Americanah

  The first time he saw Ifemelu at Jazzhole, he had come home and told Kosi, “Ifemelu is in town. I had a drink with her,” and Kosi had said, “Oh, your girlfriend in university,” with an indifference so indifferent that he did not entirely trust it.

  Why had he told her? Perhaps because he had sensed even then the force of what he felt, and he wanted to prepare her, to tell her in stages. But how could she not see that he had changed? How could she not see it on his face? In how much time he spent alone in his study, and in how often he went out, how late he stayed? He had hoped, selfishly, that it might alienate her, provoke her. But she always nodded, glib and accepting nods, when he told her he had been at the club. Or at Okwudiba’s. Once he said that he was still chasing the difficult deal with the new Arab owners of Megatel, and he had said “the deal” casually, as if she already knew about it, and she made vague, encouraging sounds. But he was not even involved at all with Megatel.

  THE NEXT MORNING, he woke up unrested, his mind furred with a great sadness. Kosi was already up and bathed, sitting in front of her dressing table, which was full of creams and potions so carefully arranged that he sometimes imagined putting his hands under the table and overturning it, just to see how all those bottles would fare.

  “You haven’t made me eggs in a while, The Zed,” she said, coming over to kiss him when she saw that he was awake. And so he made her eggs, and played with Buchi in the living room downstairs, and after Buchi fell asleep, he read the newspapers, all the time his head furred with that sadness. Ifemelu was still not taking his calls. He went upstairs to the bedroom. Kosi was cleaning out a closet. A pile of shoes, high heels sticking up, lay on the floor. He stood by the door and said quietly, “I’m not happy, Kosi. I love somebody else. I want a divorce. I will make sure you and Buchi lack nothing.”

  “What?” She turned from the mirror to look at him blankly.

  “I’m not happy.” It was not how he had planned to say it, but he had not even planned what to say. “I’m in love with somebody. I will make sure …”

  She raised her hand, her open palm facing him, to make him stop talking. Say no more, her hand said. Say no more. And it irked him that she did not want to know more. Her palm was pale, almost diaphanous, and he could see the greenish criss-cross of her veins. She lowered her hand. Then, slowly, she sank to her knees. It was an easy descent for her, sinking to her knees, because she did that often when she prayed, in the TV room upstairs, with the house help and nanny and whoever else was staying with them. “Buchi, shh,” she would say in between the words of prayer, while Buchi would continue her toddler talk, but at the end Buchi always squeaked in a high piping voice, “Amen!” When Buchi said “Amen!” with that delight, that gusto, Obinze feared she would grow up to be a woman who, with that word “amen,” would squash the questions she wanted to ask of the world. And now Kosi was sinking to her knees before him and he did not want to comprehend what she was doing.

  “Obinze, this is a family,” Kosi said. “We have a child. She needs you. I need you. We have to keep this family together.”

  She was kneeling and begging him not to leave and he wished she would be furious instead.

  “Kosi, I love another woman. I hate to hurt you like this and …”

  “It’s not about another woman, Obinze,” Kosi said, rising to her feet, her voice steeling, her eyes hardening. “It’s about keeping this family together! You took a vow before God. I took a vow before God. I am a good wife. We have a marriage. Do you think you can just destroy this family because your old girlfriend came into town? Do you know what it means to be a responsible father? You have a responsibility to that child downstairs! What you do today can ruin her life and make her damaged until the day she dies! And all because your old girlfriend came back from America? Because you have had acrobatic sex that reminded you of your time in university?”

  Obinze backed away. So she knew. He left and went into his study and locked the door. He loathed Kosi, for knowing all this time and pretending she didn’t know, and for the sludge of humiliation it left in his stomach. He had been keeping a secret that was not even a secret. A multilayered guilt weighed him down, guilt not only for wanting to leave Kosi, but for having married her at all. He could not first marry her, knowing very well that he should not have done so, and now, with a child, want to leave her. She was determined to remain married and it was the least he owed her, to remain married. Panic lanced through him at the thought of remaining married; without Ifemelu, the future loomed as an endless, joyless tedium. Then he told himself that he was being silly and dramatic. He had to think of his daughter. Yet as he sat on his chair and swiveled to look for a book on the shelf, he felt himself already in flight.

