by E. C. Osondu
That first winter, I came down with what I thought was malaria but which actually turned out to be the flu. I lay on the couch, my eyes and nose running and my body fluctuating between extreme cold and extreme heat. I did not yet know the procedure for getting a personal physician, and every time my daughter was feeling unwell, my wife would give her a spoon of gripe water. I lay on the couch and suffered. I recalled two incidents from my childhood. While growing up, my father had befriended an American Christian missionary. His name was Charles Nathan. He preached a strange doctrine: he said life was going to end on earth very soon. He was rumored to have raised a man from the dead. His mission was to organize crusades and revivals to warn souls about the impending destruction of the earth. The day before his crusade, he came down with a fever. He was sweating so much the mattress on which he lay was soaked through and his sweat formed a pool on the floor. Beside him lay his fat black Bible and film slides titled “The Photodrama of Creation.” He babbled in a strange tongue and tossed from side to side. He had to be rushed to the general hospital, and when he recovered, he canceled his crusade and went back to America. He had contracted a rare form of cerebral malaria. As I lay on the couch, I wondered whether my fate was not going to parallel that of Pastor Charles Nathan. Would I be forced to cancel my studies and return to Nigeria? My wife bought herbal tea from a Chinese shop down the road and plucked guava and mango leaves from the trees on campus. She boiled these in a large pot. She brought the pot to where I lay on the couch and asked me to sit up. She placed the steaming pot in front of me and covered me with two thick comforters. I sat under the comforters sweating until the fever broke. Looking back on this incident now, I smile. I was being treated with the same methods that old herbalists from interior villages used to cure rheumatism and malaria in Africa, even though I was living in one of the most advanced countries in the world. For days I was weak, and my hands flapped beside me lifelessly. Could I have come all the way to America to be felled by the common flu? I recovered, and that illness may have marked the beginning of the end of my period of innocence.
I came to realize, for instance, that the emergency exit door that was always open no matter how many times I closed it was the door through which those who came to buy crack passed.The guy who would smile at me each time I closed the door and would watch me get into my room and then open it again was a dope dealer. He in fact was armed all the time he smiled at me and puffed at his Newport cigarettes.
The man who began to open my eyes to my environment was Mike, a Palestinian who ran a neighborhood store. I would always go to his store to buy black-eyed peas, and he would smile at me.
“Where are you from?” he asked me one day. “Nigeria,” I responded.
“Oh, no wonder you are so respectful. I’m from Palestine, you know, the old country. We too respect older people, but this is America, and there is no respect here, the young girls talk to you from their waist.”
“Yes, we respect older people in my country,” I said.
“In Palestine, when a lady enters a bus you get up for her, but me, here I don’t get up for anybody, because there are no ladies.”
“Well—,” I said.
“Where do you live?” he asked me. “I live down the road, the old hotel.”
“You gotta be careful there; it is filled with no-good people nowadays. In the old days, when it was managed by Tom Walker, it was one of the best apartment buildings,” he said. He was the one who told me that the house next to mine was a halfway house, and that the occupants were drug addicts in recovery.
“This is a great country, you know, it takes care of everybody. When I was living in Palestine, my younger brother began to run with the wrong gang and started smoking hashish. My father—a very strong man, I’m like him, you know—he tied my brother up, he trussed him up like a goat and threw him into a dark storeroom behind the house. He stayed there screaming for days. No food, no water, for thirty-nine days. When he came out, he was sober. No more hashish. My brother, he lives in Delaware now with his wife and children, he owns his own store just like me. But here, they put them in a halfway house and feed them for free. I sometimes wish I was an addict,” he said, smiling.
After we moved and enrolled my daughter in preschool, the school district sent us a letter containing the names of child molesters on their watch list. Two of the names were people we had lived with in the apartment building. One of them, a kind-looking old man, had seen me in the lobby once and asked me if the child with me was my daughter, and when I told him yes, he had remarked that she was precious. He had asked my permission to get her a piece of candy from the vending machine, to which I had agreed.
Our new building was called the St. Leo Apartments. It lacked some of the colorful characters in our previous apartment block. But it was more expensive as well. After living for some years now in America, I still consider those innocent years in the old apartment building as the happiest days of our lives.
Teeth
The husband was home when the pains came. It was a drizzling fall evening. The doctor had told them to start coming to the hospital when the contractions became regular. They called a cab, and she cried all the way to the hospital. He thought she was in a lot of pain, but she told him later that she had cried because back home, when a woman was to have a baby, the men sat outside drinking ogogoro, the local gin, while the woman was surrounded by local midwives and aunts and cousins and grandmothers who had had many children themselves and knew how to flip the baby in the womb if it chose to come feetfirst instead of headfirst.
