UCHENNA AWOKE

FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

A tear balled below her left eye, a tadpole that hesitated for a second then swam down the undulations of her cheek.

His face fell, crushing like the soft pulp of an overripe mango falling from a height, as her tears came thick and fast. He gathered her into a tight hold.

Together, they mourned another miscarriage.

Their broken life.

Their life together was a tale of misfortunes. Omanebu had lost count of the miscarriages. Makata’s garage where he sold Tokumbo cars along Enugu Road had been gutted by fire. Cars destroyed. Heavy investments lost.

“I am tired,” she sobbed.

He was tired, too, but he did not voice it, dared not say it. Tired would be trivializing how he truly felt.

Later, he stood by the window facing south, commanding a full view of the cathedral. Their home in a Government Residential Area remained his biggest achievement—purchasing a plot of land in such an expensive area of the university town and building a cute house on it. But he was an only son, and he needed a child—precisely an heir—to inherit from him and carry on the family name. Personally, he didn’t mind all that, but not only would his mother have a heart attack, the land of Eziani where he was born would revolt against such thoughts. He dragged a long and frustrated look towards the Gothic edifice with spires pointing to the sky like missiles.

—

Omanebu spent two days at home recuperating. On the third day she drove into the landscaped premises of her office at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, certain that she was cursed. Melanin rebelled against her temptation to savour the big, dazzling sun that splashed its light over the luxuriant stretch of lawn. The harmattan air was beginning to stir in the ornamental trees. They were bowing to age, the beautiful trees planted by the white men who started the university in the early sixties. They were now falling to indigenous itchy hands and strong winds tearing their remains apart and tossing their tired limbs across the road, chainsaws screaming like howler monkeys and chasing pedagogical silence beyond Edaga Hills. In a matter of weeks, the trees would burst into flowers in flamboyant reds and yellows to usher in a colourful Christmas.

She climbed out of her car, tucked her purse under her armpit, and fled across a concrete driveway towards a wooden basement door and into a poorly lit hallway. The mild wind would have stirred joyful thoughts in her, like Christmas in a child’s mind; there would not have been a better Christmas gift for Makata than a baby.

The staircase confronted her like Chappal Waddi. She did her one-year youth service in Taraba State after her university. One of the interesting places she had visited was Gashaka-Gumti National Park on the Mambilla Plateau to see Mount Chappal Waddi. She was thinking of altitudes as she climbed the stairs into the internal audit unit of the vice-chancellor’s office where she worked.

Her tears rained down as soon as she sighted Ozioma. They were colleagues in the office, confidants. Ozioma’s supple smiles and even-temper had drawn Omanebu to her. Ozioma, a mother of two, always offered her a shoulder to cry on after each miscarriage.

“I will take you to Prophet Elisha.” Ozioma’s voice was whispery and solicitous after listening to the story of Omanebu’s eightieth miscarriage. “He is a powerful prophet who has helped many childless women with their own babies.”

“I won’t see another prophet.” Omanebu held out a pale hand before Ozioma as though she was covered in some kind of stain no one else could see, as doubts whitewashed her eyebrows, yo-yoed in the pink of her eyes, and formed scales on her skin.

“Oma. You are a beautiful woman.” Ozioma scoffed at her friend’s self-loathing, her coming to the office without making herself up. Not even a wig or a dab of powder.

Omanebu’s shoulders shook in a sneering laugh. She lifted her face, a round and freckled apple, and ran a hand over her coarse ginger hair. When she was a child, someone had described her as a “beautiful obanze.” It had seemed a compliment until she realized that to be an obanze was to be cursed. Even her own parents had looked on her as a cursed birth. The world regarded her as the effigy of woman.

“You will see Prophet Elisha.” Ozioma sounded like a big sister, emphatic, furtive as if the congregation of tables and chairs in the office had ears. “I am sure he will break the curse.”

Omanebu hissed. She had seen so many pastors and prophets she reeked of their incense and hocus-pocus. The last prophet had left her flesh torn and broken as he tried to whip daemons out of her. And Makata’s family was losing their patience with her. Her mother-in-law had made her position clear on the miscarriages, insisting that Makata would marry again should there be another one. And she would not have the adoption of a child for an option. It was a taboo in the custom of Eziani.

