You Must Set Forth at Dawn (51 page)

My “boys!” Now, what was this new development in the mystery of the missing wife? I became rather intrigued. Numerous speculations flew through my mind. Who was this man? Could there have been a case of mistaken identity, or was it a thoroughgoing setup gone wrong?

By now it was well past one o'clock at night.

“So now it's my boys who took your wife? Listen, I'll give you one minute to make sense,” I warned, “and then I shall call the police.”

The words came tumbling out. “Call the police! Call Interpol if you like, and then you'll have to explain if you have been brought to Stockholm to abduct other people's wives. You all came to my nightclub. You danced with my wife, and then you took her to your hotel to continue partying. I want her back, and now you're pretending she's not there. You may think you're world famous, I don't care if the world thinks you're famous, that doesn't give you the right to go around breaking up my marriage. . . . Hey, talk to me, Mr. Famous! Answer me, will you? . . . Hello . . . hello. . . . are you there? If you think you can hang up on me . . .”

At last something rang a bell. Earlier that evening, some of the “boys” had indeed invited me to accompany them to a nightclub. They had been at the club the previous night and had been effusively welcomed by the lady proprietor. She had invited them to return the following night—indeed, to make her club their late-night haunt throughout their stay—but had also sent a special invitation to me to accompany them. She was a collector of sorts, and in addition to the nightclub, she ran an African arts gallery. Her husband was from one of the East African countries. The “boys” painted a glowing picture of the nightclub, decorated with African motifs, serving African snacks, and playing African music. I asked them to convey my regrets to the lady, however, having made the decision to avoid any potential incidents, to which even the most staid boozery is always prone. I began to picture what had happened: the “boys” must have gone there and left with the hostess to continue partying elsewhere.

As gently as I could, I tried to explain to him where he might find his wife— not at the Grand Hotel, where all the Nobelists were lodged, but at one of the other two hotels where the Nigerian contingent was staying. He repaid me with an earful.

“Oh, are you still there? Why do you continue to talk to me from upstairs? You're too big to come down and talk to me? I am standing here in this cold lobby while you're enjoying yourself in the warmth of your room. You can't do the polite thing and come down to talk to me, is that it?”

For the first time since that telephone intrusion, I had found something that interjected a light note into the proceedings. The thought of me going down to this enraged and basically incoherent stranger, already smarting from the loss of his wife's companionship, maybe with lurid thoughts in his head of a gang of randy Nigerians taking turns warming up her Swedish or whatever blood, was so idiotic that I laughed out aloud. That only sent him into a new bout of rage.

“You may laugh at me, sir. Because you're a big man and I am a nobody. But let me tell you, I have my rights. I am also a human being and won't be trampled on by you.”

I cut short my merriment. “I am laughing at you because you dare take me for a moron. You actually expect me to leave the safety of my room to come and confront you, a total stranger in a strange hotel in the middle of the night? Now, listen, I am going to put down the phone, and if you dare call back again, I guarantee you'll sleep in a police cell tonight.”

I put down the phone and dialed the operator. Our hosts had not even left it to us to take the initiative of instructing the operator about calls. Instead, we had been consulted about how we wanted calls and other forms of intrusion to be fielded. Any caller whose name was not on the list simply did not get through, and of course a “block” message was sacrosanct. So how . . . !

The operator explained that the man must have been calling from within the hotel, probably from the lobby, thus bypassing the switchboard. He could only do that if he had my room number, however, and how he had managed to obtain it was a mystery. So I asked the operator to connect me quickly to the hotel's security detail. “There's a lunatic in the hotel lobby,” I informed him. “You'll find him at one of the house phones, still trying to dial my room.” Moments later, the security officer phoned back. Yes, indeed, there had been a man, an African, at the phones, but he had left just a few moments before. The guard had looked outside, and he thought it was the same man he had seen getting into a car.

