Chapter 5: The month of October/1

I was feeling a bit uncomfortable as I lay on my bed later that night. I have already made up my mind about the strategy, which I am going to use to invite Adelaide to the party and also to get her to start thinking about me; I have decided that I am going to buy her a bunch of roses and then send it to her with the invitation card and a love poem written in Russian. I will send her a poem by Alexander Sergeivitch Pushkin that i had stumbled on with its translation and which describes exactly the way she made me feel the moment i set eyes on her for the very first time. Yes i know that she will not be able to understand the poem just yet, but the mystery of its meaning and her excitement from trying to find it out will keep me in her mind for a long time. And then by the time of the party in 2weeks time, perhaps she will have found out what the words mean and there I will tell her that this poem expresses exactly what I feel for her.

I should really be happy thinking about how far I have come since those days when my cousins in the village had tried to teach me about their so called “raps”, but instead I as i lay on my bed i was feeling uncomfortable; my roommate, Ade, was making some strange noise across the room; he was speaking in tongues.

Ade was knelt beside his bed in his usual night time ritual of praying but today he is a little louder than usual and he is also crying. Usually by the time I come in to sleep after spending some time talking in Ugo's room, he would have been done with these rituals. However, a few days ago he got a letter from home, which said that his beloved mother had just suffered a serious stroke and since then he has been praying into the early hours of the morning. Just before he started crying i had overheard him trying to “bind the demonic spirits of stroke“. He is still binding them now and he is making quite a lot of noise and I am finding it difficult to sleep

But I feel sorry for Ade so I won’t tell him to keep his voice down. I feel sorry for him because he is an only child and his mother is all he has. His father, a relatively rich man with a Chieftaincy title-from a place called Ogbomosho-had kicked him and his mother out of the home when he was barely a year old; the story is that one of his fathers’ numerous wives had made false accusations against his mother, saying that she had slept around with different men each time the Chief had gone on one of his long business travels and that Ade was a product of such illicit liaisons. And as a result of the questions about his paternity he ended up being brought up alone by his mother who, because she comes from a very poor family, had sold tomatoes in their local market to ensure that he got a good education. She was also a very strong Christian and because of her, Ade became“born again” several years ago and has remained so until he came to Rostov where he‘s been trying to convert the rest of us.

Some of the guys, like Ugo and Eddy, make fun of him saying that he’s deceiving himself and that all he needs is a “good Russo babe to straighten him out”, but he makes me a bit uncomfortable and I find it difficult to put my finger on the exact reason. There‘s that feeling of my having lost the innocence to continue believing in what he believes in; you see, my “kind” step mother is a leader in a Church and as a result of her, I lost my religion. And yet for some inexplicable reasons, i still find myself envying Ade his innocence.

As I watch Ade kneeling there, I notice that he has started crying again. And I wonder how comes God seems to keep silent when we want Him the most; how comes He was silent through out the nights when I had cried out to Him, on a stomach that hadn’t eaten for several days, begging Him to rouse my father from the protracted spell of witchcraft, which had kept him oblivious of the cruelty of his beloved wife towards me; I wondered why God withheld His answer from the tormented child, that I was, who would scream out to Him almost every night and plead for justice?

I have decided to turn towards the wall and cover my head with my duvet so that the sound of his weeping will be muffled; I really can't bear the sound of weeping as it tends to strum unpleasant chords in my soul. I turn my face to the wall and move my head away from the spot of dampness that is forming on my pillow and I am wondering where these warm tears have come from.

The muffled sound of weeping continues to be heard in the room as I wait for sleep to come quickly to swallow me up in its dark embrace. I notice that the warm dampness of my pillow is spreading and I am hoping that God answers his prayers, because he desperately needs it for the sake of his faith.