Omanebu was not going to be deceived by Makata’s affection. He might seem unperturbed about their childlessness, but he could succumb to pressure from his family and marry another woman who would give him children. His untroubled nature sometimes angered her. It appeared he was not doing enough to help their situation. What on earth had drawn him to a woman with her skin and eyes in the first place?

Prophet Elisha was worth a try, she resolved, if Ozioma believed he would break the curse.

—

They went to see Makata’s aged mother every weekend. The visits had become a scary routine for Omanebu, but he always insisted she accompany him. Six years of marriage without a child had left her relationship with her mother-in-law bruised. Her mother-in-law was never in support of him marrying a woman like her.

“I don’t want Mama to know about the recent miscarriage,” Makata said as they set off to the village on Sunday afternoon.

She hissed. Her childlessness was always a volatile issue, one they skirted around like a dark maze.

They drove downtown to pick up groceries at Odenigbo Roundabout, from one of those ever-encroaching grocery shops nosing into the main road.

“They will probably expire again in her cupboard.” Makata chuckled at Mama’s habit with beverages.

Mama rationed her beverages. She drank them in venerated sups, the way a priest sipped communion wine at the altar. And she accused Chisom, her caregiver who lived with her, of wasting the beverages, sneaking in now and again to make herself a cup of tea or pour herself a glass of juice. And then Mama started to lock them away in a cupboard. She hid the key in her bra. The key resurfaced only when she had a special guest, any of her daughters or relatives she was willing to indulge with a drink.

They stopped to buy fried groundnuts at Elu-Agu. Mama liked the groundnuts fried together with their husks. She enjoyed husking them and tossing the light yellowish-brown nuts into her busy mouth to fill up the wells of time. Women in shabby clothes sat at tables with small heaps of the groundnuts, a child sucking from a flaccid breast or playing under the table. They measured the groundnuts out in cups to customers. In the rainy season, they would sell freshly harvested nuts. Omanebu liked them half-boiled with a crunchy rhythm when munched. Her father had said that fresh groundnuts played an important role in the food chain. “It is an early-season harvest, arriving when crops have left the barn into the soil, but have not even started to sweat underground, a time of famine,” he had said. She had noticed that one out of four passersby ate fresh groundnuts from a plastic bag. Three out of the four were apprentices who, after eating them, drank a full sachet of “pure” water to escort the nuts down.

Lunch was settled.

—

They drove through Ibagwa and Ogurute towards Eziani, the calm, shadowy village in Makata’s hometown. Ogurute was full of enterprise and din coming from motor parks and recording studios, a self-contained, lively little town. Echegu’s ears caught the music of Oshageri, a popular folklorist musician from that town, as they crossed a busy rotary. The song came on air every now and again on 91.1 Lion FM, the university’s radio station.

Houses hiding behind groves and thickets sprang at them as their car nosed past empty village squares. They stopped outside a one-story house. Chisom tearing out of the house and getting hugs from Omanebu and Makata, taking the plastic bags from Omanebu and leading the way back into the house where Mama was waiting with a tepid smile, had become a familiar ritual.

They hugged Mama in turns. She sounded cool, her hugs sulky and slack. She was sitting on a single cushion, her bare feet on the tiled floor. Mama was matronly with a clean wrapper tied around her chest over a slack yellow blouse. At a glance, Mama looked well-cared for, well-oiled with Vaseline. She had no diabetes and no arthritis feasting on her joints like most women of her age, but after sitting for a long time her feet would get swollen, growing knobbly like ginger roots.

The room looked tidy, with a clean bedspread and well-laundered curtains. The earthy smell of tobacco hung thinly in the air from the snuff Mama occasionally sniffed into her nasal cavity. Chisom was doing a great job of looking after her.

“It’s good that you are here.” Mama’s voice rang as clear as a gong. “Chisom gives me nothing but headache. She will not answer when I call her. I have to call and call before she brings herself to my presence.”

“Why do you not answer when Mama calls?” Omanebu swung at Chisom with mild rebuke in her eyes.

