No Longer at Ease

  The talk was cut short by a telephone call for Mr. Green. He returned to his room to take it.

  “There’s a lot of truth in what he says,” Marie ventured after a suitable interval.

  “I’m sure there is.”

  “I don’t mean about you, or anything of the sort. But quite frankly, there are too many holidays here. Mark you, I don’t really mind. But in England I never got more than two weeks’ leave in the year. But here, what is it? Four months.” At this point Mr. Green returned.

  “It is not the fault of Nigerians,” said Obi. “You devised these soft conditions for yourselves when every European was automatically in the senior service and every African automatically in the junior service. Now that a few of us have been admitted into the senior service, you turn round and blame us.” Mr. Green passed on to Mr. Omo’s office next door.

  “I suppose so,” said Marie, “but surely it’s time someone stopped all the Moslem holidays.”

  “Nigeria is a Moslem country, you know.”

  “No, it isn’t. You mean the North.”

  They argued for a little while longer and Marie suddenly changed the subject.

  “You look run down, Obi.”

  “I have not been very well.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. What is it? Fever?”

  “Yes, a slight touch of malaria.”

  “Why don’t you take paludrine?”

  “I sometimes forget.”

  “Tut-tut,” she said. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. And what does your fiancée say? She is a nurse, isn’t she?”

  Obi nodded.

  “If I were you, I should go and see a doctor. You do look ill, believe me.”

  Later that morning Obi went to consult Mr. Omo about a salary advance. Mr. Omo was the authority on General Orders and Financial Instructions, and should be able to tell him whether such a thing was possible and under what conditions. He had taken a firm decision about Clara’s fifty pounds. He must find it in the next two months and pay it into her bank. Perhaps they would get over the present crisis, perhaps not. But whatever happened, he must return the money.

  He had at last succeeded in seeing her at the hospital. But as soon as she saw him she had turned on her bed and faced the wall. There were other patients in the ward and most of them saw what had happened. Obi had never felt so embarrassed in his life. He left at once.

  Mr. Omo said it was possible to give an officer a salary advance under special conditions. The way he said it, it appeared the special conditions were not unconnected with his personal pleasure.

  “And by the way,” he said dropping the matter of advance, “you have to submit statement of expenditure in respect of the twenty-five pounds and refund the balance.”

  Obi had not realized that the allowance was not a free gift to be spent as one liked. He now learnt to his horror that, subject to a maximum of twenty-five pounds, he was allowed to claim so much for every mile of the return journey. Mr. Omo called it claiming “on an actuality basis.”

  Obi returned to his desk to do a little arithmetic, using the mileage chart. He discovered that the return journey from Lagos to Umuofia amounted to only fifteen pounds. “That’s just too bad,” he thought. Mr. Omo should have warned him when he gave him twenty-five. Anyway, it was too late to do anything about it now. He couldn’t possibly refund ten pounds. He would have to say that he spent his leave in the Cameroons. Pity, that.

  The chief result of the crisis in Obi’s life was that it made him examine critically for the first time the mainspring of his actions. And in doing so he uncovered a good deal that he could only regard as sheer humbug. Take this matter of twenty pounds every month to his town union, which in the final analysis was the root cause of all his troubles. Why had he not swallowed his pride and accepted the four months’ exemption which he had been allowed, albeit with a bad grace? Could a person in his position afford that kind of pride? Was it not a common saying among his people that a man should not, out of pride and etiquette, swallow his phlegm?

  Having seen the situation in its true light, Obi decided to stop payment forthwith until such a time as he could do it conveniently. The question was: Should he go and tell his town union? He decided against that, too. He would not give them another opportunity to pry into his affairs. He would just stop paying and, if they asked him why, he would say he had some family commitments which he must clear first. Everyone understood family commitments and would sympathize. If they didn’t it was just too bad. They would not take a kinsman to court, not for that kind of reason anyway.

  As he turned these things over in his mind the door opened and a messenger entered. Involuntarily Obi jumped to his feet to accept an envelope. He looked it over and turned it round and saw that it had not been opened. He put it in his shirt pocket and sank to his seat. The messenger had vanished as soon as he delivered the letter.

  His decision to write to Clara had been taken last night. Thinking again about the hospital incident, Obi had come to the conclusion that his anger was not justified. Or at any rate, Clara had far more to be angry about than he had. She was no doubt thinking that it was no thanks to him that she was still alive. She could not, of course, know how many anxious days and sleepless nights that he had passed through. But even if she did, would she be impressed? What comfort did a dead man derive from the knowledge that his murderer was in sackcloth and ashes?

  Obi, who nowadays spent all his time in bed, had got himself out and gone to his writing desk. Writing letters did not come easily to him. He worked out every sentence in his mind first before he set it down on paper. Sometimes he spent as long as ten minutes on the opening sentence. He wanted to say: “Forgive me for what has happened. It was all my fault.…” He ruled against it; that kind of self-reproach was sheer humbug. In the end he wrote:

  “I can understand your not wanting ever to set eyes on me again. I have wronged you terribly. But I cannot believe that it is all over. If you give me another chance, I shall never fail you again.”

