You Must Set Forth at Dawn (52 page)

It would be easier dealing with the gentleman assistant, I decided. I stood up, feeling battered and bruised. I had actually dared to imagine that all she sought was the use of my newly augmented profile to promote her work on the continent, obtain more support from African governments especially, and call attention to the plight of the children. Well, maybe that was the ultimate goal. The enthronement of a White African Mother might just open up the sluice gates of the milk of human kindness. She kindly let me go to prepare for my morning's engagements, and I took my leave, unsure whether I should kiss her hand or give her a filial embrace. Her assistant dutifully followed with the spoils of the encounter, determined to see me to my room.

“Did she mention the other matter?” he asked.

“You have more than one project? Apart from the boat campaign?” I was most impressed. Being a White African Mother, I would have thought, was already a full-time job.

He rolled his eyes, shook his head in despair. “I say it all the time, she is a very reticent lady. Too reticent for her own good. She said nothing about the nomination?”

“Nomination? You mean as the White African Mother?”

“No, Mr. Soyinka, that is only to show how she is perceived in Africa. How she is loved and respected, like a mother. We feel that with that kind of acknowledgment, if you, Mr. Soyinka, can give support to the idea, she will definitely win the Nobel Peace Prize. I have to tell you, Mr. Soyinka, that the lady is too reticent, which is why the government gives her some staff to help her. She has been nominated before but did not win. We feel that, again next year, she has a hundred percent chance with your support. This is a work that is done in Africa, for Africans, for the African children, and you are now the African Voice. This is why we came to see you; we need your support for it to take place.”

I gave myself a few seconds for the idea to sink in, then scrambled for a solution. “I'll tell you how we will proceed. Our ambassador here happens to be a woman, very cultured, very sophisticated, and most caring. I have known her for nearly twenty years. I shall speak to her. I assure you, she'll be most happy to take this on—I mean, continue where I leave off. Maybe you can leave a set of these publications with her?”

His eyes lit up. “Certainly. Certainly, Mr. Soyinka. We'll be delighted to do that.”

It was a very happy man who deposited my “gifts” in a convenient spot in my room, bowed his gratitude, and took the good news back to the White African Mother. On my part, I cast my eyes in the direction of the gods of restitution in whatever corner of my suite they were chuckling and asked, “Is this a mere foretaste? Do you have more exactions riding on the Nobel?”

Three Lost Years

AFTER A FEW MONTHS OF RESISTANCE, I SURRENDERED. THERE WAS CLEARLY a price to be paid by Nobel Prize winners, most especially one from the African continent. No one had prepared me for it, but I soon found that I had embarked on the rites of restitution. I handed over 1987 to the implacable Swedish deity of dynamite and fulfilled my duties, swearing silently that the moment the next beauty queen was crowned had better be recognized as my hour of liberation. I had been stretched to the limit. My constituency was always wide—in the creative industry, in home politics and those of the continent, in issues of human rights—which, for me, includes the right to life, a commitment that led to my creation of a national Road Safety Corps and the unglamorous labor of hounding homicidal maniacs off the Nigerian highways and educating them the hard way.

This constituency had swollen beyond all rational projection. Still, I consoled myself, perhaps a year was not too heavy a price to pay. I found myself compelled to acknowledge that, in the Third World especially, my presence at a number of events appeared to induce so much plain, undisguised pleasure, generated such a sense of collective vindication for a variety of causes—and in the least expected places—that some of the satisfaction bounced back to me. I could even persuade myself, sometimes, that I had got the better part of the bargain. There is pleasure in giving pleasure—even as one feels that a portion of oneself is constantly shed in the effort, that one is being, literally, eaten piecemeal. No matter, one year, and that was it! The year 1987 proved indeed to be a dry year for creativity; I produced not even so much as an occasional poem that I can recall. I envisaged 1988 waiting in the wings, when the frustrated mind would slide back gradually into a creative normality.

I could not have been more mistaken; 1988 went the same way, only it was much, much worse. So did most of the following year, and then 1990 began to look like it was following the example of the others. It took a while for me to realize that my increasing unease went beyond the nonevent of
not
writing; that had never been a problem. I have never felt under a compulsion to write. If I felt noncreative, for months, for a year, I underwent no pressure, no sense of a dereliction of duty. There were always other things to do with one's time.