“I answer, but she will not stop shouting my name.” Chisom pouted, a scrawny maiden in his mid-thirties who was happy to work as a caregiver while waiting for a suitor to come along.

Mama fretted a bit more. And then she peeked into one of the bags containing fruits and hissed. “Give them to Chisom,” she said, with a wave of the left hand and contempt in her voice. “I don’t want them. And stop bringing them. I am not a goat that eats raw things. What you should give me is a child.”

Omanebu recoiled.

“Don’t start, Mama,” Makata said.

Mama snapped a riposte, started to nag all over again.

Omanebu sidled away. She joined Chisom under a fig tree outside, doing laundry in the shade of the tree, and tried to cheer herself up with a conversation.

When the mother-and-son session finally came to an end and Makata rejoined her at the fig tree, he did look a little tense, and their departure was militarized.

—

He bumped into the countless potholes that riddled the road on their way back, thinking of his private conversation with his mother.

“It’s a terrible thing if I die without seeing your child.” Mama’s voice had broken, tears filling up her eyes. “If your father’s lineage ends with you.”

“Don’t talk about death, Mama.” Makata had tried to calm her. “We will have a child at God’s appointed time.”

“God’s appointed time, that’s what you keep saying, but when will that be? You were warned not to marry a woman like that. They don’t have a womb.”

“Oma is like every other woman despite her skin colour,” he had argued. “She has a womb. As a matter of fact, she is capable of having a baby like any woman.”

“The conversation between food and the teeth is loud enough for the ears to hear,” she had scorned. “What’s the use of conception without birth? A woman like that eats up the children in her womb.”He should have realized that news got around a lot among the communities. Far-flung as Eziani was to Nsukka, they were bridged by a wellspring of gossip. It was obvious Mama had heard about Omanebu’s eightieth miscarriage.

—

Prophet Elisha attended to his followers in a plank-and-zinc kirk located in Alor Uno, a town next to the university town. This was where Ozioma took Omanebu. A signboard announced JEHOVAH JIREY PRAYER MINISTRY at the point where the track veered off the tarred road and meandered round compounds with shrub and dried palm-frond fences. The fences were old and children peeked at them through holes in the palm fronds. Omanebu wondered if they were peering at the curious face of an obanze or at the black Highlander that filled the road and brushed past offshoots of plants.

“You didn’t tell me we were coming to a marketplace.” Omanebu caught her breath as she pulled up in the crowded church premises.

“You are not the only one with problems, are you?” Ozioma said genially as she climbed out.

Omanebu came down and looked around. Planks unevenly nailed to purlins formed the walls of the church with old tin roofing. The compound looked swept, benches arranged in rows and filled by disconsolate congregants. A young man dressed casually in grey shorts and a threadbare polo shirt was issuing numbers to newcomers from a wooden table. It was not yet 9 A.M., but the numbering was already in the thirties.

Omanebu was aware of several pairs of staring eyes as she nestled next to Ozioma on a bench. She hugged her handbag in the depressed atmosphere and scanned the crowd made up of mostly village women looking wretched and sickly and matured ladies who looked single and desperate.

The queue was slow. A doorless entrance led people to the prophet. They spent a long time with him.

“I wonder what they are doing in there,” she said.

“Unloading their life’s troubles to the prophet,” Ozioma said in her gaily way.

Omanebu tittered. “Anyone following me on the queue had better go home when it’s my turn because it will take forever to unload my problems to him.”

Ozioma chuckled.

Omanebu’s eyes wandered again to the cross section of waiters and settled on a curious lady in a frayed black skirt and yellow top. Her plaits were old, her face and fingers raw with bleach burns. Her manners seemed subdued, her looks depleted, but they echoed a time past when she was still young and pretty and probably turned down marriage proposals as if suitors were clothes you wear and take off at will.

Her gaze moved away from the lady to a man who looked so gaunt and sickly his breathing seemed to come from faraway. His skin was yellowed, and his thin, brown hair hung on his head in weak strands as if they would fall off if you looked hard at them. He sat slumped against a woman who stared ahead with a pale, strained face. Next to the woman sat a girl looking thin and pathetic; apparently his wife and daughter.

