6

‘AUGUST VISITOR’

OBASIDINELU, you have sent me to live on the earth with

humans in many cycles of existence, and I have seen many

things, and I’m wise in the ways of humanity. Yet I do not

fully understand the human heart. Every person lives as if

oscillating between two realms, unable to anchor his foot in

either. This is a strange thing. Let us consider, for instance,

the intercourse between fear and anxiety. Fear exists

because of the presence of anxiety and anxiety because

humans cannot see the future. For if only a man could see

the future, he would be more at peace. For one who plans to

travel in a coming day may say to his companion,

‘If we go

to Aba tomorrow, we will encounter robbers on the highway

and we will be robbed of this car and all our possessions.

’ To

which the other may say,

‘Surely we will not go to Aba

tomorrow.

Or suppose there is a young woman about to be married.

If she could see the future, she could say to her father on

the eve of the wedding,

‘My father, I don’t mean to

disappoint our entire clan and soil our name. But I have

come to find that if I marry this man, he will beat me every

day and will treat me worse than a dog.

’ Can you imagine

what fear this would create in her beloved father if he

believes what she has seen is true? The father would snap

his fingers over his head and cry,

‘T ufia! Y a buru ogwu ye

ere kwa la! Anyone who has prepared such a spell, may it

come to naught! You must leave the man at once, mydaughter. Where is the bride price he has
paid? Where is the

young goat? Where are the three tubers of yam? Where is

the bottle of schnapps and the crate of mineral? Return

them all at once! God forbid that my daughter should marry

such a man!’ But Chukwu, they will not do such a thing

because none of them can see the future. So without

knowing it, the men of trade will embark on their journey on

the planned day and get robbed and killed. The young

woman will marry the man who will treat her worse than a

slave.

I have seen it many times.

It is in this same way that my host drove his van to Ndali’s

house that Sunday not knowing what was in store. Unable to

induce the day to arrive earlier and unable to stop it from

coming, he’d waited anxiously for it. Time is not a living

creature that can listen to pleas, nor is it a man who can

delay. The day will come, as it has done since the beginning,

and all that man can do is wait. Waiting in such a state of

anxiety is tasking. Although one might feel a sense of peace

while waiting, that peace is deceptive – the kind that could

cause a man to think of roiling waters as calm.

He had not seen her in two days before that day, and he

longed for her. He entered her street, trying to imagine what

her family was like, what the house looked like. The

electrical poles around the street were lower than they were

in most other parts of Umuahia, and they seemed lined up

close to each other, like laundry ropes. Small sparrows sat

on a thick one that reared from the transmitter on the other

side of the road, as if they were all in some agreement to

stay on the cable. Shepherd , he thought suddenly. Is that

nobler? Shepherd of birds? Is that what he would call himself

at the meeting? Would that make things good and make

things go well?

He arrived to find their house looming over the road in

grandeur and prominence. He accessed this secluded part

of the street called ‘Layout’ by serendipity. The road was

well laid, and there was a pavement, beyond both sides ofwhich were residential buildings. The
house he was looking

for, number 71, sat at the end of the layout, creating a dead
end. Its walls were yellow, not quite as high as some of the

others but rimmed around on the top with fine hoops of

barbed wire. As if to demonstrate what might happen to a

robber confident enough to attempt a break-in, a black

polythene bag had been caught on the spike of one of the

hooped wires. The morning wind pushed persistently at the

bag, forcing it to cling to the wire by one of its handles, and

its tumefied body to continue to wheeze at the pressure of

the wind.

Oseburuwa, he did not know why he watched the bag for

as long as he did – an object caught in something from

which it could not get away no matter how much it tried.

This intrigued him. He pulled up in front of the giant gate

and turned off his engine. He looked at himself in the

rearview mirror. He’d successfully cut his hair the previous

afternoon. By the mirror, he fixed his tie, which was the

colour of the shirt he wore. He’d pressed it with the iron

Ndali had bought him, a strange technique in which the

surface of a hot object is pressed against a cloth. He sniffed

the suit and questioned whether he should have worn it. He

had washed it the day before and hung it on the laundry

rope. He’d hoped to take it in shortly afterwards but had

fallen asleep. Once I heard the rain, I rushed out of the yard,

but there was nothing I could do. A chi cannot influence a

host who is not in a conscious state. So I had watched,

helpless, as rain poured down on his laundry until the

drumming on the asbestos roof woke him. Instantly, I

flashed the thought of the suit jacket into his mind, and he

ran out but found the suit already soaked. He brought it into

the house and hung it on a chair in the living room. Although

it was dry by the time he put it on, it had acquired a rank

smell. He removed the suit jacket and held it in his hand in

case Ndali became concerned with why he did not wear it.

