by Chika Unigwe
BETTER NEVER
THAN LATE
Chika Unigwe
For my goddaughter, Ekanem Akwaugo Nkechi Okeke, who is smart and fierce: may you continue to soar.
Fly high, the sun will not melt your wings.
For my young nieces, Zite, Ayanachi and Bianna Unigwe: may you inherit a world that will never succeed in shrinking you.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
The Transfiguration of Rapu
Finding Faith
Becoming Prosperous
Everyone Deserves Grace
Better Never Than Late
Cunny Man Die, Cunny Man Bury Am
Cleared for Takeoff
Love of a Fat Woman
How to Survive a Heat Wave
Heart Is Where The Home Is
Acknowledgements
More Cassava Shorts
Support Better Late Than Never
Copyright
The Transfiguration of Rapu
The new man was tall and lanky, his stomach not spilling over his trousers like those of the other men who gathered at Prosperous and Agu’s. Yet, despite that, he moved in such a way that put Prosperous in mind of an overfed, pampered cat. He had a fashionable haircut and a thin strip of beard in the middle of his chin. This was a man for whom life in Europe had not been hard. Prosperous envied him that; a life untouched still by hardness, soft like a baby’s buttocks, like the life she had lived before.
‘My beautiful wife, Rapu.’ A small woman suddenly appeared from behind him. She sat down on the edge of the sofa as if she were ready to flee at the slightest sound. When Prosperous asked if she wanted a drink, she nodded but did not specify what, not even when Prosperous asked, ‘Mineral or juice?’ She held the glass of juice Prosperous gave her with both hands, as if holding it down to keep it from flying away. She was new. But not in the same way the man—Gwachi—was. She was new to Europe. He was just new to Belgium, and to the group that met regularly at Agu’s to drink and talk, dissecting their lives and sharing their nostalgia for a country they swore they could not wait to live in again, once the money was made and they could retire and live in the mansions they were going to build in Lagos, Abuja, Enugu, Onitsha, Jos. Whichever city in Nigeria their deferred lives still inhabited.
The new man had moved from Germany a few months ago, Agu told Prosperous the first time Gwachi visited with his paper-wife, his German wife, Hilde. ‘He said Germany is very hard for black men. Harder than Belgium. Can you imagine? Hilde suggested the move to Turnhout when he said he had heard this place was easier for blacks. She gave up her life in Germany for him. Oyibo women and love! They’d give up everything for the person they love!’
Prosperous did not remind him that there was a time when he would have given up everything for her. And she would have done the same for him—did do the same for him. Prosperous said instead, ‘We have all given up things.’
The wife Gwachi had with him now, and whom he brought most times he came afterwards, and with whom he had a six-year-old back in Nigeria, was Igbo, like everyone else in the flat. Rapu did not live with him. She lived with a Nigerian man called Shylock. Nobody seemed to know what his real name was. He had earned his nickname for the exorbitant fees he charged for whatever service he provided, even to his fellow Igbo. Shylock drove an Audi, had a gold tooth and always wore a beret and dark Ray-Bans. In the winter he wore a long black leather jacket with a furry trim on the hood.
At Christmas, he threw lavish parties where the signature dish was Chicken Shylock, a succulent affair that exploded in a multitude of flavours in the mouth, sour and sweet, spicy and soothing mint. No matter how much anyone begged for the recipe, he refused to give up its secret. It was said that he threw even bigger parties in his village at Easter where he gave out bags of rice and tins of palm oil to widows.
Gwachi complained that Shylock was charging him too much. ‘Twenty thousand euros! And we are from the same village, the man is my kporakpo! He loves money too much, when am I going to pay all that off?’
‘You make it sound like you’re paying off a car,’ Prosperous said, irritated.
‘Shylock is expensive, but he never dips into a pot of soup that is not his,’ Agu said.
‘You remember the story about that Ogwashi man?’
‘What ha-ha-happened to the-the…the Ogwashi man?’ Rapu asked.
The Ogwashi man had been paid a huge amount to marry a certain Ogwashi woman whose husband was already in the country but who could not bring her in because he was legally married to a Belgian woman. The man—very much like Gwachi—missed his “real” wife so much he did not want to wait until he had got his papers and divorced his white wife to bring her in himself. But the Ogwashi man not only took the money, he also took the wife—even going back to Ogwashi to pay her dowry once the husband in Belgium had had his dowry returned.
