"Odenigbo is fine. Nsukka is fine."
"Richard seems taken by it. He even seems taken by your revolutionary."
"You should come and visit."
"Richard and I prefer to meet here in Port Harcourt. That tiny box they gave him for a house is not exactly suitable."
Olanna wanted to tell Kainene that she meant visit her, her and Odenigbo. But of course Kainene understood what she meant and had simply chosen to misunderstand.
"I'm going to London next month," she said instead. "Maybe we could go together."
"I have too much to do here. No holiday for me yet."
"Why don't we talk anymore, Kainene?"
"What a question." Kainene sounded amused and Olanna imagined that mocking smile pulling up one side of her mouth.
"I just want to know why we don't talk anymore," Olanna said. Kainene did not respond. A static whining came over the telephone line. They were silent for so long that Olanna felt she had to apologize. "I shouldn't keep you," she said.
"Are you coming to Daddy's dinner party next week?" Kainene asked.
"No."
"I should have guessed. Too opulent for your abstemious revolutionary and yourself, I take it?"
"I shouldn't keep you," Olanna repeated, and placed the phone down. She picked it up again, and was about to give the operator her mother's number before she dropped it back. She wished there was somebody she could lean against; then she wished she was different, the sort of person who did not need to lean on others, like Kainene. She pulled at the phone wire to untangle it. Her parents had insisted on installing a phone in her flat, as if they did not hear her say that she would practically be living with Odenigbo. She had protested, but only mildly, the same limp no with which she greeted the frequent deposits to her bank account and the new Impala with the soft upholstery.
Although she knew Mohammed was abroad, she gave the operator his number in Kano; the nasal voice said, "You are phoning too much today!" before connecting her. She held on to the receiver long after there was no response. Rustling sounds came from the ceiling again. She sat on the cold floor and leaned her head against the wall to see if it would feel less light, less unmoored. Odenigbo's mother's visit had ripped a hole in her safe mesh of feathers, startled her, snatched something away from her. She felt one step away from where she should be. She felt as if she had left her pearls lying loose for too long and it was time to gather them and guard them more carefully. The thought came to her slowly: She wanted to have Odenigbo's child. They had never really discussed children. She once told him that she did not have that fabled female longing to give birth, and her mother had called her abnormal until Kainene said she didn't have it either. He laughed and said that to bring a child into this unjust world was an act of a blase bourgeoisie anyway. She had never forgotten that expression: childbirth as an act of blase bourgeoisie-how funny, how untrue it was. Just as she had never seriously thought of having a child until now; the longing in the lower part of her belly was sudden and searing and new. She wanted the solid weight of a child, his child, in her body.
When the doorbell rang that evening as she climbed out of the bathtub, she went to the door wrapped in a towel. Odenigbo was holding a newspaper-wrapped package of suya; she could smell the smoky spiciness from where she stood.
"Are you still angry?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Get dressed and we'll go back together. I will talk to my mother."
He smelled of brandy. He came inside and placed the suya on the table, and in his bloodshot eyes she glimpsed the vulnerability that hid itself so well underneath his voluble confidence. He could be afraid, after all. She rested her face against his neck as he hugged her and said to him, quietly, "No, you don't have to do that. Stay here."
After his mother left, Olanna went back to Odenigbo's house. Ugwu said, "Sorry, mah," as if he were somehow responsible for Mama's behavior. Then he fiddled with his apron pocket and said, "I saw a black cat yesterday night, after Mama and Amala left."
"A black cat?"
"Yes, mah. Near the garage." He paused. "A black cat means evil."
"I see."
"Mama said she would go to the dibia in the village."
"You think the dibia has sent the black cat to bite us?" Olanna was laughing.
"No, mah." Ugwu folded his arms forlornly. "It happened in my village, mah. A junior wife went to the dibia and got medicine to kill the senior wife, and the night before the senior wife died a black cat came to the front of her hut."
"So Mama will use the dibia's medicine and kill me?" Olanna asked.
"She wants to divide you and Master, mah."
