“Sometime you buy small something for repair your machine for him shop?” said Chris’s companion.
“Which machine? I tell you say I get machine?”
“Make you no mind. No condition is permnent. You go get. Meself as I de talk so, you think say I get machine? Even common bicycle I no get. But my mind strong that one day I go jump bicycle, jump machine and land inside motor car! And somebody go come open door for me and say yes sir! And I go carry my belle like woman we de begin to pregnant small and come sitdon for owner-corner, take cigarette put for mouth, no more kolanut, and say to driver comon move! I get strong mind for dat. Make you get strong mind too, everything go allright.”
The soldier now wore a wistful smile which sat strangely on his savaged face.
Across the bridge they walked leisurely, waiting for Braimoh and his lone passenger to get through their own ordeal. Chris’s spirits had returned to such a degree that a certain jauntiness was discernible in his walk. He even suggested to his companion that walking through check-points would seem to be their best bet from now on.
“You think you no go forget your job again?” his companion asked teasingly. “When you no fit talk again that time, fear come catch me proper and I begin pray make this man no go introduce himself as Commissioner of Information!”
“Me Commissioner? At all. Na small small motor part na him I de sell. Original and Taiwan.”
“Ehe! Talkam like that. No shaky-shaky mouth again. But oga you see now, to be big man no hard but to be poor man no be small thing. Na proper wahala. No be so?”
“Na so I see-o. I no know before today say to pass for small man you need to go special college.”
His companion liked that and laughed long and loud. “Na true you talk, oga. Special College. Poor Man Elementary Cerftikate!”
They walked along merrily discussing in confidential tones their recent success. Chris wondered why the soldier had stopped them in the first place. Had he noticed them get down from the taxi?
“At all!” Said his companion. “Make I tell you why he stop us? Na because of how you de walk as to say you fear to kill ant for road. And then you come again take corner-corner eye de look the man at the same time. Nex time make you march for ground with bold face as if to say your father na him get main road.”
“Thank you,” said Chris. “I must remember that… To succeed as small man no be small thing.”
16
THE JOURNEY to the North began five days later. The choice of Abazon as sanctuary came quite naturally. At the purely sentimental level it was Ikem’s native province which, although he had rarely spent much time there in recent years, still remained in a curious paradoxical way the distant sustainer of all his best inspirations, so that going there now in his death became for Chris and Emmanuel something of a pilgrimage.
Then it was a province of unspecified and generalized disaffection to the regime. One could indeed call it natural guerrilla country; not of course in the literal sense of suggesting planned armed struggle which would be extravagantly far-fetched as yet, but in the limited but important meaning of a place where, to borrow the watchword of a civil service poster, you could count on having your secrets kept secret.
And lastly, Braimoh’s w
ife, Aina was, as it turned out, a native of southern Abazon and Braimoh had volunteered to personally escort the distinguished refugee and hand him over to his in-laws up there for safe-keeping.
All these attractions of Abazon had of course to be set against the one considerable disadvantage of being a place where the regime might be sleeping with one eye open especially since the death of Ikem and the ugly eruption of a new crisis over the government’s refusal to turn over his body to his people for burial under the provocative pretext that investigations were still proceeding into the circumstances of his death!
The night before the journey had been quite extraordinary. Beatrice, at her own insistence, had been brought by Braimoh in a friend’s taxi through devious routes to say farewell to Chris. She wore for the occasion long-discarded clothes fished out of a big, red canvas bag in which she threw odds and ends awaiting the visit of the Salvation Army collector. With her came Elewa. It was to have been a brief visit after which the two young women would take another taxi to Elewa’s mother’s place a couple of kilometres away and spend the night there to avoid a late journey back to her flat at the GRA which might attract undue attention.
