This House Is Not for Sale (14 page)

U
ncle Zorro returned from his studies abroad with a white woman as his wife. This was great news and there was a big party to welcome him and the wife. But when the wife, Trudy that was her name, said they were not going to have children, that was when the trouble started. Trudy had started making enemies of most people in the house when she began complaining about the treatment of the cats and dogs. She was the one who had insisted that they live in the Family House and not in the posh expatriate quarters, where they could have gotten one of the more opulent houses.

The cats and dogs were working animals and were not considered ornamental or solely pets. They could be petted on occasion when they did a good job, but such occasions were
few and far between. The job of the cats was to keep the house mice-free. There were many corners and dark crevices in the house. Tiny rooms, closets, and pantries where all kinds of odds and ends were stored were good breeding grounds for mice. We were told not to feed the cats with food or they would lose their hunting skills and become lazy.

All the dogs went by the name Simple. Simple was the original name of the mother dog. All her offspring were also called Simple. There was brown Simple and black Simple and black-and-white Simple. They all worked. They kept the house secure at night by barking and attacking any would-be intruder. They went hunting with Grandpa. They were also expected to play with the children.

Trudy complained that the animals were not well treated; she carried the cats around and would feed them by hand. Soon enough the cats lost interest in hunting mice.

And what was this about the need to plant flowers around the house? She said that it was a big shame that a house as big as the Family House did not have a garden, she said it was uncivilized and a disgrace.

There was a
dogonyaro
tree behind the house. Everyone knew that the boiled bitter leaf of the tree was a good cure for malaria fever. The limber stalk of the tree was a very good medicinal chewing stick and kept stomach troubles at bay. The tree provided shade under which we played when the sun became too hot. There was an orange tree and an avocado pear tree. There were no plantain trees because we all knew they were breeding places for mosquitoes. There were useful
flowers like queen of the night, which kept witches and evil people away with its pungent, cloying smell. But Trudy wanted a real garden.

“And are you going to plant things in your garden that people can actually eat?”

“Beauty is the whole point. It must not be about food all the time. We must also feed our eyes, and our brains need to be fed sometimes.”

She was given a space to start her garden.

“She is not from here. She must be treated with extra kindness,” Grandpa said. “If she left her father and mother and family and crossed the vast ocean to follow you here, then you must do all that you can to make her comfortable.”

Trudy soon turned her attention to the way the children in the house were treated. She felt they were sometimes treated in a cruel manner.

In the meantime her husband, Uncle Zorro, was already working in the general hospital as a doctor and was assuring us that she would soon drop her foreign ways and adjust to living life the way we all lived it in the Family House.

She said that the house was a breeding ground for germs and that she was surprised we had not all perished from all kinds of germ-borne diseases.

A few people who knew about such things said Trudy was not going to last.

—The ones who stay learn our language. They eat our food. They wear our traditional clothes. They genuflect when they greet their elders—

—They get pregnant and have many children, not carrying a cat around like a baby the way this one does—

And then the news began to filter into the house that Uncle Zorro had a concubine. Nobody used the word
girlfriend
, because this was too light a word to describe the relationship. A girlfriend was someone seen occasionally. The case here was different. Uncle Zorro would drive directly from work at the hospital to his concubine's house, where he would eat his dinner, read a newspaper, and take a nap before coming back home long past midnight. It was even worse than that, he actually went over during his lunch break or his concubine would send over one of her girls to deliver his lunch to him.

And it was not just lunch; he was blatant about the affair. His car was usually prominently parked in front of his concubine's house, where every passerby could see it. He was said to have taken over the payment of the fees of some of his concubine's children from a previous marriage.

They had been seen at parties dressed in “and co”—they had on identical clothes—and when they both stood up to dance the musician had referred to the concubine as the wife of the world-famous London-trained doctor who could tell what ailed you merely by looking at your face.

As usual, people talked about this. As usual, they blamed the white wife.

—Man shall not live by bread and tea alone. Even the holy book said so. What is tea for breakfast, tea for lunch, and tea for dinner? The tongue of a black person will always crave pepper. Or was it not a piece of spicy alligator pepper and salt that were
dropped on his tongue when he was being given a name on the seventh day?—

—But if it is pepper that he craves, can't he get a native cook and steward like his other colleagues who are married to foreigners?—

—It is the fault of his wife. She is the mother of cats and dogs. Tell me what man wants to be known as the father of cats and dogs?—

—But couldn't he have gone about it more discreetly? How come he is carrying on like he is the first man to have a concubine? Men have been having concubines since the beginning of the world—

—It is the nature of man to easily get bored with the taste of one soup. Man wants to sample a different soup from time to time. So, even if the man was married to a woman, from her he will still stray—

—He had better be careful, though. I hear his wife's people do not hesitate to shoot men who cheat on them—

—Where is she going to get the gun from?—

—They always carry their own gun, not your long-mouthed double-barreled gun; their own gun is so small it can fit into their purse—

—He had better watch out, then—

—But what does he see in that
secondhand
woman who already has three children for someone else?—

—Who are you to question another man's taste?—

Trudy had at this point started going from house to house with an interpreter to talk to the women. She said she was
talking to them about safety issues, teaching them to keep themselves and their surroundings clean. Teaching them about things that'll make them better wives. But this was not the report that was received.

