can’t come back. My heart is here, but I have a husband, I have a life elsewhere.’
‘Anodu tuetu siliesi.’ He smiled.
In the early hours I left him my shopping and returned home to Onitsha, salting away his words: ‘You’re back already.’
Onitsha | 7th January, 2002
It was after that visit that I started the Menai Society (MS). My darling husband put down the seed money, but I have raised much more since then. At first it was just the language I was looking at: writing a primer, recording proverbs, idioms, historysongs, things like that. But in going around, in recording the stories, I found that what the Menai needed now was medicine, not tape recordings. The Omakasa Enquiry had found Trevi Biotics not negligent, so funding for medical care was a problem. So the focus of MS changed. We started registering Menai survivors, pairing them with kidney units, buying dialysis time . . . it was about this time that we sued Trevi and Megatum in London.
‘We,’ because my husband got involved. I had sued Trevi Biotics in the Federal High Court in Ubesia, and we were limping along, when Trevi found out that Doctor Denle Alanta was our main sponsor. They approached him with fifty times his seed money in bribes. I still don’t know why that turned Denle into a crusader for the town he had once hated so much. As a doctor he loved his money; he charged even the poorest patients his fees and stopped their treatment once they stopped paying. But I suppose he also liked a good fight. That, and concrete proof of corruption, which he had always contested, in the discontinuance of the ’80s litigation filed for the Menai by a medical NGO in London.
So that day I came in and there were new birth certificates for the children on the bed. ‘Is that how you spell their names?’ he asked, as I picked them up. My hands were trembling: he had added the Mata’s Menai names to our children’s official names.
‘How did you know?’ I whispered.
‘They told me what you call them—when I’m not around. I thought they sounded quite nice.’
‘You’re not angry?’
He laughed. ‘I’m so angry I’ll leave Eddie in charge of the hospital and we’ll both go to London for the Megatum hearing.’
‘We?’
He showed me the hands that would now bless people. ‘The curse of the dead witch,’ he said.
Kreektown | 12th March, 2005
‘Why this Field of Stones?’ I asked.
‘When I rest there,’ said the Mata, settling his hand almost tenderly on the earth, ‘I will end the curse on this land.’
‘But you said it’s not even in Nigeria! It’s . . . thousands of miles away!’
‘This land . . . this continent . . .’
Denle arrived with a grim Jonszer behind him. He took one look at the old man. ‘You have to stop now, and I mean now.’
I raised one finger, shielding the microphone for another five minutes until Mata Nimito slowed to catch his breath. Then I reluctantly clicked my recorder off.
Denle was standing over us, angrily surveying the Mata’s home. ‘We could build a house without touching the old one, and let him decide if he’ll use it or not.’
‘Look at it with new eyes, Denle,’ I whispered. ‘It’s not an old house. It’s history.’
I remained motionless on the bench, leaving Jonszer to attend to the old man. We’d had a marathon session: four straight hours, our longest yet. Denle always said the old man would talk himself into the grave if we let him, it was up to me to be responsible. But he saw I was upset, and he took a deep breath and put away his anger.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I don’t want to go to London. You can represent the society at the next session.’
‘It’s more than a court case, Shee. You are the Menai.’ He sat beside me. Softly. ‘Why?’
‘There’s so much I didn’t know!’ I was near to tears. ‘Behind every idiom, there’s wisdom; behind every word, there’s history! You know, I asked him how come all those years he never used this idiom, that word . . . and he said the miasta . . . the . . . need for it . . . had not come! So many stories . . . we were so blessed, we were so . . .’
‘We’ll be back within the month.’
I whispered in his ear so they could not overhear. ‘I don’t think he’ll wait that long . . .’
He watched Jonszer bow as he went through the low doorway with the old man in his arms.
‘We’ll take him to Onitsha, with the facilities in the hospital . . .’
I laughed and he grinned with me, until he realised I was now weeping.
‘What?’ he asked, holding me.
‘He said he won’t die in a zoo, and he’ll be buried in the original homeland of our ancestors from centuries ago.’ I wiped my tears. Soberly, I added, ‘He’s made me promise to take his body back to the Field of Stones, and . . . and I don’t have a clue where that is.’
HUMPHREY CHOW
Lower Largo, Scotland | 15th March, 2005
Rubiesu simini randa si kwemka.
Something queer happened early this morning to put me off Chinese takeaways for good. As I recall, I was alone when I retired after dinner yesterday, and I haven’t drunk alcohol in days. Yet at 4:00 a.m. I woke up with a full bladder, only to find a bearded stranger snoring on the bed beside me.
Now, there are queer things and there are urgent things: I quickly used the bathroom, running a numbing jet of cold water over my head. When I shut off the tap the small room was silent. Except for the rhythmic crashing of waves on the beach outside, the gurgling as my water funnelled to its death by sewerage . . . and a ragged snore from the bedroom.
I looked carefully in the mirror, and they were there, all right: the two loneliest eyes in the world, staring back at me like solitary inmates in their psychiatric wards. ‘Not so lonely now, are you?’ I muttered.
He was still there when I returned, a large heavy youth lying face up in a grey trench coat. His great boots hung over the edge of my bed. A pervasive smell of stale fried chicken hung in the air. The situation was getting queerer and queerer: I snuck downstairs and found that both doors were firmly locked against the Scottish cold. The windows were fast, and there was no sign of a break-in. This was no burglar—although realistically, what burglar would stop halfway through a heist and opt to grab a snooze alongside his victim?
Now, I am a reasonable man. (My wife would argue, too reasonable. Upon stumbling across a fellow breaking into my car the other day, I’d tapped his shoulder and asked if he had mistaken my car for his. In a similar situation, Grace had broken a teenager’s nose with her handbag, but I’m a reasonable man.)
