As they got up to leave, she looked at him and smiled but kept herself from saying thank you because she wanted to leave him with both his surprise and his remorse intact.
Olanna hired a pickup truck and a driver and went to Odenigbo’s house. Ugwu followed her around as she packed books and pointed at things for the driver to pick up.
“Master looks like somebody that is crying every day, mah,” Ugwu said to her in English.
“Put my blender in a carton,” she said. My blender sounded strange; it had always been the blender, unmarked by her ownership.
“Yes, mah.” Ugwu went to the kitchen and came back with a carton. He held it tentatively. “Mah, please forgive Master.”
Olanna looked at him. He had known; he had seen this woman share his master’s bed; he too had betrayed her. “Osiso! Put my blender in the car!”
“Yes, mah.” Ugwu turned to the door.
“Do the guests still come in the evenings?” Olanna asked.
“It’s not like before when you were around, mah.”
“But they still come?”
“Yes.”
“And your master still plays tennis and goes to the staff club?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She did not mean that. She had wanted to hear that Odenigbo could no longer bear to live the life that had been theirs.
When he visited her, she tried not to feel disappointment at how normal he looked. She stood at the door and gave noncommittal answers, resentful of his effortless volubility, of how casually he said, “You know I will never love another woman, nkem,” as if he was certain that, with time, everything would be the same again. She resented, too, the romantic attention of other men. The single men took to stopping by her flat, the married ones to bumping into her outside her department. Their courting upset her because it—and they—assumed that her relationship with Odenigbo was permanently over. “I am not interested,” she told them, and even as she said it, she hoped that it would not get back to Odenigbo because she did not want him to think she was pining. And she did not pine: she added new material to her lectures, cooked long meals, read new books, bought new records. She became secretary of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and after they donated food to the villages she wrote the minutes of their meetings in a notebook. She cultivated zinnias in her front yard and, finally, she cultivated a friendship with her black American neighbor, Edna Whaler.
Edna had a quiet laugh. She taught music and played jazz records a little too loudly and cooked tender pork chops and talked often about the man who had left her a week before their wedding in Montgomery and the uncle who had been lynched when she was a child. “You know what always amazed me?” she would ask Olanna, as if she had not told her only a day previously. “That civilized white folk wore nice dresses and hats and gathered to watch a white man hang a black man from a tree.”
She would laugh her quiet laugh and pat her hair, which had the greasy shine of hot-pressing. At first, they did not talk about Odenigbo. It was refreshing for Olanna to be with somebody who was far removed from the circle of friends she had shared with Odenigbo. Then, once, as Edna sang along to Billie Holiday’s “My Man,” she asked, “Why do you love him?”
Olanna looked up. Her mind was a blank board. “Why do I love him?”
Edna raised her eyebrows, mouthing but not singing Billie Holiday’s words.
“I don’t think love has a reason,” Olanna said.
“Sure it does.”
“I think love comes first and then the reasons follow. When I am with him, I feel that I don’t need anything else.” Olanna’s words surprised her, but the startling truth brought the urge to cry.
Edna was watching her. “You can’t keep lying to yourself that you’re okay.”
“I’m not lying to myself,” Olanna said. Billie Holiday’s plaintively scratchy voice had begun to irritate her. She didn’t know how transparent she was. She thought her frequent laughter was authentic and that Edna had no idea that she cried when she was alone in her flat.
“I’m not the best person to talk to about men, but you need to talk this through with somebody,” Edna said. “Maybe the priest, as payback for all those St. Vincent de Paul charity trips you’ve made?”
Edna laughed and Olanna laughed along, but already she was thinking that perhaps she did need to talk to somebody, somebody neutral who would help her reclaim herself, deal with the stranger she had become. She started to drive to St. Peter’s many times in the next few days but stopped and changed her mind. Finally, on a Monday afternoon, she went, driving quickly, ignoring speed bumps, so that she would not give herself any time to stop. She sat on a wooden bench in Father Damian’s airless office and kept her eyes focused on the filing cabinet labeled LAITY as she talked about Odenigbo.