No one in Agu and Prosperous’s circle of friends knew who the Ogwashi man was but his story had become an anecdote, told and retold in their circle to warn each other of the covetous nature of human beings. Shylock, whatever else he might be, had an untarnished reputation for honesty and professionalism. If he said he’d sell you his mother, he would, was how he was described. He was also a man with lots of connections. No one knew the exact nature of those connections, not even his kporakpo, his village-man, Gwachi, but they were said to be expansive and useful. He was the sort of middleman you wanted if you were after an “arrangee” marriage. He would know whom you could trust.
As it turned out, when Gwachi asked if he could recommend someone, Shylock said he would go one better. So, Gwachi paid for him to go to Nigeria and marry Rapu in court. ‘He even charged me for the suit he wore for the ceremony!’ Gwachi complained to Agu and Prosperous. He went to Shylock’s every evening after work to see Rapu briefly. On Sunday afternoons or evenings, he made excuses to Hilde, and went to see Rapu. It was only then that he took Rapu out like a proper husband and they went and visited his friends, or drove down to Antwerp where they checked into cheap hotels and kept an eye on the clock while they made love. It would not do to make Hilde suspicious.
‘How long still?’ Rapu asked every night when he dropped her off at Shylock’s.
‘Not long now’, came the standard reply.
Rapu told Prosperous all this when she visited.
‘What does theee… theee… this woman look like, my hus-hus-husband’s wife?’ Rapu asked Prosperous one day, her voice low and soft, her eyes dull. She was sitting on a kitchen stool, stirring her plate of rice and stew listlessly with a spoon.
‘I’ve only ever seen her once,’ Prosperous lied. ‘Gwachi does not go out with her much. He brought her here once.’ Then, because she knew what this woman, the real wife, wanted to hear, she added, ‘It’s almost as if he were ashamed of her. She’s muscular, yams on her legs and arms! She’s not beautiful. She has a beard like a man’s own. Gwachi should ask her to shave.’
Prosperous felt guilty but she squashed it. What good would it do tell Gwachi that Hilde was beautiful? Long black hair that contrasted sharply with her pale skin, pleasant manners, youthful looks. She looked like an advert for healthy skin. Or to tell her that Hilde and Gwachi held hands like children when they visited, that they touched each other when they spoke, finished each other’s sentences? It was much kinder to lie.
Rapu’s lips turned upwards in a smile. Her eyes brightened. Very softly, she said, ‘Thank you.’ She did not stutter.
At a party in Lier a few weeks later, Rapu danced towards Prosperous, hips twisting, nothing of the nervous-looking woman, the johnny-just-come newly arrived in Europe, in her, and dragged Prosperous to the floor. ‘My hus-band doesn’t… does
n’t want to dance. Wasting the music.’
She moved with a flexibility that Prosperous envied and she told her so. ‘Ah, it he-helps with the stiffness, dancing. Shy-Shy-Shylock’s sofa is not a comfortable bed!’
She snapped her fingers to the music, leapt into a backward shuffle, threw her hands in the air and shrieked in delight as another song began to play. Prosperous danced opposite her. Rapu had to shout to be heard.
‘First Gwa-Gwachi was in Lebanon. Then Ho… Ho… Holland. Then Germany. Now he says hee-hee-hee-he’s settled. Once he divorces Hee… Hilde, and I divorce Shylock, we’ll be too… too… together again. I’m tired of sleeping on the-the-the sofa. My neck hurts. Every day. Another man might have given the woman the bed but not Shylock.’
‘Oh well, Shylock doesn’t joke. It’s always strictly business with him. If he gave up his bed for you, he wouldn’t be Shylock. That’s why your husband trusts him. No funny business with him. You know where you stand.’
For two weeks, Gwachi did not visit. Instead Rapu came with Shylock. ‘I beh-beh-begged him to bring me,’ she told Prosperous. ‘Gwachi and Hilde ha-have gone to Turkey on holiday. To-to-together.’ She sounded like she was about to cry or had been crying. The hipthrowing, finger-snapping woman at the party had been usurped by this nervous-looking one.
