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I
The secret to letting your dead sister know you miss her is simple. Never let go of the grief. Look for her in strangers. Call others by her name and you just might bring her back to life.
II
There are places Safiya and the other displaced persons cannot go. The groundskeeper says they should be content with staying in the tents where the air swells with flies and stenches of loss. Or with lolling behind the camp, where they conduct bowel movements straight into the soil. But what the groundskeeper really means is that they should not affect the neighborhood with the disaster of their lives—that they are drain pipes bringing filth, bringing crime.
III
A scraggly bearded man gapes at Safiya from across the queue lining the pavilion for servings of beans and dry garri. His hands clutch his chest as if he has been impaled there. Safiya takes him for a journalist but decides against it as soon as she remembers the journalists who gather around the camp. They do not bring bags of clothes and food, and they do not stare.
The man lunges for her with something animal in his eyes. She jumps and throws the palm of her hand toward him. “What?”
His mouth opens. The muscles around his neck squeeze to push words out. He manages to articulate a distorted sound. She hurries to a corner, watching her back. He dashes to the camp office, emerging after a while with the groundskeeper.
Their eyes comb the pavilion but do not find Safiya.
IV
Lately, Safiya has been swimming in turbulent dreamscapes. She plunges into the cold emptiness of the morning a horde of Boko Haram fighters stormed Jija, wrecking whatever was in sight.
All over again, panic engulfs her and she flings herself into a staggering wooden boat full of women and children, taking only things the hand can grab. Behind them: the rata-tata-ta of machine guns, smouldering homes, and bullet-ridden bodies. In front: the slurp of rising blood-red water leading to the camp, a hundred miles away.
But tonight, she dreams of the solemn perfection of the Toyota Prado, glinting like tar.
A few days back, the groundskeeper came into Safiya’s tent and led her to the car. A middle-aged woman in batik dress occupied the passenger seat. There was something strangely intriguing about her unblinking eyes. To Safiya, it was like watching a switched-off TV. The young man who had appalled her sat in the driver’s seat.
“I am Professor Gambari,” the woman said in a thin, hesitant voice. Her pre-set smile failed to liberate the sadness locked in her face. “My son has met you before, I believe.” The smile widened. “Please, we need you to work for us, if you are interested.” She drew her lips tight against her teeth and slowly turned to face her son. He nodded and, without meeting Safiya’s eyes, called out their home address.
V
The manner in which the professor and her son asked for Safiya’s service exerted poignant anxiety in her. But she shrugged off the feeling of unease−knowing that she would no longer need to hop on the trucks packing men and women from the camp to earn their keep on construction sites. She thinks being in their employ will hasten her arrival at the brighter side of life. Something she’d dreamed of since she fled the walls of St. Anne’s Orphanage where her childhood was set. Afterward, she worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant on whose wet kitchen floor she slept. Before moving on to a textile mill that gave room and board to workers. Before opening a small hairdressing salon in Jija. Before the terrorists came.
With a sharp intake of breath, she presses the intercom attached to the gate of the Gambari’s residence.
“You came!” A voice sounds from the speakers when she states her business. The opening buzz drowns out her yes.
There is a free-form swimming pool greening to the left. Afield, a garden gathers wild grasses and butterflies. She takes a stone walk, past the Prado parked under a blue carport, to a building shaped like a daguerreotype camera. In its foyer, she stops to admire the protean abstraction of two companion paintings on the burgundy wall and mouths the name signed on them, “Hassan.”
The son springs in, wiping his hands on an apron hanging from his neck. Her heart pounds.
“Hi! I am Hassan.”
She motions at the paintings with an O in her mouth.
Hassan waves at his work with feigned modesty.
“Mom wants you to eat first,” he says. “Besides, I’m sorry for the other day.” His voice is oddly gentle. His eyes, as bright as a chandelier. He takes her hand, leading her to the sitting room, and eases her into a matte-finished chair before excusing himself.
He returns with a glass of margarita and sets it on the shellac vanished stool by her side. He turns on the TV, plays Girl, Interrupted on Netflix. Excuses himself again. She mouths a silent wow and empties the glass in one gulp. After a short while, she picks her way to the kitchen and finds him by the worktop, stirring eba.
“Can I help?”
He startles and turns to her, his face dripping with sweat. “Go and sit. Please,” he says, almost choking. “You will miss the film.”
He stops short of telling her it used to be her favorite.
VI
Safiya sinks into the rattan chair by the Professor’s bed, waiting for her to wake up. She itches to run her hands over the innumerable books injected into mahogany paneled shelves, to read the letterings on the hanging awards and plaques. But a groggy sensation overwhelms her. She blames it on the eba and beef ogbono soup Hassan served her and fights to keep her head from falling to her chest. The comfort of the chair does not help. Her vision blurs.
