Anjorin 33

Snakes

By Feyisayo Anjorin

Content warning: Graphic sexual assault and war imagery

I became an animal like the others after eating the three raw eggs I found under a dog cage surrounded by weeds. Now dog cages trigger thoughts in my head like when you press “play” on a video app.

I hate talking about the past, I hate thinking about it too, I hate the speeches of our leaders who talk as if sleek orations would erase our past, but once in a while this twenty-five-year-old bloody affair plays in my head again and again.

I know how sick I have become, but I have been able to preserve my insanity for secret places, behind closed doors, a world in my head beyond the reach of others who most likely have similar worlds in their heads too.

I fully became an animal on a sunny day in May, the season of rains. I saw a cage from a distance as I wandered among towering trees and weeds. I was on my way to it in my desperate search for food when the rain suddenly poured in the face of the sun; I realized my progress towards the dog cage wasn’t just about food now. I was not wet before settling under the cage’s roof, my knees and hands were on the ground like a four-legged animal.

It would have been a beautiful day in better times.

As I watched the rain bathing everything in view, I soon went flat on the ground as if it were a newly acquired comfy bed; I was happy for the dry place, I was grateful for a roof over my head even if it were in a dog cage.

A dry place in the rain was a rare privilege, just like sleep, because you wouldn’t want to have your head blown off like an overripe tomato, or have it sliced off your neck like cucumber, just for the sake of a dry place. The chance of life, and death, was in your movement, under the sun, in the rain, in pain, in dirty smelly clothes, drinking dirty water and reaching for rest at night. I had to live like a snake in human skin.

The sound of gunfire became the soundtrack of my days and my nights; and everyone within our borders had been stripped of the illusion of law and order.

The only way to live through the times was to roam, to run from death, to look for food in the urban wildness, surrounded by empty buildings, and buildings full of bones and rotten flesh and flies, buildings with broken glass windows, and without doors. Someone may be looking at you from a building, too, or from a hill, targeting you with a bullet or moving towards you with an instrument of death, just to get your shoes or whatever good could be got from a dead body.

You would have to be alert like a hungry carnivore, hunting and aware of being hunted. One wrong move and someone with a gun or something sharp could split your head open as if it were a big watermelon. You would see many such around.

You would have to roam in the wild too, surrounded by giant trees and the many trees under them. You would have to be as wise as a snake in the greenness as far as your eyes would see. You would have to pay attention to every sound. That slight rustle under the leaves could be a boa constrictor preparing to swallow you, or it could be another former human, a snake like you, desperate to hit you and eat you before being eaten in this new dog-eat-dog world.

After the rain, I saw her from the dog cage, I mean the woman I married after she died. She must have been at home at the spot for a long time. I could tell from the way she walked to the place and ended up beside me in one carefree move. If I had a gun within reach, I would have shot her before looking at her face and taking in the shape of her body.

I didn’t shoot her. I grabbed her like a sacrificial lamb of the gods of war, covered her mouth for the scream I expected, and told her to shut her mouth or get shot. I didn’t have my gun with me, but guns and bombs had become common like the whining sounds of mosquitoes; she would be foolish to doubt me and she wasn’t. The muscles might have deceived her, or it could be because she needed what I wanted.

Getting any pleasure in those depressing times was like finding water in a bottle after hours of thirst on a desert journey. In that case you could have someone else’s urine bottled for you and you would still willingly bend the knee in gratitude for your good fortune.

She tensed up when I felt her warmness, I licked my lips for the sweetness of my transformation; she relaxed along the way. I was not bothered by the intense hate I saw on her face when I tried to see how she was receiving what I was giving.

Hate had been alive among the tribes long before we saw it on rampage in the streets, beating in hearts, pushing us to see devils in the ones we slaughtered like chickens; there were many devils in Liberia and they belonged to the other tribes.

Hate had become ashen corpses in the city and in the forests. The cheapness of death and untamed threats to life sustained the awareness of rottenness; hate had become feasts for flies and worms and vultures, turning the sons and daughters of our land to natural fertilizers for the tropics. Hate had become blood like water on the ground, and on leaves, and on the walls of buildings like a different kind of paint, only common in the times. Hate had become body parts some fortunate people will never get to see in a lifetime; visions as lessons of peace for your life, because people become animals when that fragile peace slips away.

