Speak No Evil Page 5

  I’ve always felt weird about coming to Nigeria. Everything is always so overwhelming and aggressive from the moment we step out of the airport and into a country that my father loves so deeply he had to run away from it. But I’ve never had a choice. No one has ever asked me. Each summer my father’s momentum dragged us all home. His excitement sent my mother to the big-box stores to buy clothes, shoes and handbags to distribute to the aunties and uncles in the village. In the weeks leading up to each trip, he grew restless and wondered why OJ and I didn’t share his level of enthusiasm. OJ was smart enough to keep his mouth shut and nod when my father said, come on boys, show some excitement, we’re going home. I never learned. But this is home, I said once as we sat at the kitchen table. No it’s not, my father snapped, this place is not your home not now, not ever. He speared a piece of beef with his fork and then let the utensil clatter against the plate. I stared across the table into my father’s eyes searching for some recognition that here in Washington, we had our own house full of our things, pictures of us as a family, books collected over the years, my toys, random trinkets. Here my parents drove their own cars and always knew where they were going. We had our church, and they had jobs they went to every single day. On some days the word Nigeria never even leaves your mouth, I wanted to shout. My father’s face gave nothing. He said, Nigeria is home.

  But no matter how many times we came “home,” everything was so uncomfortable for me. My father never seemed to notice that his shirt stuck to his back with sweat, or if he noticed he didn’t care. I hated the fact that everyone walked around in a cloud of body odor so thick it almost formed a visible aura around them. I hated the discomfort sitting in traffic, discomfort sitting in the darkness when the power went out—it was always going out—the constant vibration of the generators and their exhaust fumes. I hated the forever-uneasy feeling in my stomach after each meal that sent me to bathrooms that however spotless always carried a whiff of sewage. This was not home, not to me even if I secretly loved the thunderstorms and the smell of wet red earth after the rains. I wanted to ask how I should really feel about streets packed with potholes and gutters full to the brim with trash and sludge. I wanted to know how to relax when the cars beside you drove so close that you could see the red veins in the drivers’ eyes because everyone treated the lane dividers as suggestions. It was almost too confusing to see the old and decrepit so close to the new and shiny, the jalopies held together by string and prayer next to brand-new Mercedes SUVs, the straw, palm leaf and plywood squatter settlements next to white walls protecting the large sparkling glass windows of unreasonably sized mansions that would have looked more comfortable in Hollywood. And everywhere there were people, some going places, some unmoving and happy to let the world happen around them, but covering every free space with a visible sense of entitlement no matter how tattered or well-kept their clothing. I had the irrational fear that I would disappear into the mess of all these people and never be seen or heard from again.

  For chrissake, Niru, OJ would say to me, get over yourself. Your sulking is making everybody miserable. There’s so much here. But OJ liked to go visiting with my father and sit on the verandas of old houses to listen to old men tell stories in Igbo about the old days while the crickets and the frogs croaked and chirped in the background. I couldn’t understand.

  You don’t have to go, he can’t make you go, that’s like abduction, Meredith said when I told her my father was taking me to Nigeria. She said, shit I can’t believe he hit you, like he beat you up, and she examined my face. My lips were still swollen and there was a cut on my cheek that had only started to heal. I told people I fell off my bike and we all laughed at my being an idiot. He didn’t beat me up, we just got into a fight, it happens, I said before I half sprinted down the straightaway towards the cluster of teammates stretching half-heartedly at the opposite end. The girls’ track team wore black sweats and we wore blue. The two colors remained relatively separate except for the odd pair of upperclassmen chatting while we stretched. Tell him you have track practice, Meredith said when she caught up. She put her hand on my shoulder to balance while she stretched her quads. I did, I said. Her eyes locked with mine as she caught her breath. He asked me if it was impossible to run in Nigeria, then he asked me if Nigeria sent runners to the Olympics, or was he dreaming, I said. Then come stay with me, she said, you can come live at my house until we go to college. Don’t they kill gay people in Nigeria, she whispered. Her hand clutched my shoulder harder. They don’t kill people, it’s just fourteen years in prison, I said. Niru what the fuck—no you can’t go, like you just can’t go. If you go you’re never coming back. Her eyes shot back and forth across my face. You don’t even seem to give a shit. Of course I do, I just can’t do anything about it, I said. You can come live with me, she pleaded. I thought about it only because it would cause my father a fair amount of pain. I imagined him lowering his head when people asked, what happened to that your son, the younger one? But it was never an option. The thought of perpetual self-consciousness, of walking from an unfamiliar bedroom to an unfamiliar bathroom in the mornings, of eating salmon and steak tartare instead of jollof rice and egusi soup with okporopo—even though I don’t like really okporopo—didn’t feel like home either. Your house is too cold, I told Meredith. I’m serious Niru, she said loud enough for everyone around us to look up, this is crazy.

