Читать книгу Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, Purple Hibiscus: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Three-Book Collection - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Страница 31

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Olanna sat across from her mother in the living room upstairs.

Her mother called it the ladies’ parlour, because it was where she entertained her friends, where they laughed and hailed each other by their nicknames – Art! Gold! Ugodiya! – and talked about whose son was messing around with women in London while his mates built houses on their fathers’ land, and who had bought local lace and tried to pass it off as the latest from Europe, and who was trying to snatch so-and-so’s husband, and who had imported superior furniture from Milan. Now, though, the room was muted. Her mother held a glass of tonic water in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. She was crying. She was telling Olanna about her father’s mistress.

‘He has bought her a house in Ikeja,’ her mother said. ‘My friend lives on the same street.’

Olanna watched the delicate movement of her mother’s hand as she dabbed at her eyes. It looked like satin, the handkerchief; it could not possibly be absorbent enough.

‘Have you talked to him?’ Olanna asked.

‘What am I to say to him? Gwa ya gini?’ Her mother placed the glass down. She had not sipped from it since one of the maids brought it in on a silver tray. ‘There is nothing I can say to him. I just wanted to let you know what is happening so that they will not say I did not tell somebody.’

‘I’ll talk to him,’ Olanna said. It was what her mother wanted. She had been back from London a day, and already the glow of possibility that came after she saw the Kensington gynaecologist was dulled. Already she could not remember the hope that spread through her when he said there was nothing wrong with her and she had only to – he had winked – work harder. Already she wished she were back in Nsukka.

‘The worst part of it is that the woman is common riffraff,’ her mother said, twisting the handkerchief. ‘A Yoruba goat from the bush with two children from two different men. I hear she is old and ugly.’

Olanna got up. As if it mattered what the woman looked like. As if ‘old and ugly’ did not describe her father as well. What troubled her mother was not the mistress, she knew, but the significance of what her father had done: buying the mistress a house in a neighbourhood where Lagos socialites lived.

‘Maybe we should wait for Kainene to visit so she can talk to your father instead, nne?’ her mother said, dabbing at her eyes again.

‘I said I would talk to him, Mum,’ Olanna said.

But that evening, as she walked into her father’s room, she realized that her mother was right. Kainene was the best person for this. Kainene would know exactly what to say and would not feel the awkward ineptness that she did now, Kainene with her sharp edges and her bitter tongue and her supreme confidence.

‘Dad,’ she said, closing the door behind her. He was at his desk, sitting on the straight-backed chair made of dark wood. She couldn’t ask him if it was true, because he had to know that her mother knew it to be true and so did she. She wondered, for a moment, about this other woman, what she looked like, what she and her father talked about.

‘Dad,’ she said again. She would speak mostly in English. It was easy to be formal and cold in English. ‘I wish you had some respect for my mother.’ That was not what she had intended to say. My mother, instead of Mum, made it seem as if she had decided to exclude him, as if he had become a stranger who could not possibly be addressed on the same terms, could not be my father.

He leaned back in his chair.

‘It’s disrespectful that you have a relationship with this woman and that you have bought her a house where my mother’s friends live,’ Olanna said. ‘You go there from work and your driver parks outside and you don’t seem to care that people see you. It’s a slap to my mother’s face.’

Her father’s eyes were downcast now, the eyes of a man groping in his mind.

‘I am not going to tell you what to do about it, but you have to do something. My mother isn’t happy.’ Olanna stressed the have, placed an exaggerated emphasis on it. She had never talked to her father like this before; she rarely talked to him anyway. She stood there staring at him, and he at her, and the silence between them was empty.

‘Anugo m, I have heard you,’ he said. His Igbo was low, conspiratorial, as if she had asked him to go ahead and cheat on her mother but to do it considerately. It angered her. Perhaps it was, in effect, what she had asked him to do but still she was annoyed. She looked around his room and thought how unfamiliar his large bed was; she had never seen that lustrous shade of gold on a blanket before or noticed how intricately convoluted the metal handles of his chest of drawers were. He even looked like a stranger, a fat man she didn’t know.

‘Is that all you have to say, that you’ve heard me?’ Olanna asked, raising her voice.

‘What do you want me to say?’

Olanna felt a sudden pity for him, for her mother, for herself and Kainene. She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.

