❦
THERE ARE STORIES WE HEAR that sound like an unfinished dream. They strike us as unreal—or something straining and reaching further than that, beyond what can be known, something outlandish. But one realises that there are somehow subtle deposits of reality in these tales. For I had heard one with my own ears.
It was a day in my childhood. Dad and I were sorting through old souvenirs in a chest of drawers in the parlour. He occasionally opened these drawers to look at old photos, letters, books and other bric-a-bracs. The photos felt like travelling back in time to the seventies, to the explosion of high fashion, to the age of bongo trousers with flared legs, high boots and tall afro hairstyles. The photos were all black-and-white and the faces in them had a kind of beauty that was lost in time. There were pictures taken in bars: men sitting around tables spectating over green beer bottles, smiles and laughter on their lustre faces. There were pictures taken at night: in one, there is the lit-up panorama of a city in a dark background, like a Christmas decoration, and in the foreground a couple standing together outside a neon sign with a hand on each other’s waist; pictures of beaches with many people milling around, some barefoot or shirtless, ice-cream vendors in their bicycles with small coolers above the front wheel, hawkers carrying their tray on their head, and the white beach sand made even whiter by the sepia. There was a picture of a city road: a long line of cars and heavy vehicles caught in traffic, some of the drivers standing outside their cars. A particular man in the picture with a huge afro and thick moustache stood outside his car reading a newspaper, his elbows on the roof and one of his legs still inside the car.
“Those were beautiful days, halcyon days,” Dad said, stressing halcyon as if he wanted to teach me a new word.
I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about.
A mammoth collection of photos lay on the table between us. The old air conditioner that was recently installed by Dad hummed. It was the only thing that made a sound in the parlour. I felt the silence, palpable like dew upon my brow.
Dad picked up the picture of a chief in full regalia. “Ah! My great uncle Nnaka Nwaanyanwu.” He turned to me. “He was a great man in his day. The pride of the ozo titled man. Look at the ostrich feather in his red cap. This is our pride, son.”
And so he went on with each picture he picked up: passing a comment or telling a story. His eyes sometimes became bright when he looked at a picture but at other times his forehead furrowed into fierce creases. Dad was a great storyteller. He told stories with the care of a farmer harvesting his yams. I had seen this several times when he entertained guests: it was there in the near-motionless bodies of the visitors, in the spellbinding silence that enveloped the parlour as he spoke.
“Son, look at this.” He drew my attention to a photo he just kept on the table.
He turned the back of the photo: a date, written in blue ink, said, “March 1969.” The young men in the picture wore white trousers and chequered shirts. There was certainly nothing spectacular about the photo except that it was taken long ago.
“Who are they?” I asked.
Dad moved his body somewhat nearer to me then relaxed in his chair.
“The tall youth you see in that picture is my late elder brother. You know the small one, don’t you?”
I looked at the picture again, with more scrutiny. And I recognised the familiar outlines and contours of a face I knew well.
“I know him,” I said. “That’s Uncle Pius.”
“Yes. That’s him.”
Dad looked towards the large window facing us. His eyes grew wistful and there was something about them that seemed not to see the here and now. Something his manner exuded which made me realise he was about to tell a story, for I have felt it every time he told a story from the old days, long before I was born.
“Son,” Dad began. “I believe you’re old enough to know this.”
I looked straight into his face, expectant.
“This uncle of yours, the tall one, died long ago when I was a child like you. He was the first son of my father. He refused to go to school because he said all people do at school is sit for hours on end. He was restless and never stayed in one place for too long. He avoided doing any work of any sort; instead he roamed the hamlets and the villages with his friend Okolo, and he built a reputation for bullying, stealing, womanising, and all sorts of terrible things that I can’t mention to you now. But they were all bad.
“Hardly a day passes that we do not see men and women march into our compound shouting that my brother had impregnated their daughters. The more they came, the more his promiscuity grew. When the parents of the pregnant girls came demanding marriage, he would simply say, ‘How can I be the one that impregnated your daughter when she was always the one that came to me? Do you expect me to tie my groin when something keeps pestering it?’
“I grew up seeing people storm into our compound every day claiming damages for the things my elder brother broke or stole from them. And my father (that is, your late grandfather) saw all these things and kept mute. He was a man of tradition and truth—the chief priest of Ezinkwo. As the custodian of Ezinkwo shrine in our village, people expected him to talk but he said nothing . . . nothing . . .
“What my father did was that he silently paid most of the damages incurred by my brother. Many people thought he was supporting my brother. Even my brother must have thought so at some point. But there is no way to know a silent man’s heart. One must be all the more wary of such people because they have only one way of talking. People who knew my father and his principles well agreed that whatever the case might be, what a man does lies in his heart.
“As I watched my father in those days, during his early mornings breaking kola, he almost never forgot to say the proverb: A child is not beaten the day he spills some palm oil, rather it is the day he upturns the oil’s source.
