by Chika Unigwe
I was twenty-four when I left home for the first time. Unlike many of the girls I went to primary school with, I had not gone on to boarding school, even though I had passed the entrance examination to Queens College, one of the top secondary schools in the country. I applied to a university a taxi ride away.
Most people swear that daughters and mothers cannot live together for so long without suffocating each other. With my mother and me, it was the opposite. We were close, but it was a closeness that gave us room to breathe. In between perms, my mother still braided my hair. I told her about my classes. She knew the names of all my professors, knew that one had a habit of beginning every class with a prayer, knew of another who looked so young she was often mistaken for a student herself. She knew that I liked my Chem 201 professor because she was possibly the smartest person I had ever come across.
My mother was vivacious while I, although no longer shy, preferred friendships in small doses. I did not have more than a few friends at a time, and often not for very long. I knew my mother would have liked me to have more friends, but she never pushed me. Perhaps her friends filled the house enough for the two of us. And she was enough for me.
Even before I left the country, I told my mother that, once I was settled, I wanted her to move in with me. Within three months of living in Belgium, I begged her with every phone call (at least once a week) to come and live with me. I promised her a rest from days of sitting in the sun selling peppers and tomatoes to customers determined to pay the lowest price possible. I had a good job now. It was my responsibility to make life easier for her. After all her hard work, she could reap the benefits, spend her days in my air-conditioned home and rest her feet on a side table in my sitting room. I imagined coming home from work to eat with her. Weekends, we could go shopping together. I would rent Nollywood films for us to watch together.
I was at the airport a full hour before her flight was scheduled to arrive. I sat at a table by myself and drank coffee while I waited, watching people come and go, imagining all the things that I would soon be able to do with my mother. When I saw her she looked startled. It reminded me of my own wide-eyed wonder at the gleaming smoothness of the airport floor three years ago. This woman with her wig covering one eye looked nothing like the mother I remembered. She looked older. Unkempt. Ordinary. Not a hint of redness on her lips.
The mother of my memories was elegant. She would not step out of the house without red lipstick and perfect hair. She did not walk with slow steps as this stranger did. This was not the mother who told me that, no matter how hard life got, a woman owed it to herself to dress well. The mother who, despite the poverty my father’s death and his brothers’ greed had driven us to, always managed to look glamorous.
It took her a while to notice me. I waved, she waved back, her face breaking into a smile. And then I ran to her. She smelled the same. At least that had not changed. I held her and soaked in her scent the way I did as a child when I woke up from a nightmare in which she was killed in a car accident, the way my father had been. I fought the urge to straighten her wig. I hugged her and the familiar warmth of her dissolved whatever shock I felt at her deterioration.
‘You look tired,’ I said, taking over her luggage trolley.
‘I have not slept in twenty-four hours.’
‘Why not? I especially booked a night flight for you so you’d be well rested.’
‘I could not sleep on the plane. I haven’t seen my own daughter in three years. Was I going to risk missing my stop?’
My mother had never been on an aeroplane but it had not occurred to me that she would think that planes operated like the buses she took from Nsukka to Lagos. Although I wanted to laugh, I did not want her to think that I was ridiculing her. I was consoled in thinking that perhaps her ageing was temporary, caused by lack of sleep, and that once she had rested she would revert to the woman I remembered. She held my hand in both of hers and I knew that she too had missed me.
My mother’s startled look lingered throughout the first week after her arrival. Her gaze lighted upon my doorknobs (shiny); my TV (big); the rug (soft, soft like a baby blanket); the fruit basket (These bananas look plastic); the neighbour across the street who shouted a greeting in Flemish and I responded (How did you ever learn this language?).
At the end of the first week, she set her gaze on me and said, ‘This house is too quiet. How come you never have visitors? Have you no friends?’
‘Of course I do!’
‘So how come they do not come here?’
‘Because everyone’s busy.’
‘Doing?’
‘Working.’
She clucked her tongue against her teeth the same way she did when I told her at sixteen that the boy she had caught me with was just a classmate.
While I was out at work, my mother divided her time between cooking and watching TV. I was glad I had cable so that, when the local Belgian channels did not air programmes in English, she could always depend on the BBC stations and CNN. My home smelled of my childhood: okra soup and jollof rice; yam pottage and beans. I could close my eyes and be the precarious eight-year-old on her father’s knees, while her mother dished out food in deep porcelain bowls.
Not even those bowls had survived my uncles’ greedy hands. The car was the first to go, the Peugeot 504 in which we had driven to church on Sunday mornings. Uncle Justus, my father’s older brother, laid claim to that. As he did the sofas, the TV and finally the house.
My tenth birthday was spent helping my mother set up what was left of our belongings in a one-room flat, smaller than the bedroom she and my father had shared only two years before. As we unpacked, she made me promise that I would study hard, do well at school, and get a good job, so that no matter what happened to my husband in the future, I would be OK. I gave her my promise quickly, mortified by the thought of marriage. In that one room, my mother entertained her friends. Once a month, she hosted six women from her Christian Mothers’ Group. On those days, they sat on the veranda, and kept me awake with their laughter.
‘This is like being back home.’
‘What is?’
‘The smell of all the food you’re cooking.’
My mother said, ‘Nobody here speaks English!’ as if the thought had just occurred to her. I saw the startled look in her eyes get wider.
Five weeks into her stay, she complained that she was running out of food. Was there any place where we could replenish her stocks? She had come with bags of ground egusi and dried bitter-leaf; ground crayfish and smoked fish. I was amazed that customs had let her through with so much food. She said nobody checked.
