“I was reading somewhere that Amnesty World is giving your brother an award,” Father Amadi said. He was nodding slowly, admiringly, and I felt myself go warm all over, with pride, with a desire to be associated with Papa. I wanted to say something, to remind this handsome priest that Papa wasn’t just Aunty Ifeoma’s brother or the Standard’s publisher, that he was my father. I wanted some of the cloudlike warmth in Father Amadi’s eyes to rub off on me, settle on me.
“An award?” Amaka asked, bright-eyed. “Mom, we should at least buy the Standard once in a while so we’ll know what is going on.”
“Or we could ask for free copies to be sent to us, if prides were swallowed,” Obiora said.
“I didn’t even know about the award,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “Not that Eugene would tell me anyway, igasikwa. We can’t even have a conversation. After all, I had to use a pilgrimage to Aokpe to get him to say yes to the children’s visiting us.”
“So you plan to go to Aokpe?” Father Amadi asked.
“I was not really planning to. But I suppose we will have to go now, I will find out the next apparition date.”
“People are making this whole apparition thing up. Didn’t they say Our Lady was appearing at Bishop Shanahan Hospital the other time? And then that she was appearing in Transekulu?” Obiora asked.
“Aokpe is different. It has all the signs of Lourdes,” Amaka said. “Besides, it’s about time Our Lady came to Africa. Don’t you wonder how come she always appears in Europe? She was from the Middle East, after all.”
“What is she now, the Political Virgin?” Obiora asked, and I looked at him again. He was a bold, male version of what I could never have been at fourteen, what I still was not.
Father Amadi laughed. “But she’s appeared in Egypt, Amaka. At least people flocked there, like they are flocking to Aokpe now. O bugodi, like migrating locusts.”
“You don’t sound like you believe, Father.” Amaka was watching him.
“I don’t believe we have to go to Aokpe or anywhere else to find her. She is here, she is within us, leading us to her Son.” He spoke so effortlessly, as if his mouth were a musical instrument that just let sound out when touched, when opened.
“But what about the Thomas inside us, Father? The part that needs to see to believe?” Amaka asked. She had that expression that made me wonder if she was serious or not.
Father Amadi did not respond; instead he made a face, and Amaka laughed, the gap between her teeth wider, more angular, than Aunty Ifeoma’s, as if someone had pried her two front teeth apart with a metal instrument.
After dinner, we all retired to the living room, and Aunty Ifeoma asked Obiora to turn the TV off so we could pray while Father Amadi was here. Chima had fallen asleep on the sofa, and Obiora leaned against him throughout the rosary. Father Amadi led the first decade, and at the end, he started an Igbo praise song. While they sang, I opened my eyes and stared at the wall, at the picture of the family at Chima’s baptism. Next to it was a grainy copy of the pietà, the wooden frame cracked at the corners. I pressed my lips together, biting my lower lip, so my mouth would not join in the singing on its own, so my mouth would not betray me.
We put our rosaries away and sat in the living room eating corn and ube and watching Newsline on television. I looked up to find Father Amadi’s eyes on me, and suddenly I could not lick the ube flesh from the seed. I could not move my tongue, could not swallow. I was too aware of his eyes, too aware that he was looking at me, watching me. “I haven’t seen you laugh or smile today, Kambili,” he said, finally.
I looked down at my corn. I wanted to say I was sorry that I did not smile or laugh, but my words would not come, and for a while even my ears could hear nothing.
“She is shy,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
I muttered a word I knew was nonsense and stood up and walked into the bedroom, making sure to close the door that led to the hallway. Father Amadi’s musical voice echoed in my ears until I fell asleep.
Laughter always rang out in Aunty Ifeoma’s house, and no matter where the laughter came from, it bounced around all the walls, all the rooms. Arguments rose quickly and fell just as quickly. Morning and night prayers were always peppered with songs, Igbo praise songs that usually called for hand clapping. Food had little meat, each person’s piece the width of two fingers pressed close together and the length of half a finger. The flat always sparkled—Amaka scrubbed the floors with a stiff brush, Obiora did the sweeping, Chima plumped up the cushions on the chairs. Everybody took turns washing plates. Aunty Ifeoma included Jaja and me in the plate-washing schedule, and after I washed the garri-encrusted lunch plates, Amaka picked them off the tray where I had placed them to dry and soaked them in water. “Is this how you wash plates in your house?” she asked. “Or is plate washing not included in your fancy schedule?”
