The little boy who talked of magic

Later, after my mother showed Fide his room in the detached Boys’ Quarters at the back of the house, she told us: “Fide has come from the village and he has never seen a telephone or a gas cooker. So we will all help teach him and get him settled.”

I stared at Fide, fascinated. Our former houseboy, who had left the week before after stealing some money from my father’s study, was knowingly urban, had sometimes fixed the stereo. Fide had never seen a refrigerator. He was light-skinned and his lips were so thick and wide they took up the most space on his face. He spoke a rural dialect of Igbo that was not Anglicised like ours and he chewed rice with his mouth open and you saw the rice, soggy like old cereal, until he swallowed. When he answered the phone, he said, “Hold on”, as we had taught him to, but then he would drop the phone back on the cradle.

He washed our clothes in metal basins, and pegged them on the line tied from the mango to the guava tree in the backyard. It took him hours. At first, my mother shouted: “Don’t stop your work to stare at every single lizard that goes by!” Then, later, she left him alone until he was done. Whenever. Kenechukwu and I sat on the steps while he worked. The air smelled faintly of smoke from people burning things far away and the kree-kree-kree sounds came from grasshoppers in the lawn and blue birds and yellow butterflies flitted around and Fide told us stories about magic.

“One woman in my village turned into a cat and came to attack her neighbour but the neighbour broke the leg of the cat and the next morning, the woman was limping,” he would say, as though magic was something we all practised. He would shift on the low wooden stool, his legs on either side of the metal wash basin, before launching into another story. On hot afternoons when the sun made topaz patterns on the glass louvres of the kitchen, Fide told us stories about birds; folk stories where birds flew up to the sky to ask God for rain, and nature stories where birds made their nests with bits of hair they picked up outside the barber’s hut in his village.

“I can catch some birds for you,” he said. And he dropped breadcrumbs in a staggered line from the dustbin outside, up the short steps that led into the kitchen, through the open backdoor, and into the kitchen. He crouched behind the door. When the birds followed the breadcrumbs into the kitchen, he slammed the door and dashed after them. Once he cracked a louvre, once he tore the mosquito netting on the window, once he broke my mother’s bowl. But he always caught the birds. He put them in punctured cartons for us and we fed them bread and garri. The birds died after a day or two. One stayed four days, and when it finally died, Fide held its rigid, feathery form in his hand and said, joking: “It’s in the sky now asking God for bread.”

Many years later, after Fide died, I would think about this: an image of a bird raising a stiff wing to ask God for bread.

MY MOTHER OFTEN SHOUTED at Fide. She was creative with her Igbo insults. “You are a fat millipede, nnukwu esu!” she would say when he took too long to do something. “Look at him, ike akpi, with the buttocks of a scorpion,” when he forgot yet another thing she’d asked him to do. Or: “May dogs lick your eyes!” when he didn’t tell the truth. Or: “May cholera strike you!” When she shouted at him in English, it was less interesting.

She asked Fide to start dinner in the afternoons because of how long it took him — jollof rice alone took him four hours. Years later, when I started to cook, I wondered just what it was that made Fide so slow. One afternoon stands out in my mind. Fide at the Formica-topped kitchen table, the one that had cockroach eggs underneath, scraping the scales off a tilapia with a knife. The tilapia’s dead, beady eyes stared at me. Fide worked with slow, deliberate motions, scrape, pause, scrape, pause. The raw-fish smell sickened me. There were transparent scales on Fide’s chin, on his arms, on the kitchen floor.

“You’re taking for ever to do that!” I said.

“It’s like preparing a body for funeral,” Fide said. “You take your time to do it well.”

It was a joke and he was laughing. But after he died, I would think about this too.

IN RAINY SEASON, WHEN OUR compound was washed over with different shades of green, the cucumber green of the foliage, the lettuce green of the lawns, Fide climbed the mango tree and shook the branches so the ripe fruits rained down.

“Come out of the way! It’ll land on your head!” he’d shout down to Kenechukwu and me. He climbed the cashew tree, too, but that had too many angry bees buzzing around the ripening fruits and so he didn’t shake the branches. Instead, he took a long stick up with him and nudged the fruits down. We ate the squishy-sweet yellow fruits bent over because the juices that escaped when we bit into them left our clothes with tea-coloured stains that never came off.

Afterwards, Fide roasted the kidney-bean-shaped cashew seeds in an open fire near the Boys’ Quarters. He cooled the seeds by throwing sand on them. And when we cracked them open, the blackened seeds crumbled to reveal crisp white cashew nuts. Like magic.

