Her sclera is a waned flax colour, like the husk of a ripe cacao fruit. She reeks of fresh leaves, giving off the body scent of one who had been wading through forests. When I think she sees me, her gaze sweeps past, unsettled, trundling onto faraway things. She regards everything with glazed eyes that carry no ounce of recognition.
“That’s her,” my sister whispers, indicating the woman with a pout. I stall, not knowing what to say. What do you say to loss? With what words do you bathe a woman who has lost her six-year-old twin sons to unidentified persons? Do you whisper or assure aloud, they will come back, madam? Or everything you lost shall be returned to you ten-fold? Her hair is dishevelled, the curls twisted into uncombed knots. Her unwashed face is a darker hue than it must have always been. This woman does not want our ten-fold. All she desires is to have her two sons back, the ones that were stolen off her porch.
“Where have you searched?” the crowd swarming about asks in different words. Her shoulders slump in response. She appears frazzled as she lifts an arm and points toward all the locations she must have extended her search to. She lets the hand fall. I think I see tears pooling in her eyes.
“Everywhere,” she whispers. Her words arrive withered. Her grief is ineffable and has expanded to her eyes, cracked her lips, and coarsened her voice. It is bare like an uncovered sore.
So sister, you haven’t seen them yet?
Who could have done this evil thing?
Wait, do you mean they stole the boys, the two of them? At the same time?
You will see a witch doctor. This case is nothing.
These people, unaffected by loss, hurl questions at her, and they slink away right after getting the answers, perhaps caught up in their relief at not being in the epicentre of such grief. Each time the voices of the crowd begin fade in, a new chatter builds up. She nods. She responds. She shakes her head. She gives out her phone number. She saves numbers that bear froths of promises. Her defeat decimates her into small chunks of herself, makes her say little. She says she has visited three witch doctors, broken fresh eggs at three-forked roads, chewed alligator pepper at midnight hours, and scattered the nzu powder at the lip of her compound. Now, she’s awaiting results.
I find myself stuck in a cold well of debilitation. I wonder what waiting means in this case. Does she sit on her veranda, staring quietly at the clouds, believing? Is there a need to think of time, to say it is one week today or three weeks today or one year today? Does she label her activities within those tunnels that the monolithic nature of time provides? Does she eat or laugh or immerse her body into passionate activities like lovemaking? Does she feel betrayed by the universe, or does she struggle with the guilt of letting time level the chasm of the pain she feels?
For most of my life, I knew stories of such losses. In the small town where I spent my childhood, a family – they were distant relatives – searched for their father for a long time. The speculations vacillated between whether he was alive or dead. Some people rumoured he was seen very close to home, near a market. Others claimed they saw him raving mad in a distant city. I could not deduce why he disappeared, or why his presence mattered. Each year of absence, however, dimmed the light of love and memory. Life slowly moved on without him. What hurt his loved ones was the unbalanced reality they faced. There was no proof that he was dead, and therefore a funeral could not be held to close his memory. The hope for his return must linger on even after he may have died off somewhere.
Finally, what happened?
The man returned one afternoon as the sun flared wildly in the sky, eased open his compound gate and walked in as if he had not been missing for twenty years. What did this mean? Where had he been? Would he remember his sojourns during those long years? Memories of him appeared to have receded in the minds of our towns’ people. He was no longer the loving son and brother we lost. He became the strange-looking man who suddenly showed up for a fresh beginning. Our people had only loved him from a distance and treasured the vacuum his absence spawned. There no longer seemed to be a place for him. I wondered if his family grew weary at some point before he returned, and stopped searching, or if they secretly wished that he had continued to stay away because they had trudged on for so long without him.
I often think about loss in its general sense and why it happens―but I am left completely befuddled. I think of it as the universe’s way of renewing itself. Yet this has more to do with the loss of life, a reminder that the earth is not our permanent home. But the sudden disappearance of people without evidence of death fills me with heartache. Death is definite and identifiable. He lies here. She died on the sixteenth. May the universe grant them a safe passage.
