Half of a Yellow Sun (37 page)

Olanna had stopped fanning herself and could feel the sweaty wetness on her scalp.

“When your uncle first married me, I worried because I thought those women outside would come and displace me from my home. I now know that nothing he does will make my life change. My life will change only if I want it to change.”

“What are you saying, Aunty?”

“He is very careful now, since he realized that I am no longer afraid. I have told him that if he brings disgrace to me in any way, I will cut off that snake between his legs.”

Aunty Ifeka went back to her stirring, and Olanna’s image of their marriage began to come apart at the seams.

“You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?” Aunty Ifeka said. “Your life belongs to you and you alone,
soso gi
. You will go back on Saturday. Let me hurry up and make some
abacha
for you to take.”

She tasted a little of the paste and spat it out.

Olanna left on Saturday. The man sitting next to her on the plane, across the aisle, had the shiniest darkest ebony complexion she had ever seen. She had noticed him earlier, in his three-piece wool suit, staring at her as they waited on the tarmac. He had offered to help her with her carry-on bag and, later, had asked the flight attendant if he could take the seat next to hers since it was vacant. Now, he offered her the
New Nigerian
and asked, “Would you like to read this?” He wore a large opal ring on his middle finger.

“Yes. Thank you.” Olanna took the paper. She skimmed through the pages, aware that he was watching her and that the newspaper was his way of starting conversation. Suddenly she wished she could be attracted to him, that something mad and magical would happen to them both and, when the plane landed, she would walk away with her hand in his, into a new bright life.

“They have finally removed that Igbo vice chancellor from the University of Lagos,” he said.

“Oh.”

“It’s on the back cover.”

Olanna turned to the back cover. “I see.”

“Why should an Igbo man be the vice chancellor in Lagos?” he asked and, when Olanna said nothing, only half smiling to show she was listening, he added, “The problem with Igbo people is that they want to control everything in this country.
Everything. Why can’t they stay in their East? They own all the shops; they control the civil service, even the police. If you are arrested for any crime, as long as you can say
keda
they will let you go.”

“We say
kedu
, not
keda,”
Olanna said quietly. “It means
How are you?
”

The man stared at her and she stared back and thought how beautiful he would have been if he had been a woman, with that perfectly shiny near-black skin.

“Are you Igbo?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“But you have the face of Fulani people.” He sounded accusing.

Olanna shook her head. “Igbo.”

The man mumbled something that sounded like
sorry
before he turned away and began to look through his briefcase. When she handed the newspaper to him, he seemed reluctant to take it back, and although she glanced at him from time to time, his eyes did not meet hers again until they landed in Lagos. If only he knew that his prejudice had filled her with possibility. She did not have to be the wounded woman whose man had slept with a village girl. She could be a Fulani woman on a plane deriding Igbo people with a good-looking stranger. She could be a woman taking charge of her own life. She could be anything.

As they got up to leave, she looked at him and smiled but kept herself from saying
thank you
because she wanted to leave him with both his surprise and his remorse intact.

Olanna hired a pickup truck and a driver and went to Odenigbo’s house. Ugwu followed her around as she packed books and pointed at things for the driver to pick up.

“Master looks like somebody that is crying every day, mah,” Ugwu said to her in English.

“Put my blender in a carton,” she said.
My
blender sounded strange; it had always been
the
blender, unmarked by her ownership.

“Yes, mah.” Ugwu went to the kitchen and came back with a carton. He held it tentatively. “Mah, please forgive Master.”

Olanna looked at him. He had known; he had seen this woman share his master’s bed; he too had betrayed her.
“Osiso!
Put my blender in the car!”

“Yes, mah.” Ugwu turned to the door.

“Do the guests still come in the evenings?” Olanna asked.

“It’s not like before when you were around, mah.”

“But they still come?”

“Yes.”

“And your master still plays tennis and goes to the staff club?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She did not mean that. She had wanted to hear that Odenigbo could no longer bear to live the life that had been theirs.

