Читать книгу Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, Purple Hibiscus: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Three-Book Collection - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Страница 11

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Olanna nodded to the High Life music from the car radio. Her hand was on Odenigbo’s thigh; she raised it whenever he wanted to change gears, placed it back, and laughed when he teased her about being a distracting Aphrodite. It was exhilarating to sit beside him, with the car windows down and the air filled with dust and Rex Lawson’s dreamy rhythms. He had a lecture in two hours but had insisted on taking her to Enugu airport, and although she had pretended to protest, she wanted him to. When they drove across the narrow roads that ran through Milliken Hill, with a deep gully on one side and a steep hill on the other, she didn’t tell him that he was driving a little fast. She didn’t look, either, at the handwritten sign by the road that said, in rough letters, BETTER BE LATE THAN THE LATE.

She was disappointed to see the sleek, white forms of aeroplanes gliding up as they approached the airport. He parked beneath the colonnaded entrance. Porters surrounded the car and called out, ‘Sah? Madam? You get luggage?’ but Olanna hardly heard them because he had pulled her to him.

‘I can’t wait, nkem,’ he said, his lips pressed to hers. He tasted of marmalade. She wanted to tell him that she couldn’t wait to move to Nsukka either, but he knew anyway, and his tongue was in her mouth, and she felt a new warmth between her legs.

A car horn blew. A porter called out, ‘Ha, this place is for loading, oh! Loading only!’

Finally, Odenigbo let her go and jumped out of the car to get her bag from the boot. He carried it to the ticket counter. ‘Safe journey, ije oma,’ he said.

‘Drive carefully,’ she said.

She watched him walk away, a thickly built man in khaki trousers and a short-sleeved shirt that looked crisp from ironing. He threw his legs out with an aggressive confidence: the gait of a person who would not ask for directions but remained sure that he would somehow get there. After he drove off, she lowered her head and sniffed herself. She had dabbed on his Old Spice that morning, impulsively, and didn’t tell him because he would laugh. He would not understand the superstition of taking a whiff of him with her. It was as if the scent could, at least for a while, stifle her questions and make her a little more like him, a little more certain, a little less questioning.

She turned to the ticket seller and wrote her name on a slip of paper. ‘Good afternoon. One way to Lagos, please.’

‘Ozobia?’ The ticket seller’s pockmarked face brightened in a wide smile. ‘Chief Ozobia’s daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh! Well done, madam. I will ask the porter to take you to the VIP lounge.’ The ticket seller turned around. ‘Ikenna! Where is that foolish boy? Ikenna!’

Olanna shook her head and smiled. ‘No, no need for that.’ She smiled again, reassuringly, to make it clear it was not his fault that she did not want to be in the VIP lounge.

The general lounge was crowded. Olanna sat opposite three little children in threadbare clothes and slippers who giggled intermittently while their father gave them severe looks. An old woman with a sour, wrinkled face, their grandmother, sat closest to Olanna, clutching a handbag and murmuring to herself. Olanna could smell the mustiness on her wrapper; it must have been dug out from an ancient trunk for this occasion. When a clear voice announced the arrival of a Nigeria Airways flight, the father sprang up and then sat down again.

‘You must be waiting for somebody,’ Olanna said to him in Igbo.

‘Yes, nwanne m, my brother is coming back from overseas after four years reading there.’ His Owerri dialect had a strong rural accent.

‘Eh!’ Olanna said. She wanted to ask him where exactly his brother was coming back from and what he had studied, but she didn’t. He might not know.

The grandmother turned to Olanna. ‘He is the first in our village to go overseas, and our people have prepared a dance for him. The dance troupe will meet us in Ikeduru.’ She smiled proudly to show brown teeth. Her accent was even thicker; it was difficult to make out everything she said. ‘My fellow women are jealous, but is it my fault that their sons have empty brains and my own son won the white people’s scholarship?’

Another flight arrival was announced and the father said, ‘Chere! It’s him? It’s him!’

The children stood up and the father asked them to sit down and then stood up himself. The grandmother clutched her handbag to her belly. Olanna watched the plane descend. It touched down, and just as it began to taxi on the tarmac, the grandmother screamed and dropped her handbag.

Olanna was startled. ‘What is it? What is it?’

‘Mama!’ the father said.

‘Why does it not stop?’ The grandmother asked, both hands placed on her head in despair. ‘Chi m! My God! I am in trouble! Where is it taking my son now? Have you people deceived me?’

‘Mama, it will stop,’ Olanna said. ‘This is what it does when it lands.’ She picked up the handbag and then took the older, callused hand in hers. ‘It will stop,’ she said again.

She didn’t let go until the plane stopped and the grandmother slipped her hand away and muttered something about foolish people who could not build planes well. Olanna watched the family hurry to the arrivals gate. As she walked towards her own gate minutes later, she looked back often, hoping to catch a glimpse of the son from overseas. But she didn’t.

Her flight was bumpy. The man seated next to her was eating bitter kola, crunching loudly, and when he turned to make conversation, she slowly shifted away until she was pressed against the aeroplane wall.

‘I just have to tell you, you are so beautiful,’ he said.

She smiled and said thank you and kept her eyes on her newspaper. Odenigbo would be amused when she told him about this man, the way he always laughed at her admirers, with his unquestioning confidence. It was what had first attracted her to him that June day two years ago in Ibadan, the kind of rainy day that wore the indigo colour of dusk although it was only noon. She was home on holiday from England. She was in a serious relationship with Mohammed. She did not notice Odenigbo at first, standing ahead of her in a queue to buy a ticket outside the university theatre. She might never have noticed him if a white man with silver hair had not stood behind her and if the ticket seller had not signalled to the white man to come forwards. ‘Let me help you here, sir,’ the ticket seller said, in that comically contrived ‘white’ accent that uneducated people liked to put on.

Olanna was annoyed, but only mildly, because she knew the queue moved fast anyway. So she was surprised at the outburst that followed, from a man wearing a brown safari suit and clutching a book: Odenigbo. He walked up to the front, escorted the white man back into the queue and then shouted at the ticket seller. ‘You miserable ignoramus! You see a white person and he looks better than your own people? You must apologize to everybody in this queue! Right now!’

Olanna had stared at him, at the arch of his eyebrows behind the glasses, the thickness of his body, already thinking of the least hurtful way to untangle herself from Mohammed. Perhaps she would have known that Odenigbo was different, even if he had not spoken; his haircut alone said it, standing up in a high halo. But there was an unmistakable grooming about him, too; he was not one of those who used untidiness to substantiate their radicalism. She smiled and said ‘Well done!’ as he walked past her, and it was the boldest thing she had ever done, the first time she had demanded attention from a man. He stopped and introduced himself, ‘My name is Odenigbo.’