‘I will do something about it,’ he added. He stood up and came towards her. ‘Thank you, ola m,’ he said.

She was not sure what to make of his thanking her, or of his calling her my gold, something he had not done since she was a child and which now had a contrived solemnity to it. She turned and left the room.

When Olanna heard her mother’s raised voice the next morning – ’Good-for-nothing! Stupid man!’ – she hurried downstairs. She imagined them fighting, her mother grasping the front of her father’s shirt in a tight knot as women often did to cheating husbands. The sounds came from the kitchen. Olanna stopped at the door. A man was kneeling in front of her mother with his hands raised high, palms upward in supplication.

‘Madam, please; madam, please.’

Her mother turned to the steward, Maxwell, who stood aside watching. ‘I fugo? Does he think we employed him to steal us blind, Maxwell?’

‘No, mah,’ Maxwell said.

Her mother turned back to the man kneeling on the floor. ‘So this is what you have been doing since you came here, you useless man? You came here to steal from me?’

‘Madam, please; madam, please. I am using God to beg you.’

‘Mum, what is it?’ Olanna asked.

Her mother turned. ‘Oh, nne, I didn’t know you were up.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s this wild animal here. We employed him only last month, and he already wants to steal everything in my house.’ She turned back to the kneeling man. ‘This is how you repay people for giving you a job? Stupid man!’

‘What did he do?’ Olanna asked.

‘Come and see.’ Her mother led her out to the backyard where a bicycle leaned against the mango tree. A woven bag had fallen from the backseat, spilling rice onto the ground.

‘He stole my rice and was about to go home. It was only by God’s grace that the bag fell. Who knows what else he has stolen from me in the past? No wonder I have been looking for some of my necklaces.’ Her mother was breathing quickly.

Olanna stared at the rice grains on the ground and wondered how her mother could have worked herself up like this over them and if her mother really believed her own outrage.

‘Aunty, please beg Madam. It is the devil that made me do it.’ The driver’s pleading hands faced Olanna now. ‘Please beg madam.’

Olanna looked away from the man’s lined face and yellowed eyes; he was older than she had first thought, certainly above sixty. ‘Get up,’ she said.

He looked uncertain, glancing at her mother.

‘I said get up!’ Olanna had not intended to raise her voice, but it had come out sharp. The man stood up awkwardly, eyes downcast.

‘Mum, if you’re going to sack him, then sack him and have him go right away,’ Olanna said.

The man gasped, as if he had not expected her to say that. Her mother looked surprised too and glanced at Olanna, at the man, at Maxwell, before she put down the hand placed on her hip. ‘I will give you one more chance, but don’t ever touch anything in this house unless you are permitted. Do you hear me?’

‘Yes, madam. Thank you, madam. God bless you, madam.’

The man was still singing his thanks as Olanna took a banana from the table and left the kitchen.

She told Odenigbo about it on the phone, how it repulsed her to see that elderly man abase himself so, how she was certain her mother would have fired him but only after an hour of revelling in his grovelling and in her own self-righteous outrage. ‘It could not have been more than four cups of rice,’ she said.

‘It was still stealing, nkem.’

‘My father and his politician friends steal money with their contracts, but nobody makes them kneel to beg for forgiveness. And they build houses with their stolen money and rent them out to people like this man and charge inflated rents that make it impossible to buy food.’

‘You can’t right theft with theft.’ Odenigbo sounded strangely sombre; she had expected an outburst from him about the injustice of it all.

‘Does inequality have to mean indignity?’ she asked.

‘It often does.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘My mother is here. I had no idea she was coming.’

No wonder he sounded that way. ‘Will she be gone before Tuesday?’

‘I don’t know. I wish you were here.’

‘I’m glad I’m not. Have you had a conversation about breaking the spell of the educated witch?’

‘I’ll tell her before she says anything that there’s nothing to be discussed.’

‘You might pacify her by telling her that we are trying to have a child. Or will she be horrified at the thought of my having a child? Some of those witchcraft genes may be passed along to her grandchild after all.’

She hoped Odenigbo would laugh, but he didn’t. ‘I can’t wait for Tuesday,’ he said, after a while.

‘I can’t wait either,’ she said. ‘Tell Ugwu to air the rug in the bedroom.’

