Obinze blinked. “What?”
Ifemelu laughed. Later, when she told him what his mother had said, he shook his head. “We have to tell her when we start? What kind of rubbish is that? Does she want to buy condoms for us? What is wrong with that woman?”
“But who told you we are ever going to start anything?”
CHAPTER 6
During the week, Aunty Uju hurried home to shower and wait for The General and, on weekends, she lounged in her nightdress, reading or cooking or watching television, because The General was in Abuja with his wife and children. She avoided the sun and used creams in elegant bottles, so that her complexion, already naturally light, became lighter, brighter, and took on a sheen. Sometimes, as she gave instructions to her driver, Sola, or her gardener, Baba Flower, or her two house helps, Inyang who cleaned and Chikodili who cooked, Ifemelu would remember Aunty Uju, the village girl brought to Lagos so many years ago, who Ifemelu’s mother mildly complained was so parochial she kept touching the walls, and what was it with all those village people who could not stand on their feet without reaching out to smear their palm on a wall? Ifemelu wondered if Aunty Uju ever looked at herself with the eyes of the girl she used to be. Perhaps not. Aunty Uju had steadied herself into her new life with a lightness of touch, more consumed by The General himself than by her new wealth.
The first time Ifemelu saw Aunty Uju’s house in Dolphin Estate, she did not want to leave. The bathroom fascinated her, with its hot water tap, its gushing shower, its pink tiles. The bedroom curtains were made of raw silk, and she told Aunty Uju, “Ahn-ahn, it’s a waste to use this material as a curtain! Let’s sew a dress with it.” The living room had glass doors that slid noiselessly open and noiselessly shut. Even the kitchen was air-conditioned. She wanted to live there. It would impress her friends; she imagined them sitting in the small room just off the living room, which Aunty Uju called the TV room, watching programs on satellite. And so she asked her parents if she could stay with Aunty Uju during the week. “It’s closer to school, I won’t need to take two buses. I can go on Mondays and come home on Fridays,” Ifemelu said. “I can also help Aunty Uju in the house.”
“My understanding is that Uju has sufficient help,” her father said.
“It is a good idea,” her mother said to her father. “She can study well there, at least there will be light every day. No need for her to study with kerosene lamps.”
“She can visit Uju after school and on weekends. But she is not going to live there,” her father said.
Her mother paused, taken aback by his firmness. “Okay,” she said, with a helpless glance at Ifemelu.
For days, Ifemelu sulked. Her father often indulged her, giving in to what she wanted, but this time he ignored her pouts, her deliberate silences at the dinner table. He pretended not to notice when Aunty Uju brought them a new television. He settled back in his well-worn sofa, reading his well-worn book, while Aunty Uju’s driver put down the brown Sony carton. Ifemelu’s mother began to sing a church song—“the Lord has given me victory, I will lift him higher”—which was often sung at collection time.
“The General bought more than I needed in the house. There was nowhere to put this one,” Aunty Uju said, a general statement made to nobody in particular, a way of shrugging off thanks. Ifemelu’s mother opened the carton, gently stripped away the Styrofoam packaging.
“Our old one doesn’t even show anything anymore,” she said, although they all knew that it still did.
“Look at how slim it is!” she added. “Look!”
Her father raised his eyes from the book. “Yes, it is,” he said, and then lowered his gaze.
THE LANDLORD CAME AGAIN. He barged past Ifemelu into the flat, into the kitchen, and reached up to the electric meter, yanking off the fuse, cutting off what little electricity they had.
After he left, Ifemelu’s father said, “What ignominy. To ask us for two years’ rent. We have been paying one year.”
“But even that one year, we have not paid,” her mother said, and in her tone was the slightest of accusations.
“I’ve spoken to Akunne about a loan,” her father said. He disliked Akunne, his almost-cousin, the prosperous man from their hometown to whom everyone took their problems. He called Akunne a lurid illiterate, a money-miss-road.
“What did he say?”
“He said I should come and see him next Friday.” His fingers were unsteady; he was struggling, it seemed, to suppress emotions. Ifemelu hastily looked away, hoping he had not seen her watching him, and asked him if he could explain a difficult question in her homework. To distract him, to make it seem that life could happen again.
