“I want you see my men. I call them. They come and you see them. First I call Chijioke. He work cab driver. Then Emeka. He work security. You see them.”
“You don’t have to call them just to meet me.”
“No. I call them. You tell them Igbo can marry not Igbo. They listen to you.”
“No, really. I can’t do that.”
Aisha kept speaking as if she hadn’t heard. “You tell them. They listen to you because you their Igbo sister. Any one is okay. I want marry.”
Ifemelu looked at Aisha, a small, ordinary-faced Senegalese woman with patchwork skin who had two Igbo boyfriends, implausible as it seemed, and who was now insistent that Ifemelu should meet them and urge them to marry her. It would have made for a good blog post: “A Peculiar Case of a Non-American Black, or How the Pressures of Immigrant Life Can Make You Act Crazy.”
CHAPTER 2
When Obinze first saw her e-mail, he was sitting in the back of his Range Rover in still Lagos traffic, his jacket slung over the front seat, a rusty-haired child beggar glued outside his window, a hawker pressing colorful CDs against the other window, the radio turned on low to the Pidgin English news on Wazobia FM, and the gray gloom of imminent rain all around. He stared at his BlackBerry, his body suddenly rigid. First, he skimmed the e-mail, instinctively wishing it were longer. Ceiling, kedu? Hope all is well with work and family. Ranyinudo said she ran into you some time ago and that you now have a child! Proud Papa. Congratulations. I recently decided to move back to Nigeria. Should be in Lagos in a week. Would love to keep in touch. Take care. Ifemelu.
He read it again slowly and felt the urge to smooth something, his trousers, his shaved-bald head. She had called him Ceiling. In the last e-mail from her, sent just before he got married, she had called him Obinze, apologized for her silence over the years, wished him happiness in sunny sentences, and mentioned the black American she was living with. A gracious e-mail. He had hated it. He had hated it so much that he Googled the black American—and why should she give him the man’s full name if not because she wanted him Googled?—a lecturer at Yale, and found it infuriating that she lived with a man who referred on his blog to friends as “cats,” but it was the photo of the black American, oozing intellectual cool in distressed jeans and black-framed eyeglasses, that had tipped Obinze over, made him send her a cold reply. Thank you for the good wishes, I have never been happier in my life, he’d written. He hoped she would write something mocking back—it was so unlike her, not to have been even vaguely tart in that first e-mail—but she did not write at all, and when he e-mailed her again, after his honeymoon in Morocco, to say he wanted to keep in touch and wanted to talk sometime, she did not reply.
The traffic was moving. A light rain was falling. The child beggar ran along, his doe-eyed expression more theatrical, his motions frantic: bringing his hand to his mouth again and again, fingertips pursed together. Obinze rolled down the window and held out a hundred-naira note. From the rearview mirror, his driver, Gabriel, watched with grave disapproval.
“God bless you, oga!” the child beggar said.
“Don’t be giving money to these beggars, sir,” Gabriel said. “They are all rich. They are using begging to make big money. I heard about one that built a block of six flats in Ikeja!”
“So why are you working as a driver instead of a beggar, Gabriel?” Obinze asked, and laughed, a little too heartily. He wanted to tell Gabriel that his girlfriend from university had just e-mailed him, actually his girlfriend from university and secondary school. The first time she let him take off her bra, she lay on her back moaning softly, her fingers splayed on his head, and afterwards she said, “My eyes were open but I did not see the ceiling. This never happened before.” Other girls would have pretended that they had never let another boy touch them, but not her, never her. There was a vivid honesty about her. She began to call what they did together ceiling, their warm entanglements on his bed when his mother was out, wearing only underwear, touching and kissing and sucking, hips moving in simulation. I’m longing for ceiling, she once wrote on the back of his geography notebook, and for a long time afterwards he could not look at that notebook without a gathering frisson, a sense of secret excitement. In university, when they finally stopped simulating, she began to call him Ceiling, in a playful way, in a suggestive way—but when they fought or when she retreated into moodiness, she called him Obinze. She had never called him The Zed, as his friends did. “Why do you call him Ceiling anyway?” his friend Okwudiba once asked her, on one of those languorous days after first semester exams. She had joined a group of his friends sitting around a filthy plastic table in a beer parlor off campus. She drank from her bottle of Maltina, swallowed, glanced at Obinze, and said, “Because he is so tall his head touches the ceiling, can’t you see?” Her deliberate slowness, the small smile that stretched her lips, made it clear that she wanted them to know that this was not why she called him Ceiling. And he was not tall. She kicked him under the table and he kicked her back, watching his laughing friends; they were all a little afraid of her and a little in love with her. Did she see the ceiling when the black American touched her? Had she used “ceiling” with other men? It upset him now to think that she might have. His phone rang and for a confused moment he thought it was Ifemelu calling from America.
