“Medicine, ma.”
“What antibiotic did they give you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know the name?”
“Let me bring them, ma.”
Esther came back with transparent packets of pills, on which instructions, but no names, were written in a crabbed handwriting in blue ink. Two to be taken morning and night. One to be taken three times daily.
“We should write about this, Doris. We should have a health column with useful practical information. Somebody should let the health minister know that ordinary Nigerians go to see a doctor and the doctor gives them unnamed medicines. This can kill you. How will anybody know what you have already taken, or what you shouldn’t take if you’re already taking something else?”
“Ahn-ahn, but that one is a small problem: they do it so that you don’t buy the medicine from someone else,” Zemaye said. “But what about fake drugs? Go to the market and see what they are selling.”
“Okay, let’s all calm down? No need to get all activist? We’re not doing investigative journalism here?” Doris said.
Ifemelu began then to visualize her new blog, a blue-and-white design, and, on the masthead, an aerial shot of a Lagos scene. Nothing familiar, not a traffic clog of yellow rusted buses or a water-logged slum of zinc shacks. Perhaps the abandoned house next to her flat would do. She would take the photo herself, in the haunted light of early evening, and hope to catch the male peacock in flight. The blog posts would be in a stark, readable font. An article about health care, using Esther’s story, with pictures of the packets of nameless medicine. A piece about the Nigerpolitan Club. A fashion article about clothes that women could actually afford. Posts about people helping others, but nothing like the Zoe stories that always featured a wealthy person, hugging children at a motherless babies’ home, with bags of rice and tins of powdered milk propped in the background.
“But, Esther, you have to stop all that fasting o,” Zemaye said. “You know, some months Esther will give her whole salary to her church, they call it ‘sowing a seed,’ then she will come and ask me to give her three hundred naira for transport.”
“But, ma, it is just small help. You are equal to the task,” Esther said, smiling.
“Last week she was fasting with a handkerchief,” Zemaye continued. “She kept it on her desk all day. She said somebody in her church got promoted after fasting with the handkerchief.”
“Is that what that handkerchief on her table was about?” Ifemelu asked.
“But I believe miracles totally work? I know my aunt was cured of cancer in her church?” Doris said.
“With a magic handkerchief, abi?” Zemaye scoffed.
“You don’t believe, ma? But it is true.” Esther was enjoying the camaraderie, reluctant to return to her desk.
“So you want a promotion, Esther? Which means you want my job?” Zemaye asked.
“No, ma! All of us will be promoted in Jesus’ name!” Esther said.
They were all laughing.
“Has Esther told you what spirit you have, Ifemelu?” Zemaye asked, walking to the door. “When I first started working here, she kept inviting me to her church and then one day she told me there would be a special prayer service for people with the spirit of seductiveness. People like me.”
“That’s not like entirely far-fetched?” Doris said and smirked.
“What is my spirit, Esther?” Ifemelu asked.
Esther shook her head, smiling, and left the office.
Ifemelu turned to her computer. The title for the blog had just come to her. The Small Redemptions of Lagos.
“I wonder who Zemaye is dating?” Doris said.
“She told me she doesn’t have a boyfriend.”
“Have you seen her car? Her salary can’t pay for the light in that car? It’s not like her family is rich or anything. I’ve been working with her almost a year now and I don’t know what she like really does?”
“Maybe she goes home and changes her clothes and becomes an armed robber at night,” Ifemelu said.
“Whatever,” Doris said.
“We should do a piece about churches,” Ifemelu said. “Like Esther’s church.”
“That’s not a good fit for Zoe?”
“It makes no sense that Aunty Onenu likes to run three profiles of these boring women who have achieved nothing and have nothing to say. Or the younger women with zero talent who have decided that they are fashion designers.”
“You know they pay Aunty Onenu, right?” Doris asked.
“They pay her?” Ifemelu stared. “No, I didn’t know. And you know I didn’t know.”
“Well, they do. Most of them. You have to realize a lot of things happen in this country like that?”
Ifemelu got up to gather her things. “I never know where you stand or if you stand on anything at all.”
