𝑃𝑢𝑟𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝐻𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑢𝑠

𝑺𝒑𝒆𝒂𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑾𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝑶𝒖𝒓 𝑺𝒑𝒊𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒔¹⁰

『••✎••』

Papa-Nnukwu had woken up before everyone else. He wanted to
have breakfast sitting on the verandah, to watch the morning sun. And so
Aunty Ifeoma asked Obiora to spread a mat on the verandah, and we all sat
and had breakfast with Papa-Nnukwu, listening to him talk about the men
who tapped palm wine in the village, how they left at dawn to climb up the
palm trees because the trees gave sour wine after the sun rose. I could tell that
he missed the village, that he missed seeing those palm trees the men climbed,
with a raffia belt encircling them and the tree trunk.
Although we had bread and okpa and Bournvita for breakfast, Aunty
Ifeoma made a little fufu to bury Papa-Nnukwu’s tablets in, soft spherical
coffins that she carefully watched Papa-Nnukwu swallow. The cloud had
lifted from her face.
“He will be fine,” she said, in English. “Soon he will start nagging about
wanting to go back to the village.”
“He must stay for a while,” Amaka said. “Maybe he should live here,
Mom. I don’t think that girl Chinyelu takes proper care of him.”
“Igasikwa! He will never agree to live here.”
“When will you take him to do the tests?”
“Tomorrow. Doctor Nduoma said I can have two tests done instead of all
four. The private labs in town always want full payment, so I will have to go
to the bank first. I don’t think I will finish in time to take him today, with all
those lines at the bank.”
A car drove into the compound then, and even before Amaka asked, “Is
that Father Amadi?” I knew it was him. I had seen the small Toyota hatchback
only twice before, but I could point it out anywhere. My hands started to
shake.
“He said he would stop by and see your Papa-Nnukwu,” Aunty Ifeoma
said.
Father Amadi wore his soutane, long-sleeved and loosefitting, with a
loose black rope slanted around his waist. Even in the priestly garb, his
loping, comfortable gait pulled my eyes and held them. I turned and dashed
into the flat. I could see the front yard clearly from the window in the
bedroom, which had a few louvers missing. I pressed my face close to the
window, close to the small tear in the mosquito netting that Amaka blamed
for letting in every moth that flapped around the light bulb at night. FatherAmadi was standing by the window, close enough for me to see the way his
hair lay in wavy curls on his head, like the ripples in a stream.
“His recovery has been so swift, Father, Chukwu aluka,” Aunty Ifeoma
said.
“Our God is faithful, Ifeoma,” he said happily, as though Papa-Nnukwu
were his own relative. Then he told her that he was on his way to Isienu, to
visit a friend who had just got back from missionary work in Papua New
Guinea. He turned to Jaja and Obiora and said, “I will come by this evening to
pick you up. We’ll play in the stadium with some of the boys from the
seminary.”
“Okay, Father.” Jaja’s voice was strong.
“Where is Kambili?” he asked.
I looked down at my chest, which was heaving now. I did not know why,
but I was grateful that he had said my name, that he remembered my name.
“I think she is inside,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
“Jaja, tell her she can come with us if she likes.”
When he came back that evening, I pretended I was taking a siesta. I
waited to hear his car drive off, with Jaja and Obiora inside, before I came out
into the living room. I had not wanted to go with them, and yet when I could
no longer hear the sound of his car, I wished I could run after it.
Amaka was in the living room with Papa-Nnukwu, slowly oiling the few
tufts of hair on his head with Vaseline. Afterward, she smoothed talcum
powder on his face and chest.
“Kambili,” Papa-Nnukwu said, when he saw me. “Your cousin paints
well. In the old days, she would have been chosen to decorate the shrines of
our gods.” He sounded dreamy. Some of his medications probably made him
drowsy. Amaka did not look at me; she gave his hair one last pat—a caress,
really—and then sat down on the floor in front of him. I followed the swift
movements of her hand as she moved the brush from palette to paper and then
back again. She painted so quickly that I thought it would all be a muddle on
the paper, until I looked and saw the form clearly taking shape—a lean,
graceful form. I could hear the ticking of the clock on the wall, the one with
the picture of the Pope leaning on his staff. The silence was delicate. Aunty
Ifeoma was scraping a burnt pot in the kitchen, and the kroo-kroo-kroo of the
metal spoon on the pot seemed intrusive. Amaka and Papa-Nnukwu spoke
sometimes, their voices low, twining together. They understood each other,using the sparest words. Watching them, I felt a longing for something I knew
I would never have. I wanted to get up and leave, but my legs did not belong
to me, did not do what I wanted them to. Finally, I pushed myself up and went
into the kitchen; neither Papa-Nnukwu nor Amaka noticed when I left.
