My protruding belly, which seemed to have shot out overnight as if it had been waiting for me to be found out, was a personal affront to Mama Nkemdilim. She called me names and let me know that I had done the unforgivable: I chased after men. That was why I was bundled back from Lagos. Now I had gone and given myself a big belly and been bundled back from Enugu. Where else, she wanted to know from her friend Mama Odinkemma, could I be sent where I would stay put? The moon?
She said she knew that I would come to no good. But she had hoped – how she had desperately hoped, she told anyone who would listen – that I would prove her wrong. Yet here I was, having disgraced myself, cheated myself out of a bright future – had those people not sent me to school? – and humiliated her in the eyes of the world. Here I was, an extra mouth to feed, about to produce yet another creature whose hand would remain perpetually out in the mode of ‘please give me, give me’. She was almost gleeful with having been proved right, and she lost no opportunity to drive it home to me and to anyone who had ears on their head.
I did not blame her. After living in Daddy’s spotless home with a toilet that flushed, with the possibility of living there longer while I went to school, after dreaming that I would get a job as a secretary and live in my own home in the city, there was nothing that Mama Nkemdilim said that could rival how much I tortured myself with guilt. I had not just thrown my future away; I had lost Urenna. Had I ever had him? In my mind, I saw him the way he had been that last day, perhaps the way he had always been, how I might have seen him, had I not been blinded by love.
Nothing would blot that memory from my mind, I knew. Not time, not forgiveness. Nothing would erase the way he had denied me before his parents, his eyes averted as if I were beneath his attention. Standing before his parents, who called me a liar and whose defence of their son I could not fault, and my employers, whose anger I could not assail, in that moment, I recalled how he had touched me the first time, had laid me down gently on the rough floor in the dark. I remembered how he had taken up my skirt and told me that he would be gentle and how I had watched him fumble with his fly, how frightened and full of love I was. He would not hurt me, he had said over and over. I believed him and gave myself to him. Completely. It did not hurt as much as I feared that first time – as much as Oga Emma’s roughness had – but it did not bring great pleasure; it was over very quickly. But, that time and other times that followed, I had been desperate in my desire to please him. And this caused me shame now, because I remembered his averted gaze and his staunch refusal to throw the briefest of glances at my face that day.
‘The housemaid?’ he had said, pouring scorn that I never would have thought existed inside him into that word. ‘I did nothing with the housemaid.’
The housemaid. He had forgotten my name. Nwabulu. The name he had said was beautiful.
Sometimes, the thought came to me that he had been trying simply to save face before his parents, before Daddy and Mummy. He was after all still dependent on his parents. He was an only son from whom much was expected, certainly more than a dalliance with a housemaid. Perhaps he had been hurt by my exposing him in so embarrassing a manner, with Mummy brandishing angry words and looks. But what about me? Did he think about me and what I was suffering – what I would suffer – in this situation?
I had done the worst thing an unmarried girl in Nwokenta could do – I had opened my legs to a man and announced it boldly and foolishly with a pregnant belly. Ime nkpuke! I had declared to the world that something essential was lacking in my upbringing and that I lacked chastity. I now would be unable to marry a young man from a good family, for what right-thinking family would want such a girl? What family would let in a girl who had no bloodstained sheets to show after the wedding?
I would bring a bastard in the world who would be laughed at by his peers. If it was a boy, he would have no automatic inheritance of land. He would have to depend on the charity of his grandfather or uncles to get a small piece of land on which to build his own house. Better that it was a girl, for she could marry and hope that someday people forgot how she came into the world. But even that depended on which bold suitor could convince his family that she – the daughter of a wanton, unworthy woman – would not turn out the same as her mother, for these things, as the people of Nwokenta would say, tended to run in the blood.
