People only die when we forget them. My mother used to say this, years ago. I never really understood what she meant back then. But, now, I believe that I do.
*
Some time ago, a number of people were reported to have disappeared from a navy-blue Peugeot 504 in my village, Zonkwa. No one knows for sure how many people were in the car, but from what we found and the witnesses that came forward, we knew that there were at least six people missing: a driver, a baby, a schoolgirl, a grown man, a boy with dada hair, and some other unidentified passenger in whose custody the baby must have been. The passenger doors of the Peugeot 504 was left wide open, the pane on the driver’s window was shattered, shards of glass were strewn on the seat, but no one was inside the car. Passers-by stopped to gawk at the abandoned Peugeot 504. Baffled youths scrambled inside the car. But, there was nothing of value in it. Just a gold earring that was crushed out of shape, one leg of a wooly baby shoe, another leg of a schoolgirl’s sandals, dirty notes in a half-opened purse, and a whiff of expensive masculine perfume drowning the smell of dismal possibilities in the car’s interior.
For starters, the Peugeot 504 was parked on the side of the road at the outskirt of town, so there must have been a driver. A baby shoe suggested that there must have been a baby, and since infants don’t travel alone, there must have been a nanny or a mother in the car. Unless, of course, the baby in the car was kidnapped, to begin with. At any rate, all indications led to the fact that the baby, whose shoe we had found, was in the custody of an adult, who may or may not have been the infant’s parent. This last piece of information sent chills down our spines.
*
The village head, Bobai Lambaya made frantic calls to the police as soon as he was informed of the incident.
‘This is a stain on our little town,’ he said, calling the police again. ‘We are known for our ginger, groundnuts, millet, and guinea corn. We don’t need any more attention than our agriculture can afford.’
The phone at the local police station must have rung forever.
‘The police have disappeared too,’ said Akau, the village drunk, before someone finally picked the call.
‘It is late,’ the groggy voice on the other side of the line said before hanging up.
Before long, commuters began to stop by. A man withdrew from the crowd to pee and discovered a shoe poking out of a sheaf of grass. Torchlights threw more light and picked more details: a broken buckle and blood smeared on the grass. No one could say for sure where the blood came from. But, because of its shape and size, we all assumed that the shoe must have belonged to a grown man. Perhaps, it belonged to the same man whose expensive fragrance we could still smell in the Peugeot 504. Something about that shoe reminded me of the regal smell in the car. But, it could also have belonged to someone else, because no other record of our mystery man survived. Is he as big as we think? I thought. Does he have a family expecting his return? Will he poke his head out of the forest down there looking for his other shoe?
He did none of this.
The grass, where a path cut into the forest, hung limply as if trodden by despairing feet. The farmers couldn’t account for that path. So, we assumed that it must have been cleaved recently.
‘I saw a turbaned man in the forests earlier today,’ a hunter said. ‘But, he was alone and he didn’t look like someone that was running away from danger.’
‘The earring,’ a soil-stained farmer added. ‘Women don’t just pull their earrings for nothing in public.’
This last claim injected a disquieting eeriness in the whole affair. Eyebrows were now starting to raise.
*
All of a sudden, the rumours started to take on lives of their own. The missing schoolgirl was now said to have left school with a friend. According to the gateman, they went out of the school gate together. Their parents confirmed that they had planned to meet up with them in Samaru-Kataf before dusk. At dusk, however, their parents called their phones numerous times but got no response.
The missing girls had been friends from their primary school but fell apart when they started to meet new friends in secondary school. Tani Gwazah, churchy and bookish, had lived in a small convent under a nun who only lifted her fingers from the chaplet to hold a spoon. Ndip John had three earrings hanging on both ears. At one point in time, her skin was bleached. But, it had now begun to get darker again. Maybe they met up to reconcile their differences. Or just to travel back home together. But, regardless of why they met, they were now missing and their parents were now panicking.
Of the boy with the dada hair, we heard that his name is Peter Damina. We don’t know why, but he got into the car that afternoon. His brother, trying to find him for hours now, decided to track him. And, as soon as he spotted the Peugeot 504 from a looking distance, he identified it by the license number.
‘ZKW-743PP,’ he mumbled. When asked why he was fixated on the plate number, he explained with a sullen face that just this afternoon his brother had boarded ‘this same car, but with passengers inside.’ We learned the boy was returning to his university after the long 7-month academic strike.
*
There are different reasons to want to vanish, I thought. The fantasy of starting new lives in new towns, the thrill of travel and adventure, a failing marriage, the overwhelming nature of family responsibilities, the thrill of eloping with a lover, anything really. But, I couldn’t think of one reason why all these people would want to run off in the same getaway vehicle and at the same time.
‘Maybe we should call the police again,’ a wiry man who sells grains suggested.
‘No, why?’ asked another. ‘They don’t make me feel safe.’
‘No? Why not?’ the grain seller probed.
‘Remember how they handled the case of the three hundred and something boys that were abducted from GSS Kankara?’ Silence stood in the air, only our eyes and thoughts remained busy.
*
Twenty-four hours passed and the owner of that earring hadn’t returned for it yet. Nor had the owners of the wooly baby shoe, the big-foot shoe, the school sandal, and the Peugeot 504, which was now short of one or two expensive parts.