Before he turned on the engine again, he looked at the

metallic structure attached to the gate. It was of Jisos Kraistbearing a piece of wood with two
outstretched arms. He was

gazing at this when the small gate attached to the big one

opened. A man stepped out of it wearing a uniform of faded

blue and a black beret. The man’s trousers were hiked

unevenly – one to the knees and the other below the knee.

‘Oga, what do you want?’ the man said.

‘I am a guest of Ndali.

‘A guest, er,

’ the man said, a weak frown on his face. The

man ran his eyes over the van, ignoring his affirmative

answer.

‘From where you know Madam from, Oga?’ the man

said in the language of the White Man.

‘What?’

‘I asked how you take know my Madam?’ The man had

come to the van, planted his two hands on top of it, and

bent his head to peer in at its only occupant.

‘I am her boyfriend. My name is Chinonso.

‘Okay, sir,

’ the man said. He detached from the van.

‘You

be the man they are expecting?’

‘Yes, na me.

‘Ah, welcome, sir. Welcome.

The man hurried through the small opening in the gate,

and he heard a rattling of metals and rods. One of the two

big gates squeaked and swung open. Although he knew that

Ndali’s father was a titled chief and therefore rich, he did

not expect that their wealth would be of this magnitude. He

didn’t at all expect to see the life-size sculpture of a

menacing lion, one foot suspended in mid-air, the other

ballasted into the floor of the fountain. From its wide-open

eyes and mouth flowed a steady stream of water into a bowl

of concrete. It took him a moment to recall that she’d said

something about a figure whose photo her dad had taken

during a trip to France and vowed to replicate in their

mansion in Umuahia. He searched his mind carefully to see

if he had been told about a basketball hoop. Had she

mentioned the number of cars they had, or that their cars

sat under a structure roofed with zinc? He could not

remember. He counted: the black Jeep – 1, the white Jeep –2, a car whose make he did not
know – 3, Ndali’s Audi

sedans – 4, 5, 6. Oh, there’s another shielded from view by

the big wheels – 7! Yet another, a Mercedes-Benz, beside

which he’d parked his own vehicle – 8. Looking carefully, he

could see that was all. Eight cars.

He’d stepped out before he noticed that the gateman had

been following him and had been standing beside his car

waiting for him to get out.

‘I can help you carry anything you bring inside, Oga.

He noticed then that he’d forgotten the gift he had

brought. He stopped, turned and rushed back to the car.

Even though the image of him dropping the bag with the

wine on the bench in the yard stood like a banner in his

mind, he searched the van, the backseats, the front like a

madman.

Egbunu, I must say here that this was one of the

occasions in which I had wanted to remind him that he was

forgetting the gifts. But I didn’t because of your counsel: L et

man be man . The role of the chi is to attend to higher

matters, things which, by virtue of their magnitude, can

affect the host in major or significant ways. It must also

attend to supernatural matters which man, in his limitation,

cannot handle. But this omission, as I look back now on the

things that would result from that visit, strikes me with

pangs of regret, and I begin to wish that I had reminded

him.

‘Oga, Oga, hope no problem?’ the gateman said

repeatedly.

‘No, no problem,

’ he said with a slight trembling in his

voice.

He thought for a moment if he should rush back home,

but he recalled she’d begged him not to arrive late. The

word flashed in his mind like fire: punctualit y . He

remembered her saying it: ‘My dad likes punctuality.

’ I was

relieved, Chukwu, as he hurried towards the [Link], the confidence he’d

arrived with, like an

egg in a calabash, was already broken by the time he sat at

the table with the family. Ndali had met him at the door and

told him, in frantic whispers, that he’d come late.

‘Fifteen
minutes!’ Then she reached to his back and removed

something he’d not imagined could be there: a feather. Even

I had not seen it. He almost wept as she crumpled the white

feather into her palm, pointing him towards the dining room.

‘Is that all?’ he said. In whispers she asked why he held the

suit, and he raised it up towards her face, gesturing for her

to smell it.

‘Jesus!’ she said.

‘Don’t wear that smelling thing.

