Jomo knew what tear gas was and laughed long and hard when Ugwu told him what he wanted to use it for. Jomo clapped his hands together as he laughed. “You are a sheep, aturu,” Jomo said finally. “Why do you want to use tear gas on a young girl? Look, go to your village, and if the time is right and the young girl likes you, she will follow you. You don’t need tear gas.”
Ugwu kept Jomo’s words in mind as Mr. Richard drove him to his hometown the next morning. Anulika ran up the path when she saw them and boldly shook Mr. Richard’s hand. She hugged Ugwu and, as they walked along, told him that their parents were at the farm, their cousin gave birth only yesterday, Nnesinachi left for the North last week—
Ugwu stopped and stared at her.
“Has something happened?” Mr. Richard asked. “The festival hasn’t been canceled, has it?”
Ugwu wished it had been. “No, sah.”
He led the way to the village square, already filling up with men and women and children, and sat under the oji tree with Mr. Richard. Children soon surrounded them, chanting “Onye ocha, white man,” reaching out to feel Mr. Richard’s hair. He said, “Kedu? Hello, what’s your name?” and they stared at him, giggling, nudging each other. Ugwu leaned against the tree and mourned the time he had spent thinking of seeing Nnesinachi. Now she was gone and some trader in the North would end up with his prize. He hardly noticed the mmuo: masculine figures covered in grass, their faces snarling wooden masks, their long whips dangling from their hands. Mr. Richard took photographs, wrote in his notebook, and asked questions, one after another—what was that called and what did they say and who were those men holding back the mmuo with a rope and what did that mean—until Ugwu felt irritable from the heat and the questions and the noise and the enormous disappointment of not seeing Nnesinachi.
He was silent on the drive back, looking out of the window.
“You’re already homesick, aren’t you?” Mr. Richard asked.
“Yes, sah,” Ugwu said. He wanted Mr. Richard to shut up. He wanted to be alone. He hoped Master would still be at the club so he could take the Renaissance from the living room and curl up on his bed in the Boys’ Quarters and read. Or he would watch the new television. If he was lucky, an Indian film would be on. The large-eyed beauty of the women, the singing, the flowers, the bright colors, and the crying, were what he needed now.
When he let himself in through the back door, he was shocked to find Master’s mother near the stove. Amala was standing by the door. Even Master did not know they were coming, or he would have been asked to clean the guest room.
“Oh,” he said. “Welcome, Mama. Welcome, Aunty Amala.” The last visit was fresh in his mind: Mama harassing Olanna, calling her a witch, hooting, and, worst of all, threatening to consult the dibia in the village.
“How are you, Ugwu?” Mama adjusted her wrapper before she patted his back. “My son said you went to show the white man the spirits in your village?”
“Yes, Mama.”
He could hear Master’s raised voice from the living room. Perhaps a visitor had dropped by and he had decided not to go to the club.
“You can go and rest, i nugo,” Mama said. “I am preparing my son’s dinner.”
The last thing he wanted now was for Mama to colonize his kitchen or use Olanna’s favorite saucepan for her strong-smelling soup. He wished so much that she would just leave. “I will stay in case you need help, Mama,” he said.
She shrugged and went back to shaking out black peppercorns from a pod. “Do you cook ofe nsala well?”
“I have never cooked it.”
“Why? My son likes it.”
“My madam has never asked me to cook it.”
“She is not your madam, my child. She is just a woman who is living with a man who has not paid her bride price.”
“Yes, Mama.”
She smiled, as if pleased that he had finally understood something important, and gestured to two small clay pots at the corner. “I brought fresh palm wine for my son. Our best wine-tapper brought it to me this morning.”
She pulled out the green leaves stuffed in the mouth of one pot and the wine frothed over, white and fresh and sweet-smelling. She poured some into a cup and gave it to Ugwu.
“Taste it.”
It was strong on his tongue, the kind of concentrated palm wine tapped in the dry season that made men in his village start to stagger too soon. “Thank you, Mama. It is very good.”