When he visited her, she tried not to feel disappointment at how normal he looked. She stood at the door and gave noncommittal answers, resentful of his effortless volubility, of how casually he said, “You know I will never love another woman,
nkem,”
as if he was certain that, with time, everything would be the same again. She resented, too, the romantic attention of other men. The single men took to stopping by her flat, the married ones to bumping into her outside her department. Their courting upset her because it—and they—assumed that her relationship with Odenigbo was permanently over. “I am not interested,” she told them, and even as she said it, she hoped that it would not get back to Odenigbo because she did not want him to think she
was pining. And she did not pine: she added new material to her lectures, cooked long meals, read new books, bought new records. She became secretary of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and after they donated food to the villages she wrote the minutes of their meetings in a notebook. She cultivated zinnias in her front yard and, finally, she cultivated a friendship with her black American neighbor, Edna Whaler.

Edna had a quiet laugh. She taught music and played jazz records a little too loudly and cooked tender pork chops and talked often about the man who had left her a week before their wedding in Montgomery and the uncle who had been lynched when she was a child. “You know what always amazed me?” she would ask Olanna, as if she had not told her only a day previously. “That civilized white folk wore nice dresses and hats and gathered to watch a white man hang a black man from a tree.”

She would laugh her quiet laugh and pat her hair, which had the greasy shine of hot-pressing. At first, they did not talk about Odenigbo. It was refreshing for Olanna to be with somebody who was far removed from the circle of friends she had shared with Odenigbo. Then, once, as Edna sang along to Billie Holiday’s “My Man,” she asked, “Why do you love him?”

Olanna looked up. Her mind was a blank board. “Why do I love him?”

Edna raised her eyebrows, mouthing but not singing Billie Holiday’s words.

“I don’t think love has a reason,” Olanna said.

“Sure it does.”

“I think love comes first and then the reasons follow. When I am with him, I feel that I don’t need anything else.” Olanna’s words surprised her, but the startling truth brought the urge to cry.

Edna was watching her. “You can’t keep lying to yourself that you’re okay.”

“I’m not lying to myself,” Olanna said. Billie Holiday’s plaintively scratchy voice had begun to irritate her. She didn’t know how transparent she was. She thought her frequent laughter was authentic and that Edna had no idea that she cried when she was alone in her flat.

“I’m not the best person to talk to about men, but you need to talk this through with somebody,” Edna said. “Maybe the priest, as payback for all those St. Vincent de Paul charity trips you’ve made?”

Edna laughed and Olanna laughed along, but already she was thinking that perhaps she did need to talk to somebody, somebody neutral who would help her reclaim herself, deal with the stranger she had become. She started to drive to St. Peter’s many times in the next few days but stopped and changed her mind. Finally, on a Monday afternoon, she went, driving quickly, ignoring speed bumps, so that she would not give herself any time to stop. She sat on a wooden bench in Father Damian’s airless office and kept her eyes focused on the filing cabinet labeled
LAITY
as she talked about Odenigbo.

“I don’t go to the staff club because I don’t want to see him. I’ve lost my interest in tennis. He betrayed and hurt me, and yet it seems as if he’s running my life.”

Father Damian tugged at his collar, adjusted his glasses, and rubbed his nose, and she wondered if he was thinking of something, anything, to do since he had no answers for her.

“I didn’t see you in church last Sunday,” he said finally.

Olanna was disappointed, but he was a priest after all and this had to be his solution: Seek God. She had wanted him to make her feel justified, solidify her right to self-pity, encourage her to occupy a larger portion of the moral high ground. She wanted him to condemn Odenigbo.

“You think I need to go to church more often?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Olanna nodded and brought her bag closer, ready to get up and leave. She should not have come. She should not have expected a round-faced voluntary eunuch in white robes to be in a position to understand how she felt. He was looking at her, his eyes large behind the lenses.

“I also think that you should forgive Odenigbo,” he said, and pulled at his collar as though it was choking him. For a moment Olanna felt contempt for him. What he was saying was too easy, too predictable. She did not need to have come to hear it.

“Okay.” She got up. “Thank you.”

“It’s not for him, you know. It’s for you.”

“What?” He was still sitting, so she looked down to meet his eyes.

