THE STRIKE LASTED too long. The weeks crawled past. Ifemelu was restless, antsy; every day she listened to the news, hoping to hear that the strike was over. Obinze called her at Ranyinudo’s house; she would arrive minutes before he was due to call and sit by the gray rotary phone, waiting for it to ring. She felt cut away from him, each of them living and breathing in separate spheres, he bored and spiritless in Nsukka, she bored and spiritless in Lagos, and everything curdled in lethargy. Life had become a turgid and suspended film. Her mother asked if she wanted to join the sewing class at church, to keep her occupied, and her father said that this, the unending university strike, was why young people became armed robbers. The strike was nationwide, and all her friends were home, even Kayode was home, back on holiday from his American university. She visited friends and went to parties, wishing Obinze lived in Lagos. Sometimes Odein, who had a car, would pick her up and take her where she needed to go. “That your boyfriend is lucky,” he told her, and she laughed, flirting with him. She still imagined kissing him, sloe-eyed and thick-lipped Odein.
One weekend, Obinze visited and stayed with Kayode.
“What is going on with this Odein?” Obinze asked her.
“What?”
“Kayode said he took you home after Osahon’s party. You didn’t tell me.”
“I forgot.”
“You forgot.”
“I told you he picked me up the other day, didn’t I?”
“Ifem, what is going on?”
She sighed. “Ceiling, it’s nothing. I’m just curious about him. Nothing is ever going to happen. But I am curious. You get curious about other girls, don’t you?”
He was looking at her, his eyes fearful. “No,” he said coldly. “I don’t.”
“Be honest.”
“I am being honest. The problem is you think everyone is like you.
You think you’re the norm but you’re not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Just forget it.”
He did not want to talk about it any further, but the air between them was marred, and remained disturbed for days, even after he went back home, so that when the strike ended (“The lecturers have called it off! Praise God!” Chetachi shouted from their flat one morning) and Ifemelu returned to Nsukka, they were tentative with each other for the first few days, their conversations on tiptoe, their hugs abridged.
It surprised Ifemelu, how much she had missed Nsukka itself, the routines of unhurried pace, friends gathered in her room until past midnight, the inconsequential gossip told and retold, the stairs climbed slowly up and down as though in a gradual awakening, and each morning whitened by the harmattan. In Lagos, the harmattan was a mere veil of haze, but in Nsukka, it was a raging, mercurial presence; the mornings were crisp, the afternoons ashen with heat, and the nights unknown. Dust whirls would start in the far distance, very pretty to look at as long as they were far away, and swirl until they coated everything brown. Even eyelashes. Everywhere, moisture would be greedily sucked up; the wood laminate on tables would peel off and curl, pages of exercise books would crackle, clothes would dry minutes after being hung out, lips would crack and bleed, and Robb and Mentholatum kept within reach, in pockets and handbags. Skin would be shined with Vaseline, while the forgotten bits—between the fingers or at the elbows—turned a dull ash. The tree branches would be stark and, with their leaves fallen, wear a kind of proud desolation. The church bazaars would leave the air redolent, smoky from mass cooking. Some nights, the heat lay thick like a towel. Other nights, a sharp cold wind would descend, and Ifemelu would abandon her hostel room and, snuggled next to Obinze on his mattress, listen to the whistling pines howling outside, in a world suddenly fragile and breakable.
OBINZE’S MUSCLES WERE ACHING. He lay on his belly, and Ifemelu straddled him, massaging his back and neck and thighs with her fingers, her knuckles, her elbows. He was painfully taut. She stood on him, placed one foot gingerly on the back of a thigh, and then the other. “Does it feel okay?”
“Yes.” He groaned in pleasure-pain. She pressed down slowly, his skin warm under the soles of her feet, his tense muscles unknotting. She steadied herself with a hand on the wall, and dug her heels deeper, moving inch by inch while he grunted, “Ah! Ifem, yes, just there. Ah!”
