Parallel Tracks: Two Landscapes/Two Journeys

By Barry Veret

In the late 1960s, two friends, one American, the other African, struggle to make sense of their lives as they traverse a troubled landscape of civil war in Africa and racial and political conflict in America. Their paths cross, separate and ultimately converge, as each deals with events and people which shape their self identities. The stories of their two separate journeys and the impact of their friendship, suggests a direction, uncertain but hopeful, for each to find his way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465352545

Barry Veret

The author, Barry Veret, grew up in Nebraska and went to college and law school on the east coast. He spent most of his career in the fi eld of international development and has traveled abroad extensively. Parallel Tracks is a fi rst novel and is set in the era of the tumultuous late 1960s when the author lived and worked in Lagos Nigeria and Washington D.C. Barry Veret is now retired and lives with his wife in Chevy Chase Maryland.

Book preview

Parallel Tracks

Two Landscapes/Two Journeys

A Novel by

Barry Veret

Copyright © 2011 by Barry Veret.

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4653-5253-8

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4653-5254-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

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Contents

Forward

Prologue

Part I:  Traveling New Landscapes

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Part II:  Ben’s Journey

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Part III:  Chima’s Journey

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Part IV:  Converging Tracks

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Afterword

With love and gratitude

For my wife, Nancy

And for all her patience and great help

In this and (most of) my other endeavors

Forward

I first met Ben Siecher, the teller of this tale, a number of years ago. No, it wasn’t when I looked into the mirror while I was shaving. But there is a certain family resemblance, although as far as I know we are not blood relatives. But then, what of that resemblance? I’ve spent a lot of time with Ben over the years while sitting at my computer. Maybe, as in the case of long-married couples, people do begin to resemble each other after a lengthy period of close association.

My wife, in a moment of obscure psychological insight (she’s usually more plain-spoken), once said apropos of a story I was inventing for her: We are our stories! When you write things down something does actually happen to you. A Chinese fortune cookie profundity taped to my computer says Writing is thinking on paper, so that seems to prove what my wife said. After all, our thoughts are surely a very important part of us.

As I got to know Ben, and heard him talk in my head at some length about himself, his life and his friends—especially his African friend Chima Okorie—it did seem that my wife was right, at least about Ben. The Chinese fortune cookie also appeared correct, for obviously Ben did some heavy duty thinking on paper as he wrote his story.

As time went by, and I learned more about Ben, I began to better understand the family resemblance. So when I look into the mirror while shaving, I do see similar memories, a similar imagination (occasionally overactive), and a similar world; a landscape of place and history that both Ben Siecher and I have shared.

Nevertheless, the reader should keep in mind that what follows is a work of fiction. People, places, events and institutions are largely concocted out of whole cloth. This is true even if my own story, and the landscapes I myself have trod, provided fuel for my efforts as I helped patch Ben Siecher’s tale together, much as he wove together the story of his friend Chima.

Barry Veret

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

                       Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot

No Condition Is Permanent

                       West African aphorism

Prologue

It’s summer and once again I’m back in Washington. As usual this time of year, heavy rain falls though the sultriness of early evening and cracking thunder echoes through the walls. Notwithstanding the window air conditioner, pervasive dampness insinuates itself into the mind and re-awakens the memory.

This afternoon, in the heat of August, I spent a slow couple of hours trading stories and tall tales with a bunch of African students at a Georgetown bar. Days like this bring back the months I spent in Lagos on the coast of Nigeria. Maybe it wasn’t a time sufficiently distant to talk about grand-sounding things, like the ‘stuff of personal legend’. However, it was a time far enough away for memory and imagination.

When I first returned to the States from Africa in 1968, I felt as if I had entered an alien planet. Things had changed in America, but something had also happened inside my head while I was away. I had been living in Nigeria at the start of the Biafran war when an ironic sense of African timelessness was colliding with an uncertain contemporary landscape. However, even now years later on a summer day like this, it feels like I’m still in my Ikoyi Island house facing across the creek to the coastal bush terrain of Victoria Island.

But here outside of my Washington apartment there are no ghostly lagoons hiding behind the mist of the rain squalls. The wet streets are paved, not awash with swirling brown water running through muddy clay ruts. The cars move forward with determination and efficiency, splashing through the water, not sliding and spinning across the shifting red laterite soil.

