Dream Count

Four

More days have passed and still I think of pretending, and of why Aunty Jane would think I am.

Don’t pretend that you like the life you are living.

It feels so unbeneficial to pretend to like your life.

Would you pretend to yourself or just to the world, and if you pretended to yourself too, then does the pretending become in some way real?

And what, anyway, is real? The opinions of people unimportant to me have always slid easily off my mind, so why am I now held bound by the words of a dotty aunt? Maybe my superstitious spine is signaling a new year off on an inauspicious start.

I lie in bed long after I have woken up, feeling my spirit grow tart, my body strangely weighted, as though needing to cast off parts of itself.

I should probably walk on my treadmill, although I hate to exercise.

Walking outside is the only tolerable thing, but the sun is already scorching, and so I’ll have to wait for the cooling of dusk.

I tell Philippe I don’t want any breakfast and he asks, “What of small pineapple for Madam?”

“Okay, just pineapple.”

I eat fresh pineapple slices while browsing the news.

The WHO now says the virus is transmitted human to human, which means they don’t know what they are talking about and probably never did.

But how can they know? A novel coronavirus is novel because nobody has seen it before.

There are hundreds of new articles about Kadiatou’s case, and everywhere that unflattering photo of her where her eyes are puffy with a meretricious gleam.

An op-ed calls her “an unlikely choice.”

An unlikely choice for assault.

It starts with the words “The hotel maid does not look as one would have expected,”

then goes on to say she must have agreed to sex in exchange for money.

Who writes this and then goes home and sleeps well at night? It is in the Post, but who sat at their keyboard and typed words to say Kadiatou is good enough to be paid for sex but not good enough to be raped? There are a few articles about him, the man who raped her.

They all have a mournful tone as they list his accomplishments and the dreams he will now forfeit.

Last month, when I watched his arraignment on television, I tried to read his face each time the camera closed in on him.

He was unshaven, his thin lips unsparingly straight, and from time to time he looked at the court and seemed to restrain himself from shaking his head at the absurdity of dealing with this preposterous case of great ignorance.

That he was exasperated, actually exasperated, showed how he thought of himself as the one who was wronged.

A small dark purplish bruise lay on his chin, and I thought perhaps his wife had slapped his face and left the mark for the world to see.

The attractive rich wife whose photo is splashed about with every news update.

She has rented a house in Georgetown, a gilded cage with seven rooms, where they will stay until the trial starts.

Chia says Luuk once met her in France and says she is very lovely.

Of course she is lovely. They always have lovely wives.

—

On For Men Only, I heard from a man who raised money for himself and his mother and his sister to cross over to Lampedusa on a wooden fishing boat and then watched his mother and sister drown when the boat capsized.

He is in Lomé and his wife wants to leave him because he cries all the time and spends what little they have on local gin.

Nobody should expect him ever to be whole again but everyone does.

His relatives are telling him to be a man, now that his life is better with a job and a house from his father-in-law.

He has to play hero of the tale, because he’s a man, but what if he doesn’t want to or isn’t suited for it? I want to write a post to say you don’t have to be a hero, but maybe you can find other ways to be broken—a little less gin, a little more trying to see what is present, your wife and your baby—or maybe you can think of what your mother would want.

But the words don’t come.

The words don’t come and so I shut down my laptop.

From my window I look out to see Mohammed praying in the corner by the compound walls.

The grace of his kneeling, forehead to earth, and rising again; the humility of his bowing and kneeling again.

His movements are heartfelt and fluid, almost joyful if joyful were restrained; it is not mere habit or duty, he is a true believer.

I’ve always felt that it’s why he is so honest, his tongue unable to form a single lie.

I trust him completely.

Is he one of those people born with the good fortune of a purity of spirit, or did being raised in faith create his? Maybe both.

So many people raised in faith are nothing like him, after all.

The men who murdered Uncle Hezekiah were raised in faith.

I feel the sensation that thoughts of Uncle Hezekiah always bring: an internal churning, a rushing of fluids in my head.

If I don’t sit down, my body wavers and threatens to fall.

Uncle Hezekiah, my father’s only brother, a man I loved, but I did not cry when he died.

Which might have been explained by distance, since I saw him a few times each year, but why did I fall apart soon after when another man was murdered, a man who was a complete stranger to me? I wept and moped, shrouded for weeks in lassitude and drifting in its hold.

I sought out books on grief and learned that grief is unpredictable, that our bodies know how best to grieve, and that sometimes we cry long after what we are crying about.

So crying for that stranger was crying for my uncle.

I often tell myself this but I am not convinced.

The stain of betrayal and shame remains.