N yamma! Give it to me.

’ She took it from him and folded it,

then handed it back to him.

‘Keep it in your hand

throughout, you hear me?’

The grandeur of the living room defeated him. Never had

he dreamt that such lighting could exist. He didn’t know that

someone could have a sculpture of the Madonna inside a

house. The marble on the flooring, and the design of the

ceiling, these were beautiful beyond words. There were

chandeliers and mantelpieces, articles I had seen in homes

when my former host Yagazie was in Virginia, in that land of

the brutal White Man. If the house struck him with such awe,

it was without doubt that the people who owned it would do

even more damage to his composure. So when he saw her

father, the man appeared huge to him. The man’s fair

complexion was spotted with reddish blotches that

reminded him of the musician Bright Chimezie. He found

some comfort in her mother, for her face was the exact

replica of Ndali’s. But when her brother walked down the

stairs, he wished he’d not come. He looked like black

American musicians – with nicely trimmed hair on the side

of his face that traced down to his jaw and a broad, pink-

lipped mouth held between a heavy moustache and beard.

In response to his ‘Good afternoon, my brother’

, the man

gave him only a [Link] sat at the table as the maids served different foods

on trays. With every passing moment, my host noticed one

more thing that further damaged his confidence, so that by

the time the food had all been served and they began to

eat, he was already vanquished. When the first question

came, he struggled to form words and dithered for such a

long time that Ndali spoke in his stead.

‘Nonso runs a poultry farm the size of this entire

compound all by himself,

’ she said.

‘He has a lot of chickens

– agric fowl – and also sells them in the markets.

’
‘Excuse me, gentleman,

’ her father said again, as if she

had not spoken at all.

‘What did you say you do?’

He made to speak, his voice starting to stutter, for he was

truly afraid, then he stopped. He looked at Ndali, and she

met his eyes.

‘Daddy—

‘Let him answer the question,

’ her father said, turning to

his daughter with a countenance that did not conceal his

anger.

‘I asked him, not you. He has a mouth, or not?’

He was worried by Ndali’s confrontation with her father,

and from under the table, he touched her with his leg to

make her stop, but she pulled her leg away. In the small

silence that descended, his voice broke out.

‘I am a farmer, a poultry farmer. And I have land where I

grow maize, pepper, tomatoes and okro.

’ He looked up at

her – for he had come prepared to use a tool she had

supplied him with – and said,

‘I am a shepherd of birds, sir.

’

Her father gave his wife what my host thought was a

puzzled look that filled my host with the dread that he may

have misspoken, and his feeling in this moment was like

that of a man whose extremities were bound and was then

thrust naked into the central arena of a village, with nothing

to hide himself. Without intending to, he saw that he’d

turned to her brother, on whose face he found the

impression of muffled laughter. He became frantic. This

thing Ndali had told him, how could it be wrong? She’d said

it sounded fancier, and it did – to his ear, at least.‘I see,

’ the father said.

‘So, gentleman, shepherd of birds,

what education do you have?’

‘Daddy—

‘No, Ndi, no!’ her father said in a raised voice. A strained

vein became visible on the side of his neck like a blow-

induced swelling.

‘You must let him speak, or this meeting is

over. You hear?’

‘Yes, Daddy.

‘Good. Now, gentleman, ina anu okwu I gbo ?’

He nodded.

‘Should I speak it, then?’ the father said, and a piece of

the chopped vegetable clung to his lower lip.

‘No need, sir. Speak English.

‘Good,

’ the father said.

‘What is your level of education?’

‘I have completed secondary school, sir.

‘So,

’ the father said as he gathered pieces of chicken flesh

on to the prongs of his fork.

‘School cert.

‘It is so, sir. Yes, sir.

The man gave his wife the look again.

‘Gentleman, I don’t

mean to embarrass you,

’ the father said, letting his voice

fall from the height to which he’d pitched it.

‘We are not in

the business of embarrassing people; we are a Christian

family.

’ He pointed around to an étagère placed on the

glass-covered bookcase on one side of the room, which held

various paintings of Jisos Kraist and his disciples.

My host looked up at the étagère, nodded, and said,

‘Yes,

sir—

‘But I have to ask this question.

‘Yes, sir.

‘Have you

considered that my daughter here is a soon-to-be

pharmacist?’

‘Yes, sir.

‘Have you considered that she is

now completing her bachelor’s in pharmacy and will so

proceed to do her MPhil in the UK?’

