The last days of Spring/8

A few hours later, I am sitting in my room and watching Ade. He is staring at a letter, which he just received from home and has just finished reading. He is not saying anything.
“Is everything okay?”
He raises his eyes and looks at me blankly for a few seconds. “She’s gone…”
And I know that he’s talking about his mother…she has lost the fight to live.
“Are you alright?”

He ignores my question and continues to stare at the letter and I recognize that he probably didn’t hear me. I have never been in this kind of situation before; I don’t know whether I should keep quiet and let him deal with his grief alone or whether is should console him-but he is not crying and that makes it even difficult. So I keep quiet.
“Why…God?” I hear the pain in his voice; it sounds like something breaking.
“Maybe she is in heaven right now…” I offer trying to console him. But he doesn’t seem to have heard me.

“Why…?” I hear him groan and I realize that it is best that I leave him alone to resolve his own questions and to grieve alone. Sometimes it is better that way.
I am leaving the room and have patted him on the back briefly to show my commiseration and I leave without saying anything; I don’t really know what to say.
I have gone to Ugo’s room and I meet him packing his bags.
“Ol’boy Ade just got a letter from home saying that his mum just died”
“Na wa! Wetin kill am?”

“She suffered a stroke several months ago and I don’t think she recovered”
“Poor guy…at least him go fit travel during the holidays and not miss any school work…anyway when you go travel?”
“On Sunday”
“We dey leave for Moscow tomorrow morning …we wan pass through Kharkov first”
“Are you going with Eddy?”
“Yes…”

They wanted to pass through Kharkov so that Ugo could help Eddy with some of his stuff as he didn’t want to come back to Rostov after the summer holidays. They planned on going to Nigeria to sell football boots and some antibiotics; apparently they had made quite a lot of fortune in the last few months and they now had a ready market for their goods.
“We’ll leave you and your babes in Rostov…”
“Have you seen Sveta today?”

“She’ll be coming later this evening…I fit leave Sveat for you as well”
“No thanks…Tanya’s problem is already too much for me…she been meet me and Adelaide as we dey waka down the street today and then hin come bolt like person wey dey craze…”
“Bolt go where?”
“I don’t know…”
“So wetin dat one mean?”
“I really don’t know, but I just hope say hin’ no go harm himself…”
“Why…?”
“She just dey behave like person wey get real issues and I just don’t know what to do?”
“And wetin Adelaide come talk?”
“I never talk with am since then”
“You and this your love nonsense! Why don’t you just take things easy and enjoy yourself?”
“I don’t know…”

I really don’t know. That’s the question I have been asking myself and I am wondering whether I should not try to disentangle myself from Adelaide before I get too involved to a point where I cannot turn back. I am just so confused; one moment I know that It feels as if I cannot live without her, while the next I feel so distressed by the thought of her.
Is this what love is about? Why can’t I take things easy and “enjoy myself” as Ugo asks?
“Anyway, you don here the latest with Barry?”

Ah, the man Barry; I heard that he had attacked Omar along the corridor and had continued to punch him until Omar who was carrying a sharp penknife used it on him in self-defense and stabbed him in the abdomen…

Barry had been acting even weirder in the last few days; he had almost attacked Volodya the other day calling him a KGB spy and saying that no matter what they did that they will not be able to plant anything on him. I think most people had realized that something is going on with him, but nobody has been bold enough to do anything about it. He had been literally stalking Omar in the last few days and had been saying that as long as people like Omar-who according to him are an embarrassment to the children of Kememu-walk about freely, then the black man will never know any respect. He says its people like Omar who the white man uses to divide the black man…

I think it’s because of Barry that Omar started to carry about the knife with him. And its lead to this…
“So what happened to Barry?”
“They say they think he is mad and that they’re sending him back to Zaire after they treat his wounds…”
“Poor Barry…I think he just started to muddle up a lot of things from his too much reading…”
“No. I think the guy has always been sick and should have been treated a long time ago”
“But a lot of the things he says make sense…”
“Like what?”

“There are a lot of books he’s asked us to read and I’ll look for them when I go to England”
“You think say you go get time look for book in England? E be like say you think say na holiday you dey go!”

In a way he is right. The purpose of my traveling was to go and look for some holiday jobs to raise the funds to start buying and selling things. So it wasn’t really a holiday in the real sense of the word since I would need to pay him back once I came back.
We were still talking when there was a knock on the door.
“It must be Sveta…if na she then you know say you go vamoose…”
“I know.”

The door opened and it was Sveta; she wasn’t looking happy when she saw me!

“Kasi, what have you don to my friend?” she shouted at me as she walked in.
“What did I do?"
“My friend almost killed herself and she’s at the CGB…”
CGB is the acronym in Russian for the Central state hospital but everybody just knows it as CGB.
“Is she okay…what did she do?”
“She took an overdose of some tablets but her grandmother found her throwing up and called the ambulance…”
“Is she okay?”
“They say she is going to be okay, but she wants to see you…”