“Yes, Mama.”
“I will not let this witch control him. She will not succeed. I will consult the dibia Nwafor Agbada when I return home; the man’s medicine is famous in our parts.”
Ugwu stopped. He knew many stories of people who had used medicine from the dibia: the childless first wife who tied up the second wife’s womb, the woman who made a neighbor’s prosperous son go mad, the man who killed his brother because of a land quarrel. Perhaps Master’s mother would tie up Olanna’s womb or cripple her or, most frightening of all, kill her.
“I am coming, Mama. My Master sent me to the kiosk,” Ugwu said, and hurried out through the back door before she said anything. He had to tell Master. He had been to Master’s office only once, driven in Olanna’s car when she stopped by to pick up something, but he was sure he could find it. It was near the zoo and his class had visited the zoo recently, walking in a single file led by Mrs. Oguike, and he had brought up the rear because he was the tallest.
At the corner of Mbanefo Street, he saw Master’s car coming toward him. It stopped.
“This isn’t the way to the market, is it, my good man?” Master asked.
“No, sah. I was coming to your office.”
“Has my mother arrived?”
“Yes, sah. Sah, something happened.”
“What?”
Ugwu told Master about the afternoon, quickly recounting the words of both women, and finished with what was the most horrible of all: “Mama said she will go to the dibia, sah.”
“What rubbish,” Master said. “Ngwa, get into the car. You might as well drive back home with me.”
Ugwu was shocked that Master was not shocked, did not understand the gravity of the situation, and so he added, “It was very bad, sah. Very bad. Mama nearly slapped my madam.”
“What? She slapped Olanna?” Master asked.
“No, sah.” Ugwu paused; perhaps he had gone too far with the suggestion. “But it looked as if she wanted to slap my madam.”
Master’s face relaxed. “The woman has never been very reasonable, at any rate,” he said, in English, shaking his head. “Get in, let’s go.”
But Ugwu did not want to get into the car. He wanted Master to turn around and go to Olanna’s flat right away. His life was organized, secure, and Master’s mother would have to be stopped from disrupting things; the first step was for Master to go and placate Olanna.
“Get into the car,” Master said again, reaching across the front seat to make sure the door was unlocked.
“But, sah. I thought you are going to see my madam.”
“Get in, you ignoramus!”
Ugwu opened the door and climbed in, and Master drove back to Odim Street.
5
Olanna looked at Odenigbo through the glass for a while before she opened the door. She closed her eyes as he walked in, as if doing so would deny her the pleasure that the scent of his Old Spice always brought. He was dressed for tennis in the white shorts she had often teased him were too tight around his buttocks.
“I was talking to my mother or I would have come earlier,” he said. He pressed his lips to hers and gestured to the old boubou she was wearing. “Aren’t you coming to the club?”
“I was cooking.”
“Ugwu told me what happened. I’m so sorry my mother acted that way.”
“I just had to leave … your house.” Olanna faltered. She had wanted to say our house.
“You didn’t have to, nkem. You should have ignored her, really.” He placed a copy of Drum magazine down on the table and began pacing the room. “I’ve decided to talk to Dr. Okoro about the Labor Strike. It’s unacceptable that Balewa and his cronies should completely reject their demands. Just unacceptable. We have to show support. We can’t allow ourselves to become disconnected.”
“Your mother made a scene.”
“You’re angry.” Odenigbo looked puzzled. He sat down in the armchair, and for the first time she noticed how much space there was between the furniture, how sparse her flat was, how unlived in. Her things were in his house; her favorite books were in the shelves in his study. “Nkem, I didn’t know you’d take this so seriously. You can see that my mother doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s just a village woman. She’s trying to make her way in a new world with skills that are better suited for the old one.” Odenigbo got up and moved closer to take her in his arms, but Olanna turned and walked into the kitchen.
“You never talk about your mother,” she said. “You’ve never asked me to come to Abba with you to visit her.”
“Oh, stop it, nkem. It’s not as if I go that often to see her, and I did ask you the last time but you were going to Lagos.”
She walked over to the stove and ran a sponge on the warm surface, over and over, her back to Odenigbo. She felt as if she had somehow failed him and herself by allowing his mother’s behavior to upset her. She should be above it; she should shrug it off as the ranting of a village woman; she should not keep thinking of all the retorts she could have made instead of just standing mutely in that kitchen. But she was upset, and made even more so by Odenigbo’s expression, as if he could not believe she was not quite as high-minded as he had thought. He was making her feel small and absurdly petulant and, worse yet, she suspected he was right. She always suspected he was right. For a brief irrational moment, she wished she could walk away from him. Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.
“What did you cook?” Odenigbo asked.
“Rice.” She rinsed the sponge and put it away. “Aren’t you going to play tennis?”
“I thought you would come.”
“I don’t feel up to it.” Olanna turned around. “Why is your mother’s behavior acceptable because she’s a village woman? I know village women who do not behave this way.”
“Nkem, my mother’s entire life is in Abba. Do you know what a small bush village that is? Of course she will feel threatened by an educated woman living with her son. Of course you have to be a witch. That is the only way she can understand it. The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.”
