I received an invitation from my friend to visit him a month after my mother died. My father had died when I was twelve, and I had no siblings, meaning that I was now all alone in the world.
My friend Ogon and I hadn’t spoken to each other since we were twenty-six, and in the decade that had followed, former classmates of ours had gotten married, given birth to children, built houses. It made my head ache just trying to imagine all that must have happened to him in this time.
Back in the day, he used to cut his hair very close to the scalp, exposing his enormous head to the elements. He was baby-faced, round-nosed, with unthreatening eyes, which usually led people to underestimate him. But I knew him well, knew that he never gave an inch in a debate, looked past people if the conversation was boring, and took rain checks by holding up his hand with the rose-gold wristwatch he had gotten from his parents as a university matriculation gift, saying, “In the end, man is slave to time.” He wasn’t pompous though, just a guy who found ingenious ways to maintain his spirit in a cruel world.
His invitation to visit came through a university acquaintance who had been land surveying in our hometown, Ikom. Early evening, after I had eaten my dinner of Indomie with suya, washed down with a glass of unsweetened zobo, I received the email:
You really cannot imagine my surprise when I saw him. The beard, his eyes. I wouldn’t have believed it was him if he hadn’t called me by my full name.
Ogon now lived in a cave in the side of the most famous hill in Ikom. He had heard about my mother, and he was inviting me to stop over. Beyond the shock of hearing from him, was the pleasure of realizing he still thought about me. We used to be pretty close, in fact we had grown up together in Ikom, had gone to the same primary school.
We had made acquaintance with each other one day after school, seven years old, after I had gotten into a heated argument with another boy about my house being a story building.
Ours was a small town, people lived in houses they had inherited from their parents. Tiny affairs with two bedrooms, a living room too small to host a proper crowd, and bathrooms that didn’t even have enough space for a tub. In fact there were only two houses in the entire town that were more than a story tall, and I so happened to live in one of them. But to the children I went to school with, the people who lived in those story buildings were near mythic, and me, whose nose ran in the rainy season, who couldn’t kick a football to save his life, was all too human to descend from such glory.
I was losing the argument, and the people gathered around were already beginning to chant “Liar” at me, when Ogon stepped forward. Even back then his big head was imposing. He lugged it through the crowd to join the other boy and me, held up a hand to quiet everybody.
The children obeyed him, he was one of them. He and they rushed out of the classroom together to the playground during break time, got caned together for hiding the classroom chalk and duster, and whenever parents were summoned to school because their child had done something overboard, his father and mother were always amongst the other befuddled parents, shaking their heads like they were bemoaning their luck of being bequeathed with a spirited child.
“It is true, Nsan has a staircase in his house,” he said. The children said “Argh” like they had all believed I was telling the truth from the start. “The last time I was there I saw his karate belt, and I know that he can beat anybody who gives him trouble.” He had never been to my house. My only experience of the martial art of karate was on television, and yet he spoke with such assurance that even I almost believed in my newfound martial prowess. The children all cheered for me, the other boy departed shamefaced, and my friendship with Ogon was born.
Now he lived in a cave. It was just like him to do something so rash, something that left you questioning your own sensibilities. But then you always had the feeling that he was aware that if he stumbled or made a mistake, his parents would pick him up.
He was the only friend I had whose relationship with me could be traced back to before I came to understand emotions like isolation and grief. I had to accept his invitation.
*
My mother had been sick for a while before she died. An ovarian cyst needing operation, leading to infections after surgery. On the day of her burial, I wore sunglasses, and a crisp, black kaftan to accept condolences, nodding and offering side hugs to everyone.
It wasn’t until two weeks later, on a cool evening when I went for a stroll that it hit me. When I was a child, most evenings when there was nothing to do but watch lizards scurry into their burrows for the night, my mother would grab her purse, and together we would walk half a mile to the fruit seller’s. She would buy oranges, which always seemed to be in season, guavas, avocados. Afterwards we would walk home, sharing the load between us, me asking a million questions, and her answering all of them with a smile.