His solemnness touched her. "I'm sure it was just the neighbor's cat, Ugwu," she said. "Your master's mother can't use any medicine to divide us. Nothing can divide us."
She watched him go back to the kitchen, thinking of what she had said. Nothing can divide us. Of course Odenigbo's mother's medicine from the dibia-indeed, all supernatural fetishes-meant nothing to her, but she worried again about her future with Odenigbo. She wanted certainty. She longed for a sign, a rainbow, to signify security. Still she was relieved to ease back into her life, their life, of teaching and tennis and friends that filled the living room. Because they came in the late evenings, she was surprised to hear the doorbell ring one afternoon, a week later, when Odenigbo was still at a lecture. It was Richard.
"Hello," she said, letting him in. He was very tall; she had to tilt her head to look at his face, to see his eyes that were the blue color of a still sea and his hair that fell across his forehead.
"I just wanted to leave this for Odenigbo," he said, handing Olanna a book. She loved the way he pronounced Odenigbo's name, stressing it so earnestly. He was avoiding her eyes.
"Won't you sit down?" she asked.
"I'm in a bit of a hurry, unfortunately. I have to catch the train."
"Are you going to Port Harcourt to see Kainene?" Olanna wondered why she had asked. It was obvious enough.
"Yes. I go every weekend."
"Say hello to her for me."
"I will."
"I talked to her last week."
"Yes. She mentioned it." Richard still stood there. He glanced at her and quickly looked away, and she saw the redness creep up his face. She had seen that look too many times not to know that he found her beautiful.
"How is the book coming along?" she asked.
"Quite well. It's incredible, really, how well-crafted some of the ornaments are, and they were clearly intended to be art; it wasn't an accident at all… I mustn't bore you."
"No, you're not." Olanna smiled. She liked his shyness. She didn't want him to leave just yet. "Would you like Ugwu to bring you some chin-chin? They're fantastic; he made them this morning."
"No, thank you. I should be on my way." But he did not turn to leave. He pushed his hair away from his face only to have it fall back again.
"Okay. Well, have a safe trip."
"Thank you." He still stood there.
"Are you driving? No, you're not, I remember. You'll take the train." She laughed an awkward laugh.
"Yes, I'm taking the train."
"Have a safe trip."
"Yes. All right then."
Olanna watched him leave, and long after his car had reversed out of the compound, she stood at the door, watching a bird with a blood-red breast, perched on the lawn.
In the morning, Odenigbo woke her up by taking her finger in his mouth. She opened her eyes; she could see the smoky light of dawn through the curtains.
"If you won't marry me, nkem, then let's have a child," he said.
Her finger muffled his voice, so she pulled her hand away and sat up to stare at him, his wide chest, his sleep-swollen eyes, to make sure she had heard him properly.
"Let's have a child," he said again. "A little girl just like you, and we will call her Obianuju because she will complete us."
Olanna had wanted to give the scent of his mother's visit some time to
diffuse before telling him she wanted to have a child, and yet here he was, voicing her own desire before she could. She looked at him in wonder. This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles. "Or a little boy," she said finally.
Odenigbo pulled her down and they lay side by side, not touching.
She could hear the raspy caw-caw-caw of the blackbirds that ate the pawpaws in the garden.
"Let's have Ugwu bring us breakfast in bed," he said. "Or is this one of your Sundays of faith?" He was smiling his gently indulgent smile, and she reached out and traced his lower lip with the slight fuzz underneath. He liked to tease her about religion's not being a social service, because she went to church only for St. Vincent de Paul meetings, when she took Ugwu with her for the drive through dirt paths in nearby villages to give away yams and rice and old clothes.
"I won't go today," she said.
"Good. Because we have work to do."
She closed her eyes because he was straddling her now and as he moved, languorously at first and then forcefully, he whispered, "We will have a brilliant child, nkem, a brilliant child," and she said, Yes, yes. Afterward, she felt happy knowing that some of the sweat on her body was his and some of the sweat on his body was hers. Each time, after he slipped out of her, she pressed her legs together, crossed them at her ankles, and took deep breaths, as if the movement of her lungs would urge conception on. But they did not conceive a child, she knew. The sudden thought that something might be wrong with her body wrapped itself around her, dampened her.
