And that was what happened. Perhaps it was what we wanted to happen, Jaja and I, without being aware of it. Perhaps we all changed after Nsukka—even Papa—and things were destined to not be the same, to not be in their original order.
“What is that? Have you all converted to heathen ways? What are you doing with that painting? Where did you get it?” Papa asked.
“O nkem. It’s mine,” Jaja said. He wrapped the painting around his chest with his arms.
“It’s mine,” I said.
Papa swayed slightly, from side to side, like a person about to fall at the feet of a charismatic pastor after the laying on of hands. Papa did not sway often. His swaying was like shaking a bottle of Coke that burst into violent foam when you opened it.
“Who brought that painting into this house?”
“Me,” I said.
“Me,” Jaja said.
If only Jaja would look at me, I would ask him not to blame himself. Papa snatched the painting from Jaja. His hands moved swiftly, working together. The painting was gone. It already represented something lost, something I had never had, would never have. Now even that reminder was gone, and at Papa’s feet lay pieces of paper streaked with earth-tone colors. The pieces were very small, very precise. I suddenly and maniacally imagined Papa-Nnukwu’s body being cut in pieces that small and stored in a fridge.
“No!” I shrieked. I dashed to the pieces on the floor as if to save them, as if saving them would mean saving Papa-Nnukwu. I sank to the floor, lay on the pieces of paper.
“What has gotten into you?” Papa asked. “What is wrong with you?”
I lay on the floor, curled tight like the picture of a child in the uterus in my Integrated Science for Junior Secondary Schools.
“Get up! Get away from that painting!”
I lay there, did nothing.
“Get up!” Papa said again. I still did not move. He started to kick me. The metal buckles on his slippers stung like bites from giant mosquitoes. He talked nonstop, out of control, in a mix of Igbo and English, like soft meat and thorny bones. Godlessness. Heathen worship. Hellfire. The kicking increased in tempo, and I thought of Amaka’s music, her culturally conscious music that sometimes started off with a calm saxophone and then whirled into lusty singing. I curled around myself tighter, around the pieces of the painting; they were soft, feathery. They still had the metallic smell of Amaka’s paint palette. The stinging was raw now, even more like bites, because the metal landed on open skin on my side, my back, my legs. Kicking. Kicking. Kicking. Perhaps it was a belt now because the metal buckle seemed too heavy. Because I could hear a swoosh in the air. A low voice was saying, “Please, biko, please.” More stings. More slaps. A salty wetness warmed my mouth. I closed my eyes and slipped away into quiet.
WHEN I OPENED MY EYES, I knew at once that I was not in my bed. The mattress was firmer than mine. I made to get up, but pain shot through my whole body in exquisite little packets. I collapsed back.
“Nne, Kambili. Thank God!” Mama stood up and pressed her hand to my forehead, then her face to mine. “Thank God. Thank God you are awake.”
Her face felt clammy with tears. Her touch was light, yet it sent needles of pain all over me, starting from my head. It was like the hot water Papa had poured on my feet, except now it was my entire body that burned. Each movement was too painful to even think about.
“My whole body is on fire,” I said.
“Shhh,” she said. “Just rest. Thank God you are awake.”
I did not want to be awake. I did not want to feel the breathing pain at my side. I did not want to feel the heavy hammer knocking in my head. Even taking a breath was agony. A doctor in white was in the room, at the foot of my bed. I knew that voice; he was a lector in church. He was speaking slowly and precisely, the way he did when he read the first and second readings, yet I could not hear it all. Broken rib. Heal nicely. Internal bleeding. He came close and slowly lifted my shirtsleeve. Injections had always scared me—whenever I had malaria, I prayed I would need to take Novalgin tablets instead of chloroquine injections. But now the prick of a needle was nothing. I would take injections every day over the pain in my body. Papa’s face was close to mine. It seemed so close that his nose almost brushed mine, and yet I could tell that his eyes were soft, that he was speaking and crying at the same time. “My precious daughter. Nothing will happen to you. My precious daughter.” I was not sure if it was a dream. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, Father Benedict stood above me. He was making the sign of the cross on my feet with oil; the oil smelled like onions, and even his light touch hurt. Papa was nearby. He, too, was muttering prayers, his hands resting gently on my side. I closed my eyes.
