‘My wife,’ Oko thundered.
‘Your what?’ Ali demanded.
‘My wife. That’s what I said, and you heard me well,’ said Oko.
‘Your wife?’ and Ali burst out laughing. Oko got hold of the front of All’s shirt.
‘Yes, yes,’ Oko screamed again, ‘the bitch you have been sleeping with. She is my wife.’ He was shaking with rage, as he tried to shake Ali.
To break free, Ali pushed Oko away from him so violently, Oko virtually fell. He didn’t quite, but a button from his shirt fell to the floor.
Then a child began to cry. It was Ogyaanowa. Oko picked himself up quickly and resumed banging on the door. Ogyaanowa continued yelling. Ali was trying to prise him away from the bedroom door and saying over and over and over, almost to himself, ‘Listen, I don’t know who you are, but Esi is my wife ... I don’t know who you are, but Esi is my wife ... I don’t know
Oko left the door, turned on Ali with a raised fist. But Ali was too quick for him. He got hold of the raised hand. Then, as they began to struggle, Esi, who had heard Ogyaanowa from the bedroom, opened the door, rushed out, passed the two men, picked up the child, ran with her into her car and drove off. She left two very surprised men staring after the car.
16
Opokuya was feeling sorry for herself and tired. Tired from being too conscientious. Tired of being too mindful of other people’s needs and almost totally ignoring her own. Tired from having to be in too many places at the same time. First, and as usual, there was the hospital. For one more end-of-the-year season, she had not been able to give herself any ‘offs’. However desperate she may have felt, she kept telling herself that it just wasn’t right that she who fixed the rota should also give herself the best part of the timetable; like going off during the Christmas and New Year holidays. Practically everyone else wanted to go off around that time. Obviously, when the ancients had said that ‘who shares the meat doesn’t eat bones,’ they hadn’t counted people with her kind of conscience, had they?
So there she was, administering the hospital and delivering babies on New Year’s Eve! And for the dozenth time and year, whenever she felt free for a minute, she would look at the calendar behind her chair and try to focus on the month of April.
‘What is so peculiar about April? Could one be right in thinking that people actually plan to get pregnant in April so that they would have Christmas babies?’ Of course, the Easter holidays were nearly always in April. ‘Well, well, well,’ she murmured to herself. Christianity had her firmly by the throat. However, she also told herself that in fact, people might not be having more babies at the end of the year than in any given number of days during the rest of the year. That it probably was just that precisely because of the season, and with other people so busy having a nice time, it always seemed as if those who had to work had more to do than normal. Besides, Christmas and New Year births turned out to be even more of social occasions than normal. Families and friends had more time to visit, and stay around and carry on. And again because of the general festive atmosphere, one tended to be more lenient with visitors who then exploited all this to take pictures of newborns and their mothers, open bottles of champagne if they were of the champagne-popping kind, and literally throw parties in the wards. It all boiled down to more work for hospital staff.
She had definitely worked throughout the holidays, but she had also planned this last day of the year to go straight home from the hospital to cook for New Year’s Day. She would make a big pot of abe nkwan and an equally big pot of jolof rice. And of course, bowls of chips. That way, the family could nibble, and still have regular meals with enough food left over for visiting members of the extended family and friends.
But things hadn’t gone too well this afternoon. Only the pot of soup was safely simmering away. The chips seemed to disappear through the bottom of the bowl, like the water which the poor dwarf was supposed to fill the basket with. Except that this time, red-blooded human children kept stealing them of course. Eventually, Opokuya had decided to make the cat feel responsible for the safety of the fish. She had told Nana Aba, her oldest child, that she was leaving the whole affair to her and Dada, the older of her two sons. They knew the recipe. They had better fill the bowl with chips themselves …
As for the jolof rice, it had met with a major accident. As soon as it had started to give off its aromas, a whole load of Kubi’s young relatives had arrived. And right now they were sitting around the dining table, busy chomping away. How was she going to cope? Stay up and cook again? Sneak off to bed early enough so that she could wake up early to cook another pot before going to the hospital?