He was a gentle, kind man, a deserving man, and I cannot understand what is so deficient in myself that I could not simply cry for him. How demeaning, how diminishing, to have cried for him by crying for someone else.

—

It is a drowsy Sunday and Hauwa stops by after dropping her children off on a playdate. She brings me a bag of plantain chips, the fancy kind she orders in small packs tied with gold string.

“Thank you,”

I say, and only after I say “thank you”

do I hear the listlessness of my voice.

“, is something wrong? You’ve been different. Did something happen in the village?”

Her face is soft with concern.

I’m not sure why I haven’t told her what Aunty Jane said, but I haven’t.

Maybe she hopes that something bad did happen in the village, since she begged me not to go, to come to Dubai instead, and I said no.

I know it’s unfair, and almost certainly untrue, but I think it all the same.

I remember her asking flippantly, “Why do you Igbo people always go to your village anyway? What is in the village?”

In response, I showed her photos of Chia’s father’s castle, no word better describes that house than “castle,”

and she swiped through the images and said, “I can see nobody uses the tennis courts,”

with that tinkling laugh of hers.

It was true, weeds were pushing through the concrete at the edges of those courts, but still it felt like something said just to nettle me.

I shouldn’t have shown her those pictures anyway.

It was impulsive and silly, as if the tone in her question called for a marshaling of defenses, and in predictable ways, by brandishing big houses.

To say the village is not as you imagine it to be.

Of course Chia’s father’s house has nothing to do with my attachment to Abba, and of course it’s a unicorn and much of the village is just as villagey as Hauwa imagines.

If I spend Christmas and New Year’s anywhere else, I feel as if I have been served a meal of cold leftovers about to go off.

I love the scent of the village, an ancient smell, of centuries of rainwater and wood fires and earth worship, and I love to watch the bats flying about at sundown as if suddenly freed from jail.

I think of a time when women let their wraps fall at the spring, in worship, bringing to the goddess their sacrifices and despair.

I love the cadence of rural Igbo, the blunt and brash conversations that suffer no fools.

And the striving, the striving, everybody wanting to start a small business, everybody with big trading dreams.

I always eat too much: fresh ukwa my mother makes with dried fish; abacha Aunty Nneka brings from Agulu; onugbu soup that old Nne Matefi, my grandmother’s sister, cooks in her smoke-filled mud kitchen that she has refused to have torn down.

Our relatives tease Chia and call her a foreigner because she hates ukwa and won’t touch onugbu soup from the sooty pot.

This Christmas she said to our great-aunt, “Okay, I’ll eat,”

and I eyed her a warning to stop trying to please, but she went ahead and swallowed the pounded yam and soup, then said in a tight voice, “, I’m going to vomit,”

and I said, “Chia, please not on me.”

As soon as I arrived, days before Christmas, a wiry slip of a woman named Nwando came to our gate demanding to see me, to show me her new keke rickshaw taxi.

I scolded her and said she should not have come, since she knows the only way to thank me is to help another woman.

But secretly my heart swelled with pride.

Two years ago, when I gave her a Robyn Hood grant, she was selling small red peppers on a rusting tray.

Of all the women I have given Robyn Hood grants in my village, only one, a tailor, has failed at her business.

Hauwa will not understand how I come back from all of this feeling sacramental and sated.

“Did something happen in the village?”

Hauwa asks again. “What’s wrong? You just look down. Or you don’t want to spend time with me?”

How quickly Hauwa can change from playful to petulant; she knows it has nothing to do with spending time with her. The next thing she’ll say is, “Okay, I’m going,”

which is a prompt for me to say, “No, don’t go.”

As if on cue, she says, “If I’m disturbing you, if you want me to go, just tell me to go.”

She has an expression on her face that I think of as shrewish, and I think this guiltily because I dislike words like “shrew”

and “termagant,”

for not having male equivalents.

“Hauwa, you know you’re not disturbing me,”

I say. “Nothing happened. Just the normal thing in the village, everybody praying for me to find a husband.”

“Are you serious? Wallahi. Didn’t you say they had stopped?”

“I thought they had.”

“You really don’t want to marry,”

she says, watching me as if in revelation. “You really didn’t dream of a wedding dress and all that?”

“No,”

I say. I did sometimes dream of a child, a little boy, holding his hand as we crossed the street, but in those half-lit dreams there was never a husband.

“Me, I like being a married woman. Marry and then you are free to do what you want. Don’t marry and they will always be on your case. Or at least marry and then divorce,”

Hauwa says.

She almost never speaks of her marriage. I know only that her husband is related to her mother, and travels on business all the time. He appears in her conversation as a reason more than a person. Rabiu is in town so I can’t stay late.