MY PARENTS HAD FIDE baptised shortly after he came to live with us. We were Roman Catholics and we went to Mass every Sunday and baptism was a necessity. His baptism shocked me; everybody I knew in Nsukka was baptised as a child and I did not realise it was possible for anyone not to be baptised, that it was possible for anyone to have a life different from ours in that secluded and parochial university town of tall dogonyaro trees and red dust, a town that was a few steps behind in everything — and unflustered about it. Fide was enrolled in a commercial school, Universal Secretarial Academy, a grand name for a single building of four rooms with rusty typewriters, and a grander acronym. On Fide’s school books, beneath “Fide Abonyi” he wrote, with bold, proud letters, U.S.A.

When my brothers brought video tapes of British and American films from friends’ homes, Fide watched them with us. When we borrowed books from the library, Fide would hold them and move his lips. When the military coups happened in far-away Lagos, my father placed the radio on the dining table and we all crowded round, since TV never carried coup news as it happened, and listened to announcements in Northern-Nigerian-accented English interspersed with stretches of melancholy martial music. The coup in 1993 happened on a blustery Harmattan day. General Sani Abacha had taken over the Government. “Fellow Nigerians,” he started on the radio and already we were numb. Coup announcements made you numb: the choicelessness, the fact that you were being told just for your information, just so that you would not be surprised to see a different portrait on the walls of airports and government offices. Because there was nothing you could do about it. “Long live the federal republic of Nigeria,” he ended.

“The man sounds sleepy,” Fide said.

And we all laughed.

PEOPLE MISTOOK FIDE FOR our brother. Once, a new neighbour looked over the hedge and told me: “Your big brother is handsome.” Kenechukwu and I laughed scornfully. Fide handsome? With those thick lips? We told Fide and he laughed, too, touching my shoulder, in the way that he touched people as he spoke to them or laughed with them, a way that we thought was bush. He always smelled like ugu, the deep-green fibrous kind we used in most soups, and even after he took a bath, he still smelled of ugu. Kenechukwu said often that Fide’s touch made him break out in rashes, because of the years of pumpkin leaves on Fide’s hands. We forgot to tell that neighbour that he wasn’t our brother, that he was our houseboy.

It was the custom to “start a life” for your houseboy or housegirl, after they had been with you for long enough. Fide had graduated from USA. He had taken the West African School Certificate exams a few times and failed. I was not sure how well he could type but he had learned to write shorthand, those odd curves and dots and lines. It was 1996. When my parents asked what he wanted to do after he left us, they hoped he would want to further his secretarial studies. Most houseboys wanted a small business. Fide wanted to join the Army.

At first, he wrote excited letters, sent pictures of himself in camouflage holding a long gleaming gun. He took special pride in his boots and wrote about how he polished them with Kiwi polish, the same way he used to polish the shoes my father wore to his lectures. The writing was barely legible and the English was comic and my brothers and I laughed and replied and mocked him and asked when he would be on leave and when we would see him again. He wrote about the poor state of the barracks.

Hungry is killing me. He wrote about not being paid. Slowly, the letters cooled. Then in a hasty letter, he wrote that he might be sent to Liberia, as part of the Nigerian Peacekeeping Force. Civil war was raging in Liberia. People were being skinned alive there, he wrote, people were being dragged to their deaths, stray bullets were lodging themselves into children’s bodies.

“He won’t go to Liberia,” my father said. “He’ll be fine.”

Fide did not go to Liberia. He wrote more letters about hunger and Army quarters full of rats and looking forward to spending his leave with us in Nsukka. Then a military coup happened in Sierra Leone. And General Sani Abacha, who routinely killed activists, who routinely shut down the media, who routinely jailed opponents, decided to send in Nigerian troops to restore democracy. Fide wrote to say he had been deployed.

WHEN MY PARENTS TOLD ME that Fide had died, I stared at them for a while and then started to smile because I knew they were wrong.

“Which Fide?” I asked, as if there were many others, as if he was not the only Fide we knew.

“Our own Fide,” my mother said, and those words will never leave me because even as grief enveloped me in wave after wave, I realised how lovely they were. Our own Fide. He was our own.

Later, they told me the details, that he died on September 3, 1997, and that he was blown up by a land mine in Sierra Leone. I kept wishing that the Army could have sent his boots to his family. They didn’t. Perhaps those were gone too.

© Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Half of a Yellow Sun, which will be reviewed by Helen Dunmore next week, is published by Fourth Estate, price £14.99, offer £13.49 from 0870 1608080