CRY,FATHER!

By Ovo Adagha (Nigeria)

Revised and edited 1/19/08

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                                      Home they brought her warrior dead

                                              She nor swoon’d,nor utter’d cry

                                             All her maidens, watching said,

                                            ‘She must weep or she will die’

                                                             -Alfred Tennyson (The Princess)

It was morning, and the police station was gradually revving up to life. It was getting ready for the different shades of trouble that came its way everyday. The station never lacked in population as scores of people moved like a steady stream all day, through its battered gate.

The station was a large arena, housing three decrepit buildings. On the left was the local penitentiary or cell, where a small rod barricaded opening served as a window. An evil amalgam of smells from unwashed human bodies, mounds of excreta, and other disagreeable elements of life emanated from the cell.

At the middle was the administrative building, a two storey relic from the colonial days. Situated on its right was the mess room where the officers relaxed in their spare time. Some of the police men in their black uniforms huddled together in different groups; some having their break fast, while some were engaged in idle chatter.

Nearby, a small activity was brewing. An anti-crime patrol unit had just driven into the station, bearing the corpses of three armed robbers. The exultant cops were hailed by their colleagues as they came down from the patrol truck. One of them had been hit and he was quickly taken away to a hospital.

There had been a bank robbery. It happened that the thieves were decimated in a police ambush as they tried to escape with their loot. It was not an uncommon sight at the station, as armed robbers were killed frequently in gun battles. A group of onlookers quickly gathered around the police van. They watched the lifeless forms with uncanny concentration, in between sighs of shock and regret for a wasted life.

My father, a seasoned policeman with 31 years of service under his belt, had just arrived at the station for work. At 58, he looked much older than his age. The stress of his work, coupled with destructive effects of diabetes had taken their toll .He walked with a slight limp, a condition brought about by a stiff left knee. He paused as he walked past the onlookers, and strained his neck to catch a glimpse of the fallen thieves.

 The dead were still in the van when he saw them. It was a ghastly sight. They lay spread-eagled in a grotesque manner, their bodies mangled almost beyond recognition by bullets. A small pool of blood was already forming a wedge between them and the bags of stolen money. He gave a little start, and then looked away. A muffled cry of anguish escaped his lips as his most dreaded nightmare came to fruition.

It was perhaps the most terrible moment of his life.

The propensity of the shock he felt, I cannot describe. For many a man would have collapsed under the weight of it, but not my father. He staggered back to his car and leaned on it, his mind reeling in shock. In a little while, his black police fatigue was drenched with perspiration.

He glanced at the scene with a pained look and shuddered. He saw the circle of excited onlookers with their backs turned towards him and the hostile indifference of his fellow cops as they moved around, oblivious of what they had done. Two constables entered the van and dragged the bodies out with a mechanical precision. One of them spat in disgust. The crowd of onlookers roared with applause as they corpses were thrown on the ground.

It was a painful experience for my father as he beheld the scene. He knew that in no distant time, the divisional police head would call a press conference and the bodies will be paraded in front of TV cameras. He turned away in consternation, fighting back a sudden wave of nausea.

With shoulders hunched, he entered the car and drove away, away from the station, from the grief and shame that had just enveloped him. He was going home. No one knew what had happened to him as he left in a semi daze, his features wracked by waves of unshed grief.

He bore it well. Very well indeed for a man who had just seen the corpse of his only son.

************************

My mother once told me that the only time she ever saw my father cry was when I was born. With tears gushing down his cheeks, he had proudly raised me to the skies and muttered something incomprehensible to himself. I was such a tiny creature, barely ten minutes old in the world, but I had made my father cry.

‘He had cried!’ my mother said. I was their first and only son after siring four daughters. The long awaited heir, and as a result they proceeded to spoil me. At a tender age, I discovered that I could get anything I asked for by just throwing a tantrum. This awareness of my powers turned me into a petulant urchin.

I refused to go to school, until I was almost eight years old. No sooner had they taken me to school would I find my way back to the welcoming warmth of my mothers bosom. I was her omomo, her trump card, which she proudly waved around for all to see.

The birth of my sisters had brought her nothing but scorn. Her in-laws ridiculed her to no end and had threatened to dislodge her from her matrimonial home. They had made life very difficult for her. My arrival indeed wiped the tears from her eyes and shamed her legion of detractors. She loved me dearly for it and pampered me to a fault. In her eyes I could do no wrong.

