Paradise tales, p.34
Paradise Tales, page 34
My heart is so sore I cannot speak.
“What will you do?” she asks. That sounds forlorn, so she then tries to sound perky. “Any ideas?”
“Open a casino,” I say, feeling deadly.
“Oh! Channa! What a wonderful idea, it’s just perfect!”
“Isn’t it? All those people with nothing to do.” Someplace they can bring their powder. I look out at the sea. Rith rolls his eyes. Where is there for Rith to go from here? I wonder.
I see that he, too, will have to destroy his inheritance. What will he do, drill the rock? Dive down into the lava? Or maybe out of pure rebellion ascend to Earth again?
The drug wears off and Gerda awakes, but her eyes are calm and she takes an interest in the table and the food. She walks outside onto the mall floor, and suddenly squeals with laughter and runs to the railing to look out. She points at the glowing yellow sign with black ears and says “Disney.” She says all the brand names aloud, as if they are all old friends.
I was wrong. Gerda is at home here.
I can see myself wandering the whispering marble halls like a ghost, listening for something that is dead.
We go to our suite. It’s just like the damn casino, but there are no boats outside to push slivers of wood into your hands, no sand too hot for your feet. Cambodia has ceased to exist, for us.
Agnete is beside herself with delight. “What window do you want?”
I ask for downtown Phnom Penh. A forest of gray, streaked skyscrapers to the horizon. “In the rain,” I ask.
“Can’t we have something a bit more cheerful?”
“Sure. How about Tuol Sleng prison?” I know she doesn’t want me. I know how to hurt her. I go for a walk. Overhead in the dome is the Horsehead Nebula. Radiant, wonderful, deadly, thirty years to cross at the speed of light. I go to the pharmacy. The pharmacist looks like a phony doctor in an ad. I ask, “Is…is there some way out?”
“You can go Earthside with no ID. People do. They end up living in huts on Sentosa. But that’s not what you mean, is it?” I just shake my head. It’s like we’ve been edited to ensure that nothing disturbing actually gets said. He gives me a tiny white bag with blue lettering on it.
Instant, painless, like all my flopping guests at the casino.
“Not here,” he warns me. “You take it and go somewhere else, like the public toilets.”
Terrifyingly, the pack isn’t sealed properly. I’ve picked it up, I could have the dust of it on my hands; I don’t want to wipe them anywhere. What if one of the children licks it?
I know then I don’t want to die. I just want to go home, and always will. I am a son of Kambu, Kampuchea.
“Ah,” he says and looks pleased. “You know, the Buddha says that we must accept.”
“So why didn’t we accept the Earth?” I ask him.
The pharmacist in his white lab coat shrugs. “We always want something different.”
We always must move on, and if we can’t leave home, it drives us mad. Blocked and driven mad, we do something new.
There was one final phase to becoming a man. I remember my uncle.
The moment his children and his brother’s children were all somewhat grown, he left us to become a monk. That was how a man was completed, in the old days.
I stand with a merit bowl in front of the wat. I wear orange robes with a few others. Curiously enough, Rith has joined me. He thinks he has rebelled. People from Sri Lanka, Laos, Burma, and my own land give us food for their dead. We bless it and chant in Pali.
All component things are indeed transient.
They are of the nature of arising and decaying.
Having come into being, they cease to be.
The cessation of this process is bliss.
Uninvited he has come hither
He has departed hence without approval
Even as he came, just so he went
What lamentation then could there be?
We got what we wanted. We always do, don’t we, as a species? One way or another.
What We Found
Can’t sleep. Still dark. Waiting for light in the East.
My rooster crows. Knows it’s my wedding day. I hear the pig rooting around outside. Pig, the traditional gift for the family of my new wife. I can’t sleep because alone in the darkness there is nothing between me and the realization that I do not want to get married. Well, Patrick, you don’t have long to decide.