That night, when her mother came into her room, Olanna smelt the floral Chloe perfume, a lovely scent, but she did not see why a person needed to wear perfume to bed. Her mother had too many bottles of perfume; they lined her dresser like a store shelf: stunted bottles, tapering bottles, rounded bottles. Even wearing them to bed every night, her mother could not use them all in fifty years.

‘Thank you, nne,’ she said. ‘Your father is already trying to make amends.’

‘I see.’ Olanna did not want to know just what it was her father had done to make amends but she felt an odd sense of accomplishment to have talked to her father like Kainene, to have got him to do something, to have been useful.

‘Mrs Nwizu will soon stop telephoning to tell me she saw him there,’ her mother said. ‘She said something catty the other day about people whose daughters have refused to marry. I think she was throwing words at me and wanted to see if I would throw them back at her. Her daughter got married last year and they could not afford to import anything for the wedding. Even the wedding dress was made here in Lagos!’ Her mother sat down. ‘By the way, there is somebody who wants to meet you. You know Igwe Onochie’s family? Their son is an engineer. I think he has seen you somewhere, and he is very interested.’

Olanna sighed and leaned back to listen to her mother.

She got back to Nsukka in the middle of the afternoon, that still hour when the sun was relentless and even the bees perched in quiet exhaustion. Odenigbo’s car was in the garage. Ugwu opened the door before she knocked, his shirt unbuttoned, slight sweat patches under his arms. ‘Welcome, mah,’ he said.

‘Ugwu.’ She had missed his loyal, smiling face. ‘Unu anokwa ofuma? Did you stay well?’

‘Yes, mah,’ he said, and went out to bring her luggage from the taxi.

Olanna walked in. She had missed the faint smell of detergent that lingered in the living room after Ugwu cleaned the louvres. Because she had imagined that Odenigbo’s mother was already gone, she was dampened to see her on the sofa, dressed, fussing with a bag. Amala stood nearby, holding a small metal box.

‘Nkem!’ Odenigbo said, and hurried forwards. ‘It’s good to have you back! So good!’

When they hugged, his body did not relax against hers and the brief press of his lips felt papery. ‘Mama and Amala are just leaving. I’m taking them to the motor park,’ he said.

‘Good afternoon, Mama,’ Olanna said, but did not make an attempt to go any closer.

‘Olanna, kedu?’ Mama asked. It was Mama who initiated their hug; it was Mama who smiled warmly. Olanna was puzzled but pleased. Perhaps Odenigbo had spoken to her about how serious their relationship was, and their planning to have a child had finally won Mama over.

‘Amala, how are you?’ Olanna asked. ‘I didn’t know you came too.’

‘Welcome, Aunty,’ Amala mumbled, looking down.

‘Have you brought everything?’ Odenigbo asked his mother. ‘Let’s go. Let’s go.’

‘Have you eaten, Mama?’ Olanna asked.

‘My morning meal is still heavy in my stomach,’ Mama said. She had a happily speculative look on her face.

‘We have to go now,’ Odenigbo said. ‘I have a scheduled game later.’

‘What about you, Amala?’ Olanna asked. Mama’s smiling face suddenly made her want them to stay a little longer. ‘I hope you ate something.’

‘Yes, Aunty, thank you,’ Amala said, her eyes still focused on the floor.

‘Give Amala the key to put the things in the car,’ Mama said to Odenigbo.

Odenigbo moved towards Amala, but stopped a little way away so that he had to stretch out and lengthen his arm to give her the key. She took it carefully from his fingers; they did not touch each other. It was a tiny moment, brief and fleeting, but Olanna noticed how scrupulously they avoided any contact, any touch of skin, as if they were united by a common knowledge so monumental that they were determined not to be united by anything else.

‘Go well,’ she said. She watched the car ease out of the compound and stood there, telling herself she was mistaken; there had been nothing in that gesture. But it bothered her. She felt something similar to what she had felt while waiting for the gynaecologist: convinced that something was wrong with her body and yet willing him to tell her that all was well.

‘Mah, will you eat? Should I warm rice?’ Ugwu asked.

‘Not now.’ For a moment, she wanted to ask Ugwu if he too had observed that gesture, if he had observed anything at all. ‘Go and see if any avocados are ripe.’

‘Yes, mah.’ Ugwu hesitated ever so slightly before he left.