This time, however, I did not merely not write, I did not
wish
to write, did not wish to think creatively in any direction, to be involved in any creative project. I was indifferent to any artistic activities around me. Abroad, I rarely visited the theater. No concerts, no opera, no jazz clubs. My short list of books marked down for reading expanded beyond the normal growth rate—oh, I still browsed through the review pages of journals, I could somehow manage that, but it was more an accustomed drug on which my system had grown dependent, not an act of pleasure, curiosity, or enlightenment. I jotted down titles because I feared that the phase might pass suddenly, and I could not rely on my memory. Mostly, I simply did not care. I was overwhelmed by the futility of everything I had ever done or known in the realms of literature and the arts. Even during normal times, this was always a question I deplored, but if that intrusive brigade with the perennial “What are you working on now?” only knew what leaped to the tip of my tongue during this period, they would have recoiled at the furnace that raged within me and regretted their unintended temerity. They were not to know of course, but a huge void had settled into my life, usurping the habitat of a vital presence.

I remained in thrall to this absence, whose memory still haunts me, as it does so many others in varying degrees—from Ibadan and Lagos to London, Beirut, Cannes, Cairo, or Bergamo—a now-disembodied life force that pops up in the midst of festivities, not dampening the spirit but resurrecting bereavement, a throbbing amputation but mostly evoking the presence of an enlivening guest, bringing with his recollection a sense of wonder at the unimaginable plenitude that we had all shared in the sheer being of this individual.

WHY DID HIS FAMILY choose to abandon his body in an obscure German village called Wiesbaden? Was it envy? Hate? And why, when I finally brought him home, did they frustrate the anticipation of so many to bid him adieu, to pay simple tribute to him as friends, acquaintances, business partners, even business rivals who respected him for his remarkable enterprise and flair? Why? And then, unavoidably, my own nagging sense of guilt. Seven months of total rupture—had it been truly necessary? Really unavoidable?

I have tried to imagine my attendance at the Nobel Prize conferment without Femi, that instinctive embodiment of pleasure and celebration. It would have been such a hollow event. The Nobel was made for O. B. Johnson! He had to be there for the ceremony to have any meaning, for any rite of celebration to become a rounded experience, once one has incurred a life sentence for the crime of knowing OBJ for even one day. And so I felt profoundly grateful to the ancestors that they had intervened to ensure that I was not deprived of the attendance of one who was capable of
enjoying
and enlarging the occasion in ways I never could, right there in the flesh, absorbing the panoply of it, ingesting and exuding it through his own larger-than-life persona as a shared acquisition over which he exercised the major right of possession.

MI O R'IKU L'OJU E —no, I read no death in his eyes. Neither did any of his insurance colleagues in Cairo, where, according to reports, he performed his accustomed gastronomic feats and enlivened the gathering of brokers. We parted company in London, his plaints pursuing me into my taxi because I would not change my flight, return to Nigeria via Cairo, and share with him the excitement of his induction into the marvels of Egypt.

A week later, working in my study in Abeokuta, a car drew up. I recognized it from the window and went to open the door. It was Gboyega, Femi's personal chauffeur.

“I've been asked to come for you, sir.”

“When did he return?”

“Just two days ago, sir.”

“And he's been working nonstop in his office as usual, I bet.”

I thought I detected a faint hesitation, but he said, “Y-yes, sir.”

“Well, tell him me too, I'm still tied to my desk. When I've cleared it— maybe by the weekend—I'll see him.”

His next words came out in a rush. “Please come, sir. It was Madam who sent me, not him. He's taken ill and been rushed to hospital. It is quite serious, sir.”

“Femi? In hospital?”

“It happened in his office. They sent for Dr. Soyanwo. He ordered an ambulance, but it did not arrive in time, so a car took him to hospital.”

I broke loose from the spell and dashed back into the house. An hour and a half later, I was by his bedside at Ibadan University Teaching Hospital. Femi had begun the fight for his life.

It was a stroke. Two seizures, it would seem. When the first had happened, Femi had thought he had merely had a fainting spell. He had come to, found himself on the floor, and somehow succeeded in pulling himself back to his desk. Then he had been stricken a second time. One of his secretaries had looked in and found him on the floor.

His wife, Folake, who now sat beside him, visibly distraught, had taken the call at home, but she was merely informed that her husband was feeling poorly and a doctor had been summoned. Next she learned that Femi had been taken to hospital. Her first thought was to send a driver to go and find “Prof,” bring him over from wherever he was and whatever he was doing. Now she sat with her head bowed, wringing her hands. As soon as she saw me, she was convulsed afresh with sobs.

