Purple Hibiscus

  “I don’t have enough fuel in the car to reach even Ninth Mile, and I don’t know when fuel will come. I cannot afford to charter a taxi. If I take public transport, how will I bring back a sick old man in those buses so packed with people your face is in the next person’s smelly armpit?” Aunty Ifeoma shook her head. “I am tired. I am so tired…”

  “We have some emergency fuel reserves in the chaplaincy,” Father Amadi said quietly. “I am sure I could get you a gallon. Ekwuzina, don’t sound that way.”

  Aunty Ifeoma nodded and thanked Father Amadi. But her face did not brighten, and later, when we said the rosary, her voice did not rise when she sang. I struggled to meditate on the joyful Mysteries, all the time wondering where Papa-Nnukwu would sleep when he came. There were few choices in the small flat—the living room was already full with the boys, and Aunt Ifeoma’s room was so busy, serving as food store and library and bedroom for her and Chima. It would have to be the other bedroom, Amaka’s—and mine. I wondered if I would have to confess that I had shared a room with a heathen. I paused then, in my meditation, to pray that Papa would never find out that Papa-Nnukwu had visited and that I had shared a room with him.

  At the end of the five decades, before we said the Hail Holy Queen, Aunty Ifeoma prayed for Papa-Nnukwu. She asked God to stretch a healing hand over him as he had stretched over the apostle Peter’s mother-in-law. She asked the Blessed Virgin to pray for him. She asked the angels to take charge of him.

  My “Amen” was a little delayed, a little surprised. When Papa prayed for Papa-Nnukwu, he asked only that God convert him and save him from the raging fires of hell.

  FATHER AMADI CAME EARLY the next morning, looking even more unpriestly than before, in khaki shorts that stopped just below his knees. He had not shaved, and in the clear morning sunlight, his stubble looked like tiny dots drawn on his jaw. He parked his car next to Aunty Ifeoma’s station wagon and took out a can of petrol and a garden hose that had been cut to a quarter of its length.

  “Let me do the sucking, Father,” Obiora said.

  “Make sure you don’t swallow,” Father Amadi said. Obiora inserted one end of the hose in the can and then enclosed the other end in his mouth. I watched his cheeks inflate like a balloon and then deflate. He swiftly took the hose out of his mouth and inserted it into the stations wagon’s petrol tank. He was sputtering and coughing.

  “Did you swallow too much?” Father Amadi asked, tapping Obiora’s back.

  “No,” Obiora said, between coughs. He looked proud.

  “Well done. Imana, you know sucking fuel is a skill you need these days,” Father Amadi said. His wry smile did little to mar the perfect clay smoothness of his features. Aunty Ifeoma came out dressed in a plain black boubou. She wore no shiny lipstick, and her lips looked chapped. She hugged Father Amadi. “Thank you, Father.”

  “I can drive you to Abba later this afternoon, after my office hours.”

  “No, Father. Thank you. I will go with Obiora.”

  Aunty Ifeoma drove off with Obiora in the front seat, and Father Amadi left soon after. Chima went upstairs to the neighbor’s flat. Amaka went into her room and turned on her music, high enough that I heard it clearly from the verandah. I could tell her culturally conscious musicians apart now. I could distinguish the pure tones of Onyeka Onwenu, the brash power of Fela, the soothing wisdom of Osadebe. Jaja was in the garden with Aunt Ifeoma’s shears, and I sat with the book I was almost finished reading, watching him. He held the shears with both hands, above his head, clipping away.

  “Do you think we’re abnormal?” I asked, in a whisper.

  “Gini?”

  “Amaka said we’re abnormal.”

  Jaja looked at me, then away, toward the line of garages in the front yard. “What does abnormal mean?” he asked, a question that did not need or want an answer, and then went back to trimming the plants.

  Aunty Ifeoma came back in the afternoon when the buzz of a bee around the garden was almost lulling me to sleep. Obiora helped Papa-Nnukwu out of the car, Papa-Nnukwu leaning against him as they walked into the flat. Amaka ran out and pressed her side lightly to Papa-Nnukwu’s. His eyes drooped, his lids looked as though they had weights placed on them, but he smiled and said something that made Amaka laugh.

  “Papa-Nnukwu, nno,” I said.

  “Kambili,” he said, weakly.

