Listen! to what I am telling you.
I know! what I am saying.
I was there, leaning on the rail, watching from upstairs.
No, I did not come down for a closer look. One, I was too sick; two, I did not care. But this is what I saw with these my two seeds of seeing.
Our car glided into our compound. My husband. His cousin was in the passenger’s seat, my mother-in-law’s fresh corpse in the backseat. Fresh because she died less than thirty minutes ago. I watched from this same upstairs when she was helped into the car—by my husband and BIL, with whom she lived downstairs, Mr. Cousin holding her handbag—and driven to the hospital. Mama and I were not best of friends, but as I saw her leaning on my husband’s shoulder, a cup of presentiment emptied into me. She did not look so sick, no. She’d been sick for only two days and had been taking over-the-counter meds. My husband had mentioned it was mild fever and tiredness, or so, but I was too unwell to care. There was no fear of death. The meds worked until they didn’t, and we decided to seek a doctor’s attention. There was no fear of death. But I know I felt somehow, watching her enter that car. Maybe a stray breeze played with the tiny hairs at the tip of my ear. Maybe it was the dark blue wrapper on her waist that nearly matched the colour of the Highlander. Maybe it reminded me of the sea above us. Maybe it was the plain, brown, chiffon blouse she wore. Maybe it reminded me of the grave. But she was not even gravely ill. There was no fear of death. Maybe it was the filling of my mouth, so full I thought it was vomit, save for the weightlessness. On perusal with my tongue, there was nothing but dryness. I swallowed.
After they left for the hospital, I went back into the house. I was tired and dizzy. I’ve been down with acute malaria for one week now. Truth be told, I was even sicker than Mama. I’d lost weight, been to the doctor’s and back, and was still sick. I called my eldest child to get me a cup of water. I chugalugged the thing as if my very life depended on it. Maybe it did because I felt less dry. Normal me would have drunk that water, forgotten about my phone and the world, warned my children that whoever made the dire mistake of disturbing my conclave with sleep had better say their last prayers prior, and gone to bed. But I stayed put, seated on that couch, my head resting on the backrest, my palm grasping my phone. I was too tired to ask the children to stop shouting. I did not remove myself from their play area, no. I just sat there, holding my phone.
No surprise when it vibrated. My husband. He was frantic. They just got to the hospital… nobody wanted to attend to them… the hospital was overcrowded, they say… they couldn’t even attend to her in the car… they turned them back… what would he do… Mama let out a loud exhale on the way to the hospital as if she was letting her last breath go… no, she is not dead, but he’s afraid… what would he do… why wouldn’t they attend to them…
It did not even occur to him that rushing to another hospital was an option. He was too distraught to think! So, I told him to proceed to another hospital where my cousin was a doctor. I told him I’d call my cousin. How both of us didn’t think of that hospital in the first place still shocks me. A part of me still does not blame us for that oversight because the first thing that came to our mind, that would come to your mind if you were in our shoes, is to head to the nearest hospital, which was what we did. Anyway, I called my cousin and apprised him of the urgency. He said he’d leave for the hospital at once. I called my husband back and told him. When I rang off, I knew. I knew it was over. Even when his voice, booming in my ear, assured me that his mother was not dead yet, I sensed her distance from us, his voice unknowingly transmitting the said distance. I just knew. I just knew all we were doing was simply mba a na-abara Agụ, yelling at a Leopard. I waited. I waited for a confirmation.
It came ten minutes later. My husband. He sounded subdued, defeated. She’s dead… we just drove into the hospital… she was confirmed dead on arrival. What could I say to that? Jesus? I already exclaimed that after the first sentence. Should I come, I asked. No, he was arranging to deposit her in the mortuary. A bucket of chill emptied itself on my head and ran all the way to my toes. He rang off.
She’s dead. She’s dead.
Just like that? I tried to remember her: the wrinkles around her mouth, the brownness of her eyes when she laughed or yelled, the grains of grey climbing her hair, her stout stature, her spread toes. She’s gone? Just like that? Was it her time, or was the first hospital to be blamed for this? Did she know, when she awoke in the morning, that this was it? As she walked out of her house and into the car, did she know it was it? If the stupid nurses at the first hospital had administered some sort of aid, would she still be here? If my husband had gone to the second hospital first, would she still be here? I rued over the now seemingly senseless quarrels we had. I rued the little crevices where I could have inserted an apology or two, made her feel like the winner that she so wanted to be, made peace. I rued the times I attempted drawing closer to her, was rebuffed, and I murderously clawed to Hades all thoughts of future attempts. Why did I? In the face of death, everything becomes paltry, meaningless. When I saw her walking to the car, when I sensed it was the end, the last time she would ever use those legs, why didn’t I let out the words that filled my mouth like vomit? What would it have cost me? Mama, ndo! Whether she answered or not was immaterial. At least, my last words to her would have been Mama, sorry: sorry you are ill, sorry for whatever it is I did that made you mean to me, sorry that you’re leaving us, just sorry. Why did I swallow those words?
