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His name was Moradeyo, but we called him Facilitator. He was
smooth, malleable as putty, his greasy manners oiled the clogged
wheels of the deals that happened in our small town, once in a
while. He grew up here, lived among us until nine years ago. Then
his mother’s death scattered the family in different directions,
like the grains of corn from a container that crashed, leaving
the blind father stranded, all by himself, waiting on hope, waiting
to be picked up, the lone grain buried somewhere in sand, beneath
twigs. We always knew that Facilitator didn’t believe in
anything, but we didn’t know what he would do to prove that.
He only knew how to work hard, we’d say; he knew how to
deal the cards. My brother, who was his friend and gave him the
alias, used to say that the boy could sell his mother, that the
poor woman had Death to thank, for her second son was scheming
to palm her off for a fistful of cash. Who would buy her, for
how much, to what use, my brother never said, preferring to intone,
‘If there’s one person who will do anything to get
money, it’s he.’
Whenever I visited home during my undergraduate days, I stood
by the window and watched them at play.
‘Facilitator!’ Taye, my brother, hollered as Facilitator
emerged, walking briskly along.
‘Is inside my blood!’ the boy was suddenly gratified.
‘The one and only Facilitator! Some mothers do have dem!’
‘Das right. A million stars no equal the single moon.’
‘You who know the smell of currency!’
‘Das me you hail.’
‘You who come across a rooster on a bushpath and ask, Your
feather or your flesh?’
‘Talent senior training. Abinibi pass ability.’
‘On account of the new yam you redesign your mother’s
facial marks with a machete!’
Facilitator, now close to his addressor, pulled a face. The mention
of his mother was part of the game, but it came too early. The
gathering under the acacia tree erupted into laughter, and when
he made a rude sign at Taye, nobody really noticed.
Once out of here Facilitator took the only job he could find,
and it was not easy to get or keep. He worked the Borders, the
No-Man’s-Land between the devil and deep-blue Atlantic.
He took anything: used tyres, knocked-down vehicle parts, textiles,
electronics, rice, shoes. He helped to move them where they should
be moved. He picked out couriers by a mere 'shading' of the eyes,
a wave of the hand above the din that rose with the dust as a
convoy of cars carrying contrabands zoomed like gunshots past
the detour, several miles from the Borders. He had been at it
for nine years, as soon, we surmised, as he beat the dust and
stigma of his past out of his shirt. The job fitted Facilitator;
my brother visited him once and slept in his room fitted with
new things. After three months. It seemed that this world had
been waiting for him.
In three years, maybe four, Facilitator attuned his body to the
areas. All the signs of the hustler showed up on him: the unyielding
listlessness, the yearning for visibility, the lack of shame and
self-respect. He knew the right people, he became one of them,
he became big in their hands (he was not yet a big man) by making
them feel big. He knew the women. The tough mamas who had spoused
with the Borders when they were still teenage girls, each coupling
with a bushpath, each monogamously tied to a detour, observing
with the routes the kind of chastening matrimony that was impossible
in their lives. He knew the men too, the actual lords of the Borders.
To say the least, since we knew little from this distance, it
was a risky job. You had to know people, you had to become one
of them. He did become one of them; since they were big men and
big women, Facilitator too became a big man. Like two hands washing
each other, he liked to say, according to my brother who still
reported his doings, mostly out of envy.
It was through this kind of gossip that we kept abreast of Facilitator,
in the nine years that he had been gone from here. Three months
ago, we learnt that he bought a car. It was a used car, second-handed-down
from the Cold North. But no matter; no one had owned a car in
this place in a long time. The only car ever claimed by someone
from here (quite different from the passenger vehicles that stopped
plying our roads four years ago when they became unmanageable)
belonged to an official of the Party of the Right. It was a monument
to the wild days. My brother hid inside its carcass, by the roadside
across the school grounds, when he didn’t want to do chores.
