Africa39 (3 page)

One of those people might have been her ex-boyfriend Udenna.

The knock sounded again, louder. She looked through the peephole: a pudgy, dark-skinned man who looked vaguely familiar though she could not remember where she had seen him before. She opened the door. He half-smiled and spoke without meeting her eye. ‘I am Nigerian. I live on the third floor. I came so that we can pray about what is happening in our country.’

She was surprised that he knew she, too, was Nigerian, that he knew which apartment was hers, that he had come to knock on her door; she still could not place where she had seen him.

‘Can I come in?’ he asked.

She let him in. She let into her apartment a stranger wearing a slack Princeton sweatshirt who had come to pray about what was happening in Nigeria, and when he reached out to take her hands in his, she hesitated slightly before extending hers.

He prayed in that particularly Nigerian Pentecostal way that made her uneasy: he covered things with the blood of Jesus, he bound up demons and cast them in the sea, he battled evil spirits. She wanted to interrupt and tell him how unnecessary it was, this bloodying and binding, this turning faith into a pugilistic exercise; to tell him that life was a struggle with ourselves more than with a spear-wielding Satan; that belief was a choice for our conscience always to be sharpened.

He prayed and prayed, pumping her hands whenever he said ‘Father Lord!’ or ‘in Jesus’ name!’ Then she felt herself start to shiver, an involuntary quivering of her whole body. Was it God? Once, years ago when she was a teenager who meticulously said the rosary every morning, words she did not understand had burst out of her mouth as she knelt by the scratchy wooden frame of her bed. It had lasted mere seconds, that outpouring of incomprehensible words in the middle of a Hail Mary, but she had truly, at the end of the rosary, felt terrified and sure that the white-cool feeling that enveloped her was God.

Now, the shivering stopped as quickly as it had started and the Nigerian man ended the prayer. ‘In the mighty and everlasting name of Jesus!’

‘Amen!’ she said.

She slipped her hands from his, mumbled ‘Excuse me,’ and hurried into the bathroom. When she came out, he was still standing by the door in the kitchen.

‘My name is Chinedu,’ he said.

‘I’m Ukamaka,’ she said.

‘This plane crash is terrible,’ he said. ‘Very terrible.’

‘Yes.’ She did not tell him that Udenna might have been in the crash. She wished he would leave, now that they had prayed, but he moved across into the living room and sat down on the couch and began to talk about how he had heard of the plane crash as if she had asked him to stay. He told her he did not realise initially that there were two separate incidents – the first lady had died in Spain shortly after a tummy-tuck surgery in preparation for her sixtieth birthday party, while the plane had crashed in Lagos minutes after it left for Abuja.

‘I know somebody who was on the flight,’ she said. ‘Who might have been on the flight.’

‘Jehovah God!’

‘My boyfriend Udenna. My ex-boyfriend, actually. He was doing an MBA at Wharton and went to Nigeria last week for his cousin’s wedding.’ It was after she spoke that she realised she had used the past tense.

‘You have not heard anything for sure?’ Chinedu asked.

‘No. He doesn’t have a cell phone in Nigeria and I can’t get through to his sister’s phone. Maybe she was with him. The wedding is supposed to be tomorrow in Abuja.’

‘God is faithful. God is faithful!’ Chinedu raised his voice. ‘God is faithful. Do you hear me?’

A little alarmed, Ukamaka said, ‘Yes.’

The phone rang. Ukamaka stared at it, the black cordless phone she had placed next to her laptop, afraid to pick it up.

Chinedu got up and made to reach for it and she said ‘No!’ and took it and walked to the window. ‘Hello? Hello?’ She wanted whomever it was to tell her right away, not to start with any pre­­­ambles. It was her mother.

‘
Nne,
Udenna is fine. Chikaodili just called me to say they missed the flight. He is fine. They were supposed to be on that flight but they missed it, thank God.’

