Jowhor Ile - And After Many Days

—

The person at the gate banged it in a way no sensible person would. Ma stepped out of the kitchen into the parlor, knife in hand, onion tears in her eyes. “Paul, go and check.”

It was a Friday, and Ismaila had taken the afternoon off to go to mosque for prayers, after which he would visit his friends who lived near the central mosque at Mile Three.

The visitor, when he was escorted into the living room by Paul, didn’t waste time with salutations. “I have come from home,” he said.

Ma squinted a little bit. “Are you not Ikpo’s son…emm, Moses?”

“There is problem,” he said, nodding, and Ma became alarmed, dropping the hand that still held the kitchen knife.

“Is your father okay? What has happened?”

“My father is okay.” He sounded and looked weak, like someone who had trekked a long distance. “Your husband is not at home?”

As if on cue, Bendic walked into the parlor, tightening the wrapper on his waist. “Soldiers drove into town this morning with trucks. They shot down five boys.”

Bendic shouted, “What soldiers? Whom did they shoot?” Ma asked Moses to sit down and made a gesture at Paul to get the tired guest drinking water. Bibi and Ajie were standing near the room dividers as Bendic roared out his questions.

“As we are here,” Moses said, “there are people hiding in the bush still. We ran through the bush to Ogbogu. My father said you had to hear at once. The soldiers are still in Ogibah as we are here.”

Moses struggled his way through the story. Yesterday, he said, there was an altercation between Ogibah youths and some of the workers on the new gas pipeline construction. The police intervened, but the matter got out of hand when a policeman was hit in the head with a plank. The policeman landed in the hospital, fighting for his life.

The children were all standing in different positions, encircling Moses as he told the story. The smell of something burning was coming from the kitchen, and Ma snapped at Bibi to go turn off the stove, as if it were Bibi’s fault.

“Ifenwa!” Bendic was shouting into the phone receiver. “Come, please. Come down at once, are you hearing me?

“Get me my glasses, Paul,” Bendic said, and Paul hurried out of the parlor.

—

When Mr. Ifenwa arrived, they drove out together and Bendic came back very late that night. Paul had gotten the guest room ready for Moses, and Ma asked him if he would like to wash with hot or cold water. “ Ka obula . Whichever one,” he replied.

Bendic left early the next morning. He said he and Marcus would pick up Mr. Ifenwa from his house before they headed out to see if they could get an audience with the commissioner of police. Bendic came back at about ten o’clock that night, and this went on for about two weeks, at which point the soldiers finally left Ogibah. Bendic was among the first people to enter the village after the soldiers left. He went with Marcus and they spent three days there. When they came back, he told Ma her camera battery ran out after the first day and they couldn’t find replacements in the shops in nearby villages. He told her he’d heard there had been one or two newspeople who came around, also some organizations, he wasn’t sure what they were, but nothing to reflect the scale of the event. “Nothing is left. They brought the whole place down.”

Bendic spent that evening looking through the notes he had taken on his tour of Ogibah. Bendic’s secretary, Ifiemi, had traveled to her village to see her parents, so the next morning Bendic called Paul into his study and asked him to type out a summary he had made of the event.

—

“Anything can happen to anyone,” Paul said to Ajie and Bibi later that evening, after he was done with Bendic in the study.

It was from Paul that they first heard the details of the killing, how, after gunning down the boys they saw idling away in the square, they burned down Mark Alari’s house — the first of many. Old men who couldn’t escape into the bush were manhandled and made to lie on the floor. They took, by force, any woman they came across. Houses were defaced with graffiti, and they shat in the town hall. By the evening, when they were done, a great smoke hung over Ogibah, and the air smelled of burning meat as the soldiers rewarded themselves with any livestock they could find, looting Mercury’s store and rendering all his cartons of beer empty.

“Anything can happen to anyone. What if they come here to take Bendic and Ma, what will we do?” Paul asked.

But who were they ? If only Paul could just make that clear. Police, soldiers, or armed robbers? If they came here to take Bendic and Ma, what would you do?

Bibi was silent.

Ajie desperately wanted to supply an answer, but for now he had only questions to ask, so Paul was left to deal with the query all by himself.

Paul spent the rest of the holiday mostly on the veranda, studying for his final exams. Three years earlier, when he was preparing for his junior certificate exams, he had sat on this same veranda before a chalkboard, conjugating irregular French verbs, drawing up Venn diagrams, and locating coordinates on graphs. Paul did not join the other kids who went for holiday lessons in nearby schools. Ma asked a couple of her teacher friends to give him tutorial lessons. Ma and Bendic also read through Paul’s textbooks so they could help out with the exercise. Ajie remembered Bendic ticking off some exercises at the end of a chapter on magnetism and commenting with a pencil, “You must work hard.”

This time Paul said he didn’t want any tutorials from Ma’s friends. Ma tried to persuade him — Mr. Daminabo had already agreed to come twice a week for math lessons — but Paul resisted, telling Ma he was fine studying on his own, and Ma clicked her tongue at Paul’s rebuff, and Bendic said they should let him be.

It was early evening, and SuperTed was on the television, although it was not clear who was watching it. Ajie went out to the veranda and Paul asked, “Have you seen my Ababio?”

Ajie craned his neck into the parlor, leaning backward. “Bibi, Paul wants his Ababio now.” Ajie liked this thing of calling textbooks by the author’s last name.

“You two should leave his books alone, please,” Bendic said. “The young man has an important exam to sit for.”

Later, Ma came outside. “It’s getting dark,” she said, and turned on the light. Paul looked up and returned to his reading. Ma stood for a bit watching him, while Paul pretended he wasn’t aware of her gaze. He had become a bit brittle in those final revision weeks, often aloof, always saying he was fine, yes, their parents should just leave him alone for a while. Ajie sometimes felt Ma even wanted to do Paul’s reading for him. She brought heaps of past exam questions from as far back as 1985. Bendic seemed to be aware that Paul needed some space but couldn’t help himself, either: He would start telling stories about how he prepared for his own finals back in the day, and even Bibi, who enjoyed those stories a lot, would just look at him and want to make him stop.

Ma went back inside the parlor, where Channel 10 was having a break in transmission “due to power failure,” Ma hissed, and flipped to Channel 22, where a newsreader was giving the highlights of the evening in Kolokuma language. Bendic looked up when Paul came back into the parlor with his hand full of books. “So when is your first paper?” Bendic asked.

“The eighth. May eighth,” Paul replied, dropping his books on the dining table.

“Good. What subject?”

“Chemistry practical.” He stretched. “I’m so tired of revising. I want it to come and go quickly.”