[3 of 4] Half of a Yellow Sun, Part Three: The Early Sixties, Chapters 19 - 24

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. "Part Three: The Early Sixties." Half of a Yellow Sun, Anchor Books, 2006, Chapters 19-24.

The Early Sixties

19

Ugwu sat on the steps that led to the backyard. Raindrops slid down the leaves, the air smelled of wet soil, and he and Harrison were talking about his upcoming trip with Mr. Richard.

“Tufia! I don't know why my master wants to see that devilish festival in your village,” Harrison said. He was a few steps below; Ugwu could see the bald patch on the middle of his head.

“Maybe Mr. Richard wants to write about the devil,” Ugwu said. Of course the ori-okpawas not a devilish festival, but he would not disagree with Harrison. He needed Harrison to be in a good mood so he could ask him about tear gas. They were silent for a while, watching the vultures hovering overhead; the neighbors had killed a chicken.

“Ah, those lemons are ripening.” Harrison gestured to the tree. “I'm using the fresh one for meringue pie,” he added in English.

“What is meh-rang?” Ugwu asked. Harrison would like that question.

“You don't know what it is?” Harrison laughed. “It is an American food. I will make it for my master to bring here when your madam comes back from London. I know she will like it.” Harrison turned to glance at Ugwu. He had placed a newspaper before sitting on the step, and it rumpled as he shifted. “Even you will like it.”

“Yes,” Ugwu said, although he had sworn never to eat Harrison's food after he dropped by Mr. Richard's house and saw Harrison spooning shredded orange peels into a pot of sauce. He would have been less alarmed if Harrison had cooked with the orange itself, but to cook with the peels was like choosing the hairy skin of a goat rather than the meat.

“I also use lemons to make cake; lemons are very good for the body,” Harrison said. “The food of white people makes you healthy, it is not like all of the nonsense that our people eat.”

“Yes, that is so.” Ugwu cleared his throat. He should ask Harrison about tear gas now, but instead he said, “Let me show you my new room in the Boys' Quarters.”

“Okay.” Harrison got up.

When they walked into Ugwu's room, he pointed to the ceiling, patterned black and white. “I did that myself,” he said. He had held a candle up there for hours, flicking the flame all over the ceiling, stopping often to move the table he was standing on.

“Omaka, it is very nice.” Harrison looked at the narrow spring bed in the corner, the table and chair, the shirts hanging on nails stuck to the wall, the two pairs of shoes arranged carefully on the floor. “Are those new shoes?”

“My madam bought them for me from Bata.”

Harrison touched the pile of journals on the table. “You are reading all of these?” he asked in English.

“Yes.” Ugwu had saved them from the study dustbin; the MathematicalAnnalswere incomprehensible, but at least he had read, if not understood, a few pages of SocialistReview.

It had started to rain again. The patter on the zinc roof was loud and grew louder as they stood under the awning outside and watched the water sliding down from the roof in parallel lines.

Ugwu slapped at his arm—he liked the rain-cooled air, but he didn't like the mosquitoes flying around. Finally he asked the question. “Do you know how I can get tear gas?”

“Tear gas? Why do you ask?”

“I read about it in my master's newspaper, and I want to see what it is like.” He would not tell Harrison that he in fact heard of tear gas when Master talked about the members of the Western Houseof Assembly, who punched and kicked one another until the police came and sprayed tear gas and they all passed out, leaving orderlies to carry them, limp, to their cars. The tear gas fascinated Ugwu. If it made people pass out, he wanted to get it. He wanted to use it on Nnesinachi when he went home with Mr. Richard for the ori-okpafestival. He would lead her to the grove by the stream and tell her the tear gas was a magic spray that would keep her healthy. She would believe him. She would be so impressed to see him arrive in a white man's car that she would believe anything he said.

“It will be very difficult to get tear gas,” Harrison said. “Why?”

“You are too young to know why.” Harrison nodded mysteriously. “When you are a grown man I will tell you.”

Ugwu was puzzled at first, before he realized that Harrison did not know what tear gas was either but would never admit it. He was disappointed. He would have to ask Jomo.

Jomo knew what tear gas was and laughed long and hard when Ugwu told him what he wanted to use it for. Jomo clapped his hands together as he laughed. “You are a sheep, aturu, ” Jomo said finally. “Why do you want to use tear gas on a young girl? Look, go to your village, and if the time is right and the young girl likes you, she will follow you. You don't need tear gas.”

Ugwu kept Jomo's words in mind as Mr. Richard drove him to his hometown the next morning. Anulika ran up the path when she saw them and boldly shook Mr. Richard's hand. She hugged Ugwu and, as they walked along, told him that their parents were at the farm, their cousin gave birth only yesterday, Nnesinachi left for the North last week—

Ugwu stopped and stared at her.

“Has something happened?” Mr. Richard asked. “The festival hasn't been canceled, has it?” Ugwu wished it had been. “No, sah.”

He led the way to the village square, already filling up with men and women and children, and sat under the oji tree with Mr. Richard. Children soon surrounded them, chanting “Onyeocha, white man,” reaching out to feel Mr. Richard's hair. He said, “Kedu? Hello, what's your name?” and they stared at him, giggling, nudging each other. Ugwu leaned against the tree and mourned the time he had spent thinking of seeing Nnesinachi. Now she was gone and some trader in the North would end up with his prize. He hardly noticed the mmuo:masculine figures covered in grass, their faces snarling wooden masks, their long whips dangling from their hands. Mr. Richard took photographs, wrote in his notebook, and asked questions, one after another—what was that called and what did they say and who were those men holding back the mmuowith a rope and what did that mean—until Ugwu felt irritable from the heat and the questions and the noise and the enormous disappointment of not seeing Nnesinachi.

He was silent on the drive back, looking out of the window. “You're already homesick, aren't you?” Mr. Richard asked.

“Yes, sah,” Ugwu said. He wanted Mr. Richard to shut up. He wanted to be alone. He hoped Master would still be at the club so he could take the Renaissance from the living room and curl up on his bed in the Boys' Quarters and read. Or he would watch the new television. If he was lucky, an Indian film would be on. The large-eyed beauty of the women, the singing, the flowers, the bright colors, and the crying, were what he needed now.

When he let himself in through the back door, he was shocked to find Master's mother near the stove. Amala was standing by the door. Even Master did not know they were coming, or he would have been asked to clean the guest room.

“Oh,” he said. “Welcome, Mama. Welcome, Aunty Amala.” The last visit was fresh in his mind: Mama harassing Olanna, calling her a witch, hooting, and, worst of all, threatening to consult the dibia in the village.“ How are you, Ugwu?” Mama adjusted her wrapper before she patted his back. “My son said you went to show the white man the spirits in your village?”

“Yes, Mama.”

He could hear Master's raised voice from the living room. Perhaps a visitor had dropped by and he had decided not to go to the club.

“You can go and rest, inugo, ” Mama said. “I am preparing my son's dinner.”

The last thing he wanted now was for Mama to colonize his kitchen or use Olanna's favorite saucepan for her strong-smelling soup. He wished so much that she would just leave. “I will stay in case you need help, Mama,” he said.

She shrugged and went back to shaking out black peppercorns from a pod. “Do you cook ofensala well?”

“I have never cooked it.” “Why? My son likes it.”

“My madam has never asked me to cook it.”

“She is not your madam, my child. She is just a woman who is living with a man who has not paid her bride price.”

“Yes, Mama.”

She smiled, as if pleased that he had finally understood something important, and gestured to two small clay pots at the corner. “I brought fresh palm wine for my son. Our best winetapper brought it to me this morning.”

She pulled out the green leaves stuffed in the mouth of one pot and the wine frothed over, white and fresh and sweet-smelling. She poured some into a cup and gave it to Ugwu.

“Taste it.”

It was strong on his tongue, the kind of concentrated palm wine tapped in the dry season that made men in his village start to stagger too soon. “Thank you, Mama. It is very good.”

“Do your people tap wine well?” “Yes, Mama.”

“But not as well as my people. In Abba, we have the best winetappers in the whole of Igboland. Is that not so, Amala?”

“It is so, Mama.”

“Wash that bowl for me.”

“Yes, Mama.” Amala began to wash the bowl. Her shoulders and arms shook as she scrubbed. Ugwu had not really looked at her and now he noticed that her slender, dark arms and face were shiny-wet, as if she had bathed in groundnut oil.

Master's voice, loud and firm, came from the living room. “Our idiot government should break ranks with Britain too. We must take a stand! Why is Britain not doing more in Rhodesia? What bloody difference will limp economic sanctions make?”

Ugwu moved closer to the door to listen; he was fascinated by Rhodesia, by what was happening in the south of Africa. He could not comprehend people that looked like Mr. Richard taking away the things that belonged to people that looked like him, Ugwu, for no reason at all.

“Bring me a tray, Ugwu,” Mama said.

Ugwu brought down a tray from the cupboard and made as if to help her serve Master's food, but she waved him away. “I am here so you can rest a little, you poor boy. That woman will start overworking you again once she returns from overseas, as if you are not somebody's child.” She unwrapped a small packet and sprinkled something into the soup bowl. Suspicion flared in Ugwu's mind; he remembered the black cat that appeared in the backyard after her last visit. And the packet was black, too, like the cat.“ What is that, Mama? That thing you put in my master's food?” he asked.

“It is a spice that is a specialty of Abba people.” She turned to smile briefly. “It is very good.”

“Yes, Mama.” Maybe he was wrong to think she was putting her medicine from the dibiain the master's food. Maybe Olanna was right and the black cat meant nothing and was only a neighbor's cat, although he did not know any of the neighbors who had a cat like that, with eyes that flashed yellow-red.

Ugwu didn't think again of the strange spice or the cat because, while Master had dinner, he sneaked a glass of palm wine from the pot and then another glass, since it was so sweet, and afterward he felt as if the inside of his head was coated in soft wool. He could hardly walk. From the living room, he heard Master say in an unsteady voice, “To the future of great Africa! To our independent brothers in the Gambia and to our Zambian brothers who have left Rhodesia!” followed by laughter in wild bursts. The palm wine had got to Master as well. Ugwu laughed along, even though he was alone in the kitchen and did not know what was funny. Finally, he fell asleep on the stool, his head against the table that smelled of dried fish.

He woke up with stiff joints. His mouth tasted sour, his head ached, and he wished the sun were not so oppressively bright and that Master would not speak so loudly over the newspapers at breakfast. How can more politicians return unopposed than elected? Utterrubbish !This is rigging of the worst order! Each syllable throbbed inside Ugwu's head.

After Master left for work, Mama asked, “Will you not go to school, gbo, Ugwu?” “We are on holiday, Mama.”

“Oh.” She looked disappointed.

