𝑃𝑢𝑟𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝐻𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑢𝑠

𝑺𝒑𝒆𝒂𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑾𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝑶𝒖𝒓 𝑺𝒑𝒊𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒔¹⁴

『••✎••』

“

Do you have fuel?”
“Ebekwanu? No.”
“Let me drop you. I have a little fuel.”
I watched Aunty Ifeoma and the woman walk slowly to the door, as
though weighed down by both what they had said and what they had not said.
Amaka waited for Aunty Ifeoma to shut the door behind them before she left
the window and sat down on a chair.
“Mom said you should remember to take your painkiller, Kambili,” she
said.
“What was Aunty Ifeoma talking about with her friend?” I asked. I knew
I would not have asked before. I would have wondered about it, but I would
not have asked.
“The sole administrator,” Amaka said, shortly, as if I would immediately
understand all that they had been talking about. She was running her hand
down the length of the cane chair, over and over.
“The university’s equivalent of a head of state,” Obiora said. “The
university becomes a microcosm of the country.” I had not realized that he
was there, reading a book on the living room floor. I had never heard anyone
use the word microcosm.
“They are telling Mom to shut up,” Amaka said. “Shut up if you do not
want to lose your job because you can be fired fiam, just like that.” Amaka
snapped her fingers to show how fast Aunty Ifeoma could be fired.
“They should fire her, eh, so we can go to America,” Obiora said.
“Mechie onu,” Amaka said. Shut up.
“America?” I looked from Amaka to Obiora.
“Aunty Phillipa is asking Mom to come over. At least people there get
paid when they are supposed to,” Amaka said, bitterly, as though she were
accusing someone of something.
“And Mom will have her work recognized in America, without any
nonsense politics,” Obiora said, nodding, agreeing with himself in case
nobody else did.
“Did Mom tell you she is going anywhere, gbo?” Amaka jabbed the
chair now, with fast motions.
“Do you know how long they have been sitting on her file?” Obioraasked. “She should have been senior lecturer years ago.”
“Aunty Ifeoma told you that?” I asked, stupidly, not even sure what I
meant, because I could think of nothing else to say, because I could no longer
imagine life without Aunty Ifeoma’s family, without Nsukka.
Neither Obiora nor Amaka responded. They were glaring at each other
silently, and I felt that they had not really been talking to me. I went outside
and stood by the verandah railings. It had rained all night. Jaja was kneeling
in the garden, weeding. He did not have to water anymore because the sky did
it. Anthills had risen in the newly softened red soil in the yard, like miniature
castles. I took a deep breath and held it, to savor the smell of green leaves
washed clean by rain, the way I imagined a smoker would do to savor the last
of a cigarette. The allamanda bushes bordering the garden bloomed heavily
with yellow, cylindrical flowers. Chima was pulling the flowers down and
sticking his fingers in them, one after the other. I watched as he examined
flower after flower, looking for a suitable small bloom that would fit onto his
pinky.
THAT EVENING, FATHER AMADI stopped by on his way to the stadium. He
wanted us all to go with him. He was coaching some boys from Ugwu Agidi
for the local government high-jump championships. Obiora had borrowed a
video game from the flat upstairs, and the boys were clustered in front of the
TV in the living room. They didn’t want to go to the stadium because they
would have to return the game soon.
Amaka laughed when Father Amadi asked her to come. “Don’t try to be
nice, Father, you know you would rather be alone with your sweetheart,” she
said. And Father Amadi smiled and said nothing.
I went alone with him. My mouth felt tight from embarrassment as he
drove us to the stadium. I was grateful that he did not say anything about
Amaka’s statement, that he talked about the sweet-smelling rains instead and
sang along with the robust Igbo choruses coming from his cassette player. The
boys from Ugwu Agidi were already there when we got to the stadium. They
were taller, older versions of the boys I had seen the last time; their hole-
ridden shorts were just as worn and their faded shirts just as threadbare.
Father Amadi raised his voice—it lost most of its music when he did—as he
gave encouragement and pointed out the boys’ weaknesses. When they were
not looking, he took the rod up a notch, then yelled, “One more time: set, go!”
and they jumped over it, one after the other. He raised it a few more times
before the boys caught on and said, “Ah! Ah! Fada!” He laughed and said hebelieved they could jump higher than they thought they could. And that they
had just proved him right.
It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting
higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she
expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod.
