Abandoned Property

by Chinua Achebe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Benedict Ofodile carried his house to Port Harcourt in a biscuit tin.

It was a Jacob's cream-cracker tin, square, with a lid that had to be worked off with the thumbs, one side and then the other, and it had been through the war with him and his wife from Umuoji to Ihiala to a school compound near Uli where they slept for seven months under the desks, and back to Umuoji again, and it had never once been opened by anybody but himself. In it were the conveyance of the plot at Number Fourteen, Okija Street, Diobu, dated the eleventh of March 1957 and stamped twice; the building plan, approved by the Port Harcourt Township; a receipt from the Electricity Corporation; and a letter in an envelope that was soft at the corners from handling, which did not concern the house and which he did not take out.

The lorry was called No Condition Is Permanent, and it left Onitsha at five in the morning with eighteen passengers, two goats and a bicycle tied to the roof, and it reached Port Harcourt a little after two, which the driver said was very good, considering. Considering what, nobody asked. The road had holes in it that the war had made and holes that the rain had made since, and it was no longer possible to say which were which. At three places soldiers stopped the lorry and looked at everybody's faces and at nobody's papers, and at each place the driver's mate got down and shook hands with a soldier, and something passed between the hands, and the lorry went on.

Benedict kept the tin on his knees the whole way. A woman beside him with a basin of smoked fish asked whether it was biscuits, and he said no, and she looked at it for a while and decided not to ask what it was, which he thought showed good sense.

---

He had not seen Port Harcourt for four years. He had expected to find it changed, and he was ready for that, the way a man who has been told that his friend lost an arm in the war prepares his face on the way to the visit. What he had not expected was that it should look so ordinary. The traffic went round the roundabout at Mile One as it had always gone round, badly. Women sold oranges. A boy rode past on a bicycle with a sheet of zinc on his head, steering with his knees. Somebody's radio was playing Rex Lawson, who was dead, and the music came out of the shop just as it had come out of shops in 1965, as though no one had told it.

Only the voices were different. Walking up from the motor park he listened for Igbo and heard very little of it. He heard Ikwerre, which was near enough to Igbo that a man could understand most of it if he was willing to, and Kalabari, which he could not understand at all, and a great deal of pidgin, and once, from a soldier on the steps of the post office, Hausa. Twice he opened his mouth to ask the way and shut it again, though he did not need to ask the way. He had walked from Mile One to Okija Street perhaps three thousand times.

The house was green.

He stood on the other side of the road and looked at it for a long time. When he had built it, it was white with a blue door, because his wife had wanted it so, and in the dry season the red dust of the road climbed the white wall to the height of a man's knee and he paid a boy two shillings a month to wash it down. Now it was a shiny green, the colour of a new Peugeot, and the dust did not show on it at all. Whoever had chosen that colour had been thinking. The door was brown. The louvres were the same, and one of them in the front window was still cracked in the corner where his son Obiora had put a cricket ball through it in 1961, and Benedict looked at that crack for longer than he had looked at anything else, as though it, and not the house, were what he had come all this way to see.

The mango tree was there, at the side, by the wall. He had planted it from a seed when the foundations went in. It was a big tree now. It was in fruit.

---

The woman who opened the door was young and thin and had a baby on her back, and she looked at him the way a woman in a town like that, at a time like that, looks at an old man in a good shirt standing on her step with a tin under his arm. She did not open the door wide.

"Good afternoon, madam," he said in English. "I am looking for the occupier."

"My husband is not in."

"Then I will wait for him, if you permit."

"Who is it?"

He considered this question. It was a simple question and she had a right to ask it, and he had been asking himself the same thing on the lorry for most of the journey, and he had not yet found an answer that he could give to a young woman with a baby on her back.

"Tell him it is Mr Ofodile," he said. "He will know."

She looked at him a moment longer. Then she said something over her shoulder, quickly, in Ikwerre, and a small boy squeezed out past her legs and ran off up the street without looking at Benedict at all, and she opened the door the rest of the way and stood aside.

So he went into his own parlour as a visitor.

The first thing he saw was his own chair. It was a cane chair with wide arms, made for him at Onitsha by a man who had made chairs for the Resident, and he had sat in it every evening for nine years to read the Daily Times and to be not disturbed. It stood in the same corner it had always stood in. It had a new cushion on it, red, with a pattern of birds. Somebody had mended the left arm with wire, quite neatly. He looked at the mend and could not help it: he wondered how the arm had been broken.

"Sit down, sir," said the young woman.

He sat on the settee, which was not his. She brought him water in a glass, which was not his either, and then she went and stood in the doorway to the back of the house and watched him, jogging the baby. From somewhere behind her came the sound of a pestle in a mortar, slow and heavy, and the smell of pepper.

