little gods (3)

Part Three: Love and Let Die

The festivities were over. Moji and her sisters bid the guests goodbye. While several youths took down the canopies and gathered the plastic seats, they settled into hammock chairs to reflect on Yemisi’s traditional wedding, the event they had just witnessed.

“She was the most beautiful bride ever. The groom, too,” Bukola said, leaning into her chair.

Moji nodded. “Isn’t it amazing how time flies, how quickly children grow? When we last saw, she wasn’t even born.”

“Will you be going back with Omolara? Back to Lagos?” Abiola asked Moji.

“I will.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Lara hasn’t said.”

Abiola gave Moji’s hand a small squeeze. “You should stay with us.”

“Yes, you should,” Bidemi said. “The city is too dangerous for you to move around freely. But here, all you have to look out for are bicycles and motorcycles.”

Moji sighed. Heavenly is how she would describe the simple rural pleasures she now realized she missed. Like how the clucks of chickens and the low voices of the early risers warmed her heart when she heard them in the morning. And how goats and other farm animals behaved like house pets and did not run away from you because they didn’t think you could harm them. She certainly missed her sisters and their gossip.

“Lara still needs me,” she said. “We have no husbands, as you already know. And after what you have just witnessed, Yemisi is about to leave us. But I will think about it.”

“Oh. I just remembered something,” Abiola said.

“What?”

“Your old boyfriend is back.”

“Taiwo? When?”

“Last month, I think.”

“He doesn’t go out much, they say, so hardly anyone sees him.”

“Who is Taiwo?” Bukola asked.

Abiola and Bidemi giggled.

“There was someone in Moji’s life before your brother,” Abiola said to Bukola. “Moji was once every man’s dream. Don’t you remember how beautiful she looked at her wedding? Or did you think Femi was her first?”

“Thank you for the news about Taiwo,” Moji said. Yes, she had not been a virgin bride. Still, it was not something you bragged about. She tried to change the topic. She tried, but Abiola would not be distracted.

Abiola recalled how Moji and Taiwo had once been the envy of all, and Moji learned in the course of her story that she and Taiwo had been caught stark naked and asleep in each other’s arms.

“She was never punished or cautioned,” Abiola said. “Till this day, I don’t know why. I think Mother liked Taiwo. He was so handsome, my God.”

“Did Mother see us?” Moji asked, suddenly wanting to know.

Abiola grinned. “No. It was Aunty Abosede who told us. We didn’t tell Father. Aunty Abosede said the two of you were asleep for hours.”

“Whatever happened to you guys?” Bukola asked Moji. “You seemed like the perfect couple.”

“That’s what we’d all like to know,” Abiola said. “She didn’t say much then. Perhaps she will now.”

Moji shrugged. “Taiwo moved across the border–to Benin Republic–and I moved on with my life. End of story.”

“You still haven’t said anything,” Bidemi said.

“Yes,” Abiola agreed. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would he leave like that and never come back for you?”

That night, after bedtime prayers, Moji told Lara, Yemisi, and Jide (Yemisi’s husband after traditional marriage rites) that she had something she wanted to share.

“I heard this evening that Taiwo is back in the country,” she said.

Yemisi sat up straight. “He’s here?”

“Not here. In Abese. It’s his village. It’s not far from here.”

“That’s great news,” Yemisi said. “We can all go to see him. I’ll invite him to the church wedding. Do you think he’ll come to Lagos?”

“I don’t know,” Moji said, looking at Lara. “I think I should go alone.”

“Nonsense,” Lara said. “I’m dying to meet the man who saved my life.”

Never in a million years did Moji think she’d hear those words—from Lara. So she believed? She believed.

Moji bent her head over the table, clasped her hands over her head to shade her eyes, and cried. She convulsed as she cried quietly. Lara and Yemisi came to cuddle her and fared no better.

