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Eight hundred years later, when the history of Eko is taught to our children, they will never understand why we did what we did. Their teachers will try to explain: Those were strange times in Lagos; everybody was a criminal. This textbook opinion, unwarranted though it may seem now, will nevertheless be reinforced throughout their childhood with stories and images in twenty-ninth-century multimedia. This is the truth we are not yet able to see in twenty-first-century Egbeda: a typical Lagos neighborhood — the air poisoned by generator fumes, the treeless landscape strewn with plastic trash, the waterways turned into festering sewers — so crowded with government-forsaken people and makeshift infrastructure that it is already under threat of being expunged from the urban planning models. Ikoyi and Surulere, the former more affluent and the latter middle class, are two sides of the past face of Lagos. Traffic-jammed Ikeja and flood-prone Lekki are likewise two extremes of the city’s present face; while the seaside facade of Eko Atlantic City is the future that Lagos is waterskiing toward. Thus Egbeda, like several other haphazard Lagos districts, is stuck in the perilous place of having no past glory, no present amenities, and no future plans. We would feel sorry for the residents who live with this foreboding, who leave their homes every sunrise with the nagging dread that this might be the day the bulldozers come and their neighborhood goes. We would feel sorry if we didn’t already know that most of them, the residents of Egbeda, like everyone else in Lagos who litters plastic bags and leaves their tungsten lightbulbs burning in daylight hours, is complicit in the crime of destroying our mother planet.
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The man almost didn’t go to see the house in Egbeda. This was partly due to the agent but mainly because he had never been to that section of the city in his time in Lagos, and so all he knew about it was what he’d heard about the endless traffic jams of vehicles and people. He found out about the vacancy from the agent, who led him to the outsized birdhouse masquerading as a human habitation in the no-man’s-land between Oshodi and Agege. That disappointment colored the man’s perception of everything the agent promised afterward. Which was why, when the agent snapped his fingers in a feigned eureka and began spieling on about another perfect place in far-off Egbeda, the man responded by laughing in his face long enough to hurt his feelings. The agent shut up and showed the man two other places around Oshodi, neither of which even deserved excuses for turning them down. When the man remarked on the agent’s lack of enthusiasm for what he was selling, the rejoinder was a furious accusation about those who have ears not hearing and eyes refusing to see. This outburst ended with the agent swearing on his grandmother’s grave about the oh-so-rightness of the two-bedroom upstairs apartment that was a giveaway at N220,000 for a year’s rent, excluding the agent’s fee. Faced with the choice of finding another agent to start looking all over again, the man decided the better path was the high road of pacifying this charlatan into discharging his duties with some modicum of goodwill. That’s why he agreed to see the house in Egbeda.
9
In today’s Lagos, without money to buy your way, ideals of comfort are impossible to find. The man admitted this to himself after he had suffered enough of the landlady’s smell. She kept him waiting sixteen days into the contractual start of his tenancy before handing over the key to his apartment. During that fretful period he traveled over from Surulere to pay her five separate visits, none lasting less than two hours of one-sided chatter and remorseless bruising of his olfactory senses. The first time she insulted him was on the second of these visits. He had interrupted the rerun of her life story around nine o’clock to say he needed to start heading back to Surulere because he had work tomorrow, upon which her tone sharpened into anger as she called him a disrespectful Igbo man. That night his sole response was, “I am not Igbo,” but even such anodyne assertions of fact were enough to tip her into boiling rages, as he experienced on every visit afterward until he gained his key. Whenever the spirit moved her, her mouth became as offensive as her odor.
In the early weeks of his occupancy the man thought he was the problem, that something he did or didn’t do had turned her off him, some cultural blindness on his part perhaps, like not bowing his head when he greeted her in his stilted Yoruba; or calling her Alhaja (the honorific the agent had addressed her by) rather than Mama as most people did; or not offering to carry her shopping bag the evening they met at the gate as she returned from buying smoked fish around the corner. He ceased overcompensating in his attitude toward her (mainly by surrendering his time to the black hole of her loneliness) only after the first furtive visit from his neighbor, the woman who lived in the front upstairs apartment. Before she showed up at his door he saw her every weekday morning for six weeks as she drove off with her two children — she dressed for work, they for school — in her beat-up Nissan sedan, and yet, without fail, every time he greeted her, she only nodded, never spoke. But that night in his apartment, with the louvers closed for privacy, she apologized for her seeming rudeness. It was because of the landlady, who would accuse them of gossiping about her if she saw them together. It was a pattern the neighbor said had played out countless times in the nine months she had resided in this building, and now that she was counting down to the end of her tenancy, she hoped to avoid repeats until she moved out. As penance for her cowardice she told the man everything she knew about the old woman, filling in the missing parts of the life story he had heard over and over from a source whose sincerity he had always sniffed at. The neighbor spoke about the landlady’s instant mood changes, her paranoia about everything, her deceitfulness over anything, her gaping lapses in logic, her willingness to employ aggression in word and action at any chance she got — most of which the man already knew through hard-won experience, though what he didn’t know was that everybody knew. When the neighbor confirmed she had gotten her apartment through the same agent who led him into this trap, the man realized he had before him all he needed to answer his own questions about how he found what he was looking for in Egbeda. There was nothing left to talk about, end of story; and so the landlady’s prisoners wished each other good night.
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