Oil on Water (15 page)

17

O
utside the sun is bright. I am talking to Zaq in the hut; it is one
of those days when he looks spry and full of energy.

—Did you really love Anita? Can you continue to love a person regardless of such shortcomings? Maybe because you hope to save them? Or because you can’t help it? Isn’t that what love is all about?

Zaq says nothing. He turns his face away, but just before he does so, I see the pain, the bitterness on that face. The sadness seems so out of keeping with the beautiful day outside, and I feel sorry I introduced a sad note into such a glorious day, but I want to hear his answer desperately, for some reason. He speaks softly, sadly.

—What’s the point? It is all memory now.

Anita died in a detention center in London. She hanged herself in the bathroom. The news didn’t make the front pages of the Lagos papers, just a single column in the back of one or two provincials.

Voices. Whispers. Soldiers, perhaps.
Then the cry of a child, and I thought I was imagining it. I got off the bed and crawled on all fours to the door. It was dark, the voices were coming from one of the many broken-down doors on either my right or my left. I waited, controlling my breathing, and suddenly I saw a flicker of light, and then it disappeared. Not soldiers—they would be more brash and noisy than this. I stood up and moved toward the room, but just as I got to the door my leg kicked against an empty tin, which elicited a brief scurrying sound from the room. Then silence.

—Hello.

Silence.

—Is anyone there? I’m a friend. I know you can hear me.

My voice shook, my legs were bowed and I had to hold on to the doorframe with both hands to remain upright.

—I’m a friend. I’m coming in. Here I come.

It was a moonless night and the room was nothing but vague outlines and humps. I held my breath and waited, and after a while I heard breathing, movement. I braced myself, half expecting something to whizz out of the darkness and connect with my face, but instead a match was struck and a face emerged behind the glow. A candle was lit. It was a man, in the corner, crouched on the floor. He raised the light, moving his face sideways, trying to see my face. I stepped in, and in the corners still cloaked in shadow I could hear other figures moving about, staring at me.

—My name is Rufus. I’m alone.

I spoke without thinking, trying to give as much reassuring information as possible. I couldn’t see his face: he shaded the candle with his hand so that the light fell only in my direction.

—I’m a reporter.

—A reporter?

It seemed the man turned to look into the dark part of the room, as if to communicate his surprise to the others in the shadows.

—Yes. I’m a reporter from Port Harcourt.

—What are you doing here by yourself?

Now I knew he wasn’t dangerous.

—Listen, do you have anything I can eat? I’m very hungry.

He got up and disappeared behind the light, then I heard whispering, a woman’s voice, low. He came back with something in his hand and handed it to me. It was meat, dried, rubbery, gamy. I sat down on the floor and ate, all the while staring into his glowing, watchful eyes, and when I finished he gave me a cup of water that I drank in a single gulp. He seemed to want to get rid of me as quickly as possible, but I wasn’t ready to leave him just yet, I was curious to see who was with him, and I had questions that needed to be answered, like where to find a boat.

—I escaped from the fighting. Who are you?

A figure rose from the corner and entered the light, and I saw a woman in a boubou and wrapper, a head-tie covering most of her face. More figures came forward. It was a whole family: father, mother and three children. The youngest, who looked to be about three, was crying, her face running with tears and snot, blotchy from insect bites and grime. The mother and children had been huddled beneath a large blanket, and now the children peered at me from outside the light’s circumference, and their expressions told me they felt more pity for me than fear. They had been here a whole day now. They had locked themselves up in the toilet when the shooting began, and afterward they had moved to this tiny room, coming out only to go to the toilet or to look for food. The husband was a tall, distracted-looking fisherman and he jumped at the slightest noise, clearly scared witless for his children’s safety. I wondered if there were similar families in the other houses, huddled beneath blankets, stifling their children’s cries, waiting for the storm to blow away. Revived by the water and dried meat, I stood up.

—You’d do better if you joined the camp. The soldiers are not letting anyone off the island for a few more days. You can’t survive here that long.

The wife shook her head, grabbing her children to her bosom. He looked at me and then at his wife and the children. I guessed he’d do whatever she said.

—Where can I find a boat?

