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“But you did nothing, too,” my mother said.
Nnamabia shook his head as if she did not understand. In the following days, he was more subdued. He spoke less, and mostly about the old man: how he had no money and could not buy bathing water, how the other men made fun of him or accused him of hiding his son, how the chief ignored him, how he looked frightened and so terribly small.
“Does he know where his son is?” my mother asked.
“He has not seen his son in four months,” Nnamabia said.
My father said something about how it was irrelevant whether or not the man knew where his son was.
“Of course,” my mother said. “It is wrong, but this is what the police do all the time. If they do not find the person they are looking for, they will lock up his father or his mother or his relative.”
My father brushed at something on his knee—an impatient gesture. He did not understand why my mother was stating the obvious.
“The man is ill,” Nnamabia said. “His hands shake and shake, even when he’s asleep.”
My parents were silent. Nnamabia closed the food flask of rice and turned to my father. “I want to give him some of this, but if I bring it into the cell General Abacha will take it.”
My father went over and asked the policeman at the desk if we could be allowed to see the old man in Nnamabia’s cell for a few minutes. The policeman was the light-skinned, acerbic one who never said thank you when my mother handed over the rice and money bribe. Now he sneered in my father’s face and said he could well lose his job for letting Nnamabia out and yet we were asking for another person to be allowed out? Did we think this was a boarding school visiting day? Didn’t we know that this was a high-security holding place for criminal elements of society? My father came back and sat down with a sigh and Nnamabia silently scratched at his bumpy face.
The next day, Nnamabia barely touched his rice. He said that the policemen had splashed detergent water on the floor and walls of the cell in the name of cleaning as they usually did and that the old man, who could not afford water, who had not bathed in a week, had hurried into the cell and yanked his shirt off and rubbed his frail back against the detergent-wet floor. The policemen started to laugh when they saw him do this and they asked him to take all his clothes off and parade in the corridor outside the cell, and as he did they laughed louder and asked whether his son the thief knew that papa’s penis was so shriveled. Nnamabia was staring at his yellow-orange rice as he spoke, and when he looked up I saw my brother’s eyes fill with tears—my worldly brother—and I felt a tenderness for him that I could not have explained had I been asked to.
. . .
Two days later, there was another cult attack on campus: a boy hacked another boy with an axe right in front of the music department building.
“This is good,” my mother said as she and my father got ready to go and see the Nsukka police superintendent again. “They cannot say now that they have arrested all the cult boys.” We did not go to Enugu that day, because my parents spent so long at the superintendent’s, but they came back with good news. Nnamabia and the barman were to be released immediately. One of the cult boys had become an informer, and he insisted that Nnamabia was not a member. We left earlier than usual in the morning, without jollof rice, the sun already so hot that all the car windows were down. My mother was jumpy on the drive. She was used to saying “Nekwa ya! Watch out!” to my father as if he could not see the cars making dangerous turns in the other lane, but this time she did it so often that just before we got to Ninth Mile, where hawkers crowded around the car with their trays of okpa and boiled eggs and cashew nuts, my father stopped the car and snapped, “Just who is driving this car, Uzoamaka?”
Inside the sprawling station compound, two policemen were flogging somebody who was lying on the ground under the umbrella tree. At first I thought, with a lurch in my chest, that it was Nnamabia, but it was not. I knew the boy who lay on the ground, writhing and shouting with each lash of a policeman’s koboko. He was called Aboy, and he had the grave, ugly face of a hound and drove a Lexus on campus and was said to be a Buccaneer. I tried not to look at him as we walked into the station. The policeman on duty, the one with tribal marks on his cheeks who always said “God bless you” when he took his bribe, looked away when he saw us. Prickly hives spread over my skin. I knew then that something was wrong. My parents gave him the note from the superintendent. The policeman did not look at it. He knew about the release order, he told my father, the bar man had already been released but there was a complication with the boy. My mother began to shout. “The boy? What do you mean? Where is my son?”
The policeman got up. “I will call my senior to explain to you.”
My
mother rushed at him and pulled at his shirt. “Where is my son? Where is my son?” My father pried her away and the policeman brushed at his shirt, as if she had left some dirt there, before he turned to walk away.
“Where is our son?” my father asked in a voice so quiet, so steely, that the policeman stopped.
“They took him away, sir,” he said.
“They took him away?” my mother broke in. She was still shouting. “What are you saying? Have you killed my son? Have you killed my son?”
“Where is he?” my father asked again in the same quiet voice. “Where is our son?”
“My senior said I should call him when you come,” the policeman said, and this time he turned and hurried through a door.
It was after he left that I felt chilled by fear, that I wanted to run after him and like my mother pull at his shirt until he produced Nnamabia. The senior policeman came out and I searched his completely blank face for an expression.
“Good day, sir,” he said to my father.
“Where is our son?” my father asked. My mother was breathing noisily. Later I would realize that at that moment each of us suspected privately that Nnamabia had been killed by trigger-happy policemen and that this man’s job was to find the best lie to tell us about how he had died.
“No problem, sir. It is just that we transferred him. I will take you there right away.” There was something nervous about the policeman; his face remained blank but he did not meet my father’s eyes.
“Transferred him?”
“We got the release order this morning, but he had already been transferred. We don’t have petrol, so I was waiting for you to come so that we go together to where he is.”
“Where is he?”