  Aunty Ifeoma wanted Papa-Nnukwu to lie down on Amaka’s bed, but he said he preferred the floor. The bed was too springy. Obiora and Jaja dressed the spare mattress and placed it on the floor, and Aunty Ifeoma helped Papa-Nnukwu lower himself onto it. His eyes closed almost at once, although the lid of his going-blind eye remained slightly open, as if he were stealing a peek at all of us from the land of tired, ill sleep. He seemed taller lying down, occupying the length of the mattress, and I remembered what he had said about simply reaching out to pluck icheku from the tree, in his youth. The only icheku tree I had seen was huge, with branches grazing the roof of a duplex. Still, I believed Papa-Nnukwu, that he had simply raised his hands to pluck the black icheku pods from the branches.

  “I’ll make ofe nsala for dinner. Papa-Nnukwu likes that,” Amaka said.

  “I hope he will eat. Chinyelu said even water has been hard for him to take in the last two days.” Aunty Ifeoma was watching Papa-Nnukwu. She bent and flicked gently at the rough white calluses on his feet. Narrow lines ran across his soles, like cracks in a wall.

  “Will you take him to the medical center today or tomorrow morning, Mom?” Amaka asked.

  “Have you forgotten, imarozi, that the doctors went on strike just before Christmas? I called Doctor Nduoma before I left, though, and he said he will come by this evening.”

  Doctor Nduoma lived on Marguerite Cartwright Avenue, too, down the street, in one of the duplexes with BEWARE OF DOGS signs and wide lawns. He was director of the medical center, Amaka told Jaja and me, as we watched him get out of his red Peugeot 504 a few hours later. But since the doctors’ strike had started, he had run a small clinic in town. The clinic was cramped, Amaka said. She had gotten her chloroquine injections there the last time she had malaria, and the nurse had boiled water on a smoky kerosene stove. Amaka was pleased that Doctor Nduoma had come to the house; the fumes alone in the stuffy clinic could choke Papa-Nnukwu, she said.

  Doctor Nduoma had a permanent smile plastered on his face, as though he would break bad news to a patient with a smile. He hugged Amaka, and then shook hands with Jaja and me. Amaka followed him into her bedroom to look at Papa-Nnukwu.

  “Papa-Nnukwu is so skinny now,” Jaja said. We were sitting side by side on the verandah. The sun had fallen and there was a light breeze. Many of the children from the flats were playing football in the compound. From a flat upstairs, an adult yelled, “Nee anya, if you children make patches on the garage walls with that ball, I will cut off your ears!” The children laughed as the football hit the garage walls; the dust-covered ball left the walls polka-dotted brown.

  “Do you think Papa will find out?” I asked.

  “What?”

  I laced my fingers together. How could Jaja not know what I meant? “That Papa-Nnukwu is here with us. In the same house.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jaja’s tone made me turn and stare at him. His brows were not knotted in worry, as I was sure mine were. “Did you tell Aunty Ifeoma about your finger?” I asked. I should not have asked. I should have let it be. But there, it was out. It was only when I was alone with Jaja that the bubbles in my throat let my words come out.

  “She asked me, and I told her.” He was tapping his foot on the verandah floor in an energetic rhythm.

  I stared at my hands, at the short nails that Papa used to cut to a chafing shortness, when I would sit between his legs and his cheek would brush mine gently, until I was old enough to do it myself—and I always cut them to a chafing shortness, too. Had Jaja forgotten that we never told, that there was so much that we never told? When people asked, he always said his
finger was “something” that had happened at home. That way, it was not a lie and it let them imagine some accident, perhaps involving a heavy door. I wanted to ask Jaja why he had told Aunty Ifeoma, but I knew there was no need to, that this was one question he did not know the answer to.

  “I am going to wipe down Aunty Ifeoma’s car,” Jaja said, getting up. “I wish the water ran so I could wash it. It is so dusty.”

  I watched him walk into the flat. He had never washed a car at home. His shoulders seemed broader, and I wondered if it was possible for a teenager’s shoulders to broaden in a week. The mild breeze was heavy with the smell of dust and the bruised leaves Jaja had cut. From the kitchen, the spices in Amaka’s ofe nsala tickled my nose. I realized then that Jaja had been tapping his feet to the beat of an Igbo song that Aunty Ifeoma and my cousins sang at evening rosary.

