by Jennifer Juo
The predominantly Christian town of Ibadan celebrated the Christmas season. Woven palm fronds decorated the cement and mud homes, small palm trees sported tinsel, cotton-wool snow, and bells. Christmas music blared out of roadside stalls, and slaughtered goats hung upside down at the market. A lurid red cross lit up the main church in town. Here it was a religious holiday about the baby Jesus, few toys were given, only gifts of soap, pencils, cotton cloth, or sweets were exchanged. A group of Nigerian dancers and drummers went from house to house chanting hymns and holding a brown baby doll, signifying Jesus as a gift to mankind. Crowds mobbed the dancers, trying to touch the baby Jesus.
Winston waited in the heat for almost an hour, his clothes completely drenched in sweat. It was close to six o’clock, and he knew his wife would already be getting ready for the party, wondering where he was. The sun was setting. Finally, the traffic started moving. He turned the key to start the engine, but it sputtered out and died. He tried several times but with no luck. Cars behind him started to honk, their drivers shouting obscenities at him. Was the juju doctor involved? He was sure now he saw him. Would he come for him? Winston looked around, scanning the crowd anxiously.
He thought through his options. He could try and find a mechanic to fix the problem, but he didn’t know if that would be successful. Or he could abandon the jeep and flag down a minibus or taxi to take him back to the compound. He was only thirty minutes to an hour away. The second sounded more appealing, but he knew he would lose the jeep.
A man approached wearing mechanic overalls. “You having trouble with your car, sah?”
“Are you a mechanic?” Winston asked.
“Yes, sah.”
“Will you take a look?”
“Yes, sah, no problem, I fix for you.”
The man crawled under his jeep to take a look. After about ten minutes, he slid out. “It’s fixed, sah. I make it betta for you.”
“That quickly?” Winston felt somewhat suspicious. He started his engine, and sure enough, it worked. Had this same mechanic crawled under his car earlier during the traffic jam and fiddled with something underneath? He had heard of such scams happening. Now he started to think maybe it was not related to the witch doctor but was just some random, everyday occurrence in Nigeria. Whatever it was, he wanted to get home quickly. He paid the exorbitant fee, the mechanic taking advantage of Winston’s desperate situation.
When he arrived, it was eight o’clock, and Sylvia was already at the party. Patience was at home with the children.
“Where you been, masta?” Patience said. “Madam go wait for you, but she left. She go be angry.”
Winston valued Patience’s expertise when it came to the children, but he didn’t appreciate her scolding. She was clearly in Sylvia’s camp, and that bothered him. He could do no right in her eyes.
Winston quickly showered and then dressed for the Christmas Eve party at the clubhouse. The expat compound made an attempt to celebrate Christmas where there was no snow. There was aerosol-sprayed snow on windows, and someone always dressed as Santa. Lacking a Chinese community to celebrate Chinese New Year, Winston and Sylvia had succumbed to this compound holiday as a substitute. His wife bought a plastic tree at a garage sale from a family moving back to the UK and placed a few token presents under the tree. Still, it was not a big occasion for them. Every Christmas Eve, most families on the compound congregated at the Director of the ADA’s house. Winston walked into the party, scanning the crowd for his wife.
Many of the guests wore their home country’s formal, traditional dress as well—silk saris, Yoruba iro wrappers and elaborate gele headdresses, or Scottish kilts. The American Director of the ADA had ordered frozen turkeys, cranberry sauce, and sweet potato casseroles from the US just for the party. Guests stood in line to taste this American delicacy. In the corner was a large, artificial Christmas tree, heavy with teddy bear ornaments. Outside, people ate on white plastic tables and chairs under colored Christmas lights strewn on trees. It was a warm, balmy evening, not at all like the dark snowy nights most of the revelers associated with Christmas.