A missing person triggers a frightening pain and sparks the reminder that danger lurks close. You go to bed with their smells and thoughts of them, and the dread that they might be somewhere, trapped underneath the watch of other terrible pairs of eyes. You surrender to boundless possibilities of torture and rape and death. Slowly, the pain gravitates towards some sort of reconciliation, and you desist from beckoning answers. You inter them and the memory grows less tragic, and the missing loved one starts to fade with each passing month. This must hurt.
When a human skull was exhumed by some labourers on a piece of land lying along the dual expressway that stretches from the Obina-Ikwerre Bridge to the Omagwa airport in Rivers state, a throng of witnesses gathered as custom. The warm air triggered a statewide dread. Speculations collected on all sides and spread through the media. This must be where some of the missing people go. Could the skull belong to the driver whose Missing Person poster was plastered on every wall on my street until the rainstorms washed them down to splotches of white paper? Was it Ibinabo, the lady whose picture we reposted on Facebook that year? She went out last night and hasn’t returned. How many more nights had her family gone to bed without her? In the rash of missing people cases spreading over every nook of our daily lives, which would the exhumed skull belong to?
Juddy, a grocer we bought food supplies from, was taken next. She was escorted into the back of a car by two strange men, under the full glare of an afternoon, and some metres from a police station. People were frightened by few gunshots, and the car disappeared down the road. The dispersed crowd reassembled around the space where Juddy had stood earlier. Her pair of slippers lay there, a disturbing sign that the human who once occupied this space was gone. It was possible to question in such moments, if Juddy existed, if anyone recalled what she looked like.
Where was the chubby woman who stood here some minutes ago, making a phone call? Is it true that some men took her away? Was a woman indeed standing here some minutes ago?
Juddy reappeared months later, paled at the memories of her experiences and the trauma. Her eyes were empty. She nodded and smiled at everyone. She disappeared often to hospital appointments. The only story she shared was how a woman whose family didn’t complete the requested ransom was beheaded, and she was forced to watch. There was another unvoiced speculation of forced sexual intimacy. Would she recover and carry on?
These familiar tragedies have happened to people from all walks of life. Juddy is however counted lucky, because how many of these victims reappear alive? How many of them remain erased?
In the masses of people hastening to get to their businesses, it is tasking to ascertain the number of people missing from the chaos. Time moves. The weather fluctuates from warm to cool. The rain beats down on the zinc roofs like the fall of needles. Nobody else notices, apart from the victim’s loved ones, that the man who walks by often holding a paper bag had not walked by in weeks. Nobody remembers. We are obliterated the moment our disappearance is registered. Human memory is like snowflakes, melts off at the gentle stroke of the wind. This is perhaps the reason why industrialization rips out the old picture of places we claim to know so well, and we fail, except we are reminded, to bear witness to how things used to be.
There’s something different about this place now.
It’s the new wall.
Oh, true. The wall.
What was here before?
A small market was here.
That’s true, the market!
Lately, I am plagued by the fear of losing someone in that manner. I am bugged more by the thought that I might cave into the pressure of time and stop searching, that I might allow memories of them to be eroded from the dining table, their laughter or coughs, as well as something funny they did with their faces draining out from the familiar. Only soap and lotion smells whip them briefly into memory, but not as humans in motion, rather as a static image, unmoving, a snapshot of some outstanding thing they were doing.