‘I’m Olanna,’ she said and later, she would tell him that there had been a crackling magic in the air and he would tell her that his desire at that moment was so intense that his groin ached.

When she finally felt that desire, she was surprised above everything else. She did not know that a man’s thrusts could suspend memory, that it was possible to be poised in a place where she could not think or remember, but only feel. The intensity had not abated after two years, nor had her awe at his self-assured eccentricities and his fierce moralities. But she feared that this was because theirs was a relationship consumed in sips: She saw him when she came home on holiday; they wrote to one another; they talked on the phone. Now that she was back in Nigeria they would live together, and she did not understand how he could not show some uncertainty. He was too sure.

She looked out at the clouds outside her window, smoky thickets drifting by, and thought how fragile they were.

* * *

Olanna had not wanted to have dinner with her parents, especially since they had invited Chief Okonji. But her mother came into her room to ask her to please join them; it was not every day that they hosted the finance minister, and this dinner was even more important because of the building contract her father wanted. ‘Biko, wear something nice. Kainene will be dressing up, too,’ her mother had added, as if mentioning her twin sister somehow legitimized everything.

Now, Olanna smoothed the napkin on her lap and smiled at the steward placing a plate of halved avocado next to her. His white uniform was starched so stiff his trousers looked as if they had been made out of cardboard.

‘Thank you, Maxwell,’ she said.

‘Yes, aunty,’ Maxwell mumbled, and moved on with his tray.

Olanna looked around the table. Her parents were focused on Chief Okonji, nodding eagerly as he told a story about a recent meeting with Prime Minister Balewa. Kainene was inspecting her plate with that arch expression of hers, as if she were mocking the avocado. None of them thanked Maxwell. Olanna wished they would; it was such a simple thing to do, to acknowledge the humanity of the people who served them. She had suggested it once; her father said he paid them good salaries, and her mother said thanking them would give them room to be insulting, while Kainene, as usual, said nothing, a bored expression on her face.

‘This is the best avocado I have tasted in a long time,’ Chief Okonji said.

‘It is from one of our farms,’ her mother said. ‘The one near Asaba.’

‘I’ll have the steward put some in a bag for you,’ her father said.

‘Excellent,’ Chief Okonji said. ‘Olanna, I hope you are enjoying yours, eh? You’ve been staring at it as if it is something that bites.’ He laughed, an overly hearty guffaw, and her parents promptly laughed as well.

‘It’s very good.’ Olanna looked up. There was something wet about Chief Okonji’s smile. Last week, when he thrust his card into her hand at the Ikoyi Club, she had worried about that smile because it looked as if the movement of his lips made saliva fill his mouth and threaten to trickle down his chin.

‘I hope you’ve thought about coming to join us at the ministry, Olanna. We need first-class brains like yours,’ Chief Okonji said.

‘How many people get offered jobs personally from the finance minister,’ her mother said, to nobody in particular, and her smile lit up the oval, dark-skinned face that was so nearly perfect, so symmetrical, that friends called her Art.

Olanna placed her spoon down. ‘I’ve decided to go to Nsukka. I’ll be leaving in two weeks.’

She saw the way her father tightened his lips. Her mother left her hand suspended in the air for a moment, as if the news were too tragic to continue sprinkling salt. ‘I thought you had not made up your mind,’ her mother said.

‘I can’t waste too much time or they will offer it to somebody else,’ Olanna said.

‘Nsukka? Is that right? You’ve decided to move to Nsukka?’ Chief Okonji asked.

‘Yes. I applied for a job as instructor in the Department of Sociology and I just got it,’ Olanna said. She usually liked her avocado without salt, but it was bland now, almost nauseating.

‘Oh. So you’re leaving us in Lagos,’ Chief Okonji said. His face seemed to melt, folding in on itself. Then he turned and asked, too brightly, ‘And what about you, Kainene?’

Kainene looked Chief Okonji right in the eyes, with that stare that was so expressionless, so blank, that it was almost hostile. ‘What about me, indeed?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘I, too, will be putting my newly acquired degree to good use. I’m moving to Port Harcourt to manage Daddy’s businesses there.’

Olanna wished she still had those flashes, moments when she could tell what Kainene was thinking. When they were in primary school, they sometimes looked at each other and laughed, without speaking, because they were thinking the same joke. She doubted that Kainene ever had those flashes now, since they never talked about such things any more. They never talked about anything any more.

‘So Kainene will manage the cement factory?’ Chief Okonji asked, turning to her father.

‘She’ll oversee everything in the east, the factories and our new oil interests. She has always had an excellent eye for business.’

‘Whoever said you lost out by having twin daughters is a liar,’ Chief Okonji said.

‘Kainene is not just like a son, she is like two,’ her father said. He glanced at Kainene and Kainene looked away, as if the pride on his face did not matter, and Olanna quickly focused on her plate so that neither would know she had been watching them. The plate was elegant, light green, the same colour as the avocado.

‘Why don’t you all come to my house this weekend, eh?’ Chief Okonji asked. ‘If only to sample my cook’s fish pepper soup. The chap is from Nembe; he knows what to do with fresh fish.’

Her parents cackled loudly. Olanna was not sure how that was funny, but then it was the minister’s joke.

‘That sounds wonderful,’ Olanna’s father said.

‘It will be nice for all of us to go before Olanna leaves for Nsukka,’ her mother said.

Olanna felt a slight irritation, a prickly feeling on her skin. ‘I would love to come, but I won’t be here this weekend.’

‘You won’t be here?’ her father asked. She wondered if the expression in his eyes was a desperate plea. She wondered, too, how her parents had promised Chief Okonji an affair with her in exchange for the contract. Had they stated it verbally, plainly, or had it been implied?

‘I have made plans to go to Kano, to see Uncle Mbaezi and the family, and Mohammed as well,’ she said.

Her father stabbed at his avocado. ‘I see.’

Olanna sipped her water and said nothing.

