Six
I wake up unrested, shaken by a dream.
I should not have read the book about German terrorist cells before I fell asleep.
It must be why I dreamed of Uncle Hezekiah.
In the dream a man in a dirty white jellabiya was tightening a blindfold around Uncle Hezekiah’s eyes, and at first I was running away from them and then I was running toward them, Uncle Hezekiah on his knees while the man in the jellabiya taunted me, saying he would spare Uncle Hezekiah if I ran fast enough, and I kept running and then I stumbled and woke up to the man’s gleeful laughter and the glint of a raised knife.
I feel jittery.
I rarely have vivid dreams and each time I do, I wonder why, because it cannot be random that some dreams are in color and others are not.
If it is a disturbing dream, then it hovers darkly, each event of the day freighted with foreboding, because I think of dreams as glimpses of the afterlife, that we die when we become the self that dreams.
I usually brush my teeth before I read the news each morning but I read the news first, impatiently, as if to find a clue to my dream, or a reason for this sense of impending doom.
More people have succumbed to the coronavirus in China.
It is now officially “a public health emergency of international concern.”
The Chinese doctor who warned about how bad it can get has died from the virus.
His photo on the screen, his open trusting face, makes me feel for the first time a frightening portent about this virus.
What if it does come to Nigeria? Jide’s voice rings in my head, saying, “We are finished, we are finished.”
If only there were possible precautions to take, if only it wasn’t as limp as wash your hands, wash your hands and don’t touch your face.
My mother calls to say that Aunty Jane asked her to convince me to start the adoption process now, just in case the Chinese virus comes to Nigeria.
“Did Aunty Jane say an angel appeared to her?”
I ask. “What is this obsession with my adopting a child?”
My mother sighs and says, “Your father’s people and their strangeness.”
“Yes,”
I say, knowing that if her own sibling did the same thing, she would not call it strange.
“Jane means well,”
my mother adds, almost reluctantly. “She feels for you.”
Sometimes I sense that I disappoint my mother by not being ravaged by my own childlessness. “Don’t worry, not everyone is meant to have children,”
she will tell me sometimes, seeking sorrow from me. I have never mourned not having children, but Aunty Jane’s words brought the cold drip of melancholy at facing the reality that I now almost certainly cannot, at forty-six. It’s possibility I want, doors kept open. Shut a door that I never even wanted to walk through and I grieve something lost.
“How is Daddy?” I ask.
“Today is the anniversary, your Uncle Hezekiah. You know how it is.”
“Today is the anniversary?”
I almost shout. A shiver spreads goosebumps on my skin. What does it mean, that I dreamed about my uncle on the anniversary of his death that I do not even remember?
“Yes. Why?”
“No, nothing. I just didn’t remember.”
To tell my mother is to open the door to a catalogue of worrying and more and more talking.
As she gets older her superstitions have multiplied, and she attributes supernatural causes to coincidences and illnesses.
On New Year’s Day, a poor confused bird slammed itself against the glass of her bedroom window and my mother launched into prayers about unknown spiritual forces and weapons fashioned against us.
I text Chia to tell her I dreamed about Uncle Hezekiah on the anniversary of his death that I did not even remember, and end my message with a confused emoji.
It’s kind of beautiful that you dreamed of him today, you remembered in your unconscious, she replies.
She says she wishes she had remembered and that she has just texted Aunty Nneka, Uncle Hezekiah’s wife.
I text Aunty Nneka, too, to say, May Uncle’s gentle soul continue to rest in peace.
When I first got the bank job somebody told me, “Speaking Hausa in Abuja opens doors.”
I called Aunty Nneka right away, and over a few weeks she taught me enough Hausa to have basic conversations.
It was an elegant language, mellifluous and easy to learn, but I learned so quickly I thought maybe my tongue still wore faded memories of the simple Hausa Uncle Hezekiah had taught me as a child.
He would visit from Kano and bring us stalks of sugarcane in a sisal bag, and when he first taught me to say one to ten in Hausa, he made it a song.
One- daya, two- bui, three- ukwu, four- hudu …and on saying the last words, ten- gwoma, he would clap for me as if I had made a great accomplishment.
He was gentle, like my father, and they would sit for hours in the half-lit living room talking in quiet tones.
For years I thought his was an Igbo name, Izikaya, until I saw my father write it on a Christmas card, and it amused me, and the next time I saw him I called him Uncle HEZEKIAH with teenage pomposity and he smiled and said don’t pronounce it like that in the village because nobody will know who you are talking about.
I was in university when he was murdered.
Something in my father went to sleep.
