Ogazi the fair, for Menai without end . . .
I gripped my nose, as I rose, caught my breath so tight . . . Only now, hearing my torqwa in the Mata’s voice, did I realise the darkling power of my funeral . . . For the first time since the arrival of my children, I felt they were not stillborn. They were named, properly named from the font of all Menai. I may still languish in that never-never world of a Menai who is neither dead nor ancestor, but in the land of ancestorsMenai, my children were known. Denle could not, could never know the burden of the crush of death.
I probably thought the Mata was going to fall, for he did sway, and fragile, fragile was the rag of bones and flesh that I grabbed as I found my feet, and held, but fierce, fierce was the grip he locked me in. How long we stood there, racked by dry spasms, I don’t know, how long I stood, crooning over the man I hated most in all the world, until with a long breath he was stilled and the old body became rigid like a trunk. His arms fell away, but for a thin finger pointing at the singate he had dropped once again to hold me.
My eyes were red, and I was grateful he was being blind. His onion-thin skin was dry. He smelled of roasted corn. Freshly roasted corn and aged palm wine. He stood erect, implacable, like a sentinel from the past. There was no other word, no bon mots and no goodbye, but I knew it was time to go. What had happened was something that had not happened, could never have happened, but I was gifted with a memory of it.
I turned and fled to the car, back to 43 Lemue Street in the old village. She did not argue, and I felt like the mother packing the little girl off to college. She packed her property slowly, touching things that would not fit into the car, like she was saying goodbye. Without the anger in my eyes I saw more of her, and although she had never said it in her letters, I knew now that she was dying—for her to leave the living Menai and go with her dead daughter. To break so unceremoniously with tradition. She began to pack her thirty-year-old crockery, the set so special that she never used it, and I sighed and stood up firmly. Ten minutes later we were ready to go. We shut down our Kreektown house for good and went to mine.
* * *
Onitsha | 10th September, 2001
My darling husband did not throw me out, but it was a near thing. He ran his own private hospital with a businessman’s flair. Even before we got married he had built two houses from his steep fees. With me there, less of the fees ended up buying female handbags, and we had added a couple more. Managing tenants and children was enough work for me. He did not talk to me throughout that week I brought my mother home. All he muttered, again and again to my hearing, was ‘Blood is a terrible thing!’ So I moved her to one of our empty flats. That compromise seemed to work.
He never went to see her, but he never asked me to rent out the flat either. And once, three months on, he threw a brocade fabric on my bedside, saying, ‘See if that old witch likes this.’ I did not tell him that Ruma had traded in brocade and had left the largest collection of uncut brocades at No. 43. It was the thought that counted. Even his ‘old witch’ was not much angrier than the meaningless epithets he uttered in my ear after he switched off the lights at night.
There was the day she blessed him, too. My driver had taken me to Anam to buy yams. On my return, I stopped by her flat. I stepped out of the car into screams from the hysterical housegirl on the balcony above.
‘Which hospital?’ I cried, and she stared.
I broke into the ward just as he was setting a drip. It was not something he usually did himself, but there he was. As I approached, my mother, who was just about to drift off, took his hands and held them for a silent moment. The bedlam around her ceased for a moment, as though they realised that something significant was about to happen. ‘Simba tulisu. Simba tuala,’ she said, and passed out.
* * *
19th December, 2001
‘You could have told me she was ill,’ he grumbled, afterwards. ‘We might have been able to save her life.’
And it was at such times that the wise wife held her tongue, as I did.
She had started her biweekly dialysis right after her hospitalisation. I had waited patiently, with a small smile and a private bet. Yet my darling husband was a stubborn man, and it took him weeks to, casually, ask—as though it had just occurred to him—‘What was that your mother said when she held my hands?’
‘When was that?’ I asked, playing his game. ‘I don’t remember . . .’
‘You do,’ he said, irritated. ‘Samba, samba, something.’
‘Oh,’ I said innocently, ‘that.’
‘Well?’
‘She blessed your hands,’ I equivocated.
‘Yeah? What exactly did she say?’
At that point I was a little wary, for the words could also be construed as a curse. ‘Until now, they made money. From now they will bless lives.’
He let that sink in a while, then he snorted. ‘Well, I hope—for our sakes—that they still continue to make a little money as well!’
* * *
31st December, 2001
Rumieta Kroma died on New Year’s Eve. Denle thought we should bury her in Onitsha. We had a small quarrel over that, but it quickly blew over. He had wanted her in his family vault at Onitsha. Non-Kreektowners simply don’t get it. I sent her body home, so she could sleep beside her husband in our empty living room. I sat in the hotel in Ubesia, seeing her sleepcatastrophe rites through my tears. When night had properly fallen, I sneaked into the empty house to say my farewells at her grave, but the floor had not yet been broken. My people had waited, after all. And in the silence of that bereft house I sheathed my knife for good.
They sent for the Mata, and when he came, they held the second Restoration in the history of the Menai sojourn in Kreektown. Then I joined them in the burial of my mother, Rumieta Kroma, sixty-seventh descendant from Auta, trumpeter of the court of Crown Prince Xera. We moved all the furniture out, cracked the floor, and dug down a tall man’s height in the earth, until soil filled the room. Then we laid Mama to sleep, sans coffin, in a burial shroud freshly woven by Kakandu. At five feet, we spread her bridal brocade. We filled another foot of earth and snapped her nuptial beads into glinting confetti on the red laterite. Then we filled the grave to its lip, packed it hard, and slabbed it over. And as we sang dirges for her sleepcatastrophe, I was mourning Kreektown as well, for I realised that the Mata had finally accepted that our nation was destined to die.
* * *
Kreektown | 2nd January, 2002
When the night was as silent as the living room I went to the Mata’s pavilion. He was sitting, staring at the night sky, and I sat with him. He poured me a drink of water and we toasted. As well-being flooded my body, I poured out the palm wine and we drank. Three hours passed in silence. From a distant oilfield, a single flare stack flickered. Occasionally he clucked at something he saw in the skies. Otherwise it seemed that all was well in the universe; apart from the fact that Kreektown and her last mata were all but dead.
‘Suetu maini kpana aiga she?’ I asked, pointing at the clouds.
He laughed and I laughed with him, savouring a joke I did not yet know. An
