Half of a Yellow Sun (35 page)

He woke up with stiff joints. His mouth tasted sour, his head ached, and he wished the sun were not so oppressively bright and that Master would not speak so loudly over the newspapers at breakfast.
How can more politicians return unopposed than elected? Utter rubbish! This is rigging of the worst order!
Each syllable throbbed inside Ugwu’s head.

After Master left for work, Mama asked, “Will you not go to school,
gbo
, Ugwu?”

“We are on holiday, Mama.”

“Oh.” She looked disappointed.

Later, he saw her rubbing something on Amala’s back, both of
them standing in front of the bathroom. His suspicions returned. There was something wrong about the way Mama’s hands were moving in circular motions, slowly, as if in consonance with some ritual, and about the way Amala stood silent, with her back straight and her wrapper lowered to her waist and the outline of her small breasts visible from the side. Perhaps Mama was rubbing a potion on Amala. But it made no sense because if Mama had indeed gone to the
dibia
, the medicine would be for Olanna and not Amala. It may be, though, that the medicine worked on women and Mama would have to protect herself and Amala to make sure that only Olanna died or became barren or went mad. Perhaps Mama was performing the preliminary protections now that Olanna was in London and would bury the medicine in the yard to keep it potent until Olanna came back.

Ugwu shivered. A shadow hung over the house. He worried about Mama’s cheeriness, her tuneless humming, her determination to serve all of Master’s meals, her frequent hushed words to Amala. He watched her carefully whenever she went outside, to see if she would bury anything, so he could unearth it as soon as she went back indoors. But she did not bury anything. When he told Jomo that he suspected Mama had gone to a
dibia
to find a way to kill Olanna, Jomo said, “The old woman is simply happy to have her son to herself, that is why she is cooking and singing every day. Do you know how happy my mother is when I go to see her without my wife?”

“But I saw a black cat the last time she came,” Ugwu said.

“Professor Ozumba’s housegirl down the street is a witch. She flies to the top of the mango tree at night to meet with her fellow witches, because I always rake up all the leaves they throw down. She is the one the black cat was looking for.”

Ugwu tried to believe Jomo, that he was reading undue meaning into Mama’s actions, until he walked into the kitchen the next evening, after weeding his herb garden, and saw the flies in
a foaming mass by the sink. The window was barely open. He did not see how so many flies, more than a hundred fat greenish flies, could have come in through that crack to buzz together in a dense turbulent cluster. They signified something terrible. Ugwu dashed to the study to call Master.

“Quite odd,” Master said; he took off his glasses and then put them back on. “I’m sure Prof. Ezeka will be able to explain it, some sort of migratory behavior. Don’t shut the window so you don’t trap them in.”

“But, sah,” Ugwu said, just as Mama came into the kitchen.

“Flies do this sometimes,” she said. “It is normal. They will go the same way they came.” She was leaning by the door and her tone was ominously victorious.

“Yes, yes.” Master turned to go back to the study. “Tea, my good man.”

“Yes, sah.” Ugwu did not understand how Master could be so unperturbed, how he could not see that the flies were not normal at all. As he took the tea tray into the study, he said, “Sah, those flies are telling us something.”

Master gestured to the table. “Don’t pour. Leave it there.”

“Those flies in the kitchen, sah, they are a sign of bad medicine from the
dibia
. Somebody has done bad medicine.” Ugwu wanted to add that he knew very well who it was, but he was not sure how Master would take that.

“What?” Master’s eyes narrowed behind his glasses.

“The flies, sah. It means somebody has done bad medicine for this house.”

“Shut the door and let me do some work, my good man.”

“Yes, sah.”

When Ugwu returned to the kitchen, the flies were gone. The window was the same, open only a crack, and the wan sunlight lit up the blade of a chopping knife on the table. He was reluctant to touch anything; the mysteries around him had tainted the
pans and pots. For once, he was pleased to let Mama cook, but he did not eat the
ugba
and fried fish she made for dinner, did not take so much as a sip of the leftover palm wine he served to Master and his guests, did not sleep well that night. He kept jerking awake with itchy watering eyes, wishing he could talk to somebody who would understand: Jomo, his aunty, Anulika. Finally he got up and went into the main house to dust the furniture, something mild and mindless that would keep him occupied. The purple-gray of early dawn filled the kitchen with shadows. He turned on the light switch fearfully, expecting to find something. Scorpions, perhaps; a jealous person had sent them to his uncle’s hut once, and his uncle woke up every day for weeks to find angry black scorpions crawling near his newborn twin sons. One baby had been stung and almost died.

Ugwu cleaned the bookshelves first. He had removed the papers from the center table and was bent over dusting it when Master’s bedroom door opened. He glanced at the corridor, surprised that Master was up so early. But it was Amala who walked out of the room. The corridor was dim and her startled eyes met Ugwu’s more startled eyes and she stopped for a moment before she hurried on to the guest room. Her wrapper was loose around her chest. She held on to it with one hand and bumped against the door of the guest room, pushing it as if she had forgotten how to open it, before she went in. Amala, common quiet ordinary Amala, had slept in Master’s bedroom! Ugwu stood still and tried to get his whirling head to become steady so that he could think. Mama’s medicine had done this, he was sure, but his worry was not what had happened between Master and Amala. His worry was what would happen if Olanna found out.

