Writings / Fiction: Chioma Iwunze-Ibiam

Hopeville

Agbomma did not die, as I had expected, on a white-sheeted hospital bed. Instead, she died in the house on Hopeville where she had lived—first, with her blind mother, then alone, and finally, with me. The walls had cracks running up to the ceiling. When thunderstorms shook the foundation of the house, we shuddered and waited, expecting the roof to cave in. We sometimes talked about renting a nice duplex, with a large veranda and a larger field, but Nigerians are reluctant to move until there are death threats they can do little about.

“Relax. This house survived the civil war. It can survive anything else,” she told me. “And who knows what danger lurks in the new duplexes, anyway?” I joked.

My former football coach believed choking might be easy until he nearly choked on a handful of popcorn. Agbomma’s mother was a psychiatric nurse who expected to die from the bites and blows of her violent patients or from infections picked up by accidentally sitting on a contaminated needle, but she died of cancer in a herbalist’s shed. Agbomma’s father, on the other hand, had died of heartbreak because all four of his sons hadn’t returned from the war. I had once imagined a national burial after a heart failure from scoring a hat trick. But all I got out of five football seasons was a ruptured hamstring and later, a broken tooth in a camp fight.

Agbomma had many mornings of nose bleeds and migraines in Hopeville. She was recovering from a brain tumour surgery when I found her lying ungainly on the bathroom floor, a hand touching the edge of the mop brush. A large towel dangled from the taut rope which stretched from one end of the wall to the window. She had been trying to brush something off the ceiling and her legs slipped on the wet tiles. When I looked up, a large hairy cockroach scurried off into the crevice on the wall. Her haphazardly dyed ash and coal-black hair, which had been matted into Fulani cornrows, was damp. Her eyes were wide open, her lips hung agape, as though she was bewildered after having seen an enemy long-forgotten. Agbomma wore a piece of akwete wrapper she had sewn.

Retirement, she had learned, was responsible for the early deaths of pensioners, and so she had tried out catering, failed at it and then settled for sewing. I remember her saying, somewhat absentmindedly, that she was rediscovering herself. I hadn’t expected her to be such a good person. She took me to Mass when the weather was fine, and her heath, stable. Other times, she held my hand and prayed in the mornings and in the evenings. She greeted the neighbours, calling each one by name. But she never introduced me to them. I imagined it must have been embarrassing for her to say, “Meet my daughter, the lost daughter I didn’t claim after the riots.” But I could see in her eyes, a repentance so appealing that I didn’t dare be bitter towards her. She couldn’t help it. Like Moses’ sister, she had watched from a distance as my foster mother took me into her ash Mercedes and driven off to her mansion in Ogbor Hill.

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