“And you are such a judgmental bitch?” Doris screamed, her eyes bulging. Ifemelu, alarmed by the suddenness of the change, thought that perhaps Doris was, underneath her retro affectations, one of those women who could transform when provoked, and tear off their clothes and fight in the street.
“You sit there and judge everyone,” Doris was saying. “Who do you think you are? Why do you think this magazine should be about you? It isn’t yours. Aunty Onenu has told you what she wants her magazine to be and it’s either you do it or you shouldn’t be working here?”
“You need to get yourself a moisturizer and stop scaring people with that nasty red lipstick,” Ifemelu said. “And you need to get a life, and stop thinking that sucking up to Aunty Onenu and helping her publish a god-awful magazine will open doors for you, because it won’t.”
She left the office feeling common, shamed, by what had just happened. Perhaps this was a sign, to quit now and start her blog.
On her way out, Esther said, her voice earnest and low, “Ma? I think you have the spirit of husband-repelling. You are too hard, ma, you will not find a husband. But my pastor can destroy that spirit.”
CHAPTER 50
Dike was seeing a therapist three times a week. Ifemelu called him every other day, and sometimes he spoke about his session, and other times he did not, but always he wanted to hear about her new life. She told him about her flat, and how she had a driver who drove her to work, and how she was seeing her old friends, and how, on Sundays, she loved to drive herself because the roads were empty; Lagos became a gentler version of itself, and the people dressed in their bright church clothes looked, from far away, like flowers in the wind.
“You would like Lagos, I think,” she said, and he, eagerly, surprisingly, said, “Can I come visit you, Coz?”
Aunty Uju was reluctant at first. “Lagos? Is it safe? You know what he has been through. I don’t think he can handle it.”
“But he asked to come, Aunty.”
“He asked to come? Since when has he known what is good for him? Is he not the same person who wanted to make me childless?”
But Aunty Uju bought Dike’s ticket and now here they were, she and Dike in her car, crawling through the crush of traffic in Oshodi, Dike looking wide-eyed out of the window. “Oh my God, Coz, I’ve never seen so many black people in the same place!” he said.
They stopped at a fast-food place, where he ordered a hamburger. “Is this horse meat? Because it isn’t a hamburger.” Afterwards, he would eat only jollof rice and fried plantain.
It was auspicious, his arrival, a day after she put up her blog and a week after she resigned. Aunty Onenu did not seem surprised by her resignation, nor did she try to make her stay. “Come and give me a hug, my dear,” was all she said, smiling vacuously, while Ifemelu’s pride soured. But Ifemelu was full of sanguine expectations for The Small Redemptions of Lagos, with a dreamy photograph of an abandoned colonial house on its masthead. Her first post was a short interview with Priye, with photographs from weddings Priye had planned. Ifemelu thought most of the décor fussy and overdone, but the post received enthusiastic comments,
especially about the décor. Fantastic decoration. Madam Priye, I hope you will do my own wedding. Great work, carry go. Zemaye had written, under a pseudonym, a piece about body language and sex, “Can You Tell If Two People Are Doing It Just by Looking at Them Together?” That, too, drew many comments. But the most comments, by far, were for Ifemelu’s piece about the Nigerpolitan Club.
Lagos has never been, will never be, and has never aspired to be like New York, or anywhere else for that matter. Lagos has always been undisputably itself, but you would not know this at the meeting of the Nigerpolitan Club, a group of young returnees who gather every week to moan about the many ways that Lagos is not like New York as though Lagos had ever been close to being like New York. Full disclosure: I am one of them. Most of us have come back to make money in Nigeria, to start businesses, to seek government contracts and contacts. Others have come with dreams in their pockets and a hunger to change the country, but we spend all our time complaining about Nigeria, and even though our complaints are legitimate, I imagine myself as an outsider saying: Go back where you came from! If your cook cannot make the perfect panini, it is not because he is stupid. It is because Nigeria is not a nation of sandwich-eating people and his last oga did not eat bread in the afternoon. So he needs training and practice. And Nigeria is not a nation of people with food allergies, not a nation of picky eaters for whom food is about distinctions and separations. It is a nation of people who eat beef and chicken and cow skin and intestines and dried fish in a single bowl of soup, and it is called assorted, and so get over yourselves and realize that the way of life here is just that, assorted.
