Everything Good Will Come

by Sefi Atta

  Their husband had married the same woman twice, I thought, regardless of their characters. Mama Gani was the one who had ordered me to kneel before her when I was a girl: the wicked one, but nice. Her wickedness saved their family in the end. She was always disagreeable and confronted her dead husband’s relations. She was the one who would fight on cue, Sheri said, remove her head tie to land a slap. Mama Kudi was younger and she spoke three languages: Yoruba, Hausa, English, and a little Italian for bargaining, but she hardly said a word. She was also the one with a boyfriend.

  I wondered how they could live according to their traditional roles. I had wondered, also, how they could stay together without the man who had brought them together in the first place. Sheri once said that they rarely quarreled; that they took turns to sleep with her father without once coming to blows. In her uncle’s house, the wives fought and tried to poison each other’s children, but that was because the man himself was no good. “This one-man-one-wife business,” she said. “If it’s so wonderful, why are women so heartbroken?” “We don’t break our own hearts,” I reminded her.

  Children of polygamous homes, this was their refrain, that civil marriages didn’t work anyway. They boasted about their numerous relations, elevated their mothers to sainthood. “Pity your own self,” they would tell me, “we are not unhappy with our family arrangement.” They rarely confessed about domestic battles: who got more money from Daddy, which mummy had more sons, whose children performed better in school. I suspected they were embarrassed by their fathers, who had bigger sex than brains. But how successful were civil marriages meanwhile? Couples bound by legal certificates, confused by romantic love. So and so whose husband had an outside child; so and so who slept with her boss, because her husband was sleeping with his subordinate. If this was a country struggling with religious and government structures imposed on us, it was also a country struggling with foreign family structures. On our estate alone, there were affairs from day to day, and above it all, Niyi judging other people as only a jilted man could. It was sad to see women acting out like their fathers, because they were so determined not to be like their mothers; worse, to see women joining born-again churches, seeking refuge from their marriages as some mothers had.

  Sheri’s younger siblings greeted me as I walked across the cement square.

  “Hello, Sister Enitan.”

  “Long time no see.”

  “Barka de Sallah, Sister Enitan.”

  I felt awkward smiling. I was about to respond when the ram slipped from the butcher’s grip and charged forward. Sheri and I collided. The others fled. Within a moment, the butcher had grabbed the ram. His aide tackled the hind legs. The ram bleated louder and I shut my ears to drown out the noise.

  “Are they about to kill it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Sheri said.

  “I can’t watch,” I said.

  The aide wrestled the ram off the cement square and the butcher brought out a knife. He pulled the ram’s head back and dragged his knife across its throat. Blood poured into the dark soil. The younger children shrieked and huddled closer. Sheri’s stepmothers laughed.

  “I hate this,” I whispered.

  It reminded me of the fowls Baba killed for my mother. He beheaded them and allowed their bodies to run around headless until they dropped. It reminded me of Sheri being strapped down by two boys.

  The ram lay dead on the floor and the butcher began to slit its belly.

  “Let’s go,” I said, tugging Sheri’s elbow.

  We sat on the balcony overlooking the cement square. The butcher castrated the dead ram and placed its testicles next to it. They looked like hairy mangos.

  “Not once have you fasted,” I said. “Yet you celebrate Sallah. What kind of Moslem are you?”

  “If I don’t fast until I die, I will get to Heaven,” she said, cheerfully.

  “Are you sure? I hear none of you in this house will inherit the kingdom of God.”

  “Why not?” she scoffed.

  I smiled. “It’s what the Christians say.”

  A woman poked her head through the sliding door. She was bouncing a baby boy.

  “Sister Sheri, sorry I’m late. It’s the baby again.”

  There was a coin taped to the baby’s belly button to tame his hernia.

  “What happened?” Sheri asked.

  “He hasn’t gone for days,” the woman said.