I stood there, staring at her, wishing Aunty Ifeoma were there to speak for me. Amaka glared at me for a moment longer and then walked away. She said nothing else to me until her friends came over that afternoon, when Aunty Ifeoma and Jaja were in the garden and the boys were playing football out front. “Kambili, these are my friends from school,” she said, casually.
The two girls said hello, and I smiled. They had hair as short as Amaka’s, wore shiny lipstick and trousers so tight I knew they would walk differently if they were wearing something more comfortable. I watched them examine themselves in the mirror, pore over an American magazine with a brown-skinned, honey-haired woman on the cover, and talk about a math teacher who didn’t know the answers to his own tests, a girl who wore a miniskirt to evening lesson even though she had fat yams on her legs, and a boy who was fine. “Fine, sha, not attractive,” one of them stressed. She wore a dangling earring on one ear and a shiny, false gold stud on the other.
“Is it all your hair?” the other one asked, and I did not realize she was referring to me, until Amaka said, “Kambili!”
I wanted to tell the girl that it was all my hair, that there were no attachments, but the words would not come. I knew they were still talking about hair, how long and thick mine looked. I wanted to talk with them, to laugh with them so much that I would start to jump up and down in one place the way they did, but my lips held stubbornly together. I did not want to stutter, so I started to cough and then ran out and into the toilet.
That evening, as I set the table for dinner, I heard Amaka say, “Are you sure they’re not abnormal, mom? Kambili just behaved like an atulu when my friends came.” Amaka had neither raised nor lowered her voice, and it drifted clearly in from the kitchen.
“Amaka, you are free to have your opinions, but you must treat your cousin with respect. Do you understand that?” Aunty Ifeoma replied in English, her voice firm.
“I was just asking a question.”
“Showing respect is not calling your cousin a sheep.”
“She behaves funny. Even Jaja is strange. Something is not right with them.”
My hand shook as I tried to straighten a piece of the table surface that had cracked and curled tightly around itself. A line of tiny ginger-colored ants marched near it. Aunty Ifeoma had told me not to bother the ants, since they hurt no one and you could never really get rid of them anyway; they were as old as the building itself.
I looked across at the living room to see if Jaja had heard Amaka over the sound of the television. But he was engrossed in the images on the screen, lying on the floor next to Obiora. He looked as though he had been lying there watching TV his whole life. It was the same way he looked in Aunty Ifeoma’s garden the next morning, as though it were something he had been doing for a long time rather than the few days we had been here.
Aunty Ifeoma asked me to join them in the garden, to carefully pick out leaves that had started to wilt on the croton plants.
“Aren’t they pretty?” Aunty Ifeoma asked. “Look at that, green and pink and yellow on the leaves. Like God playing with paint brushes.”
“Yes,” I said. Aunty Ifeoma was looking at me,
and I wondered if she was thinking that my voice lacked the enthusiasm of Jaja’s when she talked about her garden.
Some of the children from the flats upstairs came down and stood watching us. They were about five, all a blur of food-stained clothes and fast words. They talked to one another and to Aunty Ifeoma, and then one of them turned and asked me what school I went to in Enugu. I stuttered and gripped hard at some fresh croton leaves, pulling them off, watching the viscous liquid drip from their stalks. After that, Aunty Ifeoma said I could go inside if I wanted to. She told me about a book she had just finished reading: it was on the table in her room and she was sure I would like it. So I went in her room and took a book with a faded blue cover, called Equiano’s Travels, or the Life of Gustavus Vassa the African.
