Refuge (22 page)

On arrival, he was processed and then taken to the district surgeon for a medical check-up. The examination was superficial and the doctor seemed bored. Ifasen sat on a chair while the man flicked a light in his eyes and placed an ice-cold disc on his chest to listen to his lungs. An inmate sat on the opposite bed, his legs hanging off the edge. The front end of a metal spoon stuck out from his shirt, the sharpened handle stabbed into the flab on the side of his chest, just below his armpit. There was no blood staining through the shirt, and the man sat impassively, staring back at Ifasen. He opened his mouth to say something, but the wounded prisoner narrowed his eyes, just a flicker of a threat, enough to make him hesitate and then stay quiet. A male nurse arrived and beckoned to the injured man to follow him. He dropped off the bed and walked past Ifasen, still staring at him. The spoon stood out from his chest like some ridiculous medal. No one had spoken. The silent acceptance of the man’s condition made Ifasen shiver.

Once the surgeon had declared him healthy, the warders took Ifasen to a communal cell. There were some cot beds at the far end from the doorway, but most of the floor was taken up by thin rubber mattresses and blue-grey blankets. In spite of its large size, the room stank of sweat and mould. The inmates were all in the exercise yard, and the emptiness of the cell, strewn with the evidence of its occupants, was more intimidating than if it had been full. Then Ifasen could have lost himself among the bodies, quickly gleaned where the newcomers were cowering, forged an alliance perhaps. But now he stood alone, clutching a small packet and his blanket, wondering where to stake a place, waiting for the others to return. A fly bounced against the closed strips of glass and metal, knocking itself over and over again. There was no other sound. Ifasen stood halfway into the cell, his arms wrapped around him, paralysed by indecision and fear.

He could smell them before he heard the first angry bellows – the pungent odour of unwashed bodies as they trooped down the passageway. The group burst into the cell and pushed past him as if he was not there, shouldering him one way and the next. They shouted and swore, checking their few possessions and eyeing each other with malevolence. A wiry man, his skin green with faded tattoos, barged into Ifasen’s chest. The man’s eyes were wide – Ifasen could see the white all the way around his iris – giving him a demented appearance. Ifasen staggered back from the force of the collision, trying not to fall backwards over another man bending behind him. The room suddenly seemed very small and very dangerous.

‘
Wat die fok kyk jy, kaffer?
’

Ifasen shook his head, uncomprehending, and looked away. He heard another prisoner hiss something behind him, close by. As he turned to look, the wide-eyed man slammed his flat palm into Ifasen’s chest again, a thudding blow that left his skin feeling bruised rather than stinging. Ifasen looked down at the floor in a show of deference, trying to appease his attacker. The tattooed hand rose up to strike him again. Ifasen tried to shy back, but was aware of the hot presence of the person standing right behind him. He tensed, waiting for the blow to land or for the slicing pain of a knife from behind.

A burly man with a thick neck and rich dark skin elbowed Ifasen aside and grabbed his antagonist, closing his massive hand around the man’s scrawny neck. ‘You’re in my place again, Sokkies,’ he said. ‘Fuck off to your own bed!’

Sokkies’s eyes bulged even more, threatening to push out of their orbits, and the veins on the side of his forehead pulsed. He lashed out at the big man, but his arms were too short and the larger man only increased the pressure on his neck. Sokkies spat like a wild cat, but the man held him firmly, pulling him up higher until his toes were nearly off the floor. Suddenly Sokkies’s shoulders slackened in defeat. The man lowered him and loosened the grip on his neck. Sokkies immediately tried to fight back, but a coughing fit overtook him, hacking at his throat and chest and doubling him over in agony. He held his shirt over his mouth and retreated further into the cell, heaving as if he was going to vomit. Someone else swore at him and shoved him, making him trip over a mattress and collapse against the wall.

‘Sleep over there,’ the large man said to Ifasen, pointing to a small strip just behind the doorway. Ifasen nodded, trying to determine whether he could make an ally. But the man said nothing more. Ifasen unrolled his mattress and sat down, trying not to make eye contact with anyone. The man next to him was so close their shoulders almost touched. Ifasen could smell his bad breath, like an infected sore. He wished the man would turn his head away. He bunched his blanket into a pillow and lay down fully clothed, facing the wall inches from his face.