  “You’ve given him orange juice?” Sheri asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Bring him here,” Sheri said.

  Sheri prodded the baby’s belly. “You, you’re not supposed to give your mother this much trouble.”

  “He’s been so fussy,” the woman said. “I haven’t been able to leave his side.”

  Sheri handed the baby back to her. “He’s all right.”

  The woman left, cuddling her baby.

  “You’re a pied piper,” I said.

  “Don’t mind her, jo,” Sheri said. “She’s just pretending. Every time it’s the same with her, one excuse after the other. We can’t get her to help with cooking.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Gani’s wife.”

  “Don’t you have enough help downstairs?”

  “Ehen? She knows how to eat, doesn’t she?”

  “Leave the woman alone,” I said.

  Our country was full of passive-aggressive wives like her, finding ways to challenge their in-laws.

  Like her grandmother Alhaja, Sheri expected her brother’s wives to run around for their family functions. Sheri’s stepmothers expected the same. Through them, the spirit of Alhaja was alive, keeping the next generation of wives in check.

  As Sheri read the article, I watched the proceedings on the cement square through the balcony railings. The ram’s guts were displayed and the butcher and his aide were contemplating how to carve the body. Nearby, Sheri’s stepmothers were supervising the women who had come to cook.

  Sheri once said she was not interested in who held the power in our country, the military or the politicians. She had witnessed their corruption first hand, mixed with the underworld of people who got rich on their backs. She who slept with an important man to get her directorship. He who slept with the same important man and received a multi- million naira contract. It was enough to make me doubt we had any legitimate businesses in our country that were not somehow linked to corrupt or lustful government officials. But her stepmothers loathed the military, because they supported the wife of the man who would be president, Kudirat Abiola. Abiola was campaigning for her husband’s release, and for a reinstatement of our general election results. She was a southerner, a Moslem, and a Yoruba woman, like them. They loved her, and my mother said of her, “Oh, she just wants to be First Lady,” which was ironical to me, because Kudirat Abiola was in an openly polygamous marriage. 1994 had given us our greatest symbol of hope in post-colonial Africa with the inauguration of Nelson Mandela. Rwanda was our despair. Kudirat Abiola had become the symbol of the Africa I’d been at odds with since my return, a senior wife, fighting for her husband’s political freedom.

  “Well done,” Sheri said, after she read the article.

  If Sheri sympathized, she never showed it.

  “How’s work?” she asked.

  “A mess,” I said. “You should see. Papers all over the place. I will have to start sorting them soon.”

  “One day at a time,” she said.

  For a while, we watched the carving of the ram. The butcher skinned the ram and then cut the meat. His aide washed the blood away with boiling water.

  “How was your birthday in the end?” Sheri asked.

  “Quiet,” I said.

  “Papa Franco didn’t do anything?”

  “Doesn’t even speak to me.”

  “Eh, why not?”

  I tapped the magazine. “Over this. He didn’t want me to talk to them. The man hasn’t spoken to me for weeks because of it.”

  “Hey-hey, I think I would prefer a
beating.”

  “I hate the silence.”

  “It is my friend,” she said.

  Most times, I could only guess what was going on in her mind. Sheri had become guarded about her personal life, as unmarried women our age were; as the long-term unemployed were about their job prospects.

  I turned to her. “I mean, how can I decide what to do about my father from a kitchen? Come to think of it, how can I decide anything with a mini Idi Amin sitting right there in my home?”

  She smiled. “Papa Franco? He’s not that bad.”

  “Yes, he is. Sulking, sulking.”

  “If he frowns, just don’t look at his face.”

  “I wouldn’t be bothered with it, any of it, if I were on my own.”

  She shook her head. “It is not easy on your own. Men thinking you want them; women pitying you and not wanting you around their homes. Your own mother talking about you as if you have terminal cancer: Ah, Enitan, she’s still with us. Ah, Enitan, we pray.”