–

‘Yes, sir.

‘Have you

considered, young man, what kind of future you, an

unschooled farmer, will have with her?’

‘Daddy!’

‘Ndali, quiet!’ her father said.

‘Mechie gi onu! Ina num? A

si’m gi michie onu! ’‘Ndi, what is this?’ her mother said.

‘I ga ekwe k a dadd y gi

kwu okwu? ’

‘I’m letting him speak, Mommy, but do you hear what he

is saying?’ Ndali said.

‘Yes, but keep quiet, you hear?’

‘I do,

’ Ndali said with a sigh.

When her father began to speak again, the words came to

my host again in a glut, each running into the other and the

other.

‘Young man, have you thought about it thoroughly?’

‘Yes, sir.
’

‘Deeply about what kind of life you will have with

her?’

‘Yes, sir.

‘You have, I see.

‘Yes, sir.

‘And you

think it is the right decision to marry such a woman who is

so high above you, who wants to be her husband?’

‘I know,

sir.

‘Then, you must go and think about it again. Go and

see if truly you deserve my daughter.

’
–

‘Yes, sir.

‘That is

all I will say to you.

‘Yes, sir.

Her father rose in a slow, heavy manner, with his body

pitching against the table, and left. Her mother followed

moments later, shaking her head with a countenance my

host would reckon later to have been pity towards him. She

headed first to the kitchen, carrying empty plates stacked

together. Ndali’s brother, who had not said anything but had

made his resentment known by laughing at every answer

my host gave, rose shortly after his mother. He lingered for

a while on his feet while he took a toothpick from the

casing, stifling a laugh.

‘You too, Chuka?’ Ndali said in a voice that dripped with

sobs.

‘What?’ Chuka said.

‘Er-er, er-er, don’t even call my name

here, oh. Don’t tell me even a single thing! Is it me that

asked you to bring a poor farmer home?’ He laughed,

jerking.

‘Don’t you mention my name again, there, oh.

With that, he, too, headed his father’s way, on a flight of

stairs, the toothpick held between his clenched teeth,

whistling a tune as he [Link]-ijango, my host sat there, rendered inutile by

shame. He fixed his eyes on the plate of food in front of him,

most of which he’d barely touched. From upstairs, he heard

Ndali’s mother say to her husband in the language of the

eminent fathers,

‘Dim, you were too harsh on that young

man, er. You could have said these things in a way that

didn’t sound that harsh.

He looked up at his lover, who remained where she was,

rubbing her right hand over her left. He knew that she was

feeling a pain that was as deep as his. He wanted to comfort

her, but he could not lift himself. For such is the state a man

enters when he has been disgraced: inaction, numbness –

as if he has been tranquillised. I have seen it many times.

His eyes fell on the large painting of a man gently

ascending into the sky over what seemed to be a village

with the rest of the people of the village looking up in his

direction and pointing at him. Because his mind sometimes

bore strange convictions, he did not know why he thought

for a moment that this man who was levitating into the sky

was my host himself.

It was with a mighty effort that he rose and touched Ndali

on the shoulder and whispered in her ear to stop crying. He

pulled her gently up, but she struggled, her tears mixing

with saliva that slid slowly down her dress.

‘Leave me, leave me,

’ she said.

‘Leave me alone. What

kind of family is this, er? What?’

‘It is okay, Mommy,

’ he said with his lips unmoved so that

he wondered how the words had come out of him.

He rested his hands on her head and gently traced his

fingers down her neck. Then he bent forward and, sinking

his head towards her mouth, locked her in a kiss. Before

they walked out of the house, he threw a gaze at the

painting for one last time and noticed what had not occurred

to him the first time: that the people in the lower end of the

painting were cheering at this man who was ascending into

the [Link], I have seen first-hand what shame can do to a

man. As it often does, it filled my host with an oppressive

fear, the fear that he would lose Ndali like most of the things

that had once been his. It grew in the days following, during

which she made efforts to force her family to reconsider, but

failed. Those days stretched into weeks, and it became clear

by the third that nothing would change their minds. When

Ndali came back from a quarrel with her parents, he

resolved to change things himself and do something. Rain

had fallen all morning, but by noon the sun had risen. She

came directly from school in Uturu, filled with bitterness. He

was out on the small farm when she drove on to the path

flanked on both sides by farmland. He was at the furthest

end of the farm, where his father had erected a fence which

had partly crumbled under the heavy rainfall of the year the

White Man refers to as 2003. Two feet from the fence was a

long gutter that ran through the street, and beyond this was

the long main road. As he watched her step out of the car

towards the house, it occurred to him that she had not seen

him. He dropped his hoe, and the head of the yam for which

he had been digging a hole, and ran to the house.