The night bakes black around me. Three-thirty A.M. In three hours, the church at the top of the road will start with the singing. Two hours after that, everyone in both families will come crowding into my yard.
My rooster crows again, all his wives in the small space behind the house. It is still piled with broken bottles from when my father lined the top of that wall with glass shards.
That was one of his good times, when he wore trousers and a hat and gave orders. I mixed the concrete, and passed it up in buckets to my eldest brother, Matthew. He sat on the wall like riding a horse, slopping on concrete and pushing in the glass. Raphael was reading in the shade of the porch. “I’m not wasting my time doing all that,” he said. “How is broken glass going to stop a criminal who wants to get in?” He always made me laugh, I don’t know why. Nobody else was smiling.
When we were young my father would keep us sitting on the hot, hairy sofa in the dark, no lights, no TV because he was driven mad by the sound of the generator. Eyes wide, he would quiver like a wire, listening for it to start up again. My mother tried to speak and he said, “Sssh. Sssh! There it goes again.”
“Jacob, the machine cannot turn itself on.”
“Sssh! Sssh!” He would not let us move. I was about seven, and terrified. If the generator was wicked enough to scare my big strong father, what would it do to little me? I keep asking my mother what does the generator do?
“Nothing, your father is just being very careful.”
“Terhemba is a coward,” my brother Matthew said, using my Tiv name. My mother shushed him, but Matthew’s merry eyes glimmered at me: I will make you miserable later. Raphael prized himself loose from my mother’s grip and stomped across the sitting room floor.
People think Makurdi is a backwater, but now we have all you need for a civilized life. Beautiful banks with security doors, retina ID, and air conditioning; new roads, solar panels on all the streetlights, and our phones are stuffed full of e-books. On one of the river islands they built the new hospital; and my university has a medical school, all pink and state-funded with laboratories that are as good as most. Good enough for controlled experiments with mice.
My research assistant Jide is Yoruba and his people believe that the grandson first born after his grandfather’s death will continue that man’s life. Jide says that we have found how that is true. This is a problem for Christian Nigerians, for it means that evil continues.
What we found in mice is this. If you deprive a mouse of a mother’s love, if you make him stressed through infancy, his brain becomes methylated. The high levels of methyl deactivate a gene that produces a neurotropin important for memory and emotional balance in both mice and humans. Schizophrenics have abnormally low levels of it.
It is a miracle of God that with new generation, our genes are knocked clean. There is a new beginning. Science thought this meant that the effects of one life could not be inherited by another.
What we found is that high levels of methyl affect the sperm cells. Methylation is passed on with them, and thus the deactivation. A grandfather’s stress is passed on through the male line, yea unto the third generation.
Jide says that what we have found is how the life of the father is continued by his sons. And that is why I don’t want to wed.
My father would wander all night. His three older sons slept in one room. Our door would click open and he would stand and glare at me, me particularly, with a boggled and distracted eye as if I had done something outrageous. He would be naked; his towering height and broad shoulders humbled me, made me feel puny and endangered. I have an odd-shaped head with an indented V going down my forehead. People said it was the forceps tugging me out: I was a difficult birth. That was supposed to be why I was slow to speak, slow to learn. My father believed them.
My mother would try to shush him back into their bedroom. Sometimes he would be tame and allow himself to be guided; he might chuckle as if it were a game and hug her. Or he might blow up, shouting and flinging his hands about, calling her woman, witch, or demon. Once she whispered, “It’s you who have the demon; the demon has taken hold of you, Jacob.”
Sometimes he shuffled past our door and out into the Government street, sleeping-walking to his and our shame.
In those days, it was the wife’s job to keep family business safe within the house. Our mother locked all the internal doors even by day to keep him inside, away from visitors from the church or relatives who dropped in on their way to Abuja. If he was being crazy in the sitting room, she would shove us back into our bedroom or whisk us with the broom out into the yard. She would give him whisky if he asked for it, to get him to sleep. Our mother could never speak of these things to anybody, not even her own mother, let alone to us.
