A Million Years with You (21 page)

 

Close friends of ours, a Nigerian couple at the university, came home one afternoon and found their daughter with a fever. The fever was high; they took the child in a taxi to the hospital. The child was examined but not admitted, and was discharged at about 4:00 AM. The parents took her home, and by 7:00 AM she was dead.

 

So my daughter had to make do without medical help. I brought down her fever with cold compresses, helped her drink water and take aspirins, and by morning she seemed a little better. Within a week she had recovered. God knows what sickness she had.

 

A few days later we heard that the coup had failed and the army had taken over the government. Steve learned from one of his many connections that the coup leaders had expected the army to be on their side. But for that to happen they would have had to neutralize the commanding officer, Major General Aguiyi-Ironsi. They meant to capture him or kill him if necessary, and they sent a lieutenant to do this. Aguiyi-Ironsi was a big, imposing person, brimming with authority, and when the lieutenant came around a corner pointing a gun at him, he commanded the lieutenant to hand over the weapon. His authority was such that the lieutenant hesitated just long enough for Aguiyi-Ironsi to grab the gun and wrestle it away from him. Thus Aguiyi-Ironsi remained in charge of the army, and when the new, post-coup military government was formed, he became its leader. Because he continued to control the army, his new government could appoint whomever it liked, and did not appoint the coup leaders. The decision may have partly appeased the Northern Region, but it inflamed many people in the Eastern and Western Regions, and the violence and killings got worse.

Perhaps the new unrest unnerved some leaders in the north, or perhaps Aguiyi-Ironsi unnerved them. They secretly planned yet another coup, but didn't quite keep the secret. Steve learned of it one evening while in the barracks with an army friend. He and his friend planned to visit a bar, but before they went, the friend wanted to change into civilian clothes. And while Steve sat on his friend's footlocker, waiting, two soldiers sitting on the next bed began to chat about the new coup that was coming. It came two days later. Many soldiers were loyal to Aguiyi-Ironsi, so the new coup leaders had to kill him, which this time was done successfully, and with him gone, the Northern Region again took power.

 

The countercoup brought some of the military action to a halt, but in the Western Region it only increased the anarchy. Groups of men began stopping all traffic that went through their villages, pulling the drivers and passengers out of the cars and buses and killing those who didn't have local tribal markings. These were the facial scarifications that had begun in slavery times so that slave raiders from friendly groups wouldn't capture those who wore them. Since then the scarifications had been traditionally worn by many Yorubas. Needless to say, expatriates didn't have tribal markings, so sometimes the slaughter included them. An expatriate neighbor of ours with his family went through such a village and was mauled. His attackers wanted revenge, not money, but at least they didn't kill him or maul his wife and children.

These killings took place in roadside villages, so we learned of them only by rumor. As there were constant, terrible rumors about all kinds of things, one couldn't make all decisions based on them, and one day our wonderful neighbor, Phil Stevens, who was an anthropologist, decided to go to the Northern Region to continue some research that had a time constraint. He invited Steve to go with him. Our little son, by then seven, wanted to go with his dad, so taking Steve's car, which was roomier than Phil's, the three of them went off together.

The next day I was told by a horrified neighbor who had just come from the north that on the north-south road that Steve and Phil had taken, the men in one of the villages were stopping all cars, murdering those who lacked the right facial scarifications, and throwing their children down a well.

The village was near Ibadan. I didn't know which village, but there weren't many of them, so it might easily have been the one in which our nanny had killed a pedestrian. The people who saw the accident hadn't blamed her, but a crowd of people would have gathered at that point, and who knew how they felt about it? They'd remember the car.

By then Steve and Phil were beyond that town, but because they had no access to a telephone, nor was any such news reported on the radio, they would be coming home along that road knowing nothing of the danger.

I've never known such terror. I'm not happy to say this, but it's one thing to fear that your husband is at risk and another thing to fear that your child could be thrown down a well. Your mind's eye sees him struggling in the water. Your mind's ear hears him calling.

I thought of going to warn them, to get through the town as best I could or die trying. But what about my daughter? I certainly couldn't take her with me and I couldn't leave her behind. I tried to phone a police station north of the town, believing that the police could possibly find Steve and Phil and warn them, but the phone lines had been cut and I couldn't get through.

Here again, a phone operator helped me. I told her why I was so frightened, why I had to reach my husband, and she tried another police station farther north. She couldn't get through to them either, so she tried a third. This time it worked. I was crying with relief and gratitude when I told the police what was happening. They hadn't heard about it. I told them what kind of car Steve and Phil were driving, and the police said they'd keep a lookout for it, but reluctantly told me that they were not on that north-south road so they weren't hopeful.

I had no idea what else I could do. The travelers were not expected home for forty-eight hours. I would just have to wait. I was consumed with fear so strong I couldn't bear it, so I went to the kitchen, filled a teacup with gin, and drank it. I will always remember that moment. My fear receded a little. I drank another cup of gin.

Unknown to me, Steve and Phil had changed their plans. At their first destination, Phil learned something related to his work that sent them to another destination on the opposite side of the Northern Region. So rather than coming back on the road that passed the town where the massacres were occurring, they came back safely on another north-south road on the far side of the region.

 

One thing I learned from the Nigerian experience was what it's like to be a civilian in a war zone. You never know what's happening, or who is shooting at whom. You just hope with all your heart that they won't do it near you. I would sit up at night, wide awake, and one night, mixed with distant gunfire, I heard a song coming from a neighbor's house. It was “Moonlight in Vermont.”

