I turned on the radio. A report had been submitted to the president on the terrorist attack on the United Nations Building in Abuja. A group, Boko Haram, was claiming responsibility. The leader of this same Boko Haram group had been killed a few years before. What is the world coming to? I wondered. The government did not seem to have a clue what to do. Instead, they were holding town hall meetings to persuade Nigerians that removal of the fuel subsidies that had kept fuel prices low for many years was a great idea. They could not expect us to take them seriously, I thought. No one trusted the government to do anything worthwhile with the funds. It was just another way to siphon money into the private pockets of public officers.
I switched to the CD player, and Onyeka’s ‘One Love’ came on. A deep wave of satisfaction washed over me. Life was hard, but if you took it in little chunks, you could find some chunks that were good. My eyes looked around the busyness of Dhamija Avenue and found a young boy, his jeans sagging, his walk a dance of sorts, a caricature of something he had seen on some music video. I wondered if he ever irritated his mother leaving the house looking like that. But maybe she was just grateful he was alive, able to do the foolish things that young boys of his age did.
Ezinwa came into my mind unbidden, as he often did when I felt satisfied with life, as if to remind me that uwaezuoke, the world could never give one everything. You could never have all you wished, not at the same time anyway. That hole would be there forever, that dull thud of pain, the memory of him, vivid and clear in dreams, but hazy on awakening.
I knew that Ezinwa was dead. I had heard many years ago about Mama Nathan’s death. Not long after I ran away to Enugu, I had run into Mama Odinkemma, Mama Nkemdilim’s friend, at New Market. Her daughter had married up, she told me, and now lived in Enugu. She was here for omugwo, to tend to her daughter and her new baby. Did Mama Nathan come back with my son? I asked her. The answer was no. Some of her people had brought her back from Enugu, she told me, and buried her. Nobody saw any baby.
It was as if he had never lived and that was most painful. No one could reminisce with me about his smile, his antics, his dimples. I carried pictures of my children and Ifechi on my phone, hundreds of them. It was not really my style to spend time gazing at photos of myself, or even of the children. But I would give anything to have one picture of Ezinwa.
I closed my eyes for a second and shook my head. I would not think of Ezinwa. In that moment I hit the bumper of the car in front of me. It was a slight bump, but I still screamed ‘Jesus!’ involuntarily. The driver of the car, a blue Toyota Prado, stepped out. In his white T-shirt, he looked like what he was – a driver. He would check his car, see that there was no dent and get back in.
I set my face, preparing myself for some rude gesture or saucy warning finger. It had happened to me before, years ago when I first started driving. Looking at that boy with his jeans under his buttocks had turned me into a novice this evening. As the driver turned to get back into the car, having indeed satisfied himself that there was no damage, somebody – his boss, I presumed – also got out from the back seat to look. He was short and stocky in a white traditional outfit. His gold watch seemed outsized and rendered his arm shorter than it probably was.
Shock went from the strands of my hair to my feet. It was Urenna. Heavier than I remembered but still short, perhaps shorter because of the extra flesh. His cheeks were folded and his hairline was receding, his face was annoyed, but it was still Urenna.
For a moment, he looked me full in the face. I expected the same shock to come over his face as he slowly recognised me, the shock that must stand plain on mine. But there was nothing, only a look of annoyance at a woman who did not have the common sense to look where she was going. His eyes went derisively over my jalopy and then away, as if I could be of no more interest. Get out and tell him who you are, a voice in my head said. Instead, I sat glued to my seat, my hands sweaty on the steering wheel, staring at the man as he walked to my car.
My eyes stayed on him as he made his way to my open window. Did he want to know about his son? But how would he even know that it had been a boy? I kept gripping the steering wheel.
‘Madam. You have to be careful,’ was what he said. ‘Very careful. You are lucky that car is not scratched.’ He sounded angry, unreasonably so, given it was only a slight bump.
‘Urenna’ came out of my mouth.
