Emmanuel and Braimoh, carrying the bags they had retrieved from the bus, arrived on the scene as Chris sank first to his knees in a grotesque supplicatory posture and then keeled over sideways before settling flat on his back. Emmanuel went down and knelt beside him and the girl knelt on the other side fumbling with the wounded man’s shirt-front to stop a big hole through which blood escaped in copious spasms.
“Please, sir, don’t go!” cried Emmanuel, tears pouring down his face. Chris shook his head and then seemed to gather all his strength to expel the agony on his twisted face and set a twilight smile on it. Through the smile he murmured words that sounded like The Last Grin… A violent cough throttled the rest. He shivered with his whole body and lay still.
The sergeant had dropped his gun and fled into the wild scrubland. Braimoh had raced after him past the clusters of huts and, a hundred yards or so beyond, had wrestled him to the ground. They rolled over and over sending up whirls of dust. But Braimoh was no match for him in size, strength or desperation. The crowd on the road saw him get up again and continue his run, unattended this time, into a red sunset.
18
BEATRICE HAD DECIDED on a sudden inspiration to hold a naming ceremony in her flat for Elewa’s baby-girl. She did not intend a traditional ceremony. Indeed except in name only she did not intend ceremony of any kind. It seemed to her unlikely from the look of things that she could face anything remotely resembling a ceremony for a long, long time.
But a baby had to have a name, and there seemed nothing particularly wrong in giving it one in the company of a few friends, or doing it on the seventh market as tradition prescribed. Every other detail, however, would fall into abeyance, for this was a baby born into deprivation—like most, of course; but unlike most it was not even blessed with an incurably optimistic sponsor ready to hold it up on its naming day and call it The-one-who-walks-into-abundance or The-one-who-comes-to-eat or suchlike and then blithely hand it back to its mother to begin a wretched trudge through life, a parody of its own name. No, this baby would not lie in cushioned safety from the daily stings of the little ants of the earth floor. Indeed it was already having to manage without one necessity even the poorest may take for granted—a father (even a scarecrow father would have sufficed) to hold it in his hands and pronounce its name on this twenty-eighth day of its life.
Beatrice had asked the same handful of friends who had kept together around her like stragglers from a massacred army. That she even managed this residual relationship was a measure of the change she had begun to undergo even before the violent events of the recent past; that she did it in virtual silence an eloquent tribute to the potency of lost causes.
In earlier times she would have responded to Chris’s death by retreating completely into herself, selecting as wild beasts often do before they die a dark, lonely corner of the forest, distrustful of the solace of their fellows. But the weeks of ill omen presaging the bloody events of November had already thrown her into a defensive pact with a small band of near-strangers that was to prove stronger than kindred or mere friendship. Like old kinships this one was pledged also on blood. It was not, however, blood flowing safe and inviolate in its veins but blood casually spilt and profaned.
In spite of her toughness Beatrice actually fared worse than Elewa in the first shock of bereavement. For weeks she sprawled in total devastation. Then one morning she rose up, as it were, and distanced herself from her thoughts. It was the morning of Elewa’s threatened miscarriage. From that day she had addressed herself to the well-being of the young woman through the remaining weeks to her confinement. When she first attempted during those weeks to resume contact with the desolation inside her heart she was surprised to find that she already felt stronger on her feet and clearer in the head.
She could now return less and less timidly to relive aspects of the nightmare and even begin to reassess her reflexes, feelings and thoughts. Was she right, for instance, to turn down the new Head of State’s special invitation to the state funeral he ordered for Chris? Did she hurt her duty to his memory more by keeping away than she honoured it by showing her mistrust of his enemies? Twenty-four hours after the coup d’état, before the news of Chris got to her, she had watched with utter revulsion a lachrymose Major-General Ahmed Lango suddenly surface and make his “pledge to the nation to bring the perpetrators of this heinous crime quickly to book.” Even the gullible people of Kangan, famous for dancing in the streets at every change of government, were asking where this loyal officer was hiding in the first twenty-four hours after his Commander w
as kidnapped from the Palace by “unknown persons,” tortured, shot in the head and buried under one foot of soil in the bush. But by the time Kangan was asking these questions Beatrice had heard the news of Chris’s murder and lost contact with everything else.
