Three
Lockdown was over and I walked and wandered outside.
Cars on the windy suburban road, a tree aflame with flowers, a trilling in the grass.
I walked on the trail and walking ahead of me was a man who stopped briefly to look at a bird on a tree and I thought how wonderful it was to stop on a walk to look at a bird.
We were still alert to small wonders.
Life might yet be life again.
I called Omelogor and told her maybe life would be normal again, and she said, “Yes, let’s dream it into being.”
“Stop laughing at me.”
“I just fired Paul.
He’s been stealing from me for a long time, but this time I had had it.
Why would you open cartons of milk that you’re supposed to deliver to the motherless babies home, and take half the contents and seal it back? And he didn’t have any real remorse, the idiot.”
Beneath Omelogor’s tough tone, I heard a kind of hurt.
“He’ll come begging and say ‘for the sake of my wife and daughter,’ and you’ll shout and shout and then you’ll take him back.”
Omelogor snorted.
The last time I visited her, before Christmas, Paul always seemed nervy and jumpy, as if on the cusp of committing a crime.
Omelogor mocked me whenever I said Nigeria has a smell but it does.
Especially Lagos, the smell of layers of rot, clogged gutters and sewage, salty wind from the ocean.
This time I thought Abuja smelled of space—wide open vistas, the feeling of generous air, and more of it to breathe.
I saw why Omelogor had settled here, Lagos no longer in her plan.
She took me to work, showing me off, saying “This is my cousin Chia,”
first to her boss, the smallish man she called CEO.
On office doors, she rapped, opened, and entered, all in one fluid movement, not pausing to be asked in.
One of the managers looked up from his desk, annoyed, and I felt uncomfortable to be the reason for her barging in.
Still, he forced a smile, accommodating her.
Observing Omelogor’s power brought an intense flush of pride: she could not be dismissed or ignored.
She roused strong emotions in people—admiration and aversion, envy and devotion—but never the graveyard of indifference.
Even those who disliked her listened to her.
Her life felt so charmed.
The eclectic circle of friends at dinner, some with that ferocious stylishness of Nigerian women that made me dizzy and unsure where to focus, on their impossibly swingy wigs, or on their mask-like makeup with severely drawn brows, or on the clothes, fitted, sparkly, sweeping the floor.
After dinner, they played charades and truth or dare in her living room.
They spoke of their domestic help with languid disdain.
Halfway through dinner, Ejiro went out to the balcony to roll a joint; they called it Loud.
Omelogor once said that at Ejiro’s birthday party, waiters circulated every half hour with trays of cocktail glasses, a single white pill in each glass.
Every thirty minutes.
“It was almost as if they couldn’t bear a moment being under the influence of just themselves,”
Omelogor said.
“I didn’t know Abuja was so full of drugs,” I said.
“Chia, you make it sound like some kind of den of extreme iniquity.”
“I mean stories like that sound more like Lagos.”
“Well, it’s not like people are staggering around here high every day.”
That defensive tone, unusual for her, was because of Hauwa, her friend, her newish friend.
The friendship surprised me, such an unlikely closeness, lightweight and heavyweight.
There was something of a small bird about Hauwa, a bright-colored girly bird, quick and pretty, never perching for long enough to be known.
I thought Omelogor would find her depthless and uninteresting.
But affection always blurs sight.
Hauwa was texting her driver to ask him to buy shortbread biscuits.
“I have to send him a picture or you can be sure he will come back with bread,”
she said, not the funniest thing but Omelogor laughed a proud laugh, as if to say, “Look how funny Hauwa is.”
Omelogor had asked if I wanted to come on a day trip to Igboland, to distribute her grants.
Of course I did, a thrill rising in me.
To be part of my cousin’s magical boldness, taking stolen money to redistribute to the poor.
(“Couldn’t you have called the company something else?”
I asked when she first told me about it, and she said, “A certain level of brazenness should be kept brazen all the way.”)
Then she said Hauwa wanted to come, too.
“She knows about Robyn Hood?”
I asked, upset, surprised by how upset I was.
“You hardly know her.”
“What do you mean I hardly know her?”
Omelogor snapped.
“You think I now can’t tell who to trust?”
Anyway, Hauwa did not come with us, something about her husband being back in town, and she rarely went out when he was in town.
In Owerri, we stopped at the bank on Douglas road, for Omelogor to get more cash, a high pile of disgusting refuse piled beside the bank building with its modern metallic sheen.
One of the tellers recognized Omelogor, their famous expert in Abuja branch, and soon the branch manager wanted to say hello to her.
