Instead, I stayed home and mourned yet another loss, an unexplainable one this time: the departure of the baby to Mama Nathan’s village. The sharpness of my grieving surprised me. I woke up each morning with the heaviness of a rock in my chest. I went to school with dread and taught my classes with unwillingness, knowing that my usual drive from my school in Emene would not end with my regular stop at Obiageli’s before I went home to Tinker’s Corner. Obiageli had marvelled at my willingness to drive all around Enugu each day just to see Tata, even if the driving was in a brand-new Peugeot 504.
I expected that Obiageli and Emma would come back without Tata. But they brought him back. He was his sunny, chubby self, unaware that he had lost his closest relative. And my joy came back.
At Obiageli’s house one evening, I rocked the baby to sleep. I put him down in the crib gingerly. It was the same crib that had lulled Obiageli’s children to sleep when they were his age. The crib stood in the sitting room – it had been in the bedroom when Obiageli’s boys slept in it, but Emma would not hear of Tata sleeping in their room.
I stared down at him, half listening to the sounds of the news on NTA. I was not eager to go home, although it was past seven and darkness had taken the place of day. But Emma’s dour face and occasional questions about Eugene meant to remind me that married women did not stay out of their homes after seven o’clock made me stand up and announce my departure to my friend.
‘Is Tata asleep?’ she asked from the kitchen.
‘Yes.’
‘I will see you out.’ She came minutes later and we walked down the stairs in the silent companionship of friends who did not need chatter as reassurance.
She followed me into my 504. She loved my car and took every opportunity to sit in it. Just the car alone made Eugene the husband of the century, she often said, which never failed to elicit a laugh from me. I too liked the car, even though its grey leather seats had been the recipient of many tears.
That night, as we sat in my car in Obiageli’s yard, she turned towards me with a serious expression, and laid out the plan to me.
I listened to her in shock; I could not believe my friend capable of such cunning.
‘I can’t do it,’ I told her. It was impossible. I would be found out.
I had stolen a husband. Stealing a child would be impossible.
‘Hold on,’ Obiageli said, raising her index finger. ‘Think. Just think. What do you stand to lose by thinking about it?’
When I said nothing, she added, ‘Perhaps it was meant to happen this way. Perhaps this is the way your chi meant to send you a child.’
‘That is not how the chi of others send them children,’ I retorted. ‘That is not how your own chi sent you yours.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You are right.’ There was a pacifying quality to her voice. But she persevered. ‘Everybody’s chi is different. You know that. Even this little boy’s chi. Remember what Mama Nathan’s husband’s relatives told us about the mother of this child? How she ran away from home? No one knows where. I told you, the girl’s family does not want him; Mama Nathan’s family does not want him; Mama Nathan herself is dead. Even at the burial, Mama Nathan’s family avoided the subject. You should have seen the shifty looks they had on their faces!’
Obiageli had told me these things before. The mother, a young girl married under circumstances that sounded like something out of the last century, had run away. The men of the family did not want to know about the child. He was an extra mouth to feed, one who would grow up and demand land that had been in their family for years. He was an unwanted child, almost like the ones abandoned on the streets by hapless young girls who sought to hide their shame. It would be tragic to send this baby to people who did not want him, I thought. Would he even survive?
Maybe this was my chi at work. My chi had not been very kind, not in matters of marriage, not in matters of childbearing. Perhaps it was changing its mind.
Obiageli, intuitively picking up on my easing resistance, said, ‘You don’t have to give me an answer now. Think on it. Only remember that Emma says I have to take him to Mama Nathan’s people next week.’
‘But what will you tell Emma?’ I asked. How did my friend think we could get away with this?
‘Leave that to me,’ she said confidently. ‘Will you be the one to say I did not return him to the village?’
‘What about Eugene?’ My husband who was halfway out the door, who had reminded me the other day that the clock was ticking on my presence in our home?