I sat on the verandah, with the book on my lap, watching one of the children chase a butterfly in the front yard. The butterfly dipped up and down, and its black-spotted yellow wings flapped slowly, as if teasing the little girl. The girl’s hair, held atop her head like a ball of wool, bounced as she ran. Obiora was sitting on the verandah, too, but outside the shade, so he squinted behind his thick glasses to keep the sun out of his eyes. He was watching the girl and the butterfly while repeating the name Jaja slowly, placing the stress on both syllables, then on the first, then on the second. “Aja means sand or oracle, but Jaja? What kind of name is Jaja? It is not Igbo,” he finally pronounced.
“My name is actually Chukwuka. Jaja is a childhood nickname that stuck.” Jaja was on his knees. He wore only a pair of denim shorts, and the muscles on his back rippled, smooth and long like the ridges he weeded.
“When he was a baby, all he could say was Ja-Ja. So everybody called him Jaja,” Aunty Ifeoma said. She turned to Jaja and added, “I told your mother that it was an appropriate nickname, that you would take after Jaja of Opobo.”
“Jaja of Opobo? The stubborn king?” Obiora asked.
“Defiant,” Aunt Ifeoma said. “He was a defiant king.”
“What does defiant mean, Mommy? What did the king do?” Chima asked. He was in the garden, doing something on his knees, too, although Aunty Ifeoma often told him “Kwusia, don’t do that” or “If you do that again, I will give you a knock.”
“He was king of the Opobo people,” Aunty Ifeoma said, “and when the British came, he refused to let them control all the trade. He did not sell his soul for a bit of gunpowder like the other kings did, so the British exiled him to the West Indies. He never returned to Opobo.” Aunt Ifeoma continued watering the row of tiny banana-colored flowers that clustered in bunches. She held a metal watering can in her hand, tilting it to let the water out through the nozzle. She had already used up the biggest container of water we fetched in the morning.
“That’s sad. Maybe he should not have been defiant,” Chima said. He moved closer to squat next to Jaja. I wondered if he understood what “exiled” and “sold his soul for a bit of gunpowder” meant. Aunty Ifeoma spoke as though she expected that he did.
“Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “Defiance is like marijuana—it is not a bad thing when it is used right.”
The solemn tone, more than the sacrilege of what she said, made me look up. Her conversation was with Chima and Obiora, but she was looking at Jaja.
Obiora smiled and pushed his glasses up. “Jaja of Opobo was no saint, anyway. He sold his people into slavery, and besides, the British won in the end. So much for the defiance.”
“The British won the war, but they lost many battles,” Jaja said, and my eyes skipped over the rows of text on the page. How did Jaja do it? How could he speak so easily? Didn’t he have the same bubbles of air in his throat, keeping the words back, letting out only a stutter at best? I looked up to watch him, to watch his dark skin covered with beads of sweat that gleamed in the sun. I had never seen his arm move this way, never seen this piercing light in his eyes that appeared when he was in Aunty Ifeoma’s garden.
“What happened to your little finger?” Chima asked. Jaja looked down, too, as if he were just then noticing the gnarled finger, deformed like a dried stick.
“Jaja had an accident,” Aunty Ifeoma said, quickly. “Chima, go and get me the container of water. It is almost empty, so you can carry it.”
I stared at Aunty Ifeoma, and when her eyes met mine, I looked away. She knew. She knew what had happened to Jaja’s finger.
When he was ten, he had missed two questions on his catechism test and was not named the best in his First Holy Communion class. Papa took him upstairs and locked the door. Jaja, in tears, came out supporting his left hand with his right, and Papa drove him to St. Agnes hospital. Papa was crying, too, as he carried Jaja in his arms like a baby all the way to the car. Later, Jaja told me that Papa had avoided his right hand because it is the hand he writes with.
“This is about to bloom,” Aunt Ifeoma said to Jaja, pointing at an ixora bud. “Another two days and it will open its eyes to the world.”
“I probably won’t see it,” Jaja said. “We’ll be gone by then.”
Aunty Ifeoma smiled. “Don’t they say that time flies when you are happy?”
The phone rang then, and Aunty Ifeoma asked me to pick it up, since I was closest to the front door. It was Mama. I knew something was wrong right away, because it was Papa who always placed the call. Besides, they did not call in the afternoon.