We could hear him making noises at night, groaning as if in pain, or slapping someone. The baby slept in my parents’ room and he would start to wail. I would stare into the darkness: was Baba hurting my new brother? In the morning his own face would be puffed out. It was Raphael who dared to say something. The very first time I heard that diva voice was when he asked her, sharp and demanding, “Why does that man hit himself?”
My mother got angry and pushed Raphael’s face; slap would be the wrong word; she was horrified that the problem she lived with was clear to a five-year-old. “You do not call your father ‘that man’! Who are you to ask questions? I can see it’s time we put you to work like children used to be when I was young. You don’t know what good luck you had to be born into this household!”
Raphael looked back at her, lips pursed. “That does not answer my question.”
My mother got very angry at him, shouted more things. Afterward he looked so small and sad that I pulled him closer to me on the sofa. He crawled up onto my lap and just sat there. “I wish we were closer to the river,” he said, “so we could go and play.”
“Mamamimi says the river is dangerous.” My mother’s name was Mimi, which means truth, so Mama Truth was a kind of title.
“Everything’s dangerous,” he said, his lower lip thrust out. A five-year-old should not have such a bleak face.
By the time I was nine, Baba would try to push us into the walls, wanting us hidden or wanting us gone. His vast hands would cover the back of our heads or shoulders and grind us against the plaster. Raphael would look like a crushed berry, but he shouted in a rage, “No! No! No!”
Yet my father wore a suit and drove himself to work. Jacob Terhemba Shawo worked as a tax inspector and electoral official.
Did other government employees act the same way? Did they put on a shell of calm at work? He would be called to important meetings in Abuja and stay for several days. Once Mamamimi sat at the table, her white bread uneaten, not caring what her children heard. “What you go to Abuja for? Who you sleep with there, Wildman? What diseases do you bring back into my house?”
We stared down at our toast and tea, amazed to hear such things. “You tricked me into marriage with you. I bewail the day I accepted you. Nobody told me you were crazy!”
My father was not a man to be dominated in his own house. Clothed in his functionary suit, he stood up. “If you don’t like it, go. See who will have you since you left your husband. See who will want you without all the clothes and jewelry I buy you. Maybe you no longer want this comfortable home. Maybe you no longer want your car. I can send you back to your village, and no one would blame me.”
My mother spun away into the kitchen and began to slam pots. She did not weep. She was not one to be dominated either, but knew she could not change how things had to be. My father climbed into his SUV for Abuja in his special glowering suit that kept all questions at bay, with his polished head and square-cornered briefcase. The car purred away down the tree-lined Government street with no one to wave him good-bye.
JIDE’S FULL NAME is Babajide. In Yoruba it means Father Wakes Up. His son is called Babatunde, Father Returns. It is something many people believe in the muddle of populations that is Nigeria.
My work on mice was published in Nature and widely cited. People wanted to believe that character could be inherited; that stressed fathers passed incapacities on to their grandchildren. It seemed to open a door to inherited characteristics, perhaps a modified theory of evolution. Our experiments had been conclusive: not only were there the non-genetically inherited emotional tendencies, but we could objectively measure the levels of methyl.
My father was born in 1965, the year before the Tiv rioted against what they thought were Muslim incursions. It was a time of coup and countercoup. The violence meant my grandfather left Jos, and moved the family to Makurdi. They walked, pushing some of their possessions and my infant father in a wheelbarrow. The civil war came with its trains full of headless Igbo rattling eastward, and air force attacks on our own towns. People my age say, oh those old wars. What can Biafra possibly have to do with us, now?
What we found is that 1966 can reach into your head and into your balls and stain your children red. You pass war on. The cranky old men in the villages, the lack of live music in clubs, the distrust of each other, soldiers everywhere, the crimes of colonialism embedded in the pattern of our roads. We live our grandfathers’ lives.