The only law of the time was the right to survival.

Under that dog cage I was looking for a connection. Not the kind of connection you would have in mind before you hear me talk about seeing a fellow fighter scoop the brain of someone he had just blown open into his mouth like ice cream while laughing at my disgust, showing me his bloody teeth.

You’ve seen films about this war, I know; but those films were just ways of putting it nicely to you that human beings can be just like wild animals when they are not thinking right.

You would like to shield children in normal climes from the entertaining visuals of this war. “R18”, you would be told, so you tell them to go to bed before you slip under the duvet beside your wife and watch the pictures of human wildness.

The thing is, war cares nothing for children. War is that big bad wolf in the stories, looking for a meal, or a feast, maximizing every opportunity to smack its lips in pleasure.

The world according to the time made it clear that the children were hated; it was clarity in gory images and in brutal injections of pain.

Children get red-eyed from doses of chemicals meant to give them a feeling and you see the children inside the adults. Children smoke and drink for the pain, and the ones with firm erections could put their thing in whatever was available. Many times they would sleep with women old enough to be their mother or even older; sometimes they would sleep with women who would remind them of an aunt, a sister, a niece, a teacher.

It was always the sex that would bring them back to the days they had been evading with weed, and cocaine, and the dry gin the Harvard-trained warlord who controlled the coastal towns brought into the country in big boats.

I was like the children, too, looking for love, and getting nothing; all I saw was the world shutting the door against my face in a blatant display of hate. Hate in the heat of passion.

I didn’t have the mind to kill the woman who came to me in the dog cage. I just wanted a connection. She must have pleased a couple of other men before she got to me. I didn’t expect her to see me as a peculiar devil. I just thought about dogs mating in peacetime, and then I modified the image and saw myself as a lion in human skin.

All, they say, is fair in love and war.

I collapsed beside her after a few minutes of desperately clinging to the pleasure I got, and she kept those eyes on me. Accusing eyes.

“Are you not the Nigerian pastor with the church on Ford Street?” she asked.

I searched her face; I was looking for the backstory. Ebisola Cole!

I remembered the name; then I realized how hard I had fallen and how impossible it would be to redeem myself from the devilish thing I had done.

I was the popular one of Monrovia’s Ford Street, the home of St James Methodist cathedral. I was the snitch who let it slip through my lips that some of the president’s enemies had been hiding in a church in Sinkor. The president, a man I tried to make my friend because of his generosity with fat brown envelopes, merely hinted at their arrest when he got the information from me. The president’s blessing was always in US dollars, so – in the foolishness of the time – I didn’t ponder the possibility of the nation burning down. I figured I would just stash his bribe somewhere beyond the shores and then walk through the ruins, smoke and fires to my promised land.

Based on my information, the president’s men descended on the church with knives and worked like butchers, then the whole place became a slaughter slab.

I felt a weight on my stomach when I gave the woman’s face a closer look, then I knew she was not asking me that question because she needed an answer.

All I had wanted was a passage to the airport or seaport; a way out of the burning country, away from the blood and depressing sights, into the waiting hands of the monies I had kept safe with the help of one of the late president’s friends.

I felt like crying when I realized the reason for the hate on the face of the woman I had just forcefully plugged my thing into.

The last time I saw her, she had rosy cheeks and the smell of freshness; she was like a mother and I had been grateful for the risk she took. Now I could see her collarbones, her hitherto black hair had turned rusty brown, and her fiery eyes seemed bigger in her head. That was why I did not recognize her.

Without warning, I saw her swift hand and the progress it made towards my face. My survival instincts kicked in like a missile defense shield. If she had been successful I would have been dead. I was able to target the death in her hand and get the big stone she had from it. I was relieved to watch it roll beyond our dusty struggle on the dry patch under the dog cage.

I had poured some of my strength into her, so I had to fight with the little bit I had left with a woman who was determined to kill me.

