8
Olanna postponed her trip to Kano because of the coup. She waited until the airports were reopened, the Post and Telegraphs up again, the military governors appointed to the regions. She waited until she was sure there was order. But the coup was in the air. Everyone was talking about it, even the taxi driver in the white hat and caftan who drove her and Baby from the airport to Arize’s compound.
“But the Sardauna was not killed, madam,” he whispered. “He escaped with Allah’s help and is now in Mecca.” Olanna smiled gently and said nothing because she knew that this man, with his prayer beads dangling from his rearview mirror, needed to believe that. The Sardauna, after all, had not only been premier of the North, he had also been the spiritual leader for this man and so many Muslims like him.
She told Arize about the taxi driver’s comment, and Arize shrugged and said, “There is nothing that they are not saying.” Arize’s wrapper was pushed low, below her waist, and her blouse was loose-fitting to accommodate the swell of her belly. They sat in the living room with photos of Arize and Nnakwanze’s wedding on the oily wall, while Baby played with the children in the compound. Olanna did not want Baby to touch those children in their torn clothes, milky mucus trailing from their noses, but she didn’t say so; it shamed her that she felt that way.
“We’ll catch the first flight to Lagos tomorrow, Ari, so you can rest before we start shopping. I don’t want to do anything that will be difficult for you,” Olanna said.
“Ha, difficult! I am only pregnant, Sister, I am not sick, oh. Is it not women like me who work on the farm until the baby wants to come out? And am I not the one sewing that dress?” Arize pointed to the corner, where her Singer sewing machine was on a table amid a pile of clothes.
“My concern is for my godchild in there, not for you,” Olanna said. She raised Arize’s blouse and placed her face against the firm roundness of Arize’s belly, against the stretched-tight skin, in the gentle ritual she had been doing since Arize became pregnant; if she did it often enough, Arize said, the child would imbibe her features and look like her.
“I don’t care about the outside,” Arize said. “But she must look like you on the inside. She must have your brain and know Book.”
“Or he.”
“No, this one is a girl, you will see. Nnakwanze says it will be a boy who will resemble him, but I told him that God will not allow my child to have that flat face.”
Olanna laughed. Arize got up and opened an enamel box and brought out some money. “See what Sister Kainene sent me last week. She said I should use it to buy things for the baby.”
“It was nice of her.” Olanna knew she sounded stilted, knew Arize was watching her.
“You and Sister Kainene should talk. What happened in the past is in the past.”
“You can only talk to the person who wants to talk to you,” Olanna said. She wanted to change the subject. She always wanted to change the subject when Kainene came up. “I better take Baby to greet Aunty Ifeka.” She hurried out to fetch Baby before Arize could say anything else.
She washed some sand off Baby’s face and hands before they walked out of the compound and down the road. Uncle Mbaezi was not yet back from the market, and they sat with Aunty Ifeka on a bench in front of her kiosk, Baby on Olanna’s lap. The yard was filling with the chatter of neighbors and the shrieks of children running around under the kuka tree. Somebody was playing loud music from a gramophone; soon, a cluster of men by the compound gate began to laugh and jostle one another, mimicking the song. Aunty Ifeka laughed, too, and clapped her hands.
“What’s funny?” Olanna asked.
“That is Rex Lawson’s song,” Aunty Ifeka said.
“What is funny about it?”
“Our people say that the chorus sounds like mmee-mmee-mmee, the bleating of a goat.” Aunty Ifeka chuckled. “They say the Sardauna sounded like that when he was begging them not to kill him. When the soldiers fired a mortar into his house, he crouched behind his wives and bleated, ‘Mmee-mmee-mmee, please don’t kill me, mmee-mmee-mmee!’”
Aunty Ifeka laughed again, and so did Baby, as if she understood.
“Oh.” Olanna thought about Chief Okonji and wondered if he too was said to have bleated like a goat before he died. She looked away across the street, where children were playing with car tires, racing with one another as they rolled the tires along. A small sandstorm was gathering in the distance, and the dust rose and fell in gray-white clouds.
