by E. C. Osondu
“Fuebi, hmmm, you must not let your life be like mine. Look at me, stained and faded like an old piece of cloth. How much do we make from all this suffering? From morning till night, fetch water, grind beans, grind pepper, cut onions, haul wood, build a fire, blow the fire, sit by hot fire and hot oil, all for what? All for a profit of a half a penny, all for penny and half penny. Your life must not be like mine. You must not allow suffering to steal your beauty the way it stole mine. Any slightest opportunity you get you better start running far away from here, far away from all this suffering. Suffering and beauty are not friends, and never will be.”
“You are too hard on yourself,” Fuebi would say to her.
“What do you know? You are not a child anymore. You had better open your ears and listen very well to what I am telling you. The day you have the opportunity to run away to where suffering cannot reach you with her evil claws, run and run very far away.”
“Things can only get better, don’t worry.”
“Before our own very eyes things are getting worse. Look at me, eh, just look at me. If not for the death of your father, I know this is not where I would be. Death has done its worst. The good die young.”
And then, one evening the answer to her prayers. Fide, the patent medicine dealer, pulled up in his car and asked to be sold some akara. Fuebi remembered the song that wafted from the car’s speakers—it was “You’re My Best Friend” by Don Williams. She would learn later that this was the only kind of music that Fide played. Fide called it sentimental music.
“I don’t play with my sentimental songs,” he would say to her when they got to know each other better. Fuebi would never forget this song because it was also the song to which he would insist on fucking her without protection, insisting he wanted her skin to skin, which would eventually lead to her pregnancy. But all that was in the future. This night he wanted akara. Fuebi’s mother wrapped a generous quantity of akara for him and told Fuebi to go give it to the man in the car. She could smell the air freshener in the car from where she sat. By the light of the car, Fide looked at the beautiful gap-toothed face handing him the akara and he smiled and switched off the engine of the car. He brought out his wallet, protuberant, bloated, and overloaded almost to spilling with cash. He searched for the largest denomination and gave it to her. She went to bring back his change.
“Keep the change,” he said to her, and winked, and then he smiled at her and drove away slowly, trailed by the smell of his air freshener and the voice of Don Williams.
When Fuebi showed the change the man in the car had left for her to her mother, she stood up and danced wordlessly around the fire and the pot of boiling oil on the fire. After dancing she poured water to put out the fire and said they should go home.
“What about the customers who want to buy akara?” Fuebi asked.
“Give the akara in the basket to them but do not collect any money from them,” she said.
“But why are we closing so early tonight?” Fuebi asked.
“We are closing early because what I saw while sitting on this chair that I sit on every day to fry akara is indeed very marvelous in my sight,” she said, and broke into a Pentecostal church song.
“And what did you see?”
“You mean you did not see how that man was looking at you?”
“He was smiling and he told me to keep the change.”
“I can tell you today that things are not going to be the same for us again. Soon, you will see, I will no longer need to roast myself on the fire in the name of frying akara,” she said, and began to pack her things. “Mark my words, you’ll see, this is not the last time we will see him.”
She was right. The next evening he was back. His car stereo was playing Don Williams. He shut off the engine of the car and asked for akara. Fuebi went to hand the akara to him. Again the fat wallet appeared. Again, he handed her the fat denomination. Again, he asked her to keep the change.
That night when they got home, Fuebi was given a lesson by her mother.
“It is true you are young but you were not born yester night. The ripe orange fruit that refuses to fall off the tree to be eaten by a good man soon becomes food for the birds. That man likes you. He has shown that he likes you. Now, it is your turn to reciprocate, show him that you like him before he turns away. Men do not have lots of patience and are not good at waiting.”
The next evening Fuebi not only took the akara to Fide, but she also sat in the car with him and asked him how his day went.
“Fine, my day always goes well. Honor to Jesus, adoration to Mary,” he said, fingering the rosary that dangled from the rearview mirror.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“I do buying and selling.”
“What do you sell?”
“I sell medicines, capsules, tablets. You know, like Panadol.”
“That is nice,” she responded.
“Do you take medicines?”
“I never fall sick,” Fuebi said.
“I will come and take you out tomorrow evening.”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my mother.”
“Don’t worry. She is a good woman. I am sure she will say yes. Give her this envelope. Tell her it is from me.”
Fuebi felt the envelope. It was filled with money. As she made to alight from the car, Fide drew her closer.
“Please stop, people are watching us.”
“That is true. I will take you to someplace with fewer eyes next time.”
When Fuebi handed the envelope to her mother, she sang and danced and said that indeed there was a good God in heaven who answered the prayers of the poor and sent them kind people to save them.
The next day Fuebi dressed up in her best, which was not much, and waited for Fide near where her mother sold akara. He pulled up, looked around, and told her to get into the car quickly. His manner was abrupt and he did not smile until they pulled out of the street.