‘Did I not say to leave that to me? You ask – what about Emma? What about Eugene? What about this man? What about the other? But what about yourself? We women have to think about ourselves too. I said go and sleep on it. Tell me if you want the boy. And we will figure out the details. You have a week, not more.’
I did not sleep that night, and for many nights after. I stood before the river of decision again and pondered Obiageli’s proposal. Four years was not a long time, but in the life of a barren woman, it was a lifetime. I had not conceived even once. With the months growing longer between lovemaking, it might be a long time before it happened, I told myself. That is, if Eugene did not send me away, as he had his first wife. The child, Tata, had woken up the spirit of motherhood in me. He had opened my eyes to see what my mother had said – the heart of every woman longs to hold, to love, a child.
I longed to hold him, though he had not grown in my belly. Who would look after him in the village? The relatives who had been so quick to let Obiageli bring him back to Enugu? I thought about Obiageli’s assurances that I would be doing Tata a favour.
How did Obiageli think we could deceive my husband? I wondered. The man whose only sorrow was that his raging masculinity had still not produced a son? Should he even imagine that I was suggesting he adopt a child, one who did not spring from his loins, I would be out the door. Should he discover that he was tricked into accepting a child who was not his, I would find myself in the netherworld telling my ancestors why I left the earth so soon.
Many thoughts made their stop in my head, but instead of moving on, they stayed to join the din of confusion in there. So, for three days I said nothing about it to Obiageli. Three turbulent nights and days of pretence, pretence at ordinary tasks and conversation, while thoughts churned on the inside. I kept telling myself that it was impossible. Impossible to accomplish. I would be found out. Then divorced, disgraced, detained.
She did not press. Every time I went to her home I held the chubby, happy little boy to me and wondered how anyone could consider him a liability – how anyone could not want him. My desire grew with each visit, and I imagined that his smile widened each time he saw me.
When I came back from my visits, I spent restless nights, between nightmares filled with retribution.
I did not think I could pull off the deception this time, I told Obiageli. She disagreed. ‘Where there is a will …’ she reminded me, waiting for me to complete the idiom we had learnt in our English class in our first year at Girls’ High School Aba in 1951. ‘There is a way,’ I chorused back to her. This time she could help me, she said. I wanted to be infected by her confidence, but my heart still quaked within me.
In the end, it was not a difficult decision. If I was honest, I had made it the minute Obiageli asked if I wanted Tata. I wanted him. With all my being.
PART THREE
IN THE HOLD, 2011
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
NWABULU
I got ready for work in the dark; my movements were deft and quiet. Ifechi often wondered why I did this. He would not have minded being woken up, he used to say. But it was an old habit learnt during many years of domestic service with the rich and the poor. Accommodating others, containing issues and making sure no problems arose. Putting others first and your needs last. I was learning to value myself, but it was work that I would do the rest of my life.
Work, hard work, was also ingrained in me. If by chance he awoke to empty his bladder while I was
getting dressed, Ifechi would stare at me and say, as if this were a truth universally acknowledged by reasonable people, ‘Nwabulu, there is more to life than work.’ I believed many things he said; honesty and integrity were engraved in him and showed on his face so everyone could see. Like those marks that were put on children in the old days to prevent convulsions – small, yet distinct, and visible to all. But I did not believe this one. If there was more to life than work, it was work that was the foundation of everything. At least for those whom life had handed nothing, for those from whom life had taken important things. Like a child.
All dressed – a long skirt made from a beautiful green Ankara fabric that I had bought in Onitsha and made in the flowing mermaid style that had shown no signs of waning since the early 2000s, a chiffon sleeveless shirt that showed off my still firm and toned arms, flat, fashionable slippers for comfort, a headscarf because I felt like it, all picked out the night before – I turned towards where Ifechi slept. He still had not moved. He was one of those lucky people who slept like the proverbial edi; I awoke at the slightest sound. I smiled at him in the darkness even as his gentle snores punctuated the quiet.