The evening this memory came to me, I rushed home and sat in darkness for hours. There were sounds outside, but I couldn’t distinguish them, couldn’t hear anything that wasn’t my own thoughts. My head pounded until I began to fear that my brain would turn to mush and leak out of my ears. And if that happened, there’d be no one to rush me to the hospital, to sit by my bedside and hold my hand. I could slip out of existence at any moment and the world wouldn’t even shrug.
*
The distance from Calabar, where I lived, to Ikom was one hundred and thirty-three miles. I drove it in three hours, dodging potholes where I could, putting faith in my car’s suspension where I couldn’t. Vegetable sellers fanned flies away from their baskets of produce as I drove past, women looked on from behind signboards advertising home cooked meals. I hadn’t had one of those since my mother’s illness. I could cook, but the meals I prepared never tasted right, so I preferred to eat out.
I thought about Ogon waiting for me at the end of this journey. The closer I got to Ikom, the more nervous I became about meeting him. What would he make of my receding hairline, eye bags and growing pouch? Had I grown into the man he had hoped I would become, or was I just a regular thirty-six year old, anxious about my savings account?
As a teenager, I asked a girl out on a date once and she said no. When I told Ogon about it, he nodded and said, “You made an attempt, kudos.” And that was all it had taken to pull me out of the doldrums. His approval mattered a lot, and there was nothing I could do about that.
Ikom was as small as I remembered. I hadn’t been back in six years, and there were times after my father’s death, after my mother and I moved to the city that I had thought I would never return to a place that had become so tinted by anguish. The wooden stalls by the roadside were grimier than I remembered though, red dust clung to their roofs and walls. The signposts were more faded than before, missing vowels and consonants so that on first encounter, my road-weary brain thought that I had happened across a strange, new language. Vans and trucks from the 1970s ambled across intersections, their drivers leaning out of the window to ask for right of way.
I turned away from the main road into a red dirt track that was shiny and compact. Tall fences hid houses all the way up to their rusted zinc roofs. I drove until I stopped seeing the fences, until only bush remained on either side of the tract. I was heading east, Ekabokom hill. The largest hill in Ikom and the surrounding villages, made green by dense vegetation. You could see the mound from most places in town, a silhouette that all at once suggested mystery, dread, inconvenience.
My car bounced in the ruts, lurching from side to side, until I began to fear that the undercarriage might come apart. Sunbirds flew so close to my car, I wondered if they mistook it for a natural creature of the forest. I ran out of road gradually, the ruts getting wider, the grass taller, until my wheels could not find flat ground to roll on.
If the acquaintance’s email was correct, a quarter mile’s hike up the hill should take me at last to my destination.
Trees blocked the path ahead of me, gmelinas, sapeles and other species whose names I did not know. I weaved around their wide trunks, ducked under their branches, inhaled their fresh smell. The birds here weren’t frightened of me. They perched on the low branches and stared with a curiosity that made me self-conscious, running a hand over my hair to see if there was something stuck there.
My legs began to tire, which surprised me as I still had halfway to go. There was supposed to be a stream on the other side of the hill. Frustrating. If I could just have a drink of water, I might have been okay.
I leaned on a tree, but was soon springing away when I noticed a green caterpillar crawling down the trunk. For the first time, I wondered if I had made a great mistake coming here.
I had wanted to climb this hill for the longest time as a child. Older boys in town arranged expeditions to the top in which no child younger than twelve was allowed to follow. One day, Ogon and I waited for them to set out, then tried to hang on to their trail from a distance. Only a few minutes into the adventure, the tree canopy began to block out the sun. We felt like we were walking into the belly of the hill, away from the warmth and familiarity of the world. I lost my nerves and made a bolt for it, and Ogon had to abandon the mission, chase me down and escort me home.