HER FATHER WOULD NOT ASK Aunty Uju for help, but if Aunty Uju presented him with the money, he would not refuse. It was better than being indebted to Akunne. Ifemelu told Aunty Uju how the landlord banged on their door, a loud, unnecessary banging for the benefit of the neighbors, while hurling insults at her father. “Are you not a real man? Pay me my money. I will throw you out of this flat if I don’t get that rent by next week!”
As Ifemelu mimicked the landlord, a wan sadness crossed Aunty Uju’s face. “How can that useless landlord embarrass Brother like this? I’ll ask Oga to give me the money.”
Ifemelu stopped. “You don’t have money?”
“My account is almost empty. But Oga will give it to me. And do you know I have not been paid a salary since I started work? Every day, there is a new story from the accounts people. The trouble started with my position that does not officially exist, even though I see patients every day.”
“But doctors are on strike,” Ifemelu said.
“The military hospitals still pay. Not that my pay will be enough for the rent, sha.”
“You don’t have money?” Ifemelu asked again, slowly, to clarify, to be sure. “Ahn-ahn, Aunty, but how can you not have money?”
“Oga never gives me big money. He pays all the bills and he wants me to ask for everything I need. Some men are like that.”
Ifemelu stared. Aunty Uju, in her big pink house with the wide satellite dish blooming from its roof, her generator brimming with diesel, her freezer stocked with meat, and she did not have money in her bank account.
“Ifem, don’t look as if somebody died!” Aunty Uju laughed, her wry laugh. She looked suddenly small and bewildered among the detritus of her new life, the fawn-colored jewel case on the dressing table, the silk robe thrown across the bed, and Ifemelu felt frightened for her.
“HE EVEN GAVE ME a little more than I asked for,” Aunty Uju told Ifemelu the next weekend, with a small smile, as though amused by what The General had done. “We’ll go to the house from the salon so I can give it to Brother.”
It startled Ifemelu, how much a relaxer retouching cost at Aunty Uju’s hair salon; the haughty hairdressers sized up each customer, eyes swinging from head to shoes, to decide how much attention she was worth. With Aunty Uju, they hovered and groveled, curtseying deeply as they greeted her, overpraising her handbag and shoes. Ifemelu watched, fascinated. It was here, at a Lagos salon, that the different ranks of imperial femaleness were best understood.
“Those girls, I was waiting for them to bring out their hands and beg you to shit so they could worship that too,” Ifemelu said, as they left the salon.
Aunty Uju laughed and patted the silky hair extensions that fell to her shoulders: Chinese weave-on, the latest version, shiny and straight as straight could be; it never tangled.
“You know, we live in an ass-licking economy. The biggest problem in this country is not corruption. The problem is that there are many qualified people who are not where they are supposed to be because they won’t lick anybody’s ass, or they don’t know which ass to lick or they don’t even know how to lick an ass. I’m lucky to be licking the right ass.” She smiled. “It’s just luck. Oga said I was well brought up, that I was not like all the Lagos girls who sleep with him on the first night and the next morning give him a list of what they want him to
buy. I slept with him on the first night but I did not ask for anything, which was stupid of me now that I think of it, but I did not sleep with him because I wanted something. Ah, this thing called power. I was attracted to him even with his teeth like Dracula. I was attracted to his power.”
Aunty Uju liked to talk about The General, different versions of the same stories repeated and savored. Her driver had told her—she swayed his loyalty by arranging his wife’s prenatal visits and his baby’s immunizations—that The General asked for details of where she went and how long she stayed, and each time Aunty Uju told Ifemelu the story, she would end with a sigh, “Does he think I can’t see another man without him knowing, if I wanted to? But I don’t want to.”
They were in the cold interior of the Mazda. As the driver backed out of the gates of the salon compound, Aunty Uju gestured to the gateman, rolled down her window, and gave him some money.
“Thank you, madam!” he said, and saluted.
She had slipped naira notes to all the salon workers, to the security men outside, to the policemen at the road junction.
“They’re not paid enough to afford school fees for even one child,” Aunty Uju said.