My sisters didn’t fare better. They indulged my whims and I grew wild with each passing day. While my mates where at school, I would be playing kosso in the streets. I never did any work at home. I spent my days philandering and hanging out with bad company. It wasn’t long before I started stealing. At first, it was the innocuous meat in the soup pot, and then money started disappearing mysteriously from the house. No one suspected me, and my sisters were beaten on several occasions for my crimes.

From there I graduated into petty stealing. Our neighbours would return from work only to find some of their belongings missing; clothes, footwear, phones and any other available thing that could fetch some money. It kept happening, to everyone’s dismay. Suspicion was never directed at me, since our own things also got missing. I became very adept at making things disappear. Every day I would prowl around the backyards of neigbouring houses while they were away at work or school, looking for something to steal. It was quite an irony, my father going out every morning to fight crime, while he was unknowingly grooming a criminal in his homestead.

The moral degeneration occurred gradually over the years, and soon enough I had acquired the expensive habits of alcohol and women. By the time I was 18,  I had made quite a name for myself. I was the terror of the neighbourhood, and to augment the proceeds I made from stolen goods, I started peddling Indian hemp. Through this means I came in contact with major players in the underworld. These connections broadened my criminal abilities and outreach.

By the time my father woke up to his responsibilities it was already too late. I had crossed the Rubicon. One night, the inhabitants of a nearby street dragged me home after they caught me smoking pot in an uncompleted building. The warned my father to keep me on a leash, and threatened to deal ruthlessly with me if he failed to do so.

Scandalized, my father breathed fire and brimstone. So enraged was he that he swore to arrest me first thing the next day. He couldn’t believe his eyes; his own son, his only son, a criminal. He shouted his indignation to the rooftops. There was a mighty row in my house that night. Still high on the whiff of marijuana, I had attacked my father with a machete when matters got out of hand.

Fearful of his wrath and the ensuing repercussion, I fled from the house. I started living on the streets and joined a gang of thieves that specialized in bank raids.

                                   *******************************

The next six months happened in a blur.

I had scant recollection of my activities. I lived like a man without a past, without a future. I exchanged it all for the moment. I was involved in debauchery acts of the highest order. Stealing, for me at least, took on a new character; a pattern which built itself with dramatic artistry and created a kind of suspense I couldn’t find anywhere else. It was like a drug and I could never get enough of it. I was good at it. I owed my swift rise in the underworld ladder to my prodigious talent.

My gang, a dangerous ensemble of five misguided young men, committed all sorts of atrocities one could think of. We plundered, looted, raped and killed.

We lived with danger. We played with it, courted and sailed high on it. Life became a horrid amalgam of distorted images, of wickedness dispersed in cruel notes of laughter between us. I remember one particular incident, when we intercepted a luxury bus traveling on a long distance route. Not satisfied with robbing them, we forced the men and women in the bus to strip naked and have sex with each other.

Those that refused, we shot without hesitation. And it was fun for us, watching their misery as they clumsily tried to achieve coitus. Most of the men where so terrified, they could not get an erection. We had laughed and shot some of them.

On one other occasion, we had stormed the palatial residence of a renowned politician. After dispossessing him of large sums of money, the wicked streak in us played itself out again. We raped his wife and girls in his presence. The hapless man had defecated on his body in a wave of shock. We forced him at gun point to eat his waste. It felt wonderful playing God. To seize the power over life and death and dispense with it as we wished. We were intoxicated by this power.

But every thing under the sun has an end attached to it. Even our ugly wickedness had to come to an end one day. Life itself is resourceful in issuing due rewards for all deeds. The end came suddenly, and without warning, on that dark night outside a commercial bank we had come to rob.

                            ************************       

It was the night before that fateful morning.

I had a morbid feeling of impending danger as we sat drinking in a bar not too far away from the bank. All kinds of sounds came drifting out from the dark interior of the bar-the gay laughter of couples having a good time, the slurred speech of drunk men, the loud reports from the musical speakers.

I listened to the sounds and their echoes filled with me with forlorn and drawn-out fear. I was filled with a sense of foreboding, a kind of ominous dread, a restlessness, like the warning of terrible events drawing ever closer. My well developed instincts of danger reared its head and screamed for attention.

We had a man on a reconnaissance mission at the bank. His reports were good. Earlier in the day we had been tipped off by our contact in the bank and he showed us all the ropes. .The plan was all laid out, it looked foolproof. Yet, I couldn’t get the nagging feeling out of my system.

