Страница 13 из 113
She placed her glass down. "Let's go for a drive. I hate it when I visit Kano and only get to see the ugly cement and zinc of Sabon Gari. I want to see that ancient mud statue and go around the lovely city walls again."
"Sometimes you are just like the white people, the way they gawk at everyday things."
"Do I?"
"It's a joke. How are you going to learn not to take everything so seriously if you live with that crazy lecturer?" Mohammed stood up. "Come, we should stop by first so you can greet my mother."
As they walked past a small gate at the back and into the courtyard that led to his mother's chambers, Ola
"You look so lovely, my dear. Don't let the sun spoil that skin of yours."
"Na gode. Thank you, Hajia," Ola
"I am no longer the Igbo woman you wanted to marry who would taint the lineage with infidel blood," Ola
"I would have married you anyhow, and she knew it. Her preference did not matter."
"Maybe not at first, but what about later? What about when we had been married for ten years?"
"Your parents felt the same way as she did." Mohammed turned to look at her. "Why are we talking about this now?" There was something inexpressibly sad in his eyes. Or maybe she was imagining it. Maybe she wanted him to seem sad at the thought that they would never marry. She did not wish to marry him, and yet she enjoyed dwelling on the things they did not do and would never do.
"Sorry," she said.
"There's nothing to apologize for." Mohammed reached out and took her hand. The car made rasping sounds as they drove past the gates. "There's too much dust in the exhaust. These cars weren't made for our parts."
"You should buy a hardy Peugeot."
"Yes, I should."
Ola
"I am not like white people," she said quietly.
Mohammed glanced at her. "Of course you're not. You're a nationalist and a patriot, and soon you will marry your lecturer the freedom fighter."
Ola
Ola
"He is the greatest living mathematician, the greatest," he said. "Why don't you come with me, nkem? It's only for a week."
Ola
Ugwu looked horrified. "But mah, it is still good."
She led the way outside to the African lilies and pink roses, freshly watered by Jomo, and asked Ugwu to cut some. She showed him how much water to put in the vase. Ugwu looked at the flowers and shook his head, as if he could not believe her foolishness. "But it die, mah. The other one don't die."
"Yes, but these are better, fa makali," Ola
"How better, mah?" He always responded in English to her Igbo, as if he saw her speaking Igbo to him as an insult that he had to defend himself against by insistently speaking English.
"They are just nicer," she said, and realized that she did not know how to explain why fresh flowers were better than plastic ones. Later, when she saw the plastic flowers in a kitchen cupboard, she was not surprised. Ugwu had saved them, the same way he saved old sugar cartons, bottle corks, even yam peels. It came with never having had much, she knew, the inability to let go of things, even things that were useless. So when she was in the kitchen with him, she talked about the need to keep only things that were useful, and she hoped he would not ask her how the fresh flowers, then, were useful. She asked him to clean out the store and line the shelves with old newspapers, and as he worked she stood by and asked him about his family. It was difficult to picture them because, with his limited vocabulary, he described everyone as "very good." She went to the market with him, and after they bought the household items, she bought him a comb and a shirt. She taught him to cook fried rice with green peppers and diced carrots, asked him not to cook beans until they became pudding, not to douse things in oil, not to be too sparing with salt. Although she had noticed his body odor the first time she saw him, she let a few days pass before she gave him some scented powder for his armpits and asked him to use two capfuls of Dettol in his bath water. He looked pleased when he sniffed the powder, and she wondered if he could tell that it was a feminine scent. She wondered, too, what he really thought of her. There was clearly affection, but there was also a quiet speculation in his eyes, as if he was holding her up to something. And she worried that she came out lacking.
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 fu
"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.
Ola
"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.