He frowned at me. Did he know me? his expression queried. Maybe once, when I was a girl still, I had wondered what it would be like to see him again. That was a long time ago. But even then, I had not imagined it in these circumstances.
‘It is Nwabulu,’ I said, a little more confidence coming into my voice. I was no longer a girl, no longer a housemaid. I was a woman, a business owner, riding a car – a not-so-new car but still a car – in Enugu.
I saw him falter, reach into memory, and finally retrieve me. If I expected something, I was bound to be disappointed.
‘I see …’ he said. ‘Kedu?’ The curiosity that should have accompanied that question was missing.
‘I am fine. And you?’
‘I did not know you lived here.’ Had he wanted to know, searched for me all those years ago?
‘I do. Not very far from here. And you, do you live here?’
‘No,’ he said, a look of distaste coming over his face. Was Enugu now beneath him? ‘My parents still live here, in the old house in Independence Layout. I come to visit occasionally. I live in Abuja.’
I smelt money on him; perhaps he was a politician. I did not ask. Such interest seemed out of place with his stiffness.
When was he going to stop being formal and ask me about his child, our child? What would I say in answer, some other voice asked me. That he was stolen, that he was dead – or worse, that I did not know? I was not sure, but I wanted him to ask me.
He did not. Instead, he said, ‘I have to go now. I am late for a meeting. Jisike.’
And with that he went out of my life again.
Had he ever truly been in it, or had I merely been acting out one of Ikenna’s fairy tales? He had not wanted to know anything about me, what my life was like now. He had not asked for my number nor given me his.
The traffic held them up for a minute or two, but after a bend they sped off. I shook my head gently, trying to get my bearings as I slowly drove home.
Why did he not ask about the baby? I wondered. Did he think I’d had an abortion? Had he scrubbed his memory clean of me in their sitting room, staring by turns at my feet and at him, while Mummy and his mother had asked accusing questions, to which he had kept saying calmly, ‘I don’t really know the housemaid. In fact, I can’t recall ever really talking to her before.’ Remembering the way he kept finding ways to interject ‘the housemaid’ into his responses made my eyes watery.
I was reluctant to go in to face my husband and delve into what had happened. Or not happened, depending on how you looked at it. We had lived and loved for too long for him not to see that I was shaken up; he would notice it on my face. So, when I turned into my street, I drove past the big mango tree that had started pulling on the wires but which the owner of the house refused to cut down. I drove past my house and then the next house with its sign that said, ‘BEWARE OF 419ers. THIS HOUSE IS NOT FOR SALE.’ All in capitals, as if we could not read or obey the words otherwise.
What if he had asked what became of the baby? What would I have said? That he had died? That he was lost? That he was over thirty but was still lost? Ifechi was convinced that Ezinwa had died, perhaps of measles or malaria – many children died in those days, he said. He made 1977 sound like 1877. But what if he did not die? I would ask. What if he was alive somewhere? What if Mama Nathan gave him to someone else? Who? he would counter. Sometimes he sounded harsh. I knew what he was doing – my husband was trying to make me, a fifty-year-old woman, accept reality, accept that fairy tales were just that: fairy tales.
Only yesterday, I had bought a paper on the way to the shop. On the second pa
ge were pictures taken at a baby factory – teenagers, their bellies protruding as if they had eaten too much, some holding babies. Babies played on the floor, oblivious to the cameraman or to all the fuss. My chest tightened. Some of the babies had been sold already, I read. Could that have happened to Ezinwa? I asked my husband. Ifechi said no; baby factories were a new phenomenon. Ezinwa likely had died before Mama Nathan.
The meagre evidence was on his side. But sometimes, in my head where I resided by myself, I played the ‘what if Ezinwa was still alive?’ game. What if he was still alive somewhere? What would he be like now? He would be thirty-three. Did he look like me, tall, dark, handsome, or like Urenna, not so tall, fair-complexioned? Had he gone to school? Was he suffering somewhere, having little to eat? Would he be married, or about to get married, like that woman’s son, the woman who came in today? Maybe. He might even have a child already. Imagine, I could be a grandmother and not even know it.