He entered still wearing his dirty visor, a soiled shirt,

trousers, and farm slippers covered with loam and other

weeds he’d pruned off the land.

He found her with her face buried on her wrist, facing the
wall.

‘Mommy, k edi ihe mere nu ?’ he said, for in the moment of

tension, he reached for the language to which he was much

accustomed.

‘Why are you crying, why are you crying,

Mommy? Er, what happened?’

She turned to embrace him, but he stepped away from

her because of his farm clothes. She stopped an inch from

him, her eyes deep red.

‘Why are they doing this to me, er, Obim? Why?’

‘What happened, er? Tell me what happened.

She told him about how her father had asked her if she

was still seeing him and had threatened her. Her mother hadintervened, saying the man was
being too harsh, but her

father continued unhindered.

‘It is well,

’ he said.

‘It will be well after everything.

‘No, Nonso, no!’ she said, slapping the wall with her palm

again.

‘It will not be well. How can it be well? I am not going

back to that house again. I am not. Over my dead body.

What kind of family is this?’

His heart swirled within him at her rage. He did not know

what to do. The old fathers, in their magnanimous wisdom,

say that a person saves himself in the process of saving

others. If she cannot be saved from a situation such as this,

which has held them bound like invisible leashes, then he,

too, cannot be saved. And it won’t indeed be well. He

watched her walk a few paces towards the door, stop, and

put her hand on her chest. Then she turned back to face

him.

‘I have – I have brought a few of my things, and I am

staying here. I’m staying here.

She opened the door and stepped out of the house. He

followed her out to the front porch and looked on as she

opened the boot of her car and returned with a shiny Ghana-

must-go bag. Then, from the backseat, she took out a pair of

shoes and a nylon bag. He watched her with a certain joy,

inwardly happy that he finally had a companion.

But for much of that week, her phone rang again and

again, sometimes for extended periods. And each time,

Ndali would look at its face and say to my host,

‘It is my

dad,

’ or ‘It is my mum.
’ And every time he would beg her to

answer the call, but she wouldn’t. For she was strong-willed

like most of the great mothers. She would merely hiss at my

host’s entreaty and turn her attention to something else,

like one beyond reproach or beyond the fear of reproach. My

host admired this in her. Whenever she did this, at such

moments he’d think about a similar trait in his mother.

In the middle of the second week, her parents came to

look for her at school and waited outside her classroom, but

she ignored them and walked away with her classmate

Lydia. After she told him this, he began to fear that she wasstarting to resent her family for his
sake. Even though he

increasingly sought to salvage the situation as days passed,

he could not deny that her love for him seemed to grow

stronger in those days. For it felt as though she’d culled her

love away from everyone else and bequeathed it all to him.

It was during this time that twice, while they made love, she

wept. It was during these days that she baked him a cake,

wrote him a poem, and sang for him. And once, while he

was asleep, she unhooked the catapult from the wall and

rushed out to the yard with it and scared away a prowling

kite. And part of him sought to prolong those days, for

although they were not yet married, it felt to him as though

they were. He wished that he would take the centre of her

life, dwell around the boundaries, and seal up the limits.

This woman, whom he’d always feared he could never have

but who was now his, he could not afford to lose. Yet his fear

of what she was doing grew alongside the blossoming of his

affection for her, and her affection for him.

It was during this period that she travelled to Enugu with

him. He’d woken early that memorable morning of life to

find her dressed, in an ankara print gown and a calico head

scarf, stirring tea in a cup while looking through the poultry

record book on the table.

‘Are you going somewhere, Mommy?’

‘Good morning, dear.

‘Good morning,

’ he said.

‘No, I’m going to Enugu too.

‘What? Mommy—

‘I want to come, Nonso. I am not doing anything here. I

want to know everything about you and about the fowls. I

like it.

He was so taken aback that he struggled to find words. He

looked on the dining table, and there he found one of the

plastic crates, its dozen egg-holding cups nearly filled with

eggs.

‘Those ones are from the broilers?’She nodded.

‘I collected them around six o’clock. They are

even still laying more.

