over the last few weeks, but they had conveniently brushed it aside. However, there was something commanding, and urgent in Mr. Bergdorf's voice that neither of them could ignore. Following his advice, they picked a date that was exactly two months from that day: August 16th. Now that they had a definite date, they began to plan their wedding in earnest.
The first person Remi told about the wedding date was Olisa. He knew from day one that she was engaged, but hearing the actual wedding date from her lips threw him into a state of frenzy. She broke the news to him while they were both relaxing at Freibad Plötzensee, one of Berlin's urban beaches. As soon as she made her announcement, he jumped off the blanket they were both lying on, stretched as it was on the sand. Then, he did something that puzzled Remi: he got down on both knees and begged her to cancel the wedding.
"Remi, please hear me out," he pleaded in response to her protests. Although she knew that whatever he was going to say would make her decision more difficult, she decided to And she granted him an audience.
"Happiness and duty are not the same thing. The luckiest people alive are the ones who find them both in a single person. A special person. Remi, if you'll be the honest person I know you to be, you'll admit that your happiness does not lie with Kayode. If you married him right now, it would only be out of a sense of duty because you came all the way to Berlin for his sake. You don’t love him. Your heart belongs to someone else--"
"And another woman's heart belongs to you, Olisa!" Remi interrupted, eyes blazing. "Don’t try to force my hand when your hands are not clean. Do I need to remind you of Amaka?"
"I'm just dating her. It's not like we're engaged or anything," Olisa said, sulking.
"I bet you that’s not what she's thinking. Besides, should it matter? Should the absence of an engagement ring on her finger, somehow lessen the depth of your commitment to her?"
"You don’t know Amaka. She's lazy and can't cook--" he started.
"But you knew all this before you started dating her. What changed?"
Olisa offered no response. Remi paused, took a deep breath and continued.
"See, this won't work with me. If you're already bad-mouthing a woman who has known you longer than I have, then what do I have to look forward to? It's only a matter of time before you start bad-mouthing me too. Besides … " Remi said, tearing her eyes away from Olisa's crestfallen face, "emotional decisions are the worst kind. I mean, look at us …"
"So, you think this was a mistake, don’t you? What we have means nothing to you," Olisa said bitterly.
"No, that's not what I … Well yes … You know what I mean--" Remi said.
"Do I?"
"Look, Olisa, I feel bad … For Amaka's sake. She doesn’t deserve what I … what we've done to her. Neither does Kayode," Remi said with a sigh.
"I honestly don’t care about Kayode," Olisa said, a cold look in his eyes.
"And you don’t care about Amaka too, from your account. So who do you care about, apart from yourself?" Remi replied angrily.
"I thought that the answer would be obvious to you by now," Olisa said quietly, looking at her intently. Remi felt like someone had poured ice cold water on her. Just a few weeks back, she had felt hurt by Kayode's lack of attention and general coldness to her. That hurtful feeling was still fresh in her heart, and she could never have dreamt that she would be the one hurting someone else. Or other people.
They left the beach soon afterwards. Olisa would be leaving for Nigeria within three days. Before they parted that afternoon, he reminded her that she had a decision to make: she had to choose between staying in Berlin to marry Kayode or eventually relocating back to Nigeria to pursue a relationship with Olisa. Olisa had made it clear that he would not be satisfied with a mere relationship with Remi. Marriage was his ultimate goal. And she had to let him know what her choice was before he left. She agreed.
With the weight of this decision on her shoulders, Remi returned to the apartment she shared with Kayode. That very evening she fell ill, and she knew that this illness could not be cured by any medicine. It was in vain that Kayode tried to convince her to go to the hospital to see a doctor. It was just a slight fever, which would soon pass, was her reply.
And in a sense, she was right. It was a fever, the kind that is caused by extensive mental deliberation, aggravated by fear and anxiety. She did not go for her language class on those days, but spent hours holed up in her room, consumed with the fear that she would make the wrong decision. Kayode, in these hours, called frequently to check up on her during the day, and was her faithful nurse when he arrived from work. He was attentive to her every need and saw to it that she was as comfortable as was possible.