—She wants to convert our wives to her white ways. She will not succeed—

—What does she know about keeping a man? If she knew anything about keeping her man, would he be keeping a concubine?—

—My own wife told me with her mouth that the woman told her that she was the owner of her own body and that as such I her husband could not touch her without her permission—

—It is possible that her own husband got tired of asking for her permission like a schoolboy and decided to go to a woman whom he doesn't need to ask for permission—

—I hear some of the foolish women are listening to her. Maybe by the time their husbands drive them away she will marry them herself—

—How will that shock us? Is there anything that they'll not do in that house?—

Nobody knew for sure if Grandpa had heard about Uncle Zorro and his concubine. Of course, even a newborn child knew that Grandpa knew and heard everything. A day came when Uncle Zorro came to talk to Grandpa about marrying his concubine. He wanted to bring her into the Family House. Not just her but also her three children from her previous marriage. Grandpa was furious.

“This your wife, Trudy, that followed you all the way from across the seas, I have a question for you concerning her. Where are her parents?”

“Her parents are in their country.”

“And where are her brothers and sisters?”

“They are also in their country.”

“So she has no family here except you.”

“None.”

“So did you bring her all the way here in order to abandon her and cast her away like a piece of rag?”

“But she is not adapting.”

“You are the one who has refused to adapt,” Grandpa said. “Look at you, you say you are the educated person, but you have not shown any sign that your so-called education has had any impact on you. You cannot even hide the fact that you have a concubine from the eyes of the world, or are you the first? I must not hear that nonsense about bringing some other woman into this house again.”

Grandpa could still roar when he wanted to and his bite was even more dangerous. Uncle Zorro prostrated and promised to reorder his steps.

But Grandpa was not done with him yet.

“You must not step foot in that woman's house again. I forbid you to have any further contact with her. You must not meet with her, not even secretly. If anybody sees your car parked in front of her house again you'll see what will happen to you. Behave the way young men your age behave.”

“But the woman I have at home has no child.”

“And I thought you said you were a medical doctor. If she doesn't have a child, is that not your problem? Don't you treat women who have no children in the hospital where you work?”

“But she doesn't even want to hear about it.”

“Am I the one that will teach you how to marry your wife? Were you born yesterday? Anyway, the most important thing is that your foolish concubine business is over.”

How this conversation filtered down to the ears of those outside the house, no one knows, but they did hear. And as usual they had their views.

—I hear he stood up for the woman—

—He even warned his son to stay away from the infamous concubine—

—If only he acts like this all the time the house will not have such a bad reputation—

—He spoke up for her. Truly, she journeyed over seas and mountains and ocean to come over here with him. Why would he treat her that way?—

As if Trudy had also heard what happened she too began to change her ways. She changed her name from Trudy to Tunu. She began to wear only traditional cotton dresses and head ties. She also established what would later become famous as the Infants Home School. In the morning when the bigger kids had gone off to school she would go from house to house picking up the smaller preschoolers. She insisted that they be bathed and ready; she would go from house to house picking up the kids, who would be singing and marching behind her.
Oftentimes mispronouncing the words of the song but singing loftily all the same.

They would march to the Family House and she would spend the day with them singing and dancing and playing games. She persuaded her husband to informally consult when he came back from work in the evenings. And within a short time she could speak our local language like a native.

A
kwete was his nickname. The nickname had eclipsed his real name so much that hardly anyone recalled what his real name had been. His nickname was derived from his signature call as he pedaled into a street with bundles of clothing fabrics piled on top of each other on his carrier and some more piled on the handlebars. He sold every type of fabric—George, English wax, Hollandaise, Abada, and even Jubilee women's head tie fabrics. Children loved him; women loved him; husbands not so much. He persuaded women to buy his clothes no matter how little money they had. The cloth becomes yours as soon as you make a penny down payment. I'll write your name on it and keep it for you. The day you make your last payment I hand it to you. With that he persuaded the most reluctant women to buy from
him. Akwete, children would scream, imitating his signature call.

