In the kitchen, Arize was cutting open the chicken and Aunty Ifeka was washing the rice. She showed them the slippers from Abdulmalik and put them on; the pleated red straps made her feet look slender, more feminine.
“Very nice,” Aunty Ifeka said. “I shall thank him.”
Olanna sat on a stool and carefully avoided looking at the cockroach eggs, smooth black capsules, lodged in all corners of the table. A neighbor was building a wood fire in one corner and despite the slanting openings in the roof, the smoke choked the kitchen.
“I makwa, all her family eats every day is stockfish,” Arize said, gesturing toward the neighbor with pursed lips. “I don’t know if her poor children even know what meat tastes like.” Arize threw her head back and laughed.
Olanna glanced at the woman. She was an Ijaw and could not understand Arize’s Igbo. “Maybe they like stockfish,” she said.
“O di egwu! Like it indeed! Do you know how cheap the thing is?” Arize was still laughing as she turned to the woman. “Ibiba, I am telling my big sister that your soup always smells so delicious.”
The woman stopped blowing at the firewood and smiled, a knowing smile, and Olanna wondered if perhaps the woman understood Igbo but chose to humor Arize’s fun-poking. There was something about Arize’s effervescent mischief that made people forgiving.
“So you are moving to Nsukka to marry Odenigbo, Sister?” Arize asked.
“I don’t know about marriage yet. I just want to be closer to him, and I want to teach.”
Arize’s round eyes were admiring and bewildered. “It is only women that know too much Book like you who can say that, Sister. If people like me who don’t know Book wait too long, we will expire.” Arize paused as she removed a translucently pale egg from inside the chicken. “I want a husband today and tomorrow, oh! My mates have all left me and gone to husbands’ houses.”
“You are young,” Olanna said. “You should focus on your sewing for now.”
“Is it sewing that will give me a child? Even if I had managed to pass to go to school, I would still want a child now.”
“There is no rush, Ari.” Olanna wished she could shift her stool closer to the door, to fresh air. But she didn’t want Aunty Ifeka, or Arize, or even the neighbor to know that the smoke irritated her eyes and throat or that the sight of the cockroach eggs nauseated her. She wanted to seem used to it all, to this life.
“I know you will marry Odenigbo, Sister, but honestly I am not sure I want you to marry a man from Abba. Men from Abba are so ugly, kai! If only Mohammed was an Igbo man, I would eat my hair if you did not marry him. I have never seen a more handsome man.”
“Odenigbo is not ugly. Good looks come in different ways,” Olanna said.
“That is what the relatives of the ugly monkey, enwe, told him to make him feel better, that good looks come in different ways.”
“Men from Abba are not ugly,” Aunty Ifeka said. “My people came from there, after all.”
“And do your people not resemble the monkey?” Arize said.
“Your full name is Arizendikwunnem, isn’t it? You come from your mother’s people. So perhaps you look like a monkey as well,” Aunty Ifeka murmured.
Olanna laughed. “So why are you talking marriage-marriage like this, Ari? Have you seen anybody you like? Or should I find you one of Mohammed’s brothers?”
“No, no!” Arize waved her hands in the air in mock horror. “Papa would kill me first of all if he knew I was even looking at a Hausa man like that.”
“Unless your father will kill a corpse, because I will start with you first,” Aunty Ifeka said, and rose with the bowl of clean rice.
“There is someone, Sister.” Arize moved closer to Olanna. “But I am not sure he is looking at me, oh.”
“Why are you whispering?” Aunty Ifeka asked.
“Am I talking to you? Is it not my big sister I am talking to?” Arize asked her mother. But she raised her voice as she continued. “His name is Nnakwanze and he is from close to us, from Ogidi. He works at the railway. But he has not told me anything. I don’t know if he is looking at me hard enough.”
“If he is not looking at you hard enough, there is something wrong with his eyes,” Aunty Ifeka said.
