Season of Crimson Blossoms (15 page)

‘Yes, yes, it is. Imagine what the world would be like without love. It would be terrible, you know. Terrible! People hating people, people killing people. Total chaos, I tell you,
wallahi
.'

‘Isn't that what's happening now?' There was a sonority in her voice that came from not wanting to use it, a reluctance to speak.

‘What!' Again, it didn't sound like a question. But Binta was, by now, used to his way of speaking.

‘Are people not killing people now? These people riding bikes and shooting people, what else are they doing?'

‘Oh, but you know, that is a bit different. See me and you now. Is it not because of love that we are sitting, here! Love, I tell you,
wallahi kuwa
.'

She looked at him, saw the stubble and the shadows the dim light cast on his face. She wondered what she was doing sitting in the night beside an old man who already had two wives and a radio. ‘You are too old to be talking about love.'

‘Me! Old! By Allah, wait until our wedding night, then you will see how virile I am.' He winked at her and guffawed.

‘What the hell do you take me for?'

‘Hmmm!'

‘What kind of woman do you think I am that you will come here talking to me like that!'

‘Ah ah, Binta, I only—'

‘
Iskanci kawai
!' She let out a long drawn out hiss that startled the cat on the fence. When she rose, she shook her hijab and gathered it about her as she headed into the house, leaving him alone with the alarmed animal, scratching at his grey stubble.

In the silence of morning, Hureira slunk to the kitchen and made coffee and tea. She didn't disturb the morning by making omelettes or potato chips. She arranged the cups and slices of bread on a tray and carried it quietly back to the room. She sat down with Fa'iza and Ummi, their legs crossed in front of them, and they ate in silence, their cups barely clinking on the saucers.

‘Mommy, can I—' Ummi started saying but Hureira shushed her. The girl tried again but Hureira's sharp look silenced her. Ummi looked from her mother to Fa'iza and couldn't understand. Hureira gestured with her hands. Ummi pointed at the jar of sugar. Hureira frowned and shook her head.

They heard Binta stomping out of her room. They froze – Fa'iza with her cup halfway to her mouth and Hureira with eyes wandering wildly. Ummi sat looking from her mother to Fa'iza. They heard Binta barge into the kitchen; they heard her banging utensils and hissing. They heard her come out. They held their breath and imagined her standing by the door, contemplating whether to intrude on their silent breakfast. Finally, they heard her footfall slapping the tiles as she walked back to her room.

The girls crept about preparing for school. When they were done, on their way out, they saw Binta sitting on the couch in the living room and froze. She looked at them and turned away.

‘
Ina kwana
, Hajiya?' Fa'iza greeted.

‘Hajiya, good morning.' Ummi curtseyed.

Binta grunted.

Fa'iza held Ummi's hand and together they crept out of the room, gently closing the door behind them. It was Hureira who
had to remain imprisoned in the bedroom, away from Binta's strop. Until the phone call came in the early afternoon.

Binta showered, dabbed her face with powder and applied a dash of lipstick. She put on her fitted blouse and stood before the mirror, shored up her breasts and adjusted her bra. She put her purse and a make-up kit in her handbag and threw a hijab over her head. But heading out, she caught her reflection in the mirror and paused. She looked again.

She removed the hijab and pulled a jilbab from the wardrobe and put it on over her blouse. She took a
gyale
and wound it around her head and torso. Then she picked her bag and locked the bedroom door.

Outside, she walked as far away as she could from the house and hailed a motorcycle taxi. The okada man pulled up, revving his engine.

‘Do you know Shagali Hotel?'

When he nodded, she climbed on the pillion with as much grace as her wrapper would allow and the okada man zoomed off.

Holding the sheet about her chest, she looked around the tiny hotel room, at the ornate shell-shaped lampshades, at the ceiling fan that whirred indolently as if burdened by the weight of witnessed improprieties, at the little TV where a D'Banj music video was playing. She watched the sultry women dancing on the screen and marvelled at the audacity of their shamelessness.

When Reza emerged from the bathroom, she looked at the scars on his torso before turning her face away. He seemed leaner and there were shadows on his face, in his eyes.