He looked at her and she nodded. Crawling from house to house, dashing forward, then stopping, he led me back into the woods. He took me near the waterfront, and between two thick trees, in a deep gorge that led all the way to the sea, cleverly covered by grass and sand and rocks, he unearthed a boat and two oars. He helped me push it to the water and pointed me in the right direction. The sea was very narrow here; all I had to do was cross it and on the other side I’d find the river that led inland.

I waved as the boat pulled away, and he stood there a long time, waving back. For a moment he had put aside the enormous responsibilities of protecting his family, and now he had to return. And soon I had no need for the long oar—the water was swift, the waves were high and then low, and it wasn’t long before there was as much water in the boat as in the sea. The waves flashed at me, white and swift and startling, carrying me away.

ON A SPIT OF DRY LAND
in the middle of the sea—that was how they found me, they told me. There was no sign of my boat, and I was unconscious and spitting out water. I was discovered by a group of villagers venturing far from their little village to where the fishing was better, and if they hadn’t gone that far, or if they had been an hour later, I’d have died, exposed, cold, belly-up, like a beached fish. It seemed I had made it to the river, more by accident than by my own efforts. I woke up in a little room filled with smoked fish left to dry on racks. A single lamp hung from the roof on a long hook. In its weak, smoky light I saw that everywhere was covered with fish, and the only space left was where I was lying on a mat against the wall. The smell of fish got me crawling to the door and emptying my stomach on the doorstep.

They didn’t ask who I was and where I was going and why I was here; they only asked if I was strong enough to move on. These were dangerous waters, and I could be an escaped hostage. The last thing they wanted was a boatload of gun-wielding militants berthing on their shore. If I was going to get out of there, I had to regain my strength. I slurped the thick corn porridge they gave me with superhuman concentration and then went outside and threw up. I asked for more, my hands shaking. There were four people peering down at me: an old man seated on a rickety hand-carved stool, fair-skinned, with hairs all over his face and growing like tendrils out of his nostrils and ears and armpits and out of the top of his singlet; a fat woman standing over him, the hair on her head white and knotted; and two silent men standing in the shadows behind the fat woman, not saying much, not much hair on their heads. A smoky lamp on a hook hung from the roof. The woman took the bowl from my hands and shook her head.

—No more.

I slept for a half hour or so and didn’t even notice the fish smell. When I woke up I was strong enough to eat a whole fish. Catfish, the whiskers on its intact face looking like the hairs on the old man’s face. I told the old man I was a journalist and I was on my way to Port Harcourt.

—Ah, Port Harcourt, very far from here.

He pointed up with his hand, and from the way he pointed, and the vague, uncomprehending look on his face, Port Harcourt might have been on the moon. The others nodded.

—Can you help me?

—Everybody wan go Port Harcourt. You go enter ferry from Irikefe.

—I’ve come from Irikefe. There’s fighting going on there.

Again, they didn’t ask for details, though surely they must have been aware of the fight? News traveled fast on the water, from island to island, from creek to creek, boat to boat, hut to hut. They continued to stare at me in silence, and the lamp grew smokier above us, making my eyes water. It took a while before I registered something odd in the man’s comment.

—What do you mean, everybody wants to go to Port Harcourt? Who else wants to go there?

They looked at each other. Their eyes expressed their debate, whether to trust me—a stranger who had just washed up on their shore—or not.

—I’m a journalist. You can trust me.

The woman spoke first. She said a white woman was there three days ago, wanting a boat to go to Port Harcourt.

—Was she alone?

—No. One man dey with am. Him name na Salomon.

Isabel Floode. And Salomon, the wanted driver. The two had arrived in a boat, the woman’s face blackened with charcoal, dressed in a man’s clothes, her hair covered in a hat, but there was no hiding the blue eyes when she came closer, nor was there disguising the voice, the speech. She didn’t look very well, her arms were covered in bug bites and rashes and she looked weak, but she was determined to go to Port Harcourt at once. They spent the night there because they had arrived very late. They didn’t say much about where they were from or who they were, but they did promise the villagers a lot of money if they would help them get to Irikefe in the morning, from where they’d get the ferry to Port Harcourt. But then the fighting had broken out.

—Where is she now?

—We send her to Chief Ibiram.

—Chief Ibiram?

—Yes. Him place no far from here.

