The voice sounded mechanical, the voice of a person reciting something written. The man speaking had tribal marks all over his cheek; there seemed to be no area of skin free of the ingrained lines. The other three men walked briskly into the flat as he spoke. One opened the drawers of the sideboard, leaving each open. Two went into the bedrooms.
"Who sent you here?" Aunt Ifeoma asked.
"We are from the special security unit in Port Harcourt."
"Do you have any papers to show me? You cannot just walk into my house."
"Look at this yeye woman oh! I said we are from the special security unit!" The tribal marks curved even more on the man's face as he frowned and pushed Aunty Ifeoma aside.
"How you go just come enter like dis? Wetin be dis?" Obiora said, rising, the fear in his eyes not quite shielded by the brazen manliness in his pidgin English.
"Obiora, nodu ani," Aunt Ifeoma quietly said, and Obiora sat down quickly. He looked relieved that he had been asked to.
Aunty Ifeoma muttered to us all to remain seated, not to say a word, before she followed the men into the rooms. They did not look inside the drawers they flung open, they just threw the clothes and whatever else was inside on the floor. They overturned all the boxes and suitcases in Aunty Ifeoma's room, but they did not rummage through the contents. They scattered, but they did not search. As they left, the man with the tribal marks said to Aunty Ifeoma, waving a stubby finger with a curved nail in her face, "Be careful, be very careful."
We were silent until the sound of their car driving off faded. "We have to go to the police station," Obiora said.
Aunt Ifeoma smiled; the movement of her lips did not brighten her face. "That is where they came from. They're all working together."
"Why are they accusing you of encouraging the riot, Aunty?" Jaja asked.
"It's all rubbish. They want to scare me. Since when have students needed somebody to tell them when to riot?"
"I don't believe they just forced their way into our house and turned it upside down," Amaka said. "I don't believe it."
"Thank God Chima is asleep," Aunty Ifeoma said.
"We should leave," Obiora said. "Mom, we should leave. Have you talked to Aunty Phillipa since the last time?"
Aunty Ifeoma shook her head. She was putting back the books and table mats from the sideboard drawers. Jaja went over to help her.
"What do you mean, leave? Why do we have to run away from our own country? Why can't we fix it?" Amaka asked.
"Fix what?" Obiora had a deliberate sneer on his face.
"So we have to run away? That's the answer, running away?" Amaka asked, her voice shrill.
"It's not running away, it's being realistic. By the time we get into university, the good professors will be fed up with all this nonsense and they will go abroad."
"Shut up, both of you, and come and clean up this place!" Aunty Ifeoma snapped. It was the first time she did not look on proudly and enjoy my cousins' arguments.
An earthworm was slithering in the bathtub, near the drain, when I went in to take a bath in the morning. The purplish-brown body contrasted with the whiteness of the tub. The pipes were old, Amaka had said, and every rainy season, earthworms made their way into the bathtub. Aunty Ifeoma had written the works department about the pipes, but, of course, it would take ages before anybody did anything about them. Obiora said he liked to study the worms; he'd discovered that they died only when you poured salt on them. If you cut them in two, each part simply grew back to form a whole earthworm. Before I climbed into the tub, I picked the rope like body out with a twig broken off a broom and threw it in the toilet. I could not flush because there was nothing to flush, it would be a waste of water. The boys would have to pee looking at a floating earthworm in the toilet bowl.
When I finished my bath, Aunty Ifeoma had poured me a glass of milk. She had sliced my okpa, too, and red chunks of pepper gaped from the yellow slices. "How do you feel, nne?" she asked.
"I'm fine, Aunty." I did not even remember that I had once hoped never to open my eyes again, that fire had once dwelt in my body. I picked up my glass, stared at the curiously beige and grainy milk.
"Homemade soybean milk," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Very nutritious. One of our lecturers in agriculture sells it."
"It tastes like chalk water," Amaka said.
"How do you know, have you ever drunk chalk water?" Aunty Ifeoma asked. She laughed, but I saw the lines, thin as spiders' limbs, around her mouth and the faraway look in her eyes. "I just can't afford milk anymore," she added tiredly. "You should see how the prices of dried milk rise every day, as if somebody is chasing them."