The first commenter wrote: Rubbish post. Who cares? The second wrote: Thank God somebody is finally talking about this. Na wa for arrogance of Nigerian returnees. My cousin came back after six years in America and the other morning she came with me to the nursery school at Unilag where I was dropping off my niece and, near the gate, she saw students standing in line for the bus and she said, “Wow, people actually stand in line here!” Another early commenter wrote: Why should Nigerians who school abroad have a choice of where to get posted for their national youth service? Nigerians who school in Nigeria are randomly posted so why shouldn’t Nigerians who school abroad be treated the same way? That comment sparked more responses than the original post had. By the sixth day, the blog had one thousand unique visitors.
Ifemelu moderated the comments, deleting anything obscene, reveling in the liveliness of it all, in the sense of herself at the surging forefront of something vibrant. She wrote a long post about the expensive lifestyles of some young women in Lagos, and a day after she put it up, Ranyinudo called her, furious, her breathing heavy over the phone.
“Ifem, how can you do this kind of thing? Anyone who knows me will know it’s me!”
“That’s not true, Ranyi. Your story is so common.”
“What are you saying? It is so obviously me! Look at this!” Ranyinudo paused and then began to read aloud.
There are many young women in Lagos with Unknown Sources of Wealth. They live lives they can’t afford. They have only ever traveled business class to Europe but have jobs that can’t even afford them a regular flight ticket. One of them is my friend, a beautiful, brilliant woman who works in advertising. She lives on The Island and is dating a big man banker. I worry that she will end up like many women in Lagos who define their lives by men they can never truly have, crippled by their culture of dependence, with desperation in their eyes and designer handbags on their wrists.
“Ranyi, honestly, nobody will know it’s you. All the comments so far have been from people saying that they identify. So many women lose themselves in relationships like that. What I really had in mind was Aunty Uju and The General. That relationship destroyed her. She became a different person because of The General and she couldn’t do anything for herself, and when he died, she lost herself.”
“And who are you to pass judgment? How is it different from you and the rich white guy in America? Would you have your U.S. citizenship today if not for him? How did you get your job in America? You need to stop this nonsense. Stop feeling so superior!”
Ranyinudo hung up on her. For a long time, Ifemelu stared at the silent phone, shaken. Then she took down the post and drove over to Ranyinudo’s place.
“Ranyi, I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry,” she said.
Ranyinudo gave her a long look.
“You’re right,” Ifemelu said. “It’s easy to be judgmental. But it was not personal, and it was not coming from a bad place. Please, biko. I will never invade your privacy like that again.”
Ranyinudo shook her head. “Ifemelunamma, your problem is emotional frustration. Go and find Obinze, please.”
Ifemelu laughed. It was what she least expected to hear.
“I have to lose weight first,” she said.
“You’re just afraid.”
Before Ifemelu left, they sat on the couch and drank malt and watched the latest celebrity news on E!.
DIKE VOLUNTEERED to moderate the blog comments, so that she could take a break.
“Oh my God, Coz, people take this stuff really personal!” he said. Sometimes he laughed aloud on reading a comment. Other times, he asked her what unfamiliar expressions meant. What’s “shine your eye”? The first time the power went off after he arrived, the buzzing, whirring, piping sounds of her UPS startled him. “Oh my God, is that like a fire alarm?” he asked.
“No, that’s just something that makes sure my TV doesn’t get destroyed by crazy power cuts.”
“That’s crazy,” Dike said, but only days later he was going to the back of the flat to turn on the generator himself when the power went off. Ranyinudo brought her cousins to meet him, girls who were close to his age, skinny jeans clinging to their slender hips, their budding breasts outlined in tight T-shirts. “Dike, you must marry one of them o,” Ranyinudo said. “We need fine children in our family.” “Ranyi!” her cousins said, abashed, hiding their shyness. They liked Dike. It was so easy to like him, with his charm and his humor and the vulnerability openly lurking underneath. On Facebook, he posted a picture Ifemelu had taken of him standing on the verandah with Ranyinudo’s cousins, and he captioned it: No lions yet to eat me, folks.
“I wish I spoke Igbo,” he told her after they had spent an evening with her parents.
“But you understand perfectly,” she said.