Often, apropos of nothing, my father took to saying, musingly, “We once were four.”
Each time he said it, I would count, actually count: my father and Chia’s mother and Uncle Hezekiah and Aunty Jane.
They once were four.
On my last birthday, I sent photos of my small party to my parents and my mother asked who everyone was, and what they did and where they were from, and when she asked about Hauwa—
“This beautiful Northerner, in the scarf, where is she from?”—I didn’t want to say Kano because Kano meant Uncle Hezekiah, and Kano meant the man whose head was impaled and carried on a pole that had once held a signboard, and so I said, “She’s from Kaduna.”
It was close enough to Kano without having the wound of Kano.
—
My vivid dream leaves an aftertaste of fear, a diffuse circling fear.
Throughout the day I feel afraid and I cannot say what I am frightened of.
Maybe it is an inherited African strain, to view unusual occurrences not with curiosity but with fear.
At Uncle Hezekiah’s funeral, my great-aunt Nne Matefi gave me a small plastic bag of bitter kola.
“We must be careful,”
she said solemnly, and told me the Okonkwo children came back for their grandmother’s funeral and by the time they left the village a few days later, they were very sick, their bodies covered in pus-leaking boils.
They had been careless; they had not taken precautions, like always having a piece of bitter kola lodged in their mouth.
Villagers were so full of envy, they lay in wait for the successful to return for funerals and then they made ogwu to kill you or make you sick or make your business fail.
I didn’t reply in my usual mocking way, to say, “Why can’t people make ogwu to bring constant electricity, or fix the bad roads?”
Instead, for the three days of Uncle Hezekiah’s funeral, I went everywhere with a slight swell to my cheek from the piece of bitter kola left unswallowed in my mouth.
And from time to time, I would slip my hand in the pocket of my dress and rub between my fingers the bald smoothness of the nuts and find it oddly calming.
Chia had just had an appendectomy in America and could not come for the funeral and she laughed, asking if the bitter kola didn’t make my mouth feel disgusting.
A bit dry but not disgusting at all.
I had never tasted bitter kola before.
I thought it would be unrewardingly bitter, like a kola nut, but it had the aura of a medicinal herb.
Now I eat a bitter kola at the first sign of a cold and the bracing bitterness cleanses me, and always shortens the cold.
I don’t believe those small nuts kept me safe from evil spiritual forces at Uncle Hezekiah’s funeral, but after the funeral I began to think that I can respect what I do not believe.
Belief in ogwu made no sense, this large unwieldy concoction with no logic at its core.
But so much else lacks logic.
What is the logic of sacrificing to an omniscient God, the point of Jesus dying first before God could save us? Maybe logic is not the point of faith; maybe succor is.
It amuses Chia when I say these things.
The Christmas before she graduated from college, Chia came back with her Black American friend LaShawn.
We spent a day wandering around the village, LaShawn wanting to photograph everything.
A woman in a shop selling hair attachments asked her in Igbo why she was taking pictures of dirty shops and suddenly LaShawn was crying.
“She thinks I belong here, she thinks I’m Igbo,”
LaShawn said.
I felt myself tumbling into history, watching LaShawn.
She might indeed be from here; her ancestor could have been taken from here two hundred years ago.
It moved me and made me like her, and when we returned to Chia’s house, I gave her a book about the history of our village, shoddily printed, opened to the page about my grandfather’s brother who was stolen away as a boy.
That evening, the big news on television was of the man arrested in Lagos with a bag of fresh human parts, two breasts, a head, a kidney and two hands.
He was shown sitting on the floor of a police station cell in a dirty singlet and underwear, gaunt as if his crimes had sucked away at his body and left him looking starved.
“I wouldn’t trust him for a new kidney,”
LaShawn said.
Chia burst out laughing and told LaShawn that the body parts weren’t for organ transfers, that people used them for rituals to get rich. Chia was laughing as if to say “the whole thing is so dumb”
and LaShawn began laughing too and I felt uncomfortable, and then annoyed with Chia. Later I said to her, “Don’t laugh at us; you’ll make LaShawn not proud of her African heritage,”
and she looked incredulously at me. “How are rituals with body parts us ?”
She had that resigned -is-being- expression, as if she could not help her cousin who sometimes said crazy things.
“I don’t mean ritual murder, I mean jazz in general; it’s about a belief system and a worldview. There’s good jazz and bad jazz, and this man is obviously doing the bad, but when you laugh like that you make it all look bad,”
I said, and Chia laughingly replied, “Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again.”
I learned in university to call it jazz instead of ogwu, a younger generation’s hipper name, and pan-Nigerian since it was English, and so we could speak of Yoruba jazz and Hausa jazz and Igbo jazz.
