The Son of the House

by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe

  She told me what had happened on the street in the past year. Urenna’s parents were upset with Chidinma. ‘They said I brought you into their house,’ she told me. Urenna was still at university. I wanted to ask how he was doing, but stopped myself. I did not want her to think I was still pining for him. For me, life had moved on since he had been the sun who brought the day each morning. I had longed to know how Ikenna was doing. Was there another help living with them? I asked now. Was she good to Ikenna? Yes, they had another help. It must be the tenth one since I had left; they changed help almost each month. She did not know how Ikenna was doing; she and the new help were not friends.

  After I had left, Chidinma continued, most madams on the street became even stricter. She had to get home before six, she told me. She liked sewing school. I saw her eyes brighten, but then, perhaps remembering my own thwarted ambitions, she looked down at her feet. I longed to reassure her. There was no envy, only self-pity that my destiny had not been as kind as hers.

  ‘You look well,’ I told her.

  She did, her skin brown and smooth, oiled by good food and youth. She did not return the compliment. I knew that I looked worse than I had when I’d lived with Mummy and her family. Sorrow, chores, and too little food had left their marks on my face and figure. ‘Black beauty’ I was no longer.

  I willed myself not to cry when she asked about the baby. ‘The baby died,’ I said.

  This was what I would tell everyone, I had resolved. It was easier than the true story. I could not tell her about my son’s beauty, that he had begun to smile when he was ripped away from me. I could not tell her about the love that took you out of yourself, that was larger than you, and yet did not threaten you but gave you more joy sometimes than you could bear. I could not tell her that I had borne the death of joy and knew it to be the worst thing that could happen to a human being.

  Tears came to her eyes. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I am,’ I answered, with as much reassurance as I could muster.

  There was a pause as she felt around for something to say. ‘Was the child a boy or a girl?’ she asked timidly, as if she did not want to stir the waters too deeply.

  She was quiet for a few moments when I told her I had had a boy, and I wondered if she was trying to imagine what he had looked like.

  ‘But what are you doing here?’ Chidinma asked, getting to the question that stood between us. ‘Did you get another job nearby?’

  ‘No,’ I answered, but this was my opening, and I knew I had to pick the right words to make my request. ‘Mama Nkemdilim …’ I started. ‘It is hard for me to live with her, very hard.’

  Chidinma nodded. She knew this from before.

  ‘Chidinma,’ I continued, ‘I have nowhere to stay.’ Please, I begged her, asking if I could go stay at her sister, the one who was settled with a sewing machine when she had finished serving her madam as a house help.

  ‘Adannem?’ she frowned.

  ‘Yes, Sister Uzoamaka. May I go and stay with her until I get another job?’

  Chidinma stared at me. Was she wondering why Nwabulu, the smart housemaid who had wanted to be a secretary and work in the Ministry was asking her for help?

  She sighed. ‘Adannem just had a baby. I don’t know if her husband would be willing to take you in. Their flat in Abakpa is small.’

  Discouragement brought tears to my eyes, but Chidinma hugged me and held me close.

  ‘I cannot go back to Nwokenta, to Mama Nkemdilim,’ I sobbed. If I could not go to Chidinma’s sister, I was lost. I knew no one else in Enugu.

  ‘You can go to my sister’s house,’ Chidinma said after I have calmed down a little, ‘she may even help you get another job as a housemaid. I will give you her address.’ She tore out a page of her book and wrote down the address, then hugged me again.

  She had to go, she told me. I could feel the hurry and the worry in her hug. I thanked her.

  I would go and see what Chidinma’s sister would say. I would go on my knees and beg, I resolved. I would do anything – anything that would let me stay in Enugu.

  Chidinma waved to me one last time, then hurried away. Back to the street on which we both had once lived.

  As I stepped into the evening about to turn night, I prayed to God –the one who had let my child be stolen, the one I did not believe in any more – that Chidinma’s sister, Uzoamaka, a woman I had only heard about but never met, would help me.

