In a Glass House (36 page)

“My son came over in sixty-one with my wife, but my wife, she died on the trip.”

A pause.

“I’m sorry, you said your wife died?”

There was a catch in my father’s voice, a stillness.

“Yep.”

Another scratch of empty tape.

“How did she die, was she sick, did she have an accident?”

“She died in childbirth.”

Filomena’s awkward earnestness enraged me, that in a community as small and claustrophobic as ours she hadn’t known these things; and yet I’d chosen her to do my father exactly because she’d seemed the least likely of our group to know.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said, then returned with a quaver to her usual list of questions. I had the impression that if she’d continued to probe, my father would simply have gone on like that to tell the whole story, would have answered every question with the same humbled sense of obligation to the truth.

I thought of removing my father’s tape, his entire file – there was an intimacy in his answers I couldn’t bear, something laid open, not so much in what he’d said as in his simple inability not to speak, that made my mind ache. Yet perhaps in speaking he himself had already made peace with himself, could see his life more whole than I did, less out of the ordinary. There were a hundred different tragedies in our community, and beyond them a hundred scandals, infidelities and betrayals, illegitimacies, an ancient murder; and yet the earth had never split open in the face of them, the people they touched carrying on with their
lives, accepted, marked only by the lingering gingerliness others showed around them as if out of respect for human frailty. In the end I put the tape back in its proper place, feeling my father was owed that or perhaps simply wanting to see it there, so innocuous, among the others, apart from its few awkward moments telling, after all, the same story they did, as if time had finally levelled our lives to a comfortable normalcy.

The morning of my departure my father drove me to the depot. He had dressed, though it was a work day, in his after-work clothes, a loose summer shirt, old suit pants, his good shoes, the two of us alone again as in our old Sunday rides to church in the car’s intimate closeness.

“Does this bus from here going to take you all the way up to Ottawa?”

“I have to switch in Toronto.”

“Ah.”

He had a habit of leaning into the steering wheel as he drove to cradle it like a child, with the gesture now the sleeve of his shirt hiking up to reveal the flesh of his biceps, pale against the tauter bronze of his forearms, vulnerable and unformed like a teenager’s. I had the sense suddenly that in all the years I’d known him I’d never once dared to look at him squarely, to hold him whole in my sight, even now feeling merely this impression he was beside me, this peripheral blur, his arm on the
wheel, his weight pressing down the cushioned velour of the seat.

“Do you have some kind of address or something if we have to write to you?”

“I don’t really know exactly where I’ll be yet. I left a phone number for the people in Ottawa with Aunt Teresa – they’ll know how to find me if you need to.”

A pause, the small tensing of resentment in him.

“It seems funny to me, you don’t even know where you’re going.”

“It’s not that, it’s just I don’t have the exact address yet. Anyway I’ll send it to you as soon as I have it.”

But I hadn’t imagined writing to him, had thought of this departure as somehow complete, no lines leading back.

At the bus stop there were a half dozen others waiting on the sidewalk, a few teenagers, a young man with a crew cut in a university jacket, two women in the stiff skirts and high-collared blouses of Mexican Mennonites, their baggage two bundles wrapped in blankets and twine. My father helped me lift my bags from the trunk, a duffel bag, an overstuffed backpack, what I’d whittled myself down to.

“You don’t have to write only every six months,” my father said. “My English isn’t that good to write, you know that, but I can manage all right to read it. Maybe your aunt can write in English.”

“You can write in Italian, I’ll understand it.”

We stood a few minutes in silence. My father looked at his watch.

“Looks like it’s late,” he said.

But a minute later the bus rolled around the corner. My father, wallet in hand, went up to the driver as he stepped down.

“How much for Ottawa?”

“Hold your horses, buddy,” the driver said, moving past him. “Let me get these bags on first.”

His insolence stung me but my father seemed oblivious. When the driver returned my father peeled off a few bills for my ticket and then handed a sheaf of wrinkled fifties and hundreds to me.

“Something for the trip.”

I wadded the money awkwardly into a pocket.

“Thanks.”