It was the wife’s idea that they should have a baby while in America. He was not very enthusiastic about the idea; he was here to study, he told her. And, besides, babies cried a lot, and one of the things that was said about white people when he was growing up in Nigeria was that they did not like noise, the other two being that (1) they did not tell lies, and (2) they were completely fearless. Since they came to America, he had added reason to agree with the fact that white people did not like noise. The tiny apartment where they lived was always deathly quiet. They had had a long argument, keeping their voices down. He could not tell the wife that his classes were not going so well. He could hardly follow the speech of the professors. Their language was very idiomatic; they and the students had common terms of reference that he lacked. Sometimes in class, the professor and everyone else would be laughing. He would have his head buried in his notebook, not even knowing a joke had been made.
“Every child born on American soil is an American citizen,” she told him. The husband did not know that citizenship was automatic. He thought it was something the child got after living for a certain number of years on American soil and meeting certain eligibility requirements. “And any child born here can become the president of this country.” Can you imagine that, their child a president of the most powerful country in the world? He could imagine it himself, seeing his grandmother and all his relations from Nigeria with colorful loincloths around their waists lounging on the beautiful green lawn of the White House. She told him about the Kenyan whose father had been an international student just like him when he was born. She told him he was now a senator, and that his Kenyan relatives told the New York Times that they had danced through the night when they heard the news that he had been elected a senator.
“But that is not even the best part—the best part is that when our son is eighteen, he can file for a green card for us, his parents, to join him here in America, and you know what that means, it means we can spend our old age in this beautiful country.”
He did not know that either. He sometimes wondered about all the things she knew about the country. The country puzzled him more by the day. None of his assumptions held. He was constantly in a state of bewilderment and would open his mouth to gulp in air each time he was shocked or surprised. Since he was puzzled all the time, his mouth was perpetually open.
What he did not tell the wife was that lovemaking was not at the top of his list a
nymore. He had tried to reason through it, why it no longer meant anything to him, but he couldn’t be sure. He sometimes reasoned it was the half-naked girls that he saw on campus every day. It had shocked him at first, but after some time he had gotten used to them. He sometimes told himself his lack of interest in sex was a result of the cold. The winter in upstate New York that year had been the worst in ten years. He would come in from campus after walking one and a half miles in the snow, his eyes red, his face frozen, even the snot in his nostrils frozen stiff.
He would stay in the sitting room, pretending to be reading, while the wife got ready for bed. She would look at him and go to bed while he sat in the sitting room reading the same line a hundred times; and he would sleep on the couch when he got tired.
Sometimes the wife told him she had learned some new things about lovemaking from the shows she watched on television. This bit of news perked him up and made him leave the couch and go to the bedroom. She was right; she had indeed learned new things.
He did not believe her when she said she was pregnant. He still imagined that it had to be done in a certain position for at least a dozen times. He took her to the university health center. The nurse practitioner, who smiled all the time, ran a test for her, and within five minutes confirmed that she was indeed pregnant.She also told them that in a few months’ time they could have a sonogram to determine the sex of the baby, like most couples did in America. But his wife, who otherwise embraced everything American, objected to that.
“We don’t do that in Africa,” she told the nurse.
The wife then went into a long analogy about how babies were like parcels that had been handed to us, and sonograms were like peeking at the parcel on the way home to find out what its contents were instead of waiting to get home to find out what it contained in the privacy of your house.
“It is your decision, and I respect it,” the nurse practitioner had told them. This was one of those American expressions that baffled him—he encountered them every day, and they transformed conversations into legal expressions.
The wife saw it differently; she was happy. She thought the nurse practitioner was a nice person and had a lot of respect for Africans. She added it to the list of things that made America such a strange country. She added it to the list of things she told her mother on the phone each time she made those long-distance calls back home. Those conversations that always began, “Hmm, these people are very strange, you know; can you imagine that criminals must be read their rights and told to remain silent while being arrested, you know, unlike our own policemen that would let you say incriminating things about yourself so as to get you into more trouble. Hmm, do you know that if your husband lays his hands on you here, you could have him arrested? Our uncle Zanza, who beats his wife on the thirtieth of every month when he collects and drinks away his wages, should come here. Hmm, do you know there are couples here who choose not to have babies so that they can enjoy each other more?”
She would hear her mother’s angry hiss from the other end of the telephone line.
“And they call that life?” her mother would ask.
The nurse had also told them to announce to their friends that they were having a baby, which was yet another strange American practice. In their part of the world, you did not need to tell people. You waited till they could see with their eyes that you were pregnant. Little wonder there were many proverbs about pregnancy, one of which was that it was like smoke, and could not be hidden. Another proverb had it that pregnancy was Nature’s way of telling the world not to trust women with secrets.