The doorbell rang. My stomach heaved around itself whenever I heard it, although I knew Father Amadi usually knocked quietly on the door. It was a student of Aunt Ifeoma's, in a tight pair of blue jeans. Her face was light-skinned, but her complexion was from bleaching creams-her hands were the dark brown color of Bournvita with no milk added. She held a huge gray chicken. It was a symbol of her formal announcement to Aunty Ifeoma that she was getting married, she said. When her fiance learned of yet another university closure, he had told her he could no longer wait until she graduated, since nobody knew when the university would reopen. The wedding would be next month. She did not call him by his name, she called him "dim," "my husband," with the proud tone of someone who had won a prize, tossing her braided, reddish gold-dyed hair.
"I'm not sure I will come back to school when we reopen. I want to have a baby first. I don't want dim to think that he married me to have an empty home," she said, with a high, girlish laugh. Before she left, she copied Aunty Ifeoma's address down, so she could send an invitation card.
Aunty Ifeoma stood looking at the door. "She was never particularly bright, so I shouldn't be sad," she said thoughtfully, and Amaka laughed and said, "Mom!"
The chicken squawked. It was lying on its side because its legs were tied together. "Obiora, please kill this chicken and put it in the freezer before it loses weight, since there's nothing to feed it," Aunty Ifeoma said.
"They have been taking the light too often the past week. I say we eat the whole chicken today," Obiora said.
"How about we eat half and put the other half in the freezer and pray NEPA brings back the light so it doesn't spoil," Amaka said.
"Okay," Aunty Ifeoma said.
"I'll kill it," Jaja said, and we all turned to stare at him.
"Nna m, you have never killed a chicken, have you?" Aunty Ifeoma asked.
"No. But I can kill it."
"Okay," Aunty Ifeoma said, and I turned to stare, startled at how easily she had said that. Was she absentminded because she was thinking about her student? Did she really think Jaja could kill a chicken?
I followed Jaja out to the backyard, watched him hold the wings down under his foot. He bent the chicken's head back. The knife glinted, meeting with the sun rays to give off sparks. The chicken had stopped squawking; perhaps it had decided to accept the inevitable. I did not look as Jaja slit its feathery neck, but I watched the chicken dance to the frenzied tunes of death. It flapped its gray wings in the red mud, twisting and flailing. Finally, it lay in a puff of sullied feathers.
Jaja picked it up and dunked it in the basin of hot water that Amaka brought. There was a precision in Jaja, a single mindedness that was cold, clinical. He started to pluck the feathers off quickly, and he did not speak until the chicken had been reduced to a slim form covered with white-yellow skin. I did not realize how long a chicken's neck is until it was plucked.
"If Aunty Ifeoma leaves, then I want to leave with them, too," he said.
I said nothing. There was so much I wanted to say and so much I did not want to say.
Two vultures hovered overhead and then landed on the ground, close enough that I could have grabbed them if I had jumped fast. Their bald necks glistened in the early-morning sun. "See how close the vultures come now?" Obiora asked. He and Amaka had come to stand by the back door. "They are getting hungrier and hun
grier. Nobody kills chickens these days, and so there are less entrails for them to eat." He picked up a stone and threw it at the vultures. They flew up and perched on the branches of the mango tree only a little distance away.
"Papa-Nnukwu used to say that the vultures have lost their prestige," Amaka said. "In the old days, people liked them because when they came down to eat the entrails of animals used in sacrifice, it meant the gods were happy."
"In these new days, they should have the good sense to wait for us to be done killing the chicken before they descend," Obiora said.
Father Amadi came after Jaja had cut up the chicken and Amaka had put half of it in a plastic bag for the freezer. Aunty Ifeoma smiled when Father Amadi told her he was taking me to get my hair done. "You are doing my job for me, Father, thank you," she said. "Greet Mama Joe. Tell her I will come soon to plait my hair for Easter."