He saw his wife dressed in a red silk qipao, the long slits revealing her bare legs. Red became her, he thought. It was the Chinese color of happiness, good fortune, of all good things. She was talking to the doctor, engrossed in an intense conversation it seemed. She had been volunteering at his clinic for the past year, and he was glad, despite everything, she had found her vocation. The doctor embraced her and kissed her on the cheek. He knew this casual intimacy was a European custom, but still, it suddenly bothered him.
He quickly walked over to them. The doctor nodded at him as he approached and took his leave. His wife couldn’t help smiling at the doctor as he left.
“You’re late,” his wife said to him, her face clouding over.
He had been away for three weeks, and this was how she greeted him. He knew he deserved it, but it still hurt especially after the way she had smiled at the doctor.
“My jeep broke down,” he said.
“Again?” she looked alarmed.
“It’s not what you think. It was just a random mechanic scam.”
“Nothing is random, you know that. It’s the juju spell.”
“You’re starting to sound like Patience. You really believe all of this? I came out unhurt didn’t I?”
She seemed offended by his slighting of Patience. He knew she regarded Patience as a friend, a relative of sorts.
“For now, you might have escaped. But next time you might not? Don’t you get it?” she responded.
“Let’s not go through this again.” Winston walked off to join his colleagues, leaving his wife standing there alone. He didn’t want to go down this path because in truth, it frightened him. He didn’t want to be dragged down by his wife and her superstitious world. As far as he was concerned, it was better not to dwell on it.
***
That night, after the children had gone to bed, Sylvia was in the living room wrapping Christmas presents for the following morning.
Winston pulled out a large box of Duplo Legos for Thomas, something he had bought on a recent trip to New York. He flew twice a year to New York to give the ADA donors an update on his ADA 2000 Starter Pack program.
“You didn’t get anything for Lila from New York, did you?” Sylvia said, sounding annoyed. He sensed another argument brewing.
“Uh…” he mumbled.
“You treat her differently,” she accused.
“They can share.” He tried to placate his wife.
“Share? Legos are clearly for a boy.”
“He’s my son.”
“You regret her,” she said slowly. “You regret marrying me, don’t you?” Her voice was shaking now.
Winston was silent, neither disputing nor confirming her words. She ran down the hall into their bedroom. Winston did not follow. Did he regret marrying her? If he could rewrite his life, yes, he would do it differently. Marrying her had brought baggage, emotional baggage; he preferred to travel more lightly.
He knew he was a self-sufficient man, an introvert, operating mostly on his own. He did not require much in the way of attention or displays of love, and as a result, he didn’t seem to think others needed it either. His own parents’ relationship had been formal and aristocratic. They had never exchanged hugs or words of affection and mostly lived apart as his father studied in Beijing. He knew his parents’ behavior stood in contrast to his wife’s parents. She had told him her father was a passionate man, possessive and jealous of her mother, not letting her venture out without him. Even when Sylvia’s mother went out to purchase sanitary pads and other “women’s supplies,” Sylvia’s father insisted on accompanying her. Winston sensed his wife’s expectations of marriage were entirely different from his. He and Sylvia were both Chinese, but they did not speak the same language, not when it came to love.
SYLVIA
Chapter 18
On New Year’s Eve 1977, Sylvia spent the day picking fr
angipani blossoms and threading leis with the other compound wives for the New Year’s Eve Hawaiian Luau party. Winston feigned illness and bowed out of the party. She gladly went alone and for one reason. She wore a grass skirt with her bikini, a pink coral necklace, and a white frangipani blossom tucked in her long, flowing black hair, echoing Polynesian princesses returning to the sea.
When she reached the clubhouse, she sat in her car for a moment. She closed her eyes. The scent of the frangipani blossom in her hair made her nauseous. What was the point of trying when her husband didn’t care about their marriage or his life and obviously regretted the whole thing? He had not said it, but he didn’t need to. She knew he was a man of limited words. He would not speak in smooth, sugary words to hide anything. His silence meant the truth was better left unsaid. But it still hurt. She got out of her car and walked up to the New Year’s Eve party at the clubhouse swimming pool.
