A Small Silence Page 4

  ‘I have come,’ she said, genuflecting towards Iya Mufu.

  ‘Welcome. Oya, oya, join Abudu. You people should move those hands fast, so I can answer my customers,’ Iya Mufu screamed as Desire settled to squat by the open drain, next to Abudu, a mute boy who always smiled at her with his eyes. They washed the plastic plates together in two big bowls, one for washing with a tattered sponge and the other for rinsing. Desire then stacked the plates and hurriedly placed them by Iya Mufu, who was surrounded by a small crowd of impatient customers stretching their naira notes at her. Iya Mufu would grab the closest one to her, pick a plate from the pile by her side, and dish out a portion with the steel spoon paddle from the two black, round cauldrons—one filled with white tuwo and the other a crimson stew, which sat by a smaller pot with gbegiri soup. She served until the last drop. To signal that the tuwo was finished, Iya Mufu banged on the side of the pot and lifted her hands in the air, proclaiming ‘The end!’ with a huge smile on her face. A slight murmur would rise in the air, a little hesitation, but in a few minutes the crowds of customers dispersed slowly, leaving Desire and Abudu to clean up the place, while Iya Mufu counted the day’s earnings.

  Abudu smiled at Desire as they washed and packed the utensils into a wooden box, before both departed into the night with a bowl of tuwo and a 20 naira note.

  Desire did not ignore the changes that came from her mother. Whenever she was alone in the room, she watched her converse with her shadow. ‘You have not treated me well at all—at all. Is this the life I asked for?’ Sometimes, Desire’s mother screamed at the shadow. She moved from one side to another like one moving to a song, before breaking into a loud wail, panting. At times, she would turn to Desire and with a smile hovering over her lips say, ‘You know I love you. You know, you know, you know abi?’

  Desire stood by the door or a wall and watched as her mother talked and gestured to her shadow. She moved towards her mother and stroked her arms gently, ‘There’s no one here. Only me.’ What she wanted to do was rush towards her and shake her out of the conversation with her shadow until she stopped. Instead, she let tears run down her face, until her body convulsed against her mother’s. When Desire calmed down, she stared at her mother, unsure whether to leave her alone. But she did, she always did. She walked to the door and leaned against its frame, her body straddling the wall. She remained this way until she fell asleep standing, only to wake up bent like a broken branch.

  As time passed, Desire learnt to move to a corner of the room and focus on the noise outside, instead. Sometimes, she rushed out to play with her friends in the neighbourhood and returned to the room at night after helping Iya Mufu sell her tuwo. She tiptoed so as not to wake her mother. This was the rhythm of her life until they heard the seven-day quit notice on the radio for all the people of Maroko.

  The eviction changed everything. Soldiers carrying guns covered Maroko, and although it was acknowledged as one of the most populated areas in Lagos, where the music never stopped, it entered an eerie silence in the afternoons. Things were like this until the day the man called Prof came around to speak to the people.

  Throwing off the long silence which had taken over the area, the people of Maroko shouted, wept and clapped all at once as Prof stood on a makeshift podium, speaking to them. Caught in the throng, Desire ducked her way around until she was in front of the crowd, and within a few minutes she found herself on Prof’s shoulder, hearing the roar from the crowd but not understanding what was said. On his shoulder, she felt a calm descend upon her. The empty spaces inside her appeared to fill up as Prof whispered something in her ears as he tried to put her down on the ground, but she couldn’t hear him well because of the noise around them.

  Desire could never forget the look in Prof’s eyes as he released her from his arms. He turned immediately towards the government officials who were carrying out the demolition and wagged his finger at them. He screamed slogans into the air and Desire believed for many years that he smiled at her, his eyes saying, ‘You see, all I am doing is for you.’ All around them people were fainting, rolling on the ground as the place they called home became rubble, but she alone saw the way he stood for the people—because of her. It was what she believed. It was what she knew. Prof was there with them, to save her. He ran down from the raised platform he was on and ran towards a tractor. The tractor screeched to a halt, almost running over him as he tried to stop it from grinding a man’s personal belongings to the ground. In the hours of arguments which transpired between him and the government officials, the people salvaged what they could from their falling homes. Prof returned to her. He smiled and pushed a book into her hand. She genuflected, accepting the book, keeping her eyes glued to the ground. She did not want to look into his eyes, lest he saw her embarrassment, because she had not yet learnt to read well at that time. In a staccato, she read the title in her head: How to be a Nigerian.

  She took the book home and read the title to herself when she was alone. Then she left the book by her sleeping area. She did not open it for many days even though she wanted to. It confused her that Prof had given her a book on how to be Nigerian. She wondered if she was from somewhere else and if he knew and needed her to know that. She went about for many days repeating the title of the book to herself. She ignored the discomfort of its edges rubbing against her skin where she tucked it in her skirt at night. The book remained unopened beyond the first page for many weeks. But everything changed the moment she read the first sentence in the preamble of the book: It is not easy to write a book. First, you have to get a book: then you have to write it. Desire was intrigued by the idea of consuming another person’s difficulty. The more she thought about the process of writing and how much the writer must have struggled with thoughts and ideas, the more she was determined to become a fluent reader. She imagined that Prof wanted her to read, and that must have been what she heard.