The best opportunity for a woman such as I had become was to marry an old man as his second or third wife. This might be a man who had no sons and who was hoping that what I had in my belly was a boy. It might be a widower whose wife had died and who had young children who needed a mother. Or it might be an old man, who simply wanted young blood that would be difficult to get otherwise, and who was not averse to taking the baby as an extra. That way, a child would have a name and some protection from the ignominy of being a bastard. A woman in my situation did not refuse such an offer. Indeed, her family would accept thankfully and with relief on her behalf before the words were even completely out of the old man’s mouth. It was like selling rotting tomatoes as the evening approaches in the market; one quickly and without much haggling accepts the bid of one of the few remaining, straggling buyers, perhaps one who has waited in the wings, biding his time, waiting for the day’s market to end.
I had sold my beauty for ‘afu na kobo’, Mama Nkemdilim reminded me, the cheapest amount possible. It was the first time she acknowledged my beauty. Now, she told me, I had to pray to the Virgin Mary that such an opportunity arose, though she could not think readily of an old man currently seeking a young woman in my situation.
This was not just Mama Nkemdilim’s spitefulness. Not only would it give my son or daughter some covering, such a marriage would reduce the burden on her to provide me and the child with a home as she was obliged to do, with all that that entailed. She worked very hard on the farm to raise a few crops to harvest for sale in the market. She had only a small number of goats that she could sell when things were tight, as they often were. She, unlike many women in Nwokenta, rejected offers of marriage from my father’s family. She did not want to be covered with their protection as custom permitted. Privately, she said she did not want to be smothered by anyone. She valued her independence, and wanted to keep her late husband’s lands, which would revert automatically to any man who gave her his ‘covering’, at least until Nnanna, her young son, grew up. My father’s cousins were angry at her show of independence, so irritated that they washed their hands of her and left her to fend for herself and her children. And now, here was I, she complained, to add an enormous load to the already neck-breaking load on her head.
She made me work as hard as I could. I went back to my chores of old and acquired some new ones: getting water from the stream, fetching food for the goats, doing work on the farm, cleaning the house, and peeling egwusi until my fingers became by turns painful and numb. She told me to pray that a man would want me, a man who befitted my status as a common prostitute just returned from Enugu.
I did not pray for an old man as Mama Nkemdilim told me to. I simply lived, moving from one day to the next, numbly accepting what each day brought, with no thought of the future, and no joy at the thought of the coming baby. I did not pray for it to be a boy or girl; I did not think of its sex at all. I only knew that it would be here one day, a solid reminder of my shame.
Perhaps if I had known what was to come, I would have spent some time praying.
I did not pray for a man to come. But towards the end of my pregnancy, when my feet were so swollen that I could not imagine they would ever return to what they used to be, when I was so bloated that moving around had become in itself a chore, a proposition came to Mama Nkemdilim. I did not think she would accept; how could anyone take such an offer seriously?
This proposition came because a young man from our village had died in an accident. His name was Nathan. He was a truck driver, one of those who drove big trucks of food from the north down to the south and back again. It was a blow to our village, which had lost many young
men during the war nearly ten years before and was only just recovering. Many speculations went round about who might have killed him. It was said that he had quarrelled with the owner of the truck and had died right after leaving the man’s home en route to Kano. He had slept with his oga’s wife, someone said. Others speculated that friends of his who were envious of his success had poisoned his drink the night before. The true explanation, the elders agreed when the first rumours died down, was that he may have had a little too much to drink: young men never really understood the value of life – that they were more important to others, to their families, than they were to themselves.
He was an only child, the only son of his parents. Mama Nkemdilim said that to say he was dear to his mother’s heart was to say that sugar was sweet. Everyone knew it. The woman was also a widow; she had lost her husband during the war. The death of her son devastated her. For weeks it seemed that the entire village reverberated with the sound of her weeping and wailing, a heartbreaking sound. Women, including Mama Nkemdilim, came and went from her compound, bringing her food and company. After a while, the sound of her wailing became irritating, then worrying, when it went on ceaselessly day after day. She sang, she wailed, she wept. She refused to be comforted. Even during the akwa, the mourning rites for the dead, her wailing filled the air, making the mourners who came from all the corners of the village for the four days shift their feet uncomfortably and mutter and whisper among themselves. Some said she had lost her mind, that grief had robbed her forever of her senses.