  I have no desire to be here, but I also know there are battles that you fight to fight and battles that you fight to win, and refusing to get on the plane was not going to do anyone any good.

  Now I am here and there is no going back. My father holds my passport and the tickets. I am under his control. The world around me feels out of alignment like a globe rattling and wobbling on its stand as it spins. As we leave the terminal, I can see where I’m going but with every step the ground shifts just a little and my sense of direction becomes confused. I wonder if my father and Reverend Olumide are right, maybe there is something truly abominable about me that only the purifying fire of constant prayer can purge. Maybe I have spent too much time in the United States soaking up ungodly values and satanic sentiments, as my father has said, and that has created a confusion only the motherland can cure. Or maybe I’m just me. It seems unlikely that this prescribed week with prayer warriors will make a difference but Reverend Olumide says it’s just the start. He says there are acute and chronic interventions. When I return I’m supposed to meet with him weekly. Maybe that’s not a bad thing.

  Mr. Jacob smiles his gap-toothed smile when he sees me. He has transformed from a youngish man with a full head of hair to a middle-aged man with a scraped head to mask his early baldness. I hustle towards the car and Mr. Jacob’s outstretched hand. Oga, he says to my father, look at this small pickin, so big now. Wondaful! God has truly bless you! My father says nothing. Mr. Jacob says to me, ah ah, look at how much you have changed. When we finally settle into the backseat of Mr. Jacob’s car, my father gives a two-hundred-Naira note to the police officer waiting expectantly. Okay Jacob, let’s go, he says.

  We stay in the guest chalet at Aunty Amara’s house. It’s a small but tastefully decorated two-bedroom bungalow across a courtyard from the main house. There is an empty swimming pool between. My mother says Aunty Amara was always the most beautiful of the three girls from the day she was born and that she’s used that beauty to her advantage. She married Uncle Victor, a wealthy civil servant turned businessman fifteen years older than her who always has money but never seems to work. My father hates Uncle Victor. He calls him, “one of those,” which is his way of describing someone so steeped in “the corruption” that he has no sense of right and wrong.

  My father wakes me the next morning just as I conquer my jet lag and find an uneasy sleep. He stands in the doorway wearing the clothes he traveled in, his white shirt wrinkled and his trousers full of creases. His belt is undone. He holds his glasses loosely between his thumb and index finger as he massages his eyes with his free hand. He looks unc
ertain and badly in need of sleep but my mother isn’t around to check his more manic tendencies. Mr. Jacob is already here, we need to get ready quickly so we can make it to the village on time, my father says before he turns around and crosses the corridor to his bedroom. The call to prayer sounds in the distance as lizards scratch around the roof. I swing my feet to the floor and my toes curl against the cold granite tiles. The early morning departure from Aunty Amara’s house is another ritual for my father. He hates staying here despite its convenience and the luxury. Outside, the main house looms above the guest chalet, its white paint sparkling with the rising sun. My mother, OJ, and I always wanted to stay here longer because of the swimming pool and the army of white-uniformed house staff who set a fully prepared breakfast out on the dining table in the mornings. My mother likes to tease Aunty Amara that of all the girls she married the best. Uncle Victor owns a bank and houses across Nigeria, in London and South Africa. Her twins go to boarding school in Switzerland and Uncle Victor has a private jet. My father hates staying here because he hates depending on people—especially in his own country, on a man his own age, but mostly I think he’s jealous. Sometimes he tells my mother, if I had stayed don’t you think we would have had all this. She says, if you stayed you wouldn’t have had me. I don’t know that my father always considers that a fair trade. Appearances matter to him. That’s why we live in Avenel instead of Prince George’s County. That’s why he drives a Range Rover and wears a Rolex with his tailored suits and Ferragamos. You have to pay attention to these things, my father says, don’t give the world any reason to doubt you. A gay son, what would the world think of that?

