Pieces of Silver

Chapter Four

83 4 here was a frosty excitement in the air breathe by everyone, be they passersby or permanent inhabitants who walked the main street of Njopongo that week consciously watching out for abnormalities. The excitement had some solidity about it that seem to grip everyone who let themselves to be folded in. Not that it originated from a grand event of general interest. To the ordinary man, it could be seen as a mere speck of social grouping dramatically blown mighty and rendered unnecessarily conspicuous by the few people concerned doing everything within their power to make it so. The strategy adopted was simple and incredibly effective. Who, in the heat of the afternoon, could be indifferent to the loud roar of motorcycles whose exhaust pipes had been removed or adorned with extra holes? Or who could be blind to a high-speed race involving over thirty motorcycles with horns blaring along the only tarred road in town. Motorcycle taxi riders or Okadamen or Benskinners were having elections on Saturday. The campaigns were hot. This, everyone must know. Zacheus Esingi could feel the strange excitement. After the family brawl that led to Sirri packing her things and leaving her uncle’s house, Zacheus’ boss had been very upset. Zacheus had also learnt to take advantage of the mayor’s moods. When Lobe was annoyed, he preferred to be driven to his tennis club and left alone to drink and watch others play tennis so that when Zacheus complained of a headache at the club, Lobe waved him away and said he could stay at home until Friday when he would be needed. The truth was that Zacheus himself was tired. For almost two weeks on a row he had been working from six in the morning to eleven or midnight, sitting behind the steering while and dutifully T 84 accepting the thrashing of the AC. He needed some rest and he could only get one by complaining of an illness and he understood that his boss, like most cautious people, would not feel secured being driven by a man with a headache. On his way home, Esingi noticed the habitual crowd of motorcycle riders at Sentinel Clinic Junction in front of Amougou’s Messapresse stall where newspapers and magazines and office stationery were sold. Sentinel Clinic Junction was one of the many spacious grounds where Okadamen waited for passengers. Esingi decided to stop and listen to the Benskinners’ analysis of the political and economic news of the week. He knew that Amougou, like most newspaper vendors situated in junctions like this, had long become accustomed to the reality that Benskinners never bought newspapers. From the moment Amougou opened his stall at six-thirty in the morning, the bikes began to gather. As he put up the papers, the headlines were read directly from the stands by the riders who could read and the animated debates ignited. The headlines were enough for the riders and carwash boys to studiously and convincingly analyze in detail the rest of the news in the hidden pages. Okadamen were known to be the most current persons deeply abreast with news on local issues and world affairs – they could spell out the full names of the five soldiers blown to pieces in the recent bomb blast in Afghanistan. They seem to know too much: why the gorilla war in the oil-rich Delta Region would or wouldn’t last long, the medical history of the most recently arrested embezzler of public funds, the consequences of unpopular constitutional amendments here and there, the latest plane crash and the impossibility of recovering the black box . . . They knew it all and did their best to spread the news to the passengers they ferried to various corners of the town. Zacheus loved to hang around to listen to these debates that went on late into the night before he retired to smoke a long finger of marijuana and go to bed, listening to the hazy 85 songs of hungry mosquitoes. Apart from the news from the national station that his boss forced him to listen to in the car, he would hardly know what else went on elsewhere around the world. The newspapers were not his thing. The mayor bought piles of them that he dumped in the backseat of the car. But Zacheus never pretended to read them during the long hours of waiting. The highest he...