  PART TWO

  JULIE

  CHAPTER TEN

  1973

  He touched the gold necklace between my breasts, lifting it slightly with his long fingers, weighing the pendant. His touch was familiar, possessive.

  He nodded in approval. ‘Oriaku,’ he hailed. ‘Consumer of my wealth.’ He laughed at me, his satisfaction with me and with life beaming out of his too-wide mouth. I pushed my irritation down into my belly and found an answering smile.

  ‘Orimili,’ I gave him his title. And in calling him that, a river without end, a river of wealth, I felt the irritation dissipate. There were parts of Eugene I could quarrel with, but his generosity of spirit, often reflected in various gifts, was not one of them.

  A little after, we went to the door, he with regret, I with relief. No one saw me look out furtively as I let Eugene out of my flat into the sticky night. He wanted me to come downstairs with him; I would not. It was enough that my neighbours already talked – what single woman entertained a man in her house at night, a man who arrived ostentatiously in a brand-new Peugeot 404, as if by right?

  I returned to the sofa from which we had arisen only moments before, picking up the little black bag on the Formica-covered side table. Jewellery. A gold teapot pendant on a long chain. It was beautiful. More striking, I thought, with its intricate detailing than the long pendant of an index finger that Eugene had just admired on me. I had coveted Obiageli’s for a while now. It was I who had pointed out the jeweller on Asata Road to Eugene. And he had followed through with this beautiful set that I now would add to my growing gold collection.

  But I was curiously unsatisfied. I had not even experienced that brief thrill, that short-lived high that came with material acquisition, particularly when you had not paid for it. I had smiled my thanks to him, putting my free hand on his hand, stroking his arm between elbow and hand, conveying my appreciation with fingers and eyes. My empty heart mocked me silently – it knew well that what I had in my right hand paled in comparison to what I truly wanted. Perhaps I had gone about this the wrong way, I chided myself now. I had given away too much too soon.

  I got up and went into my bedroom. There was no escaping Eugene’s heavy cologne. I stood in front of my mirror. It was not full length, yet I could see my full figure, big breasts, and arms that should have been slimmer, especially since I did not yet have any children. My chest rose in a sigh and then come down in defeat. I took off the index-finger pendant necklace and put on the teapot one, studying it against my skin, my fleshy neck, the long chain hanging between my breasts. I had hoped to feel some respite. It did not come. The nagging feeling stayed.

  Needing distraction from the heaviness that came over me, I searched for my bag, and brought out my book, beginning to prepare my lesson notes. Work was what I needed now.

  I scribbled, yet my mind wandered. ‘Do not put up to your nose to smell what you do not intend to eat,’ my mother often said when I was younger and able to attract suitors like bees to honey. But what about what you wanted to eat? What if you had put it up to your nose? Smelt it? Taken bites off it? And still it belonged to someone else?

  Giving up on my pretence of working, I stood up and went to the kitchen, which I surveyed with critical eyes. It was too small, I thought, not for the first time. Yet it was too big for one person, my mother said the first time she visited. Did she sound critical, or was I just too sensitive? I knew she did not approve of me, a single woman, living by myself. ‘I am not a child,’ I reminded her.

  ‘You are somebody’s child until
you become somebody’s wife,’ she retorted. Would it not scare men away, she worried. A single woman on her own, living alone. I followed her train of thought and added silently to myself: a single woman, living alone, making money, independent, frightening to men, fat. Yet these thoughts did not shake my resolve to live alone. A year of living with a fellow teacher, whose untidiness and gossipy ways had made me miserable, had cured me of any illusions. I had even gone ahead and bought a car a few months earlier with the car loan for teachers. They – my little apartment and car – gave me some measure of calmness with which to deal with the world.

