I remember the incident well because we were doing the map of West Africa in our geography class at the time. So I left my father and his friend and went to my raffia schoolbag and pulled out my West African Atlas and was greatly impressed by the size of the territory over which the 1940 headmaster was champion.
There were times I suspected that he may have flogged our poor mother, though I must say in recognition of the awesomeness of the very thought that I never actually saw it happen. None of my sisters had seen it either, or if they had they preferred not to tell me, for they never took me much into confidence. Looking back on it I am sometimes amazed at the near-conspiracy in which they circled me most of the time. I had this strong suspicion nevertheless, which I could neither confirm nor deny because on those occasions my father always took the precaution to lock the door of their room. She would come out afterwards (having unlocked the door, or perhaps he did) wiping her eyes with one corner of her wrapper, too proud or too adult to cry aloud like us. It didn’t happen too often, though. But it always made me want to become a sorceress that could say “Die!” to my father and he would die as in the folk-tale. And then, when he had learnt his lesson, I would bring him back to life and he would never touch his whip again.
And then one day as my mother came out wiping her eyes I rushed to her and hugged her legs but instead of pressing me to herself as I had expected she pushed me away so violently that I hit my head against the wooden mortar. After that I didn’t feel any more like telling my father to die. I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight at the time but I know I had this strong feeling then—extraordinary, powerful and adult—that my father and my mother had their own world, my three sisters had theirs and I was alone in mine. And it didn’t bother me at all then, my aloneness, nor has it done so since.
I didn’t realize until much later that my mother bore me a huge grudge because I was a girl—her fifth in a row though one had died—and that when I was born she had so desperately prayed for a boy to give my father. This knowledge came to me by slow stages which I won’t go into now. But I must mention that in addition to Beatrice they had given me another name at my baptism, Nwanyibuife—A female is also something. Can you beat that? Even as a child I disliked the name most intensely without being aware of its real meaning. It merely struck me at that point that I knew of nobody else with the name; it seemed fudged! Somehow I disliked it considerably less in its abridged form, Buife. Perhaps it was the nwanyi, the female half of it that I particularly resented. My father was so insistent on it. “Sit like a female!” or “Female soldier” which he called me as he lifted me off the ground with his left hand and gave me three stinging smacks on the bottom with his right the day I fell off the cashew tree.
But I didn’t set out to write my autobiography and I don’t want to do so. Who am I that I should inflict my story on the world? All I’m trying to say really is that as far as I can remember I have always been on my own and never asked to be noticed by anybody. Never! And I don’t recall embarking ever on anything that would require me to call on others. Which meant that I never embarked on anything beyond my own puny powers. Which meant finally that I couldn’t be ambitious.
I am very, very sensitive about this—I don’t mind admitting it.
That I got involved in the lives of the high and mighty was purely accidental and was not due to any scheming on my part. In the first place, they all became high and mighty after I met them; not before.
Chris was not a Commissioner when I met him but a mere editor of the National Gazette. That was way back in civilian days. And if I say that Chris did all the chasing I am not boasting or anything. That was simply how it was. And I wasn’t being coy either. It was a matter of experience having taught me in my little lonely world that I had to be wary. Some people even say I am suspicious by nature. Perhaps I am. Being a girl of maybe somewhat above average looks, a good education, a good job you learn quickly enough that you can’t open up to every sweet tongue that comes singing at your doorstep. Nothing very original really. Every girl knows that from her mother’s breast although thereafter some may choose to be dazzled into forgetfulness for one reason or another. Or else they panic and get stampeded by the thought that time is passing them by. That’s when you hear all kinds of nonsense talk from girls: Better to marry a rascal than grow a moustache in your father’s compound; better an unhappy marriage than an unhappy spinsterhood; better marry Mr. Wrong in this world than wait for Mr. Right in heaven; all marriage is how-for-do; all men are the same; and a whole baggage of other foolishnesses like that.
I was determined from the very beginning to put my career first and, if need be, last. That every woman wants a man to complete her is a piece of male chauvinist bullshit I had completely rejected before I knew there was anything like Women’s Lib. You often hear our people say: But that’s something you picked up in England. Absolute rubbish! There was enough male chauvinism in my father’s house to last me seven reincarnations!
So when Chris came along I was not about to fly into his arms for the asking, although I decidedly liked him. And strangely enough he himself gave me a very good reason for caution. He was so handsome and so considerate, so unlike all the brash fellows the place was crawling with in the heady prosperity of the oil boom that I decided he simply had to be phony!
Unreasonable? Perhaps yes. But I can’t be blamed for the state of the world. Haven’t our people said that a totally reasonable wife is always pregnant? Scepticism is a girl’s number six. You can’t blame her; she didn’t make her world so tough.