She was the first woman – and so far the last – to beat me up; she made me whimper like a wimp, and she would have killed me if she had not ignored that rare moment of privileged nearness of my hand to the stone I had just wrestled from her hand.

I went for her head with all the strength I could muster. I attacked it like a coconut I intended to crack open. I would have emptied myself in her once again with the rest of my strength if I had been able to get my thing up, but I couldn’t. I targeted the head once again to put an end to her beheaded-chicken-like twitch. I kept my eyes on her, and tried to stay awake; I tried to catch my breath and felt the up and down movement of my chest.

When I opened my eyes again the moon had replaced the sun in the sky, shining, dividing the view into shades and shadows and soft light. She had been there – dead, next to me – for over four hours.

I imagined a different reality; in this reality she is my wife sleeping peacefully beside me, and I am the husband, watching her sleep, waiting for her to wake up so that we can plan our day and weave our lives together around our dreams.

I was beside her till sunrise the following day. I remembered waking up for a few minutes at night and being grateful for the silence, a rare experience after many nights – months – of gunshots and bombs and aircraft flying over here and there like birds of death.

That night, under the cage, was the first time in ten months that my sleep had not been interrupted by the choices of men and women shackled in misery by war.

When the sun came in all its tropical brightness and revealed her skin and her new look of death, and the stiffness, I felt the spirit move in me.

I told her about my love, the feelings that I feel deep inside. I saw clearly that the woman beside me could be my wife.

She would as soon choke me to death with the heat of her metamorphosis; yet she could be alive in the things I do to turn the hate on her face in the heat of our final passion to something living, something worth forgiving.

Soldiers flooded the streets of Monrovia later that day. I could tell their countries from the flags attached to the arms of their uniforms.

I was one of the thousands who came out of hiding and walked in the sun for four hours to the abandoned army base that was said to hold some promise. Eventually, I got to the end of the long queue where uniformed men, who looked like tourists from the neighboring countries in spite of big guns and knapsacks, handed us food packs in white plastic bags.

When I pondered the weight of my sin and my steady hand in helping the late president bear his devilish cross for the sake of dollars, I decided to become a father; a husband to Ebisola’s spirit, and the reliable guardian of her child, Lola.

I decided to be the one who would do everything to make sure Ebisola rested in peace. I imagined my aggressive thrusts under the cage as our mutual reach for the miracle of nature. I decided to dig deeper into the life of the woman who died for my unraveling as a wild animal. I decided to start from the little I knew.

I was desperate for a new story that would help me sleep well at night, a link between my past with my spirit wife and my future as her husband.

Years after the war I became the father of a 14-year-old who would be blessed by my new church through the donation of an anonymous member, supported by other members, with a scholarship to Fourah Bay. She would be prepared for Harvard after her years at Mount Aureol.

I did not try to mold her to the shape of my dreams; I did not try to place myself in line for the best father on Father’s Day. This was, for me, beyond an attempt to do the impossible.

I knew I could never pay for my sin, but it felt good to try.

Every month, the Men’s Fellowship of St Joseph’s would raise money for the young girl who would stand up during the adult bible study class and make the enemies of the truth say to her, in their minds, “How dare you?”

The bible was like a whip in her hand and she would not look at anybody’s face. They respected her because of the day the mayor stood up during Sunday school after she had spoken.

“Why are you so angry?” the mayor began. “You were even a baby during the war. It wasn’t as if you ever saw the sorrow, tears and deaths.”

She had smiled at the scowling arrogant face, a face pretending to be worthy of calling the shots.

“That is not about the war, sir, even you do not have the experience to speak about the state of things during the war,” she had said casually, which made the whole thing even more annoying to the mayor. “This is about the lessons from the passage we have just read. Or why are you here?” she would add. “Aren’t we here because we really want to live according to the scriptures?”

“Scriptures?” The man snorted, “Lola, you are 14 for God sakes, stop sounding like an old woman. Live a little.”

I was there in the back seat, living my new life, bearded like a rabbi, answering a new name, playing this game for the benefit of Ebisola, my wife, who had now become one of the ancestors of this hell of a country.

