Obiageli looked at me in the mirror. Then she swivelled around to look me in the face, as if the mirror did not show my true reflection.
‘What are you saying? Everybody from Nwokenta suddenly looks like Afam?’
I kept silent. I did not want to sound any more foolish than I had shown myself to be. Thirty-three years was a long time to keep a secret, and here I was behaving like a novice.
‘I have seen the woman. She is tall. She is dark. But if that is the only thing that is giving you palpitations, you might as well be describing half the women in Enugu. Besides, how do you think a young woman like that, who in all probability grew up here in Enugu, would have any connection with Mama Nathan?’ Obiageli’s light-hearted mood of only five minutes before was gone.
We looked at each other – two women over seventy, wrinkled now in face and hands, but as young in mind as we were at sixteen at Girls’ High School Aba. Who had seen each other through the years and covered the grounds of a woman’s life in twentieth-century Africa together. Fought through disappointments, managed the lives of wilful and yet fragile children, survived the infidelities and idiosyncrasies of husbands, the abuses of life, mistakes and failures that came in different shades. We knew each other well, better than the men in our lives did or had cared to know.
Her lips tightened into the ube shape, puckering out. I knew that expression: time for truth-speaking.
‘Julie,’ she said and paused, gathering her energies. ‘If you ask me,’ she went on, as if she would ever wait to be asked, ‘I would say you have not been yourself since Eugene died. You had that sickness.’ My bout with depression had been more like a battle with death than an illness. ‘And, if you ask me, you are still recovering. I am still not happy about that prophet or seer you said came to church the other time. There are all sorts of people going about looking for others to fleece.’
She was referring to a man who had come to our church the month before. He had said that long-kept secrets were about to be revealed. I had mentioned this to Obiageli and she had laughed at my seriousness. I had gone home reassured and given it no more thought. But here she was bringing it up again.
‘Nwannem nwanyi, leave all this tearing of body and soul to young people,’ she continued now, ‘peering under every stone for things that are not there. You and I know that life turns and twists, but what can you do? You have to follow it gently, see where it is leading, figure it out when you get there. I do not like this imagining of things that are not.’ She paused. ‘This woman, Nwabulu, the tailor, I have known her and used her for more than six years now. She works really hard. She is discreet, too, which is why our relationship has worked. I have no idea how you can link her with Afam. That boy is your son. He has been for thirty-three years now. Thirty-three,’ she repeated. As if I was mad to think of him being anyone else’s but mine.
‘Let the young monkey not slip and fall from the tree, hmm. After all, its mother gave birth to it on a tree.’ Her gaze was unwavering and stern. It was obvious to her that I was losing my marbles.
‘Hmm. You speak well, nwannem nwanyi. You speak well. What can one do but try to figure out life as one goes along its journey?’ I asked rhetorically, borrowing her metaphor.
‘Let us leave now,’ Obiageli said, finally ready. ‘We will be late and you know Nneka will not like that. This is her very first daughter to marry.’
Nneka, our friend – if you used that term loosely – had five girls, all unmarried. Her third daughter had finally succeeded in finding a man. We made our way out to attend the wedding of the lucky girl whose mother would surely be the happiest woman anywhere on earth today.
That night, alone and lonely, my mind began to run into dark corners, places in which I had neither been nor shined any light for years. I tossed on the four-poster bed that Eugene had bought so long ago, thinking thoughts that were best left alone.
Something I heard on the news that evening after I returned from Nneka’s daughter’s wedding came back to bother me. A baby had been picked up in the new dumpster the government had built in Ogui. The interview featured men and women coming on camera to abuse the wicked woman who had done such a wicked thing. The newscaster said the baby was recovering in the hospital. What would become of that child, I wondered.
The day before, I’d seen a movie where Margaret Thatcher talked to her long-dead husband. If I’d discussed it with Eugene, I know what he would have said – that the Iron Lady had lost her mind. I would have said that their love must have been strong, undying. He would have said that that was the problem with women – they were simply too soft to handle real life.