I looked around the little room, the three faces staring at me. I tried to imagine the woman here, her life in the hands of Salomon and these simple fishing folk. Until now I had only thought of her as a subject, if I thought of her at all, but now, perhaps because of my weakened state, I found myself trying to imagine what must have gone through her mind. How did she manage to escape, coming so far, only to discover the fighting at Irikefe? But why didn’t she go to the soldiers? I looked outside at the forest and the abandoned boats on the water, the few thatched huts, and I thought, what could fate possibly want with her on these oil-polluted waters? The forsaken villages, the gas flares, the stumps of pipes from exhausted wells with their heads capped and left jutting out of the oil-scorched earth, and the ever-present pipelines crisscrossing the landscape, sometimes like tree roots surfacing far away from the parent tree, sometimes like diseased veins on the back of an old shriveled hand, and sometimes in squiggles like ominous writing on the wall. Maybe fate wanted to show her firsthand the carcasses of the fish and crabs and waterbirds that floated on the deserted beaches of these tiny towns and villages and islands every morning, killed by the oil her husband was helping to produce.

—Listen, you must take me to Chief Ibiram now. He is a friend. I have to meet the white woman.

They looked at each other and shook their heads.

—Chief Ibiram don go. E no dey here anymore. E say e no wan stay here anymore, because of so so fighting and because of bad fishing.

—So where is he going to?

They all pointed in the same direction: northward. That meant Port Harcourt, and that explained why they had sent the woman to him: to hitch a ride on one of his boats—it was her best chance of getting there. With the whole clan on the move, she could travel with them undetected.

18

I
t was not easy: First I had to convince them I was strong enough
to leave, then I had to convince them we could catch up with Chief Ibiram if we left immediately. When words failed I waved my big wet wad of James Floode’s money before the hirsute old man, and he nodded. Two young men, Charles and Peter, eager and full of questions, set out with me in one of the village’s few riverworthy boats, and we headed north, hoping Chief Ibiram and his clan hadn’t already put too much distance between themselves and us. Charles, it turned out, was the one who had taken Salomon and Isabel to Chief Ibiram. He said Chief Ibiram and his people had left their settlement late the previous night, preferring to travel under cover of darkness, and by his estimate that put them at least ten hours ahead of us, but because they had children and women they’d be forced to stop often. If we went hard without a pause—we carried two extra gallons of petrol to avoid stopping for refills—we should be able to catch up with them before sunset.

As we passed the flood plain where Chief Ibiram’s village had once stood, I told the two men to slow down for a minute. The place looked desolate: the only signs that a community had once thrived here were a few sticks jutting out of the water, pieces of straw from roof thatches scattered in the mud and a pile of garbage under a tree, that was all.

WE CAUGHT UP
with them very late in the afternoon—and by now I was almost fainting from fatigue and weakness. My guides had offered many times to stop and rest but I had insisted we keep going, and now they had to hold me under the arms as I got off the boat.

The group was camped in a forest not far from the river, where their boats, laden with their meager belongings, waited near the trees and rocks on the banks. They had set up tents and sheds, and curious faces peered out of the doorway slits as we passed, some nodding in recognition. Young men and women and children sat under trees, eating, or playing, or just idly waiting for nightfall, when they’d be on the move again. Chief Ibiram’s tent lay a few meters from the others.

—Good to see your face again, reporter.

—You too, Chief Ibiram.

He was seated on his reclining chair, his radio on a side table; I sat on a mat, facing him, and for a second it seemed time had not moved an inch since that day when the old man and his son had first brought Zaq and me to this community. The same cloth chair, the same radio by his side, and somewhere in an imaginary back room I could hear women and children talking and laughing. Only this time there was no Zaq, and this time it was I who was slumped and bowed like Zaq had been that day, and all alone. And the old man, Tamuno and his son Michael, where were they?

—They returned safely. They are fine. They are out there, somewhere.

—Good to hear that.

—And where is your friend, Zaq?

—I left him at Irikefe. He’s not well.

—You also don’t look well, reporter.

—I’ll be fine. I’m on my way to Port Harcourt, where I’ll see a doctor. And you, I see you are on the move again.

—Yes, we couldn’t remain there anymore. My people, they are frightened, the violence gets closer every day. We’ve heard of a place not too far from Port Harcourt, the people there are friendly, most of them are refugees like us. My people could get some sort of work in Port Harcourt.

