DEAD COLD LOVE by Santi ‘Femi

It was the day after the water vanished. We had just returned from a funeral; a small funeral. The waters had made home in our homes. The waters did not only damage our things, it devastated our hearts. My house was submerged by the water, except the roof. I had barely managed to make it out alive. A lot of the things I had, had been damaged by the flood, the most invaluable of them all was a picture. That picture was the only thing I had taken with me out from the house in Berlin.

Because it meant the world to me, I had bought an expensive frame, a wooden piece with cherubs ornately carved on its angular edges. That was my last prized acquisition in Berlin – the frame. Delicately, I had slid the picture into the frame and I closed the flaps at the back meticulously. Though the picture of a dead girl housed in a wooden frame was my greatest loss to the flood, in the house that was right next to mine, it was a different tale.

The woman that lay on my bed was the only one that made it out to my roof before the water took over the whole building. Her husband and their two children were carried away, alive, by the flood. Three bodies were brought back from different locations, dead. The death was tragic; not because they died but because right from my roof, the woman watched as her husband, who had returned into the house to fetch their two children struggled with the force of the water. She watched the struggle, it was epic. She watched the water take him over… she watched him drift away. She saw as her children cry helplessly without any form of comforting as the waters bellowed and tossed them against each other. It was on such a night that all things were bright but not beautiful. The moon was out; it was a full moon. By my reckoning, it was minutes to midnight.

The day the water levels dropped, we were told of a number of survivors who had been trapped under a massive pile of debris somewhere a few streets away from ours. We hoped against hope that maybe, just maybe, they might be alive; but our faith was smaller than the mustard seed. It couldn’t keep them safe. It was this flood that washed away the joy in Ojochenemi’s house and left an ominous presence. The flood took away glory and left gloom. Suddenly all memories of the young widow’s life had gone dark. She had married the man who had always been there in her life – he had always been a significant part of everything she did. Now, he was no more.

The funeral was a small one. Three coffins – one big one and two small ones were laid to rest. Ojochenemi, Omarumieju - her sister, a priest from the church down the road, three languid, sad, and hungry looking young men that bore the palls and me were those who had come for the funeral. As they laid the coffins into the earth, I clung to the wooden frame I had salvaged from the flood. The picture was smudged and the frame broken and chipped at the edges. The coffins were Chenemi’s losses but the wooden frame with the smudged picture of a defaced girl was mine. The angel of death had visited us at Ebedom and had left in its wake a trail of flurry feathers. The god of losses had apotheosized itself in our hearts. The things we fawned at were the things we had lost. Everyone returned to wherever they had come from and the young widow was left to bear her grief: offering her mournful tears as libation to the god of losses. She came by my house on the fifth night after the funeral. She complained that the house was haunted. “I see them; they lurk around the corners. I know not my own house anymore,” she whispered with quivering lips.

I let the young bereaved woman in, fate had been hard and brute on her; it has also given her a chance to be together in our moment of grief. I offered her tea but she refused, the only thing she wanted was comfort and a place to lay her head. In my arms she found comfort and in my bed, memories of a drowning past seemed to be erased and new ones seemed to emerge. We talked and made love that night and as soon as we ended,, we went back to the debris we had created to salvage what’s left of the ruins. We never truly had the strength and courage to rip ours of our past. Our past had gained on us and had got the better of us. We were just a momentary comfort to each other: a gift of comfort meant but for a season.

Ojochenemi walked across the small, dingy room and pretty disorganized room where we had sinned. She covered her nakedness with the wrapper she had tied around her waist hours ago when she had appeared at my door. She pushed the bathroom door; as she closed it, I opened the lattice. A gusty wind blew in the garden that my window opened to. I saw damp leaves try to lift themselves up and dance to the rhythm of the wind. I felt it like the frustrations that took over my life in Berlin. In Berlin, I had sunk from a young promising expatriate executive to a handyman whose competence could only be endured. I was the competent and capable handyman with a bad luck with customers. I could fix anything around the house but there was one thing I could not fix: Adeyinka. My daughter’s demise was one thing I screwed up so tightly that I could not unscrew it. Once I couldn’t fix Adeyinka, other things that I had fixed between Similoluwa and I began to fall apart.

