“I don’t feel like going,” Aunty Uju told them, while Chikodili served orange juice, a carton on a tray, two glasses placed beside it.
“Ahn-ahn. Why now?” Uche asked.
“Serious big men are coming,” Adesuwa said. “You never know if you will meet somebody.”
“I don’t want to meet anybody,” Aunty Uju said, and there was quiet, as though each of them had to catch their breath, Aunty Uju’s words a gale that tore through their assumptions. She was supposed to want to meet men, to keep her eyes open; she was supposed to see The General as an option that could be bettered. Finally, one of them, Adesuwa or Uche, said, “This your orange juice is the cheap brand o! You don’t buy Just Juice anymore?” A lukewarm joke, but they laughed to ease the moment away.
After they left, Aunty Uju came over to the dining table, where Ifemelu sat reading.
“Ifem, I don’t know what got into me. Ndo.” She held Ifemelu’s wrist, then ran her hand, almost meditatively, over the embossed title of Ifemelu’s Sidney Sheldon novel. “I must be mad. He has a beer belly and Dracula teeth and a wife and children and he’s old.”
For the first time, Ifemelu felt older than Aunty Uju, wiser and stronger than Aunty Uju, and she wished that she could wrest Aunty Uju away, shake her into a clear-eyed self, who would not lay her hopes on The General, slaving and shaving for him, always eager to fade his flaws. It was not as it should be. Ifemelu felt a small gratification to hear, later, Aunty Uju shouting on the phone. “Nonsense! You knew you were going to Abuja from the beginning so why let me waste my time preparing for you!”
The cake a driver delivered the next morning, with “I’m sorry my love” written on it in blue frosting, had a bitter aftertaste, but Aunty Uju kept it in the freezer for months.
AUNTY UJU’S PREGNANCY CAME, like a sudden sound in a still night. She arrived at the flat wearing a sequined bou-bou that caught the light, glistening like a flowing celestial presence, and said that she wanted to tell Ifemelu’s parents about it before they heard the gossip. “Adi m ime,” she said simply.
Ifemelu’s mother burst into tears, loud dramatic cries, looking around, as though she could see, lying around her, the splintered pieces of her own story. “My God, why have you forsaken me?”
“I did not plan this, it happened,” Aunty Uju said. “I fell pregnant for Olujimi in university. I had an abortion and I am not doing it again.” The word “abortion,” blunt as it was, scarred the room, because they all knew that what Ifemelu’s mother did not say was that surely there were ways to take care of this. Ifemelu’s father put his book down and picked it up again. He cleared his throat. He soothed his wife.
“Well, I cannot ask about the man’s intentions,” he said finally to Aunty Uju. “So I should ask what your own intentions are.”
“I will have the baby.”
He waited to hear more, but Aunty Uju said nothing else, and so he sat back, assailed. “You are an adult. This is not what I hoped for you, Obianuju, but you are an adult.”
Aunty Uju went over and sat on the arm of his sofa. She spoke in a low, pacifying voice, stranger for being formal, but saved from falseness by the soberness of her face. “Brother, this is not what I hoped for myself either, but it has happened. I am sorry to disappoint you, after everything you have done for me, and I beg you to forgive me. But I will make the best of this situation. The General is a responsible man. He will take care of his child.”
Ifemelu’s father shrugged wordlessly. Aunty Uju put an arm around him, as though it were he who needed comforting.
LATER, Ifemelu would think of the pregnancy as symbolic. It marked the beginning of the end and made everything else seem rapid, the months rushing past, time hurtling forward. There was Aunty Uju, dimpled with exuberance, her face aglow, her mind busy with plans as her belly curved outwards. Every few days, she came up with a new girl’s name for the baby. “Oga is happy,” she said. “He is happy to know that he can still score a goal at his age, old man like him!” The General came more often, even on some weekends, bringing her hot water bottles, herbal pills, things he had heard were good for pregnancy.
