Half of a Yellow Sun (9 page)

He finally started to speak Igbo to her on the day she rearranged the photos on the wall. A wall gecko had scuttled out from behind the wood-framed photo of Odenigbo in a graduating gown, and Ugwu shouted,
“Egbukwala!
Don’t kill it!”

“What?” She turned to glance down at him from the chair she was standing on.

“If you kill it you will get a stomachache,” he said. She found his Opi dialect funny, the way he seemed to spit the words out.

“Of course we won’t kill it. Let’s hang the photo on that wall.”

“Yes, mah,” he said, and then began to tell her, in Igbo, how his sister Anulika had suffered a terrible stomachache after killing a gecko.

Olanna felt less of a visitor in the house when Odenigbo came back; he pulled her forcefully, kissed her, pressed her to him.

“You should eat first,” she said.

“I know what I want to eat.”

She laughed. She felt ridiculously happy.

“What’s happened here?” Odenigbo asked, looking around the room. “All the books on that shelf?”

“Your older books are in the second bedroom. I need the space for
my
books.”

“Ezi okwu?
You’ve really moved in, haven’t you?” Odenigbo was laughing.

“Go and have a bath,” she said.

“And what was that flowery scent on my good man?”

“I gave him a scented talcum powder. Didn’t you notice his body odor?”

“That’s the smell of villagers. I used to smell like that until I left Abba to go to secondary school. But you wouldn’t know about things like that.” His tone was gently teasing. But his hands were not gentle. They were unbuttoning her blouse, freeing her breast from a bra cup. She was not sure how much time had passed, but she was tangled in bed with Odenigbo, warm and naked, when Ugwu knocked to say they had visitors.

“Can’t they leave?” she murmured.

“Come,
nkem,”
Odenigbo said. “I can’t wait for them to meet you.”

“Let’s stay here just a little longer.” She ran her hand over the curly hair on his chest, but he kissed her and got up to look for his underwear.

Olanna dressed reluctantly and went out to the living room.

“My friends, my friends,” Odenigbo announced, with an exaggerated flourish, “this, finally, is Olanna.”

The woman, who was tuning the radiogram, turned and took Olanna’s hand. “How are you?” she asked. Her head was wrapped in a bright orange turban.

“I’m well,” Olanna said. “You must be Lara Adebayo.”

“Yes,” Miss Adebayo said. “He did not tell us that you were illogically pretty.”

Olanna stepped back, flustered for a moment. “I will take that as a compliment.”

“And what a proper English accent,” Miss Adebayo murmured, with a pitying smile, before turning back to the radiogram. She had a compact body, a straight back that looked straighter in her stiff orange-print dress, the body of a questioner whom one dared not question back.

“I’m Okeoma,” the man with the tangled mop of uncombed
hair said. “I thought Odenigbo’s girlfriend was a human being; he didn’t say you were a water mermaid.”

Olanna laughed, grateful for the warmth in Okeoma’s expression and the way he held her hand for a little too long. Dr. Patel looked shy as he said, “Very nice to see you finally,” and Professor Ezeka shook her hand and then nodded disdainfully when she said her degree was in sociology and not one of the proper sciences.

After Ugwu served drinks, Olanna watched Odenigbo raise his glass to his lips and all she could think of was how those lips had fastened around her nipple only minutes ago. She surreptitiously moved so that her inner arm brushed against her breast and closed her eyes at the needles of delicious pain. Sometimes Odenigbo bit too hard. She wanted the guests to leave.

“Did not that great thinker Hegel call Africa a land of childhood?” Professor Ezeka asked, in an affected tone.

“Maybe the people who put up those
NO CHILDREN AND AFRICANS
signs in the cinemas in Mombasa had read Hegel, then,” Dr. Patel said, and chuckled.

“Nobody can take Hegel seriously. Have you read him closely? He’s funny, very funny. But Hume and Voltaire and Locke felt the same way about Africa,” Odenigbo said. “Greatness depends on where you are coming from. It’s just like the Israelis who were asked what they thought of Eichmann’s trial the other day, and one of them said he did not understand how the Nazis could have been thought great by anyone at any time. But they were, weren’t they? They still are!” Odenigbo gestured with his hand, palm upward, and Olanna remembered that hand grasping her waist.

“What people fail to see is this: If Europe had cared more about Africa, the Jewish Holocaust would not have happened,” Odenigbo said. “In short, the World War would not have happened!”

“What do you mean?” Miss Adebayo asked. She held her glass to her lips.

“How can you ask what I mean? It’s self-evident, starting with the Herero people.” Odenigbo was shifting on his seat, his voice raised, and Olanna wondered if he remembered how loud they had been, how afterward he had said, laughing, “If we go on like this at night, we’ll probably wake Ugwu up, poor chap.”

“You’ve come again, Odenigbo,” Miss Adebayo said. “You’re saying that if white people had not murdered the Herero, the Jewish Holocaust would not have happened? I don’t see a connection at all!”

“Don’t you see?” Odenigbo asked. “They started their race studies with the Herero and concluded with the Jews. Of course there’s a connection!”

“Your argument doesn’t hold water at all, you sophist,” Miss Adebayo said, and dismissively downed what was in her glass.

“But the World War was a bad thing that was also good, as our people say,” Okeoma said. “My father’s brother fought in Burma and came back filled with one burning question: How come nobody told him before that the white man was not immortal?”