Later, he saw her rubbing something on Amala's back, both of them standing in front of the bathroom. His suspicions returned. There was something wrong about the way Mama's hands were moving in circular motions, slowly, as if in consonance with some ritual, and about the way Amala stood silent, with her back straight and her wrapper lowered to her waist and the outline of her small breasts visible from the side. Perhaps Mama was rubbing a potion on Amala. But it made no sense because if Mama had indeed gone to the dibia, the medicine would be for Olanna and not Amala. It may be, though, that the medicine worked on women and Mama would have to protect herself and Amala to make sure that only Olanna died or became barren or went mad. Perhaps Mama was performing the preliminary protections now that Olanna was in London and would bury the medicine in the yard to keep it potent until Olanna came back.

Ugwu shivered. A shadow hung over the house. He worried about Mama's cheeriness, her tuneless humming, her determination to serve all of Master's meals, her frequent hushed words to Amala. He watched her carefully whenever she went outside, to see if she would bury anything, so he could unearth it as soon as she went back indoors. But she did not bury anything. When he told Jomo that he suspected Mama had gone to a dibiato find a way to kill Olanna, Jomo said, “The old woman is simply happy to have her son to herself, that is why she is cooking and singing every day. Do you know how happy my mother is when I go to see her without my wife?”

“But I saw a black cat the last time she came,” Ugwu said.

“Professor Ozumba's housegirl down the street is a witch. She flies to the top of the mango tree at night to meet with her fellow witches, because I always rake up all the leaves they throw down. She is the one the black cat was looking for.”

Ugwu tried to believe Jomo, that he was reading undue meaning into Mama's actions, until he walked into the kitchen the next evening, after weeding his herb garden, and saw the flies in a foaming mass by the sink. The window was barely open. He did not see how so many flies, more than a hundred fat greenish flies, could have come in through that crack to buzz together in a dense turbulent cluster. They signified something terrible. Ugwu dashed to the study to call Master.“ Quite odd,” Master said; he took off his glasses and then put them back on. “I'm sure Prof. Ezeka will be able to explain it, some sort of migratory behavior. Don't shut the window so you don't trap them in.”

“But, sah,” Ugwu said, just as Mama came into the kitchen.

“Flies do this sometimes,” she said. “It is normal. They will go the same way they came.” She was leaning by the door and her tone was ominously victorious.

“Yes, yes.” Master turned to go back to the study. “Tea, my good man.”

“Yes, sah.” Ugwu did not understand how Master could be so unperturbed, how he could not see that the flies were not normal at all. As he took the tea tray into the study, he said, “Sah, those flies are telling us something.”

Master gestured to the table. “Don't pour. Leave it there.”

“Those flies in the kitchen, sah, they are a sign of bad medicine from the dibia.Somebody has done bad medicine.” Ugwu wanted to add that he knew very well who it was, but he was not sure how Master would take that.

“What?” Master's eyes narrowed behind his glasses.

“The flies, sah. It means somebody has done bad medicine for this house.” “Shut the door and let me do some work, my good man.”

“Yes, sah.”

When Ugwu returned to the kitchen, the flies were gone. The window was the same, open only a crack, and the wan sunlight lit up the blade of a chopping knife on the table. He was reluctant to touch anything; the mysteries around him had tainted the pans and pots. For once, he was pleased to let Mama cook, but he did not eat the ugba and fried fish she made for dinner, did not take so much as a sip of the leftover palm wine he served to Master and his guests, did not sleep well that night. He kept jerking awake with itchy watering eyes, wishing he could talk to somebody who would understand: Jomo, his aunty, Anulika. Finally he got up and went into the main house to dust the furniture, something mild and mindless that would keep him occupied. The purple-gray of early dawn filled the kitchen with shadows. He turned on the light switch fearfully, expecting to find something. Scorpions, perhaps; a jealous person had sent them to his uncle's hut once, and his uncle woke up every day for weeks to find angry black scorpions crawling near his newborn twin sons. One baby had been stung and almost died.

Ugwu cleaned the bookshelves first. He had removed the papers from the center table and was bent over dusting it when Master's bedroom door opened. He glanced at the corridor, surprised that Master was up so early. But it was Amala who walked out of the room. The corridor was dim and her startled eyes met Ugwu's more startled eyes and she stopped for a moment before she hurried on to the guest room. Her wrapper was loose around her chest. She held on to it with one hand and bumped against the door of the guest room, pushing it as if she had forgotten how to open it, before she went in. Amala, common quiet ordinary Amala, had slept in Master's bedroom! Ugwu stood still and tried to get his whirling head to become steady so that he could think. Mama's medicine had done this, he was sure, but his worry was not what had happened between Master and Amala. His worry was what would happen if Olanna found out.

20

Olanna sat across from her mother in the living room upstairs. Her mother called it the ladies' parlor, because it was where she entertained her friends, where they laughed and hailed each other by their nicknames—Art! Gold! Ugodiya!—and talked about whose son was messing around with women in London while his mates built houses on their fathers' land, and who had bought local lace and tried to pass it off as the latest from Europe, and who was trying to snatch so-and-so's husband, and who had imported superior furniture from Milan. Now, though, the room was muted. Her mother held a glass of tonic water in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. She was crying. She was telling Olanna about her father's mistress.

“He has bought her a house in Ikeja,” her mother said. “My friend lives on the same street.”

Olanna watched the delicate movement of her mother's hand as she dabbed at her eyes. It looked like satin, the handkerchief; it could not possibly be absorbent enough.

“Have you talked to him?” Olanna asked.

“What am I to say to him? Gwa ya gini?” Her mother placed the glass down. She had not sipped from it since one of the maids brought it in on a silver tray. “There is nothing I can say to him. I just wanted to let you know what is happening so that they will not say I did not tell somebody.”

“I'll talk to him,” Olanna said. It was what her mother wanted. She had been back from London a day, and already the glow of possibility that came after she saw the Kensington gynecologist was dulled. Already she could not remember the hope that spread through her when he said there was nothing wrong with her and she had only to—he had winked—work harder. Already she wished she were back in Nsukka.

“The worst part of it is that the woman is common riffraff,” her mother said, twisting the handkerchief. “AYoruba goat from the bush with two children from two different men. I hear she is old and ugly.”

Olanna got up. As if it mattered what the woman looked like. As if “old and ugly” did not describe her father as well. What troubled her mother was not the mistress, she knew, but the significance of what her father had done: buying the mistress a house in a neighborhood where Lagos socialites lived.

“Maybe we should wait for Kainene to visit so she can talk to your father instead, nne?” her mother said, dabbing at her eyes again.

“I said I would talk to him, Mom,” Olanna said.

But that evening, as she walked into her father's room, she realized that her mother was right. Kainene was the best person for this. Kainene would know exactly what to say and would not feel the awkward ineptness that she did now, Kainene with her sharp edges and her bitter tongue and her supreme confidence.

“Dad,” she said, closing the door behind her. He was at his desk, sitting on the straight-backed chair made of dark wood. She couldn't ask him if it was true, because he had to know that her mother knew it to be true and so did she. She wondered, for a moment, about this other woman, what she looked like, what she and her father talked about.

“Dad,” she said again. She would speak mostly in English. It was easy to be formal and cold in English. “I wish you had some respect for my mother.” That was not what she had intended to say.My mother, instead of Mom, made it seem as if she had decided to exclude him, as if he had become a stranger who could not possibly be addressed on the same terms, could not be my father.

He leaned back in his chair.“ It's disrespectful that you have a relationship with this woman and that you have bought her a house where my mother's friends live,” Olanna said. “You go there from work and your driver parks outside and you don't seem to care that people see you. It's a slap to my mother's face.”

Her father's eyes were downcast now, the eyes of a man groping in his mind.

“I am not going to tell you what to do about it, but you haveto do something. My mother isn't happy.” Olanna stressed the have, placed an exaggerated emphasis on it. She had never talked to her father like this before; she rarely talked to him anyway. She stood there staring at him, and he at her, and the silence between them was empty.

“Anugom, I have heard you,” he said. His Igbo was low, conspiratorial, as if she had asked him to go ahead and cheat on her mother but to do it considerately. It angered her. Perhaps it was, in effect, what she had asked him to do but still she was annoyed. She looked around his room and thought how unfamiliar his large bed was; she had never seen that lustrous shade of gold on a blanket before or noticed how intricately convoluted the metal handles of his chest of drawers were. He even looked like a stranger, a fat man she didn't know.

“Is that all you have to say, that you've heard me?” Olanna asked, raising her voice. “What do you want me to say?”

Olanna felt a sudden pity for him, for her mother, for herself and Kainene. She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.

“I will do something about it,” he added. He stood up and came toward her. “Thank you, ola m, ” he said.

She was not sure what to make of his thanking her, or of his calling her mygold, something he had not done since she was a child and which now had a contrived solemnity to it. She turned and left the room.

When Olanna heard her mother's raised voice the next morning—“Good-for-nothing! Stupid man!”—she hurried downstairs. She imagined them fighting, her mother grasping the front of her father's shirt in a tight knot as women often did to cheating husbands. The sounds came from the kitchen. Olanna stopped at the door. A man was kneeling in front of her mother with his hands raised high, palms upward in supplication.

“Madam, please; madam, please.”

Her mother turned to the steward, Maxwell, who stood aside watching. “I fugo? Does he think we employed him to steal us blind, Maxwell?”

“No, mah,” Maxwell said.

Her mother turned back to the man kneeling on the floor. “So this is what you have been doing since you came here, you useless man? You came here to steal from me?”

“Madam, please; madam, please. I am using God to beg you.”

“Mom, what is it?” Olanna asked.

Her mother turned. “Oh, nne, I didn't know you were up.”

“What is it?”

“It's this wild animal here. We employed him only last month, and he already wants to steal everything in my house.” She turned back to the kneeling man. “This is how you repay people for giving you a job? Stupid man!”

“What did he do?” Olanna asked.

“Come and see.” Her mother led her out to the backyard where a bicycle leaned against the mango tree. A woven bag had fallen from the backseat, spilling rice onto the ground.

“He stole my rice and was about to go home. It was only by God's grace that the bag fell. Whoknows what else he has stolen from me in the past? No wonder I have been looking for some of my necklaces.” Her mother was breathing quickly.

Olanna stared at the rice grains on the ground and wondered how her mother could have worked herself up like this over them and if her mother really believed her own outrage.

“Aunty, please beg Madam. It is the devil that made me do it.” The driver's pleading hands faced Olanna now. “Please beg madam.”

Olanna looked away from the man's lined face and yellowed eyes; he was older than she had first thought, certainly above sixty. “Get up,” she said.

He looked uncertain, glancing at her mother.

“I said get up!” Olanna had not intended to raise her voice, but it had come out sharp. The man stood up awkwardly, eyes downcast.

“Mom, if you're going to sack him, then sack him and have him go right away,” Olanna said.

The man gasped, as if he had not expected her to say that. Her mother looked surprised too and glanced at Olanna, at the man, at Maxwell, before she put down the hand placed on her hip. “I will give you one more chance, but don't ever touch anything in this house unless you are permitted. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, madam. Thank you, madam. God bless you, madam.”

The man was still singing his thanks as Olanna took a banana from the table and left the kitchen. She told Odenigbo about it on the phone, how it repulsed her to see that elderly man abase himself

so, how she was certain her mother would have fired him but only after an hour of revelling in his groveling and in her own self-righteous outrage. “It could not have been more than four cups of rice,” she said.