“I see we’re being cynical today,” I say.

“It’s just the truth. You know I will always tell you the truth,”

she says, with emphasis on “you,”

as if to others she will tell lies. “It’s kind of funny, and I don’t mean to add to the stress from the village, but they will stop talking about you in Abuja if you get married.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hadassah’s brother is going around saying you’re dating the vice president, and that he will swear on it, that you are the one who spoiled his contract bid.”

Her gossipy tone surprises me and makes my irritation flare.

The stories about me are the same stories that trail all the single young or youngish women with money in Abuja.

They say I was a runs girl in university and started sleeping with governors then, and I got my promotions from sleeping with CEO and I got contracts from ministers I slept with and my consulting company is a shell for laundering an ex-governor’s spoils.

That last part, of course, is partly true, although I laundered the money when I still worked at the bank.

They tell these stories because it is men who built the secret caves where fortunes are made, and a woman seen inside them must somehow be explained.

Once, at dinner, Jamila brought up some rumor about me, with a malicious smile, and Hauwa flicked her hand in a swift, dismissive way.

“All the people that talk about want to be where she is,”

she said, and then looked around the table and spoke of other things.

I felt pride like a sugar rush in my blood, pride and pleasure at how she shut Jamila down.

Now she has this gossipy tone, making the stories matter.

“Hadassah’s brother must be very important for you to suddenly have time for idle gossip,” I say.

“I just felt you should know.”

Her tone is wounded; she feels herself unfairly reprimanded.

We’re in my room and she gets up from the vanity table and walks to the door that leads to the balcony.

She’s wearing jeans and a button-up tunic and her hair is in one of those turbans dotted with stones.

“You’re going to smoke?” I ask.

“I shouldn’t smoke?”

“I thought you were picking up the kids.”

“So? You think they can tell when I’m high? Just say you don’t want me to smoke. You always act funny when I smoke.”

“Hauwa, that’s not true.”

Smoking Loud makes me itchy and then foggy-brained, but sometimes she decides to forget this and offers me a spliff, and when I turn away she says it is a moral judgment on her.

“Okay, I won’t smoke, sorry,”

she says, in a way that reminds me of how much younger than me she is.

Eight years.

I am relieved when my phone vibrates and it’s my mother, and even though I know it’s just one of those desultory calls to ask how I am, I make a sign to Hauwa to say my mother and I have to have a serious talk.

I want Hauwa to leave.

I have never wanted Hauwa to leave before but now I want her to leave.

I feel an internal agitation whose boundaries I cannot map. She doesn’t wave, not properly; she merely lifts her palm as she picks up the handbag lying on my bed.

The next morning, I send her three How are you? messages that she ignores. Finally, I text, We were not in equilibrium yesterday, and she calls almost immediately, and asks, “What does that even mean?”

“I thought sending something stupid like that might make you react,” I say.

She is silent for a while. “, sometimes you can be cold. Very cold. Like a man.”

To be called cold is not new to me, but it jars to be called cold by her. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“Something is going on that you don’t want to tell me.”

“It’s nothing. Being in the village just made me think.”

“You’re always thinking but this is different.”

“Hauwa, it’s not, honestly.”

I pause. “You heard that somebody has died of the virus in China?”

“Yes, I saw that. And confirmed cases in Japan and Thailand. We have to make sure nobody tells Jide that this thing is spreading.”

I laugh and so does she.

“Why do I want your approval so much?”

she asks, and her asking makes me suddenly happy.

“Just as I want yours. Isn’t that what friendship is, to want each other’s approval?”

I say this feeling faintly false. Friendship should have prefixes, suffixes, gradations. To capture specifically the contentment that descends from having Hauwa near me.

“Is it?”

she asks. “I have many friends but I’ve never met anybody like you.”

—

I returned from America with a jaundiced spirit and a mood like midnight.

Without Hauwa I might not have lifted myself so quickly.

Hauwa was all little gifts and little discoveries: where to get the best kulikuli heated up with ginger and pepper, bath oils that I said would be too messy in my bath and she said just try it, and when she asked me how it was I said sheepishly that it was soothing.

I loved her laughter, especially after she smoked and it took on near-hysterical heights.

“I don’t like salad because it makes my poop come out in pellets, like a goat’s,”

she said, with her hysterical laugh.

We argued once, about a group of Shia Muslims murdered by the Nigerian army after they crowded onto a road, blocking the path of cars.

“They shouldn’t have blocked the road,”

she said, looking at nail-polish colors.

“You’re just saying that because they are Shia. If they were Sunni, you would care more.”

