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Civil Peace 1
Jonathan Iwegbu counted himself extra-ordinarily lucky.
'Happy survival!' meant so much more to him than just a
current fashion of greeting old friends in the first hazy days of
peace. It went deep to his heart. He had come out of the war
with five inestimable blessings -- his head, his wife Maria's
head and the heads of three out of their four children. As a
bonus he also had his old bicycle -- a miracle too but naturally
not to be compared to the safety of five human heads.
The bicycle had a little history of its own. One day at the
height of the war it was commandeered 'for urgent military
action'. Hard as its loss would have been to him he would still
have let it go without a thought had he not had some doubts
about the genuineness of the officer. It wasn't his disreputable
rags, nor the toes peeping out of one blue and one brown
canvas shoe, nor yet the two stars of his rank done obviously
in a hurry in biro, that troubled Jonathan; many good and
heroic soldiers looked the same or worse. It was rather a
certain lack of grip and firmness in his manner. So Jonathan,
suspecting he might be amenable to influence, rummaged in
his raffia bag and produced the two pounds with which he had
been going to buy firewood which his wife, Maria, retailed to
camp officials for extra stock-fish and corn meal, and got his
bicycle back. That night he buried it in the little clearing in the
bush where the dead of the camp, including his own youngest
son, were buried. When he dug it up again a year later after the
surrender all it needed was a little palm-oil greasing. 'Nothing
puzzles God,' he said in wonder.
He put it to immediate use as a taxi and accumulated a small
pile of Biafran money ferrying camp officials and their families
across the four-mile stretch to the nearest tarred road. His
standard charge per trip was six pounds and those who had the money were only glad to be rid of some of it in this way. At
the end of a fortnight he had made a small fortune of one
hundred and fifteen pounds.
Then he made the journey to Enugu and found another
miracle waiting for him. It was unbelievable. He rubbed his
eyes and looked again and it was still standing there before
him. But, needless to say, even that monumental blessing
must be accounted also totally inferior to the five heads in the
family. This newest miracle was his little house in Ogui
Overside. Indeed nothing puzzles God! Only two houses
away a huge concrete edifice some wealthy contractor had put
up just before the war was a mountain of rubble. And here was
Jonathan's little zinc house of no regrets built with mud blocks
quite intact! Of course the doors and windows were missing
and five sheets off the roof. But what was that? And anyhow
he had returned to Enugu early enough to pick up bits of old
zinc and wood and soggy sheets of cardboard lying around the
neighbourhood before thousands more came out of their
forest holes looking for the same things. He got a destitute
carpenter with one old hammer, a blunt plane and a few bent
and rusty nails in his tool bag to turn this assortment of wood,
paper and metal into door and window shutters for five
Nigerian shillings or fifty Biafran pounds. He paid the pounds,
and moved in with his overjoyed family carrying five heads on
their shoulders.
His children picked mangoes near the military cemetery and
sold them to soldiers' wives for a few pennies -- real pennies
this time-and his wife started making breakfast akara balls for
neighbours in a hurry to start life again. With his family
earnings he took his bicycle to the villages around and bought
fresh palm-wine which he mixed generously in his rooms with
the water which had recently started running again in the
public tap down the road, and opened up a bar for soldiers and
other lucky people with good money.
At first he went daily, then every other day and finally once
a week, to the offices of the Coal Corporation where he used to
be a miner, to find out what was what. The only thing he did
find out in the end was that that little house of his was even a
greater blessing than he had thought. Some of his fellow
ex-miners who had nowhere to return at the end of the day's
waiting just' slept outside the doors of the offices and cooked
what meal they could scrounge together in Bournvita tins. As
the weeks lengthened and still nobody could say what was
what Jonathan discontinued his weekly visits altogether and
faced his palm-wine bar.
But nothing puzzles God. Came the day of the windfall
when after five days of endless scuffles in queues and counter-
queues in the sun outside the Treasury he had twenty
pounds counted into his palms as ex-gratia award for the
rebel money he had turned in. It was like Christmas for him
and for many others like him when the payments began.
They called it (since few could manage its proper official
name) egg-rasher.
As soon as the pound notes were placed in his palm
Jonathan simply closed it tight over them and buried fist and
money inside his trouser pocket. He had to be extra careful
because he had seen a man a couple of days earlier collapse
into near-madness in an instant before that oceanic crowd
because no sooner had he got his twenty pounds than some
heartless ruffian picked it off him. Though it was not right that
a man in such an extremity of agony should be blamed yet
many in the queues that day were able to remark quietly at the
victim's carelessness, especially after he pulled out the innards
of his pocket and revealed a hole in it big enough to pass a
thief's head. But of course he had insisted that the money had
been in the other pocket, pulling it out too to show its comparative wholeness. So one had to be careful.
Jonathan soon transferred the money to his left hand and
pocket so as to leave his right free for shaking hands should the
need arise, though by fixing his gaze at such an elevation as to
miss all approaching human faces he made sure that the need
did not arise, until he got home.
He was normally a heavy sleeper but that night he heard all
the neighbourhood noises die down one after another. Even
the night watchman who knocked the hour on some metal
somewhere in the distance had fallen silent after knocking one
o'clock' That must have been the last thought in Jonathan's
mind before he was finally carried away himself. He couldn't
have been gone for long, though, when he was violently
awakened again.
To be continued |