Ukamaka put the phone down on the window ledge and began to weep. First, Chinedu gripped her shoulders, then he took her in his arms. She quieted herself long enough to tell him Udenna was fine and then went back into his embrace, surprised by the familiar comfort of it, certain that he instinctively understood her crying from the relief of what had not happened and from the melancholy of what could have happened and from the anger of what remained unresolved since Udenna told her, in an ice-cream shop on Nassau Street, that the relationship was over.

‘I knew my God would deliver! I have been praying in my heart for God to keep him safe,’ Chinedu said, rubbing her back.

Later, after she had asked Chinedu to stay for lunch and as she heated up some stew in the microwave, she asked him, ‘If you say God is responsible for keeping Udenna safe, then it means God is responsible for the people who died, because God could have kept them safe, too. Does it mean God prefers some people to others?’

‘God’s ways are not our ways.’ Chinedu took off his sneakers and placed them by the bookshelf.

‘It doesn’t make sense.’

‘God always makes sense but not always a human kind of sense,’ Chinedu said, looking at the photos on her bookshelf. It was the kind of question she asked Father Patrick, although Father Patrick would agree that God did not always make sense, with that shrug of his, as he did the first time she met him, on that late summer day Udenna told her it was over. She and Udenna had been inside Thomas Sweet, drinking strawberry and banana smoothies, their Sunday ritual after grocery shopping, and Udenna had slurped his noisily before he told her that their relationship had been over for a long time, that they were together only out of habit, and she looked at him and waited for a laugh, although it was not his style to joke like that. ‘Staid’ was the word he had used. There was nobody else, but the relationship had become staid. Staid, and yet she had been arranging her life around his for three years. Staid, and yet she had begun to bother her uncle, a senator, about finding her a job in Abuja after she graduated because Udenna wanted to move back when he finished graduate school and start building up what he called ‘political capital’ for his run for Anambra State governor. Staid, and yet she cooked her stews with hot peppers now, the way he liked. She left Thomas Sweet and began to walk aimlessly all the way up Nassau Street and then back down again until she passed the grey stone church and she wandered in and told the man wearing a white collar and just about to climb into his Subaru that life did not make sense. He told her his name was Father Patrick and that life did not make sense but we all had to have faith nonetheless. Have faith. ‘Have faith’ was like saying be tall and shapely. She wanted to be tall and shapely but of course she was not; she was short and her behind was flat and that stubborn soft bit of her lower belly bulged, even when she wore her Spanx Body Shaper, with its tightly restraining fabric. When she said this, Father Patrick laughed.

‘“Have faith” is not really like saying be tall and shapely. It’s more like saying be OK with the bulge and with having to wear Spanx,’ he said. And she had laughed, too, surprised that this plump white man with silver hair knew what Spanx was.

Ukamaka dished out some stew beside the already-warmed rice on Chinedu’s plate. Chinedu held up the fork she had placed on his plate. ‘Please give me a spoon.’

She handed him one. Udenna would have been amused by Chinedu, would have said how very bush it was to eat rice with a spoon the way Chinedu did, gripping it with all his fingers – Udenna with his ability to glance at people and know, from their posture and their shoes, what kind of childhood they had had.

‘That’s Udenna, right?’ Chinedu gestured towards the photo in the wicker frame, Udenna’s arm draped around her shoulders, both their faces open and smiling.

‘Yes, that is the great Udenna.’ Ukamaka made a face and settled down at the tiny dining table with her plate. ‘I keep forgetting to remove that picture.’ It was a lie. She had glanced at it often in the past month, sometimes reluctantly, always frightened of the finality of taking it down. She sensed that Chinedu knew it was a lie.

‘We met at my sister’s graduation party three years ago in New Haven. A friend of hers brought him. He was working on Wall Street and I was already in grad school here but we knew many of the same people from around Philadelphia. He went to U Penn for undergrad and I went to Bryn Mawr. It’s funny that we had so much in common but somehow we had never met until then.’