The swimming pool was lit up and decorated with red flowers shaped into the word, “Aloha.” Paper lanterns were strung from trees and circled the poolside. Ayo came to the party late. He wore a local batik print shirt and shorts. But this time, she sought him out.
“Dance?” she said as she studied his eyes, dark-green pools waiting for her to dive, water smothering her lungs.
He hesitated at first, glancing at her bare midriff.
Soon he held her arm and waist, and they were dancing to a scratchy record of someone’s lilting Hawaiian hula music. The touch of his hand on her bare skin as they danced made her follow him later down the dark hill to the room full of pipes underneath the swimming pool. Or maybe it was the words left unsaid by her husband that chased her to these watery depths. In the dark mechanical room, Ayo pushed her against the wall, his hands moved over her bare stomach, her thighs under the grass skirt, and then he was inside her.
***
What followed was a kind of malaria-laced madness, papery snakeskin shells left on the grass, hundreds of dead frogs on the road. Sylvia swallowed bitter white malaria pills every Sunday to ward off the mosquito-love poisoning her blood. She lay in bed thinking she was delirious from malaria when what she was really suffering from was a spell of lust. There were secret rendezvous at his house in town, their bodies sticking together from the humidity as they made love. Or love for them could happen behind a wall while the party’s sherry glasses clinked on the other side.
She met Ayo at his father’s house in town in the afternoons. They lay on the mahogany four-poster bed, the room felt hazy and unreal behind the white muslin mosquito net. The blue paint on the bare walls was swollen and cracked from the humidity, the only decoration a faded biblical calendar and a large, gilded mirror opposite the bed. In the corner, a rusty green electric fan on a stool threw air back and forth around the room, comforting and suffocating the lovers at its will.
The metal window bars outside had bled tears of rust down the yellow walls of his father’s house. Even the scarlet bougainvillea could not cover it up. This house had already endured the forbidden love of his English mother and Nigerian father during Colonial times. These mud walls, once painted a vibrant yellow outside, had been built by this kind of love. Only now the pale stucco had cracked, revealing the dark mud walls underneath.
Sylvia was the ignored child, nobody’s favorite, trapped in a loveless marriage. She had been starved of love. When she finally found it, she became an addict. But what was she to Ayo? Was it that kind of love, like his parents once felt, a passionate, rebellious kind of love that went against all odds? She didn’t really know. But she did know this: he waited for her those afternoons at his rust-stained house in town. Sometimes she didn’t come, wracked with guilt at that particular moment. But he still waited. And sometimes she did come. Her long black hair flung across his face in their mad embrace while thunderstorms blew palm trees sideways.
***
Sylvia remained fearful about her husband and her daughter, guarding them against the spell and the spirits. She continued to put fresh fruit as an offering on the little shrine at the edge of their garden for Lila’s bush-soul, the wild boar. Since Winston had been born in the year of the Tiger, she decided his bush-soul was the lion. She had Energy build a shrine for him too, and she put out offerings for his bush-soul as well. She knew the lion would protect Winston. After all, wasn’t he the strongest animal here in Africa? She knew Winston would have simply laughed at her for doing this, but as far as she knew, nothing had happened, so she concluded it must be working.
Sylvia continued to volunteer at the clinic even though she and Ayo were now lovers. He never touched her at the clinic anymore. He maintained a professional stance toward her now that they were seeing each other in private. A year went by, and Sylvia was becoming a proficient nurse, learning on the job. The Nigerian nurses were happy to teach her. She lived for working at the clinic, it had been her calling. Even though the days could be harrowing, she was working beside the man she loved and doing something she cared deeply about.
In the spring of 1978, Sylvia wrote in the spiral notebook as the triage nurse spoke: Grace, three years old, seizures, cerebral malaria. Fatal at this young age, the triage nurse explained. Sylvia carried the little girl with cerebral malaria to an examining room. The thin toddler had journeyed with her aunt from their rural village for more than a day by a combination of foot, bus, and moped. By the time they had reached Ayo’s clinic, the malaria parasites had already latched onto the child’s brain.
