Gone with the Night – A Short Story by Isaac Attah Ogezi
- By Isaac Attah Ogezi
- Published December 2, 2009
- Fiction
-
Rating:
Isaac Attah Ogezi
Born in 1976, Isaac Attah Ogezi attended the University of Jos, Jos, Plateau State where he obtained his LL.B (Hons) in 2002. He proceeded to the Nigerian Law School, Abuja, and was called to the Nigerian Bar on 12 October, 2004. Currently, he is a practising lawyer based at Keffi, Nasarawa State of Nigeria. He is published in The Rocks Cry Out (an anthology of ANA, Jos Chapter, 2002), Five Hundred Nigerian Poets (2005) and several national dailies in Nigeria. He writes plays, poems, short stories and literary essays.
View all Entries by Isaac Attah Ogezi
Dearest Chinyere,
You must forgive my belated reply to your last email. I believe you know how things work in our beloved country, don’t you? Please don’t tell me that your four-year sojourn in the US has made you forget the quagmire which our fatherland wallows in. It’s always a tug of war to reply your mails online, what with the endless queue at the cyber café! This is not to mention the two taxi drops I have to take to get to the place. I understand that in the US over there, almost every house is linked to the Internet and one doesn’t have to go to any cyber café to check or send mails. How I envy you! Only God will help our country. Anyway, I trust you’ve forgiven me.
Thanks for sending me the pictures of your Mr. Right as email attachments. When I saw them, I couldn’t restrain myself from celebrating aloud at the cyber café. I guess my neighbours who stopped momentarily to look at me must be wondering what had got into this girl. You don’t have to blame me. I was simply beside myself with joy. If I couldn’t do it, my friend has done it for me. She’s demystified the white man lover for me! Before I give my candid advice to your many questions, permit me to ask you one or two questions too. Ssshh! Now let me do the asking. How do they taste, Chichi? I mean how does it feel like to sleep with a white man? I understand they are so weak that their women prefer our men! Not that I blame them, the poor dears! Our men here are so rough and ungentlemanly to the extent that they want to do it sotay dem go touch bone! You laugh. Life is so ironic that even in the face of the greatest tragedy, somehow we laugh. I believe that in the drama of life, comic relief cannot be done without.
It is sad to inform you that I‘m no longer with Andy. The only time I can remember to be this sad was when the list eventually came out four years ago and I couldn’t make it. I’m recalling this chapter of my life just to let you know how much I miss you here. Until the list came and put a knife in-between what held us together, we were like Siamese twins that some envious neighbours were wondering if we were not lesbians! How evil are the thoughts of men! But we never gave them any serious thought.
The secret behind our long-lasting friendship is the common history we share. Went to the same secondary school together, proceeded to the same School of Nursing together, studied the same course, graduated the same year, and what’s more, we were employed at the same time by the Federal Medical Centre, Udi. The only thing we haven’t done together was to share the same boyfriend! I think we were smarter than that otherwise what would have become of our friendship? Haven’t we heard strange tales how mothers were pitted against their daughters because of that? What about fathers? The day a man condescends to befriend his son’s girlfriend, he’s asking the son to assume the role of the father. Tufia kwa!
I cannot believe that four whole years has just gone past since we parted. Oh, how time flies! No wonder a writer once said that as the day breaks daily, so do our mortal lives grind gradually to our graves. You must forgive my romance with morbid topics. I cannot help thinking of death since my relationship with Andy hit the rocks and we fell apart. At one point, I contemplated slicing a rib in my vein and then dipping myself slowly into hot, salt water in the bath! I wanted to end it all in the grand old style as in the movies or in a James Hadley Chase thriller.
Yes, it was just like yesterday when the Medical Director, Consultant Pathologist Amos Waya, called all the nurses to his office to break the news that was to change the lives of only a lucky few like you. It was the golden opportunity we were all dreaming of. The quickest Green Card to live and work in America as nurses. They were coming, yes, they were coming, a US Health Agency, to screen us nurses interested in working in the US. And there we were, waiting with bated breaths.