Today, the sun stayed visible in the sky, or perhaps I was old enough not to trick my brain into imagining its disappearance. I dragged myself up the hill, and was so out of breath that when I caught sight of Ogon in between the trees, I could not shout his name as we used to do in our teens and twenties.
Instead, I rested my hands on my knees, sweat trickling down my back.
“Nsan, you came,” Ogon said, walking towards me. I could see herbs poking out of the tattered calico bag he wore across his shoulder. “Leave it to you to appear in time for dinner.” He pointed at the bag. “I was just foraging for food.”
He pulled me up by the shoulders and embraced me. He stank; sweat and grime and his natural musk. His full beard prickled my cheek. His arms were ropy as they held me close. “How many years has it been?” I asked, being fully aware of the exact number of years we had gone without seeing each other.
He rubbed my chin. “You are a full grown man,” he said. “Even your voice is different.” I raised an eyebrow and he went on to clarify. “It is so wary now.”
He too seemed to have aged twice over. His eyes sat deeper in his face, his cheeks were hollow. The skin through the patches and rips in his trousers was pale and dry. “What are you doing here?” I asked .
A smile flirted across his lips. “Living,” he said.
We walked together the rest of the way. I had so many questions, but thought it bad manners to ask them so soon. Instead I commented on the greenness of the leaves, the thickness of the shrubs. He took my comments with a raised eyebrow like I was some sort of tourist. When I pressed for his opinion, he shrugged and said, “If I knew anything about this place, it would become boring to me, and I would be forced to move elsewhere.”
He had always been this annoying, but this time, maybe because I was thirsty and lost for breath, maybe because the miles I had driven and trekked to come see him were taking their toll, I can’t say for sure, but for the first time ever, I found his nonchalant superiority grating.
*
The entrance to his abode, perforated into the side of the hill, was marked by a raffia mat nailed over the threshold. The mat must have once been yellow, now the color had drained all the way to the frayed edges, the whole material riddled with weevil holes. Ogon turned to face me, and like a man who was about to unveil his life’s work, puffed out his chest, and gestured dramatically at the entrance. “Welcome to my most humble abode.”
I was excited enough to want to rush in ahead of him, but was just able to control myself.
He rolled up the mat, using a technique I did not see to pin it at the top. The mouth of the cave was large enough to accommodate a single, stooping adult. I saw light crawl some ways into the cavern before merging with the dark. I was apprehensive for a moment, but my curiosity got the better of me and I took the plunge ahead of him.
Once inside, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to return to full height. Ogon arrived behind me, leaving the mat rolled up, the entrance open. “You will need to crouch even lower than that,” he said. I obeyed his instruction, and at once found myself seized by a sense of helplessness. I had no idea what the inner sanctum of the cave was like, no idea where I was headed, or if I could even scamper away were something bad to happen. I reached around with my hands. The ground was rough, bits of loose rock and pebbles brushed against my open palms. But Ogon told me to keep going, and his voice was so full of confidence, I had little choice but to obey.
He moved with the assurance of a mole, and soon I was struggling to keep up. I had never been in a cave before. It was humid inside, but not a bad humidity, not hot. Damp, with a heavy feeling upon the body.
We went through a passageway, away from the light, rock edges jutting against my ribs. I gasped. “Don’t be so dramatic,” he said. His voice didn’t echo as I had expected it to, which suggested the cave wasn’t as large as I had feared. “Although to be fair, I was just as dramatic my first time in here,” he added.
Soon I could feel the hollowness of an expanded area, see a huge cylinder of light hit the floor from an overhead opening. I smelled an old fire, charcoal and ash. There was also the sharp scent of citrus, vying against the pungency of urine, and another smell I refused to acknowledge. Ogon pulled away from me. I heard him root through objects, strike things together until sparks gave rise to a fire. The flames were in the middle of the cavern, and through their dance and swell I was able to make out the dimensions of Ogon’s abode. It was wide enough that four people could lie side by side without their shoulders touching. I could just about return to full height, stretch my arms, before noticing the effect of the walls on either side. Two sleeping mats lay doubled up on the ground, a bundle of old clothes and blankets resting on them. On the other side of the fire, the oranges I had caught whiff of, a basket of dried peppers, krin-krin leaves, stalks of sugarcane. Beside the basket, stacked one inside the other, plates, cups, utensils and dented pans, a bigger calabash with palm fronds covering the mouth. “Water?” Ogon asked, moving the palm fronds aside and dipping a cup into the calabash.