And they did. It was different for Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod
because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we
couldn’t.
“What clouds your face?” Father Amadi asked, sitting down beside me.
His shoulder touched mine. The new smell of sweat and old smell of cologne
filled my nostrils.
“Nothing.”
“Tell me about the nothing, then.”
“You believe in those boys,” I blurted out.
“Yes,” he said, watching me. “And they don’t need me to believe in them
as much as I need it for myself.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to believe in something that I never question.” He
picked up the water bottle, drank deeply from it. I watched the ripples in his
throat as the water went down. I wished I were the water, going into him, to
be with him, one with him. I had never envied water so much before. His eyes
caught mine, and I looked away, wondering if he had seen the longing in my
eyes.
“Your hair needs to be plaited,” he said.
“My hair?”
“Yes. I will take you to the woman who plaits your aunt’s hair in the
market.”
He reached out then and touched my hair. Mama had plaited it in the
hospital, but because of my raging headaches, she did not make the braids
tight. They were starting to slip out of the twists, and Father Amadi ran his
hand over the loosening braids, in gentle, smoothing motions. He was looking
right into my eyes. He was too close. His touch was so light I wanted to push
my head toward him, to feel the pressure of his hand. I wanted to collapse
against him. I wanted to press his hand to my head, my belly, so he could feel
the warmth that coursed through me.He let go of my hair, and I watched him get up and run back to the boys
on the field.
IT WAS TOO EARLY when Amaka’s movements woke me up the next
morning; the room was not yet touched by the lavender rays of dawn. In the
faint glow from the security lights outside, I saw her tying her wrapper round
her chest. Something was wrong; she did not tie her wrapper just to go to the
toilet.
“Amaka, o gini?”
“Listen,” she said.
I could make out Aunty Ifeoma’s voice from the verandah, and I
wondered what she was doing up so early. Then I heard the singing. It was the
measured singing of a large group of people, and it came in through the
window.
“Students are rioting,” Amaka said.
I got up and followed her into the living room. What did it mean, that
students were rioting? Were we in danger? Jaja and Obiora were on the
verandah with Aunty Ifeoma. The cool air felt heavy against my bare arms, as
if it were holding on to raindrops that were reluctant to fall.
“Turn off the security lights,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “If they pass and see
the light, they might throw stones up here.”
Amaka turned off the lights. The singing was clearer now, loud and
resonant. There had to be a least five hundred people. “Sole administrator
must go. He doesn’t wear pant oh! Head of State must go. He doesn’t wear
pant oh! Where is running water? Where is light? Where is petrol?”
“The singing is so loud I thought they were right outside,” Aunty Ifeoma
said.
“Will they come here?” I asked.
Aunty Ifeoma put an arm around me and drew me close. She smelled of
talcum powder. “No, nne, we are fine. The people who might worry are those
that live near the vice chancellor. Last time, the students burned a senior
professor’s car.”
The singing was louder but not closer. The students were invigorated
now. Smoke was rising in thick, blinding fumes that blended into the star-
filled sky. Crashing sounds of breaking glass peppered the singing.“All we are saying, sole administrator must go! All we are saying, he
must go! No be so? Na so!”
Shouts and yells accompanied the singing. A solo voice rose, and the
crowds cheered. The cool night wind, heavy with the smell of burning,
brought clear snatches of the resonating voice speaking pidgin English from a
street away.
“Great Lions and Lionesses! We wan people who dey wear clean
underwear, no be so? Abi the Head of State dey wear common underwear, sef,
talkless of clean one? No!”
“Look,” Obiora said, lowering his voice as if the group of about forty
students jogging past could possibly hear him. They looked like a fast-
flowing dark stream, illuminated by the torches and burning sticks they held.
“Maybe they are catching up with the rest from down campus,” Amaka
said, after the students had passed.
We stayed out to listen for a little while longer before Aunty Ifeoma said
we had to go in and sleep.
AUNTY IFEOMA CAME HOME that afternoon with the news of the riot. It was
the worst one since they became commonplace some years ago. The students
had set the sole administrator’s house on fire; even the guest house behind it
had burned to the ground. Six university cars had been burned down, as well.
“They say the sole administrator and his wife were smuggled out in the boot
of an old Peugeot 404, o di egwu,” Aunty Ifeoma said, waving around a
circular. When I read the circular, I felt a tight discomfort in my chest like the
heartburn I got after eating greasy akara. It was signed by the registrar. The
university was closed down until further notice as a result of the damage to
university property and the atmosphere of unrest. I wondered what it meant, if
it meant Aunty Ifeoma would leave soon, if it meant we would no longer
come to Nsukka.