  “Nothing can be worse than this, Sheri. We see each other in the morning and no hello even.”

  “Ignore the man.”

  “He is so childish.”

  “Don’t let him affect you, or anyone else. The people in your house that day, do you think they knew, or cared, that you were angry?”

  I patted my chest. “Asking me to make lunch.”

  “The day my father died, the people who came to give their condolences wanted to eat.”

  “What did you do?”

  “My stepmothers cooked. Some people even asked for more.” She laughed.

  “I don’t think it’s funny, Sheri. We laugh and one day we will be laughing in our graves.”

  “Ignore the man. He can’t do anything. And stop letting people upset you. It’s not good for you or your baby.”

  I could have predicted her advice. Sheri once taught me a lesson when she knelt to greet her uncle who had tried to disinherit her family. “How could you?” I asked, sure that I couldn’t muster a nod for him. “It’s easier to walk around a rock,” she said, “than to break it down, and you still get where you’re going.” I saw that in the past I’d been inclined to want to break rocks, stamping my feet and throwing tantrums when I couldn’t. Acting without grace. So cynical was I about the core of strength an African woman was meant to possess, untouchable, impenetrable, because I didn’t possess one myself.

  The Bakares had not forgotten how to enjoy themselves. After lunch, I watched them do a line dance called the electric boogie. During the dance there was a power cut, which brought on more laughter: no electricity for the electric boogie.

  Close families had affectations, I thought. In Niyi’s family, they spoke hush-hush; in Sheri’s family, they worried about food: Have you eaten? Why aren’t you eating? Are you sure you don’t want to eat? I thought it was best to say yes to whatever they handed me. They quarreled with people over food-related misdemeanors, like refusing to eat what they offered, or not eating enough. As they danced, I imagined them in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, no home or hair to speak of, still worrying about food.

  Niyi was out when I arrived home, and a sneer met me at the front door. It poked my shoulder and prodded me upstairs, spread its ugly mouth across my bedroom wall. In the distance, I heard sounds of Lagos: car horns, motorcycles, street hawkers. From here, the noise sounded like tin cans colliding on hot asphalt. I sat on my bed. There was a fly perched on my mosquito netting. I couldn’t tell if it was resting or trying to pass through. I faced the walls again. At one end, silence could defeat a person, a whole country even. At the other end, silence could be a shield, used as Sheri did. An attack and a defense, and yet people always said silence was peaceful.

  My phone rang. It was Busola from next door, inviting me to dinner.

  “We’re having Bomb Alaska,” she said.

  I really couldn’t, I said.

  “I saw your husband at the club today. I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘You? Here? Where’s your best half?’ He looked at me, as if to say, ‘This girl, you’re certifiable.’ I know he hates me.”

  “He doesn’t hate you.”

  “Oh, I know he doesn’t like me.”

  “He doesn’t... ”

  “Anyway he’s one of the decent ones and he works hard, unlike some lazy buggers in this house. Come on, to cheer yup.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  Busola was someone I’d known from my student days in London. She socialized with a few Nigerians who drove Porsches to lectures and snorted cocaine for extra-curricular activities. They were called the High Socs, and Oppressors, and they were the envy of those who had time for such emotions after studying and socializing. I’d always thought her crowd was a little tragic: their cocaine habits, the inevitable drying out, which could mean they were in a clinic in Switzerland, or being exorcised by the whip of a juju man in their hometowns. Wasted brains, and the boys nearly always ended up beating their girlfriends.

  “Any Rhoda,” she said.

  The gossip about Busola was that her husband had married her because of her good English and secretly he chased women who could barely string two words together without breaking them. Her father was a retired government minister and my father handled part of his large estate. While the rest of us were filling out university applications, Busola was planning a year in Paris. A year stretched to two years and she returned to London wearing short skirts and saying she was in public relations. No one could understand it. We had to go to university. But Busola didn’t, and her parents brought her back home when they discovered she was dating an English boy. Now she was married to a Nigerian whose sole purpose in life was to wear good suits and attach himself to the polo-playing clique in Lagos.

