Father Benedict Grimm pulled aside the embroidered scarlet curtain, and stepped into Umuofia’s atmospheric weave of dust and gentle breeze – sighing as he closed the door of the confessional. His heart was weary from the weight of hearing too many of fallen man’s numerous foibles. Only midday, he was drained – cursing the day God had created the pitiful tyranny of sweat and bones he called man. Only that day, he had listened through the latticed grating to a husky man grouchily tell of how he slaughtered his wife for smiling with a younger lad, who wooingly told her jokes.
'I did it', he had said in Igbo, 'with my dinner spoon'.
Father Ben, seventy-one, could see his bloodshot eyes seething with canine rage like a Freudian cauldron of mysteries. Another woman jealously stuffed the toddling son of her husband’s senior wife with pap, triggering a deathly convulsion. The other day, in a feyly sordid re-enactment of the biblical story of vengeance, a prostitute was stoned with rocks, and left to die at the town cemetery. Why? Why this bloody coup on the conscience? Why create raging emotions in the breast of fallen angels with clipped wings? Why suffer this wretchedness? His questions weren’t rhetorical. If a God surfing in the seventh heaven did not hear him, his fading mortality did; and every day, for 24 years in the Nigerian village he made his home – far away from the port of Leith in Scotland, when he asked these questions with richer, perplexing intensity, his body ached. He was dying – with every pain in his chest, with every Trojan vein that was not there before on his trembling hands...
‘Pa! In the box eh!’
It was little Ezenwa at the room door. Father Ben had retired to his simple, hermit-like room the State of Anambra had recently built him. He was drinking from a bowl when Ezenwa had burst into the room. Father Ben was numb to excitement by now.
‘Another time, boy. Tell the visitor that I am closed...’
He paused – interrupting his own self. He saw Ezenwa’s eyes. Moments later, in a flurry of dust, rosaries and confusion, Father Ben burst into the box. Through the lattice he saw nothing. Outside Ezenwa beckoned hurriedly to the Father – pointing at the other side of the large box. Then the Father heard. With some shock, he moved round to the other side of the confessional. There, wrapped in dirty akwa was a baby, suckling and crying. Father Benedict Grimm slowly picked up the tiny thing, and stepped out of the box. Though his eyes were weary, in the distance he could make out the furtive features of someone else spying on them. He shielded his eyes for a better view. He didn’t know her, but he recognized her – even though she veiled herself. The bloody face, inflamed skin, and wild hair. The prostitute. There was silence between them as their eyes held each other. A deep silence, and then she was gone – hidden by the clusters of palm-trees.
Deep within Father Ben’s chest, his heart beat painfully against his ribcage. He closed his eyes fleetingly, opening them on the bundle of beauty in his hands. Ezenwa stared at Father and child – mystified. The Father, with a smile on his face, lifted his eyes to the blue sky. He had not found an answer - there was no booming voice in the sky, and the rosary he held around his neck did not levitate; instead of an answer, he had found a question...and a hope in the beauty and innocence of a child from a prostitute: how could something so utterly beautiful be possible in this world of tears and darkness? How could beauty be seen in the midst of dirt and evil? God, still silent, had spoken...again.