In spite of everything, our friendship had returned in the end, when Eugene had tired of money and women. But what was life but an instrument to make sure the soul did not get too comfortable? As soon as it saw that we were becoming the proverbial old married couple, knowing each other so well that we could finish each other’s sentences, and learning to like each other again after the era of puerile selfishness, the highs and lows of hormonal changes, the excitement and turbulence of child-rearing, death had knocked on our door. When we had joined the category of people he and I liked to call ‘the no-leave, no-transfer club’, men and women who had agreed they were stuck with each other – that this was not the end of the world, that they were better off making the most of life together than haranguing each other over flaws that would never change – death snatched away Eugene.
He had died suddenly. I had been downstairs supervising the cook. Nobody could make onugbu soup like I did, Eugene often said. So I had been in the kitchen when I could have been with him and seen when he was about to fall. By the time I sent Uche, the help, up to get him for lunch, he was already gone. Almost two years later, I could still feel the stun, the hammer against my chest when I saw him on the floor of the bedroom. I still remember my surprise at how vacant he had looked. Like an empty, abandoned house – the force, the spirit, the charisma that had given life to his body gone, leaving his big, long shell behind in a grotesque, crumpled heap. And leaving me to go back to singleness, that state I had done so much to escape.
I collected the broken pieces of myself and got ready to give him the kind of burial he would have given himself. Orimili atata, the sea which never ran dry, deserved only the best.
As I prepared for the funeral, the only snag was Onyemaechi, his first wife, who was still married to my husband. Nobody had ever brought up divorce, although the thought had come to me sometimes. She had stayed in the background, known only to a few people in Enugu. Having left us alone for many years, she now came back to claim what she said was her ‘rightful’ place.
‘I am the first wife. He married you. I do not dispute that. But I am first. And his body and everything he has must come first to me, and his children, inulia?’
It was a bit pathetic to watch her, an old woman, with scanty hair straightened, almost fried by cheap relaxer, stand before me after thirty-some years to claim a man who had abandoned her so many years before. Her daughters must have put her up to it, telling her to fight for their inheritance. It was comical, more comical than it would have been had she come all those years ago to pour hot water on me at my school. Her daughters hovered around her, too timid to give their mother the support she needed. Were these really Eugene’s daughters? These dithering women, standing by their tight-skinned mother?
She had come too late. I was prepared to give her a spot in the backyard of the house in the village to receive her few well-wishers, a chance to throw some sand into the grave before it was closed up, but nothing more. Fortunately, Eugene had in his last years made sure that most of the property had been transferred to me and Afam. ‘Death,’ he used to say, ‘likes to choose its own time.’ How prescient he had been. Yet what had Onyemaechi done to him other than fail to bear him a son, I wondered as I signed papers put in front of me by his lawyers.
She and her daughters were now in court contesting the will, which only disposed of a small part of E
ugene’s considerable fortune. The rest had been transferred in Eugene’s lifetime to a company in which Afam and I were the directors. But Onyemaechi and her daughters had not been left out in the cold – he had made sure that the girls and their children, his grandchildren, could have comfortable lives, living on the rent of houses in Lagos, Enugu, and Onitsha. Still, Onyemaechi told everyone she came across that I was a highway robber. Sour grapes, I thought, very sour grapes.
So when Eugene died, with all the resources I had at my disposal, it was easy to elbow Onyemaechi out of the arrangements. I ignored her antics, and when people saw where the money was coming from, they ignored her too. I told his kinsmen that Chief Eugene Obiechina, Orimili Atata 1 was nnukwu ozu, a big corpse. He had single-handedly built the town hall. Many had gone to school on the Obiechina scholarships he had instituted. He had taken all the titles. He was a Jerusalem Pilgrim. He was a Knight of the Church. He deserved a burial ceremony which was befitting, which was bright and clear before the face of all. They agreed with me, and told Onyemaechi to pipe down and accept a smaller role. No one was sending her away; she was their brother’s wife, after all. But Eugene had to be buried properly by his only son, Afam. I smiled in triumph and set about preparing for the largest party the village had ever seen.