After dinner, they moved to the balcony for liqueurs. Olanna liked this after-dinner ritual and often would move away from her parents and the guests to stand by the railing, looking at the tall lamps that lit up the paths below, so bright that the swimming pool looked silver and the hibiscus and bougainvillea took on an incandescent patina over their reds and pinks. The first and only time Odenigbo visited her in Lagos, they had stood looking down at the swimming pool and Odenigbo threw a bottle cork down and watched it plunk into the water. He drank a lot of brandy, and when her father said that the idea of Nsukka University was silly, that Nigeria was not ready for an indigenous university, and that receiving support from an American university – rather than a proper university in Britain – was plain daft, he raised his voice in response. Olanna had thought he would realize that her father only wanted to gall him and show how unimpressed he was by a senior lecturer from Nsukka. She thought he would let her father’s words go. But his voice rose higher and higher as he argued about Nsukka being free of colonial influence, and she had blinked often to signal him to stop, although he may not have noticed since the veranda was dim. Finally the phone rang and the conversation had to end. The look in her parents’ eyes was grudging respect, Olanna could tell, but it did not stop them from telling her that Odenigbo was crazy and wrong for her, one of those hot-headed university people who talked and talked until everybody had a headache and nobody understood what had been said.

‘Such a cool night,’ Chief Okonji said behind her. Olanna turned around. She did not know when her parents and Kainene had gone inside.

‘Yes,’ she said.

Chief Okonji stood in front of her. His agbada was embroidered with gold thread around the collar. She looked at his neck, settled into rolls of fat, and imagined him prying the folds apart as he bathed.

‘What about tomorrow? There’s a cocktail party at Ikoyi Hotel,’ he said. ‘I want all of you to meet some expatriates. They are looking for land and I can arrange for them to buy from your father at five or six times the price.’

‘I will be doing a St Vincent de Paul charity drive tomorrow.’

Chief Okonji moved closer. ‘I can’t keep you out of my mind,’ he said, and a mist of alcohol settled on her face.

‘I am not interested, Chief.’

‘I just can’t keep you out of my mind,’ Chief Okonji said again.

‘Look, you don’t have to work at the ministry. I can appoint you to a board, any board you want, and I will furnish a flat for you wherever you want.’ He pulled her to him, and for a while Olanna did nothing, her body limp against his. She was used to this, being grabbed by men who walked around in a cloud of cologne-drenched entitlement, with the presumption that, because they were powerful and found her beautiful, they belonged together. She pushed him back, finally, and felt vaguely sickened at how her hands sank into his soft chest. ‘Stop it, Chief.’

His eyes were closed. ‘I love you, believe me. I really love you.’

She slipped out of his embrace and went indoors. Her parents’ voices were faint from the living room. She stopped to sniff the wilting flowers in a vase on the side table near the staircase, even though she knew their scent would be gone, before walking upstairs. Her room felt alien, the warm wood tones, the tan furniture, the wall-to-wall burgundy carpeting that cushioned her feet, the reams of space that made Kainene call their rooms flats. The copy of Lagos Life was still on her bed; she picked it up, and looked at the photo of her and her mother, on page five, their faces contented and complacent, at a cocktail party hosted by the British high commissioner. Her mother had pulled her close as a photographer approached; later, after the flashbulb went off, Olanna had called the photographer over and asked him please not to publish the photo. He had looked at her oddly. Now, she realized how silly it had been to ask him; of course he would never understand the discomfort that came with being a part of the gloss that was her parents’ life.

She was in bed reading when her mother knocked and came in.

‘Oh, you’re reading,’ her mother said. She was holding rolls of fabric in her hand. ‘Chief just left. He said I should greet you.’

Olanna wanted to ask if they had promised him an affair with her, and yet she knew she never would. ‘What are those materials?’

‘Chief just sent his driver to the car for them before he left. It’s the latest lace from Europe. See? Very nice, i fukwa? ’

Olanna felt the fabric between her fingers. ‘Yes, very nice.’

‘Did you see the one he wore today? Original! Ezigbo!’ Her mother sat down beside her. ‘And do you know, they say he never wears any outfit twice? He gives them to his houseboys once he has worn them.’

Olanna visualized his poor houseboys’ wood boxes incongruously full of lace, houseboys she was sure did not get paid much every month, owning cast-off kaftans and agbadas they could never wear. She was tired. Having conversations with her mother tired her.

‘Which one do you want, nne? I will make a long skirt and blouse for you and Kainene.’

‘No, don’t worry, Mum. Make something for yourself. I won’t wear rich lace in Nsukka too often.’

Her mother ran a finger over the bedside cabinet. ‘This silly housegirl does not clean furniture properly. Does she think I pay her to play around?’

Olanna placed her book down. Her mother wanted to say something, she could tell, and the set smile, the punctilious gestures, were a beginning.

‘So how is Odenigbo?’ her mother asked finally.

‘He’s fine.’

Her mother sighed, in the overdone way that meant she wished Olanna would see reason. ‘Have you thought about this Nsukka move well? Very well?’

‘I have never been surer of anything.’

‘But will you be comfortable there?’ Her mother said comfortable with a faint shudder, and Olanna almost smiled because her mother had Odenigbo’s basic university house in mind, with its sturdy rooms and plain furniture and uncarpeted floors.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said.

‘You can find work here in Lagos and travel down to see him during weekends.’

‘I don’t want to work in Lagos. I want to work in the university, and I want to live with him.’

Her mother looked at her for a little while longer before she stood up and said, ‘Good night, my daughter,’ in a voice that was small and wounded.

Olanna stared at the door. She was used to her mother’s disapproval; it had coloured most of her major decisions, after all: when she chose two weeks’ suspension rather than apologize to her Heathgrove form mistress for insisting that the lessons on Pax Britannica were contradictory; when she joined the Students’ Movement for Independence at Ibadan; when she refused to marry Igwe Okagbue’s son, and later, Chief Okaro’s son. Still, each time, the disapproval made her want to apologize, to make up for it in some way.

She was almost asleep when Kainene knocked. ‘So will you be spreading your legs for that elephant in exchange for Daddy’s contract?’ Kainene asked.

Olanna sat up, surprised. She did not remember the last time that Kainene had come into her room.

‘Daddy literally pulled me away from the veranda, so we could leave you alone with the good cabinet minister,’ Kainene said. ‘Will he give Daddy the contract then?’

‘He didn’t say. But it’s not as if he will get nothing. Daddy will still give him ten per cent, after all.’

‘The ten per cent is standard, so extras always help. The other bidders probably don’t have a beautiful daughter.’ Kainene dragged the word out until it sounded cloying, sticky: beau-ti-ful. She was flipping through the copy of Lagos Life, her silk robe tied tightly around her skinny waist. ‘The benefit of being the ugly daughter is that nobody uses you as sex bait.’

‘They’re not using me as sex bait.’

Kainene did not respond for a while; she seemed focused on an article in the paper. Then she looked up. ‘Richard is going to Nsukka too. He’s received the grant, and he’s going to write his book there.’

