To kill time I updated my reporter’s notebook, as I had done without fail every morning since the day we started on the white woman’s trail. I sat against the wall, and while Zaq fiddled absently with Chief Ibiram’s radio I wrote down all that I had witnessed since we left Irikefe: the abandoned villages, the hopeless landscape, the gas flares that always burned in the distance. I re-created with as much detail as I could the brutal taking of Karibi, and, as I wrote, his son’s words came back to me: He’ll be taken to Port Harcourt, where he’ll be tried and found guilty of fraternizing with the militants.
Zaq fell asleep in the chair. I was hungry and, since it didn’t look like anyone was coming soon to offer us food, I decided to do some scouting. I got up and opened the door through which the girl had appeared yesterday with the lamp and food. I found myself on a half-exposed walkway that connected the front room to other areas of the house, presumably the kitchen and the storage rooms. From here I could see the other houses, and I could hear voices of children and women. The women were standing in an open shed around a hearth, probably smoking fish. The smoke from the hearth rose through the shed’s thatch roof and dissipated in the dull, cloudy skies. I opened the first door on my right and saw a group of children, about five of them, all about the same age, seated around an old woman. She was telling them a story. They looked up at me, and my shadow fell on the floor before them as I stood in the half-open doorway, trying to see into the dark room. I withdrew and went to another door, and this time I was in the right place. It was the kitchen, but, apart from a few pots and pans resting on a smoke-blackened table, it was empty. In a corner was a water pot with a plastic cup hanging from a string over it. I drank, but as I turned to go the old woman entered and stood just inside the doorway, but without blocking it.
— Hello, I’m looking for the old man. . and the boy. We came together yesterday. And. . food. .
She kept nodding as I spoke, a friendly smile on her lined face, and as she nodded she repeated the same word: Yes. She probably couldn’t understand me, and because I didn’t speak the local language I simply mimed eating — putting my right hand to my mouth.
— Food, please.
She laughed, nodding her understanding.
— Yes, yes.
She brought me a bowl full of corn porridge — it was warm and sickly sweet and filling. She stood by the door and watched me eat, nodding and smiling all the time. Through the open door behind her came the voices of the children in the back. When I asked her when the men would be back, she said nothing, but kept smiling and bowing and moving backward until she was out of the door. Afterward, I walked out into the mud flats. I spent the next hour walking in an ankle-high flood, my trousers rolled up to my knees, taking pictures of the houses. Most of the houses were empty, the men out fishing and the women smoking fish in the shed I’d seen earlier. I went to the shed last. The older women stared into the camera lens silently, their tired, lined faces neither acknowledging nor forbidding my action; the younger women giggled self-consciously, hastily wiping the ash and sweat from their faces with the edges of their wrappers; the children ran forward and posed with hands on their waists, pushing each other out of the way.
While I was on my way back to Chief Ibiram’s front room, the men returned. I passed them hauling their canoes out of the shallow water and tying them to the house stilts; others carried the day’s catch in plastic buckets and wicker baskets, and, from what I could see, it wasn’t bountiful. The boy and the girl took from one boat a basket with a handful of thin wiggling fish at the bottom. The kids stopped on the veranda when they saw me, waiting for me to speak, standing side by side with the basket on the floor between them, and behind them the sun was huge and dying, spilling orange and red and rust on the shallow river and the mangroves.
— Smile.
They smiled. I clicked. I wanted to talk to them, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I had known the boy for a couple of days now, and in that time I had never heard him say much, only answers to his father’s questions or commands, and mostly they never talked at all; each seemed to have an instinctive understanding of what the other wanted.
— When I was a boy, me and my sister, we used to catch crabs.
They looked at each other. — No crabs here now. The water is not good.
The girl, whose name was Alali, was more willing to talk. The boy only nodded with his head lowered, a fixed smile on his lips. I wanted to tell them about my childhood in a village not too far away from here. I realized how very much like theirs my childhood must have been. Barefoot and underfed we may have been, but the sea was just outside our door, constantly bringing surprises, suggesting a certain possibility to our lives. Boma and I used to spend the whole night by the water, catching crabs, armed with sticks and basket, our hands covered in old rags to protect our fingers from the scissor-sharp claws. We usually sold our catch to the market women, but sometimes, to make more money, we took the ferry to Port Harcourt to sell to the restaurants by the waterfront. That was how we paid our school fees when our father lost his job.
Zaq was trying hard to hide his annoyance, and he wasn’t succeeding.
— You should have told us you were going to be out all day. We’ve wasted a whole day now. I thought your job was to be our guide, we hired you.
We were in the veranda; Chief Ibiram was inside somewhere, taking a bath. Technically, we hadn’t hired the old man; he had simply appeared out of the night and become our guide, he and his son. But I understood Zaq’s anger, because I felt it too. But mine wasn’t directed at the old man; rather, it came from a feeling of frustration and general irritability at the way things had been going since we started on the trail of the kidnapped woman. Events were always a step ahead of us, as if Eshu the trickster god were out to play with us. Zaq’s anger was intensified by his strange fever, and the continuous ache from his swelling legs. The booze had helped to dull the pain, but now that the booze was finished, the pain kept him constantly on edge.
The old man looked close to tears; he glanced toward me helplessly, waving his hands.
— You no well, sir, tha’s why. I think say you go stop here rest small before we go. Tha’s why. .
But Zaq’s anger disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. He lowered his voice and turned to go into the house. — We really must set out early tomorrow. First thing in the morning.
— Yes. Yes, sir. Early morning, tomorrow.
That night I listened to Zaq turning and moaning and cursing on the mat beside me, all night long battling his pain and his demons.
3
Toward morning, sitting side by side, both of us having given up on sleep, I asked Zaq how he ended up on this assignment.
— They came to my office. It was just another dull day at work, and, believe me, setting out on an expedition after some kidnapped woman was the furthest thing from my mind.
His editor, Beke Johnson, who was also the Daily Star’s owner, walked into his office, his face nervous with excitement, and told him two men wanted to see him. Two white men.
— I recognized the husband immediately. I had seen his face alongside his wife’s in the papers and on TV for the past few days. Oil-company worker, British, petroleum engineer, his wife had gone out by herself and she never came back, believed to have been kidnapped by the militants. The kidnapping was of some interest to me because only the day before I had written an editorial on another kidnapping, that of a seventy-year-old woman and a three-year-old girl. They’d been kidnapped for ransom by militants. I titled the editorial “Gangsters or Freedom Fighters?”