Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction by Teju Cole Read Free Book Online Page A

best I can manage is to take a few photographs. For the rest of the month, I neither read nor write.
    And yet, and yet. The place exerts an elemental pull on me. There is no end of fascinations. People talk all the time, calling on a sense of reality that is not identical to mine. They have wonderful solutions to some nasty problems; in this I see a nobility of spirit that is rare in the world. Butalso, there is much sorrow, not only of the dramatic kind but also in the way that difficult economic circumstances wear people down, eroding them, preying on their weaknesses, until they do things that they themselves find hateful, until they are shadows of their best selves. The problem used to only be the leadership. But now, when you step out into the city, your oppressor is likely to be your fellow citizen, his ethics eroded by years of suffering and life at the cusp of desperation. There is venality in abundance here, and the general air of surrender, of helplessness, is the most heartbreaking thing about it. I decide that I love my own tranquillity too much to muck about in other people’s troubles. I am not going to move back to Lagos. No way. I don’t care if there are a million untold stories, I don’t care if that, too, is a contribution to the atmosphere of surrender.
    I am going to move back to Lagos. I must. I lie in bed, on my back, wearing only boxer shorts, enduring the late afternoon’s damp heat. I have headphones on, and I am listening to “Giant Steps,” that twisting, modal argument of saxophone, drums, bass, and piano that is like a repeated unmaking and remaking of the audible world. It is at high volume, but the generators say, No, you will not enjoy this. I have no right to Coltrane here, not with everything else going on. This is Lagos. I disagree, turn the volume up, listen to both the music and the noise. Neither gives way. No sense emerges of the combat between art and messy reality.

FOURTEEN
    T he National Museum is in Onikan in the heart of old Lagos. This part of the city has much in common with other faded colonial centers. The legacy of foreign rule is visible in the churches, the Brazilian-style buildings, the porticoed and decrepit institutions that lace the tiny, winding streets. Alongside these are the gleaming modern buildings that announce Lagos Island as the national center of commerce. It is the same thing one might observe in Bombay around Victoria Terminus, a combination of the borrowed old and the uncertain new. The museum sits in a less choked section of Onikan, in the shadow of the Tafawa Balewa Square stadium, across the street from the vibrant headquarters of theMusical Society of Nigeria, next to the brand-new Doric-porticoed City Mall.
    The museum has no share in the glamour of these buildings. It consists of three or four low buildings set at the end of a drive fringed with manicured lawns. On the morning of my visit, the grounds are quiet. A sweeper is at his calm work. Behind the blue ironwork grille at the entrance is a pair of giant pots. The reception window, which opens into the vestibule, has a sign announcing an entry fee of fifty naira. The listless woman at the reception sends me to the ticket office, which is five yards away from where she sits. I buy a ticket from another woman and, as neither the receptionist nor the ticket agent looks keen to answer questions, walk into the first of the galleries. There are no brochures available about the collection. There are no books or prints for sale. There is no gift shop.
    I have looked forward to this visit for many years because the National Museum has been a memorial touchstone for me. During my years in the United States and in Europe, many of my musings about Nigerian cultural patrimony returned me mentally to Onikan, to the insubstantial recollection I had of a place I had last visited as a young schoolboy. All people who are far from home have something they hold on to. For me, it was the museum and the meaning I