Outside, the stars spangle. It will be a beautiful clear day. My traditional clothes hang unaccepted in the closet and I fear for any son that I might have. What will I pass on? Who would want their son to repeat the life of my father, the life of my brother? Ought I to get married at all? Outside in the courtyard, wet with dew, the white plastic chairs are lined up for the guests.
My Grandmother Iveren would visit without warning. Her name meant “Blessing,” which was a bitter thing for us. Grandmother Iveren visited all her children in turn no matter how far they moved to get away from her: Kano, Jalingo, or Makurdi.
A taxi would pull up and we would hear a hammering on our gate. One of us boys would run to open it and there she would be, standing like a princess. “Go tell my son to come and pay for the taxi. Bring my bags, please.”
She herded us around our living room with the burning tip of her cigarette, inspecting us as if everything was found wanting. The Intermittent Freezer that only kept things cool, the gas cooker, the rack of vegetables, the many tins of powdered milk, the rumpled throw rug, the blanket still on the sofa, the TV that was left tuned all day to Africa Magic. She would switch it off with a sigh as she passed. “Education,” she would say, shaking her head. She had studied literature at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and she used that like she used her cigarette. Iveren was tiny, thin, very pretty, and elegant in glistening blue or purple dresses with matching headpieces.
My mother’s mother might also be staying, rattling out garments on her sewing machine. Mamagrand, we called her. The two women would feign civility, even smiling. My father lumbered in with suitcases; the two grandmothers would pretend that it made no difference to them where they slept, but Iveren would get the back bedroom and Mamagrand the sofa. My father then sat down to gaze at his knees, his jaws clamped shut like a turtle’s. His sons assumed that that was what all children did, and that mothers always kept order in this way.
Having finished pursuing us around our own house, she would sigh, sit on the sofa, and wait expectantly for my mother to bring her food. Mamamimi dutifully did so—family being family—and then sat down, her face going solid and her arms folded.
“You should know what the family is saying about you,” Grandmother might begin, smiling so sweetly. “They are saying that you have infected my son, that you are unclean from an abortion.” She would say that my aunt Judith would no longer allow Mamamimi into her house and had paid a woman to cast a spell on my mother to keep her away.
“Such a terrible thing to do. The spell can only be cured by cutting it with razor blades.” Grandmother Iveren looked as though she might enjoy helping.
“Thank heavens such a thing cannot happen in a Christian household,” my mother’s mother would say.
“Could I have something to drink?”
From the moment Grandmother arrived, all the alcohol in the house would start to disappear: little airline sample bottles, whisky from my father’s boss, even the brandy Baba had brought from London. And not just alcohol. Grandmother would offer to help Mamamimi clean a bedroom; and small things would be gone from it forever, jewelry or scarves or little bronzes. She sold the things she pilfered, to keep herself in dresses and perfume.
It wasn’t as if her children neglected their duty. She would be fed and housed for as long as any of us could stand it. Even so, she would steal and hide all the food in the house. My mother went grim-faced, and would lift up mattresses to display the tins and bottles hidden under it. The top shelf of the bedroom closet would contain the missing stewpot with that evening’s meal. “It’s raw!” my mother would swelter at her. “It’s not even cooked! Do you want it to go rotten in this heat?”
“I never get fed anything in this house. I am watched like a hawk!” Iveren complained, her face turned toward her giant son.
Mamamimi had strategies. She might take to her room ill, and pack meat in a cool chest and keep it under her bed. Against all tradition, especially if Father was away, she would sometimes refuse to cook any food at all. For herself, for Grandmother, or even us. “I’m on strike!” she announced once. “Here, here is money. Go buy food! Go cook it!” She pressed folded money into our hands. Raphael and I made a chicken stew, giggling. We had been warned about Iveren’s cooking. “Good boys, to take the place of the mother,” she said, winding our hair in her fingers.