One of my girlfriends—a more sensible and attractive person you never saw—except that she committed the crime to be twentysix and still unmarried; she was taken by her fiancé to meet his people in some backwater village of his when an aunt or something of his made a proverb fully and deliberately to her hearing that if ogili was such a valuable condiment no one would leave it lying around for rats to stumble upon and dig into! Well, you can trust Comfort! The insult didn’t bother her half as much as her young man’s silence. So she too kept silent until they got back to the city and inside her flat. Then she told him she had always suspected he was something of a rat. I can hear Comfort saying that and throwing him out of the flat! Now she is happily married to a northerner and has two kids.
My experience with Chris was, of course, entirely different. He seemed to understand everything about me without asking a single question. In those first days he would very often startle me with insights about little things like colours or food or behaviour I liked or didn’t like and I would ask: But how did you know? And he would smile and say: I am a journalist, remember; it’s my business to find out. Just the way he said it would melt any woman.
Emotionally then I had no reservations whatsoever about Chris from the word go. But intellectually I had to call into full play my sense of danger. In a way I felt like two people living inside one skin, not two hostile tenants but two rather friendly people, two people different enough to be interesting to each other without being incompatible.
I recall clearly that the very first time we met the thought that flashed through my mind was to be envious of his wife. And yet it was weeks before I could bring myself to probe delicately about her, not directly through Chris but surreptitiously via a third party, Ikem. But such was the carefully balanced contrariness induced in me by Chris that the news of his wife’s nonexistence, though it admittedly gave me a measure of relief, did not bring total satisfaction. There was a small residue of disappointment at the bottom of the cool draught, so to say. Was it the disappointment of the gambler or the born fighter cheated out of the intoxication of contest and chancy victory? Or did the affair lose some of its attraction for me because deep inside I was not unlike the dreadful, cynical aunt in the village who believed that nothing so good could wait this long for me to stumble upon? What an awful thought!
Even when I found myself begin to pick and choose what dress or what make-up to wear whenever I thought I migh
t run into him I simply dismissed it as a little harmless excitement I was entided to indulge in as long as I remembered to keep a sharp look-out.
It was in a supermarket one Saturday morning, I think, that Ikem gave me an opening to ask about Chris’s wife. I don’t remember the exact details now but I think it was a vague invitation to go with him, his girlfriend and Chris to some friend of their’s birthday party. I said no for one reason or the other but also managed to ask as offhandedly as I could where Chris’s wife was anyway; or was he one of those who will pack their wife conveniently away to her mother and the village midwife as soon as she misses her period?
“BB!” he screamed in mock outrage, his large eyes beaming with wicked pleasure. “Looking at your demure lips…”
“I know, I know. You couldn’t tell, could you? Like looking at a king’s mouth you couldn’t tell, could you?”
“Or looking at a lady’s gait, you couldn’t tell, could you?”
“Enough!” I said in my own counterfeit outrage, my index finger against my lips. “All I asked you was where your friend packs his wife.”
“There is no wife, my dear. So you can rest easy.”
“Me! Wetin concern me there.”
“Plenty plenty. I been see am long time, my dear.”
“See what? I beg commot for road,” and I made to push my trolley past him to the cashier but he grabbed my arm and pulled me back and proceeded to give me in loud whispers accompanied by conspiratorial backward glances a long and completely absurd account of all the actions and reactions he had meticulously observed between Chris and me in the last few months which could only have one meaning—his friend, Chris, done catch!
“You de craze well, well… I beg make you commot for road.”
That was the year I got back from England. I had known Ikem for years—right from my London University days. How he did it I can’t tell but he became instantly like a brother to me. He had completed his studies two or three years earlier and was just knocking about London doing odd jobs for publishers, reading his poetry at the Africa Centre and such places and writing for Third World journals, before his friends at home finally persuaded him to return and join them in nation-building. “Such crap!” he would say later in remembrance.
When he finally left for home I was just getting into my degree year at Queen Mary College and we had become very close indeed. There was a short period when the relationship veered and teetered on the brink of romance but we got it back to safety and I went on with Guy, my regular boyfriend and he with his breathless succession of girlfriends.
I have sat and talked and argued with Ikem on more things serious and unserious than I can remember doing with any other living soul. Naturally I think he is a fantastic writer and it has given me such wonderful encouragement to have him praise the odd short story and poem I have scribbled from time to time. I don’t even mind too much that his way of praising my style was to call it muscular on one occasion and masculine on another! When I pointed this out to him jokingly as a sure sign of his chauvinism he was at first startled and then he smiled one of those total smiles of his that revealed the innocent child behind the mask of beard and learned fierceness.
In the last couple of years we have argued a lot about what I have called the chink in his armoury of brilliant and original ideas. I tell him he has no clear role for women in his political thinking; and he doesn’t seem to be able to understand it. Or didn’t until near the end.
“How can you say that BB?” he would cry, almost in despair. And I understand the meaning of his despair too. For here’s a man, who has written a full-length novel and a play on the Women’s War of 1929 which stopped the British administration cold in its tracks, being accused of giving no clear political role to women. But the way I see it is that giving women today the same role which traditional society gave them of intervening only when everything else has failed is not enough, you know, like the women in the Sembene film who pick up the spears abandoned by their defeated menfolk. It is not enough that women should be the court of last resort because the last resort is a damn sight too far and too late!