He smiled at her. ‘You want to shower?'

She looked in the direction of the bathroom and then back at him. ‘So, how many times have you done this? Bringing women to a hotel room, I mean?'

He shrugged. When he said never, she knew he had just told her his first lie.

She felt a little whirl deep down in her heart and she knew if she could have seen the wind that stirred, it would have been yellow. She was too old to rage over another woman. After all, she did not want to think of herself as one of his girlfriends. She shouldn't. She shook her head. ‘This is my first time in a hotel room.'

His smile was small but almost empathic. ‘It's very private
here. Everybody minds his business, you understand.' He came and sat next to her. ‘Are you not hungry?'

She reached out for the wrap of suya he had bought. He had arrived at the hotel ahead of her and booked the room. But when she came, her hunger – their hunger – had been of a different sort. She had barely waited for him to close the door when she covered his lips with hers, pushing him against the panel.

Overcoming his initial surprise, he had responded with fervour, his hands reaching down to lift her dress over her head. Their tongues intertwined, their bodies entangled, their hands feeling each other's bodies – as if to be sure that in the period of their forced abstinence they hadn't changed. They moved to the bed and, because she wanted to, fought for it even, he let her sit astride him and ride him, her moans reaching up to the ceiling.

She put a piece of spiced meat in her mouth so she would not blurt out how she had never wanted any man so badly. She savoured the meat; a bit hard, but tasty. ‘How is your father?'

Reza nodded, suddenly sombre. ‘They think it's his kidney. They have to do some tests.'

‘I'm sorry to hear that. Is he very old?'

Reza looked up at the ceiling. ‘Seventy-two, seventy-five. I'm not sure.'

‘You care for him, don't you?'

It wasn't a question anyone had ever asked him. He considered it for a while. ‘My father, he used to travel to Potiskum, sometimes even to Sokoto to buy cattle and then travel to the east to sell them to the Igbos. He was the only one who ever cared about me, you understand.'

He was almost choking now so she put her arms around him and held him to her, whispering into his ear that his father would be all right.

They lay down again on the bed, listening to each other's breathing. When next she opened her eyes, it was almost four in the afternoon. She nudged Reza and he woke up, wiping his eyes.

She sat up on the bed. ‘I've got to go now. It's late.'

‘Must you?'

‘Of course, don't be silly.'

She reached for her bag, fished in it, brought out a receipt and handed it to him. With her hands on her lap, she watched his face.

‘WAEC registration? For me?'

She nodded and smiled.

‘
Kutuma
!' He frowned at the paper, his expression transforming from amazement to delight, and then to one of profound thought.

‘I think it's important you go back to school, Hassan.'

His head was still bent at the receipt. ‘Wow! And you paid for me?'

‘I know if I asked you to pay you would dally, so I took the liberty.' She reached again into her bag and fetched a brown envelope. ‘Now all you need to do is fill the forms, attend some classes and write the exams.' She extended the envelope to him.

‘Yes, yes.' He folded the receipt neatly and put it in his jeans pocket. He covered his face with his hand and sighed.

‘You are not happy about this, are you?'

‘No, no. I am, I am. It's just that, you understand, I just have to think about this.'

She nodded. ‘I know. Think about it.'

They were silent for a while.

She wanted to say something to thaw the awkwardness. ‘The fence has barbed wire now.' And she told him how Munkaila had brought the workmen to install the wire after the generator theft.

‘So, I will have to find another way in next time,' he laughed.

Binta, too, laughed. Then she got out of the bed. ‘I hope they have hot water here, I need to shower now.'

Jos: August, 1995

She first heard rumours that Yaro was hanging out with the boys at the junction; the boys who ran the black market selling petrol to motorists by the roadside. She heard that they were making good money because there was a shortage of petrol at the filling stations.

She raised the issue with Zubairu several times but he had only grunted. He was preoccupied with the new suya spot he was
struggling to keep afloat. The first, which he had started back in '82, was destroyed in '85 by the government task force that seemed determined to demolish anything it did not like the sight of. For years he went to the
majalisa,
where jobless men sat and argued all day, drank fura da nono in the afternoon and returned home at night with dark faces and limp pockets.