She stood at the front door until Odenigbo came back. She was not sure what the shrivelling in her stomach and the racing in her chest meant. She opened the door and searched his face.

‘Did anything happen?’ she asked.

‘What do you mean?’ He held some newspapers in his hand. ‘One of my students missed the last test, and this morning he came and offered me some money to pass him, the ignoramus.’

‘I didn’t know Amala came with Mama,’ she said.

‘Yes.’ He began to rearrange the newspapers, avoiding her eyes. And, slowly, shock spread over Olanna. She knew. She knew from the jerky movements he made, from the panic on his face, from the hasty way he was trying to look normal again, that something that should not have happened had happened.

‘You touched Amala,’ Olanna said. It was not a question, and yet she wanted him to respond as if it were; she wanted him to say no and get upset with her for even thinking that. But Odenigbo said nothing. He sat down on his armchair and looked at her.

‘You touched Amala,’ Olanna repeated. She would always remember his expression, him looking at her as if he could never have imagined this scene and so did not know how to think about thinking about what to say or do.

She turned towards the kitchen and nearly fell beside the dining table because the weight in her chest was too large, not measured to fit her size.

‘Olanna,’ he said.

She ignored him. He would not come after her because he was frightened, full of the fear of the guilty. She did not get in her car right away and drive to her flat. Instead, she went outside and sat on the backyard steps and watched a hen near the lemon tree, guarding six chicks, nudging them towards crumbs on the ground. Ugwu was plucking avocados from the tree near the Boys’ Quarters. She was not sure how long she sat there before the hen began to squawk loudly and spread its wings to shield the chicks, but they did not run into the shelter quickly enough. A kite swooped down and carried one of them off, a brown-and-white chick. It was so fast, the descent of the kite and the gliding away with the chick grasped in hooked claws, that Olanna thought she might have imagined it. She couldn’t have, though, because the hen was running around in circles, squawking, raising clouds of dust. The other chicks looked bewildered. Olanna watched them and wondered if they understood their mother’s mourning dance. Then, finally, she started to cry.

* * *

The blurred days crawled into one another. Olanna grasped for thoughts, for things to do. The first time Odenigbo came to her flat she was unsure whether to let him in. But he knocked and knocked and said, ‘Nkem, please open, biko, please open,’ until she did. She sat sipping some water while he told her that he had been drunk, that Amala had forced herself on him, that it had been a brief rash lust. Afterwards, she told him to get out. It was grating that he remained self-assured enough to call what he had done a brief rash lust. She hated that expression and she hated the firmness of his tone the next time he came and said, ‘It meant nothing, nkem, nothing.’ What mattered to her was not what it meant but what had happened: his sleeping with his mother’s village girl after only three weeks away from her. It seemed too easy, the way he had broken her trust. She decided to go to Kano because, if there was a place where she could think clearly, it was in Kano.

Her flight stopped first in Lagos, and as she sat waiting in the lounge a tall, thin woman hurried past. She stood up and was about to call out Kainene! when she realized it could not be. Kainene was darker-skinned than the woman and would never wear a green skirt with a red blouse. She wished so much that it were Kainene, though. They would sit next to each other and she would tell Kainene about Odenigbo and Kainene would say something clever and sarcastic and comforting all at once.

In Kano, Arize was furious.

‘Wild animal from Abba. His rotten penis will fall off soon. Doesn’t he know he should wake up every morning and kneel down and thank his God that you looked at him at all?’ she said, while showing Olanna sketches of bouffant wedding gowns. Nnakwanze had finally proposed. Olanna looked at the drawings. She thought them all to be ugly and overdesigned, but she was so pleased by the rage felt on her behalf that she pointed at one of them and murmured, ‘O maka. It’s lovely.’

Aunty Ifeka said nothing about Odenigbo until a few days had passed. Olanna was sitting on the veranda with her; the sun was fierce and the zinc awning crackled as if in protest. But it was cooler here than in the smoke-filled kitchen, where three neighbours were cooking at the same time. Olanna fanned herself with a small raffia mat. Two women were standing near the gate, one shouting in Igbo – ‘I said you will give me my money today! Tata! Today, not tomorrow! You heard me say so because I did not speak with water in my mouth!’ – while the other made pleading gestures with her hands and glanced skyward.

