Africa39

by Wole Soyinka

  ‘No. I met them when I came.’

  ‘How long have you lived here?’

  ‘Not long. Since spring. I knew I had to make the effort to make friends in this building. How else will I get to the grocery store and to church? Thank God you have a car,’ he said.

  On Sundays, she drove Chinedu to his Pentecostal church in Lawrenceville before going to the Catholic church on Nassau Street, and when she picked him up after service, they went grocery shopping at McCaffrey’s. She noticed how few groceries he bought and how carefully he scoured the sale flyers that Udenna had always ignored.

  ‘I’m starving. Should we get a sandwich somewhere?’

  ‘I’m fasting,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Oh.’ As a teenager, she, too, had fasted, drinking only water from morning until evening for a whole week, asking God to help her get the best result in the Senior Secondary School exam. She got the third-best result.

  ‘No wonder you didn’t eat any rice yesterday,’ she said. ‘Will you sit with me while I eat then?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Is this a special prayer you are doing? Or is it too personal for me to ask?’

  ‘It is too personal for you to ask,’ Chinedu said with a mocking solemnity.

  She took down the car windows as she backed out of the parking lot, stopping to let two jacketless women walk past, their jeans tight, their blonde hair blown sideways by the wind. It was a strangely warm day for late autumn.

  ‘Fall sometimes reminds me of harmattan,’ Chinedu said.

  ‘I know,’ Ukamaka said. ‘I love harmattan. I think it’s because of Christmas. I love the dryness and dust of Christmas. Udenna and I went back together for Christmas last year and he spent New Year’s Day with my family in Nimo and my uncle kept questioning him: “Young man, when will you bring your family to come and knock on our door?”’ Ukamaka mimicked a gruff voice and Chinedu laughed.

  ‘Have you gone home to visit since you left?’ Ukamaka asked, and as soon as she did, she wished she had not. Of course he would not have been able to afford a ticket home to visit.

  ‘No.’ His tone was flat.

  ‘Will you move back when you finish here? I can imagine the loads of money you’ll make at one of those oil companies in the Niger Delta, with your chemistry doctorate.’ She knew she was speaking too fast, babbling, really, trying to make up for the discomfort.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Chinedu barely smiled. She drove slowly to the sandwich place, over-nodding to the music from the radio to show that she was enjoying it as much as he seemed to be.

  ‘I’ll just pick up the sandwich,’ she said, and he said he would wait in the car. The garlic flavours from the foil-wrapped chicken sandwich filled the car when she got back in.

  ‘Your phone rang,’ Chinedu said.

  She picked up her cell phone, lodged by the shift, and looked at it. Rachel, a friend from her department, perhaps calling to find out if she wanted to go to the talk on morality and the novel at East Pyne the next day.

  ‘I can’t believe Udenna hasn’t called me,’ she said, and started the car. He had sent an email to thank her for her concern while he was in Nigeria. He had removed her from his Instant Messenger buddy list so that she could no longer know when he was online. And he had not called.

  ‘Maybe it’s best for him not to call,’ Chinedu said. ‘So you can move on.’

  She waited until they were back at their apartment building and Chinedu had taken his bags up to his apartment and come back down before she said, ‘You know, it really isn’t as simple as you think it is. You don’t know what it is to love an asshole.’

  ‘I do.’

  She looked at him, wearing the same clothes he had worn the afternoon he first knocked on her door: a pair of jeans and an old sweatshirt with a saggy neckline, Princeton printed on the front in orange.

  ‘You’ve never said anything about it,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve never asked.’

  She placed her sandwich on a plate and sat down at the dining table. ‘I didn’t know there was anything to ask. I thought you would just tell me.’

  Chinedu said nothing.

  ‘So tell me. Tell me about this love. Was it here or back home?’

  ‘Back home. I was with him for almost two years.’

  The moment was quiet. She picked up a napkin and realised that she had known intuitively, perhaps from the very beginning, but she said, because she thought he expected her to show surprise, ‘Oh, you’re gay.’