“Did you talk to her about this?”
“I didn’t see the point. Look, I want to catch Dr. Okoro at the club. Let’s discuss this when I get back. I’ll stay here tonight.”
She paused as she washed her hands. She wanted him to ask her to come back with him to the house, wanted him to say he would tell his mother off in front of her, for her. But here he was deciding to stay at her flat, like a frightened little boy hiding from his mother.
“No,” she said.
“What?”
“I said no.” She walked into the living room without drying her hands. The flat seemed too small. “What is wrong with you, Olanna?”
She shook her head. She would not let him make her feel that there was something wrong with her. It was her right to be upset, her right to choose not to brush her humiliation aside in the name of an overexalted intellectualism, and she would claim that right. “Go.” She gestured toward the door. “Go and play your tennis and don’t come back here.”
She watched him get up and leave. He banged the door. They had never had a quarrel; he had never been impatient with dissent from her as he was with others. Or it may simply be that he humored her and did not think much of her opinions in the first place. She felt dizzy. She sat alone at her bare dining table—even her table mats were in his house—and ate the rice. It tasted bland, nothing like Ugwu’s. She turned the radio on. She thought she heard rustles in the ceiling. She got up to go visit her neighbor Edna Whaler; she had always wanted to get to know the pretty black American woman who sometimes brought her cloth-covered plates of American biscuits. But she changed her mind at the door and didn’
t step out. After she left the half-eaten rice in the kitchen, she walked around the flat, picking up old newspapers and then putting them down. Finally, she went to the phone and waited for the operator.
“Give me the number quick, I have other things to do,” the lazy nasal voice said.
Olanna was used to unprofessional and inept operators, but this was the rudest she had experienced.
“Haba, I will cut this line if you keep wasting my time,” the operator said.
Olanna sighed and slowly recited Kainene’s number.
Kainene sounded sleepy when she picked up the phone. “Olanna? Did something happen?”
Olanna felt a rush of melancholy; her twin sister thought something had to have happened for her to call. “Nothing happened. I just wanted to say kedu, to find out how you are.”
“How shocking.” Kainene yawned. “How’s Nsukka? How’s your revolutionary lover?”
“Odenigbo is fine. Nsukka is fine.”
“Richard seems taken by it. He even seems taken by your revolutionary.”
“You should come and visit.”
“Richard and I prefer to meet here in Port Harcourt. That tiny box they gave him for a house is not exactly suitable.”
Olanna wanted to tell Kainene that she meant visit her, her and Odenigbo. But of course Kainene understood what she meant and had simply chosen to misunderstand.
“I’m going to London next month,” she said instead. “Maybe we could go together.”
“I have too much to do here. No holiday for me yet.”
“Why don’t we talk anymore, Kainene?”
“What a question.” Kainene sounded amused and Olanna imagined that mocking smile pulling up one side of her mouth.
“I just want to know why we don’t talk anymore,” Olanna said. Kainene did not respond. A static whining came over the telephone line. They were silent for so long that Olanna felt she had to apologize. “I shouldn’t keep you,” she said.
“Are you coming to Daddy’s dinner party next week?” Kainene asked.
“No.”
“I should have guessed. Too opulent for your abstemious revolutionary and yourself, I take it?”
“I shouldn’t keep you,” Olanna repeated, and placed the phone down. She picked it up again, and was about to give the operator her mother’s number before she dropped it back. She wished there was somebody she could lean against; then she wished she was different, the sort of person who did not need to lean on others, like Kainene. She pulled at the phone wire to untangle it. Her parents had insisted on installing a phone in her flat, as if they did not hear her say that she would practically be living with Odenigbo. She had protested, but only mildly, the same limp no with which she greeted the frequent deposits to her bank account and the new Impala with the soft upholstery.
Although she knew Mohammed was abroad, she gave the operator his number in Kano; the nasal voice said, “You are phoning too much today!” before connecting her. She held on to the receiver long after there was no response. Rustling sounds came from the ceiling again. She sat on the cold floor and leaned her head against the wall to see if it would feel less light, less unmoored. Odenigbo’s mother’s visit had ripped a hole in her safe mesh of feathers, startled her, snatched something away from her. She felt one step away from where she should be. She felt as if she had left her pearls lying loose for too long and it was time to gather them and guard them more carefully. The thought came to her slowly: She wanted to have Odenigbo’s child. They had never really discussed children. She once told him that she did not have that fabled female longing to give birth, and her mother had called her abnormal until Kainene said she didn’t have it either. He laughed and said that to bring a child into this unjust world was an act of a blasé bourgeoisie anyway. She had never forgotten that expression: childbirth as an act of blasé bourgeoisie—how funny, how untrue it was. Just as she had never seriously thought of having a child until now; the longing in the lower part of her belly was sudden and searing and new. She wanted the solid weight of a child, his child, in her body.
When the doorbell rang that evening as she climbed out of the bathtub, she went to the door wrapped in a towel. Odenigbo was holding a newspaper-wrapped package of suya; she could smell the smoky spiciness from where she stood.