They all laughed. There was something habitual about it, as if they had had different variations of this conversation so many times that they knew just when to laugh. Olanna laughed too and felt for a moment that her laughter sounded different, more shrill, than theirs.

The following weeks, when she started teaching a course in introductory sociology, when she joined the staff club and played tennis with other lecturers, when she drove Ugwu to the market and took walks with Odenigbo and joined the St. Vincent de
Paul Society at St. Peter’s Church, she slowly began to get used to Odenigbo’s friends. Odenigbo teased her that more people came to visit now that she was here, that both Okeoma and Patel were falling in love with her, because Okeoma was so eager to read poems in which descriptions of goddesses sounded suspiciously like her and Dr. Patel told too many stories of his days at Makerere, where he cast himself as the perfectly chivalrous intellectual.

Olanna liked Dr. Patel, but it was Okeoma whose visits she most looked forward to. His untidy hair and rumpled clothes and dramatic poetry put her at ease. And she noticed, early on, that it was Okeoma’s opinions that Odenigbo most respected, saying “The voice of our generation!” as though he truly believed it. She was still not sure what to make of Professor Ezeka’s hoarse superciliousness, his certainty that he knew better than everyone else but chose to say little. Neither was she sure of Miss Adebayo. It would have been easier if Miss Adebayo showed jealousy, but it was as if Miss Adebayo thought her to be unworthy of competition, with her
unintellectual
ways and her too-pretty face and her mimicking-the-oppressor English accent. She found herself talking more when Miss Adebayo was there, desperately giving opinions with a need to impress—Nkrumah really wanted to lord it over all of Africa, it was arrogant of America to insist that the Soviets take their missiles out of Cuba while theirs remained in Turkey, Sharpeville was only a dramatic example of the hundreds of blacks killed by the South African state every day—but she suspected that there was a glaze of unoriginality to all her ideas. And she suspected that Miss Adebayo knew this; it was always when she spoke that Miss Adebayo would pick up a journal or pour another drink or get up to go to the toilet. Finally she gave up. She would never like Miss Adebayo and Miss Adebayo would never even think about liking her. Perhaps Miss Adebayo could tell, from her face, that she was afraid
of things, that she was unsure, that she was not one of those people with no patience for self-doubt. People like Odenigbo. People like Miss Adebayo herself, who could look a person in the eye and calmly tell her that she was illogically pretty, who could even use that phrase,
illogically pretty
.

Still, when Olanna lay in bed with Odenigbo, legs intertwined, it would strike her how her life in Nsukka felt like being immersed in a mesh of soft feathers, even on the days when Odenigbo locked himself in the study for hours. Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it to a prosaic partnership.

   3   

R
ichard said little
at the parties Susan took him to. When she introduced him, she always added that he was a writer, and he hoped the other guests assumed he was distant in the way writers were, although he feared they saw through him and knew he simply felt out of place. But they were pleasant to him; they would be to anyone who was Susan’s companion, as long as Susan continued to engage them with her wit, her laughter, her green eyes that sparkled in a face flushed from glasses of wine.

Richard didn’t mind standing by and waiting until she was ready to leave, didn’t mind that none of her friends made an effort to draw him in, didn’t even mind when a pasty-faced drunk woman referred to him as Susan’s
pretty boy
. But he minded the all-expatriate parties where Susan would nudge him to “join the men” while she went over to the circle of women to compare notes on living in Nigeria. He felt awkward with the men. They were mostly English, ex-colonial administrators and business people from John Holt and Kingsway and GB Ollivant and Shell-BP and United Africa Company. They were reddened from sun and alcohol. They chuckled about how tribal Nigerian politics was, and perhaps these chaps were not quite so ready to rule themselves after all. They discussed cricket, plantations they owned or planned to own, the perfect weather in Jos, business opportunities in Kaduna. When Richard mentioned his interest in Igbo-Ukwu art, they said it didn’t have much of a market yet, so he did not bother to explain that he wasn’t at all interested in
the money, it was the aesthetics that drew him. And when he said he had just arrived in Lagos and wanted to write a book about Nigeria, they gave him brief smiles and advice: The people were bloody beggars, be prepared for their body odors and the way they will stand and stare at you on the roads, never believe a hard-luck story, never show weakness to domestic staff. There were jokes to illustrate each African trait. The uppity African stood out in Richard’s mind: An African was walking a dog and an Englishman asked, “What are you doing with that monkey?” and the African answered, “It’s a dog, not a monkey”—as if the Englishman had been talking to him!

Richard laughed at the jokes. He tried, too, not to drift throughout the conversations, not to show how awkward he felt. He preferred talking to the women, although he had learned not to spend too long with a particular woman, or Susan would throw a glass at the wall when they got home. He was baffled the first time it happened. He had spent a short time talking to Clovis Bancroft about her brother’s life as a district commissioner in Enugu years ago, and afterward Susan was silent during the drive back in her chauffeur-driven car. He thought perhaps she was dozing off; it had to be why she was not talking about somebody’s ghastly dress or the unimaginative hors d’oeuvres that had been served. But when they got back to her house, she picked up a glass from the cabinet and threw it against the wall. “That horrible little woman, Richard, and right in my face too. It’s so awful!” She sat on the sofa and buried her face in her hands until he said he was very sorry, although he was not quite sure what he was apologizing for.