There was so much Dike wanted which made his heart pound hard often, which made him snarl at everything in silence, which sometimes would bring to him abstract emotions. These emotions could linger, say for days or weeks making him steal glances at people, especially the ones in fancy apparels. He would withdraw his eyes often (like he was doing now in the bus) and place it on his shoes, the only thing he quite understood. Nothing else was to be done on it; a street cobbler had once offered him his, since he bluntly alleged that Dike’s shoes had seen better days; yet as Dike looked at it he would refute that he recognized, that he noticed the strands of thread peeking out, the constant needle-like and burning itches on his toes with the fury it brought to his eyes; he would deny these truths and move on with whatever pains available. These things were nothing and didn’t have to matter; they were meaningless, nothing like his fifty-seven years old body.
He watched with ease and a little bit of disdain, the green branches that slightly faded the gas station to chrome, the decaying pomegranate that littered its floor, the hefty smoke of exhaust pipes and the drag, anchored with curses and shouts of desperate hawkers with treacherous smiles and tender assurances, slightly pushing everything into the vehicles with persons; okpa, plantain chips, cashew nuts, La casera; everything. He sat on the edge, watching and smiling, scared of the invisible; the dried voice that has become his privilege – where laughter once lived, the lump that has thickened in his lungs. He couldn’t quite see what it would hold yet; nobody does see such things really. It has been blurred by other things, the no and the leave me that was once his, the precarious reasons and excuses that has now creased his weight, the time that has become an upright fawn, casting almost a little or no shadow. But he would be fine, there are no side effects to recurring stiffness in men like him, men with years’ experience of late-night torture session from angry and hungry wives, unrequited disrespect from their kids younger than eighteen.
He had been a sucker for such things, a sucker on life support: diazepam, diclofenac, ibuprofen and multivitamins. His wife had used the word ‘unwell’ when he told her that he would be going to Umuahia that morning. She had suddenly started rolling on the floor in tears, telling him he was unwell for a few fleeting moment. Her body in the process was wrapped with contempt or anger or something, the expressions on her face charged with pity – a strange and recent agitation which had made Dike even more determined to travel. He wasn’t sure if he was the man she swore to love life after life. It amused him on the ease of the phrase, for life might have failed him or might have even fixed upon him a gaze which in fact entirely bright, seemed futile. He had become darker with years of burning cigarettes, his hair dishevelled; such sight a respite for death. His eyes, a hollow thing with a pinch of red cataracts and with a sunken chest, he had become an alien to himself, a battered one.
“Oga, you no go buy anything? The driver don buy fuel finish o.” The man with the Khaki trousers near him said.
Dike stared at him for long; he had seen him at the bus park in Enugu gesticulating at a woman whose money had fallen. He had gone to bury his dead. The man’s image glared on the distal part of his chest, Adieu Nnaanyi written in what seemed like a marker. He wondered how the dead had lived, wondered if he was such persons who usually fought death when it came knocking, for he too had fought death and might still be fighting, because he was unwell. His thigh bones ached and the ones in his back ached more. Death was near him. He had become sullen and unperturbed with what laid in each new day, what was to come in the next tyrannous hour to confront him or to pull him into an unknown place; hell or heaven he was ready, he wasn’t going to resist again. He had had enough, winning these enemies of uncertainties, tossing their metallic stones back and strangely whispering ‘it is not yet my time oh’. His strength was gone and he was done with whatever silly play it had become.
“No”, it didn’t come out quite right. It wasn’t the way people said it and it wasn’t what he wanted to say. He would have said yes, would have made it clear to him that there was no money. But those words were powerless, as they had always been.
The man gave a sluggish nod, a kind and sympathetic one. He went on to give Dike unsolicited praises about being a real man, not behaving like a child, beckoning on everything that came with a ware. He wanted to say more, he was saying more, filled with the admiration of seeing his own tongue wag. He mentioned hard times occasionally, snapping his fingers as he talked, his Igbo and English tangling. He would often pause, expecting Dike to say something – though Dike sought distractions from his thoughts by listening to him – his willing ears and eyes had become bored, tired. Anybody would have noticed his lack of interest; anybody would have seen the little pouches of sickness and hunger.
“Ozugo, I want to rest small” Dike said.
