no one considered it to be anything but a joke. I don’t always keep it, but my policy was take the book to bed, not the writer.
I left him reaching for my plate.
ZANDA ATTURK
Kreektown | 18th March, 2005
I had switched off my mobile phone and spent three nights at Ma’Calico’s. The deadline for my column had come and gone. I was not much of a drinker, but I spent my afternoons and evenings at the bar downstairs. I told myself I was, like Hameed the secret service agent, prospecting for information on Badu in the most practical way. Yet I was filled with despair. It couldn’t be long before Patrick Suenu’s posse arrived on the trail of his AWOL reporter.
A bus arrived from Ubesia carrying a group of organisers. They came with a public address system, musicians, and a sizeable crowd of their own. They took a fortifying round of beer at Ma’Calico’s and set off for the square to hold a secession rally. I thought they were pretty slow on the uptake and went along to watch the fun.
They had come the day before, played their music, and made their stirring speeches—but the not-so-secret secret agent was watching from the door of Ntupong’s Joint, and nobody had joined the rally. The secessionists had given up after an hour and piled, discouraged, into their buses.
The reception this time couldn’t have been more different.
Amana saw me gaping at the crowd and laughed. ‘Hameed left this morning. He got an urgent summons to come to Abuja for top secret briefings.’
‘If it’s top secret, how do you know?’
‘I saw them faking it at the post office.’
* * *
SO FAR, I had avoided investigating Kreektown with any kind of thoroughness. For one thing, I did not want to confront the condemnation of an empty Atturk house—or far worse, an Atturk house occupied by roughboys or strangers from Ubesia. I spent my days in my rented room. By early evening, the drivers and conductors from Ubesia would begin to arrive and the bar at Ma’Calico’s would grow interesting enough to bring me out of my hermitage.
The butcher brought the news of the old man’s death. He didn’t sell much meat in that village, so he also did some palm wine rounds, which helped him stay on the cutting edge of what anaemic gossip there was in the community. But in the land of gossip the death of Mata Nimito was a table sweeper. The butcher walked into a heated argument on the virtues of local gin and announced, raising his voice above the hubbub, ‘Hundredyears don die o!’
‘Hundredyears?’ I asked.
‘That dead people dia chief.’
‘GodMenai!’ Something like remorse touched me, manifesting as a thirst for beer. ‘He was still alive?’
The butcher looked at me strangely. The timing of his laughter was off. He had not sold much palm wine that day, which was bad for his sobriety; he had a firm policy of potting his wine in his belly rather than have it go sour in his kegs. He quietened and continued, ‘Everyday, I use to drop one bottle for am, yesterday’s own still dey dia!’ He peered at me. ‘So you know Hundredyears?’
Recoiling instinctively, I shook my head. ‘What killed him?’
He laughed sarcastically, his careening voice inviting other villagers into the joke. ‘Old man like Hundredyears die an dis one dey ask wetin kill am! Okay, na witch kill am!’
They laughed generously. It was the sport of the season, mocking the Stranger That Refused to Go Home.
‘He’s the last of the Menai, isn’t he?’ asked a voice behind me,
‘No, there’s Jonszer . . .’
‘Jonszer! We’re talking of people and you’re counting Jonszer?’
‘And there’s some sick people in their Lagos camp—it won’t be long . . .’
I rose and took my glass outside, away from their raucous talk. Through the open window the laughter mocked me. I felt the traitor. Jonszer was Menai like me. Now in his fifties, he would have been in his twenties when the Trevi inoculations were administered. They had not bothered to inoculate him, considering their precious vial wasted on the drunk. That mean-spiritedness had, ironically, saved his life. Not that it did him much good. A lifetime of addictions had likely addled his mind: in the last two days, he had passed me a couple of times without recognition.
As I brooded, a limousine with the number plate “Ubesia 1” pulled off the Warri-Ubesia highway, pausing ponderously at the entrance to Ma’Calico’s. On the bonnet flew the green-crested flag of the Nanga of Ubesia, traditional ruler of the Sontik people. The windows were blacked out, so there was no way of knowing if the traditional ruler was himself in the car, but as I watched, a door opened and a greying fiftyish man stepped out. I recognised Justin Bentiy immediately, cousin and right-hand man of the Nanga.
I downed the rest of my glass and returned to the saloon as Amana emerged from the freezer with a laden tray, which emptied rapidly as she approached. I took the last bottle of beer, and she raised her voice: ‘Bottle number four for Reverend!’ There was a cheer all round, for I was entering uncharted waters at Ma’Calico’s.
Justin Bentiy entered. It was a mostly Sontik crowd in the saloon, and they recognised him immediately, greeting him respectfully. He sat with Ma’Calico by her counter and ordered a Sprite, which he drank mincingly. In his expensive damask robe, he looked out of place in that rough bar. Then he sent Amana out to the car with cold water for the Nanga. The realisation that the Nanga of Ubesia himself was in Ma’Calico’s yard hushed the room. The traditional ruler had been bedridden for months. Ma’Calico rose to attend to him, but Justin Bentiy swayed his horsetail quietly and she deferred. Amana hurried out nervously. She was gone a while, and the bar room conversation stayed on the health of the ailing Nanga until she returned. Soon afterwards, Justin rose and left, his bottle barely touched.
The news of Mata Nimito’s death had breached my carefully constructed distance from Kreektown. Once again I was in the circle of death and loss. Without trying, I was remembering.
I WAS orphaned.
The new Kreektown settlers were sharper than knives. I was cut, again and again, and it was to Mata Nimito, hermit cloudcaster and stargazer, that I turned.
‘Kiwami ananwusu,’ he had said. ‘You were nurturetaught to live among the People. It’s a new world now. Now, you must not put naked fingers in a crab basket.’
‘How can I live in this world, Mata?’
‘Practiselearn. The lesson of the crab.’
‘What is that lesson, Mata?’
‘Carry your truthsweetness inside; but as for the world, show them only your crabshell.’
And I blended in.
MATA NIMITO, who had no traffic with the world, the great teacher of that world; Mata Nimito, who lived all those years only to die in the week I returned . . . No one did guilt like Menai. It weighed me down now. I had been close to the old man, until I fled his circumcision blade . . .
I rose queasily