Aunty Ifeoma sat on a low stool, pulling the brown skin off hot
cocoyams, throwing the sticky, rounded tubers in the wooden mortar and
stopping to cool her hands in a bowl of cold water.
“Why do you look that way, o gini?” she asked.
‘What way, Aunty?”
“There are tears in your eyes.”
I felt my wet eyes. “Something must have flown into my eyes.”
Aunty Ifeoma looked doubtful. “Help me with the cocoyams,” she said,
finally.
I pulled a low stool close to her and sat down. The skins seemed to slip
off easily enough for Aunty Ifeoma, but when I pressed one end of a tuber, the
rough brown skin stayed put and the heat stung my palms.
“Soak your hand in water first.” She demonstrated where and how to
press, to have the skin come sliding off. I watched her pound the cocoyams,
dipping the pestle often into the bowl of water so the cocoyam wouldn’t stick
too much to it. Still, the sticky white mash clung to the pestle, to the mortar,
to Aunty Ifeoma’s hand. She was pleased, though, because it would thicken
the onugbu soup well.
“See how well your Papa-Nnukwu is doing?” she asked. “He has been
sitting up so long for Amaka to paint him. It’s a miracle. Our Lady is
faithful.”
“How can Our Lady intercede on behalf of a heathen, Aunty?”
Aunty Ifeoma was silent as she ladled the thick cocoyam paste into the
soup pot; then she looked up and said Papa-Nnukwu was not a heathen but a
traditionalist, that sometimes what was different was just as good as what was
familiar, that when Papa-Nnukwu did his itu-nzu, his declaration of
innocence, in the morning, it was the same as our saying the rosary. She said a
few other things, but I was not really listening, because I heard Amaka
laughing in the living room with Papa-Nnukwu, and I wondered what they
were laughing about, and whether they would stop laughing if I went in there.WHEN AUNTY IFEOMA woke me up, the room was dim and the shrills of the
night crickets were dying away. A rooster’s crow drifted through the window
above my bed.
“Nne.” Aunty Ifeoma patted my shoulder. “Your Papa-Nnukwu is on the
verandah. Go and watch him.”
I felt wide awake, although I had to pry my eyes open with my fingers. I
remembered Aunty Ifeoma’s words from the day before, about Papa-Nnuwku
being a traditionalist and not a heathen. Still, I was not sure why she wanted
me to go and watch him on the verandah.
“Nne, remember to be quiet. Just watch him.” Aunty Ifeoma whispered
to avoid waking Amaka.
I tied my wrapper around my chest, over my pink-and-white flowered
nightgown, and padded out of the room. The door that led to the verandah
was half open, and the purplish tinge of early dawn trickled into the living
room. I did not want to turn the light on because Papa-Nnukwu would notice,
so I stood by the door, against the wall.
Papa-Nnukwu was on a low wooden stool, his legs bent into a triangle.
The loose knot of his wrapper had come undone, and the wrapper had slipped
off his waist to cover the stool, its faded blue edges grazing the floor. A
kerosene lamp, turned to its lowest, was right next to him. The flickering light
cast a topaz glow over the narrow verandah, over the stubby gray hairs on
Papa-Nnukwu’s chest, over the loose, soil-colored skin on his legs. He leaned
down to draw a line on the floor with the nzu in his hand. He was speaking,
his face down as if addressing the white chalk line, which now looked yellow.
He was talking to the gods or the ancestors; I remembered Aunty Ifeoma
saying that the two could be interchanged.
“Chineke! I thank you for this new morning! I thank you for the sun that
rises.” His lower lip quivered as he spoke. Perhaps that was why his Igbo
words flowed into each other, as if writing his speech would result in a single
long word. He bent down to draw another line, quickly, with a fierce
determination that shook the flesh on his arm, which was hanging low like a
brown leather pouch. “Chineke! I have killed no one, I have taken no one’s
land, I have not committed adultery.” He leaned over and drew the third line.
The stool squeaked. “Chineke! I have wished others well. I have helped those
who have nothing with the little that my hands can spare.”
A cock was crowing, a drawn-out, plaintive sound that seemed very
close close by.“Chineke! Bless me. Let me find enough to fill my stomach. Bless my
daughter, Ifeoma. Give her enough for her family.” He shifted on the stool.
His navel had once jutted out, I could tell, but now it looked like a wrinkled
eggplant, drooping.
“Chineke! Bless my son, Eugene. Let the sun not set on his prosperity.