  I dished some ora soup and meat into a bowl and went into the sitting room to eat. The first spoonful helped. The spicy pungency of the hot red pepper and ogili in cocoyam thickener and the distinctive taste of ora leaves hit my taste buds. It made the world all right. But only for a few moments. My thoughts wandered from my mother to my father.

  Ada eji eje mba, my father had often called me. I would go far, he said, when I brought home exercise books full of good marks, with words like ‘excellent’ and ‘very good’ praising me. So I set about going far. I came first in many of my classes. From primary school, I moved to the prestigious Girls’ High School Aba on a government scholarship, after coming first in the entrance examinations. I smiled appropriately and lowered my head in humility when people said that I was a brilliant girl, the first in our village to go to university.

  But my mother worried about my marriage prospects.

  ‘Who will want to marry a woman who has gone to university?’ she had asked my father.

  ‘You are stuck in the days of your mother,’ my father would reply, waving his hand as if to chase an irritating mosquito from the ear. He would look down at his crisp, white, charcoal-ironed shirt and his khaki shorts with their iron-sharp lines, and nod in the satisfaction of knowing that he understood what he spoke about better than his audience.

  My mother was perhaps stuck in days past. The domestic chores that she thought I should stay back from boarding school to do were all done by women. Yet, in the days of my grandmother, women were powerful, my mother had told me. While each woman was required to obey her husband, when women came together in their umuada group, the hearts of men trembled. When they tied their wrappers on their waists, bare breasts hanging down, and confronted an issue, no man dared to challenge them. The collective force of the umuada quelled every machination of the men that was not favoured by the women.

  My mother would furrow her fair brow, wishing that she could go back to those days, because these days women still had to do all the chores but had much less power. Less power to stop a husband from ruining the marriage chances of his daughter.

  ‘It is the 1960s,’ my father had reminded her, brandishing his superiority not only as a man but as the one who was educated. ‘Nurses and teachers are in high demand everywhere as wives. Plus, did you not raise her to know her place no matter what level of education she attains? I don’t know about you, but I know that I have done my best. Not so?’ he would turn around to ask me.

  ‘It is so, Papa,’ I would respond meekly.

  My mother, never one to speak back to her husband, would sweep to the back of the house to continue with the chores that would not do themselves while a girl spent her days going from one school to another in the name of education.

  A woman must know her place. A woman must also, like a man, have integrity. Integrity, my father had said, was the most important thing a person could have. Not to lie, not to deceive, because that was the hallmark, the defining characteristic of Satan. Not to covet or take what belonged to another, to strive always to do good. And he had brought each one of us up with these values, he would say, with no small amount of pride. He had lived that way, too. I wondered what score he would give me if he were to see me today.

  I sat still, adopting the quiet-time pose that we had been taught years ago in secondary school. I would prefer not to engage in deception. My father often said that liars were always found out. But nothing in Eugene’s bearing today – not in the careless way he swallowed his messily moulded balls of garri, in the way the meat went down his throat, nor in the sticking out of his Adam’s apple – said that he was thinking seriously about buying the cow now that he had tasted its milk.

  I shivered a little. The night was getting on, bringing a chill and lonesomeness with it. Not long ago, I had served food and eaten with a man, our laughter spicing the evening. I had taken off my clothes and watched desire take over his face. But Eugene had gone home. He had to go.

  I carried my bowl with its unfinished soup into the kitchen and left it unwashed in the sink that always seemed too big for the kitchen. The cliché about time and tide waiting for no one came to me all the way from idioms class at Girls’ High School Aba. I forced myself to sit at my desk in my room to continue work on the lesson notes.

  Before I met Eugene, I had lived. I had not pined for a man, though there were times when I’d longed for hands to brush across my breasts or even to lift them up, heavy as they were, and admire them lovingly. That was only at night. In the morning, I would get up and go about life like a man. Teach, buy a plot of land, apply to see if I could be one of those sent on full-time, paid study leave to London.

