Wálé

It shocks you that your daughter is now too heavy to carry. Rubbing her eyes with balled-up fists after waking up way too early, she falls into your embrace as you crouch down to her level. “I’m going to see grandpa for a couple of days,” you say. And as you rise to your feet, you try to lift the sleepy girl off the ground again, but her weight surprises you still. You wonder when she got this heavy as you watch your husband put your bag into the boot of the car that’ll take you to the train station. You say your final goodbye and hug your girl extra tight before you set off for Ibàdàn.

Your father’s call came last night. “I feel very weak,” he slurred into the phone. “I feel very tired.” You knew something was wrong right away. You have never heard him say anything like that. So you panicked and wanted to hop out in the middle of the night right after the call, but your husband managed to calm your impulse. When you finally slept, you dreamt of a bright light hanging over your head and your father walking into it. You jolted awake, repeating, “Daddy mi is going to die,” to your husband. He told you rather harshly to shut up before pulling you into himself, rocking you like a little girl, like he would do your daughter, until the first light of the morning broke, and you could hurry your way home.

Home, that is what you call Ìbàdàn, what you call the house you grew up in. Home, where your father now lives alone. He doesn’t want anyone around the house anymore, not even the live-in housekeeper you tried to get after your mother died silently three years ago. Silently, you like to say, because there were no phone calls to forewarn you, no signs of the scythe hanging over her, only the obvious markers of her many years in this world that showed a life well lived far more than an impending death. And so she slipped away silently into the darkness one night, with her husband of fifty-odd years sleeping by her side. A peaceful death, one that you wish you could get when the time is right. But a stinging death for your father nonetheless, who looked at you and asked, “What meaning does my life have now?”

 Ìyá Sola, your mother’s old friend, who has made it her duty to check on your father every morning and evening, every single day since then, says he spends his time sitting in the living room, staring at a wall. By the time you reach the front of the house in Ibàdàn, she has already called you a few times. “Baba is not breathing well,” she says in English, with that tinge of her heavily accented Yorùbá still present.

You meet your father in his rocking chair in the living room when you enter the house. He lifts his head and says something, his eyes brightening at the sight of you. You cannot hear him clearly, but you recognise your name, “Tolani,” coming from him like a refrain. You collapse at his feet, hold his hand placed on the armrest, and feel his grip tighten around yours.

“Daddy mi, you should have called earlier. I’m sorry I couldn’t come last week as planned,” you say, trying to find justification for missing your bi-weekly visit to the house, a routine you have tried to maintain since your mother’s death.

Your father nods slowly, smiling. He calls your name again.

Ìyá Sola comes from the kitchen and finds you at your father’s feet. “Tolani, why are you acting like Baba is not alive?” she says, rubbing a hand against her wrapper as she holds a mug in the other. “Don’t act like this.”

You rise, smoothen your clothes and greet Iyá Sola with your knees to the ground. “I’m just scared.”

Ìyá Sola puts a finger to her lips to silence you as she hands your father the mug he drinks from.

 “Warm water helps his chest,” she says. She takes the mug from your father and returns to the kitchen.

You follow her.

“We have not had light for some days,” she says when she sees you looking at the empty freezer. An unpleasant odour is coming from it.

“It is the same thing at our place,” you say.

She nods. “We have to take him to the hospital,” she tells you.

You sniffle. “Today, let us go this morning.”

*

After Iyá Sola leaves the house to call the driver who’ll take your father to the hospital, you return to his feet. It is now that you notice how unstable and loud his breathing is. You remember being in this same position as a girl, as little as your own daughter, watching your father at the feet of his own aged father.

Your father would often take you and your brother to your grandfather’s house. Your brother. You think about him. Broda Labi, who, as a boy, was always starry-eyed as if spirits elsewhere were calling to him. Who would run through your grandfather’s cocoa farm outside Ibàdàn whenever you visited, while your father carried you on his shoulders. Who splashed in the stream with local children while you stayed by your father’s side in a farm shed. You cannot remember your grandfather’s face, but you remember his voice always lashing out at Broda Labi, telling your father that “this one smells of trouble.”

It was not long before those visits to the cocoa farm ended. Your father’s job as a journalist increasingly took him around the country. Your father would return to Ìbàdàn briefly and would be off to Jos and then to Lagos, returning home every couple of weeks. Broda Labi became more stubborn, and your mother’s attempt to control him barely worked.