“He should be in the emergency unit of a hospital ward, not here.” Omanebu heard her own voice, and a little shiver of indignity ran through her.

Ozioma cast a comforting glance at the yellow-skinned man and his disconsolate family.

“The queue is very slow.” Omanebu glanced at her wristwatch again with a restless gesture. “The prophet has not seen up to ten persons since we came.”

“You can pay for a special session and come back another day when you will have the prophet all to yourself.” A plain, ashy face smiled at Omanebu when she turned to look at the lady who had spoken. The lady’s hair was cut low, her gown a loose, depressive grey. Her ears were empty of earrings, her soft eyes evaluating Omanebu and resolving that her emerald-green English gown and the soft waterfall of Human Hair weave-on splashed over her shoulders were worth a special session.“Oh, wow!” Ozioma had shrieked when she saw Omanebu’s lash extensions that morning as they set out, straight brunette hair flowing softly down her shoulders, freckles vaguely highlighted through the soft tones of her powder, ornamenting her face. Red lipstick on thick, pert lips gave her face a flushed, pouty look. “You look gorgeous.”

 —

The lady who reminded her of Chisom, her mother-in-law’s caregiver, beckoned the prophet’s apprentice, and when he came over, Omanebu said, “I would like to pay for a special session.”

“It will cost you five thousand naira,” the young man said. He was trying to grow a beard. His chin looked grainy, a mix of coarse hairs and pimples. It had become fashionable for guys to wear full beards with muscles rippling in their shirts. Back on campus, ladies went about half naked.

Omanebu felt like reaching out with both thumbs and squeezing out seeds from the white-tipped grains on his face. Growing up, she had itchy thumbs for the pimples that fruited on her own face. “Stop eating yourself up raw,” her mother would snap at her when she spent idle times pinching at pimples.

She searched in her handbag for the money and handed it over to the boy. He fetched an exercise book and scribbled on it.

“You are booked for tomorrow,” he said.

They thanked him and left.

—

On their way back to town, Omanebu wondered aloud about the sick man and the lady in the black skirt and yellow top. “Problems come in different shapes, colours, and sizes,” she said.

“They come even in the yellow and black of a butterfly.” Ozioma smiled encouragingly, thinking of the lady they saw. She had read somewhere in a book that black and yellow butterflies symbolized new beginnings. “Ladies like her go there regularly in search of a husband in the hope that, one day, the prophet will match make them with a male congregant.”

Ozioma was thirty. She had been married in her early twenties and would have had her fourth baby by now if she wanted more children. At that lady’s age—well in her forties and unmarried—she would live in Prophet Elisha’s church. For fresh beginnings.

Omanebu gave a deep sigh. She was driving at a sedate pace, the sky full of butterflies with yellow and black wings.

—

The sweet stench of incense ushered Omanebu and Ozioma into the poorly ventilated enclosure. Prophet Elisha sat alone in his sanctuary, a thickset man in white garment and dreads. He was sitting by an altar around which the infinite flame of a Pascal candle cast a lengthened shadow of itself against the plain wall of the half-lit sanctum.

“You are blessed,” came the deep voice.

They settled on seats across from him. Seashells were highlighted in his locs as their eyes got used to the poor lighting. One hung from a loose strand of his rough beard. Omanebu braved herself for signs and wonders as the prophet started to pray. Whenever she had found herself in the presence of a prophet or pastor, a veil had fallen over their eyes and blinded them to all auguries.

He started to speak in tongues, strange words bursting forth with seamless ease, the ground vibrating with his voice. His robed body responded to it, shaking like a weaver ant. The seashells in his hair shone with chalk-white severity as he momentarily paused to catch his breath.

Omanebu tensed up for prophesies, hoping he would divine her many miscarriages and her husband’s countless misfortunes in his business without having to draw the story of her life out of her.

“Obanze is a curse placed on humans by daemons,” he said in a calm and authoritative voice, his piety glistening on his forehead like petroleum jelly, his shirt damp with sweat. “They take away your beauty and give you scales to drive away suitors.”

“I am married.” She fought the doubts that now invaded her mind and the tears that rushed to her eyes. “But I have been married for nearly ten years without a child.”