“It was still stealing, nkem.”

“My father and his politician friends steal money with their contracts, but nobody makes them kneel to beg for forgiveness. And they build houses with their stolen money and rent them out to people like this man and charge inflated rents that make it impossible to buy food.”

“You can't right theft with theft.” Odenigbo sounded strangely somber; she had expected an outburst from him about the injustice of it all.

“Does inequality have to mean indignity?” she asked. “It often does.”

“Are you all right?”

“My mother is here. I had no idea she was coming.”

No wonder he sounded that way. “Will she be gone before Tuesday?” “I don't know. I wish you were here.”

“I'm glad I'm not. Have you had a conversation about breaking the spell of the educated witch?” “I'll tell her before she says anything that there's nothing to be discussed.”

“You might pacify her by telling her that we are trying to have a child. Or will she be horrified at the thought of my having a child? Some of those witchcraft genes may be passed along to her grandchild after all.”

She hoped Odenigbo would laugh, but he didn't. “I can't wait for Tuesday,” he said, after a while. “I can't wait either,” she said. “Tell Ugwu to air the rug in the bedroom.”

That night, when her mother came into her room, Olanna smelled the floral Chloe perfume, a lovely scent, but she did not see why a person needed to wear perfume to bed. Her mother had too many bottles of perfume; they lined her dresser like a store shelf: stunted bottles, tapering bottles, rounded bottles.

Even wearing them to bed every night, her mother could not use them all in fifty years. “Thank you, nne, ” she said. “Your father is already trying to make amends.”“ I see.” Olanna did not want to know just what it was her father had done to make amends but she felt an odd sense of accomplishment to have talked to her father like Kainene, to have got him to do something, to have been useful.

“Mrs. Nwizu will soon stop telephoning to tell me she saw him there,” her mother said. “She said something catty the other day about people whose daughters have refused to marry. I think she was throwing words at me and wanted to see if I would throw them back at her. Her daughter got married last year and they could not afford to import anything for the wedding. Even the wedding dress was made here in Lagos!” Her mother sat down. “By the way, there is somebody who wants to meet you. You know Igwe Onochie's family? Their son is an engineer. I think he has seen you somewhere, and he is very interested.”

Olanna sighed and leaned back to listen to her mother.

She got back to Nsukka in the middle of the afternoon, that still hour when the sun was relentless and even the bees perched in quiet exhaustion. Odenigbo's car was in the garage. Ugwu opened the door before she knocked, his shirt unbuttoned, slight sweat patches under his arms. “Welcome, mah,” he said.

“Ugwu.” She had missed his loyal smiling face. “Unu anokwa ofuma? Did you stay well?” “Yes, mah,” he said, and went out to bring her luggage from the taxi.

Olanna walked in. She had missed the faint smell of detergent that lingered in the living room after Ugwu cleaned the louvers.

Because she had imagined that Odenigbo's mother was already gone, she was dampened to see her on the sofa, dressed, fussing with a bag. Amala stood nearby, holding a small metal box.

“Nkem!” Odenigbo said, and hurried forward. “It's good to have you back! So good!”

When they hugged, his body did not relax against hers and the brief press of his lips felt papery. “Mama and Amala are just leaving. I'm taking them to the motor park,” he said.

“Good afternoon, Mama,” Olanna said, but did not make an attempt to go any closer.

“Olanna, kedu?” Mama asked. It was Mama who initiated their hug; it was Mama who smiled warmly. Olanna was puzzled but pleased. Perhaps Odenigbo had spoken to her about how serious their relationship was, and their planning to have a child had finally won Mama over.

“Amala, how are you?” Olanna asked. “I didn't know you came too.” “Welcome, Aunty,” Amala mumbled, looking down.

“Have you brought everything?” Odenigbo asked his mother. “Let's go. Let's go.” “Have you eaten, Mama?” Olanna asked.

“My morning meal is still heavy in my stomach,” Mama said. She had a happily speculative look on her face.

“We have to go now,” Odenigbo said. “I have a scheduled game later.”

“What about you, Amala?” Olanna asked. Mama's smiling face suddenly made her want them to stay a little longer. “I hope you ate something.”

“Yes, Aunty, thank you,” Amala said, her eyes still focused on the floor. “Give Amala the key to put the things in the car,” Mama said to Odenigbo.

Odenigbo moved toward Amala, but stopped a little way away so that he had to stretch out and lengthen his arm to give her the key. She took it carefully from his fingers; they did not touch each other. It was a tiny moment, brief and fleeting, but Olanna noticed how scrupulously they avoided any contact, any touch of skin, as if they were united by a common knowledge so monumental that they were determined not to be united by anything else.

“Go well,” she said. She watched the car ease out of the compound and stood there, telling herselfshe was mistaken; there had been nothing in that gesture. But it bothered her. She felt something similar to what she had felt while waiting for the gynecologist: convinced that something was wrong with her body and yet willing him to tell her that all was well.

“Mah, will you eat? Should I warm rice?” Ugwu asked.

“Not now.” For a moment she wanted to ask Ugwu if he too had observed that gesture, if he had observed anything at all. “Go and see if any avocados are ripe.”

“Yes, mah.” Ugwu hesitated ever so slightly before he left.

She stood at the front door until Odenigbo came back. She was not sure what the shriveling in her stomach and the racing in her chest meant. She opened the door and searched his face.

“Did anything happen?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” He held some newspapers in his hand. “One of my students missed the last test, and this morning he came and offered me some money to pass him, the ignoramus.”

“I didn't know Amala came with Mama,” she said.

“Yes.” He began to rearrange the newspapers, avoiding her eyes. And, slowly, shock spread over Olanna. She knew. She knew from the jerky movements he made, from the panic on his face, from the hasty way he was trying to look normal again, that something that should not have happened had happened.

“You touched Amala,” Olanna said. It was not a question, and yet she wanted him to respond as if it were; she wanted him to say noand get upset with her for even thinking that. But Odenigbo said nothing. He sat down on his armchair and looked at her.

“You touched Amala,” Olanna repeated. She would always remember his expression, him looking at her as if he could never have imagined this scene and so did not know how to think about thinking about what to say or do.

She turned toward the kitchen and nearly fell beside the dining table because the weight in her chest was too large, not measured to fit her size.

“Olanna,” he said.

She ignored him. He would not come after her because he was frightened, full of the fear of the guilty. She did not get in her car right away and drive to her flat. Instead, she went outside and sat on the backyard steps and watched a hen near the lemon tree, guarding six chicks, nudging them toward crumbs on the ground. Ugwu was plucking avocados from the tree near the Boys' Quarters. She was not sure how long she sat there before the hen began to squawk loudly and spread its wings to shield the chicks, but they did not run into the shelter quickly enough. A kite swooped down and carried one of them off, a brown-and-white chick. It was so fast, the descent of the kite and the gliding away with the chick grasped in hooked claws, that Olanna thought she might have imagined it. She couldn't have, though, because the hen was running around in circles, squawking, raising clouds of dust. The other chicks looked bewildered. Olanna watched them and wondered if they understood their mother's mourning dance. Then, finally, she started to cry.

The blurred days crawled into one another. Olanna grasped for thoughts, for things to do. The first time Odenigbo came to her flat she was unsure whether to let him in. But he knocked and knocked and said, “Nkem, please open, biko, please open,” until she did. She sat sipping some water while he told her that he had been drunk, that Amala had forced herself on him, that it had been a brief rash lust. Afterward, she told him to get out. It was grating that he remained self-assured enough to call what he had done a brief rash lust. She hated that expression and she hated the firmness of his tone the next time he came and said, “It meant nothing, nkem, nothing.” What mattered to her was not what it meant but what had happened: his sleeping with his mother's village girl after only three weeksaway from her. It seemed too easy, the way he had broken her trust. She decided to go to Kano because, if there was a place where she could think clearly, it was in Kano.

Her flight stopped first in Lagos, and as she sat waiting in the lounge a tall, thin woman hurried past. She stood up and was about to call out Kainene! when she realized it could not be. Kainene was darker-skinned than the woman and would never wear a green skirt with a red blouse. She wished so much that it were Kainene, though. They would sit next to each other and she would tell Kainene about Odenigbo and Kainene would say something clever and sarcastic and comforting all at once.

In Kano, Arize was furious.

“Wild animal from Abba. His rotten penis will fall off soon. Doesn't he know he should wake up every morning and kneel down and thank his God that you looked at him at all?” she said, while showing Olanna sketches of bouffant wedding gowns. Nnakwanze had finally proposed. Olanna looked at the drawings. She thought them all to be ugly and overdesigned, but she was so pleased by the rage felt on her behalf that she pointed at one of them and murmured, “O maka. It's lovely.”

Aunty Ifeka said nothing about Odenigbo until a few days had passed. Olanna was sitting on the veranda with her; the sun was fierce and the zinc awning crackled as if in protest. But it was cooler here than in the smoke-filled kitchen, where three neighbors were cooking at the same time. Olanna fanned herself with a small raffia mat. Two women were standing near the gate, one shouting in Igbo —“I said you will give me my money today! Tata! Today, not tomorrow! You heard me say so because I did not speak with water in my mouth!”—while the other made pleading gestures with her hands and glanced skyward.

“How are you?” Aunty Ifeka asked. She was stirring a doughy paste of ground beans in a mortar. “I'm fine, Aunty. I'm finer for being here.”

Aunty Ifeka reached inside the paste to pick out a small black insect. Olanna fanned herself faster. Aunty Ifeka's silence made her want to say more.

“I think I will postpone my program at Nsukka and stay here in Kano,” she said. “I could teach for a while at the institute.”

“No.” Aunty Ifeka put the pestle down. “Mba.You will go back to Nsukka.” “I can't just go back to his house, Aunty.”

“I am not asking you to go back to his house. I said you will go back to Nsukka. Do you not have your own flat and your own job? Odenigbo has done what all men do and has inserted his penis in the first hole he could find when you were away. Does that mean somebody died?”

Olanna had stopped fanning herself and could feel the sweaty wetness on her scalp.

“When your uncle first married me, I worried because I thought those women outside would come and displace me from my home. I now know that nothing he does will make my life change. My life will change only if I want it to change.”

“What are you saying, Aunty?”

“He is very careful now, since he realized that I am no longer afraid. I have told him that if he brings disgrace to me in any way, I will cut off that snake between his legs.”

Aunty Ifeka went back to her stirring, and Olanna's image of their marriage began to come apart at the seams.

“You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?” Aunty Ifeka said. “Your life belongs to you and you alone, sosogi.You will go back on Saturday. Let me hurry up and make some abacha for you to take.”

She tasted a little of the paste and spat it out.

Olanna left on Saturday. The man sitting next to her on the plane, across the aisle, had theshiniest darkest ebony complexion she had ever seen. She had noticed him earlier, in his three-piece wool suit, staring at her as they waited on the tarmac. He had offered to help her with her carry-on bag and, later, had asked the flight attendant if he could take the seat next to hers since it was vacant. Now, he offered her the NewNigerianand asked, “Would you like to read this?” He wore a large opal ring on his middle finger.