  I was still sitting on the verandah, reading, when Doctor Nduoma left. He talked and laughed as Aunty Ifeoma walked him to his car, telling her how tempted he was to ignore the patients waiting in his clinic so he could take her up on her offer of dinner. “That soup smells like something Amaka washed her hands well to cook,” he said.

  Aunty Ifeoma came to the verandah and watched him drive off.

  “Thank you, nna m,” she called out to Jaja, who was cleaning her car parked in front of the flat. I had never heard her call Jaja “nna m,” “my father”—it was what she sometimes called her sons.

  Jaja came up to the verandah. “It’s nothing, Aunty.” He lifted his shoulders as he stood there, like someone proudly wearing clothes that were not his size. “What did the doctor say?”

  “He wants us to get some tests done. I will take your Papa-Nnukwu to the medical center tomorrow, at least the labs there are still open.”

  AUNTY IFEOMA TOOK Papa-Nnukwu to the University Medical Center in the morning and came back shortly afterward, her mouth set in a full pout. The lab staff was on strike, too, so Papa-Nnukwu could not have the tests done. Aunty Ifeoma stared at the middle distance and said she would have to find a private lab in town and, in a lower voice, said the private labs jacked up their fees so much that a simple typhoid fever test cost more than the medicine for the fever. She would have to ask Dr. Nduoma if she really had to have all the tests done. She would not have paid a kobo at the medical center; at least there was still that benefit to being a lecturer. She left Papa-Nnukwu to rest and went out to buy the medicine that Doctor Nduoma had prescribed, worry lines etched in her forehead.

  That evening, though, Papa-Nnukwu felt well enough to get up for dinner, and the knots on Aunty Ifeoma’s face loosened a little. We had leftover ofe nsala and garri, pounded to a sticky softness by Obiora.

  “Eating garri at night is not right,” Amaka said. But she was not scowling as she usually did when she complained; instead, she had that fresh smile that showed the gap in her teeth, the smile she seemed to always have when Papa-Nnukwu was around. “It rests heavy in your stomach when you eat it at night.”

  Papa-Nnukwu clucked. “What did our fathers eat at night in their time, gbo? They ate pure cassava. Garri is for you modern ones. It does not even have the flavor of pure cassava.”

  “But you have to eat all of yours, anyway, nna anyi.” Aunty Ifeoma reached over and plucked a morsel from Papa-Nnukwu’s garri; she dug a hole in it with one finger, inserted a white medicine tablet, and then molded the morsel into a smooth ball. She placed it on Papa-Nnukwu’s plate. She did the same with four other tablets. “He will not take the medicine unless I do this,” she said in English. “He says tablets are bitter, but you should taste the kola nuts he chews happily—they taste like bile.”

  My cousins laughed.

  “Morality, as well as the sense of taste, is relative,” Obiora said.

  “Eh? What are you saying about me, gbo?” Papa-Nnukwu asked.

  “Nna anyi, I want to see you swallow them,” Aunty Ifeoma said.

  Papa-Nnukwu dutifully picked up each molded morsel, dunked it in soup, and swallowed. When the five were gone, Aunty Ifeoma asked him to drink some water so the tablets could break down and start to help his body heal. He took a gulp of water and set the glass down. “When you become old, they treat you like a child,” he muttered.

  Just then the TV made a scratchy sound like pouring dry sand on paper and the lights went off. A blanket of darkness covered the room.

  “Hei,” Amaka groaned. “This is not a good time for NEPA to take light. I wanted to watch something on TV.”

  Obiora moved through the darkness to the two kerosene lamps that stood at the corner of the room and lit them. I smelled the kerosene fumes almost immediately; they made my eyes water and my throat itch.

  “Papa-Nnukwu, tell us a folk story, then, just like we do in Abba,” Obiora said. “It is better than TV anyway.”

  “O di mma. But first, you have not told me how those people in the TV climb into it.”

  My cousins laughed. It was something Papa-Nnukwu said often to make them laugh. I could tell from the way they started to laugh even before he finished speaking.

  “Tell us the story of why the tortoise has a cracked shell!” Chima piped up.

  “I would like to know why the tortoise features so much in our people’s stories,” Obiora said in English.

  “Tell us the story of why the tortoise has a cracked shell!” Chima repeated.

