Doing Dangerously Well (25 page)

E
arly the next morning, before the sun grew too hot, Barbara took her yoga mat out onto the grounds of the famed Hill Station Hotel and practised in her purple leotard. A sizeable assembly of people gathered to comment on each posture, tone wavering between outrage and fascination.

At noon, she flew with Aminah and Femi to the area surrounding the collapsed Jebba Dam. Leaning over Aminah’s shoulder to look at her newspapers, Barbara stared at photographs of Kolo commiserating with local survivors. She shook her head in pity and tapped Aminah on the shoulder. “Your president seems touched by the tragedy.”

“Really?” Aminah’s eyebrows rose to meet a headwrap of architectural merit. “Then I wonder why his government didn’t warn those downstream of Kainji to move before the next dam burst!” She kissed her teeth with a proficiency Barbara could only admire.

A driver picked them up in a jeep, and they set off on their tour. Brown mists of faint sickly smells hung over them as they stopped at a pretty village on the outskirts of the catastrophe. Children ran up to them, shouting an excited welcome.

Round huts made of clay blended seamlessly into the landscape, throwing into relief a scattering of low concrete buildings with corrugated iron roofs. As she looked to the periphery of the village, Barbara spotted conical granaries with doorways built halfway up, surrounded by a multitude of earthenware pots filled with water.

While the other three stopped at a roadside eatery that had been hastily erected for sightseers, Barbara unwrapped a vegetarian sandwich with a certain fanfare. An ancient and garrulous vendor stood as the eatery’s proud proprietor. Femi gave him a bottle of water, which the vendor secreted away with pleasure, then brought some sticks of grilled meat with a glance of challenge at Barbara.

“So,” the vendor croaked, “you come look village or you come play?”

“We come play,” Femi replied, ripping apart the meat, eyes trained on the vegetation entering Barbara’s mouth.

“Play?” Barbara put her hands on her hips, sandwich quivering with her indignation. “We’re certainly not playing here, Femi!”

Femi spoke under his breath. “Play is Pidgin. We’re touring. As opposed to visiting people in the village.”

“Actually,” Barbara corrected the vendor, “we’re not tourists. We have important work to do. We’ve come to save people.”

“Missionary?” He wobbled on rickety legs.

“No. I’m Buddhist,” Barbara replied. The old man looked at her. “Well, a mix between Buddhist and Taoist.”

“Okay. I see.”

He clearly did not.

“I practice yoga. I meditate. I chant. I find it grounds me; it centres—”

Femi muttered something to the vendor in a local language. The vendor looked up at Femi, pity spreading across his shrivelled face.

“I respect the flow of nature,” she carried on. “That’s why I don’t eat meat.”

The vendor stared at her, chewing, though he had nothing in his mouth.

“We are worried about plans to build a new dam,” Femi interjected, licking the animal fat off his fingers with undisguised hostility towards his vegetarian guest.

“A dam?”

“Yes. Kolo is planning to build a bigger dam.”

“What! Is he mad? Why did no one tell us?”

“Does a hawk warn its prey?”

The vendor crossed his arms as he looked up at Femi, squinting, perhaps considering the separate qualities of the many hawks he had witnessed. Finally, he shook his head. “No, sir. No hawk like this exists in Nigeria,” he announced with certainty. His voice then went up a notch. “So, you have come to talk with chief?”

“No,” Femi replied. “Why?”

“He met Kolo long time ago. Yes, come and talk to him.”

He creaked off to find the chief, beckoning them to follow him. They walked through the village, which was filled with the sounds of women pounding yam. At a distance, Barbara could see women hoeing the ground, babies on their backs, while others carried water. She was creeping towards the field to snap some pictures when she heard a harsh whistling sound, as if alerting her to some danger. She turned around to find
Femi snapping his fingers at the ground behind him, calling her back as if she were a disobedient dog. She obeyed with a disgusted huff.