His voice was hopeful, but his eyes were pessimistic, cloudy. Gradually the community was drifting toward the big city, and sooner or later it would be swallowed up, its people dispersed, like people getting off a bus and joining the traffic on the city streets. He sighed.

—You came for the white woman, didn’t you? Do you want to see her now?

—Can I?

At last I was going to see Isabel Floode, and I didn’t even have a pen or a notepad or my camera. I tried to control my nervousness as I followed Chief Ibiram out of his tent into the heat. She was in a tent by herself, seated on what looked like a folded trampoline; beside her was a half-covered bowl with a half-eaten meal in it. She was staring out to the trees through the door slit, and she didn’t seem at all surprised to see us; perhaps her recent experiences had exhausted her capacity for surprise—which I could understand. Now she looked up with a dull, locked-in expression, waiting for us to speak.

—This is Rufus, a journalist. He’s come to see you.

At the mention of “journalist” a spark of interest entered her eyes. His job done, Chief Ibiram nodded at me, turned and left us. Now I saw how thin she looked. Her hair had been chopped off and the jagged edges hung unevenly over her ears. An old red blouse that didn’t seem to belong to her hung from her shoulders, and her collarbones jutted out, stretching the skin. Her face was covered in rashes; the skin was still slightly discolored from whatever dye she had used to disguise her skin while making her escape from her kidnappers. But it was her eyes that expressed her situation best: they looked hollow, lusterless, and even when they rested directly on you, they did so bluntly, never cutting below the surface. She was about forty years old, but right now she looked ten years older.

—My name is Rufus. I’m from the Reporter.

—Hello. I’m Isabel Floode.

—Yes. Mrs. Floode, your husband sent me . . . us. Me and a friend, though I’m alone here at the moment. We’ve been searching for you for more than two weeks now.

—James sent you?

—Yes. He sent us to see if you were alive and well, and

if possible to negotiate your ransom . . . but now that you are free . . .

—Yes, yes. I’m free.

I noticed that her attention kept wavering. Her eyes were still fixed at the little slit through which a line of light came into the tent, and I wondered what she was staring at outside, or if she was expecting something to come charging in. I felt awkward, unsure how to behave with her, what to say or ask. I had always imagined she’d be surrounded by gun-toting militants when I met her, and I had always assumed Zaq would be there with me and he’d do all the talking; not in my wildest imaginings did I ever see myself sitting less than a meter from her, alone in a tent by the river, carrying the burden of the conversation. But I was a reporter, and this was what reporters do—improvise, look confident and poised.

—Mr. Floode really wanted to be here himself, but because of security . . .

She said nothing, and kept staring at the same spot.

—I know you’re tired; if you’d rather rest . . .

Now she turned to me and I saw how my unexpected comment had taken her by surprise. She shook her head.

—No. I can talk. What do you want to know?

—Well, how did you do it? How did you manage to escape?

—It wasn’t that hard. Salomon was able to overpower the guard. He bashed him on the head with a stone, and we slipped away. I guess they weren’t expecting us to try something so crazy.

—Yes, Salomon, why did he help you escape? He kidnapped you in the first place, didn’t he?

—It’s complicated.

—What do you mean?

—He didn’t actually kidnap me.

—He didn’t? Well, the police are looking for him. He’s their primary suspect.

—Look, you’ll have to ask Salomon for some of the details of what happened that day. He’s out there somewhere. What I can tell you is what I know.

—Okay. That’s all right. Please go ahead, Mrs. Floode.

—Sorry . . . I didn’t mean to snap at you, but everything is so . . . I expected to die back there, you know. I still find it hard to believe I’m here, almost safe, on my way to Port Harcourt. When I decided to come to this country, the last thing on my mind was getting kidnapped. Of course, I had been advised about the risks of coming to Nigeria, to Port Harcourt. The embassy had shown me all the newspaper clippings about abducted foreigners, but I didn’t pay much attention. I was coming on a special mission. I was coming to save my marriage.

She paused and looked at me, her eyes still expressionless. I had read somewhere that she was a schoolteacher—perhaps her husband had told me—and her eyes made me feel like an erring student, waiting for judgment.

