But who were they? If only Paul could just make that clear. Police, soldiers, or armed robbers? If they came here to take Bendic and Ma, what would you do?
Bibi was silent.
Ajie desperately wanted to supply an answer, but for now he had only questions to ask, so Paul was left to deal with the query all by himself.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Paul spent the rest of the holiday mostly on the veranda, studying for his final exams. Three years earlier, when he was preparing for his junior certificate exams, he had sat on this same veranda before a chalkboard, conjugating irregular French verbs, drawing up Venn diagrams, and locating coordinates on graphs. Paul did not join the other kids who went for holiday lessons in nearby schools. Ma asked a couple of her teacher friends to give him tutorial lessons. Ma and Bendic also read through Paul’s textbooks so they could help out with the exercise. Ajie remembered Bendic ticking off some exercises at the end of a chapter on magnetism and commenting with a pencil, “You must work hard.”
This time Paul said he didn’t want any tutorials from Ma’s friends. Ma tried to persuade him — Mr. Daminabo had already agreed to come twice a week for math lessons — but Paul resisted, telling Ma he was fine studying on his own, and Ma clicked her tongue at Paul’s rebuff, and Bendic said they should let him be.
It was early evening, and SuperTed was on the television, although it was not clear who was watching it. Ajie went out to the veranda and Paul asked, “Have you seen my Ababio?”
Ajie craned his neck into the parlor, leaning backward. “Bibi, Paul wants his Ababio now.” Ajie liked this thing of calling textbooks by the author’s last name.
“You two should leave his books alone, please,” Bendic said. “The young man has an important exam to sit for.”
Later, Ma came outside. “It’s getting dark,” she said, and turned on the light. Paul looked up and returned to his reading. Ma stood for a bit watching him, while Paul pretended he wasn’t aware of her gaze. He had become a bit brittle in those final revision weeks, often aloof, always saying he was fine, yes, their parents should just leave him alone for a while. Ajie sometimes felt Ma even wanted to do Paul’s reading for him. She brought heaps of past exam questions from as far back as 1985. Bendic seemed to be aware that Paul needed some space but couldn’t help himself, either: He would start telling stories about how he prepared for his own finals back in the day, and even Bibi, who enjoyed those stories a lot, would just look at him and want to make him stop.
Ma went back inside the parlor, where Channel 10 was having a break in transmission “due to power failure,” Ma hissed, and flipped to Channel 22, where a newsreader was giving the highlights of the evening in Kolokuma language. Bendic looked up when Paul came back into the parlor with his hand full of books. “So when is your first paper?” Bendic asked.
“The eighth. May eighth,” Paul replied, dropping his books on the dining table.
“Good. What subject?”
“Chemistry practical.” He stretched. “I’m so tired of revising. I want it to come and go quickly.”
Paul returned to school one week before Ajie and Bibi. He needed to settle in before his paper, which was due the first week. By early June he had written all nine papers but spent an extra week in school because it was hard for him to say goodbye to his friends and everything he had known for the last six years of his life. He had told Bendic not to send Marcus with the car to fetch him, that he would board a bus and come home on his own, maybe in the company of some of his friends.
He was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows when he returned, with a traveling bag slung over his shoulder. He was almost taller than Bendic. Ma said he looked like a university student already, and Bendic agreed.
By August, when Bibi and Ajie were making preparations to return to school for a new session, Paul had bought and completed his JAMB forms, and when Ajie asked him what universities he had picked, he simply replied, “UP and UI.” Bendic wanted Paul to go to Ibadan, where he himself had gone. Ma thought staying at a university in Port Harcourt was a better idea, but they worried about the strikes by lecturers. Most universities across the country closed down so often, it was normal for students to spend two to three extra years to complete their courses.
That August, they talked about the student riots, the lack of funding for universities, and how lecturers had to go on strike when their salaries didn’t come. They moaned about “this government’s complete disregard for education.” It was as if the head of state were doing these things to thwart them in particular — he was in direct opposition to Bendic and Ma’s happiness. This criminal in an army uniform and sunglasses, he was a complete maniac. He was destroying this country and its future; the only place he deserved to be was in a high-security jail. If you called at 11 Yakubu that August, you would have thought Bendic and Ma were speaking of a very personal enemy.
They talked in low tones sometimes about sending Paul somewhere abroad to study. “At least we can be sure of the quality of education he is getting.”
“But where is the money, eh?”
Ma said Paul was too young to be sent abroad, she wanted him close by. Bendic said he still had friends in England who could act as guardian should the need arise.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mr. Ifenwa came before dinner that Sunday. He did not come in with his usual dramatic flourish, hailing Bendic’s college nicknames, his voice booming from the driveway. He did not come flinging jovial insults and accusations with a newspaper in his hand and an unfinished argument from the last time, wagging a finger at Bendic and saying, “This boy, this boy.” He came in under a pile of papers held together in files bound with jute ropes, his face tired, his weak eyes gathering bags beneath them.
“I need to finish marking these papers. I haven’t had electricity in over a week, and I’m so busy in the day,” he moaned at Ma as soon as he walked into the parlor. He sat down and pushed the files onto the table. When Bendic walked into the parlor, Mr. Ifenwa looked up at him. “At least here is something you can contribute to the common good. I’m hoping if NEPA cuts the power while I’m here, you will turn on your generator so I can finish the work. Let us benefit a little bit from your bourgeois largesse.”
“Oh, Ifenwa, be quiet and let me hear something.” Bendic laughed and sat down.
“Nne, thank you,” Ifenwa said to Ma as the drinks arrived. “I didn’t mean you.”
“I know.” Ma laughed. “Once you put me in that talk, I’ll start keeping my cold beer to myself.”
He was marking an English exam, and Ma suggested they split the papers between them. They were multiple-choice questions and they could be done in an hour, Ma said. Ifenwa said, “You are a godsend, my sister.” He slid some of the papers her way with a copy of the answers.
The telephone rang for Bendic, and he took it in his study and came back a few minutes after. Paul turned up the TV volume and flipped back and forth between the two channels, hoping something interesting would begin on one. Channel 22 was showing a sitcom set in a chaotic house where Chief, his four wives, servants, and innumerable children lived, the sort of house you were never really sure how many people actually slept and ate there. Chief’s wives took turns fighting him, and once, when he’d annoyed everyone, all his wives and children came together to beat him up. He looked ridiculous, threatening them afterward, pointing and huffing. Ajie thought the program stupid and not funny at all.
“The roadblocks are worse today,” Mr. Ifenwa said, placing a marked script on the increasing pile to his left. He and Bendic began to talk wistfully about the kind of student protest they had in their day, their student union governments, and what they were able to accomplish. “What would you do”—Mr. Ifenwa turned his gaze on Ajie—“if you were the president of this country?”