  ‘Perhaps Julie is destined to remain single, an okpokwu,’ I had heard my mother confide in a low voice to her friend two weeks ago when they thought I could not hear. There was sadness and something like resignation in her voice.

  ‘Wash your mouth out with water and soap,’ her friend, Mama Nduka, a woman who had eight sons, had replied. ‘She will still marry.’

  I hoped Mama Nduka was right.

  My brother was drunk. Alcohol, cigarettes, vomit, yesterday’s clothes, and sweat intermingled and yet assaulted the nostrils distinctly. There he lay, his mouth open, drooling saliva on my mother’s couch, his snores the sound of an old car engine.

  I had come to visit my mother from Enugu, as I often did on the weekends. On my way in I had passed some firewood stacked on the red earth by our raffia fence, waiting for someone whose hands had more strength than my ageing mother’s to take them to the kitchen for splitting. My brother, Afam, had strength in him, but he lay slack, looking disarmed, abandoned by the universe. For a fleeting moment, I wanted to cradle his head and have him nestle in my arms as I would have done when we were young and loved each other. But something snapped in me. I stormed at him and hit his back. It was fleshy yet hard.

  ‘Get up!’ I shouted. ‘Other men are at work.’ Probably not on a Saturday. But it didn’t make any difference; he was often drunk in the week too.

  Afam merely groaned and turned his head the other way. I pounded his back with both hands. A nut had come loose in my head, I would think later. Or perhaps it had always been wobbly and just fell off, letting hinges within my brain come apart.

  ‘I will not let you kill my mother, you hear? I will not,’ I shouted like a madwoman.

  Without warning, he swung out at me with his left hand. He caught me in the face, hard. The blow was painful and stunned me for a few seconds. Even when we were children, Afam had avoided hitting me, although he had always been stronger than me. Now, I retaliated by pounding him harder, all over his body, wherever my fists could reach. My hands against his body felt like a small boat tossing on the sea, helpless in a storm. Helpless against his drinking, his determination to self-destruct.

  When he could no longer take it, he launched at the nuisance that was keeping him from sleep. He sat up and hit out at me with balled fists like a boxer, catching me in the stomach and on my left breast. He stopped when I screamed. Without looking at me or my mother, who had by this time came into the room and was shouting herself hoarse, commanding us to stop this nonsense, he stumbled out.

  My breath came out heavy, laboured. Fighting a man was not an easy undertaking, especially when you knew from the start that you were going to lose.

  ‘Why do you turn into a goat, into a mumu, every time you see y
our brother? Where do your senses flee to when you set eyes on him?’ my mother asked me angrily, her index finger extended in my direction. ‘Will your hitting him stop him from drinking himself into a stupor this very evening? If he hit you and sent you to the hospital, who would you blame?’

  I bowed my head and pressed my sore stomach where the blow had landed. She was right. I had let my fury, my frustration, get the better of me. And I knew that my mother could not abide stupidity. Women who were foolish did not survive long in the world of men, she often said.

  My mother went to fetch some Robb. ‘Here, put that on the sore spots. I will get you Panadol.’

  I knew better than to say I did not need these things.

  She sat on the other sofa, placed an arm on its dark wooden armrest, and waited for me to take the Panadol. I hated taking medicine, an old antipathy from childhood, but she did not urge me on. She simply waited. Her quietness told me that a lecture was coming, whether long or short, I could not tell. I put my finger into the small bottle of Robb, pulled down my skirt, and rubbed it on my belly. I winced. My mother waited. Her only movement was to retie her scarf. Since my father had died, she had worn her long, full hair short, as if there were no more point to tending it, tying it in black thread, or weaving it.

  ‘Juliana,’ she began when I was done with my massage, using my full name. Because what she was about to say was important. I could remember all the times she had called me ‘Juliana’ like that – when I was about to go to boarding school at Girls’ High School Aba; when Amechi had come for my hand in marriage and I was going to turn him down because my father thought I could do better; when my father died and no one could console me.