During my fitful siesta, I dreamed that that the sole administrator was
pouring hot water on Aunty Ifeoma’s feet in the bathtub of our home in
Enugu. Then Aunty Ifeoma jumped out of the bathtub and, in the manner of
dreams, jumped into America. She did not look back as I called to her to stop.
I was still thinking about the dream that evening as we all sat in the
living room, watching TV. I heard a car drive in and park in front of the flat,
and I clasped my shaky hands together, certain it was Father Amadi. But the
banging on the door was unlike him; it was loud, rude, intrusive.Aunty Ifeoma flew off her chair. “Onyezi? Who wants to break my door,
eh?”
She opened the door only a crack, but two wide hands reached in and
forced the door ajar. The heads of the four men who spilled into the flat
grazed the door frame. Suddenly, the flat seemed cramped, too small for the
blue uniforms and matching caps they wore, for the smell of stale cigarette
smoke and sweat that came in with them, for the raw bulge of muscle under
their sleeves.
“What is it? Who are you?” Aunty Ifeoma asked.
“We are here to search your house. We’re looking for documents
designed to sabotage the peace of the university. We have information that
you have been in collaboration with the radical student groups that staged the
riots…” The voice sounded mechanical, the voice of a person reciting
something written. The man speaking had tribal marks all over his cheek;
there seemed to be no area of skin free of the ingrained lines. The other three
men walked briskly into the flat as he spoke. One opened the drawers of the
sideboard, leaving each open. Two went into the bedrooms.
“Who sent you here?” Aunt Ifeoma asked.
“We are from the special security unit in Port Harcourt.”
“Do you have any papers to show me? You cannot just walk into my
house.”
“Look at this yeye woman oh! I said we are from the special security
unit!” The tribal marks curved even more on the man’s face as he frowned
and pushed Aunty Ifeoma aside.
“How you go just come enter like dis? Wetin be dis?” Obiora said,
rising, the fear in his eyes not quite shielded by the brazen manliness in his
pidgin English.
“Obiora, nodu ani,” Aunt Ifeoma quietly said, and Obiora sat down
quickly. He looked relieved that he had been asked to. Aunty Ifeoma muttered
to us all to remain seated, not to say a word, before she followed the men into
the rooms. They did not look inside the drawers they flung open, they just
threw the clothes and whatever else was inside on the floor. They overturned
all the boxes and suitcases in Aunty Ifeoma’s room, but they did not rummage
through the contents. They scattered, but they did not search. As they left, the
man with the tribal marks said to Aunty Ifeoma, waving a stubby finger with
a curved nail in her face, “Be careful, be very careful.”We were silent until the sound of their car driving off faded.
“We have to go to the police station,” Obiora said.
Aunt Ifeoma smiled; the movement of her lips did not brighten her face.
“That is where they came from. They’re all working together.”
“Why are they accusing you of encouraging the riot, Aunty?” Jaja asked.
“It’s all rubbish. They want to scare me. Since when have students
needed somebody to tell them when to riot?”
“I don’t believe they just forced their way into our house and turned it
upside down,” Amaka said. “I don’t believe it.”
“Thank God Chima is asleep,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
“We should leave,” Obiora said. “Mom, we should leave. Have you
talked to Aunty Phillipa since the last time?”
Aunty Ifeoma shook her head. She was putting back the books and table
mats from the sideboard drawers. Jaja went over to help her.
“What do you mean, leave? Why do we have to run away from our own
country? Why can’t we fix it?” Amaka asked.
“Fix what?” Obiora had a deliberate sneer on his face.
“So we have to run away? That’s the answer, running away?” Amaka
asked, her voice shrill.
“It’s not running away, it’s being realistic. By the time we get into
university, the good professors will be fed up with all this nonsense and they
will go abroad.”
“Shut up, both of you, and come and clean up this place!” Aunty Ifeoma
snapped. It was the first time she did not look on proudly and enjoy my
cousins’ arguments.