“Have you people seen this woman? Why can’t I talk to my big sister in peace?” Arize rolled her eyes, but it was clear she was pleased and perhaps had used this opportunity to tell her mother about Nnakwanze.
That night, as Olanna lay on her uncle and aunt’s bed, she watched Arize through the thin curtain that hung on a rope attached to nails on the wall. The rope was not taut, and the curtain sagged in the middle. She followed the up-down movement of Arize’s breathing and imagined what growing up had been like for Arize and her brothers, Odinchezo and Ekene, seeing their parents through the curtain, hearing the sounds that might suggest an eerie pain to a child as their father’s hips moved and their mother’s arms clutched him. She had never heard her own parents making love, never even seen any indication that they did. But she had always been separated from them by hallways that got longer and more thickly carpeted as they moved from house to house. When they moved to their present home, with its ten rooms, her parents chose different bedrooms for the first time. “I need the whole wardrobe, and it will be nice to have your father visit!” her mother had said. But the girlish laugh had not rung true for Olanna. The artificiality of her parents’ relationship always seemed harder, more shaming, when she was here in Kano.
The window above her was open, the still night air thick with the odors from the gutters behind the house, where people emptied their toilet buckets. Soon, she heard the muted chatter of the night-soil men as they collected the sewage; she fell asleep listening to the scraping sounds of their shovels as they worked, shielded by the dark.
The beggars outside the gates of Mohammed’s family home did not move when they saw Olanna. They remained seated on the ground, leaning against the mud compound walls. Flies perched on them in dense clusters, so that for a moment it seemed as if their frayed white caftans had been splashed with dark-colored paint. Olanna wanted to put some money in their bowls but decided not to. If she were a man, they would have called out to her and extended their begging bowls, and the flies would rise in buzzing clouds.
One of the gatemen recognized her and opened the gates. “Welcome, madam.”
“Thank you, Sule. How are you?”
“You remember my name, madam!” He beamed. “Thank you, madam. I am well, madam.”
“And your family?”
“Well, madam, by the will of Allah.”
“Is your master back from America?”
“Yes, madam. Please come in. I will send to call Master.”
Mohammed’s red sports car was parked in front of the sprawling sandy yard but what held Olanna’s attention was the house: the graceful simplicity of its flat roof. She sat down on the veranda.
“The best surprise!”
She looked up and Mohammed was there, in a white caftan, smiling down at her. His lips were a sensual curve, lips she had once kissed often during those days when she spent most of her weekends in Kano, eating rice with her fingers in his house, watching him play polo at the Flying Club, reading the bad poetry he wrote her.
“You’re looking so well,” she told him, as they hugged. “I wasn’t sure you’d be back from America.”
“I was planning to come up to Lagos to see you.” Mohammed moved back to look at her. There was a tilt to his head, a narrowing of his eyes, that meant he still harbored hope.
“I’m moving to Nsukka,” she said.
“So you are finally going to become an intellectual and marry your lecturer.”
“Nobody said anything about marriage. And how is Janet? Or is it Jane? I mix up your American women.”
Mohammed raised one eyebrow. She could not help admiring his caramel complexion. She used to tease him about being prettier than she was.
“What did you do to your hair?” he asked. “
It doesn’t suit you at all. Is this how your lecturer wants you to look, like a bush woman?”
Olanna touched her hair, newly plaited with black thread. “My aunty did it. I quite like it.”
“I don’t. I prefer your wigs.” Mohammed moved closer and hugged her again. When she felt his arms tighten around her, she pushed him away.
“You won’t let me kiss you.”
“No,” she said, although it had not been a question. “You’re not telling me about Janet-Jane.”
“Jane. So this means I won’t see you anymore when you go to Nsukka.”
“Of course I’ll see you.”
“I know that lecturer of yours is crazy, so I won’t come to Nsukka.” Mohammed laughed. His tall slim body and tapering fingers spoke of fragility, gentleness. “Would you like a soft drink? Or some wine?”
