Monday, Mr.

I believe there is more to the way I am disturbed by my recollections of Monday than mere sympathy, for what I knew of him, and of the events of his life, did not pass on to me as particularly strange, or heart rending. Life, as a rule, is unsparing in the blows it metes out, thus a man who is wont to weep over the sufferings of his fellows will never be dry-eyed. If Monday struck a singular impression on me (an impression which in spite of it's wavering character has not been diminished by time), I believe it is the way of life too, an event often impressing itself differently on people, so that one may forget it completely, and another recall it with the vividness of a blinding vision. Now, I cannot pin down to an exact moment, the first time I saw Monday, for he regularly passed through my street. However, one afternoon, after a downpour, as I stood at my bedroom window staring up at the grey skies and down at the wet street, there he was at one end, a cement bag on his back, in work-rags and muddy Wellingtons, trudging along. Staring at him a few moments, the figure of an ant suddenly rose before my eyes, in human proportions, and took the place of the fellow on the street. I shuddered deeply, and immediately made an appearance on my balcony, in order to saturate my eyes with a view of him that would be beyond illusion. I am inclined to think- with the passage of time- that the image that came to me did not originate at that instant, but was rather the culmination of previous glimpses of him ; a piling up of pixels to achieve an intelligible picture. Myself, having sprung this impression of him, what did I do? Nothing. I did nothing, maybe shook my head, felt a little pity, a little admiration for him as he walked past, and weighed down by his burden, unable to spare an upward glance.

~
Perhaps, he too, had seen me before, appraised me, and in his particular way come to an opinion of me. He may have seen in me a benefactor, or an employer, he may have even thought I was a kinsman. I do not know, and I find by experience that one cannot descend beneath the shallows of another. One morning then, a week or so later, there is a knock at my gate, and opening it, I beheld the thick and looming figure of Monday. How easy, I think it is, to typecast people, of a sudden my ant and labourer became human. The pockmarked and wrinkled face, upturned nostrils with hairs sticking out and suggesting he was sneering at you, the shifty eyes, the breath of cheap alcohol, the large head resting solidly atop a thickset frame adorned in work rags, stood before my eyes starkly.
'Morn sah!' he said, a slavish smile on his face.
Then he asked if I had any work for him. I have often wondered how much of events is mere incidence, how much coincidence. The house in which I lived belonged to a relative, who having bought it off a declining man, decided it would not accrue much value to him, and permitted me the use of it. He was also considerate enough to provide the occasional stipend to keep the building from further degenerating, for it had been acquired in a bad condition. Around the period before Monday knocked at my gate, I had been contemplating the best way to go about repairing the fence, a small section of which had fallen apart. I let him in and took him to it. I think he may have been pressed for money at the time, for I was able to take him on ridiculously low wages.

He worked three days for me. During the afternoons, he would go to buy lunch. It was without variation, a medium sized loaf of bread, some beans in a plate and a bottle of mineral. I watched as he sat upon a concrete block placed length-wise, tore off chunks of bread and with the chunks, scooped his beans and champed it. He eased his swallowing by drinking the mineral. Finished, he put his fingers-often not entirely free of mortar-into his mouth and removed the food particles stuck in his teeth. He would then return to work.

~
And later he understood he was welcome in my house. He passed by with the same regularity, but dropped by infrequently. He often came with little gifts, oranges from a farm he worked, a paw-paw or two, little trifles. Gradually, as much from me as from him, he told me something of his life. He had come from the east in the eighties. Leaving his village, he had not Lagos in mind, having no kinsman willing to offer him roof. In time however, by way of Asaba and Sagamu, he arrived. He first worked in a furniture company, soon defunct, as a packer, where he came to the notice of the boss, who often gave him tips. He drifted through a countless succession of jobs, navvy, gardener, night watchman etc. Menial jobs were all he ever did, so that there was little variety in his accounts. He did speak of a woman who, though married, was enamoured of him, and asked him to leave her with a child that she might remember him by it. The part of the city most nostalgic for him was somewhere called Ilasa, where he had worked during the period he met that woman. He mentioned that place often; it was the first place he had lived. I was at that time new in Lagos and had never been there, so that I was infected by his nostalgia and felt that there must be something alive about the place. Thus, even when I passed through it later on and saw with my own two eyes, that it was as crowded and dingy as other poor neighbourhoods, that feeling never entirely left me. Yes, he was political in his own way, and as are people who are limited in knowledge, but confident in their conclusions, he tended to over-simplify things. He grumbled at why the government did not make sure that everyone had money and jobs, wished he could get close to the president to bring his spade down upon him.
He was the harbinger of all sorts of optimistic rumours, impossible and fantastic. When a minimum wage was being talked about in political circles and on the streets, he was passionately interested in the outcome, though he had little chance of profiting by it. Yes, he supported Biafra too, but when I asked him how it would work, he had no idea. Upon his neck hung a rosary, old and browned, yet I doubt if he was a churchgoer.