The whisper of shuffling feet rouses Safiya. She opens her eyes to see the Professor coming from the toilet in a loose black undergarment. There’s something outlandish about the professor’s current state—body wizened like a plucked capon, legs heavy with contemplation, the fingers on one hand stretched out as if to catch fresh air, those on the other locked around the head of a white cane.
“Thanks for coming to manage my ruination,” the Professor says in a soft voice, tapping the cane against the rattan. “I have kept you long enough for today.” She taps the bed frame, lowers her body to the bed with a rueful smile and rolls in. A blanket swallows her.
VII
The daylight is darkening when Safiya finds Hassan smoking on a metal chair in the backyard. He takes one last drag from his cigarette and gets up.
“Your mom is―”
“Yes.” He nods, blowing out smoke from his nose. “The diabetes got mom’s eyes.” He tears the cigarette butt into shreds. “Her vision went black months ago. When I talk of surgery, she is like: What is there to see again?” He slants his head sideways, peering at her. “Of course, you know how pessimistic mom can be. Right?”
She throws him a confused gaze. In a faint afterthought voice she says, “I have barely met your mother.”
He twitches, then closes his eyes for a moment.
“Are you okay?”
He nods, picks up some pebbles from the ground, and lobs them one after the other toward the pool. As the pebbles sink into the depth of algae infested water, she imagines he is struggling to put her in the depths of what he cannot express, and experiences a strange pity for him and his blind mother.
“Today was not as pleasant as it should have been,” he says, as though she had come to an outing, and retrieves a basket of apples from under the metal chair. “I am happy you’re here. Getting someone to take care of her has been daunting, and I need to rush to Lagos for my exhibition.” There is a fondness in his voice and a mist in his eyes when he stretches the basket out to her and says, “Take this. And please come back tomorrow.”
VIII
The Professor gropes for Safiya’s hand. “Hassan says you…” Finding the hand, she grips it. “I need you to give me a description of yourself.”
The steel grip of the Professor’s hand cuts off Safiya’s thought.
“Do you have…?” The Professor’s right hand wobbles on to Safiya’s shoulder, then to her neck and face. She feels Safiya’s chin and stiffens upon touching an elongated bump. She wails so violently, her body locks in a spasm.
It is clear to Safiya now that something tragic hovers within the Gambari’s residence. There have been hints of it in Hassan’s dithering, in his compulsive attempts at making her comfortable since she arrived. Now, the Professor’s tears put her in mind of how, yesterday in the garden, he sounded as though she was part of the family.
The Professor wipes her eyes and fumbles with a portable Sony radio, looking for the afternoon news. On JFM 95.3, a reporter talks about the attack on Jija and other rural communities. Two hundred more dead. Three hundred more injured. On Ray Power FM, federal soldiers and the anti-terrorism police are retreating. The Professor mutes the volume, steeping the room in mourning silence.
“Can I do anything for you, ma’am?”
The Professor smacks her lips, letting out a low-toned yeah. “Read to me.”
She speaks of her collection, bragging as Safiya plucks out books from the shelves. Up The Down Staircase: “It helped me when I started teaching in the University. At nineteen.” She cuts a preening smile, and sighs when Safiya mentions Famished Road. “Oh, the stimulation of Ben Okri’s verbiage.” She settles for I Heard the Owl Call My Name.
“This is coming too late, my dear,” she says to Safiya gently, “but what is your name?”
IX
At 4 a.m., Safiya wakes up bleary-eyed on a couch in the study―head pounding, ears ringing. From the corner where the lights leap into shadows, Hassan’s entranced eyes scope her.
She props up her aching body and remembers last night, gradually.
After closing for the day, she had come here—where Hassan was painting—to say goodnight. He had insisted she join him for a quick drink before she left for the camp. She did not want to but had pushed through her reservations. It might allow him to commit the unsaid into speech, she thought. It might allow her to know what was running the engines of her employment. She promised herself she would leave for the camp by 8 p.m. but then the first drink―Baron de Valls―begot Vodka and tonic. And before long they were laughing at jokes forgotten as soon as said, while chomping on microwaved turkey. And her body had taken to the Burna Boy songs he played on his phone. And unbeknownst to her, she had done the Zanku dance with a mastery strongly reminiscent of someone Hassan always thinks about.
He draws in a shuddering breath and slowly calls out a name, “Karimah.”
“Who is Karimah?”
He points at her. “You are Karimah.”
She shakes her head, flustered.
Hassan furnishes her with tapestries of shared memories, too long and detailed to keep track of:
Remember the fun time we had at our cousin’s house in Kano? How we concocted delicacies with Aisha and Musa?
How we missed each other when we went to our respective boarding schools? How we hugged as soon as we saw each other again? How we exchanged dreams in this very room?
“I’m sorry, but—”
“Karimah.”
“I am not Karimah. Please, stop.”