6
Richard ate the pepper soup slowly. After he had spooned up the pieces of tripe, he raised the glass bowl to his lips and drank the broth. His nose was running, there was a delicious burning on his tongue, and he knew his face was red.
"Richard eats this so easily," Okeoma said, seated next to him, watching him.
"Ha! I didn't think our pepper was made for your type, Richard!" Odenigbo said, from the other end of the dining table.
"Even I can't take the pepper," another guest said, a Ghanaian lecturer in economics whose name Richard always forgot.
"This is proof that Richard was an African in his past life," Miss Adebayo said, before blowing her nose into a napkin.
The guests laughed. Richard laughed too, but not loudly, because there was still too much pepper in his mouth. He leaned back on his seat. "It's fantastic," he said. "It clears one up."
"The finger chops are lovely too, Richard," Olanna said. "Thank you so much for bringing them." She was sitting next to Odenigbo, and she leaned forward to smile at him.
"I know those are sausage rolls, but what are these things?" Odenigbo was poking at the tray Richard brought; Harrison had daintily wrapped everything in silver foil.
"Stuffed garden eggs, yes?" Olanna glanced at Richard.
"Yes. Harrison has all sorts of ideas. He took out the insides and filled them with cheese, I think, and spices."
"You know the Europeans took out the insides of an African woman and then stuffed and exhibited her all over Europe?" Odenigbo asked.
"Odenigbo, we are eating!" Miss Adebayo said, although she was stifling laughter.
The other guests laughed. Odenigbo did not. "It's the same principle at play," he said. "You stuff food, you stuff people. If you don't like what is inside a particular food, then leave it alone, don't stuff it with something else. A waste of garden eggs, in my opinion."
Even Ugwu looked amused as he came into the dining room to clear up. "Mr. Richard, sah? I put the food in container for you?"
"No, keep it or throw it away," Richard said. He never took any leftover food back; what he took back to Harrison were the compliments from the guests about how pretty everything was, but he did not add that the guests then bypassed his canapes to eat Ugwu's pepper soup and moi-moi and chicken boiled in bitter herbs.
Everyone was moving to the living room. Soon, Olanna would turn off the light because the fluorescent glare was too bright, and Ugwu would bring more drinks, and they would talk and laugh and listen to music, and the light that spilled in from the corridor would fill the room with shadows. It was his favorite part of their evenings, although he sometimes wondered if Olanna and Odenigbo touched each other in the dimness. He shouldn't think about them, he knew; it was no business of his. But he did. He noticed the way Odenigbo looked at her in the middle of an argument, not as if he needed her to be on his side, because he didn't seem ever to need anybody, but simply to know that she was there. He saw, too, how Olanna sometimes blinked at Odenigbo, communicating things he would never know.
Richard placed his glass of beer on a side table and sat next to Miss Adebayo and Okeoma. His peppery tongue still tingled. Olanna got up to change the music. "My favorite Rex Lawson first, before some Osadebe," she said.
"He's a little derivative, isn't he, Rex Lawson?" Professor Ezeka asked. "Uwaifo and Dairo are better musicians."
"All music is derivative, Prof," Olanna said, her tone teasing.
"Rex Lawson is a true Nigerian. He does not cleave to his Kalahari tribe; he sings in all our major languages. That's original-and certainly reason enough to like him," Miss Adebayo said.
"That's reason not to like him," Odenigbo said. "This nationalism that means we should aspire to indifference about our own individual cultures is stupid."
"Don't waste your time asking Odenigbo about High Life. He's never understood it," Olanna said, laughing. "He's a classical music person but loath to admit it in public because it's such a Western taste."
"Music has no borders," Professor Ezeka said.
"But surely it is grounded in culture, and cultures are specific?" Okeoma asked. "Couldn't Odenigbo then be said to adore the Western culture that produced classical music?"
