Everything Good Will Come

by Sefi Atta

  She propped herself up slowly.

  “Nobody hits me. You hit me and I will hit you back. God no go vex.”

  There was yam flour in her hair.

  “Who hit you?”

  She patted her chest. “Telling me I’m a whore for going out. Your mother is the whore. Raise a hand to hit Sheri Bakare, and your hand will never be the same again. Stupid man, he will find it hard to play polo from now on.”

  “Sheri, you beat up the brigadier?”

  With a pot, she said. The Civil War hadn’t prepared him for her. She beat him for every person who had crossed her path in life. I told her she didn’t have a drop of white blood in her. Anyone who had white blood wouldn’t beat up a whole brigadier, like that, with a pot of okra stew.

  “I was raised in downtown Lagos,” she said. “Bring the Queen of England there. She will learn how to fight.”

  She swept the yam flour off the kitchen floor.

  “You know you will have to leave this place,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “And you know he might send people over to harass you.”

  “Let him send the president,” she said. “United Nations troops, even.”

  “You’re prepared to die?”

  “I know people who will beat him up for ten naira alone,” she said. “And I know things about him that will land him in Kirikiri maximum security prison for the rest of his life, if he tries any nonsense. The man is a coward. That is why he hit me. He won’t dare send anyone here. If he does, he will read in Weekend People how a woman beat him up.”

  I shook my head.

  “Me and you, I don’t know who is crazier.”

  “After what my eyes have seen? If I’m not crazy, what else will I be? The man is jealous of me. Can you believe it? He’s jealous of my success. With all he has. He wants me to have nothing, except what he gives me. He says he will take it all back. I said take it! All of it! I did not come to this place naked.”

  I looked into the living room.

  “What about your furniture?”

  “We don’t have tables and chairs in my father’s house? Let him keep them. All I want is my Barbara Streisands.”

  I could see she was struggling with the broom.

  “Let me do that,” I said.

  She dragged a chair as I gathered the flour into a pile.

  “Enitan,” she said after a while. “I’m telling you this, not because of what happened tonight, and I hope you will listen.”

  I was about to kneel. “Yes?”

  “My mother is not dead. My father told me she was, but the truth was he took me away from her.”

  “What?”

  “You know how England was in those days. Black people were like monkeys to the oyinbos. He had just graduated. She was working in a hotel. She used to bring him food. They never married, and he wanted me to know our traditions.”

  I whispered. “Traditions of what?”

  The man didn’t even bother to raise Sheri. He handed her over to his mother and then to his wives.

  “Alhaja told me everything before she died. She apologized. I told her it was in the past. Stop looking at me like that. I’m not the first or last. At least he didn’t leave me in England like some did, and anyway, I have two mothers.”

  “But your real mother... ”

  “The person who never came to look for me. That isn’t a real mother.”

  I shut my eyes. “What your father did was wrong. Wrong!”

  “I can accept it; so can anyone else. Are you trying to tell me you feel my pain more than me?”

  She was smiling; I knew not to probe.

  “Sorry.”

  “Just make up with your father. That’s all I’m asking. It’s enough now. I’m moving out of here tomorrow, and I’m going back to my family. I think you should do the same. These things happen in families. They happen. It’s what you do afterward that matters. Your father raised you. He never abandoned you. Don’t be stubborn.”

  “I have a right to be angry.”

  “So you deny the person who raised you.”

  “It’s more than his lies.”

  “What more?”

  “I can’t trust him. Not even with my friends.”

  “Which friends?”

  I pointed.

  Her eyes widened. “You think your father is after me?”

  I imitated him: “‘My dear this, my dear that.’”

  “He does the same to you.”

  “Well, I know him. He thinks I don’t, but I do.”

  I stood up, aware that I was sounding like my mother.

  “This is Lagos,” she said. “You can’t behave like this. You won’t be the first, and you won’t be the last. Our fathers, we know what they’re like. We just have to accept them as they are.”

  I emptied the dust pan into the large waste bin.

  “Enitan!”

  Walking down the graveled path, I felt ashamed. Daughters were meant to listen and I hadn’t listened. I paused before I rang the door bell; rang it twice and heard footsteps. The door opened. Her hair was completely gray. Perhaps she’d forgotten to dye it. For the first time, I worried that my mother would die without forgiving me.

  “It’s you?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Come in,” she said.

  She listened to what I had to say.

  “You were rude to him,” she said, “You will have to apologize. That is taboo, to call your father a liar.”

  She kicked her bedroom slippers off. They were originally light blue, but her feet had left brown imprints and the fabric was matted with dust.

  “He was no good. After you were born, I told him I didn’t want another child. God had blessed us with a healthy child. Why risk having another? But his family wouldn’t hear of it. He had to have a son, so they started threatening that he would take another wife, and his mother, that woman who suffered so much herself, threatened me too. Your father never said a word to support me.