We sat on overstuffed sofas in his office, the tall piles of files on his desk felt ancient, a relic from pre-computer times.
“We actually have two branches on Douglas road,”
the manager was saying, and Omelogor cut him short and said, “Douglas was an English colonial officer who murdered hundreds of Igbo people, and we then named the biggest road in a state capital after him.
The enduring stupidity of the colonized.”
“Well,”
the manager said, looking bemused.
“You know they don’t want us to learn our history.”
“Who is ‘they’? You think anybody cares enough to invent a conspiracy to keep you away from your history? Go and learn your history.
It’s not anybody’s responsibility to teach you.”
Now he was taken aback.
“Ahn-ahn, are we quarreling?” he asked.
“Do you want us to quarrel?”
she responded, suggestive and combative, and I saw him dissolving before her as men always did.
I saw his eyes stray, and his mind collapse into imagination; she saw it too, and later she asked me playfully, “Should I explore him?’
She was in a bad mood and it had to do with Hauwa, my questioning about Hauwa, but I was not sure how.
I was thinking of how to ask her, how to clear the air between us.
In the car, after she had given money to eleven women, Omelogor said, “Hauwa doesn’t actually know the details of Robyn Hood.
She thinks it’s just my money.”
“Okay,”
I said, waiting for more.
“You were right to question how much she knows.
I shouldn’t have snapped.
Only you and Chijioke know the details.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t like her,”
Omelogor said.
“No, it’s not that.”
I paused.
“Well, there isn’t much to like or dislike.”
“Ouch!”
Omelogor said, laughing, and the tension was lifted.
It was then that she asked, about the manager at the bank, “Should I explore him?”
That evening she sent him a text asking if he wanted to come to her hotel room, and of course he did, and she emerged in the morning looking refreshed and amused.
“When men say they would have married you, do they ever wonder if you would have married them?”
she asked me.
“At least he’ll get his two weeks,” I said.
“He lacks intellectual curiosity,”
she said and I began to laugh.
“So no two weeks for him?”
Omelogor is made differently.
Her short passion attacks fascinate me.
But if I lived like that, my heart would be a desert, struck by insatiable thirst, eternally unfulfilled.
—
“But seriously, don’t you ever dream of an entirely different life?”
I asked Omelogor at the end of lockdown.
“Not an impractical one,”
she said.
“Although Aunty Jane really shook me when she said my life is empty.”
“It shook you because you do dream of wanting to be known,” I said.
“, stop looking for a partner in your madness.
And what does it actually mean to be known? You want somebody to study you and cram you like a textbook?”
“Yes, and anticipate me.”
“Anticipate you.”
“If you live your life and die without one person fully knowing you, then have you even lived?”
“Well, I know you fully.”
“It has to be romantic.”
“Why?”
“It just has to be.”
“Your thesis is falling apart.
So you’re not looking to be known, on principle; you’re looking for a heterosexual man who will study you like a textbook.”
“It doesn’t sound as nice when you say it like that.”
We were both laughing and I thought of how much I had missed my cousin, how I longed to hug her again.
“I really wasted time with Darnell,”
I said.
“His ex was cutting herself, a woman clearly in pain, and he turned it into glamour and I actually felt bad that I wasn’t like her.”
“Your voice just changed.”
“What?”
“Talking about Darnell, your voice just changed.”
“Why was he even with me? He didn’t even like me.
Why be with someone just to be cruel to them?”
“Don’t you Americans say that everything is the fault of the parents? Maybe they didn’t hug him every night before bed.”
“His family was solid.
His mother was lovely and had a hair salon.
His father adored him and kept a stable job in the Water Department.”
“Chia, you’re not asking yourself why you were with him.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re allowed to be victim and something else, not just victim.
If you can take some responsibility, if you can say, ‘Okay, he was cruel but I allowed him to be cruel,’ then you can also say, ‘Next time I will not allow a man to be cruel.’?”
“I’ve always known I allowed things I should not have allowed,”
I said, feeling chastised.
“But it’s because I believe that love must ask something of us.”
“That man did not deserve to tie your shoelaces.
Remember your Swedish Nazi? How you said your breakup was nice?”
“What? Oh, Johan.”
“Ahn-ahn.
How can you have forgotten somebody you said you would marry?”
“I never said that.”
“You did.
Until his friend defended the Holocaust or something.”
“I said it was easy being with him.
And he is not a Nazi!”
I was laughing.
“So you didn’t look him up?”
“No.”
“Your dream count is incomplete, then!”