Nine
I playfully back away from hugging my cousin Afam. “Are you safe? You Lagos people have the virus.”
The Italian man with the virus may be in quarantine, but now there is talk that the people on his flight won’t come to be tested, or the people in his company’s health clinic in Lagos.
Doctors don’t have the protective equipment they need.
Some doctors have tested positive but refuse to quarantine.
“I’m safe. I haven’t been close to any Italians,”
Afam says.
Our hug is warm and lasting.
I tell him he is growing the symbol of successful Nigerian men: a paunch.
When he smiles, I see Chia’s father in the kind crinkle of his eyes and in his teeth, the front two slightly large.
Whenever he is in Abuja on business, he comes by to see me, and we enjoy our time together.
He has a warm, genial air, unlike his twin, Bunachi, that gaseous trial of a man.
Chia always says Bunachi and I should never be left alone in a room because it will result in a corpse and another near-dead form.
Afam has brought me whiskey and he places the bottle on a side table and says, “For one of the boys.”
I went with him to a wedding in Lagos and this man he knew came lapping around me, asking for my number, asking what I would drink.
I said a whiskey neat and he replied with displeasure, “That is not a feminine drink, it’s a drink for one of the boys.”
Afam laughed and laughed. “Don’t mind the bush man,”
he told me, but since then he has taken to sending me texts saying, Just checking in on one of the boys.
“This coronavirus thing is scary,”
I tell Afam.
“I don’t think it will affect us much. You know Nigeria has a way of being outside of the center of things, for good and bad,”
Afam says, and something in his voice, reasonable and sane, makes me feel better.
“I know.”
“So how is the solo consulting going?”
“Not bad. You should see my client list.”
“Did the guy from Vestex Investments call you?”
“Yes. Thank you, Afam, darling cousin of life.”
“I haven’t told you what percentage of your fees I want as project finder.”
We laugh. “I haven’t resumed this year. I decided to take some time and stay home doing nothing.”
“Don’t get complacent,”
Afam says.
“You know me. I won’t.”
“It’s not as glamourous, being on your own,”
Afam says, and I think of how through the years I enjoyed seeing my photos in the newspapers, beside the great and the rich, at our bank events and at every major corporate do. I don’t miss it. Those years were filling and I no longer wanted more servings.
“Do you ever regret leaving?”
Afam asks, and I don’t think about it before I say, firmly, “No.”
—
I must have thought of leaving, from time to time, over the years, musingly, fleetingly, but my decision was made when my mother told me Mr.
Nduka had died.
It was a day before my birthday and my hairdresser had come to install a kinky-straight wig.
I gestured for her to stop the fitting and tugging so that I could focus on the call.
Mr.
Nduka had not been paid his pension in eleven months and the government kept delaying and dallying and organizing endless pension-verification exercises, claiming dead people were still collecting pensions.
Mr.
Nduka was there early at seven to prove he wasn’t dead, and he stayed waiting in the sun for hours and he wasn’t feeling too well and he collapsed and died, and from the pension-verification center he was taken in the boot of a car to the mortuary.
Mr.
Nduka was my father’s old friend, a civil servant of the old breed, and my image of him was in a crisp short-sleeved shirt and a tie, eternally proper and straight.
I had just laundered money for the governor of his state.
A minuscule fraction could have paid the pension of thousands of workers like him.
When I graduated first class he brought me a gift, a gray rooster with a floppy red comb that we kept for weeks before finally having it for Sunday lunch.
The night he died, I dreamed of him, and even though in real life he was stocky, in the dream he was gangly and thin.
Then he collapsed and turned instantly into dry bones.
A heap of dried bones, whitish in tone.
The government did not pay pensions because they said family members were claiming pensions on behalf of dead people, but I had hoarded billions of state money in a short-term high-interest account and called it after some months and deposited the interest in the governor’s private accounts and then put the money back in another high-interest account.
Cycling public money to make private money.
While Mr.
Nduka was slumping slowly to his death, his pension was earning interest for the governor of his state, all impeachably done by me.
