Anthills of the Savannah (25 page)

The red-eyed sergeant who was given charge of Beatrice’s bedroom was executing it with a vengeance. He had pulled out the bedsheets off the bed and thrown them on the floor where he walked all over them as he frenziedly darted from one object to another. It was fortunate that Beatrice never learnt to lock suitcases and things. So the sergeant’s fury had nothing to wrench open. He merely spilt clothes everywhere. The officer came in and asked him again to go easy and picked up the bedsheets himself and threw them back on the bed. As the captain turned his back Beatrice caught in the eye of the sergeant a flash from the utmost depths of contempt and hatred.

“Miss Okoh, excuse my asking. Who is this young lady?”

“She is Elewa… my girlfriend.”

“Your
girl
friend? Interesting. What does she do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean does she have a job?”

“Yes. She is a sales-girl in a Lebanese shop.”

“Does she live with you normally?”

“No, she is just visiting.”

“I see.”

Elewa’s eyes darted from one to the other as they discussed her like the seller and prospective buyer of some dumb animal brought to the market. Her grief had temporarily been displaced by these strange events now going on around her. In her oversize jeans and dressing gown she looked almost comical. She was not walking around with Beatrice and the officer but had taken her position on a dining-chair in the living-room annexe.

Beatrice, worried about her fall, asked as many times as she came through the living-room how she felt. No trouble, she would answer. Perhaps it was the Valium making her unusually calm.

In Elewa’s room the soldier detailed there was looking through papers and books on the table when Beatrice trailing the officer came in again.

“Are you looking for books too?”

“Everything,” replied the officer on behalf of the soldier. “My people have a saying which my father used often. A man whose horse is missing will look everywhere even in the roof.”

He searched everywhere for his missing horse for about an hour, apologized for disturbing Beatrice’s sleep, saluted and left. What kind of enigma was this? Could there really be even one decent young man in the Security Services or indeed the entire Kangan Army and Police. Or was this the ultimate evil—the smiling face of Mephistopheles in the beguiling habit of a monk? Safer by far to believe the worst.

A
S SHE WAS
drowsily getting dressed for work the bedside telephone rang. Startled, she grabbed it on the second ring. A voice said: “Miss Okoh?”

“Yes. Who is that?” Her heart was thumping and the telephone in her unsteady hand bobbed up and down against her ear. Silence at the other end. Was he gone? Then:

“Never mind who. I know where the horse is. But I don’t want to find him. Get him moved. Before tonight.” He rang off.

Or was he cut off? She stood transfixed, the handset in her hand vibrating still against her ear. Hoping the voice would return? Had they been intercepted? Slowly she replaced and sank with leaden weariness into her unmade bed.

Move him? Was it a trap? To lure him into the soldier-infested streets? Who exactly was this fellow? Could he be genuine? Who in God’s name could one ask? Tears of loneliness began to form in her eyes. She got up, wiped them and blew her nose and then tiptoed to Elewa’s room. She was sleeping beautifully, childlike,
beguiled perhaps by a dream in which the bad news had not yet been heard, where what happened here had not yet happened. She tiptoed out again leaving her to snatch what strength she could from the short reprieve of her dreams. She picked up her handbag and went alone in search of a safe telephone.

Later in the office she had a restless day wondering whether any of the score of accidents that could happen to the move had happened, and which. Only one was needed. Just as they say of bullets… The worst thing was sitting there so inactive signing daft letters, and not knowing what was going on. Should she risk a quick phone call from another office just to know, even without saying a word, whether his host, already gone to work when she had transmitted the message, had been reached to come back to arrange the move. And again that officer, was he genuine? Could anyone be genuine in these shark-infested waters? What then could his game be? Oh God! But why couldn’t she just slip into one of the offices down the corridor, dial the number and see who picks up the phone? But Chris would be mad; he had been so insistent that she must not… And if she simply dialled the number and didn’t speak, that could cause panic at the other end and might lead to a false step… Oh my God!