“That small money you gave him will not help him pay any school fees,” Ifemelu said.
“But he can buy a little extra something and he will be in a better mood and he won’t beat his wife this night,” Aunty Uju said. She looked out of the window and said, “Slow down, Sola,” so that she could get a good look at an accident on Osborne Road; a bus had hit a car, the front of the bus and the back of the car were now mangled metal, and both drivers were shouting in each other’s faces, buffered by a gathering crowd. “Where do they come from? These people that appear once there is an accident?” Aunty Uju leaned back on her seat. “Do you know I have forgotten what it feels like to be in a bus? It is so easy to get used to all this.”
“You can just go to Falomo now and get on a bus,” Ifemelu said.
“But it won’t be the same. It’s never the same when you have other choices.” Aunty Uju looked at her. “Ifem, stop worrying about me.”
“I’m not worrying.”
“You’ve been worrying since I told you about my account.”
“If somebody else was doing this, you would say she was stupid.”
“I would not even advise you to do what I’m doing.” Aunty Uju turned back to the window. “He’ll change. I’ll make him change. I just need to go slowly.”
At the flat, Aunty Uju handed Ifemelu’s father a plastic bag swollen with cash. “It’s rent for two years, Brother,” she said, with an embarrassed casualness, and then made a joke about the hole in his singlet. She did not look him in the face as she spoke and he did not look her in the face as he thanked her.
THE GENERAL HAD yellowed eyes, which suggested to Ifemelu a malnourished childhood. His solid, thickset body spoke of fights that he had started and won, and the buckteeth that gaped through his lips made him seem vaguely dangerous. Ifemelu was surprised by the gleeful coarseness of him. “I’m a village man!” he said happily, as though to explain the drops of soup that landed on his shirt and on the table while he ate, or his loud burping afterwards. He arrived in the evenings, in his green uniform, holding a gossip magazine or two, while his ADC, at an obsequious pace behind him, brought his briefcase and put it on the dining table. He rarely left with the gossip magazines; copies of Vintage People and Prime People and Lagos Life littered Aunty Uju’s house, with their blurry photos and garish headlines.
“If I tell you what these people do, eh,” Aunty Uju would say to Ifemelu, tapping at a magazine photo with her French-manicured nail. “Their real stories are not even in the magazines. Oga has the real gist.” Then she would talk about the man who had sex with a top general to get an oil bloc, the military administrator whose children were fathered by somebody else, the foreign prostitutes flown in weekly for the Head of State. She repeated the stories with affectionate amusement, as though she thought The General’s keenness on raunchy gossip was a charming and forgivable indulgence. “Do you know he is afraid of injections? A whole General Officer Commanding and if he sees a needle, he is afraid!” Aunty Uju said, in the same tone. It was, to her, an endearing detail. Ifemelu could not think of The General as endearing, with his loud, boorish manner, the way he reached out to slap Aunty Uju’s backside as they went upstairs, saying, “All this for me? All this for me?” and the way he talked and talked, never acknowledging an interruption, until he finished a story. One of his favorites, which he often told Ifemelu, while drinking Star beer after dinner, was the story of how Aunty Uju was different. He told it with a self-congratulatory tone, as if her difference reflected his own good taste. “The first time I told her I was going to London and asked what she wanted, she gave me a list. Before I looked at it, I said I already know what she wants. Is it not perfume, shoes, bag, watch, and clothes? I know Lagos girls. But you know what was in it? One perfume and four books! I was shocked. Chai. I spent one good hour in that bookshop in Piccadilly. I bought her twenty books! Which Lagos babe do you know that will be asking for books?”
Aunty Uju would laugh, suddenly girlish and pliant. Ifemelu would smile dutifully. She thought it undignified and irresponsible, this old married man telling her stories; it was like showing her his unclean underwear. She tried to see him through Aunty Uju’s eyes, a man of wonders, a man of worldly excitements, but she could not. She recognized the lightness of being, the joyfulness that Aunty Uju had on weekdays; it was how she felt when she was looking forward to seeing Obinze after school. But it seemed wrong, a waste, that Aunty Uju should feel this for The General. Aunty Uju’s ex-boyfriend, Olujimi, was different, nice-looking and smooth-voiced; he glistened with a quiet polish. They had been together for most of university and when you saw them, you saw why they were together. “I outgrew him,” Aunty Uju said.