Prophet Elisha started to sing and clap. They sang the chorus and clapped with him. As the clapping grew rhythmic, he started to dance, tossing his long and kinky hair like a reggae artiste. The dancing gathered momentum, the seashells touching with a bizarre clatter, his garment getting soaked. He stopped and wiped sweat from his face with a white handkerchief.

Omanebu and Ozioma stopped, too, their voices trailing off into silence. The prophet sat down and waved them to their seats. His gaze fell on Omanebu, intense and interrogating, while he tried to recover his breath.

“The daemons are unhappy that a man finds your scales attractive, so they lock your womb and throw the key into the river,” he said, to Omanebu’s utter bewilderment. “Do you have sex with a strange man in your dream?”

It came back to her in clear details, awakening hot, delirious feelings: the familiar teasing face and the tall frame of his sweaty, black body stretched over her, six-pack, pectoral muscles, and all; the salty taste of his body fluid and his infinite kinetic energy. She had woken up to a prostrating climax after each recurring dream.

“We will need to go get the key from a marine spouse who found it and kept it in his custody. He is fiercely jealous of your consummation with a worldly man. Until the key is recovered from him and the marine espousal between both of you is broken your life with any earthly man will be like a basket filled with ripe fruits from which a furtive hand takes until it is empty.”

The Paschal candle burned with luminous intensity, its flame magnified, larger than life.

Omanebu glanced at Ozioma, whose look was firm and reassuring. None of the prophets and pastors she had seen in the past had said anything about a marine husband.

“You will need a spiritual bath in a river after we recover the key.” His voice was mannered. “There are materials to provide. My apprentice will give you a list of the materials on your way out. But you have the option of monetizing if you can’t provide the items so that he will help you get them. A date will be fixed for the deliverance as soon as the materials are ready or the money provided. You will then have as many children as you want. Go in peace.”

Omanebu felt like an actress on a Nollywood set.

—

The list the apprentice gave them contained items like a Paschal candle, frankincense and myrrh soap for a spiritual bath, packets of incense and sage sticks, different kinds of spiritual oils, a white towel, and many other spiritual pieces—so many of them Omanebu opted for the money equivalent.

“A spiritual bath?” Omanebu’s voice had a slight tremble as they left the premises.

Ozioma snapped. “I expected you to do better than the Bahama Mamas if a bath in some river is all it takes for you to have your own baby and save your marriage.”

Omanebu giggled in spite of herself, reminded of her favourite painting, Bahama Mamas, by Shelly Wilkerson; a painting of coquettish, old women enjoying copious sips of liquor and laughing unrestrainedly with their cat nestling around.

“Wait!” Omanebu suddenly brought the car to a halt. “I hope I won’t have to undress for the bath in his presence.”

“Can you tell me the number of times you have had to lay stark naked on a bed while some gynecologist probed your body from top to bottom with his hands in the name of medical examination?” Ozioma said. “How many children have you had to compensate for that?”

Omanebu hissed and drove on. She had been to different gynecologists and nurses who sewed her up with needles until she had felt like a piece of old clothing. She suddenly realized her problem was a key in the hands of a demigod.

—

The drive out to Adada River for the spiritual bath took them through the towns of Obimo and Nkpologu, across villages announced by small food-and-drinks junctions, but mostly across high ranges of hills and acres of savage-looking vegetation. Omanebu was driving, her heart taking short, wild flights. Ozioma sat beside her with a relaxed look, full-bosomed in a tight Ankara gown that went well with her dark skin. Omanebu had insisted she come along with her calming presence.

Omanebu glanced at the rearview mirror and saw the stress of the past few days on her flushed face with its set of hooded eyes, full lips, and bulbous nose. Prophet Elisha sat comfortably in the back with his white robe and wild hair, such a paradox she half-expected him to vanish with her next glance. He was wearing a large, knee-length crucifix.

When she looked at him again, she stamped on the brake so hard the car came to a seesawing halt. They were restrained from crashing out through the windscreen by the seat belts. She threw a terrified glance at the prophet. He was sitting calmly, the intense brown eyes staring out of the window, everything appearing normal.