  Once she started to read, she learnt to build a world with the words she found in books and stopped minding that her mother spoke with shadows. Reading, however, came with its own troubles. She needed books to read and they needed to be bought or stolen.

  Desire stole from neighbours, she stole from her friends at school. She stole books and nothing else.

  The woman Desire stole from the most was a woman she worked for during her secondary school holidays. Madam, as Desire called her, was a high school teacher who brought home books from school. She would fall asleep sprawled across the sofa, limbs stretched as far as they could reach.

  Desire stole one book a week from the house, or sometimes two if she finished one too quickly. She took it into the toilet with her when no one was watching, and it was in the toilet that she wrapped the book in a scarf over her stomach, adjusted her gown and returned to work.

  It was going smoothly until the woman asked her one day, ‘Desire! Can you please check if some of the books fell behind the shelf? Or maybe the children threw them under the chairs. The shelf is almost empty.’

  Desire moved around the house performing the task of cleaning and searching for books she knew were in her house. She lifted the chairs, upturned the tables, and the shelves. She swept the inner corners and arranged her face into a look of despair before walking up to the woman in the sitting room.

  ‘Isn’t it possible that Taiwo and Kenny have been taking books with them to the neighbours? I think I saw them going there yesterday.’

  ‘What! Which of the neighbours? Is it that woman?’

  Desire did not talk, but merely grunted, to agree with the woman’s suspicion without exactly burdening her conscience further with guilt. Especially, as the neighbour the woman suspected was one Desire knew Madam would never ask about the books.

  ‘Ha! And you could not stop them. Didn’t I tell them to stop going to that woman’s house? These children won’t kill me.’

  ‘I can go and call them now.’

  ‘I thought they were in their room?’

  ‘Sorry Madam. I was cleaning and tak
ing care of the house, and—’

  ‘See, Desire, I know you are here to clean, but please, also help mind the children when you can. I don’t want my kids to go to other people’s houses, okay?’

  Desire genuflected again, looking down.

  ‘Oh, I think the kids are in their room. I made a mistake.’

  ‘Okay, go on and continue your work. And please, just make sure you stop them if they ever try to go to that woman’s house again. I wish someone would just evict her and let a normal human being come into this compound.’

  A week later Desire sent a message that she could no longer work there because it was affecting her health. By the time she left her boss, she had stolen 33 books.

  She arranged the books in a high pile in the room, and it took the place of the furniture she and her mother did not have. They joined several other stolen, picked, borrowed-and-never-returned books. By the time she was 16, she had so many books she could have stocked a library with them if she wanted to do so. She only stopped stealing books the day she watched a mob burning a thief for stealing from a stationery shop.

  6

  As the years passed, Desire decided to find out more about Prof, beginning with his full name: Eniolorunda Durotimi Akanni. At first, it was not a conscious effort to know more about him, but the news of him found her as the years passed. His stories filled her ears wherever she went. His news came to her between caring for a mother who was now not just talking to shadows but was now a shadow herself, a shrunken body on the mat mumbling to herself, waiting to be bathed and fed. It was from the news going around that she learnt that the university had sacked him because he would not dobale for the Vice-Chancellor, a man who asked that his lecturers lay prostrate before him at every meeting. Desire learnt how he led so many student marches and followed with labour union action.

  She watched Prof on the television sets arranged side by side by the roadside electronic shop, varying only in size as if to make their presence noticeable in their difference. She watched as Prof wept over how much he loved his country. It was so unexpected. One minute he was screaming out slogans, and the next, he let out small sobs, and then he would let out a howl that left the few people standing around him with open mouths, before they drew close to him and touched his shoulder. He sniffed and shook his head, his grey suit slipping down off his shoulders. He wiped his eyes with a handkerchief that someone handed to him, and returned to roaring about his passion to save Nigerians from the clutches of “foxes from hell”.

  ‘This is a violence against human rights! And I will not be here and watch you suffer. I am ready to die for the people. My people,’ he was heaving and puffing, gesticulating as he spoke. His upper lip twitched as he spoke of how citizens were being cheated out of what should be theirs.

  The following day, Desire walked up to a discussion of the “Free Readers’ Association”, men who gathered at newspaper stands to read for free. Most FRA members were men on their way to work that bored, with no work that bored, or looking for work that bored. They gathered and argued over political analysis, which led to lengthy complaints on the sorry lives of Nigerians.

  ‘Bro, country is very hard-o. I go collect salary like dis, begin cry.’

  ‘Sebi, you even dey collect salary. If me I see work like dis, na to begin use my company name as my surname.’

  This remark made the others laugh. Desire stood with the men, their hands whipping the air as they described life in Nigeria with the magnitude of their anger distorting their mouths and widening their eyes. They talked about monies that travelled in and out of the accounts of those in government. They bemoaned the absence of Prof in the country. Although it was common knowledge that the police had arrested him, no one knew where he had been taken.