Afam came back from Lagos, where he had moved two years before, and, with my instructions ringing in his ears, ran around arranging for canopies, banners, programme booklets, talking with the priests in Enugu and the village, and ensuring that the mortuary attendants kept the corpse clean and in a good state. We purchased goats with which Eugene’s mother’s people were duly informed that their daughter’s son had died, even though we had spoken to everyone who needed to know on the phone or in person. We bought Ankara and made uniforms for members of the family and almost half of the village.
Obiageli helped me organise the caterers. Three cows and ten goats were slaughtered to provide meat for the guests, who came from all over the country. Afam took care of the drinks – champagne, wines, beers, soft drinks, juices. He ran errands to my favourite decorators, to the vendors of souvenirs, the sellers of meats, the announcers on radio and television.
I shamelessly asked for tributes, which filled up the programme booklet. I sent Afam to the Government House to pick up one from the governor and the speaker. It was silliness, people who had barely known my husband describing his loss as ‘immense to the Obiechina family and the world at large’, and pronouncing him an ‘icon’ and a ‘legend’.
The funeral was lavish, with food and drink flowing, and important people in expensive clothing. A gospel band, two large choirs, two big akwunechenyi music troupes, souvenirs for guests of umbrellas, notepads, trays, handkerchiefs, face towels with his face boldly imprinted on them. It was such extravagance, so out of touch with the pain of the occasion, but exactly as Eugene would have wanted it. It was a befitting send-forth, the best that I could do for him. Much of it was superficial, Afam argued. I agreed with our son, but it did not matter. Eugene would have loved it.
They were such different people, Eugene and Afam. And Eugene was not comfortable with difference. He had wanted a clone of himself. Yet, even as a child, Afam did not have the sort of masculinity and self-assurance that surrounded Eugene and seemed to emanate from him. Afam had many fears and discomforts – masquerades, the loud laughter of Eugene’s drinking buddies, even other children sometimes. Where Eugene drew people to himself, friends swimming around him as if he were the king of the sea, paying obeisance and agreeing with every word that dropped from his mouth, Afam shrank back in shyness. Afam was tall or, more accurately, was on his way to being tall like Eugene, but it seemed that he had gone AWOL the day God gave out boldness.
What would have become of Afam if I had not picked him up and raised him as my own, as Eugene’s son? I did not want to think about that.
‘He must get this shyness from you,’ Eugene would say, though he could point to no situation in which I had displayed this weakness. ‘It certainly does not come from me or my people.’
‘It would be dull if everyone was the same,’ I would tell him. ‘Besides, he is only a child – he will outgrow it.’
‘I was never shy,’ he would state, arrogance in every word. ‘What use is shyness in a world where boldness gets you everything? Tell me that.’
Turning to Afam, he would bellow, ‘Stand straight, boy. Walk tall. Your father is a rich man. Do you hear me? Nna gi bara aba.’
Yet Afam had done well, was doing well. As adulthood drew near, the shyness melted away. An involuntary smile came to my face as I remembered the time that Afam, four or five years old, and I huddled in the car on the side of the Enugu highway. The rain had caught us, fast, hard, pelting our car, the skies growing gloomy and covering us with darkness in the middle of the day. So, I parked and, kept company only by the long elephant grass and tall trees that bore no fruit, we waited for the rain to stop. Afam was scared and clutched my hand. The sun would come out, I reassured him. I began telling him the story of the Osa and his mother, and their cunning in the famine that struck the land of the animals, a story my own mother had told us – me and Afam, my brother.
Only last year, Afam, my son, had written and produced a single for Nigeria’s famous musical twins, based on that story. It was not my cup of tea, but it had many admirers and my chest rose with pride.