The party man’s enemies had waylaid him during the Farmers’
Uprising. They dragged him out of the Ford, hacked him prone,
and doused the mess with petrol, which turned into a bonfire that
blazed brighter than the high noon. You would think that Wetie!
was a thing of the past, but in this place, regarding the
past, there was little difference between four years and four
hundred years.
So Facilitator owned a car. My brother, who had failed at various
things — bus conductor, back-up singer for a fuji
band, butcher’s apprentice, party thug — paid him
a visit. He was himself trying to get into what everyone called
‘the port business’ at the edge of the waters across
the Borders, since Wharf and TinCan required the kind of guts
he no longer possessed. He visited Facilitator to see if there
was a way for him, too. In spite of the resentment, they continued
to be friends. Facilitator was a generous man, and Taye was always
in need.
The day my brother visited, other friends were present. There
was much to drink. The friends thought that Facilitator, now a
big man, ought to come down home to have his car blessed by his
blind father. It would lift the vegetating man’s spirits,
they said. No one had given this family a chance, but see the
way God works? A man everyone had written off had bought a car,
the second man to do so in the entire village. Facilitator, a
reasonable man, saw their point, but his wife said No! Our town,
which she had never visited was, she opined, full of evil and
spiteful people, who didn’t like to see a person succeed.
They might cast a spell on the car’s engine, or turn something
into a cat that ran across the road just when he was driving.
Her husband wanted to know how she knew this; he wanted her to
be exact.
A self-deprecating laughter escaped her, and she said: ‘There’s
more than meets the eye in this world.’
Facilitator replied: ‘I want you to look at it this way.
People will see the car being blessed, and that will be the right
insurance.’
Others nodded, but the wife remained unconvinced. Facilitator
remarked that he had not seen his father in nine years. ‘And
when I was leaving,’ he said, turning to my brother, ‘I
didn’t tell you this, Taye, but I made a promise to my father
that I will return to him, but not on foot. He knew what I meant.
God has made it so.’
‘Well’, the wife grumbled, ‘if you say that
my mouth is smelly, I will hold my lips.’
Her husband snapped: ‘But you refuse to look at it that
way. You don’t have to seal your lips.’
One week later, Facilitator brought his car home. My brother rode
with him. It was the first vehicle to come to this place in four
years, since the passenger lorry, Ledemsay, made its
final trip. We said it was the bad roads, but we knew better.
Or, we didn’t know better: we had no idea what had depleted
the fleet of Ledemsay's owner. When someone who used
to have no longer did, we said it was an act of God. We rubbed
our palms together in prayer, wishing his misfortunes didn’t
spread to us. Since Ledemsay’s last trip, anyone
traveling out of here walked the sixteen miles to the highway,
the Express, where it was possible to catch a bus coming from
the near North.
Facilitator rode into the town early in the afternoon, his Datsun
covered in the water-resistant dust of April. I watched him from
my window; I had been here only two weeks, on a research trip.
He dropped my brother off at our house, near the outskirts. Then,
trailed by a horde of excited kids and wonderstruck grownups,
he cruised through the main street, heading for his family house
at the edge of the bush. One elderly man walked up to the slow-moving
car and raised his hand. The driver bowed in greeting.
‘Ah, Moradeyo, omo gidi!’ the man said. ‘O
kare lae.’
Facilitator stopped the car, got out, and prostrated to the man.
Impressed by the praise he gave the man his fist, and returned
to the car. The man watched him drive off. Nodding thoughtfully,
he turned in the direction of our house, examining the currency
in his hand. He paused under my window, looked back again at the
spectacle of the constantly interrupted car, and muttered to himself:
‘Olorun ma tobi l’oba o. Eda o ma l’aropin
o.’
Many years ago, when Mr. Douglas still lived here, he would sidle
up to me, eager to know what the man said, not minding that the
astonished tone inflecting the words carried enough meaning. I
wondered about that time, about my irritated paraphrases, and
evasions if the comments were offensive. Were he here now, assuming
he still required my services, I would mutter something about
the greatness of God and the infinitude of human fate.