It was Binta's paltry salary as a schoolteacher that kept them afloat in those days until Zubairu started another suya spot. It prospered for several years until he got into a fight with a police sergeant. The officer wanted Zubairu to buy a ‘licence to operate' from him, except there was no receipt for the transaction, and the fees were renewable each time the officer got broke. The negotiations ended in a fist fight, with Zubairu knocking out two of the sergeant's teeth.

The police confiscated his goods and locked him up. It took a week and some significant payments to get Zubairu released. He then tried his hand at several trades: selling used clothes; running a motorcycle taxi (that ended when he crashed the bike and was left with a limp for months) and a failed trade in onions procured from farmers in the villages. In the end, he went back to his suya business and had just got another spot up and running at Angwan Rukuba Junction. He was struggling and Binta's salary had not been paid in eight months. Teachers had been on strike the last six.

Finally, she decided to do it, to have this talk with the son she had been brought up not to acknowledge. She had meant to talk to Yaro that day because she had heard the rumours of the rolls of ganja under the black marketeers' tables, she had heard how they leered at and harassed passing girls.

But it was Munkaila who came at dinner time, smiling broadly, a bulging plastic bag dangling from his hand.

Binta looked up from the lesson notes she had been updating for whenever schools resumed. There were talks going on between union leaders and the government. But there had been talks before. Binta was not certain that this round of talks would be any different from the previous ones.

‘Where is that coming from?'

Munkaila's smile broadened as he reached into his pocket,
pulled out a wad of notes and held them before her eyes. ‘My GCE registration fees.' He beamed.

‘What! Registration fees! Your father must have come into some money.' She raised her hands heavenwards with a smile in her eyes.

‘Not Father. Yaro.'

Her hands dropped. ‘What do you mean Yaro?'

‘He gave me the money and the things in the bag. And he gave me this for you.' He pulled out a smaller wad from his other pocket.

She looked at the money and thought of Hadiza's worn shoes and Hureira's aching tooth. ‘Put it on the table.' She knew that she would hate herself for saying that.

She started to perceive the smell of ganja lingering about Yaro each time he returned. He came back very late and left early, after he had come to say good morning to her, always squatting down, supporting himself with his fingers on the floor. Each time she would grunt and look the other way. Sometimes he lingered, as if waiting for her to say something or wanting to tell her something. Because she never looked in his eyes, she would never know. And each time he rose and left, she would feel her heart clench three times – always three times.

But the money kept coming, and the shopping bags too. And Zubairu's shame no longer loomed as large because this time, it wasn't from his wife's purse they fed. It was from his son's, his
first
son.

But one dawn in December when the harmattan rattled the windowpanes, Binta had come out to perform her ablutions for Subhi prayers when she noticed the smell. For some time she stood still, her nostrils filtering the cold air. She allowed her nose to lead her towards Yaro's door. She stood, her heart racing. What she had always feared was true. The smell of ganja slipped out from the chinks of
his
door. She rapped on the door and felt the panel rattle under her fist. She pounded until he opened.

The men, their co-tenants, had already left for the mosque so only the women in the compound were left to peek through their curtains. She slapped him and he bowed his head.

‘Under my roof, Yaro? Is this what you want to teach your brother, you useless boy? Men are at the mosque praying while you are here smoking your useless life away, under
my
roof!'

He looked her in the eye, briefly. She slapped him again. And then rage gave her hands a life of their own. They moved frenziedly, left and right. Left and right. He retreated from her into the narrow room, until he tripped and fell backwards onto the mattress. She stopped, looking down at him. He was panting, as she was, his eyes were angry, and hurt. When he looked away, it was the hurt that she remembered more, it was the hurt that endured in her mind.

That was the last night Yaro spent under her roof. It was also the last time she saw him alive. He packed his things in a small bag and left. Munkaila reported that he had moved in with one of his friends from the junction.

That was where the police found him. They had been looking for Yaro's host on suspicion of robbery. They broke down the door and opened fire.

When his friends brought home his bloodied corpse, Binta held him in her arms and called him by his given name. Her wailing voice dazed the soaring birds and pierced the underbelly of the heavens.