I was the last to board. I wanted only to be gone but sensed the emotion welling in my father, the need for a gesture. I had only to embrace him, to brush my cheeks against his, the usual ritual of parting; and yet I had never done such a thing, couldn’t bring myself to do it now though my whole body felt impelled to.

“So I guess I’ll see you in a couple of years,” I said.

“Yep.”

And then I was already on the bus, without so much as a handshake, a touch. As the bus pulled away I had a last glimpse of him lingering there on the sidewalk, a lonely figure I’d never known, seeming still the sad stranger I’d sat beside years before on a Halifax train.

My first vision of Africa, as I surfaced from afternoon sleep to gaze from the window of our plane, wasn’t the endless bush I’d expected but a city of sun-baked mud on the desert’s edge, moulded out of the rusted earth like some child’s creation. Then the wall of heat as we stepped from the plane, the ramshackle airport, a cinder-block shed merely, alone in that blasted landscape like a final outpost; and finally the bus ride into Kano, the road alive with a human traffic like a refugee trail, on foot, on bikes, on tiny scooters and motorcycles that chirred away from the path of our ancient bus like swatted insects, everything suspended in the blaze of desert heat as in a dream.

Our in-country orientation was held in a government teaching college just outside the city, the group of us sequestered there in our whiteness as in some holiday camp. All the rhetoric we’d heard in Ottawa about development work seemed to fall away now: there was no global perspective here, only the nuts and bolts of getting by, basic language training, how to work a kerosene fridge, how to select and slaughter a chicken. There’d
been talk in Ottawa about a boycott against Nestlé but here their products were used unthinkingly, the powdered milk and the biscuits, even the coffee, Nescafé instant, imported from Belgium though Africa abounded in coffee.

Some of the older volunteers led groups of us into the city. The heat there, the mud barrenness, gave the sense of a perpetual aimlessness or repose, of a world still awaiting the decree that would set it in motion. Taxis – battered blue Datsuns and Beetles, white Peugeot 504s – barrelled through the narrow streets like rockets, from another planet, the calm splitting open to let them pass and then closing again. We came on a bar, a warehouse of a place in yellow stucco, where a dusty juke box was playing the latest Rolling Stones; but outside you had only to walk a few minutes, into the maze of crooked lanes the city was, to feel that time hadn’t moved for a thousand years.

In the old market the gloomy alleyways hummed with quick activity, narrow mud stalls leading back into mysteries of secreted goods. The traders, tall and sharp-featured and dignified, haughty, called out to us in Hausa,
bature
, white man, then gave the air of not caring to sell to us if we approached them. At prayer time, prayer mats were unfurled, activity ceased: we seemed made invisible then by their indifference, irrelevances they toyed with, then blotted out.

Some fifteen of us out of the eighty or so volunteers who had come had been posted in the southwest. On the fifth day we set out before sunrise in an old plywood-floored bus whose back seats had been removed to make way for a large metal drum, of oil or kerosene or petrol, I was never clear which. The drum was part of some private transaction of the driver’s – the field officer who’d come up from Ibadan to accompany us, Richard Harmond, blond and pink-skinned, seeming to exude still the
dying glow of a suburban complacence, had made a show of arguing with the driver before our departure; but the drum had remained. The road was pocked with great potholes, craters really, two, three, four feet across; the driver, never letting up speed, careened and swerved to avoid them, though sometimes a wheel caught the edge of one and the drum at the back gave out a liquid groan as it shifted with the jolt.

As we moved south the landscape grew greener, resolving itself finally into a tree-studded savannah; small mud villages and Fulani encampments glimpsed distantly from the highway gave way to towns of more modern appearance, the buildings of sun-faded stucco, the roofs a sea of corrugated tin. At Kaduna we stopped to eat at a lorry park, a great dusty square ringed round with chop houses and traders’ stalls and crowded with taxis and minibuses and mammy wagons. The older buses seemed cobbled together from scraps of old metal and wood, each one distinct, painted in yellows and blues and inscribed in florid lettering with strange slogans, “No condition is permanent,” “God is God,” “Water be for sea.”