The ache grew wider, the hole deeper, and I knew I would have a nightmare that night, the same one I had had for years. It came and went, but it was always the same: Mama Nathan running away with Ezinwa. Always at first it seems that I can catch up with her, then it becomes more difficult; my legs are making the movement of running but I am not moving. And she is going further and further away, and then she no longer has a head, and I hear Ezinwa screaming. Ifechi would often wake me at this point. You have been screaming, he would say. He would hold me and wipe my tears. He would not speak the encouraging words he used to in the early years. His arms around me, his silent compassion, were much more comforting.
I gripped the steering wheel hard. I would never forget, I acknowledged to myself now as I had done many times. Not even if the man who fathered him had blotted out the times that had brought my child to this world. The pain was a small price to pay for remembering. I sighed deeply, my chest rising with the seat belt. I turned up volume of the CD player to try to drown out the sadness. I shook myself. This was life, and I had been dealing with it for a while; the surprise was that I still let it master me.
I knew what to do. I would go and see Chidinma. My best friend would know what to say to me now.
As I drove to Uwani where she lived, my mind took a brisk walk through the day’s doings: the clothes that had gone out, the new customer who was going to her son’s wedding, my car incident, Urenna. My intuition had been working this morning, I admitted. Who could have thought that I would see Urenna again? Yet, he had not asked after his child.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
JULIE
‘She said she was from Nwokenta.’
I shifted and adjusted myself on my rocking chair. I had acquired it many years before on a trip to England. In those days, when my husband wanted to hurt me as people sometimes do when they have been together long, maybe too long, he would tell me that he was surprised it could still take my heavy frame. Once, those words, ndakakwa, had the power to wound, but no more. My heaviness was an old scar, familiar, worn, a part of life. I knew now that exercise videos were a waste of money, that sucking in my belly was a waste of precious time, that I would be heavy until the grave called me. Until it did, that chair was still one of the good things of life for me and my bad knees.
‘Nwokenta?’ my best friend asked now, no perceptible strain of curiosity in her tone.
I was ready, had been for the last half hour, but Obiageli had kept us from leaving. As usual. She was not sure the necklace she had on went with the gold blouse she was wearing; the shades were too close, yet not close enough to look good together. We were merely guests, but the way she was going on, you would think that this wedding at the All Saints Church was her child’s. She kept plucking her eyebrows, peering into the wall mirror in my bathroom.
Ageing gracefully was yet to enter Obiageli’s lexicon. She wanted to stay beautiful until God called her home and she was working hard at it, she told me. At a little over seventy, though Obiageli would die rather than admit to that age, I thought she was a little too old for that fluffiness. But when I looked at the folds in my neck and my sagging jowls, I thought she might have a point. Fortunately, unlike me, she had good genes, and her skin did not show the many lines that my expensive creams and make-up did not succeed in concealing. And, more importantly, as I often told her, she could still laugh at a good joke – her brain still worked. Even so, she had told me just this past week that when she went over to the States to help Ifeoma, her daughter, when the baby came, she would see about the possibility of getting a facelift. Her husband might kill himself over the cost, but if she could get Ifeoma to keep a secret – a tall order, for Ifeoma was especially close to her father – she could get away with it. Her eyes had glowed at the possibility.