I nodded, not quite sure what I was assenting to. “How long have you lived here?”
He handed me the cup. “I have absolutely no way of knowing.”
“How do you live then?”
He paused while I raised the water to my lips, then he said, “To tell you the truth, many seasons have come and gone.”
The water was cool and without the telltale heaviness of city water. I gulped it down in one go. He filled a pot with water and set it over the fire. “It’s been too long, my friend,” he said. “Tell me everything.” The obvious thing to tell him about was my mother’s death. He listened without interrupting, oohing and aahing where necessary. When I was done, he set aside the vegetables he had been shredding into the pot, came over, and touched me on the shoulder. “Loneliness requires a certain constitution,” he said. You do not have it, was the part he did not speak out loud.
He went back to his cooking, and I sank to the ground, allowing the exhaustion of the road wash over me. My wrists were sore from gripping the steering wheel, my calves ached from the climb. My eyes grew heavy, and I busied my mind with old memories and regrets.
*
The morning my father died, my mother made sure to come home from the hospital to tell me, before returning there to make arrangements for his internment. He had suffered a heart attack while tapping a palm tree at the back of our house the previous day. His body had gone slack in the raffia harness that hugged him to the tree, and a neighbor had had to climb up to fetch him.
My mother and I looked nothing alike. She was a big woman, with thick arms and a way of marching into a room that made people defer to her. When she put her arms around me to tell me that my father had passed from this world, I felt myself swallowed up by a warmth that seemed to delay the painful new reality of our lives. I wanted to stay inside that hug forever, but soon she was pulling away, pressing away my tears with her thumbs. “I am coming back,” she said. “Don’t worry, I am coming back.”
I stayed in my room all day crying. I didn’t really understand death, what I was reacting to was the sadness that like a musty cloth had settled over everyone else. My mother usually hummed during every spare moment she could find. But since my father had been discovered limp on the palm tree, I hadn’t heard her hum a single note.
Our one-story house, an inheritance from my grandfather who had been a messenger in the colonial civil service, had been invaded by uncles and second cousins, people I saw mostly on Sundays and special occasions, now come to stare at me and ask if I needed anything. Whenever I caught their eyes, I saw pity, more pity than I was ever given after a bad fall or even a bout of malaria.
I wished Ogon was with me, he had a way of coming up with activities that could distract you from anything you did not want to think about. One time, my father had sighted me climbing one of the palm trees in the backyard, and had yelled that he would give me the thrashing of my life. So I had jumped down and fled to Ogon’s house. Upon taking one look at me, Ogon had fetched a bucket of water which he emptied on the ground, so that we could use the softened earth to make mud sculptures all afternoon. In this way I forgot all about my father and his threat.
But now Ogon wasn’t here. His father had gotten a new job in Calabar, and had moved the whole family there. I was alone with these relatives who could only feed me pity.
My father’s brothers and uncles picked the date for the burial, and insisted on planning every aspect of the ceremony. Then the eldest of them, a man who I noticed smelled of tobacco when I greeted him, cleared his throat and said he would take up responsibility for my upbringing. “The boy is our child, and we must take care of him.”
My mother, who had been sitting with head bowed the entire time, looked up when he said this. I had never seen her sit up that straight before. “Over my dead body would I be parted from my child,” she said in the same voice she only ever used when my father came home late, smelling of the drinking parlour. The men tried to dissuade her. But I knew my mother, knew that no amount of wailing or stamping would get her to change her mind.
