News from Home Read online

  First published 2010 by

  INTERLINK BOOKS

  An imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Ltd

  46 Crosby Street, Northampton, Massachusetts 01060

  www.interlinkbooks.com

  Text copyright © Sefi Atta, 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Atta, Sefi.

  News from home / by Sefi Atta.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56656-803-6 (pbk.)

  1. Nigeria—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3601.T78N49 2010

  813’.6—dc22

  2009048648

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications, where earlier versions of these stories appeared:

  “The Miracle Worker” in Eclectica Magazine, 2003 (third prize in the Zoetrope Short Fiction Contest, 2002). “Hailstones on Zamfara” in Carve Magazine and Los Angeles Review, 2003 (winner of the Red Hen Press Short Story Award, 2003). “Spoils” as “Spoils of the Death Road” in Per Contra, 2006. “Lawless” in Carve Magazine and African Love Stories (Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2006). “Twilight Trek” in International PEN, 2006 (winner of the David T.K. Wong Prize, 2005). “Last Trip” in Chimurenga, 2005 (short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing, 2006). “News from Home” as “A Union on Independence Day” in Eclectica Magazine, 2003 (finalist for the storySouth Million Writers Award, 2004). “Green” in storySouth, 2004, and X-24: unclassified, 2007.

  Cover image © Ferdinandreus / Dreamstime.com

  Book design by Juliana Spear

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  for Gboyega and Temi

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  THE MIRACLE WORKER

  HAILSTONES ON ZAMFARA

  SPOILS

  LAWLESS

  TWILIGHT TREK

  A TEMPORARY POSITION

  MADNESS IN THE FAMILY

  LAST TRIP

  NEWS FROM HOME

  GREEN

  YAHOO YAHOO

  THE MIRACLE WORKER

  Makinde’s only point of contention with his new wife, Bisi, was that she gave too much in tithes to her church. Ten percent was not enough for Bisi. She had to prove just how born-again she was, and each time she visited the Abundant Life Tabernacle, she placed a little extra on the collection tray for the married women’s fellowship, a haven for gossips as far as Makinde was concerned.

  Makinde was a panel beater. He worked on a lot on the corner of a Lagos street. Bisi sold bread and boiled eggs to bus passengers at a nearby depot. When she abandoned her colorful up-and-downs for black dresses, Makinde didn’t object. When she stopped speaking to his non-Christian friends because they were sinners, he didn’t say a word. He broke his hand after a motorcycle taxi almost ran over him. (Makinde dived into a nearby gutter and held his head for protection. The slime in the gutter was masking a bed of rocks.) Bisi fasted two weeks for his hand to heal. He ate her share of meals and recovered with his small finger permanently bent at a right angle. Bisi was prone to zeal, he thought, so on that afternoon when she came to the lot with his usual lunch of bread and boiled egg, and she saw the windscreen of an old car that had been sitting there for years, and she fell on her knees saying it was a vision of the Virgin Mary, Makinde barely raised his head from his sandwich to acknowledge her. He had cleaned the windscreen with an oily rag to get rid of some bird droppings that offended him. The rain had fallen lightly that morning, and Bisi wasn’t even a Catholic.

  She ran to the bus depot to tell passengers she’d seen a vision. About a dozen of them came back to confirm. A few, mostly men, walked away joking about Nigerian women and their pious ways. The rest, mostly women, stayed to stare at the dirty windscreen. They trembled and burst into tears. It was a miracle, they said. There was a clear figure all right: one small circle over a bigger mound and rainbow colors around the small circle. More bus passengers joined the onlookers as word of the vision spread. Soon there were enough to make his work impossible. Makinde drove them away.

  All his life he had worked—at least from the time his mother had stopped hand-feeding him. He started off by selling oranges on a tray; he never attended school. At age ten he began his apprenticeship with his father, a self-taught mechanic. Makinde pumped tires, plucked nails from them, and patched them up, before graduating to changing spark plugs.

