Ugwu laughed but had not entirely doubted Jomo. He wished so much that Jomo had come to work today. Jomo would have been the best person to ask about arigbe—indeed, to ask for advice on how best to placate Master.
He walked out of the compound, to the street, and looked through the plants on the roadside until he saw the rumpled leaves close to the root of a whistling pine. He had never smelled anything like the spicy sharpness of arigbe in the bland food Master brought back from the staff club; he would cook a stew with it, and offer Master some with rice, and afterward plead with him. Please don’t send me back home, sah. I will work extra for the burned sock. I will earn the money to replace it. He did not know exactly what he could do to earn money for the sock, but he planned to tell Master that anyway.
If the arigbe softened Master’s heart, perhaps he could grow it and some other herbs in the backyard. He would tell Master that the garden was something to do until he started school, since the headmistress at the staff school had told Master that he could not start midterm. He might be hoping for too much, though. What was the point of thinking about an herb garden if Master asked him to leave, if Master would not forgive the burnt sock? He walked quickly into the kitchen, laid the arigbe down on the counter, and measured out some rice.
Hours later, he felt a tautness in his stomach when he heard Master’s car: the crunch of gravel and the hum of the engine before it stopped in the garage. He stood by the pot of stew, stirring, holding the ladle as tight as the cramps in his stomach felt. Would Master ask him to leave before he had a chance to offer him the food? What would he tell his people?
“Good afternoon, sah—Odenigbo,” he said, even before Master had come into the kitchen.
“Yes, yes,” Master said. He was holding books to his chest with one hand and his briefcase with the other. Ugwu rushed over to help with the books. “Sah? You will eat?” he asked in English.
“Eat what?”
Ugwu’s stomach got tighter. He feared it might snap as he bent to place the books on the dining table. “Stew, sah.”
“Stew?”
“Yes, sah. Very good stew, sah.”
“I’ll try some, then.”
“Yes, sah!”
“Call me Odenigbo!” Master snapped before going in to take an afternoon bath.
After Ugwu served the food, he stood by the kitchen door, watching as Master took a first forkful of rice and stew, took another, and then called out, “Excellent, my good man.”
Ugwu appeared from behind the door. “Sah? I can plant the herbs in a small garden. To cook more stews like this.”
“A garden?” Master stopped to sip some water and turn a journal page. “No, no, no. Outside is Jomo’s territory, and inside is yours. Division of labor, my good man. If we need herbs, we’ll ask Jomo to take care of it.” Ugwu loved the sound of Division of labor, my good man, spoken in English.
“Yes, sah,” he said, although he was already thinking of what spot would be best for the herb garden: near the Boys’ Quarters where Master never went. He could not trust Jomo with the herb garden and would tend it himself when Master was out, and this way, his arigbe, his herb of forgiveness, would never run out. It was only later in the evening that he realized Master must have forgotten about the burnt sock long before coming home.
Ugwu came to realize other things. He was not a normal houseboy; Dr. Okeke’s houseboy next door did not sleep on a bed in a room, he slept on the kitchen floor. The houseboy at the end of the street with whom Ugwu went to the market did not decide what would be cooked, he cooked whatever he was ordered to. And they did not have masters or madams who gave them books, saying, “This one is excellent, just excellent.”
Ugwu did not understand most of the sentences in the books, but he made a show of reading them. Nor did he entirely understand the conversations of Master and his friends but listened anyway and heard that the world had to do more about the black people killed in Sharpeville, that the spy plane shot down in Russia served the Americans right, that De Gaulle was being clumsy in Algeria, that the United Nations would never get rid of Tshombe in Katanga. Once in a while, Master would stand up and raise his glass and his voice—“To that brave black American led into the University of Mississippi!” “To Ceylon and to the world’s first woman prime minister!” “To Cuba for beating the Americans at their own game!”—and Ugwu would enjoy the clink of beer bottles against glasses, glasses against glasses, bottles against bottles.