He holds her chin with his hand. “Where did you get this scar?”
He does not believe her when she says that a matron at St. Anne’s Orphanage had beaten it into her with a mop handle because she had mistakenly broken a set of china; that there are many other scars his eyes are yet to reach.
He cries, “You got it while teaching me how to ride a bicycle―”
“I have never ridden on a bicycle.” Her muscles tighten, quelling the urge to scream. “How could I have taught someone?”
She tells him she’s only Safiya, daughter of the people she never knew and pseudo-sister to those she grew up with at St. Anne—people whom she may never see again.
From the way he turns his head she can tell that her experience has no legitimacy before his reasoning, and that her name will never become part of his vocabulary.
He takes backwards steps, and is gone.
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Voices from the professor’s room float into the study.
“Let’s stop being silly.” Gasp. “Okay?”
“It’s because you cannot see.”
“You would tell me I need eyes to identify my daughter?” Gasp. “Someone I gave birth to and buried?”
“It’s because you cannot see!”
“You, you let your eyes get the better of you!” Gasp.
X
The professor takes Safiya on a course about the country’s failed medical system. And the indomitability of a brother’s craziness in expecting his elder sister’s impossible return:
Karimah was the superhero of Hassan’s childhood fantasy, a god unto his youth. He burgeoned in the belief that she was immortal, only for Karimah to bleed to death on an operating table a year ago. The surgeon accidentally cut off a chunk of her kidney.
In the final seconds of her life, she said something to me. I was to only relay it to Hassan after he was done with his exams. I did that over the phone, two weeks later. He flew back from school immediately, swollen with suffering, feeling betrayed. The message was: Tell him not to miss me.
He has barricaded himself with the belief that Karimah will come back. Nothing will suffice until that happens.
XI
Today, Safiya’s mind is a freeway bursting through a desert. The more she thinks of something, the more it coasts farther and farther from her mind. She goes to the sitting room straight from the shower, in a towel tightly wound around her chest and turns on the TV. As expected: Many more dead. Many more injured.
She has not heard from Hassan since he left for Lagos and she began to spend nights at the Professor’s house. She phones him, wanting gist about the ongoing exhibition and to know how he has been. When he picks up, he rattles, “Karimah? Sister Karimah?” In a pleading tone, he adds, “Talk to me, sister Karimah.”
She exhales when her call card runs out. Her ringtone fills her with adrenaline as he calls back. She switches off the phone and plods to the room she now knows belongs to Karimah.
Safiya makes for the bureau in the room. There is a flamingo-pink diary on its surface. She opens it and reads the handwriting but barely understands the words. She looks at the pictures slotted in and notes Karimah―bright-eyed, dimpled, bearing a crescent scar under her chin. Crowning their semblance are the avocado-shaped heads and the martial build of the Amazons.
In a spellbinding picture, Karimah is wearing red shorts and a white sweater with a yellow canary woven on its front. Hassan is beside her in a sleeveless shirt and baggy shorts. They are in front of Shoprite―hands, armed with yellow shopping bags, held to a twilight sky. Safiya mimics Karimah’s smile again and again in front of the gilt-edged mirror in the room, until her cheeks ache.
Something exhorts Safiya on. She rummages through the camphor-tinctured clothes in Karimah’s wardrobe and pulls out a bunch of them for closer inspection. She drags down an Echolac box from the top of the wardrobe and continues her search. Her head swirls with excitement when she finds the sweater with the yellow canary tucked in the box. It seems as though she has been underwater without an oxygen mask―holding her breath all the while―looking for the unknown and eventually seeing it.
She holds the sweater to the light with one hand, the other unfastening the towel on her chest. It drops to the floor like moulted snake skin. She stands, legs astride, naked, becoming.
XII
It’s night, and drizzly, as Hassan sounds the Prado’s horn at the gate.
“Are you ready?” The Professor asks Safiya, kissing the scar on her chin, her trembling hands sliding across the canary sweater. When Safiya slipped it on, a shiver shot through her body, leaving a trail of goosebump.
She nods. “I think I am.”
The shaft of the Prado’s headlamps hits Safiya as she steps outside to welcome Hassan. The car squeals to a stop. Hassan jumps out―engine still running−and gawks at the particular appearance caught in the glare of the headlamps. His voice is shrill in the night, “Sister Karimah!”
Safiya enacts the practiced smile. He swoops to her, headlong.
“I knew you would come back home,” he says, panting for breath. “I knew I would see you again.” The rain pelts him, pelts his words. He grips her shoulders, looking wide-eyed, before taking her in his arms as he sobs.
“Hassan. I am home now.” The cadence of her voice shocks her as much as the strangely familiar comfort of the hands that squeeze her. “I’ve missed you very much.” A silent cry fills her mouth, loosening her body until she is numb.
Safiya would always wonder at this moment and say to herself, that was not my voice. That was not me.