  He was not the best mechanic in Lagos, but he was one of the few that people could leave their vehicles with, without fear that parts would go missing. He was amazed by some of the clients he encountered, Mercedes owners, who had access to his country’s elusive oil money. Yet these wealthy people were frugal when it came to paying for work. They handed Makinde small change with soft plump palms, while Makinde couldn’t even remember the color of his own fingernails. He had black oil under them and cleaned his hands with petrol dabbed on rags like the one he’d used on the windscreen. He ate zero-one-zero to save money: nothing for breakfast, one big lunch meal, nothing for dinner. This was the real miracle: he was still poor.

  “My wife,” he said, after the visitors had left, “I don’t care if you choose to waste your earnings on your church—actually I do, but nothing I say will change your mind. What I won’t tolerate is you having a church service here, on my lot, and getting in the way of my work.”

  “Why?” Bisi asked.

  “Your people will scare my customers away with their wailing and shaking.”

  “How?” Bisi asked.

  This was her style of arguing. She wouldn’t challenge him, but she asked enough questions to drive him to distraction and hopefully have her way.

  “All I’m saying is that it must never happen again,” Makinde answered.

  He was known as a patient man, because he didn’t like talking; talking took his energy. Bisi called him a stubborn man. He refused to attend church services with her.

  The next day when Makinde arrived at work a group of about twenty people were waiting in his lot, men, women and children included. They wore white robes and were barefoot despite the ground, a black surface of oil and dirt.

  “We have come to see the vision,” an old man said.

  “In the name of God,” Makinde muttered.

  It was about five thirty in the morning. Bisi couldn’t have told them. He had not bargained on this, those people from yesterday spreading the news.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t have you praying on my lot.”

  “Unfortunately that is out of your control,” the old man said. “Celestial forces have chosen this place. You’d do best to submit to their will, rather than try to stand in the way.” The old man was smiling, but Makinde was afraid anyway. He believed in a celestial force. He just didn’t believe the celestial force considered him special enough to deliver him.

  “Over there,” he said.

  He pointed at the old car, incidentally a once beige Peugeot 405. Now it resembled a carcass. The seats and steering wheel were gone, removed by robbers. The barefoot group walked towards the windscreen. The old man saw the vision first and fell on his knees. His troupe followed, and then they hummed. Makinde beat a panel loudly enough to drown out their noise. At most, he hoped, five groups might visit his lot. Three that day, and maybe two the next. He’d heard about such visions, on dirty glass in poor districts. He could not read, so he didn’t know that, in Lagos, these visions actually drew what newspaper reporters called Throngs, and that these throngs Flocked. Throngs Flock to Vision
of Mary on Latrine Window. Throngs Flock to Vision of Mary on Popcorn and Groundnut Seller’s Glass Cubicle. Such were past national headlines.

  Makinde’s prediction was an underestimate. Two hundred and fifty people visited his lot in the morning. By afternoon, about five hundred had been. Makinde stopped showing them the windscreen of the Peugeot. A tall thin woman stayed from her morning visit to act as a guide. She told the story to a reporter: how Makinde and his wife were newlyweds, Bisi was born-again and Makinde didn’t attend church. This vision had occurred on his lot nonetheless, and it was a clear sign that God’s mercy could manifest just about anywhere.

  Bisi came at lunchtime with Makinde’s usual bread and boiled egg. She saw the crowds and immediately denied she was responsible: “It wasn’t me!”

  “Don’t worry, I believe you,” Makinde said. The situation was out of her control.

  The guide woman approached her. “God’s blessings to you, my sister.”

  “To you, too,” Bisi said.

  “We’ve been here all morning, without pay, showing the people where to pray for miracles.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, and we are getting quite hungry now, so please can you go back to your stall and get bread and eggs for us to eat?”

  The guide was referring to herself alone. The miracle she’d prayed for was for others to stop saying she was insane. She knew her calling was to do God’s work. Anywhere else in the world she would be a street preacher. Here, she was sent to a hospital, where the doctors injected her while the nurses held her down and later beat her up.