More friends visited on weekends, and when Ugwu came out to serve their drinks Master would sometimes introduce him—in English, of course. “Ugwu helps me around the house. Very clever boy.” Ugwu would continue to uncork bottles of beer and Coke silently, while feeling the warm glow of pride spread up from the tips of his toes. He especially liked it when Master introduced him to foreigners, like Mr. Johnson, who was from the Caribbean and stammered when he spoke, or Professor Lehman, the nasal white man from America who had eyes that were the piercing green of a fresh leaf. Ugwu was vaguely frightened the first time he saw him because he had always imagined that only evil spirits had grass-colored eyes.
He soon knew the regular guests and brought out their drinks before Master asked him to. There was Dr. Patel, the Indian man who drank Golden Guinea beer mixed with Coke. Master called him Doc. Whenever Ugwu brought out the kola nut, Master would say, “Doc, you know the kola nut does not understand English,” before going on to bless the kola nut in Igbo. Dr. Patel laughed each time, with great pleasure, leaning back on the sofa and throwing his short legs up as if it were a joke he had never heard before. After Master broke the kola nut and passed the saucer around, Dr. Patel always took a lobe and put it into his shirt pocket; Ugwu had never seen him eat one.
There was tall skinny Professor Ezeka, with a voice so hoarse he sounded as if he spoke in whispers. He always picked up his glass and held it up against the light, to make sure Ugwu had washed it well. Sometimes he brought his own bottle of gin. Other times, he asked for tea and then went on to examine the sugar bowl and the tin of milk, muttering, “The capabilities of bacteria are quite extraordinary.”
There was Okeoma, who came most often and stayed the longest. He looked younger than the other guests, always wore a pair of shorts, and had bushy hair with a parting at the side that stood higher than Master’s. It looked rough and tangled, unlike Master’s, as if Okeoma did not like to comb it. Okeoma drank Fanta. He read his poetry aloud on some evenings, holding a sheaf of papers, and Ugwu would look through the kitchen door to see all the guests watching him, their faces half frozen, as if they did not dare breathe. Afterward, Master would clap and say, in his loud voice, “The voice of our generation!” and the clapping would go on until Okeoma said sharply, “That’s enough!”
And there was Miss Adebayo, who drank brandy like Master and was nothing like Ugwu had expected a university woman to be. His aunty had told him a little about university women. She would know, because she worked as a cleaner at the faculty of sciences during the day and as a waitress at the staff club in the evenings; sometimes, too, the lecturers paid her to come in and clean their homes. She said university women kept framed photos of their student days in Ibadan and Britain and America on their shelves. For breakfast, they had eggs that were not cooked well, so that the yolk danced around, and they wore bouncy straight-hair wigs and maxi-dresses that grazed their ankles. She told a story once about a couple at a cocktail party in the staff club who climbed out of a nice Peugeot 404, the man in an elegant cream suit, the woman in a green dress. Everybody turned to watch them, walking hand in hand, and then the wind blew the woman’s wig off her head. She was bald. They used hot combs to straighten their hair, his aunty had said, because they wanted to look like white people, although the combs ended up burning their hair off.
Ugwu had imagined the bald woman: beautiful with a nose that stood up, not the sitting-down flattened noses that he was used to. He imagined quietness, delicacy, the kind of woman whose sneeze, whose laugh and talk,
would be soft as the under feathers closest to a chicken’s skin. But the women who visited Master, the ones he saw at the supermarket and on the streets, were different. Most of them did wear wigs (a few had their hair braided or plaited with thread), but they were not delicate stalks of grass. They were loud. The loudest was Miss Adebayo. She was not an Igbo woman; Ugwu could tell from her name, even if he had not once run into her and her housegirl at the market and heard them both speaking rapid incomprehensible Yoruba. She had asked him to wait so that she could give him a ride back to the campus, but he thanked her and said he still had many things left to buy and would take a taxi, although he had finished shopping. He did not want to ride in her car, did not like how her voice rose above Master’s in the living room, challenging and arguing. He often fought the urge to raise his own voice from behind the kitchen door and tell her to shut up, especially when she called Master a sophist. He did not know what sophist meant, but he did not like that she called Master that. Nor did he like the way she looked at Master. Even when somebody else was speaking and she was supposed to be focused on that person, her eyes would be on Master. One Saturday night, Okeoma dropped a glass and Ugwu came in to clean up the shards that lay on the floor. He took his time cleaning. The conversation was clearer from here and it was easier to make out what Professor Ezeka said. It was almost impossible to hear the man from the kitchen.
