The Thing Around Your Neck Read Free Page A

Nnamabia to fend for himself for a day.
    My father looked at me, surprised, and asked, “What do you mean?” My mother eyed me up and down and headed for the door and said nobody was begging me to come; I could sit there and do nothing while my innocent brother suffered. She was walking toward the car and I ran after her, and when I got outside I was not sure what to do, so I picked up a stone near the ixora bush and hurled it at the windshield of the Volvo. The windshield cracked. I heard the brittle sound and saw the tiny lines spreading like rays on the glass before I turned and dashed upstairs and locked myself in my room to protect myself from my mother’s fury. I heard her shouting. I heard my father’s voice. Finally there was silence, and I did not hear the car start. Nobody went to see Nnamabia that day. It surprised me, this little victory.
       
    We visited him the next day. We said nothing about the windshield, although the cracks had spread out like ripples on a frozen stream. The policeman at the desk, the pleasant dark-skinned one, asked why we had not come the day before; he had missed my mother’s jollof rice. I expected Nnamabia to ask, too, even to be upset, but he looked oddly sober, an expressionI had not seen before. He did not eat all of his rice. He kept looking away, toward the cluster of half-burned cars at the end of the compound, the remnants of accidents.
    “What is wrong?” my mother asked, and Nnamabia began to speak almost immediately, as if he had been waiting to be asked. His Igbo was even-toned, his voice neither rising nor falling. An old man had been pushed into his cell the day before, a man perhaps in his mid-seventies, white-haired, skin finely wrinkled, with the old-fashioned refinement of an incorruptible retired civil servant. His son was wanted for armed robbery, and when the police could not find the son, they decided to lock him up instead.
    “The man did nothing,” Nnamabia said.
    “But you did nothing, too,” my mother said.
    Nnamabia shook his head as if she did not understand. In the following days, he was more subdued. He spoke less, and mostly about the old man: how he had no money and could not buy bathing water, how the other men made fun of him or accused him of hiding his son, how the chief ignored him, how he looked frightened and so terribly small.
    “Does he know where his son is?” my mother asked.
    “He has not seen his son in four months,” Nnamabia said.
    My father said something about how it was irrelevant whether or not the man knew where his son was.
    “Of course,” my mother said. “It is wrong, but this is what the police do all the time. If they do not find the person they are looking for, they will lock up his father or his mother or his relative.”
    My father brushed at something on his knee—an impatient gesture. He did not understand why my mother was stating the obvious.
    “The man is ill,” Nnamabia said. “His hands shake and shake, even when he’s asleep.”
    My parents were silent. Nnamabia closed the food flask of rice and turned to my father. “I want to give him some of this, but if I bring it into the cell General Abacha will take it.”
    My father went over and asked the policeman at the desk if we could be allowed to see the old man in Nnamabia’s cell for a few minutes. The policeman was the light-skinned, acerbic one who never said thank you when my mother handed over the rice and money bribe. Now he sneered in my father’s face and said he could well lose his job for letting Nnamabia out and yet we were asking for another person to be allowed out? Did we think this was a boarding school visiting day? Didn’t we know that this was a high-security holding place for criminal elements of society? My father came back and sat down with a sigh and Nnamabia silently scratched at his bumpy face.
    The next day, Nnamabia barely touched his rice. He said that the policemen had splashed detergent water on the floor and walls