Obiageli should have left Emma long ago, I thought. His miserliness had not improved. Indeed, it grew worse with age. When the children were still at home, he would deliberately pick fights with Obiageli, which ended with him acting offended and rejecting food cooked in the house. He could do this for a month, two, three months at a time. During that time, he would bring no money home for the upkeep of the house, including the feeding of their children. When regular electricity became a luxury meant for people living in other countries, even Ghana, everyone acquired a generator. Gbo gbo gbo gbo, the sound went from every house, every shop, little and big. Even the barber’s salon, the place in the market where we bought okporoko, and the man who lived with his family of seven in one room acquired a generator, the small I-Pass-My-Neighbour variety which could not carry a lot of household devices. Even then, Emma insisted that his household keep using kerosene lamps. Eventually, Obiageli gave in, abandoned her stance that it was the responsibility of a man to ensure that his family did not stay in darkness, and bought a generator. Emma promptly stated that he could not buy fuel for the generator because he was not the one who chose to acquire a needless and expensive gadget. Also, he loved the word ‘ban’ and sought every possible occasion under heaven to use it. He purported to ban her from wearing nice clothes. From seeing me, the wife of a rich, corrupt fraudster. From making soups that were too delicious and filled with meat and fish. From sitting in the living room, the only room that was air-conditioned in their house. She never paid him any mind and simply carried on living as well as she could under the circumstances.
The result of all this was that Obiageli learnt to rely on herself and no one else, except perhaps me. These days, Obiageli told me, Emma would hoard food in his room. This started after his retirement. I thought he might have a mental illness and I told her this. He would never agree to see a psychiatrist, she said. Yet she stayed with him, as she had for over forty years, proudly answering to Mrs Emmanuel Nwajei, speaking up for him in the village, in church, at neighbourhood meetings, explaining why they could not pay for this or that, and then going behind his back to make the payments. To this day they still fought over housekeeping money, how much Obiageli spent on her dressing – which I had to admit could get out of hand. Obiageli would laugh and insist her extravagance was justified by saying that she was dressing up for the two of them. It would not do at all for the world to think two crazy people had married each other, she said, seeing as her husband had yet to see the value in changing the shirts that he had bought in the Seventies.
‘Yes. She said she was from Nwokenta,’ I repeated for emphasis now, trying to pull her attention to the real-life issue that had been on my mind for three days.
‘I did not know that. She never said.’
‘Of course she did not. How would she tell you if it never came up in conversation?’
Now Obiageli turned and looked at me. Her expression said that she did not know what bee had found its way into my head-tie.
‘Well, it never came up. I am sure that in every part of this city you will find people from Nwokenta. Just like you would find people from Nnewi, Onitsha, Awka, Nanka, Udi, and so on.’
‘She said that her husband is from Okpatu. She said she has not been back for years.’
&
nbsp; ‘Oh, okay. There is nothing unusual about that.’
‘Hmm.’ There was a little silence as I pondered this, my eyes on my red-painted toenails. Was there nothing unusual about one not visiting one’s ikwunne? Still, even with my ingrained sense of duty, I had only been to my mother’s village a few times since she died, so perhaps Obiageli had a point.
I looked up. My friend was done plucking her eyebrows and had started putting on lipstick. She was waiting for me to say something.
‘Nwanne m nwanyi, something about that woman reminded me of Afam,’ I said after a while, finally getting to the point.
I could not put my finger on it. Maybe it was the expression, the way the tailor’s eyes stared at you too long as if they were trying to read your mind, see what you were not saying. She was beautiful, the way my son was a fine man. Maybe it was the same colouring, that ebony blackness that Eugene had often commented on. The men of their family, he said, were dark-skinned, but this one, he would point to Afam proudly, this one came with the darkest hue of them all, almost a Sudanese.
‘Hmm,’ was all Obiageli said, looking away from me and applying some eye shadow, as if to deflect the force of my words. She pushed the lid up with the brush and held it up for a second or two to reverse the droopiness that time had wrought.
Perhaps the only resemblance between my son and that tailor was simply the mention of Nwokenta. Surely that had planted these wild ideas in my head. When the woman said she was from Nwokenta, I almost fell down from shock. Did she notice? No, I did not think so, because she carried on with the conversation and proceeded to take my fabric and do my measurements, when all I wanted was to run out of that place and never come back.
I was being ridiculous; even I knew that. But I needed to hear Obiageli say it out loud for reassurance.
The Son of the House Page 18