  BECAUSE HE HAD RETREATED to his study, and slept on the couch there, because they had said nothing else to each other, he thought Kosi would not want to go to his friend Ahmed’s child’s christening party the next day. But in the morning Kosi laid out, on their bed, her blue lace long skirt, his blue Senegalese caftan, and in between, Buchi’s flouncy blue velvet dress. She had never done that before, laid out color-coordinated outfits for them all. Downstairs, he saw that she had made pancakes, the thick ones he liked, set out on the breakfast table. Buchi had spilled some Ovaltine on her table mat.

  “Hezekiah has been calling me,” Kosi said musingly, about his cousin in Awka, who called only when he wanted money. “He sent a text to say he can’t reach you. I don’t know why he pretends not to know that you ignore his calls.”

  It was an odd thing for her to say, talking about Hezekiah’s pretense while immersed in pretense herself; she was putting cubes of fresh pineapple on his plate, as if the previous night had never happened.

  “But you should do something for him, no matter how small, otherwise he will not leave you alone,” she said.

  “Do something for him” meant give him money and Obinze, all of a sudden, hated that tendency of Igbo people to resort to euphemism whenever they spoke of money, to indirect references, to gesturing instead of pointing. Find something for this person. Do something for that person. It riled him. It seemed cowardly, especially for a people who otherwise were blisteringly direct. Fucking coward, Ifemelu had called him. There was something cowardly even in his texting and calling her, knowing she would not respond; he could have gone over to her flat and knocked on her door, even if only to have her ask him to leave. And there was something cowardly in his not telling Kosi again that he wanted a divorce, in his leaning back into the ease of Kosi’s denial. Kosi took a piece of pineapple from his plate and ate it. She was unfaltering, single-minded, calm.

  “Hold Daddy’s hand,” she told Buchi as they walked into Ahmed’s festive compound that afternoon. She wanted to will normalcy back.

  She wanted to will a good marriage into being. She was carrying a present wrapped in silver paper, for Ahmed’s baby. In the car, she had told him what it was, but already he had forgotten. Canopies and buffet tables dotted the massive compound, which was green and landscaped, with the promise of a swimming pool in the back. A live band was playing. Two clowns were running around. Children dancing and shrieking.

  “They are using the same band we used for Buchi’s party,” Kosi whispered. She had wanted a big party to celebrate Buchi’s birth, and he had floated through that day, a bubble of air between him and the party. When the MC said “the new father,” he had been strangely startled to realize that the MC meant him, that he was really the new father. A father.

  Ahmed’s wife, Sike, was hugging him, tugging Buchi’s cheeks, people milling about, laughter thick in the air’s clasp. They admired the new baby, asleep in the crook of her bespectacled grandmother’s arms. And it struck Obinze that, a few years ago, they were attending weddings, now it was christenings and soon it would be funerals. They would die. They would all die after trudging through lives in which they were neither happy nor unhappy. He tried to shake off the morose shadow that was enveloping him. Kosi took Buchi over to the cluster of
women and children near the living room entrance; there was some sort of game being played in a circle, at the center of which was a red-lipped clown. Obinze watched his daughter—her ungainly walk, the blue band, speckled with silk flowers, that sat on her head of thick hair, the way she looked up imploringly at Kosi, her expression reminding him of his mother. He could not bear the thought of Buchi growing up to resent him, to lack something that he should have been for her. But it wasn’t whether or not he left Kosi that should matter, it was how often he saw Buchi. He would live in Lagos, after all, and he would make sure he saw her as often as he could. Many people grew up without fathers. He himself had, although he had always had the consoling spirit of his father, idealized, frozen in joyful childhood memories. Since Ifemelu came back, he found himself seeking stories of men who had left their marriages, and willing the stories to end well, the children more contented with separated parents than with married unhappy parents. But most of the stories were of resentful children who were bitter about divorce, children who had wanted even unhappy parents to remain together. Once, at his club, he had perked up as a young man talked to some friends about his own parents’ divorce, how he had felt relieved by it, because their unhappiness had been heavy. “Their marriage just blocked the blessings in our life, and the worst part is that they didn’t even fight.”