“Are you still angry?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Get dressed and we’ll go back together. I will talk to my mother.”
He smelled of brandy. He came inside and placed the suya on the table, and in his bloodshot eyes she glimpsed the vulnerability that hid itself so well underneath his voluble confidence. He could be afraid, after all. She rested her face against his neck as he hugged her and said to him, quietly, “No, you don’t have to do that. Stay here.”
———
After his mother left, Olanna went back to Odenigbo’s house. Ugwu said, “Sorry, mah,” as if he were somehow responsible for Mama’s behavior. Then he fiddled with his apron pocket and said, “I saw a black cat yesterday night, after Mama and Amala left.”
“A black cat?”
“Yes, mah. Near the garage.” He paused. “A black cat means evil.”
“I see.”
“Mama said she would go to the dibia in the village.”
“You think the dibia has sent the black cat to bite us?” Olanna was laughing.
“No, mah.” Ugwu folded his arms forlornly. “It happened in my village, mah. A junior wife went to the dibia and got medicine to kill the senior wife, and the night before the senior wife died a black cat came to the front of her hut.”
“So Mama will use the dibia’s medicine and kill me?” Olanna asked.
“She wants to divide you and Master, mah.”
His solemnness touched her. “I’m sure it was just the neighbor’s cat, Ugwu,” she said. “Your master’s mother can’t use any medicine to divide us. Nothing can divide us.”
She watched him go back to the kitchen, thinking of what she had said. Nothing can divide us. Of course Odenigbo’s mother’s medicine from the dibia—indeed, all supernatural fetishes—meant nothing to her, but she worried again about her future with Odenigbo. She wanted certainty. She longed for a sign, a rainbow, to signify security. Still she was relieved to ease back into her life, their life, of teaching and tennis and friends that filled the living room. Because they came in the late evenings, she was surprised to hear the doorbell ring one afternoon, a week later, when Odenigbo was still at a lecture. It was Richard.
“Hello,” she said, letting him in. He was very tall; she had to tilt her head to look at his face, to see his eyes that were the blue color of a still sea and his hair that fell across his forehead.
“I just wanted to leave this for Odenigbo,” he said, handing Olanna a book. She loved the way he pronounced Odenigbo’s name, stressing it so earnestly. He was avoiding her eyes.
“Won’t you sit down?” she asked.
“I’m in a bit of a hurry, unfortunately. I have to catch the train.”
“Are you going to Port Harcourt to see Kainene?” Olanna wondered why she had asked. It was obvious enough.
“Yes. I go every weekend.”
“Say hello to her for me.”
“I will.”
“I talked to her last week.”
“Yes. She mentioned it.” Richard still stood there. He glanced at her and quickly looked away, and she saw the redness creep up his face. She had seen that look too many times not to know that he found her beautiful.
“How is the book coming along?” she asked.
“Quite well. It’s incredible, really, how well-crafted some of the ornaments are, and they were clearly intended to be art; it wasn’t an accident at all… I mustn’t bore you.”
“No, you’re not.” Olanna smiled. She liked his shyness. She didn’t want him to leave just yet. “Would you like Ugwu to bring you some chin-chin? They’re fantastic; he made them this morning.”
“No, thank you. I should be on my way.” But
he did not turn to leave. He pushed his hair away from his face only to have it fall back again.
“Okay. Well, have a safe trip.”
“Thank you.” He still stood there.
“Are you driving? No, you’re not, I remember. You’ll take the train.” She laughed an awkward laugh.
“Yes, I’m taking the train.”
“Have a safe trip.”
“Yes. All right then.”
Olanna watched him leave, and long after his car had reversed out of the compound, she stood at the door, watching a bird with a blood-red breast, perched on the lawn.
In the morning, Odenigbo woke her up by taking her finger in his mouth. She opened her eyes; she could see the smoky light of dawn through the curtains.
“If you won’t marry me, nkem, then let’s have a child,” he said.
Her finger muffled his voice, so she pulled her hand away and sat up to stare at him, his wide chest, his sleep-swollen eyes, to make sure she had heard him properly.
“Let’s have a child,” he said again. “A little girl just like you, and we will call her Obianuju because she will complete us.”
Olanna had wanted to give the scent of his mother’s visit some time to diffuse before telling him she wanted to have a child, and yet here he was, voicing her own desire before she could. She looked at him in wonder. This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles. “Or a little boy,” she said finally.
Odenigbo pulled her down and they lay side by side, not touching. She could hear the raspy caw-caw-caw of the blackbirds that ate the pawpaws in the garden.
“Let’s have Ugwu bring us breakfast in bed,” he said. “Or is this one of your Sundays of faith?” He was smiling his gently indulgent smile, and she reached out and traced his lower lip with the slight fuzz underneath. He liked to tease her about religion’s not being a social service, because she went to church only for St. Vincent de Paul meetings, when she took Ugwu with her for the drive through dirt paths in nearby villages to give away yams and rice and old clothes.
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