He smiled, for one of the things she loved the most about

tending his poultry was collecting the eggs. She was

fascinated by the phenomenon of egg laying, how rapidly it

occurred in chickens.

‘Mommy, okay, but Ogbete market is—

‘It is okay, Nonso. It is okay. I am not an egg. I have told

you – I don’t like you treating me like I’m an egg. I’m like

you. I want to come.

His eyes fell hard on her face, and he saw in her eyes that

she meant it. He nodded.

‘Okay, let me baff, then,

’ he said,

and rushed off to bathe.

Later, they dropped off the eggs at the restaurant down

the street, and he promised to come for his pay on his way

back from Enugu. As they drove on the highway, he could

tell that he’d never felt such joy while travelling before. On

the bridge over the Amatu River, she revealed to him how

after the night he first found her on that bridge, she was still

greatly heartbroken. She went to Lagos to stay with her

uncle for two months, and while there, she frequently

thought of him. And every time she did she would laugh at

how strange he was. He in turn told her about how he’d

returned to the river to look for the fowls but couldn’t find

them, and how he had been angry at himself.

‘I was thinking the other day,

’ she said,

‘how a man who

loves fowls so much could do that. Why did you?’

He looked at her.

‘I don’t know, Mommy.

Once he’d said those words, it struck him that he might

know why she loved him: because he’d rescued her from

something. Just like his gosling, also taken under his care.

This thought was enunciated so loudly in his mind that he

looked at her to make sure she did not hear it. But her eyes

were out the window, looking at the other side of the road,

where the thick forest had given way to the scattered

habitation of a [Link] the market in Enugu, he introduced her as his fiancée

to a gleeful reception by his acquaintances. Ezekobia, a feed

seller, gave them palm wine to drink, the drink of the gods .

Some of them shook hands with him and embraced her. My

host’s face was lit with a flaming smile the entire time, for

the blank wall of the future had suddenly become

emblazoned with warm colours. It was almost full sun when

they left the market, carrying the things they had bought.

He and Ndali purchased ugba from a roadside hawker

near the garage where they parked the vehicle. Ndali,

soaked in sweat, bought a bottle of La Casera. She had him

try it, and it tasted sweet, but he could not describe what it

tasted like. She laughed at him.

‘Bushman. It is apple taste. I’m sure you have never eaten

apple before.

He shook his head. They had loaded a new cage, and two

bags of broiler feed, and a half sack of millet, and were now

sitting in the van, about to return to Umuahia.

‘I am not Oyibo. I will eat my ugba as correct African man.

He unwrapped the food and began putting handfuls into

his mouth and chewing in a way that made her laugh.

‘I have told you to stop chewing things like a goat: nyum-

yum-yum. T ufia! ’ she said, snapping her fingers in the air,

laughing.

But he ate on, bobbing his head and darting his tongue

about in his mouth.

‘Well, maybe one day we will go abroad together.

‘Abroad? Why?’

‘So you can see things, naw, and stop this

bushmanliness.

‘Ha, okay, Mommy.

He started the engine, and they hit the road. The van had

just left the city when he began feeling uneasy. His stomach

gave in to wild sensations, and he farted.

‘Jesus! N yamma! ’ she cried.

‘Nonso?’

‘Mommy, sorry, but I am—

’He was silenced by another release. He pulled hurriedly to

the shoulder of the road.

‘Mommy, my stomach,

’ he gasped.

‘What?’

‘You have tissue, tissue paper?’

‘Yes, yes.
’ She reached for her bag, but before she could

get the papers out, he grabbed a handkerchief from the

pocket under the door handle of his side of the van and

raced towards the bush. Chukwu, he nearly tore his trousers

open once he was within concealable distance of the forest,

and once they came off, his excreta slammed into the grass

with an unaccustomed force. I was alarmed, for not since he

was a boy had I seen this kind of thing happen to him.

When he rose up it was with some relief, his forehead wet

as if he’d been in the rain. Ndali had come out of the van

and was at the mouth of the bush, holding the half-used roll

of tissue.

‘What happened?’

‘I wanted to shit badly,

’ he said.

‘God! Nonso?’

She burst out laughing again.

‘Why are you laughing?’

She struggled to speak.

‘See your face – you are

sweating.

They had barely driven for fifteen minutes when he

rushed out again. He had the tissues this time, and with so
much force did he defecate that his strength was expended.