“Like you said, there are too many eyes watching. One has to be careful.”
He turned to her and told her she looked beautiful. He asked her if she was hungry. She said she was not hungry. He soon pulled up to a hotel and parked his car. The people at the reception seemed to know him very well and he took her up to a room upstairs.
“This is a good place for us to relax, away from all those eyes,” he said.
She sat on a chair beside the bed and began to open the pages of a green Gideon’s Bible by the side of the bed.
“Come and relax with me here on the bed. I am not going to bite you.”
She joined him on the bed, and he wasted no time undressing her. As he took off her clothes he emitted a deep gurgling sound that seemed to emerge from some deep part of his throat. All the while he kept saying to her, you are beautiful, I am not going to bite you. With some force he pushed her legs apart and entered her. She felt a sharp pain. One moment he was in her and the next moment he was out. He looked down at her legs.
“This is your first time.” It was a statement; not a question.
She nodded.
“You are a good girl, you are a very good girl and I will reward you.” Once again he brought out two fat envelopes and gave them to her. “One for you and one for your mother.”
Fuebi felt a little dull pain and throbbing below.
“Don’t worry, the pain will soon go. If you feel any more pain, take two tablets of paracetamol. You’ll feel better.”
He dropped her off by the road near where her mother fried akara and drove off.
When she got home she gave both envelopes to her mother. Her mother opened them and began to dance around their room.
She told her mother that she was feeling a little tired.
“Don’t worry. I’ll boil you some warm water so you can take your bath and go to bed.”
She took her bath and went to bed and was soon deeply asleep.
Twice a week, Fide showed up and took her to the same hotel. He seemed to take less and less time, after whic
h he fell into a short sleep and snored, then would jerk up suddenly awake and tell her to get dressed, that he had some urgent business to settle in his store.
When Fuebi began to look pale and vomit in the mornings, her mother said that this was another answered prayer.
“Your father’s spirit is too strong. I know he has been itching to come back to this world that he left abruptly due to bad people. See, now he is going to come back through you. And you have found a good man too.”
When Fuebi told Fide her good news, Fide was angry.
“What do you take me for? Do you think I am an irresponsible man?”
“But what do you want me to do?”
“I am not the person who will tell you what to do. You are not a child. You know what to do.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“In that case, ask your mother, she will know where to take you.”
“She says I should tell you, that you’ll be happy.”
“And what about my wife? And what about my daughters, will they be happy? And what about my reverend father, will he be happy?”
It was the first time Fide had ever mentioned a wife and children.
The next time Fuebi went to the store to wait for Fide, she spent the better part of the day waiting. She was told he had gone to the port to see to the release of his imported goods. When he came in and saw her his face changed.
“Take this note,” he said as he scribbled something on the back of his card.
“Take this,” he said, giving her an envelope.
He then directed her to go and see a doctor who would take care of her.
When Fuebi showed the note to her mother, her mother took the card with the scribbled note from her and said she was going to keep it as evidence. As for the money in the envelope, she said it was going to be used for baby clothes.
Fuebi eventually gave birth to twins. Two boys. The boys screamed lustily into the world. They were ravenous and began to eat as if they had been starving for the nine months that they had been in the womb.
“Look at their mouths, look at those greedy lips, just like their father’s,” Fuebi’s mother said.
Fuebi was tired and was lying weakly on the bed. She had not seen Fide since the last time he gave her the money to go see his friend to take care of the pregnancy.
Word soon got to Grandpa that Fuebi had delivered a set of twins and that their father had refused to show up. Grandpa summoned Fide.
“What is this I hear about you refusing to see your God-given children?”
“It is not me, it is my wife. She will kill me. She has two girls for me, two girls only. She doesn’t want to hear that another woman had children for me.”
“Are you a man or are you a woman who pees from behind?”
“And the priest will not be happy about it too.”
“Were you thinking of the priest when you were doing it with her?”
Fide shook his head from side to side and began making squiggles on the ground with his big toe.
“Tell your wife that children bring children. She will see, as soon as these twins are under your roof, she too will give birth to her own male children.”
And that was how it was settled. Fuebi moved into Fide’s house. Just as Grandpa had said, Fide’s older wife gave birth to a boy exactly one year later.
TRUDY
Uncle Zorro returned from his studies abroad with a white woman as his wife. This was great news and there was a big party to welcome him and the wife. But when the wife, Trudy that was her name, said they were not going to have children, that was when the trouble started. Trudy had started making enemies of most people in the house when she began complaining about the treatment of the cats and dogs. She was the one who had insisted that they live in the Family House and not in the posh expatriate quarters, where they could have gotten one of the more opulent houses.