‘Oh, good. So that means you will be spending time in Nsukka?’

Kainene ignored the question. ‘Richard doesn’t know anybody in Nsukka, so maybe you could introduce him to your revolutionary lover.’

Olanna smiled. Revolutionary lover. The things Kainene could say with a straight face! ‘I’ll introduce them,’ she said. She had never liked any of Kainene’s boyfriends and never liked that Kainene dated so many white men in England. Their thinly veiled condescension, their false validations irritated her. Yet she had not reacted in the same way to Richard Churchill when Kainene brought him to dinner. Perhaps it was because he did not have that familiar superiority of English people who thought they understood Africans better than Africans understood themselves and, instead, had an endearing uncertainty about him – almost a shyness. Or perhaps because her parents had ignored him, unimpressed because he didn’t know anyone who was worth knowing.

‘I think Richard will like Odenigbo’s house,’ Olanna said. ‘It’s like a political club in the evenings. He only invited Africans at first because the university is so full of foreigners, and he wanted Africans to have a chance to socialize with one another. At first it was BYOB, but now he asks them all to contribute some money, and every week he buys drinks and they meet in his house –’ Olanna stopped. Kainene was looking at her woodenly, as if she had broken their unspoken rule and tried to start idle chatter.

Kainene turned towards the door. ‘When do you leave for Kano?’

‘Tomorrow.’ Olanna wanted Kainene to stay, to sit on the bed and hold a pillow on her lap and gossip and laugh into the night.

‘Go well, jee ofuma. Greet Aunty and Uncle and Arize.’

‘I will,’ Olanna said, although Kainene had already left and shut the door. She listened for Kainene’s footsteps on the carpeted hallway. It was now that they were back from England, living in the same house again, that Olanna realized just how distant they had become. Kainene had always been the withdrawn child, the sullen and often acerbic teenager, the one who, because she did not try to please their parents, left Olanna with that duty. But they had been close, despite that. They used to be friends. She wondered when it all changed. Before they went to England, for sure, since they didn’t even have the same friends in London. Perhaps it was during their secondary- school years at Heathgrove. Perhaps even before. Nothing had happened – no momentous quarrel, no significant incident – rather, they had simply drifted apart, but it was Kainene who now anchored herself firmly in a distant place so that they could not drift back together.

Olanna chose not to fly up to Kano. She liked to sit by the train window and watch the thick woods sliding past, the grassy plains unfurling, the cattle swinging their tails as they were herded by barechested nomads. When she got to Kano, it struck her once again how different it was from Lagos, from Nsukka, from her hometown Umunnachi, how different the North as a whole was from the South. Here, the sand was fine, grey, and sun-seared, nothing like the clumpy, red earth back home; the trees were tame, unlike the bursting greenness that sprang up and cast shadows on the road to Umunnachi. Here, miles of flatland went on and on, tempting the eyes to stretch just a little farther, until they seemed to meet with the silver-and-white sky.

She took a taxi from the train station and asked the driver to stop first at the market, so that she could greet Uncle Mbaezi.

On the narrow market paths, she manoeuvred between small boys carrying large loads on their heads, women haggling, traders shouting. A record shop was playing loud High Life music, and she slowed a little to hum along to Bobby Benson’s ‘Taxi Driver’ before hurrying on to her uncle’s stall. His shelves were lined with pails and other housewares.

‘Omalicha!’ he said, when he saw her. It was what he called her mother, too – Beautiful. ‘You have been on my mind. I knew you would come to see us soon.’

‘Uncle, good afternoon.’

They hugged. Olanna rested her head on his shoulder; he smelt of sweat, of the open-air market, of wares arranged on dusty wood shelves.

It was hard to imagine Uncle Mbaezi and her mother growing up together, brother and sister. Not only because her uncle’s light- complexioned face had none of her mother’s beauty, but also because there was an earthiness about him. Sometimes Olanna wondered if she would admire him as she did if he were not so different from her mother.

Whenever she visited, Uncle Mbaezi would sit with her in the yard after supper and tell her the latest family news – a cousin’s unmarried daughter was pregnant, and he wanted her to come and stay with them to avoid the malice of the village; a nephew had died here in Kano and he was looking into the cheapest way to take the body back home. Or he would tell her about politics: What the Igbo Union was organizing, protesting, discussing. They held meetings in his yard. She had sat in a few times, and she still remembered the meeting where irritated men and women talked about the northern schools not admitting Igbo children. Uncle Mbaezi had stood up and stamped his foot. ‘Ndi be anyi! My people! We will build our own school! We will raise money and build our own school!’ After he spoke, Olanna had joined in clapping her approval, in chanting, ‘Well spoken! That is how it shall be!’ But she had worried that it would be difficult to build a school. Perhaps it was more practical to try and persuade the Northerners to admit Igbo children.

Yet, now, only a few years later, her taxi was on Airport Road, driving past the Igbo Union Grammar School. It was break time and the schoolyard was full of children. Boys were playing football in different teams on the same field, so that multiple balls flew in the air; Olanna wondered how they could tell which ball was which. Clusters of girls were closer to the road, playing oga and swell, clapping rhythmically as they hopped first on one leg and then the other. Before the taxi parked outside the communal compound in Sabon Gari, Olanna saw Aunty Ifeka sitting by her kiosk on the roadside. Aunty Ifeka wiped her hands on her faded wrapper and hugged Olanna, pulled back to look at her, and hugged her again. ‘Our Olanna!’

‘My aunty! Kedu? ’

‘I am even better now that I see you.’

‘Arize is not back from her sewing class?’

‘She will be back anytime now.’

‘How is she doing? O na-agakwa? Is her sewing going well?’

‘The house is full of patterns that she has cut.’

‘What of Odinchezo and Ekene?’

‘They are there. They visited last week and asked after you.’

‘How is Maiduguri treating them? Is their trading picking up?’

‘They have not said they are dying of hunger,’ Aunty Ifeka said, with a slight shrug. Olanna examined the plain face and wished, for a brief guilty moment, that Aunty Ifeka were her mother. Aunty Ifeka was as good as her mother, anyway, since it was Aunty Ifeka’s breasts that she and Kainene had sucked when their mother’s dried up soon after they were born. Kainene used to say their mother’s breasts did not dry up at all, that their mother had given them to a nursing aunt only to save her own breasts from drooping.

