TO GO TO NSUKKA was to finally see Obinze’s home, a bungalow resting in a compound filled with flowers. Ifemelu imagined him growing up, riding his bicycle down the sloping street, returning home from primary school with his bag and water bottle. Still, Nsukka disoriented her. She thought it too slow, the dust too red, the people too satisfied with the smallness of their lives. But she would come to love it, a hesitant love at first. From the window of her hostel room, where four beds were squashed into a space for two, she could look out to the entrance of Bello Hall. Tall gmelina trees swayed in the wind, and underneath them were hawkers, guarding trays of bananas and groundnuts, and okadas all parked close to each other, the motorcyclists talking and laughing, but each of them alert to customers. She put up bright blue wallpaper in her corner and because she had heard stories of roommate squabbles—one final-year student, it was said, had poured kerosene into the drawer of the first-year student for being what was called “saucy”—she felt fortunate about her roommates. They were easygoing and soon she was sharing with them and borrowing from them the things that easily ran out, toothpaste and powdered milk and Indomie noodles and hair pomade. Most mornings, she woke up to the rumbling murmur of voices in the corridor, the Catholic students saying the rosary, and she would hurry to the bathroom, to collect water in her bucket before the tap stopped, to squat over the toilet before it became unbearably full. Sometimes, when she was too late, and the toilets already swirled with maggots, she would go to Obinze’s house, even if he was not there, and once the house help Augustina opened the front door, she would say, “Tina-Tina, how now? I came to use the toilet.”
She often ate lunch in Obinze’s house, or they would go to town, to Onyekaozulu, and sit on wooden benches in the dimness of the restaurant, eating, on enamel plates, the tenderest of meats and the tastiest of stews. She spent some nights in Obinze’s boys’ quarters, lounging on his mattress on the floor, listening to music. Sometimes she would dance in her underwear, wiggling her hips, while he teased her about having a small bottom: “I was going to say shake it, but there’s nothing to sha
ke.”
University was bigger and baggier, there was room to hide, so much room; she did not feel as though she did not belong because there were many options for belonging. Obinze teased her about how popular she already was, her room busy during the first-year rush, final-year boys dropping by, eager to try their luck, even though a large photo of Obinze hung above her pillow. The boys amused her. They came and sat on her bed and solemnly offered to “show her around campus,” and she imagined them saying the same words in the same tone to the first-year girl in the next room. One of them, though, was different. His name was Odein. He came to her room, not as part of the first-year rush but to talk to her roommates about the students’ union, and after that, he would come by to visit her, to say hello, sometimes bringing a pack of suya, hot and spicy, wrapped in oil-stained newspaper. His activism surprised Ifemelu—he seemed a little too urbane, a little too cool, to be in the students’ union government—but also impressed her. He had thick, perfectly shaped lips, the lower the same size as the upper, lips that were both thoughtful and sensual, and as he spoke—“If the students are not united, nobody will listen to us”—Ifemelu imagined kissing him, in a way that she imagined doing something she knew she never would. It was because of him that she joined the demonstration, and convinced Obinze to join, too. They chanted “No Light! No Water!” and “VC is a Goat!” and found themselves carried along with the roaring crowd that settled, finally, in front of the vice chancellor’s house. Bottles were broken, a car was set on fire, and then the vice chancellor came out, diminutive, encased between security men, and spoke in pastel tones.
Later, Obinze’s mother said, “I understand the students’ grievances, but we are not the enemy. The military is the enemy. They have not paid our salary in months. How can we teach if we cannot eat?” And, still later, the news spread around campus of a strike by lecturers, and students gathered in the hostel foyer, bristling with the known and the unknown. It was true, the hall rep confirmed the news, and they all sighed, contemplating this sudden unwanted break, and returned to their rooms to pack; the hostel would be closed the next day. Ifemelu heard a girl close by say, “I don’t have ten kobo for transport to go home.”