“Your father is not here,” Mama said. Her voice sounded nasal, as if she needed to blow her nose. “He had to leave this morning.”
“Is he well?” I asked.
“He is well.” She paused, and I could hear her talking to Sisi. Then she came back to the phone and said that yesterday soldiers had gone to the small, nondescript rooms that served as the offices of the Standard. Nobody knew how they had found out where the offices were. There were so many soldiers that the people on that street told Papa it reminded them of pictures from the front during the civil war. The soldiers took every copy of the entire press run, smashed furniture and printers, locked the offices, took the keys, and boarded up the doors and windows. Ade Coker was in custody again.
“I worry about your father,” Mama said, before I gave the phone to Jaja. “I worry about your father.”
Aunty Ifeoma seemed worried, too, because after the phone call, she went out and bought a copy of the Guardian although she never bought newspapers. They cost too much; she read them at the paper stands when she had the time. The story of soldiers closing down the Standard was tucked into the middle page, next to advertisements for women’s shoes imported from Italy.
“Uncle Eugene would have run it on the front page of his paper,” Amaka said, and I wondered if the inflection in her voice was pride.
When Papa called later, he asked to talk to Aunty Ifeoma first. Afterward he talked to Jaja and then me. He said he was fine, that everything was fine, that he missed us and loved us very much. He did not mention the Standard or what had happened to the editorial offices. After we hung up, Aunty Ifeoma said, “Your father wants you to stay here a few days longer,” and Jaja smiled so widely I saw dimples I did not even know he had.
THE PHONE RANG EARLY, before any of us had taken a morning bath. My mouth went dry because I was sure it was about Papa, that something had happened to him. The soldiers had gone to the house; they had shot him to make sure he would never publish anything again. I waited for Aunty Ifeoma to call Jaja and me, though I tightened my fist and willed her not to. She stayed for a few moments on the phone, and when she came out, she looked downcast. Her laughter did not ring out as often for the rest of the day, and she snapped at Chima when he wanted to sit next to her, saying, “Leave me alone! Nekwa anya, you are no longer a baby.” One half of her lower lip disappeared into her mouth, and her jaw quivered as she chewed.
Father Amadi dropped by during dinner. He pulled a chair from the living room and sat, sipping water from a glass Amaka had brought him.
“I played football at the stadium and afterward I took some of th
e boys to town, for akara and fried yams,” he said, when Amaka asked what he had done today.
“Why didn’t you tell me you would be playing today, Father?” Obiora asked.
“I’m sorry I forgot to, but I will pick you and Jaja up next weekend so we can play.” The music of his voice lowered in apology. I could not help staring at him, because his voice pulled me and because I did not know a priest could play football. It seemed so ungodly, so common. Father Amadi’s eyes met mine across the table, and I looked away quickly.
“Perhaps Kambili will play with us also,” he said. Hearing my name in his voice, in that melody, made me feel taut inside. I filled my mouth, as if I might have said something but for the food I had to chew. “Amaka used to play with us when I first came here, but now she spends her time listening to African music and dreaming unrealistic dreams.”
My cousins laughed, Amaka the loudest, and Jaja smiled. But Aunty Ifeoma did not laugh. She chewed her food in little bites; her eyes were distant.
“Ifeoma, is something wrong?” Father Amadi asked.
She shook her head and sighed, as though she had just realized that she was not alone. “I got a message from home today. Our father is sick. They said he did not rise well three mornings in a row. I want to bring him here.”
“Ezi okwu?” Father Amadi’s brows furrowed. “Yes, you should bring him here.”
“Papa-Nnukwu is sick?” Amaka asked shrilly. “Mom, when did you know?”
“This morning, his neighbor called. She is a good woman, Nwamgba, she went all the way to Ukpo to find a phone.”
“You should have told us!” Amaka shouted.
“O gini? Have I not told you now?” Aunty Ifeoma snapped.
“When can we go to Abba, Mom?” Obiora asked, calmly, and at that moment, as in many others I had observed since we came, he seemed so much older than Jaja.
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