The man stopped, with mouth half opened, eyes widened, gawping at Dike. His bewilderment proffered a new look on him. He sagged with contempt on his back and turned his gaze almost immediately towards the window, muttering swear words in Igbo about terrible and rude poor men who couldn’t afford sachet water.
But Dike was not poor, or maybe he was. But something absurd had disguised itself as wealth within him. He was a man who believed in nothing but himself. A man who believed in what was his own, no matter how little, no matter how empty. He looked up on life in the ideal hustle (according to his own terms) on your own, people might be really reclusive although with claims of being deeply immersed in your struggle tales, and upon the sentiment that a man should on no account trade his self respect going on long walks just to find himself back, stirring gossips. He was metaphorically pointing on himself contemptuously, extremely pushing himself off being in any sort of need. He had been implanted with something tasty yet sour, something still yet detached, something he was lost to. Something which had made him board a bus to Umuahia after six years.
He took out the invitation, a carefully folded yellow paper with the state seal of Abia State. His wife had kept it till this day, the way she had kept the one before it and the others. He unfolded it and glanced at few words, his eyes had started to itch, a tear rolled down, another one and another, then it came freely, permitting this full-grown man to yearn vaguely and uncertain, yet somewhat sure of his recent novelty, conscious of the transience of life that had made him board a bus to Umuahia after six years, a life without an end.
He fixed his gaze on the paper, he wasn’t reading. The name which was always distinguishable at the end spot had come in bold alphabets. This was the first time he had ever looked at it. DR. NEBOLISA IKE. He forced a smile, not really a smile (for his real smile has in recent time remained undiscovered) but a sort of brief and irresponsible laugh and mumbled “DR.kwa”. His face displayed that peculiar anxiety mixed with disgust, an expression that comes only on instant knowledge of an unpleasant memory. He strived to push out the image that has come forming in his head, Nebo’s face remained the same in all his memory of him, a round face with pockmarks and dark blemish around the eyes, an uneven moustache and even more pockmarks. This is the image that always fits before his eyes, even though it wasn’t what he exactly looked like now. The man had become new, (he had seen him on the National Tv some years back, just a sheer glance) had become fine. He hated to admit it, the “Nebo is beautiful”, his wife always said and the fury it whispers; and so he has come to hate his wife more for saying such words.
As he rightly remembers now, the first time he met Nebolisa at the INEC office in Enugu in the late 80’s he had those pockmarks (just a little, not like the ones that appear in recent times), was newly married, had a white lady’s bike and lived in a room apartment at Coal Camp. Nebolisa, a short-demoralized man in his late forties had walked into his office, wearing a shoddy and ill-fitting western suit. He had a decent soul then, the tide that bound men had fallen on them and they became friends to very close friends to what later seemed like brothers. When Nebolisa got arrested for being a suspect in the robbery of a Mercedes Benz, it was he who bailed him. The night his wife left with their daughter, it was he who consoled him throughout the night and throughout the month. He ate in his house and stayed late, and sometimes he did sleepover, sobbing in bass about having been evicted by his landlord, snoring in a high and low pitch on the couch. But those were years ago, years before he thought Nebolisa should contest for the Governor of Abia state, before Nebolisa became unknown; became far.
Their bus jolted often, making grating purrs that brought suffering to their ears, the roughness of the air bloated his Dashiki often, softening the sighs of sour thoughts. He would lean on the man with Khakitrousers, their eyes struggling to stay adrift and in the sweat of his upturned face make silent moans of pain. The bus made a brief stop – a demand of refreshment by the passengers. Dike remained in his seat watching them in their harness urinate and buy things. His gaze was on the man with the Khaki trousers, he had not noticed his potbelly – half big half clear. He admired things like that, but yet somehow it sickened him. “Nebolisa is chopping life, his tummy is big oh!” a friend had told him years back. His belly was flat as his own the last time he saw him. To think of the man calling himself a doctor bothered him more. He had never had a sense of getting past his National Diploma. During their days of brotherliness, he had added scorn upon everything education. Nothing interested him more than his strives for power and money, more than his strives for getting only himself in.