“Don’t see it as forgiving him. See it as allowing yourself to be happy. What will you do with the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery?”

Olanna looked at the crucifix above the window, at the face of Christ serene in agony, and said nothing.

Odenigbo arrived very early, before she had had breakfast. She knew that something was wrong even before she unlocked the door and saw his somber face.

“What is it?” she asked, and felt a sharp horror at the hope that sneaked into her mind: that his mother had died.

“Amala is pregnant,” he said. There was a selfless and steely tone to his voice, that of a person delivering bad news to other people while remaining strong on their behalf.

Olanna clutched the door handle. “What?”

“Mama just came to tell me that Amala is pregnant with my child.”

Olanna began to laugh. She laughed and laughed and laughed
because the present scene, the past weeks, suddenly seemed fantastical.

“Let me come in,” Odenigbo said. “Please.”

She moved back from the door. “Come in.”

He sat down on the edge of the chair, and she felt as if she had been gumming back the pieces of broken chinaware only to have them shatter all over again; the pain was not in the second shattering but in the realization that trying to put them back together had been of no consequence from the beginning.

“Nkem
, please, let’s deal with this together,” he said. “We will do whatever you want. Please let’s do it together.”

Olanna went to the kitchen to turn the kettle off. She came back and sat down opposite him. “You said it happened just once. Just once and she got pregnant? Just once?” She wished she had not raised her voice. But it was so implausible, so theatrically implausible, that he would sleep with a woman once in a drunken state and get her pregnant.

“It was just once,” he said. “Just once.”

“I see.” But she did not see at all. The urge came then, to slap his face, because the self-entitled way he stressed
once
made the act seem inevitable, as if the point was how many times it had happened rather than that it should not have happened at all.

“I told Mama I’ll send Amala to Dr. Okonkwo in Enugu, and she said it would be over her dead body. She said Amala will have the child and she will raise the child herself. There is a young man doing timber work in Ondo that Amala is to marry.” Odenigbo stood up. “Mama planned this from the beginning. I see now how she made sure I was dead drunk before sending Amala to me. I feel as if I’ve been dropped into something I don’t entirely understand.”

Olanna looked at him, from his halo of hair to his slender toes in leather sandals, alarmed that she could feel this burst of dislike
for someone she loved. “Nobody dropped you into anything,” she said.

He made to hold her but she shrugged him off and asked him to leave. Later, in the bathroom, she stood in front of the mirror and savagely squeezed her belly with both hands. The pain reminded her of how useless she was; reminded her that a child nestled now in a stranger’s body instead of in hers.

Edna knocked for so long that Olanna had to get up and unlock the door.

“What’s wrong?” Edna asked.

“My grandfather used to say that other people just farted but his own fart always released shit,” Olanna said. She had wanted to sound funny, but her voice was too hoarse, too tear-lined.

“What’s wrong?”

“The girl he slept with is pregnant.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

Olanna squinted; what was wrong with her?

“Get ahold of yourself!” Edna said. “You think he’s spending his day crying like you are? When that bastard left me in Montgomery, I tried to kill myself and you know what he was doing? He had gone off and was playing in a band in Louisiana!” Edna patted her hair irritably. “Look at you. You’re the kindest person I know. Look how beautiful you are. Why do you need so much outside of yourself? Why isn’t what you
are
enough? You’re so damned weak!”

Olanna moved back; the tumultuous crowding of pain and thoughts and anger that shot through her made the words flow out of her mouth with quiet precision. “It is not my fault that your man deserted you, Edna.”

Edna first looked surprised, then disgusted, before she turned and walked out of the flat. Olanna watched her go, sorry to have
said what she said. But she would not apologize yet. She would give Edna a day or two. She felt suddenly hungry, bitingly hungry; her insides had been emptied out by her tears. She did not let her leftover
jollof
rice warm properly but ate it all from the pot, drank two cold bottles of beer, and still did not feel sated. She ate the biscuits in the cupboard and some oranges from the fridge, and then decided to go to Eastern Shop for some wine. She would drink. She would drink as much wine as she could.