“You should stretch after playing ball, mister man,” she said, and then she was lying on his back, tickling his underarms and kissing his neck.
“I have a suggestion for a better kind of massage,” he said. When he undressed her, he did not stop, as usual, at her underwear. He pulled it down and she raised her legs to aid him.
“Ceiling,” she said, half-certain. She did not want him to stop, but she had imagined this differently, assumed they would make a carefully planned ceremony of it.
“I’ll come out,” he said.
“You know it doesn’t always work.”
“If it doesn’t work, then we’ll welcome Junior.”
“Stop it.”
He looked up. “But, Ifem, we’re going to get married anyway.”
“Look at you. I might meet a rich handsome man and leave you.”
“Impossible. We’ll go to America when we graduate and raise our fine children.”
“You’ll say anything now because your brain is between your legs.”
“But my brain is always there!”
They were both laughing, and then the laughter stilled, gave way to a new, strange graveness, a slippery joining. It felt, to Ifemelu, like a weak copy, a floundering imitation of what she had imagined it would be. After he pulled away, jerking and gasping and holding himself, a discomfort nagged at her. She had been tense through it all, unable to relax. She had imagined his mother watching them; the image had forced itself onto her mind, and it had, even more oddly, been a double image, of his mother and Onyeka Onwenu, both watching them with unblinking eyes. She knew she could not possibly tell Obinze’s mother what had happened, even though she had promised to, and had believed then that she would. But now she could not see how. What would she say? What words would she use? Would Obinze’s mother expect details? She and Obinze should have planned it better; that way, she would know how to tell his mother. The unplannedness of it all had left her a little shaken, and also a little disappointed. It seemed somehow as though it had not been worth it after all.
When, a week or so later, she woke up in pain, a sharp stinging on her side and a great, sickening nausea pervading her body, she panicked. Then she vomited and her panic grew.
“It’s happened,” she told Obinze. “I’m pregnant.” They had met, as usual, in front of the Ekpo refectory after their morning lecture. Students milled around. A group of boys were smoking and laughing close by and for a moment, their laughter seemed directed at her.
Obinze’s brows wrinkled. He did not seem to understand what she was saying. “But, Ifem, it can’t be. It’s too early. Besides, I came out.”
“I told you it doesn’t work!” she said. He suddenly seemed young, a confused small boy looking helplessly at her. Her panic grew. On an impulse, she hailed a passing okada and jumped on the back and told the motorcyclist that she was going to town.
“Ifem, what are you doing?” Obinze asked. “Where are you going?”
“To call Aunty Uju,” she said.
Obinze got on the next okada and was soon speeding behind her, past the university gates and to the NITEL office, where Ifemelu gave the man behind the peeling counter a piece of paper with Aunty Uju’s American number. On the phone, she spoke in code, making it up as she went along, because of the people standing there, some waiting to make their own calls, others merely loitering, but all listening, with unabashed and open interest, to the conversations of others.
“Aunty, I think what happened to you before Dike came has happened to me,” Ifemelu said. “We ate the food a week ago.”
“Just last week? How many times?”
“Once.”
“Ifem, calm down. I don’t think you’re
pregnant. But you need to do a test. Don’t go to the campus medical center. Go to town, where nobody will know you. But calm down first. It will be okay, inugo?”
Later, Ifemelu sat on a rickety chair in the waiting room of the lab, stony and silent, ignoring Obinze. She was angry with him. It was unfair, she knew, but she was angry with him. As she went into the dirty toilet with a small container the lab girl had given her, he had asked, already getting up, “Should I come with you?” and she snapped, “Come with me for what?” And she wanted to slap the lab girl. A yellow-faced beanpole of a girl who sneered and shook her head when Ifemelu first said, “Pregnancy test,” as though she could not believe she was encountering one more case of immorality. Now, she was watching them, smirking and humming insouciantly.
