The Death of Vivek Oji

by Akwaeke Emezi

  “Your father,” she shot back, wiping at her face.

  I smiled and smoothed back some of her hair. “Are you okay?”

  She leaned her head against my shoulder. “I’m fine. I haven’t cried like that for him in a long time. Since I first heard.”

  “I hadn’t cried like that for him at all.”

  She looked up at me. “Really?”

  I nodded. There wasn’t much else to say. Juju put her arm across my chest and squeezed a little, like she understood.

  “What are we going to tell your mother in the morning when she sees me?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry, she leaves around eight. She won’t disturb us.” She slid off the bed and went over to her CD player.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “You’re putting on music? At this time?”

  Juju laughed. “Mumsy is used to it. I like to fall asleep listening to something.” She slid in a Mariah Carey album, Daydream, skipped a song, then pressed play.

  I tensed as the music started with a tinkle of chimes. “Not that one,” I said. It was Juju’s favorite—she used to play it all the time when Vivek was alive. It hurt to hear Mariah’s voice singing over a slow piano and soft percussion, but Juju didn’t turn it off. Instead, she danced slowly over, a relaxed two-step, the nightgown swirling gently around her. Her hair was down and swaying at her shoulders. “I said, not that one.”

  Juju climbed on the bed and straddled me. The pain in my chest was near overwhelming, but she took my face in her hands and her eyes fed on the hurt seeping out of my skin. “It’s okay,” she whispered. I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to cry again. “It’s okay.” I felt her kiss me and she tasted like she was already crying. I slid my hands to her back and dug my fingers into her spine, kissing her back. I could almost feel the brush of his hair dragging over my shoulders, his strong palm on the back of my neck. Before I knew it, my tears were pooling at the corners of my mouth, she was eating them along with hers, we were filling our mouths with salt and tongues and wet grief. I pulled off my singlet and Juju raised herself enough for me to take the boxers off as well, then raised her arms to let me pull off her nightgown.

  Mariah’s voice was wrapping high notes around us and it felt like heartbreak washing in a thousand pinpricks over our skin. Juju leaned sideways for her bedside drawer and I kissed the arch of her neck, the wing of her collarbone, the flesh of her shoulder. She returned to my mouth and tore open the condom, lifting herself again to roll it on. I gasped when she slid back down, her knees digging into the mattress, her hands like brands burning me. I imagined Vivek behind her, his legs mixed up with mine, his mouth against her back; imagined I could reach beyond her and meet his forearms, pull him closer until we were all pressed against each other.

  But when my hands reached out, there was only air, unmoving and hot.

  “He’s not here,” Juju whispered, as if she read my mind.

  I returned my hands to her, settling them on her hips as she rolled them forward.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m here for you.”

  But he was there, somehow, even if just in our memories of him—he was there because his absence was there. We didn’t mind. He wouldn’t have. He would have smiled that annoying little smile, lain down next to us and watched, happy. How could he be gone when he’d overtaken us so completely while he was here?

  Afterward, Juju lay with her head on my chest. “I didn’t tell anyone,” she said quietly.

  I turned my head slightly. “You didn’t tell anyone what?”

  “That you came looking for him the day he died. After he left here. I didn’t tell your aunt.”

  I brought one of my hands in to stroke her shoulder. “Thank you.”

  “You didn’t find him, abi? That’s what you told me.” She sounded like a little girl.

  I kissed the top of her head, grateful that she couldn’t see my eyes. “No,” I said. “I didn’t find him. Go to sleep.” She snuggled in and I listened until her breathing evened out. Still, I stayed awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering if I was doing the right thing by lying. The darkness stared back at me and said nothing, as always.

  Twenty

  Vivek

  He was right. Of course I watched them—they were so beautiful together. I put my hands on the small of her back and on the solid stretch of his chest. I kissed the sweat of her neck and his stomach.

  They were keeping me alive in the sweetest way they knew how, you see.