We moved to the city after this, my father’s kinsmen washing their hands off us. The adventure of a new beginning blunted my grief for a time. Some mornings we slept in, watching television and eating breakfast food for lunch. She bought me toys, took me to see the sights of the city. I enrolled in the same school as Ogon, and some nights my mother let me sleep over at his house.
But one day in school, someone told everyone that my father was dead, and they all started whispering behind my back, giving me funny looks when I walked past. For a while I tried to ignore them, but when the murmuring wouldn’t stop, I walked up to one of the boys and demanded that he tell me why he was talking about me. At first he looked away, but when it became clear that I wasn’t going to leave, he snarled and said, “What would you do if I don’t tell you?” Then he smiled, and I realized too late what was coming. “Are you going to report me to your daddy?”
I scurried away from the classroom, to the urinal at the back of the school. I felt something rising inside me, the same feeling like the one from when I had learned about my father’s death. My mouth was bitter, and I pressed my hand into my chest, trying to hold back the tears.
Ogon found me there, eyes open with concern, but I did not want to talk to him, and after I had turned my back on him twice, he took the hint and went away.
I did not return to class the rest of the day. The urinal was close to the cement fence that encircled the school. There were enough grooves in the fence to grant a foothold. I could be up and over on the other side in a matter of seconds. Undeveloped land waited on the other side, tall grasses and wild mango trees. I might get lost, but maybe I might find rare birds, squirrels and grasshoppers. At the very least there would be no taunting classmates out there in the wilderness, no pain from the grief of my father’s death.
I was still considering doing this when my mother arrived, led by Ogon. The bell had rung to mark the end of school without my hearing it. My mother and I didn’t speak to each other until we were back home, then I asked, “Where’s daddy?”
My mother sank into the couch. She had found work teaching English at a Senior Secondary school, and had now developed the habit of rubbing her forehead whenever I said something she thought was lacking in logic. “You know your father is no longer with us.”
I was not to be reasoned with. “When is he coming back?”
“You are twelve, Nsan.” Her voice was stern.
“I want to see him.”
“If he was here, he would slap your mouth.” She said it as if she was letting me in on a secret.
I knew the thing I was about to say would hurt her, but I said it all the same. “I want to go away.”
She did not bat an eyelid. “To where?”
“I don’t know. Anywhere is better than this place.”
She sighed, and I saw for the first time that she was very tired. Exhaustion oozed out of her eyes, and I wondered how she had been able to drive us home. “I don’t blame you, my love,” she said. “Me too I’ll like to leave.”
I stuttered. I had kept a response ready in anticipation of a harsh reply. Now that she had done the opposite, I did not know what to say. She patted the space on the couch beside her. All the anxiety that had engulfed me since the boy at school had made the comment about my father, the pressure in my chest, all of it bled away as I walked the short distance to the couch and flopped down next to her. She put her arm around me, and pulled me close so that my head rested on her chest. “This is me, and this is you.” Her chest went up and down as she spoke. “As long as one of us is here, the other cannot walk away.”
Those words carried me through teenhood. While peers hustled to get away from home, I applied to a local university instead. Whenever I saw a bird in the sky or a rodent scampering in the bush, as liberated as any cliché, I thought of my mother, and looked the other way.
Ogon caught on. “What is it about the wilderness that calls you?” he asked. I refused to answer. One day, he got so frustrated that he hissed at me and said, “You can keep your secrets to yourself.”
I did, and I also kept my promise to my mother, through university and early employment, expecting that she would hold up her own end of the bargain, but then she died.
*
Soon I could no longer stand watching Ogon fuss over the pot, and so I crawled out for some air. The sun had begun to sink, but still the shock of daylight after so much darkness made me squint. I stood there coughing, trying to see over the tree line to the town below. I couldn’t. If I wanted, I could pretend that the town had disappeared, or that we had gone back in time to a period of human history where trees were true giants, and animals did not know man.