‘How are you?’ Aunty Ifeka asked. She was stirring a doughy paste of ground beans in a mortar.

‘I’m fine, Aunty. I’m finer for being here.’

Aunty Ifeka reached inside the paste to pick out a small black insect. Olanna fanned herself faster. Aunty Ifeka’s silence made her want to say more.

‘I think I will postpone my programme at Nsukka and stay here in Kano,’ she said. ‘I could teach for a while at the institute.’

‘No.’ Aunty Ifeka put the pestle down. ‘Mba. You will go back to Nsukka.’

‘I can’t just go back to his house, Aunty.’

‘I am not asking you to go back to his house. I said you will go back to Nsukka. Do you not have your own flat and your own job? Odenigbo has done what all men do and has inserted his penis in the first hole he could find when you were away. Does that mean somebody died?’

Olanna had stopped fanning herself and could feel the sweaty wetness on her scalp.

‘When your uncle first married me, I worried because I thought those women outside would come and displace me from my home. I now know that nothing he does will make my life change. My life will change only if I want it to change.’

‘What are you saying, Aunty?’

‘He is very careful now, since he realized that I am no longer afraid. I have told him that if he brings disgrace to me in any way, I will cut off that snake between his legs.’

Aunty Ifeka went back to her stirring, and Olanna’s image of their marriage began to come apart at the seams.

‘You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?’ Aunty Ifeka said. ‘Your life belongs to you and you alone, soso gi. You will go back on Saturday. Let me hurry up and make some abacha for you to take.’

She tasted a little of the paste and spat it out.

Olanna left on Saturday. The man sitting next to her on the plane, across the aisle, had the shiniest, darkest ebony complexion she had ever seen. She had noticed him earlier, in his three-piece wool suit, staring at her as they waited on the tarmac. He had offered to help her with her carry-on bag and, later, had asked the flight attendant if he could take the seat next to hers since it was vacant. Now, he offered her the New Nigerian and asked, ‘Would you like to read this?’ He wore a large opal ring on his middle finger.

‘Yes. Thank you.’ Olanna took the paper. She skimmed through the pages, aware that he was watching her and that the newspaper was his way of starting conversation. Suddenly she wished she could be attracted to him, that something mad and magical would happen to them both and, when the plane landed, she would walk away with her hand in his, into a new bright life.

‘They have finally removed that Igbo vice chancellor from the University of Lagos,’ he said.

‘Oh.’

‘It’s on the back cover.’

Olanna turned to the back cover. ‘I see.’

‘Why should an Igbo man be the vice chancellor in Lagos?’ he asked and, when Olanna said nothing, only half smiling to show she was listening, he added, ‘The problem with Igbo people is that they want to control everything in this country. Everything. Why can’t they stay in their East? They own all the shops; they control the civil service, even the police. If you are arrested for any crime, as long as you can say keda they will let you go.’

‘We say kedu, not keda,’ Olanna said quietly. ‘It means How are you?’

The man stared at her and she stared back and thought how beautiful he would have been if he had been a woman, with that perfectly shiny, near-black skin.

‘Are you Igbo?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘But you have the face of Fulani people.’ He sounded accusing.

Olanna shook her head. ‘Igbo.’

The man mumbled something that sounded like sorry before he turned away and began to look through his briefcase. When she handed the newspaper to him, he seemed reluctant to take it back, and although she glanced at him from time to time, his eyes did not meet hers again until they landed in Lagos. If only he knew that his prejudice had filled her with possibility. She did not have to be the wounded woman whose man had slept with a village girl. She could be a Fulani woman on a plane deriding Igbo people with a good-looking stranger. She could be a woman taking charge of her own life. She could be anything.

As they got up to leave, she looked at him and smiled but kept herself from saying thank you because she wanted to leave him with both his surprise and his remorse intact.

Olanna hired a pick-up truck and a driver and went to Odenigbo’s house. Ugwu followed her around as she packed books and pointed at things for the driver to pick up.

‘Master looks like somebody that is crying every day, mah,’ Ugwu said to her in English.

‘Put my blender in a carton,’ she said. My blender sounded strange; it had always been the blender, unmarked by her ownership.

‘Yes, mah.’ Ugwu went to the kitchen and came back with a carton. He held it tentatively. ‘Mah, please forgive Master.’