Beyond Kaduna the land grew gradually more hilly, the vegetation more dense; here and there abandoned lorries lay toppled at curves in the road like felled monsters. The towns we passed seemed like settlements in the Old West, dusty and becalmed, provisional, the buildings sitting at odd angles to the road as if someone had wrenched the country out of square.

The checkpoints grew more frequent. In the north we’d encountered them only at the outskirts of towns: the soldiers would step up into the bus, officious, then their eyes would glaze at the sight of us and they’d wave us through. But now the checkpoints appeared without warning in the middle of the bush, makeshift, simply planks laid over metal drums to block
the road and little shanties of corrugated tin at the roadside where two or three soldiers milled, rifles slung languidly over their shoulders. Sometimes they didn’t bother to rise up from the little benches they sat on, merely gazed unimpressed at our faces in the windows and called the driver out to them, joking or condescending, going through his papers indifferently or with a painstaking thoroughness, unpredictable; then sometimes they boarded the bus.

“
Oyinbó
.” The Yoruba word for white man; we were passing into the south.

At one of these stops a soldier came on and strutted idly to the back of the bus, prodding some of the baggage there with the butt of his rifle and then tapping a finger against the top of the metal drum.

“Driv-uh!” The driver came to the back; the soldier made a cursory inspection of his papers, then put them ostentatiously into the pocket of his shirt. He tapped the drum again.

“Na be safety hazard, not so?”

There was a brief exchange in Yoruba and then the soldier left the bus; the driver followed. Outside, a long discussion ensued in mixed Yoruba and English, the soldier’s voice growing increasingly more peremptory, more adamant, the driver’s more pleading; the words “safety hazard” repeated themselves amidst long stretches of Yoruba like a catch-phrase. Finally the soldier crossed back to his shanty and the driver boarded the bus – but only, it turned out, to pull it off to the side of the road. The soldier hadn’t returned his papers; they could be seen bulging still in his pocket.

“Welcome to Nigeria,” Richard said.

The driver resumed his pleading. But the soldier seemed to have lost interest in him now, busying himself with other vehicles
passing through or simply sitting at his bench talking idly with the other soldiers, closing the driver out. A few of us got out of the bus to smoke; ten minutes passed, then twenty. Richard kept apart, explaining nothing – he seemed to be awaiting some inevitable conclusion, though time passed and the driver appeared no closer to winning the soldier over. His pleading seemed a ritual merely, the two of them like characters in a masque, the driver perpetually playing the penitent, lean and diminutive in his ragged pyjama clothes, the soldier perpetually feigning indifference.

“Leave me now!” the soldier said finally.

The driver came over to Richard.

“
Oga
, I beg you, make you give ’am dash.”

“No way,” Richard said, but with a kind of smugness, of put-on authority. “It’s your drum, it’s your problem.”

“No be so,
oga
, they dey see so many white man, they think na big big money. Why you wan’ make palaver for these people, na be all night we go sit here.”

One of the older volunteers, David, had gone up to them.

“Look, why don’t you just give them the dash. You were the one who wanted to do the trip in a day.”

Richard shrugged.

“We’re not that far behind schedule.” But he seemed put out at the opposition, tried to make light of it. “Anyway you wouldn’t want me to set a bad example for our new recruits.”

“It’s the way things work,” David said. “They might as well get used to it.”

Richard pulled a bill from his wallet and handed it to the driver.

“Then just don’t accuse me of corrupting you guys.”

And in a minute we’d set off again.

A few miles past the next town one of the front tires gave out. The bus veered wildly for an instant but then the driver righted it and brought it expertly to a stop. I expected some complication, some tremendous delay; but the driver pulled a spare, balding but sound, from somewhere under the bus and in a short while we were back on the road. At the next town he stopped at the lorry park to repair the flat. The mechanic was not in his stall; someone was sent to fetch him. We bought some suya from one of the Hausa stalls, some greasy pastries, a few bottles of Fanta and Coke from a barefooted boy who hawked them out of a water-filled bucket. The boy lingered warily at the edges of our group while we drank, anxious that we not leave without returning his empties. Other children gathered, stood staring at us from a distance; one, a small girl, came toward me, put out a tentative hand to touch the whiteness of my skin.