He could have recognised what he was then; could have noticed this unqualified doctor. Yet as he sat there, disconnected from the world, his head kept pacing, decluttering, pulling out strings of insomnia and if one listened closely he or she would hear the hum of his mind at work. He didn’t see why he would hesitate to express what was in his mind. He didn’t see why he had been ignoring Nebo’s invites to the government house for the past six years. Nebolisa had been his friend, it was his money he gave him to rent a house in Umuahia when his political ambition was birthed, it was him who lost his job at the INEC office after the rigged election and ever since then, he had been wandering about, looking for a moment with him, a moment to just re-introduce himself in any case he had forgotten, a moment to just tell him that life had cast a frightening shadow upon him. A moment he had chosen to bury till now. But he has fallen behind these moments, he would not just say these things to him and pretend that his words were done. He would prostrate and let out a loud cry. He would ask him his terms if there were any and accept them once. He wouldn’t mind any sort of cheap wine he would offer. He would go on and tell him to offer him food, that he had not eaten a proper meal for a very long time, that he was unwell. He would beg Nebolisa for money. A motionless obscurity fell on him on these thoughts and as he looked out of the moving vehicle, it collected all his feelings.
“Do you want water?” the man with the Khakitrousers asked.
“I say, do you want water?” he blurted now, after Dike’s silence.
Dike shrugged contemptuously now, a bitter sensation had started to fill-in. What more could an aged man want; an aged man with a sombre and hungry face, an unwell aged man. Yet with an aching heart he would say NO. A swift no, a no which had always come freely, the way it came when Nebolisa asked if he needed help six years ago, the way it comes anytime his wife persuades him to go see him; the way it would always come.
He avoided the man’s eyes the more now, constantly wooing a distant sleep and failing. Somehow, he wanted to hit him on his shoulder, to tell him that his friend was the Governor of Abia State, to tell him never to feel sorry for him. But there was no need to lose his temper again since their destination was reached. He didn’t speak to the man, neither of them did. He found an empty cab with a distraught body and tossed his bag in.
It was late November, and the red harmattan dusts of Umuahia swallowed all but the windscreen of the cab. The road filtered clean, nothing like the old denim and gravel roads. It was smooth, like the very large portraits of his friend with the inscription ‘Nebolisa is Working’ plastered everywhere: water tanks, billboards, windscreens of public vehicles, battered walls; everywhere. There, the trip reminds, it is bound to his memory like a treacherous nightmare, a sonorous soliloquy in a fluency of tears; Dike had been hardened over the years, crumbled so many times but still tough and stoic – he likes to assure himself. Now that this age long lies have crystallized into a diamond alibi, the glare of facing an unknown truth.
He didn’t shrug nor shake his head; he only felt he should reproach himself for not noticing. What his wife had failed to understand was that beyond hard walls laid layers of soft air. It wasn’t such a big deal owning all that they had required for, for the good life, all which apparently made life fair. It would have been easy to say yes to the Khaki man’s offer of water, would have been easier to ask for money. His slow and dull approach to issues had labelled him a weakling amongst his family. Things were hard wasn’t the nicest thing to say to a 14-year-old daughter who had requested a little money to buy a sanitary pad. It wasn’t the most favourable thing to say to a son with ulcer nor one to be said to a wife in need of little fragments of love. If for nothing his father had lived like him, his grandfather too. Does a sun go from being a sun to being a moon? This was who he was, Dike Mbadiwe, the son of his father. To hell with any man who would ever project his insecurities on another man, to hell with him. He wasn’t quite certain who he had become, but certainly those were his words.
He spat through the window and cleared his throat.
“Nna, biko, turn around, take me back to the park”
The driver looked at him through the rear-view mirror to be certain. Dike nodded.
“You go pay me double o”
Dike nodded, he wouldn’t mind starving himself throughout the day, he wouldn’t mind that this was the only money he had – gotten from his wife with sweet assurances of paying with interest. He doesn’t mind.
The harsh wind of harmattan came with a full force now, it raised a pamphlet lying on the dashboard and he caught it. On it was written ‘Our Governor is Working, God Bless Him’. It had Nebo’s face and those pockmarks were slightly visible. For a moment, Dike silently wished he could continue the journey.
Madufor-Edmund Ifunanya is an Igbo storyteller from Nigeria residing in a secluded area of Nsukka, where she finds meaning in art. Ifunanya, who is also a workshop alumnus of Ake fiction 2016, has been published on Brittle Paper, the Kalahari Review and University of Nigeria’s ‘The Muse Journal’. She is one who seeks love and consolation from African literature and cinema. She constantly hopes to find herself in stories and above all to be read.