‘Mama … Mama …’That was Kweku’s voice and fists on the door. The door opened before she could ask him to come in.
‘Mama, Mama.’
‘What is it?’
‘Auntie Esi is here.’ The information was accompanied with audible panting from the excitement of it all.
‘Auntie Esi? Esi, here?’ Opokuya herself was almost dazed with surprise.
‘She has come. And Ogyaanowa too,’ Kweku announced. Opokuya jumped up. She adjusted her headscarf. But before she could open the door to go out, Esi entered.
‘Es ...’ Opokua had wanted to ask, ‘how come you are here?’ or something like that. Instead, she had a good look at Esi’s face and immediately asked Kweku to take Ogyaanowa to the kitchen where all the young people were.
‘Tell Nana Aba to look after her … They must give her plenty of chips, you hear?’ she called after the retreating backs of the two children.
Then she shut the door.
‘Esi, what is it?’
Oko and Ali are fighting,’ Esi blurted out.
Opokuya nearly laughed. But she checked herself. Later, she knew the two of them would holler over the incident together. But now it would just be unfair to Esi. The fact that people are our friends doesn’t mean we can be rude or unkind to them. So she just motioned Esi to sit on the bed, and sat by her. Since nothing occurred to her which she wanted to voice out, she kept quiet and gently rocked her friend as though Esi was a baby.
After a while, Esi looked up at Opokuya and they both smiled. When Esi began to tell her story, Opokuya asked her to wait. She ran out of the bedroom and into the front room to bring Kubi. As Kubi entered the bedroom he murmured a rather cold greeting, then stood by a window, heavy as a cloud, while Esi told her story. For nearly half an hour, Esi spoke without interruption. Opokuya and Kubi just exclaimed every now and then: ‘Christ’, ‘Lord’ and ‘Good Lord’, and others in that vein.
After she had finished, the first thing that Kubi asked was, ‘So you left them there fighting?’
‘Yes,’ Esi said, already feeling scolded.
‘Well, it is extremely dangerous, isn’t it? One never knows what they might do to one another.’
‘But Kubi, there was very little Esi could have done, really. She could not have separated them even if she had stayed on. And in any case, it wouldn’t have been wise to let Ogyaanowa see more of the fighting.’
‘I believe you are right,’ Opokuya’s husband agreed grudgingly. Then he announced that he would go to Esi’s house and check on those two anyway.
After he had found the keys to their car and was going out, Opokuya asked him to take one or two of the eldest of his visiting nephews with him. And please, could he be careful and remember it was the eve of a new year?
17
When Kubi and his nephews got to Esi’s place, they found the gate wide open, and so they drove in. The door of the house was locked though. Clearly, Oko and Ali were both gone. Kubi suggested that they should walk around the house to see if everything was all right. This was fairly difficult to do because it was already dark and there were no lights on, either outside or inside the house. Kubi remembered he had a torch in the glove compartment of his car. One of the young men fetched it and they began to do the inspection as best as they could. Two windows were open in the sitting room, and one in the ma
in bedroom. They manoeuvred them to get them to appear shut. When they were as satisfied as the situation permitted, they drove out and parked the car outside the gate. Then they went back to the gate, and removed the padlock since they weren’t sure that Esi had taken its key with her when she was leaving. Finally, they looked for and found a piece of wire. They wired the gate shut, and drove to Sweet Breezes Hill.
As soon as they arrived, Kubi went straight to the kitchen where he’d expected to find the two women. They were there with the children. He called them back into the bedroom, and gave them a report, using his best civil service voice. During his narration, Esi realised that she was close to tears. But she told herself silently that she was not the tearful type, so she had better pull herself together.
The three of them discussed the situation at length. They speculated on what could have happened at her place after she left. They came to a rather reassuring conclusion that, from the way the place looked, each of the men must have driven away in his own car.