That night, I was at your one-bedroom apartment to dream dreams. We outlined our plans for the future and how we would work in several hospitals in a day when we got there in order to send dollars to our poor parents and relations at home. We would build mansions in our villages, acquire shares in major companies in our country and so on and so forth. It’s amazing how dreams can keep one going. It’s the life-wire of existence. In your own case, going to the US would mean more to you than our mere dreams. You needed it as a rehabilitation home to recuperate from the injuries inflicted on you by love. For who would have believed that Tayo of all people would dare do what he did to you? Imagine after all those sacrifices from you! Indeed some men can be so shameless. A friend of mine told me the other day that he is no longer together with her. What I failed to tell that friend was that it was nemesis that had at last caught up with him. Life will never allow you to eat your cake and have it. No, that would be injustice. Today, he may be regretting his action. With your money, you can buy ten of his kind any day in any city of our country! Men? No, my sister, I’ve long ceased to believe in any of them. I mean it. I doubt if I was created from any man’s crooked rib. They cannot be the helpmeets God meant in the Bible. Now, before you accuse me of blasphemy, let me explain. You see, what we misconstrue as love is nothing but the ageless war of the sexes, to dominate the other, to oppress the will of the other, to outwit and what have you. Love is a battle between two unequal parties with the woman from time immemorial playing the role of the underdog. Smart women who have understood this secret have given up on man-woman love and are now full-fledged lesbians!
Despite everything, you have my unreserved admiration. Your ability to make a comeback on love after all that you had passed through in the hands of that scum still amazes me. How did you do it, Chichi? Or is it the age-long triumph of the human spirit against all odds? I can still remember vividly the day you came back from Abuja looking so distraught. The journey that was to be a soul-lifting one for you turned out to be a horrible nightmare. How I wept along with you when you finally pulled yourself together and narrated your ordeal in the hands of that devil incarnate!
Tayo was a young man who was lucky to receive the blessing of your love much against my advice. I never failed to table my reservations against your picking on him. One, he was about four years younger than you. I kept reminding you that we were in Nigeria and not in America where anything could go in the name of love, but alas, Cupid had blinded you to that fact. Two, he was from another tribe, Yoruba, while you were Igbo. Lastly and most importantly, I pointed out that he was still an undergraduate, in fact, in his first year at the university and not a working-class guy. But I was in for another shocker when you declared to me two months after your affair with him that the two of you were engaged to be married! Wonder of wonders! I kept my cool. What I didn’t tell you as a friend was that you were too naïve to fall for that kind of cheap bait of men, after the word ‘marriage’, there you were ready to spend the last kobo in your bank account for that smooth-talking trickster. And how did he repay you? Didn’t he send his much younger woman to pull the clothes off your body?
He was doing his National Youth Service when you went to visit him. The swine was not even ashamed to show you the wedding invitation cards of his forthcoming marriage to a Sister-in-the-Lord in his church. He had suddenly become a born-again Christian who must not be of equally yoked with an unbeliever like you. I could imagine the agonized look on your face as you calmly asked him: ‘Is this how you have decided to repay me after all these years, Tayo?’ He kept quiet, looking penitent. ‘Was that your plan all this while to make me a laughing-stock before my fellow girls, eh Tayo?’ In reply, he went down on his knees, all apologetic. The hypocrite! It was then that he remembered that you and him were not compatible – your ‘advanced’ age, different ethnic groups, and his new born-again status. He had forgotten your hard-earned money which saw him through the university and your body that kept him warm in the coldest nights. Anytime he was home on semester or sessional break, he always put up in your place. You not only fed him but gave him the sex of his life. Free sex, Chichi.