I returned to the cave. The pot was bubbling now, and Ogon squatting over it was laughing. “I too found the cave to be a lot at first,” he said. “But still, I didn’t need to run outside after only five minutes.”
I ignored him. “What is the hardest part of living here?” I asked.
Without missing a beat he said, “My parents.” They were both still alive from what I knew, both still in Calabar. “They know I’m here, and every quarter of the year, they drive down to try and convince me to leave.”
Of course he didn’t care how his actions affected his parents. He hadn’t experienced the terror that comes from being made aware of their vulnerability. “Don’t you think you are being selfish?” I asked.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Anyway, this is my dream,” I said. “You are literally living my dream.”
He stirred the contents of the pot for a long time, not saying anything. When he finally looked up, I was shaken to see the shadow of anger across his face. “Did you create the trees, the grass, the plants?” he asked. “Was it you who scooped out the rocks and dirt to form this cave?”
There it was, that confidence again. I was jealous of him in every way one can be jealous of another human being. “Why did you decide to become my friend?” I asked.
He sighed, the weariness of three decades. “Perfect timing,” he said. “Being in this cave has allowed me to think about things like this. The other boys thought there was something wrong with you,” he pointed at his head. “I believed them, and decided to be your friend out of pity.”
It was as if I’d been rammed in the chest by a lorry. I stepped back until I was leaning against the cave wall. But then I had a revelation, I was allowed to try to hurt him back. “This is not a real cave,” I said, trying to add conviction to my voice. “It is just a hole in the side of the hill. You are living out a fake adventure.”
He did not respond for a long time, and when he finally did, his voice was calmer than I had expected. “Admit it,” he said, “this life doesn’t suit you.”
He was right. I couldn’t give up my life in the city for this cave. I hated him for making it look so easy. But also, of course, I admired him.
The broth he ladled into my bowl was worse than tasteless. The herbs carried a jolt that normally should have been embellished away with spices. But I was so hungry, I gulped it all down without complaint. Ogon watched me throughout, waiting for a compliment, I assumed. I did not give him one.
The mat, when I lay on it after putting away my bowl, did nothing to cushion my back from the rough cave floor. I struggled to go to sleep, thinking of the time I got accepted into the local university and my mother acted as if I was about to set off for the moon. This attitude persisted throughout university. Every time I would come home with a girl, she would shake her head, then drink from the bottle of cognac she kept on the kitchen countertop.
I woke up the whole night, changing positions because of the soreness. By the time I had gotten used to the discomfort, Ogon was rousing to catch the morning sun. I shut my eyes tight until he left the cave, then drifted back to sleep.
*
I had no sense of the hour when I woke again, only that the fire was now so cold that the faint smell of smoke was all that recalled its existence from the night before. I got up, and left the cave, shading my eyes, wondering where Ogon had gone.
A lone chewing-stick lay on a plantain leaf at the mouth of the cave. I was grateful for this hospitality. While cleaning my tongue with the stick I realized that I might be expected to find my own breakfast. I guessed his hospitality had its limits. Down the hill, the mango and breadfruit trees were not in season. Paw-paw might be in season, although I had been in the city too long to speak of rural ways with any certainty. Things moved in the tough grass, insects along with the creatures that preyed on them. Still there was no sign of Ogon.
My car was where I had left it. There were no scratches on the body, no nicks or other signs of attempted forced entry. I didn’t feel like driving though. Ogon was out there somewhere, trekking through the landscape, the clear blue sky above him. I wanted a taste of whatever it was he was gaining from living like this.
It had been a very dry season, the earth flakey and brittle, so that the soil broke into tiny particles that were then ground to a fine powder that rose with every footfall. I covered my nose and mouth with my hand, but it didn’t stop me from spitting out red saliva.