Then I stepped outside the room and headed to the kitchen, walking quietly in the darkness. This was our routine: I went to work and he would come by on his way to his; he said he could not afford to spend so many hours at work without setting eyes on me in the morning. I smiled again. Routines like that had the deep comfort of a blanket in the harmattan cold.
I turned on the light when I got to the kitchen. Although one of the workers could have made me breakfast, I always got this myself each day, and on the weekends I got Ifechi his. The reason was simple: I woke up before everyone else and my stomach woke up with me. I used to wonder if my stomach did not quite trust that the days of hunger pangs and insufficient food were over.
I sat down on a stool, pulled a novel from my bag, and left it on the table. I made myself Milo, scooping large spoons of Peak milk into my mug. I took a sip of my tea – as we call every drink made from hot water around here – put some slices of bread on a plate, and picked up my book. Ifechi had bought me an iPad last year and my son, Chukwuemeka, had downloaded books on it. But I was old-fashioned. At least Chukwuemeka thought so. If it was old-fashioned to flip brown pages, turn the book face down while I stood up to go to the sink before returning to the familiarity of my brown pages, then old-fashioned I was and always would be.
I proceeded to eat without style or grace. That was one good thing about my early-morning eating – I did not have to watch my manners and behave as though I were a well-brought-up person, chewing my food quietly, not letting the saliva from my mouth touch anything outside it, as Daddy insisted in those days. I breathed deeply and wished that no one would wake up for a while. The smell of last night’s ora soup had clung to the walls and now climbed into my nose.
I had been up an hour, buried deep in Colombia, before one of my girls came in. ‘Good morning, Ma,’ she said, the night’s sleep still in her voice.
‘Good morning, Nkechi. Did you sleep well?’ With those first words to another, the day had truly started. I mourned a little as I became an adult again, putting the book in my bag and arranging my features to suit my voice, the madam of the house.
‘Yes, Ma,’ she replied. I could see that sleep had not completely left her. I stood up. She only came up to just below my breasts. She would never be tall, I thought. Her legs were short and stocky, planted solidly on the ground in a little bow, like they had no idea why those of us who pursued the heavens with our frames did that. She was from a village in Udi. She had come to live with me two years ago and, at first, had eaten as though food was a new thing, a novelty invented in my house. It showed in her girth but not in her height. Nnenna, the other girl who had been with me a year, would complain to me. I tried not to let my irritation show – Nnenna had no way of seeing back into the past to know that I could not be put out by a young girl eating too much, that I knew, like a wife knew what a dear husband does in the wee hours, what hunger felt like. I let Nkechi eat and I was rewarded with a hard worker who woke up to start her chores each morning before everyone else.
‘When Nnenna comes in,’ I said, ‘let her make Papa Onyinye’s breakfast. Then come to the shop as soon as both of you have eaten.’
‘Yes, Ma.’
‘If the carpenter shows up this morning before you girls go, call me on your phone so I can speak with him.’ As I said this, I felt in my bag for my mobile phone.
‘Yes, Ma.’
‘Tell him I said not to start work on that poultry house before he has spoken to me or Ifechi.’ I pulled on my ear for emphasis.
‘Yes, Ma,’ she answered again, patient, acquiescing, much as I would have been years ago.
I was different, I reassured myself. I was a better mistress than some of the madams had been to me or to the housemaids I worked with. I did not overwork my girls. I let them go home every other weekend. I fed them well, gave them comfortable beds to sleep in. I did not raise my voice too often, nor did I ever raise my hands to them. I did not make them do anything that I could reasonably do myself. I got myself water when I wished to drink, searched out missing trinkets from under my bed, served my husband his food when I was home, and cleaned up after myself. I permitted them rest, especially on Sundays. Most importantly, I taught them my tailor’s trade so that, when they left me, they could depend on themselves and help their families. Unlike many madams, I talked to them frankly about sex and love, menstruation and womanly desires, birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, and the value of waiting for the right person and the right time. I ignored their horrified expressions and their shamefacedness, and told them what someone should have said to me at their age.