There were two other children in the room, a girl of perhaps eight and a boy younger, sitting on a mat with a schoolbook between them, and they had stopped reading and were looking at him with their mouths a little open. He winked at the boy. The boy looked at his sister to find out whether this was allowed.

"What are you reading?" said Benedict.

The girl held up the book so that he could see the cover. It was the New Oxford English Course, Book Three. Obiora had learnt from Book Three. It was very possibly, Benedict thought, the same copy. He had left a whole shelf of books in the back room when they went, because a family running for its life does not carry Book Three, and he remembered putting them in order on the shelf on the last afternoon, before the lorry came, which his wife had told him at the time was the act of a madman.

"Very good," he said. "Read me something."

The girl read, in a high, careful voice, about a boy called Tom who went with his father to the market. Benedict listened. Through the doorway behind the young woman he could see down the short passage to the back room, and on the frame of the back-room door, low down, at the height of a child, there were marks in pencil. He could not see them clearly from where he sat. He did not get up.

---

Samuel Worlu came in a quarter of an hour later, a little out of breath, with the small boy behind him. He was a man of forty or so, short and solid, in the khaki trousers and white shirt of a government clerk, with a biro clipped in the shirt pocket, and he stood in the doorway of the parlour and looked at Benedict and Benedict looked at him, and the girl stopped reading in the middle of a sentence.

"Mr Ofodile," said Worlu.

"Mr Worlu." Benedict stood up. He had learnt the name eighteen months before, from a letter, the only answer that had ever come to the many he had sent. He held out his hand, and after a moment Worlu took it.

"Sit down. Sit down, please." Worlu said something to his wife, and she went into the back, and the children were sent out, and the two men sat. Worlu took the cane chair. He did it without thinking, the way a man sits in his own chair, and then he seemed to remember something, and for a moment he did not quite know where to put his hands.

His wife brought a bottle of beer and two glasses. Worlu opened the bottle with the edge of a spoon and poured, and they drank, and for a time neither of them said anything at all.

"You came from Onitsha today?" said Worlu.

"This morning."

"The road is bad."

"The road is very bad."

"They say the Federal Government is going to repair it."

"They say so."

Worlu nodded. He took the biro out of his pocket and looked at it and put it back.

"You have seen my letter," he said. "I wrote it to you as a courtesy. I did not have to write it."

"I know that. I thank you for it."

"So you know what the position is."

"I know what the letter says."

Worlu got up, and went into the back room, and came out with a brown envelope, and took out of it a paper, which he unfolded and laid on the little table between them. Benedict put on his spectacles. It was a letter from the Abandoned Property Committee of the Rivers State, on the State's paper, stating that the premises known as Number Fourteen, Okija Street, Diobu, having been found abandoned within the meaning of Edict Number Eight of 1969, had been let to Mr S. N. Worlu, of the Ministry of Works, at a rent of four pounds ten shillings per month, payable to the Committee. It was signed, and it was stamped once.

Benedict read it twice. Then he worked the lid off the biscuit tin with his thumbs, one side and then the other, and took out the conveyance, and laid it on the table beside Worlu's paper, and turned it round so that Worlu could read it.

Worlu did not read it. He looked at it. He looked at the two stamps.

"I know that you own the house," he said. "Nobody says that you do not own the house."

"Then I do not understand the position."

"The position is that you abandoned it."

Benedict took off his spectacles.

"Mr Worlu," he said. "In May of 1968 the Federal army, which had held Bonny since the year before, was coming up the river, and every Igbo man in this town who had a lorry or could find one went, and every Igbo man who could not find one walked. I did not abandon this house. I ran away from it. If a man's house is on fire and he runs out of it, nobody says he has abandoned it."

"Nobody set fire to this house."

"No," said Benedict. "I see that."

---

Somewhere at the back the pestle had stopped. In the street a hawker went by calling bread, bread, fine sugar bread, and her voice rose and fell and went away.

"Let me tell you something," said Worlu. He spoke quietly and he did not look at Benedict while he spoke; he looked at the floor between his feet, at the cement, which Benedict had laid with his own two labourers in 1957 and which had a crack in it now, near the door, that had not been there before. "I lived in Rumuokoro then. My elder brother lived with me. Nyeche. He was a fisherman before; then he came to the town to work in the yard at the Ports Authority. In March of 1968 some soldiers came to Rumuokoro. Your soldiers. They were looking for saboteurs. Somebody told them that Nyeche had been seen on the waterfront at night. Of course he had been seen on the waterfront at night. He worked on the waterfront. They took him in a Land Rover to the barracks in this town, and that was the last we saw of him."

Benedict said nothing.