“Darling, kedu ebe I no?” His wife, Kosi, always began her calls to him with those words: Where are you? He never asked where she was when he called her, but she would tell him, anyway: I’m just getting to the salon. I’m on Third Mainland Bridge. It was as if she needed the reassurance of their physicality when they were not together. She had a high, girlish voice. They were supposed to be at Chief’s house for the party at seven-thirty p.m. and it was already past six.
He told her he was in traffic. “But it’s moving, and we’ve just turned into Ozumba Mbadiwe. I’m coming.”
On Lekki Expressway, the traffic moved swiftly in the waning rain and soon Gabriel was pressing the horn in front of the high black gates of his home. Mohammed, the gateman, wiry in his dirty white caftan, flung open the gates, and raised a hand in greeting. Obinze looked at the tan colonnaded house. Inside was his furniture imported from Italy, his wife, his two-year-old daughter, Buchi, the nanny Christiana, his wife’s sister Chioma, who was on a forced holiday because university lecturers were on strike yet again, and the new housegirl, Marie, who had been brought from Benin Republic after his wife decided that Nigerian housegirls were unsuitable. The rooms would all be cool, air-conditioner vents swaying quietly, and the kitchen would be fragrant with curry and thyme, and CNN would be on downstairs, while the television upstairs would be turned to Cartoon Network, and pervading it all would be the undisturbed air of well-being. He climbed out of the car. His gait was stiff, his legs difficult to lift. He had begun, in the past months, to feel bloated from all he had acquired—the family, the houses, the cars, the bank accounts—and would, from time to time, be overcome by the urge to prick everything with a pin, to deflate it all, to be free. He was no longer sure, he had in fact never been sure, whether he liked his life because he really did or whether he liked it because he was supposed to.
“Darling,” Kosi said, opening the door before he got to it. She was all made-up, her complexion glowing, and he thought, as he often did, what a beautiful woman she was, eyes perfectly almond-shaped, a startling symmetry to her features. Her crushed-silk dress was cinched tightly at the waist and made her figure look very hourglassy. He hugged her, carefully avoiding her lips, painted pink and lined in a darker pink.
“Sunshine in the evening! Asa! Ugo!” he said. “Chief doesn’t need to put on any lights at the party, once you arrive.”
She laughed. The same way she laughed, with an open, accepting enjoyment of her own looks, when people asked her “Is your mother white? Are you a half-caste?” because she was so fair-skinned. It had always discomfited him, the pleasure she took in being mistaken for mixed-race.
“Daddy-daddy!” Buchi s
aid, running to him in the slightly offbalance manner of toddlers. She was fresh from her evening bath, wearing her flowered pajamas and smelling sweetly of baby lotion. “Buch-buch! Daddy’s Buch!” He swung her up, kissed her, nuzzled her neck, and, because it always made her laugh, pretended to throw her down on the floor.
“Will you bathe or just change?” Kosi asked, following him upstairs, where she had laid out a blue caftan on his bed. He would have preferred a dress shirt or a simpler caftan instead of this, with its overly decorative embroidery, which Kosi had bought for an outrageous sum from one of those new pretentious fashion designers on The Island. But he would wear it to please her.
“I’ll just change,” he said.
“How was work?” she asked, in the vague, pleasant way that she always asked. He told her he was thinking about the new block of flats he had just completed in Parkview. He hoped Shell would rent it because the oil companies were always the best renters, never complaining about abrupt hikes, paying easily in American dollars so that nobody had to deal with the fluctuating naira.