AN EARTHWORM WAS slithering in the bathtub, near the drain, when I went
in to take a bath in the morning. The purplish-brown body contrasted with the
whiteness of the tub. The pipes were old, Amaka had said, and every rainy
season, earthworms made their way into the bathtub. Aunty Ifeoma had
written the works department about the pipes, but, of course, it would take
ages before anybody did anything about them. Obiora said he liked to study
the worms; he’d discovered that they died only when you poured salt on
them. If you cut them in two, each part simply grew back to form a wholeearthworm.
Before I climbed into the tub, I picked the ropelike body out with a twig
broken off a broom and threw it in the toilet. I could not flush because there
was nothing to flush, it would be a waste of water. The boys would have to
pee looking at a floating earthworm in the toilet bowl.
When I finished my bath, Aunty Ifeoma had poured me a glass of milk.
She had sliced my okpa, too, and red chunks of pepper gaped from the yellow
slices. “How do you feel, nne?” she asked.
“I’m fine, Aunty.” I did not even remember that I had once hoped never
to open my eyes again, that fire had once dwelt in my body. I picked up my
glass, stared at the curiously beige and grainy milk.
“Homemade soybean milk,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “Very nutritious. One of
our lecturers in agriculture sells it.”
“It tastes like chalk water,” Amaka said.
“How do you know, have you ever drunk chalk water?” Aunty Ifeoma
asked. She laughed, but I saw the lines, thin as spiders’ limbs, around her
mouth and the faraway look in her eyes. “I just can’t afford milk anymore,”
she added tiredly. “You should see how the prices of dried milk rise every
day, as if somebody is chasing them.”
The doorbell rang. My stomach heaved around itself whenever I heard it,
although I knew Father Amadi usually knocked quietly on the door.
It was a student of Aunt Ifeoma’s, in a tight pair of blue jeans. Her face
was light-skinned, but her complexion was from bleaching creams—her
hands were the dark brown color of Boumvita with no milk added. She held a
huge gray chicken. It was a symbol of her formal announcement to Aunty
Ifeoma that she was getting married, she said. When her fiance learned of yet
another university closure, he had told her he could no longer wait until she
graduated, since nobody knew when the university would reopen. The
wedding would be next month. She did not call him by his name, she called
him “dim,” “my husband,” with the proud tone of someone who had won a
prize, tossing her braided, reddish gold-dyed hair.
“I’m not sure I will come back to school when we reopen. I want to have
a baby first. I don’t want dim to think that he married me to have an empty
home,” she said, with a high, girlish laugh. Before she left, she copied Aunty
Ifeoma’s address down, so she could send an invitation card.
Aunty Ifeoma stood looking at the door. “She was never particularlybright, so I shouldn’t be sad,” she said thoughtfully, and Amaka laughed and
said, “Mom!”
The chicken squawked. It was lying on its side because its legs were tied
together.
“Obiora, please kill this chicken and put it in the freezer before it loses
weight, since there’s nothing to feed it,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
“They have been taking the light too often the past week. I say we eat the
whole chicken today,” Obiora said.
“How about we eat half and put the other half in the freezer and pray
NEPA brings back the light so it doesn’t spoil,” Amaka said.
“Okay,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
“I’ll kill it,” Jaja said, and we all turned to stare at him.
“Nna m, you have never killed a chicken, have you?” Aunty Ifeoma
asked.
“No. But I can kill it.”
“Okay,” Aunty Ifeoma said, and I turned to stare, startled at how easily
she had said that. Was she absentminded because she was thinking about her
student? Did she really think Jaja could kill a chicken?
I followed Jaja out to the backyard, watched him hold the wings down
under his foot. He bent the chicken’s head back. The knife glinted, meeting
with the sun rays to give off sparks. The chicken had stopped squawking;
perhaps it had decided to accept the inevitable. I did not look as Jaja slit its
feathery neck, but I watched the chicken dance to the frenzied tunes of death.
It flapped its gray wings in the red mud, twisting and flailing. Finally, it lay in
a puff of sullied feathers. Jaja picked it up and dunked it in the basin of hot
water that Amaka brought. There was a precision in Jaja, a singlemindedness
that was cold, clinical. He started to pluck the feathers off quickly, and he did
not speak until the chicken had been reduced to a slim form covered with
white-yellow skin. I did not realize how long a chicken’s neck is until it was
plucked.
“If Aunty Ifeoma leaves, then I want to leave with them, too,” he said.