I’ve thought a lot about how Africa soaked into me. Perhaps the equatorial climate cooked my brains and caused a chemical reaction that changed my perceptions. Most of all, Africa was a strange, unexpected landscape for me to explore with my friend Chima Okorie. It was through his eyes and his story that I began to see my own world in a different light.

Certainly each of us had problems understanding and shaping the personal identities with which we wanted to journey. I’m not sure that even now either of us has completely found himself. But when at last we met again a few weeks ago, Chima was busy living his return home to Africa. As for me, after wandering through Africa, I still may be trying to find my way.

*     *     *

My name is Ben Siecher. I’m a lawyer and I once worked for the U.S Government, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. In 1966, I had a chance to live in Africa for a couple years. I did that too, probably because again I didn’t know what else to do.

It seemed like a great idea. I was a bachelor in my early thirties and this was an opportunity to live a belated expatriate year or two of adventure. I was too old for the Peace Corp and when I did break loose for the wilds of Africa I was careful to have a secure government job. My lifeline to home was the U.S. State Department foreign assistance agency, USAID. I went to work in its West Africa mission in Lagos Nigeria.

I knew vaguely of Nigeria’s recent history. The democratic political structure with which Nigeria had started its decade of independence had broken down. The African statesmen who had piloted Nigeria toward independence could not control corruption and political anarchy. The army responded by moving from the barracks into the state house; the first military coup came in January of 1966.

Nigeria suffered terribly the rest of that year. The coup set off tribal animosities which had never been far beneath the surface. The country was too much a patchwork of tribes, stitched together by the colonial regime, only to pop its threads in creating its identity as an independent nation state.

Antagonism toward the Ibo tribe of the Eastern region of the country increased after the January coup. Some said the Ibos were engaged in a power grab, setting in motion the initial coup and killing leaders of the Moslem north. Some harbored jealousy of Ibo commercial and intellectual success. By May anti-Ibo riots began to undercut any hope of national stability. In July a counter coup took place. Eventually, General Gowan, a Christian northerner, became head of the Nigerian Federal Military Government.

But Gowan’s government was unable to ease the tribal tensions and contain the violence. Ibo massacres were instigated by Northern army units and the conflagration began to spread. The Ibos started an exodus from throughout the country to their ancestral homelands in the Eastern Region. The political and tribal fences rose higher and the Nigerian nation faltered.

In May 1967, when I was already living in Lagos, the military leader of the Eastern Region, General Ojukwu, led the East out of the Nigerian Federation and proclaimed it the sovereign, independent nation of Biafra. But the Federal Military Government was not about to permit the breakup of the Federation. Thus began the Biafran war, the Nigerian civil war, another war of brother against brother. The tragedy of the next two and a half years left hundreds of thousands dead, and the lingering unanswered questions which wars always leave hanging in the corridors of history.

*     *     *

I had arrived in Nigeria in December 1966. Soon after the New Year, I was introduced by mutual friends to Chima Okorie, an African about my age who had recently returned to Lagos from the States. Chima had been born an Ibo from the Eastern Region, but he had lived and studied most of his life abroad, most recently at Columbia University in New York.

The shadow of civil war was already falling on Nigeria and was soon to affect all our lives in different ways. During this time, Chima seemed to float, almost disembodied, above the darkening political landscape. He appeared ambivalent about having returned from his personal diaspora and uncertain about how to complete the journey. He avoided talk of going to the Eastern Region, to the homeland of his parents and childhood. Instead he chose to join with European friends and colleagues at the Lagos clubs frequented by both expatriates and Africans. He and I spent many of our leisure hours drinking Heineken and the local Star beer and discussing distant things like the Cold War, Vietnam and the Middle East.

He spoke only rarely of his childhood and parents. My understanding at the time was that his father had been a prominent politician and businessman in the Eastern Region before his death. Chima described him as a born leader, a man of the people, who had instinctive political and business skills. He said his father’s voice and authority held sway over the remote villages of Iboland’s deep equatorial forests, while at the same time he made a fortune in the thriving commerce between the Eastern and Northern regions of the country. But the wealth he built on trade with the North ultimately proved disastrous. Chima said that tribal and regional suspicions led to his murder, a case which remained unsolved.

