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Chinua
Achebe
Jonathan Iwegbu counted himself extra-ordinarily lucky. ‘Happy
survival!’ meant so much more to him than just a current fashion of greeting
old friends in the first hazy days of peace. It went deep to his heart. He had
come out of the war with five inestimable blessings--his head, his wife Maria’s
head and the heads of three out of their four children. As a bonus he also had
his old bicycle--a miracle too but naturally not to be compared to the safety
of five human heads.
The bicycle had a little history of its own. One day at the
height of the war it was commandeered ‘for urgent military action’. Hard as its
loss would have been to him he would still have let it go without a thought had
he not had some doubts about the genuineness of the officer. It wasn’t his
disreputable rags, nor the toes peeping out of one blue and one brown canvas
shoes, nor yet the two stars of his rank done obviously in a hurry in biro,
that troubled Jonathan; many good and heroic soldiers looked the same or worse.
It was rather a certain lack of grip and firmness in his manner. So Jonathan,
suspecting he might be amenable to influence, rummaged in his raffia bag and
produced the two pounds with which he had been going to buy firewood which his
wife, Maria, retailed to camp officials for extra stock-fish and corn meal, and
got his bicycle back. That night he buried it in the little clearing in the
bush where the dead of the camp, including his own youngest son, were buried.
When he dug it up again a year later after the surrender all it needed was a
little palm-oil greasing. ‘Nothing puzzles God,’ he said in wonder.
He put it to immediate use as a taxi and accumulated a small
pile of Biafran money ferrying camp officials and their families across the
four-mile stretch to the nearest tarred road. His standard charge per trip was
six pounds and those who had the money were only glad to be rid of some of it
in this way. At the end of a fortnight he had made a small fortune of one
hundred and fifteen pounds.
Then he made the journey to Enugu and found another miracle
waiting for him. It was unbelievable. He rubbed his eyes and looked again and
it was still standing there before him. But, needless to say, even that
monumental blessing must be accounted also totally inferior to the five heads
in the family. This newest miracle was his little house in Ogui Overside.
Indeed nothing puzzles God! Only two houses away a huge concrete edifice some
wealthy contractor had put up just before the war was a mountain of rubble. And
here was Jonathan’s little zinc house of no regrets built with mud blocks quite
intact! Of course the doors and windows were missing and five sheets off the
roof.
But what was that? And anyhow he had returned to Enugu early
enough to pick up bits of old zinc and wood and soggy sheets of cardboard lying
around the neighbourhood before thousands more came out of their forest holes
looking for the same things. He got a destitute carpenter with one old hammer,
a blunt plane and a few bent and rusty nails in his tool bag to turn this
assortment of wood, paper and metal into door and window shutters for five
Nigerian shillings or fifty Biafran pounds. He paid the pounds, and moved in
with his overjoyed family carrying five heads on their shoulders.
His children picked mangoes near the military cemetery and sold
them to soldiers’ wives for a few pennies--real pennies this time--and his wife
started making breakfast akara balls for neighbours in a hurry to start life
again. With his family earnings he took his bicycle to the villages around and
bought fresh palm-wine which he mixed generously in his rooms with the water
which had recently started running again in the public tap down the road, and
opened up a bar for soldiers and other lucky people with good money.
At first he went daily, then every other day and finally once a
week, to the offices of the Coal Corporation where he used to be a miner, to
find out what was what. The only thing he did find out in the end was that that
little house of his was even a greater blessing than he had thought. Some of
his fellow ex-miners who had nowhere to return at the end of the day’s waiting
just slept outside the doors of the offices and cooked what meal they could
scrounge together in Bournvita tins. As the weeks lengthened and still nobody
could say what was what Jonathan discontinued his weekly visits altogether and
faced his palm-wine bar.
But nothing puzzles God. Came the day of the windfall when after
five days of endless scuffles in queues and counter-queues in the sun outside
the Treasury he had twenty pounds counted into his palms as exgratia award for
the rebel money he had turned in. It was like Christmas for him and for many
others like him when the payments began. They called it (since few could manage
its proper official name) _egg-rasher_.
As soon as the pound notes were placed in his palm Jonathan
simply closed it tight over them and buried fist and money inside his trouser
pocket. He had to be extra careful because he had seen a man a couple of days
earlier collapse into near-madness in an instant before that oceanic crowd
because no sooner had he got his twenty pounds than some heartless ruffian
picked it off him. Though it was not right that a man in such an extremity of
agony should be blamed yet many in the queues that day were able to remark
quietly on the victim’s carelessness, especially after he pulled out the
innards of his pocket and revealed a hole in it big enough to pass a thief’s
head. But of course he had insisted that the money had been in the other
pocket, pulling it out too to show its comparative wholeness. So one had to be
careful.
