‘Jagua, mother mine!’ Rosa threw herself at Jagua, clinging to her, moaning with delight. ‘I was jus’ askin’ de woman de way to Ogabu … I follow de address you give me till I reach here, den I loss …’ She spoke rapidly in Ibo now that they were in Iboland.
Rosa seemed pale, wide-eyed and nervy. It could be the long journey by lorry but there was that sleepless glint in her eye, a kind of permanent frown not based on anger, which worried Jagua and made Rosa’s appearance in the forests seem imaginary. Jagua touched the bright youthful skin, and the scarlet and yellow cotton-print blouse. They felt real and she was reassured.
‘I come home with my man, so I remember you.’ Her man’s home, she explained, was not very far from Ogabu. She told Jagua that the young man in a blazer was on holiday and was taking the opportunity to come and speak to Rosa’s people.
‘You get good luck,’ Jagua said. ‘I don’ know say he serious with you.’ She immediately told her girls to pack up, hailed a porter to take Rosa’s suitcase. Together they walked through the woods. The six miles seemed like six yards, so exuberant were they with reminiscences.
‘You hear anythin’ about Dennis Odoma?’ Rosa asked at one point.
Jagua’s heart began thumping hard. ‘No! what happen?’
‘You don’ hear say dem hang him?’ Rosa asked.
‘No,’ Jagua said, and began to cry.
‘I goin’ to tell you de full story sometime,’ Rosa promised.
With her usual energy Rosa peeled the yam and ground the pepper. She made the stew and pounded the yam. She had stripped her print dress and had only a sleeveless singlet and bright green wrapper tied sarong-wise round her hips. Her small breasts danced, her rounded hips rolled as she descended the steps of the courtyard at the back of the house. Jagua admired her complete ‘at-homeness’.
‘Mama, we have one who has come.’ Jagua said when her mother came in. ‘Her name is Rosa. In Lagos I knew her.’
‘Welcome, Rosa. You come well?’ She turned to Jagua. ‘She has eaten? Quick now. Give her food.’
Jagua smiled and pinched Rosa. ‘My mother likes you,’ she whispered.
When they had bathed and eaten, Jagua and Rosa sat on the piazza and five hundred miles from Lagos Rosa told Jagua what happened to Dennis Odoma and Uncle Taiwo. After endless minute questions, Jagua knew the story of Dennis as if she had been at the trial herself. According to Rosa, the magistrate had tried to save him. But his case was hopeless. Rosa told how the magistrate’s face clouded as he added up the pros and cons, how Dennis stood in the dock, trembling. He had grown extremely pale and unkempt, his beard was unshaven and his clothes looked as if he had slept in them. It had been raining for ten days in Lagos, without stopping. Grey bleak rain, slamming down, eating into the tarmac and unearthing the stones, running into rivulets, rushing into streams that clogged the gutters and floated the wood and silt, the carcasses of sheep and dogs. At night when the moon struggled out, the rain stopped and then you could hear again the city sounds – horns bleating in the distance, trains jangling over the rails. She was miserable and so was everyone, particularly the prosecution police who put their heads together, conspiring, while the press boys scribbled away and everyone waited. At this time those who came to court talked, but only in whispers.
This was the time when Rosa hoped that Dennis would be freed or given a light sentence, because everyone was getting tired of the case and the public were all for Dennis. But the police went on to prove that he was a thoroughly bad character. He was an ‘habitual’. He had attacked a police officer before, about four years ago. They proved also that in the last four years, Dennis was in and out of prison five times. Rosa was amazed. She said she could never have guessed it from the way Dennis behaved when he came to visit Jagua. The police prosecutor read out: ‘House-breaking and stealing – 15 months … Counterfeit coins – 9 months. Under the name Matthias Oemji, 9 months for stealing … Again, 4 months for stealing … And again, 4 months for stealing …’ Rosa dramatized how the police officer was shuffling the cards as he spoke and how Dennis in the dock, bowed his head and said nothing. When they began to speak of how this merciless and wicked boy had planned to kill the policeman, had lured him into a side street ‘with intent’, Rosa knew there was no way out then. And when later on, she saw his picture in the paper, saying he was to hang, she was shocked but no longer surprised. She heard that Dennis appealed, but nothing ever came out of it.
Jagua said not a word. All she could murmur to herself was: ‘An’ de boy love me so much. He use to call me Ma. I try to teach ’im to be gentleman, but is a different kind from Freddie Namme. Differen’ kin’.’ She spoke up now. ‘You know, is like say his body on fire all de time. When his body wake, he got enough power to kill man with one blow. But he gentle when he love, though he kin hardly control hisself whenever he see me naked.’
