One night in August, he returned. We had finished dinner and I had put out the lamp and Mama had said the bedtime prayers, when the knock came on our door, loud at first, and three soft raps after a while. My mother was already asleep. Thieves, I thought. But what was there to steal anyway? Do they not say that what is empty cannot be emptied? So I walked to the door, my heart in my hands, to usher the night prowlers into the home of a widow and her teenage daughter.
I opened the door, and there he stood. The moon above him, smelling of the night, his eyes a pair of dying suns, his face pallid but still very recognizable to me. My brother!
In the darkness of the night, I could see his wide, nutty smile , a smile that invited you to an experience. My brother. It occured to me that this figure— smiling, mute mannequin of a brother—could as well be his ghost standing before me. But if the ghost of someone I so much longed to see could suddenly appear in front of my door late at night with all smiles and no words, then I could breathe life into him and he’d live again.
I looked down to the bag on the ground at his feet, then up to his face again, and I noticed his beards were missing. Those lovely beards.
“Kamsi,” He called me finally.
It was him, indeed. His voice was enough confirmation. It still had that metallic quality to it.
In the past months when I thought of him, I tried to imagine what I would do if Mama and I ever saw him again. Whether it was at the market or in church that we saw him, or we boarded a bus to a city where someone must have seen him, I would scream his name and jump on him, circling my hands around his neck while laughing and crying at the same time. I would kiss his neck, give an exaggerated smile that would make him comment on my dimples once again, and whine my waist in a way that would make him laugh, then I would run off to tell my friends one by one in their houses.
I never imagined he would just show up so late at night, in the hour of ghosts. I didn’t even know I could betray all those hours spent in imagining his return, because all I said to him now was, “Brother Nmeso, welcome.”
I stepped aside for him to go in, and I followed him with his luggage to his room in silence.
I hadn’t entered his room since he left, and I was surprised that asides the dust coating every surface, nothing changed. Sometimes when I sat in class during lessons, I would imagine someone climbing into Brother Nmeso’s room through his window to steal his expensive sweet-smelling perfumes. I would imagine the thief trying all the clothes in my brother’s wardrobe on himself to know which ones to take, until I hear my teacher call, “Kamsiyo! Where is your mind?” Still I would not go to check the room when I returned. I was grateful now that none of that actually happened.
“Goodnight, Brother Nmeso,” I said as I made to leave after dropping his bag.
He kept dusting off his bed with a towel, saying nothing nor turning to me.
Back in our room, I lay beside Mama on the bed but it took me time to finally ease off to sleep with many questions in my mind. Why had Brother Nmeso not asked me of Mama, or at least stopped by our room to check on her? Did he just casually assume that nothing could have happened and that Mama would just be waiting for him? Why had I said only Welcome to him as though he’d stepped out just this afternoon to see a friend?
Days before Brother Nmeso made the trip to Borno state, he and Mama had a soft quarrel. The house became so hot in those few days, the air we breathed was thick with unspoken bits of heavy feelings. Brother Nmeso had outgrown Mama’s outright dominance over him, but he hadn’t grown to the age of starkly defying Mama’s words.
So in the days before the trip, Mama went about her chores murmuring about a son who was about to foolishly abandon his family and waste his life in the name of work. He was the bread winner of the house, as his salary was more than thrice the profit from Mama’s provision store in front of the house, but what did it matter to Mama? That wasn’t enough reason for her to act comfortable with the trip.
During lunch one afternoon, Mama turned to me and said, “But see this kidnapping and killing and Boko Haram happening in the North. What conference are they doing in such death zone?”
I looked at Mama, knowing she expected me to say something but not knowing what she expected me to say. I got up and walked into our room, conscious of her eyes on me.
The day he left, we followed him to the Aba main park where he boarded a bus. There in the noise of the lively-bustling park, standing between us with his right hand on my shoulder and his left hand on Mama’s, he leaned towards me and whispered, “You and Mama should stop acting like you see Death’s signature on my face. I’ve been traveling, amd this is just for three weeks.” To Mama, he whispered loud enough for me to hear, “The Lord protects His own.”
Yes, he’d been attending conferences all over the country for the company where he worked, but going to a terror-ridden Maiduguri was a reason to worry, we heard the news everyday. If he didn’t return, Mama and I would have no man in our lives, but God would protect His own for those three weeks.
When we heard in the news that terrorists had attacked travellers in Borno state the same day my brother travelled, the words that escaped my mother’s mouth were The Lord Protects His Own. An assurance complemented by silence.
Few days rolled by without a call from him. His phone line was unreachable. But we tried to avoid speaking about him— except Mama pausing a sentence midway to say, “Ndu nwa enweghi nti”. Life of an obstinate child — until the three weeks raced past with no news of my brother; and I woke up one morning to find Mama sobbing, her face buried into the kitchen sink. I touched her back and the force of her words startled me. “Nmesoma juru inu ihe. He refused to hear!”
Before I slept on the night of his return, I considered going to his room to tell him that Mama never cooked Oha throughout his absence because he was not there to lick the soup; that we said twenty decades of Rosary every night for his return. I wanted to tell him that Miss Nonye whom he often joked he’d marry had married a man who sold laces at Shopping Center. I wanted to tell him that I’d returned from school one day to find Mama sprawled on the floor of the sitting room, his name on repeat on her lips.
But I just couldn’t tell him all that happened in sixteen months that should have been three weeks. For instance, that Mama had placed his picture at the foot of Jesus in our church grotto, and that Mama was waiting for him to return and fix our curtain rail.
The next morning, the sound of Mama and my brother singing at the backyard woke me up. When I came out , I saw Mama husking egusi and him washing his bedsheets. I felt like I had gone to bed the previous night and the world sped off without me, and now Mama was singing with a son whom she just saw in her house that morning after more than a year.
They turned to me when I greeted. He smiled.
Later, he would tell us how he watched a woman die with her baby’s head stuck in her vagina; how the kidnappers never took off their masks; how their driver had tried to escape the kidnappers until the bus tyre was shot. He’d tell us how a lady died of snake bite in the bush. How some of the kidnappers spoke Igbo and some Hausa; and that he didn’t know when we moved from 2013 to 2014.
But for now, what he said to me was, “Kamsi baby, smile for brother.” His lips spread in a slight smile.
I didn’t mean to, but soon I was smiling. Mama joined me, and as if a dream, we were smiling with he who was supposed to be gone for just three weeks.
Daniel Echezonachi Maxwell is a writer and student of the university of Nigeria. He was Shortlisted for the 2024 African Writers’ Awards( Poetry); and has works on Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Ikenga Short Story Prize 2024.