Jonathan soon transferred the money to his left hand and pocket
so as to leave his right free for shaking hands should the need arise, though
by fixing his gaze at such an elevation as to miss all approaching human faces
he made sure that the need did not arise, until he got home.
He was normally a heavy sleeper but that night he heard all the
neighbourhood noises die down one after another. Even the night watchman who
knocked the hour on some metal somewhere in the distance had fallen silent
after knocking one o’clock. That must have been the last thought in Jonathan’s
mind before he was finally carried away himself. He couldn’t have been gone for
long, though, when he was violently awakened again.
‘Who is knocking?’ whispered his wife lying beside him on the
floor.
‘I don’t know,’ he whispered back breathlessly.
The second time the knocking came it was so loud and imperious
that the rickety old door could have fallen down.
‘Who is knocking?’ he asked then, his voice parched and
trembling.
‘Na tief-man and him people,’ came the cool reply. ‘Make you
hopen de door.’ This was followed by the heaviest knocking of all.
Maria was the first to raise the alarm, then he followed and all
their children.
_’Police-o! Thieves-o! Neighbours-o! Police-o! We are lost! We
are dead! Neighbours, are you asleep? Wake up! Police-o!’_
This went on for a long time and then stopped suddenly. Perhaps
they had scared the thief away. There was total silence. But only for a short
while.
‘You done finish?’ asked the voice outside. ‘Make we help you
small. Oya, everybody!’
_’Police-o! Tief-man-o! Neighbours-o! we done loss-o!
Police-o!...’_
There were at least five other voices besides the leader’s.
Jonathan and his family were now completely paralysed by terror.
Maria and the children sobbed inaudibly like lost souls. Jonathan groaned
continuously.
The silence that followed the thieves’ alarm vibrated horribly.
Jonathan all but begged their leader to speak again and be done with it.
‘My frien,’ said he at long last, ‘we don try our best for call
dem but I tink say dem all done sleep-o... So wetin we go do now? Sometaim you
wan call soja? Or you wan make we call dem for you? Soja better pass police. No
be so?’
‘Na so!’ replied his men. Jonathan thought he heard even more
voices now than before and groaned heavily. His legs were sagging under him and
his throat felt like sandpaper.
‘My frien, why you no de talk again. I de ask you say you wan
make we call soja?’
‘No’.
‘Awrighto. Now make we talk business. We no be bad tief. We no
like for make trouble. Trouble done finish. War done finish and all the
katakata wey de for inside. No Civil War again. This time na Civil Peace. No be
so?’
‘Na so!’ answered the horrible chorus.
‘What do you want from me? I am a poor man. Everything I had
went with this war. Why do you come to me? You know people who have money.
We...’
‘Awright! We know say you no get plenty money. But we sef no get
even anini. So derefore make you open dis window and give us one hundred pound
and we go commot. Orderwise we de come for inside now to show you guitar-boy
like dis...’
A volley of automatic fire rang through the sky. Maria and the
children began to weep aloud again.
‘Ah, missisi de cry again. No need for dat. We done talk say we
na good tief. We just take our small money and go nwayorly. No molest. Abi we
de molest?’
‘At all!’ sang the chorus.
‘My friends,’ began Jonathan hoarsely. ‘I hear what you say and
I thank you. If I had one hundred pounds...’
‘Lookia my frien, no be play we come play for your house. If we
make mistake and step for inside you no go like am-o. So derefore...’
‘To God who made me; if you come inside and find one hundred
pounds, take it and shoot me and shoot my wife and children. I swear to God.
The only money I have in this life is this twenty-pounds _egg-rasher_ they gave
me today...’
‘OK. Time de go. Make you open dis window and bring the twenty
pound. We go manage am like dat.’
There were now loud murmurs of dissent among the chorus: ‘Na lie
de man de lie; e get plenty money... Make we go inside and search properly
well... Wetin be twenty pound?...’
‘Shurrup!’ rang the leader’s voice like a lone shot in the sky
and silenced the murmuring at once. ‘Are you dere? Bring the money quick!’
‘I am coming,’ said Jonathan fumbling in the darkness with the
key of the small wooden box he kept by his side on the mat.
At the first sign of light as neighbours and others assembled to
commiserate with him he was already strapping his five-gallon demijohn to his
bicycle carrier and his wife, sweating in the open fire, was turning over akara
balls in a wide clay bowl of boiling oil. In the corner his eldest son was
rinsing out dregs of yesterday’s palm wine from old beer bottles.
‘I count it as nothing,’ he told his sympathizers, his eyes on the rope he was tying. ‘What is _egg-rasher_? Did I depend on it last week? Or is it greater than other things that went with the war? I say, let _egg-rasher_ perish in the flames! Let it go where everything else has gone. Nothing puzzles God.’
~x~
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