saw the blank look in his eyes. She knew she had felt that way too, longingly wanting the Fulani woman to touch her, to call her name, to display even a hint of affection. He was the one she wanted to make hers, to claim for herself, for the memories she wished she had had with her own mother. She wanted to touch her son, to feel his temperature, to whisper his name and tell him it would be all right. She wanted to. But she could not. So she loomed over him. ‘What are you doing sitting there?’
He said nothing, preferring instead to slink away and sit on the dakali and stare out at the street. He was there when the other boys spotted a girl in tight black trousers heading up the street. Her hair – permed in the Michael Jackson Thriller style – streamed behind her as she swung her hips ostentatiously. Then the chants started.
‘Biri da wando!’ the boys sang, running after her. Some ran ahead and pulled down their trousers and wiggled their little backsides before the embarrassed girl. The racket drew more boys from their houses and playfields and Yaro, too, was sucked in. Women in purdah came out and stood by the front door, trying to call back their sons, but their voices were drowned in the maelstrom.
Then the pelting started.
Missiles of damp mud struck the girl on her offending trousers, the imprint of dirt standing out starkly against the black of the nylon. She started crying, cowering and shielding her head from the missiles. The racket went up several decibels. Some women ran out and tried to dissuade the boys, but they were too many. In the excitement, they did not see Zubairu, who was not much taller than the biggest boys, until he reached out and grabbed his son. Like flustered bees, the boys scattered, dodging into neighbouring houses and running down slime-covered alleys.
Zubairu led Yaro by the arm back to the house. He stormed past Binta, who was busy washing the mortar in the compound. She turned it over and allowed the water to trickle out before wiping it clean with a piece of cloth. She poured in some damp guinea corn from the basin beside her and when she heard the flogging start, she began pounding. The harder the boy cried out, the harder Binta pounded, her pestle thumping heavily. Munkaila and Hureira abandoned their play to stand by the door, listening to the wails of their elder brother. Hadiza tugged at her mother’s wrapper, imploring her to intervene. But Binta would not stop pounding.
It was her neighbour Mama Ngozi who rushed into Binta’s room to rescue the boy. She led him to her room. But in the brief interval between fluttering curtains, Binta saw the raw welts on Yaro’s back and legs. She saw the blood dribbling down from them. She turned her head away and kept pounding, oblivious to the tears streaming down her face. Finally, she put down the pestle. ‘Hadiza, come let me see what is in your eyes.’
She knelt before her daughter and peered into the baffled little face. She drew the girl to her and held her tightly against her chest.
Zubairu sat on the sofa fiddling with the knob of his radio. Across the room, legs stretched out before them on the plastic carpet, sat Hadiza and Hureira. Their eyes were on Krtek, the wide-eyed silent mole going about his business on the 14-inch black and white screen in the corner. The volume was turned down because Zubairu was listening to the Voice of America Hausa service.
Zubairu hissed. ‘This country is going to shits, I tell you.’
Binta, sitting on the prayer rug, whispered petitions to God into her upraised palms and patted her face. She leaned against the wall and counted her tasbih once more.
‘Imagine!’ Zubairu was grumbling again, ‘Selling us off to the IMF! SAP this, SAP that! What nonsense structural adjustment? The kind of accursed leaders we have in this country—’
He went on ranting about SAP, about General Babangida and his proposed new constitution and illusory transition to civil rule. He went on about the bad roads, the cost of fertilizer, the unyielding taps and the wells that dried up once the rains ceased. He talked, but no one else said anything.
Patting his pockets, he heard the crackle of a plastic wrapper. He reached into his pocket. ‘Yauwa, Hadiza, come have a sweet.’
Hadiza looked from her mother to her sister and then down at her hands tucked between her thighs.
‘Come, come. Buttermint, eh?’
When he saw that she would not go to him, Zubairu got up and tapped her on the shoulder. She trembled at his touch. He considered her for a while and then unceremoniously dropped the Buttermint on her lap. He announced that he was going out and used a rag by the door to dust his shoes. The flapping curtain confirmed his departure.
That night, Binta lay beside Zubairu, irritated by his snores. Beneath his wheezing, she heard the wind whistling outside and, in the distance, a lonesome dog barking. She climbed out of the bed, crossed the room and opened the adjoining door to the living room where her children slept. The girls were on one mattress in the corner, their chests heaving. On the far side of the room, Munkaila was sprawled on another mattress. Beside him, Yaro lay on his stomach, shivering. Even in the faint light of the hurricane lamp, the welts on his back glistened from the soothing balm Mama Ngozi had massaged into them. Binta knelt beside him and felt his temperature. She was startled when he opened his eyes and looked at her, by the questions his eyes held.
She got up and fetched a cup of water and a foil of Cafenol and made him sit up and swallow the pills. When he was done, she took the cup from him and put it away. Then she did something she had never done before.
‘Murtala,’ she whispered and put an arm around his tensed shoulders, drawing his quivering body to hers. ‘My son.’ She felt his stiffness thawing, until he leaned on her body and they both wept quietly. She hoped that someday, unlike her, he would remember that his mother had once called him by his given name.
The next time she dared to call him by his name, years later, he was lying dead in her arms, his blood drenching the ground.
Little Ummi rushed in and whispered something to Fa’iza. Fa’iza shut the novella she was reading and hurried out of the room with Ummi following. When she burst into Binta’s room, they found browning pictures on the bed, an open album beside the pile and Binta poised with a photo in her hand. Fa’iza cautiously peered over Binta’s shoulder. She saw the picture she was holding. Even with Binta’s thumb on the young man’s face, Fa’iza knew it was her cousin Yaro.
‘Hajiya, are you crying?’
Binta wiped away the tears from her eyes and sniffled. ‘I’m fine.’
Fa’iza sat down and put her arms around her aunt’s shoulders. Binta shrugged her off and, holding her hand to her face, hurried to the bathroom.