“I have the result,” she said after a while, holding the unsealed paper, her expression disappointed because it was negative. Ifemelu was too stunned, at first, to be relieved, and then she needed to urinate again.
“People should respect themselves and live like Christians to avoid trouble,” the lab girl said as they left.
That evening, Ifemelu vomited again. She was in Obinze’s room, lying down and reading, still frosty towards him, when a rush of salty saliva filled her mouth and she leaped up and ran to the toilet.
“It must be something I ate,” she said. “That yam pottage I bought from Mama Owerre.”
Obinze went inside the main house and came back to say his mother was taking her to the doctor’s. It was late evening, his mother did not like the young doctor who was on call at the medical center in the evenings, and so she drove to Dr. Achufusi’s house. As they passed the primary school with its trimmed hedges of whistling pine, Ifemelu suddenly imagined that she was indeed pregnant, and the girl had used expired test chemicals in that dingy lab. She blurted out, “We had sex, Aunty. Once.” She felt Obinze tense. His mother looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Let us see the doctor first,” she said. Dr. Achufusi, an avuncular and pleasant man, pressed at Ifemelu’s side and announced, “It’s your appendix, very inflamed. We should get it out quickly.” He turned to Obinze’s mother. “I can schedule her for tomorrow afternoon.”
“Thank you so much, Doctor,” Obinze’s mother said.
In the car, Ifemelu said, “I’ve never had surgery, Aunty.”
“It’s nothing,” Obinze’s mother said briskly. “Our doctors here are very good. Get in touch with your parents and tell them not to worry. We will take care of you. After they discharge you, you can stay in the house until you feel strong.”
Ifemelu called her mother’s colleague, Aunty Bunmi, and gave her a message, as well as Obinze’s home phone number, to pass on to her mother. That evening, her mother called; she sounded short of breath.
“God is in control, my precious,” her mother said. “Thank God for this your friend. God will bless her and her mother.”
“It’s him. A boy.”
“Oh.” Her mother paused. “Please thank them. God bless them. We will take the first bus tomorrow morning to Nsukka.”
Ifemelu remembered a nurse cheerfully shaving her pubic hair, the rough scratch of the razor blade, the smell of antiseptic. Then there was a blankness, an erasure of her mind, and when she emerged from it, groggy and still swaying on the edge of memory, she heard her parents talking to Obinze’s mother. Her mother was holding her hand. Later, Obinze’s mother would ask them to stay in her house, there was no point wasting money on a hotel. “Ifemelu is like a daughter to me,” she said.
Before they returned to Lagos, her father said, with that intimidated awe he had in the face of the well-educated, “She has BA London First Class.” And her mother said, “Very respectful boy, that Obinze. He has good home training. And their hometown is not far from us.”
OBINZE’S MOTHER WAITED a few days, perhaps for Ifemelu to regain her strength, before she called them and asked them to sit down and turn the TV off.
“Obinze and Ifemelu, people make mistakes, but some mistakes can be avoided.”
Obinze remained silent. Ifemelu said, “Yes, Aunty.”
“You must always use a condom. If you want to be irresponsible, then wait until you are no longer in my care.” Her tone had hardened, become censorious. “If you make the choice to be sexually active, then you must make the choice to protect yourself. Obinze, you should take your pocket money and buy condoms. Ifemelu, you too. It is not my concern if you are embarrassed. You should go into the pharmacy and buy them. You should never ever let the boy be in charge of your own protection. If he does not want to use it, then he does not care enough about you and you should not be there. Obinze, you may not be the person who will get pregnant, but if it happens it will change your entire life and you cannot undo it. And please, both of you, keep it between both of you. Diseases are everywhere. AIDS is real.”
They were silent.
“Did you hear me?” Obinze’s mother asked.
“Yes, Aunty,” Ifemelu said.
“Obinze?” his mother said.
“Mummy, I’ve heard you,” Obinze said, adding, sharply, “I’m not a small boy!” Then he got up and stalked out of the room.