  “I was very reserved, you know. Aloof. Your father liked that. Sunny, he always felt he had to be above others. Maybe because he was so neglected as a boy. And I did not mind wearing what he bought, clothes, jewelry. I had it all, but when your brother was born, who cared about them? Imagine the pain for a child? He would scream and scream and we couldn’t touch him. I couldn’t touch my son. For what? For a man who wouldn’t be kept. Going out all the time, as if my son didn’t exist, as if I didn’t exist. He said I stopped looking after myself. I did not have time for myself. He said I was angry all the time. Of course I was angry. It was like swallowing broken glass. You can’t expel broken glass from your body. It will tear you apart. It’s best that it remains inside you.”

  “Never make sacrifices for a man. By the time you say, ‘Look what I’ve done for you,’ it’s too late. They never remember. And the day you begin to retaliate, they never forget. Pray you never know what it means to have a sick child, either. You don’t know whether to love them too much, or too little. Then as they become sicker, you love them the only way you can, as though they are a part of you.

  “The day your brother died, your father was out. I took your brother to church. We were praying. How we prayed that day. Your father wouldn’t forgive me, kept talking about hospital. Why didn’t you take him to hospital, why didn’t you take him to hospital. What can hospital do? Hospital can’t take sickle cell out of a child, hospital cannot make a dying child live. I am not an ignorant woman. There isn’t a mother in the world who wouldn’t believe that faith can heal her child after medicine has failed, even the young women of today, who are so smart about family planning.”

  I nodded. In those days, couples took chances. These days, couples who could afford it, traveled overseas for a test in their first trimester. If the result showed a sickle child, the woman would have a quiet abortion. We believed in reborn spirits no more than we believed in the sanctity of early life.

  “Yes,” my mother said
. “A son, you say. I’m not surprised. It was a question of time before he surfaced. I’m glad I know. All those years, I wanted your father to admit he was doing wrong. He never did.”

  I tried to picture my brother. He was scrawny; always being tossed in the air and tickled, even by me, except when he was sick. Sometimes I wanted to know how it felt to be sick. Once, I tried to pretend that I was having a crisis. He laughed and poked me off my bed, screamed until my mother rushed in.

  “You think it’s funny?” she said to me.

  The day of his funeral, none of us attended. My parents didn’t, because parents couldn’t bury their children, according to the custom. I stayed with them because my father said I was too young. Years after, I fantasized that my brother was playing another prank, this time, pretending to be dead. I wanted to see him again, getting me into trouble and sneaking peeks to gauge my reaction, but I was afraid of ghosts. My brother was the brave one, I thought. Whenever he was in hospital, I preferred to hide under my bed than to visit him, and after he died, I worried that he would visit me like an ugly masquerader. For a while, death became the logical conclusion to every situation. My head itched, so I would scratch it, so I would bleed and bleed until I died. A spider on the curtain, so it would fall into my mouth, bite my throat, my throat would swell up and I would die. As I grew older, the links between events became less precarious.

  There were things I remembered about my mother also, how she brewed lemon grass tea whenever I was ill and checked on me several times a night, like a nurse, without pity: “Open up. Good.” In another country, she might have sought help through counseling or therapy. Here, people were either mad or not mad. If they were mad, they were walking the streets naked. If they were not mad, they remained at home. My mother once had thirty-three bottles of perfume on her dressing table, before she started wearing those church gowns smelling of bleach and starch. I counted them. I could still remember the glamour days, the velvet caftan with circular mirrors. I imagined her with broken crystals in her stomach. They were there in her eyes. She was a beautiful woman. I had long forgotten.

  1995

  People say I was hot-headed in my twenties. I don’t ever remember being hot-headed. I only ever remember calling out to my voice. In my country, women are praised the more they surrender their right to protest. In the end they may die with nothing but selflessness to pass on to their daughters; a startling legacy, like tears down a parched throat.

  The first time I spoke to Niyi about marriage, I’d discovered my mother was scavenging our trash bags for my used sanitary towels and taking them to church for prayers. Her priest had said I would remain childless otherwise. She was still a member of his church, a senior sister now. She lit candles in the mornings and evenings to pray, mumbled to herself and hummed church songs. Her front door was padlocked by six o’clock and her curtains drawn. I would go out to see Niyi just to escape from her, from her house where I often felt shackled by afterbirth. It was hers now, since my father relinquished it. That happened three weeks after I moved in with her. I received a transfer letter from him with a covering letter accusing me of de-camping. I replied, thanking him for raising me and reminded him that I was never given a chance to decide what camp to be in. I apologized for my rudeness meanwhile. Really, I shouldn’t have called my own father a liar.

  My mother began to boast to her church friends that I’d seen his hypocrisy first-hand. I watched her disappear every Sunday only to come back and accuse these same people of meanness. I pretended to listen. I knew that she hurt because of the sacrifices she’d made in her marriage. I finally understood why she turned her mind to church with such fervor. Had she turned to wine or beer, people would have called her a drunkard. Had she sought other men, they would have called her a slut. But to turn to God? Who would quarrel with her? “Leave her alone,” they would say. “She is religious.”

  I had watched my mother worship, and seen the way she waved her hands and exaggerated her smile. Whenever she said amen, I thought she might have well have been saying nyah-nyah. She had tricked us all. Her fixation with religion was nothing but a life-long rebellion. Faith had not healed her and I hoped that one day, the birth of a grandchild would.