Then they moved to wondering whether Kubi should not drive over to Oko’s mother to check on Oko. At first, Esi wouldn’t hear of it. She knew that if he saw Kubi, Oko would want to come back with him to collect Ogyaanowa. Kubi was insistent because he too was convinced that it was his responsibility to check on his friend. During the exchange, quite a bit of the bad feeling that had accumulated between him and Esi surfaced. Opokuya stood by and silently suffered. She was convinced that even though her friend may have been partly responsible for the way things had turned out, Kubi was also being terribly unfair. However, she couldn’t say any of this openly.
In the end, Kubi left the two women and drove to Oko’s mother’s house. Oko was there — with a cut lip. Kubi found this so funny, he laughed out loud as the two of them split a beer and Oko winced each time he raised the glass to his lips. He related his version of what had happened.
‘Of course, legally, you are in the wrong,’ Kubi ventured. Oko glared rather fiercely at him. Kubi took the hint and didn’t continue with that line of discussion. After all, he had not come to rub salt into his friend’s wound. And besides, he knew too well that our passions do not always meet at the same junction with the points of the law.
An hour or so later, Kubi informed Oko that it was time he went back to Sweet Breezes Hill.
‘I’ll follow you in my car then,’ Oko announced.
‘What for?’
‘I’m coming for my daughter.’
Kubi was plainly distressed. Of course Esi had been right. Anyway, one thing he was perfectly clear about that night was that he was not returning home with Oko trailing behind him. He tried to reason the issue out: that it was too late; that it was a special evening; that there had been enough commotion already for the child without having to drag her across the streets of Accra on a night like that.
‘Wasn’t her mother aware of all that when she went whoring on the last day of the year? ... Eh, my friend?’ Oko asked Kubi with a dead-pan face.
Kubi didn’t respond to that. What good would it do to remind an angry man that strictly speaking Esi must have been sleeping quite willingly with a man who had married her, and that that could not be remotely described as whoring. He saw his main task then as seeing to it that Oko stayed well and calm where he was, and Ogyaanowa left alone. And clearly, he would achieve neither by trying to argue with the man. Eventually he succeeded by sitting quietly and drinking his beer. Besides, for all his fury and bravado, it was apparent that Oko was tired.
When Kubi finally got up to leave, Oko’s mother came to express her thanks to him, and saw to it that she did not miss the opportunity to ask him whether ‘our master knew the kind of drug which a woman like that gangling witch could have given an honourable man like my son to behave so oddly? Because,’ she went on, doing her own little shouting into the night, ‘there must be something really wrong when a man decides to go and fight another man over a woman who has treated him as shabbily as that woman has treated Oko … Don’t you think so, my master?’
Kubi knew that he was not really expected to say anything, and so he said nothing, except something very polite like, ‘Mama, all will be well in the end,’ and ‘perhaps things might be better in the New Year.’ Then he said his farewells with a promise to come the next day to see Oko. They wished one another A Happy Meeting of the Years, and Kubi drove away.
Esi and her daughter Ogyaanowa spent the rest of that night with Opokuya and her family. For Ogyaanowa, and Opokuya’s children, the whole episode seemed to have added something unexpected and therefore exciting. Before the young people went to bed, they had made more chips than the bowlful Opokuya had asked them to. Their lot was not anywhere as fine as the lot Opokuya had made earlier. But then, only ‘Mama’ could tell the difference.
For Opokuya herself, Esi’s invasion had been a real boon. Each time Kubi had left, they had stayed in the bedroom talking for a little while longer; then they had moved to the kitchen where, chatting and laughing as the two of them continuously did whenever they were together, Opokuya not only made an equally huge pot of jolof rice, but Esi too fried lots of fish and prawns. Indeed, by midnight, Opokuya was convinced that she could feed all of the king’s workmen if necessary. At midnight they had joined Kubi in the sitting room and wished one another a Happy New Year and had a drink. The kids were already in bed. Then the grown-ups stayed up for a while chatting about this and that. Finally, it was agreed that Kubi would find himself somewhere to sleep and therefore Esi could share the bedroom with Opokuya for the rest of the night.