Olanna looked at him. He had known; he had seen this woman share his master’s bed; he too had betrayed her. ‘Osiso! Put my blender in the car!’

‘Yes, mah.’ Ugwu turned to the door.

‘Do the guests still come in the evenings?’ Olanna asked.

‘It’s not like before when you were around, mah.’

‘But they still come?’

‘Yes.’

‘And your master still plays tennis and goes to the staff club?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ She did not mean that. She had wanted to hear that Odenigbo could no longer bear to live the life that had been theirs.

When he visited her, she tried not to feel disappointment at how normal he looked. She stood at the door and gave noncommittal answers, resentful of his effortless volubility, of how casually he said, ‘You know I will never love another woman, nkem,’ as if he was certain that, with time, everything would be the same again. She resented, too, the romantic attention of other men. The single men took to stopping by her flat, the married ones to bumping into her outside her department. Their courting upset her because it – and they – assumed that her relationship with Odenigbo was permanently over. ‘I am not interested,’ she told them, and even as she said it, she hoped that it would not get back to Odenigbo because she did not want him to think she was pining. And she did not pine: she added new material to her lectures, cooked long meals, read new books, bought new records. She became secretary of the St Vincent de Paul Society, and after they donated food to the villages she wrote the minutes of their meetings in a notebook. She cultivated zinnias in her front yard and, finally, she cultivated a friendship with her black American neighbour, Edna Whaler.

Edna had a quiet laugh. She taught music and played jazz records a little too loudly and cooked tender pork chops and talked often about the man who had left her a week before their wedding in Montgomery and the uncle who had been lynched when she was a child. ‘You know what always amazed me?’ she would ask Olanna, as if she had not told her only a day previously. ‘That civilized white folk wore nice dresses and hats and gathered to watch a white man hang a black man from a tree.’

She would laugh her quiet laugh and pat her hair, which had the greasy shine of hot-pressing. At first, they did not talk about Odenigbo. It was refreshing for Olanna to be with somebody who was far removed from the circle of friends she had shared with Odenigbo. Then, once, as Edna sang along to Billie Holiday’s ‘My Man’, she asked, ‘Why do you love him?’

Olanna looked up. Her mind was a blank board. ‘Why do I love him?’

Edna raised her eyebrows, mouthing but not singing Billie Holiday’s words.

‘I don’t think love has a reason,’ Olanna said.

‘Sure it does.’

‘I think love comes first and then the reasons follow. When I am with him, I feel that I don’t need anything else.’ Olanna’s words surprised her, but the startling truth brought the urge to cry.

Edna was watching her. ‘You can’t keep lying to yourself that you’re okay.’

‘I’m not lying to myself,’ Olanna said. Billie Holiday’s plaintively scratchy voice had begun to irritate her. She didn’t know how transparent she was. She thought her frequent laughter was authentic and that Edna had no idea that she cried when she was alone in her flat.

‘I’m not the best person to talk to about men, but you need to talk this through with somebody,’ Edna said. ‘Maybe the priest, as payback for all those St Vincent de Paul charity trips you’ve made?’

Edna laughed and Olanna laughed along, but already she was thinking that perhaps she did need to talk to somebody, somebody neutral who would help her reclaim herself, deal with the stranger she had become. She started to drive to St Peter’s many times in the next few days but stopped and changed her mind. Finally, on a Monday afternoon, she went, driving quickly, ignoring speed bumps, so that she would not give herself any time to stop. She sat on a wooden bench in Father Damian’s airless office and kept her eyes focused on the filing cabinet labeled laity as she talked about Odenigbo.

‘I don’t go to the staff club because I don’t want to see him. I’ve lost my interest in tennis. He betrayed and hurt me, and yet it seems as if he’s running my life.’

Father Damian tugged at his collar, adjusted his glasses, and rubbed his nose, and she wondered if he was thinking of something, anything, to do since he had no answers for her.

‘I didn’t see you in church last Sunday,’ he said finally.

Olanna was disappointed, but he was a priest after all and this had to be his solution: Seek God. She had wanted him to make her feel justified, solidify her right to self-pity, encourage her to occupy a larger portion of the moral high ground. She wanted him to condemn Odenigbo.