In final year a girl I hardly talked to whose room was on my hostel floor said another girl in my department had said the only reason boys kept chasing me was because I used jazz.
I imagined myself bending low to enter the spooky home of a dibia, with its tortoises and dead chicks and whatever else, and then emerging with potions in small dirty bottles, or maybe a string around my waist which, as I walked past men, would make them follow me.
To make the gossip-bringer feel satisfied of my hurt and expectant of my confrontation with the other girl, I raised my voice and said, “What rubbish! How can she say that about me!”
The gossip-bringer left looking pleased; there are people who find satisfaction in setting up the stage for other people’s battles.
I never confronted the girl in my department, of course, but each time I saw, I looked at her with fascination, thinking: She believes this, she really believes this.
—
The dream of Uncle Hezekiah, the coronavirus spreading, the news coverage of Kadiatou.
It’s all too much and I absently study the rice and stew on my plate, my appetite gone.
Philippe says nothing as he clears away the food and shuts the kitchen door more gently than he normally would.
I walk slowly and I feel an internal liquid softening, as if with a little exertion my insides might begin to melt.
Suddenly all I want is to sit with Atasi.
When she was a small child she would sit in my lap while I read to her, or while I ate, slipping her a piece of fish or meat from time to time.
Only a year or two ago, I could still coax her out of her isolation to watch game shows on TV, or sometimes to go for a walk.
Now it seems we talk only when she is asking me for things.
I find her in her room, lying in her bed, fashion magazines scattered around.
She looks at me with puzzled eyes, as if there must be a reason why I’ve come into her room but she can’t remember it now.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
She shrugs, then extends her phone to show me a photo of a girl wearing a bikini.
“This is ab goals,” she says.
“Poor soul didn’t eat for the twenty hours before this photo was taken and she is sucking in her belly,” I say.
Atasi looks at the ceiling to show she expected me to disappoint her as usual, and I wish I had said something different.
“Did you hear about the women who died in Lagos after Brazilian butt surgery?”
I ask, gesturing to my own phone as if it is now my turn to offer it to her.
The women were twenty-two and twenty-three.
They couldn’t afford the American-trained doctor everyone went to, and when his nurse offered them the surgery for less, they accepted.
On social media there are photos of the nurse in what she called her operating room, and photos of the girls with the letters RIP splashed across their bodies, pretty girls with arched eyebrows and glittery highlighter on their cheeks.
“It’s so bad what that nurse did,”
Atasi says.
“Yes, terrible,”
I say. I hope she will say something else but she doesn’t.
I ask if she’s decided what to wear to the party tomorrow, her friend’s sixteenth.
“Not yet,”
she says, and looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to leave.
“It’s in Maitama?”
“Yes.”
“Paul will take you.”
“Can Chiso and Cynthia come and get ready here in our house?”
“Yes,”
I say, and I like the sound of her saying “our house.”
—
My mother was unhappy when I bought this house. She walked reluctantly from room to room, as if afraid that showing excitement would give the house an approval it did not deserve.
“Is this marble floor a little slippery?”
she asked, standing in the middle of my vast living room.
“No,” I said.
“You’re too young to have this kind of house. Men get intimidated. Why not a flat, a very big flat, bigger than your last one?”
she asked.
“There were no big flats on the market,”
I said brightly.
At the door of the bedroom next to mine, she stopped, not entering. “Ahn-ahn, there are things here.”
“This is Atasi’s room,” I said.
My mother sighed. “Why does she have a room? A man that wants to marry you might not like this arrangement.”
“What if I find a man who likes it?”
She was in Abuja because I was taking her the following week to America for a checkup.
She did not feel unwell but said she wanted a checkup in America.
Among her friends, the latest boast was your child organizing a checkup abroad.
India was popular, the care was as good and cheaper than England, but America carried the heaviest boasting weight.
On the phone I heard her say to a friend, “ is taking me to America for a checkup.
You know these children, I told her everything is fine and that I don’t need it, but she is insisting.”
I held back from laughing. My mother’s expertise at fake modesty often astonished me. I was looking forward to the trip just to see Chia. My darling Chia. My mother once said, “You really have time for Chia,”
as if she wished I didn’t.
“She’s my cousin.”
“You have other cousins.”
My mother throughout childhood kept pushing me to be close to her brother’s child, Chinyere, but we never had much to say to each other; Chinyere had a faded personality, as if she might have been vibrant in a different life.
Then Chinyere died in childbirth and for weeks I shied away from thinking of her, because it left me overwhelmed with an irrational guilt, the sense that if I had been nicer to her and replied to her tedious text messages, then she might not have died.