“Of course I would care more. Do you care equally about your mother and a random woman in the street?”

I paused and could not think of what to say in response.

The blithe open simplicity of her positions was refreshing, the way she was instinctive, almost impulsive, the lightness she brought.

She wasn’t interested in my time in America, like my old friends were, and it freed me to put my wounded self away.

—

I had known Hauwa a few months before I first went to her house.

She opened the enormous wooden front door herself and let me in.

Glazed urns stood in a line and the perfectly round faux boxwood that sat in each one made her anteroom look familiar, like a big generic hotel’s entranceway.

Her children were upstairs with their nannies.

Her husband was away. She wanted to show me her books in a small square room whose walls were covered entirely by shelves.

“I told you I had books,”

she said, with her high laugh. “See, I told you my father gave me some old Shakespeare volumes.”

“I didn’t doubt you.”

“Yes, you did. You thought people like me don’t read books.”

She was wearing a purple satin boubou which sheathed her body in a regal sheen, and as she walked, the fringes on her sleeves swayed.

“Is there any painting in your house that isn’t of galloping horses?” I asked.

“You’re judging me.”

“As I should. These paintings are terrible.”

“Not all of us have highbrow taste and know about art, Madam ,”

she said, and she mispronounced my name in that Northern accent I loved.

“Honestly, Hauwa. You can buy some decent paintings.”

“I would rather buy a new handbag or jewelry. How can I be wasting money on paintings?”

“Bags are such poor investments,” I said.

“If it gives you pleasure, then it’s a good investment. Me, I buy diamonds. Everyone likes gold, but I don’t like gold.”

We were in her living room, or one of the many living rooms.

She crossed her legs, and her boubou rode up to show a thin shimmering anklet encircling her leg.

A photo of her and her husband was hanging on the wall.

He was older than I imagined, late fifties maybe, portly, good-looking in an accomplished sort of way.

“So, , there’s something I want to tell you. There’s a party on Friday, my friend’s party. I don’t know if you would like to go,” she said.

“You could ask with a bit more animation,” I said.

“Well, it’s not…it’s a bit alternative. Okay, look, she’s going to have strippers, and some guys doing tantric massage. I’m not sure if you’ll be interested, I mean…”

“Are you serious?”

“How can I be joking?”

“Of course I’m interested.”

She was laughing now as if relieved. “I was worried about how you would react.”

“Why?”

“You know you’re not normal.”

I was by then used to the unexpected curves of life in Abuja, but still it surprised me that Hauwa was inviting me to a party with strippers in a rented flat.

“What’s your friend celebrating?” I asked.

“Life,”

she said. “It’s all women, and all of us are married. You’re the only single one.”

—

At the party I had a rare attack of trembling shyness. Short-stay apartments depress me, with their aura of impermanence, as if many people have trooped in and out, all feeling unfulfilled. I rang the doorbell and somebody shouted, “It’s open!”

The music was turned down low and smooth and the speakers must have been in the walls of each room.

A chef in white was in the kitchen making small chops.

I could smell the frying puff-puff, while a man in a blue uniform was setting up shisha in the living room.

I peered in.

Two women were on the couch looking at something on a phone and laughing.

I wandered inside, looking for Hauwa.

In the first bedroom, a naked woman was on the wide bed and a man without an ounce of fat on him was massaging her back.

The room was dark, and for a moment I thought it was Hauwa, until I saw, in the light from the bathroom, the woman’s weave falling over her shoulders.

Not Hauwa.

The woman’s moans sounded theatrical and I stood at the door watching, feeling faintly theatrical myself and thinking that the man’s muscles looked theatrical too, glistening in the low light like an oiled bodybuilder.

“Do you want happy ending?”

he asked her, and she moaned again before she said, “No, I have some stripper girls coming. Let me save myself.”

Then she laughed. The man turned to me and asked, “Do you want me to massage you?”

I didn’t like his forwardness and I didn’t realize he had known I was standing there, and there was no greater turn-off than his bush accent. “No,”

I said coldly.

A feeling came over me, of self-disgust, to be in this tawdry place watching this scene and to be spoken to by this man whose voice was edged with mocking disrespect.

But Hauwa appeared and the feeling disappeared.

It was the first time I had seen her without her scarf, her hair in cornrows snaking down to her neck, and she looked younger and smaller and jauntier, like a very pretty popular prefect in secondary school.

“I went downstairs to look for you!”

she said. “Come. I made sure they have good whiskey.”

When the two strippers arrived, slender and shapely and not more than twenty-five, I watched them dance naked, touching and licking and shimmying.

One of them playfully pretended to push her nipple into my mouth, and I smiled and moved my mouth away, and asked, “How long have you been doing this work?”