She left her office like a bird released from its cage, on the dot of three-thirty. (Chris had also insisted that she must not leave before closing time on his account because her movements would then attract attention. Damn his efficiency!) She did not head straight for home but went ostensibly shopping. From the crowded parking-lot, however, she went elsewhere than the shops.

There was a sprightliness in her walk as she returned to the parking-lot that told all her news. She decided to treat herself to a phial of Blue Grass and went into the shops. Instead of one bottle she bought two; one for Elewa. Then she picked up a loaf of bread and a few other groceries and set out jauntily for home. At the car-park she deposited her bag of purchases on the bonnet of her car and unzipped her handbag for the key. She searched one compartment and then the other. Her ill-used heart began to palpitate again. She told herself to keep calm, take a deep breath, and search the bag more thoroughly. She did, and even emptied the contents on the bonnet. But the little bunch was not there. She half-ran all the hundred or so yards to the public telephone. A man
was making a call. She knocked on the glass door and tried to slide it open. The man interrupted his conversation to protest.

“I am sorry. I’m looking for my car key.”

“There is no car key here,” said the man angrily as he wrenched the door from her hand, shut it firmly and resumed his conversation, after a hissing sound longer than men generally could manage. She returned dejectedly to the car after she had retraced her steps with mounting hopelessness through the various stops she had made inside the shop and the different cashiers’ stations where she had brought out her wallet from her handbag and made payments. Everyone, especially the perfumery girls, remembered her, but not her bunch of keys.

She was tired; hugely tired. The sun’s routine oppression had changed all at once into a special act of vindictiveness against her in reprisal perhaps for the nervous energy she had just displayed instead of the languor decreed from above. All around her in the parking-lot she saw vaguely in slow motion hundreds, more wise than she, who obeyed and prospered.

She turned around for no apparent reason and took a look inside the car, and saw the keys dangling from the key-hole. Transports of joy! Now she could go home and even if she failed to locate her spares—which had become a major fear since she had begun considering strategies—she could bring a mechanic, even a car-thief, and force the door-lock or do something with the glass, and move the car.

Smiling, she went in search of a taxi. Was it happiness about the keys or something deeper, a response called up by the crisis in which she and her friends were enmeshed? Whatever it was, she struck up a conversation with the taxi-driver and very soon she was learning things she didn’t know, about the death of Ikem, about the missing Commissioner for Information and about the planned meeting tomorrow of the Taxi Drivers Union “to put their mouth into this nonsense story” of Ikem’s death.

“If you get somewhere to go make you go today. Tomorrow no taxi go run.”

By the time they got to her flat the rapport between Beatrice and the driver was such that although she took a little time finding her spare keys he did not mind in the least. The beer she offered him to make the time pass more pleasantly he put away under his
dashboard until his break-time. He promised to bring the empty bottle back tomorrow on his way to the meeting.

“Don’t worry about the bottle,” said Beatrice.

“Why I no go worry? I be monkey wey dem say to give im water no hard but to get your tumbler back?”

Beatrice burst into laughter as she climbed back into the car for the return journey to the parking-lot. Even the joker had to laugh then at his own joke.

C
HRIS’S LAST HIDEOUT
had been raided as promised at midnight. Beatrice had got ready quite early but had had to wait until there was adequate traffic on the roads before venturing out to put a call through to the house. The conversation was brief and undetailed, without proper names.

“Any visitors?”

“Yes they came at twelve.”

“Any problems?”

“None so far.”

“So far?”

“Well, none really. Nothing at all.

“Thank God.”

Click!

She went into her flat as she sometimes did, quietly by the kitchen entrance. Elewa was at the table dipping dry bread in a mug of Ovaltine while Agatha watched her leaning on the doorway between the kitchen and the dining-annexe.

“What are you watching her for? And what sort of breakfast is this? No eggs… no margarine…”

“But she no ask me for egg or margarine.”