Yes, I have time for Chia.
Chia is easy to love, but had she not been, I would have loved her still.
Sometimes two humans have spirits fully at rest with each other and lucky for us we are also related.
My mother likes to say, “Chia is just roaming around not doing anything serious.
If you leave it to her, by the next generation all their money will have been frittered away.”
Bless my darling mother, but she drinks a glass of entitlement every morning, in a strong Igbo flavor, the kind that leaves distant relatives calmly convinced that all you have toiled for is also somehow theirs.
“There is only so much Italian gold one person can wear,”
my mother would often say about Aunty Adaeze, in my teenage years when her resentment was at its peak.
“Mummy, Aunty Adaeze owes us nothing.”
Then I would list what Aunty Adaeze had done: she bought my father a car, she sent money when academics were striking and the government stopped paying salaries.
“They could do more and not even notice. They could have sent you abroad to university; they know how bright you are.”
My mother would then mumble about my father being so vague and uninterested in these things, otherwise he could have pressured his sister to do more.
I didn’t want Aunty Adaeze to do more for us because I did not want to drown in the lake of thank-you.
I wanted to be able to do more for us—myself and my parents and my little brother Ifeatu—and therefore leave my skin unmarked by the stigmata of eternal gratitude.
At fourteen, I already planned to study finance in Enugu campus, because I had read a story of a young man who as a banker became exceedingly rich.
After our junior secondary exam results came out, my favorite teacher, Mrs.
Orjiani, began lovingly crafting my future. “ is our best student, of course she will study medicine,”
she said in the staffroom and I smiled agreeably, knowing she was wrong.
—
With money from my PGT shares, I could fund my father’s research and send my brother to the UK and appease my mother’s ancient entitlements.
Ifeatu went to do a master’s in engineering, and in all these years he has not been back home; he lives in Wales, a recluse who never calls.
“I don’t know, maybe Ifeatu should have stayed in Nigeria,”
my mother has taken to saying, in a voice strained with the faintest reproach.
Yet it was she who pushed and pushed for me to pay for the masters and for his rent until he found a job.
She pushed for the new house in the village, the house outside campus in Nsukka, the car, the gold jewelry she apologetically said was “so expensive”
while still asking for it.
I felt she no longer deserved the luxury of resenting Aunty Adaeze and Chia, but it had been a part of her for so long that she could not stop her sniping, her calculating and measuring.
She was visiting me when a Malaysia Airlines plane went missing, and on television people were asking how a whole plane could just disappear.
“Better check that your cousin is not on the plane that disappeared since she is always flying up and down,”
my mother said. It was the first time her cracks at Chia deeply upset me. It felt mean-spirited, an unacceptable joke.
“So if Chia is really traveling, this is how you’ll say it?” I asked.
“Of course I know she is not in Malaysia.”
“How do you know?”
She looked at me then, her face still with hesitant doubt. “She’s not, is she?”
she asked in a small voice.
I knew Chia was in Germany with her new man, the Swede with long hippie hair, but still I stupidly called her just to be sure. “Yes, I’m in Berlin,”
Chia said, sounding downcast, her voice mumbling over the phone.
“ Kedu? Are you okay?”
I asked, more concerned than usual because my mother’s comments had left me on edge.
“Yes. We just got back from a dinner at this German woman’s house. I’ll tell you later,” she said.
“But no problems?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
The Swedish man sounded like the kind of unserious White person who was happy without a real job.
Chia already had the unserious gene and she needed somebody with his feet firmly on the ground, and if it must be a White man, then somebody like Luuk.
When I first met Luuk, in New York, we went out to dinner and he looked at the menu and made a sound to show the absurd.
“What is this, squid ink? It sounds bad, no? If they must serve a dish with squid ink, then give it a different name; who wants to eat ink? And the ink of a squid?”
I liked him right away. (When we went swimming, I watched him float, long and lean, and his paleness made me think guiltily of uncooked chicken. I watched Chia swim over to him and tenderly touch the side of his face, and thought to myself: Amazing how we like what we like.)
Luuk at least had a sense of humor, unlike Darnell, that love of Chia’s life, who didn’t feel any emotion but could talk about the semiotics of emotion.
I remember how Chia kept scratching at hard unyielding dirt, looking for reasons everywhere but at him. She says the Englishman was her great love, but it is Darnell who left her serrated with scars. My darling Chia, so sophisticated and traveled and yet so innocent and new.
There’s a helplessly feminine quality about her, with that beautiful face and small slim body: her breakability, her dreaminess.