Sylvia shaved some of the hair off the child’s head, and then, under the nurse’s instruction, she inserted an IV to administer quinine. The child lay unconscious, contorted in pain. Ayo came into the room to examine her. He embodied both the heroic and the sordid, brandishing his stethoscope in a blood-stained white coat. The doctor on the edge of humanity, hopelessly trying to save lives in the tropics where bacteria thrived and the water ran brown or red, but never clear.
“Will she…be all right?” Sylvia remembered when Lila had been on the brink of life and death with malaria as a newborn.
“She’s gone into a coma already. But let’s hope so,” Ayo said.
“You don’t sound so hopeful,” Sylvia said quietly.
“I’ve seen so many children die from cerebral malaria, semi-conscious as I pumped quinine and valium into the tiny veins in their skulls. And then the sudden rasping struggle of breath, followed by death and the total collapse of their little bodies.”
He looked defeated as he said this. She felt for him, doing this kind of work. Wanting to save lives, but in reality, watching life violently choke, gasp, and then pass away. But somehow, she didn’t share his sense of frustration yet. Maybe she still knew too little, her medical ignorance protecting her from this despair that Ayo sometimes felt.
The little girl, Grace, lay on the bed, still unconscious and rigid, frozen in pain. Sylvia looked at the shaved side of the child’s head with the IV still inserted. She saw how frail Grace seemed. The spirits’ grip on her was firm. She remembered the time she had spent by her daughter’s bedside when Lila had struggled with malaria. Suddenly Grace started having seizures, and her previously still body flailed around violently. The nurse showed Sylvia how to administer pain suppositories for the girl.
“Can you do anything?” Sylvia asked Ayo, feeling afraid.
He shook his head as if he knew death was coming and the only thing he could do was ease the pain.
***
That night, he came to her house around midnight. Sylvia opened the door, and he stood there in his stained, white doctor’s coat, his face unshaven. He looked like he had come directly from the clinic. They didn’t speak. He kissed her roughly, pushing her against the kitchen counter. His hands undid her silk robe. Grace is dead, Sylvia thought, he came to tell me.
He made love to her on the white terrazzo tile of her kitchen floor as if it were his life dangling by a thin IV line. Afterward, they got up from the cold, hard floor. Naked, she walked towards the living room. Ayo followed. The dark house w
as full of the swaying shadows of the palm trees outside. They lay down on the couch holding each other.
“She’s…” Sylvia began.
“She’s the same.”
For one more day, Grace was still with them, she thought.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
“For Grace?”
“For keeping me sane. You keep me sane,” he said.
She wanted to ease the pain of his toiling in a place of death and hopelessness; she wanted to be his nurse. She massaged his tight neck and shoulder muscles, the places where he held all his stress.
***
That morning, she set up a shrine for Grace too. She didn’t know what her bush-soul might be, so she picked the monkey.
The next day when she went back to the clinic, she felt obligated to sit watch by Grace’s bedside, not just for Ayo but also for herself. Grace’s precarious hold on life mirrored Lila’s struggle with malaria years before. Both girls were ravaged by spirits except this girl had no mother to protect her.
As Sylvia walked into the clinic, a nurse came up to her and grabbed her arm.
“Come and see dis,” the nurse said. Was Grace gone? She tried to brace herself.
They walked into Grace’s room. Sylvia almost fainted in surprise. The little girl’s eyes were wide open.
“She didn’t die, she woke up instead,” Sylvia said, rushing up to her bed.
Ayo came into the room.
“She’s come out of her coma,” Sylvia said. She held the little girl in her arms, feeling emboldened by her results. “I made a little shrine for her bush-soul, you know, like you told me to do for Lila. And it looks like it’s working.”
