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“Another site. I will take you there.”
“Why was he transferred?”
“I was not here, sir. They said he misbehaved yesterday and they took him to Cell One and then there was a transfer of all the people in Cell One to another site.”
“He misbehaved? What do you mean?”
“I was not here, sir.”
My mother spoke then in a broken voice. “Take me to my son! Take me to my son right now!”
I sat in the back with the policeman. He smelled of the kind of old camphor that seemed to last forever in my mother’s trunk. We did not speak except for his giving my father directions until we arrived about fifteen minutes later, my father driving inordinately fast, as fast as my heart was beating. The small compound looked neglected, with patches of overgrown grass, with old bottles and plastic bags and paper strewn everywhere. The policeman hardly waited for my father to stop the car before he opened the door and hurried out, and again I felt chilled by fear. We were in this part of town with untarred roads and there had been no sign that said Police Station and there was a stillness in the air, a strange deserted feeling. But the policeman came out with Nnamabia. There he was, my handsome brother, walking toward us, unchanged, it seemed, until he came close enough for my mother to hug him and I saw him wince and back away; his left arm was covered in soft-looking welts. Dried blood was caked around his nose.
“Nna-Boy, why did they beat you like this?” my mother asked him. She turned to the policeman. “Why did you people do this to my son?”
The man shrugged, a new insolence to his demeanor; it was as if he had been uncertain about Nnamabia’s well-being but now could let himself talk. “You cannot raise your children well, all of you people who feel important because you work in the university. When your children misbehave, you think they should not be punished. You are lucky, madam, very lucky that they released him.”
My father said, “Let’s go.”
He opened the door and Nnamabia climbed in and we drove home. My father did not stop at any of the police checkpoints on the road; once, a policeman gestured threateningly with his gun as we sped past. The only thing my mother said on the silent drive was, Did Nnamabia want us to stop at Ninth Mile and buy some okpa? Nnamabia said no. We had arrived in Nsukka when he finally spoke.
“Yesterday the policemen asked the old man if he wanted a free bucket of water. He said yes. So they told him to take his clothes off and parade the corridor. My cell mates were laughing. But some of them said it was wrong to treat an old man like that.” Nnamabia paused, his eyes distant. “I shouted at the policeman. I said the old man was innocent and ill and if they kept him here they would never find his son because he did not even know where his son was. They said I should shut up immediately or they would take me to Cell One. I didn’t care. I didn’t shut up. So they pulled me out and beat me and took me to Cell One.”
Nnamabia stopped there and we asked him nothing else. Instead I imagined him raising his voice, calling the policeman a stupid idiot, a spineless coward, a sadist, a bastard, and I imagined the shock of the policemen, the shock of the chief staring openmouthed, the other cell mates stunned at the audacity of the handsome boy from the university. And I imagined the old man himself looking on with surprised pride and quietly refusing to undress. Nnamabia did not say what had happened to him in Cell One, or what happened in the new site, which seemed to me like where they kept people who would later disappear. It would have been so easy for him, my charming brother, to make a sleek drama of his story, but he did not.
IMITATION
Nkem is staring at the bulging, slanted eyes of the Benin mask on the living room mantel as she learns about her husband’s girlfriend.
“She’s really young. Twenty-one or so,” her friend Ijemamaka is saying on the phone. “Her hair is short and curly—you know, those small tight curls. Not a relaxer. A texturizer, I think. I hear young people like texturizers now. I wouldn’t tell you sha, I know men and their ways, but I heard she has moved into your house. This is what happens when you marry a rich man.” Ijemamaka pauses and Nkem hears her suck in her breath—a deliberate, exaggerated sound. “I mean, Obiora is a good man, of course,” Ijemamaka continues. “But to bring his girlfriend into your house? No respect. She drives his cars all over Lagos. I saw her myself on Awolowo Road driving the Mazda.”
“Thank you for telling me,” Nkem says. She imagines the way Ijemamaka’s mouth scrunches up, like a sucked-until-limp orange, a mouth wearied from talk.
“I had to tell you. What are friends for? What else could I do?” Ijemamaka says, and Nkem wonders if it is glee, that highness in Ijemamaka’s tone, that inflection in “do.”