“! Let the girl do her thing! Everything is not an intellectual study!”

Hauwa said, laughing.

“This one is so beautiful,”

one of the women said, placing her hand on the stripper’s unusually narrow waist.

“She’s not bad, but I have a girl who comes to my house to service me whenever my husband travels. You should see that one,”

another woman said.

One stripper was trailing her tongue down Jamila’s body.

Hauwa turned to me. “You want her to do it to you?”

“No,”

I said. “Not my thing.”

Hauwa stood up and pulled her long boubou over her head and flung it on the couch.

A short black spaghetti-strapped slip was underneath, and for a moment I thought she was going to take that off too, and beckon to the stripper.

But she kept it on and got up and said she was going to call her dealer, because she didn’t like the Loud here.

“It’s too mild, it’s not catching me!”

Jamila took Hauwa’s spliff and inhaled. “How can you say it’s not catching you? Nothing is catching you today.”

I went with Hauwa to the balcony. In the slip, her bare shoulders looked exquisitely smooth. Soon Chi-Chi and Jamila joined us.

“Do you have food?”

Hauwa asked the dealer on the phone. “One quarter ounce. Hurry up, please.”

“Ask him to roll it!”

Chi-Chi said, and Hauwa shook her head, ending the call.

“You know I won’t smoke anything that I don’t roll myself. I have my Raw here,”

Hauwa said.

“Hauwa is an expert crush-and-roll babe,”

Jamila said.

The dealer delivered quickly. The greenish-grayish clusters Hauwa unwrapped reminded me of the herbs my mother dried and put in her breakfast eggs. I told Hauwa that I had never smoked in my life, because I had never been interested in smoking.

“, people will see you looking so fine and they won’t know that you’re such a square.”

She was laughing at me, and I liked that she was laughing at me. I understood then that this evening was an act of trust, and she wanted me to see the fullness of her, this secret part of her life.

“Let’s make the square a little rounded. Roll one for me,”

I said, and she did.

I inhaled and coughed, and the itching started after I inhaled again.

But I didn’t mind.

I was learning to inhale with Hauwa sitting beside me, our faces so close they almost touched.

Hauwa inhaling with her brows furrowed as if in thought.

Hauwa exhaling and throwing her head back in a kind of ecstasy.

Hauwa who could hold flames like flowers and flowers as if they were flames. Hauwa.

Somebody wearing only a bra leaned over us and asked me, “Can I have a drag?”

“No,” I said.

That tinkling laugh came from Hauwa. “, everybody shares.”

“Not me. I don’t want anybody’s germs,”

I said firmly.

The woman in the bra left and Hauwa asked me, “What about my germs?”

And then came the attack of shyness.

Suddenly I could not look at Hauwa’s face, so I got up and went into the kitchen, saying I wanted small chops that I didn’t want at all.

I came back to see that someone was passing around tiny white tablets on a plate.

When it came to me, I simply passed it on.

How do people actually swallow something whose provenance is unknown? Inhale, yes, but swallow? Swallowing felt more intimate and the consequences more dire.

The woman in the bra, it was a sparkly bra with rhinestones and crystals, was playing with a balloon, blowing it up and then letting it deflate.

Hauwa said, “I don’t like the balloons, the high is too short. They fill it with gas and you inhale from the balloon.”

“Oh,”

I said, because I didn’t even know what the balloon was.

Hauwa’s eyes were glazed now and she was talking and talking, saying cocaine was overrated, a Lebanese man in Kano supplied her but it made her nose bleed and the high wasn’t even smooth. “It’s Loud for me any day!”

Hauwa said in the tone of an announcement.

Chi-Chi came to us and began to dance a slow drawn-out dance. She was chubby and glitzy, everything about her in high decibels.

“, you don’t want to bless us by letting us see your body,”

Chi-Chi said. I was the only one who had not taken any clothes off, in my flowy palazzo pants and a low-cut satin top.

“You haven’t earned the blessing,” I said.

Chi-Chi laughed the kind of laugh she would not laugh if she were not high. “Okay, but watch out for the rich old women in this town!”

“Why are you telling me?”

I asked, amused.

“They like fine babes like you, with front and back, and they’re always looking for babes that are new to Abuja.”

“ is not new to Abuja,”

Hauwa said sharply. “She just went to America to do her postgraduate and then came back. She can handle all those old aunties.”

After Chi-Chi left, Hauwa said to me, “Why were you laughing with her?”

If Hauwa were a man, I would have known how to handle her possessiveness, swatted it away or coddled it, but I shrugged, silent, and still in thrall to the final tremors of that trembling shyness.