It was already two o’clock in the morning. Plainly for Opokuya there wasn’t much of the night left. She had to wake up at five — exactly three hours later — to get ready for the hospital. When she stepped down from the bed, she could hardly walk for fatigue. One consolation was that at least there was food for everyone in the house, and more.
Esi spent the rest of the New Year holidays at Opokuya’s. She had wanted to return to her place the next day, although she had waited for Opokuya to come home from the hospital before doing so. But both Opokuya and Kubi cautioned her against returning so soon. They all knew that Oko was not a violent man, but then they also agreed that you never knew what anybody can do when he is feeling angry and hurt. Besides, said Opokuya, why leave the house where there were quite a few children for Ogyaanowa to play with and return her where there wasn’t a single other child? So, with her mind’s eye Esi looked at her bungalow and surveyed the entire neighbourhood. Most families would have gone away anyway, and the whole place would be silent in a way which she would not mind but which she also had to admit could be oppressive for a child. So she agreed they would stay, although she insisted that she should dash back to the place to double-check on the doors and the windows and also bring more clothes for herself and Ogyaanowa.
From Esi’s house, Ali had driven back to his office to sit there and calm his nerves. He told himself that it just wouldn’t do for him to get back to Fusena and the children looking visibly shaken or in any shape that would prompt them to ask questions. Once in the office, he had taken a bottle of mineral water from the fridge and had had a good drink. A few minutes later, and feeling somewhat collected, he had phoned home. Fusena was almost incoherent with concern. Where was he? Was he all right? He had assured her repeatedly. When she mentioned that they had been waiting for him to come home so that they could all eat supper together, he felt really bad. But he asked her to eat with the children. She would not agree. How could he expect her to? Eventually, he persuaded her to let the children eat so that they could go to bed. She agreed to that, but she would wait for him, of course …
Having sorted that out for the meantime — and he was aware it was only for the meantime — he turned his attention back to Esi. Because he had no doubt that that was where they would go, he phoned the Dakwas’ to make sure that she and Ogyaanowa were safe. Of course they were there. He had been passed on to Esi almost immediately, and he had virtually crooned to her, apolo
gising for his contribution to the embarrassment she had suffered. Esi had in turn said that frankly she did not know what he was talking about. It was she who had to apologise. After all, it was her ex-husband who had come to embarrass them all. Wasn’t it?
Okay, okay, but I am feeling bad all the same.’
‘Were you hurt, Ali?’
‘No … no,’ said Ali, making clicking noises to show his disapproval for the way she seemed to be so concerned about him. Although deep down he could not help feeling pleased too. It was at the end of the telephone conversation that he also suggested to Esi that she stay away from her bungalow for a day or two.
On the second day of January, which was a Friday, Ali drove to the Dakwa house with a bottle of whisky and one of gin for Kubi and Opokuya, and a carload of goodies calculated to win young hearts forever. They were meant for Ogyaanowa and the two youngest Dakwa children. Toffees, other sweets, cakes, balloons, sodas. Even toys. The kids were very happy with everything. The grown-ups not so much. Kubi hardly looked at him although he managed to do what was expected, including offering Ali a drink. Ali declined alcohol in favour of some fruit juice. As for the children, they destroyed the ears of the grown-ups with non-stop choruses of how very very nice they thought ‘Uncle Ali’ was.
In the meantime, Oko had decided that behaving the way he had just done wouldn’t do. It was a definite lowering of standards. Why make that bitch think she was the only woman in the world? He was going to leave her and get on with his life. Before he returned to his secondary school, he took one male relative with him and they went to Esi’s house to collect the child. Ogyaanowa was thoroughly fed up with having no one else around apart from the housekeeper when her mother went to work. So when she saw her father, she showed such an eagerness to go with him, Esi really felt rejected. But she let the child go anyway.
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