  I liked Busola, down to her Chinese hair wigs and bags from Milan. I thought she was stylish, smart even. She had conned a whole bunch of people into submitting their children for her Montessori classes, hosted art exhibitions for artists she knew nothing about, dabbled in interior design. All these things required skills, I told Niyi who started calling her “the blockhead next door.” From the day she described the houses on our estate as glorified storage space, he’d lost patience with her. Her father had robbed the treasury and she was not afraid to open her mouth, he said. “Why do you always befriend women that no one else can stand, like that Sheri?” he asked. Sheri, who having spent a mere ten minutes with Busola, asked, “Come, what was she talking about? Is she a joker?”

  Being generally offensive was what I had in common with both women, and there were a handful of jokers in Lagos, enough to keep the dinner parties going. They cherished their foreign ways, not like the bumbling colonial copycats of our parents’ generation. They were much too savvy for that. They gave their children Nigerian names, wore traditional dress, spoke our languages, and pidgin. They were not that different from me, to be fair. But I lacked their affectations, to be fairer still. I imagined them being accosted by state security men at Busola’s party. She would drop her Bomb Alaska and run screaming through the gates of Sunrise.

  She was nice. The kind of nice that she would say of her husband: “He took my car, went out and didn’t come back till morning, and I was furious. So, so furious. You know what I did? I looked at him. Like this. So he knew how furious I was.”

  Each time I heard a car that night, I went to the window. How free was I, really, in my marriage? Niyi got in a bad mood and in no time, so did I. When I met him, I followed his eye movements, to see if he would stray. Now that I was sure he didn’t, I still worried if he was out late, and not just because of his safety. Infidelity was always my limit. For Sheri it was any form of physical force. But there were other things a man could do. My father-in-law had tamed his wife, almost as if he’d scooped out her brains and left just enough for her to keep on obeying him. His son acted like I was invisible until he liked what he saw.

  I went downstairs and padlocked the front door, tossed the key with a flourish. Beaters, cheaters, lazy buggers.
The worst were the so-called decent. No one would ever encourage a woman to run like hell from them. Fortunately, my mother had shown me the power of a padlock. Whenever Niyi returned, he would have to wait a while before he entered his own home. Mosquitoes could keep him company outside meanwhile.

  It was past midnight when I heard the door bell. I opened the door in my crumpled night shirt. My face was swollen. I had not slept. Niyi dropped his keys on the dining table as he normally would. I sat on the bottom stair. I was determined to make peace with him this time. The floor felt cold under my feet.

  “Busola says she saw you,” I said.

  He raised his brows as if to say, “And so?”

  Niyi’s face was easy to read when he was angry. This was not the case. He was not sulking; what he wanted was a surrender. I’d almost forgotten that he was a man who believed in absolutes: he wouldn’t chase other women but he would break my heart for my own good.

  “I’m not asking you to talk,” I said. “Just listen. I know you’re scared for my safety. I too wish my father were not involved. He and I, there are questions I could ask him, but none of it matters now. What if I never have a chance to speak to him again? God knows what is going to happen, but my life has to change, and you have to help me. Please. This is too much for me. Look at me.”

  Niyi looked as if he wished I were still upstairs sleeping. “You hear me?” I asked.

  His expression didn’t change. I gave him time.

  “So,” I said. “This is how it is. I can’t tell a lie—you’re hurting me. I’ve tried my best. Don’t forget to lock your door.”

  Anger was heavy in my hands that week, weighing them down, and I didn’t know where to place it. I would stab a table with a pencil, drag a curtain by the nose, kick a door in its shin. Sometimes I passed Niyi along a corridor when he returned from work. I felt like reaching out to push him, with both hands: “Bombastic element!” But I wasn’t going to give in.