Within an hour of Facilitator’s arrival, the ‘Town
Hall’ was raucous with noise. It was a squat building on
a strip of land across from the acacia trees, and it had risen,
I know, as a response to the degradation that had befallen our
town: it helped the people’s civic pride to erect a hall
when all else was going to seed. A part of it was visible from
my window, but I would have to step out if I wanted to see the
car. I had the urge to go walking by, but I decided to watch,
knowing that Taye would return to brief me. He had long swaggered
out the house; he was the celebrant’s best friend, and he
had to support him. The house was quiet. A moment later, I saw
my mother saunter out, a shawl on her head. Like everyone else,
she would walk by the hall, hoping Facilitator would notice her.
Failing that, she would go and greet his father. Since my arrival
two weeks ago, I had not moved about much, outside of biking to
the farms where I interviewed the extension service agents who
bypassed our town in their Land Rovers. I had my reservations
about Facilitator’s character, and I knew he would be eager
for my approval. Finally, I too yielded to my curiosity.
The car was parked outside the building, a short distance from
Galilee, Ma Israel’s drinking shack that, with the acacias,
the doctor’s Hill House, and the town hall (sometimes called
‘Community Center’) formed the town square. I noticed
Ma Israel at the store-front. Usually, she provided the drinks
for occasions such as this; it was a common sight to see her workers
darting about with cartons of beer and soft drinks. Now she stood
alone, surly and irritable, and she pointedly ignored my greetings
at the moment my brother flipped open the car’s boot to
ease out a carton of Star beer. Facilitator had brought his own
party things. Taye saw me, and smiling guiltily, slipped into
the hall. From the opposite direction, I saw Facilitator’s
father being led along. I paused by the Datsun. It had been painted
anew in that hurried, functional way of dedicated artisans. The
sheen of the bodywork dazzled in the sun, its stink of emulsion
rising like a swarm of gnats to assail my nostrils.
The blind father was led into the hall. As I walked past, I saw
someone call Facilitator outside. The two men bent down to whisper,
and the young car-owner blurted out:
‘Ah, no problem for that one. If you have any load, just
put it there.’ And he pointed at the car.
Farther down the road, a throng ambled along with pieces of luggage,
probably seeking a similar favor. I couldn’t blame them:
everyone could use a free ride.
*
A quarter of an hour later, I returned from my
walk. The hall was rowdy in a pleasant way. Lively dance-music blared
out, rigged from a dry-cell-battery cassette player. A band of kids
tussled over a bottle of Coca-Cola. Next to the car, there were
two sacks. I remembered the man who had whispered to the car owner.
Apparently he wanted a ride to the City; there was no telling when
the next car would stray to our town, and the extension service
people gave no lifts. A goat ambled by, and started picking at one
of the sacks. Out of reflex, I stomped the ground to scare it off.
But moments later, it returned. A little girl, ten at the most,
broke off the band fighting for a sip of the warm Coke. She picked
a pebble and threw it at the adamant goat. The stone flew, missed
its target, bumped against the sack, and landed on the car’s
front windscreen with the lightness of a butterfly’s perch.
It didn’t make a clean piercing, but cracked at the edgy glass,
whose whinny ripples turned the crystal silver of the windscreen
into an opaque sheet, slowly misted by the disturbing impact of
stone on hot glass. A noise welled up all around, while the goat
scurried off, a piece of green plantain in her mouth. The clamor
overwhelmed the sound of merriment inside the hall. A few people
tumbled out, Facilitator ahead of them. A glance at the spreading
mist of his windscreen was enough to rile the young man, who piled
his hands on his head:
‘Ha-ah! I’m in debt!’
