The chief gave Jubril a bad look, as if to say, If you had behaved well you would have been the one to benefit from that seat. Jubril had watched the drama from a distance, with a mixture of pity and jealousy and then repulsion. When the sick man had struggled with Emeka for the blanket, Jubril felt like helping Emeka. But he did not know what to do. How could he have helped with one hand? How could he have dared to speak with his Hausa accent? He had prayed for the man silently and wished that Allah would keep death far from him, at least until he got to his destination.
Jubril began to feel a strange affinity for the sick man: the malaria had twisted his tongue, making him babble, and Jubril had to speak as little as possible and feign an accent for the sake of his disguise. He watched the people watching the man, and on their sympathetic faces he could see that the man might not make it home alive. The spike in his fever had put a chill on the struggle for space in the bus, and the refugees now spoke in hushed voices. Jubril really admired how Emeka had rallied to help the sick man and talked people out of their spaces for him.
Yet, seeing how one man got the sympathy of the whole bus, Jubril began to feel jealous. What could he do to endear himself to these people? How could he get everybody to arrange for a place for him to sit or ask the chief to give him back his seat, without giving himself away? And then he could not bear to look at the sick man on the floor. He reminded him of so many corpses he had seen on the way here. In his mind Jubril tried to distinguish the dead from those who were in the process of dying, like this man. He could not.
He kept looking at the ceiling of the bus. Now his revulsion for the sick man was so strong that he preferred to look at the TV sets. They were not as frightening as before, though when he looked at them his sensibilities were not as unguarded as when he looked at the women. He paid attention to the knobs and the rings around the knobs. He wished the darkness of the TV screens would descend on his recent memories, and he wished those memories, which kept pressing to be recognized, were fastened and caged like the TVs.
“Well, if he die,” Tega said, pointing to the sick man, “we must decide quick quick wetin we go do wid de corpse, chebi?”
“You want steal de corpse or de dead man space too?” Ijeoma said.
“We must take the corpse home,” Emeka said.
“No, I tink we must give his space to anoder person!” Tega said.
“It’s our tradition to be laid to rest in our ancestral land,” Emeka said.
“No need to carry dead body home when so many dey stranded,” Tega insisted.
“But he has paid his fare,” Madam Aniema said.
“And the Luxurious Bus insurance covers his burial, you know,” Emeka said.
“Who go claim de body sef dis wahala time? Na major crisis we dey now.”
“I’m sure you be Musrim,” Ijeoma said. “Dat’s why you want buly am quick quick.”
The bus was silent.
The word Muslim formed in many mouths, but nobody had the will to say it aloud. Instead they turned and looked at Tega carefully and then examined their neighbors. It was as if a sacrilegious word had been uttered in the holy of holies. Jubril looked down and bit his lip. He felt that all eyes were on him but kept telling himself they were not talking about him. In his ears, the silence was like an eternity. He closed his eyes and waited for blows to land on him.
“YOU WANT INCITE DEM to kill me, abi?” Tega said, finally finding her voice. She was breathing hard and pulling at her cornrows as if she intended to tear out the beads. Her eyes met the dangerous stares in the bus with credulity.
“She is not a Muslim!” Emeka announced, and the whole bus was behind him, scolding Ijeoma for calling Tega a Muslim. They told her a fight over storage space was too small a matter to elicit such bad will toward a fellow Christian. They berated her for ingratitude to God, for she was seated, when others would have to stand for hundreds of miles during the journey home. The cacophony seemed unending, with some insisting that Ijeoma must apologize to Tega and to the whole bus.
“My people, my people,” Chief Ukongo said, standing up and thudding his stick repeatedly to calm the situation. When everybody kept quiet, the old man cleared his throat. “This matter is getting out of hand. Let no one say Muslim or Islam again on this bus. We have suffered too much already at the hands of Muslims. . . . If the man dies we shall take him home, period.”
“Yes, good talk!” one man concurred.
“Chief, you go live forever!” another said.
“Make nobody mention anyting wey be against God’s children!”
“Yes, let’s watch what we say on this bus,” Madam Aniema said.
As the conversation reverted to the bus’s insurance policy, Jubril began to breathe again. He did not know how he had managed to remain on his feet at the mention of the word Muslim or when people had searched the faces of their neighbors. Though he had looked down immediately, he had expected someone to grab him and tell him he was a fraud. He expected someone to pull his arm out of his pocket. It was as if his mind had stopped, for he did not hear Tega protesting her innocence or the chief diffusing the people’s anger toward Ijeoma. The point at which he started hearing again was when someone said, “Yes, good talk!”
Now Jubril wedged the bag between his knees and used his left hand to wipe the sweat that trickled down his forehead. It was not enough, so he pulled a shirt from his bag and mopped his face and neck and tried to pay attention to the conversation around him. When he returned the shirt to his bag, he felt the piece of paper that bore the name of his father’s village. It was like an energy boost. He thought of taking it out and looking at it but decided against that. He wriggled his toes in the canvas shoes to be sure they were not numb and shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He looked about the bus and even smiled at the chief, who did not smile back.
He listened to the chatter around him as one might a fairy tale, both hopeful and afraid of the awesome possibilities. He was surprised that a bus company could insure its passengers against injury, accident, or cost of burial, whereas the politicians who promised the people better health care never delivered. It was as if this bus and its company existed in a dream world. Since the motor park he had run to was already south of Khamfi, in his mind Jubril began to associate all the new things he had experienced so far with the myth of the south. In his imagination, he saw the south as more developed than the north, even if it was inhabited by infidels. He saw well-paved roads and functional hospitals. He saw huge markets and big motor parks full of Luxurious Buses. He thought about big schools with colorful buildings and well-fed children. He believed this was precisely the sort of place to escape to. He needed a place to hide and to heal, and from the little he had heard from these Christians he did not think he had made a mistake by running south.
THE MORE JUBRIL LABORED to suppress thoughts of his journey so he could focus on maintaining his disguise, the more his mind revolted. When he was not dwelling on the circumstances of his escape, his mind wandered further back into his past, to some distant event that was tangled up in his flight from Khamfi.
For example, the dread of each stage of the journey, not knowing if he would make it to the next stop, had forced him, in the past two days, especially in Khamfi, to harbor thoughts he had never considered important and that he even would have considered heretical. Though he had no recollection of his home in the south—or of his infant baptism there—and would probably never have thought about his father’s ancestral home if not for the crisis, his heart pined for it now. Yet, the prospect of being both a Christian and a Muslim still felt like an aberration to him. If someone had told him a month ago that he would be standing here, trying to blend in with a crowd of southern Christians, he would have considered it an insult or a curse and called down Allah’s condemnation on the fellow.