“Don’t you outgrow and move on to something better?” Ifemelu asked. And Aunty Uju laughed as though it was really a joke.
On the day of the coup, a close friend of The General’s called Aunty Uju to ask if she was with him. There was tension; some army officers had already been arrested. Aunty Uju was not with The General, did not know where he was, and she paced upstairs and then downstairs, worried, making phone calls that yielded nothing. Soon, she began to heave, struggling to breathe. Her panic had turned into an asthma attack. She was gasping, shaking, piercing her arm with a needle, trying to inject herself with medicine, drops of blood staining the bedcovers, until Ifemelu ran down the street to bang on the door of a neighbor whose sister was also a doctor. Finally, The General called to say that he was fine, the coup had failed and all was well with the Head of State; Aunty Uju’s trembling stopped.
ON A MUSLIM HOLIDAY, one of those two-day holidays when non-Muslims in Lagos said “Happy Sallah” to whoever they assumed to be a Muslim, often gatemen from the north, and NTA showed footage after footage of men slaughtering rams, The General promised to visit; it would be the first time he spent a public holiday with Aunty Uju. She was in the kitchen the entire morning supervising Chikodili, singing loudly from time to time, being a little too familiar with Chikodili, a little too quick to laugh with her. Finally, the cooking done and the house smelling of spices and sauces, Aunty Uju went upstairs to shower.
“Ifem, please come and help me trim my hair down there. Oga said it disturbs him!” Aunty Uju said, laughing, and then lay on her back, legs spread and held high, an old gossip magazine beneath her, while Ifemelu worked with a shaving stick. Ifemelu had finished and Aunty Uju was coating an exfoliating mask on her face when The General called to say he could no longer come. Aunty Uju, her face ghoulish, covered in chalk-white paste except for the circles of skin around her eyes, hung up and walked into the kitchen and began to put the food in plastic containers for the freezer. Chikodili looked on in confusion. Aunty Uju worked feverishly, jerking the freezer compartment, slamming the cupboard, and as she pushed back the pot of jollof rice, the pot of
egusi soup fell off the cooker. Aunty Uju stared at the yellowish-green sauce spreading across the kitchen floor as though she did not know how it had happened. She turned to Chikodili and screamed, “Why are you looking like a mumu? Come on, clean it up!”
Ifemelu was watching from the kitchen entrance. “Aunty, the person you should be shouting at is The General.”
Aunty Uju stopped, her eyes bulging and enraged. “Is it me you are talking to like that? Am I your agemate?”
Aunty Uju charged at her. Ifemelu had not expected Aunty Uju to hit her, yet when the slap landed on the side of her face, making a sound that seemed to her to come from far away, finger-shaped welts rising on her cheek, she was not surprised. They stared at each other. Aunty Uju opened her mouth as though to say something and then she closed it and turned and walked upstairs, both of them aware that something between them was now different. Aunty Uju did not come downstairs until evening, when Adesuwa and Uche came to visit. She called them “my friends in quotes.” “I’m going to the salon with my friends in quotes,” she would say, a wan laughter in her eyes. She knew they were her friends only because she was The General’s mistress. But they amused her. They visited her insistently, comparing notes on shopping and travel, asking her to go to parties with them. It was strange what she knew and did not know about them, she once told Ifemelu. She knew that Adesuwa owned land in Abuja, given to her when she dated the Head of State, and that a famously wealthy Hausa man had bought Uche’s boutique in Surulere, but she did not know how many siblings either of them had or where their parents lived or whether they had gone to university.
Chikodili let them in. They wore embroidered caftans and spicy perfume, their Chinese weaves hanging down to their backs, their conversation lined with a hard-edged worldliness, their laughter short and scornful. I told him he must buy it in my name o. Ah, I knew he would not bring the money unless I said somebody was sick. No now, he doesn’t know I opened the account. They were going to a Sallah party in Victoria Island and had come to take Aunty Uju.
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