My body actually began to ache because I wanted so badly to be in Vermont. I still can't hear that song without pain. I began to hope that my dad would come in a helicopter and rescue us. I was like someone in a Pacific island cargo cult, wherein people believed that somehow a plane would appear, loaded with things they desperately needed. They would clear a landing place and wait beside it for the help that never came. Interestingly, as I learned later, my dad at home also thought of rescuing us with a helicopter, but such an effort would not have been possible—an approaching helicopter would have been shot out of the sky.

 

Steve didn't want to go home, but I did, and when at last the borders opened, I got on a homebound plane with the children and the dogs but without enough material for a book. A series of scares was not what
The New Yorker
had sent me to write about, nor did I have any intention of trying. I just wanted to erase the whole thing from my mind.

But I did go home with three perfect memories. The first came about because I loved highlife music, and also learned to dance the highlife, which I'd do when we went to a nightclub. Steve didn't like to dance, but his Nigerian friends did, so they would dance with me. One night my dancing partner told me I was the best expatriate dancer in Ibadan. Wow! The Nigerian women were much better, of course, but it was nevertheless good to hear.

The second perfect memory came from before the rigged election, while the country was still relatively stable, and concerned a performance of
Danda
, a stage production based on a recently published novel by Nkem Nwankwo. The production was mobile and took place outdoors at night when a large truck arrived and people began to unfold things from it—the stage, a ramp, powerful lights, the scenery, and a strong metal barricade to surround the area so that people who hadn't paid for tickets couldn't get near enough to see the play. The production had little to do with the novel, as far as I could tell, but the audience loved it. What I liked best about the evening, though, was that some people saw it for free.

 

A swarm of twenty or thirty tiny children gathered outside the barricade. One or two might have been as old as six and a few were just two or three, but most were four or five. The stage managers kept chasing them away, and they'd all run off together, but soon enough they'd be back. When the lights went down and the play was about to start, they crept between the bars of the barricade, and by the time the lights went up again, the play was in progress so nobody was available to chase them. They stood near the stage and watched the play, enraptured—all but some of the very tiny ones who by then had fallen asleep in the arms of the slightly older children who carried them.

When Danda's baby, a life-sized doll, was carried offstage, the children crept around behind the stage in hopes of seeing it. They came back looking a bit disappointed. When the play was over and the whole cast, singing and dancing, piled down the ramp in the grand finale, the tiny children, very subdued but wide-eyed and excited, clung to the sides of the ramp. Some of them danced. One tiny girl in a ragged dress lifted both arms and waved at the performers.

The grown-up audience went home, the stage was folded up, the ramp was folded up, the wings of the stage were folded up, the lights were packed in boxes, then all was put on the truck and the sides of the truck were folded up. The little children watched all this with wonder. Then someone in authority got out of the truck to chase them and they ran off into the night.

 

The third perfect memory arose from the trip that Steve and I and our children took to the Northern Region—the time we were nearly stopped by the bandit and his roadblock. We had gone to the Northern Region to meet the emir of one of the smaller tribal areas, an extremely nice man who gave us three dozen eggs as a gift and asked us about a “tail-star” he had been watching. It appeared suddenly, he told us, and he wondered if we knew about it.

We knew nothing about it. We didn't even know what a “tail-star” was. But we were sorry to have no information because the emir had been awed by it. We talked for a while about the stars and the mysteries of nature, and when we parted he told us to look at the eastern sky a little after midnight.

By midnight we were in a motel and Steve was asleep, not particularly interested in the tail-star, but the children and I went to a nearby hill. Stars, in my experience, were tiny, and I wondered if we could see the star without binoculars.

Binoculars? On the far side of the hill was a blinding pillar of light that took up a quarter of the sky and reached from the zenith to the horizon. It was a monstrous comet, the brightest ever seen for a thousand years. It came to be known as the Great Comet of 1965, which is an understatement, and it was worth the whole trip to Nigeria.

 

After I went home with the children and dogs, Steve went to Enugu, capital of what had been Nigeria's Eastern Region. The massacre of Ibo people, by then called “the Jews of Nigeria,” had been so intense that the Eastern Region seceded, to become Biafra and declare its independence from the rest of Nigeria. While Steve was there, the Nigerian army massed at the border to invade. I was at home by then, and learned from a newscast that the Biafran government had declared that all non-Biafrans found in Biafra would be shot. Steve later told me that this wasn't true, as reporters from England were there and not in any more danger than other people, but the border was closed, so he couldn't go back to Ibadan.

However, he was offered transportation in a government vehicle which would take several important Biafrans to Cameroon, from which they would go on various missions for their country. Steve couldn't take his car with him, so he gave it to the Biafran cause and left it at the barracks. He then got in the government vehicle with the others, among whom was the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. Steve was a huge fan, so he and Achebe went to Cameroon talking about
Things Fall Apart
, Achebe's famous novel.

Because of road conditions, the government vehicle could go no farther than central Cameroon, so everyone got out and waited until a plane could come for them. Central Cameroon gets 140 inches of rain a year, also plenty of fog, so the plane took a while to get there. But come it did, and they all got in. It was raining hard, and the windshield wipers didn't work so the pilot had to work them manually. The plane took off and flew for several hours through high mountains buried in clouds. Every so often the passengers would get a glimpse of a rock cliff just beyond the plane's wing. But then the clouds parted, the plane flew into beautiful, bright sunlight, the shining ocean appeared before them, and they landed in Port Douala. Steve came home from there.

10

A
S THE FIRST WORLD WAR
was to my father, as Vietnam was to my daughter's husband, so was the Nigerian experience to me, in that I didn't talk about it. Needless to say, I couldn't write the book that
The New Yorker
had sent me to write. Nor did I want to. Nor did I want to write about anything.