I said nothing. There was so much I wanted to say and so much I did not
want to say. Two vultures hovered overhead and then landed on the ground,
close enough that I could have grabbed them if I had jumped fast. Their bald
necks glistened in the early-morning sun.“See how close the vultures come now?” Obiora asked. He and Amaka
had come to stand by the back door. “They are getting hungrier and hungrier.
Nobody kills chickens these days, and so there are less entrails for them to
eat.” He picked up a stone and threw it at the vultures. They flew up and
perched on the branches of the mango tree only a little distance away.
“Papa-Nnukwu used to say that the vultures have lost their prestige,”
Amaka said. “In the old days, people liked them because when they came
down to eat the entrails of animals used in sacrifice, it meant the gods were
happy.”
“In these new days, they should have the good sense to wait for us to be
done killing the chicken before they descend,” Obiora said.
Father Amadi came after Jaja had cut up the chicken and Amaka had put
half of it in a plastic bag for the freezer. Aunty Ifeoma smiled when Father
Amadi told her he was taking me to get my hair done. “You are doing my job
for me, Father, thank you,” she said. “Greet Mama Joe. Tell her I will come
soon to plait my hair for Easter.”
MAMA J>OE’S SHED IN Ogige market just barely fit the high stool where she
sat and the smaller stool in front of her. I sat on the smaller stool. Father
Amadi stood outside, beside the wheelbarrows and pigs and people and
chickens that went past, because his broad-shouldered form could not fit in
the shed. Mama Joe wore a wool hat even though sweat had made yellow
patches under the sleeves of her blouse. Women and children worked in the
neighboring sheds, twisting hair, weaving hair, plaiting hair with thread.
Wooden boards with lopsided print leaned on broken chairs in front of the
sheds. The closest ones read MAMA CHINEDU SPECIAL HAIR STYLIST and MAMA
BOMBOY INTERNATIONAL HAIR. The women and children called out to every
female who walked past. “Let us plait your hair!” “Let us make you
beautiful!” “I will plait it well for you!” Mostly, the women shrugged off their
pulling hands and walked on.
Mama Joe welcomed me as though she had been plaiting my hair all my
life. If I was Aunty Ifeoma’s niece, then I was special. She wanted to know
how Aunty Ifeoma was doing. “I have not seen that good woman in almost a
month. I would be naked but for your aunty, who gives me her old clothes. I
know she doesn’t have that much, either. Trying so hard to raise those
children well. Kpau! A strong woman,” Mama Joe said. Her Igbo dialect
came out sounding strange, with words dropped; it was difficult to
understand. She told Father Amadi that she would be done in an hour. Hebought a bottle of Coke and placed it at the foot of my stool before he left.
“Is he your brother?” Mama Joe asked, looking after him.
“No. He’s a priest.” I wanted to add that he was the one whose voice
dictated my dreams.
“Did you say he is a fada?”
“Yes.”
“A real Catholic fada?”
“Yes.” I wondered if there were any unreal Catholic priests.
“All that maleness wasted,” she said, combing my thick hair gently. She
put the comb down and untangled some ends with her fingers. It felt strange,
because Mama had always plaited my hair. “Do you see the way he looks at
you? It means something, I tell you.”
“Oh,” I said, because I did not know what Mama Joe expected me to say.
But she was already shouting something to Mama Bomboy across the aisle.
While she turned my hair into tight cornrows, she chattered nonstop to Mama
Bomboy and to Mama Caro, whose voice I heard but whom I could not see
because she was a few sheds away. The covered basket at the entrance of
Mama Joe’s shed moved. A brown spiraled shell crawled out from
underneath. I nearly jumped—I did not know the basket was full of live snails
that Mama Joe sold. She stood up and retrieved the snail and put it back in.
“God take power from the devil,” she muttered. She was on the last corn row
when a woman walked up to her shed and asked to see the snails. Mama Joe
took the covering basket off.
“They are big,” she said. “My sister’s children picked them today at
dawn near Adada lake.”
The woman picked up the basket and shook it, searching for tiny shells
hidden among the big ones. Finally, she said they were not that big anyway
and left. Mama Joe shouted after the woman, “People who have bad stomachs
should not spread their bad will to others! You will not find snails this size
anywhere else in the market!”
She picked up an enterprising snail that was crawling out of the open
basket. She threw it back in and muttered, “God take power from the devil.” I
wondered if it was the same snail, crawling out, being thrown back in, and
then crawling out again. Determined. I wanted to buy the whole basket and
set that one snail free.

『••✎••』