About six weeks later it stopped and I thought no more of it, but one day she came to our house. It was a hot afternoon and I was home alone. I had taken off my blouse and had only a wrapper around my frame, which seemed enormous to me. I sat outside, fanning myself with Mama Nkemdilim’s akupe, praying for a breeze to miss its route and stop by our house to relieve me from the unrelenting sun and its companion, humidity.
Mama Nathan had been a woman with flesh to spare, and I was surprised to see how grief had eaten away most of it, leaving her almost as thin as I had been before I became pregnant. Her looks, the talk of the town in her youthful days, had faded, and an expression of bitterness was now etched, permanently it seemed, into her face. Age had dug grooves into the sides of her cheeks and her mouth curled downwards – disdain at life and death, I imagined. Her hair, which she had not bothered to tie with a scarf, had grown out since her son had died and was now more grey than black. But her eyes glowed with a fierceness that made me uncomfortable, a brightness that seemed to speak of madness. She stared at my belly.
‘Good afternoon, Ma.’ I greeted her.
She looked up at my face and answered. ‘Afternoon, nwa m. Can I come in?’
I led her to the backyard, where we often received visitors. She sat down on a low stool and looked at the small pile of egwusi I had been peeling since that morning.
‘Mama Nkemdilim is away at the market. She will be back this evening.’
She made no response to that; instead she asked, ‘Did you peel all of that egwusi?’ Her hands gestured to the small mound. I said yes. She nodded. A nod of satisfaction, it seemed. ‘You are almost due,’ she said.
I said I was. There seemed no awkwardness, at least on her part, about my pregnancy. The entire village knew what I had done.
She sat quietly for a while, her hands supporting her chin, simply staring at me. This made me uncomfortable. Perhaps the people who said that grief had driven her mad were right. Did she plan to stay until Mama Nkemdilim returned in the late evening?
After some time she stood up and said, ‘I am going. Tell Mama Nkemdilim I came by.’
‘I shall tell her,’ I began to say, but she was already leaving, striding purposefully away.
That evening, when I told Mama Nkemdilim that Mama Nathan had come by but that she did not say what she wanted, Mama Nkemdilim shook her head and said, ‘Poor woman.’ She carried on breaking apart the dry fish with which she wanted to make soup. And so the incident was forgotten.
Until the next week. This time, Mama Nathan came in the deep evening when she knew Mama Nkemdilim would be home. She was wearing a yellow blouse and a brown wrapper, not the black china cotton she wore the first time she came. It made her look different, lighter, less gloomy. Was she out of mourning, I wondered idly.
She sat with us behind the house where we cooked each evening, waiting for the night to come and bring with it supper and sleep. Nnanna, my stepbrother, was kicking an old Bournvita can that Mama Nkemdilim had thrown out – the bottom had fallen out in protest after years of use. I was pounding ogbono for soup. The baby moved, as if it wondered why my body shook with each thud. My sister, Nkemdilim, was rolling the stone in the little mortar, trying to turn the red pepper into a smooth paste, while Mama Nkemdilim was plucking ugu leaves for the soup. It seemed like a normal evening, with everyone doing their work, but Mama Nathan would soon change the atmosphere with her words.
‘Di nwe uno,’ she hailed Nnanna, master of the house. ‘Dalu o.’ He looked up briefly from the mechanics of turning a tin can into a football but went back to it.
Mama Nkemdilim nodded her head vigorously; it seemed right to her that Mama Nathan chose to refer to her son as the master of the house.