My official aide-de-camp from the Foreign Ministry was given the report the moment he arrived the following morning, and of course it became quite a moderate-sized scandal. The response of the Nigerian squad was to set up its own round-the-clock protection unit. During the day, they moved physically into the lobby of the Grand Hotel, and they would not depart until I was safely locked in my room. First thing in the morning, they were back.

The woman in question was interrogated. She admitted that she had in fact booked a room at the Grand Hotel before the arrival of the laureates so as to be able to hand me a present personally—a commissioned painting. So the husband was indeed right in some of his suspicions. Was it all an innocent jape? The lady had taken the trouble to book a room well in advance so as to have easy movement into and out of the hotel occupied by the laureates, never mind that she lived in the suburbs of Stockholm.

I received a note from her afterward. She was very upset that she was now obliged to move out, having earned herself a hostile interrogation by hotel security and some discreet checks by the police—all undeserved, she protested. I was bombarded by messages sent through every Nigerian she met. She even attended, quite legitimately, a party organized by our embassy; she was on the regular embassy guest list, it seemed, or at least had acquired a genuine invitation. However, by then, the “boys”—Olu Agunloye, Deji Akintilo, Yemi Ogunbiyi, and others—had formed a cordon sanitaire around me and would not let her get within spitting distance. Each time she attempted to move in my direction during the party, she was physically blocked. I was not aware of all this at the time, though I did notice some deft footwork, some strange concerted movements and signals going on around me.

Not that she gave up, so desperate was she to explain her side of the story and hand over the present. Her “husband” was not a husband as such but a business partner with whom she had once lived, but that affair was long over, even though they still maintained their business relations, including running the nightclub. She desperately wanted me to visit her gallery and wrote me a letter asking for a face-to-face meeting. I replied, thanking her for the present and her hospitality to my compatriots, sympathizing with her for her ordeal with her business partner and the police; I did not consider a meeting necessary, however, and regretted that it would not be possible.

Swiftly pushed to the forefront of my mind, from the moment the irate “husband” uttered his first accusation, was the scandal—also involving a woman—in which Martin Luther King, Jr., was very nearly embroiled in Oslo when he received the Nobel Peace Prize. The CIA was alleged to have engineered that incident.

THE NOBEL APPEARS to be a bug whose bite is craved, sometimes without any sense of discrimination or inhibition. The best-organized siege that was laid to my newly acquired sponsorship clout—as perceived by the outsider—was a whirlwind “courtship” by the wife of a former European minister who had established a quite impressive philanthropic foothold in East Africa, especially with children. Hers was a bold, direct, and quite impressive semiofficial campaign. At first, I did not know what she wanted.

I received a message that the lady had flown in by private plane the morning of the ceremony. She could be present in Stockholm only for the day, as the plane was taking her somewhere else for another engagement and she had to be back at her African station some time later. My recollections of this high-powered encounter are somewhat imprecise, as so many encounters took place at the same time. If she did indeed arrive that morning, an advance party must have preceded her, because, when I came down to the lobby, an impressive area had been devoted to literature by and about her. Coffee-table publications, expensively produced, jostled with brochures, photographic displays, citations, and a few artifacts from the regions where she had worked with children. There was a huge tome of a register for visitors to the mini-exhibition to sign, and it was not enough just to sign it. Visitors were also urged to write their impressions—in effect, testimonials to the humanitarian work being done by the lady.

The madam had an able assistant—a suave, lanky government official— whose duty appeared to be to prepare visitors in advance for the phenomenon they were about to encounter, enumerate her virtues, her selfless dedication to The Cause, and ensure—or perhaps this service was performed only for myself?—that they were not fooled by her reticent and inhibited nature. He owed it to her mission to place her achievements in perspective and lamented how the world had so far failed to appreciate them sufficiently, but was confident that I, as a discerning person, would see how this kind of work needed to be catapulted into world attention. She had met numerous African leaders; I would see the glowing testimonials they had written when we arrived at the exposition. As for her journeys by boat—her favorite mode of transportation, it seemed, and one that enabled her to penetrate the continent with tons and tons of supplies for undernourished and sick children—they were epics in themselves. First, the boats had to be cajoled from their owners or sponsors; than—I believe he explained—she sailed around the world obtaining supplies and medicines from governments, companies, and other donors. She next sailed around African ports, from which commenced yet other grueling journeys into the interior—using jeeps, camels, and any other form of transportation, breaking through into neglected areas where no one had trod before.

