Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [15]
No one could say why the Great Carrier of Sacrifice to the Almighty was doing this to the world, except that it had happened before, long, long ago in legend. The earth broke the hoes of the grave-diggers and bent the iron tip of their spears. Then the people knew the time had come to desert their land, abandoning their unburied dead and even the dying, and compounding thereby whatever abominations had first unleashed the catastrophe. They travelled by starlight and lay under the shade of their mats by day until the sands became too hot to lie upon. Even legend is reticent about their plight recounting only that every night when the journey began again many failed to rise from under their mats and that those who did stagger up cast furtive glances at the silent shelters and set their stony faces to the south. And by way of comment the voice of legend adds that a man who deserts his town and shrine-house, who turns his face resolutely away from a mat shelter in the wilderness where his mother lies and cannot rise again or his wife or child, must carry death in his eyes. Such was the man and such his remnant fellows who one night set upon the sleeping inhabitants of the tiny village of Ose and wiped them out and drank the brown water in their wells and took their land and renamed it Abazon.
And now the times had come round again out of storyland. Perhaps not as bad as the first times, yet. But they could easily end worse. Why? Because today no one can rise and march south by starlight abandoning crippled kindred in the wild savannah and arrive stealthily at a tiny village and fall upon its inhabitants and slay them and take their land and say: I did it because death stared through my eye.
So they send instead a deputation of elders to the government who hold the yam today, and hold the knife, to seek help of them.
4
Second Witness—Ikem Osodi
“LOOK HERE, ELEWA, I don’t like people being difficult for no reason at all. I explained this whole thing to you from the very beginning. Didn’t I?”
“You explain what? I beg you, no make me vex… Imagine! Hmm! But woman done chop sand for dis world-o… Imagine! But na we de causam; na we own fault. If I no kuku bring my stupid nyarsh come dump for your bedroom you for de kick me about like I be football? I no blame you. At all!”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“How you go know? You no fit know.”
There is a car coming into the driveway and I go back to the window to see. No, it’s only one of the people in the flats, but I stay at the window all the same and watch the car creep towards the common garage building on the right. One of the brake lights shows a naked white bulb in a broken red casing. So it was Mr. So Therefore, the notorious Posts and Telegraphs man in the next flat. He crawled through the third door. Perhaps he will beat his beautiful wife tonight; he hasn’t done it now in months. Do you miss it then? Confess, you disgusting brute, that indeed you do! Well, why not? There is an extraordinary surrealistic quality about the whole thing that is almost satisfyingly cathartic. I start hearing it in my dream and then pass into a state of half-waking, and stay there for the rest of the act because he always chooses that hour when sleep is at its most seductive—the hour favoured also by the most discriminating armed robbers. And in the morning I find myself wondering how much of it had happened and how much I had dreamt up on my own. I ran into them once the very next morning on the short walk to the garage and they were so outrageously friendly and relaxed! She especially. I was dumbfounded. Later I hear how a concerned neighbour once called the police station—this was before I came to live here—and reported that a man was battering his wife and the Desk Sergeant asked sleepily: “So Therefore?” So, behind his back, we call him Mr. “So Therefore.” I can never remember his real name.
Elewa is still