The details came later — how a truckload of soldiers, Hausas, high on cheap heroin and hatred, had killed them, setting fire to the mansion, piling rocks at the exits — but the details never hardened into pictures in her head. So she never really believed it, not really, couldn’t see it, never settled on a sight that would have made the thing stick, put some meat on the words (roaring fire, burning wood), put a face on the corpses. The words remained bones. They were no one, the “soldiers.” They were shadow-things, not human beings. The “Nwaneris” were what they’d always been: a portrait on the wall, a name. A pallid cast of characters. Not even characters, but categories: civilian, soldier, Hausa, Igbo, villain, victim. Too vague to be true.
And not him.
It was him. He was there without question (though they never could confirm it, his bones turned to ashes, in REM, dreaming, his “Fola!” two bubbles), as rampant anti-Igbo pogroms kicked off the war. But she simply couldn’t see him, not her father as she knew him, as she’d seen him from the table, bobbing, bobbing out of view. It was someone else they’d killed that night, these “soldiers” whom she couldn’t see, this “victim” whom they didn’t know, anonymous as are all victims.
The indifference of it.
This was the problem and would be ever after, the block on which she sometimes feels her whole being stumbled: that he (and so she) became so unspecific. In an instant. That the details didn’t matter in the end. Her life until that moment had seemed so original, a richly spun tale with a bright cast of characters — she: motherless princess of vertical palace, their four-story apartment on Victoria Island; they: passionate, glamorous friends of her father’s, staff; he: widowed king of the castle. Had he died a death germane to this life as she’d known it — in a car crash, for example, in his beloved Deux Chevaux, or from liver cancer, lung, to the end puffing Caos, swilling rum — she could have abided the loss. Would have mourned. Would have found herself an orphan in a four-story apartment, having lost both her parents at thirteen years old, but would have been, thus bereaved, a thing she recognized (tragic) instead of what she became: a part of history (generic).
She sensed the change immediately, in the tone people took when they learned that her father had been murdered by soldiers; in the way that they’d nod as if, yes, all makes sense, the beginning of the Nigerian civil war, but of course. Never mind that the Hausas were targeting Igbos, and her father was a Yoruba, and her grandmother Scottish, and the house staff Fulani, some Indian even. Ten dead, one an Igbo, minor details, no matter. She felt it in America when she got to Pennsylvania (having been taken first to Ghana by the kindly Sena Wosornu), that her classmates and professors, white or black, it didn’t matter, somehow believed that it was natural, however tragic, what had happened. That she’d stopped being Folasadé Somayina Savage and had become instead the native of a generic War-Torn Nation. Without specifics. Without the smell of rum or posters of the Beatles or a kente blanket tossed across a king-size bed or portraits. Just some war-torn nation, hopeless and inhuman and as humid as a war-torn nation anywhere, all war-torn nations everywhere. “I’m sorry,” they’d say, nodding yes in agreement, as one says I’m sorry when the elderly die, “that’s too bad” (but not that bad, more “how these things go” in this world), in their eyes not a hint of surprise. Surely, broad-shouldered, woolly-haired fathers of natives of hot war-torn countries got killed all the time?
How had this happened?
It wasn’t Lagos she longed for, the splendor, the sensational, the sense of being wealthy — but the sense of self surrendered to the senselessness of history, the narrowness and naïveté of her former individuality. After that, she simply ceased to bother with the details, with the notion that existence took its form from its specifics. Whether this house or that one, this passport or that, whether Baltimore or Lagos or Boston or Accra, whether expensive clothes or hand-me-downs or florist or lawyer or life or death — didn’t much matter in the end. If one could die identityless, estranged from all context, then one could live estranged from all context as well.
• • •
This is what she’s thinking as she sits here, wet, empty, a newly wrecked ship on a shore in the dark: that the details are different but the space is unchanging, unending, the absence as present, absolute. He is gone now, her father, has been gone for so long that his goneness has replaced his existence in full. It didn’t happen over time but in an instant, in his bedroom: he was removed, and she remained, and that was that.
That is that.
One pepper bird, pluckier than its bickering playmates, pecks at the glass at the back of the drapes. “Kookoo, kookoo, kookoo,” it cries, and she is reminded for a moment of what she said as she woke. What was it? She can’t remember. A nightmare. It was nothing. “Koo-koo,” insists the bulbul, but the A/C cuts in.
“Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.” A death rattle. It dies, and the bedroom falls silent.
Fola waits a minute, then laughs at her waiting. Waiting for what? There is nothing, she thinks. He is gone, she remains, that is that, tat-tat-tat. She changes and goes back to sleep.
But doesn’t sleep deeply.
The telephone rings.
At first she thinks: no, I’m still dreaming. Ignores it. But then wonders how, if she’s dreaming, she’s thinking. So opens one eye. Hears the ringing. Picks up. “Hello?” she murmurs.
“Fola,” he answers.
A man. But who has this number? Not him. Not Olu. Not Kehinde. The voice is too deep. “Who is this?”
“It’s Benson,” he says.
“Benson, hi. What time is it?” she asks, looking around for a clock.
“I’m sorry to call you so early…”
No clock. “What time is it?” she repeats.
“Just, you gave me this number last Thursday…”
A man who is stalling.
She perceives this in an instant and sits up now, worried. “What is it?” A very brief silence ensues. “I’m sorry,” he begins — so she runs through the quadrants: alive if not well, fish in water, they’re fine. She knows that he’s crying though doesn’t know how. She hears nothing. She comforts, on instinct, “Don’t cry. The children are fine.”
Which he thinks is a question. “Yes,” he says quickly. “I’m sure they’re all fine.” A cough, one soft sniffle, and then there is nothing.
“Benson?”
“I don’t know how to say this. I’m sorry.”
Now she knows what and knows who and is silent.
“Fola?”
She wonders how she missed it. Not the child. “Where are you?” she asks.
“At the house,” Benson answers. “His wife—” then stops short. “I’m so sorry.”
Not the father. The roaring returns without warning and, rising, the tide from the middle. “Not him,” Fola breathes.
“She called me at home and I came straightaway, but the heart had — he — it was too late.”
Benson continues in his sonorous voice, a dead ringer for Luther Vandross. Among the various disjointed things she now thinks, Fola remembers meeting Benson at Hopkins that day. Twenty-three years old in the hospital lobby with Olu tucked into her wrappa, asleep. Benson in scrubs with his skin of burnt umber, the taller of the handsome Ghanaians.
The other one.
“Kookoo!” the bulbul cries.