He could not bring himself to think of Abayomi or Khalifah. He felt that his tears were only just held at bay. And he knew that to cry here would be disastrous. It would mark him as an easy victim. He would be stripped of his clothes and belongings. He would be descended on, used by the powerful men and then discarded for even the lowliest lieutenants to enjoy. He would be their plaything.

Ifasen started to hum quietly to himself, barricading his thoughts against the reality of his surroundings. He repeated the chorus harmony of a Fela Kuti Afrobeat song that had been popular in his days as a young teacher, with its playful combination of traditional Yoruba chanting and open jazz. He remembered the first time he had heard the song, sitting in the café after work with his friends. They had stopped talking to listen to the melodies belted out through tinny speakers hanging from the ceiling.

He wondered what had happened to his lost friends. Were they, too, holed up in some corner of hell? Olinke and his family, Idowu … where were they now? Idowu, of course, he knew about, but the others. What had been their fate?

He smiled at the thought of Olinke; the English teacher’s obsession with Chinua Achebe had filled them with such amusement. ‘With you, everything is Achebe. Achebe says this, Achebe wrote that,’ Ifasen and his friends had joked. ‘What of Soyinka or even Okri? Or the memory of Saro-Wiwa? Is it because the colonialists like him?
Things Fall Apart
. That fits with their ideas of Africa.’

‘Okri!’ Olinke had spluttered into his beer at the suggestion. ‘Can the man even find his way to Enugu or Abuja any more? I don’t think the London Underground will take him all the way there. Talk about a colonialist lapdog.’

Ifasen and the rest of the group had bayed in dissent, laughing and calling for another round. They had debated literature, the ethnic strife that plagued the country and, in more hushed tones, the politics of the day. All the while, they snacked on Puff Puff dipped in sugar, suya kebabs and groundnuts, the shells lying in crushed heaps beside their bottles of beer and cooldrink.

When the conversation turned to politics, their voices always lowered. President Umaru Yar’Adua of the People’s Democratic Party had succeeded Obasanjo in the last round of elections, widely condemned as rigged. Nigerians had come to accept that Obasanjo’s brutal legacy would remain.

Ifasen remembered reading a speech in which Yar’Adua had called Obasanjo
umooru
– his father. ‘How obvious is that?’ he’d said to his group of friends. ‘He’s a stooge, trying to persuade the West that democracy is alive and kicking in Nigeria. What nonsense!’

‘Kicking, yes.’ Olinke grinned. ‘Kicking in its grave while Obasanjo drives another stake through its heart.’

‘Is that what you teach in your classes, Olinke?’ asked Idowu, a sensitive man with mournful eyes. He was younger than the others and had only just started his studies. His earnestness exposed the precariousness of their position as intellectuals.

Olinke had laughed mildly at the question. ‘Idowu, there are things that we think, and there are things that we can say. They aren’t the same. You make me nervous if you’re unsure about the difference. You must be careful, my friend, or your words will be the noose around your neck.’

Olinke’s words had been prophetic. As the months passed, the news filled with reports of renewed fighting between Muslims and Christians in the south, the flare-up of traditional hostilities between the Tivs and Fulanis. Idowu had been unable to repress his views on ethnic intolerance and the state’s failure to build a united Nigeria. His studies introduced him to left-wing politics and, in his gullible manner, he had shared his thoughts with all who would listen. One evening on his way home through the back alleys, he had been accosted by an unidentified group of men. His battered body was only found the next morning once the crows had started to gather. Ifasen thought back to the small funeral; they had chased away two militia spies that had skirted around the group of mourners like jackals.

The outspoken Olinke had been luckier. Though his classroom comments had reached the ears of the authorities, he had lost only his job. After months of harassment by the militia, he left the province. Ifasen had tried to contact him without success. The last he had heard of his friend, he had made his way to France. Perhaps he had found some peace there, Ifasen hoped. He wanted to cry at his country’s failings, for the stupidity of its intolerance.

Yet, how he yearned to be there. How much more bearable would it be to face the tragedy of his own people rather than the unfathomable hatred that this foreign land meted out daily. It was not that he was a calculated target in this country: it was that he was unnoticed, a casualty of a larger, arbitrary malaise. His destruction would be nothing more than an unintended byproduct of a frenzy of enmity. He had the sense that he might be lost for ever in a maelstrom of careless viciousness.

