His third wife, Alikatu, returning from market one evening, had a stroke. By morning there had been a relapse and she lay in a coma – not alive, not dead, not suffering. Lajide was distraught. He dared not leave Alikatu to go and visit Beatrice.
•
The news spread quickly. The financier’s wife was dying. Sango heard it in the Sensation office and booked a van to take him to Molomo Street. As he stepped out of the lorry he recognized the leader of the Realization Party who had offered him a free room, rushing round in his siesta jumper and cloth as if trying to shake the sleep from his eyes. From the neighbouring houses women poured into Lajide’s compound, pressing their noses against the windows. This whole part of the city seemed to be agitated and anxious as the last moments ticked by in the life of someone they knew and liked.
Sango squeezed through till he could see Alikatu lying on the bed. Her face was pallid. Gone was the radiance that made her one of Lajide’s favourite wives. The head wife, fat and busy, pushed him aside and took Alikatu’s head in her lap, like a baby’s.
She pressed a tumbler to the sick woman’s lips. ‘Drink it!’
Alikatu gurgled and turned away. ‘Drink it,’ echoed the politician. Alikatu gurgled again, spat out the liquid and lay still.
Lajide’s head wife looked into the sky with the palms of her hands facing her Creator and called out, ‘Olorun-O!’ in this manner offering to God all her prayers for more help and possibly a miracle.
‘I think we better fetch a taxi, before is too late!’ said the politician. The word taxi was taken up till it was echoed outside. ‘Taxi is here!’ someone shouted from the streets. An argument arose and in the end the politician said: ‘Tell the taxi to go! Is best not to move her. We’ll send for a doctor.’
Lajide arrived and saw Sango. ‘I don’t want you here! Go away. You and that Lebanese thief Zamil, you worry the life out of me. Everywhere I go I see you. Have I no private life?’
The politician held Lajide back, for he was advancing with clenched fists. Sango stood his ground. Tender hands managed to calm Lajide, who sat beside Alikatu and held her head in his arms.
‘Alikatu!’ he called softly. The feeling he injected into that whispered word, the loving care with which he held his wife, created a restlessness and pain in all present. The man was laying bare his soul before them. He kept glancing behind him expectantly.
Almost on his heels a tall and well-dressed man in European clothes walked into the room and put down his bag. He took out a stethoscope, pressed it to the woman’s heart. They watched him in silence. His face betrayed nothing.
He took his bag and went downstairs accompanied by the politician. Sango listened to their whispered conversation. He heard nothing. The doctor continued down the stairs and had hardly gained the street when a wailing cry broke out from the room where Alikatu lay. The story was there – plainly written on every face. But in every face was also engraved that stubborn shade of hope . . . that there might still be just the barest chance . . . that the body lying there – the body of Alikatu – was not dead, only resting. She would still breathe, surely. She would answer when called loudly by name.
A tense crowd hovered in hushed silence along the corridor. Now a man with a black bag – a doctor in the African manner trained by tradition in the ways of the past – this man went down the stairs and began to chalk up the ground and to spatter the blood of a chicken about the house, muttering incantations. He made a great show of the ceremony while the gentle wind blew the feathers about the compound. To Sango it was rather early to begin to frighten off Alikatu’s ghost from Twenty Molomo. The herbalist seemed to be giving the final order to the ghost, to be tilting the balance in a particular direction.
‘Alikatu!’ Everyone knew now. People threw themselves down into convulsions, crying: ‘Alikatu!’
The lament in that cry could tear the heart out of a stone. It chilled Sango’s blood. As he stood there and listened to the wailing and the moaning, he could also hear the prayers, exhortations, wishes, rebukes, regrets. His soul
was stirred. The sobs and sighs shook the frail rafters of Twenty Molomo. Something in the ritual reminded him of the terrible night at Lugard Square, the night of the Apala dance. Why, if Alikatu’s spirit still hovered around this place, did it not have pity on the poor mortals and re-inhabit the body where it belonged? O, pitiless death.
The mourners came in groups. Sometimes Twenty Molomo was so quiet that one could hardly guess it was inhabited by even a single soul. Then a new and noisy group would come and start the wailing and the moaning and the deafening cries.
What Sango noticed specially was that not one of the people who had been at the festive party at the All Language Club set foot in Lajide’s house. They must have heard of his bereavement. Instead they sent flowers. It must be the sophisticated thing to do. They were too busy to come, too busy to hearken to the voice of death which must one day call them one by one.
•
Sango went to the ‘Waking’ because Bayo had promised him there would be lots of girls. A waking in the city was a sad affair, but the living had eyes to the future and many a romance had been kindled in the long-drawn-out hours between night and morning, when resistance is at its minimum and the whole spirit is sympathetic and kindly disposed.
It was no surprise to Sango when, moving among the mourners, the drummers, and those who drank palm wine, he saw Aina. She had indeed bought and tailored her Accra dress and it heightened her charm. Plum velvet it was, bordered with white lace and sewn in the latest style. The blouse showed off the roundness of her arms, and the skirt, a long piece of material artfully tied round the waist, showed off just so much tantalizing thigh, and no more. Sango wondered how the men could keep their minds on death, with Aina so very vibrant with life.
Only one moment before that, Sango had seen Lajide sitting motionless, unaware of the world about him. Lajide’s head had been sunk on his breast while Zamil came in briefly to console him. The fact that Lajide had not lifted his head, that he was surrounded by a group of friends who were chosen to prevent him from trying to take his own life, showed Sango the depth of his grief.
The contrast between his attitude and Aina’s was clear. Aina had not come to mourn. She was not dressed like the others, in the aso-ebi, the prescribed dress of mourning.
She too had seen Sango and she now came towards him, bright-eyed. Some feet away, Sango caught a whiff of her perfume and the dry feeling came immediately to his throat. He desired her immediately. With shame in his eyes he tried to look away, to ignore her presence.
‘Hello, Sango, I called at yours several times after that night!’
‘Aina, not here! We have come to mourn, not romance!’
‘I heard something; is it true that you went home to marry? They said when you went to the Eastern Greens during the crisis you paid the bride-price on your future wife. Is it true she will join you soon?’
Sango smiled. ‘Aina! But why are you so angry about it?’
‘Don’t you know why? It means you have been deceiving me!’