‘He looks tall,’ Chinedu said, still standing by the bookcase, his plate balanced in his hand.

‘He’s six feet four.’ She heard the pride in her own voice. ‘That’s not his best picture. He looks a lot like Thomas Sankara. I had a crush on that man when I was a teenager. You know, the president of Burkina Faso, the popular president, the one they killed—’

‘Of course I know Thomas Sankara.’ Chinedu looked closely at the photograph for a moment, as though to search for traces of Sankara’s famed handsomeness. Then he said, ‘I saw both of you once outside in the parking lot and I knew you were from Nigeria. I wanted to come and introduce myself but I was in a rush to catch the shuttle.’

She restrained herself from asking what exactly Chinedu remembered: Had he seen Udenna’s hand placed on her lower back? Had he seen Udenna saying something suggestive to her, their faces close together?

‘Is the stew too peppery?’ she asked, noticing how slowly Chinedu was eating.

‘It’s fine. I’m used to eating pepper. I grew up in Lagos.’

‘I never liked hot food until I met Udenna. I’m not even sure I like it now.’

‘But you still cook it.’

She did not like his saying that and she did not like that his face was closed, his expression unreadable, as he glanced at her and then back at his plate. She said, ‘Well, I guess I’m used to it now.’

She pressed a key on her laptop, refreshed a Web page.
All Killed in Nigeria Plane Crash.
The government had confirmed that all one hundred and seventeen people aboard the airplane were dead.

‘No survivors,’ she said.

‘Father, take control,’ Chinedu said, exhaling loudly. He came and sat beside her to read from her laptop, their bodies close, the smell of her peppery stew on his breath. There were more photographs from the crash site. Ukamaka stared at one of shirtless men carrying a piece of metal that looked like the twisted frame of a bed; she could not imagine what part of the plane it could possibly have been.

In the following days, days now cool enough for her knee-length leather boots, days in which she took the shuttle to campus, researched her dissertation at the library, met with her advisor, taught her undergraduate composition class, she would return to her apartment in the late evening and wait for Chinedu to visit so she could offer him rice or pizza or spaghetti. So she could talk about Udenna. She liked that Chinedu said little, looking as if he was not only listening to her but also thinking about what she was saying. Once she thought idly of starting an affair with him, of indulging in the classic rebound, but there was a refreshingly asexual quality to him, something about him that made her feel that she did not have to pat powder under her eyes to hide her dark circles.

Her apartment building was full of other foreigners. She and Udenna used to joke that it was the uncertainty of the foreigners’ new surroundings that had congealed into the indifference they showed to one another. They did not say hello in the hallways or elevators, nor did they meet one another’s eyes during the five-minute ride on the campus shuttle, these intellectual stars from Kenya and China and Russia, these graduate students and fellows who would go on to lead and heal and reinvent the world. And so it surprised her that as she and Chinedu walked to the parking lot, he would wave to somebody, say hi to another.

‘Do you know them from your programme?’ she asked.

He had once said something about chemistry, and she assumed he was doing a doctorate. It had to be why she never saw him on campus; the science labs were so far off and so alien.

‘No. I met them when I came.’

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Not long. Since spring. I knew I had to make the effort to make friends in this building. How else will I get to the grocery store and to church? Thank God you have a car,’ he said.

On Sundays, she drove Chinedu to his Pentecostal church in Lawrenceville before going to the Catholic church on Nassau Street, and when she picked him up after service, they went grocery shopping at McCaffrey’s. She noticed how few groceries he bought and how carefully he scoured the sale flyers that Udenna had always ignored.

‘I’m starving. Should we get a sandwich somewhere?’

‘I’m fasting,’ he said quietly.

‘Oh.’ As a teenager, she, too, had fasted, drinking only water from morning until evening for a whole week, asking God to help her get the best result in the Senior Secondary School exam. She got the third-best result.

‘No wonder you didn’t eat any rice yesterday,’ she said. ‘Will you sit with me while I eat then?’

‘Sure.’