“I don’t go to the staff club because I don’t want to see him. I’ve lost my interest in tennis. He betrayed and hurt me, and yet it seems as if he’s running my life.”
Father Damian tugged at his collar, adjusted his glasses, and rubbed his nose, and she wondered if he was thinking of something, anything, to do since he had no answers for her.
“I didn’t see you in church last Sunday,” he said finally.
Olanna was disappointed, but he was a priest after all and this had to be his solution: Seek God. She had wanted him to make her feel justified, solidify her right to self-pity, encourage her to occupy a larger portion of the moral high ground. She wanted him to condemn Odenigbo.
“You think I need to go to church more often?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Olanna nodded and brought her bag closer, ready to get up and leave. She should not have come. She should not have expected a round-faced voluntary eunuch in white robes to be in a position to understand how she felt. He was looking at her, his eyes large behind the lenses.
“I also think that you should forgive Odenigbo,” he said, and pulled at his collar as though it was choking him. For a moment Olanna felt contempt for him. What he was saying was too easy, too predictable. She did not need to have come to hear it.
“Okay.” She got up. “Thank you.”
“It’s not for him, you know. It’s for you.”
“What?” He was still sitting, so she looked down to meet his eyes.
“Don’t see it as forgiving him. See it as allowing yourself to be happy. What will you do with the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery?”
Olanna looked at the crucifix above the window, at the face of Christ serene in agony, and said nothing.
Odenigbo arrived very early, before she had had breakfast. She knew that something was wrong even before she unlocked the door and saw his somber face.
“What is it?” she asked, and felt a sharp horror at the hope that sneaked into her mind: that his mother had died.
“Amala is pregnant,” he said. There was a selfless and steely tone to his voice, that of a person delivering bad news to other people while remaining strong on their behalf.
Olanna clutched the door handle. “What?”
“Mama just came to tell me that Amala is pregnant with my child.”
Olanna began to laugh. She laughed and laughed and laughed because the present scene, the past weeks, suddenly seemed fantastical.
“Let me come in,” Odenigbo said. “Please.”
She moved back from the door. “Come in.”
He sat down on the edge of the chair, and she felt as if she had been gumming back the pieces of broken chinaware only to have them shatter all over again; the pain was not in the second shattering but in the realization that trying to put them back together had been of no consequence from the beginning.
“Nkem, please, let’s deal with this together,” he said. “We will do whatever you want. Please let’s do it together.”
Olanna went to the kitchen to turn the kettle off. She came back and sat down opposite him. “You said it happened just once. Just once and she got pregnant? Just once?” She wished she had not raised he
r voice. But it was so implausible, so theatrically implausible, that he would sleep with a woman once in a drunken state and get her pregnant.
“It was just once,” he said. “Just once.”
“I see.” But she did not see at all. The urge came then, to slap his face, because the self-entitled way he stressed once made the act seem inevitable, as if the point was how many times it had happened rather than that it should not have happened at all.
“I told Mama I’ll send Amala to Dr. Okonkwo in Enugu, and she said it would be over her dead body. She said Amala will have the child and she will raise the child herself. There is a young man doing timber work in Ondo that Amala is to marry.” Odenigbo stood up. “Mama planned this from the beginning. I see now how she made sure I was dead drunk before sending Amala to me. I feel as if I’ve been dropped into something I don’t entirely understand.”
Olanna looked at him, from his halo of hair to his slender toes in leather sandals, alarmed that she could feel this burst of dislike for someone she loved. “Nobody dropped you into anything,” she said.
He made to hold her but she shrugged him off and asked him to leave. Later, in the bathroom, she stood in front of the mirror and savagely squeezed her belly with both hands. The pain reminded her of how useless she was; reminded her that a child nestled now in a stranger’s body instead of in hers.