Lola would stand in front of the mayor, Sanusi Padmore. She was shorter than him, but her eyes would pierce like arrows; a few of the men had thought about getting her alone in a corner, tying her up like a ram and doing bad things to her. Many animals like me became sweet-faced angels after the war, but the taste of blood was still a memory in their mouths.

The men of the church spoke with one voice on the member who would sit at the steps an hour before the start of Sunday service and watch the arrival of everyone. She would hug her bible as she walked to the door, she would smile to your greetings and slightly bend the knee for older men and women. She had read some books about Ajayi Crowther; she was the best student in her class at Prince of Wales School where she had enrolled for her A level.

There had been competitions and it was always her ending up with the plaque or whatever it was that was given as a reminder of her place above the rest, and in church she would make the vicar, a bald-headed man with his signature shy smile, jot down the wisdom of her words.

St Joseph’s would someday talk about a scholarship like most churches trying to do their bit in the reconstruction, and the enemies of Lola Tolbert would nod at the reasonable input. The years had proved her worthy of their investment.

Lola Tolbert was like the younger female version of Mayor Sanusi Padmore. That was the thing he hated about her.

I believed my secret daughter had lived free from the foolishness of adolescence; I did not wait to see the futility of my daughter’s uptight attitude like the mayor was quoted to have said.

Sanusi Padmore believed that the coming years would change Lola and make her less judgmental. She would stop adapting the outdated teachings of a book written by folks living in agrarian cultures, talking about the preferences of one unseen God probably sitting on a giant chair in the sky.

I was in the back seat of the church one Sunday morning when I heard the mayor tell his story of how he would deal with Lola. I remembered the way Sanusi Padmore looked, dressed in agbada of the same dark brown colour as the pew’s backrest. I didn’t find his plans as funny as he did. If I had found them funny, the mayor’s skull would not be that dry piece of art in the cupboard in my basement.

That was how I became the devil’s assistant after the war. An animal in wartime, the devil’s assistant in peacetime. I discovered my perverse pleasure in sleeping beside corpses; I kept the mayor’s corpse beside me for two days before, cutting off the head and throwing the rest of him in the acid tank beside my vegetable farm.

This is also one of the blessings of living in a nation with recent history of chaos. If someone asks me why I have a skull in the cupboard of my basement, I would just sigh and lower my head and talk about my late wife. It was the war, I would say. There would be no money to waste on DNA tests and all the stuff of criminal investigation you see on American crime shows.

Sanusi Padmore, declared missing by the police, would remain a skeleton in my closet.

I knew what the mayor did to my daughter. It was exactly what I did to her mother under the dog cage during the war. Lola had been quite mindful of the people she told her story, so it was like our little secret. Her coldest war would never be wasted words in the ears of the proud.

You would never imagine her being overpowered by the missing mayor. I had my relief from the thought of it, too, because it got harder for me to imagine the skull in my basement ever harming my daughter.

But the letter to the world was on her face, and her pain had been like blood flowing through her veins. It was a part of her she had come to live with; it was pain that had become an effective weapon in her hands.

I started following Lola after the war. I lived the refugee life for a few weeks after that long walk to the abandoned army depot and my queue for free food. I kept my ears open and spoke less, I pondered the questions flying around. I listened to the answers and the tears or joy they brought. I took in the potpourri of bittersweet memories, of recollections of life before hell came down, the times when people took for granted the simple privilege of sitting at the table to eat their fufu and okra soup with their families.

I heard about a four-year-old girl whose Mum ran Galaxy, the most popular bar in the county before the war. She drove an orange Peugeot, wore blue jeans, smoked SM and drank gin like tap water.

“Do you remember Galaxy? That friendly woman that would suddenly grab you in the balls and make sure you pay for every beer?”

Before the war I hated beer and palm wine and every other thing that could give me giddy feelings, so I never got to know about Ebisola Cole till she came with her car, this orange Peugeot that seemed like a character in every story about her, to save me from being lynched.

After the war I had to trace a woman in a wheelchair who had braved the economic odds to take care of her niece whose mother I had raped and killed.

I was not able to take certain information I unwittingly got with a shrug and a resigned demeanor like most people did.