“What’s wrong?” Ozioma was visibly panting from the shock of the screaming halt.

“It’s fine.” Omanebu sighed.

She cast another bewildered look behind her and drove off again, wondering if it was her imagination or a trick of the mirror. In that fleeting glance at the prophet in the rearview mirror, at the crucifix he was wearing, she had seen the inverted image of Jesus, the image of Him standing upside down—head facing down and legs up.

She shooed away a sense of foreboding.

—

The road narrowed. The scenery changed, becoming more alpine, more foliaged. The midmorning sun was bright in a cheerful blue sky with streaks of white clouds. Omanebu wondered what Makata was doing at the moment. At half past ten, he was probably reading a newspaper in his office. He loved luxury and news. He bought newspapers on a daily basis and sat cross-legged in his high-back executive chair, lost in them. Paired with the chair was a luxurious half-moon desk with a beguiling, dark wood finish. Makata had a taste for deluxe furniture. A museum of old, yellowed newspapers occupied a prestigious position in the office next to a circle wall shelf. He would spend hours arguing with friends about politics, religion, and football. His energy for argument surprised her. Too much reading seemed to have made him headstrong, taller and austere.

Omanebu sighed. She wondered how Makata would react if he was told that she was out here in the middle of nowhere, driving to a river for a spiritual bath to be delivered of a marine husband. He would be mad with her, deeply disappointed. He had no regard for myths and superstitions. “A child will come at the right time,” he insisted, his Adam’s apple nodding in consonance. He was her strong shield, the reason his family had not chased her out for her childlessness, her obanzeness.

But it was only a matter of time. She must bleed into the land of Eziani to become one with its soil.

She let out another sigh on sighting outcroppings of rock in the distance beyond a mangrove swamp. The closest she had come to Adada River was a faraway view of the mangrove forest that seemed to enfold the river from the road to Umulokpa. She had been passing on her way to a classmate’s traditional marriage ceremony.

“This is as far as the car can go,” Prophet Elisha said suddenly.

She pulled up, scared of looking into the mirror. Ozioma sat back in the car on the instruction of Prophet Elisha as Omanebu followed him through a track bordered by tall reeds. A chilly wind stirred in the reeds. After a long walk, the track sloped, then led them down a dark, broody waterside. The ground was strewn with candle wax, half-burnt incense sticks among blue-green deposits of algae. It was evident that Prophet Elisha or other prophets brought people here regularly for spiritual baths.

He lit candles and incense.

She felt the vomit rise to her throat as she stepped into a grove to change clothes. She came out shortly with a white cloth tied around her chest. A shower cap protected her hair. Herons flapped low over the water as Prophet Elisha led her a little further into the seclusion of the grove. The river was dark and shallow here, barely rising above the ankle. The water was cold, and she felt it clasp around her ankles like leg irons. The smell of incense mixed with algae blossomed, partly woody and partly iodine.

The Prophet seemed to be possessed by a deep mystery as he started to pray. The loneliness and silence of the river fled as he rebuked the marine husband in a loud and authoritative voice, as he soaped her face, her bare shoulders, and her arms. The smell of the soap was pleasing. It was mesmerizing. She felt lightheaded and shut her eyes to the overpowering aura of frankincense and myrrh. He cupped water in his hands and lifted it over her head, drenching her, the wet, white cloth clinging to her body like another layer of her skin.

He started to dry her body with a white towel after the bath. As he oiled her skin, she felt his probing hands moving up and down the dark contours of her nakedness. His fingers came in contact with her moistened breasts, sending a shiver down her spine. And then she froze as the hardness in his groin brushed against her thigh. His breathing, loud and heavy, fanned her face.

An inner voice ricocheted off the mangrove walls and stoned her with words: People spread all kinds of lies about you. They say you cannot have children and won’t live long. To some harvesting your body parts brings them wealth and prosperity, to others sleeping with you gives them magical powers.

She tried to fight him off but was drained of energy, overcome by a strange lassitude. And when she forced her eyes open, the riverbanks were shrouded in dense mangroves that stretched ominously out of sight and screened them from view.

Looping around them like chains.

Uchenna Awoke is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent being The Butterfly Lampshade, longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at USC.