Edna knocked for so long that Olanna had to get up and unlock the door.
“What’s wrong?” Edna asked.
“My grandfather used to say that other people just farted but his own fart always released shit,” Olanna said. She had wanted to sound funny, but her voice was too hoarse, too tear-lined.
“What’s wrong?”
“The girl he slept with is pregnant.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Olanna squinted; what was wrong with her?
“Get ahold of yourself!” Edna said. “You think he’s spending his day crying like you are? When that bastard left me in Montgomery, I tried to kill myself and you know what he was doing? He had gone off and was playing in a band in Louisiana!” Edna patted her hair irritably. “Look at you. You’re the kindest person I know. Look how beautiful you are. Why do you need so much outside of yourself? Why isn’t what you are enough? You’re so damned weak!”
Olanna moved back; the tumultuous crowding of pain and thoughts and anger that shot through her made the words flow out of her mouth with quiet precision. “It is not my fault that your man deserted you, Edna.”
Edna first looked surprised, then disgusted, before she turned and walked out of the flat. Olanna watched her go, sorry to have said what she said. But she would not apologize yet. She would give Edna a day or two. She felt suddenly hungry, bitingly hungry; her insides had been emptied out by her tears. She did not let her leftover jollof rice warm properly but ate it all from the pot, drank two cold bottles of beer, and still did not feel sated. She ate the biscuits in the cupboard and some oranges from the fridge, and then decided to go to Eastern Shop for some wine. She would drink. She would drink as much wine as she could.
The two women standing at the shop entrance, the Indian in the Faculty of Science and the Calabar woman who taught anthropology, smiled and said good afternoon, and she wondered if their covert glances shielded their pity, if they thought she was falling apart and weak.
She was examining wine bottles when Richard came up to her.
“I thought it was you,” he said.
“Hello, Richard.” She glanced at his basket. “I didn’t know you did your own shopping.”
“Harrison has gone to his hometown for a few days,” he said. “How are you? Are you all right?”
She disliked the pity in his eyes. “I’m very well. I can’t decide which of these two to buy.” She gestured to the wine bottles. “Why don’t I buy both and if you’ll share them with me, we can decide which is better. Can you spare an hour? Or do you have to run back to your writing?”
Richard looked taken aback by her cheer. “I would hate to impose, really.”
“Of course you wouldn’t be imposing. Besides, you’ve never visited me”—she paused—“in my flat.”
She would be her normal gracious self and they would drink wine and talk about his book and her new zinnias and Igbo-Ukwu art and the Western Region elections fiasco. And he would go back and tell Odenigbo that she was fine. She was fine.
When they got to her flat, Richard sat upright on the sofa, and she wished he would sit in that relaxed, semi-sprawling way he did in Odenigbo’s house; even the way he held his wineglass was stiff. She sat on the carpeted floor. They toasted Kenya’s independence.
“You really must write about the horrible things the British did in Kenya,” Olanna said. “Didn’t they cut off testicles?”
Richard murmured something and looked away, as if the word testicles had made him shy. Olanna smiled and watched him. “Didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“You should write about it then.” She drank her second glass slowly, raising her head to enjoy the cold liquid flowing down her throat. “Do you have a title for the book?”
“‘The Basket of Hands.’”
“‘The Basket of Hands.’” Olanna tilted her glass and finished her drink. “It sounds macabre.”
“It’s about labor. The good things that were achieved—the railways, for example—but also how labor was exploited and the lengths the colonial enterprise went to.”
“Oh.” Olanna got up and uncorked the second bottle. She bent down to fill her glass first. She felt light, as if it were much easier to carry her own weight, but she was clearheaded; she knew what she wanted to do and what she was doing. Richard’s almost-damp smell filled her nose when she stood before him with the bottle.
“My glass isn’t quite empty,” he said.