In later years, Afam and Eugene would fight about everything. What course Afam would study – Eugene thought business, maybe law; Afam thought music but compromised and went to engineering. Eugene thought he should go to America, to Harvard or MIT, when he finished his first degree; Afam said no and went to Canada, a country nobody had heard about, his father complained to me. When he was ready to come back home, Eugene wanted him to run the companies. Afam told him that he wanted to go into music and run his own production company. He had never lost his love for music and he foresaw money spouting from every note out of the new musicians’ mouths, from every fast beat that made its way into the world. Globalisation and the internet, he told me, were about to make Nigerian music the biggest thing since the personal computer. Many arguments broke out over this. Eugene stopped talking to him for a while, giving me messages instead to pass to Afam. Afam stuck by his ideas. The ice melted over time and the two started speaking again.
But, just before Eugene died, a battle was raging over when and whom Afam would marry. ‘An only son, the son of the Obiechina house,’ Eugene would tell him, ‘has responsibilities to himself, but most importantly to his family. A responsibility to marry quickly, to marry well, and to sire sons. You have the responsibility to make sure the compound, the name, the lineage does not die, do you hear?’
Afam would laugh, making his father want to go mad. ‘Daddy,’ he would say gently, ‘this is not the Dark Ages. This is the twenty-first century. I will marry when I find someone I can love and live with. Mummy is praying, so I am sure it will happen soon.’
In this matter, I could see both sides of the argument. But I wished Afam would hurry up and find this woman he could love and live with. I was eager for grandchildren, not to carry on the Obiechina name but to hold in my arms. Thankfully, when he discovered that a young woman from Kenya was the one, his father was gone. Had he not seen all the Igbo girls around? Eugene would have roared.
My son, Afam, was of course named after my brother. When I suggested the name to Eugene, who was eager to name his first and, as it turned out, only son, he acceded immediately. Yes, of course, he said, my name will not be lost. The names of all the great Obiechina warriors will live again through this boy, the seed of my loins, he intoned with pride. Years later, he would tell the story the way he remembered it: ‘As soon as Julie returned from England with the baby, I called him Afamefuna, may my name and those of my ancestors live forever.’
‘Amii o,’ his listeners would chorus back if they were Igbo men of a certain age.
Should I have told Eugene? I asked myself now. While he lived, there had nev
er been any urgency in my spirit about this, no fear. Not even after he died.
My nerves had to be firmer than they had ever been, Obiageli had warned. And how right she had been. Within the week after Obiageli sat in my 504 and told me that the baby would be returned if I did nothing, while the thoughts and doubts churned through my mind, I received the letter I had been waiting for: the letter allowing me a one-year study leave in England. When I told Obiageli, she exclaimed, ‘That is it!’
‘That is what?’
‘Do you not see it?’
‘See what?’
‘Take the child and travel. Come back with him, the first son of Chief Eugene …’
‘How?’
She looked at me as if I had become slow of thinking. ‘Take the baby with you to London!’
‘Ehen.’
‘Do I have to explain every little thing to you?’ In fact, she did: I needed her to break it down for me. ‘You will travel with the child and bring him back as your child.’
Would it work? Obiageli was sure it would. I would have to extend my study leave after the first year, she said, to make sure the child looked a little older, otherwise my sisters-in-law might suspect.
She carried on as if I were becoming soft in the head and needed every detail worked out for me: ‘And while you’re there, studying, you will have to look for one of those baby-care centres to help care for the baby,’ she said. ‘This is where having a rich husband comes in handy.’
I balked at this – wasn’t the baby too young? – but could come up with no feasible alternative. Normally, I could have sought to take a young girl to help me, but nothing about this situation was normal.
All I remembered from that time was the jumpiness that lasted until we got on British Airways to London, my heart beating faster than God appointed. Everything wracked my nerves: from obtaining a forged birth certificate for presentation at the visa office, to making sure that I fixed my travel date for when Eugene was away. There was a time when this would have been impossible, when we were inseparable, but our emotional distance favoured my plans. Tata and I arrived safely in London.
The Son of the House Page 19