You always waited for your father’s return home so that he would tell you about the festivals in Argungu, in Ijebu Ode, in Ile Ife. One year, he said the Ooni of Ife was impressed by his coverage of the previous Olojo festival, and when he was to visit Cuba, your father went with him. He said that rain hadn’t fallen in Havana for months, but when the Ooni’s feet touched ground, venerated by the Afro-descendants there, he prayed to their shared ancestors, and the rain poured. He showed you a couple of fat, brown cigars that he said Fidel Castro himself had given to the Ooni’s entourage. One of those cigars still lay somewhere in the house. When the Berlin Wall fell, your father said the world was coming to an end for men like him; you didn’t know what that meant. You still don’t. But you heard his stories, and your dreams would be filled with everything you could imagine, wondering how vast the world truly was.

Broda Labi heard these stories, too, when he sat with your father after getting his routine reprimand. You imagine they made an even bigger impression on him than they did on you, because they told him of a world with more places for him to escape to, and not be subject to the dictates of your parents and everyone who told him he would not turn out well if he stayed mischievous. And that was exactly what he sought; he took up wings and left.

“The rascal made his own way out,” your father said about Broda Labi’s flight from Ìbàdàn to Turkey. He never made it known that he had that in the works. He simply went off to the university in Ife and, a couple of years after graduating, sent a letter to the house saying that he had gotten a scholarship to a university in Turkey for a postgraduate degree. This flight, a betrayal, in a sense, hurt your mother, who expressed it before you in tears, but your father held it inside him, only showing rage when your brother’s name was mentioned in his presence, at least for a while.

Broda Labi wrote home once a year after leaving. He narrated how a Ghanaian friend of his was beaten to a pulp by men who attacked him outside the student quarters for dating a Turkish girl. Your mother was worried sick by that letter. Your father said Broda Labi would be fine, that all his fighting in Ibàdàn had prepared him. You wondered why your father’s stories of the world outside never contained tales of others being hostile.

“He said that rain hadn’t fallen in Havana for months, but when the Ooni’s feet touched ground, venerated by the Afro-descendants there, he prayed to their shared ancestors, and the rain poured.”

In your later years, when you and your husband travelled out of the country on holiday, you formed your own experience of the world. It was the glamour and the extravagance that disturbed you. When you visited Dubai, you found it disturbing that such sights existed in the world alongside the shanties that your father sometimes spoke about. Now you have three versions of the world in your head, two of which you had seen through the eyes of your father and brother.

Broda Labi would go silent and then reach out intermittently. The last time he reached out was on his 50th birthday, six years ago. Your mother was still alive. He had sent a picture of his family a couple of years before that. It showed him and his wife, a Turkish woman, with one girl and a younger boy, lighter than anyone in your family has ever been. There were no hostile side remarks, only pleasantries and him promising to bring the children to visit Nigeria soon. Your mother had asked if they could speak Yorùbá, if they knew where their father came from, if they knew what amala and ewedu tasted like, if they greeted him by prostrating and kneeling. Broda Labi had said she could teach them those things when he brought them home. And then your mother died, and he did not come. He cried over the phone. He said he was devastated. He promised, again, to come back home soon.

*

The engine of a car is idling outside, and you rush through the house gathering toiletries, extra clothes, bread, water. You help your father, who shuffles gingerly on his feet until he heaves himself into the back of the car. You sit beside him, his head resting on your shoulder, his laboured breathing beating a rhythm into your ears. As the driver turns into the main road, he hints at the cost of the ride that Ìyá Sola apparently hasn’t said anything about.

“Fuel don cost now, ma,” he says.

Ìyá Sola snaps at him, “Finish the work I called you for first.”

When you arrive at UCH, it takes a long time for anyone to even attend to you. Your father is reclining on a wooden bench like the many others, waiting. Ìyá Sola sits by him. You are told many things as you scurry about to get your father some attention. You are told there aren’t enough beds, that there hasn’t been stable electricity at the hospital for almost a year and that there is hardly any money for diesel. That the cost of diesel has skyrocketed, too.

You have heard this for at least four days now, even before coming to Ìbàdàn. Your husband had said the same thing. “It is this war in the Middle East that is causing it,” he said. “Bombs are falling fifty countries away, but we are affected.”