“The Sardauna was an evil man, ajo mmadu,” Aunty Ifeka said. “He hated us. He hated everybody who did not remove their shoes and bow to him. Is he not the one who did not allow our children to go to school?”
“They should not have killed him,” Olanna said quietly. “They should have put him in prison.”
Aunty Ifeka snorted. “Put him in which prison? In this Nigeria where he controlled everything?” She got up and began to close up the kiosk. “Come, let’s go inside so I can find Baby something to eat.”
The Rex Lawson song was playing loudly in Arize’s compound when Olanna returned. Nnakwanze found it hilarious too. He had two huge front teeth, and when he laughed it was as if too many teeth had been painfully crammed into his small mouth. Mmeee-mmeee-mmeee, a goat begging not to be killed: mmeee-mmeee-mmeee.
“It’s not funny,” Olanna said.
“Sister, but it is funny oh,” Arize said. “Because of too much Book, you no longer know how to laugh.”
Nnakwanze was sitting on the floor at Arize’s feet, rubbing her belly in light circular motions. He had worried a lot less than Arize when she did not get pregnant the first, second, and third year of their marriage; when his mother visited them too often, poking at Arize’s belly and urging her to confess how many abortions she had had before marriage, he asked his mother to stop visiting. He asked her, too, to stop bringing foul-smelling concoctions for Arize to drink in bitter gulps. Now that Arize was pregnant, he did more overtime at the railway and asked her to cut down on her sewing.
He was still singing the song and laughing. A goat begging not to be killed: mmeee-mmeee-mmeee.
Olanna got up. The night breeze was unpleasantly cool. “Ari, you should get to bed, so you are rested in the morning for Lagos.”
Nnakwanze made as if to help Arize up, but she brushed him aside. “I have told you people that I am not sick. I am only pregnant.”
Olanna was pleased that the house in Lagos would be empty. Her father had called to say they were going overseas. She knew it was because he wanted to be away until things calmed down, because he was wary of his ten percents and lavish parties and slick connections, but neither he nor her mother said so. They called it a holiday. It was their policy to leave things unsaid, the same way they pretended not to notice that she and Kainene no longer spoke and that she came home only when she was sure Kainene was not visiting.
In the airport taxi, Arize taught Baby a song while Olanna watched Lagos careen by: the tumultuous traffic, the rusty buses and exhausted masses waiting for them, the touts, the beggars sliding on flat wooden trolleys, the shabby hawkers thrusting trays toward people who either would not or could not buy.
The driver stopped in front of her parents’ walled compound in Ikoyi. He peered at the high gate. “The minister they killed used to live around here, abi, aunty?” he asked. Olanna pretended not to have heard and instead said to Baby, “Now, look what you did to your dress! Hurry inside so we can wash it off!”
Later, her mother’s driver, Ibekie, took them to Kingsway. The supermarket smelled of new paint. Arize walked from aisle to aisle, cooing, touching the plastic wrappings, picking out baby clothes, a pink pram, a plastic doll with blue eyes.
“Everything is so shiny in supermarkets, Sister,” Arize said, laughing. “No dust!”
Olanna held up a white dress trimmed with pink lace. “O maka. This is lovely.”
“It’s too expensive,” Arize said.
“Nobody asked you.”
Baby pulle
d down a doll from a low shelf and turned it upside down, and it let out a crying sound.
“No, Baby.” Olanna took the doll and placed it back.
They shopped for a while longer and then left for Yaba market, where Arize could shop for fabrics for herself. Tejuosho Road was crowded, families huddled around pots of bubbling food, women roasting corn and plantains in charred basins, bare-chested men loading bags into lorries with hand-painted wisdoms: NO CONDITION IS PERMANENT. GOD KNOWS BEST. Ibekie parked near the newspaper stands. Olanna glanced at the people standing and reading the Daily Times and her feet grew light with pride. They were reading Odenigbo’s article, she was sure; it was easily the best there. She had edited it herself and toned down his rhetoric, so that his argument—that only a unitary government could remove the divisions of regionalism—was clearer.