‘Come, ada anyi,’ Aunty Ifeka said. ‘Let’s go inside.’ She pulled down the wooden shutters of the kiosk, covering the neatly arranged cases of matches, chewing gum, sweets, cigarettes, and detergent, and then picked up Olanna’s bag and led the way into the yard. The narrow bungalow was unpainted. The clothes hung out to dry were still, stiff, as if desiccated by the hot afternoon sun. Old car tyres, the ones the children played with, were piled under the kuka tree. Olanna knew the tranquil flatness of the yard would change soon, when the children came back from school. The families would leave doors open and the veranda and kitchen would fill with chatter. Uncle Mbaezi’s family lived in two rooms. In the first, where worn sofas were pushed aside at night to make room for mats, Olanna unpacked the things she had brought – bread, shoes, bottles of cream – while Aunty Ifeka stood back watching, her hands behind her back. ‘May another person do for you. May another person do for you,’ Aunty Ifeka said.

Arize came home moments later and Olanna braced herself to stand firmly, so Arize’s excited hug would not knock her down.

‘Sister! You should have warned us that you were coming! At least we would have swept the yard better! Ah! Sister! Aru amaka gi! You look well! There are stories to tell, oh!’

Arize was laughing. Her plump body, her rounded arms, shook as she laughed. Olanna held her close. She felt a sense that things were in order, the way they were meant to be, and that even if they tumbled down once in a while, in the end they would come back together again. This was why she came to Kano: this lucid peace. When Aunty Ifeka’s eyes began to dart around the yard, she knew it was in search of a suitable chicken. Aunty Ifeka always killed one when she visited, even if it was the last she owned, sauntering around the yard, its feathers marked with a splash or two of red paint to distinguish it from the neighbours’ chickens, which had bits of cloth tied to their wings or paint of a different colour. Olanna no longer protested about the chicken, just as she no longer protested when Uncle Mbaezi and Aunty Ifeka slept on mats, next to the many relatives who always seemed to be staying with them, so that she could have their bed.

Aunty Ifeka walked casually towards a brown hen, grasped it quickly, and handed it to Arize to kill in the backyard. They sat outside the kitchen while Arize plucked it and Aunty Ifeka blew the chaff from the rice. A neighbour was boiling corn, and once in a while, when the water frothed over, the stove fire hissed. Children were playing in the yard now, raising white dust, shouting. A fight broke out under the kuka tree, and Olanna heard a child scream at another in Igbo, ‘Your mother’s pussy!’

The sun had turned red in the sky before it began its descent, when Uncle Mbaezi came home. He called out to Olanna to come and greet his friend Abdulmalik. Olanna had met the Hausa man once before; he sold leather slippers close to Uncle Mbaezi’s stall in the market, and she had bought a few pairs that she took back to England but never wore because it was then the middle of winter.

‘Our Olanna has just finished her master’s degree. Master’s degree at London University! It is not easy!’ Uncle Mbaezi said proudly.

‘Well done,’ Abdulmalik said. He opened his bag and brought out a pair of slippers and held them out to her, his narrow face creased in a smile, his teeth stained with kola nut and tobacco and whatever else Olanna did not know, stains of varying shades of yellow and brown. He looked as if it were he who was receiving a gift; he had that expression of people who marvelled at education with the calm certainty that it would never be theirs.

She took the slippers with both hands. ‘Thank you, Abdulmalik. Thank you.’

Abdulmalik pointed at the ripe gourdlike pods on the kuka tree and said, ‘You come my house. My wife cook very sweet kuka soup.’

‘Oh, I will come, next time,’ Olanna said.

He muttered more congratulations before he sat with Uncle Mbaezi on the veranda, with a bucket of sugar cane in front of them. They gnawed off the hard, green peels and chewed the juicy, white pulp, speaking Hausa and laughing. They spit the chewed cane out on the dust. Olanna sat with them for a while, but their Hausa was too swift, too difficult to follow. She wished she were fluent in Hausa and Yoruba, like her uncle and aunt and cousin were, something she would gladly exchange her French and Latin for.

In the kitchen, Arize was cutting open the chicken and Aunty Ifeka was washing the rice. She showed them the slippers from Abdulmalik and put them on; the pleated red straps made her feet look slender, more feminine.

‘Very nice,’ Aunty Ifeka said. ‘I shall thank him.’

Olanna sat on a stool and carefully avoided looking at the cockroach eggs, smooth black capsules, lodged in all corners of the table. A neighbour was building a wood fire in one corner and despite the slanting openings in the roof, the smoke choked the kitchen.

‘I makwa, all her family eats every day is stockfish,’ Arize said, gesturing towards the neighbour with pursed lips. ‘I don’t know if her poor children even know what meat tastes like.’ Arize threw her head back and laughed.

Olanna glanced at the woman. She was an Ijaw and could not understand Arize’s Igbo. ‘Maybe they like stockfish,’ she said.

‘O di egwu! Like it indeed! Do you know how cheap the thing is?’ Arize was still laughing as she turned to the woman. ‘Ibiba, I am telling my big sister that your soup always smells so delicious.’

The woman stopped blowing at the firewood and smiled, a knowing smile, and Olanna wondered if perhaps the woman understood Igbo but chose to humour Arize’s fun poking. There was something about Arize’s effervescent mischief that made people forgiving.

‘So you are moving to Nsukka to marry Odenigbo, Sister?’ Arize asked.

‘I don’t know about marriage yet. I just want to be closer to him, and I want to teach.’

Arize’s round eyes were admiring and bewildered. ‘It is only women that know too much Book like you who can say that, Sister. If people like me who don’t know Book wait too long, we will expire.’ Arize paused as she removed a translucently pale egg from inside the chicken. ‘I want a husband today and tomorrow, oh! My mates have all left me and gone to husbands’ houses.’

‘You are young,’ Olanna said. ‘You should focus on your sewing for now.’

‘Is it sewing that will give me a child? Even if I had managed to pass to go to school, I would still want a child now.’

‘There is no rush, Ari.’ Olanna wished she could shift her stool closer to the door, to fresh air. But she didn’t want Aunty Ifeka, or Arize, or even the neighbour to know that the smoke irritated her eyes and throat or that the sight of the cockroach eggs nauseated her. She wanted to seem used to it all, to this life.

‘I know you will marry Odenigbo, Sister, but honestly I am not sure I want you to marry a man from Abba. Men from Abba are so ugly, kai! If only Mohammed was an Igbo man, I would eat my hair if you did not marry him. I have never seen a more handsome man.’

‘Odenigbo is not ugly. Good looks come in different ways,’ Olanna said.

‘That is what the relatives of the ugly monkey, enwe, told him to make him feel better, that good looks come in different ways.’