You wonder what saying “it is this war in the Middle East” would mean to your father and others like him, clinging to life. If it would mean anything to the driver who had grumbled when Ìyá Sola told him to wait until you were done at the hospital. If it should mean anything to you, because now you see a woman running into the hospital with a child on her back, and you remember when your father used to carry you through his father’s farm with Broda Labi running ahead, until he was warned not to get his feet caught in any of the traps set to catch bushmeat.

You go out into the sun and, on impulse, try calling the only number you have for Broda Labi. It rings and rings. He doesn’t pick up. You see the driver dozing off inside the car. The heat from the sun is blistering, and sweat licks your face, pools in your underarms. You go back inside and tell Ìyá Sola you have to leave.

“But Baba nko?” she says.

“We’ll go to another hospital.”

Back inside the car, the scenes of the city flash by: roads that are familiar from your childhood, that your father drove your mother and you and Broda Labi past many times.

You end up near the Dominican Chapel, at a private hospital where everything is expensive.

“You no sabi wetin diesel dey talk now?” a nurse says to explain it away.

You pay. Your father soon sees a doctor, and in between, you call Broda Labi’s number again. No response. You begin to fear that violent men have finally attacked him for being with a Turkish woman, and worse still, for having children. You tremble at this thought.

When you return home that evening, your father is laden with prescription medicines. ìyá Sola makes dinner for everyone. You feel indebted to her for leaving her textile shop closed all day to be with you and your father, and you tell her this.

“I’m doing it for aunty mi,” she says, referring to your mother.

And then, she leaves.

You and your father are now finally alone; you bring out his mattress from the bedroom into the living room so you can both sleep side by side in a well-ventilated space. You sit up by him on the bed. You look at him and his frail body, his strained breathing, and finally burst into tears.

He turns slowly, looks at you, and chuckles. “You remind me of your mother,” he says.

You wipe your tears, not wanting him to see them. “I tried calling Broda Labi today,” you tell him.

You expect him to say something, but the longer you wait, the more darkness envelopes the house through the louvred windows, his laboured breathing beating new rhythms in your ears until you fall asleep yourself.

When you open your eyes again, your father is standing up to go pee. You turn on your phone’s flashlight to help walk him to the toilet. He returns and falls back to sleep quickly. You do not return to bed but sit on his rocking chair instead, watching the darkness fight the dim glow of the flashlight. You rock on the chair slowly until sleep takes over you again.

The thing that stuns you awake isn’t noise, but silence.

The strange silence that hangs in the air. The unusual silence that comes from your father’s body. You slowly inch towards him on the bed and turn him on his back. He flops down, heavy, limp.

 “Daddy mi, daddy mi,” you call. You tap him, place your ear against his face, on his chest. You want to hear something, anything from him.

You hear nothing.

The first person you think to call is Broda Labi. You dial his number again and again. You are shivering; your chest threatens to implode. And when you do not expect it, the line clicks, and you hear life come from the other end.

“Broda Labi,” you say. “Daddy mi is dead.”

He doesn’t say anything, but you feel his presence. An aged man in his own right, but you still cannot picture him being older than he was when he left home.

You hear him whisper, “My father is dead”, in the background, perhaps to his Turkish wife.

 “Tolani, when did this happen?” he sounds alarmed.

“Now,” you say.

“What do you mean now?”

“I’m at the house; he just died,” you say. “You must come home this time.”

He sighs. “May God rest his soul.”

“Broda Labi, you must come back home to bury daddy mi,” you shout, almost in tears.

“Bad timing, Tolani, really bad timing. You know, with this war thing, flights from here are not going to be easy,” he says. “But I’ll see what can be done. This war is getting bad.”

You tell Broda Labi to swim across the sea, to cross the desert to make it back home because he must see your father’s body get lowered into the ground to rest.

He tells you to stop being so emotional. To be rational. “I’ll call you soon,” he says.

The call ends. You exhale heavily.

Your father has just died, but somehow what takes over your mind are thoughts of a conflict thousands of miles away from the hilly streets of Ìbàdàn, defining everything around you so much. And you can almost hear yourself shriek loudly, like you used to do all those years ago, riding your father’s shoulders as he carried you through rows and rows of a thousand cocoa trees.