"I went to the barracks the next day. I stood at the gate from morning to evening. A young officer came out to me in the evening. A boy. He spoke Igbo to me, very fast, as if I was an idiot, and I answered him in Igbo, and he looked surprised that I could. He said there was nobody of that name inside. He said go home. He said, Unu bu ndi sabo, you people are all saboteurs, and went back in."

He was quiet for a while.

"So when the Federal Army came," Worlu said, "I did not run away. And when the Committee asked who would take these houses, I put my name down. I am not ashamed of it. I am telling you so that you will know who you are drinking with."

Benedict's hand had gone to the biscuit tin, and lay on the lid of it, and stayed there.

He was thinking about the barracks at Port Harcourt in March of 1968, and about the officers who had been there, the young ones, the boys who spoke Igbo very fast. He was thinking about a letter in a soft envelope that had come from that place in that month, in a hand that still sloped backwards no matter how many times its teacher had rapped the knuckles, which said that all was well and the food was bad and that he should tell Mama not to worry, and that was the last letter, and in the end the army had sent nothing, not even a paper with a stamp on it. He was thinking that there must have been many boys at those barracks who spoke Igbo very fast. There must have been a great many.

He did not say any of this. He found that he had lifted the beer to his mouth, and he drank, and put it down.

"I am sorry for your brother," he said.

Worlu looked up at him then.

"Yes," he said, after a time. "Well. And I am sorry that you had to run."

---

They drank the rest of the beer. Worlu told him, as a man tells another man the price of things, that the Committee had raised the rent once already and would raise it again; that half the houses in Diobu were in the same position and the other half were in the courts; that a man from Nnewi two streets away had got his house back by order of the High Court and had been very happy for a month, and then had found that he could not get a tenant to take it at any price, because nobody wanted to be the tenant of that particular house on that particular street. He told it plainly, without satisfaction, the way the rain tells you the roof is bad.

"You can go to court," he said. "I will not stop you. If the court says the house is yours, it is yours."

"And you?"

Worlu shrugged. "I will find another house. There are many houses." He paused. "There are many houses in Port Harcourt now whose owners have not come back."

Benedict understood that this was meant kindly, and he also understood that it was not only meant kindly, and he let both meanings sit where they were.

"Who mended the chair?" he said.

Worlu looked down at the arm of the cane chair as though he had not noticed it before.

"I did. When we came it was broken. Soldiers had been in the house, I think. There was nothing else left in this room. Only the chair, with the arm broken." He ran his thumb along the wire. "It is a good chair. I did not want to throw it away."

"It was made at Onitsha," said Benedict. "By a man who made chairs for the Resident."

"I thought it was something like that," said Worlu.

---

When Benedict got up to go, he asked whether he might see the back of the house, and Worlu said of course, and walked with him down the passage, as a host does.

The back room had a bed in it, and a mosquito net tied up in a knot, and a calendar from a Lebanese trading company on the wall, and no shelf. There was a lighter rectangle on the wall where the shelf had been, with four screw-holes in it, filled with putty and not yet painted over.

The doorframe had been painted, like the rest of the house, a shiny green. Under the paint, if he bent close and the light was right, he could make out the old marks, a little raised, like the scars on a man's face that only show in the evening: O. 1959, O. 1961, O. 1963, and the last one, high up, at the level of his own ear, that he did not need to bend to see. Over them, in fresh pencil on the new paint, starting much lower down, were three columns of new marks, each with a set of initials and a date, A. 1970, A. 1971, T. 1971, C. 1971, and one at the very bottom, barely above the floor, with no initials at all, only a little cross. That would be the baby.

Worlu stood in the passage behind him and said nothing, and Benedict was grateful to him for that.

---

At the front door the young wife was waiting with something in her hands. It was a polythene bag, the kind the market women use, and it was full of mangoes, green going on gold, with the sap still sticky at the stems.

"From the tree," she said in English. "For the journey."

He thanked her. He thought of offering money and saw in her face that she had expected him to think of it, and that she would be insulted if he did. He took the bag.

Worlu walked with him to the end of Okija Street, and they shook hands there, at the corner, where the bread hawker was sitting now with her tray on the ground and her feet out in the dust. Neither of them said anything about the court. Then Worlu went back, and Benedict walked on alone toward Mile One, with the biscuit tin under one arm and the mangoes in the other hand, knocking against his knee.

The motor park was a confusion of lorries and touts and dust and people shouting the names of towns. He found one going to Owerri that would leave when it was full, which might be in an hour and might be tomorrow, and he climbed into it and sat down on the hard bench at the back. The light was going. He set the tin on his knees, and after a while, because there was nowhere else to put it, he set the bag of mangoes on top of the tin, and sat with both hands on them to keep them from falling, and waited for the lorry to fill.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Chinuā Achebē per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Chinua Achebe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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