She was not sure what to make of his thanking her, or of his calling her my gold, 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. Who knows 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 reveling 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 herself she 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 no and 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 weeks away 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, soso gi. You will go back on Saturday. Let me hurry up and make some abacha for you to take.”
&nb
sp; 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 the shiniest 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 New Nigerian and 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 How are 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 sorry before 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.
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