“She no ask you?”

“Make you no worry, BB. This one done do.”

“Agatha, you are a very stupid girl and a very wicked girl… Get out of my way!”

She pushed past her back into the kitchen, broke and whisked three eggs for an omelette. While it simmered she brought breakfast things out of the refrigerator to the table—margarine, marmalade, honey, orange juice, milk. Then she sat down and insisted that Elewa eat the egg and drink the fresh orange juice. She literally waited on her not just because her grief entitled her to it but she wanted her solicitude to be a ringing rebuke to Agatha who
had made no attempt to conceal her resentment at having to serve someone she clearly felt, judging from the contempt in her eyes and the way she curled her lips, was no better than a servant herself.

After the first surge of anger Beatrice found herself feeling for the first time for this poor, twisted, desiccated, sanctimonious girl something she had never before thought of extending to her—pity. Yes, she thought, her Agatha deserved to be pitied; this girl who danced and raved about salvation from dawn to dusk every Saturday, who distributed free leaflets (she had once even sneaked up to Chris when Beatrice stepped out of the room and given him one). Yes, this Agatha who was so free with leaflets dripping with the saving blood of Jesus and yet had no single drop of charity in her own anaemic blood.

As she drank her coffee and nibbled at the bread and omelette she was having just to keep Elewa company and make sure she had a little something nourishing and needful for her condition she wondered why Agatha should want to be so beastly to the girl.

Of course being a servant could not be fun. Beatrice knew that. She had never belittled the problem or consciously looked down on anyone because she was a servant, so help her God. For she was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quite easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people’s shit in buckets on his head. So how could a girl like Beatrice, intelligent, compassionate, knowing that fact of our situation look down on another less lucky and see more to it than just that—blind luck?

But there was more to it. There had to be. Look at Elewa. Was she not as unlucky as Agatha in the grand capricious raffle? A half-literate salesgirl in a shop owned by an Indian; living in one room with a petty-trader mother deep in the slums of Bassa. Why had she not gone sour? Why did she radiate this warmth and attraction and self-respect and confidence? Why did it seem so natural to install her in the spare bedroom and not, like Agatha, in the servant’s quarters? She was Ikem’s girl, true. But was that all? And
how come Ikem singled her out in the first place to be his girl from the millions just as unlucky as herself? There was something in her that even her luckless draw could not remove. That thing that drew Ikem to her, and for which she must be given credit.

Ikem! Oh yes, Ikem. Provocative, infuriating, endearing Ikem! He was, had to be, at the root of these unusual musings! She recalled the last visit he had paid her in this flat. Though she was to see him a couple of times again subsequently, the last time only the other day at Chris’s place when they had all watched the news of his suspension together, that last visit here at her flat had risen with his death to dominate her consciousness of him and driven earlier and even later memories firmly into the background.

It was perhaps the strong, spiritual light of that emergent consciousness that gave Elewa, carrying as it turned out a living speck of him within her, this new luminosity she seemed to radiate which was not merely a reflection of common grief which you could find anywhere any hour in Kangan, but a touch, distinct, almost godlike, able to transform a half-literate, albeit good-natured and very attractive, girl into an object of veneration.

But even more remarkable was the way this consciousness was now, at the ebb-tide of her anger impinging on despised Agatha, who had wilfully placed herself until now beyond the reach of Beatrice’s sympathy by her dry-as-dust, sanctimonious, born-again ways; yes, impinging on her of all people and projecting on to the screen of the mind a new image of her; and in the background the narrator’s voice coming through and declaiming:
It is now up to you women to tell us what has to be done. And Agatha is surely one of you
.

And do you know what? Perhaps it might even be said that by being so clearly, so unpleasantly, so pig-headedly unhappy in her lot Agatha by her adamant refusal to be placated may be rendering a service to the cause more valuable than Elewa’s acceptance; valuable for keeping the memory of oppression intact, constantly burnished and ready. How about that?