The man beside him stirred, extending into Ifasen’s space, his body releasing dirty warmth. Ifasen was struck by the intensity of the loneliness he felt while surrounded so densely by other human beings. The paradox of such crowded solitude was unbearable, a perpetual punishment in which his misery was clutched within his chest, unspoken and painful. The incongruity went even further: while taking his own life might seem to be a logical escape, the absence of any privacy made it impossible and he was too preoccupied with survival to contrive an opportunity. It was a constructed torture from which he could not break free.

Over the next few days, Ifasen came to realise that the control exerted by the warders inside the section was illusory, a gossamer web of rules and commands that was easily broken. In truth, the inmates lived in a state of pressurised competition; the only semblance of management was maintained through a sordid credit programme. Prisoners earned points for informing on other prisoners. These points were notionally translatable into probation time when being considered for early parole. Different categories of information achieved varying numbers of points. A disclosure leading to the discovery of a dangerous weapon achieved a certain number of points; information on the presence of drugs attained another level. But the inmates traded in points like any other commodity. Warders were paid to bring bullets into the prison. The bullets were traded for cigarettes. The points secured by supposedly ratting on the holder of the bullet were exchanged with the informant for tik. The points for handing in the tik were swapped for crack cocaine. And so the credit programme created an enduring and potent trading stock that ultimately undermined the basis for which it had been established.

For their part, the warders avoided antagonising the prisoners; their days were spent in jocular interactions. It was easier to trade in hidden favours than to fight with desperate men and keep discipline in the prison. Their desire for peaceful and uncomplicated shifts made them malleable. And once a warder had stepped across the line, his footmarks were indelible and he was easily taken there again.

Ifasen’s section was run not by a warder but by a grisly man who had been awaiting trial for over a year for two murders. He moved around the corridors with his lieutenants, barking commands. The warders accepted his word, as if they, too, were subject to his authority.

There were two gangs operating in Ifasen’s communal cell. They were associated by seemingly arbitrary numbers which were nevertheless imbued with mythic meaning and commanded absolute loyalty. Their members held meetings in the cell, brazenly discussing their plans in earshot of their supposed enemies. At times they seemed to cooperate and at other moments tempers flared into fights.

On his third evening in the cell two inmates started arguing over a missing box of cigarettes. Ifasen watched how the groups started to coalesce, sliding together into two opposing armies in the cramped space. He sensed that the altercation had been contrived, to provide an excuse to break the tension that had been building over the days. He lay down on his mat and faced the wall, avoiding becoming a witness. Their voices rose in pitch, becoming screams and yells. The sound of bodies being struck, the thud of people falling to the ground, the crack of fists. The heat rose as the men attacked each other, gasping for breath in a hysteria of bloody savagery.

Then silence. A surprised gurgle from one man who fell with his back against the door, his feet snagging against Ifasen’s legs. Ifasen looked up in dread. The man rested, panting with both shoulders pushed back onto the metal grille. The head of a turquoise toothbrush stuck out of his left eye. Most of the shaft had been stabbed into the socket and only the head, its bristles splayed from overuse, protruded. There was a surprised look on the man’s face and his hand hovered halfway to his chin, as if searching for the injury around his jaw. A thin line of watery blood trickled down from his eye, coursing down his cheek and plopping onto the corner of Ifasen’s mattress. The wounded man’s legs buckled under him and he sank to the floor. Ifasen put his hand out in case the body fell his way but the man pitched forward instead, sprawling lifelessly. The cell was still, save for the grating breathing of the fighters. Within seconds they had dispersed to their beds, lying down and covering themselves with their blankets.

Ifasen hardly slept during the night, acutely aware of the motionless body crumpled at his feet. In the morning, no one got up. The moment the warders opened the cell door and saw the prisoners still in bed, they knew. They treated it like a routine affair, taking the stiffened body out on a stretcher, lining the prisoners up and checking them for signs of fighting or blood. Some were taken away and put into solitary. Ifasen was asked brusquely whether he had seen anything. They did not press him for an answer. No one mentioned the dead man after that. Later that day, Ifasen noticed some of the men scraping the ends of their toothbrushes on the brickwork, slowly sharpening the plastic handles.