In December 2021, I was still thinking about opening sentences in the time I spent in Aso Pada for a Christmas holiday. In Makurdi, before I visited, I’d written a 4000-word metafictional short story, “The Trial of Mr. Orvangegbilin,” partly thematic about this fascination. It was rejected by a magazine that insisted on an exclusive submission, for which I even paid its $2.5 submission fee; a sorry tale for another day. My romance with first sentences must kill me, I thought: as I started another chapter of Astralite, my novel-in-progress, this came to me, which, I believe, I fashioned quite well: “I had never met a man with more aplomb than the city’s self-appointed historian.” A few more sentences followed, and that was it: A struggling Nigerian writer makes small progress, a small escape from oblivion, and to give the right answer when friends ask, “How is the novel coming?”
It was my sixth day in Aso Pada. I’d stayed indoors enough and began to have illusions of being wasteful. So this morning, a stroll was imminent.
I had walked farther from the less dense commute from the house and was in the middle of my stroll when the bad smell of the drainage, the cold weather, and the exhaust fumes from vehicles began to choke me. My facemask was at home. I endured, a small sacrifice. Nothing in my line of sight interested me, nearing the junction to the main street that goes on to Maraba Junction ahead, as the commute grew denser. More people. Workers in waiting for public transport. Early hawkers. Foodsellers by the roadside, opening for the day. Motorcycles and kekes making noise. I really needed a facemask.
To my right was Maraba junction; to the left was an unknown terrain. I chose left. Maybe to see something new; also, because I could see from its steep topography farther ahead, a less crowded space. The road was as if carved out of a gorge as the shop buildings flanking it were elevated with tiles done in to prevent erosion. I was on the lookout for a supermarket or a chemist for a facemask. It was December of 2021—who was still selling facemasks? I saw a chemist at last. I looked up to the chemist owner, reminded briefly of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in relation to our positions, him up, me down, as if supplicating, and covered my face with my palms to him. He understood me and said “no.”
I was naked to anyone who noticed: this attention to hygiene, as I blocked my nose with my palms. I coughed and sneezed. I asked myself once more if I’d finally become an egg from life spent indoors in the last three years. I realise how lucky freelancers in Nigeria must be to wake up and stay at home, far from the chaos of morning rush and the jungle of the Nigerian 9-to-5, and still earn much more than the average person. Smoke from refuse burning in a gorge after an NNPC fuel station stopped me. It was impossible to continue my stroll past it without being sullied with its smell. No endurance this time. I lingered awhile at the barricade to the non-functional fuel station. I stared at the steep rise of the settlement ahead, the houses among hills supplicating to the sky. I decided to return home.
When I stepped out of the house I had a wish to stumble on a familiar face. On this same road, but closer to Maraba Junction, was where earlier in January I’d seen David Ishaya Osu, quite unexpectedly. My thoughts of him had remained with the University of Kent where he’d finished an MFA. He’d done an interview with me in Gainsayer during my Hitomaro phase, in 2019. I remember stopping the okada I was on when I saw him. We were both pleasantly surprised to see each other and tried to talk. But it was a busy road; I had somewhere to go, as he did, too. As I was leaving Aso Pada the next day, we wouldn’t get a chance to hang out, we tacitly concluded. He promised to meet me at the park the next day, to gift me some books, he said.
It was a beautiful January. He came to the park, New Nyanya Mass Transit, at Maraba Junction. With him three books. I recall two: copies of Frank O Hara and Allen Ginsberg’s collected poems, respectively. We chatted about writing, his time in Kent, the MFA process, and other things. Then he left. And after him, came Jane, who I saw from the entrance to the park. What I can remember was a blouse whose colour and style are lost to memory, and a knee-length skirt. (I would later write a Hitomaro poem in her name, something about music untainted by perfection and the first dial of a piano student.) What I also saw was her perfect oval face and the brightness in it. Her jaunty steps. Her youthfulness and the scarf on her head concealing an unmade hair. And how she walked to me. She’d brought a parcel to waybill to a cousin but hadn’t met the driver. The men in the park—I overheard their conversation—wanted to overcharge her and get their cut, I think. That was when she left them and walked toward me. “Good morning. Please, where is the driver?” she said.
I was grooming a shrub of dreadlocks then and had a scary, full beard which gave me a rather hardcore appearance. How had she found the courage to talk to me? I think it was the first trap—this stupid question, firstly a fascination, with the chats between us that followed, that would wake me from my romantic atrophy, to find what attracted beauty to the beast. Solving the puzzle, my heart opened, I fell in love. A new moon finally, a bow of love; she, the arrow to perfect the archery. A Hitomaro poem written, a sweet romantic time in my life, calls and chats. A Richard Ali poem suffices for what I have to say next:
There is no joy in the music, new aridities
Encroach, dunes overcome our palace . . .