‘She sleeps with my hus-hus-husband every night. She’s got him and what ha… ha… have I got?’ She wrung her hands as she spoke, cracked her knuckles.
‘In a way, he is her husband too,’ Prosperous said gently. She usually tried to avoid thinking of the woman with the delightful high laugh whom Gwachi brought along to theirs sometimes, though not as often as he brought Rapu. The woman had mock-complained once that rather than taking her to Nigeria to see his home country and meet his people, Gwachi was taking her on a tour of Nigerian homes in Belgium. ‘It’s not the same, you know darling?’ Laughing in that high way of hers, kissing him on the nose.
‘Tell her,’ Gwachi had said, appealing to the room. ‘Tell her how dangerous Nigeria is. It’s not a country to visit. It’s not like Kenya or South Africa where you can go on safaris. Why do you think I left? Ah, tell her about our country!’
Prosperous had said nothing, unwilling to be dragged into the performance expected of them, demanded by friendship. But Agu and Godwin had complied. They magnified Nigeria’s flaws, transforming it with their words into a nation with none of the redeeming features they spoke warmly of over plates of eba and soup (Food tastes so much better in Nigeria! In Nigeria, people might not have much but they are always willing to help! Nigerians are so much happier than these oyibo people! Our people are resilient! Resourceful! Brilliant! The best ever!) and that they defended when Agu talked of how some ‘ignorant man at work who has never even been on an aeroplane’ dared to ask if Nigerians lived in trees (Imagine! He doesn’t know that Nigeria is a rich country! We export oil!). They spoke to Hilde, instead, of kidnappings at gunpoint; of policemen who sold their uniforms and rifles to armed robbers; of constant power outages and air so thick with the exhaust fumes of rickety old cars that it was impossible to breathe.
As they piled one horror story on top of another, Hilde’s smile became thinner and thinner, almost disappearing into her face. When she shrieked, ‘I never want to go to Nigeria! What a horrible country!’ Prosperous left the room.
Later, when real terror came to Nigeria—daily bombings in the north-east, abductions of schoolgirls, entire towns being razed, Fulani herdsmen terrorising citizens—Prosperous remembered the stories these men had told and wondered if somehow by focusing on all the negatives, by exaggerating those, they had birthed these new horrors.
When Gwachi returned from Turkey at the end of August, his visits with Rapu continued. He had bought her a small leather bag, which Rapu showed off happily. ‘How was your holiday?’ Prosperous asked him.
‘What is there to do on holiday?’ He played with Rapu’s braids, ran a palm over her back. ‘I missed my wife. Hilde wanted to see museums. To shop. To walk. Every morning, she dragged me out to walk.’ Gwachi’s voice, however, remained soft, a feather, a voice wholly lacking in conviction. Prosperous wondered if she was the only one who caught it.
‘Walk to where?’ Agu asked, laughing in anticipation of the response.
‘To nowhere! Just white people’s walk. Hand in hand. Like schoolchildren.’ He sounded sad, wistful. His laughter accompanying Agu’s loud one rang hollow.
Rapu shook his hand off her back and walked away into the kitchen. Prosperous followed.
‘You know I kept asking heee… him to bring me. Bring me over. Bring me, I said, I can hah… han-handle it. I missed him. Now, I don’t know. Maybe I should ha… ha… have remained in Nigeria.’
A few months later, Rapu came to visit Prosperous. She was on her own. Her lipstick looked like it had been hastily put on. Her eyes were red. Prosperous thought someone had died.
‘What’s wrong, Rapu?’
‘Heee… She… Hilde is—’
‘She’s what?’
‘Pregnant!’
It was the first time Prosperous had ever seen Rapu cry. She had seen her close to tears several times and had imagined that, if she eventually did cry, it would be soft sobs with lots of sniffing. But Rapu moaned when she cried, a ghost in a Nollywood movie.
‘He won’t lee… lee… leave her now, my sister, will he?’
‘Is that what he’s said?’
‘No. No. But he… he… he…’ The words refused to dislodge and she gave up and wept into her palms.
‘You know Hilde is pregnant?’ Prosperous asked Agu later. He did. ‘Is he going to abandon her with a baby? After everything she’s done for him?’ She felt like throwing something, flinging a cup at the door, smashing a window, anything to ease the anger building up in her.