Lift the curse they have put on him.” Papa-Nnukwu leaned over and drew one
more line. I was surprised that he prayed for Papa with the same earnestness
that he prayed for himself and Aunty Ifeoma.
“Chineke! Bless the children of my children. Let your eyes follow them
away from evil and towards good.” Papa-Nnukwu smiled as he spoke. His
few front teeth seemed a deeper yellow in the light, like fresh corn kernels.
The wide gaps in his gums were tinged a subtle tawny color. “Chineke! Those
who wish others well, keep them well. Those who wish others ill, keep them
ill.” Papa-Nnukwu drew the last line, longer than the rest, with a flourish. He
was done.
When Papa-Nnukwu rose and stretched, his entire body, like the bark of
the gnarled gmelina tree in our yard, captured the gold shadows from the
lamp flame in its many furrows and ridges. Even the age spots that dotted his
hands and legs gleamed. I did not look away, although it was sinful to look
upon another person’s nakedness. The rumples in Papa-Nnukwu’s belly did
not seem so many now, and his navel rose higher, still enclosed between folds
of skin. Between his legs hung a limp cocoon that seemed smoother, free of
the wrinkles that crisscrossed the rest of his body like mosquito netting. He
picked up his wrapper and tied it around his body, knotting it at his waist. His
nipples were like dark raisins nestled among the sparse gray tufts of hair on
his chest. He was still smiling as I quietly turned and went back to the
bedroom. I never smiled after we said the rosary back home. None of us did.
PAPA-NNUKWU WAS BACK on the verandah after breakfast, sitting on the
stool, with Amaka settled on a plastic mat at his feet. She scrubbed his foot
gently with a pumice stone, soaked it in a plastic bowl of water, rubbed it over
with Vaseline, and then moved to the other foot. Papa-Nnukwu complained
that she would make his feet too tender, that even soft stones would pierce his
soles now because he never wore sandals in the village, though Aunty Ifeoma
made him wear them here. But he did not ask Amaka to stop.
“I am going to paint him out here on the verandah, in the shade. I want to
catch the sunlight on his skin,” Amaka said, when Obiora joined them.Aunty Ifeoma came out, dressed in a blue wrapper and blouse. She was
going to the market with Obiora, who she said figured out change faster than
a trader with a calculator. “Kambili, I want you to help me do the orah leaves,
so I can start the soup when I come back,” she said.
“Orah leaves?” I asked, swallowing.
“Yes. Don’t you know how to prepare orah?”
I shook my head. “No, Aunty.”
“Amaka will do it, then,” Aunty Ifeoma said. She unfolded and refolded
her wrapper around her waist, knotting it at her side.
“Why?” Amaka burst out. “Because rich people do not prepare orah in
their houses? Won’t she participate in eating the orah soup?”
Aunty Ifeoma’s eyes hardened—she was not looking at Amaka, she was
looking at me. “O ginidi, Kambili, have you no mouth? Talk back to her!”
I watched a wilted African lily fall from its stalk in the garden. The
crotons rustled in the late morning breeze. “You don’t have to shout, Amaka,”
I said, finally. “I don’t know how to do the orah leaves, but you can show
me.” I did not know where the calm words had come from. I did not want to
look at Amaka, did not want to see her scowl, did not want to prompt her to
say something else to me, because I knew I could not keep up. I thought I was
imagining it when I heard the cackling, but then I looked at Amaka—and sure
enough, she was laughing.
“So your voice can be this loud, Kambili,” she said.
She showed me how to prepare the orah leaves. The slippery, light green
leaves had fibrous stalks that did not become tender from cooking and so had
to be carefully plucked out. I balanced the tray of vegetables on my lap and
set to work, plucking the stalks and putting the leaves in a bowl at my feet. I
was done by the time Aunty Ifeoma drove in, about an hour later, and sank
onto a stool, fanning herself with a newspaper. Sweat streaks had washed
away her pressed powder in parallel lines of darker-colored skin down the
sides of her face. Jaja and Obiora were bringing in the foodstuffs from the car,
and Aunty Ifeoma asked Jaja to place the bunch of plantains on the verandah
floor.
“Amaka, ka? Guess how much?” she asked.
Amaka stared at the bunch critically before she guessed an amount.
Aunty Ifeoma shook her head and said that the plantains had cost forty nairamore than what Amaka guessed.
“Hei! For this small thing?” Amaka shouted.