After he had done selling he would come to the Family House to chat with Grandpa. He grew from being a bicycle owner to the owner of a Honda motorcycle and eventually bought a Peugeot pickup truck. When he was not selling clothes, traveling up and down to buy clothes or collect money from his customers, he loved to hunt. He had a double-barreled hunting rifle. He enjoyed hunting and told interesting hunting stories.

He said that every animal had a peculiar smell. He said that as a good hunter what he always did was to bury his nose in the belly of every animal he killed, that way, the animal's peculiar smell became encoded in his memory. The next time he went hunting, he could tell if that type of animal was in that particular bush. The moment he entered a forest to hunt, he would immediately exclaim, I smell an antelope, I smell a deer, I smell a wild boar.

Some people had unflattering things to say about him. He was a man who was ever smiling, as if he had discovered the secret of happiness as soon as he was born.

—What kind of man sells women's clothes?—

—Why does he not sell men's clothes?—

—What manner of man is always comfortable sitting around with women, haggling with them, sharing their jokes and letting women touch him?—

Whenever Akwete came to Grandfather's house and these words got to his ears, he would laugh and utter a couple of aphorisms.

“Even the money made from packing poop smells as sweet, money has no gender, let them say what they like, nobody can please the world.”

Even his hunting exploits gave them something to talk about. For he was also a good hunter and would sometimes kill a wild boar and sell it for lots of money.

—How did he even become a hunter?—

—I never heard that he learned to hunt from anybody. We know that every hunter's father and grandfather were also hunters. Where or who did he learn his own hunting from?—

—One morning, he went to the market and bought a double-barreled gun and went into the forest and shot his first deer and brought it home—

—Does that story sound right to you, he was not even afraid of going into the forest alone at night?—

—What I hear is that some people have a talisman that turns them invisible in the forest and that way they can hunt and kill all those animals without the animals smelling them or hearing them approach—

To these comments Akwete simply replied that those who were interested in knowing about his skills as a hunter should go with him into the forest at night or should transform themselves into a herd of wild boar and see if he would not gun all of them down to the last animal. All these negative comments did not stop him from always smiling and joking with women and persuading them to make a down payment on his cloth fabrics with only a penny, just a penny, he would say again and again for emphasis, all the while laughing.

Akwete went hunting with this friend of his, a schoolteacher named Joachim. It was not the first time they were hunting together. It was a moonless night and they both wore miner's lamps on their heads. They turned the lamp on when they heard the sound of an animal; they would temporarily blind the animal with the dazzling light and then shoot.

Akwete and Joachim separated and said they'd meet under a designated tree later on. Everyone knew Akwete hunted alone, which was why he had all the stories swirling around him. When Akwete narrated the story later to many people, it did not make sense to his listeners. In his words, the first thing he saw was two shiny eyes. As he inched closer, for he was crawling on his belly, he saw vaguely the gray outline of an animal that looked like a very enormous wild boar. Without putting on his hunting lamp he shot and then shot again. There was a loud wail and then a scream—
I am dead
—the wailing voice was Joachim's.

But how could this be? Akwete wondered. When he pointed his gun what he saw was an animal, not a person. He hurriedly carried Joachim in both hands while throwing his gun aside. As he took a few steps out of the forest, Joachim drew his last breath.

Akwete was screaming as he carried his dead friend into town.

“I did not kill him.

“I did not shoot him.

“It was an animal that I shot, not Joachim.

“It was when I moved closer that I saw it was my friend that was bleeding. Please somebody help me.”

He was still crying and wailing, his hunting clothes stained with blood, as he cried to the Family House.

Akwete was loved by many but he was also a man with enemies and now they began to talk.

—Was I born today? Who says a human being and an animal have the same shape?—

—He should come up with a more believable story to tell us. He probably killed the man for prosperity rituals—

—He should have thought of a more believable story—

—There has always been something a little not straightforward about that man—

—Instead of following an honest trade like other men, he spends the whole day with other people's wives, cracking jokes with them, smiling with them, touching them and being touched by them and persuading them to go into debt for his colorful fabrics—

But there were also a few people who were on Akwete's side. A few people who knew about hunting said that a hunter who goes into the forest at night to hunt would often encounter quite a few strange things. They talked about animals that lured a hunter deeper and deeper into the forest until the hunter lost his way and ended up being hunted down and devoured by wild animals. They said it was not unusual to encounter animals that were not really animals but people. Evil people transformed themselves into animals to scare hunters. They spoke of birds with melodious voices that sang beautifully
in the forest, songs so sweet that hunters dropped their guns and began to listen and listen till they forgot that they were hunters and dozed off for days until they breathed their last and then the bird with the melodious voice descended and pecked out their eyes. They talked of wild boars that had skin so tough no bullet could penetrate them.