My mother had been in physical pain for months before she died. She, who had never been stylish, but nonetheless conscious of her appearance, now had her hair scattered all over the place. Every now and then she opened her eyes long enough to see something she didn’t like, then squeezed them shut and ground her teeth. She would groan and look at me in embarrassment, like she was aware of the toll it was taking on me to sit there and sponge her face every day. “No child should see their parent like this,” she said to me. I wanted to say something reassuring in return but I couldn’t. At night I would wake at the slightest sound. Sometimes I was convinced I heard her scream, only to find her asleep in bed, lips twitching.
A boy wearing a cycling hat shot across my path. He wasn’t quite tall enough to reach my shoulder, his arms and legs were still skinny, with many more years of filling out yet to come. Just before he disappeared into the bush, he turned to look at me, and I saw that he had a scar running from the bridge of his nose to under one eye. A smooth scar, lighter in shade than the rest of his face. I could not stare at him for long.
I knew where I was headed even though I had not planned to go there. The sun was over the summit of Ekabokom hill by the time I arrived at the house. It stood one story tall as I remembered, but wore a different coat of paint, clay-orange, with taupe stripes framing the windows. The floor of the veranda was new, the linoleum polished and shiny. The front door was the same old oak, but the handle had been replaced by one of the more modern options, the slim kind that meant the door could be opened with a gentler touch. I knocked.
A middle-aged woman stepped outside, staring at me in befuddlement. Her eyes were large, with a mess of red lines across the whites. Most of her was covered by a long blue dress with puffy sleeves. She gripped the handle of the door with one hand, with the other, she clutched a thin, silver pendant dangling from her neck. Her feet were bare, and I could see her thick ankles bob up and down as she tapped one foot on the ground in either impatience or anxiety.
I had followed an impulse to come here. It had never even crossed my mind that I might need to introduce myself, and now that I was expected to do so, I found that I was shy from all the attention.
“My name is Nsan Ayuk,” I said. “My father used to live here.”
She let go of the door, bringing her face so close I could smell onions on her breath. I had a full head on her, and she had to look upwards at my face. She swept her eyes over me, moving up and down. I held steady by looking over her shoulder into the house, saw the shoe shelves lining the hallway, the new paintings on the wall.
“Nsan.” She spoke in our native tongue. Rubbing my arms, my chest, my face. “You have your mother’s face, but it is your father’s spirit that has brought you here.” I chuckled. She had spoken those words like they were the most obvious thing in the world.
“It is me,” I said.
“Where have you been?”
I did not know how to answer that question, but I did not need to. She was speaking again, in English this time, her hands on her chest, saying my other relatives wouldn’t believe her if she told them I had returned. My father’s two other brothers were dead, an aunt had moved to another State. I had cousins everywhere, cousins who did not know me. “We did not come for your mother’s burial because we thought she wouldn’t have wanted that,” she said.
Twenty-four years it had been, and yet I wasn’t the least surprised by her reticence. My mother had made a big statement by taking me away from them, by moving us to the city. This was against tradition, against the very working of the world. In those years, I had come across my mother crying in the bathroom because one of her relatives had asked her why she wouldn’t remarry. I had never questioned her because this was how it was supposed to be, just the two of us, and beyond that, the hard, fiery world.
“I would have been happy if you came.” I was surprised by the onrush of relief I felt the moment I said this.
The woman was smiling, her grace abundant and generous. “I am Veronica Ntui, your father’s cousin.” She pinched my cheeks. “I had just had my second child when you and your mother went away.”
My stomach rumbled then, alerting her to the fact that I hadn’t eaten all day. “Come inside,” she said, leading me through the door. The paintings on the wall, the new tiles, the clingy smell of lavender, I might have well been in the house of a stranger. I moved with the meek gait of a visitor, avoiding the walls, glancing at everything. When she strode into the kitchen, I hung back, unsure. But she was soon waving me in. “Come and eat,” she said. “Don’t be afraid, this is your house.” Those words, not very accurate yet suffused with so much compassion that I could not resist them. I was being welcomed, me who had been a complete stranger only some minutes ago.
