Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction (11 page)

In December, dust drowns the city. But one Friday morning in the third week of the month, it rains heavily for only the second time in the dry season. It is a relief. It makes the roads torturous. Where there were shallow depressions, lakes suddenly appear. Rivulets rage along the roads. The rain falls for an intense half hour just after I head out. On Allen Avenue, through the gray scrim of the rolled-up windows, I see a swarm of lime-green shirts and yellow trousers, lime-green blouses and yellow skirts: students caught in the rain, racing for shelter. These teenagers, thrilled by the weather and by the excitement of running together, are laughing, but are inaudible through the heavy rain drumming on the car roof. I drive slowly through this dream of hurrying bodies.

The rain stops as suddenly as it started. The city is becalmed and devastated as it always is after a downpour. The
streets are clear, the air renewed, and I only have to avoid some puddles as I turn off Ikorodu Road. I’m on my way to visit an old friend. I’ll call her Amina. She’s a woman now, the same age as I am, but when I last saw her, she was a girl and I was a boy, and we’d just come past the moment of first love. Our love, a matter of months, has remained with me all these years as one of my few sweet memories of the city. Recently, through email, we found each other again. We didn’t talk about the past, but now I am on my way to visit her.

Near Akoka, on a road I know well, a police officer flags me down. Lean, in a black uniform, with a hungry look, he walks toward the car. His gait is that of a much larger man, a capacious and considered saunter. His colleague, equally lean, doesn’t get up from their makeshift shelter, which is set back from the road: a bench, four wooden poles, a tin roof. It’s a sniper’s hideout.

—Good afternoon, Officer.

—You know why I stopped you?

His certainty alarms me. No, I say evenly, I don’t know.

—What does that sign say?

He points to a sign behind us. Its upright element is bent, and the sign itself is partially obscured by a tree.

—Oh God. I didn’t see it. This road never used to be a one-way. It must be a new sign.

It’s a scam, of course. The sign has been deliberately concealed.

—It’s one way from here to the end, until the entrance to the university.

—I didn’t know. Sorry. I didn’t know.

He chuckles. The moment has been well rehearsed.

—This is not a matter of sorry.

—I didn’t see the sign. I didn’t know.

—The sign is not for those who know,
oga
. The sign is for those who don’t know. Your situation is unfortunate. But the reason the sign is there is for you. You have to come to the station with us.

Minutes are wasted. I don’t want to let go of my entire afternoon only to later pay a “fine” that will end up in someone’s pocket. Finally, he comes around to his demand, or rather, he compels me to make it explicit.

—So, what are we to do now, Officer? Maybe one thousand five hundred, so you can get yourself something to eat?

His opening bid is five thousand naira. I manage to hide my disgust, and bargain him down to two thousand five. I hand the money over, start the car. You people should know the law, he says. It doesn’t matter who you are, the law is not a respecter of persons.

I keep my eyes on the road. My face floods with fury.

A
mina has come out onto the street to meet me. She looks like herself: girlish still, slender, with chubby cheeks. She wears her hair in an afro usually, but today she’s plaited it simply. I catch sight of her wounded hand (a kitchen accident), which she makes no effort to conceal. Three fingers, two stumps. I back into the driveway of the two-story duplex. It’s a middle-class home, a ground-floor apartment of,
I guess, two or three bedrooms, with exterior paint that has gone gray in parts. Air conditioners protrude from several windows and, from somewhere, comes the hum of a generator or two. In the doorway is a man whom I suppose is her husband. He carries a sleeping toddler.

—My husband, Henry. My daughter, Rekia. Please come in, come in.

We are playing grown-ups.

A
mina’s living room has solid red floor-to-ceiling drapes and a hushed air. She looks less girlish now. The interior has brought a seriousness to her mood and her body. I notice the bags under her eyes, little dots of heat rash on her cheeks, and the nubs where her right middle and ring finger used to be. Daylight shoots through in a white column where the drapes fail to meet in the middle. Conversation is polite. Henry is a kind, narrow-shouldered man with the beginnings of a paunch. The flat-screen TV, which is on but muted, is playing a Nollywood drama.

He is a banker; he has Friday mornings off. Amina recently left banking and is looking for the next thing. She says she enjoys the opportunity to be with her daughter, but there’s something dutiful in the answer. I ask them about their commutes to work, and about whether they plan to have more children. They don’t ask me much about myself. They do ask if I’d like lunch, and I say no. She has, I presume, told him about me: the first heart she broke (or perhaps it was the other way around). It would be different if I
was alone here with her, without the stranger who knows nothing of our conversations, our letters (belabored cursive on perfumed paper; where are they all now?), our long-ago truancy, our first frightened moments in bed, the shame and delight after. And then doing it again and again, any opportunity we had, swept up in a hunger like none since.

The pauses last too long. The tension is that of a waiting room, and I wonder why I have come, why I have chosen, yet again, to recover the impossible. I tell them about my encounter with the policeman, careful not to sound too angry about it.

—You see what we have to face in this country? she says, laughing. But you paid too much. One thousand naira would have done it.