  But when I told her I was going to marry Niyi she said they had madness in his family. Oh yes. One of his aunts was always washing her hands, and another one, pretty thing like this, had a baby and would not touch it for days. “Imagine that for a mother,” she said. I told my father about my engagement and he, too, suddenly became religious. “Not allowed,” he said, raising his forefinger; not allowed by the Pope, he meant. Niyi was a divorced Catholic, so he would not give his blessings. Not until Uncle Fatai persuaded him would he agree to the wedding, then he lectured Niyi about how our marriage would have to work. That ended any father-son relationship they could have developed, and Niyi, disturbed by my mother’s church activities, avoided her as if she were a sorceress.

  On the day of my traditional engagement, I knelt before him according to the rites. He presented a dowry to my family, of hand-woven cloth and gold jewelry. I did not want a dowry and I did not want to kneel. Niyi, who was reluctant to participate in rites that would proceed as if he were 21 and without a child of his own, did not want to be there at all. During the ceremony my parents argued. My mother refused to sit by my father. He told her she was quite welcome to stand outside his gates. A week later, at the civil ceremony, I almost suffocated from the ill-feeling in the Ikoyi registry.

  I did not shed a tear over leaving home. I, who cried easily. After the final rites, when a bride knelt before her parents and they blessed her, she was supposed to cry. An entire wedding party waited for this moment, so that they could say “Ah, she wept. She wept, that girl. She loves her parents no end.” But I’d always been suspicious. What were the tears for, on cue like that? One bride, almost 40, gray hairs all over her head, she was crying as if her parents had sold her. They had all but given up on her. What was she crying for? I was not bitter about my parents. We had healed the way most families did, enough to hold us together from one day to the next, but liable to split under any great stress. I still had not met my father’s outside son, my half-brother. At first it was about letting my father know I hadn’t forgotten about his deception. Then it was about being loyal to my mother. After a while, it was really about having other matters to worry about, like work.

  At the time, I was working for the Ministry of Justice and supplementing my income with the odd business incorporation. After we got married, Niyi introduced me to some of his friends in banking and I found a job in credit control. I was not prepared for my new environment, handling large sums of money within tight deadlines. On the one hand, I had the hustlers from treasury pushing me to pass deals; on the other, management cautioning me to check credit lines. The treasury guys would come ten minutes to cut-off time, tallying exactly how much the bank would lose if I didn’t approve their transactions. I would get heartburn from arguing with them. Then, one day, I mistakenly approved a deal with an insufficient credit line and manage- ment hauled me in for a reprimand.

  After work I drove home crying. Niyi took one look at me. “You have to be tougher than this, o-girl,” he said. “You can’t let people push you around. Tell them to go to hell if they pressure you.”

  “You have no idea,” I said. Bankers were not like lawyers. We were accustomed to waiting for due process. We expected delays. Niyi pulled my nose. “Stop,” I said and slapped his hand away.

  He patted my head. “That is what I want to hear.”

  I was able to face work the next morning. From then on, Niyi led me through similar rites. Months later, when the company secretary left, I stepped into her position.

  At work I consciously tried to imitate him. How he said “no” without moving his head; how his eyes, once locked, wouldn’t shift. At home, he had me howling with things he would do and say with that look. He played pieces on my piano and dared to call them jazz. I thought they sounde
d like a petrified rat scurrying back and forth over the keyboards. He walked around with nothing but Y-fronts on. On more than one occasion, he turned his back and pulled them down; to check. He had hemorrhoids, at least two episodes a year. I told him it said something about his personality, that he had a hidden weakness in his gut. He said I should get used to it, the pesseries and the ointments. I would eventually grow accustomed to this and other marital surprises. I didn’t know a man could have his own way of squeezing toothpaste. I didn’t know I could come close to lunging across the dining table to throttle a man, because of the way he chewed. Then there were more serious times, when Niyi’s brows knotted and I knew that silence would follow. This happened whenever he was reminded of his grudges, against his ex-wife, against their friends who had taken sides and his own family. That I would never get used to.

  After he left his father’s firm, Niyi’s brothers avoided him for fear of offending their father. Only his mother sneaked visits to him. Then his wife left him. The day she found a new boyfriend, their son stopped calling. Now, years later, although they were all on speaking terms, Niyi swore he would never forget each person’s role. Whenever he wanted to speak to his son, I was the one to call his ex-wife. He was wary of his father and brothers, and he protected his mother like an egg.

  Toro Franco. She was one of those women who swallowed her voice from the day she married. She was a nurse, and yet her husband and sons, all lawyers, thought she couldn’t grasp the rudiments of Offer and Acceptance, so she acted like she didn’t. She called “precedence” “presidents,” walked around with her underskirt hanging out. Whenever she tried to join in their legal discussions, they teased her, “Mama, look at you. Your Saturday is sticking out of your Sunday.” They laughed as she adjusted her underskirt. If they mentioned the word hungry, she ran into her kitchen and began to boss her house boys around. Soon she would summon me to help. I knew that she watched me botch my kitchen duties, dropping spoons, recoiling from hot handles, slicing my fingers.