The pregnancy gave her something to do. She now had doctor’s appointments and lab appointments and was able to leave the house, unlike before, when she spent all her time indoors watching daytime soaps and talk shows. The doctor gave her a note to the county office, and she was given coupons for milk and tuna and carrots.
“See, we are already reaping the rewards of an American baby,” she told her husband as she brandished the coupons.
They debated what she should do in case the pains started while he was away on campus. He gave her twenty dollars and told her to keep it somewhere safe and to call a cab if the pains began while he was away on campus. She told him that American men held their wives’ hands while they had their babies. He smiled and told her to watch less television.
Now he sat on a chair by the labor room as morbid thoughts ran through his mind. He was more worried about the fact that she could die while having the baby than anything else. The school made international students take out an insurance policy for themselves and their spouses that would cover the cost of taking their bodies home in case they died.
He heard his wife’s cry and then the cry of the baby and a brief silence and then only the cry of the baby. He walked to the door and waited. The doctor came out and beckoned to him; he was frowning slightly.
“What is wrong? Is she dead?” he asked.
“Mother and baby are fine. Please come in, we want you to take a look at something.”
He walked in, his feet feeling as if his shoes were made of heavy steel. He saw that his wife was alive; she looked at him and gave him a small smile.
“He is very dark, just like you,” she said, smiling wanly. What had she expected, that the baby would be white, because they lived among many white people?
“It is very unusual, just take a look at this,” the doctor said, lifting the new baby’s upper lip.
He peered into the little mouth; the baby had a full set of teeth. He grabbed the doctor’s hands; the nurses and attendants were looking up to him like he held the answer and all he needed to do was open his mouth and give them a logical explanation. The father was frightened.
Back in Nigeria, the elders would have consulted the oracle so they could know what this meant. He did not imagine this kind of thing would happen here. He would have been less shocked if the baby had been a curly blond or an albino. He turned to the doctor.
“How did this happen?” he asked.
The doctor gently removed his hands from the father’s and assumed a professional manner.
“Otherwise he is a perfect baby, and very long for a child too. You just might have a basketball player in the family.”
He looked at the doctor and looked at the bloodstained sheets surrounding them and began to weep. His wife too, as if she had been waiting for this cue, began to cry.
“There are options, I mean. We have run a battery of tests and all that, and we still plan to do more, but I just thought I should ask you, since you people are not from the United States and all, is this common where you come from? We were wondering whether it was cultural. No doubt it is a medical mystery. I have heard that in some parts of the world people are born with only two toes; at the university hospital up the hill, an African woman had this lovely baby with six fingers and six toes. I do not mean to embarrass you; I feel you may be able to offer some kind of explanation….”
The doctor trailed off.
He had hardly heard what the doctor said. His mouth felt dry, and he gulped in air, feeling suffocated. The nurses began to clean up. One of the nurses was talking to his wife about breastfeeding. It appeared that everything had once again returned to normal.
The hospital staff were furtive in their dealings with the husband and wife; they could hear people whispering in the large hallway about the strange African baby. The husband was afraid; he told the wife that he had heard on television that the government took away strange babies to secret laboratories in the desert where they put them in glass boxes like tropical butterflies and studied them. While they were talking, a woman with a camera came in. She was smiling.
“Hello, mom and dad. Can I take a picture of the baby?”
“Are you from the newspaper?” the woman asked, clutching the baby tightly to her chest.
“No, actually I work for the hospital. We need the baby’s photograph for our records and our Web site.”
“Do we have to pay?” the m
an asked, regaining his voice.
“No, it is absolutely free,” the female photographer said, and repeated the word “free.”
“What is the baby’s name?” she asked.
“He has no name yet,” the husband said. “In our part of Africa you don’t give a new baby a name until the seventh day.”
“How neat,” the female photographer said and began to position her camera. She touched the baby’s cheeks to get a smile. The baby smiled, showing his teeth; the photographer’s face reddened, and she very nearly dropped the camera.
“Oh my goodness, I never saw—oh my goodness,” she said again and began to snap away feverishly, the popping flashbulb brightening the room and temporarily blinding the husband and wife.
“You’ve got a long one there too,” she said as she detached the flashbulb from her camera and started putting it away.
The husband shared the food the hospital provided for the wife. The wife urged him to eat: “You know I am not home, and there is no one to make your food.”
The husband urged her to eat, telling her that she needed to eat well to breast-feed the baby. The baby began to cry; the woman picked him up and began to breast-feed him.
“Thank God it is producing milk; the nurse told me that for some women it took a couple of days before they began to produce milk.”
“Does he bite you with it?” the man asked.
“No, he is just sucking away. I don’t feel anything. He must be very hungry.”
“Come and take a look,” she said, raising his blanket and pointing at the baby’s stomach. Half a dozen fine lines ran from one side of the tiny stomach to the other.