However, on the second day of her strange malady, which she had told Kayode was a side effect of her monthly visits from Mother Nature, she was alone at home. Kayode had gone to work that morning. About two hours after he left, she woke up to find that the over-the-counter medication that she had been using was not on her nightstand as usual. She got up from her bed and began to look for it. It wasn’t in her room, or the kitchen or any of the common areas where it was likely to be. Then, a thought occurred to her: Kayode had probably taken it to his room and forgot it there.
Convinced that this theory was the most plausible one, she lumbered to Kayode's room, which was right next to hers. As a general rule, she never went to his room in his absence, out of respect for his privacy. But today was different. She genuinely needed something that was possibly in that room.
Kayode's room was a lot neater than Remi's own, owing to the fact that he was more finicky about putting items in specific places. He hated people moving things from where he was accustomed to leaving them. So, he had books - mostly hard backed books - organized by color and size on a tall book shelf facing his queen-sized bed. The in-built closet was closed, but Remi felt sure that if she opened it, she would find the clothes hanging neatly from the hangers. His shoes were neatly packed into sectioned squares in a cube-shaped, shoe organizer made from a durable linen fabric. The entire room looked like a four-star hotel room before guests unpacked their luggage and made the room theirs. One could not help being impressed with the level of organization, especially since this room belonged to a man.
As Remi stepped in Kayode's rather organized world, her first thoughts were to search in the side-table beside his bed, which doubled as his nightstand. The little table, made of cherry wood, had just one drawer. As soon as she pulled it out, she took one look at the interior and immediately saw that what she was looking for was not there. The drawer contained a single item: a leather-bound blue journal. Ordinarily, Remi would have closed the drawer and continued her search in another part of the room, except for one thing: there was a single word handwritten in whimsical flourishes on the cover of the book. It was her name: Remi.
She was so taken aback by surprise at her discovery that she sat down suddenly on Kayode's bed. The grogginess she had felt moments before was gone and in its stead, was an all-consuming desire to know what was written in this book which bore her name. Then began the internal battle between principle and curiosity: should she open this journal and read its contents or pretend like she never saw it, consoled with the thought that she was a principled person and it was wrong to violate another person's privacy? It took her less than thirty seconds to make up her mind. In the end, curiosity won.
With trembling hands and her heart thumping so loud she was sure the neighbors could hear it, she opened the journal and began to read it. It took her a full hour to completely digest its contents, and in that time, she went through a whole gamut of emotions, some of which she did not know she was capable of experiencing. She cried, she laughed, she screamed, she even danced at some point. What she read was far better than a Nollywood movie script. And she discovered that Kayode was also an artist.
The journal was a compendium of thoughts by Kayode, expressing how he felt about Re
mi, in words that he had found necessary to put down in writing. Each section was prefaced by a little poem and a sketch of Remi, with different facial expressions. Remi recognized the sketches immediately. They were reproductions of her personal pictures, which she had sent to Kayode during the months when they were dating in Nigeria. Kayode talked about the depth of his love for Remi and how he knew she was meant for him. It also contained, to Remi's surprise, Kayode's insecurities and his uncertainties about being able to show Remi how much he cared about her. It seemed that the Kayode who wrote these words was not the same man who she had openly and inwardly criticized for his nonchalance and coldness towards her.
But perhaps, the most shocking part of Kayode's confessions were his thoughts on marriage. He started out by writing that he was determined not to make the same mistake his parents had made. He knew his parents loved each other, and he had no gripe with that. What annoyed him, however, was the fact that his father was guilty of showing too much affection for his mother. His mother who was extremely manipulative, used her husband's love for her as a weapon against him at every opportunity she had. She knew that she was his ultimate weakness. Kayode who had observed this dynamic in his parents'