Mama Joe's shed in Ogige market just barely fit the high stool where she sat and the smaller stool in front of her. I sat on the smaller stool. Father Amadi stood outside, beside the wheelbarrows and pigs and people and chickens that went past, because his broad-shouldered form could not fit in the shed. Mama Joe wore a wool hat even though sweat had made yellow patches under the sleeves of her blouse. Women and children worked in the neighboring sheds, twisting hair, weaving hair, plaiting hair with thread. Wooden boards with lopsided print leaned on broken chairs in front of the sheds. The closest ones read mama chinedu special hair stylist and mama bomboy international hair. The women and children called out to every female who walked past. "Let us plait your hair!" "Let us make you beautiful!" "I will plait it well for you!" Mostly, the women shrugged off their pulling hands and walked on. Mama Joe welcomed me as though she had been plaiting; my hair all my life. If I was Aunty Ifeoma's niece, then I was special. She wanted to know how Aunty Ifeoma was doing. "I have not seen that good woman in almost a month. I would be naked but for your aunty, who gives me her old clothes. I know she doesn't have that much, either. Trying so hard to raise those children well. Kpau! A strong woman," Mama Joe said. Her Igbo dialect came out sounding strange, with words dropped; it was difficult to understand. She told Father Amadi that she would be done in an hour. He bought a bottle of Coke and placed it at the foot of my stool before he left. "Is he your brother?" Mama Joe asked, looking after him.
"No. He's a priest." I wanted to add that he was the one whose voice dictated my dreams.
"Did you say he is afada?"
"Yes."
"A real Catholicise?"
"Yes." I wondered if there were any unreal Catholic priests.
"All that maleness wasted," she said, combing my thick hair gently. She put the comb down and untangled some ends with her fingers. It felt strange, because Mama had always plaited my hair. "Do you see the way he looks at you? It means something, I tell you."
"Oh," I said, because I did not know what Mama Joe expected me to say. But she was already shouting something to Mama Bomboy across the aisle. While she turned my hair into tight cornrows, she chattered nonstop to Mama Bomboy and to Mama Caro, whose voice I heard but whom I could not see because she was a few sheds away. The covered basket at the entrance of Mama Joe's shed moved. A brown spiraled shell crawled out from underneath. I nearly jumped-I did not know the basket was full of live snails that Mama Joe sold. She stood up and retrieved the snail and put it back in. "God take power from the devil," she muttered.
She was on the last corn row when a woman walked up to her shed and asked to see the snails. Mama Joe took the covering basket off. "They are big," she said. "My sister's children picked them today at dawn near Adada lake."
The woman picked up the basket and shook it, searching for tiny shells hidden among the big ones. Finally, she said they were not that big anyway and left. Mama Joe shouted after the woman, "People who have bad stomachs should not spread their bad will to others! You will not find snails this size anywhere else in the market!" She picked up an enterprising snail that was crawling out of the open basket. She threw it back in and muttered, "God take power from the devil." I wondered if it was the same snail, crawling out, being thrown back in, and then crawling out again. Determined. I wanted to buy the whole basket and set that one snail free.
Mama Joe finished my hair before Father Amadi came back. She gave me a red mirror, neatly broken in half, so that I saw my new hairstyle in fractions. "Thank you. It's nice," I said.
She reached out to straighten a cornrow that did not need to be straightened. "A man does not bring a young girl to dress her hair unless he loves that young girl, I am telling you. It does not happen," she said. And I nodded because again I did not know what to say. "It doesn't happen," Mama Joe repeated, as if I had disagreed.
A cockroach ran out from behind her stool, and she stepped on it with her bare foot. "God take power from the devil." She spit into her palm, rubbed her hands together, drew the basket closer, and started to rearrange the snails. I wondered if she had spit in her hand before she started on my hair. A woman in a blue wrapper with a bag tucked under her armpit bought the whole basket full of snails just before Father Amadi came to pick me up. Mama Joe called her "nwanyi oma," although she was not pretty at all, and I imagined the snails fried to a crisp, warped corpses floating in the woman's soup pot.
"Thank you," I said to Father Amadi, as we walked to the car. He had paid Mama Joe so well that she protested, weakly, and said she should not take so much for plaiting the hair of Aunty Ifeoma's niece. Father Amadi brushed my gratitude aside in the good natured way of someone who had done what was his duty. "O maka, it brings out your face," he said, looking at me. "You know, we still don't have anybody playing Our Lady in our play. You should try out. When I was in the juniorate, the prettiest girl in the junior convent always played Our Lady."