  I slip into my clothes and splash water on my face in the bathroom. When I step out onto the small patio, Mr. Jacob is already hard at work with a rag in one hand and the garden hose in the other spraying and wiping as he makes a circular orbit around a late-model Prado parked in the shadow of the main house. I can see the muscles in his bare back tense and relax as he strains to make the vehicle shine. If you can do nothing else, at least look decent, my father likes to say. He also says, there is no decency in Nigeria. Mr. Jacob looks at me from across the hood and smiles. The last few years have not treated him kindly and his worries, his younger brother, his kids, his wife, all of whom cost money, are etched on his face. Oga Niru, I dey greet you, he says, waving an arc of water across the car hood. Na long journey for today, but we thank God. I wave back and drag my carry-on to the car. When we were younger, we would pile all the bags full of gifts in the back, squeeze our suitcases beside them and then huddle together, my mother on one side, OJ on the other, me sandwiched in the middle with my legs straddling the floor hump. If I fell asleep on OJ, he jerked an elbow to push me off. My mother let me snuggle into her shoulder, the one bit of comfort she received on a journey she hated. If my mother had her way, we would make the trip by plane—forty-five minutes instead of seven hours—but my father hates flying, especially in Nigeria. It makes his blood pressure skyrocket. He hides it with his claims that he wants me and OJ to get to know our country and what better way to do that than to watch as clear skies over open plains of brown scrub and mudbrick, thatched-roof huts give way to green hills dotted with cement houses and tin roofs beneath the large gray clouds. Each year, OJ and I have watched it all pass in an air-conditioned SUV from which my father always points out the dwarf goats crossing the road and the straw-hatted Fulani herdsmen shuffling behind emaciated cows they hope to sell in the south. You could be them, OJ says. My mother says, I forbid it in Jesus Name. I say, but I’m not.

  My father appears on the patio in a fresh shirt and chinos with his jacket draped over his carry-on. Did you take your bath, he asks loud enough for Mr. Jacob to hear. I ignore the question as I contemplate whether to honor duty and take his bag to the car, but Mr. Jacob leaps forward and grabs the suitcase from my father’s hand. Oga sah, good morning, he says and stomps his foot. Good morning O, my father says back. How can you be carrying my bag when we have this young man here to help us, he says as he stares at me. Mr. Jacob yanks the bag from my father’s loose grip. I inhale and feel the air burn my nostrils and throat. I feel like I don’t exhale until we reach my grandfather’s house in the village.

  I never met my grandfather. He died two years before I was born, and my father never says much about him except that he died drunk and broke, leaving nothing for the family except his small bungalow squatting beneath two mango trees that have never produced any fruit but at least provide shade for the cinder-block walls that would otherwise absorb the intense sun. My grandfather never managed to paint the house, not even when my father sent money, so its gray walls and steel burglary bars in the windows make it feel like a prison. At the far end of the small compound near the wall is my grandfather’s grave. It lies beneath a scraggly orange tree. When my father dies he will be buried there. When I die I am supposed to be buried there too. My father hates this house because it is crude and simple, especially compared to the larger modern structures that now line the unpaved roads in the village. Still he makes us come every year because home is home, even if you have to bathe from buckets and eat food cooked over an open charcoal flame. My mother hates it but she says nothing except, your father has his reasons.