But the strain and the confusing events of recent days and nights which Beatrice had borne all on her own with such intrepidity seemed all of a sudden to assume an unbearable heaviness on her shoulders at this tantalizing reunion. Why should she accept this role of a star-crossed lover in a cheap, sentimental movie waving frantically from the window of an express train at her young man at his window in another train hurtling away on opposite tracks into a different dark tunnel? And so she rebelled with a desperate resolve grounded on a powerful premonition that Chris and she had tonight come to a crossroads beyond which a new day would break, unpredictable, without precedent; a day whose market wares piled into the long basket on her head as she approached the gates of dawn would remain concealed to the very last moment.
And so, timidly for once, Beatrice chose to hang by a thread to the days she had known, to spin out to infinite lengths the silken hours and minutes of this last familiar night.
“I shall stay here till morning,” she pronounced from that rocklike resolve just as Braimoh peeped through the door a second time for instructions about a taxi. Glances were exchanged all round but no one dared to demur. Rather, new arrangements were quickly taken in hand, debated and concluded around Beatrice’s now-aloof stance while she, immobile as a goddess in her shrine, her arms across her breasts, stared away fixedly into the middle distance.
She heard the debate and the conclusions remotely: Elewa would take Emmanuel to her mother’s place in the taxi; Braimoh would pack the five children off to sleep in a neighbour’s house…
“Oh no no no!” said Chris suddenly out of a reverie, stamping his foot firmly on the linoleum-covered floor. All eyes turned to him but he merely went on shaking his head for a while longer before saying quite decisively that the children must not be moved. The thinking which had produced this sharp reaction had gone somewhat as follows: I arrived here and failed to prevent Braimoh and Aina his wife from abandoning their matrimonial bed to me and going out every night to sleep God-knows-where. I’ll be damned if their five children will now be ejected from their floor because of Beatrice.
He leaned over and explained these thoughts to her in excited whispers. Her response was instantaneous. Her mind and all her thoughts had been so totally focussed on Chris’s metamorphosis from disembodied voice back into flesh and blood that she had left herself no room whatever to consider such things as beds and floors and at what and whose cost. Now she spoke as firmly as Chris in favour of the children. She went further to say, in sincere atonement, that as far as she was concerned the chair on which she sat was all she needed for the night.
Later, she had to be summoned several times by Chris before she left that chair and, stepping over the sleeping children, hung her head-tie on a nail driven into the wall and went over to the bed. She was still suffering a sense of shame for her thoughtlessness. But how was she to have known that by simply obeying an impulse to stay close to Chris this one night before a journey into the unknown she was selfishly putting out a poor family? Why did no one tell her? Or was she, as her people say, just to sniff her finger and know? Then who was to tell her? Braimoh? Look, Miss, my wife and I go out to pass the night on a neighbour’s floor while our five children sleep here on this floor; so you can’t stay here. Or Chris? Yes, Chris the Information man should have informed, not after but before. But how was even he to know the impulse bubbling inside her and erupting in her pronouncement? The fault is then hers. Although she had not consciously thought about it she must have made the assumption in some inattentive zone of her mind that one or two of all those doors that gave into the long odoriferous corridor running through the belly of this airless block-house must lead into other rooms used by Braimoh and his family. Why did she make that assumption? Surely everyone had heard that large families of the urban poor lived in single windowless rooms. Did she imagine then that for her that piece of information would stay in the domain of hearsay, that it would never fall to her luck to encounter it in a living family and even share its meagre resources for a single night?
Chris called out again to her from the bed screened by two large curtains of cheap cotton print hung on a rope that stretched from one wall to the other with a sag in the middle that made one want to get up and pull the rope tighter around the nail on which it was fastened.
She picked her steps carefully through the confusion of young sleeping bodies on straw mats on the floor and gained the bed. She had brought pyjamas in her picnic bag but had left the bag unopened beside her chair. Sitting now on the edge of the bed she took off her blouse and hung it on the sagging curtain-rope. She then loosed her lappa from her waist and retied it above the breast and lay down beside Chris.
Their love-making that night was cramped by distractions. At least two of the children lying on the floor beyond the cotton screen—a boy and a girl—could easily possess enough stréet-lore to know if something was going on and what. Then there was the multiple-pitched squealing of the bed at the slightest change of position.