‘Men from Abba are not ugly,’ Aunty Ifeka said. ‘My people came from there, after all.’

‘And do your people not resemble the monkey?’ Arize said.

‘Your full name is Arizendikwunnem, isn’t it? You come from your mother’s people. So perhaps you look like a monkey as well,’ Aunty Ifeka murmured.

Olanna laughed. ‘So why are you talking marriage-marriage like this, Ari? Have you seen anybody you like? Or should I find you one of Mohammed’s brothers?’

‘No, no!’ Arize waved her hands in the air in mock horror. ‘Papa would kill me first of all if he knew I was even looking at a Hausa man like that.’

‘Unless your father will kill a corpse, because I will start with you first,’ Aunty Ifeka said, and rose with the bowl of clean rice.

‘There is someone, Sister.’ Arize moved closer to Olanna. ‘But I am not sure he is looking at me, oh.’

‘Why are you whispering?’ Aunty Ifeka asked.

‘Am I talking to you? Is it not my big sister I am talking to?’ Arize asked her mother. But she raised her voice as she continued. ‘His name is Nnakwanze and he is from close to us, from Ogidi. He works at the railway. But he has not told me anything. I don’t know if he is looking at me hard enough.’

‘If he is not looking at you hard enough, there is something wrong with his eyes,’ Aunty Ifeka said.

‘Have you people seen this woman? Why can’t I talk to my big sister in peace?’ Arize rolled her eyes, but it was clear she was pleased and perhaps had used this opportunity to tell her mother about Nnakwanze.

That night, as Olanna lay on her uncle and aunt’s bed, she watched Arize through the thin curtain that hung on a rope attached to nails on the wall. The rope was not taut, and the curtain sagged in the middle. She followed the up-down movement of Arize’s breathing and imagined what growing up had been like for Arize and her brothers, Odinchezo and Ekene, seeing their parents through the curtain, hearing the sounds that might suggest an eerie pain to a child as their father’s hips moved and their mother’s arms clutched him. She had never heard her own parents making love, never even seen any indication that they did. But she had always been separated from them by hallways that got longer and more thickly carpeted as they moved from house to house. When they moved to their present home, with its ten rooms, her parents chose different bedrooms for the first time. ‘I need the whole wardrobe, and it will be nice to have your father visit!’ her mother had said. But the girlish laugh had not rung true for Olanna. The artificiality of her parents’ relationship always seemed harder, more shaming, when she was here in Kano.

The window above her was open, the still night air thick with the odours from the gutters behind the house, where people emptied their toilet buckets. Soon, she heard the muted chatter of the night- soil men as they collected the sewage; she fell asleep listening to the scraping sounds of their shovels as they worked, shielded by the dark.

The beggars outside the gates of Mohammed’s family home did not move when they saw Olanna. They remained seated on the ground, leaning against the mud compound walls. Flies perched on them in dense clusters, so that for a moment it seemed as if their frayed, white kaftans had been splashed with dark-coloured paint. Olanna wanted to put some money in their bowls but decided not to. If she were a man, they would have called out to her and extended their begging bowls, and the flies would rise in buzzing clouds.

One of the gatemen recognized her and opened the gates. ‘Welcome, madam.’

‘Thank you, Sule. How are you?’

‘You remember my name, madam!’ He beamed. ‘Thank you, madam. I am well, madam.’

‘And your family?’

‘Well, madam, by the will of Allah.’

‘Is your master back from America?’

‘Yes, madam. Please come in. I will send to call Master.’

Mohammed’s red sports car was parked in front of the sprawling sandy yard but what held Olanna’s attention was the house: the graceful simplicity of its flat roof. She sat down on the veranda.

‘The best surprise!’

She looked up and Mohammed was there, in a white kaftan, smiling down at her. His lips were a sensual curve, lips she had once kissed often during those days when she spent most of her weekends in Kano, eating rice with her fingers in his house, watching him play polo at the Flying Club, reading the bad poetry he wrote her.

‘You’re looking so well,’ she told him, as they hugged. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d be back from America.’

‘I was planning to come up to Lagos to see you.’ Mohammed moved back to look at her. There was a tilt to his head, a narrowing of his eyes, that meant he still harboured hope.

‘I’m moving to Nsukka,’ she said.

‘So you are finally going to become an intellectual and marry your lecturer.’

‘Nobody said anything about marriage. And how is Janet? Or is it Jane? I mix up your American women.’

Mohammed raised one eyebrow. She could not help admiring his caramel complexion. She used to tease him about being prettier than she was.

‘What did you do to your hair?’ he asked. ‘It doesn’t suit you at all. Is this how your lecturer wants you to look, like a bush woman?’

Olanna touched her hair, newly plaited with black thread. ‘My aunty did it. I quite like it.’

‘I don’t. I prefer your wigs.’ Mohammed moved closer and hugged her again. When she felt his arms tighten around her, she pushed him away.

‘You won’t let me kiss you.’

‘No,’ she said, although it had not been a question. ‘You’re not telling me about Janet-Jane.’

‘Jane. So this means I won’t see you any more when you go to Nsukka.’

‘Of course I’ll see you.’

‘I know that lecturer of yours is crazy, so I won’t come to Nsukka.’ Mohammed laughed. His tall, slim body and tapering fingers spoke of fragility, gentleness. ‘Would you like a soft drink? Or some wine?’

‘You have alcohol in this house? Someone must inform your uncle,’ Olanna teased.

Mohammed rang a bell and asked a steward to bring some drinks. Afterwards, he sat thoughtfully rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. ‘Sometimes, I feel my life is going nowhere. I travel and drive imported cars, and women follow me. But something isn’t there, something isn’t right. You know?’ She watched him; she knew where he was going with this. Yet when he said, ‘I wish things didn’t change,’ she was touched and flattered.

‘You’ll find a good woman,’ she said limply.

‘Rubbish,’ he said, and as they sat side by side drinking Coke, she recalled the disbelieving pain on his face that had only deepened when she told him she had to end it right away because she did not want to be unfaithful to him. She expected that he would resist, she knew very well how much he loved her, but she had been shocked when he told her to go ahead and sleep with Odenigbo as long as she did not leave him: Mohammed, who often half-joked about coming from a lineage of holy warriors, the very avatars of pious masculinity. Perhaps it was why her affection for him would always be mingled with gratitude, a selfish gratitude. He could have made their breakup more difficult for her; he could have left her with much more guilt.

She placed her glass down. ‘Let’s go for a drive. I hate it when I visit Kano and only get to see the ugly cement and zinc of Sabon Gari. I want to see that ancient mud statue and go around the lovely city walls again.’