There’s a blanket
Of chill around my heart which longs still for beating
Butterfly wings and the laughter before the confidence
That laughter could be done without.
Strangely titled “At the Start of Winter,” it appeared my episode with Jane began at the end of autumn.
It pained me for two weeks; as Richard Ali writes in another poem—my embers of love, “stolen from a comet someplace” which still burnt. She’d asked a simple question; my stupid answer from a place of sincerity; and the end of love. I spare the details. But talking about love, I met Dora, too, many months later in November of the same year. There wasn’t much spontaneity between us. We’d gone on a date and had irregular chats, but I had never been so helpless in my life about what to say or do with a girl I liked with Dora. At the time, I was playing with the idea of writing an essay based on a theory about debut novels, so I was rereading Emmanuel Iduma’s over-sentient Farad. In it, I found a description fitting my situation with Dora:
Our talk didn’t seem to be heading in any direction. We hadn’t gotten to the point where we could talk intimately, trade our lives. I sensed he was not ready for that. More importantly, I sensed he wasn’t sure what he wanted with me, from me, and what words we could use to define our friendship, if we became friends.
Another sour reminder from literature, poignant and immediate to me, with an understanding of what was going on with me and Dora, or a reminder of nothing going on with us at all. I believed the last sentiment more. Yet the haunting ambivalence: not being sure I could sense what I wanted with her, or from her, and my inability to let her off my mind. Dora, pleasant, hirsute, and sweetly radiant.
Well, I returned home that day after my stroll without much to worry about. An evening a day after, I stole from the house to a bar for a bottle of stout, to force the existentialist thoughts from my head. Someone tall stopped in front of me and bent for recognition. “Carl?” I looked up. It was Ishaya again, an 11-month reunion since January. We laughed at the coincidence of where we met again; this time, at a sleepy bar, two mere Nigerian writers in a corner of the world. We discussed everything except the coming Christmas celebration. I told him about my lethargy and dispassion about writing. How I’d asked myself if I was doing the right thing pursuing a writer’s life. We talked about meeting again for a more celebrative outing. I told him about TJ Benson in Kaduna who said he was coming to Abuja and would drag me out of the house, into the city; if he eventually came, we could hang out together. Then I asked him to read TJ Benson’s The Madhouse.
The evening before Christmas, I prepare to kill the goat my uncle brought from the village. I act clumsily about it and he intervenes and does the killing. I make a mental note to buy my own goat soon and correct his impatience. But I happily take charge of roasting off the ruminant’s thin fur to prepare it for butchering. The smell of burnt fur wafts into my nose as my younger cousin hustles to scrape off the goat’s burnt skin with a knife. Aunt Edith, my uncle’s wife, beautiful soul, says we are going to make her work late into the night preparing the goat, because we didn’t slaughter it on time. I can butcher a hen into its fine pieces, but not a goat. My uncle, however, who spent his childhood in the ’70s in the village of Tombo, Buruku, has no qualms about this. He dismembers the carcass at its joints, cleanly carves out the abdomen to expose the entrails, which we pull out and keep separately to cut the main meat. He calls out distinct names of the cut parts, surprising us with Tiv words we have never heard before. Aunt Edith asks for the goathead to be split into smaller pieces, as with the legs, and other interesting parts, for her peppersoup plans.
The next day, Christmas, I announce to the family I’m leaving for Kuje where my mother is, to celebrate with her. We hadn’t seen each other in 23 months. “Just like that,” my uncle says. “Why na, Uncle Lucky?” his wife says, knowing her children will miss me. She arranges five tubers of yam as a “loho” (Tiv word for message) to my mother. Her husband signals to her and she enters the house and returns with two cans of Hero for me to put inside my bag. It is an austere Christmas. She says I should manage them, the beer. I smile at this. Family. The name is sour in my mouth. In the past days, I’d become her gist partner and found she had not lost her evergreen amiability. I would now put a valve to those moments.
Living by myself in Makurdi I’d learnt detachment and forgotten my manners on community—their unpreparedness for me to leave that morning left me mildly guilty. Now I know I should marry. The realisation that a writer’s life gradually takes one farther and farther afield from people gnawed at me once more, as one leans more to the solitary life of the thinker. I lift my backpack and wear it like a burden. Terhide, a far-flung relative, carries the sack of yams on his head and sees me off to the road.♦
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Carl Terver was longlisted for the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He is the founding editor of Afapinen. 𝕏