Voice of America (19 page)

He heard his wife’s cry and then the cry of the baby and a brief silence and then only the cry of the baby. He walked to the door and waited. The doctor came out and beckoned to him; he was frowning slightly.

“What is wrong? Is she dead?” he asked.

“Mother and baby are fine. Please come in, we want you to take a look at something.”

He walked in, his feet feeling as if his shoes were made of heavy steel. He saw that his wife was alive; she looked at him and gave him a small smile.

“He is very dark, just like you,” she said, smiling wanly. What had she expected, that the baby would be white, because they lived among many white people?

“It is very unusual, just take a look at this,” the doctor said, lifting the new baby’s upper lip.

He peered into the little mouth; the baby had a full set of teeth. He grabbed the doctor’s hands; the nurses and attendants were looking up to him like he held the answer and all he needed to do was open his mouth and give them a logical explanation. The father was frightened.

Back in Nigeria, the elders would have consulted the oracle so they could know what this meant. He did not imagine this kind of thing would happen here. He would have been less shocked if the baby had been a curly blond or an albino. He turned to the doctor.

“How did this happen?” he asked.

The doctor gently removed his hands from the father’s and assumed a professional manner.

“Otherwise he is a perfect baby, and very long for a child too. You just might have a basketball player in the family.”

He looked at the doctor and looked at the bloodstained sheets surrounding them and began to weep. His wife too, as if she had been waiting for this cue, began to cry.

“There are options, I mean. We have run a battery of tests and all that, and we still plan to do more, but I just thought I should ask you, since you people are not from the United States and all, is this common where you come from? We were wondering whether it was cultural. No doubt it is a medical mystery. I have heard that in some parts of the world people are born with only two toes; at the university hospital up the hill, an African woman had this lovely baby with six fingers and six toes. I do not mean to embarrass you; I feel you may be able to offer some kind of explanation….”

The doctor trailed off.

He had hardly heard what the doctor said. His mouth felt dry, and he gulped in air, feeling suffocated. The nurses began to clean up. One of the nurses was talking to his wife about breastfeeding. It appeared that everything had once again returned to normal.

The hospital staff were furtive in their dealings with the husband and wife; they could hear people whispering in the large hallway about the strange African baby. The husband was afraid; he told the wife that he had heard on television that the government took away strange babies to secret laboratories in the desert where they put them in glass boxes like tropical butterflies and studied them. While they were talking, a woman with a camera came in. She was smiling.

“Hello, mom and dad. Can I take a picture of the baby?”

“Are you from the newspaper?” the woman asked, clutching the baby tightly to her chest.

“No, actually I work for the hospital. We need the baby’s photograph for our records and our Web site.”

“Do we have to pay?” the man asked, regaining his voice.

“No, it is absolutely free,” the female photographer said, and repeated the word “free.”

“What is the baby’s name?” she asked.

“He has no name yet,” the husband said. “In our part of Africa you don’t give a new baby a name until the seventh day.”

“How neat,” the female photographer said and began to position her camera. She touched the baby’s cheeks to get a smile. The baby smiled, showing his teeth; the photographer’s face reddened, and she very nearly dropped the camera.

“Oh my goodness, I never saw—oh my goodness,” she said again and began to snap away feverishly, the popping flashbulb brightening the room and temporarily blinding the husband and wife.

“You’ve got a long one there too,” she said as she detached the flashbulb from her camera and started putting it away.

The husband shared the food the hospital provided for the wife. The wife urged him to eat: “You know I am not home, and there is no one to make your food.”

The husband urged her to eat, telling her that she needed to eat well to breast-feed the baby. The baby began to cry; the woman picked him up and began to breast-feed him.

“Thank God it is producing milk; the nurse told me that for some women it took a couple of days before they began to produce milk.”

“Does he bite you with it?” the man asked.

“No, he is just sucking away. I don’t feel anything. He must be very hungry.”

“Come and take a look,” she said, raising his blanket and pointing at the baby’s stomach. Half a dozen fine lines ran from one side of the tiny stomach to the other.