  Obinze, from the other end of the bar, had said, “Good!” drawing strange looks from everyone.

  He was still watching Kosi and Buchi talk to the red-lipped clown, when Okwudiba arrived. “The Zed!”

  They hugged, thumped backs.

  “How was China?” Obinze asked.

  “These Chinese people, ehn. Very wily people. You know the previous idiots in my project had signed a lot of nonsense deals with the Chinese. We wanted to review some of the agreements but these Chinese, fifty of them will come to a meeting and bring papers and just tell you ‘Sign here, sign here!’ They will wear you down with negotiation until they have your money and also your wallet.” Okwudiba laughed. “Come, let’s go upstairs. I hear that Ahmed packed bottles of Dom Pérignon there.”

  Upstairs, in what seemed to be a dining room, the heavy burgundy drapes were drawn, shutting out the daylight, and a bright elaborate chandelier, like a wedding cake made of crystals, hung down from the middle of the ceiling. Men were seated around the large oak table, which was crowded with bottles of wine and liquor, with dishes of rice and meat and salads. Ahmed was in and out, giving instructions to the server, listening in on conversations and adding a line or two.

  “The wealthy don’t really care about tribe. But the lower you go, the more tribe matters,” Ahmed was saying when Obinze and Okwudiba came in. Obinze liked Ahmed’s sardonic nature. Ahmed had leased strategic rooftops in Lagos just as the mobile phone companies were coming in, and now he sublet the rooftops for their base stations and made what he wryly referred to as the only clean easy money in the country.

  Obinze shook hands with the men, most of whom he knew, and asked the server, a young woman who had placed a wineglass in front of him, if he could have a Coke instead. Alcohol would sink him deeper into his marsh. He listened to the conversation around him, the joking, the needling, the telling and retelling. Then they began, as he knew they invariably would, to criticize the government—money stolen, contracts uncompleted, infrastructure left to rot.

  “Look, it’s very hard to be a clean public official in this country. Everything is set up for you to steal. And the worst part is, people want you to steal. Your relatives want you to steal, your friends want you to steal,” Olu said. He was thin and slouchy, with the easy boastfulness that came with his inherited wealth, his famous surname. Once, he had apparently been offered a ministerial position and had responded, according to the urban legend, “But I can’t live in Abuja, there’s no water, I can’t survive without my boats.” Olu had just divorced his wife, Morenike, Kosi’s friend from university. He had often badgered Morenike, who was only slightly overweight, about losing weight, about keeping him interested by keeping herself fit. During their divorce, she discovered a cache of pornographic pictures on the home computer, all of obese women, arms and bellies in rolls of fat, and she had concluded, and Kosi agreed, that Olu had a spiritual problem.

  “Why does everything have to be a spiritual problem? The man just has a fetish,” Obinze had told Kosi. Now, he sometimes found himself looking at Olu with curious amusement; you could never tell with people.

  “The problem is not that public officials steal, the problem is that they steal too much,” Okwudiba said. “Look at all these governors. They leave their state and come to Lagos to buy up all the land and they will not touch it until they leave office. That is why nobody can afford to buy land these days.”

  “It’s true! Land speculators are just spoiling prices for everybody. And the speculators are guys in government. We have serious problems in this country,” Ahmed said.

  “But it’s not just Nigeria. There are land speculators everywhere in the world,” Eze said. Eze was the wealthiest man in the room, an owner of oil wells, and as many of the Nigerian wealthy were, he was free of angst, an obliviously happy man. He collected art and he told everyone that he collected art. It reminded Obinze of his mother’s friend Aunty Chinelo, a professor of literature who had come back from a short stay at Harvard and told his mother over dinner at their dining table, “The problem is we have a very backward bourgeoisie in this country. They have money but they need to become sophisticated. They need to learn about wine.” And his mother had replied, mildly, “There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.” Later, after Aunty Chinelo left, his mother said, “How silly. Why should they learn about wine?” It had struck Obinze—they need to learn about wine—and, in a way, it had disappointed him, too, because he had always liked Aunty Chinelo. He imagined that somebody had told Eze something similar—you need to collect art, you need to learn about art—and so the man had gone after art with the zeal of an invented interest. Every time Obinze saw Eze, and heard him talk fumblingly about his collection, he was tempted to tell Eze to give it all away and free himself.