For some time after he was done, he knelt down and clung

to a tree. I had never seen anything like this happen to him.

And even though I had learned to gaze into his viscera, I

could not find exactly what was wrong with him, even

though he was convinced he had diarrhoea.

‘I actually have diarrhoea,

’ he told Ndali when he returned

to the van.

Ndali laughed even harder, and he joined in.

‘It must be that ugba. I don’t know what they put inside.

’‘Yes, you don’t know.

’ She laughed even more.

‘This is

why I don’t eat anyhow for anywhere. You are doing African

man.

‘I’m feeling like tired.

‘Yes, drink water and my La Casera and rest. I will drive.

‘You will drive my van?’

‘Yes, why not?’

Astonished though he was, he let her drive, and for a long

time after they resumed the journey, he did not feel the

urge. But when it came, he pounded his hands on the

dashboard, and when she pulled up, he flung himself out of

the door and tripped into the creepers. Then, picking himself

up, he dashed into the bush as if unhinged. He returned to

the van drenched in sweat, while she struggled to contain

her laughter. He emptied the big Ragolis water bottle into

his mouth and clung to the empty bottle. He told her a story

his father had once told him about a man who had stopped

like him to shit in a wild bush on the highway, and while at

it, got swallowed by a python. His father used to play the

song someone sang about it,

‘Eke a Tuwa lam ujo’

‘I think I have heard the song before. But I’m afraid of all

snakes – python, oh; cobra, oh; rattlesnake, oh; every

snake.

‘It is so, Mommy.

‘How are you feeling now?’

‘Fine,

’ he said. He hadn’t gone for nearly as long as it

would take to break five full kola nuts in four places, and
they were almost in Umuahia.

‘Almost thirty minutes now, I

never go. I think it have stopped.

‘Yes, I agree. But I have laughed all my energy out, too.

They drove past thick forests on both sides for some time

in serenity, his mind splintered between thoughts. Then

suddenly it came upon him with the force of a gust, and he

dashed into the bush.

OSEBURUWA, she tended to my host until he was whole

again. She went to the university the following day. Whenshe returned, she joined him on the
bench in the yard,

plucking a sick fowl with bare hands so it could get some air

into its skin. An old tray sat between them, full of feathers.

He held on to one leg of the bird as he worked. She did this

duty – the oddest thing she’d ever done in her life – with a

curious mix of equanimity and laughter. While they worked,

he forced himself to talk about his family, how he missed

them, and the need for her to reconcile with hers. He spoke

with great care, as if his tongue was a wet priest in the

sanctuary of his mouth. Then she told him that her parents

had come to the school to look for her that day again.

‘Nonso, I don’t want to see them. I just don’t want.

’
‘Have you thought of it very well? Do you know this is

even making the situation worst now?’

She’d started to twist a feather from the leg of the bird

when he said this. She drew back and sat on her legs on the

raffia mat spread on the ground.

‘How?’

‘Because, Mommy, I am the one. It is because of me this

is happening.

The hen raised its freed leg and dropped a blob of faeces

on the mat.

‘Oh, my God!’

They laughed and laughed on until he released the hen

and it hopped towards the coop, cackling plaintively.

Egbunu, it might be the laughter that softened her heart, for

when he explained afterwards that her action might make

her family despise him the more, since it was for his sake

this was happening, she sat in silence. And, later, as they

lay in bed to sleep, she said, suddenly and over the rattling

of the ceiling fan, that he had spoken the truth. She would

return home.

Like a water-filled calabash sent off with an emissary to

the land of a provoked enemy, she went home the following

day, but returned three days later as a calabash

smouldering with fire. Her father had sent out very many

invitations for his upcoming sixtieth birthday party but hadnot invited him. Her father had said he
was not qualified to

be there. She left the house, her resolve firm that she would

not return. She said this with feral rage, stamping her feet

and shouting,

‘How, just how can he do this? How? And if

they refuse to invite you,

’ she said,

‘I swear to God who

made me’

– she tapped the tip of her tongue with her index

finger –

‘er, I swear to God who made me, I will not attend

myself. I will not.