“Yes. Thank you.” Olanna took the paper. She skimmed through the pages, aware that he was watching her and that the newspaper was his way of starting conversation. Suddenly she wished she could be attracted to him, that something mad and magical would happen to them both and, when the plane landed, she would walk away with her hand in his, into a new bright life.

“They have finally removed that Igbo vice chancellor from the University of Lagos,” he said. “Oh.”

“It's on the back cover.”

Olanna turned to the back cover. “I see.”

“Why should an Igbo man be the vice chancellor in Lagos?” he asked and, when Olanna said nothing, only half smiling to show she was listening, he added, “The problem with Igbo people is that they want to control everything in this country. Everything. Why can't they stay in their East? They own all the shops; they control the civil service, even the police. If you are arrested for any crime, as long as you can say keda they will let you go.”

“We say kedu, not keda, ” Olanna said quietly. “It means Howare you?”

The man stared at her and she stared back and thought how beautiful he would have been if he had been a woman, with that perfectly shiny near-black skin.

“Are you Igbo?” he asked. “Yes.”

“But you have the face of Fulani people.” He sounded accusing. Olanna shook her head. “Igbo.”

The man mumbled something that sounded like sorrybefore he turned away and began to look through his briefcase. When she handed the newspaper to him, he seemed reluctant to take it back, and although she glanced at him from time to time, his eyes did not meet hers again until they landed in Lagos. If only he knew that his prejudice had filled her with possibility. She did not have to be the wounded woman whose man had slept with a village girl. She could be a Fulani woman on a plane deriding Igbo people with a good-looking stranger. She could be a woman taking charge of her own life. She could be anything.

As they got up to leave, she looked at him and smiled but kept herself from saying thankyou because she wanted to leave him with both his surprise and his remorse intact.

Olanna hired a pickup truck and a driver and went to Odenigbo's house. Ugwu followed her around as she packed books and pointed at things for the driver to pick up.

“Master looks like somebody that is crying every day, mah,” Ugwu said to her in English.

“Put my blender in a carton,” she said.Myblender sounded strange; it had always been theblender, unmarked by her ownership.

“Yes, mah.” Ugwu went to the kitchen and came back with a carton. He held it tentatively. “Mah, please forgive Master.”

Olanna looked at him. He had known; he had seen this woman share his master's bed; he too had betrayed her. “Osiso!Put my blender in the car!”

“Yes, mah.” Ugwu turned to the door.

“Do the guests still come in the evenings?” Olanna asked.“ It's not like before when you were around, mah.” “But they still come?”

“Yes.”

“And your master still plays tennis and goes to the staff club?” “Yes.”

“Good.” She did not mean that. She had wanted to hear that Odenigbo could no longer bear to live the life that had been theirs.

When he visited her, she tried not to feel disappointment at how normal he looked. She stood at the door and gave noncommittal answers, resentful of his effortless volubility, of how casually he said, “You know I will never love another woman, nkem, ” as if he was certain that, with time, everything would be the same again. She resented, too, the romantic attention of other men. The single men took to stopping by her flat, the married ones to bumping into her outside her department. Their courting upset her because it—and they—assumed that her relationship with Odenigbo was permanently over. “I am not interested,” she told them, and even as she said it, she hoped that it would not get back to Odenigbo because she did not want him to think she was pining. And she did not pine: she added new material to her lectures, cooked long meals, read new books, bought new records. She became secretary of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and after they donated food to the villages she wrote the minutes of their meetings in a notebook. She cultivated zinnias in her front yard and, finally, she cultivated a friendship with her black American neighbor, Edna Whaler.

Edna had a quiet laugh. She taught music and played jazz records a little too loudly and cooked tender pork chops and talked often about the man who had left her a week before their wedding in Montgomery and the uncle who had been lynched when she was a child. “You know what always amazed me?” she would ask Olanna, as if she had not told her only a day previously. “That civilized white folk wore nice dresses and hats and gathered to watch a white man hang a black man from a tree.”

She would laugh her quiet laugh and pat her hair, which had the greasy shine of hot-pressing. At first, they did not talk about Odenigbo. It was refreshing for Olanna to be with somebody who was far removed from the circle of friends she had shared with Odenigbo. Then, once, as Edna sang along to Billie Holiday's “My Man,” she asked, “Why do you love him?”

Olanna looked up. Her mind was a blank board. “Why do I love him?” Edna raised her eyebrows, mouthing but not singing Billie Holiday's words. “I don't think love has a reason,” Olanna said.

“Sure it does.”

“I think love comes first and then the reasons follow. When I am with him, I feel that I don't need anything else.” Olanna's words surprised her, but the startling truth brought the urge to cry.

Edna was watching her. “You can't keep lying to yourself that you're okay.”

“I'm not lying to myself,” Olanna said. Billie Holiday's plaintively scratchy voice had begun to irritate her. She didn't know how transparent she was. She thought her frequent laughter was authentic and that Edna had no idea that she cried when she was alone in her flat.

“I'm not the best person to talk to about men, but you need to talk this through with somebody,” Edna said. “Maybe the priest, as payback for all those St. Vincent de Paul charity trips you've made?”

Edna laughed and Olanna laughed along, but already she was thinking that perhaps she did need to talk to somebody, somebody neutral who would help her reclaim herself, deal with the stranger she had become. She started to drive to St. Peter's many times in the next few days but stopped and changed her mind. Finally, on a Monday afternoon, she went, driving quickly, ignoring speed bumps, so that she would not give herself any time to stop. She sat on a wooden bench in Father Damian's airless office and kept her eyes focused on the filing cabinet labeled laity as she talked aboutOdenigbo.

“I don't go to the staff club because I don't want to see him. I've lost my interest in tennis. He betrayed and hurt me, and yet it seems as if he's running my life.”

Father Damian tugged at his collar, adjusted his glasses, and rubbed his nose, and she wondered if he was thinking of something, anything, to do since he had no answers for her.

“I didn't see you in church last Sunday,” he said finally.

Olanna was disappointed, but he was a priest after all and this had to be his solution: Seek God. She had wanted him to make her feel justified, solidify her right to self-pity, encourage her to occupy a larger portion of the moral high ground. She wanted him to condemn Odenigbo.

“You think I need to go to church more often?” she asked. “Yes.”

Olanna nodded and brought her bag closer, ready to get up and leave. She should not have come. She should not have expected a round-faced voluntary eunuch in white robes to be in a position to understand how she felt. He was looking at her, his eyes large behind the lenses.

“I also think that you should forgive Odenigbo,” he said, and pulled at his collar as though it was choking him. For a moment Olanna felt contempt for him. What he was saying was too easy, too predictable. She did not need to have come to hear it.

“Okay.” She got up. “Thank you.”

“It's not for him, you know. It's for you.”

“What?” He was still sitting, so she looked down to meet his eyes.

“Don't see it as forgiving him. See it as allowing yourself to be happy. What will you do with the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery?”

Olanna looked at the crucifix above the window, at the face of Christ serene in agony, and said nothing.

Odenigbo arrived very early, before she had had breakfast. She knew that something was wrong even before she unlocked the door and saw his somber face.

“What is it?” she asked, and felt a sharp horror at the hope that sneaked into her mind: that his mother had died.

“Amala is pregnant,” he said. There was a selfless and steely tone to his voice, that of a person delivering bad news to other people while remaining strong on their behalf.

Olanna clutched the door handle. “What?”

“Mama just came to tell me that Amala is pregnant with my child.”

Olanna began to laugh. She laughed and laughed and laughed because the present scene, the past weeks, suddenly seemed fantastical.

“Let me come in,” Odenigbo said. “Please.” She moved back from the door. “Come in.”

He sat down on the edge of the chair, and she felt as if she had been gumming back the pieces of broken chinaware only to have them shatter all over again; the pain was not in the second shattering but in the realization that trying to put them back together had been of no consequence from the beginning.

“Nkem, please, let's deal with this together,” he said. “We will do whatever you want. Please let's do it together.”

Olanna went to the kitchen to turn the kettle off. She came back and sat down opposite him. “You said it happened just once. Just once and she got pregnant? Just once?” She wished she had not raised her voice. But it was so implausible, so theatrically implausible, that he would sleep with a womanonce in a drunken state and get her pregnant. “It was just once,” he said. “Just once.”

“I see.” But she did not see at all. The urge came then, to slap his face, because the self-entitled way he stressed oncemade the act seem inevitable, as if the point was how many times it had happened rather than that it should not have happened at all.

“I told Mama I'll send Amala to Dr. Okonkwo in Enugu, and she said it would be over her dead body. She said Amala will have the child and she will raise the child herself. There is a young man doing timber work in Ondo that Amala is to marry.” Odenigbo stood up. “Mama planned this from the beginning. I see now how she made sure I was dead drunk before sending Amala to me. I feel as if I've been dropped into something I don't entirely understand.”

Olanna looked at him, from his halo of hair to his slender toes in leather sandals, alarmed that she could feel this burst of dislike for someone she loved. “Nobody dropped you into anything,” she said.

He made to hold her but she shrugged him off and asked him to leave. Later, in the bathroom, she stood in front of the mirror and savagely squeezed her belly with both hands. The pain reminded her of how useless she was; reminded her that a child nestled now in a stranger's body instead of in hers.

Edna knocked for so long that Olanna had to get up and unlock the door. “What's wrong?” Edna asked.

“My grandfather used to say that other people just farted but his own fart always released shit,” Olanna said. She had wanted to sound funny, but her voice was too hoarse, too tear-lined.

“What's wrong?”

“The girl he slept with is pregnant.” “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Olanna squinted; what was wrong with her?

“Get ahold of yourself!” Edna said. “You think he's spending his day crying like you are? When that bastard left me in Montgomery, I tried to kill myself and you know what he was doing? He had gone off and was playing in a band in Louisiana!” Edna patted her hair irritably. “Look at you. You're the kindest person I know. Look how beautiful you are. Why do you need so much outside of yourself ? Why isn't what you areenough? You're so damned weak!”

Olanna moved back; the tumultuous crowding of pain and thoughts and anger that shot through her made the words flow out of her mouth with quiet precision. “It is not my fault that your man deserted you, Edna.”

Edna first looked surprised, then disgusted, before she turned and walked out of the flat. Olanna watched her go, sorry to have said what she said. But she would not apologize yet. She would give Edna a day or two. She felt suddenly hungry, bitingly hungry; her insides had been emptied out by her tears. She did not let her leftover jollof rice warm properly but ate it all from the pot, drank two cold bottles of beer, and still did not feel sated. She ate the biscuits in the cupboard and some oranges from the fridge, and then decided to go to Eastern Shop for some wine. She would drink. She would drink as much wine as she could.

The two women standing at the shop entrance, the Indian in the Faculty of Science and the Calabar woman who taught anthropology, smiled and said good afternoon, and she wondered if their covert glances shielded their pity, if they thought she was falling apart and weak.

She was examining wine bottles when Richard came up to her. “I thought it was you,” he said.

