“I don’t believe in any gods at all.”
“I know. You don’t believe in anything.”
“Love,” he said, looking at her. “I believe in love.”
She did not mean to laugh, but the laughter came out anyway She wanted to say that love, too, was irrational. “We have to think of a name,” she said.
“Mama named her Obiageli.”
“We can’t call her that.” His mother had no right to name a child she had rejected. “We’ll call her Baby for now until we find the perfect name. Kainene suggested Chiamaka. I’ve always loved that name: God is beautiful. Kainene will be her godmother. I have to go and see Father Damian about her baptism.” She would go shopping at Kingsway. She would order a new wig from London. She felt giddy.
Baby stirred and a new wave of fear enveloped Olanna. She looked at the hair shining with Pears oil and wondered if she could really do it, if she could raise a child. She knew it was normal, the way the baby was breathing too fast, as if panting in her sleep, and yet even that worried her.
The first few times she called Kainene that evening, there was no answer. Perhaps Kainene was in Lagos. She called again at night and when Kainene said, “Hello,” she sounded hoarse.
“Ejima m,” Olanna said. “Do you have a cold?”
“You fucked Richard.”
Olanna stood up.
“You’re the good one.” Kainene’s voice was controlled. “The good one shouldn’t fuck her sister’s lover.”
Olanna sank back down on the puff and realized that what she felt was relief. Kainene knew. She would no longer have to worry about Kainene’s finding out. She was free to feel real remorse.
“I should have told you, Kainene,” she said. “It meant nothing.”
“Of course it meant nothing. It was just fucking my lover, after all.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Olanna felt the tears in her eyes. “Kainene, I’m so sorry.”
“Why did you do it?” Kainene sounded frighteningly calm. “You’re the good one and the favorite and the beauty and the Africanist revolutionary who doesn’t like white men, and you simply did not need to fuck him. So why did you?”
Olanna was breathing slowly. “I don’t know, Kainene, it wasn’t something I planned. I am so sorry. It was unforgivable.”
“It was unforgivable,” Kainene said and hung up.
Olanna put down the phone and felt a sharp cracking inside her. She knew her twin well, knew how tightly Kainene held on to hurt.
24
Richard wanted to cane Harrison. It had always appalled him, the thought that some colonial Englishmen flogged elderly black servants. Now, though, he felt like doing just as they had done. He longed to make Harrison lie down on his belly and flog, flog, flog him until the man learned to keep his mouth shut. If only he had not brought Harrison with him to Port Harcourt. But he was spending a whole week and did not want to leave him alone in Nsukka. The first day they arrived, Harrison, as if to justify his visit, cooked a complicated meal: a bean and mushroom soup, a pawpaw medley, chicken in a cream sauce speckled with greens, and a lemon tart as pudding.
“This is excellent, Harrison,” Kainene said, with a teasing sparkle in her eyes. She was in a good mood; she had pulled Richard into her arms after he arrived and mock-danced with him over the polished floor of the living room.
“Thank you, madam.” Harrison bowed.
“And do you cook this in your home?”
Harrison looked wounded. “I am not cooking in my home, madam. My wife is cooking native food.”
“Of course.”
“I am cooking any type of European food, anything my master is eating in his country.”
“You must have difficulty eating native food when you go home then.” Kainene stressed the word native, and Richard held back his laughter.
“Yes, madam.” Harrison bowed again. “But I must manage.”
“This tart tastes better than one I had the last time I was in London.”
“Thank you, madam.” Harrison beamed. “My master is telling me that everybody in Mr. Odenigbo’s house is saying the same thing. I used to make it for my master to take there, but I am not making anything again for Mr. Odenigbo’s house since that time he is shouting on my master. Shouting like madman and the whole street is hearing. The man’s head is not correct.”
Kainene turned to Richard and raised her eyebrows. Richard knocked his glass of water over.