  ‘Somebody once told me that I am the straightest gay person she knew, and I hated myself for liking that.’ He was smiling; he looked relieved.

  ‘So tell me about this love.’

  The man’s name was Abidemi. Something about the way Chinedu said his name, Abidemi, made her think of gently pressing on a sore muscle, the kind of self-inflicted ache that is satisfying.

  He spoke slowly, revising details that she thought made no difference – was it on a Wednesday or Thursday that Abidemi had taken him to a private gay club where they shook hands with a former head of state? – and she thought that this was a story he had not told often in its entirety, perhaps had never told.

  Abidemi was a banker, a Big Man’s son who had gone to university in England, the kind of guy who wore leather belts with elaborate designer logos as buckles. He had been wearing one of those when he came into the Lagos office of the mobile phone company where Chinedu worked in customer service. He had been almost rude, asking if there wasn’t somebody senior he could talk to, but Chinedu did not miss the look they exchanged, the heady thrill he had not felt since his first relationship with a sports prefect in secondary school. Abidemi gave him his card and said, curtly, ‘Call me.’ It was the way Abidemi would run the relationship for the next two years, wanting to know where Chinedu went and what he did, buying him a car without consulting him, so that he was left in the awkward position of explaining to his family and friends how he had suddenly bought a Honda, asking him to come on trips to Calabar and Kaduna with only a day’s notice, sending vicious text messages when Chinedu missed his calls. Still, Chinedu had liked the possessiveness, the vitality of a relationship that consumed them both. Until Abidemi said he was getting married. Her name was Kemi and his parents and hers had known one another a long time. The inevitability of marriage had always been understood between them, unspoken but understood, and perhaps nothing would have changed if Chinedu had not met Kemi, at Abidemi’s parents’ wedding anniversary party. He had not wanted to go – he stayed away from Abidemi’s family events – but Abidemi had insisted, saying he would survive the long evening only if Chinedu was there. Abidemi spoke in a voice lined with what seemed troublingly like laughter when he introduced Chinedu to Kemi as ‘my very good friend’.

  ‘Chinedu drinks much more than I do,’ Abidemi had said to Kemi, with her long weave-on and strapless yellow dress. She sat next to Abidemi, reaching out from time to time to brush something off his shirt, to refill his glass, to place a hand on his knee, and all the while her whole body was braced and attuned to his, as though ready to spring up and do whatever it took to please him. ‘You said I will grow a beer belly, abi?’ Abidemi said, his hand on her thigh: ‘This man will grow one before me, I’m telling you.’

  Chinedu had smiled tightly, a tension headache starting, his rage at Abidemi exploding. As Chinedu told Ukamaka this, how the anger of that evening had ‘scattered his head’, she noticed how tense he had become.

  ‘You wished you hadn’t met his wife,’ Ukamaka said.

  ‘No. I wished he had been conflicted.’

  ‘He must have been.’

  ‘He wasn’t. I watched him that day, the way he was with both of us there, drinking stout and making jokes about me to her and about her to me, and I knew he would go to bed and sleep well at night. If we continued, he would come to me and then go home to her and sleep well every night. I wanted him not to sleep well sometimes.’

  ‘And you ended it?’

 
; ‘He was angry. He did not understand why I would not do what he wanted.’

  ‘How can a person claim to love you and yet want you to do things that suit only them? Udenna was like that.’

  Chinedu squeezed the pillow on his lap. ‘Ukamaka, not everything is about Udenna.’

  ‘I’m just saying that Abidemi sounds a little bit like Udenna. I guess I just don’t understand that kind of love.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t love,’ Chinedu said, standing up abruptly from the couch. ‘Udenna did this to you and Udenna did that to you, but why did you let him? Why did you let him? Have you ever considered that it wasn’t love?’

  It was so savagely cold, his tone, that for a moment Ukamaka felt frightened, then she felt angry and told him to get out.