“Hello, Richard.” She glanced at his basket. “I didn't know you did your own shopping.” “Harrison has gone to his hometown for a few days,” he said. “How are you? Are you all right?” She disliked the pity in his eyes. “I'm very well. I can't decide which of these two to buy.” She gestured to the wine bottles. “Why don't I buy both and if you'll share them with me, we can decide which is better. Can you spare an hour? Or do you have to run back to your writing?”

Richard looked taken aback by her cheer. “I would hate to impose, really.”

“Of course you wouldn't be imposing. Besides, you've never visited me”—she paused—“in my flat.”

She would be her normal gracious self and they would drink wine and talk about his book and her new zinnias and Igbo-Ukwu art and the Western Region elections fiasco. And he would go back and tell Odenigbo that she was fine. She wasfine.

When they got to her flat, Richard sat upright on the sofa, and she wished he would sit in that relaxed, semi-sprawling way he did in Odenigbo's house; even the way he held his wineglass was stiff. She sat on the carpeted floor. They toasted Kenya's independence.

“You really must write about the horrible things the British did in Kenya,” Olanna said. “Didn't they cut off testicles?”

Richard murmured something and looked away, as if the word testicleshad made him shy. Olanna smiled and watched him. “Didn't they?”

“Yes.”

“You should write about it then.” She drank her second glass slowly, raising her head to enjoy the cold liquid flowing down her throat. “Do you have a title for the book?”

“‘The Basket of Hands.' ”

“‘The Basket of Hands.' ” Olanna tilted her glass and finished her drink. “It sounds macabre.”

“It's about labor. The good things that were achieved—the railways, for example—but also how labor was exploited and the lengths the colonial enterprise went to.”

“Oh.” Olanna got up and uncorked the second bottle. She bent down to fill her glass first. She felt light, as if it were much easier to carry her own weight, but she was clearheaded; she knew what she wanted to do and what she was doing. Richard's almost-damp smell filled her nose when she stood before him with the bottle.

“My glass isn't quite empty,” he said.

“No, it's not.” She placed the wine bottle on the floor and sat next to him and touched the hair that lay on his skin and thought how fair and soft it was, not assertively brittle like Odenigbo's, nothing like Odenigbo at all. He looked at her and she wondered if his eyes had really turned gray or if she was imagining it. She touched his face, left her hand resting on his cheek.

“Come, sit on the floor with me,” she said finally.

They sat side by side, their backs resting on the sofa seat. Richard said, in a mumble, “I should leave,” or something that sounded like it. But she knew he would not leave and that when she stretched out on the bristly carpet he would lie next to her. She kissed his lips. He pulled her forcefully close, and then, just as quickly, he let go and moved his face away. She could hear his rapid breathing. She unbuckled his trousers and moved back to pull them down and laughed because they got stuck at his shoes. She took her dress off. He was on top of her and the carpet pricked her naked back and she felt his mouth limply enclose her nipple. It was nothing like Odenigbo's bites and sucks, nothing like those shocks of pleasure. Richard did not run his tongue over her in that flicking way that made her forget everything; rather, when he kissed her belly, she was aware that he was kissing her belly.

Everything changed when he was inside her. She raised her hips, moving with him, matching his thrusts, and it was as if she was throwing shackles off her wrists, extracting pins from her skin, freeing herself with the loud, loud cries that burst out of her mouth. Afterward, she felt filled with a sense of well-being, with something close to grace.

21

Richard was almost relieved to learn of Sir Winston Churchill's death. It gave him an opportunity to avoid going to Port Harcourt for the weekend. He could not face Kainene yet.

“You'll have to lay your awful Churchill joke to rest now, won't you?” Kainene said on the phone, when he told her that he would be going to Lagos for the memorial at the British High Commission. He laughed and then thought of what it would be like if she found out and left him and he never heard that sardonic voice over the phone.

It was only days ago, but even the memory of Olanna's flat was hazy: he had fallen asleep afterward, on her living room floor, and woken up with a dry headache and a keenly uncomfortable sense of his own nudity. She was sitting on the sofa, dressed and silent. He felt awkward, not sure whether they were supposed to talk about what had happened. Finally he turned to leave without saying a word because he did not want what he imagined to be regret on her face to turn into dislike. He had not been chosen; it could have been any man. He had sensed this even while holding her naked, but it had not marred the pleasure he found in her curvy body, her moving with him, her taking as much as she gave. He had never been so firm, never lasted so long as he had with her.

Now, though, he was bereft. His admiration had thrived on her being unattainable, a worship from afar, but now that he had tasted the wine on her tongue, pressed himself so close against her that he too smelled of coconuts, he felt a strange loss. He had lost his fantasy. But what he worried most about losing was Kainene. He was determined that Kainene would never know.

Susan sat next to him at the memorial service, and when parts of a speech delivered by Sir Winston Churchill were played, she clasped her gloved hands together, tightly, and leaned against him. Richard felt tears in his eyes. This was perhaps the only thing they had in common, their admiration for Churchill. Afterward, she asked him to have a drink with her at the Polo Club. She had taken him once before and had said, while they sat by the expanse of green lawn, “Africans have been allowed in for only a few years, but you wouldn't believe how many come now, and they show such little appreciation, really.”

They were seated at the same spot again, near the whitewashed railing, by a Nigerian waiter in a tight black suit. The club was almost empty, although a polo game was on at the other side. The sounds of eight shouting, swearing men galloping at full speed after a ball filled the air. Susan spoke quietly, full of the dulled grief of mourning a person she had never known. She said how interesting it was that the last commoner to get a state funeral was the Duke of Wellington, as if it was news to him, and how sad it was that some people still didn't know how much Churchill had done for Britain, and how horrible it was that somebody at the memorial had suggested that his mother had some Red Indian blood. She looked a little more tan than he remembered; he had not seen her since he moved to Nsukka. She became animated after a few glasses of gin and talked about a marvelous film on the royal family that had been screened at the British Council.

“You're not paying much attention, are you?” she asked after a while. Her ears were red. “Of course I am.”

“I heard about your lady love, Chief Ozobia's daughter,” Susan said, ladylovein the comic caricature that she assumed was an uneducated accent.

“Her name is Kainene.”“ Will you make sure always to use a rubber? One must be careful, even with the most educated of these people.”

Richard looked out at the calm unending greenness. He would never have been happy with her—life would be gossamer, all his days merging into one long sheer sheet of nothingness.

“I had an affair with John Blake,” she said. “Did you?”

Susan laughed. She was playing with her glass, running it along the table, smearing the water that had collected on it. “You seem surprised.”

“I'm not,” he said, although he was. Not because she had an affair but because it was with John, who was married to her good friend Caroline. But this was expatriate life. All they did, as far as he was concerned, was have sex with one another's wives and husbands, illicit couplings that were more a way of passing heat-blanched time in the tropics than they were genuine expressions of passion.

“It means nothing, absolutely nothing,” Susan said. “But I did want you to know that I shall keep busy while I wait for you to finish with your dusky affair.”

Richard wanted to say something about her disloyalty to her friend and then realized how hypocritical it would sound, even if only to himself.

5. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died

He writes about starvation. Starvation was a Nigerian weapon of war. Starvation broke Biafra and brought Biafra fame and made Biafra last as long as it did. Starvation made the people of the world take notice and sparked protests and demonstrations in London and Moscow and Czechoslovakia. Starvation made Zambia and Tanzania and Ivory Coast and Gabon recognize Biafra, starvation brought Africa into Nixon's American campaign and made parents all over the world tell their children to eat up. Starvation propelled aid organizations to sneak-fly food into Biafra at night since both sides could not agree on routes. Starvation aided the careers of photographers. And starvation made the International Red Cross call Biafra its gravest emergency since the Second World War.

22

Ugwu's diarrhea was cramping and painful. It did not get better when he chewed the bitter tablets in Master's cabinet or the sour leaves Jomo gave him, and it had nothing to do with food because the sudden dashes to the Boys' Quarters happened with whatever he ate. It was about his worry. Master's fear worried him.

Since Mama brought the news of Amala's pregnancy, Master half stumbled around as if his glasses were blurred, called for his tea in a subdued voice, and asked Ugwu to tell the guests he had gone out, even though his car was in the garage. He stared into space often. He listened to High Life often. He spoke of Olanna often. “We'll leave that for when your madam moves back” or “Your madam would prefer it in the corridor,” he would say, and Ugwu would say, “Yes, sah,” although he knew Master would not bother saying any of that if Olanna were really coming back.

Ugwu's diarrhea got worse when Mama visited with Amala. He watched Amala carefully; she did not look pregnant, still slender and flat-bellied, and he hoped that the medicine had not worked after all. But Mama told him, as she peeled hot coco-yams, “When this baby boy comes, I will have somebody to keep me company and my fellow women will no longer call me the mother of an impotent son.”

Amala sat in the living room. Her pregnancy had elevated her, so she could sit idly listening to the radiogram, no longer Mama's help but now the woman who would give birth to Mama's grandchild. Ugwu watched her from the kitchen door. It was a good thing she had not chosen Master's armchair or Olanna's favorite puff because he would have asked her to get up right away. She sat with her knees pressed together, her eyes focused on the pile of newspapers on the center table, her face blank. It was so wrong that such an ordinary person in a nondescript dress and a cotton scarf around her forehead was in the middle of all this. She was neither beautiful nor ugly; she was like the many young women he used to watch going to the stream in his village every morning. Nothing distinguished her. Watching her, Ugwu suddenly felt angry. His anger was not directed at Amala, though, but at Olanna. She should not have run away from her own house because Mama's medicine had pushed Master into the arms of this common slip of a girl. She should have stayed and showed Amala and Mama who was truly mistress here.

The days were suffocating and repetitive, Mama cooking strong-smelling soups that she ate alone because Master stayed out late and Amala felt nauseated and Ugwu had diarrhea. But Mama did not seem to mind; she hummed and cooked and cleaned and praised herself when she finally learned to turn the stove on. “One day I will have my own stove; my grandson will buy one for me,” she said, and laughed.

She finally decided to go back to the village after more than a week and said she would leave Amala behind. “You see how ill she is?” she asked Master. “My enemies want to harm the pregnancy, they do not want somebody to carry on our family name, but we will defeat them.”

“You must take her with you,” Master said. It was past midnight. Mama had stayed up until Master came home and Ugwu was in the kitchen, half asleep, waiting to lock up.

“Did you not hear me say that she is ill?” Mama said. “It is better for her to stay here.” “She will see a doctor, but you must take her with you.”

“You are refusing your child and not Amala,” Mama said.

“You must take her with you,” Master repeated. “Olanna may return soon, and things will not stand right if Amala is here.”“ Your own child,” Mama said, shaking her head mournfully, but she did not argue. “I will leave tomorrow because I must attend an umuada meeting. I will return at the end of the week to fetch her.”

The afternoon Mama left, Ugwu found Amala in the vegetable garden, crouched on the ground with her knees drawn up, arms around her legs. She was chewing peppers.