Truth is, Similoluwa and I did not stay together because we loved each other. Not that we never loved each other, we did but things just never went as we planned them to go. Ours was a tale of young lovers caught in reckless love. Love took us on a journey - life took over from where our fantasies had left us off. When we found out that we were two parallel lines that should never have met, life had crept upon us and had changed our course. On that journey, the dust of shame covered us and our sores wouldn’t heal. We were trapped in the crisis we had created with our own hands. We tried to make the most of the situation: the best we could make of it was chaos. Similoluwa was already with child. She wanted the child but did not want me around the child: my child, our child.

Soon after she delivered of Adeyinka, I lost my job. Since Similoluwa was the only one with a job the whole burden of the house was on her. I tried to get a new job but I got none. Everyone blamed the economic meltdown. A year after I lost my job, she got promoted at Le Restaurant where she worked. That was when she began the night shift. Since she paid the bills in the house, I did the chores and took care of the child. At first, it didn’t matter much to me that I cleaned the house or cooked the meals. However, it became undignifying when Similoluwa began to bark orders at me like I was a serf. For so long, I fought to earn back my respect but, I never won. At last, I gave up fighting and resigned to my fate: she was destined to be the man and me the woman. I found comfort in the excuse that I tolerated such insolence from Similoluwa for my daughter’s sake. I shook my head violently as I tried to shut the thoughts of Berlin from my mind. I wanted none of it anymore.

I heard sobs from the bathroom. I shut the lattice and the bathroom door opened. Ojochenemi appeared with my towel wrapped around her. She looked frail. “Mr. Afolabi, who is the girl in the broken frame? Is she your child?” she asked softly as though the words she spoke were glassware that would break if they fell off her lips. I looked at the direction of the frame and signaled to her to sit right next to me on the bed. The wind hit the window like a turbo engine. The woman shuddered. “Adeyinka, that’s her name. She’s dead. She died on my watch,” I began.

“She died while her mother was away at Le Restaurant, passionately making love in the rest room with a young chef. On that night when Adeyinka came down with a sickle cell crisis, I was asleep in front of the television downstairs. I had neatly tucked our four year old daughter into bed…I even read her a story – Hansel and Gretl. She loved it. She had complained a few minutes before that she was languid so she didn’t finish her cereal. I figured out that she only needed to rest and so I had tucked her in earlier than usual. Once I was sure she was asleep on Hansel and Gretl, I kissed her good night and returned downstairs to watch a football game that was already underway. I only woke up when Similoluwa returned from Le Restaurant. It was when she went to Adeyinka’s room to kiss her goodnight that she found her gasping. Before we could make it to the hospital, she was dead.  

Adeyinka passed on and the truth began to pour out. It was then that I figured it all out, every bit of it. It had not been coincidental, afterall, that it was when I lost my job that she got promoted at Le Restaurant. Since she, alone, bore the burden of settling the bills in the house, she needed a raise in her pay. Pierre Savigne, the owner of Le Restaurant, offered her promotion with a raise on the condition that she slept with him. Similoluwa took her chances, not for me but for her daughter. She cared less if I went hungry or died. What kept us together was gone; Adeyinka’s demise gave Simbiat the chance to file for separation.

 I worked the nights as a gateman in one of the city’s hospital and I worked the day doing menial jobs: fixing things in people’s homes. Simbiat’s divorce suit didn’t see the light of the day since there was no marriage in the first place. The court held that, at best, what we had was a long cohabitation. The court refused to allow that the cohabitation should suffice as marriage. Things got messier when the suit was thrown out court. There was a problem. Similoluwa had continued the mortgage payment when I lost my job. She had paid for two years. So who will take the house? She had Savigne on her side and things were looking up for her. I was surprised that she could betray me for rich French who was simply lucky enough to own a restaurant. A sister had betrayed one of her kind. It was then that in the summer that followed Adeyinka’s death, I packed the few things I had and got on the next plane homebound.

Ojochenemi lay on my bed half-naked. She held tightly to my hands like she was sinking and needed me to pull her up. Though she was in my room, on my bed, holding my hands, she didn’t look at me. I was her shame, yet her strength. Something burned in her heart; she desperately wanted to say something but she held back. Deep down within her was an untold story, buried but not dead. She licked her lips and sighed.