  He read it over and over again. Then he rewrote the whole letter, changing I cannot believe to I cannot bring myself to believe.

  He left home very early in the morning so that he could drop the letter at the hospital before reporting for duty at eight o’clock. He dared not go into the ward; he stood outside waiting for a nurse to show up. Large numbers of patients were already queueing up in front of the consulting room. The air smelt of carbolic and strange drugs. Perhaps the hospital wasn’t really dirty, although it looked so. A little to the right a pregnant woman was vomiting into an open drain. Obi did not want to see the vomit, but his eyes kept wandering there on their own account.

  Two ward servants passed by Obi and he heard one say to the other:

  “Wetin de sick dat nursing sister?”

  “Me I no know-o,” the other answered as if he had been charged with complicity. “Dis kind well today sick tomorrow pass me.”

  “Dey say dey don givam belle.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Altogether Clara was in hospital for five weeks. As soon as she was discharged she was granted seventy days’ leave and she left Lagos. Obi heard of it from Christopher, who heard of it from his girl friend who was a nurse in the General Hospital.

  After one more failure Obi had been advised not to try to see Clara again in her present frame of mind. “She will come round,” said Christopher. “Give her time.” Then he quoted in Ibo the words of encouragement which the bedbug was said to have spoken to her children when hot water was poured on them all. She told them not to lose heart because whatever was hot must in the end turn cold.

  Obi’s plan to pay fifty pounds into her account had come to nothing for various reasons. One day he had received a registered parcel slip. He wondered who could be sending him a registered parcel. It turned out to have been the Commissioner of Income Tax.

  Marie advised him to arrange in future to pay by monthly installments through his bank. “That way you don’t notice it,” she s
aid.

  That was, of course, useful advice for the next tax year. As for the present, he had to find thirty-two pounds pretty soon.

  On top of it all came his mother’s death. He sent all he could find for her funeral, but it was already being said to his eternal shame that a woman who had borne so many children, one of whom was in a European post, deserved a better funeral than she got. One Umuofia man who had been on leave at home when she died had brought the news to Lagos to the meeting of the Umuofia Progressive Union.

  “It was a thing of shame,” he said. Someone else wanted to know, by the way, why that beast (meaning Obi) had not obtained permission to go home “That is what Lagos can do to a young man. He runs after sweet things, dances breast to breast with women and forgets his home and his people. Do you know what medicine that osu woman may have put into his soup to turn his eyes and ears away from his people?”

  “Do you ever see him in our meetings these days?” asked another. “He has found better company.”

  At this stage one of the older members of the meeting raised his voice. He was a very pompous man.

  “Everything you have said is true. But there is one thing I want you to learn. Whatever happens in this world has a meaning. As our people say: ‘Wherever something stands, another thing stands beside it.’ You see this thing called blood. There is nothing like it. That is why when you plant a yam it produces another yam, and if you plant an orange it bears oranges. I have seen many things in my life, but I have never yet seen a banana tree yield a coco yam. Why do I say this? You young men here, I want you to listen because it is from listening to old men that you learn wisdom. I know that when I return to Umuofia I cannot claim to be an old man. But here in this Lagos I am an old man to the rest of you.” He paused for effect. “This boy that we are all talking about, what has he done? He was told that his mother died and he did not care. It is a strange and surprising thing, but I can tell you that I have seen it before. His father did it.”

  There was some excitement at this. “Very true,” said another old man.

  “I say that his father did the same thing,” said the first man very quickly, lest the story be taken from his mouth. “I am not guessing and I am not asking you not to mention it outside. When this boy’s father—you all know him, Isaac Okonkwo—when Isaac Okonkwo heard of the death of his father he said that those who kill with the matchet must die by the matchet.”

  “Very true,” said the other man again. “It was the talk of Umuofia in those days and for many years. I was a very little boy at the time, but I heard of it.”

  “You see that,” said the President. “A man may go to England, become a lawyer or a doctor, but it does not change his blood. It is like a bird that flies off the earth and lands on an anthill. It is still on the ground.”

  Obi had been utterly prostrated by the shock of his mother’s death. As soon as he saw a post office messenger in khaki and steel helmet walking towards his table with the telegram he had known.

  His hand trembled violently as he signed the receipt and the result was nothing like his signature.

  “Time of receipt,” said the messenger.

  “What is the time?”

  “You get watch.”

  Obi looked at his watch, for, as the messenger had pointed out, he had one.

  Everybody was most kind. Mr. Green said he could take a week’s leave if he wished. Obi took two days. He went straight home and locked himself up in his flat. What was the point in going to Umuofia? She would have been buried by the time he got there, anyway. The thought of going home and not finding her! In the privacy of his bedroom he let tears run down his face like a child.

  The effect of his tears was startling. When he finally went to sleep he did not wake up even once in the night. Such a thing had not happened to him for many years. In the last few months he had hardly known any sleep at all.