—A successful man like Akwete should have been more careful. He has far too many enemies. He is too prosperous for evil eyes not to look in his direction. He has his motorcycle and is said to be planning to build a mansion, why won't evil eyes look at him—

—Remember when every day they offloaded tipper-load after tipper-load of white sand in the place where he was planning to build a house? After which they began offloading cement blocks for days—

—What about the mountains of gravel that were dumped on the same construction site—

—People wondered what kind of mansion he was planning to build—

—You know what they say about a man who spends years and years getting ready to go mad, the preamble for the house construction was like that—

Joachim's family insisted that there was foul play and wanted the full force of the law brought down on Akwete. Akwete ran down to his friend Grandpa.

“See, they want to destroy me. My enemies have finally got me. If I go to jail my business will be all gone by the time I return, that is, if I ever come out of jail alive.”

“Panicking will take you nowhere. A man without enemies is an unsuccessful man. The problem is here. The right thing to do is to find a solution to it. You say the family does not want to be paid off. It means they want to make trouble. Nothing can bring back a dead person. But if they want to be unreasonable, there is nothing you can do.”

“So do I simply fold my hands and go to prison?”

“Nobody said anything about you going to prison.”

“So what is it going to be?”

“Someone will go to prison on your behalf. It has been done before. Whatever sentence is passed on you, that person will serve the jail time. We will ensure that the sentence is short. This is a case of manslaughter, not murder, for indeed Joachim was your friend and you had no plans to kill him, neither have you profited in any way from his death.”

“So who will agree to go to jail on my behalf?”

“There are so many people under this roof, we will find somebody. You will reward him highly for serving your time on your behalf. You will marry him a wife. You will build him a house. You will set him up in business when he is released.”

“That is not a problem.”

It was done.

Uwa was the one who was asked to go to jail on Akwete's behalf. Uwa was the one who was often called upon to carry out any duty that people found impossible to do in the house. He untightened fast screws, he found lost things, he crawled into and out of tight corners, he once jumped into the well to bring out a child that had accidentally fallen in.

Promises were made to him.

“Look, you are young. You still have your best years ahead of you.”

“By the time you come out you will live like a rich man for the rest of your days.”

“You have nothing to worry about; as I am building my own house I will also be completing one for you. You will move into your own mansion as soon as you are out.”

“You will definitely not regret doing this.”

“Wives, children, a house of your own, and even a textile business of yours is guaranteed. I will put you in touch with the suppliers, and here's the good thing, you'll not need to peddle and hawk your goods like me. You'll sit gently in your store and all your customers will come to you.”

Uwa did not need any convincing. What was his life worth? He could have done it for free.

No one knows for sure how things like this were arranged, but everyone knew that Akwete went on trial and was sentenced but Uwa was the person who went into the prison vehicle and was driven off to jail.

But soon after Uwa's departure for prison, Akwete became a completely different person. He began to drink. Just as he went from place to place trying to sell his clothes in the old days, he now went from one drinking place to another. He was often too drunk to sell his clothes or even to ride his motorcycle home after his drinking bouts.

—It is the spirit of the man he shot. Some people have a really strong spirit that cannot be appeased—

—What is he trying to mask by drinking? There must be something he is hiding from—

—He committed two forms of evil. He killed his friend and should have served the punishment, but, no, he has connections and will not serve his punishment like other people, he hires someone to serve his punishment for him, but look who is being punished now—

—You can run from your atrocities but you surely cannot hide from your atrocities, this is a lesson for all who do evil—

Soon Akwete was owing money to the large textile distributors who had sold him the clothes on credit. He had abandoned the house he was supposed to be building. He began selling off those things that he could still sell off in order to have money to drink.

A few people called him to talk to him about his new lifestyle but he mocked them.

“Don't worry about me. Worry about yourselves. You think my wealth is gone? My wealth that is on the way is going to be one hundred times bigger than whatever I had before. Don't worry yourselves; the same lips laughing at me now will be the same lips that'll praise me in the not too distant time.”

By the time Akwete died, which was not long after Uwa had gone to prison, there was nothing of his wealth left. He even owed those whom he had been buying drinks from.

It was a few people who remembered him, especially the women who put money together to give him some kind of burial, befitting or not.

And what about Uwa?

He did the time and came out. He was released far ahead of time for good behavior. Even while in prison, he still put to use his skill for doing what ordinary people found difficult to do.

He was expecting to move into a mansion and be set up in business and to live happily from then on. He heard of the death of Akwete and the burial of his promises.

He returned to the Family House. He was not broken even one bit. To those who asked him how he felt, he had only one response.

“I still have my life, yes, I still have my life,” he said to them, moving on to attend to some errand.