“Mummy, Kambili pushed me rough!”
My three-year-old. I rubbed her hair and smiled at her. “Ndo, nwam.” A mere “sorry” pacified her, and she went off to play with the same Kambili who pushed her.
Didn’t they feel it? Their grandmother’s transcendence, didn’t they feel it? Their grandmother just made the jump from human to spirit. Their grandmother just shed her body ten minutes after she released her last breath. What did she do in those ten minutes? Did she fall asleep? Did she leave at that breath, but it took her body ten minutes to get the gist? Did she watch her boy child drive frantically to the second hospital? Did she try to tell him not to bother? Didn’t these children feel it? Where was she? Still with her body, or did she come back here?
My phone vibrated again. My husband. He called his mother’s child in Lagos… he said they should not put their mother in any mortuary… he wanted to see her… he wanted to see her without her being tampered with… how sure were they that she was dead… he did not want to listen to anything… that we should take her home… he’d be here tomorrow… nobody should take her to the mortuary…
So where was he now?
Driving home with her corpse in the backseat. He was almost at the gate even.
I pressed my palms on the chair’s arms for support, but it took me a while to scrape myself off that couch, so that when I eventually did, my palms, having borne the entire weight of my body, remained white a while before flooding with colour, with blood, with aliveness, the entire weight of my body dispersing. I warned my children that if anybody opened this door… so help me God! I leaned on the walls to support myself, at least until my roving eyes calmed. I closed the door behind me, leaned on the balcony railing, and waited. The children’s laughter slipped through the hinges, casting, threshold, and sashayed to the balcony. No, they didn’t feel it. Life’s as usual for them.
The honk was stupid with grief, too heavy to rend the air. My husband. When he parked and alighted, he looked up at me. I could have sworn that, somewhere between the hospitals and back here, he misplaced half his weight and features: his wide nose thinned, his skin darkened, his round belly flattened, his ash button-down shirt slackened. His eyes were tired. They were dry and just utterly fed up. What could I say? Nothing. I only nodded. He nodded back. Anything that could have followed that nod was sliced into nothingness by the quacking of BIL, Mama’s last child.
“Nti ochiri gi? I SAID SHE IS NOT COMING INTO THIS HOUSE!”
Both my husband and I turned toward the noise. This shouting man was not in my sight, but I could clearly envision the bulging, stretched veins of his neck, which resembled his mother’s when she yelled. Of all her six children, he was most like her: same flat buttocks, stoutness, spread toes, same Almond complexion, same propensity to find wahala in any little thing, same quasi-deep voice, laughter, same draining, entitled, dependency on my husband. His anger-leavened voice made it past upstairs, past our gate, smoked the street, and dragged in threads of onlookers. My husband tried to explain to him that it was their eldest’s wish that their mother not be placed in a mortuary until he saw her.
“THEN TAKE HER UPSTAIRS TO YOUR HOUSE! TAKE HER THERE!”
“I should take her to my house? With my little children in there? I should carry this body all the way upstairs when it’s easier to take her into this one downstairs?”
“NOBODY IS ENTERING THIS HOUSE, SIMPLE AND SHORT!”
Nobody, as in no human being, or no body, as in no dead body? He must have heard my thoughts because he made himself clear.
“I will not spend the night with a corpse! And nobody should try me this afternoon! TAKE HER BACK TO THE MORTUARY AND TELL THEM NOT TO TOUCH HER UNTIL HE COMES AND SEES HER!”
The passerby Orange-seller stopped by our gate, looked in, turned as if to leave, then thought better of it and came back. She perched by the gate and watched. She waved at me when she saw me staring at her, and even had the effrontery to point at her deranged Oranges, as if asking me if I wanted to buy some! Mtchew! Nzuzu!
“Are you stupid? That is your mother you are talking about!” said Cousin.
“ARE YOU DEAF? THAT IS A CORPSE! MY MOTHER HAS GONE OUT OF IT! AND I WILL NEVER EVER SPEND THE NIGHT WITH A CORPSE!”