“Remember, the doctor said he was going to be a basketball player—see, the lines must have come from his curling himself up so tightly in that little space.”

“What are we going to do with that?” the husband said, pointing at the drooping bit of navel from the umbilical cord.

“Don’t worry, it will fall off in a couple of weeks.”

“I mean, where are we going to bury it when it falls off? Or do you mean you don’t know that back home you are buried wherever that bit of navel is buried?”

“Oh, yes, that—when it falls off, I will keep it at the bottom of my box where I keep my clothes and preserve it with camphor. We can take it back with us whenever we are going back home.”

The husband did not respond. His head fell back on the hospital chair, and his mind went back to his childhood.

He was sitting by his grandmother’s feet, and she was telling him a story; it was something that happened in the land of Idunoba. The inhabitants of Idunoba were dying of thirst. They woke up one morning and discovered that a black python had taken over the well that was the community’s only source of water. All the brave hunters who went to the well to kill the python ended up being strangled by it. Then a woman who had been pregnant for seven years began to feel birth pangs. The baby came into the world feetfirst. When he opened his mouth, he had a complete set of teeth, and he used this to bite off his umbilical cord. While everyone in Idunoba watched, he began
to grow. His arms became stout, and his feet grew sturdy, and he stood at over seven feet. He began to speak and command the villagers to take him to the well. When he got to the well, he used his bare hands to drag out the python and choked it to death. Everyone was happy, including the king. He gave the boy his daughter to marry, and they had seven brave sons and lived happily ever after.

Now the wife was shaking the husband and asking him to wake up so he could go home. She had assumed he was sleeping. He rubbed his face, picked up his bag, and left.

When he got home, he assembled the new crib that he bought for the baby from Kmart and hung up a balloon on the doorway that said “Congratulations.”

The next morning he went to the hospital to bring the baby and mother back home. The wife had called him the previous night to tell him that the doctor had confirmed that all the tests were negative, and she was free to go home. The doctor told her to clean the baby’s teeth with cotton wool and warm water.

There was a bit of a situation when they were about to leave the hospital. The state law required all newborn babies to be transported in an infant car seat. They did not have a car, so they didn’t have a car seat. The hospital loaned them one, and they took a taxi back home.

The wife was happy on seeing the balloon when they entered their apartment, and thanked him. She was happy because he was becoming American in his ways. She put the baby in the crib, and he continued the sleep he had started at the hospital. The woman told him she was tired, went to bed, and dozed off. He read for a while and also fell asleep. The baby woke up twice in the night and was suckled by the wife.

The child continued to grow, and when he was a few months old, they bought him a toothbrush. Just because he had teeth, they gave him meat to chew on occasion, but he always spat it out.

The hospital sent a social worker to visit them to find out if they needed any assistance. The wife became friendly with the social worker, and it was the social worker that told her that here in America, people believed in something called the tooth fairy.

“You’ll see, when your son grows up and starts school, he will learn about the tooth fairy.”

The wife was happy to hear this little piece of news, and when the husband came back from school, she shared it with him.

“This means they are not so different from us,” the wife said.

“Yes, they are not so different,” the man agreed.

“I told my mother about it,” the wife said.

“I thought we agreed you were not going to tell her,” he said.

“I could not bear it anymore; I had to tell her.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said it is a sign of greatness—she said her grandson is going to be a great man.”

“For once I agree with your mother,” the husband said, and looked at the wife with mischief lurking at the corners of his mouth.

They both began to laugh. Their laughter woke up the baby, who was taking a nap, and he began to cry.

T
he bars favored by American oil workers in Port Har-court were named after girls—retired prostitutes called club girls. The names were short and memorable—Pat’s Bar, Stella’s Bar, Abby’s Bar, Christy’s Bar, and so on. The oldest of them was Pat’s Bar; it was also the one most visited by the older oil workers. You could tell the older oil workers by the color of their skin, a very dark brown like the color of anthills. You could spot the old-timers: they smoked Marlboro Reds, were usually potbellied like most of the prosperous locals, and had their shirts unbuttoned to the chest, revealing wiry gray chest hairs. They spoke a smattering of pidgin English, sprinkled with local expressions such as
wahala, oga, ashewo, nyash,
and
na wah.

