TALES ON DOVE ST.

To the North Again II

by Ezenwa Obumneme Ugochukwu

On the 25^th of March; three days after the surviving Lorries left after the war had failed to come through my village, I rode on a bicycle with Chima sweating ahead of me with our weights towards Onitsha to board any of the persuaded Lorries to the north.

“Makurdi is the farthest we will get,” a driver advised some north-bound passenger.

“Is there no bus for Kano?” a woman asked.

“Madam, please! What I know is what I have just told you,” the driver raised a hand to prevent any further argument from the woman.

“ONAGA! ONAGA!!” a lorry boy cried with his last breathe, announcing the entrance of the North-bound lorry.

Our eyes peered towards the direction the skinny boy had come from, and the honking of a lorry hissing fumes from its opened bonnet.

“Onaga ugwuhaousa!” the boy said to passengers who inquired.

The lorry came to a halt in front of us, and we all knew we were all in for one hell of a ride to the hills of the North.

“Banye nu!” the lorry boy cried again, urging us to pay our fares as he chewed into a huge loaf of bread.

At the chimes of the midday bells of the cathedral calling for the Angelus, our lorry jogtrotted through heavy human-traffic of hawkers. Men and women selling wares from everywhere they have brought them from, mostly stolen from foreign aids or smuggled into black markets the western states were enjoying at the time.

We had maintained supposedly convenient positions before we set out for the long journey, spots we were sure soon to loose from our jam-packed state when we struggle for space like the theory posited by Darwin.  It might have been a blessing or perhaps a dream come true that I was travelling northward again for the second time in fourteen years after my first experience that didn’t end well.

 I sat in a corner packed high with our different luggage ranging from really expensive suitcases to hand woven jute-bags, sucked in behind the men, the women sat across us relatively comfy, and we traded conversation both ways in camaraderie . A man kept casting hateful stares to a woman, everything she and her little baby did appeared to upset him, his patience was in check until the teething girl passed foul smelling fluids on the floor of the vehicle and had to cause us to stop, so she could be cleaned. He lamented that he had told the woman to stay back while he went to look at the business he left, but she insisted and wound up with him in the same lorry against his knowledge. She was his wife. “It is the hardship here” I  heard an elderly woman said to the man, she too had a small shop in Kaduna before the war broke out, she said  her entire family were wiped out in the war, her only surviving son who was an engineer in Europe returned during the war and joined the cabinet of the republic only to disappear at the brink of the war, I was upset at her story and hate filled my heart for her son: his mother was alive and appears to be faring well, mine had suffered terribly, and most painfully to me was that she had a challenge: she was hunchbacked. I never permitted myself to ruminate what had played out on her during those times, but blamed absence, when she sure needed all her children to support her.  I was not there and I was not sure if I had thought about her during the time I learnt the war was at the hardest. Although I couldn’t venture into the country because the western border of Cameroon was sealed, only refugees were admitted into Yaoundé, the gendarmes would never let anyone out, without approved government official pass and high protection.

“If I were your son, I would never leave you!” emotion betrayed the promise I made to myself not to say a word to anyone on the journey.

“He had a strong position in ‘our government’, he saved his head. he fled with Onyisi”, I was never part of that government that had caused the death of my mother and sister,  and made this woman, my old friends and so many  others to lose their family members, I would never have sought war nor support one. It downed on me that I was wrong, it was a collective agreement by our legislatures from the central and south eastern states, and they lured us to war. All of us: they were the ones that elevated the Governor to a General and asked him to lead them to war, now that the war was over; their faces still graced most of the local and international tabloids trading blames or dissociating themselves from their deed. The ones worth exempting were those that were put in jails notably were the mathematics professor, Chike Obi in the famous University town of Nsukka, and to an extent the high ranking Colonels and some soldiers executed when they developed cold feet during the war. The harm was already done; we had all gone on a journey with the whirlpool and came out not too well. Those of us in the bus retracing our path northward, and many others who came behind were the ones taking the real gamble on peace, and not them that have either left the country or returned to the shambles of their homestead.  

“I still wouldn’t have left my mother,” I stuttered, this time tears stood in my eyes, without more ado the handkerchief in my hand dabbed my eyes as I feigned something were in those eyes. I couldn’t fool the old woman.

“Everybody knew how the war was fought…there was nothing anyone could do. Mothers would never have done better for their children, neither could children for their parents…there was nothing anyone could do,” she said to me, her eyes querying the redness in mine.

If only the eyes gave out all that was in the heart. I bowed to conceal the embarrassment my eyes were causing on their own; the other passengers became interested in me. Something I intend to avoid, but their eyes on mine were quizzing. They have forgiven themselves, picked up their shattered lives together looking forward to create a better future for their children than the one they had had. Why couldn’t I?

It was the bitter truth: no one had the right to carry any form of blame. I convinced myself. I was simply fleeing from my mother all these times without knowing it. It wasn’t just a while. Eleven years; she sent me letters and I had none for her, It was usually from those letters that I learnt she knew my location each time I was more miles away from her: I presume she usually made the long journey to the mission house in Onitsha to ask about her son, who was a beneficiary of the mission’s scholarship in Cameroun.

“It must have been hard on you” the old woman smiled at me on one of our stops, when she found me lurking around the lorry while other passengers were either eating in close bunkers, buying things with their squeezed money or maybe stretching their soon to be tired feet. I smiled and offered her an orange I had just bought from a little bare-chested boy hawker, she took it with a smile that reminded me of Felicia, the old secretary of the Logistics Department of the ‘Cam-Herald’, this time the lean frame before me with an overflowing gown popularly called ‘ Mary Amaka’ around here had none of those exaggerated makeup the secretary habitually adorned on her small face.   

Minutes later we crept back into our spaces; hardly a time any one of us adjusted from the hard bench on our behind during the journey, that the other didn’t feel a thing. We were all inconvenienced from everything. Unless there was a stopover; times when our driver had to put petrol from a jerry can which maintained an enviable position among us. There were also times on that journey that I regretted why I hadn’t taken Abdulkadir’s offer and would have been by now basking in a spacious of his peugeout.

The breaks in our journey translated into putting water into the steaming radiator after kilometers, a change a flat tire or to ease ourselves and eat. There was an occasion when the front wheel busted with a loud bang, and ran into a ditch close to a village, and we had to come down with our bare lives intact so it could be fixed.  On three stops; the driver and his boy repaired something in the engine compartment, maybe electrical or mechanical. The total stopover had rare numbers for the passengers’ refreshment: to eat lunch in crowded stations of hawkers and canteens, or for the driver to stretch his legs- we seized such stops too to stretch like him, and to take leaks or emptied our bowels, warning ourselves not to wander too far from the pack. Husbands followed their women to reasonable distances into the bush. One of those stops offered us the opportunity to avert an impending danger, had I not noticed the defunct republic coat of arm on both sides of the front bumper of our lorry.

...to be continued!

Ezenwa Obumneme Ugochukwu is a Writer and Author of The Land is an Orphan. He tweets @EzenwaUgochukwu