“I will get rag, sah,” Harrison said, and Richard restrained himself from leaping across to strangle him.
“Whatever is Harrison talking about?” Kainene asked, after the water had been wiped up. “The revolutionary shouted at you?”
He could have lied. Even Harrison himself did not know exactly why Odenigbo had driven into the compound that evening and shouted at him. But he did not lie, because he was scared that he would fail at lying and would eventually have to tell her the truth and that way make it all doubly damaging. So he told her everything. He told her about the good white Burgundy he and Olanna drank and how, afterward, he was overwhelmed with regret.
Kainene pushed away her plate and sat with her elbows on the table, her chin lightly supported on her clasped hands. She said nothing for many long minutes. He could not read the expression on her face.
“I hope you won’t say forgive me,” she said, finally. “There is nothing more trite.”
“Please don’t ask me to leave.”
She looked surprised. “Leave? That would be too easy, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m sorry, Kainene.”
Richard felt transparent; she was looking at him but he felt as if she could see the wood carving that hung on the wall behind him. “So you have been lusting after my sister. How unoriginal,” she said.
“Kainene,” he said.
She stood up. “Ikejide!” she called. “Come and clear this place.”
They were leaving the dining room when the phone rang. She ignored it. It rang again and again and finally she went to it. She came back into the bedroom and said, “That was Olanna.”
Richard looked at her, pleaded with his eyes.
“It would be forgivable if it were somebody else. Not my sister,” she said.
“I am so sorry.”
“You should sleep in the guest room.”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
He did not know what she was thinking. It was what frightened him the most, that he had no idea what she was thinking. He patted his pillow and rearranged his blanket and sat up in bed and tried to read. But his mind was too active for his body to be still. He worried that Kainene would call Madu and tell him what had happened, and Madu would laugh and say, “He was a mistake from the beginning, leave him, leave him, leave him.” Finally, before he fell asleep, Molière’s words came to him, strangely comforting: Unbroken happiness is a bore; it should have ups and downs.
Kainene greeted him with a stoic face in the morning.
The rain was heavy on the roof and the overcast sky cast a pallor over the dining room. Kainene sat drinking a cup of tea and reading a newspaper with the light on.
“Harrison is making pancakes,” she said, and turned back to her paper. Richard sat opposite her, unsure of what to do, too guilty even to pour his tea. Her silence and the noises and smells from the kitchen made him feel claustrophobic.
“Kainene,” he said. “Can we speak, please?”
She looked up, and he noticed, first, that her eyes were swollen and raw, and then he saw the wounded rage in them. “We will talk when I want to talk, Richard.”
He looked down, like a child being reprimanded, and felt, again, afraid that she would ask him to get out of her life forever.
The doorbell rang before noon and, when Ikejide came in to say that madam’s sister was at the door, Richard thought that Kainene would ask him to shut the door in Olanna’s face. But she didn’t. She asked Ikejide to serve drinks and went down to the living room and from the top of the stairs where
he stood, Richard tried to hear what was said. He heard Olanna’s tearful voice but could not make out what she was saying. Odenigbo spoke briefly, in a tone that was unusually calm. Then Richard heard Kainene’s voice, clear and crisp. “It is stupid to expect me to forgive this.”
There was a short silence and then the sound of the door being opened. Richard hurried to the window to see Odenigbo’s car backing out, the same blue Opel that had parked in his own compound on Imoke Street before Odenigbo bounded out, a stocky man in well-ironed clothes shouting, “I want you to stay away from my house! Do you understand me? Stay away! Don’t ever come to my house again!” He had stood in front of the veranda and wondered if Odenigbo would punch him. Later, he realized that Odenigbo did not intend to punch him, perhaps did not consider him worthy of a punch, and the thought had depressed him.
“Did you eavesdrop?” Kainene asked, walking into the room. Richard turned away from the window, but she didn’t wait for his response before she added, mildly, “I’d forgotten how much the revolutionary looks like a wrestler, really—but one with finesse.”