  Twenty-one

  Chika repainted Ahunna’s house for Vivek’s burial, a bone white everywhere, drops of it splattering on the soil around the walls. Ekene had since built his own house just down the road, but Chika remained attached to their mother’s house, renovating and expanding it, like a parasite customizing its host’s body. In the years since her death, he had planted hedges and trees in the compound, built a fence and topped it with rolling barbed wire. He chose white even though he knew it would have to be repainted often, as dust from the untarred road coated the walls a dull, gritty red. Chika did all this in a flurry of activity, in the weeks before he collapsed into his bed and succumbed again to the familiar stupor of grief.

  They all retreated to the village in those first days, Chika and Kavita and Vivek’s body, Mary and Ekene; it was the only place they could be. The impending burial forced a truce between the women, for which the brothers were grateful. Osita had stayed in Owerri until the last minute, despite a heated quarrel with his parents. “I won’t miss the burial,” he insisted, but Ekene was so incensed by his refusal to come and help beforehand that he raised his hand to hit Osita, something he hadn’t done in years. Before he could land the blow, though, he caught a glimpse of Osita’s eyes, and what he saw there—complete indifference—bothered him enough to drop his arm and stalk out of the room, his rage bitter and impotent in the back of his mouth.

  Once he was at the village, Ekene thought that Chika was doing too much for the burial, but he couldn’t open his mouth, not when his own son was alive. He watched the repainting with grief hot in his heart, watched the bright reddening of his brother’s eyes. Chika had stopped sleeping.

  While Kavita lay in bed, her husband stalked through the house, among the paint buckets and brushes, the tarps spread out over the tiled floor, the rolled-up rugs and covered furniture. Everything seemed dead or suspended, everything paused, a long moment of tangible silence to mark his lost child. Vivek was resting at a local embalmer’s, being prepared for his interment, as Chika walked through the night, dust layered over his skin. In the mornings Ekene brought him breakfast and made him eat it, listening as his younger brother rattled on about the burial plans. Ekene said nothing—about the repainting, the clearing of the compound, the preparations for food and music—but he drew the line when Chika mentioned killing a cow.

  “Mba,” Ekene said. “You can’t do that.” He folded his arms and stared down at his brother, who glared back up at him.

  “What do you mean, I can’t do that?” Chika replied. “Is it not my money? Is anyone asking you to buy the cow?”

  “You’re not thinking straight, and that’s understandable, but let me just tell you now, Chika, you cannot kill a cow for your son. It’s not right.”

  Chika took a deep breath. “You want to tell me what’s right to bury my own son?”

  Ekene sighed and sat down next to him. “He was too young, Chika. To kill a cow is to celebrate a life. That’s what we do for someone who lived their whole life fully, who was not taken before his time. If you celebrate this—with a whole cow—it’s like you’re celebrating something unnatural, when your son died so young. Ịghọtala m?”

  Chika sagged back into his chair. “I just want to honor my child,” he said.

  “And you can, and you will,” said Ekene, putting a hand on his arm. “You know what? Kill a goat. They will even talk about that sef, but so what? Recogn
ize your son.”

  “He was my only child,” Chika continued. “We didn’t kill a cow for Mama.”

  “She told us not to,” said Ekene, leaning back and taking his hand off his brother. “Remember how she put it? That if she died in the evening, we should not allow the sun to rise and set on her corpse.”

  Chika smiled sadly. “And then she said that if we had a goat or a dog, we should slaughter it, nothing elaborate. A quiet burial. She begged us.”

  “And we did it the way she wanted. So how can you go and kill a cow for your son when we only killed a goat for Mama? It will look somehow.”

  Chika nodded. “You’re right.”

  “Mary was saying she would just go to the slaughterhouse early in the morning and buy enough meat for the people coming.”

  “She’s organizing it?”

  Ekene gave his brother a look. “Who did you think was taking care of it? Kavita?”

  Chika ducked his head in shame. He’d assumed one of the women was handling those things; he hadn’t even asked his wife about it. These days he found it hard to look at her, to see his grief magnified in her eyes.

