Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction (14 page)

—I understand that. I hear what you’re saying.

—Oh, sir, I am so glad you understand, actually. As I said, I am happy to know you. If we could exchange telephone numbers, you know, just to stay in touch. Or your email contact. If you are okay with that.

—Yes, I’m all right. The thing is, Chinedu, I still have to come to Mrs. Aboaba’s office before I leave Nigeria. So no rush. I’ll see you then, you know, we can exchange information then. Because this phone in my hand now belongs to my aunt. So later will be better.

—Okay, okay. Actually that’s good. I hope to see you there. I’m there every day.

—And don’t worry. I won’t tell your boss. Thanks again for coming to pick up these books. See you soon?

—Yes, oh yes. Thank you.

I shake his hand, knowing full well I will never see him again. He is still grinning, the pearly rows interrupted by that single derelict incisor. He makes as if to say something else, but he changes his mind. Nodding, smiling, without further words, we wave each other goodbye. He begins to walk down the long, quiet stretch of unpaved road that leads to the gate of the estate. In a few minutes he will be at the bus terminal and once again join that great mass of the deserving, those countless others awaiting miracles. He keeps to the center of the road, walking at an even clip. I watch him for a long time, and his figure gradually becomes insubstantial as the little clouds of dust take over. After a while, there is only the road.

TWENTY-SIX

I
spend three days in a feverish haze, and by the time the twenty-seventh of December arrives, a Tuesday, the date printed on my return ticket, I am in bed in agony. I am hot, cold, hot, huddling in near nakedness under a heavy swathe of blankets, sweating and shivering, my joints hurting. The large dose of Coartem I take seems to temper these symptoms, but it has terrible side effects. I vomit a great volume of liquids, mostly the oatmeal I had for breakfast. And I have to run repeatedly to the toilet to void liquid shit, the body frantic in its attempt to clear itself of the pathogen. I take thalazole to control the stools, mefloquine for the malaria. I hear footsteps, heavy breathing, the sound of a blade edge being worked on stone, the dull flapping of a great-coat.
At the most delirious moment, I think: He’s come for me. But the thought flits past, and so do the hallucinations.

A guest comes to the bedroom in the late morning. Oluwafemi is a friend from my days in Zaria. He was a junior student to me. Like almost all the other young people I haven’t seen in well over a decade, he has grown to imposing size. He is a lawyer in training and is ambitious to someday open a corporate law firm in Lagos.

—I have malaria.

—Oh, I don’t say that.

I am puzzled.

—But what do you mean? I have malaria.

—I mean I don’t say things like “I have malaria.” The tongue is very powerful, you know.

—Oh. Well, that’s fine and dandy. But the thing, old man, is that I actually do have malaria. So I do say that. I’ve been sick as a dog for the past twenty-four hours.

—It’s saying it that makes it so. You’re not sick.

I don’t really want to argue with him. At that point, I hurry to the water closet to relieve a sudden urge. When I come back, crawling back into bed, I say:

—The female
Anopheles
mosquito has caught up with me. That’s the reality. It’s the plasmodium parasite denaturing my red blood cells that makes it so, and the sooner I admit that to myself, the sooner I can start treating the disease, Oluwafemi. There’s no point in being counterfactual.

I search his face, in vain, for signs of comprehension. He only shakes his head, as if he feels sorry for me, stuck as I am
in a scientific view of the world. “Relax! God is in control.” And in his attitude, I find a key to much of what I have observed in the preceding weeks. The idea that saying makes it so, that the laws of the imagination matter more than all others. But of course, Oluwafemi is vindicated: he is in the pink of health, and it is I, careless of tongue and lacking in faith, who lie under the clammy sheets.

The illness is still in my body when I arrive at the airport for departure. I am feverish, not at all eager to travel. I consider canceling my flight. The officer checking me in asks, rather morosely, if I have anything for him. Dollars perhaps, or naira. No, I say, showing him my palms, I am empty. My bags are searched and, found free of contraband, tagged. They are picked up by a cheerful baggage handler. Anything for him, he wants to know, anything at all? No—nothing tonight, nothing. I go through security and head to the gate. From the plate glass of the terminal, a line of great phosphorescent lamps shines through the dusk, all along the wider tunnel in the main building, until we come to the gate and enter the narrower, enclosed tunnel, and board the aircraft. I buckle myself into the seat. Droplets rapidly form and evaporate on my forehead. All around me, the bustle of departure, people with too much carry-on luggage, disputations over seating assignments. Jets of dry air hiss out of the overhead nozzles and there is a feeling of compression in the cabin. The word “home” sits in my mouth like foreign food. So simple a word, and so hard to pin to its meaning. We have not left yet, and already there is something drawing
me back to this city, this country. After the plane is filled, and everyone is sitting and buckled in, and all the overhead compartments are closed, we are stalled on the tarmac for half an hour. And then, at last, and with no explanation from the flight staff, we begin to move. I place my head against the small window.

The plane sheds ballast and rises above the city, rises above the countless small dots of light that are scattered like stars across the landscape, rises slowly into the cloudless harmattan night, easing the compression, rises deep into the ether, until there is nothing visible in the darkness below except for the earth’s dark curve.