“Is it well?” Ugwu asked. Perhaps the woman was a spirit person and had come here to perform rituals with her fellow ogbanje.

Amala said nothing for a while; she spoke so seldom that her voice always surprised Ugwu by how childishly high it was. “Pepper can remove pregnancy,” she said.

“What?”

“If you eat plenty of hot peppers, they will remove pregnancy.” She was huddled in the mud like a pathetic animal, chewing slowly, tears streaming down her face.

“Peppers cannot do that,” Ugwu said. Yet he hoped that she was right, that peppers would indeed abort the pregnancy and his life would return to what it was before: Olanna and Master securely together.

“If you eat enough, they can,” she insisted, and reached out to pluck another one.

Ugwu did not want her to finish the peppers he so carefully cultivated for his stews, but if she was right about what the peppers could do, perhaps it was worth it to let her be. Her face was slick with the moisture of tears and mucus, and once in a while she opened her mouth and extended her pepper-burned tongue to pant like a dog. He wanted to ask why she had gone along with it if she did not want the baby. She had gone to Master's room herself, after all, and she must have known about Mama's plan. But he did not ask; he did not want her friendship. He turned and went back inside.

Days after Amala left, Olanna visited. She sat upright on the sofa, legs crossed like an unfamiliar guest, and refused the chin-chin Ugwu brought on a saucer.

“Take it back to the kitchen,” she said to Ugwu, at the same time as Master said, “Leave it on the table.”

Ugwu stood uncertainly, holding the saucer.

“Take it back to the kitchen, then!” Master snapped, as if Ugwu were somehow responsible for the tension that had settled in the room. Ugwu did not shut the kitchen door, so that he could stand by it and listen, but he might as well have closed it because Olanna's raised voice was audible enough. “It's you and not your mother. It happened because you let it happen! You must take responsibility!”

It startled Ugwu, how that soft voice could change to something so fierce.

“I am not a philandering man, and you know that. This would not have happened if my mother didn't have a hand!” Master should have lowered his voice; he should know very well that a beggar did not shout.

“Did your mother pull out your penis and insert it into Amala as well?” Olanna asked.

Ugwu felt the sudden rumbling rush in his stomach and he ran out to the toilet in the Boys' Quarters. When he came out, he saw Olanna standing by the lemon tree. He searched her face to see how the conversation had ended, if it had ended; why she was out here. But he could make nothing of her face. There were tight lines around her mouth and a sleek confidence to the way she stood, wearing a new wig that made her seem much taller.

“You want anything, mah?” he asked.

She walked over to look at the anara plants. “These look very well. Did you use fertilizer?” “Yes, mah. From Jomo.”

“And on the peppers?” “Yes, mah.” She turned to walk away. It was incongruous to see her there in her black shoes and her knee-length dress. She, who was always in a wrapper or a housedress in the garden.

“Mah?” She turned.

“I have one uncle who is trading in the North. People have been jealous of him because he is doing well. One day he washed his clothes, and when he brought them in from the sun, he saw that somebody had cut off a piece of his shirtsleeve.”

Olanna was watching him; there was something in her expression that made him realize she would not be patient enough to listen much longer.

“The person who cut it used it for bad medicine, but it did not work because my uncle burned the shirt immediately. That day, there were many flies near his hut.”

“What are you talking about, for heaven's sake?” Olanna asked in English. Because she hardly ever spoke English to him, it sounded cold, distancing.

“Mama used bad medicine on my master, mah. I saw flies in the kitchen. I saw her putting something in his food. Then I saw her rubbing something on Amala's body, and I know it is the medicine that she used to tempt my master.”

“Rubbish,” Olanna said. It came out sounding like a hiss, rubbish, and Ugwu's stomach tightened. She was different; her skin and clothes were crisper. She bent and flicked away a green aphid that had perched on her dress before she walked away. But she did not go around the house, past Master's garage to her own car parked in front. Instead she went back into the house. He followed. In the kitchen, he heard her voice from the study, shouting a long string of words that he could not make out and did not want to. Then silence. Then the opening and closing of the bedroom door. He waited for a while before he tiptoed across the corridor and pressed his ear against the wood. She sounded different. He was used to her throaty moans but what he heard now was an outward, gasping ah-ah-ah, as if she was gearing up to erupt, as if Master was pleasing and angering her at the same time and she was waiting to see how much pleasure she could take before she let out the rage. Still, hope surged inside Ugwu. He would cook a perfect jollofrice for their reconciliation meal.

Later, when he heard her car start and saw the glaring headlights near the bush with the white flowers, he thought she was going to collect a few things from her flat. He set two places for dinner but did not serve the food because he wanted to keep it warm in the pot.

Master came into the kitchen. “Do you intend to eat alone today, my good man?” “I am waiting for madam.”

“Serve my food, osiso!”

“Yes, sah,” Ugwu said. “Will madam come again soon, sah?” “Serve my food!” Master repeated.

23

Olanna stood in Richard's living room. Its austere emptiness made her nervous; she wished he had pictures or books or Russian dolls that she could look at. There was only a small photo of an Igbo-Ukwu roped pot on the wall, and she was peering at it when Richard came out. The uncertain half smile on his lips softened his face. She sometimes forgot what a handsome man he was, in that fair-haired blue-eyed sort of way.

She spoke immediately. “Hello, Richard.” Without waiting for his response and the lull that came with greetings, she added, “Did you see Kainene last weekend?”

“No. No, I didn't.” His eyes avoided hers, focused on her glossy wig. “I was in Lagos. Sir Winston Churchill has died, you see.”

“What happened was stupid of both of us,” Olanna said and noticed that his hands were shaking. Richard nodded. “Yes, yes.”

“Kainene doesn't forgive easily. It would make no sense at all to tell her.”

“Of course not.” Richard paused. “You had emotional problems, and I should not have—”

“What happened took two, Richard,” Olanna said, and suddenly felt contempt for his trembling hands and pale shyness and the vulnerabilities he wore so openly knotted at his throat like a tie.

Harrison came in with a tray. “I am bringing drinks, sah.”

“Drinks?” Richard turned quickly, jerkily, and Olanna was relieved that there was nothing close or he would have knocked it over. “Oh, no, really. Would you like something?”

“I'm just leaving,” Olanna said. “How are you, Harrison?” “Fine, madam.”

Richard followed her to the door.

“I think we should keep things normal,” she said, before she hurried out to her car.

She wondered if she should have been less histrionic and given them both the chance to have a calm conversation about what happened. But it would have achieved little, digging up the dirt of yesterday. They had both wanted it to happen and they both wished it had not; what mattered now was that nobody else should ever know.

She surprised herself, then, when she told Odenigbo. She was lying down while he sat next to her on his bed—she thought of the bedroom itself now as his rather then theirs—and it was the second time they had slept together since she left. He was asking her to please move back to the house.

“Let's get married,” he said. “Mama will leave us alone then.”

It may have been his smug tone or the flagrant way he continued to sidestep responsibility and blame his mother that made Olanna say, “I slept with Richard.”

“No.” Odenigbo looked incredulous, shaking his head. “Yes.”

He got up and walked to the wardrobe and looked at her, as if he could not be close to her at that moment because he was afraid of what he would do if he were. He took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. She sat up and realized that distrust would always lie between them, that disbelief would always be an option for them.

“Do you have feelings for the man?” he asked. “No,” she said.

He came back and sat next to her. He looked torn between shoving her off the bed and pulling her close, and then he got up abruptly and left the room. When she knocked later on his study door to sayshe was leaving, he did not respond.

Back in her flat, she paced up and down. She should not have told him about Richard. Or she should have told him more: that she regretted betraying Kainene and him but did not regret the act itself. She should have said that it was not a crude revenge, or a scorekeeping, but took on a redemptive significance for her. She should have said the selfishness had liberated her.

The loud knocking on her front door the next morning filled her with relief. She and Odenigbo would sit down and talk properly, and this time she would make sure that they did not circle each other without meeting. But it was not Odenigbo. Edna came in crying, her eyes swollen red, to tell her that white people had bombed the black Baptist church in her hometown. Four little girls had died. One of them was her niece's schoolmate. “I saw her when I went back home six months ago,” Edna said. “Just six months ago I saw her.”

Olanna made tea and sat next to Edna, their shoulders touching, while Edna cried in loud gasps that sounded like choking. Her hair did not have its usual greasy shine; it looked like the matted head of an old mop.

“Oh, my God,” she said, between sobs. “Oh, my God.”

Olanna reached out often to squeeze her arm. The rawness of Edna's grief made her helpless, brought the urge to stretch her hand into the past and reverse history. Finally, Edna fell asleep. Olanna gently placed a pillow beneath her head and sat thinking about how a single act could reverberate over time and space and leave stains that could never be washed off. She thought about how ephemeral life was, about not choosing misery. She would move back to Odenigbo's house.

———

They had dinner in silence the first night. Odenigbo's chewing irritated her, his bulging cheek and the grinding motion of his jaw. She ate little and looked across often at her box of books in the living room. Odenigbo was absorbed in separating his chicken from the bone, and for once he ate all of his rice until his plate was clean. When he finally spoke, he talked about the chaos in the Western Region.

“They should never have reinstalled the premier. Why are they surprised now that thugs are burning cars and killing opponents in the name of elections? A corrupt brute will always behave like a corrupt brute,” he said.

“He has the prime minister behind him,” Olanna said.

“It's the Sardauna who's really in charge. The man is ruling this country like his personal Muslim fiefdom.”

“Are we still trying to have a child?”

Behind his lenses, his eyes looked startled. “Of course we are,” he said. “Or aren't we?”

Olanna said nothing. A foggy sadness overwhelmed her, thinking of what they had allowed to happen between them and yet there was the new excitement of freshness, of a relationship on different terms. She would no longer be alone in her struggle to preserve what they shared; he would join her. His certainty had been rocked.

Ugwu came in to clear the table.

“Get me some brandy, my good man,” Odenigbo said. “Yes, sah.”

Odenigbo waited for Ugwu to serve the brandy and leave before he said, “I asked Richard to stop coming here.”

“What happened?”

“I saw him on the road near my faculty building, and there was an expression on his face that really annoyed me, so I followed him back to Imoke Street and told him off.”“ What did you say to him?” “I don't remember.”

“You don't want to tell me.” “I don't remember.”

“Was anybody else there?” “His houseboy came out.”

They sat on the sofa in the living room. He had no right to harass Richard, to direct his anger at Richard, and yet she understood why he had.

“I never blamed Amala,” she said. “It was to you that I had given my trust and the only way a stranger could tamper with that trust was with your permission. I blamed only you.”

Odenigbo placed his hand on her thigh.

“You should be angry with me, not with Richard,” she said.

He was silent for so long that she thought he was not going to respond and then he said, “I wantto be angry with you.”

His defenselessness moved her. She knelt down before him and unbuttoned his shirt to suck the soft-firm flesh of his belly. She felt his intake of breath when she touched his trousers zipper. In her mouth, he was swollen stiff. The faint ache in her lower jaw, the pressure of his widespread hands on her head, excited her, and afterward she said, “Goodness, Ugwu must have seen us.”

