Chapter 32: Chapter 32
CHAPTER 28
The afternoon passed like the breeze in the desert. It was unobstructed, not having to think twice, just passing. Teju has been so marinated in his thoughts that it seemed the day had skipped the afternoon. Possibly the day had been impatient on his behalf and had jumped from morning to evening. He had been indoors all day, manned by his misfortune. He could not watch the sunrise on an ungrateful universe or the sun set into the underworld. It was a joyful thing to watch the horizon, but the beauty of the horizon could not have appealed to him at this time.
He had resolved to plug his ears with earphones and listen to Ed Sheeran. His songs were like narcotics to his present emotional anguish. As the evening of the day breezed in, he felt the need of keeping a company. It seemed prudent to talk to somebody at least. He had not seen Sam since last Friday. It was the most unusual thing about his life presently. He wondered how Sam was handling the unveiling of his promiscuous scandal. Though Sam was not worthy of being his confidant or his casual therapist in matters concerning marital issues, he felt he needed to talk to someone who was ready to listen. Who knows, something good might come out of Nazareth this time around.
The night was a clear night. Teju observed the innumerable stars that dotted the black sky as he walked out of the house in his grey polo shirt and black jean trousers. He used to try to connect the stars in the sky to find the archer when he was much younger as he had read in his fantasy-ridden children fictions. Unfortunately, he had never been lucky enough to find the archer as the characters in his books did. Today,however, fantasy remained a fantasy. Nothing as idle as finding a nonexistent archer was going to happen.
The crescent moon shimmered on the earth and its passive and active inhabitants. It lighted the dark night like mild dabs of white powder on a black face. It sketched the murky shadows of objects on the surface of the earth. Even the 10-feet tall concrete walls that surrounded the house, crowned with encircled barbed wire, the cars and the bougainvillaeas in the yard had their images biasedly outlined on the earth surface, like a swarm of silhouettes. He wondered if the song he sang about the moon when he was a kid was true. He wondered if the moon saw him if the moon saw his misery. It was a little bit cold. The harmattan had started peeping behind the departing raining season.
The taxi dropped him off at the junction of Sam’s house. He had decided against driving his car. He had suddenly discovered that he needed to stay clear of certain things, and one of them was the perfume of the interior of his car. He preferred the discordant smell of the taxi macerated with the scent of passengers. He inhaled the humid-free breeze as they beat against his face, stroking his skin with its toothsome succulence.
Teju was determined not to talk about their marital nightmares. If Sam gets to know about his domestic problem, he could become boastful of his licentious philosophy. Or he could tease him to death while he talked about his own marital calamity being a blessing in disguise. Teju would rather tell him how he had been cooking in the kitchen. Though he was well aware of the sarcasm Sam would subject him to, calling him ‘woman wrapper’. That is; a sort of man browbeaten by a woman. Sam would never enter the kitchen in his own house when he had a wife, as though if he did, he would be struck dead by God. “Why do I work so hard then?” he would say or “I wonder why I paid so much dowry on her head” as if his wife was a mere slave he had bought for a handsome price.
Though he tried not to imagine what Sam’s attitude would be, he could not stop imagining how carefree and apathetic Sam was going to be to his crumbling marriage. Probably he was not going to meet him at home. Probably they would have divorced and Sam would have relocated without a curtsey notice put across to his long-standing best friend.
Immediately he entered through the gate, he had started to hear distant voices, resonating shouts. He could hardly discern if it was of joy or of the otherwise. He was getting closer to Sam’s and his wife’s apartment which was a three bedroom flat when the voices became more concrete and audible. It became apparent that it was a clamour of the otherwise.
He could hear Sam’s voice. His voice was monstrous, thickly woven with outright hatefulness. It was the exact reverse of the voice he used when he told him of his trophies and medals with women. The other voice was his wife’s. The music in her voice seemed to have been sapped as she wailed painfully at some audible thudding of what sounded like lashes.
Instead of knocking on the door, Teju navigated to the window of the sitting room. The curtain was yanked aside. He saw Sam pounding his wife with punches and with the lashes of his heavy leather belt in succession. His wife was fighting violently both against the blows and the pain that accompanied them. It was such a grotesque sight. Teju was aghast. His inner-man was mortified.
Sam was a dog and a beast, Teju thought. He quickly took away his eyes from the scene. Though he felt a big urge to dash into the house with a cudgel and yank it down heavily on Sam’s head, knocking him out of his bestial consciousness into a lesson-teaching coma, he hesitated, quite indecisive. His feet shivered as he felt his knees wobbling like a leaf on troubled water, and his hands heavy like pig iron. The burden of his own problem had weighed his hands down so that he could not use them to save other people. He could not wait to witness more of his friend's unjustified brutality, even though he did not know how Sam had been provoked by his wife.
The agony-filled wailing of Sam’s wife echoed with her helplessness. She needed to be salvaged. But somehow to Teju, the odious grunting of Sam and the soprano shrieking of his wife suddenly became indigestible. When their neighbours paid no attention to them, why should he? It was a mistake to think Sam had something good to offer in the first place.
He darted out of the compound as though he had stolen something and was so anxious about escaping before anyone took the sight of him. And as he walked home that night, carrying twice the burden he had took away from home, he thought of how cold he had become. He considered how unfeeling he had turned. Possibly, it could be inhuman to have looked away from Sam’s wife, even when he was the last hope for her to be saved from her beasty husband who, ironically, was his long-standing best friend.