Without another word, he ran inside the car and kicked it alive,
forcing Taye to struggle with the other door. He raised a heavy
dust as he backed out of the dead-end lying between Galilee and
the hall, and once my brother managed to get a foot in, the car
made a murderous turn that sent the few sympathizers fleeing for
safety. The cloud of dust was the last thing we saw. Silence fell
all around. The bickering kids had gone totally quiet, and the girl
who threw the stone was now drenched in her own tears. A boy led
Facilitator’s father back to the house at the edge of the
bush. The owner of the load stood like a stump, plantains dangling
from his hands. The elderly man who had marveled at the ways of
God leaned on the largest of the acacia trees, muttering. Then he
beckoned the man with the plantains.
I went back to my room. Hours later, looking out from my window,
I saw my brother trudging along, his swagger gone.
‘He threw me out of his car,’ he said as he walked in.
*
It started raining at about seven o’clock that evening. I
was trying to read by the light of the storm lantern. Taye slipped
out of the house, and when my mother called out to him, he responded
with a careless sound that the rain swallowed up.
The roads were bad. Facilitator was close to the market village
ten miles to the Express when his car ran into a ditch, partly because,
with the windscreen now an opaque whiteness, he could not see far
ahead. The force of the car entering the crater crashed the weakened
glass into a pile across the dashboard, and allowed a deluge to
gush at him. He soldiered on, driving against the rain and the wind,
until both ceased to matter, until he got to the market village,
and decided to maneuver the vehicle under a stall by the side of
the road. The headlights shone on a man lying on a bench at the
far end of the stall, who scrambled to a sitting position.
‘Are we safe?’ the man asked, and a report accompanied
his question: he was drunk. Facilitator, whose time at the Borders
had put him in touch with army top brass, understood the question:
it belonged to the vocabulary of soldiers. Feeling his way out of
the car, the sound of his shaky hands heard through the car keys,
he laughed and offered the appropriate response: ‘No cause
for alarm.’
The drunk peered closer at his face, and belched.
‘True?’
‘To God who made me.’
‘If so, then make yourself at home.’ The man moved a
little on the bench so Facilitator could sit. The car’s headlights
were bright, and each man saw the other’s face.
Then the drunk brought out a flashlight which he shot at the car.
‘But alarm don blow for your windscreen.’
Facilitator told him what happened.
He was still talking when a female voice tore through the rain from
the other side of the stall:
‘Bentigoor! Bentigoor!!’
‘That’s me,’ the drunk said to Facilitator, ‘but
is just wife trouble. Continue with your story.’
‘That’s all. And it started raining. And I got here.’
Bentigoor was quiet for a while. Finally, he felt his pocket for
something. He gave the flashlight to Facilitator to free his hand.
After the sound of a closing door, the voice came through again:
‘Bentigoor, alias palmwine drinkard! One day, the thirsty
jerry can inside your stomach crying to be fill with Paraga
will take pity on you and set you free! Bentigoor, are you deaf
or ignoring me?’
Bentigoor made a grunting sound as he pulled something out of his
pocket.
‘See this?’
Facilitator trained the light on the raised hand. The man was holding
up a roll of peppermints.
‘You see this Trebor? Even if I drink thirty thousand pails
of ogogoro and Paraga, once I chew three of this
thing, that’s the end. My mouth will smell, I will be belching,
but I will know what I’m doing. You must be a man…’
‘Bentigoor, who are you talking to? Where you get this car?’
The woman stood above them, a tin-lantern in her hand, an umbrella
dripping water resting on her shoulder.
‘Isioma, cool down. You see me with a visitor.’
‘Which useless visitor, ehn? These are the people bringing
you cannabis and stone under the cover of darkness!’
‘Show respect, Isioma! This is a visitor. Don’t you
have eyes? As I was saying, my friend, there’s nothing coming
from above that is too big for the ground. You bought this one,
and you will buy a bigger one. A solution may be small, but is bigger
than the problem.’
‘Thank you,’ Facilitator said. ‘It’s what
I told my wife. People will see the car’s blessing, and that
will be the correct insurance. It did not work out that way.’
‘I said, No problem. We are all together. You can’t
go tonight. Sleep in our house.’ He turned to his wife still
towering over them:
‘Isioma, we have a visitor for the night.’