“One evening, my brother came home drunk and came straight to my father. If I remember clearly, he called my father all sorts of names. And it has to do with my father placing his case before the umunna. He said a lot of terrible things to my father that night, going as far as telling him to die very quickly so he can inherit all the lands. He also said he would destroy the Ezinkwo shrine and that my father was his biggest problem in life.
“My father’s only reply was to tell him to go and sleep and continued rocking back and forth in his easy chair. My brother did not relent.
“ ‘This child, go and sleep before you vomit taboo with your basket of a mouth!’ my father thundered.
“I am sure—quite sure—that when my father said that, he was thinking of the Ezinkwo shrine my brother said he would destroy. My brother had been stretching his patience and now he was near its elastic limits.
“Beyond the walls of our compound, the gloom of dusk had not fully descended. An owl hooted somewhere, from the direction of the forest to the left, its notes as clear as the sound of a metal gong. Even though I was a child then, I remember that I thought it was eerie: an owl hooting when darkness had not yet driven us to our mother’s huts or, if the moon was full again, to the village square to play and listen to stories and songs.
“ ‘Eh, is it me? Me!’ my brother’s voice rose sharply.
“The glare in my father’s eyes was sinister. He rose to his full height and he was about to open his mouth to say something when, as if propelled by a nether force, my brother raised his hand and it landed on my father’s cheek with a great, plummeting gravity.
“There was a sudden, bated moment of silence, as if time had stopped for a second or two. My father trembled. It was certainly not only him that trembled in that moment, we all did. The light in his eyes glowed so brightly.
“He rushed quickly into his hut and came out almost immediately with his ofo, the staff of the priest of Ezinkwo. His movement was quick, almost inhuman, and his voice was the spirit-filled caterwauling of thunder. He was now the spirit messenger of Ezinkwo, not the father I knew. He held the staff aloft and began to speak words that, even after all these years, are so clear to me now:
“ ‘I hold Ofo na Ogu in my hands. My conscience is clear. For this is a son that has never given me cause to drink the water and drop the cup in peace; a son that has put his grubby hands in the food of elders. Hear me, Kamalu, hear me, Ezinkwo. What have I done? What have I done to deserve a son who has decided to pass faeces on the path that leads out his own house? Patience is the virtue of the elder. But have I not had patience enough? Ofo come, come and see that a son has lifted his father up. But does the child who lifts his father up not know that debris would enter his eyes? Let abomination be cleansed at once, for this is my covenant. Let the spirits take the place of the parrot’s mouth.’ And with this, he struck the staff on the ground a few times and entered his hut.
“Silence descended like a mist on the compound. And all we could hear was the great fearful sounds of distant thunders, occasional flickers of light glowing in the far reaches of the sky. Our mothers clasped us—the children of the compound—tenaciously to their bosoms and sequestered us to their huts. Thinking about it now, the adults were frightened too, for they had all ran into their rooms. The thunder raged without rain for about an hour. No one ventured out of their rooms in the ominous stillness that followed. Not even the night birds made a noise, or the crickets, or the frogs, or the wall geckos that scampered and scratched all the time.
“The next morning was the day I will always remember all my life. There was a heavy stench coming from my elder brother’s room. He was not only dead but his body had decomposed overnight. Fear descended on the entire hamlet. But my father betrayed no emotion. He went about making arrangements for the spiritual cleansing of the compound and the disposal of the corpse.
“We have feared everything since that day. As we grew up, we talked to our father only when we had to answer a question or go on an errand. It was terrible. But sometimes we forgot, especially because it was during the war and afterwards. Things were never the same after that, both within and without.”
Dad rubbed his eyes and looked at me for a moment as if searching for something.
“Do you understand what I just told you?”
I nodded again, unable to form words in the fog of my head.
I bent and picked up the photo again. The faces no longer seemed beautiful; they had turned grotesque, as if they had been tampered with by some humourless mischief makers. Dad said nothing again. He turned to other photographs, other souvenirs, other mysteries. And the silence was there in the parlour, the air conditioner humming into its depths.
* * *
All my life this memory has haunted me. I had been wary of it, especially because it was related to me. Perhaps I was running from a dent in my lineage, a necessary truth. Why did my father choose to tell me this story? Time has passed since that day in the parlour, the winds of years have floated rapidly by, the cycles of the seasons moving in perpetuity. My views about the many events of life are changing too, for it has become clear to me that we will never truly know everything about this world.❦
Chimezie Chika is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His works have appeared in The Shallow Tales Review, The Republic, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Iskanchi, Efiko Magazine, and Afrocritik. He was a 2021 Fellow of the Ebedi International Writers’ Residency in Iseyin, Nigeria. He is the Fiction Editor of Ngiga Review and currently resides in Nigeria.