“He has the prime minister behind him,” Olanna said.
“It’s the Sardauna who’s really in charge. The man is ruling this country like his personal Muslim fiefdom.”
“Are we still trying to have a child?”
Behind his lenses, his eyes looked startled. “Of course we are,” he said. “Or aren’t we?”
Olanna said nothing. A foggy sadness overwhelmed her, thinking of what they had allowed to happen between them and yet there was the new excitement of freshness, of a relationship on different terms. She would no longer be alone in her struggle to preserve what they shared; he would join her. His certainty had been rocked.
Ugwu came in to clear the table.
“Get me some brandy, my good man,” Odenigbo said.
“Yes, sah.”
Odenigbo waited for Ugwu to serve the brandy and leave before he said, “I asked Richard to stop coming here.”
“What happened?”
“I saw him on the road near my faculty building, and there was an expression on his face that really annoyed me, so I followed him back to Imoke Street and told him off.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t want to tell me.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Was anybody else there?”
“His houseboy came out.”
They sat on the sofa in the living room. He had no right to harass Richard, to direct his anger at Richard, and yet she understood why he had.
“I never blamed Amala,” she said. “It was to you that I had given my trust and the only way a stranger could tamper with that trust was with your permission. I blamed only you.”
Odenigbo placed his hand on her thigh.
“You should be angry with me, not with Richard,” she said.
He was silent for so long that she thought he was not going to respond and then he said, “I want to be angry with you.”
His defenselessness moved her. She knelt down before him and unbuttoned his shirt to suck the soft-firm flesh of his belly. She felt his intake of breath when she touched his trousers zipper. In her mouth, he was swollen stiff. The faint ache in her lower jaw, the pressure of his widespread hands on her head, excited her, and afterward she said, “Goodness, Ugwu must have seen us.”
He led her to the bedroom. They undressed silently and showered together, pressing against each other in the narrow bathroom and then clinging together in bed, their bodies still wet and their movements slow. She marveled at the comforting compactness of his weight on top of her. His breath smelled of brandy and she wanted to tell him how it was almost like old times again, but she didn’t because she was sure he felt the same way and she did not want to ruin the silence that united them.
She waited until he fell asleep, his arm flung over her, his snoring loud through parted lips, before she got up to call Kainene. She had to make sure that Richard had said nothing to Kainene. She didn’t really think that Odenigbo’s shouting would have rattled him into confessing but she could not be entirely sure.
“Kainene, it’s me,” she said, when Kainene picked up the phone.
“Ejima m,” Kainene said. Olanna could not remember the last time Kainene had called her my twin. It warmed her, as did Kainene’s unchanged voice, the dry-toned drawl that suggested speaking to Olanna was the slightest of bothers, but a bother all the same.
“I wanted to say kedu,” Olanna said.
“I’m well. Do you know what time it is?”
“I didn’t realize it was so late.”
“Are you back with the revolutionary lover?”
“Yes.”
“You should have heard Mum talking about him. He’s given her perfect ammunition this time.”
“He made a mistake,” Olanna said, and then wished she hadn’t because she didn’t want Kainene to think she was excusing Odenigbo.
“Isn’t it against the tenets of socialism, though, impregnating people of the lower classes?” Kainene asked.
“I’ll let you sleep.”
There was a slight pause, before Kainene said, with an amused tone, “Ngwanu. Good night.”
Olanna put the phone down. She should have known that Richard would not tell Kainene; his own relationship with her might not survive it. And perhaps it was best that he would no longer visit in the evenings.
———
Amala had a baby girl. It was a Saturday and Olanna was making banana fritters with Ugwu in the kitchen, and when the doorbell rang she knew right away that a message had come from Mama.
Odenigbo came to the kitchen door, his hands held behind his back. “O mu nwanyi,” he said quietly. “She had a girl. Yesterday.”
Olanna did not look up from the bowl smeared with mashed bananas because she did not want him to see her face. She did not know how it would look, if it could capture the cruel mix of emotions she felt, the desire to cry and slap him and steel herself all at once.
“We should go to Enugu this afternoon to see that everything is fine,” she said briskly, and stood up. “Ugwu, please finish.”
“Yes, mah.” Ugwu was watching her; she felt the responsibility of an actress whose family members expected the best performance.
“Thank you, nkem,” Odenigbo said. He placed his arm around her, but she shrugged it off.
“Let me take a quick bath.”
In the car, they were silent. He looked across at her often, as if he wanted to say something but did not know how to begin. She kept her eyes straight ahead and glanced at him only once, at the tentative way he held the steering wheel. She felt morally superior to him. Perhaps it was unearned and false, to think she was better than he was, but it was the only way she could keep her disparate emotions together, now that his child with a stranger was born.
He finally spoke as he parked in front of the hospital.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
Olanna opened the car door. “About my cousin Arize. She hasn’t even been married a year and she is desperate to get pregnant.”
Odenigbo said nothing. Mama met them at the entrance of the maternity ward. Olanna had expected Mama to dance and look at her with mocking eyes, but the lined face was dour, the smile as she hugged Odenigbo was strained. Chemical hospital smells were thick in the air.