When I take my six-year-old nephew to a shopping mall, I am usually afraid to leave him under another person’s watch even for a second. Caution, however, wears off sometimes, especially when we are pressed with a deadline for some tasks. I tell him to stay in the car for a little bit. I’d just take some money from the Mobile Bank and be with him shortly. The transaction takes even a shorter time, but he is not there when I arrive. At first, it feels incredulous. There is no room for panic yet. I blink. He is not there. A blank space opens, and I tumble in. I see nothing else except that my nephew who was there a few minutes earlier was no longer there. Fear pulses through me and moves up my arms and neck and fills my throat and the floor of my mouth, and gathers in my eyes. Will my nephew be added to the number of missing people? Will the space I stand in be cordoned off by memory as a crime scene, a place of yet another loss? I do not know how to stand in the circle the woman who lost her twins occupied, neither do I want to be made to describe my nephew’s punk haircut, the black jeans and light blue cardigan he had on, and his chocolate skin tone.
I tug open the car door, peer under the carpets, ineffectually hoping that he had become so small and can fit under there. I tremble with regret and loss. I scream his name. My voice surprises the world. People wheel around to glare at me. My nephew comes running from a corner of the car park, zipping his fly. He’d gone to urinate, he says, and his attention was seized by a cartoon movie showing on a television nearby. I hug him. My sweet, sweet nephew. He stares at my face.
“You look funny,” he says and chuckles. I think of this narrow escape. The people milling about have no idea that had the tectonic plates moved slightly against me, they would be rallying about me by now, filled with dread and questions.
The next time I see the woman who lost her twins, we are sharing the backseat of a taxi. Her hair is beautifully coiffed in the manner of someone who has chosen to keep living. Her grief is etched deep in her heart, tucked away from people’s eyes. She has two large shopping bags and struggles to contain them between her thighs. I take one of them from her without asking. She glances at me with relief. There is a bareness about her, as if she’s lost her life’s bulwark.
“Thank you.”
Despite her terrible burden, she can produce the language of gratitude. She does not remember me, yet I know her. I’d always remember her. Thank you, she says again when I alight and pay her taxi fare. This service is my token to her life’s walk already replete with sadness. This is my way of standing in solidarity with another human and offering an act of kindness, which I hope she commits to mind for at least the next hour.
Kidnaps and abductions are a leitmotif in our societies; half the cases are forgotten after a shake of the head. Witch doctors often join the search. They rattle conch shells and make mandatory demands for virgin rats and the first eggs ever laid by a bird. Most times, nothing happens. There is only the blurred report of they are still alive which is rather haunting than relieving.
In the old neighbourhood where I once worked, I visit there and mention a name, Ifeanyi, and everyone falls silent. Is he dead? No, it’s worse. He’s missing. He took a phone call and went out to meet the caller. It’s been two months. He hasn’t returned. This news frightens me―the huge emergency of looking for a whole human being, a grown man of over forty years. His little children look up in expectation at every creak of the door. His wife, a tree snapped from its stem, holds the rein of feeding their little ones and feigning control over her trauma. Whom did he last speak with? Where did his feet touch last as a free man? Is he tied up in some underbrush or some windowless room, this feisty man? There’s no lead yet.
I try to extract him from my thoughts, refusing to submit to the tragic pithiness of human memory, but his image flees unending, morphing into blurred replays of a one-time conversation with him. I see him strolling past and calling me sister, his voice concealed in a dark corner. I strive to beat him down from everywhere and clamp my eyes shut to retrieve more recollections of him, but he has been inexorably swept into the small nothings where missing people go.
This essay first appeared in the Afro Anthology Series: The Weight of Years.
Frances Ogamba is a 2022 CLA fellow at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has won the 2022 Diana Woods Award in Creative Nonfiction, the 2020 Kalahari Short Story Competition and the 2019 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She is also a finalist for the 2019 Writivism Short Story Prize and 2019 Brittle Paper Awards for short fiction. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Ambit, Ninth Letter, Chestnut Review, CRAFT, New Orleans Review, Lunch Ticket, Vestal Review, The Dark Magazine, Uncharted, Frivolous Comma, Jalada Africa, in The Best of World SF and elsewhere. She is a 2022 Pushcart Prize and Locus Awards Nominee and her stories have been recommended on must-read lists by Tor Magazine. She is an alumna of the Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop taught by Chimamanda Adichie.