My self-contempt came in waves that made me nauseous.
From circling the mediocre, I had embraced it, and now I had become it.
My mother must have felt my expression was a little too pained for a man I had not known that well.
“ Nne, anything wrong?”
“No, no, I just feel bad,” I said.
“It is sad, but it has nothing to do with you.”
She had no idea what I did, what I really did; my parents were na?ve to so many deceptions of Nigerian life.
They trustingly waited each month for the university to deposit their salaries in their bank accounts, and they had only one account and did not understand what investing was about.
They believed I was doing honest, brilliant work.
On my birthday, my father began his birthday message with “Our pride and joy.”
My domestic staff surprised me with a small cake and a handmade card in which each of them wrote messages in blue ink.
I was surprised that Mohammed could write English; his message, the shortest, read, Madam you are good.
It felt like a taunt, or a rebuke or a final chance at redemption.
Why hadn’t they written notes on my previous birthdays, when they would appear in the living room to say happy birthday with sheepish smiles and thank me for the cake Philippe had given them?
—
An outside agency was now hiring all new bank staff and I discovered that the agency belonged to CEO.
Giving himself loans that he never paid back was one thing, but owning an agency that cut small slices from the already small salaries of his new staff? His petty grasping disgusted me.
He often complained of an ulcer, his face crumpling from pain in the middle of meetings, and he seemed more and more feeble, his vibrancy gone.
One day he came to work with heavy-framed black glasses sitting stolidly on his face and he looked like an elderly man who had taken his son’s cool glasses.
“You don’t like them?” he asked.
“Your thin wire rims are more flattering, sir,” I said.
“Maybe when you take over we’ll have a CEO who can wear original designer glasses that suit,”
he said. He sometimes said things like that, hinting at succession, throwing out little crumbs as if to lure a bird into a trap. But I was already looking away, overcome by a desire to cleanse my moral palate and rinse out my life.
I kept waiting for the right time to tell CEO that I wanted to leave. One day, he asked me to handle a transaction with a private banking client, a new client he had poached from the enemy-friend’s bank with an interest-rate offer that made no business sense. The client was always on those magazine lists of wealthiest Africans, but he wasn’t half as wealthy as they claimed. He wore a showy watch with the showing-off air of an obnoxious arriviste.
“? What kind of name is that?” he asked.
“My name, sir.”
“I’ve not heard that name before. From where? Rivers State?”
“Anambra.”
“Oh. Igbo girl.”
His mouth curved slightly downwards at the edges. “Do you know what you are doing? I don’t want somebody to do a nonsense transaction.”
Maybe he disliked Igbo people, or he resented confident women, or both, or neither and was just one more human being naturally adorned with a nasty streak. But in that moment something was sealed.
I stood up. “Excuse me, sir. Let me check and see if any of my colleagues is willing to talk to a rude client, because I’m not.”
I walked out, already imagining CEO’s anger, how he would shout at me and then scramble to appease the man. And he did, but also his eyes narrowed looking at me, thinking how out of character my reaction was. I had overlooked worse, laughed away a man who told me he could not trust any Igbo banker, shrugged at another who asked for a man because women got nervous at big transactions.
“Did anything else happen?”
CEO asked.
“No, sir.”
I paused. “I want to take a leave of absence and go to graduate school in America.”
“Ahn-ahn, because I shouted at you?”
“No, sir, you did not start shouting at me today.”
“So why?”
“I feel that I need a break, to recharge my brain.”
“Okay. We can pay for the executive course.”
He thought I meant one of those overpriced short courses business people take so they can append the names of exalted American universities to their measly CVs.
“I want to do a proper master’s,” I said.
“Not that you need an MBA,” CEO said.
“Not an MBA. A master’s in cultural studies. I’m interested in pornography.”
“Pornography,”
he repeated, and laughed as if it was just one of the strange things I said. “And you’ll come back afterwards and share your newly acquired skills with the bank?”
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded, but he was not a stupid man, and I sensed he could tell that beneath my equanimity tectonic plates were shifting.