‘Rapu is his wife, is she not? She’s the one who’s recognised back home. She’s the one we recognise, the one who has his child already. He’ll do right by Hilde. But his marriage to Rapu, that’s the one he needs to fix.’
‘But Hilde?’ Prosperous said, not quite sure what she wanted to say.
‘You want him to leave Rapu and his son for her?’
‘This is just fucked up,’ she said.
Two days later Prosperous ran into Gwachi and Hilde opposite the baby shop on Gasthuisstraat. ‘We’re going to set up our baby registry,’ Hilde told her. Gwachi stood beside her, his eyes shining as if he had been shown some wonder. Prosperous recognized the look of pride. She muttered ‘Congratulations,’ and walked off.
It was Prosperous who noticed that Rapu was gaining weight. She joked to Gwachi that Shylock was feeding his wife well.
‘It’s this-this-country,’ Rapu said. ‘Too many sugary things to-to-to eat.’ She took a large bite of the cake Prosperous had served and sipped some Coke. Her eyes had lost their startled look and acquired a certain calm. When she spoke, she no longer wrung her hands or cracked her knuckles. She settled into Prosperous’s sofa as if she owned the place. She asked for music so she could dance. She no longer mentioned Hilde or her pregnancy.
‘Her eyes are opening,’ Prosperous said to Agu. She liked this woman.
Rapu picked up weight steadily so that whenever Prosperous saw her she had piled on more. The weight was spread evenly over her body, as if it had taken a conscious decision to be fair. One day, Rapu told Prosperous she was pregnant.
‘And what does Gwachi think of it?’
‘He-he-he is happy,’ she said, burying her head in her glass of Coke as if she were afraid of looking Prosperous in the eye. ‘Two babies at once! He-he’s happy.’
‘Gwachi doesn’t know how he’s going to deal with it,’ Agu told Prosperous later that night. ‘Two babies coming in the same year. He thinks it’d be very cruel to leave Hilde now she’s almost due. He loves Rapu but he also loves Hilde. He said that her parents were totally against her marrying a black man. She married him against their will and her father is still not talking to her. She hopes
that the grandchild will help bring her parents round.’
Prosperous thought of Hilde fighting her parents for the man she loved. She thought of Rapu and her growing stomach. She thought of Nkonye in Nigeria, waiting to join his parents. She did not know whom to feel sorry for, whom to root for: Hilde or Rapu?
In May, as the weather became warmer, Hilde had her baby. A girl with her father’s nose, bigger than the average baby girl. She was fifty-four centimetres at birth, Hilde announced proudly as she handed the baby over to Prosperous when she and Agu visited. ‘Guhwashi has been very good with her,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t dropped her once!’ Her laughter filled the room.
‘Ah, me, I’m good with babies,’ Gwachi responded, taking the baby who was now sleeping from Prosperous and putting her down in her cot. His delight in his baby puffed out his body so that his stomach looked rounded, as if he too had just gone through a pregnancy. His eyes shone with a familiar intensity. She wondered now if he and Rapu would set up a baby registry too. She and Agu, as well as many of their Nigerian friends, had not been very generous with the gifts they chose from the list for this baby with her father’s nose: rattles and hair brushes and feeding bottles and baby nail clippers. They were saving up for the real wife’s baby.
‘When Rapu drops, we’ll buy the pram!’ Agu boasted to Gwachi in Igbo as he handed over the plastic rattle he and Prosperous had brought. He had already levied some of their friends 50 euros each to buy a Pericles like Princess Mathilde’s baby had. ‘Nothing but the best for our baby!’
Gwachi had laughed and thanked them but Prosperous thought the laughter held something else, something weightier, something less carefree. Prosperous did not mind spending so much money, almost 800 euros on a pram, but it bothered her that they acted as if Rapu’s baby was the real baby, and Hilde’s own some impostor they had to pretend to care for until Rapu’s arrived.
‘Guwashi is like a pro. You wouldn’t tell that this is his first. He impressed the nurses at the hospital,’ Hilde said. Gwachi smiled and kissed Hilde on the forehead. He asked her if she wanted something else to drink; her tea had got cold.