“Hurry.”
As she walked away, she remembered the military school where General Bazooka had sent her to become an agent, especially the big posters with the words WE LOVE YOU MARSHAL AMIN. She remembered her hair being shaved off; and stripping, walking naked with other women through a corridor to get military fatigues and boots; the old clothes and shoes burning on a heap through the night; the graduation parade wearing new clothes, a new persona; and membership of a new family. As she washed the filth off her body, she knew that it was time to become a full person again. But how and where?
Tayari smoked a cigarette. It was going to be a beautiful day, clear, warm, windy. It was very quiet here and gave the impression that the whole country was at peace, blessed with the serenity of a very small rural village. He wondered what he would do after the conflicts, the dynamite. Would he return to civilian life? Or spy for a new regime? The way things looked, the final war would be short and fierce. The regime had dislodged itself by virtue of its lack of order. The fact that they could not catch him, and that many believed he was a ghost, said a lot about the present state of affairs. His journey down this dangerous path had begun simply: with sibling rivalry. All he had ever wanted was to beat his brother and prove his worth. The weight of the political situation, and the fact that he would never catch up to his brother, had pointed the way to his destiny. He had enjoyed the secrecy, the silences which had covered his tracks. People had written him off. Then came the fireworks, the beauty of the weddings, the air of celebration, the release of the explosion. He sometimes missed the ambience, the smell of pilau, the dancers, the wrestlers, the beauty of the flower of dynamite fading in the air.
The sight of Victoria stumbling back broke his train of thoughts. He stood in front of her and watched her approaching. She dared not meet his eyes, preferring to look to the side or on the ground, which was for the better because he felt so much hatred for her that he did not want to see her as a full person. He wanted to see her as an object he could hate and, if given the opportunity, could smash and trample. His voice was an ugly croaking sound which carried the full impact of his feelings. “We can do it the easy way or the hard way. It is up to you. Start talking.” Standing two metres away, her head turned to the side, her fingers playing with a cluster of blades of grass, her voice tremulous, she told him everything. From the way she talked, he knew that she was telling the truth.
“Get in the car.”
The drive back was slower; he had got all the answers. She thought he was driving her home; instead, he took her to the small town where his friends were waiting. They debated whether or not to go and arrest the butchers themselves. They knew that the killers would be on their guard and would do anything to protect themselves. They knew that they were burly men, not easily subdued. Wisely, they decided to call the detectives working on the case.
THE NEWS OF THE ARREST of the main suspects in the murder investigations was broadcast on the evening news. Victoria had hit national radio. It was further reported that one of the suspects was in hospital with gunshot wounds sustained during his arrest. He had swung at the arresting officers with his machete-cum-cleaver and been shot.
THE BODY OF THE LATE BABIT was finally released by the coroner for burial. The torso had, mercifully, been reunited with its head, the whole embalmed, and enclosed in a gleaming mahogany coffin with genuine brass handles. During all this time Bat’s mind was locked onto the encounter in the surgeon’s office. He had gone there to sign some forms pertaining to the case. He arrived to find the man holding his wife’s head by the hair, headed for the operating theatre. He remembered standing still to take in the scene. He might have shaken his head to clear the perplexity. The man was smoking a cigarette and humming Nat King Cole’s “Coquette.” He smiled when he saw him and said, “This baby is in safe hands. I am going to sew her up really well.”
All that time he kept thinking that he had held that head in his arms, kissed it, laid it on his breast. He had liked that lifeless hair, and sometimes complained about the smell of the products used to keep it glossy. He had loved those eyes, now vacant, and knew those lips, now gaping, and that tongue, now lolling. He knew that neck, now abbreviated, waiting to be rejoined onto its old hinges; the taste of the saliva in that desecrated mouth; and the torso which lay somewhere on a slab, emptied of its organs. The essence had gone; the head now looked foreign, monstrous.
At that moment he was convinced that there was no resurrection of bodies; he didn’t want the idea to exist. He had no wish to meet Babit in that body ever again. It would be too unpleasant an experience; there would be no joy in it. His mind would keep going back to the bathroom, to this office. He only wanted to meet her in ethereality, pure, liberated from bodily encumbrances. Sublimated. At the same time, he discovered another basic truth, that he had become a polygamist, just like any man who lost a wife in whichever way. Babit had become a trinity: there was the Babit he had courted and married; the dead Babit, whose head he found on a plate on the bathroom floor; and the ethereal Babit, the one he wanted to see again.
The scene played itself in his head through the wailings, the eulogies, the rituals of saying goodbye. The first shovelful of dirt to hit the coffin sounded like an old prison gate banging closed: how long would his incarceration last?
The family was reminded that it was an exceptional occurrence to lower the coffin when the culprits were already apprehended. There was a growing feeling that they could be the few who would benefit from the justice living a weak existence in an age of gun rule. This became the focus tempering much of their grief because, deep down, people were optimists, who wanted mistakes corrected, things back to running as they remembered them in the past. They waited for the court case as if it were unquestionable that the verdict would be in their favour. They could not allow anybody to crush that with pessimism; that would be like breaking open Babit’s grave and throwing her body out of the coffin. Bat promised to hire the best lawyers money could buy and to give the killers the sentence they deserved.
What Babit’s family did not know was that General Bazooka had been briefed about the case and had vowed to leave no stone unturned in the effort to free “a hard-working Bureau agent falsely accused of the murder of a common prostitute.” It was just as well that they remained uninformed. In a country where there was no open prostitution, the word “prostitute” would have hurt too much, most especially because Babit had known only one man in her life.
BAT FOUND HIMSELF in a crater of despair he could not climb out of. His friends visited often, but because they knew him well, they knew when to stay and when to leave. With other sympathizers it was different. They kept streaming in from the village of his birth, from Babit’s and Mafuta’s families, and they kept the place buzzing even when he craved solitude, a moment of contemplation. People he had done favours for, lent money to, recommended for jobs, came to pay their respects. On one level the attention was good; on another it was counterproductive because grief is an individual emotion. But he still entertained his guests, men who now held him in high regard because of his education, and the fact that he had come back from the dead after being presumed six months in the morgue. He had become their man, their beacon. They could count on him to understand their problems.
They brought him chickens, multicoloured birds with legs tied together with banana fibre. They brought him goats, which had survived the roadblocks and the cooking pans of hungry soldiers. They brought him long-fingered cooking bananas because they had heard that they were his favourite food. They brought him sacks of beans, groundnuts, maize, millet. His home became a food depot, an abattoir, a chaotic holiday camp. In their goodness, their enthusiasm, they just made things worse. He would see them following him around, listen to their questions about the lawyers: Why had he not hired Saudi or Libyan lawyers who were most likely to exert influence because of their nationality? Why had he not hired people to take care of the killer? Why had he not removed his daughter from the hands of a murderess? When was he going to remarry?