He told her, “Of course you will deliver abroad,” and asked which she preferred, America or England. He wanted England, so that he could travel with her; the Americans had barred entry to high-ranking members of the military government. But Aunty Uju chose America, because her baby could still have automatic citizenship there. The plans were made, a hospital picked, a furnished condo rented in Atlanta. “What is a condo, anyway?” Ifemelu asked. And Aunty Uju shrugged and said, “Who knows what Americans mean? You should ask Obinze, he will know. At least it is a place to live. And Oga has people there who will help me.” Aunty Uju was dampened only when her driver told her that The General’s wife had heard about the pregnancy and was furious; there had, apparently, been a tense family meeting with his relatives and hers. The General hardly spoke about his wife, but Aunty Uju knew enough: a lawyer who had given up working to raise their four children in Abuja, a woman who looked portly and pleasant in newspaper photographs. “I wonder what she is thinking,” Aunty Uju said sadly, musingly. While she was in America, The General had one of the bedrooms repainted a brilliant white. He bought a cot, its legs like delicate candles. He bought stuffed toys, and too many teddy bears. Inyang propped them in the cot, lined some up on a shelf and, perhaps because she thought nobody would notice, she took one teddy bear to her room in the back. Aunty Uju had a boy. She sounded high and elated over the phone. “Ifem, he has so much hair! Can you imagine? What a waste!”
She called him Dike, after her father, and gave him her surname, which left Ifemelu’s mother agitated and sour.
“The baby should have his father’s name, or is the man planning to deny his child?” Ifemelu’s mother asked, as they sat in their living room, still digesting the news of the birth.
“Aunty Uju said it was just easier to give him her name,” Ifemelu said. “And is he behaving like a man that will deny his child? Aunty told me he’s even talking about coming to pay her bride price.”
“God forbid,” Ifemelu’s mother said, almost spitting the words out, and Ifemelu thought of all those fervent prayers for Aunty Uju’s mentor. Her mother, when Aunty Uju came back, stayed in Dolphin Estate for a while, bathing and feeding the gurgling, smooth-skinned baby, but she faced The General with a cold officiousness. She answered him in monosyllables, as though he had betrayed her by breaking the rules of her pretense. A relationship with Aunty Uju was acceptable, but such flagrant proof of the relationship was not. The house smelled of baby powder. Aunty Uju was happy. The General held Dike often, suggesting that perhaps he needed to be fed again or that a doctor needed to see the rash on his neck.
FOR DIKE’S FIRST BIRTHDAY PARTY, The General brought a live band. They set up in the front garden, near the generator house, and stayed until the last guests left, all of them slow and sated, taking food wrapped in foil. Aunty Uju’s friends came, and The General’s friends came, too, their expressions determined, as though to say that no matter the circumstances, their friend’s child was their friend’s child. Dike, newly walking, tottered around in a suit and red bow tie, while Aunty Uju followed him, trying to get him to be still for a few moments with the photographer. Finally, tired, he began to cry, yanking at his bow tie, and The General picked him up and carried him around. It was the image of The General that would endure in Ifemelu’s mind, Dike’s arms around his neck, his face lit up, his front teeth jutting out as he smiled, saying, “He looks like me o, but thank God he took his mother’s teeth.”
The General died the next week, in a military plane crash. “On the same day, the very same day, that the photographer brought the pictures from Dike’s birthday,” Aunty Uju would often say, in telling the story, as though this held some particular significance.
It was a Saturday afternoon, Obinze and Ifemelu were in the TV room, Inyang was upstairs with Dike, Aunty Uju was in the kitchen with Chikodili when the phone ran
g. Ifemelu picked it up. The voice on the other end, The General’s ADC, crackled through a bad connection, but was still clear enough to give her details: the crash happened a few miles outside Jos, the bodies were charred, there were already rumors that the Head of State had engineered it to get rid of officers who he feared were planning a coup. Ifemelu held the phone too tightly, stunned. Obinze went with her to the kitchen, and stood by Aunty Uju as Ifemelu repeated the ADC’s words.
“You are lying,” Aunty Uju said. “It is a lie.”
She marched towards the phone, as though to challenge it, too, and then she slid to the floor, a boneless, bereft sliding, and began to weep. Ifemelu held her, cradled her, all of them unsure of what to do, and the silence in between her sobs seemed too silent. Inyang brought Dike downstairs.
“Mama?” Dike said, looking puzzled.
“Take Dike upstairs,” Obinze told Inyang.