The casual way he mentioned his mother going out of herself as if she just chose to walk away, as if the body is something that is occupied and exited like an excessively starched shirt. But it is, isn’t it? Isn’t that why a dead person, even someone as recently dead as one minute ago, is immediately cleped corpse, cloth, body, but never human, never again human? Is that not why we call death the removal of cloth, the going-on-something? Surely, it’s not the body that goes on the something (journey?) because we know right where it is, here with us. It’s the occupier of the body that went on something.
“How about you come upstairs to my house for the night while she stays here alone?”
“NOT A CHANCE! Where will I sleep after tomorrow? In your house forever? Look, stop wasting my saliva. SHE IS NOT ENTERING HERE, PERIOD! TAKE HER BACK TO THE MORTUARY!”
He said period as if his last sentence could be punctuated with a full stop. Nothing else would do except an exclamation mark. Those incessant yells must surely have scrambled the smoothness of his neck with venation. He’s sure to nurse a nifty headache afterward.
Nobody asked me, but if they did, I’d side with him. I would not want to spend the night with a corpse. And what was that balderdash about bringing her upstairs to my house? Ha! I ga-asikwa! She did not even really like me, and you want her corpse to sleep in my house? When she was alive, how many times did she make the arduous pilgrimage from her flat downstairs up to mine? Please, nobody should annoy me.
Nobody asked me, but if they did, I’d insist they return her to the mortuary. In fact, left to me, they shouldn’t have brought her back here in the first place. I did not like the idea of her sleeping in this compound. I did not like the idea of being in proximity to her corpse. Wasn’t that why I perched myself upstairs watching, when I could have been downstairs in the front row? Because what if I raked my way downstairs and her aversion toward me roused her corpse to slap me? Ah! Biko, ike adighim.
Voices tried to outdo voices, arguing whether to take her to the mortuary or not. Some told BIL to move from the door, or he’d be moved by force. BIL, funnily enough, assented that he understood he could be swept away from the frontage, but if they dared take that body into his house, they'd better be prepared to spend the night inside the very same room with it, else he’d mutilate the hell out of it! Sounded good to me, except for the part where he called the house his. Exactly how was it his? He lived rent-free there, all utilities, food included, provided.
Voices tried to reason with my husband to take the woman to the mortuary. Mama Amarachi, who sold roasted Corn down the road, was there. She must have left her business to teenage Amarachi and rushed here to avoid being told what she could witness. The welder, Okongwu, who ought to be engrossed in making a gate for our new project across the road, was right there, amongst the take-her-back group. Ikoku of the provision store was there, wearing, as usual, his destroyed singlet, destroyed because the damn thing was overused, slack, colourless, utterly dead. But trust Ikoku not to discard it. Ikoku held my husband by the shoulder, leading him away from the door lest he slap my-God! out of his mother’s child. I mention all these people so that you can confirm what I am telling you.
Even the Sun watched the drama because it seemed shinier than usual. The car was still parked, the glasses all wound up. Wouldn’t the heat inside the car trigger instant decomposition? Clear skies, no clouds, an otherwise calm day. Mama Chima screamed Chima! That woman called that twelve-year-old one million times a day. Chima, I only just noticed, was also in our compound, watching at a distance. Ukpa! a hawker screamed, peeped into our compound, and walked on. Ukpa! Minister GUC’s “Obinigwe” flowed from Jehovah-knows-where into our compound. That song moved me. Right there, in the backseat of that closed-up car, under this hot Sun, lay a woman who was alive in this same hour. Worthy is the Lamb that sits upon the throne! At the beginning of this hour, she was alive and in her house. Now, this same hour, she was dead, a corpse, at the back of a heating car, refused entry to her house. Is this what life is? I’m amazed you showed up for me! Obinigwe! Didn’t Mama show up for her children when they were young? Do people become irrelevant at death? After all her mothering, she’s tossed aside less than an hour after her death? BIL’s raging voice bore no strand of wetness. Didn’t he cry? Why wasn’t he crying? His mother, whom he told good morning to and who responded, was now dead. Why wasn’t he crying? What did I do to deserve this kind of love? Mama lived in that house, didn’t she? Lived, yes, no longer, but she just literally walked out of that house less than an hour ago, yes? Yes, she walked out as one thing and came back as another; still, he wouldn’t permit her just one more night?
Ikoku managed to lead my husband away from his mother’s child and toward the car. Apparently, the take-her-back group won. Even the cousin who followed my husband to the hospital the first time was waiting by the passenger’s seat. My husband looked up, as if to see if I was still there, then was shocked that I was still there. I nodded at him again. His shoulders dropped. He lowered his head. His shoulders rose and dropped. Ikoku tapped him encouragingly. My husband touched the handle of the door and
Everybody made a run for it! The high-pitched ringing in my ears succeeded an audio dropout. All that remained sounded like blood circulating in the brain, the sound of bringing your palms slowly toward your ears until they were covered. An explosive hissing, sounding like a divisive congress of Snakes, yanked off the ringing.