“Do your people tap wine well?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“But not as well as my people. In Abba, we have the best wine-tappers in the whole of Igboland. Is that not so, Amala?”
“It is so, Mama.”
“Wash that bowl for me.”
“Yes, Mama.” Amala began to wash the bowl. Her shoulders and arms shook as she scrubbed. Ugwu had not really looked at her and now he noticed that her slender, dark arms and face were shiny-wet, as if she had bathed in groundnut oil.
Master’s voice, loud and firm, came from the living room. “Our idiot government should break ranks with Britain too. We must take a stand! Why is Britain not doing more in Rhodesia? What bloody difference will limp economic sanctions make?”
Ugwu moved closer to the door to listen; he was fascinated by Rhodesia, by what was happening in the south of Africa. He could not comprehend people that looked like Mr. Richard taking away the things that belonged to people that looked like him, Ugwu, for no reason at all.
“Bring me a tray, Ugwu,” Mama said.
Ugwu brought down a tray from the cupboard and made as if to help her serve Master’s food, but she waved him away. “I am here so you can rest a little, you poor boy. That woman will start overworking you again once she returns from overseas, as if you are not somebody’s child.” She unwrapped a small packet and sprinkled something into the soup bowl. Suspicion flared in Ugwu’s mind; he remembered the black cat that appeared in the backyard after her last visit. And the packet was black, too, like the cat.
“What is that, Mama? That thing you put in my master’s food?” he asked.
“It is a spice that is a specialty of Abba people.” She turned to smile briefly. “It is very good.”
“Yes, Mama.” Maybe he was wrong to think she was putting her medicine from the dibia in the master’s food. Maybe Olanna was right and the black cat meant nothing and was only a neighbor’s cat, although he did not know any of the neighbors who had a cat like that, with eyes that flashed yellow-red.
Ugwu didn’t think again of the strange spice or the cat because, while Master had dinner, he sneaked a glass of palm wine from the pot and then another glass, since it was so sweet, and afterward he felt as if the inside of his head was coated in soft wool. He could hardly walk. From the living room, he heard Master say in an unsteady voice, “To the future of great Africa! To our independent brothers in the Gambia and to our Zambian brothers who have left Rhodesia!” followed by laughter in wild bursts. The palm wine had got to Master as well. Ugwu laughed along, even though he was alone in the kitchen and did not know what was funny. Finally, he fell asleep on the stool, his head against the table that smelled of dried fish.
He woke up with stiff joints. His mouth tasted sour, his head ached, and he wished the sun were not so oppressively bright and that Master would not speak so loudly over the newspapers at breakfast. How can more politicians return unopposed than elected? Utter rubbish! This is rigging of the worst order! Each syllable throbbed inside Ugwu’s head.
After Master left for work, Mama asked, “Will you not go to school, gbo, Ugwu?”
“We are on holiday, Mama.”
“Oh.” She looked disappointed.
Later, he saw her rubbing something on Amala’s back, both of them standing in front of the bathroom. His suspicions returned. There was something wrong about the way Mama’s hands were moving in circular motions, slowly, as if in consonance with some ritual, and about the way Amala stood silent, with her back straight and her wrapper lowered to her wai
st and the outline of her small breasts visible from the side. Perhaps Mama was rubbing a potion on Amala. But it made no sense because if Mama had indeed gone to the dibia, the medicine would be for Olanna and not Amala. It may be, though, that the medicine worked on women and Mama would have to protect herself and Amala to make sure that only Olanna died or became barren or went mad. Perhaps Mama was performing the preliminary protections now that Olanna was in London and would bury the medicine in the yard to keep it potent until Olanna came back.
Ugwu shivered. A shadow hung over the house. He worried about Mama’s cheeriness, her tuneless humming, her determination to serve all of Master’s meals, her frequent hushed words to Amala. He watched her carefully whenever she went outside, to see if she would bury anything, so he could unearth it as soon as she went back indoors. But she did not bury anything. When he told Jomo that he suspected Mama had gone to a dibia to find a way to kill Olanna, Jomo said, “The old woman is simply happy to have her son to herself, that is why she is cooking and singing every day. Do you know how happy my mother is when I go to see her without my wife?”