CHAPTER 8
Strikes now were common. In the newspapers, university lecturers listed their complaints, the agreements that were trampled in the dust by government men whose own children were schooling abroad. Campuses were emptied, classrooms drained of life. Students hoped for short strikes, because they could not hope to have no strike at all. Everyone was talking about leaving. Even Emenike had left for England. Nobody knew how he managed to get a visa. “So he didn’t even tell you?” Ifemelu asked Obinze, and Obinze said, “You know how Emenike is.” Ranyinudo, who had a cousin in America, applied for a visa but was rejected at the embassy by a black American who she said had a cold and was more interested in blowing his nose than in looking at her documents. Sister Ibinabo started the Student Visa Miracle Vigil on Fridays, a gathering of young people, each one holding out an envelope with a visa application form, on which Sister Ibinabo laid a hand of blessing. One girl, already in her final year at the University of Ife, got an American visa the first time she tried, and gave a tearful, excited testimony in church. “Even if I have to start from the beginning in America, at least I know when I will graduate,” she said.
One day, Aunty Uju called. She no longer called frequently; before, she would call Ranyinudo’s house if Ifemelu was in Lagos, or Obinze’s house if Ifemelu was at school. But her calls had dried up. She was working three jobs, not yet qualified to practice medicine in America. She talked about the exams she had to take, various steps meaning various things that Ifemelu did not understand. Whenever Ifemelu’s mother suggested asking Aunty Uju to send them something from America—multivitamins, shoes—Ifemelu’s father would say no, they had to let Uju find her feet first, and her mother would say, a hint of slyness in her smile, that four years was long enough to find one’s feet.
“Ifem, kedu?” Aunty Uju asked. “I thought you would be in Nsukka. I just called Obinze’s house.”
“We’re on strike.”
“Ahn-ahn! The strike hasn’t ended?”
“No, that last one ended, we went back to school and then they started another one.”
“What is this kind of nonsense?” Aunty Uju said. “Honestly, you should come and study here, I am sure you can easily get a scholarship. And you can help me take care of Dike. I’m telling you, the small money I make is all going to his babysitter. And by God’s grace, by the time you come, I will have passed all my exams and started my residency.” Aunty Uju sounded enthusiastic but vague; until she voiced it, she had not given the idea much thought.
Ifemelu might have left it at that, a formless idea floated but allowed to sink again, if not for Obinze. “You should do it, Ifem,” he said. “You have nothing to lose. Take the SATs and try for a scholarship. Ginika can help you apply to schools. Aunty Uju is there so at least you have a foundation to start with. I wish I could do the same, but I can
’t just get up and go. It’s better for me to finish my first degree and then come to America for graduate school. International students can get funding and financial aid for graduate school.”
Ifemelu did not quite grasp what it all meant, but it sounded correct because it came from him, the America expert, who so easily said “graduate school” instead of “postgraduate school.” And so she began to dream. She saw herself in a house from The Cosby Show, in a school with students holding notebooks miraculously free of wear and crease. She took the SATs at a Lagos center, packed with thousands of people, all bristling with their own American ambitions. Ginika, who had just graduated from college, applied to schools on her behalf, calling to say, “I just wanted you to know I’m focusing on the Philadelphia area because I went here,” as though Ifemelu knew where Philadelphia was. To her, America was America.
The strike ended. Ifemelu returned to Nsukka, eased back into campus life, and from time to time, she dreamed of America. When Aunty Uju called to say that there were acceptance letters and a scholarship offer, she stopped dreaming. She was too afraid to hope, now that it seemed possible.
“Make small-small braids that will last long, it’s very expensive to make hair here,” Aunty Uju told her.
“Aunty, let me get the visa first!” Ifemelu said.
She applied for a visa, convinced that a rude American would reject her application, it was what happened so often, after all, but the gray-haired woman wearing a St. Vincent de Paul pin on her lapel smiled at her and said, “Pick up your visa in two days. Good luck with your studies.”