“I just wish I spoke.”
“You can still learn,” she said, suddenly feeling desperate, unsure how much this mattered to him, thinking again of him lying on the couch in the basement, drenched in sweat. She wondered if she should say more or not.
“Yes, I guess so,” he said, and shrugged, as though to say it was already too late.
Some days before he left, he asked her, “What was my father really like?”
“He loved you.”
“Did you like him?”
She did not want to lie to him. “I don’t know. He was a big man in a military government and that does something to you and the way you relate to people. I was worried for your mom because I thought she deserved better. But she loved him, she really did, and he loved you. He used to carry you with such tenderness.”
“I can’t believe Mom hid from me for so long that she was his mistress.”
“She was protecting you,” Ifemelu said.
“Can we go see the house in Dolphin Estate?”
“Yes.”
She drove him to Dolphin Estate, astounded by how much it had declined. The paint was peeling on buildings, the streets pitted with potholes, and the whole estate resigned to its own shabbiness. “It was so much nicer then,” she told him. He stood looking at the house for a while, until the gateman said, “Yes? Any problem?” and they got back into the car.
“Can I drive, Coz?” he asked.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. She came out of the driver’s seat and went around to his. He drove them home, hesitating slightly before he merged o
nto Osborne Road, and then easing into traffic with more confidence. She knew it meant something to him that she could not name. That night, when the power went off, her generator would not come on, and she suspected that her driver, Ayo, had been sold diesel spiked with kerosene. Dike complained about the heat, about mosquitoes biting him. She opened the windows, made him take off his shirt, and they lay side by side in bed talking, desultory talking, and she reached out and touched his forehead and left her hand there until she heard the gentle even breathing of his sleep.
In the morning, the sky was overcast with slate-gray clouds, the air thick with rains foreboding. From nearby a clutch of birds screeched and flew away. The rain would come down, a sea unleashed from the sky, and DSTV images would get grainy, phone networks would clog, the roads would flood and traffic would gnarl. She stood with Dike on the verandah as the early droplets came down.
“I kind of like it here,” he told her.
She wanted to say, “You can live with me. There are good private schools here that you could go to,” but she did not.
She took him to the airport, and stayed watching until he went past security, waved, and turned the corner. Back home, she heard the hollowness in her steps as she walked from bedroom to living room to verandah and then back again. Later, Ranyinudo told her, “I don’t understand how a fine boy like Dike would want to kill himself. A boy living in America with everything. How can? That is very foreign behavior.”
“Foreign behavior? What the fuck are you talking about? Foreign behavior? Have you read Things Fall Apart?” Ifemelu asked, wishing she had not told Ranyinudo about Dike. She was angrier with Ranyinudo than she had ever been, yet she knew that Ranyinudo meant well, and had said what many other Nigerians would say, which was why she had not told anyone else about Dike’s suicide attempt since she came back.
CHAPTER 51
It had terrified her, the first time she came to the bank, to walk past the armed security guard, and into the beeping door, where she stood in the enclosure, sealed and airless like a standing coffin, until the light changed to green. Had banks always had this ostentatious security? Before she left America, she had wired some money to Nigeria, and Bank of America had made her speak to three different people, each one telling her that Nigeria was a high-risk country; if anything happened to her money, they would not be responsible. Did she understand? The last woman she spoke to made her repeat herself. Ma’am, I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. I need to know that you understand that Nigeria is a high-risk country. “I understand!” she said. They read her caveat after caveat, and she began to fear for her money, snaking its way through the air to Nigeria, and she worried even more when she came to the bank and saw the gaudy garlands of security at the entrance. But the money was safely in her account. And now, as she walked into the bank, she saw Obinze at the customer service section. He was standing with his back to her and she knew, from the height and the shape of the head, that it was him. She stopped, sick with apprehension, hoping he would not turn just yet until she had gathered her nerves. Then he turned and it was not Obinze. Her throat felt tight. Her head was filled with ghosts. Back in her car, she turned on the air conditioner and decided to call him, to free herself of the ghosts. His phone rang and rang. He was a big man now; he would not, of course, pick up a call from an unknown number. She sent a text: Ceiling, it’s me. Her phone rang almost immediately.