“I had an affair in my marriage,” she blurted out. She closed her eyes and continued. “You had just moved into the neighbourhood, I would not know for how long it was that you had been around but it was when I first saw you that I knew it. I loved you.” I must have been struck by a thunderbolt.

I couldn’t figure out how that could be so. I tried to act calm, she continued her confession. “Truth, you’re the first man I ever fell in love with.” She paused as though to let that sink in.

“How about your late husband?” I asked quickly.

“Abel and I was a mistake. We should not have happened.”

I stared at the ceiling in disbelief. I had always looked at this couple with envy. The new developments were shocking. I dreaded that I was caught somewhere in the middle of it.

“I was brought into the country when I was eleven. My sister and I were smuggled across the border in a truck filled with bales of cotton. We left the slums of Porto-Novo to become housemaids in Nigeria. To many of the folks that we left behind, we were considered to be lucky to have a chance to go to the great Nigeria. We had heard so much about the country and its greatness. We were told that it was the City of God. We heard tales about how everyone in Nigeria had everything they ever wanted. It was the land where all dreams came true. So when we waved goodbye to our widowed mother, we thought we were waving goodbye to all our sufferings and pains. For the endless hours of the road trip to Lagos, my sister and I spent them all in a stack of sacks filled with fairly used clothes.”

I chuckled at the thought that Nigeria was the City of God. Her face lit up. She looked, once again, beautiful. I squeezed her hands in mine and swung both our hands. She continued. “Omarumieju and I were delivered to a certain woman somewhere at Iyana-Ipaja and in a few weeks, we were flung apart. I was brought to Ebedom to work for a family. Oma was luckier; she was taken to work for a family based in Lagos. The family was good to her. They put her through school till she completed her secondary school education and she proceeded to be an apprentice at a seamstress’.

“I was not as lucky as Omar was. I spent all my life taking care of the house when everyone went to work. It was always lonely and boring till Abel came along. In my quest for fun, I crossed the line and got pregnant. I had intended to abort the baby but Abel insisted that I kept it. He said he had a plan and that I shouldn’t worry. He went ahead to tell “Daddy” that he wanted to marry me. His request was initially declined but when it was found that he had put me in the family way, Daddy agreed and we were married. My sister and I had spent so long in the homes we were placed in because the woman who had brought us from Iyana-Ipaja had died few months after we were dispatched and so we became mistresses of our own fate.”

“I moved into Abel’s house and that was it. Even though he tried to make me and the kids happy, I wasn’t. As I grew older, I began to reprove myself for letting things get that far. Abel was a good man but wasn’t the kind of man I had wanted to live the rest of my life with. You came along and that changed everything. One thought of you and my world is completely turned upside down. This was the pain I bore in silence till the flood came. It wiped out my painful mistakes with grief and gave me a clean slate.

I froze as I lay beside her. I drew her close and she faced me. I wanted to give her a kiss but she wouldn’t let me.

“I love you, Mr. Afolabi, but you have no place for me in your heart.”

“How?” I asked somberly.

 “You’re full of grief, pain and bitterness…your heart has become home to the dead. That is where your daughter lives now. Your rage blinds you that you do not see beyond these words that I speak that I love you.”

The clock on the wall chimed, it was dawn already. The cock crowed soon after. Ojochenemi stood up and began to dress up.

“I may have a past but my slate is clean. Your past hasn’t left you yet, it grows on you.” She said. I found a need to cough a reply.

“No, your slate isn’t clean!” I said very firmly in protest. “It is just an illusion. The slate will never be clean anymore, residue of used ink will always remain…it was just six days ago that we laid them to earth and you already see your kids lurking around dark corners of your house. It’s right there in your heart and there they would always be.”

“Then with the dead I shall make peace,” she responded sullenly and with guilt.

With that, she left my room. A foul stench drew the whole neighbourhood back to her apartment only three days after she left my place. The door was broken down and Ojochenemi she was found on a short drop to a sudden stop. She was dangling with her tongue stuck out and her eyes popping. She loved me enough to let me be with my grief. She loved her family enough to follow them right into the darkness of the afterlife. Now that she’s gone, I can’t shake her off my mind. She was right about one thing afterall, my heart will always be home to the dead. To Adeyinka…to her, Chenemi