Great lady, I admire your guts. Tragedy does either of two things to a man – it either breaks his spirit completely or brings out the best in him. It did the latter to you. For after absorbing the shock from Tayo, you refused to pass the night in his place and checked into a not-too-cheap hotel at Gwaimpa Estate. The fool had thought all was well. The next day, you were in the pastorage of his church to see the resident pastor with a copy of the wedding invitation card. After the usual exchange of pleasantries and the subtle prodding into your private life by the man of God, you opened up to him about Brother Tayo in his church, much to the greatest shock of the priest. When the priest sent for Brother Tayo and he couldn’t deny any of your allegations, the wedding was stopped right away, with three days to the D-day! That was what brought his fiery intended into the scene, screeching like a witch to come and fight you. A much younger girl, she tore the clothes on you but your aim was more than achieved. As if that was not enough, Tayo said he would see how you would stop the marriage from going on at the court. Yes, the church had expelled him but the court was there to wed him and her, he told you to your face. He even threatened to kill you! That was when you returned, crestfallen, to Udi but his death threats and hate mails never stopped pouring in in torrents. You had wanted to institute a civil action against him at the High Court for breach of promise to marriage which I passionately dissuaded you. It would definitely do more harm to your name than good, what with the negative publicity that would go with it. Was he worth the trouble? No, you would only scare away more eligible men away from you, I argued. I’m still grateful to you for heeding my advice. Today, you’re better off without Tayo.
A few months after this ugly incident in your life, the much-awaited US Health Agency arrived to screen nurses interested in living and working in America. That changed the menu of our discussions by relegating your disheartening story to the background. We plunged ourselves into our new dreams, body and soul. Besides, we knew the type of people that we were dealing with and had to arm ourselves with the academic wherewithal to pass the various stages of the screening. If we slept around with our lecturers during our school days to pass our exams, these people were different. They were no-nonsense Americans out to fish the best brains among us for their country. Talk about the perennial issue of brain drain that is gradually crippling our national life. For the first time in years, we dusted our lesson notes from our nursing school and burnt the midnight oil like final-year medical students.
How didn’t we celebrate our victory when we scaled through the first stage of the screening? Thanks to our intensive preparations, the aptitude test was a walk-over for us. This gave us the leverage for the next stage which was the oral interview. It was another beehive of intense preparations. We mortgaged our personal lives for the diamond-bright future that lay ahead and anytime we met, we contemplated the likely questions they would ask us. Why do you want to live and work in America? To trade in hard drugs like cocaine and heroin? What is your take on the September 11 attack in the US? Who is Florence Nightingale? How would you react to the assertion that there are countless churches and mosques in Nigeria yet the level of bribery and corruption is fast on the increase? What is osmosis and diffusion? et cetera, et cetera. We racked our brains to guess the likely questions we would be asked and never underrated any questions, as my father would say, no one knows the woman that will give birth to Jesus Christ. It could be the wife the husband least expected. In any case, we were so obsessed with our dreams of going to live in America that we daily pelted questions at each other like hailstones in lieu of greetings. Happily enough, the interview was much simpler than we had anticipated and we came out celebrating in advance our flight to America, the Promised Land of our dreams, the land flowing with milk and honey!
You must forgive my belated reply to your last email. I believe you know how things work in our beloved country, don’t you? Please don’t tell me that your four-year sojourn in the US has made you forget the quagmire which our fatherland wallows in. It’s always a tug of war to reply your mails online, what with the endless queue at the cyber café! This is not to mention the two taxi drops I have to take to get to the place. I understand that in the US over there, almost every house is linked to the Internet and one doesn’t have to go to any cyber café to check or send mails. How I envy you! Only God will help our country. Anyway, I trust you’ve forgiven me.
Thanks for sending me the pictures of your Mr. Right as email attachments. When I saw them, I couldn’t restrain myself from celebrating aloud at the cyber café. I guess my neighbours who stopped momentarily to look at me must be wondering what had got into this girl. You don’t have to blame me. I was simply beside myself with joy. If I couldn’t do it, my friend has done it for me. She’s demystified the white man lover for me! Before I give my candid advice to your many questions, permit me to ask you one or two questions too. Ssshh! Now let me do the asking. How do they taste, Chichi? I mean how does it feel like to sleep with a white man? I understand they are so weak that their women prefer our men! Not that I blame them, the poor dears! Our men here are so rough and ungentlemanly to the extent that they want to do it sotay dem go touch bone! You laugh. Life is so ironic that even in the face of the greatest tragedy, somehow we laugh. I believe that in the drama of life, comic relief cannot be done without.
It is sad to inform you that I‘m no longer with Andy. The only time I can remember to be this sad was when the list eventually came out four years ago and I couldn’t make it. I’m recalling this chapter of my life just to let you know how much I miss you here. Until the list came and put a knife in-between what held us together, we were like Siamese twins that some envious neighbours were wondering if we were not lesbians! How evil are the thoughts of men! But we never gave them any serious thought.
