Before we left home, our relatives gathered in our parents’ living room, and Papa and Mama told us to be obedient to Fofo Kpee, not to disgrace them by being ungrateful to him at the border town to which he was taking us. They said he would henceforth be our father and mother and that I was to show a good example to Yewa and to protect the name of our family at all costs. I promised everyone I would be good. Fofo said he was happy to take care of his brother’s children and said he would bring us back to the village to visit our parents and our older siblings, Ezin and Esse and Idossou, whenever time and resources allowed. My grandpapa, the gentle patriarch of our extended family, prayed over us that morning before we left on the Glazoué Cotonou Road. Grandmama sobbed silently beside Papa, who had turned his face to the wall to cry. I remember our siblings and a host of relatives waving to us until our bus turned the corner, heading south.
Now, whenever we asked Fofo about our parents, he always said that they were recovering. He said they were eager to see us and we would soon go back to visit, but it was more important that we got used to our new home and studied hard in school. That Nanfang night, in my excitement, I was already thinking of the celebration that would sweep through our family when we rode in on the motorcycle, and everyone saw that one of theirs had brought home something better than a Raleigh bicycle. I figured once we got off the machine, Ezin and Esse and Idossou would be the first to get a ride. I could imagine Mama and our aunties cooking up pots of obe aossin, melon soup; iketi, cornmeal; and mounds of egun, pounded yam; and Papa and his brothers making sure there was plenty of chapalo, local beer. I looked forward to seeing all our friends and cousins, telling them about the beauty of the ocean and all the border hassles. We might even arrange a soccer match between all the boys in our extended family and another family in the village.
FOFO KPEE PULLED OUT a bag from under his bed and rested it on his lap like a baby, feeling for something inside without looking, until he grabbed and pulled out an old green four-angle schnapps bottle. It was half filled with payó. He shook it and opened it, the local gin’s pungency briefly overpowering the scent of the new bike. He sipped slowly from the bottle, his eyes glittering in the heat of the drink, his left eye shining more because it was bigger, the scar looking like a large tear flowing down his cheek.
“S’il vous plaît,” Yewa whined again, gawking at the drink, “I want to sleep with my Nanfang tonight. Just tonight.” Her little bony face was upturned, the yellow lantern light washing over one side like a half moon. Tears shone from the lighted part of her face.
“If you want small payó, say it,” Fofo Kpee said. But Yewa pretended not to hear what he said. “Gal, you go be big-time businesswoman for Gabon. You be hard bargainer!”
“Please,” Yewa said.
Fofo Kpee gave up and poured some gin into the silver top of the bottle and then into Yewa’s mouth. Yewa swallowed, cleared her throat, and smacked her lips contentedly. She didn’t say anything else, but just stroked the spokes of the motorcycle gently as if they were the strings of some beloved musical instrument.
“Finish de room for de zoke˙ke˙, den I go give you your drink,” Fofo told me. “Payó head no good for Nanfang!”
I entered the inner room, which was smaller than the first, and began to move things around to make space for the machine. The room had become our treasure store and had been filling up recently, with the sudden change in our lifestyle. I picked up packets of roof nails and gaskets and placed them on the pile of secondhand corrugated roofing sheets by the far wall, near the back door. There were two huge black plastic water vats, neither of which needed to be moved, in opposite corners of the room, and five bags of Dangote cement, stacked by the near wall below the window, that kept shedding a fine gray dust. After I began to move things, a stuffy thickness filled the air. My nostrils felt itchy, and I sneezed three times. If we swept the room, even with the two windows open, the dust whirled up and beclouded everything like the harmattan haze. I began to work the bolt on one window to let in the humid ocean air.
“No open de window o!” Fofo said from the parlor, his voice raspy from the gin. “You want expose my zoke˙ke˙ to tieves, huh? A yón cost of Nanfang?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You better be—nuluno˙!”
I went on to rearrange the corner of the room where our food and utensils were. On a big upturned wooden mortar, I put a wicker basket of plates and cutlery. The long black pestle was leaning in the corner, its head white and cracked by use. I stacked up three empty pots, careful not to touch their soot, careful not to touch our pot of egusi soup, which I had already warmed for the night. Stirring it would make it sour before morning. Soon, Fofo, in a solemn procession, brought in the machine and stood it at the center of the room, like a giant bearing down on everything, an athlete poised at the starting line.
That night, the bike followed me into the land of my dreams. I rejected Suzuki, Honda, and Kawasaki and chose a Nanfang and became rich forever. I used it to climb the coconut trees, learned to park on the palms, and used coconut milk for gas. I rode it across the ocean, creating a huge wake behind me. I flew it like a helicopter to distant places and landed it many times in my father’s compound in Braffe. At school, all my classmates had Nanfangs, and we played soccer riding them, like in polo. I rode my Nanfang until I grew old, but the Nanfang neither aged nor needed repairs. At the end of my life, my people buried me atop it, and I rode that Nanfang straight to heaven’s gate, where Saint Peter gave me an automatic pass.
FOR FOUR DAYS, WE watched Big Guy teach Fofo Kpee how to ride along the strips of grass in the coconut plantation. From our house, we could see Fofo perched on the bike, his face split in two by his trademark laugh. He looked like a pantomime because we couldn’t hear him or the bike over the sound of the ocean. Big Guy’s shaven head was so oiled that it reflected the sun. Both of them seemed to be having fun, and on the horizon, a ship heading to or leaving Porto Novo dragged a black funnel of smoke across the sky.
The next Sunday, we got ready for church. Fofo had informed the pastor that we were going to have our first Family Thanks-giving, which was what some well-to-do families did every Sunday.
At dawn, Fofo Kpee woke up and took the Nanfang behind the house and propped it on our bathing stone. He undressed it of its plastic covers as gingerly as one would remove stitches from a wound. He poured Omo detergent into a bucket of water and swirled and rattled the water until it foamed. Gently, he sponged the frame and scrubbed the tires, as if they would never touch the ground again. After rinsing the Nanfang, he wiped it with the towel the three of us shared. During our own bath, he squatted and soaked our feet and scrubbed them with a new kankan, a native sponge, for the big occasion. He held the kankan like a shoe brush and worked on our soles until their natural color returned, until the fissures disappeared.