“No, it’s not.” She placed the wine bottle on the floor and sat next to him and touched the hair that lay on his skin and thought how fair and soft it was, not assertively brittle like Odenigbo’s, nothing like Odenigbo at all. He looked at her and she wondered if his eyes had really turned gray or if she was imagining it. She touched his face, left her hand resting on his cheek.
“Come, sit on the floor with me,” she said finally.
They sat side by side, their backs resting on the sofa seat. Richard said, in a mumble, “I should leave,” or something that sounded like it. But she knew he would not leave and that when she stretched out on the bristly carpet he would lie next to her. She kissed his lips. He pulled her forcefully close, and then, just as quickly, he let go and moved his face away. She could hear his rapid breathing. She unbuckled his trousers and moved back to pull them down and laughed because they got stuck at his shoes. She took her dress off. He was on top of her and the carpet pricked her naked back and she felt his mouth limply enclose her nipple. It was nothing like Odenigbo’s bites and sucks, nothing like those shocks of pleasure. Richard did not run his tongue over her in that flicking way that made her forget everything; rather, when he kissed her belly, she was aware that he was kissing her belly.
Everything changed when he was inside her. She raised her hips, moving with him, matching his thrusts, and it was as if she was throwing shackles off her wrists, extracting pins from her skin, freeing herself with the loud, loud cries that burst out of her mouth. Afterward, she felt filled with a sense of well-being, with something close to grace.
21
Richard was almost relieved to learn of Sir Winston Churchill’s death. It gave him an opportunity to avoid going to Port Harcourt for the weekend. He could not face Kainene yet.
“You’ll have to lay your awful Churchill joke to rest now, won’t you?” Kainene said on the phone, when he told her that he would be going to Lagos for the memorial at the British High Commission. He laughed and then thought of what it would be like if she found out and left him and he never heard that sardonic voice over the phone.
It was only days ago, but even the memory of Olanna’s flat
was hazy: he had fallen asleep afterward, on her living room floor, and woken up with a dry headache and a keenly uncomfortable sense of his own nudity. She was sitting on the sofa, dressed and silent. He felt awkward, not sure whether they were supposed to talk about what had happened. Finally he turned to leave without saying a word because he did not want what he imagined to be regret on her face to turn into dislike. He had not been chosen; it could have been any man. He had sensed this even while holding her naked, but it had not marred the pleasure he found in her curvy body, her moving with him, her taking as much as she gave. He had never been so firm, never lasted so long as he had with her.
Now, though, he was bereft. His admiration had thrived on her being unattainable, a worship from afar, but now that he had tasted the wine on her tongue, pressed himself so close against her that he too smelled of coconuts, he felt a strange loss. He had lost his fantasy. But what he worried most about losing was Kainene. He was determined that Kainene would never know.
Susan sat next to him at the memorial service, and when parts of a speech delivered by Sir Winston Churchill were played, she clasped her gloved hands together, tightly, and leaned against him. Richard felt tears in his eyes. This was perhaps the only thing they had in common, their admiration for Churchill. Afterward, she asked him to have a drink with her at the Polo Club. She had taken him once before and had said, while they sat by the expanse of green lawn, “Africans have been allowed in for only a few years, but you wouldn’t believe how many come now, and they show such little appreciation, really.”
They were seated at the same spot again, near the whitewashed railing, by a Nigerian waiter in a tight black suit. The club was almost empty, although a polo game was on at the other side. The sounds of eight shouting, swearing men galloping at full speed after a ball filled the air. Susan spoke quietly, full of the dulled grief of mourning a person she had never known. She said how interesting it was that the last commoner to get a state funeral was the Duke of Wellington, as if it was news to him, and how sad it was that some people still didn’t know how much Churchill had done for Britain, and how horrible it was that somebody at the memorial had suggested that his mother had some Red Indian blood. She looked a little more tan than he remembered; he had not seen her since he moved to Nsukka. She became animated after a few glasses of gin and talked about a marvelous film on the royal family that had been screened at the British Council.
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