TWENTY-SEVEN

S
now is total. It robs the street of details and muffles the goings-on outside the window. In the warm interior of the apartment, my body is still responding to the difference in time zone. It is five in the morning. I have insomnia. I hold a cup of tea in my hands. And, as I sit there, a memory of Lagos returns to me, a moment in my brief journey that stands out of time.

I am there again, in the area around St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Iganmu, where colonial-style buildings crumble next to makeshift roadside shacks, and the unkempt façade of the Government Press building faces the shiny glass doors of a Mr. Bigg’s. Here, the city becomes as trackless as a desert. It is a hot Thursday afternoon. People are hard at
their work, and I alone wander with no particular aim. On house after house is painted the straightforward but nonetheless intriguing directive: “This house is not for sale.” Little streets wind in upon each other like a basketful of eels; no two run parallel. Losing my geographical bearings in this way always brings ambiguous emotions. Not knowing where I am exposes me to various dangers, and there is always a possibility that I will be accosted by a hostile party. On the other hand, letting go of my moorings makes me connect to the city as pure place, through which I move without prejudging what I will see when I come around a corner.

I am in a labyrinth. A labyrinth, not a maze: I hadn’t really thought about the difference before, but it has become clear. A labyrinth’s winding paths lead, finally, to the meaningful center. A maze, in contrast, is full of cul-de-sacs, dead ends, false signals; a maze is the trickster god’s domain. When I enter a little sun-suffused street in the heart of the district, I sense an intentionality to my being there. It feels like a return, like a center, though it is not a place I have ever been before. It is an alley, and it is full of boats. The boats are in storage. Their prows jut out from the bottom floor of each of the buildings on one side of the street. The buildings are mostly two or three stories high, and the alley itself is no longer than 150 yards. Because the sun is high and I am disoriented, I cannot really tell if this is the street’s south side or its north. Across from the buildings, there is a concrete wall behind a stand of three large
trees. The wall runs the length of the alley and, underneath the trees, there are young children playing. A woman cooks beans in a large basin. This side of the street is dappled. As I move, or rather as I am pulled, into the little street, as one might be pulled by the broad strength of a receding tide, I see that the jutting shapes are not boats at all. They are coffins, dozens of them, in different sizes and various states of completion, presented in sober and matter-of-fact array.

There are no cars parked on the narrow street, just one or two motorbikes. But there is a lot of activity. Men, bare-chested or in white singlets, work wood with saws, planes, and other carpentry tools. Their bodies glisten in the half shadows of the shops. There are so many of them, it must be a kind of carpentry consortium: this is evidently where they do all their work and live with their families. But their only product, as far as I can see, is coffins. No chairs, tables, wardrobes, or anything else. Only coffins, some painted white, some stained to a lustrous finish, many others pale and as yet unstained. A few wide planks rest on the wall across the street. A darkly polished casket lies on a trestle. It is grand, with brass handles, and looks as out-of-place and unsurprising as a Rolls-Royce parked in a ghetto. It is half-open, revealing a tufted interior encased in plush white satin: an invitation to sleep.

I want to take the little camera out of my pocket and capture the scene. But I am afraid. Afraid that the carpenters, rapt in their meditative task, will look up at me; afraid that I will bind to film what is intended only for the memory,
what is meant only for a sidelong glance followed by forgetting. A tall man in a sky-blue cap rhythmically moves his arms back and forth over a butter-colored plank. His arms are lean and black, and he has one eye closed as he works. The shavings fall in a nest about his feet. He is ankle-deep in that soft wood-stuff which, I suddenly remember, was so fascinating to me when I was a child of seven or eight. I remember the carpenter who made our furniture, the pile of shavings in his shop, and the sweet, oily fragrance they emanated, an aroma that fit the playful nature of the material, those buoyant curls of gold that seemed to transcend the timber that originated them.

There is a dignity about this little street, with its open sewers and rusted roofs. Nothing is preached here. Its inhabitants simply serve life by securing good passage for the dead, their intricate work seen for a moment and then hidden for all time. It is an uncanny place, this dockyard of Charon’s, but it also has an enlivening purity. Enlivening, but not joyful exactly. A wholeness, rather, a comforting sense that there is an order to things, a solid assurance of deep-structured order, so strongly felt that when I come to the end of the street and see, off to my right, the path out of the labyrinth and into the city’s normal bustle, I do not really want to move on. But I know, at the same time, that it is not possible for me to stay.

The children cry out from the shadowed side of the street as they play with an old bicycle wheel. One toddler, left out of the fun, begins weeping, until a sibling sweeps
him up and tickles him and he gurgles with delight. The woman keeps stirring her beans, putting a finger in to taste them. This is the street to which the people of old Lagos, right across the social classes, come when someone dies. They come with great fanfare if it is an old person, order the most expensive casket in celebration of a life, hire out the football field of a secondary school, throw a large party with canopies and live music and colorful outfits. But if the deceased is a youth, fallen before the full fruition of life, the rites are performed under grief’s discreet shadow, a simple box, no frills, a small afternoon burial on a weekday, marked by bitter and unshowy tears, and attended by neither the parents nor by the parents’ friends, for the old should not see the young buried. The carpenters, I am sure, have borne witness to all this. And there are, perhaps, women in the back rooms of their humble houses who help prepare the bodies for their last journey, washing down what remains of a father or mother or child, fitting the heavy limbs into new clothes, putting talcum powder on the face, working coconut oil into the hair and scalp.