The cats and dogs were working animals and were not considered ornamental or solely pets. They could be petted on occasion when they did a good job, but such occasions were few and far between. The job of the cats was to keep the house mice-free. There were many corners and dark crevices in the house. Tiny rooms, closets, and pantries where all kinds of odds and ends were stored were good breeding grounds for mice. We were told not to feed the cats with food or they would lose their hunting skills and become lazy.
All the dogs went by the name Simple. Simple was the original name of the mother dog. All her offspring were also called Simple. There was brown Simple and black Simple and black-and-white Simple. They all worked. They kept the house secure at night by barking and attacking any would-be intruder. They went hunting with Grandpa. They were also expected to play with the children.
Trudy complained that the animals were not well treated; she carried the cats around and would feed them by hand. Soon enough the cats lost interest in hunting mice.
And what was this about the need to plant flowers around the house? She said that it was a big shame that a house as big as the Family House did not have a garden, she said it was uncivilized and a disgrace.
There was a dogonyaro tree behind the house. Everyone knew that the boiled bitter leaf of the tree was a good cure for malaria fever. The limber stalk of the tree was a very good medicinal chewing stick and kept stomach troubles at bay. The tree provided shade under which we played when the sun became too hot. There was an orange tree and an avocado pear tree. There were no plantain trees because we all knew they were breeding places for mosquitoes. There were useful flowers like queen of the night, which kept witches and evil people away with its pungent, cloying smell. But Trudy wanted a real garden.
“And are you going to plant things in your garden that people can actually eat?”
“Beauty is the whole point. It must not be about food all the time. We must also feed our eyes, and our brains need to be fed sometimes.”
She was given a space to start her garden.
“She is not from here. She must be treated with extra kindness,” Grandpa said. “If she left her father and mother and family and crossed the vast ocean to follow you here, then you must do all that you can to make her comfortable.”
Trudy soon turned her attention to the way the children in the house were treated. She felt they were sometimes treated in a cruel manner.
In the meantime her husband, Uncle Zorro, was already working in the general hospital as a doctor and was assuring us that she would soon drop her foreign ways and adjust to living life the way we all lived it in the Family House.
She said that the house was a breeding ground for germs and that she was surprised we had not all perished from all kinds of germ-borne diseases.
A few people who knew about such things said Trudy was not going to last.
—The ones who stay learn our language. They eat our food. They wear our traditional clothes. They genuflect when they greet their elders—
—They get pregnant and have many children, not carrying a cat around like a baby the way this one does—
And then the news began to filter into the house that Uncle Zorro had a concubine. Nobody used the word girlfriend, because this was too light a word to describe the relationship. A girlfriend was someone seen occasionally. The case here was different. Uncle Zorro would drive directly from work at the hospital to his concubine’s house, where he would eat his dinner, read a newspaper, and take a nap before coming back home long past midnight. It was even worse than that, he actually went over during his lunch break or his concubine would send over one of her girls to deliver his lunch to him.
And it was not just lunch; he was blatant about the affair. His car was usually prominently parked in front of his concubine’s house, where every passerby could see it. He was said to have taken over the payment of the fees of some of his concubine’s children from a previous marriage.
They had been seen at parties dressed in “and co”—they had on identical clothes—and when they both stood up to dance the musician had referred to the
concubine as the wife of the world-famous London-trained doctor who could tell what ailed you merely by looking at your face.
As usual, people talked about this. As usual, they blamed the white wife.
—Man shall not live by bread and tea alone. Even the holy book said so. What is tea for breakfast, tea for lunch, and tea for dinner? The tongue of a black person will always crave pepper. Or was it not a piece of spicy alligator pepper and salt that were dropped on his tongue when he was being given a name on the seventh day?—
—But if it is pepper that he craves, can’t he get a native cook and steward like his other colleagues who are married to foreigners?—
—It is the fault of his wife. She is the mother of cats and dogs. Tell me what man wants to be known as the father of cats and dogs?—
—But couldn’t he have gone about it more discreetly? How come he is carrying on like he is the first man to have a concubine? Men have been having concubines since the beginning of the world—
—It is the nature of man to easily get bored with the taste of one soup. Man wants to sample a different soup from time to time. So, even if the man was married to a woman, from her he will still stray—
—He had better be careful, though. I hear his wife’s people do not hesitate to shoot men who cheat on them—
—Where is she going to get the gun from?—
—They always carry their own gun, not your long-mouthed double-barreled gun; their own gun is so small it can fit into their purse—
—He had better watch out, then—
—But what does he see in that secondhand woman who already has three children for someone else?—
—Who are you to question another man’s taste?—
Trudy had at this point started going from house to house with an interpreter to talk to the women. She said she was talking to them about safety issues, teaching them to keep themselves and their surroundings clean. Teaching them about things that’ll make them better wives. But this was not the report that was received.
—She wants to convert our wives to her white ways. She will not succeed—