  Makinde told Bisi to get her bread and a boiled egg, and then as both women left to carry out their respective tasks, the thought came to his mind. Without pay, the guide had said. The people were standing on his lot, getting in the way of his work. Why not charge them? They paid to attend church. He calculated his lost earnings, net of transportation. He divided that by the number of visitors who came to the lot. He rounded down, taking poverty into consideration, and ended up with a fee of one naira per person.

  In front of his lot was the gutter he had dived into to save his life. There was a wide plank over it, tough enough to support vehicles. He stood on the plank and announced, “Excuse me? I am Makinde. Yes, em, the owner of this lot. I have decided I will not get in the way of your worship today. But... I... I am a man of small means, as you can see, and my business is, em, suffering from the constant traffic in and out. Yes, what I’m suggesting is that... can you... can you please... ?”

  Talking was exhausting him. Hardly anyone was listening anyway. They were praying, singing, rocking. Makinde raised his voice. “My name is Makinde. I’m the owner of this lot, and I’m telling you now, if you wish to continue to see your vision, I suggest you pay me one naira each, or else I will take a rag and wipe the vision off.”

  A hush fell on his lot. One or two people were asking what he was talking about and why he was getting angry. The guide woman was explaining to them when another visitor appeared. Makinde stretched his hand out without looking at her face.

  “It’s one naira to enter, please,” he said.

  “Since when?”

  It was Bisi. She had returned with the bread and boiled egg for the guide, and so fast.

  Makinde earned money that month from the visitors to his lot. He was even in the Sunday newspapers. Throngs Flock to Miracle at Mechanic’s. People came to pray for cures, scholarships, school examinations, job applications, job promotions, and money mostly. There were visitors in wheelchairs, on crutches; blind visitors; insane, evicted, heartbroken, abandoned, bitter, barren visitors. Beggars and gossips, too, including the women of his wife’s fellowship. Some people complained about the one-naira fee. A few refused and walked away. One was a priest. “H-how can you do this?” he asked Makinde. “C-capitalize on people’s s-sorrows and-and woes?” Makinde waived his fee as he secretly did for beggars and sick children. The priest still refused to walk into his lot. “D-did Jesus charge for miracles? How do you sleep at night know-knowing you do this for a living?”

  Quite well, when he wasn’t making love to Bisi, who was now talking about having a child and perhaps taking a break from her work. She conceived one night during a thunderstorm. Hearing the rain on his roof, Makinde worried about the fate of his Virgin Mary, though he’d protected the Peugeot’s windscreen with a tarpaulin sheet and secured its edges with rocks. Had he known the wind was strong enough to shift one of the rocks, and that the rock would roll off the roof of the Peugeot, free an edge of the tarpaulin, and the tarpaulin would flop over the bonnet of the Peugeot, and the raindrops would fall on the windscreen and wipe the vision away, he would have worried more.

  He arrived at work the next morning and there were only two people in his lot. One was a vagrant who normally came to look for scraps of food; the second was the guide woman. “Our vision is no more,” she said.

  The ground of his lot had turned to mud and the gutter in front was overflowing with slime. Makinde could see only the clean windscreen of the Peugeot. He was thinking about how to get back to panel beating.

  The guide continued. “It appears the storm last night is the cause. Our work here is done, then. We don’t expect you’ll have visitors anymore and, as you know, the Lord giveth and the—”

  “Quiet!” Makinde shouted, so loudly she ran out of his lot. What kind of Lord gaveth, and then taketh and taketh and taketh? He kicked the Peugeot, which appeared to be grinning, with enough force to dent it. Then he boxed it with just as much force, and the impact straightened his bent little finger.

  He did have one visitor that day. A tax assessor, who seemed to be studying the sweat on his own nose. “Mr. Makinde,” he began. “Eh, I read about you in the papers. You’ve been getting a lot of attention here recently, eh? Since you can’t call this a church, nor yourself a priest, it means that you are liable for taxes.”