The vendor led them inside a concrete building, where he introduced them to a group of men sitting in a semicircle. An unassuming figure with a cow-tail whip and a dirty agbada sat on a chair, higher than the others. He almost obscured a shrine on which a variety of objects sat, but through the flicker of candlelight Barbara spotted two identical dusty wooden carvings, bells and all manner of natural objects such as cowrie shells, bones and dried leaves. It all looked so exotic. She tried to elbow past Femi to get a closer look, but a strong hand yanked her back and pointed once more to the ground behind him. Barbara lingered in no man’s land, then unwillingly returned to her designated position.

Femi, Aminah and the driver laid themselves on the ground in prostration. Barbara looked down at them, then took a closer look at the man in the chair. It was then that she noticed his aura—bright, luminous and crackling. She dived down, her breasts slapping the unforgiving clay.

The chief rose from his seat, then bent down to help her up, looking appalled. “Please, madam. Stand up. This is not necessary. Please, stand up. Welcome—welcome to our village.”

Barbara refused to move, pleased to be involved in some ancient ritual. Only when Femi poked her with his toe, and she peeped up to find the other three already standing, did she struggle to her feet. Her eyes darted around the room, fascinated by its atmosphere of primordial wisdom. “You must be the village chief.” She searched his face for clues to the mysteries of life. “How wise you must be! How very, very wise. What a magnificent aura!”

Femi glared at her for a long moment and then turned to the
chief. “Sir, we greet you. We have heard that President Kolo came to see you some time ago.”

“Yes,” the chief replied, peeking around Femi to stare at Barbara. “He only branched for a few hours.”

“What was he doing in this area, sir?”

“Maybe the same reason a dog pisses on a tree. But Kolo does not waste his piss on small bushes.”

“Wise words, wise words,” Barbara agreed, imbibing the ancestral knowledge.

“What you say is true, sir.” Femi dodged to hide Barbara, obliterating her view of the proceedings. “As you say, sir, Kolo is not a stupid man. Apparently, he is trying to build a bigger dam at Kainji. Even though your village lies so far downstream, you will lose your water.”

“Aha! So that is why he was here. He just want parasite our water. We thought maybe he came to see Victoria. But it is not only to rest its belly that a snake hides in a tree.”

“And a snake is not a stripper just because it sheds its skin,” Barbara added.

“Pardon?” the chief asked.

“I said that just because a snake sheds its skin, that doesn’t mean you can hire it as a stripper.”

The sound of women pounding yam resonated through the village. A mangy dog walked past the doorway, caring little for the philosophical import of their discussions. Flies buzzed around its patches of bare skin.

The chief’s retainers looked at each other, perplexed. Femi drew circles in the clay with his toe, avoiding lines of sight. Aminah put her hands on her immense hips, wondering what spirits she had offended to bring this woman to her.

Femi then embarked on a long whispered interchange with the chief in a local language. The chief seemed to grow more
concerned as Femi spoke, glancing in Barbara’s direction with a look of compassion, accompanied by a hint of alarm. She smiled back at him.

“I’m sorry,” the chief replied in a muted voice to Femi. “May Allah take pity on her and her family.”

“Thank you, sir,” Femi bowed, his face rigid with sorrow.

“Please, sir.” Aminah’s voice rebounded off the walls of the concrete building as if it were made of rubber. “Who is Victoria, sir? Why would Kolo come to see Victoria?” Three aides flinched as her utterances detonated.

The chief waited for the walls to be free of all vibration before replying. “Victoria took care of Kolo when he was a child. But when I mentioned her name, he stood up and ran, as if he had heard of a ghost.”

Aminah’s eyebrows shot up in enquiry. “Why, sir?” Her voice blasted across these two syllables.

The chief waited for the echoes to end and silence to return to the room. “Victoria knows something about his childhood, some terrible secret that Kolo has hidden from everyone. We don’t ask her, because it frightens her to speak of it. And it happened a long time ago. However, let me show you something that maybe you can use.”

He turned to a retainer and murmured something. The man left the room, while the rest of them hung their heads, grinning, unable to contain their amusement.

After a few moments, the aide returned and handed a photo to Femi, whose eyes crinkled until he wept with laughter. Aminah peeked too, then set off on a journey through laughter’s wild and varied landscape. All Barbara could see was Kolo kneeling before the village chief. She did not understand what was so amusing. In fact, she was surprised that the president still respected the traditions of yore.

“We took this photo of Kolo after his company put meters on our wells to charge us for water,” the chief explained.