  He woke with a start and saw that it was broad daylight. For a brief moment he wondered what had happened. Then yesterday’s thought woke violently. Something caught in his throat. He got out of bed and stood gazing at the light coming in through the louvres. Shame and guilt filled his heart. Yesterday his mother had been put into the ground and covered with red earth and he could not keep as much as one night’s vigil for her.

  “Terrible!” he said. His thoughts went to his father. Poor man, he would be completely lost without her. For the first month or so it would not be too bad. Obi’s married sisters would all return home. Esther could be relied upon to look after him. But in the end they would all have to go away again. That was the time the blow would really fall—when everyone began to go away. Obi wondered whether he had done the right thing in not setting out for Umuofia yesterday. But what could have been the point in going? It was more useful to send all the money he could for the funeral instead of wasting it on petrol to get home.

  He washed his head and face and shaved with an old razor. Then he nearly burnt his mouth out by brushing his teeth with shaving cream which he mistook for toothpaste.

  As soon as he returned from the bank he went and lay down again. He did not get up until Joseph came at about three in the afternoon. He came in a taxi. Sebastian opened the door for him.

  “Put these bottles in the fridge,” he told him.

  Obi came out from his bedroom and found bottles of beer at the doorstep. There must have been a dozen. “What is that, Joseph?” he asked. Joseph did not reply immediately. He was helping Sebastian to put them away first.

  “They are mine,” he said at last. “I will use them for something.”

  Before very long a number of Umuofia people began to arrive. Some came in taxis, not singly like Joseph but in teams of three or four, sharing the fare among them. Others came on bicycles. Altogether there were over twenty-five.

  The President of the Umuofia Progressive Union asked whether it was permissible to sing hymns in Ikoyi. He asked because Ikoyi was a European reservation. Obi said he would rather they did not sing, but he was touched most deeply that so many of his people had come, in spite of everything, to condole with him. Joseph called him aside and told him in a whisper that he had brought the beer to help him entertain those who would come.

  “Thank you,” Obi said, fighting back the mist which threatened to cover his eyes.

  “Give them about eight bottles, and keep the rest for those who will come tomorrow.”

  Everybody on arrival went to Obi and said “Ndo” to him. He answered some with a word and some with a nod of the head. No one dwelt unduly on his sorrow. They simply told him to take heart and were soon talking about the normal affairs of life. The news of the day was about the Minister of Land who used to be one of the most popular politicians until he took it into his head to challenge the national hero.

  “He is a foolish somebody,” said one of the men in English.

  “He is like the little bird nza who after a big meal so far forgot himself as to challenge his chi to single combat,” said another in Ibo.

  “What he saw in Obodo will teach him sense,” said yet another. “He went to address his people, but everyone in the crowd covered his nose with a handkerchief because his words stank.”

  “Was that not where they beat him?” asked Joseph.

  “No, that was in Abame. He went there with lorry-loads of women supporters. But you know Abame people; they don’t waste time. They beat him up well well and seized his women’s head ties. They said it was not proper to beat women, so they took their head ties from them.”

  In the far corner a little group was having a different conversation. There was a lull in the bigger discussion and the voice of Nathaniel was heard telling a story.

  “Tortoise went on a long journey to a distant clan. But before he went he told his people not to send for him unless something new under the sun happened. When he was gone, his mother died. The question was how to make him return to bury his mother. If they told him that his mother had died, he would say it was nothing new. So they told him th
at his father’s palm tree had borne a fruit at the end of its leaf. When tortoise heard this, he said he must return home to see this great monstrosity. And so his bid to escape the burden of his mother’s funeral was foiled.”

  There was a long and embarrassed silence when Nathaniel finished his story. It was clear that he had not meant it for more than a few ears around him. But he had suddenly found himself talking to the whole room. And he was not the man to stop in midstory.

  Again Obi slept all night and woke up in the morning with a feeling of guilt. But it was not as poignant as yesterday’s. And it very soon vanished altogether, leaving a queer feeling of calm. Death was a very odd thing, he thought. His mother was not three days dead and yet she was already so distant. When he tried last night to picture her he found the picture a little blurred at the edges.

  “Poor mother!” he said, trying by manipulation to produce the right emotion. But it was no use. The dominant feeling was of peace.

  He had a large and unseemly appetite when breakfast came, but he deliberately refused to eat more than a very little. At eleven, however, he could not help drinking a little garri soaked in cold water with sugar. As he drank it with a spoon he caught himself humming a dance tune.

  “Terrible!” he said.

  Then he remembered the story of King David, who refused food when his beloved son was sick, but washed and ate when he died. He, too, must have felt this kind of peace. The peace that passeth all understanding.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  When the period of guilt was over Obi felt like metal that has passed through fire. Or, as he himself put it in one of his spasmodic entries in his diary: “I wonder why I am feeling like a brand-new snake just emerged from its slough.” The picture of his poor mother returning from the stream, her washing undone and her palm bleeding where his rusty blade had cut into it, vanished. Or rather it took a secondary place. He now remembered her as the woman who got things done.