‘You think I need to go to church more often?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

Olanna nodded and brought her bag closer, ready to get up and leave. She should not have come. She should not have expected a round-faced, voluntary eunuch in white robes to be in a position to understand how she felt. He was looking at her, his eyes large behind the lenses.

‘I also think that you should forgive Odenigbo,’ he said, and pulled at his collar as though it was choking him. For a moment, Olanna felt contempt for him. What he was saying was too easy, too predictable. She did not need to have come to hear it.

‘Okay.’ She got up. ‘Thank you.’

‘It’s not for him, you know. It’s for you.’

‘What?’ He was still sitting, so she looked down to meet his eyes.

‘Don’t see it as forgiving him. See it as allowing yourself to be happy. What will you do with the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery?’

Olanna looked at the crucifix above the window, at the face of Christ serene in agony, and said nothing.

* * *

Odenigbo arrived very early, before she had had breakfast. She knew that something was wrong even before she unlocked the door and saw his sombre face.

‘What is it?’ she asked, and felt a sharp horror at the hope that sneaked into her mind: that his mother had died.

‘Amala is pregnant,’ he said. There was a selfless and steely tone to his voice, that of a person delivering bad news to other people while remaining strong on their behalf.

Olanna clutched the door handle. ‘What?’

‘Mama just came to tell me that Amala is pregnant with my child.’

Olanna began to laugh. She laughed and laughed and laughed because the present scene, the past weeks, suddenly seemed fantastical.

‘Let me come in,’ Odenigbo said. ‘Please.’

She moved back from the door. ‘Come in.’

He sat down on the edge of the chair, and she felt as if she had been gumming back the pieces of broken chinaware only to have them shatter all over again; the pain was not in the second shattering but in the realization that trying to put them back together had been of no consequence from the beginning.

‘Nkem, please, let’s deal with this together,’ he said. ‘We will do whatever you want. Please let’s do it together.’

Olanna went to the kitchen to turn the kettle off. She came back and sat down opposite him. ‘You said it happened just once. Just once and she got pregnant? Just once?’ She wished she had not raised her voice. But it was so implausible, so theatrically implausible, that he would sleep with a woman once in a drunken state and get her pregnant.

‘It was just once,’ he said. ‘Just once.’

‘I see.’ But she did not see at all. The urge came then, to slap his face, because the self-entitled way he stressed once made the act seem inevitable, as if the point was how many times it had happened rather than that it should not have happened at all.

‘I told Mama I’ll send Amala to Dr Okonkwo in Enugu, and she said it would be over her dead body. She said Amala will have the child and she will raise the child herself. There is a young man doing timber work in Ondo that Amala is to marry.’ Odenigbo stood up. ‘Mama planned this from the beginning. I see now how she made sure I was dead drunk before sending Amala to me. I feel as if I’ve been dropped into something I don’t entirely understand.’

Olanna looked at him, from his halo of hair to his slender toes in leather sandals, alarmed that she could feel this burst of dislike for someone she loved. ‘Nobody dropped you into anything,’ she said.

He made to hold her but she shrugged him off and asked him to leave. Later, in the bathroom, she stood in front of the mirror and savagely squeezed her belly with both hands. The pain reminded her of how useless she was; reminded her that a child nestled now in a stranger’s body instead of in hers.

Edna knocked for so long that Olanna had to get up and unlock the door.

‘What’s wrong?’ Edna asked.

‘My grandfather used to say that other people just farted but his own fart always released shit,’ Olanna said. She had wanted to sound funny, but her voice was too hoarse, too tear-lined.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘The girl he slept with is pregnant.’

‘What the hell is wrong with you?’

Olanna squinted; what was wrong with her?

‘Get ahold of yourself!’ Edna said. ‘You think he’s spending his day crying like you are? When that bastard left me in Montgomery, I tried to kill myself and you know what he was doing? He had gone off and was playing in a band in Louisiana!’ Edna patted her hair irritably. ‘Look at you. You’re the kindest person I know. Look how beautiful you are. Why do you need so much outside of yourself? Why isn’t what you are enough? You’re so damned weak!’

Olanna moved back; the tumultuous crowding of pain and thoughts and anger that shot through her made the words flow out of her mouth with quiet precision. ‘It is not my fault that your man deserted you, Edna.’