They all laughed, and Odenigbo looked at Olanna in that way that softened his eyes. Miss Adebayo launched into the French ambassador issue again. She did not think the French should have tested atomic weapons in Algeria, of course, but she did not understand why it mattered enough for Balewa to break off diplomatic relations with France. She sounded puzzled, which was unusual.
"It's quite clear Balewa did it because he wants to take away attention from his defense pact with the British," Odenigbo said. "And he knows that slighting the French will always please his masters the British. He's their stooge. They put him there, and they tell him what to do, and he does it, Westminster parliament model indeed."
"No Westminster model today," Dr. Patel said. "Okeoma promised to read us a poem."
"I have told you that Balewa simply did it because he wants the North Africans to like him," Professor Ezeka said.
"North Africans to like him? You think he cares much for other Africans? The white man is the only master Balewa knows," Odenigbo said. "Didn't he say that Africans are not ready to rule themselves in Rhodesia? If the British tell him to call himself a castrated monkey, he will."
"Oh, rubbish," Professor Ezeka said. "You are digressing."
"You refuse to see things as they truly are!" Odenigbo shifted on his seat. "We are living in a time of great white evil. They are dehumanizing blacks in South Africa and Rhodesia, they fermented what happened in the Congo, they won't let American blacks vote, they won't let the Australian aborigines vote, but the worst of all is what they are doing here. This defense pact is worse than apartheid and segregation, but we don't realize it. They are controlling us from behind drawn curtains. It is very dangerous!"
Okeoma leaned closer to Richard. "These two won't let me read my poem today."
"They're in fine fighting form," Richard said.
"As usual." Okeoma laughed. "How is your book coming along, by the way?"
"I'm plowing on."
"Is it a novel about expatriates?"
"Well, no, not quite."
"But it's a novel, isn't it?"
Richard sipped his beer and wondered what Okeoma would think if he knew the truth-that even he did not know whether it was a novel or not because the pag
es he had written did not make any coherent whole.
"I'm very interested in Igbo-Ukwu art, and I want to make that a central part of the book," he said.
"How so?"
"I've been utterly fascinated by the bronzes since I first read about them. The details are stunning. It's quite incredible that these people had perfected the complicated art of lost-wax casting during the time of the Viking raids. There is such marvelous complexity in the bronzes, just marvelous."
"You sound surprised," Okeoma said.
"What?"
"You sound surprised, as if you never imagined these people capable of such things."
Richard stared at Okeoma; there was a new and quiet disdain in the way Okeoma stared back, a slight furrow to his eyebrows before he said, "Enough, Odenigbo and Prof! I have a poem calling to you all."
Richard sucked his tongue. The peppery burning was unbearable now, and he hardly waited for Okeoma to finish reading a strange poem-about Africans getting buttocks rashes from defecating in imported metal buckets-before he got up to leave.
"It's still all right to drive Ugwu to his hometown next week, Odenigbo?" he asked.
Odenigbo glanced at Olanna.
"Yes, of course," Olanna said. "I hope you enjoy watching the ori-okpa festival."
"Have another beer, Richard," Odenigbo said.
"I'm off to Port Harcourt early in the morning, so I must get to sleep," Richard said, but Odenigbo had already turned back to Professor Ezeka.
"What about the stupid politicians in the Western House of Assembly that the police had to use tear gas on? Tear gas! And their orderlies carried their limp bodies to their cars! Imagine that!"
The thought that Odenigbo would not miss him after he was gone left Richard dispirited. When he got home, Harrison opened the door and bowed. "Good evening, sah. The food is going well, sah?"
"Yes, yes, now let me get to sleep," Richard snapped. He was not in the mood for what he was certain would follow: Harrison would offer to teach any of his friends' houseboys who wanted to learn the majestic recipes for sherry trifle or stuffed garden eggs. He went to his study and spread his manuscript pages out on the floor and looked at them: a few pages of a small-town novel, one chapter of the archaeologist novel, a few pages of rapturous descriptions of the bronzes. He started to crumple them, page by page, until he had a jagged pile next to his dustbin, and then he got up and went to bed with the sensation of warm blood in his ears.
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