  “Land prices are no problem for people like you, Eze,” Okwudiba said.

  Eze laughed, a laugh of preening agreement. He had taken off his red blazer and hung it on his chair. He teetered, in the name of style, on dandyism; he always wore primary colors, and his belt buckles were always large and prominent, like buckteeth.

  From the other end of the table, Mekkus was saying, “Do you know that my driver said he passed WAEC, but the other day I told him to write a list and he cannot write at all! He cannot spell ‘boy’ and ‘cat’! Wonderful!”

  “Speaking of drivers, my friend was telling me the other day that his driver is an economic homosexual, that the man follows men who give him money, meanwhile he has a wife and children at home,” Ahmed said.

  “Economic homosexual!” somebody repeated, to loud general laughter. Charlie Bombay seemed particularly amused. He had a rough scarred face, the kind of man who would be most himself in the middle of a pack of loud men, eating peppery meat, drinking beer, and watching Arsenal.

  “The Zed! You are really quiet today,” Okwudiba said, now on his fifth glass of champagne. “Aru adikwa?”

  Obinze shrugged. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

  “But The Zed is always quiet,” Mekkus said. “He is a gentleman. Is it because he came here to sit with us? The man reads poems and Shakespeare. Correct Englishman.” Mekkus laughed loudly at his own non-joke. At university, he had been brilliant with electronics, he fixed CD players that were considered lost causes, and his was the first personal computer Obinze had ever seen. He graduated and went to America, then came back a short while afterwards, very furtive and very wealthy from what many said was a massive credit card fraud. His house was studded with CCTV cameras; his security men had automatic guns. And now, at the merest mention of America in a conversation, he would say
, “You know I can never enter America after the deal I did there,” as though to take the sting from the whispers that trailed him.

  “Yes, The Zed is a serious gentleman,” Ahmed said. “Can you imagine Sike was asking me whether I know anybody like The Zed that I can introduce to her sister? I said, Ahn-ahn, you are not looking for somebody like me to marry your sister and instead you are looking for somebody like The Zed, imagine o!”

  “No, The Zed is not quiet because he is a gentleman,” Charlie Bombay said, in his slow manner, his thick Igbo accent adding extra syllables to his words, halfway through a bottle of cognac that he had put territorially in front of himself. “It is because he doesn’t want anybody to know how much money he has!”

  They laughed. Obinze had always imagined that Charlie Bombay was a wife beater. There was no reason for him to; he knew nothing of Charlie Bombay’s personal life, had never even seen his wife. Still, every time he saw Charlie Bombay, he imagined him beating his wife with a thick leather belt. He seemed full of violence, this swaggering, powerful man, this godfather who had paid for his state governor’s campaign and now had a monopoly on almost every business in that state.

  “Don’t mind The Zed, he thinks we don’t know that he owns half the land in Lekki,” Eze said.

  Obinze produced an obligatory chuckle. He brought out his phone and quickly sent Ifemelu a text: Please talk to me.

  “We haven’t met, I’m Dapo,” the man sitting on the other side of Okwudiba said, reaching across to shake Obinze’s hand enthusiastically, as though Obinze had just sprung into existence. Obinze enclosed his hand in a halfhearted shake. Charlie Bombay had mentioned his wealth, and suddenly he was interesting to Dapo.

  “Are you into oil too?” Dapo asked.

  “No,” Obinze said shortly. He had heard snatches of Dapo’s conversation earlier, his work in oil consulting, his children in London. Dapo was probably one of those who installed their wife and children in England and then came back to Nigeria to chase money.