“Mama, kedu?” Olanna asked. She wanted to seem in control, to determine how things would proceed.
“I am well,” Mama said.
“Where is the baby?”
Mama looked surprised by her briskness. “In the newborn ward.”
“Let’s see Amala first,” Olanna said.
Mama led them to a cubicle. The bed was covered in a yellowed sheet and Amala lay on it with her face to the wall. Olanna pulled her eyes away from the slight swell of her belly; it was newly unbearable, the thought that Odenigbo’s baby had been in that body. She focused on the biscuits, glucose tin, and glass of water on the side table.
“Amala, they have come,” Mama said.
“Good afternoon, nno,” Amala said, without turning to face them.
“How are you?” Odenigbo and Olanna asked, almost at the same time.
Amala mumbled a response. Her face was still to the wall. In the silence that followed, Olanna heard quick footfalls on the corridor outside. She had known this was coming for months now, and yet looking at Amala she felt an ashy hollowness. A part of her had hoped this day would never arrive.
“Let’s see the baby,” she said. As she and Odenigbo turned to leave, she noticed that Amala did not turn, did not move, did not do anything to show she had heard.
At the newborn ward a nurse asked them to wait on one of the benches that lined the wall. Olanna could see, through the louvers, the many cots and many crying infants, and she imagined that the nurse would be confused and would bring the wrong baby. But it was the right baby; the full head of softly curled black hair and the dark skin and the widely spaced eyes were unmistakable. Only two days old, and she
looked like Odenigbo.
The nurse made to give Olanna the baby, wrapped in a white woolly blanket, but she gestured to Odenigbo. “Let her father hold her.”
“You know her mother has refused to touch her,” the nurse said, as she handed the baby to Odenigbo.
“What?” Olanna asked.
“She has not touched her at all. We are using a wet nurse.”
Olanna glanced at Odenigbo, holding the baby with his arms outstretched as if he needed some distance. The nurse was about to say something else when a young couple came in and she hurried over to them.
“Mama just told me,” Odenigbo said. “She said Amala won’t hold the baby.”
Olanna said nothing.
“I should go and see to the bill,” he said. He sounded apologetic.
She held out her arms and as soon as he handed her the baby, the high-pitched crying began. From across the room, the nurse and the couple watched and Olanna was certain that they could tell that she did not know what to do with a howling infant in her arms, that she was incapable of getting pregnant.
“Shush, shush, o zugo,” she said, feeling a little theatrical. But the tiny mouth remained open and twisted, and the crying was so shrill she wondered if it hurt the tiny body. Olanna fit her small finger in the baby’s fist. Slowly the crying stopped but the little mouth remained open, showing pink gums, and the round eyes scrunched up and peered at her. Olanna laughed. The nurse walked across.
“Time to take her in,” she said. “How many do you have?”
“I don’t have children,” Olanna said, pleased that the nurse had assumed that she did.
Odenigbo came back and they walked to Amala’s cubicle, where Mama sat by the bedside, holding a covered enamel bowl. “Amala has refused to eat,” she said. “Gwakwa ya. Tell her to eat.”
Olanna sensed Odenigbo’s discomfort before he spoke in a voice that was too loud. “You should eat, Amala.”
Amala mumbled something. Finally she turned her face toward them and Olanna looked at her: a plain village girl curled up on the bed as if she were cringing from one more furious blow from life. She never once looked at Odenigbo. What she must feel for him was an awed fear. Whether or not Mama had told her to go to his room, she had not said no to Odenigbo because she had not even considered that she could say no. Odenigbo made a drunken pass and she submitted willingly and promptly: He was the master, he spoke English, he had a car. It was the way it should be.
“Did you hear what my son said?” Mama asked. “He said you should eat.”
“I heard, Mama.” Amala sat up and took the enamel plate, her eyes focused on the floor. Olanna was watching her. Perhaps it was hate she felt for Odenigbo. How much did one know of the true feelings of those who did not have a voice? Olanna moved closer to Amala, but she was unsure what she wanted to say and so she picked up the tin of glucose, examined it, and placed it back. Mama and Odenigbo had stepped outside.
“We are leaving,” Olanna said.
“Go well,” Amala said.
Olanna wanted to say something to her but she could not find the words, so she patted Amala’s shoulder and left the cubicle. Odenigbo and Mama were talking beside a water tank, for so long that mosquitoes began to bite Olanna as she stood waiting, so she climbed into the car and pressed the horn.
“Sorry,” Odenigbo said, when he got in. He did not say anything about what he and his mother had talked about until they were driving past the campus gates in Nsukka, an hour later. “Mama doesn’t want to keep the baby.”
“She doesn’t want to keep the baby?”
“No.”
Olanna knew why. “She wanted a boy.”
“Yes.” Odenigbo removed a hand from the steering wheel to roll his window farther down. She found a guilty pleasure in the humility he had cloaked himself in since Amala gave birth. “We’ve agreed that the baby will stay with Amala’s people. I’ll go to Abba next week to see them and discuss—”
“We’ll keep her,” Olanna said. She startled herself by how clearly she had articulated the desire to keep the baby and how right it felt. It was as if it was what she had always wanted to do.
