“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 canapés 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 Kalabari 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 pages 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 imag
ined 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.
He didn’t sleep well; he felt as if he had just laid his head on the pillow before the blinding sunlight streamed in through his curtains and he heard Harrison’s clatter in the kitchen and Jomo’s digging in the garden. He felt brittle. He could not wait to sleep properly, with Kainene’s thin arm pressed against his body.
Harrison served fried eggs and toast for breakfast.
“Sah? There are papers I am seeing on the ground in the study?” He looked alarmed.
“Leave them there.”
“Yes, sah.” Harrison folded and refolded his arms. “You are taking your manscrit? I pack other papers for you?”
“No, I won’t be working this weekend,” Richard said. The disappointment on Harrison’s face did not amuse him as it usually did. He wondered, as he boarded the train, what it was Harrison did during the weekends. Perhaps he cooked himself tiny exquisite meals. He shouldn’t have been so ill-tempered with the poor man; it wasn’t Harrison’s fault that Okeoma felt he was condescending. It was the look in Okeoma’s eyes that worried him the most: a disdainful distrust that made him think of reading somewhere that the African and the European would always be irreconcilable. It was wrong of Okeoma to assume that he was one of those Englishmen who did not give the African the benefit of an equal intelligence. Perhaps he had sounded surprised, now that he thought of it, but it was the same surprise he would express if a similar discovery were made in England or anywhere else in the world.
Hawkers were milling about. “Buy groundnuts!” “Buy oranges!” “Buy plantains!”
Richard beckoned to a young woman carrying a tray of boiled groundnuts that he didn’t really want. She lowered her tray and he took one, cracked it between his fingers, and chewed the nuts inside before he asked for two cups. She looked surprised that he knew about tasting first, and he thought sourly that Okeoma, too, would have been surprised. Before he ate each nut, he examined it—soft-boiled, light purple, shriveled—and tried not to think of the crumpled pages in his study, until the train arrived in Port Harcourt.
“Madu’s invited us to dinner tomorrow,” Kainene said, as she drove him from the train station in her long American car. “His wife has just come back from overseas.”
“Has she?” Richard said little else, and instead looked at the hawkers on the road, shouting, gesturing, running after cars to collect their money.
The sound of the rain slapping against the window woke him up the next morning. Kainene lay beside him, her eyes half open in that eerie way that meant she was deeply asleep. He looked at her dark chocolate skin, which shone with oil, and lowered his head to her face. He didn’t kiss her, didn’t let his face touch hers, but placed it close enough so that he could feel the moistness of her breath and smell its faint curdled scent. He stretched and went to the window. It rained in slants here in Port Harcourt so that the water hit the windows and walls rather than the roof. Perhaps it was because the ocean was so close, because the air was so heavy with water that it let it fall too soon. For a moment, the rain became intense and the sound against the window grew loud, like pebbles being flung against the glass. He stretched again. The rain had stopped and the windowpanes were cloudy. Behind him, Kainene stirred and mumbled something.
“Kainene?” he said.
Her eyes were still half open, her breathing still regular.
“I’m going for a walk,” he said, although he was sure she didn’t hear him.
Outside, Ikejide was plucking oranges; his uniform bunched up at the back as he nudged fruit down with a stick.
“Good morning, sah,” he said.
“Kedu?” Richard asked. He felt comfortable practicing his Igbo with Kainene’s stewards, because they were always so expressionless that it did not matter whether or not he got the tones right.
“I am well, sah.”
“Jisie ike.”
“Yes, sah.”
Richard went to the bottom of the orchard, where he could see, through the thicket of trees, the white foam of the sea’s waves. He sat on the ground. He wished that Major Madu had not invited them to dinner; he was not at all interested in meeting the man’s wife. He got up and stretched and went around to the front yard and looked at the violet bougainvillea that crept up the walls. He walked for a while down the muddy stretch of deserted road that led to the house before he turned back. Kainene was in bed reading a newspaper. He climbed in beside her and she reached out and touched his hair, her fingers gently caressing his scalp. “Are you all right? You’ve been tense since yesterday.”
Richard told her about Okeoma, and because she did not respond right away, he added, “I remember the first time I read about Igbo-Ukwu art, in an article where an Oxford don described it as having a strange rococo, almost Fabergé-like virtuosity. I never forgot that—rococo, almost Fabergé-like virtuosity. I fell in love even with that expression.”
She folded the newspaper and placed it on the bedside cabinet. “Why does it matter so much what Okeoma thinks?”
“I do love the art. It was horrible of him to accuse me of disrespect.”
“And it’s wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It’s possible to love something and still condescend to it.”
Richard rolled away from her. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know if I’m a writer.”
“You won’t know until you write, will you?” Kainene climbed out of bed, and he noticed a metallic sheen on her thin shoulders. “I see you don’t feel up to an evening out. I’ll call Madu and cancel dinner.”
She came back after making the phone call and sat on the bed, and in the silence that separated them he suddenly felt grateful that her crispness gave him no space for self-pity, gave him nothing to hide behind.
“I once spat in my father’s glass of water,” she said. “He hadn’t upset me or anything. I just did it. I was fourteen. I would have been incredibly satisfied if he drank it, but of course Olanna ran and changed the water.” She stretched out beside him. “Now you tell me something horrible you did.”
He was aroused by her silky skin rubbing against his
, by how readily she had changed the evening plans with Major Madu. “I didn’t have the confidence to do horrible things,” he said.
“Well, tell me something, then.”
He thought of telling her about that day in Wentnor when he hid from Molly and felt, for the first time, the possibility of shaping his own destiny. But he didn’t. Instead, he told her about his parents, how they stared at each other when they talked, forgot his birthdays, and then had Molly make a cake that said HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY weeks after. They never knew what and when he ate; Molly fed him when she remembered. They had not planned to have him and, because of that, they had raised him as an afterthought. But he understood even as a young boy that it was not that they did not love him, rather it was that they often forgot that they did because they loved each other too much. Kainene raised her eyebrows, sardonic, as if his reasoning did not make sense to her, and because of that he was afraid to tell her that he sometimes thought he loved her too much.
2. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died
He discusses the British soldier-merchant Taubman Goldie, how he coerced, cajoled, and killed to gain control of the palm-oil trade and how, at the Berlin Conference of 1884 where Europeans divided Africa, he ensured that Britain beat France to two protectorates around the River Niger: the North and the South.
The British preferred the North. The heat there was pleasantly dry; the Hausa-Fulani were narrow-featured and therefore superior to the negroid Southerners, Muslim and therefore as civilized as one could get for natives, feudal and therefore perfect for indirect rule. Equable emirs collected taxes for the British, and the British, in return, kept the Christian missionaries away.
The humid South, on the other hand, was full of mosquitoes and animists and disparate tribes. The Yoruba were the largest in the Southwest. In the Southeast, the Igbo lived in small republican communities. They were nondocile and worryingly ambitious. Since they did not have the good sense to have kings, the British created “warrant chiefs,” because indirect rule cost the Crown less. Missionaries were allowed in to tame the pagans, and the Christianity and education they brought flourished. In 1914, the governor-general joined the North and the South, and his wife picked a name. Nigeria was born.