He led her to the bedroom. They undressed silently and showered together, pressing against each other in the narrow bathroom and then clinging together in bed, their bodies still wet and their movements slow. She marveled at the comforting compactness of his weight on top of her. His breath smelled of brandy and she wanted to tell him how it was almost like old times again, but she didn't because she was sure he felt the same way and she did not want to ruin the silence that united them.

She waited until he fell asleep, his arm flung over her, his snoring loud through parted lips, before she got up to call Kainene. She had to make sure that Richard had said nothing to Kainene. She didn't really think that Odenigbo's shouting would have rattled him into confessing but she could not be entirely sure.

“Kainene, it's me,” she said, when Kainene picked up the phone.

“Ejima m, ” Kainene said. Olanna could not remember the last time Kainene had called her mytwin. It warmed her, as did Kainene's unchanged voice, the dry-toned drawl that suggested speaking to Olanna was the slightest of bothers, but a bother all the same.

“I wanted to say kedu, ” Olanna said. “I'm well. Do you know what time it is?” “I didn't realize it was so late.”

“Are you back with the revolutionary lover?” “Yes.”

“You should have heard Mum talking about him. He's given her perfect ammunition this time.”

“He made a mistake,” Olanna said, and then wished she hadn't because she didn't want Kainene to think she was excusing Odenigbo.

“Isn't it against the tenets of socialism, though, impregnating people of the lower classes?” Kainene asked.

“I'll let you sleep.”

There was a slight pause, before Kainene said, with an amused tone, “Ngwanu. Good night.”

Olanna put the phone down. She should have known that Richard would not tell Kainene; his own relationship with her might not survive it. And perhaps it was best that he would no longer visit in the evenings.———

Amala had a baby girl. It was a Saturday and Olanna was making banana fritters with Ugwu in the kitchen, and when the doorbell rang she knew right away that a message had come from Mama.

Odenigbo came to the kitchen door, his hands held behind his back. “O mu nwanyi, ” he said quietly. “She had a girl. Yesterday.”

Olanna did not look up from the bowl smeared with mashed bananas because she did not want him to see her face. She did not know how it would look, if it could capture the cruel mix of emotions she felt, the desire to cry and slap him and steel herself all at once.

“We should go to Enugu this afternoon to see that everything is fine,” she said briskly, and stood up. “Ugwu, please finish.”

“Yes, mah.” Ugwu was watching her; she felt the responsibility of an actress whose family members expected the best performance.

“Thank you, nkem, ” Odenigbo said. He placed his arm around her, but she shrugged it off. “Let me take a quick bath.”

In the car, they were silent. He looked across at her often, as if he wanted to say something but did not know how to begin. She kept her eyes straight ahead and glanced at him only once, at the tentative way he held the steering wheel. She felt morally superior to him. Perhaps it was unearned and false, to think she was better than he was, but it was the only way she could keep her disparate emotions together, now that his child with a stranger was born.

He finally spoke as he parked in front of the hospital. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

Olanna opened the car door. “About my cousin Arize. She hasn't even been married a year and she is desperate to get pregnant.”

Odenigbo said nothing. Mama met them at the entrance of the maternity ward. Olanna had expected Mama to dance and look at her with mocking eyes, but the lined face was dour, the smile as she hugged Odenigbo was strained. Chemical hospital smells were thick in the air.

“Mama, kedu?” Olanna asked. She wanted to seem in control, to determine how things would proceed.

“I am well,” Mama said. “Where is the baby?”

Mama looked surprised by her briskness. “In the newborn ward.” “Let's see Amala first,” Olanna said.

Mama led them to a cubicle. The bed was covered in a yellowed sheet and Amala lay on it with her face to the wall. Olanna pulled her eyes away from the slight swell of her belly; it was newly unbearable, the thought that Odenigbo's baby had been in that body. She focused on the biscuits, glucose tin, and glass of water on the side table.

“Amala, they have come,” Mama said.

“Good afternoon, nno, ” Amala said, without turning to face them. “How are you?” Odenigbo and Olanna asked, almost at the same time.

Amala mumbled a response. Her face was still to the wall. In the silence that followed, Olanna heard quick footfalls on the corridor outside. She had known this was coming for months now, and yet looking at Amala she felt an ashy hollowness. A part of her had hoped this day would never arrive.

“Let's see the baby,” she said. As she and Odenigbo turned to leave, she noticed that Amala did not turn, did not move, did not do anything to show she had heard.

At the newborn ward a nurse asked them to wait on one of the benches that lined the wall. Olanna could see, through the louvers, the many cots and many crying infants, and she imagined that the nursewould be confused and would bring the wrong baby. But it was the right baby; the full head of softly curled black hair and the dark skin and the widely spaced eyes were unmistakable. Only two days old, and she looked like Odenigbo.

The nurse made to give Olanna the baby, wrapped in a white woolly blanket, but she gestured to Odenigbo. “Let her father hold her.”

“You know her mother has refused to touch her,” the nurse said, as she handed the baby to Odenigbo.

“What?” Olanna asked.

“She has not touched her at all. We are using a wet nurse.”

Olanna glanced at Odenigbo, holding the baby with his arms outstretched as if he needed some distance. The nurse was about to say something else when a young couple came in and she hurried over to them.

“Mama just told me,” Odenigbo said. “She said Amala won't hold the baby.” Olanna said nothing.

“I should go and see to the bill,” he said. He sounded apologetic.

She held out her arms and as soon as he handed her the baby, the high-pitched crying began. From across the room, the nurse and the couple watched and Olanna was certain that they could tell that she did not know what to do with a howling infant in her arms, that she was incapable of getting pregnant.

“Shush, shush, ozugo, ” she said, feeling a little theatrical. But the tiny mouth remained open and twisted, and the crying was so shrill she wondered if it hurt the tiny body. Olanna fit her small finger in the baby's fist. Slowly the crying stopped but the little mouth remained open, showing pink gums, and the round eyes scrunched up and peered at her. Olanna laughed. The nurse walked across.

“Time to take her in,” she said. “How many do you have?”

“I don't have children,” Olanna said, pleased that the nurse had assumed that she did.

Odenigbo came back and they walked to Amala's cubicle, where Mama sat by the bedside, holding a covered enamel bowl. “Amala has refused to eat,” she said. “Gwakwa ya. Tell her to eat.”

Olanna sensed Odenigbo's discomfort before he spoke in a voice that was too loud. “You should eat, Amala.”

Amala mumbled something. Finally she turned her face toward them and Olanna looked at her: a plain village girl curled up on the bed as if she were cringing from one more furious blow from life. She never once looked at Odenigbo. What she must feel for him was an awed fear. Whether or not Mama had told her to go to his room, she had not said no to Odenigbo because she had not even considered that she could say no. Odenigbo made a drunken pass and she submitted willingly and promptly: He was the master, he spoke English, he had a car. It was the way it should be.

“Did you hear what my son said?” Mama asked. “He said you should eat.”

“I heard, Mama.” Amala sat up and took the enamel plate, her eyes focused on the floor. Olanna was watching her. Perhaps it was hate she felt for Odenigbo. How much did one know of the true feelings of those who did not have a voice? Olanna moved closer to Amala, but she was unsure what she wanted to say and so she picked up the tin of glucose, examined it, and placed it back. Mama and Odenigbo had stepped outside.

“We are leaving,” Olanna said. “Go well,” Amala said.

Olanna wanted to say something to her but she could not find the words, so she patted Amala's shoulder and left the cubicle. Odenigbo and Mama were talking beside a water tank, for so long that mosquitoes began to bite Olanna as she stood waiting, so she climbed into the car and pressed the horn.

“Sorry,” Odenigbo said, when he got in. He did not say anything about what he and his mother hadtalked about until they were driving past the campus gates in Nsukka, an hour later. “Mama doesn't want to keep the baby.”

“She doesn't want to keep the baby?” “No.”

Olanna knew why. “She wanted a boy.”

“Yes.” Odenigbo removed a hand from the steering wheel to roll his window farther down. She found a guilty pleasure in the humility he had cloaked himself in since Amala gave birth. “We've agreed that the baby will stay with Amala's people. I'll go to Abba next week to see them and discuss —”

“We'll keep her,” Olanna said. She startled herself by how clearly she had articulated the desire to keep the baby and how right it felt. It was as if it was what she had always wanted to do.

Odenigbo turned to her with eyes widened behind his glasses. He was driving so slowly over a speed bump that she feared the car would stall. “Our relationship is the most important thing to me, nkem, ” he said quietly. “We have to make the right decision for us.”

“You were not thinking about us when you got her pregnant,” Olanna said, before she could help herself; she hated the malice in her tone, the renewed resentment she felt.

Odenigbo parked the car in the garage. He looked tired. “Let's think about this.” “We'll keep her,” Olanna said firmly.

She could raise a child, his child. She would buy books about motherhood and find a wet nurse and decorate the bedroom. She shifted this way and that in bed that night. She had not felt sorry for the child. Instead, holding that tiny warm body, she had felt a conscious serendipity, a sense that this may not have been planned but had become, the minute it happened, what was meant to be. Her mother did not think so; her mother's voice over the phone line the next day was grave, the solemn tone that would be used to talk about somebody who had died.

“Nne, you will have your own child soon. It is not right for you to raise the child he had with a village girl he impregnated as soon as you traveled. Raising a child is a very serious thing to undertake, my daughter, but in this case it is not the right thing.”

Olanna held the phone and stared at the flowers on the center table. One of them had fallen off; it was surprising that Ugwu had forgotten to remove it. There was truth in her mother's words, she knew, and yet she knew, also, that the baby had looked like she had always imagined her and Odenigbo's child would, with the lush hair and widely spaced eyes and pink gums.

“Her people will give you trouble,” her mother said. “The woman herself will give you trouble.” “She doesn't want the child.”

“Then leave it with her people. Send them what is needed but leave the child there.” Olanna sighed. “Anugo m, I'll give this more thought.”

She put the phone down and picked it up again and gave the operator Kainene's number in Port Harcourt. The woman sounded lazy, made her repeat the number a few times and giggled before connecting her.

“How noble of you,” Kainene said when Olanna told her. “I'm not being noble.”

“Will you adopt her formally?” “Yes. I think so.”

“What will you tell her?” “What will I tell her?” “Yes, when she's older.”

“The truth: that Amala is her mother. And I'll have her call me Mummy Olanna or something, so that if Amala ever comes back, she can be Mummy.”“ You're doing this to please your revolutionary lover.” “I'm not.”

“You're always pleasing other people.”

“I'm not doing this for him. This is not his idea.” “Why are you doing it then?”

“She was so helpless. I felt as if I knew her.”

Kainene said nothing for a while. Olanna pulled at the phone wire. “I think this is a very brave decision,” Kainene said finally. Although Olanna heard her clearly, she asked, “What did you say?” “It's very brave of you to do this.”

Olanna leaned back on the seat. Kainene's approval, something she had never felt before, was like a sweetness on her tongue, a surge of ability, a good omen. Suddenly her decision became final; she would bring the baby home.