I sat by his bedside, looking at my friend, a drip in his arm and a tube up one nostril. His discomfort was nearly palpable; he tossed about and unconsciously tried to rip the tube from his body, so his other arm had been tied to the bed. Sometime later, Femi opened his eyes, rolled them toward me, and tried to speak. I gestured to him to be quiet—there would be time enough for that. He appeared to fall asleep again but mostly tossed around in a state of half consciousness. A doctor entered, an acquaintance. He patted me on the shoulders and tried to convey his sympathy. His examination over, I followed him outside, and we discussed Femi's condition.

Two to three hours later, I said to Folake, “You can go home now. Go and pack his things and send them over, then get some rest yourself while you can. There is nothing more you can do here.” It took the doctors and me a long while to convince her to move.

FEMI'S CONDITION did not improve. The decision became unavoidable: he would have to be flown abroad for specialized treatment. Inevitably, and with a sense of belatedness, I remembered how Femi had tried to interest some doctors to start a home-based diagnostic hospital. It was an idea that had come from his annual checkup in the favorite health spot of the nation's politicians, top military, and other well-heeled members of society. Once Femi had found himself in a queue behind the then prime minister, Tafawa Balewa, ruler and ruled equalized by the bleached hospital smock that covered their otherwise naked bodies, by the urine and excrement samples and diagnostic cards that they carried as they moved from one room, cubicle, or window to the next. It was typical of Femi's creative mind to seek remedies at home:
If I must carry my
own shit in my hand, why should I do it abroad rather than here?
He tried to interest a few doctors in the idea—my own brother, his namesake, among them. He asked them to prepare estimates and offered to put up the working capital. Whatever stage his efforts had reached at the time of his illness, they were clearly too late to help him. The premier teaching hospital in the nation lacked even the drugs required to stabilize his condition before he could be flown abroad.

And so—a familiar scenario for a teaching hospital—an all-out search! In all of Ibadan, the drugs could not be found. Throughout Lagos also—once the nation's capital and still its commercial center—this critical drug was equally unavailable! Finally news came that a pharmacy in a most unlikely city, Ilorin, had a small stock in store. A driver was dispatched. In anticipation, the air ambulance was alerted, perhaps even the same plane that had once flown his brother, Bolus, to Germany after a horrifying motor accident. It would take off from Germany as soon as the word was given, fully equipped for any emergency. The news grew graver by the day. A blood clot had been discovered in Femi's brain, and now we were looking at what, for us laymen, was going to be critical brain surgery. Suddenly, time was ranged against us. In the meanwhile, Femi tossed between full consciousness and partial incapacitation. He understood all that was going on around him, was lucid enough to mutter one of his favorite mantras from time to time: “Iku lo m'eja kako.”
⁴⁸

It was a familiar self-mocking lament for a moment of frustration, for any form of constraint—no different, for instance, from an inability to embark on or expand a business venture owing to a lack of an opening or capital. Only after the event, rewinding the reel of our last moments together in all their detail, did its prophetic pertinence strike me or anyone else. In any case, I was preoccupied with practical concerns: How quickly could I wind up my affairs, reschedule appointments, and so on and prepare to join Femi in Germany?

FEMI WAS BROUGHT out from the ambulance; his stretcher was laid on the tarmac for some fresh air, awaiting his transfer into the ambulance plane. The clearance papers for the plane's departure were being processed. I stood some distance away, to let him and his wife have a few moments alone before his departure—she had just been told that there would be no room for her in the plane. My eyes swept over trees, horizon, tarmac, and parked planes, contemplated the slim craft that would bear Femi away, then came to rest on the stretcher. In obedience to some strange pull, I walked slowly back toward the couple. Femi must have heard my footsteps, because he tried to move his head and see behind him, but he only succeeded in rolling his eyes skyward, then tried to extend his scope of vision to embrace whatever it was that approached.

As I looked down on the stretcher, I received a jolt, rather like an electric shock, a crude intimation of finality. Nothing had prepared me for the plea for help that I encountered when my eyes looked into my friend's. His, glassy and mud brown, rolled upward to encounter mine, eloquent in their depth of bewilderment. What is happening to me? they pleaded. Help me up out of this pit,
just help me emerge from this darkness.
Femi's eyes appeared to dissolve and sink into a deep, endless tunnel, fathomless. I stood above these opaque windows and stared into their roiling recesses, encountering nothing but space, just space, infinite space into which I was violently pulled, so that I felt weightless. I came to and found that I had leaned over and encased his free hand in both of mine.

I withdrew slowly, chilled to the bone, acknowledging that he had withdrawn himself from the world, even as my hands left his. For I knew, in that moment, that I had left Femi at the very end of the tunnel, within that fathomless space, that the friend who lay on that stretcher would not return home in the form we knew—and cherished.