‘Sometimes you are just like the white people, the way they gawk at everyday things.’

‘Do I?’

‘It’s a joke. How are you going to learn not to take everything so seriously if you live with that crazy lecturer?’ Mohammed stood up. ‘Come, we should stop by first so you can greet my mother.’

As they walked past a small gate at the back and into the courtyard that led to his mother’s chambers, Olanna remembered the trepidation she used to feel coming here. The reception area was the same, with gold-dyed walls and thick Persian rugs and grooved patterns on the exposed ceilings. Mohammed’s mother looked unchanged, too, with the ring in her nose and the silk scarves around her head. She was fine-spun in the way that used to make Olanna wonder if she wasn’t uncomfortable, dressing up every day and simply sitting at home. But the older woman did not have that old standoffish expression, did not speak stiffly with her eyes focused somewhere between Olanna’s face and the hand-carved panelling. Instead she got up and hugged Olanna.

‘You look so lovely, my dear. Don’t let the sun spoil that skin of yours.’

‘Na gode. Thank you, Hajia,’ Olanna said, wondering how it was possible for people to switch affection off and on, to tie and untie emotions.

‘I am no longer the Igbo woman you wanted to marry who would taint the lineage with infidel blood,’ Olanna said, as they climbed into Mohammed’s red Porsche. ‘So I am a friend now.’

‘I would have married you anyhow, and she knew it. Her preference did not matter.’

‘Maybe not at first, but what about later? What about when we had been married for ten years?’

‘Your parents felt the same way as she did.’ Mohammed turned to look at her. ‘Why are we talking about this now?’ There was something inexpressibly sad in his eyes. Or maybe she was imagining it. Maybe she wanted him to seem sad at the thought that they would never marry. She did not wish to marry him, and yet she enjoyed dwelling on the things they did not do and would never do.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘There’s nothing to apologize for.’ Mohammed reached out and took her hand. The car made rasping sounds as they drove past the gates. ‘There’s too much dust in the exhaust. These cars weren’t made for our parts.’

‘You should buy a hardy Peugeot.’

‘Yes, I should.’

Olanna stared at the beggars clumped around the walls of the palace, their bodies and begging bowls covered in flies. The air smelt of the spicy-sour leaves from the neem tree.

‘I am not like white people,’ she said quietly.

Mohammed glanced at her. ‘Of course you’re not. You’re a nationalist and a patriot, and soon you will marry your lecturer the freedom fighter.’

Olanna wondered if Mohammed’s lightness hid a more serious mockery. Her hand was still in his and she wondered, too, if he was having difficulty manoeuvring the car with one hand.

* * *

Olanna moved to Nsukka on a windy Saturday, and the next day Odenigbo left for a mathematics conference at the University of Ibadan. He would not have gone if the conference was not focused on the work of his mentor, the black American mathematician David Blackwell.

‘He is the greatest living mathematician, the greatest,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come with me, nkem? It’s only for a week.’

Olanna said no; she wanted the chance to settle down when he was not there, to make peace with her fears in his absence. The first thing she did after he left was to throw away the red and white plastic flowers on the centre table.

Ugwu looked horrified. ‘But mah, it is still good.’

She led the way outside to the African lilies and pink roses, freshly watered by Jomo, and asked Ugwu to cut some. She showed him how much water to put in the vase. Ugwu looked at the flowers and shook his head, as if he could not believe her foolishness. ‘But it die, mah. The other one don’t die.’

‘Yes, but these are better, fa makali,’ Olanna said.

‘How better, mah?’ He always responded in English to her Igbo, as if he saw her speaking Igbo to him as an insult that he had to defend himself against by insistently speaking English.

‘They are just nicer,’ she said, and realized that she did not know how to explain why fresh flowers were better than plastic ones. Later, when she saw the plastic flowers in a kitchen cupboard, she was not surprised. Ugwu had saved them, the same way he saved old sugar cartons, bottle corks, even yam peels. It came with never having had much, she knew, the inability to let go of things, even things that were useless. So when she was in the kitchen with him, she talked about the need to keep only things that were useful, and she hoped he would not ask her how the fresh flowers, then, were useful. She asked him to clean out the store and line the shelves with old newspapers, and as he worked she stood by and asked him about his family. It was difficult to picture them because, with his limited vocabulary, he described everyone as ‘very good’. She went to the market with him, and after they bought the household items, she bought him a comb and a shirt. She taught him to cook fried rice with green peppers and diced carrots, asked him not to cook beans until they became pudding, not to douse things in oil, not to be too sparing with salt. Although she had noticed his body odour the first time she saw him, she let a few days pass before she gave him some scented powder for his armpits and asked him to use two capfuls of Dettol in his bath water. He looked pleased when he sniffed the powder, and she wondered if he could tell that it was a feminine scent. She wondered, too, what he really thought of her. There was clearly affection, but there was also a quiet speculation in his eyes, as if he was holding her up to something. And she worried that she came out lacking.

He finally started to speak Igbo to her on the day she rearranged the photos on the wall. A wall gecko had scuttled out from behind the wood-framed photo of Odenigbo in a graduating gown, and Ugwu shouted, ‘Egbukwala! Don’t kill it!’

‘What?’ She turned to glance down at him from the chair she was standing on.

‘If you kill it you will get a stomachache,’ he said. She found his Opi dialect funny, the way he seemed to spit the words out.

‘Of course we won’t kill it. Let’s hang the photo on that wall.’

‘Yes, mah,’ he said, and then began to tell her, in Igbo, how his sister Anulika had suffered a terrible stomachache after killing a gecko.

Olanna felt less of a visitor in the house when Odenigbo came back; he pulled her forcefully, kissed her, pressed her to him.

‘You should eat first,’ she said.

‘I know what I want to eat.’

She laughed. She felt ridiculously happy.

‘What’s happened here?’ Odenigbo asked, looking around the room. ‘All the books on that shelf?’

‘Your older books are in the second bedroom. I need the space for my books.’

‘Ezi okwu? You’ve really moved in, haven’t you?’ Odenigbo was laughing.

‘Go and have a bath,’ she said.

‘And what was that flowery scent on my good man?’

‘I gave him a scented talcum powder. Didn’t you notice his body odour?’

‘That’s the smell of villagers. I used to smell like that until I left Abba to go to secondary school. But you wouldn’t know about things like that.’ His tone was gently teasing. But his hands were not gentle. They were unbuttoning her blouse, freeing her breast from a bra cup. She was not sure how much time had passed, but she was tangled in bed with Odenigbo, warm and naked, when Ugwu knocked to say they had visitors.