“We should have a bigger pan-African response to what is happening in the American South really—” Professor Ezeka said.
Master cut him short. “You know, pan-Africanism is fundamentally a European notion.”
“You are digressing,” Professor Ezeka said, and shook his head in his usual superior manner.
“Maybe it is a European notion,” Miss Adebayo said, “but in the bigger picture, we are all one race.”
“What bigger picture?” Master asked. “The bigger picture of the white man! Can’t you see that we are not all alike except to white eyes?” Master’s voice rose easily, Ugwu had noticed, and by his third snifter of brandy he would start to gesture with his glass, leaning forward until he was seated on the very edge of his armchair. Late at night, after Master was in bed, Ugwu would sit on the same chair and imagine himself speaking swift English, talking to rapt imaginary guests, using words like decolonize and pan-African, molding his voice after Master’s, and he would shift and shift until he too was on the edge of the chair.
“Of course we are all alike, we all have white oppression in common,” Miss Adebayo said dryly. “Pan-Africanism is simply the most sensible response.”
“Of course, of course, but my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe,” Master said. “I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.”
Professor Ezeka snorted and shook his head, thin legs crossed. “But you became aware that you were Igbo because of the white man. The pan-Igbo idea itself came only in the face of white domination. You must see that tribe as it is today is as colonial a product as nation and race.” Professor Ezeka re-crossed his legs.
“The pan-Igbo idea existed long before the white man!” Master shouted. “Go and ask the elders in your village about your history.”
“The problem is that Odenigbo is a hopeless tribalist, we need to keep him quiet,” Miss Adebayo said.
Then she did what startled Ugwu: she got up laughing and went over to Master and pressed his lips close together. She stood there for what seemed a long time, her hand to his mouth. Ugwu imagined Master’s brandy-diluted saliva touching her fingers. He stiffened as he picked up the shattered glass. He wished that Master would not sit there shaking his head as if the whole thing were very funny.
Miss Adebayo became a threat after that. She began to look more and more like a fruit bat, with her pinched face and cloudy complexion and print dresses that billowed around her body like wings. Ugwu served her drink last and wasted long minutes drying his hands on a dish towel before he opened the door to let her in. He worried that she would marry Master and bring her Yoruba-speaking housegirl into the house and destroy his herb garden and tell him what he could and could not cook. Until he heard Master and Okeoma talking.
“She did not look as if she wanted to go home today,” Okeoma said. “Nwoke m, are you sure you are not planning to do something with her?”
“Don’t talk rubbish.”
“If you did, nobody in London would know.”
“Look, look—”
“I know you’re not interested in her like that, but what still puzzles me is what these women see in you.”
Okeoma laughed and Ugwu was relieved. He did not want Miss Adebayo—or any woman—coming in to intrude and disrupt their lives. Some evenings, when the visitors left early, he would sit on the floor of the living room and listen to Master talk. Master mostly talked about things Ugwu did not understand, as if the brandy made him forget that Ugwu was not one of his visitors. But it didn’t matter. All Ugwu needed was the deep voice, the melody of the English-inflected Igbo, the glint of the thick eyeglasses.
He had been with Master for four months when Master told him, “A special woman is coming for the weekend. Very special. You make sure the house is clean. I’ll order the food from the staff club.”
“But, sah, I can cook,” Ugwu said, with a sad premonition.
“She’s just come back from London, my good man, and she likes her rice a certain way. Fried rice, I think. I’m not sure you could make something suitable.” Master turned to walk away.
“I can make that, sah,” Ugwu said quickly, although he had no idea what fried rice was. “Let me make the rice, and you get the chicken from the staff club.”
“Artful negotiation,” Master said in English. “All right, then. You make the rice.”