“You have alcohol in this house? Someone must inform your uncle,” Olanna teased.
Mohammed rang a bell and asked a steward to bring some drinks. Afterward, he sat thoughtfully rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. “Sometimes, I feel my life is going nowhere. I travel and drive imported cars, and women follow me. But something isn’t there, something isn’t right. You know?” She watched him; she knew where he was going with this. Yet when he said, “I wish things didn’t change,” she was touched and flattered.
“You’ll find a good woman,” she said limply.
“Rubbish,” he said, and as they sat side by side drinking Coke, she recalled the disbelieving pain on his face that had only deepened when she told him she had to end it right away because she did not want to be unfaithful to him. She expected that he would resist, she knew very well how much he loved her, but she had been shocked when he told her to go ahead and sleep with Odenigbo as long as she did not leave him: Mohammed, who often half joked about coming from a lineage of holy warriors, the very avatars of pious masculinity. Perhaps it was why her affection for him would always be mingled with gratitude, a selfish gratitude. He could have made their breakup more difficult for her; he could have left her with much more guilt.
She placed her glass down. “Let’s go for a drive. I hate it when I visit Kano and only get to see the ugly cement and zinc of Sabon Gari. I want to see that ancient mud statue and go around the lovely city walls again.”
“Sometimes you are just like the white people, the way they gawk at everyday things.”
“Do I?”
“It’s a joke. How are you going to learn not to take everything so seriously if you live with that crazy lecturer?” Mohammed stood up. “Come, we should stop by first so you can greet my mother.”
As they walked past a small gate at the back and into the courtyard that led to his mother’s chambers, Olanna remembered the trepidation she used to feel coming here. The reception area was the same, with gold-dyed walls and thick Persian rugs and grooved patterns on the exposed ceilings. Mohammed’s mother looked unchanged, too, with the ring in her nose and the silk scarves around her head. She was finespun in the way that used to make Olanna wonder if she wasn’t uncomfortable, dressing up every day and simply sitting at home. But the older woman did not have that old standoffish expression, did not speak stiffly with her eyes focused somewhere between Olanna’s face and the hand-carved paneling. Instead she got up and hugged Olanna.
“You look so lovely, my dear. Don’t let the sun spoil that skin of yours.”
“Na gode. Thank you, Hajia,” Olanna said, wondering how it was possible for people to switch affection off and on, to tie and untie emotions.
“I am no longer the Igbo woman you wanted to marry who would taint the lineage with infidel blood,” Olanna said, as they climbed into Mohammed’s red Porsche. “So I am a friend now.”
“I would have married you anyhow, and she knew it. Her preference did not matter.”
“Maybe not at first, but what about later? What about when we had been married for ten years?”
“Your parents felt the same way as she did.” Mohammed turned to look at her. “Why are we talking about this now?” There was something inexpressibly sad in his eyes. Or maybe she was imagining it. Maybe she wanted him to seem sad at the thought that they would never marry. She did not wish to marry him, and yet she enjoyed dwelling on the things they did not do and would never do.
“Sorry,” she said.
“There’s nothing to apologize for.” Mohammed reached out and took her hand. The car made rasping sounds as they drove past the gates. “There’s too much dust in the exhaust. These cars weren’t made for our parts.”
“You should buy a hardy Peugeot.”
“Yes, I should.”
Olanna stared at the beggars clumped around the walls of the palace, their bodies and begging bowls covered in flies. The air smelled of the spicy-sour leaves from the neem tree.
“I am not like white people,” she said quietly.
Mohammed glanced at her. “Of course you’re not. You’re a nationalist and a patriot, and soon you will marry your lecturer the freedom fighter.”
Olanna wondered if Mohammed’s lightness hid a more serious mockery. Her hand was still in his and she wondered, too, if he was having difficulty maneuvering the car with one hand.
Olanna moved to Nsukka on a windy Saturday, and the next day Odenigbo left for a mathematics conference at the University of Ibadan. He would not have gone if the conference was not focused on the work of his mentor, the black American mathematician David Blackwell.
