Everything Good Will Come (26 page)

In no time at all Niyi and I began to quarrel about the fertility regime. It made us feel like mating animals. Every minor event sparked an accusation, and I shrunk to the size of my womb. I stared at other people's children imagining their soft, sticky hands in mine, worked myself into false morning sickness and cursed out loud when my periods started. Sometimes they didn't, then I'd be buying pregnancy kits and peeing on the sticks. Soon I convinced myself that it was a punishment; something I'd done, said. I remembered the story of Obatala who once caused women on earth to be barren. I made apologies to her. I remembered also, how I'd opened my mouth once too often and thought that if I said another bad word, had another bad thought, I would remain childless, so I swallowed my voice for penitence.

That was how my thirties found me, in a silent state. I felt as though I'd been running in midair for years. The realization had me laughing at myself. “Satisfied?” I asked myself aloud one morning. When I could hear no answer, I said, “Good.”

I would not delve below that; I preferred to balance my home on a pin than to delve.

The day I got pregnant, I sat on my bathroom floor crying over a stick. “Thank you, God,” I said. “God bless you, God.” I waddled to Niyi, already imagining my stomach big, fell into his arms and his eyes filled with tears.

“I thought we were finished,” he said.

“We are never finished,” I said.

We promised not to argue. This time, my doctor suggested bed rest for three months and I resigned from work because my managing director, the one with the bad sinuses—who once told me I was segsy, very segsy indeed and he would have chazed me but for my sginny legs—he had been looking for an opportunity to move his cousin into my position and refused to approve my request for time off. “Mizeez Frango,” he said. “Our bank can ill-afford an abzent company segretary.” The bank couldn't afford my lawsuit either, I threatened. This wasn't a position to let go without a fight. I considered suing for a while, then I gave up on the idea because really, I wanted to be a mother more than I wanted to be a company secretary. I knew this when I would vomit into a toilet bowl in the mornings, look at myself in the mirror and smile. I accepted my father's offer for partnership instead.

During my first month of bed rest, I read local newspapers I normally didn't have time to read while I was working. Mostly I read stories in less reputable papers:
Woman gives birth to snake. Hundreds flock to vision of Mary on latrine window
. I also read the obituary pages:
Rest in peace, O glorious mother and wife, died after a brief illness. In loving memory of our father
. Here was the real news, I thought. The obituaries were always timely and uncensored, expect when they were hiding deaths from AIDS.

Sometimes I read editorials about the future of democracy. It was over a year since June 12, 1993, the day on which our country's third transition to democratic rule was to begin. That ended two weeks later when the military government annulled our general election and stepped down. A transitional government lasted three months before there was another coup. This new regime partially restored our constitution; placed a ban on political parties, disbanded both houses of senate and representatives, then instituted something called a constitutional conference to bring about democratic reform.

Not since the Civil War had we seen such resentment. Reading the papers, it was clear that some Yorubas blamed their one-time Civil War allies, the Hausas. But those who were less blind-sided looked to the small but powerful clique of Hausas who sanctioned our nation's military rulers. The majority of people simply cared about their vote. Pro- democracy groups immediately called for a boycott of the constitutional conference. There were organized protests, which ended in gunfire, and deaths. The National Democratic Coalition was formed. Then the winner of the general elections was arrested and detained when he declared himself president. Oil workers went on strike and this led to petrol shortages. The Nigerian Bar Association, teachers' unions, university students, joined the protest. Our military government responded by breaking up meetings, detaining students, lawyers, union leaders, ex-politicians, journalists, any individuals they considered enemies of the state. They passed new decrees to strengthen the old ones, seized passports, imposed exit visas on journalists.

Of the pro-democracy activists campaigning, one was my father's long time client, Peter Mukoro, now editor of a magazine called the
Oracle
. Over the years, Mukoro had gained a wide readership because of the kind of reports he pursued: exposes on drug rings, oil spills in the Niger Delta, cults and gangs in universities, religious wars in the north, Nigerian prostitution rings in Italy. When Peter Mukoro wrote people read, so, quite often, Peter Mukoro was in trouble. He'd had several law suits against him. My father continued to represent him. Some they lost, some they won, others were pending. Peter Mukoro's house was burgled twice, although nothing was stolen. Then there was that mysterious fire in his office. After that Mukoro declared himself “the unluckiest man in town” because, even by Lagos standards, his life was “well and truly jinxed.” When he ran an editorial calling for the reinstatement of the general election results he himself was detained. His magazine went underground. He was not formally charged, but his detention was made lawful under Decree Two, that decade-old military decree under which persons suspected of acts prejudicial to state security could be detained without charge. Even I felt sorry for him. At least he wasn't one of those journalists who were government critics until they landed a government job. Mukoro would not work for a state-owned paper. He would not work for anyone with military affiliations.