I took a deep breath and prayed I would not stutter. "I can't act. I've never acted."
"You can try," he said. He turned the key in the ignition, and the car started with a squeaky shudder. Before he eased it onto the crowded market road, he looked at me and said, "You can do anything you want, Kambili."
As he drove, we sang Igbo choruses. I lifted my voice until it was smooth and melodious like his.
The green sign outside the church was lit with ^i white lights. The words ST. peter's catholic chaplaincy, university OF Nigeria seemed to twinkle as Amaka and I walked into the incense-scented church. I sat with her in the front pew, our thighs touching. We had come alone; Aunty Ifeoma had gone to the morning service with the others.
St. Peters did not have the huge candles or the ornate marble altar of St. Agnes. The women did not tie their scarves j properly around their heads, to cover as much hair as possible. I watched them as they came up for offertory. Some justl draped see-through black veils over their hair; others wore,! trousers, even jeans. Papa would be scandalized. A woman's! hair must be covered in the house of God, and a woman must not wear a man's clothes, especially in the house of God, he! would say.
I imagined the plain wooden crucifix above the altar swinging back and forth as Father Amadi raised the host at consecration. His eyes were shut, and I knew that he was no longer behind the altar draped in white cotton, that he was somewhere else that only he and God knew about. He gave me communion and when his finger grazed my tongue, I wanted to fall at his feet. But the thunderous singing from the choir propped me up and strengthened me to walk back to my seat. After we said the Lord's Prayer, Father Amadi did not say, "Offer to each other the sign of peace." He broke into an Igbo sons* instead. "Ekene nke udo-ezigbo nwanne m nye m oka gi." "The greeting of peace-my dear sister, dear brother, give me your hand." People clasped hands and hugged. Amaka hugged me, then turned to exchange brief hugs with the family seated behind. Father Amadi smiled right at me from the altar, his lips moving. I was not sure what he said, but I knew I would think about it over and over. I was still thinking about it, wondering what it was he had said, as he drove Amaka and me home after Mass. He told Amaka that he still had not received her confir
mation name. He needed to get all the names together and have the chaplain look at them by the next day, Saturday. Amaka said she was not interested in choosing an English name, and Father Amadi laughed and said he would help her choose a name if she wanted. I looked out the window as we drove. There was no power, and so the campus looked as though a giant blue-black blanket had covered it. The streets we drove past were like tunnels darkened by the hedges on each side.
Gold-yellow lights of kerosene lamps flickered from behind windows and on verandahs of homes, like the eyes of hundreds of wild cats. Aunty Ifeoma was sitting on a stool on the verandah, across from a friend of hers. Obiora was on the mat, seated between the two kerosene lamps. Both were turned low, filling the verandah with shadows. Amaka and I greeted Aunty Ifeoma's friend, who wore a bright tie-dye boubou and her short hair natural. She smiled and said, "Kedu?"
"Father Amadi said to greet you, Mom. He couldn't stay, he has people coming to see him at the chaplaincy house," Amaka said. She made to take one kerosene lamp.
"Keep the lamp. Jaja and Chima have a lit candle inside. Close the door so the insects don't follow you in," Aunty Ifeoma said.
I pulled my scarf off and sat down next to Aunty Ifeoma, watching the insects crowd around the lamps. There were many tiny beetles with something sticking out at their backs, as if they had forgotten to tuck in their wings properly. They were not as active as the small yellow flies that sometimes flew away from the lamp and too close to my eyes.
Aunty Ifeoma was recounting how the security agents had come to the flat. The dim light blurred her features. She paused often, to add dramatic urgency to her story, and even though her friend kept saying "Gini mezia?" — What happened next? — Aunty Ifeoma said, "Chelu nu"-wait-and took her time. Her friend was silent a long time after Aunty Ifeoma finished her story. The crickets seemed to take up the conversation then; their loud shrilling seemed so close, although the well might have been miles away.
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