‘Can’t they leave?’ she murmured.

‘Come, nkem,’ Odenigbo said. ‘I can’t wait for them to meet you.’

‘Let’s stay here just a little longer.’ She ran her hand over the curly hair on his chest, but he kissed her and got up to look for his underwear.

Olanna dressed reluctantly and went out to the living room.

‘My friends, my friends,’ Odenigbo announced, with an exaggerated flourish, ‘this, finally, is Olanna.’

The woman, who was tuning the radiogram, turned and took Olanna’s hand. ‘How are you?’ she asked. Her head was wrapped in a bright-orange turban.

‘I’m well,’ Olanna said. ‘You must be Lara Adebayo.’

‘Yes,’ Miss Adebayo said. ‘He did not tell us that you were illogically pretty.’

Olanna stepped back, flustered for a moment. ‘I will take that as a compliment.’

‘And what a proper English accent,’ Miss Adebayo murmured, with a pitying smile, before turning back to the radiogram. She had a compact body, a straight back that looked straighter in her stiff orange-print dress, the body of a questioner whom one dared not question back.

‘I’m Okeoma,’ the man with the tangled mop of uncombed hair said. ‘I thought Odenigbo’s girlfriend was a human being; he didn’t say you were a water mermaid.’

Olanna laughed, grateful for the warmth in Okeoma’s expression and the way he held her hand a little too long. Dr Patel looked shy as he said, ‘Very nice to see you finally,’ and Professor Ezeka shook her hand and then nodded disdainfully when she said her degree was in sociology and not one of the proper sciences.

After Ugwu served drinks, Olanna watched Odenigbo raise his glass to his lips and all she could think of was how those lips had fastened around her nipple only minutes ago. She surreptitiously moved so that her inner arm brushed against her breast and closed her eyes at the needles of delicious pain. Sometimes Odenigbo bit too hard. She wanted the guests to leave.

‘Did not that great thinker Hegel call Africa a land of childhood?’ Professor Ezeka asked, in an affected tone.

‘Maybe the people who put up those NO CHILDREN AND AFRICANS signs in the cinemas in Mombasa had read Hegel, then,’ Dr Patel said, and chuckled.

‘Nobody can take Hegel seriously. Have you read him closely? He’s funny, very funny. But Hume and Voltaire and Locke felt the same way about Africa,’ Odenigbo said. ‘Greatness depends on where you are coming from. It’s just like the Israelis who were asked what they thought of Eichmann’s trial the other day, and one of them said he did not understand how the Nazis could have been thought great by anyone at any time. But they were, weren’t they? They still are!’ Odenigbo gestured with his hand, palm upward, and Olanna remembered that hand grasping her waist.

‘What people fail to see is this: If Europe had cared more about Africa, the Jewish Holocaust would not have happened,’ Odenigbo said. ‘In short, the World War would not have happened!’

‘What do you mean?’ Miss Adebayo asked. She held her glass to her lips.

‘How can you ask what I mean? It’s self-evident, starting with the Herero people.’ Odenigbo was shifting on his seat, his voice raised, and Olanna wondered if he remembered how loud they had been, how afterwards he had said, laughing, ‘If we go on like this at night, we’ll probably wake Ugwu up, poor chap.’

‘You’ve come again, Odenigbo,’ Miss Adebayo said. ‘You’re saying that if white people had not murdered the Herero, the Jewish Holocaust would not have happened? I don’t see a connection at all!’

‘Don’t you see?’ Odenigbo asked. ‘They started their race studies with the Herero and concluded with the Jews. Of course there’s a connection!’

‘Your argument doesn’t hold water at all, you sophist,’ Miss Adebayo said, and dismissively downed what was in her glass.

‘But the World War was a bad thing that was also good, as our people say,’ Okeoma said. ‘My father’s brother fought in Burma and came back filled with one burning question: How come nobody told him before that the white man was not immortal?’

They all laughed. There was something habitual about it, as if they had had different variations of this conversation so many times that they knew just when to laugh. Olanna laughed too and felt for a moment that her laughter sounded different, more shrill, than theirs.

***

The following weeks, when she started teaching a course in introductory sociology, when she joined the staff club and played tennis with other lecturers, when she drove Ugwu to the market and took walks with Odenigbo and joined the St Vincent de Paul Society at St Peter’s Church, she slowly began to get used to Odenigbo’s friends. Odenigbo teased her that more people came to visit now that she was here, that both Okeoma and Patel were falling in love with her, because Okeoma was so eager to read poems in which descriptions of goddesses sounded suspiciously like her and Dr Patel told too many stories of his days at Makerere, where he cast himself as the perfectly chivalrous intellectual.

Olanna liked Dr Patel, but it was Okeoma whose visits she most looked forward to. His untidy hair and rumpled clothes and dramatic poetry put her at ease. And she noticed, early on, that it was Okeoma’s opinions that Odenigbo most respected, saying ‘The voice of our generation!’ as though he truly believed it. She was still not sure what to make of Professor Ezeka’s hoarse superciliousness, his certainty that he knew better than everyone else but chose to say little. Neither was she sure of Miss Adebayo. It would have been easier if Miss Adebayo showed jealousy, but it was as if Miss Adebayo thought her to be unworthy of competition, with her unintellectual ways and her too-pretty face and her mimicking-the-oppressor English accent. She found herself talking more when Miss Adebayo was there, desperately giving opinions with a need to impress – Nkrumah really wanted to lord it over all of Africa, it was arrogant of America to insist that the Soviets take their missiles out of Cuba while theirs remained in Turkey, Sharpeville was only a dramatic example of the hundreds of blacks killed by the South African state every day – but she suspected that there was a glaze of unoriginality to all her ideas. And she suspected that Miss Adebayo knew this; it was always when she spoke that Miss Adebayo would pick up a journal or pour another drink or get up to go to the toilet. Finally, she gave up. She would never like Miss Adebayo and Miss Adebayo would never even think about liking her. Perhaps Miss Adebayo could tell, from her face, that she was afraid of things, that she was unsure, that she was not one of those people with no patience for self-doubt. People like Odenigbo. People like Miss Adebayo herself, who could look a person in the eye and calmly tell her that she was illogically pretty, who could even use that phrase, illogically pretty.

Still, when Olanna lay in bed with Odenigbo, legs intertwined, it would strike her how her life in Nsukka felt like being immersed in a mesh of soft feathers, even on the days when Odenigbo locked himself in the study for hours. Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it to a prosaic partnership.