“The traders say it is hard to transport their food because there is no fuel,
so they add on the costs of transportation, o di egwu,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
Amaka picked up the plantains and pressed each between her fingers, as
if she would figure out why they cost so much by doing that. She took them
inside just as Father Amadi drove in and parked in front of the flat. His
windscreen caught the sun and glittered. He bounded up the few stairs to the
verandah, holding his soutane up like a bride holding a wedding dress. He
greeted Papa-Nnukwu first, before hugging Aunty Ifeoma and shaking hands
with the boys. I extended my hand so that we could shake, my lower lip
starting to tremble.
“Kambili,” he said, holding my hand a little longer than the boys’.
“Are you going somewhere, Father?” Amaka asked, coming onto the
verandah. “You must be baking in that soutane.”
“I am going over to give some things to a friend of mine, the priest who
came back from Papua New Guinea. He returns next week.”
“Papua New Guinea. How did he say the place is, eh?” Amaka asked.
“He was telling a story of crossing a river by canoe, with crocodiles right
underneath. He said he is not sure which happened first, hearing the teeth of
the crocodiles snapping or discovering that he had wet his trousers.”
“They had better not send you to a place like that,” Aunty Ifeoma said
with a laugh, still fanning herself and sipping from a glass of water.
“I don’t even want to think about your leaving, Father,” Amaka said.
“You still don’t have an idea where and when, okwia?”
“No. Sometime next year, perhaps.”
“Who is sending you?” Papa-Nnukwu asked, in his sudden way that
made me realize he had been following every word spoken in Igbo.
“Father Amadi belongs to a group of priests, ndi missionary, and they go
to different countries to convert people,” Amaka said. She hardly peppered
her speech with English words when she spoke to Papa-Nnukwu, as the rest
of us inadvertently did.
“Ezi okwu?” Papa-Nnukwu looked up, his milky eye on Father Amadi.
“Is that so? Our own sons now go to be missionaries in the white man’sland?”
“We go to the white man’s land and the black man’s land, sir,” Father
Amadi said. “Any place that needs a priest.”
“It is good, my son. But you must never lie to them. Never teach them to
disregard their fathers.” Papa-Nnukwu looked away, shaking his head.
“Did you hear that, Father?” Amaka asked. “Don’t lie to those poor
ignorant souls.”
“It will be hard not to, but I will try,” Father Amadi said, in English. His
eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled.
“You know, Father, it’s like making okpa,” Obiora said. “You mix the
cowpea flour and palm oil, then you steam-cook for hours. You think you can
ever get just the cowpea flour? Or just the palm oil?”
“What are you talking about?” Father Amadi asked.
“Religion and oppression,” Obiora said.
“You know there is a saying that it is not just the naked men in the
market who are mad?” Father Amadi asked. “That streak of madness has
returned and is disturbing you again, okwia?”
Obiora laughed, and so did Amaka, in that loud way it seemed only
Father Amadi could get out of her.
“Spoken like the true missionary priest, Father,” Amaka said. “When
people challenge you, label them mad.”
“See how your cousin sits quiet and watches?” Father Amadi asked,
gesturing to me. “She does not waste her energy in picking never-ending
arguments. But there is a lot going on in her mind, I can tell.”
I stared at him. Round, wet patches of sweat encircled his underarms,
darkening the white of his soutane. His eyes rested on my face and I looked
away. It was too disturbing, locking eyes with him; it made me forget who
was nearby, where I was sitting, what color my skirt was. “Kambili, you did
not want to come out with us the last time.”
“I…I…I was asleep.”
“Well, today, you’re coming with me. Just you,” Father Amadi said. “I
will come and pick you up on my way back from town. We’re going to the
stadium for football. You can play or watch.”
Amaka started to laugh. “Kambili looks frightened to death.” She waslooking at me, but it was not the look I was used to, the one where her eyes
held me guilty of things I did not know. It was a different, softer look.
“There is nothing to be frightened about, nne. You will have fun at the
stadium,” Aunty Ifeoma said, and I turned to stare blankly at her, too. Tiny
beads of sweat, like pimples, covered her nose. She seemed so happy, so at
peace, and I wondered how anybody around me could feel that way when
liquid fire was raging inside me, when fear was mingling with hope and
clutching itself around my ankles.
After Father Amadi left, Aunty Ifeoma said, “Go and get ready so you
don’t keep him waiting when he gets back. Shorts are best because even if
you don’t play, it will get hotter before the sun falls and most of the spectator
stands don’t have roofs.”
“Because they have spent ten years building that stadium. The money
has gone into peoples’ pockets,” Amaka muttered.
“I don’t have shorts, Aunty,” I said.