  Makinde had not paid taxes before. Taxes were for people who wore shirts and ties, people who received checks regularly. He thought the tax assessor was a con man.

  “From where are you?” he asked.

  “I represent the government.”

  “Couldn’t they give you a clean shirt?”

  “You’re practically in tatters yourself. What have you done with your money?”

  Makinde stroked his bandaged finger, feeling exhausted. Perhaps the man really was a tax assessor, and if so, why didn’t he go back to the people he represented, those who had access to his country’s oil money, and assess them?

  “This is my lot,” he said.

  “Where is your title?” the tax assessor asked.

  “What?”

  “Your title deed. To show that the lot belongs to you.”

  Makinde trembled with anger. How dare the tax assessor question his ownership of the lot. “My father left me this lot,” he said. “My father found this lot. He cleared this lot. He worked on this lot.” Long before that part of Lagos had been deemed a slum district.

  “So it’s yours,” the tax assessor said. “Then you must show me evidence, at least, that you’ve paid ground rent on the property, from the time you inherited it. Don’t look so vexed. That is another department’s business, but I will make sure I alert them after I have finished my assessment of your taxable earnings, eh?”

  Makinde removed his shirt. His earnings were hidden under his mattress at home. He slept on them. He wasn’t about to let this messenger of wealthy men have access to them.

  “What is this?” the tax assessor asked, expecting a blow.

  “Here I am,” Makinde said, unzipping his trousers. “Tax my head, my arms, my broken finger included. Tax my legs. See? My foot is sprained, tax that. Here, tax my balls, and when you finish with them”—he turned his backside to the tax assessor—“tax my ass.”

  The tax assessor promised he would return with henchmen. “You will pay,” he said, “or they will help themselves to your wife.”

  A wife who wouldn’t even allow Makinde a
ccess to her. She was nauseous and eating dirt now that she was pregnant. Dirt. “I can’t help it,” she said. “The sight of it makes me want to touch it. The feel makes me want to sniff it. The smell makes me want to eat it.”

  Makinde watched as she scooped up soil and licked it. He tried to stop her by reminding her of worm eggs. He couldn’t afford to take her to a doctor. He couldn’t go to work for fear the tax assessor would return with henchmen. They argued. She eventually packed a portmanteau and said she was going to her mother in the village for a week.

  Makinde decided to seek counsel from Rasaki, a local man known as the Duke of Downtown; Rasaki, whose work included playing the pools and brokering assault contracts. People said he was friendly with thugs and armed robbers in Lagos, that he smoked marijuana, and drank ogogoro, and called out to Lagos chicks, “Baby, I’ve got a big one.” And they replied, “Bet it’s the size of a Bic biro.” That sort of duke. But he was also known as a person who helped those who were in trouble with the authorities: the police, the mobile squad known as Kill-and-Go, customs and excise and taxmen. He knew exactly who to bribe.

  Rasaki was smoking a Bicycle cigarette as Makinde talked. His fingers were as black as his lips, and his teeth were the color of curry. “My friend,” he rasped, “what is wrong with your head? You don’t insult a tax assessor.”

  Makinde mumbled, “It’s too late for that advice.”

  Rasaki scratched his armpit. He had just woken up. On his wall was a calendar. The girl of the month, Miss February, had one breast pointing east, the other pointing west. Her teeth had a center parting. Her name was Dolly. “You should have kept your mouth shut,” Rasaki said. “Or else you want to offer your wife?”

  “My wife,” Makinde said. “She smells of boiled egg most days. Right now she eats dirt. I love her. I would not offer my wife to the president if he wanted her.”

  Rasaki coughed and smacked his chest. “I thought not, and I’m telling you, these taxmen are not normal human beings. They have a lot of hatred in their hearts, and they are vengeful. It is how they get their jobs in the first place. I suggest—and you don’t have to take my advice, I’m only suggesting—that you pay him the money he asked for.”