My father immediately published a statement in the Oracle, saying he would continue to petition until Peter Mukoro's release. I worried about my father's safety, given that under Decree Two, any arrest could be justified. These days, my father was going as far as to ask the military regime to step down. I, too, wanted them out, especially after they gunned down protesters during the political unrest. But there were thousands of other ways people were being killed in my country: unseen pot-holes in the roads, fake malaria medicine. People died because they couldn't afford an intravenous drip. People died because they drank contaminated water. People died from hardship: no water- no light, we called it in Lagos. People died because they got up one morning and realized they were ghettoized, impoverished. 1995 had me giving thanks for the calamities my family and friends had escaped, not protesting against the government. I was almost two months pregnant and thought, like many Nigerians, that my priorities were best kept at home. What I hoped for, at the beginning of the year, was to have my baby in peace.

Niyi handed the latest copy of the
Oracle
to me.

“Read,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Your old man,” he said. “He's talking again.”

He left our bedroom and I read the article. My father had given an interview about recent detentions under Decree Two. He was advocating a national strike. I tossed the magazine on the bed and put some clothes on. Niyi was surprised to see me coming downstairs. He lowered his paper. “You're going out?”

“Yes. To see my father. Talk some sense into his head.”

“What about bed rest?”

“I'm tired of resting.”

He pulled his paper up by the shoulders. “Be careful.”

I assured him that I would. As I drove to my father's house, I breathed in deeply. It was a while since I'd been out on my own and during the harmattan season the evenings were cooler. I could see no more than half a mile down the road because of the dusty haze. It shrouded leaves and blew into people's eyes. Children were still calling conjunctivitis Apollo.

I should have planned what to say to my father. I found him indoors. He no longer sat outside on the veranda in the evenings, not since thieves visited the house next door by boat.

“What are you doing out of bed?” he asked.

“I'm not ill,” I said.

Over the years, his hair had whitened considerably and the pupils of his eyes had faded to a grayish-brown. His shoulders were also hunched, as though he were permanently grumbling.

“You're supposed to be lying down,” he said.

I held the magazine up. “I read your interview, Daddy.”

“Yes?” he said.

“You're calling for a national strike?”

“Yes.”

“Suppose they pick you up?”

“Did you come here to visit or to fight?”

“I came to visit.”

“Then you are welcome to stay. If not, find your way.”

He picked up a cushion and gave it several blows before sitting. I settled in his sofa. I could smell the wood wax on the floor. Every month my father's floor was polished. He would never give that up. On his walls there were three fake crystal clocks that looked like corporate gifts. They had all stopped working: quarter to five, half past seven, twenty-seven after two. My father could not be bothered to replace a battery and he surrounded himself with clutter: unhung paintings, lava lamps so old they were fashionable again. The spot where my piano had stood was now a storage space for records and gifts. From the mess he would pull out a bottle of port, a biography, a Nat King Cole or Ebenezer Obey record.

“How shall I beg you?” I asked.

“For what?”

I didn't have to explain. “You know.”

He waved his arm. “So I mustn't talk? An... an innocent man is locked up and I mustn't say anything?”

“Just be careful is what I'm saying.”

“Of what should I be careful? Walking outside? Driving down the road? Sleeping in my house? Eating food? Breathing air.”

“Don't make fun.”

“But you are funny, all of you, Fatai and the rest. ‘Don't do this. Don't do that.' Maybe I'm the one who's ruining this country.”

“We're worried.”

“Well, worry yourself with your own worries. Let me worry about mine.”

He was not ready to listen.

“Do you have any idea,” he said, in his normal voice. “Do you have any? One hundred million of us, less than ten thousand of them and they want to run this country... ” he searched for words. “Like it's a club that belongs to them?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then they tell us.” He patted his chest. “Tell us that we can't talk? We can't say anything, or we'll be locked up? Fatai, too, comes here this morning telling me that I should be careful. I'm disappointed in him. He is afraid like a woman.”

He noticed my expression and pulled a face to imitate mine.

“What? How come your husband let you out of the house anyway?”

I laughed. “I'm not a pet.”

“You modern wives.”

“I see everything is a joke to you.”

He folded his arms. “Humor is all I have left.”

His anger was not controlled. He was like a child with a bloodied nose, waiting for the opportunity to strike back.

“So,” I said. “Nothing I say will change your mind.”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Activists end up in prison.”

“I'm not a criminal. Why should I fear going to prison? Anyway who's calling me an activist? Have you seen me join any pro-democracy group?”

“No.”

“Do you see me running off to Amnesty International?”

“No,” I said.

“Well then. I'm only doing my job, as I've always done. My business is to look after other people's legal business and I can't let this go, not as easily as they want. They must free Peter Mukoro. He has done nothing wrong.”

There were lawyers who made their names in the struggle for human rights. My father was not one of them. He never cared for groups and had lost favor with some in the bar association, because of his association with Peter Mukoro, who had called senior advocates “senile advocates.”

“Now, look at the situation we're in,” he was saying. “Older people afraid to talk, the young ones too busy chasing money. Doesn't the situation bother the youth at all?”

“It does.”

“Yet none of you are saying anything?”

“We worry about no money, no light. You form your groups and they beat you up and throw tear gas in your face. What can we do?”

“Women,” he grumbled. “We never hear from them.”

“Women? What do you want to hear from women for?”

“Where are they? More than half our population.”

“We have our own problems.”

“Like what? More important than this? People ridiculing our constitution?”