“Questioning for what? What has he done? Who sent you? Show us your arrest warrant. Don’t think you can intimidate us. You must think we are uneducated. To arrest a man from his house, you need a warrant. Is that not what the law says? If you are real policemen, you must know that much, at least!”
“You are obstructing the course of justice,” the policemen say. “You are standing in the way of the law.”
“We will obstruct any obstructable,” a boy shouts back at the policemen. It is getting dark now. Someone from the crowd makes a sudden lurch toward one of the men. The policeman turns around and grabs the nearest person by the neck. “Did I touch you?” the man asks him. “Take your stinking hands off me. You think police work is work?” The policeman’s grip weakens. The man begins to slap the hand off; the crowd cheers. The policeman reasserts himself, tightens his grasp. His colleague has come to his aid, and the crowd closes in. Application Master watches from behind the crowd in a position that allows him a good view of what is going on.
Now enters Agility. He could be anything from seventeen to twenty-four years old. He is an up-and-coming stalwart of Ogibah Youth Front, a mover and an agitator. He gave himself the nickname Agility and bears it with great confidence because, as he said, he looked up the word in the dictionary and was quite proud of the meaning. This boy breaks through the crowd and strides toward the policeman, who is still holding the man by the collar. Agility looks the policeman straight in the face and says in a firm voice, “Leave him.” The policeman ignores him. Slap, slap, pull. Slap, slap, pull. A struggle ensues, and pretty soon everyone joins in.
Application Master raises his voice from where he stands. “Calm down, steady, steady, young men.” He is going toward Agility to calm him when he catches a glimpse of something going up in the air. It is the form of a man: One of the police has been lifted bodily, flung up into the night air, and abandoned, like a sacrifice, and the crowd parts to allow him to land without impediment. He meets the ground with a clumsy thud. Everything goes quiet. There is something quirky about his heavy fall, the sound of corporal damage. He lies there, leg drawn up at the knee. “Maybe he has broken something,” someone says, “a leg, his waist, his neck, his back.” They move closer to the man and do not notice when the other policeman relieves himself of their company. Voices of caution rise from the crowd. “We warned you boys to let them go; whatever comes out of this, you will carry it on your own heads.” “But who knows their mission,” other voices counter. Someone goes close to the fallen man and prods him with a finger. He doesn’t respond. A firmer prodding. Then all of a sudden the man leaps from the ground, grazes a finger on the ground, and disappears into the night.
“He has escaped! He has escaped!” they shout as they run toward the road, and then loud arguments follow.
Three days later, a police van arrives and carries four boys away. The whole village is being accused of violence against police on official duty, and Application Master is wanted for inciting the violence.
—
Bendic slapped his arm and yawned. Mosquitoes made faint noises, and stars had begun to appear in the sky. Ma looked up and said it would be a blessing if it rained tonight. “The heat is too much.”
The tall plantain tree in the corner waved its arms and cast a shadow on the fence. In the moonlight, the shadow looked like a pregnant woman with two children by her side, waiting for a bus by the road. Ajie closed his eyes and opened them and the pregnant woman was still there by the roadside, waiting for a bus, with her two children by her side. A southwesterly wind blew and the tree shadow took the form of boats on water, boats with high masts and swollen sails, like the drawing in Ajie’s Macmillan school reader, a drawing that had underneath it the caption: A fleet of boats.
“We will see what we can do tomorrow,” Bendic said. “Once Marcus comes to work, we will drive together to Ifenwa’s house. His brother knows the commissioner of police.”
Ajie looked toward the gate, but it was buried in the half-dark. He could not make out Ismaila’s small concrete four-cornered shed. He wondered what it would be like if policemen came banging on their gate, asking to see Bendic. Ismaila would assume they were robbers. He would bring out his bow and poisoned arrows and aim at the gate. Then he would order the intruders in that big voice of his to vamoose. That is what he would say: “Vamoose or I shoot! Move or I move you!”
NEPA had a change of mind and restored power. “Light has come,” Bibi squealed.
The adults got up, and the children carried the seats as they all trudged back inside. A new energy was injected into their evening. It was not that late, just a little past nine o’clock. They caught the tail end of the news, which was followed by a government-sponsored program about skills acquisition projects for rural women.
Bendic thought aloud about what he had to do the next day. He had to send for Ifiemi, his secretary, so they could draft letters to different people who could influence things. If this whole business of police in Ogibah were nipped in the bud, the trouble could be stopped from escalating. It could be stalled for a while, but only for a while. At some point the wheels would go a full cycle. More trouble would erupt, and on such a large scale that it would be difficult to predict.
Bendic and Application Master did not know that this was just the beginning. There were no dead boys yet. No girls had been dragged into the bush. Graffiti was yet to appear on the walls of the secondary school saying, “Ogibah, Fear the Nigeria Police and Army.” None of these things had happened yet. For now, some policemen had been assaulted, a few boys had been arrested as a consequence, and Bendic was doing his best to save the situation.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ifiemi, Bendic’s secretary, arrived before nine the next morning and immediately converted the dining area into an ad hoc office. She mounted the Imperial 66 typewriter at one end of the oval dining table. An enormous dictionary was set to her left, the covers frail from regular use. A wooden ruler with smooth edges, correction fluid, thinner, pens (black, blue, and red), erasers, and pencils were all set within arm’s reach. Bendic drafted the letters in longhand on foolscap paper, and Ifiemi typed them out on crisp white A4 sheets. Bendic then corrected the typed drafts with a red pen, after which Ifiemi retyped them. By noon they were almost done. Only a few final adjustments needed to be made, polishing the letter for a perfect tone. This time Bendic dictated what should be added, his sentences delivered in an even tempo, like someone reading Scripture aloud in a church.
The children sat on the veranda, and Bibi mimed Bendic’s words, pretending she had glasses balanced on the bridge of her nose that she kept adjusting, looking up every now and then to stare at the camera like newsreaders who spoke with fake voices and shuffled their papers at intervals.
Bendic, however, didn’t need to look up to any camera as he dictated to his secretary — although there was a time when he drifted off midsentence, his brows lifting over the frames of his reading glasses, as if to acknowledge someone waving in a crowd. Ifiemi’s hands waited on the keyboard. An angel in a thundering white gown hurried past and made the kitchen door sigh. “Are you there?” Bendic asked, as if it weren’t he who had drifted off.
Are you there? This was how Bendic sometimes called for attention. When thoughts crowded his mind and he couldn’t call up which name belonged to which child, he simply said, “Are you there? Bring me a glass of water, please.” The children imitated and used it on each other. Paul would say to Ajie, “Are you there? You have forgotten to tie your shoelace.” “Are you there? Try and bring down your voice, you are shouting.” It could be anyone’s name. You poked the person in the side while asleep and called, “Are you there?”