“I will never forgive myself if I lose you, Kainene.”
Her face was expressionless. “I took your manuscript from the study this morning and I burned it,” she said.
Richard felt a soar in his chest of emotions he could not name. “The Basket of Hands,” the collection of pages that he was finally confident could become a book, was gone. He could never duplicate the unbridled energy that had come with the words. But it did not matter. What mattered was that by burning his manuscript she had shown him that she would not end the relationship; she would not bother to cause him pain if she was not going to stay. Perhaps he was not a true writer after all. He had read somewhere that, for true writers, nothing was more important than their art, not even love.
6. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died
He writes about the world that remained silent while Biafrans died. He argues that Britain inspired this silence. The arms and advice that Britain gave Nigeria shaped other countries. In the United States, Biafra was “under Britain’s sphere of interest.” In Canada, the prime minister quipped, “Where is Biafra?” The Soviet Union sent technicians and planes to Nigeria, thrilled at the chance to influence Africa without offending America or Britain. And from their white-supremacist positions, South Africa and Rhodesia gloated at further proof that black-run governments were doomed to failure.
Communist China denounced the Anglo-American-Soviet imperialism but did little else to support Biafra. The French sold Biafra some arms but did not give the recognition that Biafra most needed. And many Black African countries feared that an independent Biafra would trigger other secessions and so supported Nigeria.
PART FOUR
The Late Sixties
25
Olanna jumped each time she heard the thunder. She imagined another air raid, bombs rolling out of a plane and exploding in the compound before she and Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu could reach the bunker down the street. Sometimes she imagined the bunker itself collapsing, squashing them all into mud. Odenigbo and some of the neighborhood men had built it in a week; after they dug the pit, as wide as a hall, and after they roofed it with clay-layered palm trunks, he told her, “We’re safe now, nkem. We’re safe.” But the first time he showed her how to climb down the jagged steps, Olanna saw a snake coiled in a corner. Its black skin glistened with silver markings and tiny crickets hopped about and, in the silence of the damp underground that made her think of a grave, she screamed.
Odenigbo bashed the snake with a stick and told her he would make sure the zinc sheet at the entrance of the bunker was more secure. His calmness bewildered her. The tranquil tone he used to confront their new world, their changed circumstances, bewildered her. When the Nigerians changed their currency and Radio Biafra hurriedly announced a new currency too, Olanna stood in the bank line for four hours, dodging flogging men and pushing women, until she exchanged their Nigerian money for the prettier Biafran pounds. Later, during breakfast, she held up the medium-size envelope of notes and said, “All the cash we have.”
Odenigbo looked amused. “We’re both earning money, nkem.”
“This is the second month the directorate has delayed your salary,” she said, and put the tea bag on his saucer in her own cup. “And you can’t call what they pay me at Akwakuma earning money.”
“We’ll get our life back soon, in a free Biafra,” he said, his usual words lined with his usual forceful reassurance, and sipped his tea.
Olanna placed her cup against her cheek, to warm it, to delay the first sip of weak tea made from a reused tea bag. When he stood up and kissed her goodbye, she wondered why he was not frightened by how little they had. Perhaps it was because he did not go to the market himself. He did not notice how a cup of salt cost a shilling more each week and how chickens were chopped into bits that were still too expensive and how nobody sold rice in large bags anymore because nobody could buy them. That night, she was silent as his thrusts became faster. It was the first time she felt detached from him; while he was murmuring in her ear, she was mourning her money in the bank in Lagos.
“Nkem? Are you all right?” he asked, raising himself to look at her.
“Yes.”