‘So what?’
‘Is food ready?’
‘Food will ready when you come inside to cut the meat.’
She turned and went back into the house, the level of the rain rising
as her umbrella unfurled again. Midway, she paused:
‘Papa is hungry and angry.’
‘I’m coming,’ Bentigoor shouted back.
The two men sat in the dark while it rained. Facilitator’s
listless hands played with the car-keys. Bentigoor had resumed his
supine position, his back slightly raised, resting on a post upholding
the stall.
He said: ‘You have something, I don’t know what it is,
but it makes people like you. Is in your blood.’
‘Thank you,’ Facilitator said.
‘If is another person, he will still be crying. Or at leas’,
he will refuse to talk. You understand life.’
‘Well, there is no use crying when the head is already off.
What would happen has happened.’
‘I like you, and I respect you,’ Bentigoor said, with
touching thoughtfulness. ‘I am also like that. My wife followed
me all the way from Delta because she saw me like that. But now
she complain about my drinking.’
Facilitator was quiet.
‘Drinking is good,’ Bentigoor said. ‘What is bad
is overdrinking. Abi I lie?’
‘It’s true. Moderation is the key to life.’
‘You also like to drink?’
‘Sometimes, but not much.’
‘I can’t do without drink.’
‘Hmmm.’
They were quiet again, and Facilitator’s keys had found a
resting place in his pocket. ‘Before she starts shouting again,
let us go inside,’ Bentigoor said finally, rising. Walking
ahead, he stopped just as he went past the car:
‘The smell of Star is coming out of the boot.’
‘Oh,’ said Facilitator. ‘It is the rest of the
drinks we were using to wash the car. I think the bottles broke
because of the bad road.’
Bentigoor said: ‘If there are some unbroken bottles, it means
that the road has drunk enough libation.’
And he began to fumble with the car’s trunk.
*
Late that night, after the rain had dropped to
a mere drizzle, Facilitator and a few friends that Bentigoor had
rallied from the village sat over the beers rescued from the car.
Isioma, it turned out, was not averse to guzzling. Although no one
invited her, she joined them on the pretext that her mouth was not
at the washerman’s. She opened a bottle with her teeth, bent
a tumbler in her left hand, and filled it to the brim, lapping the
foam with a relish that elicited a sudden, unified noise from the
men:
‘Awyokotoh!’
‘Bentigoor, your wife sabbe am oh!’
‘Million upon million shine-shine don go inside.’
Isioma belched and said: ‘All of you dey craze. You think
only men know how to drink?’
There was a knock on the front door. Bentigoor said: ‘Better
hide your bottle. More guzzlers on the loose.’
‘You think people care for your drink?’ Isioma retorted,
holding the bottle between her legs.
One of the drinkers said, ‘You give them Sungbalaja
instead.’
Nobody rose to answer the door. The knocking continued.
‘What’s that you said?’ another asked.
‘Ha, hear this novice-o,’ Isioma crowed. ‘You
drink for this village you don’t know Sungbalaja?’
Bentigoor pulled out a bottle of Schnapps without the label. Against
the lantern on the window pane beneath which he sat he held up the
bottle to measure the level of its content.
‘See this? That’s Sungbalaja. Strong pass Paraga.’
‘But what it means is what I want to know.’
‘As the name implies,’ Bentigoor said. ‘Knock-Out.
Knock you out flat. You sleep like a log of wood. Like stone.’
The sound of knocking had not abated, but it was gentler now, as
though the person at the door was about to give up.
‘Isioma,’ Bentigoor said carefully, ‘finish your
drink and open the door.’
The woman glared at him: ‘They tie your hand?’
‘Okay. I know the beer is entering your sense.’ He rose
and went to open the door, but instead of letting the intruder in,
he remained at the threshold, his back to the rest of the drinking
company.
‘Yes?’ he began, but seemed to change his mind. ‘Ha!
This is a delegation. Two, three…five. No, four people. Also
a small boy. Isioma, please bring the lantern.’