The girls had been given money to open the bars as gifts from departing boyfriends. Pat’s was a parting gift from a boyfriend who had returned to Texas. Over the years the place had grown into the favorite hangout of old expatriate oil workers. Pat openly cultivated these oil workers, making trips to the interior
to bring young girls from Opobo and Nembe for her customers, who preferred them very young.

She would tell the other women so everyone could hear it, “All of us are club girls o, every girl who runs a bar in this Port Harcourt na ashewo, we be all prostitutes from A to Z, we know ourself o, make nobody deceive herself we all slept with oyibo to get money, so why I no permit young girls wey want to hustle and make money like me.” You could tell how prosperous she had grown from the folds on her neck. Her community had even conferred a chieftaincy title on her, Chirizua—“Uplifter of the Youths.”

Pat’s Bar was one of the few places where male prostitutes hung out to be picked up by expatriates. It also had a couple of decent rooms upstairs for “fresh fish,” the slang for newly arrived expatriate oil workers who had yet to find permanent accommodation. When these expatriates became well established in Port Harcourt, they never forgot the early days when they were still finding their feet, and Pat’s hospitality to them. The bar had cheeseburgers and fries, reminding its American patrons of home food. It also had several varieties of mustard and imported Heinz ketchup, not the tart-tasting locally made variety to be found at Christy’s Bar four blocks down the road. When you changed your money in the informal
bureau de change
at Pat’s Bar, you were sure you were getting genuine and clean naira notes, not the mutilated and sometimes counterfeit notes that were mixed with the real notes when you changed at Hotel Presidential.

Every year Pat adopted a local charity, and she kept a transparent plastic box for collecting donations on a stool in the bar. The first year she did this for St. Anne’s Motherless Babies’
Home, she collected close to two hundred thousand naira when the money was converted into the local currency. The local cat-echist and his wife who ran the orphanage could not believe their eyes when they saw the money, and from that day on, they designated a special seat for her in the church. Different charities began to approach her to put a box for them in her bar. She would look at a soliciting pastor, shake her head, and smile.

“But you are the same people that criticize prostitutes in your church. Na una talk say na ashewo work we dey do for here, when una reach church on Sunday na to siddon for pulpit dey take mouth scatter us say na we dey corrupt this town of Port Harcourt.” The pastor would bow his head sheepishly as she carried on her tirade.

“Una don forget say even for Bible, sef, God say judge not so that nobody go judge you, even Rahab in the Bible was a prostitute.”

She would relent after her tirade, set up a box for the charity, and by the end of the year would have a large sum of money. The expatriates were always happy to drop a couple of dollars to help motherless children, especially after a night of heavy drinking and with one of Pat’s girls hanging on their arm.

Her fish pepper soup was the best in town. She had two fishponds filled with live catfish; all a customer needed to do was point, and the fish was quickly brought out of the pond and killed.

There was no kind of drink that was not sold in the bar, from the local Gulder and Star lagers to Heineken, Budweiser, Miche-lob, and Guinness, and of course the house specialty, nicknamed Monkey Tail by the expatriates, a potent mixture of local rum, marijuana, and seven pieces of alligator pepper. It was rumored that when one of the American expatriates, Chet Williams, had
first arrived in the country, he had taken more than the recommended one shot and ended up with a hangover that lasted for seven days. As he lay on the floor, writhing and yelling for ice water, he claimed that he saw snakes crawling all over the floor.

Pat got people out of all kinds of trouble, ranging from traffic infractions to separating them from local girls who had become too clingy. She had recently intervened when was one of her girls had become pregnant and refused to abort because she wanted to have a child with fair hair and blue eyes like engineer Rogers, her expatriate boyfriend.