“Don’t worry,” she said, and touched his shoulder. “God will bring Shell. We will be okay, darling.”
The flats were in fact already rented by an oil company, but he sometimes told her senseless lies such as this, because a part of him hoped she would ask a question or challenge him, though he knew she would not, because all she wanted was to make sure the conditions of their life remained the same, and how he made that happen she left entirely to him.
CHIEF’S PARTY WOULD bore him, as usual, but he went because he went to all of Chief’s parties, and each time he parked in front of Chief’s large compound, he remembered the first time he had come there, with his cousin Nneoma. He was newly back from England, had been in Lagos for only a week, but Nneoma was already grumbling about how he could not just lie around in her flat reading and moping.
“Ahn ahn! O gini? Are you the first person to have this problem? You have to get up and hustle. Everybody is hustling, Lagos is about hustling,” Nneoma said. She had thick-palmed, capable hands and many business interests; she traveled to Dubai to buy gold, to China to buy women’s clothing, and lately, she had become a distributor for a frozen chicken company. “I would have said you should come and help me in my business, but no, you are too soft, you speak too much English. I need somebody with gra-gra,” she said.
Obinze was still reeling from what had happened to him in England, still insulated in layers of his own self-pity, and to hear Nneoma’s dismissive question—“Are you the first person to have this problem?”—upset him. She had no idea, this cousin who had grown up in the village, who looked at the world with stark and insensitive eyes. But slowly, he realized she was right; he was not the first and he would not be the last. He began applying for jobs listed in newspapers, but nobody called him for an interview, and his friends from school, who were now working at banks and mobile phone companies, began to avoid him, worried that he would thrust yet another CV into their hands.
One day, Nneoma said, “I know this very rich man, Chief. The man chased and chased me, eh, but I refused. He has a serious problem with women, and he can give somebody AIDS. But you know these men, the one woman that says no to them is the one that they don’t forget. So from time to time, he will call me and sometimes I go and greet him. He even helped me with capital to start over my business after those children of Satan stole my money last year. He still thinks that one day I will agree for him. Ha, o di egwu, for where? I will take you to him. Once he is in a good mood, the man can be very generous. He knows everybody in this country. Maybe he will give us a note for a managing director somewhere.”
A steward let them in; Chief was sitting on a gilded chair that looked like a throne, sipping cognac and surrounded by guests. He sprang up, a smallish man, high-spirited and ebullient. “Nneoma! Is this you? So you remember me today!” he said. He hugged Nneoma, moved back to look boldly at her hips outlined in her fitted skirt, her long weave falling to her shoulders. “You want to give me heart attack, eh?”
“How can I give you heart attack? What will I do without you?” Nneoma said playfully.
“You know what to do,” Chief said, and his guests laughed, three guffawing, knowing men.
“Chief, this is my cousin, Obinze. His mother is my father’s sister, the professor,” Nneoma said. “She is the one that paid my school fees from beginning to end. If not for her, I don’t know where I would be today.”
“Wonderful, wonderful!” Chief said, looking at Obinze as though he was somehow responsible for this generosity.
“Good evening, sir,” Obinze said. It surprised him that Chief was something of a fop, with his air of fussy grooming: nails manicured and shiny, black velvet slippers at his feet, a diamond cross around his neck. He had expected a larger man and a rougher exterior.
“Sit down. What can I offer you?”
Big Men and Big Women, Obinze would later learn, did not talk to people, they instead talked at people, and that evening Chief had talked and talked, pontificating about politics, while his guests crowed, “Exactly! You are correct, Chief! Thank you!” They were wearing the uniform of the Lagos youngish and wealthyish—leather slippers, jeans and open-neck tight shirts, all with familiar designer logos—but there was, in their manner, the plowing eagerness of men in need.