“Kee ihe ọwụ!”
“Chi mo! Chi mo!”
“Kee ihe ọwụ!”
Rather than screaming My God! My God! and asking What is it! What is it!, the correct question should be Why it happened. They knew what happened, but not why. They asked what because the why was too unbelievable to accept. Humans lean into absences when we shy away from reality. When realism becomes too strange to be real, we call it speculative; even when our very two, clear, wide-opened seeds-of-sight witnessed it; even when our brains insist that it’s realism, not speculative, we cling to the latter. What happened? The window behind the passenger’s seat exploded without help. The knot of the tyre, under the said window, loosened without help and let out all the air, making the tyre as lifeless as the car’s sole occupant. Only one entity was responsible for that: the passenger in the backseat.
Is she still alive?
If she’s still alive, won’t she come down from the car? Are you stupid?
Maybe she came back to life?
She came back to life, and she did not simply open the door? Have you lost your actual mind? Do living people shatter windows just because?
I did not waste thoughts on their questions. That woman was dead, no two ways about it. I wondered instead where BIL was. Did he run into the house, or did he proceed even farther away from my sight?
Everybody simultaneously arrived at one conclusion. “Iwe na-ewe ya.”
Of course, she was angry! She’s always been an angry person, but did anybody listen to me when I complained? No! She was wont to slam her palm against the walls when enraged, and she was often enraged. Apparently, she was still by her body. She must have been talking ever since inside the car, giving her take on the matter, but, of course, nobody heard. Perhaps, angry at being ignored, she banged a don’t-you-dare-move-this-car fist on the window. But her fists are no longer human. They bear the force of the divine, a force that enfeebles all things human. It’s with that Storm-arresting force that she slammed her fists on the window, exploding it instantly. But did she then fly out? Did she stay in there with her body? Did she stand by the car watching the foregathers? I couldn’t care less where she was, provided she was not headed upstairs.
Mama, don’t behave like this.
Is this how you say goodbye to your children? Eeh, Mama?
Funeral no bi small money, o! Why still incur this kind of cost for your children, eeh, Mama?
Why are you angry? Who offended you, eeh, Mama?
They threw comments at the corpse, confident she listened, even if the corpse stayed still. At this point, the consensus was to drive her to the mortuary. There’s no way that kind of angry spirit would be allowed into the house with the living. She should go and stay with the dead so that she would get accustomed to being dead, so that they could teach her the code of the dead.
Whatever those codes may be, the utmost must be, “Stay still!” But we have heard stories of corpses changing positions in the mortuary, as if they were sleeping persons. One even made the rounds not long ago, about a chief who was found every morning lying on other corpses. He’d be moved, and the next morning, the mortuary attendants would find him lying on other corpses. He’d neatly stacked them on the ground like a bed and lay on top of them. He was eventually expelled from the mortuary. They refused to keep him one more day. His children were forced to bury him and do the funeral later when they’d gathered money. We gossiped that this chief must have been too attached to his chief form to accept that he was no longer even human, let alone a chief. The body is nothing without its occupant soul. We gossiped that he craved the reverence ascribed to titled persons, which was why he stayed beside a body he no longer occupied, bullying the bodies of those who had enough sense to discard a body they occupied no longer, to pass on to the other life. Yes, it was rare, but not news, that corpses sometimes moved unaided and even slapped my-God! out of the mortuary attendants if they dared to enter the mortuary without knocking. Mama keyed into show-not-tell. She must have slammed her palms on the window to get their attention, forgetting, or not recognising, that she’s now a ghost with spirit strength. What was she trying to say? Why was she still even with her body?
Take her away!
Take her away!
My husband and his cousin packed sand and threw it over their shoulders as if they were bathing. They sprinkled salt in the rear footwell. They entered the destroyed car and drove it that way to the mortuary. A scoop of the camp ran off. I was still leaning on the rails, following the footprints of fading gossip, when they returned with a dibia, a white Fowl, Kola nuts, Palm wine, and Jehovah-knows-what-else to cleanse the compound.
The Fowl cried as if they knew this was it. I headed inside. When that Fowl responded to the greeting of their fellows this morning, did they know today was going to be it? If Mama had complied with the prime code of the dead, would this Fowl have lived through today? I shut the door just when the Fowl cries became whimpers.
Even my children were quiet.