  In the weeks that followed, the newspapers stopped carrying stories about him. Before the newspaper stories, the news of his arrest was all over the city. As the weeks multiplied, people stopped talking about him openly except at the newspaper FRA. This was where Desire heard them discussing the killing of another activist, Ken Saro Wiwa, and eight other Ogoni, and she wondered if Prof would end up in the same way. One morning, the men at the FRA were discussing their fears that Prof would die, but were interrupted by a truckload of army men with whips, who dispersed everyone there for “illegal gathering.”

  Prof’s disappearance and the demise of the FRA came about at the time Desire started to work as a porter for Mama T, a big trader at the Balogun Market. Mama T, shortened from “Mama Terror”, always wore her face in a frown. She could throw tantrums that shamed thunder. The few times she smiled were when she counted money placed on her elephant thighs and it was on one such day that Desire’s grief for Prof, who she feared she would never meet again, overtook her. She focused on the open book in her hands as she suppressed her tears, only to look up to see the successful trader eating her up with a look that burnt into her skin. Desire clamped the book shut. She knew what those eyes were telling her, ‘You are here reading a book while the others are working, abi?’

  ‘See this olowikowi, you sure do not have a head on your neck ke?’ Mama T tapped her on the shoulder as she carried in the last bundle of lace fabric.

  Mama T bent over her, slapping her hands together like clapping cymbals. She turned away from Desire and faced the other labourers who were busy loading off batches of cloth from trucks into the shop.

  ‘Se, you’re learning how to cawwy material from twuck to shop inside the book? Do you think that is how we make money in Lagos?’

  The other porters found this hilarious.

  ‘Mama T that is tisha-o. She like book too much. She even know everything sef.’

  Desire put the book down and hurried to do her work, muttering an apology even after Mama T’s eyes were no longer on her.

  ‘Tisha? Me, I’m not looking for “Madam Tisha” here-o. I want pwoper somebody whose muscles are not made fwom plastic. I need an akilapa—sturdy and stwong hands like iron. So gbo?

  Desire hurried to meet the others. She dropped her book on one of the bags of sachet milk as she did. Mama T picked it up and studied the cover. ‘War and Peace? What kind of book is this? Leo Toy-toy? What kind of name is this?’ She held Desire in a long stare before saying, ‘Come for your big book with the stwange name when you finish your work-o. So gbo? Who goes around reading this kind of big book inside the market?’ Mama T shook her head and paddled her heavy buttocks to her seat.

  In the evening, as the market became empty, Desire walked up to Mama T. She thought of words to express her apology, but none came to her. When she stood in front of Mama T, the first words she said were, ‘I love reading.’

  It was not what she had meant to say when she knelt on the ground in front of Mama T. It was what came out. She thought over her words again and said, ‘Do not be upset, Ma. It won’t happen again, Ma.’ She looked at the ground and prayed in silence. Mama T said nothing to her. Desire felt her eyes on her, scanning her body from top to bottom. Mama T shook her head. She stood up and walked away with pouted lips that let out a long ‘Issssh,’ and a wave of the hand over her shoulder, ‘Go away, unfortunate one. Bookworm!’

  Desire hesitated for a while before she ran to pick up the book from the chair. She held it close to her chest. When she left the shop, she knew she would not be doing much sleeping that night. And indeed, she woke several times in the night mumbling prayers that she would not be laid off. The next day, she avoided Mama T, who in turn ignored her until evening time, when she prepared to go home after the day’s work.

  ‘Er… you. What’s that your name again?’

  ‘Desire.’

  ‘Desire? As in, “the things I want”?’

  ‘Yes, Ma.’

  ‘O ga o. Desire, Desire, Desire. What won’t one hear? Anyway, ask one of the girls to give you the diwection to my house, so gbo? See you on Sunday, by 3pm.’

  Desire walked into Mama T’s compound scouting for the entrance to the house after missing her way trying to
locate the building. There was a chaos of lock-up shops and kiosks in front of the house and the houses on the streets were numbered without any logic. Desire walked past three houses side by side numbered 7, 21, and 49, all the while trying to locate the “house with the sculpture inside it” as one of the girls had described it to her. She found it the fourth time she barged into a house. The sculpture was a mottled mould of an old man facing the house as if he was watching over it. Desire would later learn that Mama T inherited the bungalow from her father, the sculpted old man.

  Desire looked at the house. A block of architecture dabbed with brown and cream paint, occupying space and beautifying nothing. It was evident that the designer had attempted to put some finesse into it, but the occupants’ mark was more evident than that of the architect. Now the building sat in the middle of the compound, a giant, rectangular antique, surrounded by a cemented floor and whittled flowers leaning against the walls like they were in mourning. She walked past three Land Rovers parked at the back of the house and directly in front of the door. This three-bedroom bungalow, with its entrance behind rather than in front, would become a welcoming home to her.

  It was on this first visit to Mama T that she told the rich merchant her life story. Desire told her of her excellent school-leaving results, her dying mother and a childhood spent on the beach. For the first time, she told someone everything—well, almost everything—about herself. Mama T was so quiet as she told her story, that Desire at a point believed she was no longer listening, until she asked, ‘Can you help Remilekun do her GCE?’