For the next fifteen minutes, Ijemamaka talks about her visit to Nigeria, how prices have risen since the last time she was back—even garri is so expensive now. How so many more children hawk in traffic hold-ups, how erosion has eaten away chunks of the major road to her hometown in Delta State. Nkem clucks and sighs loudly at the appropriate times. She does not remind Ijemamaka that she, too, was back in Nigeria some months ago, at Christmas. She does not tell Ijemamaka that her fingers feel numb, that she wishes Ijemamaka had not called. Finally, before she hangs up, she promises to bring the children up to visit Ijemamaka in New Jersey one of these weekends—a promise she knows she will not keep.
She walks into the kitchen, pours herself a glass of water, and then leaves it on the table, untouched. Back in the living room, she stares at the Benin mask, copper-colored, its abstract features too big. Her neighbors call it “noble”; because of it, the couple two houses down have started collecting African art, and they, too, have settled for good imitations, although they enjoy talking about how impossible it is to find originals.
Nkem imagines the Benin people carving the original masks four hundred years ago. Obiora told her they used the masks at royal ceremonies, placing them on either side of their king to protect him, to ward off evil. Only specially chosen people could be custodians of the mask, the same people who were responsible for bringing the fresh human heads used in burying their king. Nkem imagines the proud young men, muscled, brown skin gleaming with palm kernel oil, graceful loincloths on their waists. She imagines—and this she imagines herself because Obiora did not sug
gest it happened that way—the proud young men wishing they did not have to behead strangers to bury their king, wishing they could use the masks to protect themselves, too, wishing they had a say.
. . .
She was pregnant when she first came to America with Obiora. The house Obiora rented, and would later buy, smelled fresh, like green tea, and the short driveway was thick with gravel. We live in a lovely suburb near Philadelphia, she told her friends in Lagos on the phone. She sent them pictures of herself and Obiora near the Liberty Bell, proudly scrawled very important in American history behind the pictures, and enclosed glossy pamphlets featuring a balding Benjamin Franklin.
Her neighbors on Cherrywood Lane, all white and pale-haired and lean, came over and introduced themselves, asked if she needed help with anything—getting a driver’s license, a phone, a maintenance person. She did not mind that her accent, her foreignness, made her seem helpless to them. She liked them and their lives. Lives Obiora often called “plastic.” Yet she knew he, too, wanted the children to be like their neighbors’, the kind of children who sniffed at food that had fallen on the dirt, saying it was “spoiled.” In her life, her childhood, you snatched the food up, whatever it was, and ate it.
Obiora stayed the first few months, so the neighbors didn’t start to ask about him until later. Where was her husband? Was something wrong? Nkem said everything was fine. He lived in Nigeria and America; they had two homes. She saw the doubt in their eyes, knew they were thinking of other couples with second homes in places like Florida and Montreal, couples who inhabited each home at the same time, together.
Obiora laughed when she told him how curious the neighbors were about them. He said oyibo people were like that. If you did something in a different way, they would think you were abnormal, as though their way was the only possible way. And although Nkem knew many Nigerian couples who lived together, all year, she said nothing.
Nkem runs a hand over the rounded metal of the Benin mask’s nose. One of the best imitations, Obiora had said when he bought it a few years ago. He told her how the British had stolen the original masks in the late 1800s during what they called the Punitive Expedition; how the British had a way of using words like “expedition” and “pacification” for killing and stealing. The masks—thousands, Obiora said—were regarded as “war booty” and were now displayed in museums all over the world.
Nkem picks up the mask and presses her face to it; it is cold, heavy, lifeless. Yet when Obiora talks about it—and all the rest—he makes them seem breathing, warm. Last year, when he brought the Nok terra-cotta that sits on the table in the hallway, he told her the ancient Nok people had used the originals for ancestor worship, placing them in shrines, offering them food morsels. And the British had carted most of those away, too, telling the people (newly Christianized and stupidly blinded, Obiora said) that the sculptures were heathen. We never appreciate what we have, Obiora always ended by saying, before repeating the story of the foolish head of state who had gone to the National Museum in Lagos and forced the curator to give him a four-hundred-year-old bust, which he then gave to the British queen as a present. Sometimes Nkem doubts Obiora’s facts, but she listens, because of how passionately he speaks, because of how his eyes glisten as though he is about to cry.
She wonders what he will bring next week; she has come to look forward to the art pieces, touching them, imagining the originals, imagining the lives behind them. Next week, when her children will once again say “Daddy” to someone real, not a telephone voice; when she will wake up at night to hear snoring beside her; when she will see another used towel in the bathroom.