“He is the greatest living mathematician, the greatest,” he said. “Why don’t you come with me, nkem? It’s only for a week.”
Olanna said no; she wanted the chance to settle down when he was not there, to make peace with her fears in his absence. The first thing she did after he left was to throw away the red and white plastic flowers on the center table.
Ugwu looked horrified. “But mah, it is still good.”
She led the way outside to the African lilies and pink roses, freshly watered by Jomo, and asked Ugwu to cut some. She showed him how much water to put in the vase. Ugwu looked at the flowers and shook his head, as if he could not believe her foolishness. “But it die, mah. The other one don’t die.”
“Yes, but these are better, fa makali,” Olanna said.
“How better, mah?” He always responded in English to her Igbo, as if he saw her speaking Igbo to him as an insult that he had to defend himself against by insistently speaking English.
“They are just nicer,” she said, and realized that she did not know how to explain why fresh flowers were better than plastic ones. Later, when she saw the plastic flowers in a kitchen cupboard, she was not surprised. Ugwu had saved them, the same way he saved old sugar cartons, bottle corks, even yam peels. It came with never having had much, she knew, the inability to let go of things, even things that were useless. So when she was in the kitchen with him, she talked about the need to keep only things that were useful, and she hoped he would not ask her how the fresh flowers, then, were useful. She asked him to clean out the store and line the shelves with old newspapers, and as he worked she stood by and asked him about his family. It was difficult to picture them because, with his limited vocabulary, he described everyone as “very good.” She went to the market with him, and after they bought the household items, she bought him a comb and a shirt. She taught him to cook fried rice with green peppers and diced carrots, asked him not to cook beans until they became pudding, not to douse things in oil, not to be too sparing with salt. Although she had noticed his body odor the first time she saw him, she let a few days pass before she gave him some scented powder for his armpits and asked him to use two capfuls of Dettol in his bath water. He looked pleased when he sniffed the powder, and she wondered if he could tell that it was a feminine scent. She wondered, too, what he really thought of her. There was clearly affection, but there was also a quiet speculation in his eyes, as if he was holding her up to something. And she worried that she came out lacking.
He finally started to speak Igbo to
her on the day she rearranged the photos on the wall. A wall gecko had scuttled out from behind the wood-framed photo of Odenigbo in a graduating gown, and Ugwu shouted, “Egbukwala! Don’t kill it!”
“What?” She turned to glance down at him from the chair she was standing on.
“If you kill it you will get a stomachache,” he said. She found his Opi dialect funny, the way he seemed to spit the words out.
“Of course we won’t kill it. Let’s hang the photo on that wall.”
“Yes, mah,” he said, and then began to tell her, in Igbo, how his sister Anulika had suffered a terrible stomachache after killing a gecko.
Olanna felt less of a visitor in the house when Odenigbo came back; he pulled her forcefully, kissed her, pressed her to him.
“You should eat first,” she said.
“I know what I want to eat.”
She laughed. She felt ridiculously happy.
“What’s happened here?” Odenigbo asked, looking around the room. “All the books on that shelf?”
“Your older books are in the second bedroom. I need the space for my books.”
“Ezi okwu? You’ve really moved in, haven’t you?” Odenigbo was laughing.
“Go and have a bath,” she said.
“And what was that flowery scent on my good man?”
“I gave him a scented talcum powder. Didn’t you notice his body odor?”
“That’s the smell of villagers. I used to smell like that until I left Abba to go to secondary school. But you wouldn’t know about things like that.” His tone was gently teasing. But his hands were not gentle. They were unbuttoning her blouse, freeing her breast from a bra cup. She was not sure how much time had passed, but she was tangled in bed with Odenigbo, warm and naked, when Ugwu knocked to say they had visitors.
“Can’t they leave?” she murmured.
“Come, nkem,” Odenigbo said. “I can’t wait for them to meet you.”