Half of a Yellow Sun (18 page)

Although she knew Mohammed was abroad, she gave the operator his number in Kano; the nasal voice said, “You are phoning too much today!” before connecting her. She held on to the receiver long after there was no response. Rustling sounds came from the ceiling again. She sat on the cold floor and leaned her head against the wall to see if it would feel less light, less
unmoored. Odenigbo’s mother’s visit had ripped a hole in her safe mesh of feathers, startled her, snatched something away from her. She felt one step away from where she should be. She felt as if she had left her pearls lying loose for too long and it was time to gather them and guard them more carefully. The thought came to her slowly: She wanted to have Odenigbo’s child. They had never really discussed children. She once told him that she did not have that fabled female longing to give birth, and her mother had called her
abnormal
until Kainene said she didn’t have it either. He laughed and said that to bring a child into this unjust world was an act of a blasé bourgeoisie anyway. She had never forgotten that expression: childbirth as an act of blasé bourgeoisie—how funny, how untrue it was. Just as she had never seriously thought of having a child until now; the longing in the lower part of her belly was sudden and searing and new. She wanted the solid weight of a child, his child, in her body.

When the doorbell rang that evening as she climbed out of the bathtub, she went to the door wrapped in a towel. Odenigbo was holding a newspaper-wrapped package of
suya;
she could smell the smoky spiciness from where she stood.

“Are you still angry?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Get dressed and we’ll go back together. I will talk to my mother.”

He smelled of brandy. He came inside and placed the
suya
on the table, and in his bloodshot eyes she glimpsed the vulnerability that hid itself so well underneath his voluble confidence. He could be afraid, after all. She rested her face against his neck as he hugged her and said to him, quietly, “No, you don’t have to do that. Stay here.”

———

After his mother left, Olanna went back to Odenigbo’s house. Ugwu said, “Sorry, mah,” as if he were somehow responsible for Mama’s behavior. Then he fiddled with his apron pocket and said, “I saw a black cat yesterday night, after Mama and Amala left.”

“A black cat?”

“Yes, mah. Near the garage.” He paused. “A black cat means evil.”

“I see.”

“Mama said she would go to the
dibia
in the village.”

“You think the
dibia
has sent the black cat to bite us?” Olanna was laughing.

“No, mah.” Ugwu folded his arms forlornly. “It happened in my village, mah. A junior wife went to the
dibia
and got medicine to kill the senior wife, and the night before the senior wife died a black cat came to the front of her hut.”

“So Mama will use the
dibia’s
medicine and kill me?” Olanna asked.

“She wants to divide you and Master, mah.”

His solemnness touched her. “I’m sure it was just the neighbor’s cat, Ugwu,” she said. “Your master’s mother can’t use any medicine to divide us. Nothing can divide us.”

She watched him go back to the kitchen, thinking of what she had said.
Nothing can divide us
. Of course Odenigbo’s mother’s medicine from the
dibia
—indeed, all supernatural fetishes—meant nothing to her, but she worried again about her future with Odenigbo. She wanted certainty. She longed for a sign, a rainbow, to signify security. Still she was relieved to ease back into her life, their life, of teaching and tennis and friends that filled the living room. Because they came in the late evenings, she was surprised to hear the doorbell ring one afternoon, a week later, when Odenigbo was still at a lecture. It was Richard.

“Hello,” she said, letting him in. He was very tall; she had to tilt her head to look at his face, to see his eyes that were the blue color of a still sea and his hair that fell across his forehead.

“I just wanted to leave this for Odenigbo,” he said, handing Olanna a book. She loved the way he pronounced Odenigbo’s name, stressing it so earnestly. He was avoiding her eyes.

“Won’t you sit down?” she asked.

“I’m in a bit of a hurry, unfortunately. I have to catch the train.”

“Are you going to Port Harcourt to see Kainene?” Olanna wondered why she had asked. It was obvious enough.

“Yes. I go every weekend.”

“Say hello to her for me.”

“I will.”

“I talked to her last week.”

“Yes. She mentioned it.” Richard still stood there. He glanced at her and quickly looked away, and she saw the redness creep up his face. She had seen that look too many times not to know that he found her beautiful.

“How is the book coming along?” she asked.

“Quite well. It’s incredible, really, how well-crafted some of the ornaments are, and they were clearly intended to be art; it wasn’t an accident at all… I mustn’t bore you.”

“No, you’re not.” Olanna smiled. She liked his shyness. She didn’t want him to leave just yet. “Would you like Ugwu to bring you some
chin-chin?
They’re fantastic; he made them this morning.”

“No, thank you. I should be on my way.” But he did not turn to leave. He pushed his hair away from his face only to have it fall back again.

“Okay. Well, have a safe trip.”

“Thank you.” He still stood there.

“Are you driving? No, you’re not, I remember. You’ll take the train.” She laughed an awkward laugh.

“Yes, I’m taking the train.”

“Have a safe trip.”

“Yes. All right then.”

Olanna watched him leave, and long after his car had reversed out of the compound, she stood at the door, watching a bird with a blood-red breast, perched on the lawn.

In the morning, Odenigbo woke her up by taking her finger in his mouth. She opened her eyes; she could see the smoky light of dawn through the curtains.

“If you won’t marry me,
nkem
, then let’s have a child,” he said.

