The Eyes of Lira Kazan

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eva Joly is a Norwegian-born French magistrate and politician. She became famous as an anti-corruption prosecuting judge taking on, among others, former minister Bernard Tapie and the bank Crédit Lyonnais. Her most famous case was that of France's leading oil company – Elf Aquitaine. In the face of death threats, she carried on the case to uncover several cases of fraud. She was chosen by the Green Party to be their candidate in the 2012 French presidential elections. This is her first novel.

 

Judith Perrignon is a former journalist of the newspaper
Liberation
, a prize-winning essayist and the author of a number of historical and other literary works, including
La nuit du Fouquet's
, co-authored by Ariane Chemin. This is her second novel after the much-lauded
Les Chagrins
, also published this year.

 

“Did they say what time?” his wife asked.

Nwankwo didn't answer. He carried on reading, his daughter on his knee, the book in his hands.

 

 

“Did they say what time?”

“No, the message was to be ready to leave before dawn. That's all. The sun will be up in two hours, they'll be here soon.”

“Go on, Daddy!”

 

 

“There's a car coming.”

“Stay away from the window, madam,” one of the bodyguards said.

“I'm still in my own house!”

“Do what they say Ezima,” Nwankwo said wearily.

“They're slowing down… How can you just sit there reading stories to your daughter at a time like this?”

“Go and wake the other children. Baïna, don't move. We're leaving. I'll go and see what's happening.”

 

Nwankwo got up, unfolding his large frame, and made a sign to the bodyguard: everything must happen calmly. Any more tension would make the whole operation even more difficult than it already was. His wife was nervous, and the children were afraid.

The car had stopped in front of the house, its lights switched off. Nobody got out. The two other bodyguards standing on the porch had their hands in their jackets, ready to draw. The first one went over to the car and tapped at the window. The driver lowered it and mumbled: “
Egbe bere, ugo bere
.” That was the password, an old proverb from childhood days. Nwankwo had often used it: “Let the falcon perch, let the eagle perch.” The second guard could alert the family: the evacuation could begin.

The houses all seemed asleep in this residential street in Abuja. Out they came, their luggage carried by servants, first a woman with a child in her arms, then a teenager and finally a little girl holding her father's hand. They looked forwards and backwards and then piled into the big car: they were leaving, not knowing whether they would ever come back, leaving for a long time. The car set off. It had taken hardly ten minutes to abandon everything – their whole life and, soon, their country. Back in the house the sitting-room lights were still on and the book of Igbo fairy tales lay on the sofa.

Nwankwo sat beside the driver and was told the programme. The next stop would be Lagos, where they would discreetly board a speedboat which would take them out to sea to a Norwegian tanker. Three days later they would be on a plane to London.

“But they said we would cross the border and take a plane from Yaoundé,” Nwankwo protested.

“Last minute change of plan – this'll be safer,” the man replied.

Nwankwo was silent. It would be a long and exhausting journey for the children. His original plan had been to go alone, so as not to condemn his whole family to exile – he wouldn't have been the first African to live so far away from his family. But Ezima had refused.

He turned towards her, murmured that they were going by sea, not the most comfortable of escapes, but the safest. A ship flying a Norwegian flag was less risky than an African road. Then he was silent again, they all were, each one assessing the situation. Abuja was disappearing behind them, with all its glittering modernity. Its cranes, its soulless concrete churches, mosques, office blocks and bypasses bore witness to its youth and new status as capital. It had no history, it was just the artificial shop window for a powerful, oil-rich state. It had replaced noisy, teeming, stinking Lagos. Which was where they were going.

Soon there were no street lights or road markings. Aso Rock melted into the night.
Aso
means victory. The words, the landscape, the doubts – it all churned around in Nwankwo's head. He had believed in victory, he had made powerful men tremble with fear in his office, and he had remained stony-faced against their airs and their threats; he had smiled when they tried to buy him, accepting their fifteen million dollars in hundred-dollar bills, but depositing them in the central bank with instructions to make good use of them, and then pursuing his enquiries with renewed vigour. And then they had started killing his men one by one. Then they killed Uche, his friend and right-hand man. Then they had sacked him and now he was being forced to flee…

 

“My book!” Baïna suddenly cried. “We've forgotten my book!”

