Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction by Teju Cole Page A

appeared, they leave. They shake their forearms at us, turn around, and head for the gate. We stand stock-still as they open the gate, step out, and close it behind them. The sky darkens rapidly over Surulere. My uncle says:
    —Will they come back? Will they wait outside for us?
    —Don’t worry about it, Mr. Wuraola says. Empty threats. But you know, it would be wise to leave the car here tonight. It’s safe in the school compound. Come back and pick it up in a few days. They won’t bother us again. They’lltake some money from the trailer driver when he leaves, but not too much. He knows it is part of his expense.
    We all work at double pace to finish loading the vans. Nobody can avoid the thought that one of the four vans might be waylaid on the way. We agree to drive in tight convoy. My uncle and my aunt enter one of the vans, and I another. I feel sad. This is life too close to the edge of danger for me. It is too severe a tax on the right to private property.
    Night falls. The convoy streams out of the school. Each driver nervously looks right and left as we move through Surulere and onto Western Avenue. Finally, out on the open road, we relax. The traffic thickens at Ikorodu Road and we lose sight of each other. The van in which I am riding selects an unfortunate route—we run into a total standstill at Anthony and yet another on Allen Avenue. The fight lies sleeping like a snake in my veins. We do not arrive at Ojodu until two hours after the others.

NINETEEN
    “O ne can’t say it aloud, but there is a lot of repressed violence here. That is why the furnishings seem so heavy. And why it is so difficult to see the other thing present: a spot of sun that moves over the house walls and slips over the unaware forest of flickering faces, a biblical saying never set down: ‘Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you.’ ”
    I pretend for a moment that these lines of Tomas Tranströmer’s were written with Nigeria in mind. It is not hard to see how they fit our situation. The contradictions he writes about are the contradictions of poetry, the voice that says: maybe this, maybe that, maybe something else. But in an atmosphere in which the past has been erased, contradictionsare forbidden. The typical middle-class Nigerian living room is a dark space. Anchored with weighty upholstery and veiled in thick curtains that banish all light, it announces to all visitors that the household is prosperous. The windows are never opened, the furniture has to be immovable. These are the rules. What is this place? A cipher enclosed within a riddle.
    It is late morning, a Wednesday. I wander around old Lagos. There was a brief, sudden shower earlier in the day, the only rain I have seen in these harmattan weeks of my journey. As the downpour began, the congested streets opened up as people fled from one spot to another. The rain in Lagos takes everyone by surprise, regardless of season. The bright heat has now returned. At the artery of the CMS junction, which is always dense with rapidly moving human bodies, my mind makes a heavy and unexpected connection: the secret twinship this city has with another, thousands of miles away. The thought is of the chain of corpses stretching across the Atlantic Ocean to connect Lagos with New Orleans. New Orleans was the largest market for human chattel in the New World. There were twenty-five different slave markets in the city in 1850. This is a secret only because no one wants to know about it. It was at those markets that buyers came to bid on the black men and women who had survived the crossing, but that is a history that is now literally submerged. Actually, it was submerged long before the recent flood, the city’s slaving past drowned in drink and jazz and Mardi Gras. High times: the best curefor history. The human cargo that ended up in New Orleans originated from many ports, most of them along the West African shore. And here was another secret: none of those ports