The news was brought to her by Captain Abdul Medani. He was in mufti and came in a taxi. But his face had become so deeply etched in Beatrice’s mind during the weeks he played the mystery voice that in spite of his dress and the dark glasses she had immediately recognized the officer who had led the search of her flat. And she had read his countenance and deciphered the disaster before he opened his mouth. He said he just wanted to be sure she did not hear it on the air, and left immediately. An hour later it was broadcast on the national radio. Later that evening Emmanuel and Braimoh arrived back.
In the weeks and months that followed, her flat became virtually the home of Emmanuel and Braimoh and the girl Adamma. The Captain also came quite frequently. Sometimes, especially at weekends, they would all be there together and discuss the deepening crisis in the country. At first Beatrice heard the voices and the arguments around her as though they came from an adjoining room behind a closed door. But slowly she began to pick out the words out of the muffled sounds, then snatches of sentences and finally even the occasional joke forcing a faint smile like a twitch on her slow-thawing face.
The door had slowly opened and the words and snatches of sentences coalesced into spirited conversations and even debates mostly between Emmanuel and Abdul. But although Beatrice did seem to hear what was said she still did not take part in the exchanges. She still steered her own thoughts as carefully as she could around them. But there were collisions nonetheless which could not but alter now and again, however slightly, the speed and drift of her own silent activity.
“… And what I want to know from you is how this latest blood-letting has helped Kangan in its historical march as you call it. The blood of His Former Excellency and the blood of his victims—if indeed they were his victims…”
If indeed they were his victims, repeated Beatrice in her mind. The very thought that had already visited her dressed, albeit, differently! The explanation of the tragedy of Chris and Ikem in terms of petty human calculation or personal accident had begun to give way in her throbbing mind to an altogether more terrifying but more plausible theory of premeditation. The image of Chris as just another stranger who chanced upon death on the Great North Road or Ikem as an early victim of a waxing police state was no longer satisfactory. Were they not in fact trailed travellers whose journeys from start to finish had been carefully programmed in advance by an alienated history? If so, how many more doomed voyagers were already in transit or just setting out, faces fresh with illusions of duty-free travel and happy landings ahead of them?
That was the day she broke her long silence and asked the two young men: “What must a people do to appease an embittered history?”
The smiles that lit up the faces in the room, especially of the two indefatigable debaters stopped in their tracks, were not addressed to that grave question and its train of echoes from a bottomless pit of sadness. It was rather the ending of an exile that the faces acknowledged, the return of utterance to the sceptical priest struck dumb for a season by the Almighty for presuming to set limits to his omnipotence.
It was not that Beatrice had spoken no words at all before that day. She said hello and even, on occasion, offered hospitality. Certainly she had resumed work in her office one week after Chris’s burial; and at home she conducted her domestic life in the company of Elewa and Agatha. But in all this she had only used words that did not threaten to invade her thoughts and drag them into the profanity of the open air. She became more accessible only in slow stages, egged on usually by one little crisis or another in her small community.
Abdul had confided to her that he had been assigned (or had assigned himself—it wasn’t too clear which) to watch her and her friends. She had smiled and said, “Good luck!” Weeks later she had decided in fairness to inform Emmanuel. He was outraged.
“The fellow is an agent provocateur. How can we be so naive?”
“We? You are such a gentleman, Emmanuel. The weeks with Chris, cooped up together and conspiring, I see, have left their mark. But, no; I’m not naive. The fellow is quite genuine.”
“How?”
“Woman’s intuition, if you like.”
“Since when?”
“What do you mean since when? Are you asking me since when have I become a woman?… And I have just called you a gentleman.”
For a while after that Emmanuel had shown his resentment by ostentatiously keeping sealed lips whenever Abdul was around. Beatrice watched the two without further intervention. In the end it was curiosity which killed the cat of Emmanuel’s silence. It all happened over the rumour about Colonel Johnson Ossai.
“Is it really true that he is missing?” Emmanuel had asked in spite of himself. Abdul had simply nodded without deigning to open his mouth. He had become aware of Emmanuel’s suspicion and had adopted what Beatrice considered a most sophisticated response—simply ignored it and him.
“But how can a whole boss of State Security just disappear? Like that!”
“I believe you had already left Bassa when the boss of the State itself went missing.” Then he positioned himself as if he was talking to Beatrice and the others. “I can give a few facts that have emerged so far. Colonel Ossai was last seen going in to see the Head of State and has not been sighted ever since. You remember Idi Amin? Well, according to unconfirmed reports he used to strangle and behead his rivals for women and put their head in the fridge as a kind of trophy. So perhaps Colonel Ossai is in the cooler, somewhere.”