  Ekene softened his voice. “Mary is your sister,” he said. “Kavita is in mourning, and you for some reason have decided to repaint the whole house. Of course she’s taking care of it.”

  “I didn’t even know they were talking again.”

  Ekene laughed shortly. “They’re not, not really.” He shrugged. “You know how women are.”

  “Please tell me that her church is not involved in this.”

  “Ah, no. She tried but I stopped that one. Kavita would kill her on the spot if she brought anyone from there. We’re getting a Catholic priest to come to the compound.”

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been more involved in these plans,” said Chika. “Everything feels so strange around me.”

  “Focus on the house.” Ekene was grateful that the repainting was animating his brother, even to these sleepless lengths. He still remembered what had happened after their mother died. “We will handle the rest.”

  * * *

  —

  The day before the burial, the repainting was complete. Ekene sent a group of young boys to the local embalmer. They returned with Vivek’s body in a casket, balancing it in the back of a bus with the seats taken out, holding it steady as they trundled over bumps and potholes. When they arrived they carried it into the downstairs parlor, setting it on a table in the center of the room. Kavita watched them from the staircase. She had been coming down before they jostled in through the door, shouting at one another to hold the casket steady. Seeing it, she sank slowly, her hands gripping the banister posts, her eyes staring through them. She heard the gentle thud as they set it down, Ekene’s voice, the smack of their slippers against the tile as they filed out, some of them casting curious looks at her.

  After he closed the door behind them, Ekene came and squatted on the step below her. “Kavita? Do you want to see him?”

  She raised her eyes to him and he held out a hand. Heart shaking, she took it and allowed him to pull her to her feet and lead her into the parlor. The casket was still closed. Ekene let go of her hand and went to lift the lid, then stood at the head, waiting for her to walk forward. Kavita’s hair was plaited into a single long braid down her back, and for a moment she imagined it was rising in the air, pulling her toward the door—because, if she didn’t look inside, then maybe she could pretend that none of this was real, that Vivek was somewhere else and they’d just gotten the whole thing very wrong. But instead she walked forward and curled her fingers around the polished wood of the casket’s edge. Vivek was lying inside, his hands draped along his sides, his eyes and mouth closed, his hair fanned out over a satin pillow, just as she had asked. She noticed it looked dry, his hair, and she ran her hand over it, wondering if she should pass some coconut oil through it, like she used to do.

  People like to say that dead people look asleep, and maybe she would have bought that under different circumstances. Ahunna had looked asleep, but after all she had died in her sleep, so sleep and death had blurred together for her, and when they buried her the next day, she had taken peace down with her. But Kavita had already seen a different dead Vivek: the one on her veranda, the clotting blood, the flopping foot—they couldn’t trick her with this cleaned-up version, they couldn’t bring a peace that was never there. Not that they hadn’t tried, dressing him in his favorite white traditional, his feet as bare as when he’d knocked over the flowerpot by the front door. Kavita burst into tears, her body folding in on itself, and Ekene rushed to catch her before she hit the floor. He put his arm around her and guided her weight back up to her room, murmuring nonsense that even he knew made no difference.

  She came down later, this time with Chika, and they stood by the casket for a long time.

  “Where’s his necklace?” Chika finally said.

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t on him when I found him.”

  “He was always wearing it. Are you sure it didn’t fall off at the embalmer’s? Or that they didn’t steal it?”

  Kavita’s face was set, hammered hard with pain. “I’m sure, Chika. It wasn’t on his body.” She could tell he wanted to argue, but she knew he couldn’t. She had refused to move from the body after she had found it; she had run her hands over Vivek’s face and wailed with her cheek on his chest. Besides, his body had been stripped naked. If the necklace had been there, Kavita would have seen it.

  “He should be buried with it. It looks somehow that he’s not wearing it.”

  Kavita agreed and patted Chika’s arm. He needed something to fixate on now that the repainting was done, now that his grief was chasing him from room to room, begging him to spend some time alone with it. They all knew what would happen when that time came: it would slice behind his knees and knock him down and he would fall back into that same dark place he’d gone when Ahunna died.