‘I jus’ remember somethin’, Jagua!’ Rosa came running up from the forest. Jagua was sitting on the verandah in front of her father’s house.
‘What thin’, Rosa?’
She came up the steps and said, ‘You know any man dem call Ofubara … Chief Ofubara? From Krinameh?’
‘Chief Ofubara,’ Jagua whispered, holding her breast. ‘Yes, is de time I go Bagana. From dere I reach Krinameh and …’ She checked herself, unable to tell Rosa about the jealous incident when she had pursued Nancy Namme into the waters of Krinameh. But she talked of how she had been really Jagwa, the day Chief Ofubara first set eyes on her.
‘Soon after you lef’, de man come to Lagos. He worryin’ about you till he nearly crase. He say you promise to marry am. He come till he tire, worryin’ ’bout you. So he don’ come here to find you? Sometime dem take de steamer go home …’
Rosa told how Chief Ofubara had come with some others for a conference in Lagos, something to do with chieftaincy.
Jagua sighed. ‘Dat man you see, is a very kin’ man.’ She knew now that she would like to see him again, but not now, when she was carrying another man’s baby. In a way, she regarded herself as his wife. Though he had not gone to speak to her parents in the traditional manner, he had paid the price on her head, but got no bride. But no, she could not marry him now. She might go to the Port Harcourt wharf, or even as far as Bagana, for news of him. Krinameh was not so far away now, on this side of the Niger.
Night after night, they sat and talked. And on the second night, Rosa told the story of Uncle Taiwo: a terrifying one indeed, and one that taught Jagua that politics was dirtiest to them that played it dirty. Rosa told how she was going to market and she heard that a dead man was lying at the roundabout in the centre of the city. She was terrified. It was said to be lying near the marketplace, in front of the Hotel Liverpool. People going to work saw it from their cars in the early morning as they came up the hill. The policeman at the control point had the cape of his raincoat up and his white cap was sodden with the endless rain. The roads were all muddy and pitted; the gutters were full, the farms in the suburbs were overgrown with weeds. Lagos was in a state of chaos that day. It seemed as if the ghost of that corpse had gone abroad among them. The body was lying there twisted and swollen; one knee was drawn up against the chest, the arms were clutching at the breast, rigid like a statue. Rosa tried to imitate the position of the body on the floor, and Jagua, horrified, hastily begged her to get up. She was shaking with fright.
In Africa you see these things, Rosa reminded her. Rosa said she circled round the body three times. She saw some dogs circling too. Perhaps they were waiting for nightfall to feast on the body of the famous man. This was in Lagos, nowhere else. Then she went up into the Hotel Liverpool and stood looking down from five floors at the chain of red, blue, green, scarlet, yellow and cream cars; at the slow jerk and stop of the traffic flowing into the island. But it was the body of Uncle Taiwo, lying in the rain that seemed to rivet all the attention and to spread terror among the drivers … She ordered brandy and sipped it slowly because she was feeling sick. The waiters in the white uniforms chattered but none of them knew Rosa and none of them said anything she did not really know. They said, however, that he had been murdered by his party and abandoned at the roundabout. He had broken faith with them and they blamed him for losing the elections.
It kept on drizzling, rattling on the roof. A bleak day on which Uncle Taiwo died. Rosa said she came down from the hotel and went home in the rain without entering the market.
Jagua was horrified by the story. She had never loved Uncle Taiwo. She had been a mere tool in his hands, an elderly man who knew what he wanted and did not complain when asked to pay for it. She had never realized that he was so deeply enmeshed in political ties and societies he would never mention in public. How different he was from Dennis, with his pulse-beat of life and his daring disregard of convention, his youthful urgency, a young man who had stirred her deep down and made her restless and inadequate.
When Rosa had gone to bed Jagua thought over the story of Uncle Taiwo. There was now no point in keeping the bag any longer. She would go now to the backyard and destroy all the papers. She lit a hurricane lamp and went to the cupboard in her mother’s room where the bag was. She took it down and tried to open it b
ut it was locked. With a knife she cut open the leather flap and the contents poured out at her feet. She stood back aghast. The bag was full of notes, stacked in bundles of £50. She counted twenty such bundles before going over and shaking her mother by the shoulder.
‘Mama, Mama, get up! … Come an’ see what I see!’