That was about the only serious reservation I had about Ikem’s political position. I have to admit that, although he tended to be somewhat cavalier with his girlfriends and has even been called unprincipled by no less a friend than Chris, he did in fact have the most profound respect for three kinds of women: peasants, market women and intellectual women.
He could be considerate to a fault and I have known him to go to great lengths of personal inconvenience to help a lady in distress. I still have goose-flesh just thinking of one bitterly cold winter night he got himself stranded on the last train in London and nearly caught his death on my account.
I had been foolish enough to telephone him after I had suffered one of the most humiliating evenings of my life in the hands of my boyfriend, Guy, at a Nigerian Christmas dance at the St. Pancras Town Hall. I wasn’t really asking Ikem to set out for my place at that hour but just needed to talk to someone like him, someone different from that noisy, ragtag crowd of illiterate and insensitive young men our country was exporting as plentifully at the time as its crude oil. But apparently I sounded so out of my mind on the telephone that Ikem donned his wool cap and muffler and his coat and headed into the snow and caught the last train in a South London station well after midnight. When he finally made it to my door, after an extended adventure on night buses, it was half-past three in the morning. I felt so bad I didn’t need any further comfort for myself. I was ready to start cooking whatever meal would make him warm. Rice? Semolina? Plantain? He shook his head, his lips too frozen to speak. In the end all I could persuade him to take was a cup of coffee without cream or sugar; and he doffed his coat, slumped on the bed-sitter and went to sleep instantly. I stripped my bed of the last blanket and piled it on him.
Of all the absurd things people have found to say about us lately the most ridiculous was to portray Ikem as one of my trio of lovers. Damn it, the fellow was a brother to me!
In the last year I didn’t see too much of him—a couple of times at Mad Medico’s, a few times at parties and one or two visits to my house. He was never a great one for home visits but every one he made left a lasting impression.
The final one was in August. I remember it was August because he walked into my flat out of a huge and unseasonal tropical storm. The doorbell screeched in the kitchen followed by loud, panic bangs on the front door. I sprang up not to answer it but to bar the way to my maid, Agatha, who had dashed out of the kitchen like a rabbit smoked out of its hole and was making for the front door. No matter how I tried to explain it with details of multiple rape and murder, Agatha remained blissfully impervious to the peril of armed robbers surrounding us. She simply says yesmah and nosemah to everything you tell her and goes right ahead doing whatever she was doing before.
“Go back to the kitchen!” I thundered at her and with the same voice turned to the presence outside my door. I had been feeling somewhat more protected lately since I had all doors and windows in the flat reinforced with iron grills so that even if the fellow outside did manage to knock down the outer wooden door he would still have to face the iron, all of which gave you some time to plan your escape. Even so I stood well away from the front door with one eye on the kitchen exit and the fire-escape beyond it.
“Who is that?” I shouted. Whoever it was didn’t seem to hear and continued ringing the alarm and banging on the door. Well, I wasn’t going to budge either and continued screaming who? This went on literally for minutes and I was getting scared when he either heard me or else it occurred to him independendy to use his voice instead of his fists. And I caught it in one of those brief spells when a storm pauses to take a deep breath. I unchained the iron grill and unlocked the door.
“It wasn’t raining in my place,” he shouted sheepishly as he came in. “I ran full tilt into it just there around the Secretariat. It was literally like barging into a pillar of rain, you know
. You could stand there with the forward foot wet and the other dry.”
“Come on in. We’ll go hoarse shouting out here.”
He left his dripping umbrella with my potted plants on the landing and followed me into the parlour. Once inside, with door and window-louvres tightly shut, the noise of the rain receded dramatically to a distant background leaving us in muffled cosiness.
“When we were children,” Ikem said as he threw himself into the sofa and began to remove his wet shoes and tuck his socks inside them, “August used to be a dry month. August Break we called it. The geography textbooks explained it, the farmer in the village expected it. The August Break never failed in those days.”
“Really?”
“What’s happened to the days of my youth, BB?”
“Wasted, squandered, Ikem. Lost for ever, I’m afraid.”
“I hoped you would not say that. Not today. Oh, well.”
“What’s wrong with today. Your birthday or something?”
“I have no birthdays. There was no registration of births and deaths in my village when I was born. Signed Notary Public.” I laughed and he joined me… “I wasn’t one of your spoilt maternity births. I arrived on banana leaves behind the thatched house, not on white bed sheets… Those are lovely flowers, what are they?”
“I have never known you to notice flowers or women’s clothes and rubbish like that before. What’s the matter.”
“I’m sorry, BB, that’s a lovely dress. And lovely flowers, what are they?”
“Agatha is roasting corn and ube. Would you like some. Or with coconut if you prefer…”
“I prefer both ube and coconut.”
“Glutton!”
“That’s right! Terminal stage when it attacks your grammar! You still haven’t told me what these flowers are. I may not have noticed flowers before but I do now. It’s never too late, is it?”