At some point we finally came upon the lady, waiting dutifully by her exposition. She piloted me through the eloquent photographic essays on the table: she fending off African heat in a safari outfit complete with pith helmet, with supplies in the boat, with one prime minister after another, then masses of photographs of her with African babies in her arms, crawling all over her, scrawny babies, plump babies—before and after—testimonies galore, and heavy photo publications—about Voyages I, II, and III, and now the preparations for IV. The “reticent” lady went over the ground already covered by her able spokesman, filled in gaps, presented me copies of these backbreaking tomes, then wondered how best to package the books for convenient transportation. No sooner was the thought spoken than she seized her wine-red Cartier briefcase, flung its contents on the table, then began to stuff it with books, photographs, brochures . . . and of course I was to keep this expensive designer briefcase, and, while I was at it, did I smoke? I was mumbling that I did smoke the odd cigar now and then when from nowhere an elegant Cartier lighter appeared, still in its case. And then there was a third item that was pressed into my hands, and of course I was not to worry—it would all be sent up to my room since she appreciated that I did not have much time and we should really go now and have that coffee together. It was kind of me to spare her that much time, but she just wanted to draw my attention to the children's books especially, the ones that contained the children's spontaneous songs to her, expressions of their childlike faith in her works, much more important than any tribute a head of state might pay or any state decoration she might receive. Mr. Soyinka, what you could do for this cause . . .

“Ah yes, madam, what would you like me to do?”

“I am preparing a new book, and how wonderful it would be if you could write the foreword, endorsing our efforts and—yes—wouldn't it be wonderful if you could compose a poem on this work for the children of Africa, and it would be a poem both in your own language and in English, and we would translate it into other languages? I think it is something those children would understand. Did I tell you that they call me the White African Mother? It's in one of those children's tributes. So if you wrote a poem . . .”

“I have to warn you, I do not find it that easy to simply sit down and scribble a poem to order. Not even the simplest-looking poem.”

“Well, it needn't be a poem, Mr. Soyinka. It could be simply something from your own tribe. Are you Ibo? That would be Biafran, not so?”

“I am Yoruba.”

“Aah, of course, Yoruba. I know about the Yoruba, very rich culture. So, some kind of children's Yoruba poem, which you would translate for us. Something that has to do with a mother's care for her children. The relation between mothers and their children is something that struck me so forcefully as I traveled all over the place. We are like that in my country, you know. So do you think you could do this for the cause? It would be like a kind of dedication to the work of the White African Mother. . . .”

“White African Mother,” I said. “You'd like a poem to the White African Mother?”

“Or some Yoruba saying that could be adapted, something to do with the mother. I am sure you still retain some songs, something from your own childhood.”

I nodded with full comprehension. “Well, you'll have to give me some time to think about it. This hectic atmosphere does not exactly facilitate regressions into childhood, you realize.”

She was fully understanding but abundantly prepared. “Actually, my aide and I were thinking about that, and we found what might be the solution. An original poem can come later if you feel like it, a traditional song or saying. But we brought along this poem, and it's already translated into English, ready to go into the new book. So what is needed is for you to translate it back into your own language, Yoruba, and then dedicate it to these children's White African Mother. Anything else you care to send later on, that will be more than kind, Mr. Soyinka. Do you think the translation is something you can do in the next few days? I have to be gone. My government was very kind to lend me a plane, but now it must take me back. But my assistant—there he is, you've met already—will be staying around with the exhibition. You can copy your translation directly into the large book I showed you, and then, with the dedication, it will appear in this new publication.”