She took Baby’s hand and led the way past the roadside hawkers who sat under umbrellas with batteries and padlocks and cigarettes carefully arranged on enamel trays. The main market entrance was strangely empty. Then Olanna saw the crowd ahead. A man in a yellowed singlet stood at the center while two men slapped him, one after the other, methodical leathery-sounding slaps. “Why now? Why are you denying?” The man stared at them, blank, bending his neck slightly after each slap. Arize stopped.
Somebody from the crowd called out, “We are counting the Igbo people. Oya, come and identify yourself. You are Igbo?”
Arize muttered under her breath, “I kwuna okwu,” as if Olanna was thinking of saying anything, and then shook her head and started to speak fluent loud Yoruba, all the while casually turning so they could go back the way they had come. The crowd lost interest in them. Another man in a safari suit was being slapped on the back of the head. “You are Igbo man! Don’t deny it! Simply identify yourself!”
Baby began to cry. “Mummy Ola! Mummy Ola!”
Olanna picked Baby up. She and Arize did not talk until they got back in the car. Ibekie had already reversed and kept glancing at the rearview mirror. “I saw people running,” he said.
“What is happening?” Olanna asked.
Arize shrugged. “We hear rumors that they have been doing this in Kaduna and Zaria since the coup; they go out in the streets and start to harass Igbo people because they said the coup was an Igbo coup.”
“Ezi okwu? Really?”
“Yes, Aunty,” Ibekie said quickly, as if he had been waiting for the opportunity to speak. “My uncle in Ebutte Metta does not sleep in his house anymore since the coup. All his neighbors are Yoruba, and they said some men have been looking for him. He sleeps in different houses every night, while he takes care of his business. He has sent his children back home.”
“Ezi okwu? Really?” Olanna repeated. She felt hollow. She did not know that things had come to this; in Nsukka, life was insular and the news was unreal, functioning only as fodder for the evening talk, for Odenigbo’s rants and impassioned articles.
“Things will calm down,” Arize said, and touched Olanna’s arm. “Don’t worry.”
Olanna nodded and looked out at the words printed on a nearby lorry: NO TELEPHONE TO HEAVEN. She could not believe how easy it had been to deny who they were, to shrug off being Igbo.
“She will wear that white dress for her christening, Sister,” Arize said.
“What, Ari?”
Arize pointed at her belly. “Your goddaughter will wear that white dress for her christening. Thank you so much, Sister.”
The light in Arize’s eyes made Olanna smile; things would indeed calm down. She tickled Baby, but Baby did not laugh. Baby stared back at her with frightened eyes that were not yet dried of tears.
9
Richard watched as Kainene zipped up the lilac dress and turned to him. The hotel room was brightly lit, and he looked at her and at her reflection in the mirror behind her.
“Nke a ka mma,” he said. It was prettier than the black dress on the bed, the one she had earlier picked out for her parents’ party. She bowed mockingly and sat down to put on her shoes. She looked almost pretty with her smoothing powder and red lipstick and relaxed demeanor, not as knotted up as she had been lately, chasing a contract with Shell-BP. Before they left, Richard brushed aside some of her wig hair and kissed her forehead, to avoid spoiling her lipstick.
There were garish balloons in her parents’ living room. The party was under way. Stewards in black and white walked around with trays and fawning smiles, their heads held inanely high. The champagne sparkled in tall glasses, the chandeliers’ light reflected the glitter of jewelry on fat women’s necks, and the High Life band in the corner played so loudly, so vigorously, that people clumped close together to hear one another.
“I see many Big Men of the new regime,” Richard said.
“Daddy hasn’t wasted any time in ingratiating himself,” Kainene said in his ear. “He ran off until things calmed down, and now he’s back to make new friends.”
Richard scanned the rest of the room. Colonel Madu stood out right away, with his wide shoulders and wide face and wide features and head that was above everyone else’s. He was talking to an Arab man in a tight dinner jacket. Kainene walked over to say hello to them and Richard went to look for a drink, to avoid talking to Madu just yet.