“But I saw a black cat the last time she came,” Ugwu said.
“Professor Ozumba’s housegirl down the street is a witch. She flies to the top of the mango tree at night to meet with her fellow witches, because I always rake up all the leaves they throw down. She is the one the black cat was looking for.”
Ugwu tried to believe Jomo, that he was reading undue meaning into Mama’s actions, until he walked into the kitchen the next evening, after weeding his herb garden, and saw the flies in a foaming mass by the sink. The window was barely open. He did not see how so many flies, more than a hundred fat greenish flies, could have come in through that crack to buzz together in a dense turbulent cluster. They signified something terrible. Ugwu dashed to the study to call Master.
“Quite odd,” Master said; he took off his glasses and then put them back on. “I’m sure Prof. Ezeka will be able to explain it, some sort of migratory behavior. Don’t shut the window so you don’t trap them in.”
“But, sah,” Ugwu said, just as Mama came into the kitchen.
“Flies do this sometimes,” she said. “It is normal. They will go the same way they came.” She was leaning by the door and her tone was ominously victorious.
“Yes, yes.” Master turned to go back to the study. “Tea, my good man.”
“Yes, sah.” Ugwu did not understand how Master could be so unperturbed, how he could not see that the flies were not normal at all. As he took the tea tray into the study, he said, “Sah, those flies are telling us something.”
Master gestured to the table. “Don’t pour. Leave it there.”
“Those flies in the kitchen, sah, they are a sign of bad medicine from the dibia. Somebody has done bad medicine.” Ugwu wanted to add that he knew very well who it was, but he was not sure how Master would take that.
“What?” Master’s eyes narrowed behind his glasses.
“The flies, sah. It means somebody has done bad medicine for this house.”
“Shut the door and let me do some work, my good man.”
“Yes, sah.”
When Ugwu returned to the kitchen, the flies were gone. The window was the same, open only a crack, and the wan sunlight lit up the blade of a chopping knife on the table. He was reluctant to touch anything; the mysteries around him had tainted the pans and pots. For once, he was pleased to let Mama cook, but he did not eat the ugba and fried fish she made for dinner, did not take so much as a sip of the leftover palm wine he served to Master and his guests, did not sleep well that night. He kept jerking awake with itchy watering eyes, wishing he could talk to somebody who would understand: Jomo, his aunty, Anulika. Finally he got up and went into the main house to dust the furniture, something mild and mindless that would keep him occupied. The purple-gray of early dawn filled the kitchen with shadows. He turned on the light switch fearfully, expecting to find something. Scorpions, perhaps; a jealous person had sent them to his uncle’s hut once, and his uncle woke up every day for weeks to find angry black scorpions crawling near his newborn twin sons. One baby had been stung and almost died.
Ugwu cleaned the bookshelves first. He had removed the papers from the center table and was bent over dusting it when Master’s bedroom door opened. He glanced at the corridor, surprised that Master was up so early. But it was Amala who walked out of the room. The corridor was dim and her startled eyes met Ugwu’s more startled eyes and she stopped for a moment before she hurried on to the guest room. Her wrapper was loose around her chest. She held on to it with one hand and bumped against the door of the guest room, pushing it as if she had forgotten how to open it, before she went in. Amala, common quiet ordinary Amala, had slept in Master’s bedroom! Ugwu stood still and tried to get his whirling head to become steady so that he could think. Mama’s medicine had done this, he was sure, but his worry was not what had happened between Master and Amala. His worry was what would happen if Olanna found out.
20
Olanna sat across from her mother in the living room upstairs. Her mother called it the ladies’ parlor, 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 gynecologist 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 neighborhood 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, Mom,” 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 talk
ed 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 Mom, 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 toward her. “Thank you, ola m,” he said.
Half of a Yellow Sun Page 25
