‘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, Olanna remembered the trepidation she used to feel coming here. The reception area was the same, with gold-dyed walls and thick Persian rugs and grooved patterns on the exposed ceilings. Mohammed’s mother looked unchanged, too, with the ring in her nose and the silk scarves around her head. She was fine-spun in the way that used to make Olanna wonder if she wasn’t uncomfortable, dressing up every day and simply sitting at home. But the older woman did not have that old standoffish expression, did not speak stiffly with her eyes focused somewhere between Olanna’s face and the hand-carved panelling. Instead she got up and hugged Olanna.
‘You look so lovely, my dear. Don’t let the sun spoil that skin of yours.’
‘Na gode. Thank you, Hajia,’ Olanna said, wondering how it was possible for people to switch affection off and on, to tie and untie emotions.
‘I am no longer the Igbo woman you wanted to marry who would taint the lineage with infidel blood,’ Olanna said, as they climbed into Mohammed’s red Porsche. ‘So I am a friend now.’
‘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.’
Olanna stared at the beggars clumped around the walls of the palace, their bodies and begging bowls covered in flies. The air smelt of the spicy-sour leaves from the neem tree.
‘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.’
Olanna wondered if Mohammed’s lightness hid a more serious mockery. Her hand was still in his and she wondered, too, if he was having difficulty manoeuvring the car with one hand.
* * *
Olanna moved to Nsukka on a windy Saturday, and the next day Odenigbo left for a mathematics conference at the University of Ibadan. He would not have gone if the conference was not focused on the work of his mentor, the black American mathematician David Blackwell.
‘He is the greatest living mathematician, the greatest,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come with me, nkem? It’s only for a week.’
Olanna said no; she wanted the chance to settle down when he was not there, to make peace with her fears in his absence. The first thing she did after he left was to throw away the red and white plastic flowers on the centre table.
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,’ Olanna said.
‘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 odour 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 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 odour?’
‘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.’