Lara did not have stale blood running through her veins. What happened was this: when a single drop of blood left her body, it immediately turned stale. She had found this too bizarre to keep to herself and had shared it with Moji and Yemisi. Moji surmised that her synergy with Taiwo worked inside the body. It didn’t work outside. As for her infertility, Moji said Taiwo had explained that their synergy worked through the fusion of their somatic cells. (One of her mono-nuclear cells combined with one of Taiwo’s to form a new mono-nuclear cell.) Their healing synergy was the result of new mononuclear cells. Their sex cells never fused and remained unaffected by their synergy. That’s why they could not get pregnant. And that was why they could not revive Lara’s dead ovaries. Lara listened without a word as Moji explained all this. Afterward, she got into her car and went for a drive. The next day, she returned to her old self and pretended they had never had that conversation.

On the day they set out to find Taiwo, the sky was the peak of a giant waterfall, and Abeokuta was its nadir. The wind was so strong it bounced the boulders that weighted old zinc roofs and skewed the rain as it pissed down. Lightning flashed; thunder crackled. Jide, who was at the wheel, could not see past the concave waves of rain on the windscreen, so he turned off the wiper. When his view of the road became too blurry, he cleared onto the pavement and parked the car. While they waited for the downpour to subside, a lone Peugeot 504 with its headlamps at full blast blazed past them, drenching their Audi GLS with a splash as high as a market stall.

They sat inside and waited. They had to wait. If not for the rain to stop, for people to come back out. At this juncture, Moji was lost. She needed someone to give them directions on how to get to Taiwo’s clan home. Taiwo’s town Abese had changed so much from what she remembered.

The rain didn’t stop, but the downpour thinned to a drizzle. Dust roads were troughs of mud. Like a master rower, Jide plowed the car through undulating mires, staying close to the shallower edges. They had the luck of a few pedestrians skirting the mud for directions. Several clans went by the name ‘Adetokunbo’ so Moji asked if they knew a Kayode Adetokunbo who had a son named Taiwo, and they did.

When they reached the place they were told was Taiwo’s hamlet, they found an old man crouched over hazelnuts that he cracked open with a slate. They asked him which one was Taiwo Adetokunbo’s house, and he pointed to the white bungalow with a modern design, an oasis in the hamlet. They went up to the door and rang the doorbell. After a few more rings, a young man opened the door a crack and peered at them. He confirmed they were at the right place, and when they said they had come to see Taiwo, he said Taiwo was sick and couldn’t see visitors. He spoke in a peculiar dialect of Yoruba that Moji knew she had heard somewhere. She groaned when Lara inquired if he was Beninese, and he said yes. He introduced himself as Waheed, one of Taiwo’s former students, now a medical doctor.

“I hope it isn’t too bad,” Lara said.

The young doctor hesitated. “He has prostate cancer.”

Lara winced. “How bad?”

“Stage four.”

Moji’s heart sank.

She put on a brave face and tried to stay calm for her family. “May I see him?” she asked.

“He’s sleeping at the moment—”

“I would like to see him. I insist.”

Waheed opened the door fully and let them in.

Inside the house, four of Taiwo’s kinsmen, three elderly men, and a woman looked up at them from their morose reclinings. Moji asked Lara, Yemisi, and Jide to wait for her in the hallway while she followed Waheed into Taiwo’s bedroom.

The curtains in the room were drawn so they let in just enough light for Moji to make out the shapes of two people: a young woman attending to a catheter and a patient at the end of the catheter. The patient was a thin man advanced in age. He was asleep. He looked in dire need of a shave. He looked starved too. Waheed introduced the woman as Sherifat, his wife, who was also a doctor (another one of Taiwo’s students). Moji was surprised with the way her lungs resumed working. She had feared she might be Taiwo’s daughter, how this could mean he had a wife–that he had once loved someone else.

“Why is he so thin?” Moji asked.

“He hasn’t been eating much,” Sherifat said.

“And he refuses to be fed through a tube,” Waheed added.

Moji wiped the tears brimming in her eyes. “Thank you,” she said. “Both of you. For looking after him.”

Their silence asked a question. “I’m Moji, his… his best friend.”

Sherifat smiled reassuringly and carried on with what she was doing.

“I’d like a moment with him. Alone, if you don’t mind,” Moji said.

Waheed and Sherifat searched each other’s faces as they considered her request.

“No problem,” Waheed said. “We’ll be out in the corridor if you need us.”