“It does not mean anything. They give extreme unction to anyone who is seriously ill,” Mama whispered, when Papa and Father Benedict left.
I stared at the movement of her lips. I was not seriously ill. She knew that. Why was she saying I was seriously ill? Why was I here in St. Agnes hospital?
“Mama, call Aunty Ifeoma,” I said.
Mama looked away. “Nne, you have to rest.”
“Call Aunty Ifeoma. Please.”
Mama reached out to hold my hand. Her face was puffy from crying, and her lips were cracked, with bits of discolored skin peeling off. I wished I could get up and hug her, and yet I wanted to push her away, to shove her so hard that she would topple over the chair.
FATHER AMADI’S FACE was looking down at me when I opened my eyes. I was dreaming it, imagining it, and yet I wished that it did not hurt so much to smile, so that I could.
“At first they could not find a vein, and I was so scared.” It was Mama’s voice, real and next to me. I was not dreaming.
“Kambili. Kambili. Are you awake?” Father Amadi’s voice was deeper, less melodious than in my dreams.
“Nne, Kambili, nne.” It was Aunty Ifeoma’s voice; her face appeared next to Father Amadi’s. She had held her braided hair up, in a huge bun that looked like a raffia basket balanced on her head. I tried to smile. I felt woozy. Something was slipping out of me, slipping away, taking my strength and my sanity, and I could not stop it.
“The medication knocks her out,” Mama said.
“Nne, your cousins send greetings. They would have come, but they are in school. Father Amadi is here with me. Nne…” Aunty Ifeoma clutched my hand, and I winced, pulling it away. Even the effort to pull it away hurt. I wanted to keep my eyes open, wanted to see Father Amadi, to smell his cologne, to hear his voice, but my eyelids were slipping shut.
“This cannot go on, nwunye m,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “When a house is on fire, you run out before the roof collapses on your head.”
“It has never happened like this before. He has never punished her like this before,” Mama said.
“Kambili will come to Nsukka when she leaves the hospital.”
“Eugene will not agree.”
“I will tell him. Our father is dead, so there is no threatening heathen in my house. I want Kambili and Jaja to stay with us, at least until Easter. Pack your own things and come to Nsukka. It will be easier for you to leave when they are not there.”
“It has never happened like this before.”
“Do you not hear what I have said, gbo?” Aunty Ifeoma said, raising her voice.
“I hear you.”
The voices grew too distant, as if Mama and Aunty Ifeoma were on a boat moving quickly to sea and the waves had swallowed their voices. Before I lost their voices, I wondered where Father Amadi had gone. I opened my eyes hours later. It was dark, and the light bulbs were off. In the glimmer of light from the hallway that streamed underneath the closed door, I could see the crucifix on the wall and Mama’s figure on a chair at the foot of my bed.
“Kedu? I will be here all night. Sleep. Rest,” Mama said. She got up and sat on my bed. She caressed my pillow; I knew she was afraid to touch me and cause me pain. “Your father has been by your bedside every night these past three days. He
has not slept a wink.”
It was hard to turn my head, but I did it and looked away.
MY PRIVATE TUTOR came the following week. Mama said Papa had interviewed ten people before he picked her. She was a young Reverend Sister and had not yet made her final profession. The beads of the rosary, which were twisted around the waist of her sky-colored habit, rustled as she moved. Her wispy blond hair peeked from beneath her scarf. When she held my hand and said, “Kee ka ime?” I was stunned. I had never heard a white person speak Igbo, and so well. She spoke softly in English when we had lessons and in Igbo, although not often, when we didn’t. She created her own silence, sitting in it and fingering her rosary while I read comprehension passages. But she knew a lot of things; I saw it in the pools of her hazel eyes. She knew, for example, that I could move more body parts than I told the doctor, although she said nothing. Even the hot pain in my side had become lukewarm, the throbbing in my head had lessened. But I told the doctor it was as bad as before and I screamed when he tried to feel my side. I did not want to leave the hospital. I did not want to go home.