Chima’s father had been well educated by missionaries. But he dreamed that his son would go beyond the dusty secondary school compounds of his own student days. So his father sent Chima, as a very young boy, abroad for a Western education. Remittance checks in hard currency from substantial Swiss bank accounts followed Chima regularly to London, Paris and New York.

Chima’s intellect flowered in the great universities he attended. He was smart and curious, and readily took to the canons of Western civilization, avidly devouring the classics and European art, history and political science. He was rarely haunted by his African past, only when he didn’t know what else to do or where he might go next.

He told me that his mother had neither comprehended nor shared his father’s dreams and ambitions. He described her as a simple woman, uneducated and unsophisticated, who never understood nor lived in the emerging world of political and economic affairs which occupied her husband. Yet Chima recalled that always, at the end of the week, his father returned to the village and held his wife in his arms and told the small boy of the people he had met, the rallies at which he had spoken, and the events and news of the world beyond the forest clearings.

Chima spoke of his mother with sympathy, but distantly, for he had lived abroad without family ties since early childhood. However, when he and I saw each other again, things had changed for him. He had explored and I think had arrived someplace like home.

My journey was different. And yet, in some ways it may turn out to be not so different after all.

Part I

Traveling New Landscapes

Chapter 1

The plane lifted off from Geneva in the early morning and set its course to the south. I leaned forward and looked out at the Alps; they were backlit by the sun, the snowfields still in shadow. I had arrived from Washington a few days earlier and gone skiing in Zermatt. Alone among strangers on the slopes, I felt more than ready for two years away from home.

Upon reflection, my leave-taking from the States was timely and perhaps overdue. After law school, I tried to do some good in the early 60s by working on civil rights voter registration in the South but eventually I needed a regular job. Thinking that anti-trust law was a promising field, I became a prosecutor at the Justice Department. Like Teddy Roosevelt I liked the idea of trust-busting, but I figured there were usually reasonable arguments on each side in any given case. That notion had a lot of appeal because if I ended up going to Wall Street and defending big-money capitalists, I need not feel like a complete sell-out.

One thing I hadn’t counted on was the ‘Bleak House’ pace of anti-trust work. By the time a case got anywhere near the courts I had long since lost interest in what the whole damn thing was about to begin with. The final straw was being assigned to investigate price fixing by the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. That was hardly my idea of going after malefactors of great wealth. Looking around for something more useful to do, I ended up working on the foreign assistance program at USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development.

I spent my days gilding the lilies reported on by our project people for the edification of Congressional staffers. The stories often seemed pretty good, I must say, and I began thinking it would be cool to go overseas and see if what I wrote had any basis in fact. The thought strengthened one day when my boss told me to stretch the truth a bit more on some Congressional testimony I was writing. We need to soar like an eagle when we’re up on the Hill. Tell them we are truly winning hearts and minds all over the place, he crowed. I thought it better not to tell him his crowing totally failed to sound like an eagle’s scream; it was mostly like a turkey’s gobble. I settled on commenting that if we oversold ourselves too much in Congressional hearings we might end up dead ducks rather than soaring eagles. He didn’t like the comment, but that was par for the course among some of the humorless senior bureaucrats I worked with.

I finally decided to take on a foreign assignment when my personal life took a dive. I had been seeing a girl in New England, a soft gentle lady who loved sad folk songs, French impressionist art, pottery making and quaint mountain villages. I had known her for years, and thought she brought out what I regarded as my true poetic sensitivity. In our younger days really serious sex was off limits and my relationship with her didn’t go very far. Eventually she broke my heart and married an older guy, only to have her heart broken in turn. I spent months comforting her and eventually she gave in and took me into her arms and bed. I was in total bliss until my next visit. Then with a moody voice she told me that, alas, I was too much like a brother for our love affair to flourish. Therefore she was leaving me to follow some jerk who was really sensitive and, in addition, an accomplished devotee of mystical Eastern philosophy and music. Together they were off to seek the light and listen to celestial sounds in a wonderful ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas.

It was clearly time for me to hit my own road. I went to Colorado, where my parents lived, to announce the kind of intentions that neither of them particularly cared to hear. When I told them of my decision to take an African assignment, my mom cried and sighed, but then gave up. My dad was grim and quiet.

It was the Thanksgiving holiday,