The secret behind our long-lasting friendship is the common history we share. Went to the same secondary school together, proceeded to the same School of Nursing together, studied the same course, graduated the same year, and what’s more, we were employed at the same time by the Federal Medical Centre, Udi. The only thing we haven’t done together was to share the same boyfriend! I think we were smarter than that otherwise what would have become of our friendship? Haven’t we heard strange tales how mothers were pitted against their daughters because of that? What about fathers? The day a man condescends to befriend his son’s girlfriend, he’s asking the son to assume the role of the father. Tufia kwa!
I cannot believe that four whole years has just gone past since we parted. Oh, how time flies! No wonder a writer once said that as the day breaks daily, so do our mortal lives grind gradually to our graves. You must forgive my romance with morbid topics. I cannot help thinking of death since my relationship with Andy hit the rocks and we fell apart. At one point, I contemplated slicing a rib in my vein and then dipping myself slowly into hot, salt water in the bath! I wanted to end it all in the grand old style as in the movies or in a James Hadley Chase thriller.
Yes, it was just like yesterday when the Medical Director, Consultant Pathologist Amos Waya, called all the nurses to his office to break the news that was to change the lives of only a lucky few like you. It was the golden opportunity we were all dreaming of. The quickest Green Card to live and work in America as nurses. They were coming, yes, they were coming, a US Health Agency, to screen us nurses interested in working in the US. And there we were, waiting with bated breaths.
That night, I was at your one-bedroom apartment to dream dreams. We outlined our plans for the future and how we would work in several hospitals in a day when we got there in order to send dollars to our poor parents and relations at home. We would build mansions in our villages, acquire shares in major companies in our country and so on and so forth. It’s amazing how dreams can keep one going. It’s the life-wire of existence. In your own case, going to the US would mean more to you than our mere dreams. You needed it as a rehabilitation home to recuperate from the injuries inflicted on you by love. For who would have believed that Tayo of all people would dare do what he did to you? Imagine after all those sacrifices from you! Indeed some men can be so shameless. A friend of mine told me the other day that he is no longer together with her. What I failed to tell that friend was that it was nemesis that had at last caught up with him. Life will never allow you to eat your cake and have it. No, that would be injustice. Today, he may be regretting his action. With your money, you can buy ten of his kind any day in any city of our country! Men? No, my sister, I’ve long ceased to believe in any of them. I mean it. I doubt if I was created from any man’s crooked rib. They cannot be the helpmeets God meant in the Bible. Now, before you accuse me of blasphemy, let me explain. You see, what we misconstrue as love is nothing but the ageless war of the sexes, to dominate the other, to oppress the will of the other, to outwit and what have you. Love is a battle between two unequal parties with the woman from time immemorial playing the role of the underdog. Smart women who have understood this secret have given up on man-woman love and are now full-fledged lesbians!
Despite everything, you have my unreserved admiration. Your ability to make a comeback on love after all that you had passed through in the hands of that scum still amazes me. How did you do it, Chichi? Or is it the age-long triumph of the human spirit against all odds? I can still remember vividly the day you came back from Abuja looking so distraught. The journey that was to be a soul-lifting one for you turned out to be a horrible nightmare. How I wept along with you when you finally pulled yourself together and narrated your ordeal in the hands of that devil incarnate!
Tayo was a young man who was lucky to receive the blessing of your love much against my advice. I never failed to table my reservations against your picking on him. One, he was about four years younger than you. I kept reminding you that we were in Nigeria and not in America where anything could go in the name of love, but alas, Cupid had blinded you to that fact. Two, he was from another tribe, Yoruba, while you were Igbo. Lastly and most importantly, I pointed out that he was still an undergraduate, in fact, in his first year at the university and not a working-class guy. But I was in for another shocker when you declared to me two months after your affair with him that the two of you were engaged to be married! Wonder of wonders! I kept my cool. What I didn’t tell you as a friend was that you were too naïve to fall for that kind of cheap bait of men, after the word ‘marriage’, there you were ready to spend the last kobo in your bank account for that smooth-talking trickster. And how did he repay you? Didn’t he send his much younger woman to pull the clothes off your body?