—Rufus, I’m telling you all this just to put everything into perspective. I know you must have risked a lot to be here, so you deserve to know everything. Perhaps my husband has told you some of it already, but it doesn’t matter. Though I expect you to use your judgment to know what to print and what to leave out.

I nodded. She turned away and continued her story.

She had met Floode at university. He was in his final year, and she was a year behind. They got married a year after she graduated. The first years were happy ones. He worked for a chemical company in London, but then he got his present job, and that was when things began to change. He was a gifted petroleum engineer, and his skills were in great demand. He began to travel a lot, and over the past three years he had lived in five different countries: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Canada, Netherlands and now Nigeria. At first she happily went with him to each new place, but after Canada she suddenly lost interest. Why go all that distance only to stay at home watching TV or shopping at the mall, never seeing him till late in the evenings? So when he got posted to the Netherlands, they decided it was best if she stayed with his mother in Newcastle. But six months later he was out of the Netherlands and on his way to Nigeria. When she asked him if he was happy with the way things were, if he would perhaps think of another line of work for the sake of their marriage, he told her Nigeria would be for only two years, and then he would retire. He was being paid a lot of money to go there because of the dangerous conditions. But then she met someone else. It was nothing serious, nothing actually happened, but it got her thinking.

—I realized how lonely I had been all this while. What we had, me and James, couldn’t really be called a marriage. At first we used to phone every day, but then many days would pass without a word from him. He always claimed that the infrastructure in Nigeria was just awful. Well, I had a brilliant idea. I was going to have a baby. I was going to go to Nigeria on a surprise visit, get pregnant, and everything would be fine.

At first he appeared happy to see her, and every day he came home early from work; there were invitations from other families for cocktails and garden parties, and trips to Lagos and Abuja—in the evenings they’d sit out on the veranda, with its view of the distant sea, and eat, refreshed by the sea breeze. But then, abruptly, things changed. A bomb exploded at his office, and the next day an Italian worker was kidnapped. He started coming home late, saying things were crazy at the office, and he had to be there all the time. After a month of waiting for things to change, of going to the club to play tennis with some of the wives, of sipping sherry under umbrellas by the pool, alone, she realized that was it, and things were not going to change.

—When, in desperation, I told him about my intention to get pregnant, he said it was out of the question. And that was when he told me he was seeing someone else. He didn’t tell me whom, and I assumed it was one of the many expatriate women I always saw at the club. He told me he wanted a divorce.

I kept nodding, keeping my expression pleasant and interested, comparing what she was telling me with what her husband had told me. I tried to calm my excitement: I was being handed a major scoop, and, though I had no pen or recorder, I was storing every word, every inflection of her voice.

—Well, he said the affair had been going on for a while, and . . . and that she was pregnant. You can imagine how I felt, the shock. It was as if a cloud had risen in the room, roaring and blocking out every other thing. I couldn’t see. I needed to be alone, to think. It was late at night and I didn’t know the roads very well. The driver, Salomon, always took me out, but I didn’t care. I took the car and went to the club. My plan was to leave for London the next morning.

But she was surprised to find that Salomon had come to look for her there. At first she thought he was waiting to drive her home, but then she noticed he wasn’t wearing his blue-and-black uniform.

—Hello, Solomon . . .

—Salomon.

She realized she had always referred to him as Solomon, and he had never corrected her, till now.

—Oh, sorry.

—It’s okay. No problem.

—Did James send you?

—No, madam. I came to talk to you about something serious.

He looked and sounded different. He was wearing a jacket—a bit tight around the shoulders—and it gave him a more formal air than the uniform ever did; and he wasn’t speaking the usual pidgin English that she found so irksome and that always had to be explained to her. Today he spoke a grammatically faultless English, and even the accent was modified, easy to understand. Later she discovered that he was actually a university graduate who, like a lot of young men in the Delta, had been forced to take a job far below his qualifications while he waited for that elusive office job with an oil company. She gave him the car keys and they drove—she had no idea where they were going, but she didn’t care. Something told her what she was about to hear wasn’t going to be pleasant. He said nothing as he drove but she could feel him watching her in the car mirror. Finally they stopped at what looked like a roadside motel.

—Can I get a drink here?

—Yes. My uncle owns this place.