Odenigbo turned to her with eyes widened behind his glasses. He was driving so slowly over a speed bump that she feared the car would stall. “Our relationship is the most important thing to me, nkem,” he said quietly. “We have to make the right decision for us.”
“You were not thinking about us when you got her pregnant,” Olanna said, before she could help herself; she hated the malice in her tone, the renewed resentment she felt.
Odenigbo parked the car in the garage. He looked tired. “Let’s think about this.”
“We’ll keep her,” Olanna said firmly.
She could raise a child, his child. She would buy books about motherhood and find a wet nurse and decorate the bedroom. She shifted this way and that in bed that night. She had not felt sorry for the child. Instead, holding that tiny warm body, she had felt a conscious serendipity, a sense that this may not have been planned but had become, the minute it happened, what was meant to be. Her mother did not think so; her mother’s voice over the phone line the next day was grave, the solemn tone that would be used to talk about somebody who had died.
“Nne, you will have your own child soon. It is not right for you to raise the child he had with a village girl he impregnated as soon as you traveled. Raising a child is a very serious thing to undertake, my daughter, but in this case it is not the right thing.”
Olanna held the phone and stared at the flowers on the center table. One of them had fallen off; it was surprising that Ugwu had forgotten to remove it. There was truth in her mother’s words, she knew, and yet she knew, also, that the baby had looked like she had always imagined her and Odenigbo’s child would, with the lush hair and widely spaced eyes and pink gums.
“Her people will give you trouble,” her mother said. “The woman herself will give you trouble.”
“She doesn’t want the child.”
“Then leave it with her people. Send them what is needed but leave the child there.”
Olanna sighed. “Anugo m, I’ll give this more thought.”
She put the phone down and picked it up again and gave the operator Kainene’s number in Port Harcourt. The woman sounded lazy, made her repeat the number a few times and giggled before connecting her.
“How noble of you,” Kainene said when Olanna told her.
“I’m not being noble.”
“Will you adopt her formally?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“What will you tell her?”
“What will I tell her?”
“Yes, when she’s older.”
“The truth: that Amala is her mother. And I’ll have her call me Mummy Olanna or something, so that if Amala ever comes back, she can be Mummy.”
“You’re doing this to please your revolutionary lover.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re always pleasing other people.”
“I’m not doing this for him. This is not his idea.”
“Why are you doing it then?”
“She was so helpless. I felt as if I knew her.”
Kainene said nothing for a while. Olanna pulled at the phone wire.
“I think this is a very brave decision,” Kainene said finally.
Although Olanna heard her clearly, she asked, “What did you say?”
“It’s very brave of you to do this.”
Olanna leaned back on the seat. Kainene’s approval, something she had never felt before, was like a sweetness on her tongue, a surge of ability, a good omen. Suddenly her decision became final; she would bring the baby home.
“Will you come for her baptism?” Olanna asked.
“I still haven’t visited that dusty hell, so yes, maybe I will.”
Olanna hung up, smiling.
Mama brought the baby, wrapped in a brown shawl that had the unpleasant smell of ogiri. She sat in the living room and cooed to the b
aby until Olanna came out. Mama got up and handed the baby over.
“Ngwanu. I will visit again soon,” she said. She seemed in an uncomfortable hurry, as if the whole business was one that she was quick to finish.
After she left, Ugwu examined the baby, his expression slightly worried. “Mama said the baby looks like her mother. It is her mother come back.”
“People just look alike, Ugwu, it doesn’t mean they reincarnate.”
“But they do, mah. All of us, we will come back again.”
Olanna waved him away. “Go and throw this shawl into the dustbin. It smells terrible.”
The baby was crying. Olanna hushed her and bathed her in a small basin and glanced at the clock and worried that the wet nurse, a large woman that Ugwu’s aunty had found, would be late. Later, after the nurse arrived and the baby fed at her breast and fell asleep, Olanna and Odenigbo looked down at her, lying face up in the cot near their bed. Her skin was a radiant brown.
“She has so much hair, like you,” Olanna said.
“You’ll look at her sometimes and hate me.”
Olanna shrugged. She did not want him to think she was doing this for him, as a favor to him, because it was more about herself than it was about him.
“Ugwu said your mother went to a dibia,” she said.
“What?”
“Ugwu thinks all this happened because your mother went to a dibia and his medicine charmed you into sleeping with Amala.”
Odenigbo was silent for a moment. “I suppose it’s the only way he can make sense of it.”
“The medicine should have produced the desired boy, shouldn’t it?” she said. “It is all so irrational.”
“No more irrational than belief in a Christian God you cannot see.”
She was used to his gentle jibes about her social-service faith and she would have responded to say that she was not even sure she believed in a Christian God that could not be seen. But now, with a helpless human being lying in the cot, one so dependent on others that her very existence had to be proof of a higher goodness, things had changed.
“I do believe,” she said. “I believe in a good God.”
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