“I tell my sons to be hungry when they come to visit.” Veronica’s eyes beamed when she mentioned her sons. “Two of them are always fighting over the last meat in the pot.”
She set a bowl of egusi soup and eba in front of me. The aroma of the crushed melon seeds, the meat broth and fresh peppers. I barely paused long enough to blow over the lumps of eba before throwing them into my mouth. It was only after I was done eating and about to ask for seconds that I realized the sight I must have made, swallowing the food with the sauces dripping onto the tabletop.
Veronica was pleased by all this. The look on her face was in equal parts approval and tenderness. “You eat like my sons, they will be very happy to meet you.”
I realized I was curious about meeting them too. How had their experience growing up in this house differed from mine? They must feel a sense of proprietorship over the place that I had long since forgotten. When I was done eating, Veronica led me to the living room, right up to the family portraits on the wall. I recognized her husband, a short, dark man who used to help my father ferment his palm wine. I saw her sons through the ages, as young boys who wore matching clothes, teenagers with gangly arms and knees made enormous by the slightness of the rest of their body. Now they dressed like young men at the rear end of my generation, round sunglasses and shorts so tight they might as well have worn spandex.
Veronica jabbed at this last photo and started laughing. “Maybe if you tell them how stupid they look, they would listen to you.” She put her arm through mine. The ease with which she did so, the way it appeared that she hadn’t considered that I might rebuff her. “They think I’m too old, maybe they would listen to their big brother.”
Something dull and jagged grew in my throat. I tried to respond, but the lump would not let me, instead my vision began to blur, and I had to blink rapidly to control myself. Veronica seemed to become aware of what I was going through, but instead of drawing attention to it, she began to rub my back, narrating a litany of stories about her sons, how they had given their father much headache as teenagers, but that since they had left the house, he couldn’t get on with his weekend until he had spoken to both of them on the phone.
We stood there for a long time, arm in arm, until my voice came back to me and I told her that I must be on my way.
“When are you returning to the city?” she asked.
“This evening,” I replied.
“You must come again.” Her teeth were so white, much whiter than you’d see in someone her age. “You must come back when your brothers are around. My husband would love to meet you.”
I nodded. I was going to return. I could still taste the onions from the egusi on the back of my tongue. I was intrigued by this husband of hers who couldn’t permit himself two days of rest until he had spoken to his sons. I wanted to tell her about my mother, the stabs of pain that left her sniffling like a child, how she had looked at me towards the end like she knew she had done a terrible thing, stranding me out there with her.
“Can I bring you a gift the next time I come?”
She burst into laughter. The sound was smooth and demure, weathered by all the years she had lived. “Wait until I tell your brothers,” she said. “They never bring me anything.”
*
The sun was clear on the other side of the horizon by the time I started back up the hill. I hadn’t even realized how long I had been with Auntie Veronica, and even now I was still thinking about her, how she had tried to force plantains and yams on me, frozen fish and corn flour. I was too thin, she said.
My voice had filled the room when I said no, that I’d be back the following weekend, more prepared, ready to take the entire pantry with me if she so wished. She rubbed my back and let me leave. And now I was on the hill again, the dark vegetation now familiar to me. I stepped over the places where erosion had come up against thick shrubs and gnarly roots. My thighs ached from all this trekking; my lungs were sore from being overtasked.
Close to the cave, I caught sight of Ogon, sitting outside the entrance, chewing something. He looked bored in the way of a wealthy landowner surveying his land at the end of a long day.
I shook my head good-naturedly at the arrogant slope of his shoulders, the way his jaw moved up and down like he had all the time in the world. Well, he was no longer the only one who did. We were separated by mere meters now. I started jogging, impatient to see the look on his face when I told him I wouldn’t need dinner tonight.
*
Reyumeh Ejue is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has been published in Transition Magazine, The Hudson Review, swamp pink, and Open Country Mag.
Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash