The set of apartments sat like the last twelve cubes in a St. Louis sugar box.
I could smell the aroma of freshly fried fish and the delicious scent of slightly burnt party jollof rice and plantain coming from Mama Amaka’s apartment. Beyond that, there was no way to tell she was home unless you happened upon the zipped silence of her two children playing in the hallway.
There were no sounds.
There were babies, but no cries during the day or night. There were neighbors, but no whispers, no clanging of doors, no congregation of humans, no presence, no churchgoers, no call to prayer, no hawkers, no blaring horns at the gates, no generators. When you see children, they moved through the hallway like creeping things, waving banners of grey oblivion. Even routine acts like flushing the toilet were performed quietly.
The stillness was absolute in its richness. Sometimes, it felt delicate, yet transparently powerful, as though one could detest it with every fiber and still acknowledge its rapturous quality. From my window, I could see the hushed beauty of the abandoned hotel. The garden was well tended, and the lawn was perfectly mowed. Everywhere, you could see an invisible hand dictating the features of the forsaken property, like the sonic filters draped over the human noise.
For the first time, I was interacting with my mind with profound intimacy, enjoying the tranquility and awareness it presented to me. It was as if a wider world had been opened to me.
But then, I would press an empty wine glass against Mama Amaka’s wall to hear a human breath besides mine. Detecting the faintest human noise from her house was a significant victory during weekdays when the apartments were usually deserted as early as 5 am. I could easily hear her husband’s footsteps, despite his strong efforts to muffle them, when he left for work at the break of dawn. His departure was usually accompanied by a quick sequence of subdued human sounds, the noise of someone hitting the wall in an attempt to find their way in the dark hallway leading to the exit.
Mr. Benjamin, the neighbor opposite our room, was known for frequently bumping into walls. Whenever he did, I reminded myself to tell him to get a better pair of glasses to combine with his phone’s torchlight. His current spectacles seemed too weak to help him navigate the dark hallway at dawn. But when I see him on Friday nights and Saturday mornings, I quickly tire out from my other questions about his outings. Ironically, he was a heavy smoker. So, if he managed to get a new pair of glasses and stopped his awkward morning departures, the smell of Benson and Hedges would still betray him to me. The cigarette smoke was more noticeable than the children’s sad attempts at stillness.
The apartment was once the High Gates Hotel. Like many hotels on Adekunle Fajuyi Street, our rooms catered to wealthy and middle-class travelers in the 1990s before being replaced by the newer, modern building standing next to it. The management attempted to rent out the property for years, but no one was willing to lease an old hotel situated near a more modern and upscale establishment. When they finally found a buyer, the new owner faced a series of new city regulations. The government was demolishing houses belonging to political opponents or their associates under the pretense of enforcing the master plan. The city’s plans changed frequently, depending on which opponents were targeted for demolition.
Even though it had escaped being demolished, the old High Gates Hotel no longer aligned with the state’s master plan as it had been built in the 1960s. However, the new owner believed it was better to keep something standing rather than leave the land empty. Six years ago, Mama Amaka and other tenants had quietly moved into the old High Gates late at night after the government had demolished their rental apartment at PWD, the old passport office.
At PWD, children played freely and adults left their radios on at full volume because a good song isn’t judged by its lyrics or beats; it’s only good when shared with neighbors. So, the sound of Tu Face Idibia’s “African Queen” echoed from one room to another; talk shows and news spilled over dozens of apartments until midnight. The national anthem woke up the neighborhood. When the Super Eagles played, neighbors brought their TVs outside so everyone could watch and cheer together. And when the team lost—as they often did—the same neighbors would scold themselves for expecting too much from the super chickens.
“These are not Eagles, but chickens. Our real Eagles would have flown over Ghana to the finals,” someone in the crowd had said after Ghana knocked Nigeria out of the African Nations Cup. Loud laughter followed, as this line never lost its humor when told at the right moment.
Children danced to Kanu Nwankwo’s Peak Milk commercials, telling themselves they’d make their parents proud without understanding the full weight of that statement. I disliked the commercial because I was beginning to grasp the cultural semiotics behind Kanu’s expectation in the ad—the weight of that hope—and how it didn’t fit with an undergraduate who lacked talent and was facing a bleak job market. I had visited my aunt at PWD before it was demolished. After the place was sealed and plastered with court numbers, she moved back to the village because, according to her, “I am done with Lagos housing wahala. You sleep in your house at night and wake up in the streets the next morning.”
I arrived at the old High Gates hotel for the first time one December morning after school closed for the holidays. My father warned me sternly about coordinating my movements and maintaining silence at the new apartment. He told me to time my trips home so I could arrive during the open entry and exit periods—in the morning and at night.
“You can read all day and night without any music or children disturbing you,” he said. I thought it strange that he would sell a restrictive apartment as a place suitable for my studies.
Our old apartment, located on a nearby street called Adeyemo Alakiji, had been demolished while I was away at school. This was not my first experience with demolitions, but it hit me the most as I had just started recovering from the previous experience. I had foolishly eased into the permanence of something that was ephemeral, as these abandoned houses in Ikeja GRA were wont to be. I was breaking the rules, sharing my real address with friends and accepting compliments for my false social status.
Therefore, when the bulldozers came down on the building, they came down heavily on me, throwing me off the false pedestal that I had placed myself. I was restless. I walked around my school on the first evening after hearing the news, for no reason. The vegetable vendors in the bustle of Agbowo, the market in front of the school, with their tables overflowing with greens, tubers of yams, fruits, and onions, no longer enticed me. The second-hand book sellers under the waning streetlights, with titles that stopped you in your tracks, no longer interested me. Every note of beauty returned me to my own disturbance, shutting the color and the fragrance of the moment. My identity was being reshaped, and I could not stop it. I kept walking, erasing all the objects that I couldn’t see myself in.
I desired only the identity that was being reconstructed—the one I had known for some years. There was no resolution in sight, no escape from this unstable self. I was wondering what my new story would be and where I would return to during semester breaks. In that period between the demolition and my return home, I got another news equally humbling and disastrous—my parents’ separation.
I was given the option to return to either one of them at the end of the semester. I decided to return to my father because he had promised that his place was closer to the location where my former self was formed.
On my first day at the hotel, my father handed me a series of written instructions, as detailed and confusing as a guidebook for first-time parents. These guidebooks were known for increasing anxiety rather than easing it and so did those instructions.
First, I was never to turn on the lights. There was no record of human habitation on the abandoned property, and our continued tenancy depended on staying out of the spotlight. Then, I was never to make a sound. Campus life might be lively, but the old High Gates Hotel required complete silence. The previous tenants were evicted after making their presence felt with loud music and wild parties. Our living arrangement hinged on the continued possibility that the new High Gates Hotel never discovered there were lodgers in the old High Gates. Finally, movements were restricted to before sunrise and after sunset.
I read those notes in utter disbelief, as nothing had prepared me for this new asceticism straight from university. My father had left for work early the next morning without so much as a whisper of confirmation that I’d understood the rules. By then, I’d discovered he had secured a new job as a security guard on the same Adekunle Fajuyi Street. I expected, in addition to the guidebook, a note to me about the new life here without my mother. But the note brooked no such discussions.
Later in the morning, while loud music blared from the speakers of the new High Gates, Mama Amaka came up to me in the backyard to whisper in my ear, “Has your father told you about the rules of this community? Because we only live here as long as we keep pretending we don’t.”
She was wearing tight shorts and a slightly oversized shirt. The shorts hugged all her curves below, while the loose shirt managed to reveal parts of her upper body calling for their freedom.
“We do not speak here except when loud music is playing on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. A lot of parties happen at the new High Gates Hotel on weekends, but on weekdays it’s as quiet as a graveyard, so we must be quiet, too,” she concluded.
I nodded, careful not to say too much and risk upsetting this fragile tenement. The backyard was a stretch of irregularly cemented ground with a low clothesline anchored into the dirt. A little further away was a water reservoir that supplied water to the apartments. With a mechanical motion, Mama Amaka resumed hanging her washed clothes on the line, as if I were never there with her or she hadn’t just whispered something to me.
Only after meeting Mr. Uche that Saturday afternoon did I realize the meaning of silence. He came very close to me before he responded to my enthusiastic and slightly loud greeting.
“We don’t do that here. You could have simply waved at me, and I would have waved back.” He took a good look at me, adjusting the angle of his left shoulder as if there was a facial feature of mine missing from his current field of vision. Obviously, my father had informed them of my arrival, but the mode of communication was something I was beginning to wonder about. Did he send them a written letter and a photograph explaining the coming of a potential initiate into the cult of silence? Or did they whisper these messages on a late Friday night before my arrival?
“You are not supposed to think that this place is unsafe because of the rules. In fact, this is one of the safest and friendliest neighborhoods in the country,” said Mr. Uche. “We have the police station nearby, and we are in the middle of the wealthiest neighborhoods by virtue of our location at the GRA. These apartments are more secure than the houses in Lekki and Lagos Island.”
That evening, he left a stack of newspapers and magazines at my door with a note about the chapters to review. The City People magazine featured glossy sections on expensive properties in Ikeja GRA and highlighted it as the best place to live for the year. There were photos of commercial streets like Isaac John that were opening luxury shops for the wealthy. One of these shops was Adam and Eve. Another magazine had a cover story on Metro Park and The Place. The former was advertised as a nightclub with “exotic” fun, while the latter was a go-to eatery for quick meals. There were also pictures of Sobo Arobiodun Street. The only photo of Adekunle Fajuyi Street in the newspapers was of the new High Gates Hotel.
The Uches, my father, and Mr. Benjamin were not the only tenants. There was Abubakar, who was known as the gatekeeper to the property owner but had taken on the role of caretaker, collecting a monthly rent and enforcing silence while regulating everyone’s movements. He was rarely seen, but he observed every move and confronted violators with his unusually low, yet effective whisper. Abubakar embodied the strength of a calm voice. There was a young man named Efraim, a bachelor who appeared and disappeared from the apartment like a cool breeze. All these tenants, except Efraim, seemed to rely on Abubakar for guidance in navigating the rules of the old High Gates. Abubakar kept a close watch on them to make sure everyone stayed in line. I sometimes wondered if he kept a record of their movements, including the decibels of their breathing and snores, the times of their walks, and bathing habits.
The next day, I received another stack of old magazines. Mr. Uche bookmarked a page where Ikeja GRA was named the best neighborhood in Lagos to raise a child. But this time, there was a newspaper clipping about Lt. General Adekunle Fajuyi, and the article narrated his death during the second military coup.
According to the writer, Fajuyi surrendered his life to the coup plotters when they came for the former head of state, General Ironsi, in 1966. Ironsi was Fajuyi’s guest in Ibadan, and the coup plotters saw his visit as the perfect opportunity to strike. Fajuyi, noticing the appearance of complicity to the public and Ironsi’s family if he survived unscathed, asked the coup plotters also to take his life, instead. Mr. Uche had highlighted the phrase, “Fajuyi exemplifies the true definition of friendship, sacrifice, and the Nigerian spirit.”
During our first meeting, Mr. Uche may have mentioned he was a former history teacher before being laid off, but I didn’t recall giving him the impression that I wanted history lessons. Or perhaps my indifference to the street name where High Gates was located prompted him to correct my ignorance.
That December, the harmattan winds blew with hesitation. There was an unpleasant heat at night, and the usual cold that was supposed to herald the morning was timid. The lethargy in the air trickled into the silence.
One Thursday afternoon, Abubakar caught Mr. Uche and his children laughing out loud. They had all gone to the Christmas cantata where the older child played Mary, and something in her performance seemed to stay with them. I stood close to the wall, listening to the laughter vibrate through it. It was as if they had rediscovered that they could walk again after many years of trying and failing, and they wanted to test their legs repeatedly to be sure it was no fluke. Then I heard a knock, the laughter stopped, and Abubakar’s assured whispers followed.
It seemed to me not long afterward that I heard a measured and steady sound pierce through my headphones. The noise passed through me like a wave, carrying with it a sense of terror and foreboding, which I had come to associate with any unexpected noise. The noise was unusual, and I was not entirely sure how to process it, not because it was too severe and not because it was too incidental, but because it seemed severe one moment and incidental the next, and so I was not quite able to decide whether this was the beginning of the end of this tenement or not. It sounded like some badly mixed sound blaring from the new High Gates Hotel. Somebody influential must have paid heavily to have them throw a party on a Thursday afternoon.
As the sound continued, I thought of the very nature of wealth in Lagos, the need for it to be seen and heard, and how this translated to the need to be felt. Each display of wealth could only be matched by the vulgarity of the lack that served as its backdrop, whether it be the convoy of cars in a community without water or the flouting of the rules at the new High Gates Hotel. The sound continued to rise, followed by the clear noise of internal struggle from across the hallway.
If the sound was measured on our scale of silence, it had gone from a whisper into a siren. Then it became clearer. It was not a misplaced beat in a song, but the continuous cry for help from a nearby source.
Suddenly, Mr. Uche’s door opened, and I heard another door open. I realized that other tenants had a hidden desire to witness this unexpected emancipation of human noise. In the hallway, other tenants had crowded around a face from Mr. Benjamin’s apartment. Rapid sounds were coming from the face, but I could not see it clearly because Efraim, Mr. Uche and his wife, Abubakar, and four or five other faces I had not seen before were now circling this person resorting to words because their silence had been ignored. The daylight in the hallway was only enough to allow me to see the person when I got closer. It was someone I had not seen before, and from her frantic narrative and Abubakar’s attempt to suppress her and rein in the silence once more, it was clear she was someone they knew. She was one of them. The other neighbors were pale with fear. They were grateful for the human noise, it seemed, but afraid that the silence had been interrupted for too long.
“He hits me every morning before he leaves for work. I can’t take it anymore. I will have to call the police,” I heard her say.
Mr. Uche started to speak at the top of his voice, blaming the silence for his inability to distinguish between Benjamin beating his wife and Benjamin bumping into the walls of the hallway on his way to work. Abubakar was still pleading for calm with his eyes, his nose, his hands, and every other part of his body, except his lips. He wanted to bring back the fragmented world of silence, which was facing imminent extinction. He was making gestures for calm, asking for the interlude of words to be replaced by the regime of silence once more. His face expressed a slight, sickening twinge of fear. It was a fear of the reality around him, the implication of calling the police to resolve this domestic abuse in a place where nobody lives, a surface of the earth known for its human absence.
It was the fear of a man who knew that the veils are about to be struck down one by one, and he is unable to grasp the complex, concrete reality of the cause of this panic. The woman was displaying her bruised back, shoulder, and face to the small gathering as evidence of her torture from Mr. Benjamin. Her mood reflected that of the crowd. Her despair resonated with ours, and we responded and reacted accordingly.
The truth was that we enjoyed the words, and more than that, we hungered for someone to speak to us outside the approved time. When we rushed out in the early morning or waved to our neighbors fervently in the morning or at night, or when we listened to the walls for the human noise from the next room, what we were truly seeking was the end of this regime of silence and the return of human speech as we had known it before the old High Gates. We had banished all noises that were not essential to the texture of our survival. This episode was the one clear flash in the dark panic that was our silence. We could not believe that Mr. Benjamin was capable of this torture, though.
The man who made you think he was weak, incapable of helping himself, groping the darkness of the hallway… When presented as a monster, it was not altogether unfitting if you needed more than a minute to reconsider. So, we were all reconsidering in front of the damage to our sonic filters. We all reconsidered, not only from pity, nor yet from a sense of tainted innocence, but I felt certain, from the conviction that at this point, the silence had ceased to be an issue.
We were besotted by the glamor of her misery. More and more, I noticed she cultivated our interest; in our minds, there was no longer a neutral and variable cause for her abuse, and we were charmed by her complete, human speech—the fact that someone had broken the silence to express her full human spirit. With every new detail of how Mr. Benjamin had locked her up in the apartment and threatened that she would be the cause of our eviction if she made a sound, she gained a new friend; she fashioned a matching myth of human connection through her words.
I wished then that I had listened more to the bumps as I listened clearly now to her hurt. I felt I would have known that someone was sinking.
Mr. Uche asked her, “Why didn’t you say something before now? Why didn’t you run away from him when he started?”
She looked at him, and he realized it was a rhetorical question. The silence. She could not speak because of the silence, and she could not leave the house because of the silence. Mr. Uche nodded to himself in a spark of brilliant epiphany. But he repeated the same question once more. Then, once again, in a louder voice. He kept shouting the questions even as the crowd slowly began to disappear. It was as if all the muted music of his life could no longer be contained after the interruption of the silence.
****
Image: Hello Cdd20 Pixabay remixed