Free Oil on Water by Helon Habila Page A

turning to day in a pageant of orange and pink colors. In the open doorway is my mother, and in her hand is a little wrap. I packed my bag the night before; now I pick it up and my father leads me past the living room, past the kitchen, past my sister still asleep on her little mat in the corridor between my parents’ bedroom and the kitchen, to the waiting motorbike outside. My mother rushes forward and hugs me. As the okada flies through the early morning toward the station where I’ll take the ferry to the next village, and then the bus to Port Harcourt and my new life as an apprentice photographer, it is Boma I miss, and it is to her I make a promise: that I’ll return safe and sound, and our life will continue, happy and free. The plan is my father’s; he has lost his job, just like half the town. They all worked for the ABZ Oil Company, and now the people, once awash in oil money, watch in astonishment as the streets daily fill up with fleeing families, some returning to their hometowns and villages, some going on to Port Harcourt in the hope of picking up something in the big city. Many years later I’ll suddenly run into an old classmate, a half-forgotten neighbor, destitute on the backstreets of Port Harcourt. Get a trade, my father said, get something you can do with your hands, and this will never happen to you. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Recently he has turned religious. He wakes us up at six a.m. daily to seek God’s intervention in our affairs. He has been contemplating going back to his old profession of teaching and has asked God to show him if this is the right thing to do, but God still hasn’t replied, and daily his doubt increases. I don’t know how or when he met Udoh Fotos, how or when they arranged for me to go to Port Harcourt and live with Udoh Fotos as an apprentice and learn the trade—all I know is that the day I turn sixteen my father sends me off to Port Harcourt to learn photography. In my first year I do not learn much about light and darkness, or the many lenses packed in the backroom of Udoh Fotos’s studio, or the difference between a Leica and a Canon and a Kodak, but I learn from Mrs. Fotos how to cook rice and garri and how to sweep the junk-filled three-bedroom house and how to bathe the four rude shin-kicking children every evening and how to wake up at six a.m. to go to the public tap seven times to fetch water to fill the plastic drum in the kitchen. I grow thin. I develop a weary, tense, animallike demeanor. In those early months I would happily have run away if I’d had the money, and if I’d known how to negotiate the myriad side streets and alleyways of the shabbiest section of Diobu, Port Harcourt. And later, when I am able to run away, I am checked by the question of what I will tell my father. For I have realized that he has sent me here to become a man, so that I can see how harsh and unfair and difficult life is—and if I can stand it, I might have a chance. Three years later, at the end of my apprenticeship, when Udoh Fotos hands me a flimsy certificate with my name scrawled across it and his spidery signature at the bottom, I understand why apprentices like me at the end of their training, or servitude, throw what they call a Freedom Party. In those three years my father comes only twice to visit me, and I go to visit home only once.
    I paused when I heard Zaq snoring. He had asked me the question that had started me on this memory-rummaging, and he hadn’t waited to hear the answer. But I was happy to see him sleeping. I was a bit nervous about what the test results would be tomorrow. I turned and faced the open window of the shed, gazing at the sky, unable to sleep. The memories were like floodgates, easier to open than to close.
    Here I was with my certificate, going back home, leaving Port Harcourt for good, I hoped. But when I at last located my family, it was not where I had left them, in the town where I was born and raised. I found out that after