When he stole from us, my parents did not go over to Professor Ebube’s house to ask for our things back. His shirts were always crisply ironed, and I used to watch him across the hedge, then close my eyes and imagine that he was walking toward me, coming to claim me as his.
PIRATE FONTS NO CUSSIN NO THIEVIN TV
Osita, our neighbor who had stolen our TV only weeks before Nnamabia’s theft, was lithe and handsome in a brooding sort of way, and walked with the grace of a cat. They drove their parents’ cars in the evening, their seats pushed back and their arms stretched out to reach the steering wheel. Still, when the professors saw one another at the staff club or at church or at a faculty meeting, they were careful to moan about the riffraff from town coming onto their sacred campus to steal. Boys who had grown up watching “Sesame Street,” reading Enid Blyton, eating cornflakes for breakfast, and attending the university staff primary school in polished brown sandals were now cutting through the mosquito netting of their neighbors’ windows, sliding out glass louvres, and climbing in to steal TVs and VCRs. This was the season of thefts on our serene campus. He had done it, too, because other sons of professors were doing it. He had done it because my mother’s jewelry was the only thing of any value in the house: a lifetime’s accumulation of solid-gold pieces. “That he could hurt his mother like that!” was the last thing my father said on the subject.īut Nnamabia hadn’t set out to hurt her. What else could my father have done? After Nnamabia had written the report, my father filed it in the steel cabinet in his study where he kept our school papers. He was already between secondary school and university, and was too old for caning. Besides, Nnamabia was seventeen, with a carefully tended beard. I didn’t think that Nnamabia would tell the truth, and I don’t think that my father thought he would, but he liked reports, my professor father, he liked to have things written down and nicely documented. My father asked Nnamabia to write a report: how he had pawned the jewelry, what he had spent the money on, with whom he had spent it.
And when he told her she placed both hands on her head and cried, “Oh! Oh! Chi m egbuo m! My God has killed me!” I wanted to slap her. “How much did they give you for my gold?” our mother asked him. Two weeks later, he came home gaunt, smelling of beer, crying, saying he was sorry, that he had pawned the jewelry to the Hausa traders in Enugu, and that all the money was gone. He walked out the back door and did not come home that night. Nnamabia stared at my father with wounded eyes and said that he may have done horrible things in the past, things that had caused my parents pain, but that he had done nothing in this case.
He pointed out that the window louvres had been slipped out from the inside, rather than from the outside (Nnamabia was usually smarter than that-perhaps he had been in a hurry to get back to church before Mass ended), and that the robber knew exactly where my mother’s jewelry was: in the back left corner of her metal trunk. Later, when my parents had come home and neighbors began to troop in to say ndo-sorry-and to snap their fingers and heave their shoulders up and down, I sat alone in my room upstairs and realized what the queasiness in my gut was: Nnamabia had done it, I knew. Or perhaps it was simply that I knew my brother too well. Even then, I felt that there was a theatrical quality to the way the drawers had been flung open. I went inside to find him standing in the middle of the parlor. We drove home in silence, and when he parked in our long driveway I stayed back to pick some ixora flowers while Nnamabia unlocked the front door. I imagined that he had gone off to smoke or to see some girl, since he had the car to himself for once but he could at least have told me. He came back just before the priest said, “The Mass is ended, go in peace.” I was a little piqued. We sat together in church as we usually did, but we did not have time to nudge each other and stifle giggles about somebody’s ugly hat or threadbare caftan, because Nnamabia left without a word after ten minutes. My parents had travelled to their home town to visit our grandparents, so Nnamabia and I went to church alone. The second time our house was robbed, it was my brother Nnamabia, who faked a break-in and stole my mother’s jewelry. The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who climbed in through the dining-room window and stole our TV and VCR, and the “Purple Rain” and “Thriller” videotapes that my father had brought back from America.