‘Should we bring some okpa with us?’ Nkechi asked.
‘No.’ I felt too full to contemplate eating anything else, although from experience I knew that my belly would wake up again around brunch time.
When I stepped out, the sun was still trying to make up its mind whether it had to work yet another day. The car sputtered a little, also trying to decide whether its ten years on earth – that is, if you believed Innocent, the mechanic who had sold it to me – did not yet qualify it for retirement.
The drive from our house to my shop was short. Our house. That phrase felt so good, as good as anything that had taken its time coming. Although it was not the Independence Layout I had dreamt of, it was mine, ours. A house in Trans-Ekulu was not something anyone could turn their nose up at. There were three neighbourhoods that were the best: Independence Layout, GRA, and Trans-Ekulu. Initially built by the government and acquired mainly by civil servants – in those days when civil service was the place to work, the place where salaries were paid without interruption, and you had a guaranteed pension – Trans-Ekulu lay between Independence Layout and GRA. Independence Layout was the place for the rich, where I first served in Daddy’s house as a housemaid; GRA, the government-reserved quarters, was where the colonising Europeans had first lived and where top civil servants lived until they retired from government service. But things had changed. Trans-Ekulu had become commercialised, as I imagined most places in Nigeria were now becoming. The playground had been converted to a shopping mall. And all along Dhamija and Federation avenues you would find shops selling everything from fresh vegetables to children’s slippers and electronic appliances, the red dust that no one could escape coating the wares. That was where I had my shop, hanging up the creations I made for rich and, sometimes, poor women.
Our house stood in one of the still-quiet streets. Hopefully, I told Ifechi at the time, the market would stay where it was, and we could have peace. It was not a new house. But the pride that swelled in me whenever I drove my car into its good-sized compound rivalled the happiness that I felt at other blessings my life had enjoyed. Me, a house owner. In Enugu. Who would have thought it? Who? The housemaid from Nwokenta? The tailor in Abakpa? I wished my father could see me, see our hous
e.
It had needed lots of work when we bought it. The previous owners had abandoned it, allowing it to become dilapidated even while still living in it. I insisted we move in and then begin to renovate gradually. Ifechi acceded. He was almost as excited as I was. I remembered the houses I had worked in, the houses I had carried my measuring tape to or brought the finished product to, and I determined that we would live like that too – gold-plated vases, sweet-smelling candles, and rich-coloured curtains. I was forever looking for decorative items.
When we first moved in, three years ago, I wondered if we would ever get the incense smell of the previous owners out of the house. But, as we began to live there and fill the place with our own smells – the smell of the ora soup that my husband needed almost like air, the smell of the goats and their droppings and their pee, the smell of the new furniture that we had made to fit the sitting room downstairs, the smell of our candles that were never lighted for fear the house would catch fire, and the lavender Air Wick that I sprayed round the sitting room so that our guests could breathe something nice – the suffocating aroma of incense slowly dissipated, perhaps seeking the people who had originally put it there. Soon, I would add the smell of the poultry chickens that I planned to put in my new poultry if Mr Emmanuel, the carpenter, finished it in this lifetime.
My husband was not looking forward to the last. The smell of poultry could wake the dead, he said. And why did we need that? His computer business and my tailoring business were enough to feed us. Why did we have to add the smell of chicken poop to tell God that we were working hard? I ignored him. I knew the trick: Never argue too hard when you wanted something. Ifechi loved to argue and then to win. After almost two decades together, he knew better. But it was hard to change old habits. It did not matter how many times he lost – and lose he had many times – he had to argue. So long as you did not get into an argument while he walked about the house pontificating on any issue, so long as you waited until he came into a room where it was only the two of you, with no outsider listening in and hearing you win the argument, you could do anything you wanted. So I was ignoring him and going ahead with the poultry house. As the Igbo people would say, you do not stand in one spot to watch the masquerade. Putting one’s hands in various businesses would tell poverty that we were really serious about not making friends.
The Son of the House Page 16