‘Let them come in, ah beg! At leas’, they are not spirits.’
Bentigoor walked away from the door followed by four people, including
Taye, whom Facilitator recognized the instant the visitors came
within the glare of the light. Bentigoor was right; it was a delegation
from our town: Taye; the old man who’d paused below my window;
the man with the sack of farm produce; and the little girl who threw
the pebble that shattered the windscreen. Facilitator rose to meet
them, and the revelers stood up one after the other, making space
for the company dripping with rain. Just as he had when passing
a gift of cash to the old man, he went down on his hands, prostrate.
‘Ha, baba, you should not have worried. And you brought this
child.’
Bentigoor ensured that each had a place to sit. From what Taye told
me afterwards about the meeting, down to Facilitator’s account
of how he wound up as Bentigoor’s guest, it was clear that
they had set out as soon as he walked out the house, replying my
mother’s query with a flippant noise.
The old man spoke, and the night listened. He stared at the floor
and spoke in short sentences. For a long time he spoke. He did not
tell a tale, and this disappointed his listeners, including the
night, the revelers, and Facilitator, the man at the center of the
gathering. He did not talk about the accident. From what he said,
this is what Taye recalled:
‘Moradeyo, listen well. Taboos arise when the world is full
of uncertainties. There is order in our world. God is great. Fate
is infinite. Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. Sometimes we
don’t understand what yesterday has revealed to us. When a
meteor falls from the sky, nobody knows where it lands. This does
not trouble the world. The same face is home to laughter and to
tears. All is well with reconciliation. Let there be restitution
first. Let the world live inside you. This is why we have come.
A long speech is a haven of lies.’
The old man had made a long speech but his truth was patient. Facilitator
too stared at the floor. Taye gripped his shoulders, and when his
friend turned to look at him, his face broke into a smile.
‘How did you know I was in this house? You heard our noise?’
The old man spoke again: ‘As an elder, I would say we followed
the light of your good spirits…'
‘I heard it too,’ Bentigoor interrupted. ‘The
smell of Star.’
‘…but, in truth, it was your friend who suggested that
we take shelter from the rain.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t go far,’ Taye said. ‘In
the rain.’
Isioma stood at the kitchen door, beckoning Bentigoor.
‘I’m looking at that girl, and she is hungry,’
she said.
*
In the morning, the old man was gone, with the
little girl, and the man with the sack of plantains. Taye woke up
on the wooden bench and, finding the house quiet, moved toward the
door. There was no one in sight. From where he stood, his view of
the market area was blocked by an ailing stall directly in front
of the house. Farther down, in the general direction of the village’s
outskirts, on the way to the Express, came the regulated sound of
hammer on wood. He turned back into the house, listening. He had
dropped out of the drinking company soon after the meal hurriedly
prepared by Isioma; Taye might boast about his toughness, but a
night tired him out fast. Dropping into a slumber, he had felt estranged
from whatever bond the mixture of warm-hearted beers and gins with
the old man’s conciliatory words had created. He was not surprised
to have woken up alone; what intrigued him was the absolute silence
of the house.
There was, after all, another sound, a general kind of laughter,
audible in the pauses of the hammer, except that its direction was
not clear. Taye stepped beyond the crumbling stall and walked into
the open air.
The market was not in session; it convened every five days. But
the villagers made use of some of the stalls, and seeing people
clustered around a grate here, a table mounted with a basin of boiled
rice there, he was amazed at the power of the initial silence in
the midst of these activities. Others might have wondered about
the meaning of a discrepancy, but Taye was more interested in what
he could see. Next to the food-seller was a man splitting wood upon
an upturned mortar--the sound of hammer was not as distant as he’d
thought, and it was not a hammer. It was an axe. When he was close
enough to be noticed by the man chopping wood, he realized the source
of the laughter, and was relieved. Halfway to the edge of the bush
where the village ended stood a group of people around a car, and
among them, Taye saw his friend. He walked up to them.