Edna first looked surprised, then disgusted, before she turned and walked out of the flat. Olanna watched her go, sorry to have said what she said. But she would not apologize yet. She would give Edna a day or two. She felt suddenly hungry, bitingly hungry; her insides had been emptied out by her tears. She did not let her leftover jollof rice warm properly but ate it all from the pot, drank two cold bottles of beer, and still did not feel sated. She ate the biscuits in the cupboard and some oranges from the fridge, and then decided to go to Eastern Shop for some wine. She would drink. She would drink as much wine as she could.

The two women standing at the shop entrance, the Indian in the Faculty of Science and the Calabar woman who taught anthropology, smiled and said good afternoon, and she wondered if their covert glances shielded their pity, if they thought she was falling apart and weak.

She was examining wine bottles when Richard came up to her.

‘I thought it was you,’ he said.

‘Hello, Richard.’ She glanced at his basket. ‘I didn’t know you did your own shopping.’

‘Harrison has gone to his hometown for a few days,’ he said. ‘How are you? Are you all right?’

She disliked the pity in his eyes. ‘I’m very well. I can’t decide which of these two to buy.’ She gestured to the wine bottles. ‘Why don’t I buy both and if you’ll share them with me, we can decide which is better. Can you spare an hour? Or do you have to run back to your writing?’

Richard looked taken aback by her cheer. ‘I would hate to impose, really.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t be imposing. Besides, you’ve never visited me’ – she paused – ‘in my flat.’

She would be her normal, gracious self and they would drink wine and talk about his book and her new zinnias and Igbo-Ukwu art and the Western Region elections fiasco. And he would go back and tell Odenigbo that she was fine. She was fine.

When they got to her flat, Richard sat upright on the sofa, and she wished he would sit in that relaxed, semi-sprawling way he did in Odenigbo’s house; even the way he held his wine glass was stiff. She sat on the carpeted floor. They toasted Kenya’s independence.

‘You really must write about the horrible things the British did in Kenya,’ Olanna said. ‘Didn’t they cut off testicles?’

Richard murmured something and looked away, as if the word testicles had made him shy. Olanna smiled and watched him. ‘Didn’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘You should write about it then.’ She drank her second glass slowly, raising her head to enjoy the cold liquid flowing down her throat. ‘Do you have a title for the book?’

‘“The Basket of Hands.”’

‘“The Basket of Hands.”’ Olanna tilted her glass and finished her drink. ‘It sounds macabre.’

‘It’s about labour. The good things that were achieved – the railways, for example – but also how labour was exploited and the lengths the colonial enterprise went to.’

‘Oh.’ Olanna got up and uncorked the second bottle. She bent down to fill her glass first. She felt light, as if it were much easier to carry her own weight, but she was clear-headed; she knew what she wanted to do and what she was doing. Richard’s almost-damp smell filled her nose when she stood before him with the bottle.

‘My glass isn’t quite empty,’ he said.

‘No, it’s not.’ She placed the wine bottle on the floor and sat next to him and touched the hair that lay on his skin and thought how fair and soft it was, not assertively brittle like Odenigbo’s, nothing like Odenigbo at all. He looked at her and she wondered if his eyes had really turned grey or if she was imagining it. She touched his face, left her hand resting on his cheek.

‘Come, sit on the floor with me,’ she said finally.

They sat side by side, their backs resting on the sofa seat. Richard said, in a mumble, ‘I should leave,’ or something that sounded like it. But she knew he would not leave and that when she stretched out on the bristly carpet he would lie next to her. She kissed his lips. He pulled her forcefully close, and then, just as quickly, he let go and moved his face away. She could hear his rapid breathing. She unbuckled his trousers and moved back to pull them down and laughed because they got stuck at his shoes. She took her dress off. He was on top of her and the carpet pricked her naked back and she felt his mouth limply enclose her nipple. It was nothing like Odenigbo’s bites and sucks, nothing like those shocks of pleasure. Richard did not run his tongue over her in that flicking way that made her forget everything; rather, when he kissed her belly, she was aware that he was kissing her belly.

Everything changed when he was inside her. She raised her hips, moving with him, matching his thrusts, and it was as if she was throwing shackles off her wrists, extracting pins from her skin, freeing herself with the loud, loud cries that burst out of her mouth. Afterwards, she felt filled with a sense of well-being, with something close to grace.