   20   

O
lanna sat across
from her mother in the living room upstairs. Her mother called it the ladies’ parlor, because it was where she entertained her friends, where they laughed and hailed each other by their nicknames—Art! Gold! Ugodiya!—and talked about whose son was messing around with women in London while his mates built houses on their fathers’ land, and who had bought local lace and tried to pass it off as the latest from Europe, and who was trying to snatch so-and-so’s husband, and who had imported superior furniture from Milan. Now, though, the room was muted. Her mother held a glass of tonic water in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. She was crying. She was telling Olanna about her father’s mistress.

“He has bought her a house in Ikeja,” her mother said. “My friend lives on the same street.”

Olanna watched the delicate movement of her mother’s hand as she dabbed at her eyes. It looked like satin, the handkerchief; it could not possibly be absorbent enough.

“Have you talked to him?” Olanna asked.

“What am I to say to him?
Gwa ya gini?”
Her mother placed the glass down. She had not sipped from it since one of the maids brought it in on a silver tray. “There is nothing I can say to him. I just wanted to let you know what is happening so that they will not say I did not tell somebody.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Olanna said. It was what her mother wanted. She had been back from London a day, and already the glow of
possibility that came after she saw the Kensington gynecologist was dulled. Already she could not remember the hope that spread through her when he said there was nothing wrong with her and she had only to—he had winked—work harder. Already she wished she were back in Nsukka.

“The worst part of it is that the woman is common riffraff,” her mother said, twisting the handkerchief. “A Yoruba goat from the bush with two children from two different men. I hear she is old and ugly.”

Olanna got up. As if it mattered what the woman looked like. As if “old and ugly” did not describe her father as well. What troubled her mother was not the mistress, she knew, but the significance of what her father had done: buying the mistress a house in a neighborhood where Lagos socialites lived.

“Maybe we should wait for Kainene to visit so she can talk to your father instead,
nne?”
her mother said, dabbing at her eyes again.

“I said I would talk to him, Mom,” Olanna said.

But that evening, as she walked into her father’s room, she realized that her mother was right. Kainene was the best person for this. Kainene would know exactly what to say and would not feel the awkward ineptness that she did now, Kainene with her sharp edges and her bitter tongue and her supreme confidence.

“Dad,” she said, closing the door behind her. He was at his desk, sitting on the straight-backed chair made of dark wood. She couldn’t ask him if it was true, because he had to know that her mother knew it to be true and so did she. She wondered, for a moment, about this other woman, what she looked like, what she and her father talked about.

“Dad,” she said again. She would speak mostly in English. It was easy to be formal and cold in English. “I wish you had some respect for my mother.” That was not what she had intended to say.
My mother
, instead of
Mom
, made it seem as if she had decided
to exclude him, as if he had become a stranger who could not possibly be addressed on the same terms, could not be
my father
.

He leaned back in his chair.

“It’s disrespectful that you have a relationship with this woman and that you have bought her a house where my mother’s friends live,” Olanna said. “You go there from work and your driver parks outside and you don’t seem to care that people see you. It’s a slap to my mother’s face.”

Her father’s eyes were downcast now, the eyes of a man groping in his mind.

“I am not going to tell you what to do about it, but you
have
to do something. My mother isn’t happy.” Olanna stressed the
have
, placed an exaggerated emphasis on it. She had never talked to her father like this before; she rarely talked to him anyway. She stood there staring at him, and he at her, and the silence between them was empty.

“Anugo m
, I have heard you,” he said. His Igbo was low, conspiratorial, as if she had asked him to go ahead and cheat on her mother but to do it considerately. It angered her. Perhaps it was, in effect, what she had asked him to do but still she was annoyed. She looked around his room and thought how unfamiliar his large bed was; she had never seen that lustrous shade of gold on a blanket before or noticed how intricately convoluted the metal handles of his chest of drawers were. He even looked like a stranger, a fat man she didn’t know.

“Is that all you have to say, that you’ve heard me?” Olanna asked, raising her voice.

“What do you want me to say?”

Olanna felt a sudden pity for him, for her mother, for herself and Kainene. She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.

“I will do something about it,” he added. He stood up and came toward her. “Thank you,
ola m,”
he said.

She was not sure what to make of his thanking her, or of his calling her
my gold
, something he had not done since she was a child and which now had a contrived solemnity to it. She turned and left the room.

When Olanna heard her mother’s raised voice the next morning—“Good-for-nothing! Stupid man!”—she hurried downstairs. She imagined them fighting, her mother grasping the front of her father’s shirt in a tight knot as women often did to cheating husbands. The sounds came from the kitchen. Olanna stopped at the door. A man was kneeling in front of her mother with his hands raised high, palms upward in supplication.

“Madam, please; madam, please.”

Her mother turned to the steward, Maxwell, who stood aside watching.
“I fugo?
Does he think we employed him to steal us blind, Maxwell?”

“No, mah,” Maxwell said.

Her mother turned back to the man kneeling on the floor. “So this is what you have been doing since you came here, you useless man? You came here to steal from me?”