There was banging on the gate. Two men and three women, relatives of The General, had bullied Adamu to open the gate, and now stood at the front door, shouting. “Uju! Pack your things and get out now! Give us the car keys!” One of the women was skeletal, agitated and red-eyed, and as she shouted—“Common harlot! God forbid that you will touch our brother’s property! Prostitute! You will never live in peace in this Lagos!”—she pulled her headscarf from her head and tied it tightly around her waist, in preparation for a fight. At first, Aunty Uju said nothing, staring at them, standing still at the door. Then she asked them to leave in a voice hoarse from tears, but the relatives’ shouting intensified, and so Aunty Uju turned to go back indoors. “Okay, don’t go,” she said. “Just stay there. Stay there while I go and call my boys from the army barracks.”
Only then did they leave, telling her, “We are coming back with our own boys.” Only then did Aunty Uju begin to sob again. “I have nothing. Everything is in his name. Where will I take my son to now?”
She picked up the phone from its cradle and then stared at it, uncertain whom to call.
“Call Uche and Adesuwa,” Ifemelu said. They would know what to do.
Aunty Uju did, pressing the speaker button, and then leaned against the wall.
“You have to leave immediately. Make sure you clear the house, take everything,” Uche said. “Do it fast-fast before his people come back. Arrange a tow van and take the generator. Make sure you take the generator.”
“I don’t know where to find a van,” Aunty Uju mumbled, with a helplessness foreign to her.
“We’re going to arrange one for you, fast-fast. You have to take that generator. That is what will pay for your life until you gather yourself. You have to go somewhere for a while, so that they don’t give you trouble. Go to London or America. Do you have American visa?”
“Yes.”
Ifemelu would remember the final moments in a blur, Adamu saying there was a journalist from City People at the gate, Ifemelu and Chikodili stuffing clothes in suitcases, Obinze carrying things out to the van, Dike stumbling around and chortling. The rooms upstairs had grown unbearably hot; the air conditioners had suddenly stopped working, as though they had decided, in unison, to pay tribute to the end.
CHAPTER 7
Obinze wanted to go to the University of Ibadan because of a poem.
He read the poem to her, J. P. Clark’s “Ibadan,” and he lingered on the words “running splash of rust and gold.”
“Are you serious?” she asked him. “Because of this poem?”
“It’s so beautiful.”
Ifemelu shook her head, in mocking, exaggerated incredulity. But she, too, wanted to go to Ibadan, because Aunty Uju had gone there. They filled out their JAMB forms together, sitting at the dining table while his mother hovered around, saying, “Are you using the right pencil? Cross-check everything. I have heard of the most unlikely mistakes that you will not believe.”
Obinze said, “Mummy, we are more likely to fill it out without mistakes if you stop talking.”
“At least you should make Nsukka your second choice,” his mother said. But Obinze did not want to go to Nsukka, he wanted to escape the life he had always had, and Nsukka, to Ifemelu, seemed remote and dusty. And so they both agreed to make the University of Lagos their second choice.
The next day, Obinze’s mother collapsed in the library. A student found her spread on the floor like a rag, a small bump on her head, and Obinze told Ifemelu, “Thank God we haven’t submitted our JAMB forms.”
“What do you mean?”
“My mom is returning to Nsukka at the end of this session. I have to be near her. The doctor said this thing will keep happening.” He paused. “We can see each other during long weekends. I will come to Ibadan and you come to Nsukka.”
“You’re a joker,” she told him. “Biko, I’m changing to Nsukka as well.”
The change pleased her father. It was heartening, he said, that she would go to university in Igboland since she had lived her whole life in the west. Her mother was downcast. Ibadan was only an hour away, but Nsukka meant a day’s journey on the bus.
“It’s not a day, Mummy, just seven hours,” Ifemelu said.
“And what is the difference between that and a day?” her mother asked.
Ifemelu was looking forward to being away from home, to the independence of owning her own time, and she felt comforted that Ranyinudo and Tochi were going to Nsukka too. So was Emenike, who asked Obinze if they could be roommates, in the boys’ quarters of Obinze’s house. Obinze said yes. Ifemelu wished he had not. “There’s just something about Emenike,” she said. “But anyway, as long as he goes away when we are busy with ceiling.”