He sucked her lower lip before he rolled off and fell asleep. She had never known his snoring to be so rasping. He was tired. The long walk to the Manpower Directorate, the sheer mindlessness of compiling names and addresses day after day, exhausted him, she knew, yet he came home each day with lit-up eyes. He had joined the Agitator Corps; after work, they went into the interior to educate the people. She often imagined him standing in the middle of a gathering of rapt villagers, talking in that sonorous voice about the great nation that Biafra would be. His eyes saw the future. And so she did not tell him that she grieved for the past, different things on different days, her tablecloths with the silver embroidery, her car, Baby’s strawberry cream biscuits. She did not tell him that sometimes when she watched Baby running around with the neighborhood children, so helpless and happy, she wanted to gather Baby in her arms and apologize. Not that Baby would understand.
Ever since Mrs. Muokelu, who taught Elementary One at Akwakuma, had told her about the children forced into a truck by soldiers and returned at night with their palms chafed and bleeding from grinding cassava, she had asked Ugwu never to let Baby out of his sight. But she did not really believe the soldiers would have much use for a child as young as Baby. She worried, instead, about air raids. She had a recurring dream: She forgot about Baby and ran to the bunker and after the bombs had fallen, she tripped on the burnt body of a child with its features so blackened that she could not be certain it was Baby. The dream haunted her. She made Baby practice running to the bunker. She asked Ugwu to practice picking Baby up and running. She taught Baby how to take cover if there was no time for the bunker—to lie flat on her belly, hands wrapped around her head.
Still, she worried that she had not done enough and that the dream portended some negligence of hers that would harm Baby. When, toward the end of the rainy season, Baby began to cough in drawn-out whistles, Olanna felt relief. Something had happened to Baby. If the heavens were fair, wartime misfortunes would be mutually exclusive; since Baby was sick, she could not be harmed in an air raid. A cough was something Olanna could exercise control over, an air raid was not.
She took Baby to Albatross Hospital. Ugwu removed the palm fronds piled on top of Odenigbo’s car, but each time she turned the key, the engine wheezed and died out. Finally Ugwu pushed it before it started. She drove slowly and stepped on the brake when Baby started to cough. At the checkpoint, where a huge tree trunk lay across the road, she told the civil defenders that her child was very sick and they said sorry and did not search the car or her handbag. The dim hospital corridor smelled of urine and penicillin. Women were sitting with babies on their laps, standing with babies on their hips, and their chatter mixed with crying. Olanna remembered Dr. Nwala fr
om the wedding. She had barely noticed him until after the bombing, when he said, “The mud will stain your dress,” and helped her up, Okeoma’s shirt still wrapped around her.
She told the nurses that she was an old colleague of his.
“It’s terribly urgent,” she said, and kept her English accent crisp and her head held high. A nurse showed her into his office promptly. One of the women sitting in the corridor cursed. “Tufiakwa! We have been waiting since dawn! Is it because we don’t talk through our nose like white people?”
Dr. Nwala raised his willowy body from his seat and came around to shake her hand. “Olanna,” he said, looking into her eyes.
“How are you, doctor?”
“We are managing,” he said, and patted Baby’s shoulder. “How are you?”
“Very well. Okeoma visited us last week.”
“Yes, he stayed a day with me.” He was staring at her, but she felt as if he were not listening, as if he were not really there. He looked lost.
“Baby has been coughing for some days now,” Olanna said loudly.
“Oh.” He turned to Baby. He placed the stethoscope on her chest and murmured ndo as she coughed. When he walked over to the cupboard to look through some bottles and packets of medicine, Olanna felt sorry for him and was not sure why. He spent too long looking through so few things.
“I’ll give you a cough syrup, but she needs antibiotics and I’m afraid we’ve run out,” he said, staring at her again, in that odd way that locked his eyes with hers. His expression was filled with melancholy fatigue. Olanna wondered if perhaps he had recently lost a person he loved.
“I’ll write a prescription and you can try one of those people who trade, but it should be somebody reliable, of course.”
“Of course,” Olanna repeated. “I have a friend, Mrs. Muokelu, who can help.”
“Very good.”
“You should come and visit us when you have time,” Olanna said, standing up.
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