  “We’ll find it,” Kavita said, accepting the fixation with both hands. “It has to be somewhere. He may have taken it off.”

  “He always wore it.”

  “He might have taken it off to clean it.”

  “Yes,” said Chika. “To clean it.”

  They stood there, the room empty around them, before the wailers and the mourners arrived, just the two of them with their son.

  * * *

  —

  Ekene had been watching them from the doorway, careful not to intrude, unwilling to break the veil of grief that had woven itself around the tableau. Eventually he left them there and went back to his house, where Mary was.

  “You’re not going to the wake-keeping?” he asked her.

  “I’ll go later,” she said. “Shebi they’re doing it all night?”

  “The relatives, maybe. I doubt Kavita will stay the whole time. It’s too painful for her.”

  Mary nodded. “And she won’t like to be around all of them. She and Chika like to keep to themselves.”

  Ekene agreed, and it was close to midnight when Mary slipped out and went to join the wake-keeping. Along with the female relatives, cousins of cousins and whatnot, they covered their heads and sang gospel songs till dawn. Kavita and Chika stayed upstairs, drifting in and out of consciousness, weeping in private. One of the women brought up some food, but it stayed untouched on the tray in their room, oil congealing at the top in a lonely skin.

  The Nigerwives arrived en masse in the morning, flocking around Kavita like protective birds, extending and interlocking their wings. Chika and Ekene watched them, shaking their heads.

  “Maybe she will feel better with them here,” said Ekene. Chika grunted in reply and his brother squeezed his shoulder.

  Mary was downstairs coordinating the women who were cooking in the back. The Nigerwives’ children—the ones who had come, the girls who were actually friends with Vivek—were milling about downsta
irs. It was only when Osita arrived that they followed him into the parlor to see Vivek’s body.

  Osita stood beside his cousin’s casket and stared down, the wailing around him like static in the air. He felt Juju slide her hand into his, pressing her shoulder against him.

  “I can’t believe this,” she whispered. “Should we say something?”

  Osita’s eyes didn’t move from Vivek’s face. “There’s no point,” he said. “He’s not in there anymore.”

  “Osita! Don’t say that!”

  “It’s true na. What’s the point?” His voice was rough with dammed-up tears, but as angry as he sounded, he didn’t step away from the casket. Juju squeezed his hand and said silent things to the body of her friend. Beside her, Olunne was praying quietly; Somto stood with them, one arm pressed across her stomach, a hand to her mouth, eyes wet.

  * * *

  —

  Out back, Kavita stood on the veranda and watched as a group of men dragged a goat in on a length of frayed rope. She had asked to be called when it was time to kill the animal, and she watched as its legs were tied and a small hole dug in the ground. They laid it on its side and its bleating rang through the backyard. A knife was produced, with an old wooden handle and a sharpened although nicked blade. They pulled back the goat’s head until its neck was curved, then ran the knife, almost casually, across it. Blood spouted, red and thick, pouring into the small hole in the earth. Kavita watched silently as the goat’s sounds faded into gray silence. She thought of the blood on her hand when she found Vivek’s body, and a wave of revulsion sent her running into the house to vomit into the nearest toilet. She heard faint laughter from the men outside and knew they were laughing at her. Maybe they didn’t know she was the dead boy’s mother, but it didn’t matter; no one knew what it was like, what it had been like to find him.

  She still had nightmares about it, though: dreams where she rushed out and there was nothing on the veranda except a widening pool of blood still enough to capture her reflection. Where he opened his eyes and laughed when she pulled back the cloth, where it was all a trick, a joke. Where she lifted his head up and he dissolved into dust in her hands, leaving her with nothing but that akwete cloth. Leaning against the porcelain of the toilet, she wondered what would have happened if someone hadn’t brought Vivek back to the house, if they had just left him wherever he died. Would he have rotted there? Would anyone have cleared his body? She thought about what she owed to whoever had brought him. It killed her not to know who it was, what had happened.