I listen closely to her laughter. I can’t quite reconcile it with what I remember. I can’t tell if it has darkened or if it is some other difference. Is there some trace in her every reaction of that day her hand was caught in the food processor? There had been a power surge, a mutual friend had told me. Something had slipped, somehow, or she had reached into the machine. The blades had whirred, and she’d lost a lot of blood.

I’m distracted by this thought when Henry asks me something.

—Sorry?

—I said, Did you think you could move back here?

—Oh, who knows? The money would have to be right.
Things would have to fall into place. It’s easier for bankers than for doctors. We have good banks and bad hospitals.

Another pause. Traffic outside. Generators. There are many lives and many years, and relatively few moments when those individual histories touch each other with real recognition.

At no time is Amina awkward in handling objects. It is she who gives me the glass of water, in the clawlike grip of her right hand. When she writes (but this I know only from hearsay) she writes with her left. She had to learn again, with a hand different from the one that used to write to me. On the television, the camera zooms in on a man with wide eyes, then cuts away and zooms in on another man, with whom he’s locked in staring combat. The little girl finally wakes up. Hello, Rekia, I say. She shies away.

Amina says:

—So moving back has crossed your mind?

—It has crossed my mind.

This is the answer I have heard others give. It will be many weeks before it rains again. When I leave their house, I wipe water from the side-view mirror to get a better glimpse of the three of them waving me bye. They are close together and small, as in a medallion of the Holy Family.

TWENTY-ONE

I
escape family and go out into the city on my own to observe its many moods: the lethargy of the early mornings, the raucous early evenings, the silent, lightless nights cut through with the sounds of generators. It is in this aimless wandering that I find myself truly in the city. The days go by. I do not delve, as I had thought I would, into my childhood, do not visit my former schools or look up other old friends.

One afternoon, a few days before Christmas Day, as I walk on Allen Avenue with no particular destination in mind, I happen on a sign for a jazz shop. I follow the arrows and enter a small room at the back of a building. Here at last is something that caters to the tastes of the minority. All
that is available at the many street-side record shacks is Nigerian music and records by popular black American and Caribbean artists: hip-hop, dancehall, reggaeton. The interior, covered in glass cases and mirrors, is like a miniature version of the set for the final fight scene in Bruce Lee’s
Enter the Dragon
. The glass cases have a decent selection of music. There are the “smooth jazz” artists with their cloying offerings, but there are also many discs by the giants: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, and many others. The modern jazz adventurers such as Vijay Iyer and Brad Mehldau are also well represented. The ceiling of the shop is, like all the walls, a mirror. The reflective surfaces, in combination with the bright fluorescent lighting, have the peculiar effect of making the room feel not bigger but, rather, smaller and weirder, as if one were stuffed into one of those camera obscura boxes so favored by the early Dutch lens grinders.

A woman and a man are talking at the cashier’s table when I come in. The woman is also working on an accounts book. I look around the shop, and when I have taken note of what is available, I ask about prices.

—Oh, sorry, none of it is for sale.

—Excuse me?

—The compact discs are not for sale. Unless you want to pay three thousand five for each one.

I am confused. A jazz shop, but the discs are not for sale. Unless I pay twenty-five dollars for each, an absurd figure. Most of these discs wouldn’t cost me any more than fifteen
dollars in the States, and some of the reissues would be considerably less. What could be her meaning?

—But, sir, if you see something that you like, what we can do is make a copy for you. That applies to any disc in the shop. And that costs one thousand naira. But the originals are not for sale.

A legitimate business, with a public sign, on one of the busier commercial streets in town, catering to a sophisticated clientele, and all the while living on piracy. Do they have any idea that this is a problem? Or is it enough to settle for sophistication without troubling oneself about the laws that defend creativity? The following week, I visit a shop called Jazzhole on Awolowo Road in Ikoyi. And there I finally find myself in an inspired and congenial setting. The place is a combination music and book shop. The owner is one of a small but tenacious breed of Nigerian cultural innovators. The presentation is outstanding, as well done as many a Western bookshop: there is a broad selection of jazz, Pan-African, and other international music near the capacious entrance, and rows and rows of books for the general reader toward the back. The shop has a cool and quiet interior. Here, I think to myself, is finally that moving spot of sun I have sought.

I see music by Ali Farka Touré, by Salif Keïta. There are books by Philip Roth, Penelope Fitzgerald, and, as I had hoped, Michael Ondaatje. The prices are high; not higher than they would be in an American or British shop, but certainly beyond the reach of most Nigerians. And yet, knowing
that there is such a place, in the absence of good libraries or other vendors, makes all the difference to those who must have such sustenance. And better at these high prices than not at all. But the illegitimate business model of the other jazz shop is a threat to this essential work. The people behind the bookshop have also created a record label—they have released three albums by the wonderfully named highlife artist Fatai Rolling Dollar—as well as a publishing house. One of their newest projects, the book
Lagos: A City at Work
, is a huge textual and photographic compendium of the life of labor here. It features the work of Nigerian thinkers, writers, and photographers, all grappling with the “nonlinear nature” of the city. It is a brilliant confrontation with our great behemoth of a settlement. And there is really only one word for what I feel about these new contributions to the Lagosian scene: gratitude. They are emerging, these creatives, in spite of everything; and they are essential because they are the signs of hope in a place that, like all other places on the limited earth, needs hope.