‘Dalu o,’ she continued her thanks. This time, they were directed to Mama Nkemdilim. ‘You have done well, Mama Nkemdilim,’ she began. Never one to turn away praise, Mama Nkemdilim smiled. Mama Nathan continued, ‘It is not every woman who can do what you are doing: widowed at a time when other women are still enjoying the embrace of a man, his protection, and his hard work. I, too, was widowed like you. When my husband lived, he beat me until my people threatened to beat him up. Yet, when he died, I knew that life was more difficult for a widow than a woman, even a woman who had a married a man who beat her.’ She paused.
We said nothing. We waited. I wondered how she could speak well of a man who beat her, even if he was dead.
‘Mba, not every woman can raise children like you have alone, without the help of a man. And, even now, in these trying times,’ she stopped and looked at me, ‘you have not abandoned your duty even though Ekwensu had brought you trials to bear.’
I was the trial the devil had brought to Mama Nkemdilim. I bent my head and pounded a little more, and felt the baby heave lazily from one corner of my belly to the other, looking for a more comfortable position.
‘Hmm,’ Mama Nkemdilim sighed, dramatically. ‘It is only God,’ she pointed to heaven, ‘only God Himself who knows what I am going through. It is only by His strength that I have survived the scorn of my fellow women.’
I sat down to rest, fanning myself, acting as they were doing, as though I were not there.
Mama Nathan began to talk about her son. ‘Life,’ she moaned, ‘life is the most difficult thing. If God were to ask people whether or not they wanted to come to earth, and told us what we would encounter, and asked us to choose whether or not to come, that would be better than throwing us here and letting us swim the rivers of life whether or not we had learnt to swim.
‘Do you know that only the weekend before the accident, Nathan, my son, brought back the gwongworo, the truck that he drove, and asked me to get in. He drove me around the village, making jokes and laughing with me. You know he liked to laugh …’ Here, the woman turned pensive and her voice shook, but no tears came. Her voice was still tremulous, but strong when she stood up and told Mama Nkemdilim to come with her. She led her away from where we sat, to the path that went to the pit toilet. I wondered what they had to discuss in secret.
When she came back, Mama Nkemdilim was alone. She looked over at me speculatively from time to time as I sat peeling off egwusi shells. I was too exhausted to wonder what was on her mind and longed only for sleep. But I could tell from the way she glanced at me that I was the subject of her thoughts.
One day, soon after Mama Nathan’s second visit, I put my hand in my bag to get a small mirror that I had picked out of the garbage can when
I lived with Daddy and Mummy. I had paid no attention to my appearance since I had come back to the village two months before. I knew that my body felt heavy, that sitting up or lying down, or getting up from either position, was painful and full of effort. Without looking into a mirror, I had seen that my legs were swollen and that the veins had risen out of the cavern in my hands where they must have hidden all these years. My once-flat belly was now big and round as if it had a small ite ona pot in it. But, in that small mirror, I could see that my face was swollen and round too, that it looked weary and without hope, and that my youth was barely there.
I laughed aloud at the thought of an old man wanting me in this state.
I put back the mirror and, as I did so, my hand felt something else. It was the familiar form of a book – the book of fairy tales that Ikenna had given me the night before I left Enugu. I took it out, and the tears that I had steadfastly held back these two and half months gushed out with abandon. I wept because I missed that young boy; I cried for all that I had lost. I wept because I had no hope for the future.
This was when I began reading again, going over the stories that Ikenna and I had read together. It was not easy to steal time to do so, but I read one of the twenty-four stories whenever I could.
One afternoon, I was reading it under the orange tree behind the house when Mama Nkemdilim came back unexpectedly. I scrambled to get up when I saw her shadow fall in front of me. It was no mean feat in my condition. She waited for me without helping me, but thankfully she said nothing about my wasting time when there was egwusi to peel and ogbono to pound.
‘Good afternoon, Ma,’ I said.
‘Good afternoon,’ she responded. Then: ‘You must be the most fortunate girl in the world to get another chance after what you have done.’
The Son of the House Page 8