He was doing his National Youth Service when you went to visit him. The swine was not even ashamed to show you the wedding invitation cards of his forthcoming marriage to a Sister-in-the-Lord in his church. He had suddenly become a born-again Christian who must not be of equally yoked with an unbeliever like you. I could imagine the agonized look on your face as you calmly asked him: ‘Is this how you have decided to repay me after all these years, Tayo?’ He kept quiet, looking penitent. ‘Was that your plan all this while to make me a laughing-stock before my fellow girls, eh Tayo?’ In reply, he went down on his knees, all apologetic. The hypocrite! It was then that he remembered that you and him were not compatible – your ‘advanced’ age, different ethnic groups, and his new born-again status. He had forgotten your hard-earned money which saw him through the university and your body that kept him warm in the coldest nights. Anytime he was home on semester or sessional break, he always put up in your place. You not only fed him but gave him the sex of his life. Free sex, Chichi.
Great lady, I admire your guts. Tragedy does either of two things to a man – it either breaks his spirit completely or brings out the best in him. It did the latter to you. For after absorbing the shock from Tayo, you refused to pass the night in his place and checked into a not-too-cheap hotel at Gwaimpa Estate. The fool had thought all was well. The next day, you were in the pastorage of his church to see the resident pastor with a copy of the wedding invitation card. After the usual exchange of pleasantries and the subtle prodding into your private life by the man of God, you opened up to him about Brother Tayo in his church, much to the greatest shock of the priest. When the priest sent for Brother Tayo and he couldn’t deny any of your allegations, the wedding was stopped right away, with three days to the D-day! That was what brought his fiery intended into the scene, screeching like a witch to come and fight you. A much younger girl, she tore the clothes on you but your aim was more than achieved. As if that was not enough, Tayo said he would see how you would stop the marriage from going on at the court. Yes, the church had expelled him but the court was there to wed him and her, he told you to your face. He even threatened to kill you! That was when you returned, crestfallen, to Udi but his death threats and hate mails never stopped pouring in in torrents. You had wanted to institute a civil action against him at the High Court for breach of promise to marriage which I passionately dissuaded you. It would definitely do more harm to your name than good, what with the negative publicity that would go with it. Was he worth the trouble? No, you would only scare away more eligible men away from you, I argued. I’m still grateful to you for heeding my advice. Today, you’re better off without Tayo.
A few months after this ugly incident in your life, the much-awaited US Health Agency arrived to screen nurses interested in living and working in America. That changed the menu of our discussions by relegating your disheartening story to the background. We plunged ourselves into our new dreams, body and soul. Besides, we knew the type of people that we were dealing with and had to arm ourselves with the academic wherewithal to pass the various stages of the screening. If we slept around with our lecturers during our school days to pass our exams, these people were different. They were no-nonsense Americans out to fish the best brains among us for their country. Talk about the perennial issue of brain drain that is gradually crippling our national life. For the first time in years, we dusted our lesson notes from our nursing school and burnt the midnight oil like final-year medical students.
How didn’t we celebrate our victory when we scaled through the first stage of the screening? Thanks to our intensive preparations, the aptitude test was a walk-over for us. This gave us the leverage for the next stage which was the oral interview. It was another beehive of intense preparations. We mortgaged our personal lives for the diamond-bright future that lay ahead and anytime we met, we contemplated the likely questions they would ask us. Why do you want to live and work in America? To trade in hard drugs like cocaine and heroin? What is your take on the September 11 attack in the US? Who is Florence Nightingale? How would you react to the assertion that there are countless churches and mosques in Nigeria yet the level of bribery and corruption is fast on the increase? What is osmosis and diffusion? et cetera, et cetera. We racked our brains to guess the likely questions we would be asked and never underrated any questions, as my father would say, no one knows the woman that will give birth to Jesus Christ. It could be the wife the husband least expected. In any case, we were so obsessed with our dreams of going to live in America that we daily pelted questions at each other like hailstones in lieu of greetings. Happily enough, the interview was much simpler than we had anticipated and we came out celebrating in advance our flight to America, the Promised Land of our dreams, the land flowing with milk and honey!