  She had begun, before that day, to notice strange things about Chinedu. He never asked her up to his apartment, and once, after he told her which apartment was his, she looked at the mailbox and was surprised that it did not have his last name on it; the building superintendent was very strict about all the names of renters being on the mailbox. He did not ever seem to go to campus; the only time she asked him why, he had said something deliberately vague, which told her he did not want to talk about it.

  She would never speak to him again, she told herself; he was a crude and rude person from the bush. But Sunday came and she had become used to driving him to his church in Lawrenceville before going to hers on Nassau Street. She hoped he would knock on her door and yet knew that he would not. She felt a sudden fear that he would ask somebody else on his floor to drop him off at church, and because she felt her fear becoming a panic, she went up and knocked on his door. It took him a while to open. He looked drawn and tired; his face was unwashed and ashy.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to drop you off at church?’

  ‘No.’ He gestured for her to come in. The apartment was sparsely furnished with a couch, a table, and a TV; books were piled one on top of the other along the walls.

  ‘Look, Ukamaka, I have to tell you what’s happening. Sit down.’

  She sat down. A cartoon show was on TV, a Bible open face down on the table, a cup of what looked like coffee next to it.

  ‘I am out of status. My visa expired three years ago. This apartment belongs to a friend. He is in Peru for a semester and he said I should come and stay while I try to sort myself out.’

  ‘You’re not here at Princeton?’

  ‘I never said I was.’ He turned away and closed the Bible. ‘I’m going to get a deportation notice from Immigration anytime soon. Nobody at home knows my real situation. I haven’t been able to send them much since I lost my construction job. My boss was paying me under the table but he said he did not want trouble now that they are talking about raiding workplaces.’

  ‘Have you tried finding a lawyer?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t have a case.’ He was biting his lower lip, and she had not seen him look so unattractive before, with his flaking facial skin and his shadowed eyes.

  ‘You look terrible. You haven’t eaten much since I last saw you,’ she said, thinking of all the weeks that she had spent talking about Udenna while Chinedu worried about being deported.

  ‘I’m fasting.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to drop you off at church?’

  ‘It’s too late anyway.’

  ‘Come with me to my church then.’

  ‘You know I don’t like the Catholic Church, all that unnecessary kneeling and standing and worshiping idols.’

  ‘Just this once.’

  Finally he got up and washed his face and changed. They walked to the car in silence. She had never thought to tell him about her shivering as he prayed on that first day, but because she longed now for a significant gesture that would show him that he was not alone; that she understood what it must be like to feel so uncertain of a future, to lack control about what would happen to him tomorrow – because she did not, in fact, know what else to say – she told him about the shivering.

  ‘It was strange,’ she said. ‘Maybe it was just my suppressed anxiety about Udenna.’

  ‘It was a sign from God,’ Chinedu said firmly.

  ‘What was the point of my shivering as a sign from God?’

  ‘You have to stop thinking that God is a person. God is God.’

  ‘Your faith, it’s almost like fighting.’ She looked at him. ‘What’s the point of God being a puzzle?’

  ‘Because it is the nature of God. If you understand the basic idea of God’s nature being different from human nature, then it will make sense,’ Chinedu said, and opened the door to climb out of the car. What a luxury to have a faith like his, Ukamaka thought, so uncritical, so forceful, so impatient. And yet there was something about it that was exceedingly fragile; it was as if Chinedu could conceive of faith only in extremes, as if an acknowledgment of a middle ground would mean the risk of losing everything.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ she said, although she did not see at all.

  Outside the grey stone church, Father Patrick was greeting people, his hair a gleaming silver in the late morning light.

  ‘I’m bringing a new person into the dungeon of Catholicism, Father P,’ Ukamaka said.

  ‘There’s always room in the dungeon,’ Father Patrick said, warmly shaking Chinedu’s hand.

  The church was dim, full of echoes and mysteries and the faint scent of candles. They sat side by side in the middle row, next to a woman holding a baby.

  ‘Did you like him?’ Ukamaka whispered.

  ‘The priest? He seemed OK.’

  ‘I mean like like.’