“We'll buy another one,” her mother said.

“They won't have it where we're going!”

“They have everything there, you'll see. It's a country with big shops.”

“But I want my book! We must turn round.”

“That's enough, Baïna!” Nwankwo stopped her. “I've read that story to your brother for years, and so often to you that I know it by heart. And Mummy, too. We'd got to the stripy rat.”

He looked at his wife in the mirror. She understood that he needed silence. Ezima shut her eyes and continued.

 

 

At this stage in the story, when his eldest son was little, Nwankwo had made the sound of the galloping antelope by slapping his hand on his thigh. In those days he had been a young lawyer, a graduate of the University of Zaria. He had handed his diplomas to his father, who had proudly displayed them in his house. “It's good, you've the taste for battle,” the old man had sighed, implying that he himself had now lost it. Deep down he had never recovered from seeing those rebels who had fought against colonial power turning into tyrants – it went against all that he wanted to believe about the world and mankind, everything that he thought he had learnt from his beloved books. And then had come the civil war, several military coups and, with the arrival of a whole new breed of predators, he had finally lost his bearings. He was now approaching the end of his life in silence, but it was a silence in which there echoed the sadness of ancient words that had lost their meaning. Nwankwo would visit his father regularly after work, and, sitting on the steps that led up to the bamboo-trellised house, he would tell him about the battles that had become more and more frequent: a newspaper office sacked for having
written the truth, small-property owners whose houses had been burnt down to make way for a huge shopping centre. All these cases told the same story: rich country, poor people. Corruption at every level. When a judge condemned a rich man it was only because he would get a larger bribe for the appeal.

Born at the time of independence and the discovery of oil, Nwankwo had been an arrogant and energetic twenty-year-old, but already, behind the rectangular glasses he had worn since childhood, there lurked a serious young man lacking in frivolity, always on the alert – already his life's mission was to do the right thing. The old man always had the last word, with his precise schoolteacher's grammar: “Our country would be better off without this damned oil, I wish that we might never have breathed its odour.”

But soon words were no longer enough for Nwankwo. He wanted to act, rather than simply argue in court. He sailed through his prosecutor's exams with brilliant marks. Once again he handed the diploma to his father who this time forgot to frame it and hang it up. Nobody at the time saw any ill omen in this. There at the Nigerian Law School he met Uche, who was his exact opposite, a man who laughed all the time, especially at tragic events. It was an orphan's habit, he would explain. Together they climbed several rungs of the ladder and when, thanks to an unforeseeable political upheaval, Nwankwo became head of the fraud squad, he asked to have Uche at his side. This was five years ago. Now Uche was dead. He had been found with his hands tied, shot through the head, in the boot of his car, two weeks ago. Nwankwo had got the message. The noose was tightening. It was time to leave, and fast.

 

The road was becoming bumpier as they plunged deeper and deeper into the bush. Nwankwo could sense the silent thickets around them, permanently dripping in this rainy season. Fireflies glittered in the night, like the eyes of a
thousand cats watching the fleeing car. Or spirits – the ones that only come out at night. Nwankwo had been told every day, when he was very small: never go outside after sunset, even if someone calls your name; start being cautious in the afternoon, because the land only belongs to men in the morning, and after that they have to share it. The spirits begin to prowl; they take control of the paths, the lanes and the roads. “The toad never goes out in the afternoon – for good reason,” his grandfather would say with the affectionate pat that always accompanied his wise sayings. As a little boy, Nwankwo had believed these stories, less so of course as he grew up, but he had never completely freed himself from them. Those who say they don't believe in spirits are lying. On this particular evening he understood those words: the more you try to escape the more they cling to you; leaving forces you to remember and finally to decipher the voices of ancestors and their spells. Man is not king on earth.

In the back Ezima's voice was becoming fainter at the end of the story. The root had hit the antelope's foot, the hawk had touched the root, the child had touched the hawk, then cried and gone to his mother.