I took my exams on my hospital bed while Mother Lucy, who brought the papers herself, waited on a chair next to Mama. She gave me extra time for each exam, but I was finished long before the time was up. She brought my report card a few days later. I came first. Mama did not sing her Igbo praise songs; she only said, “Thanks be to God.”
My class girls visited me that afternoon, their eyes wide with awed admiration. They had heard I had survived an accident. They hoped I would come back with a cast that they could all scribble their signatures on. Chinwe Jideze brought me a big card that read “Get well soon to someone special,” and she sat by my bed and talked to me, in confidential whispers, as if we had always been friends. She even showed me her report card—she had come second. Before they left, Ezinne asked, “You will stop running away after school, now, won’t you?”
Mama told me that evening that I would be discharged in two days. But I would not be going home, I would be going to Nsukka for a week, and Jaja would go with me. She did not know how Aunty Ifeoma had convinced Papa, but he had agreed that Nsukka air would be good for me, for my recuperation.
Rain splashed across the floor of the verandah, even though the sun blazed and I had to narrow my eyes to look out the door of Aunty Ifeoma’s living room. Mama used to tell Jaja and me that God was undecided about what to send, rain or sun. We would sit in our rooms and look out at the raindrops glinting with sunlight, waiting for God to decide.
“Kambili, do you want a mango?” Obiora asked from behind me.
He had wanted to help me into the flat when we arrived earlier in the afternoon, and Chima had insisted on carrying my bag. It was as if they feared my illness lingered somewhere within and would pounce out if I exerted myself. Aunty Ifeoma had told them mine was a serious illness, that I had nearly died.
“I will eat one later,” I said, turning.
Obiora was pounding a yellow mango against the living room wall. He would do that until the inside became a soft pulp. Then he would bite a tiny hole in one end of the fruit and suck it until the seed wobbled alone inside the skin, like a person in oversize clothing. Amaka and Aunty Ifeoma were eating mangoes too, but with knives, slicing the firm orange flesh off the seed.
I went out to the verandah and stood by the wet metal railings, watching the rain thin to a drizzle and then stop. God had decided on sunlight. There was the smell of freshness in the air, that edible scent the baked soil gave out at the first touch of rain. I imagined going into the garden, where Jaja was on his knees, digging out a clump of mud with my fingers and eating it.
“Aku na-efe! Aku is flying!” a child in the flat upstairs shouted.
The air was filling with flapping, water-colored wings. Children ran out of the flats with folded newspapers and empty Bournvita tins. They hit the flying aku down with the newspapers and then bent to pick them up and put them in the tins. Some children simply ran around, swiping at the aku just for the sake of it. Others squatted down to watch the ones that had lost wings crawl on the ground, to follow them as they held on to one another and moved like a black string, a mobile necklace.
“Interesting how people will eat aku. But ask them to eat the wingless termites and that’s another thing. Yet the wingless ones are just a phase or two away from aku” Obiora said.
Aunty Ifeoma laughed. “Look at you, Obiora. A few years ago, you were always first to run after them.”
“Besides, you should not speak of children with such contempt,” Amaka teased. “After all, they are your own kind.”
“I was never a child,” Obiora said, heading for the door.
“Where are you going?” Amaka asked. “To chase aku?”
“I’m not going to run after those flying termites, I am just going to look,” Obiora said. “To observe.”
Amaka laughed, and Aunty Ifeoma echoed her.
“Can I go, Mom?” Chima asked. He was already heading for the door.
“Yes. But you know we will not fry them.”
“I will give the ones I catch to Ugochukwu. They fry aku in their house,” Chima said.
“Watch that they do not fly into your ears, inugo? Or they will make you go deaf!” Aunty Ifeoma called as Chima dashed outside.
Aunty Ifeoma put on her slippers and went upstairs to talk to a neighbor. I was left alone with Amaka, standing side by side next to the railings. She moved forward to lean on the railings, her shoulder brushing mine. The old discomfort was gone.
