Helon Habila - Oil on Water

— Hello, I’m looking for the old man. . and the boy. We came together yesterday. And. . food. .

She kept nodding as I spoke, a friendly smile on her lined face, and as she nodded she repeated the same word: Yes. She probably couldn’t understand me, and because I didn’t speak the local language I simply mimed eating — putting my right hand to my mouth.

— Food, please.

She laughed, nodding her understanding.

— Yes, yes.

She brought me a bowl full of corn porridge — it was warm and sickly sweet and filling. She stood by the door and watched me eat, nodding and smiling all the time. Through the open door behind her came the voices of the children in the back. When I asked her when the men would be back, she said nothing, but kept smiling and bowing and moving backward until she was out of the door. Afterward, I walked out into the mud flats. I spent the next hour walking in an ankle-high flood, my trousers rolled up to my knees, taking pictures of the houses. Most of the houses were empty, the men out fishing and the women smoking fish in the shed I’d seen earlier. I went to the shed last. The older women stared into the camera lens silently, their tired, lined faces neither acknowledging nor forbidding my action; the younger women giggled self-consciously, hastily wiping the ash and sweat from their faces with the edges of their wrappers; the children ran forward and posed with hands on their waists, pushing each other out of the way.

While I was on my way back to Chief Ibiram’s front room, the men returned. I passed them hauling their canoes out of the shallow water and tying them to the house stilts; others carried the day’s catch in plastic buckets and wicker baskets, and, from what I could see, it wasn’t bountiful. The boy and the girl took from one boat a basket with a handful of thin wiggling fish at the bottom. The kids stopped on the veranda when they saw me, waiting for me to speak, standing side by side with the basket on the floor between them, and behind them the sun was huge and dying, spilling orange and red and rust on the shallow river and the mangroves.

— Smile.

They smiled. I clicked. I wanted to talk to them, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I had known the boy for a couple of days now, and in that time I had never heard him say much, only answers to his father’s questions or commands, and mostly they never talked at all; each seemed to have an instinctive understanding of what the other wanted.

— When I was a boy, me and my sister, we used to catch crabs.

They looked at each other. — No crabs here now. The water is not good.

The girl, whose name was Alali, was more willing to talk. The boy only nodded with his head lowered, a fixed smile on his lips. I wanted to tell them about my childhood in a village not too far away from here. I realized how very much like theirs my childhood must have been. Barefoot and underfed we may have been, but the sea was just outside our door, constantly bringing surprises, suggesting a certain possibility to our lives. Boma and I used to spend the whole night by the water, catching crabs, armed with sticks and basket, our hands covered in old rags to protect our fingers from the scissor-sharp claws. We usually sold our catch to the market women, but sometimes, to make more money, we took the ferry to Port Harcourt to sell to the restaurants by the waterfront. That was how we paid our school fees when our father lost his job.

Zaq was trying hardto hide his annoyance, and he wasn’t succeeding.

— You should have told us you were going to be out all day. We’ve wasted a whole day now. I thought your job was to be our guide, we hired you.

We were in the veranda; Chief Ibiram was inside somewhere, taking a bath. Technically, we hadn’t hired the old man; he had simply appeared out of the night and become our guide, he and his son. But I understood Zaq’s anger, because I felt it too. But mine wasn’t directed at the old man; rather, it came from a feeling of frustration and general irritability at the way things had been going since we started on the trail of the kidnapped woman. Events were always a step ahead of us, as if Eshu the trickster god were out to play with us. Zaq’s anger was intensified by his strange fever, and the continuous ache from his swelling legs. The booze had helped to dull the pain, but now that the booze was finished, the pain kept him constantly on edge.

The old man looked close to tears; he glanced toward me helplessly, waving his hands.

— You no well, sir, tha’s why. I think say you go stop here rest small before we go. Tha’s why. .

But Zaq’s anger disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. He lowered his voice and turned to go into the house. — We really must set out early tomorrow. First thing in the morning.

— Yes. Yes, sir. Early morning, tomorrow.

That night I listened to Zaq turning and moaning and cursing on the mat beside me, all night long battling his pain and his demons.

Toward morning, sitting side by side, both of us having given upon sleep, I asked Zaq how he ended up on this assignment.

— They came to my office. It was just another dull day at work, and, believe me, setting out on an expedition after some kidnapped woman was the furthest thing from my mind.

His editor, Beke Johnson, who was also the Daily Star’s owner, walked into his office, his face nervous with excitement, and told him two men wanted to see him. Two white men.

— I recognized the husband immediately. I had seen his face alongside his wife’s in the papers and on TV for the past few days. Oil-company worker, British, petroleum engineer, his wife had gone out by herself and she never came back, believed to have been kidnapped by the militants. The kidnapping was of some interest to me because only the day before I had written an editorial on another kidnapping, that of a seventy-year-old woman and a three-year-old girl. They’d been kidnapped for ransom by militants. I titled the editorial “Gangsters or Freedom Fighters?”

— I’m an avid reader of your column.

The man moved forward and offered Zaq his hand. Zaq looked at the hand as though unsure what to do with it, his eyes blinking in the strong light coming in through the open windows, then he stuck out his own pudgy hand and shook it. He was badly hung-over and his breath left his corpulent frame in a heaving, gasping motion. Beke Johnson hovered behind his desk, urging the visitors to please sit down, please sit down. His rumpled suit and tie, the wolfish smile on his fat face, added to Zaq’s headache and he felt like reaching out and covering the smile with his hand. The other visitor remained standing, looking out through the open window, as if to avoid a bad smell in the narrow room. Zaq took in the black nondescript suit, the blue shirt, the black-and-white-striped tie, the well-polished black shoes: diplomatic service, most likely security section. He must have been the handler, there to make sure the husband didn’t betray the famous stiff-upper-lip tradition.

— You want to see me?

Zaq stood with his hands clasped before him, trying not to scratch at his stubbled chin. His eyes were red and teary from gazing all day into the computer screen, his lips were parched.

— I am—

— I know who you are. You’re in the news. What can I do for you?

The husband sighed. His eyes went to the other man, who nodded and spoke directly to Zaq.

— Well, you already know about the kidnapping, so we won’t go into all that. James here is a great admirer of your writing, and it was his idea that we come to you and ask you to go with a few other journalists to confirm that his wife is still alive. We need to know that before commencing with the ransom negotiation.