After his guests left, Chief turned to Nneoma. “Do you know that song ‘No One Knows Tomorrow’?” Then he proceeded to sing the song with childish gusto. No one knows tomorrow! To-mor-row! No one knows tomorrow! Another generous splash of cognac in his glass. “That is the one principle that this country is based on. The major principle. No one knows tomorrow. Remember those big bankers during Abacha’s government? They thought they owned this country, and the next thing they knew, they were in prison. Look at that pauper who could not pay his rent before, then Babangida gave him an oil well, and now he has a private jet!” Chief spoke with a triumphant tone, mundane observations delivered as grand discoveries, while Nneoma listened and smiled and agreed. Her animation was exaggerated, as though a bigger smile and a quicker laugh, each ego-burnish shinier than the last, would ensure that Chief would help them. Obinze was amused by how obvious it seemed, how frank she was in her flirtations. But Chief merely gave them a case of red wine as a gift, and said vaguely to Obinze, “Come and see me next week.”
Obinze visited Chief the next week and then the next; Nneoma told him to just keep hanging around until Chief did something for him. Chief’s steward always served fresh pepper soup, deeply flavorful pieces of fish in a broth that made Obinze’s nose run, cleared his head, and somehow unclogged the future and filled him with hope, so that he sat contentedly, listening to Chief and his guests. They fascinated him, the unsubtle cowering of the almost rich in the presence of the rich, and the rich in the presence of the very rich; to have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money. Obinze felt repulsion and longing; he pitied them, but he also imagined being like them. One day, Chief drank more cognac than usual, and talked haphazardly about people stabbing you in the back and small boys growing tails and ungrateful fools suddenly thinking they were sharp. Obinze was not sure what exactly had happened, but somebody had upset Chief, a gap had opened, and as soon as they were alone, he said, “Chief, if there is something I can help you do, please tell me. You can depend on me.” His own words surprised him. He had stepped out of himself. He was high on pepper soup. This was what it meant to hustle. He was in Lagos and he had to hustle.
Chief looked at him, a long, shrewd look. “We need more people like you in this country. People from good families, with good home training. You are a gentleman, I see it in your eyes. And your mother is a professor. It is not easy.”
Obinze half smiled, to seem humble in the face of this odd praise.
“You are hungry and honest, that is very rare in this country. Is that not so?” Chief asked.
“Yes,” Obinze said, even though he was not sure whether he was agreeing about his ha
ving this quality or about the rarity of this quality. But it did not matter, because Chief sounded certain.
“Everybody is hungry in this country, even the rich men are hungry, but nobody is honest.”
Obinze nodded, and Chief gave him another long look, before silently turning back to his cognac. On his next visit, Chief was his usual garrulous self.
“I was Babangida’s friend. I was Abacha’s friend. Now that the military has gone, Obasanjo is my friend,” he said. “Do you know why? Is it because I am stupid?”
“Of course not, Chief,” Obinze said.
“They said the National Farm Support Corporation is bankrupt and they’re going to privatize it. Do you know this? No. How do I know this? Because I have friends. By the time you know it, I would have taken a position and I would have benefited from the arbitrage. That is our free market!” Chief laughed. “The corporation was set up in the sixties and it owns property everywhere. The houses are all rotten and termites are eating the roofs. But they are selling them. I’m going to buy seven properties for five million each. You know what they are listed for in the books? One million. You know what the real worth is? Fifty million.” Chief paused to stare at one of his ringing cell phones—four were placed on the table next to him—and then ignored it and leaned back on the sofa. “I need somebody to front this deal.”
“Yes, sir, I can do that,” Obinze said.
Later, Nneoma sat on her bed, excited for him, giving him advice while smacking her head from time to time; her scalp was itchy beneath her weave and this was the closest she could come to scratching.
“This is your opportunity! The Zed, shine your eyes! They call it a big-big name, evaluation consulting, but it is not difficult. You undervalue the properties and make sure it looks as if you are following due process. You acquire the property, sell off half to pay your purchase price, and you are in business! You’ll register your own company. Next thing, you’ll build a house in Lekki and buy some cars and ask our hometown to give you some titles and your friends to put congratulatory messages in the newspapers for you and before you know, any bank you walk into, they will want to package a loan immediately and give it to you, because they think you no longer need the money! And after you register your own company, you must find a white man. Find one of your white friends in England. Tell everybody he is your General Manager. You will see how doors will open for you because you have an oyinbo General Manager. Even Chief has some white men that he brings in for show when he needs them. That is how Nigeria works. I’m telling you.”
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