Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [95]
“And so they survived to bite us tonight.”
“Exactly.”
“I wonder what she will tell them after a good spray of aerosol insecticide?” Which led her to ask Chris why he had not thought of buying himself a can of Flit since getting here.
“I thought of it actually the first night but then decided against it in the morning.”
“What?”
“You see, Emmanuel made the point that since aerosol was a remedy our host could not himself afford it was perhaps better not to insult him by introducing it into his household. I was stunned by that argument, and he handed back to me the money I had given him to buy a canister at the petrol station.”
Beatrice was silent for a while. Then she said “What a fellow, that Emmanuel of yours! Still I am glad I won’t be spending five nights here.”
Their low-toned conversation was abruptly interrupted by a major disturbance on the floor. One child, it appeared, had urinated on his brother. The remonstrance, sleepy at first, quickly sharpened into clear-eyed accusations and a general commotion in which someone soon began to cry, calling on his mother. Click! went the switch and the single naked bulb hanging down the centre of the ceiling flooded the room with light. Chris and Beatrice remained still and silent like a couple of mice interrupted far from their hole and sheltering behind utensils in a crowded room.
“Shush!” It must have been either the biggest of the three boys or the bigger of the two girls taking command. Nothing more was heard after that. They were probably speaking by signs and with their eyes, no doubt pointing to the bed and its distinguished occupants. The switch went click again and darkness returned, broken for a while by discreet whispers; and then silence.
THE DECISION by Chris and his two companions to travel to the North by bus instead of Braimoh’s taxi was well taken because a bus was bound to attract less attention to itself than a taxi even when it was as old as Braimoh’s.
The bus they chose was one of a new generation of transports known, even to the illiterate, as Luxurious, so called because they were factory-built and fitted out with upholstered seats. Chris had never been inside a Luxurious before. Indeed his last experience in Kangan buses was years and years ago before he had left to study in Britain. In those days buses were still the crude handiwork of bold and ingenious panel-beaters and welders who knocked any sheet-metal that came to hand into a container on wheels, and got a sign-writer to paint BUS in florid letters all over it.
Before embarking on Luxurious, Chris walked round it sizing it up like a prospective buyer. He felt a curious pride in its transformation which had not entirely abandoned its origins. The florid lettering had remained virtually unchanged by prosperity. Perhaps the same sign-writers of his younger days were still working or, more likely, had influenced generations of apprentices in their peculiar calligraphy. And to think of it, that imaginative roadside welder who created the first crude buses might be the managing director of the transport company that now had a fleet of Luxuriouses! If there had been no progress in the nation’s affairs at the top there had clearly been some near the bottom, albeit undirected and therefore only half-realized.
The sign-writers had long expanded their assignment from merely copying down the short word BUS into more elaborate messages rather in the tradition of that unknown monk working away soberly by candle-light copying out the Lord’s Prayer as he must have done scores of times before and then, seized by a sudden and unprecedented impulse of adoration, proceeded to end the prayer on a new fantastic flourish of his own: For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen!
The sign-writers of Kangan did not work in dark and holy seclusions of monasteries but in free-for-all market-places