There were three men besides Facilitator. Bentigoor was not in the
group. There were men who crowded around the remainder of Facilitator’s
drinks the previous night, before and after the old man’s
benediction. Now Taye recognized one of them, but didn’t know
his name.
‘Morning,’ he said, with a good-natured parting of his
lips. Unsure who he was, they nodded, striking the sullen poise
of strangers who would help if they knew what was required. Facilitator
replied him:
‘No longer morning here. The day is old.’
‘Is still morning for a late-riser,’ someone ventured,
drawing titters.
Taye was intrigued. Something about the people was unsettling. How
had Facilitator managed to know these people in such a short time,
even without Bentigoor, the friend he’d met in a moment of
desperation? He contributed to the titters, and shuffled around.
Facilitator moved closer to him and, wordless, pointed. Taye followed
the finger and his sight came to rest on the car, and then he saw
it: the car’s windscreen. It was there, sure and clean as
new, as if it came with the car.
Turning back to his friend, Taye wore a face full of questions he
didn’t need to ask.
‘That moment,’ he told me later that day, ‘was
when I saw myself unlike him. What I could not be. The things I
used to fear about him were crawling all over me.’
For the first time in over a decade, he called his friend by his
given name: ‘Moradeyo, how come?’
Instead of answering, Facilitator turned to the other men:
‘This is Mayor, my new friend. Bentigoor put me in his hands.
While you slept, he changed everything for me.’
One of the men, the one Taye remembered from the night at Bentigoor’s
house, said:
‘Mayor, Bentigoor, Facilitator. All names resemble. I want
to be like you — o!’
‘It’s not me,’ Mayor said, seriously. ‘You
have Brigadier-General to thank. He’s not here, but his spirit
is here with us.’
‘Yes, Brigadier,’ the aspirant said. ‘A good man,
Brigadier Igida.’
‘Brigadier-General Igida,’ Mayor corrected him.
‘Two-in-one,’ the corrected man noted without a feeling
of embarrassment.
‘So,’ Facilitator said, addressing Mayor and others.
‘All it remains is to go back to City.’
Taye did not understand what had happened, but it was clear that
Facilitator had solved his problem. He continued to stare around,
as if hoping that the riddle would yield its own truth if he waited
long enough. But the longer he stared the less wanted he felt in
their midst. Once the name Brigadier-General was mentioned, Facilitator
didn’t bother to look in his direction again. Indeed, they
suddenly got clannish and retreated some way off, leaving him to
wonder. He wandered back to the house, and found Bentigoor in the
kitchen, skinning a wild-rabbit.
‘Welcome! You slept well?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Your friend is lucky. Without a penny he has a new glass
for his car. Is the Brigadier at work.’
Taye grunted, but remained standing.
‘I went to check my traps, but I knew it would happen. Is
just a matter of time. Brigadier Igida make everything happen here.’
He turned to look at Taye who stood over him, unable to move or
speak.
‘It surprise you?’
Taye managed a smile, but the confidence didn’t hold.
‘Your friend understand life better. To people who don’t
understand life, it will surprise them.’ He pulled a bowl
of soapy water closer, and threw his knife in it. He picked up a
small machete, and began to file it on a whetstone.
‘You want to meet him?’
‘Brigadier?’
‘Yes, Brigadier. Your friend will drive to his house to thank
him. I can’t go, but you can follow them.’
Finally Taye decided to ask one question:
‘How do you know all these things? You weren’t there.’
Bentigoor took the carcass in one hand, and the machete in the other.
He paused, as if to listen. He did not shift his gaze from the small
counter on which the meat rested. Then, very haltingly, as though
unsure of his words, said: ‘Never ask the coconut how come
it has water, since it has strong shell. Otherwise, it is angry
and dry up the sea. And sea never dry.’
Taye was quiet. He sat down, watching chunks of meat fall into a
plastic basin. Finally, he said to Bentigoor:
‘I’m not ready.’ 
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