~
As often happens, as I got to know him more and more, so my fascination with him diminished, it even seemed that I became slightly irritated by his presence. A time came when I did not care to spend my time with him, so that as soon as he came in and greeted me, I often left him by himself. He was long in realizing this, or in fact never did, for he kept on coming in his usual way. He sat down anywhere he could, stood up, walked around, and did the occasional task. Then when he got it into his head to be on his way, he would come to the door of my parlour and tell me he wanted to go. Our relations stood upon this footing for about half a year.
Then, one late afternoon in March, he came to tell me that his 'wife' had given birth the previous week. It was a boy, he said, and he meant to name him after himself. He was animated and asked pleadingly that I come to see his child. Thus, I found myself following him through winding streets. He had never known that walking could be a pleasure, so that I struggled to be apace with him. Walking for several minutes alongside what was a drainage canal, deep, slowly flowing, smelly and littered with refuse, he turned outwards and I found before me, a rather long decrepit building. Its edges were crumbling, the walls greenish with algae. The rusty corrugated-iron roof was torn up in parts and sheets were fluttering noisily by the wind. In front of the building was an open space, where many children were playing, kicking up dust and a ball. Two women seated on low stools were washing clothes. Walking past them, Monday knocked at the door to his room, and without waiting for an answer, announced that he was with a visitor. Someone moved quickly within the room, perhaps trying to arrange it a little. A few moments later, we were inside. At first, I could not breathe easy, for the air was musty and hung heavy. It had that distinct smell of poverty, reminiscent of villages, but also very common in the cities. it was quite bearable though, and in time I got used to it. The room was lit up by a candle, which burned on the centre table. In one corner were articles and effects, stacked up, high along the wall and up to the ceiling. Most of the articles did not appear to be useful. A fat young girl, with a dark and wan complexion, sat on one of two narrow beds placed at right angles to each other, a babe in her arms. She greeted me very respectfully, raising herself from the bed to do so. Monday went to sit beside her, but he first straightened out the sheets on the other bed and offered it to me as a seat. The bed creaked beneath me.
I looked around a bit, and then began to say those words that came to me as proper in such situations; I carried the powdered baby in my arms, praised him as healthy to his mother, shook him up in the air and returned him to her. She smiled.
A picture album also lay on the centre table. I leafed through it by the light of the candle. Anyone who wished to learn anything new about Monday would have been disappointed, for all the pictures were taken in a studio. He struck artificial poses against fantastic backgrounds. In one, he sat languorously upon a low sofa, carefully dressed in clothes of the white-collar profession, and the background was of a large seascape, done on a wooden board. In another, he stood in profile, his hands in his pockets, a mural of a palatial house and a glittering sports car behind him. There were pictures of the girl in her school uniform, which appeared tight by the straining of her body against its fabric. Her wide face with its bland features sadly, excluded her from real beauty. She looked just the same as in the pictures, so that it came into my mind to ask if she was out of school. Monday put his arms around her.
'No' she said.
'She will still go back' he added.
For a few moments there was an uneasy silence, and then it was broken by the baby's cries. She brought him to her breasts and began to nurse him. I too, hastily drank a coke which Monday had produced from somewhere.
~
A month passed. The secretary of my neighbourhood association paid me a visit. I always remember him as a lively, talkative Igbo man. It was early evening. His visit ended, I was walking with him to my gate, when prompted by an impulse, and I asked if he knew Monday. He did know, and more than I expected too, for by some unaccountable coincidence, his village was close to Mondays'. We stood talking for half an hour. He was in a jocular mood and managed to say everything in such a funny way that his narrative was interspersed by bouts of laughter.
Monday was the child of an ill-starred love, which came to fruition in the midst of civil war, between a Nigerian soldier and an Igbo woman. She had likely defied her family by carrying out relations with him. It seemed the soldier had hoped to take her with him after the war and make her his wife, but he had not survived it. Then too, that girl-whom I saw that evening, sitting on the bed with the baby in her arms and who threw such affectionate glances at Monday-was not really his wife. It was true that he had gotten her pregnant, and she had borne the child, and was even willing to marry him, but her family had put up obstacles and she had bowed to them.
Afterward, I wanted to reach out to him, be friendlier again, but he did not visit. I too, did not attempt to search him out. On the single occasion when I saw him walk past, I looked at him without blinking, thinking. I felt that I should encapsulate all I knew and thought of him into a solid, round globe of meaning, but it was all blurry in my head. It came to me that I could help him get a softer, steady job through my relatives, but alas, it never resulted into action. Gradually, pressing and practical matters crowded into my mind and whittled down even the very thought of him, and this was made easier by the fact that I stopped seeing him; he seemed to have gone away.
~
In time, I heard that he had moved to another part of town. He was said to have gotten a steady job, and was doing 'fine'. The woman who told me this was certain of it because she saw him sporting a new pair of shoes. It did not seem likely to me, but as I did not hear of any contrary opinion, and genuinely wished him good, I gradually came to believe it.
~
A year went by, then a few months too. After another evening's visit to collect my dues, the secretary asked.
'Have u heard what happened?'
I told him that I had not.
‘A truck crushed him as he was crossing the road'
Long into the night, I lay sleepless, conjuring images in my head and muttering to myself, ‘A truck crushed him, a truck crushed him'
I thought of ants, and I thought of him. I remembered myself as a little boy, crouched on my kitchen floor, dropping candle wax on roving ants. I felt a squeezing of my heart, and grasped a little of the helplessness of man.
But, when sleep finally came, it was sweet and dreamless.