“Will you come for her baptism?” Olanna asked.

“I still haven't visited that dusty hell, so yes, maybe I will.” Olanna hung up, smiling.

Mama brought the baby, wrapped in a brown shawl that had the unpleasant smell of ogiri.She sat in the living room and cooed to the baby until Olanna came out. Mama got up and handed the baby over.

“Ngwanu.I will visit again soon,” she said. She seemed in an uncomfortable hurry, as if the whole business was one that she was quick to finish.

After she left, Ugwu examined the baby, his expression slightly worried. “Mama said the baby looks like her mother. It is her mother come back.”

“People just look alike, Ugwu, it doesn't mean they reincarnate.” “But they do, mah. All of us, we will come back again.”

Olanna waved him away. “Go and throw this shawl into the dustbin. It smells terrible.”

The baby was crying. Olanna hushed her and bathed her in a small basin and glanced at the clock and worried that the wet nurse, a large woman that Ugwu's aunty had found, would be late. Later, after the nurse arrived and the baby fed at her breast and fell asleep, Olanna and Odenigbo looked down at her, lying face up in the cot near their bed. Her skin was a radiant brown.

“She has so much hair, like you,” Olanna said. “You'll look at her sometimes and hate me.”

Olanna shrugged. She did not want him to think she was doing this for him, as a favor to him, because it was more about herself than it was about him.

“Ugwu said your mother went to a dibia, ” she said. “What?”

“Ugwu thinks all this happened because your mother went to a dibiaand his medicine charmed you into sleeping with Amala.”

Odenigbo was silent for a moment. “I suppose it's the only way he can make sense of it.”

“The medicine should have produced the desired boy, shouldn't it?” she said. “It is all so irrational.” “No more irrational than belief in a Christian God you cannot see.”

She was used to his gentle jibes about her social-service faith and she would have responded to say that she was not even sure she believed in a Christian God that could not be seen. But now, with a helpless human being lying in the cot, one so dependent on others that her very existence had to be proof of a higher goodness, things had changed.“ I do believe,” she said. “I believe in a good God.” “I don't believe in any gods at all.”

“I know. You don't believe in anything.”

“Love,” he said, looking at her. “I believe in love.”

She did not mean to laugh, but the laughter came out anyway. She wanted to say that love, too, was irrational. “We have to think of a name,” she said.

“Mama named her Obiageli.”

“We can't call her that.” His mother had no right to name a child she had rejected. “We'll call her Baby for now until we find the perfect name. Kainene suggested Chiamaka. I've always loved that name: God is beautiful. Kainene will be her godmother. I have to go and see Father Damian about her baptism.” She would go shopping at Kingsway. She would order a new wig from London. She felt giddy.

Baby stirred and a new wave of fear enveloped Olanna. She looked at the hair shining with Pears oil and wondered if she could really do it, if she could raise a child. She knew it was normal, the way the baby was breathing too fast, as if panting in her sleep, and yet even that worried her.

The first few times she called Kainene that evening, there was no answer. Perhaps Kainene was in Lagos. She called again at night and when Kainene said, “Hello,” she sounded hoarse.

“Ejima m, ” Olanna said. “Do you have a cold?” “You fucked Richard.”

Olanna stood up.

“You're the good one.” Kainene's voice was controlled. “The good one shouldn't fuck her sister's lover.”

Olanna sank back down on the puff and realized that what she felt was relief. Kainene knew. She would no longer have to worry about Kainene's finding out. She was free to feel real remorse.

“I should have told you, Kainene,” she said. “It meant nothing.”

“Of course it meant nothing. It was just fucking my lover, after all.”

“I didn't mean it like that.” Olanna felt the tears in her eyes. “Kainene, I'm so sorry.”

“Why did you do it?” Kainene sounded frighteningly calm. “You're the good one and the favorite and the beauty and the Africanist revolutionary who doesn't like white men, and you simply did not need to fuck him. So why did you?”

Olanna was breathing slowly. “I don't know, Kainene, it wasn't something I planned. I am so sorry. It was unforgivable.”

“It wasunforgivable,” Kainene said and hung up.

Olanna put down the phone and felt a sharp cracking inside her. She knew her twin well, knew how tightly Kainene held on to hurt.

24

Richard wanted to cane Harrison. It had always appalled him, the thought that some colonial Englishmen flogged elderly black servants. Now, though, he felt like doing just as they had done. He longed to make Harrison lie down on his belly and flog, flog, flog him until the man learned to keep his mouth shut. If only he had not brought Harrison with him to Port Harcourt. But he was spending a whole week and did not want to leave him alone in Nsukka. The first day they arrived, Harrison, as if to justify his visit, cooked a complicated meal: a bean and mushroom soup, a pawpaw medley, chicken in a cream sauce speckled with greens, and a lemon tart as pudding.

“This is excellent, Harrison,” Kainene said, with a teasing sparkle in her eyes. She was in a good mood; she had pulled Richard into her arms after he arrived and mock-danced with him over the polished floor of the living room.

“Thank you, madam.” Harrison bowed. “And do you cook this in your home?”

Harrison looked wounded. “I am not cooking in my home, madam. My wife is cooking native food.”

“Of course.”

“I am cooking any type of European food, anything my master is eating in his country.”

“You must have difficulty eating nativefood when you go home then.” Kainene stressed the word native, and Richard held back his laughter.

“Yes, madam.” Harrison bowed again. “But I must manage.”

“This tart tastes better than one I had the last time I was in London.”

“Thank you, madam.” Harrison beamed. “My master is telling me that everybody in Mr. Odenigbo's house is saying the same thing. I used to make it for my master to take there, but I am not making anything again for Mr. Odenigbo's house since that time he is shouting on my master. Shouting like madman and the whole street is hearing. The man's head is not correct.”

Kainene turned to Richard and raised her eyebrows. Richard knocked his glass of water over.

“I will get rag, sah,” Harrison said, and Richard restrained himself from leaping across to strangle him.

“Whatever is Harrison talking about?” Kainene asked, after the water had been wiped up. “The revolutionary shouted at you?”

He could have lied. Even Harrison himself did not know exactly why Odenigbo had driven into the compound that evening and shouted at him. But he did not lie, because he was scared that he would fail at lying and would eventually have to tell her the truth and that way make it all doubly damaging. So he told her everything. He told her about the good white Burgundy he and Olanna drank and how, afterward, he was overwhelmed with regret.

Kainene pushed away her plate and sat with her elbows on the table, her chin lightly supported on her clasped hands. She said nothing for many long minutes. He could not read the expression on her face.

“I hope you won't say forgive me, ” she said, finally. “There is nothing more trite.” “Please don't ask me to leave.”

She looked surprised. “Leave? That would be too easy, wouldn't it?” “I'm sorry, Kainene.”

Richard felt transparent; she was looking at him but he felt as if she could see the wood carving thathung on the wall behind him. “So you have been lusting after my sister. How unoriginal,” she said. “Kainene,” he said.

She stood up. “Ikejide!” she called. “Come and clear this place.”

They were leaving the dining room when the phone rang. She ignored it. It rang again and again and finally she went to it. She came back into the bedroom and said, “That was Olanna.”

Richard looked at her, pleaded with his eyes.

“It would be forgivable if it were somebody else. Not my sister,” she said. “I am so sorry.”

“You should sleep in the guest room.” “Yes, yes, of course.”

He did not know what she was thinking. It was what frightened him the most, that he had no idea what she was thinking. He patted his pillow and rearranged his blanket and sat up in bed and tried to read. But his mind was too active for his body to be still. He worried that Kainene would call Madu and tell him what had happened, and Madu would laugh and say, “He was a mistake from the beginning, leave him, leave him, leave him.” Finally, before he fell asleep, Molière's words came to him, strangely comforting: Unbroken happiness is a bore; it should have ups and downs.

Kainene greeted him with a stoic face in the morning.

The rain was heavy on the roof and the overcast sky cast a pallor over the dining room. Kainene sat drinking a cup of tea and reading a newspaper with the light on.

“Harrison is making pancakes,” she said, and turned back to her paper. Richard sat opposite her, unsure of what to do, too guilty even to pour his tea. Her silence and the noises and smells from the kitchen made him feel claustrophobic.

“Kainene,” he said. “Can we speak, please?”

She looked up, and he noticed, first, that her eyes were swollen and raw, and then he saw the wounded rage in them. “We will talk when I want to talk, Richard.”

He looked down, like a child being reprimanded, and felt, again, afraid that she would ask him to get out of her life forever.

The doorbell rang before noon and, when Ikejide came in to say that madam's sister was at the door, Richard thought that Kainene would ask him to shut the door in Olanna's face. But she didn't. She asked Ikejide to serve drinks and went down to the living room and from the top of the stairs where he stood, Richard tried to hear what was said. He heard Olanna's tearful voice but could not make out what she was saying. Odenigbo spoke briefly, in a tone that was unusually calm. Then Richard heard Kainene's voice, clear and crisp. “It is stupid to expect me to forgive this.”

There was a short silence and then the sound of the door being opened. Richard hurried to the window to see Odenigbo's car backing out, the same blue Opel that had parked in his own compound on Imoke Street before Odenigbo bounded out, a stocky man in well-ironed clothes shouting, “I want you to stay away from my house! Do you understand me? Stay away! Don't ever come to my house again!” He had stood in front of the veranda and wondered if Odenigbo would punch him. Later, he realized that Odenigbo did not intend to punch him, perhaps did not consider him worthy of a punch, and the thought had depressed him.

“Did you eavesdrop?” Kainene asked, walking into the room. Richard turned away from the window, but she didn't wait for his response before she added, mildly, “I'd forgotten how much the revolutionary looks like a wrestler, really—but one with finesse.”

“I will never forgive myself if I lose you, Kainene.” Her face was expressionless. “I took your manuscript from the study this morning and I burned it,” she said.Richard felt a soar in his chest of emotions he could not name. “The Basket of Hands,” the collection of pages that he was finally confident could become a book, was gone. He could never duplicate the unbridled energy that had come with the words. But it did not matter. What mattered was that by burning his manuscript she had shown him that she would not end the relationship; she would not bother to cause him pain if she was not going to stay. Perhaps he was not a true writer after all. He had read somewhere that, for true writers, nothing was more important than their art, not even love.

6. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died

He writes about the world that remained silent while Biafrans died. He argues that Britain inspired this silence. The arms and advice that Britain gave Nigeria shaped other countries. In the United States, Biafra was “under Britain's sphere of interest.” In Canada, the prime minister quipped, “Where is Biafra?” The Soviet Union sent technicians and planes to Nigeria, thrilled at the chance to influence Africa without offending America or Britain. And from their white-supremacist positions, South Africa and Rhodesia gloated at further proof that black-run governments were doomed to failure.

Communist China denounced the Anglo-American-Soviet imperialism but did little else to support Biafra. The French sold Biafra some arms but did not give the recognition that Biafra most needed. And many Black African countries feared that an independent Biafra would trigger other secessions and so supported Nigeria.

DMU Timestamp: November 06, 2024 03:33