The jeep bumped along the road out of the village, swerving past potholes and chickens. As it jolted along, Barbara gripped the back of the seat in front of her to stay upright, using long forgotten muscles to counterbalance the swaying of the vehicle. After half an hour she grew quite exhausted with the effort.

They moved through the faint odour of decay, carried by winds held in brown clouds. She tried to fan the smell away, but it only grew stronger, more rancid, the entire sky a hazy brown. It seeped into her clothing, clung to her hair, leached into her skin. Its pungency was unlike anything she had ever smelled—a bitterness that she felt on her tongue and the roof of her mouth, right through to the back of her throat, as if she were being force-fed decaying meat.

The jeep struggled through the mud until it reached a village blanketed by the smell, a choking stench of putrefaction. Stinking mist with a biting sweetness brought tears to Barbara’s eyes and stung her nasal passages. Though she tried to breathe through her mouth, she could not escape the noxious gases, the fetid stench of decomposing bodies.

The jeep turned a corner. All around, flung recklessly like clothes in a bedroom, were bodies swollen to the point of puncture, bodies disembowelled by that which once cleansed them. Birds pecked at them, throwing the crimson flesh up in the air and then catching it in their beaks.

Barbara spotted one man trying to move, his body writhing on the ground, twitching as he willed himself to live. As the jeep approached him, she saw his open wounds, through which maggots crawled, wriggling under his skin, squirming for dominance. Someone screamed—an ear-splitting, unending
screech. After a few seconds Barbara realized that the voice was her own.

In the midst of the horror, she was transfixed by one sight: a hand sticking out of the mire. She could not embrace the logic of what had occurred. Why was it there? Had some wretched being struggled frantically to free itself from its muddy tomb? Or had the water, in a brief moment of mercy, allowed it to fashion its own bloody headstone?

She sat, rigid, in silence, staring at the hand—a hand that beckoned a gory greeting to all who saw it, a hand that bid a frightful farewell.

As the mud grew deeper, the group had to abandon the jeep. Each step they took, over pieces of flesh, fragments of bone and the remnants of people’s lives, sucked them deeper into grief’s belly. They reached the trunk of a baobab tree that had been snapped off in the flood; this mutilated landmark indicated that they now stood at the heart of the village.

Here, a few people engaged in a forlorn search for bodies, wandering as if in a dream. One or two had managed to find their dead relatives and were digging rectangles of differing sizes in the mud. Others nailed papers onto the tree—pictures of people still missing. Some just sat, stunned into inertia or keening with voices that had grown weak.

The stench that winds would not bear away suffocated her, causing her muscles to pull in hard like stone; wails that usually evaporated into the air vibrated on her skin and lodged in her spine; images of life that often flitted past without note now became etched as separate visions with their own individual power; thoughts that might have fluttered away were stamped into the permanence of memory. She hunted around for meaning, from the silence of mutilated body parts to the awful sounds of those left to grieve, from the rigidity of death to the
limp torpor of the living. She searched and searched, but the annihilation of so many made no sense.

Barbara looked at Femi, hoping for some kind of guidance as to how to deal with these images of horror. But he stood as if rooted in the mud, disbelief on his face, terror in his eyes. It had not occurred to her that these sights would be as far from his experience as they were from hers. She wondered what appalling thoughts such grisly scenes produced in him and to what terrible landscape his imagination might lead him.

The foursome at last returned to the jeep in silence, their footsteps squelching in the mud. Even Aminah had nothing to say. She only dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.

Had she been alone, Barbara would have simply done things. But now she was trapped in the back seat, next to Femi. Their arms touched and she could feel his limbs trembling, his breathing erratic. She glanced at him. His eyes were glistening with tears, and he appeared to be mouthing words, as if reasoning with himself or urging himself on. She tracked her vision away from this sight.

Femi had been right. She had never been acquainted with even a small death at close quarters, let alone seen death on this scale. She wanted nothing to do with any of it and so coped the only way she knew how: by moving from reflection to action.

“Well.” She flicked open a notebook with the words “Miracles Happen” emblazoned on its cover. “What do we do now?” She sniffled and then clicked open a pink pen.