Her finger muffled his voice, so she pulled her hand away and sat up to stare at him, his wide chest, his sleep-swollen eyes, to make sure she had heard him properly.

“Let’s have a child,” he said again. “A little girl just like you, and we will call her Obianuju because she will complete us.”

Olanna had wanted to give the scent of his mother’s visit some time to diffuse before telling him she wanted to have a child, and yet here he was, voicing her own desire before she could. She looked at him in wonder. This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles. “Or a little boy,” she said finally.

Odenigbo pulled her down and they lay side by side, not touching. She could hear the raspy
caw-caw-caw
of the blackbirds that ate the pawpaws in the garden.

“Let’s have Ugwu bring us breakfast in bed,” he said. “Or is this one of your Sundays of faith?” He was smiling his gently indulgent smile, and she reached out and traced his lower lip with the slight fuzz underneath. He liked to tease her about
religion’s not being a social service, because she went to church only for St. Vincent de Paul meetings, when she took Ugwu with her for the drive through dirt paths in nearby villages to give away yams and rice and old clothes.

“I won’t go today,” she said.

“Good. Because we have work to do.”

She closed her eyes because he was straddling her now and as he moved, languorously at first and then forcefully, he whispered, “We will have a brilliant child,
nkem
, a brilliant child,” and she said, Yes, yes. Afterward, she felt happy knowing that some of the sweat on her body was his and some of the sweat on his body was hers. Each time, after he slipped out of her, she pressed her legs together, crossed them at her ankles, and took deep breaths, as if the movement of her lungs would urge conception on. But they did not conceive a child, she knew. The sudden thought that something might be wrong with her body wrapped itself around her, dampened her.

   6   

R
ichard ate the pepper soup slowly
. After he had spooned up the pieces of tripe, he raised the glass bowl to his lips and drank the broth. His nose was running, there was a delicious burning on his tongue, and he knew his face was red.

“Richard eats this so easily,” Okeoma said, seated next to him, watching him.

“Ha! I didn’t think our pepper was made for your type, Richard!” Odenigbo said, from the other end of the dining table.

“Even I can’t take the pepper,” another guest said, a Ghanaian lecturer in economics whose name Richard always forgot.

“This is proof that Richard was an African in his past life,” Miss Adebayo said, before blowing her nose into a napkin.

The guests laughed. Richard laughed too, but not loudly, because there was still too much pepper in his mouth. He leaned back on his seat. “It’s fantastic,” he said. “It clears one up.”

“The finger chops are lovely too, Richard,” Olanna said. “Thank you so much for bringing them.” She was sitting next to Odenigbo, and she leaned forward to smile at him.

“I know those are sausage rolls, but what are these things?” Odenigbo was poking at the tray Richard brought; Harrison had daintily wrapped everything in silver foil.

“Stuffed garden eggs, yes?” Olanna glanced at Richard.

“Yes. Harrison has all sorts of ideas. He took out the insides and filled them with cheese, I think, and spices.”

“You know the Europeans took out the insides of an African
woman and then stuffed and exhibited her all over Europe?” Odenigbo asked.

“Odenigbo, we are eating!” Miss Adebayo said, although she was stifling laughter.

The other guests laughed. Odenigbo did not. “It’s the same principle at play,” he said. “You stuff food, you stuff people. If you don’t like what is inside a particular food, then leave it alone, don’t stuff it with something else. A waste of garden eggs, in my opinion.”

Even Ugwu looked amused as he came into the dining room to clear up. “Mr. Richard, sah? I put the food in container for you?”

“No, keep it or throw it away,” Richard said. He never took any leftover food back; what he took back to Harrison were the compliments from the guests about how pretty everything was, but he did not add that the guests then bypassed his canapés to eat Ugwu’s pepper soup and
moi-moi
and chicken boiled in bitter herbs.

Everyone was moving to the living room. Soon, Olanna would turn off the light because the fluorescent glare was too bright, and Ugwu would bring more drinks, and they would talk and laugh and listen to music, and the light that spilled in from the corridor would fill the room with shadows. It was his favorite part of their evenings, although he sometimes wondered if Olanna and Odenigbo touched each other in the dimness. He shouldn’t think about them, he knew; it was no business of his. But he did. He noticed the way Odenigbo looked at her in the middle of an argument, not as if he needed her to be on his side, because he didn’t seem ever to need anybody, but simply to know that she was there. He saw, too, how Olanna sometimes blinked at Odenigbo, communicating things he would never know.

Richard placed his glass of beer on a side table and sat next to Miss Adebayo and Okeoma. His peppery tongue still tingled.
Olanna got up to change the music. “My favorite Rex Lawson first, before some Osadebe,” she said.

“He’s a little derivative, isn’t he, Rex Lawson?” Professor Ezeka asked. “Uwaifo and Dairo are better musicians.”

“All music is derivative, Prof,” Olanna said, her tone teasing.

“Rex Lawson is a true Nigerian. He does not cleave to his Kalabari tribe; he sings in all our major languages. That’s original—and certainly reason enough to like him,” Miss Adebayo said.

“That’s reason
not
to like him,” Odenigbo said. “This nationalism that means we should aspire to indifference about our own individual cultures is stupid.”

“Don’t waste your time asking Odenigbo about High Life. He’s never understood it,” Olanna said, laughing. “He’s a classical music person but loath to admit it in public because it’s such a Western taste.”