The thing I did to her Mum was like a gun against my head, giving me visions of death in this life and of a raging fire for my kind in the life to come, as it is written in the holy books. Sometimes the weight of judgment would come to me as something poetic about the second death while I was still battling with the first.

“That is her child.” Someone would point to another who needed to know.

The woman in the wheelchair, Lola’s aunt, lost her religion during the war, so she would be home on Sunday; her niece was always at St James in the morning, unaware of the good serpent that would later become her good shepherd.

Ebisola Cole came into my life for the first time on the very day lawlessness crippled the nation like a deadly virus. That day some angry men came to our vicarage carrying sticks, rusty iron bars, and machetes, chanting their fury, breaking things and lighting fires with the name of the vicar on their lips.

“That man welcomes our murderer president with smiles and gifts, and he keeps getting bigger gifts for his sycophancy!”

I had to run. My white cassock, flapping in the wind like a flag, did not slow me down; and I had the pair of Nikes that had been left behind by Reverend McLaren, an Irish missionary who was my assistant at the mission house.

I jumped from the roof after running up the flight of stairs, breathless in my search for a way out. I was soon at the edge, at the highest point of the building. I was lucky to have my leg intact when I landed on the concrete below. I didn’t stay the third second on the ground before I started running towards the fence and near the gate; I saw a car speeding along the road. The door opened as if the driver had been dancing with me in speed.

“Get in,” she said. That was Ebisola Cole, the woman who came to me the second time under the dog cage.

I didn’t look at her body as she drove me through the citywide storm of fury that day after her dramatic rescue. She had been driving towards her husband’s place of work in the outskirts of the city, a chicken farm beyond the river. She knew what would happen to a man like me, being chased by a mob, a scapegoat for many sins. It was exactly what would happen to her if she got caught in a trap set by one tribe for being from the wrong tribe.

She came at the right time.

I did not see anything unusual about her skirt and her silky-smooth skin and her disheveled hair. She was the first person in many days that had the sweet smell of soap, and had driven the orange Peugeot recklessly with the composure of a stuntwoman practicing her art in peacetime.

Right there, in the midst of my race from death, she was like a mother to me.

Ebisola Cole got through a hail of bullets while I tried to get rid of my cassock, an easy target because of its colour, and then she drove through the barricade on the bridge across the Mesurado river, unwittingly throwing three gunmen into the river with their guns.

“You’re OK?” she asked with a sigh when she eventually stopped. We kept hearing gunshots like distant rumblings of thunder.

“Yes,” I said.

She told me about the men at the other end of this road, waiting to make sure no Oku people make it to the other side. I had to come down from the car in search of increasingly elusive safety. I didn’t even have the time I needed to give her face a good look when she said her name, Ebisola Cole.

I had been helped because I was the Nigerian clergyman in town who could be seen as a devil or an angel, depending on which side of the city you listen to.

The mayor was not in the country during the war. He was in Chicago, like most of the folks who were now back in the country, back for the power, speaking English with the glossiness of silk, talking about reconciliation and reconstruction, taking pictures with journalists and white people from this or that organization, smiling for the cameras.

Sanusi Padmore announced a 50 percent slash in his pay immediately after he was appointed mayor, and he converted the gigantic official residence to the new county secretariat; he was content with a three-bedroom flat. But you wouldn’t have imagined that the two women he called his executive assistants, being paid by the county, were his girlfriends in his student days in the US, young girls who skipped class to meet his needs and became dropouts after a few months of carefree devotion.

He did not see anything wrong in having his women wherever he placed them. Women were always looking for an opportunity to do what men had taken as their exclusive right, and he, Sanusi Padmore, had an agenda.

He became a darling of the feminist movement for the overt evidence of women empowerment. He did things to these women in private, in secret places. In the intricate plot of lovers or pseudo-lovers he was the master weaver. He didn’t want his pictures on the walls of the county offices, but a professional photographer from Mississippi had been given the contract by the new president, and she had to print even more photos because Sanusi Padmore’s official portrait outsold the president’s. He was a master in the way he made people see the future in his eyes; he made them feel his voice, and they bought his dreams even in the apparent hopelessness of poverty.