He said nothing, busied with the soft burden she’d laid on

him. He was seated at the dining table, where he’d sat

picking dirt and pebbles out of a bowl of white beans. Bean

weevils escaped from the unpacked beans, crouched on the

table, or perched on the adjacent wall. When he finished

picking the beans, he poured them into a pot and set it on

the stove. He took up the flashy invitation card from the

chair on which she’d dropped it and began reading the

words to himself.
This card is to invite mister

and miss

____

____

and your

household to the birthday part y of Chief . Doctor . L uk e

Ok oli Obialor, the Nmalite 1 of Umuahia-Ibek u kingdom

of Abia State of Ni geria. The event shall be at the

Obialor compound on Jul y 14 , at A gui yi Ironsi Layout …

She had gone to his old bedroom, where the wall was

defaced with his childhood drawings, mostly of the God of

the White Man, his angels, his sister and his gosling. She’d

chosen this room as her study, where she read her books

while in the house, and she slept with him in the bedroom

that had once belonged to his parents. He read the

invitation aloud from the sitting room so that she could hear

him.

‘Fourteen, at Lagos Street on the July 14, 2007. There will

be food in abundance and music by His Excellency, the king

of ogene music, Chief Oliver De Coque. The party will be

held from four p.m. to nine p.m.

‘It is my turn, me too I will not care.

’‘The emcee of the occasion will be none other than the

inestimable Nkem Owoh, Osuofia himself.

‘I don’t care; I will not go.

‘Come one, come all.

IJANGO-IJANGO, the early fathers, wise in the ways of

humanity, used to say that the life of a man is anchored on

a swivel. It can spin this way or that way, and a person’s life

can change in significant ways in an instant. In the batting

of an eyelid, a world that has stood can lie prostrate, and

that which was flat on the ground just a moment before can

suddenly stand erect. I have seen it many times. I saw it

again after my host returned from an errand one afternoon a

few days later. He’d gone out not too long after they had

lunch to supply four of the large cocks to the restaurant at

the centre of the city while Ndali studied. He’d become

increasingly troubled by the gathering storms in his life,

fearing again that something was watching him, looking for

a time when he’d be happy enough to strike and steal his

joy and replace it with sorrow. It was a fear that had lodged

itself in his mind from the time his gosling died. This fear –

as is common when it possesses a man’s mind – convinced

him with all the force of a persuasion that Ndali would be

pressured to leave him eventually. And as much as I flashed

thoughts in his mind continuously to contest it, it held firm.

He went on fearing that, in time, she would give him up

rather than lose her family. So biting was this fear that, as

he drove back to the compound after the errand, he had to

play Oliver De Coque’s music on the van’s cassette player

to prevent himself from slipping into despair. Only one of the

speakers was working, and sometimes, overwhelmed by the

loud street noise, the music lapsed. It was those times,

when Oliver’s baritone voice quailed, that the weight on his

mind came bearing down on him.

When he got home later, Ndali was sitting in the backyard,

watching the fowls feed on the corn she’d spread on a sack,

reading a textbook on the bench under the tree by the lightof the rechargeable lamp. She had
changed into a blouse

and shorts that made her buttocks prominent. She had her

hair oiled slick and now wore a bandanna over it. She stood

up once she heard the net door opening.

‘Guess, guess, guess, Obim?’ she said.

She clasped her hand around him, almost stepping on one

of the chickens, which fled frantically, its wings spread out,

cawing.

‘What?’ my host said, surprised as much as I was.

‘They said you can come.

’ She pressed her hands around

his neck.

‘My dad, they said you can come.

He had not expected this at all, and it was thus with relief

and mild incomprehension that he bellowed,

‘Oh, that is

good!’

‘Will you come, Obim?’

He could not look at her, so he did not look at her. But she

inched towards him, in slow steps, and took his jaw and

lifted his face to face her.

‘Nonso, Nonso.

‘Eh, Mommy?’

‘I know what they did to you was not good. They

disgraced you. But, you see, these things happen. This is

Nigeria. This is Alaigbo. A poor man is a poor man. Onye

ogbenye , he is not respected in the society. And, again, my

dad and brother? They are proud people. Even my mum,

even though she does not support my dad very much in

this.

He did not speak.

‘They may be ashamed of you, but I am not. I cannot be

ah—

’ She held his jaw and peered into his face.

‘Nonso,

what is it? Why are you not saying anything?’

‘Nothing, Mommy. I will come.

She hugged him. And in the silence, he heard the sound of

the nocturnal insects emptying into the ear of the night.

‘I will go with you to the party, for your sake,

’ he said

again. And as he spoke, he saw that she’d closed her eyes

and would not open them until he’d finished speaking