“You have become Father Amadi’s sweetheart,” she said. Her tone was the same light tone she had used with Obiora. She could not possibly know how painfully my heart lurched. “He was really worried when you were sick. He talked about you so much. And, amam, it wasn’t just priestly concern.”
“What did he say?”
Amaka turned to study my eager face. “You have a crush on him, don’t you?”
“Crush” was mild. It did not come close to what I felt, how I felt, but I said, “Yes.”
“Like every other girl on campus.”
I tightened my grip on the railings. I knew Amaka would not tell me more unless I asked. She wanted me to speak out more, after all. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“Oh, all the girls in church have crushes on him. Even some of the married women. People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It’s exciting to have to deal with God as a rival.” Amaka ran her hand over the railings, smearing the water droplets. “You’re different. I’ve never heard him talk about anyone like that. He said you never laugh. How shy you are although he knows there’s a lot going on in your head. He insisted on driving Mom to Enugu to see you. I told him he sounded like a person whose wife was sick.”
“I was happy that he came to the hospital,” I said. It felt easy saying that, letting the words roll off my tongue. Amaka’s eyes still bored into me.
“It was Uncle Eugene who did that to you, okwia?” she asked.
I let go of the railings, suddenly needing to ease myself. Nobody had asked, not even the doctor at the hospital or Father Benedict. I did not know what Papa had told them. Or if he had even told them anything. “Did Aunty Ifeoma tell you?” I asked.
“No, but I guessed so.”
“Yes. It was him,” I said, and then headed for the toilet. I did not turn to see Amaka’s reaction.
THE POWER WENT OFF that evening, just before the sun fell. The refrigerator shook and shivered and then fell silent. I did not notice how loud its nonstop hum was until it stopped. Obiora brought the kerosene lamps out to the verandah and we sat around them, swatting at the tiny insects that blindly followed the yellow light and bumped against the glass bulbs. Father Amadi came later in the evening, with roast corn and ube wrapped in old newspapers.
“Father, you are the best! Just what I was thinking about, corn and ube,” Amaka said.
“I brought this on the condition that you will not raise any arguments today,” Father Amadi sa
id. “I just want to see how Kambili is doing.”
Amaka laughed and took the package inside to get a plate.
“It’s good to see you are yourself again,” Father Amadi said, looking me over, as if to see if I was all there. I smiled. He motioned for me to stand up for a hug. His body touching mine was tense and delicious. I backed away. I wished that Chima and Jaja and Obiora and Aunty Ifeoma and Amaka would all disappear for a while. I wished I were alone with him. I wished I could tell him how warm I felt that he was here, how my favorite color was now the same fired-clay shade of his skin.
A neighbor knocked on the door and came in with a plastic container of aku, anara leaves, and red peppers. Aunty Ifeoma said she did not think I should eat any because it might disturb my stomach. I watched Obiora flatten an anara leaf on his palm. He sprinkled the aku, fried to twisted crisps, and the peppers on the leaf and then rolled it up. Some of them slipped out as he stuffed the rolled leaf in his mouth.
“Our people say that after aku flies, it will still fall to the toad,” Father Amadi said. He dipped a hand into the bowl and threw a few into his mouth. “When I was a child, I loved chasing aku. It was just play, though, because if you really wanted to catch them, you waited till evening, when they all lost their wings and fell down.” He sounded nostalgic.
I closed my eyes and let his voice caress me, let myself imagine him as a child, before his shoulders grew square, chasing aku outside, over soil softened by new rains.
AUNTY IFEOMA SAID I would not help fetch water just yet, until she was sure I was strong enough. So I woke up after everyone else, when the sun’s rays streamed steadily into the room, making the mirror glitter. Amaka was standing at the living room window when I came out. I went over and stood by her. She was looking at the verandah, where Aunty Ifeoma sat on a stool, talking. The woman seated next to Aunty Ifeoma had piercing academic eyes and humorless lips and wore no makeup.
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