Later, Obinze would ask, half seriously, if Ifemelu thought his mother’s fainting had been deliberate, a plot to keep him close. For a long time, he spoke wistfully of Ibadan until he visited the campus, for a table tennis tournament, and returned to tell her, sheepishly, “Ibadan reminded me of Nsukka.”
TO GO TO NSUKKA was to finally see Obinze’s home, a bungalow resting in a compound filled with flowers. Ifemelu imagined him growing up, riding his bicycle down the sloping street, returning home from primary school with his bag and water bottle. Still, Nsukka disoriented her. She thought it too slow, the dust too red, the people too satisfied with the smallness of their lives. But she would come to love it, a hesitant love at first. From the window of her hostel room, where four beds were squashed into a space for two, she could look out to the entrance of Bello Hall. Tall gmelina trees swayed in the wind, and underneath them were hawkers, guarding trays of bananas and groundnuts, and okadas all parked close to each other, the motorcyclists talking and laughing, but each of them alert to customers. She put up bright blue wallpaper in her corner and because she had heard stories of roommate squabbles—one final-year student, it was said, had poured kerosene into the drawer of the first-year student for being what was called “saucy”—she felt fortunate about her roommates. They were easygoing and soon she was sharing with them and borrowing from them the things that easily ran out, toothpaste and powdered milk and Indomie noodles and hair pomade. Most mornings, she woke up to the rumbling murmur of voices in the corridor, the Catholic students saying the rosary, and she would hurry to the bathroom, to collect water in her bucket before the tap stopped, to squat over the toilet before it became unbearably full. Sometimes, when she was too late, and the toilets already swirled with maggots, she would go to Obinze’s house, even if he was not there, and once the house help Augustina opened the front door, she would say, “Tina-Tina, how now? I came to use the toilet.”
She often ate lunch in Obinze’s house, or they would go to town, to Onyekaozulu, and sit on wooden benches in the dimness of the restaurant, eating, on enamel plates, the tenderest of meats and the tastiest of stews. She spent some nights in Obinze’s boys’ quarters, lounging on his mattress on the floor, listening to music. Sometimes she would dance in her underwear, wiggling her hips, while he teased her about having a small bottom: “I was going to say shake it, but there’s nothing to sha
ke.”
University was bigger and baggier, there was room to hide, so much room; she did not feel as though she did not belong because there were many options for belonging. Obinze teased her about how popular she already was, her room busy during the first-year rush, final-year boys dropping by, eager to try their luck, even though a large photo of Obinze hung above her pillow. The boys amused her. They came and sat on her bed and solemnly offered to “show her around campus,” and she imagined them saying the same words in the same tone to the first-year girl in the next room. One of them, though, was different. His name was Odein. He came to her room, not as part of the first-year rush but to talk to her roommates about the students’ union, and after that, he would come by to visit her, to say hello, sometimes bringing a pack of suya, hot and spicy, wrapped in oil-stained newspaper. His activism surprised Ifemelu—he seemed a little too urbane, a little too cool, to be in the students’ union government—but also impressed her. He had thick, perfectly shaped lips, the lower the same size as the upper, lips that were both thoughtful and sensual, and as he spoke—“If the students are not united, nobody will listen to us”—Ifemelu imagined kissing him, in a way that she imagined doing something she knew she never would. It was because of him that she joined the demonstration, and convinced Obinze to join, too. They chanted “No Light! No Water!” and “VC is a Goat!” and found themselves carried along with the roaring crowd that settled, finally, in front of the vice chancellor’s house. Bottles were broken, a car was set on fire, and then the vice chancellor came out, diminutive, encased between security men, and spoke in pastel tones.
Later, Obinze’s mother said, “I understand the students’ grievances, but we are not the enemy. The military is the enemy. They have not paid our salary in months. How can we teach if we cannot eat?” And, still later, the news spread around campus of a strike by lecturers, and students gathered in the hostel foyer, bristling with the known and the unknown. It was true, the hall rep confirmed the news, and they all sighed, contemplating this sudden unwanted break, and returned to their rooms to pack; the hostel would be closed the next day. Ifemelu heard a girl close by say, “I don’t have ten kobo for transport to go home.”