  Our arrival sparks the interests of a few village boys who cluster at the compound gates to watch Mr. Jacob wipe down the car. My father struggles with the front door until brute force twists the key in the padlock on the grate, the lock opens and the door swings outward on its hinges. A block of sunlight settles into the dark dusty room. Within moments he has circled the small parlor and thrown open all the windows so that the sunlight illuminates the burgundy-colored furniture. The room smells of a thick dust that settles on my tongue and makes me cough. Mr. Jacob, can you call those boys, my father shouts through an open window. He louvers the glass slats up and down and then runs a finger over the thick layer of gray dust settled on the surface. Biko tell them I have work for them to do.

  There should be an older woman, Mama Chikwu, who opens the house for us weeks before we arrive, but her husband died last Christmas and she left to join her daughter and grandson in Lagos. She swept the veranda and kept the weeds that clustered around the foundation at bay. She exorcised the house of cockroaches and lizard droppings. She doused the bathrooms with Dettol and captured rain water. She would have arranged for someone else to tidy up the house, but this visit my father didn’t call ahead. He flops onto the sofa, raising a cloud of dust that catches in the afternoon sunlight. Here we are, home, he says with his arms spread wide.

  Oga sah, they are ready, Mr. Jacob says through the open slats. He holds his hands out to a group of preteen boys with spindly legs and arms sticking out from their ragtag shorts and T-shirts. We have only a few childhood pictures of my father, but his younger self looked just like them. I have two thousand Naira for each of you if you’re ready to work this afternoon, my father says in Igbo. I need people to cut this grass, sweep, fetch water and wash these windows. The boys whisper excitedly at the prospect of two thousand Naira for work they do every day for free. My father looks at me as if to say, see what I spared you.

  I join them because it feels wrong to stand around while boys younger than me work to clean the house I will be living in, but also because I have no desire to follow my father as he makes his first stops to let the necessary distant relatives and old friends know that we have arrived. OJ calls them “the extras” because they remind him of the people used as background in movies about white people in Africa. There are the old men who grip your shoulder and demand you call them Uncle after telling the same old story in a disjointed mixture of Igbo and English of how in primary school, they conspired with my father to steal the head teacher’s chickens. My father gives them all tall bottles of Johnnie Walker Black and sheepishly distributes crumpled Naira notes for their memories. It beats standing awkwardly in front of round-bodied women in multicolored cloth who call me fine boy even while they scold me for not speaking Igbo.
They say, you must learn to speak it now, it is your language, this is your home. OJ speaks Igbo—badly—but everybody loves him because at least he tries. My father loves to show him off. They walk these red-earth roads from house to house so he can say this is my boy, my first son, the one I told you is studying to become a medical doctor, a surgeon at Columbia University. I see my father slip out with Mr. Jacob. He doesn’t even ask me to come.

  The boys are embarrassed for me and try to stop me from taking a grungy rag soaked in soapy water to the windows. They attack the cracking cement floor on their hands and knees to rub away spots of obvious grime from the parlor. I move to the bedrooms with a rag and bucket. Mr. Jacob has placed our carry-ons in my grandfather’s bedroom just at the foot of his large and unsteady bed. Yellowed mosquito netting hangs limply from its four posts. The sheets are still crisply folded but covered in dust and lizard droppings. I use the broom to sweep the dry pellets to the floor. My father will sleep here surrounded by the belongings of a man he equally loved and despised. Aside from pictures of a wiry little man who covered his bald head with a tattered trucker’s hat, I have no sense of what my grandfather was like. My father says he never spoke much and he drank a lot after my grandmother was killed during the war. Some people just can’t take the trauma, my father told me and OJ when we flipped through an old photo album at home. He didn’t sound angry, but I could hear that he considered my grandfather weak.