Aunty Ifeoma did not ask why, perhaps because she already knew. She
asked Amaka to lend me a pair of shorts. I expected Amaka to sneer, but she
gave me a pair of yellow shorts as if it were normal that I did not have any. I
took my time putting on the shorts, but I did not stand in front of the mirror
for too long, as Amaka did, because guilt would nibble at me. Vanity was a
sin. Jaja and I looked in the mirror just long enough to make sure our buttons
were done right.
I heard the Toyota drive up to the front of the flat awhile later. I took
Amaka’s lipstick from the top of the dresser and ran it over my lips. It looked
strange, not as glamorous as it did on Amaka; it did not even have the same
bronze shimmer. I wiped it off. My lips looked pale, a dour brown. I ran the
lipstick over my lips again, and my hands shook.
“Kambili! Father Amadi is horning outside for you,” Aunty Ifeoma
called. I wiped the lipstick away with the back of my hand and left the room.
FATHER AMADI’S CAR smelled like him, a clean scent that made me think
of a clear azure sky. His shorts had seemed longer the last time I saw him in
them, well past his knees. But now they climbed up to expose a muscular
thigh sprinkled with dark hair. The space between us was too small, too tight.
I was always a penitent when I was close to a priest at confession. But it was
hard to feel penitent now, with Father Amadi’s cologne deep in my lungs. I
felt guilty instead because I could not focus on my sins, could not think ofanything except how near he was. “I sleep in the same room as my
grandfather. He is a heathen,” I blurted out.
He turned to me briefly, and before he looked away, I wondered if the
light in his eyes was amusement. “Why do you say that?”
“It is a sin.”
“Why is it a sin?”
I stared at him. I felt that he had missed a line in his script. “I don’t
know.”
“Your father told you that.”
I looked away, out the window. I would not implicate Papa, since Father
Amadi obviously disagreed.
“Jaja told me a little about your father the other day, Kambili.”
I bit my lower lip. What had Jaja said to him? What was wrong with
Jaja, anyway? Father Amadi said nothing else until we got to the stadium and
he quickly scanned the few people running on the tracks. His boys were not
here yet, so the football field was empty. We sat on the stairs, in one of the
two spectator stands that had a roof.
“Why don’t we play set ball before the boys come?” he asked.
“I don’t know how to play.”
“Do you play handball?”
“No.”
“What about volleyball?”
I looked at him and then away. I wondered if Amaka would ever paint
him, would ever capture the clay-smooth skin, the straight eyebrows, which
were slightly raised as he watched me. “I played volleyball in class one,” I
said. “But I stopped playing because I…I was not that good and nobody liked
to pick me.” I kept my eyes focused on the bleak, unpainted spectator stands,
abandoned for so long that tiny plants had started to push their green heads
through the cracks in the cement.
“Do you love Jesus?” Father Amadi asked, standing up.
I was startled. “Yes. Yes, I love Jesus.”
“Then show me. Try and catch me, show me you love Jesus.”He had hardly finished speaking before he dashed off and I saw the blue
flash of his tank top. I did not stop to think; I stood up and ran after him. The
wind blew in my face, into my eyes, across my ears. Father Amadi was like
blue wind, elusive. I did not catch up until he stopped near the football goal
post. “So you don’t love Jesus,” he teased.
“You run too fast,” I said, panting.
“I will let you rest, and then you can have another chance to show me
you love the Lord.”
We ran four more times. I did not catch him. We flopped down on the
grass, finally, and he pushed a water bottle into my hand. “You have good legs
for running. You should practice more,” he said.
I looked away. I had never heard anything like that before. It seemed too
close, too intimate, to have his eyes on my legs, on any part of me.
“Don’t you know how to smile?” he asked.
“What?”
He reached across, tugged lightly at the sides of my lips. “Smile.”
I wanted to smile, but I could not. My lips and cheeks were frozen,
unthawed by the sweat running down the sides of my nose. I was too aware
that he was watching me.
“What is that reddish stain on your hand?” he asked.
I looked down at my hand, at the smudge of hastily wiped lipstick that
still clung to the sweaty back of my hands. I had not realized how much I had
put on. “It’s…a stain,” I said, feeling stupid.
“Lipstick?”
I nodded.
“Do you wear lipstick? Have you ever worn lipstick?”
“No,” I said. Then I felt the smile start to creep over my face, stretching
my lips and cheeks, an embarrassed and amused smile. He knew I had tried to
wear lipstick for the first time today. I smiled. I smiled again.
“Good evening, Father!” echoed all around, and eight boys descended on
us. They were all about my age, with shorts that had holes in them and shirts
washed so often I didn’t know what color they had originally been and similar
crusty spots from insect bites on their legs. Father Amadi took his tank top off
and dropped it on my lap before joining the boys on the football field.

『••✎••』