Instead I tried to drown it in glasses of hard spirits. Usually, it was all part of the preparation. We’d drink and dope till it will be difficult to distinguish friend from foe. But the drinking failed to eliminate the gut feeling I had of an impending catastrophe. My hands twitched uncontrollably and for the first time in many months I thought about my family.

In the early days, I thought about them very often .Especially on those days when I felt terribly alone and forsaken, I’d think about them. What their opinion of me was. Sometimes I would wonder what my father would do if he saw me again. Would he put me behind bars as he had vowed to do, or would his compassion for an only son surpass his official sense of responsibility?

The image of him gritting his teeth in anger and that of my mum fretting and worrying about my whereabouts, stayed with me. I knew they were deeply hurt by my terrible lifestyle. Sometimes I would feel a deep sense of shame and guilt for betraying them, the love and attention they had showered on me. Their pain was my shame.

There was a tense air of anticipation on our table that night. We were all afraid, each man saddled with his own private fears. But we all tried hard to hide the fact. At the scheduled time, it was this fear that unleashed us as we invaded the bank with the deadly precision of a striking cobra.

                        ************************   

The last moments of my life unfolded with an uncanny detail. Like a scene in a horror movie.

We had done our bit in the bank, and we were on the way out when the moment of reckoning came. Apparently, someone had tipped off the special anti-crime patrol team and they were waiting for us just outside the bank premises.

We ran into their whip fire and from then on it was madness. Surprised and frightened of the destruction looming over us, we fought back; the five of us, our backs pressed against the wall and fighting for dear life. Something we had taken away from our victims without the slightest regard.  The pump action gun in my hands was tuned on full blast, its evil message ricocheting across the road. But it was a desperate movement borne out of fear and guilt. There was no way out, we were in a Zugzwang.

I knew my end had come even before I felt the bullets ripping my chest apart. I saw a flash of bright lights, the image of my father as he raised me up to the skies in celebration, and that of my mother smiling proudly beside him. And for one fleeting moment of regret, I wished I could be remembered that way.

Darkness swiftly enclosed my heart and it was all over. My sins had caught up with me at last. I had gone the way of the gun.

                             ************************

My father’s trajectory as he drove back home that fateful morning was slow, painful and tortuous. It led him through the streets without seeing anyone. His mind was bleak. Such a horrible place the world can be sometimes. The strength of his youth was gone. They had brought his warrior home and dead.

He shook his head for the umpteenth time in disbelief. All around him, car horns bleated mournfully and echoed through the still morning air like the voices of wounded creatures lamenting their fate. Tears welled up in his heart like a dam in full gloom. A dam which must not burst or the earth will be drowned in the flow of sorrow. He drove home, unseeing and uncaring.

My mother was at the door when he got home. A simple woman with a big heart, the stress of worrying constantly about the whereabouts of her only son had left her in a sorry state of nerves. There were wrinkles and lines of tiredness etched on her face. She had the look of a frightened woman around her. Puzzled at his sudden return, she searched his face for an explanation. Father averted his red eyes in a futile attempt at shielding the disaster from her. But she had already seen them.

A tight knot of fear gripped her innards as she appraised him. It was a fear she had lived with for the past year .The fear that I would one day bring ruin and disgrace to the family. The fear that one day, they will find me dead. I was a forbidden topic at home, safely tucked away in the darkest chamber of their hearts. I had destroyed her peace of mind and the pride of her motherhood, but her maternal passion for me burned even stronger.

One look at my father’s grief and guilt wracked features, and she knew that her worst fears had come to life. Her response, unlike my father’s, was devoid of all vanity. It began with a slow shaking of the head and then an un-emphatic whimpering of ‘No, it can’t be true, No!’ And then she started crying.

But it was true. She knew it was true.

Worn out with emotion, father sat down. He suddenly felt very tired and useless. He had failed her. She bore him a son and yet he had failed in his duties to keep him alive. For the first time in his life, he felt the full weight of his years. It hung heavily on his shoulders, almost crushing him with guilt.

It was another heart wrenching moment in a gloomy day. Two bereaved parents united in their pain. My father was wielding such a tight rein over his emotions. He ached to shed his sorrow in some way, but the shame and the possibility of public ridicule preyed mostly on his mind. He would rather pretend it never happened. At whatever damage to himself and at whatever pain to others.

He sighed and said the only thing that came to his mind. ‘There won’t be a burial!’

It was the last straw. My mother’s wail of a broken hearted woman reverberated across the walls of our home, even to the world beyond.

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