  Papa-Nnukwu cleared his throat. “Long ago, when animals talked and lizards were few, there was a big famine in the land of the animals. Farms dried up and the soil cracked. Hunger killed many of the animals and the ones left behind did not even have the strength to dance the mourning dance at funerals. One day all the male animals had a meeting to decide what could be done, before hunger wiped out the whole village.

  “They all staggered to the meeting, bony and weak. Even Lion’s roar was now like the whine of a mouse. Tortoise could hardly carry his shell. It was only Dog that looked well. His fur shone with good health and you could not see the bones under his skin because they were padded with flesh. The animals all asked Dog how he remained so well in the midst of famine. ‘I have been eating feces like I always do,’ Dog answered.

  “The other animals used to laugh at Dog because he and his family were known to eat feces. None of the other animals could imagine themselves eating feces. Lion took control of the meeting and said, ‘Since we cannot eat feces like Dog, we must think of a way to feed ourselves.’

  “The animals thought long and hard until Rabbit suggested that all the animals kill their mothers and eat them. Many of the animals disagreed with this, they still remembered the sweetness of their mothers’ breast milk. But finally they all agreed that it was the best alternative, since they would all die anyway if nothing was done.”

  “I could never eat Mommy,” Chima said, giggling.

  “It might not be a good idea, that tough skin,” Obiora said.

  “The mothers did not mind being sacrificed,” Papa-Nnukwu continued. “And so each week a mother was killed and the animals shared the meat. Soon they were all looking well again. Then, a few days before it was time for Dog’s mother to be killed, Dog ran out wailing the mourning song for his mother. She had died of the disease. The other animals sympathized with Dog and offered to help bury her. Since she had died of the disease, they could not eat her. Dog refused any help and said he would bury her himself. He was distraught that she would not have the honor of dying like the other mothers who were sacrificed for the village.

  “Only a few days later, Tortoise was on his way to his parched farm to see if there were any dried vegetables to be harvested. He stopped to ease himself near a bush, but because the bush was wilted it did not give good cover. He was able to see across the bush and he saw Dog, looking up and singing. Tortoise wondered if perhaps Dog’s grief had made him go mad. Why was Dog singing to the sky? Tortoise listened and heard what Dog was singing: ‘Nne, Nne, Mother, Mother.’”

  “Njemanze!” my cousins chorused.

  “‘Nne, Nne, I ha
ve come.’”

  “Njemanze!”

  “‘Nne, Nne, let down the rope. I have come.’”

  “Njemanze!”

  “Tortoise came out then and challenged Dog. Dog admitted that his mother had not really died, that she had gone to the sky where she lived with wealthy friends. It was because she fed him daily from the sky that he looked so well. ‘Abomination!’ Tortoise bellowed. ‘So much for eating feces! Wait until the rest of the village hears what you have done.’

  “Of course, Tortoise was as cunning as always. He had no intention of telling the village. He knew that Dog would offer to take him to the sky, too. When Dog did, Tortoise pretended to think about it before accepting. But saliva had already started to run down his cheeks. Dog sang the song again and a rope descended from the sky and the two animals went up.

  “Dog’s mother was not pleased that her son had brought a friend but she served them well anyway. Tortoise ate like an animal with no home training. He ate almost all of the fufu and onugbu soup and poured a full horn of palm wine down his throat when his mouth was full of food. After the meal they descended the rope. Tortoise told Dog he would tell no one as long as Dog took him to the sky every day until the rains came and the famine ended. Dog agreed—what else could he do? The more Tortoise ate in the sky, the more he wanted, until one day he decided that he would go to the sky by himself so that he would get to eat Dog’s portion as well as his. He went to the spot by the dry bush and started singing, mimicking Dog’s voice. The rope started to fall. Just then, Dog came by and saw what was happening. Furious, Dog started to sing loudly. ‘Nne, Nne, Mother, Mother.’”

  “Njemanze!” my cousins chorused.

  “‘Nne, Nne, it is not your son coming up.’”

  “Njemanze!”

  “‘Nne, Nne, cut the rope. It is not your son coming up. It is the cunning Tortoise.’”

  “Njemanze!”

  “Right away, Dog’s mother cut the rope and Tortoise, already halfway to the sky, came hurtling down. Tortoise fell on a pile of stones and cracked his shell. To this day, the Tortoise has a cracked shell.”