Kainene’s mother came up and kissed his cheek; he knew she was drunk, or she would have greeted him with the usual frosty “How do you do?” Now, though, she told him he looked well and cornered him at an unfortunate end of the room, with the wall to his back and an intimidating piece of sculpture, something that looked like a snarling lion, to his side.
“Kainene tells me you are going home to London soon?” she asked. Her ebony complexion looked waxy with too much makeup. There was something nervous about her movements.
“Yes. I’ll be away for about ten days.”
“Just ten days?” She half smiled. Perhaps she had hoped he would be away for longer, so she could finally find a suitable partner for her daughter. “To visit your family?”
“My cousin Martin is getting married,” Richard said.
“Oh, I see.” The rows and rows of gold around her neck weighed her down and made her head look slumped, as if she was under great strain and, in trying so hard to hide it, made it all the more obvious. “Maybe we’ll have a drink in London then. I’m telling my husband that we should take another small vacation. Not that anything will happen, but not everybody is happy with this unitary decree the government is talking about. It’s just nicer to be away until things are settled. We may leave next week but we are not telling anybody, so keep it to yourself.” She touched his sleeve playfully, and Richard saw a glimpse of Kainene in the curve of her lips. “We are not even telling our friends the Ajuahs. You know Chief Ajuah, who owns the bottling company? They are Igbo, but they are Western Igbo. I hear they are the ones who deny being Igbo. Who knows what they will say that we have done? Who knows? They will sell other Igbo people for a tarnished penny. A tarnished penny, I’m telling you. Do you want another drink? Wait here and I’ll get another drink. Just wait here.”
As soon as she lurched away, Richard went looking for Kainene. He found her on the balcony with Madu, standing and looking down at the swimming pool. The smell of roasting meat was thick in the air. He watched them for a while. Madu’s head was slightly cocked to the side as Kainene spoke, her body looked frail next to his huge frame, and they seemed somehow to fit effortlessly. Both very dark, one tall and thin, the other taller and huge. Kainene turned and saw him.
“Richard,” she said.
He joined them, shook hands with Madu. “How are you, Madu? A na-emekwa?” he asked, eager to speak first. “How is life in the North?”
“Nothing to complain about,” Madu said in English.
“You didn’t come with Adaobi?” He did wish the man would come out more often with his wife.
“No,” Madu said, and sipped his drink; it was clear he had not wanted anybody to disturb their chat.
“I see my mother was entertaining you, how
exciting,” Kainene said. “Madu and I were stuck with Ahmed there for a while. He wants to buy Daddy’s warehouse in Ikeja.”
“Your father will not sell anything to him,” Madu declared, as if it were his decision to make. “Those Syrians and Lebanese already own half of Lagos, and they are all bloody opportunists in this country.”
“I would sell to him if he stopped smelling so awfully of garlic,” Kainene said.
Madu laughed.
Kainene slipped her hand into Richard’s. “I was just telling Madu that you think another coup is coming.”
“There won’t be another coup,” Madu said.
“You would know, wouldn’t you, Madu? Big Man colonel that you are now,” Kainene teased.
Richard tightened his hold on her hand. “I went to Zaria last week, and it seemed that all everybody was saying was second coup, second coup. Even Radio Kaduna and the New Nigerian,” he said in Igbo.
“What does the press know, really?” Madu replied in English. He always did that; since Richard’s Igbo had become near-fluent, Madu insistently responded to it in English so that Richard felt forced to revert to English.
“The papers ran articles about jihad, and Radio Kaduna kept broadcasting the late Sardauna’s speeches, and there was talk about how Igbo people were going to take over the civil service and—”
Madu cut him short. “There won’t be a second coup. There’s a little tension in the army, but there always is a little tension in the army. Did you have the goat meat? Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Yes,” Richard agreed, almost automatically, and then wished he hadn’t. The air in Lagos was humid; standing next to Madu, it seemed suffocating. The man made him feel inconsequential.
The second coup happened a week later, and Richard’s first reaction was to gloat. He was rereading Martin’s letter in the orchard, sitting on the spot where Kainene often told him that a groove the exact size and shape of his buttocks had appeared.