Dawn until Dusk
by Franklin Obiekwe
Just a stone’s throw from my place, there is a building that is as old and decrepit as its inhabitant. One glance at it and you can tell it has seen better days. The stuccoed walls, studded with many a crevice, have begun to crumble in places. The old man who lives there is a deep one; I honestly do not know what to make of him.
Every morning I walk past his house on my way to work and find him quietly seated on his balcony watching the world go by, or whatever it is he does there. There is always a chewing stick lodged somewhere in between the few fractured teeth in his mouth. A rather patchy thatch of grizzled hair sits atop his head, and on his face are very obtrusive imprints of crow’s feet and what I think look like tribal marks that make his most benign of smiles take on the sclerotic cast of a scowl.
He waves at me each time he sees me. I can’t tell if he does this to every other person he sees passing by. Each time I raise my hand to wave back, or stretch the corners of my mouth in response to his curious smiles, I feel the twinge of hesitancy, of unsureness, as if I’m doing what I ought not to do. “Good morning, sir,” I say to him while he keeps waving and nodding and smiling with sincerity in his eyes. Not a word ever spoken back to me.
Time and again I have put down his lack of vocal response to aphasia or aphonia—sometimes both. But I censure myself for this and refrain from such baseless, damning conclusions. This man, however, this old hermit of a neighbor, is something of a mystery to me.
A few weeks or so ago, curiosity got the best of me, and I’d found myself on my haunches behind an oak tree in front of the old man’s house, furtively trying to catch a glimpse or two of him sitting there on his balcony. For days, I would not cease wondering how the man stayed indoors from dawn to dusk. How did he get what to eat? There had been an intolerable scarcity of water at the time; even I had had to go high and low with my buckets in search of water. How did the old man manage that period without setting foot outside? How has he not died of boredom? Surely, his solitude is not sufficient company for him. Surely, there is someone in there with him; someone helping him with chores and things of that nature; someone keeping him company. I remember thinking to myself: “But I have never seen anyone enter or leave this building.”
That day, I came to find out for myself whether this was entirely true. But it did not particularly go well. The sun had just sunk underneath the horizon, and the sky was starting to morph into a soft blend of ochre and vermilion. I placed one leg in front of the other, a movement so tentative and so cautious you’d think I was suddenly afraid of the same ground on which I trod every day. I hid behind the fence and craned my neck. There he was, seated alone, an indeterminate set to his thin jaw as he picked and picked his teeth.
I had not gazed for up to five minutes before I felt a slow crawling around my neck and left arm. I lifted the rubbery thing and, seeing that it was one green little snake, I let out a scream—rather effeminate, I must say, for a grown man like me—and flung the reptile carelessly. Out of panic I had lost my footing and bruised the edge of my left elbow against the rough surface of the wall. This did not delay my swift return home.
“How did you come by this bruise, honey?” my girlfriend asked that night when she came around. “It’s got blood on it.”
I mumbled something about having been harshly shoved while vying for the bus today. I could not imagine telling her about the old man’s eerie house and my silly adventure there. “It’s nothing serious anyway,” I said, even though she had already started soothing it with a pack of ice from the refrigerator.
Just a stone’s throw from my place, there is a building that is as old and decrepit as its inhabitant. One glance at it and you can tell it has seen better days. The stuccoed walls, studded with many a crevice, have begun to crumble in places. The old man who lives there is a deep one; I honestly do not know what to make of him.