We rifled through the forest. No leaf was left unturned. The search went deep and all hands were on deck. Fishermen scoured the rivers. Tree fellers pried branches. Hunting guns slung over drooping shoulders. Veterans parted thickets with an unnatural resolve. The forest, swarming with secrets and hidden places, stretched auspiciously with hunters, vigilantes, and hunting dogs weaving through stumps and snuffling the mysteries with their cold noses. The local women brought cold kunu and zobo with warm doughnuts for the tired men. Zonkwa is a small town, but we had to do for ourselves what the government wouldn’t do for us.
Soon, some men began to chatter. A new discovery. A feeding bottle half-filled with milk. This corroborated the assertion that the little wooly shoe belonged to an infant. But, the idea of a starving infant out there, somewhere, worried us inexplicably. We searched determinedly. Trailing the same path where that feeding bottle was found. The forest yielded nothing.
*
Seventy-two hours had now passed, and the relatives of the missing people had begun to circulate flyers. ‘MISSING! MISSING!! MISSING!!!’ the flyers screamed. The ones with more means emblazoned the faces of their missing relatives on t-shirts. Some of us, who aren’t related to any of the missing people, got some of the printed shirts sent to us too. Mine had Tani’s face. Her eyes were so blank and so deep like she was doomed from the beginning. I wore it anyway, like a signboard until the dust and dirt began to drown out the white.
We gathered at the railings of the busiest street in our town—where sex workers, homeless people, and drug dealers converged. We held the photographs of the missing passengers in front of passers-by. But, all we got were sideways glances and a shake of the head. We went back and made the photographs bigger and clearer. But, still, no one came forward with any meaningful information about the missing people.
Then, a soft drink merchant came forward. She told us that she had sold soft drinks to the passengers in the park before the car took off.
‘Something seemed to connect them in the vehicle,’ she said. ‘They looked like a family on a picnic.’
But, we knew that they couldn’t have known each other from anywhere. The only prior relationship, we thought, was that of the two schoolgirls. Still, the drink merchant insisted that the passengers seemed like characters connected in some tragic plot.
‘The driver too,’ she said. ‘Doomed.’
By now dust had begun to settle on the vehicle. The number plate was a smudge of brown, unreadable. The expensive fragrance had tapered off as if it had never been there.
The questioning started. Parents. Boyfriends. Colleagues. Neighbours. Schoolmates. Classmates. Teachers. Midwives. Hunters and farmers. Anyone we could connect to the missing people. Even the chairman of the Zonkwa branch of the National Drivers Association. A forty-something year old with kola-stained teeth.
‘Ah, Kantiyok,’ he said. ‘He’s a good person o! Even if he’d turn bad overnight, he’d definitely not abandon his car like that. No! No professional driver does that.’
The Chairman said that he was sitting under the dogon yaro shade when the Peugeot 504 pulled out of the park that morning and he had sat where he sat since then.
‘What’s the significance of that?’ we probed.
‘Yes, they left,’ he said with blank eyes, ‘but they never returned.’
In the news, the government spokesperson insisted that there were no missing passengers from a Peugeot 504 with the number plate number ZKW-743PP. By now, the story had lingered on for too long, in the tabloids, that it was soon replaced by news of the elections and the new farming season. We tried to lobby for the relatives of the missing people to get some form of compensation, but the letter that returned from the Government House asked what the compensation would be paid for. We weren’t sure either.
*
The days rolled by and the dust changed the colour of the Peugeot 504 from navy-blue to brown. Soon, the windscreen became shrouded in dust and the tires became flat. Our hopes were beginning to turn to ash. The phone calls started to wane. Businesses started to open. And, people no longer stopped to look at the vehicle like it held some sentimental value. It was just there, like a rock, sitting, immobile. Zonkwa and its people were slowly moving on, the dismal possibility sinking in. Flyers posted on walls began to curl and yellow at the edges. Tapes lost their grips and the posters began to flap in the breeze. What happened to boys in Kankara and girls in Chibok may have made the national news, but this one hit close to home.
Initially, the missing people lingered in our dreams. Vague, shadowy figures creeping on the edges of our minds. Appearing like a shoe sometimes. An enormous earring. Other times a shoe with a broken buckle. Once as a feeding bottle. A dot of blood. Sometimes the dream would embody all of these things at once, and then morph into a hollowed face with these items as different body parts. When we tried to hold onto them, they just spiraled and faded to nothingness. No face, no features, no name. Just the grim memory of a schoolgirl’s sandals. A gold earring. A whiff of expensive perfume and a half-filled feeding bottle. We sensed them in all of these objects, like a relic from the past, until gradually, like stars in a harmattan dawn; they began to fizzle, one by one, out of our collective memory.
Eugene Shichet Yakubu holds an MA in English literature from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. An alumnus of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop, he has been shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak Prize, Writivism/Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and his novel manuscript on the theme 'Writing Gender' was also shortlisted for the 2021 Huza Press/Goethe Institut Writing Residency. He curates and organizes art and creative writing programs in Northern Nigeria and volunteers to teach literacy and creative writing to inmates and students in marginalized communities. He writes about the relationship between body and identity as well as the borderland between power and intersectionality.