Moji watched them shuffle out like idlers.

The minute they shut the door, she brought the man’s hands together over his lap. She paused to examine his face. He was much darker, but he had Taiwo’s nose. Still holding his hands, she thought about waking him: he had to be conscious for them to synergize. She felt him. Not his stir. His soul. He sparked like electricity.

His eyes fluttered open. He squinted before he said, “Moji?”

He yanked his hands away and broke their synergy.

“If you do it, I will hang myself,” he croaked. “And you will have my death on your conscience.”

Baffled, she stared at him. He was serious. Like the time he said they should not marry. She felt dizzy. She needed air. It was how she was when tense, and she was often like that before she lost her temper.

She took a deep breath to calm herself. “I’ve missed you,” she said. “Missed us.” The hoarseness in her voice was gone. Their brief synergy had returned youth to her vocal cords. “My life is the most… painful life anyone could have. Imagine experiencing what completes you and knowing you can never have it again. I need this, Taiwo. Do it for me, if you won’t do it for you. If you love me, do it. Please. We can go back to our old selves, after. I beg you.”

He shook his head. “No. Let it go. You need to stop chasing temporary happiness. People can get highs from crack and booze, but their joy never lasts. They won’t know true happiness. Is this what you want for us, to live for the next euphoria like addicts?”

“An eternity is made up of several brief moments.”

“An eternity where? Here? Can’t happen. It shouldn’t. I am going to another place to wait for you.”

Unable to carry her weight longer, she lowered herself into the chair beside his bed. “Okay,” she said. “Just answer this question for me. How come you never got married?”

He asked her to prop him up with the second pillow beside him, and she helped him up to a slant and stuck the pillow underneath his back. It made it much easier for him to talk.

“I was married once but she left. It lasted about a year. The women in my life—the women after you—all complained about the same thing: I seemed far away when I was with them. My wife said she didn’t know what to do to make me happy. It made her very unhappy, she said. That was when I told her about you. I left out the synergy, of course. After that, she told me she was leaving, and I said, I won’t stop you.

“The truth is, I’ve always felt like I wasn’t meant to be with anyone but you. Always felt that I wasn’t—that we weren’t meant to be here. That never changed.”

Moji fought back her tears. She wanted to hit him, but then again, she wanted to kiss him. She tried to form words but could only cry harder. She screamed.

Taiwo’s doctors rushed into the room. They must have expected to see his corpse or to see him fighting for his life because they stopped and stared when they saw him propped up on his bed. He motioned them to leave, and they retraced their steps.

Kehinde’s effigy stared at her from a bookshelf in the corner. It looked peaceful. Never had she seen something so peaceful. She went over to it and picked it up.

“Can I have it back?” she asked.

“What?”

She showed him the effigy.

“Of course. You’ll be needing it.”

She remembered the carving for its prominent features: its eyes, lips, and breasts. But honestly, the small breasts could be a man’s. So could the lips.

“My husband died almost twenty years ago,” she said. “A bus accident. I heard you were back, so I came to see you. I came with my family: my daughter, granddaughter, and my granddaughter’s husband. My granddaughter just got married the customary way. She’s a cartographer. She makes maps for people, yet she’s still trying to find her way in the world.”

He smiled.

“My daughter—you know her—Lara, the one you saved—”

“We saved. We.”

“Yes. We. You forget to say it like that after so long. She’s a pediatrician now.” She exhaled. “I’ve been meaning to ask you: Is she ever going to die? I sometimes wonder about that.”

“She will. After one of us is. With one of us gone, there is no synergy. Everything we’ve done, everything we’ve created, goes back to the way it was.”

“Are you saying…?”

“Yes.”

She let it all sink in and was amazed at her response. “Thank you. I needed to know that.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Can you at least stay alive until her daughter is married in church? In a week?”

“I’ll try.”

“Would you like to meet my family?”

“Sure.”

Moji ushered Lara, Yemisi, and Jide in. It was the happiest she had ever been in a long time. Finally, they were meeting Taiwo, and he was real to them. As real as he had ever been to her. But what she would also like, if Taiwo would indulge her for the last time, was a small demonstration of what they could do together. Just something for her children.

End