‘Why did you bring so much?’ I asked the day she arrived.
‘I was not sure I could stomach whatever it was you ate here. Mama Patience who went to visit her grandchildren in America warned me about the food. One does not learn a new dance in old age.’
‘But this is not America, Mama. This is Belgium.’
‘Belgium. America. Obodo oyibo is obodo oyibo.’
On a sunny Saturday afternoon, I took my mother to an African supermarket in Antwerp. When the shopkeeper said to her in English, ‘Hello, Mama,’ my mother’s response was effusive. She asked him where he was from.
‘Ghana is Nigeria’s sister,’ my mother said before asserting the superiority of Nigerian jollof rice over Ghana’s version. It was the most I had heard her say in weeks.
The shopkeeper’s response, which I did not catch, made my mother laugh. That was when it hit me. This was the first time she had laughed since her arrival. She had smiled. She had complimented. But she had not laughed. That day at the supermarket, everything set her off. I walked beside her. She picked up a guava, pinched it, smelled it, laughed and threw it in the shopping trolley. At that moment, her laughter gleaming in her eyes, I realised that I had unwittingly dragged her to museums and malls to dazzle her into letting out the mirth that had earned her the nickname Joy. In her first week with me, I took days off and accompanied her
around Belgium. We went to the zoo in Antwerp, we took a horse carriage ride in Ghent, we went on the tourist bus in Brussels and took pictures in front of the palace, but she did not seem entertained. We took the train to Bruges and walked to the Boudewijn Theme Park and Dolfinarium. We caught a dolphin show and she wondered aloud how an animal that looked so dumb could be as intelligent as to dance in sync with humans. She asked if we were singlehandedly supporting the place when, at her insistence, I told her how much our tickets had cost. She had gone with me from one part of the theme park to the other but nothing had amused her. I did not see in her eyes the same enthusiasm that I’d felt the first time I visited the park.
After we came back from shopping, my mother sang as she cooked. Back in Nsukka, she would have been chatting with the neighbours. As a teenager who liked to spend time alone, I remember thinking that the only time my mother was ever truly alone was when she was in the bathroom. She sought company. If nobody came to visit, she went and visited them. As a first-year psychology student, I was certain that my father’s death gave my mother a fear of being left alone. When I asked her about it, she said that the world was made to be enjoyed in company.
My mother’s laughter lasted exactly two months. It was a generous, capacious laughter that accommodated even the most ridiculous: Judge Judy’s tight smile on daytime TV. This Judge woman looks like she’s being forced to smile with a lemon in her mouth, hahahaha! The fact that, in this country, you did not just turn up at people’s doorsteps. You waited to be invited. Hahahaha!
And then, just as it had showered upon my house, the laughter dried up. As did her voice. She hardly spoke to me. No longer asked if I had no friends. No longer marvelled at all the shiny things my home had to offer. She no longer played with the TV remote control trying to find programmes that interested her, mostly American and British soaps on cable and the news. She sat with me as I listened to the news in Dutch and muttered, ‘I could never learn this language!’ One day, she held her throat dramatically and said, ‘This is what it must feel like to be dumb. To hear and not understand. To speak and not be understood.’
When we went out, she no longer said anything about the number of new cars on the roads. The house became a tomb, too sturdily built for me to crack open with my own voice. My mother looked sad, and her sadness permeated the house so that it seemed as if it, too, was in mourning. The doorknobs seemed to have lost the lustre my mother had so admired. No matter what she cooked it smelled of the incense she sometimes burned in our parlour back in Nigeria. Often I asked her what was wrong. Each time she told me it was nothing. The sadness wound itself around my ankles, slowing my usual quick strides. I began to wish that I had never asked her to come.
One day I came back from work and my mother was sobbing and rolling on the floor of the sitting room. There were no friends crying with her as they had the day my father died. She had never been without friends. I had not managed to make a single friend here. I was not part of the Nigerian community because, in addition to my reclusive nature, my job kept me busy. I chatted to colleagues but never invited anyone home for a coffee. I had no desire to be inundated with people for whom I would have to be responsible: offering biscuits and drinks, keeping the conversation going. What I missed was the undemanding presence of a friend for whom I did not have to bear the social responsibilities of a hostess. Perhaps what I missed was not so much my mother but the company of a close friend.
I rolled close to my mother and held her tight. I held her until we both stopped crying. She got up, wiped her eyes and went into her bedroom. I did not follow. I did not ask what was wrong. I sat at my computer and booked her a ticket home.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to all the wonderful people who spurred this book on by asking the right questions, providing coffee and wine and space; those who allowed me to pester them into reading early drafts; those who kept me sane with long phone calls and pep talks when I ran the risk of coming apart: Kate Johnson, agent and early reader; Bibi Bakare-Yusuf; Brian Chikwava; Elnathan John; Adamu Abubakar; Jude Dibia; Ike Ilegbune; Andrew Colarusso; Uwem Akpan; Kola Tubosun; Aruni Kashyap; all the editors who worked on this.
DW Gibson and Ledig House; Bill Pierce and Jennifer Alise Drew for publishing Finding Faith in AGNI; EC Osondu for that journey.
Jane, Winnie, Vic, Maureen, Okey and BG., siblings like no other; my parents for whom everything I write is worth celebrating.
My Jan and our boys-to-men.
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Copyright
First published in 2019 by Cassava Republic Press
Abuja—London
First published in the USA in 2020 by Cassava Republic Press
Copyright © Chika Unigwe 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.
The moral right of Chika Unigwe to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Nigeria and the British Library.