  ‘Oh, Jehovah God! Of course not.’

  She had made him smile. ‘You are not going to be deported, Chinedu. We will find a way. We will.’ She squeezed his hand and knew he was amused by her stressing of the ‘we’.

  He leaned close. ‘You know, I had a crush on Thomas Sankara, too.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I didn’t even know that there was a country called Burkina Faso in West Africa until my teacher in secondary school talked about him and brought in a picture. I will never forget how crazy in love I fell with a newspaper photograph.’

  At first they stifled their laughter and then they let it out, joyously leaning against each other, while next to them, the woman holding the baby watched.

  The choir had begun to sing. It was one of those Sundays when the priest blessed the congregation with holy water at the beginning of Mass, and Father Patrick was walking up and down, flicking water on the people with something that looked like a big saltshaker. Ukamaka watched him and thought how much more subdued Catholic Masses were in America; how in Nigeria it would have been a vibrant green branch from a mango tree that the priest would dip in a bucket of holy water held by a hurrying, sweating Mass-server; how he would have stridden up and down, splashing and swirling, holy water raining down; how the people would have been drenched; and how, smiling and making the sign of the cross, they would have felt blessed.

  The Banana Eater

  Monica Arac de Nyeko

  Naalu and her family lived a block from us, at number G.16 in the housing estates. Many things about our houses were similar. Their size: a kitchen and store, a sitting room and a bedroom. The paint: cream and magenta against a brown tiled roof. Only our back yards were different. Theirs was almost bare – grassless and without any bougainvillea, thorn brush, or red euphorbia fencing to keep trespassers or vagabonds away. Ours was lush with paspalum grass. We had flowers, too. In the rain season, dahlias and hibiscus bloomed; so did roses and sophronitella, cosmos and bleeding heart vines. Everyone who passed by our house said the garden gave a fine display of colour and fragrance.

  Ma’s gardening knowledge had been transplanted from her school years at Our Lady of Good Counsel, the Catholic girls’ school. Home economics was compulsory then. Ma never did like the cooking and baking bits. But she did like gardening. A house, she often said, starts at the back yard. See the sta
te of the back yard and you’ll know if you want to enter.

  Gardening might have seemed viable in Catholic boarding school, but in the real world things were different. In the estates, only potato fields and cassava survived to maturity. They were unspectacular. The silly boys were not interested in them; nor were the children who liked to roam about the houses breaking windows or anything that looked fragile. Plant fences and flowers, on the other hand, were different. They were boastful. They attracted everyone. And oftentimes people did stop to examine the garden arrangement or to pick flowers to stick in their hair. These people were generally not trouble­some. Ma tolerated them. The lot she found unbearable, though, were the market vendors.

  Every day as soon as customers turned scarce, the vendors left the market. They crossed Estate Close, the road that separated the market from the estates, and came to sit in our back yard. They were choosy, those vendors. They avoided all the other back yards on the block. They came straight for ours, and laid down their tired and sweaty bottoms. Our back yard was a place to forget about the market and its unsold sacks of potatoes and bananas, a place to gossip, a place to laugh out loud at anyone, including our distinguished house guests.

  One particular guest among all others ignited fits of laughter among the vendors. Perhaps there was something about his temperament that provoked them. Perhaps it was his German bowl haircut. Or maybe it was the fact that he often talked to himself. The man’s name was Patrick Aculu, a strange little man from our church. He was thin and unassuming, watchful and quiet. Because his demeanour seemed over-tolerant, I was convinced he had suffered heavily at the hands of bullies in his school days.

  The first day Patrick Aculu came to visit us it was at Ma’s insistence. The market vendors, when they saw him, laughed with tears in their eyes. They clapped. They did not stop for a long time. I opened the door for him as soon as he made it past the vendors. I showed him into our sitting room. I even called him Uncle Aculu in the hope of pacifying him. But Uncle Aculu did not look up, did not show any interest in Ma’s gold cushion covers, the new curtains, or the vase with fresh roses.