“Yes, sah,” Ugwu said. Later, he cleaned the rooms and scrubbed the toilet carefully, as he always did, but Master looked at them and said they were not clean enough and went out and bought another jar of Vim powder and asked, sharply, why Ugwu didn’t clean the spaces between the tiles. Ugwu cleaned them again. He scrubbed until sweat crawled down the sides of his face, until his arm ached. And on Saturday, he bristled as he cooked. Master had never complained about his work before. It was this woman’s fault, this woman that Master considered too special even for him to cook for. Just come back from London, indeed.
When the doorbell rang, he muttered a curse under his breath about her stomach swelling from eating feces. He heard Master’s raised voice, excited and childlike, followed by a long silence and he imagined their hug, and her ugly body pressed to Master’s. Then he heard her voice. He stood still. He had always thought that Master’s English could not be compared to anybody’s, not Professor Ezeka, whose English one could hardly hear, or Okeoma, who spoke English as if he were speaking Igbo, with the same cadences and pauses, or Patel, whose English was a faded lilt. Not even the white man Professor Lehman, with his words forced out through his nose, sounded as dignified as Master. Master’s English was music, but what Ugwu was hearing now, from this woman, was magic. Here was a superior tongue, a luminous language, the kind of English he heard on Master’s radio, rolling out with clipped precision. It reminded him of slicing a yam with a newly sharpened knife, the easy perfection in every slice.
“Ugwu!” Master called. “Bring Coke!”
Ugwu walked out to the living room. She smelled of coconuts. He greeted her, his “Good afternoon” a mumble, his eyes on the floor.
“Kedu?” she asked.
“I’m well, mah.” He still did not look at her. As he uncorked the bottle, she laughed at something Master said. Ugwu was about to pour the cold Coke into her glass when she touched his hand and said, “Rapuba, don’t worry about that.”
Her hand was lightly moist. “Yes, mah.”
“Your master has told me how well you take care of him, Ugwu,” she
said. Her Igbo words were softer than her English, and he was disappointed at how easily they came out. He wished she would stumble in her Igbo; he had not expected English that perfect to sit beside equally perfect Igbo.
“Yes, mah,” he mumbled. His eyes were still focused on the floor.
“What have you cooked us, my good man?” Master asked, as if he did not know. He sounded annoyingly jaunty.
“I serve now, sah,” Ugwu said, in English, and then wished he had said I am serving now, because it sounded better, because it would impress her more. As he set the table, he kept from glancing at the living room, although he could hear her laughter and Master’s voice, with its irritating new timbre.
He finally looked at her as she and Master sat down at the table. Her oval face was smooth like an egg, the lush color of rain-drenched earth, and her eyes were large and slanted and she looked like she was not supposed to be walking and talking like everyone else; she should be in a glass case like the one in Master’s study, where people could admire her curvy, fleshy body, where she would be preserved untainted. Her hair was long; each of the braids that hung down to her neck ended in a soft fuzz. She smiled easily; her teeth were the same bright white of her eyes. He did not know how long he stood staring at her until Master said, “Ugwu usually does a lot better than this. He makes a fantastic stew.”
“It’s quite tasteless, which is better than bad-tasting, of course,” she said, and smiled at Master before turning to Ugwu. “I’ll show you how to cook rice properly, Ugwu, without using so much oil.”
“Yes, mah,” Ugwu said. He had invented what he imagined was fried rice, frying the rice in groundnut oil, and had half hoped it would send them both to the toilet in a hurry. Now, though, he wanted to cook a perfect meal, a savory jollof rice or his special stew with arigbe, to show her how well he could cook. He delayed washing up so that the running water would not drown out her voice. When he served them tea, he took his time rearranging the biscuits on the saucer so that he could linger and listen to her, until Master said, “That’s quite all right, my good man.” Her name was Olanna. But Master said it only once; he mostly called her nkem, my own. They talked about the quarrel between the Sardauna and the premier of the Western Region, and then Master said something about waiting until she moved to Nsukka and how it was only a few weeks away after all. Ugwu held his breath to make sure he had heard clearly. Master was laughing now, saying, “But we will live here together, nkem, and you can keep the Elias Avenue flat as well.”