Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [81]
Signed Colonel Johnson Ossai,
Director of the State Research Council.
That is the end of this Special Announcement. There will be a repeat of the announcement at seven o’clock.
Chris threw a few things into his travelling bag while he waited nervously for Beatrice to arrive. As soon as she drove in he went out with the bag, locked the front door and left his house, as it turned out, for good.
The decision to leave had little at first to do with fear for his own safety although that factor was to loom larger with every passing day. But right now in his mind the overwhelming issue which had been crystallizing even as the announcement was issuing from the box was how to counter the hideous lie. Not tomorrow, it could be too late, but now!
As soon as he got to his first hideout he picked up the telephone and summoned two foreign correspondents to meet with him at eight o’clock that night. Then he went to the back room where a camp-bed and writing-table had been set up for him and began to draft his statement. His mind was strangely efficient and lucid; no detail seemed to escape him. A few minutes after he began working he re-emerged in the living-room where his host and Beatrice were making phone calls and told them to make sure that people understood that Ikem was not just wounded but dead. He was convinced that the drafters of the government statement had deliberately chosen a phrase which was popularly misunderstood in order to diffuse the shock of the news by revealing its full extent only in stages. Beatrice thought the theory a little ingenious but didn’t argue the point.
When she got home that night a little after eleven she found Elewa whom she had failed to locate all day, distraught, waiting in her flat. And, just as Chris had said, she had totally misunderstood the announcement! For a brief while she toyed with the idea of leaving her in her ignorance till morning. But she immediately realized that if she did it would not be necessarily out of consideration for Elewa but more likely from the cowardly fear of having to handle such a terrible task all by herself. And that decided her. The future she saw unfolding so relentlessly before them would demand brutal courage, not squeamishness, from the likes of Elewa and herself, from now on.
And strange are the ways of deep emotion, Elewa proved the tougher of the two! One piercing cry that continued to reverberate in Beatrice’s brain like a rifle-shot in salute to a fallen comrade and Elewa sat down, still and silent. It was Beatrice herself who then gave way to emollient tears she had reserved all evening making frenetic phone calls in Chris’s secret command post.
By late afternoon of the next day it was obvious that the State Research Council had begun to look for Chris. One of the fore-sighted steps he had taken was asking Beatrice to return to her flat and to go to work as usual in the morning and not try to make physical contact until further notice. Just before close of work her secretary asked her to take a call from the Director of SRC. She picked up the phone with deliberate slowness which gave her time to compose her voice and attitude. When she spoke she was cold and indifferent but not hostile.
“Colonel Johnson Ossai speaking.”
“I see. Anything I can do for you, Colonel?”
“Well, yes… You see I have this very important message for Commissioner Oriko from His Excellency… I have tried him at the Ministry of Information several times but he is not on seat. I have tried his house but no answer. I wonder… erm… if you know his… erm… whereabouts. It is…”
“No I don’t.”
“I see. I am sorry…”
“Not at all, Colonel. Goodbye.”
Meanwhile Chris had, in addition to the foreign correspondents, made very useful contact with other opinion-makers. He was particularly encouraged by his meeting