The devotion of the women wasn’t something spiritual for the mayor. It was logic; he should be the one to give his all – whatever that was – to his country, while the land and the people give all they have to support his mission.

He didn’t let this slip out as words. He kept it sealed in his lips.

In all the parties he ever attended following his first day in the country after 17 years of absence, water had been his choice drink. Loose lips, he believed, would sink ships. I doubt if anyone told him about loose hips.

I was hiding behind the vestry at St Joseph’s after the morning service when he told my daughter about meeting later in the evening. Why would you want to meet me on a Sunday evening? Lola had asked.

By then she was eighteen, turning nineteen in a few weeks, and very much aware of the changes in the way men treated her, in the way they adored her curves but pretend to be possessed with a Mother Teresa spirit.

“Come on,” the mayor probably said with a wink. “We are just going to talk about the bible.”

She was there in Sanusi Padmore’s house in the evening, bantu knots on her head, wearing a black accordion skirt that stopped at her ankles, holding the worn-out bible close to her chest. She must have guessed something was wrong when he opened the door and she saw him in his boxer shorts and caught the whiff of whiskey in his breath.

“Sister Lola, welcome,” he said like a real brother.

The guards outside were a bit tipsy too, so I sneaked around a bit and did something that would make them sleep for a long time.

I heard voices when I crouched beside the window of the large sitting room. The sound was nothing unusual, just a man and a woman having a conversation. I looked through the window after some time and I saw him pouring a milky liquid in the cup, asking her how come she had never taken palm wine?

“It is good for the eye,” he assured her.

She was not the same young woman I usually see during Sunday school at St Joseph’s. I could tell from the way she sounded when her voice came to me. She was in a cage with a strange man; she could possibly feel the strangeness in his unusual friendliness.

The next time I tried to look inside through the window above my head, I realized he had unwittingly drawn the curtain across my view. I was faced with a red curtain glowing in the light; all I could do was listen.

Then I heard something like the argument of a couple, followed by prolonged struggle that led them towards the other end of the house, which I was sure was the bedroom. I tiptoed outside the windows to find meaning in the guttural sounds. I heard her in pain and in pleasure; I got her message in the creaking of the bed. I would have hurried into the house to rescue her, but I saw myself in the mayor. I imagined my daughter as my spiritual wife, giving herself to me as I poured myself into her.

I saw her sweaty rush out through the front door into the moonless night; her skirt had become a thigh-high slit skirt, her hair disheveled, her tears running down her cheek and her hand cupped over her mouth.

I used the opportunity of the open door and my experience as a snake during the war. Inside the house I saw the trail of blood, right from the front door to the bedroom where the mayor was still naked on the bloodstained bed, thinking he was the only one in the compound.

Lola continued to win after that sad run from the mayor’s house; because the mayor also left the house that very hour. I got him sleeping in a jute bag balanced on my head like tubers of yam. I carried him for about ten minutes before putting my yams in the boot of the car I had parked under a tree in a nearby street.

My girl could easily forget Sanusi Padmore’s power if she wanted. I hoped she would forget his devilish hold on her. I hoped she would not retain the thought of a forty-five-year-old divorcee flexing his muscles against a teenager, happy for the puncturing of her hymen.

The mayor was forever lost in the city.

I saw my daughter lean on a lectern during her first public lecture after her return from the US, where she had just completed her study at Harvard, her bespectacled eyes on the audience.

“In this country we will no longer leave governance in the hands of men! Women will no longer be spectators in affairs of this country!” She got cheers from the audience for her fist that was in the air.

I stood up too like the rest of them; I clapped my hands and showed my teeth, I knew for sure that this woman who got under the skin of the mayor and a few members of St Joseph’s remained unbroken.

I could walk up to her after the speech, tired of the animal I had become. I wanted to tell her my story; the true story, even if it would cost me my life.

Feyisayo Anjorin is the author of One Week In The Life of A Hypocrite, Another Week In The Life of A Hypocrite, and Love Lessons From The Life of A Hypocrite.

His writings have appeared in Afritondo, African Writer, Brittle Paper, Bella Naija, Agbowo, Lolwe, and Kalahari Review.

He writes from Akure North, Nigeria.