THE STRIKE LASTED too long. The weeks crawled past. Ifemelu was restless, antsy; every day she listened to the news, hoping to hear that the strike was over. Obinze called her at Ranyinudo’s house; she would arrive minutes before he was due to call and sit by the gray rotary phone, waiting for it to ring. She felt cut away from him, each of them living and breathing in separate spheres, he bored and spiritless in Nsukka, she bored and spiritless in Lagos, and everything curdled in lethargy. Life had become a turgid and suspended film. Her mother asked if she wanted to join the sewing class at church, to keep her occupied, and her father said that this, the unending university strike, was why young people became armed robbers. The strike was nationwide, and all her friends were home, even Kayode was home, back on holiday from his American university. She visited friends and went to parties, wishing Obinze lived in Lagos. Sometimes Odein, who had a car, would pick her up and take her where she needed to go. “That your boyfriend is lucky,” he told her, and she laughed, flirting with him. She still imagined kissing him, sloe-eyed and thick-lipped Odein.
One weekend, Obinze visited and stayed with Kayode.
“What is going on with this Odein?” Obinze asked her.
“What?”
“Kayode said he took you home after Osahon’s party. You didn’t tell me.”
“I forgot.”
“You forgot.”
“I told you he picked me up the other day, didn’t I?”
“Ifem, what is going on?”
She sighed. “Ceiling, it’s nothing. I’m just curious about him. Nothing is ever going to happen. But I am curious. You get curious about other girls, don’t you?”
He was looking at her, his eyes fearful. “No,” he said coldly. “I don’t.”
“Be honest.”
“I am being honest. The problem is you think everyone is like you.
You think you’re the norm but you’re not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Just forget it.”
He did not want to talk about it any further, but the air between them was marred, and remained disturbed for days, even after he went back home, so that when the strike ended (“The lecturers have called it off! Praise God!” Chetachi shouted from their flat one morning) and Ifemelu returned to Nsukka, they were tentative with each other for the first few days, their conversations on tiptoe, their hugs abridged.
It surprised Ifemelu, how much she had missed Nsukka itself, the routines of unhurried pace, friends gathered in her room until past midnight, the inconsequential gossip told and retold, the stairs climbed slowly up and down as though in a gradual awakening, and each morning whitened by the harmattan. In Lagos, the harmattan was a mere veil of haze, but in Nsukka, it was a raging, mercurial presence; the mornings were crisp, the afternoons ashen with heat, and the nights unknown. Dust whirls would start in the far distance, very pretty to look at as long as they were far away, and swirl until they coated everything brown. Even eyelashes. Everywhere, moisture would be greedily sucked up; the wood laminate on tables would peel off and curl, pages of exercise books would crackle, clothes would dry minutes after being hung out, lips would crack and bleed, and Robb and Mentholatum kept within reach, in pockets and handbags. Skin would be shined with Vaseline, while the forgotten bits—between the fingers or at the elbows—turned a dull ash. The tree branches would be stark and, with their leaves fallen, wear a kind of proud desolation. The church bazaars would leave the air redolent, smoky from mass cooking. Some nights, the heat lay thick like a towel. Other nights, a sharp cold wind would descend, and Ifemelu would abandon her hostel room and, snuggled next to Obinze on his mattress, listen to the whistling pines howling outside, in a world suddenly fragile and breakable.
OBINZE’S MUSCLES WERE ACHING. He lay on his belly, and Ifemelu straddled him, massaging his back and neck and thighs with her fingers, her knuckles, her elbows. He was painfully taut. She stood on him, placed one foot gingerly on the back of a thigh, and then the other. “Does it feel okay?”
“Yes.” He groaned in pleasure-pain. She pressed down slowly, his skin warm under the soles of her feet, his tense muscles unknotting. She steadied herself with a hand on the wall, and dug her heels deeper, moving inch by inch while he grunted, “Ah! Ifem, yes, just there. Ah!”
“You should stretch after playing ball, mister man,” she said, and then she was lying on his back, tickling his underarms and kissing his neck.
“I have a suggestion for a better kind of massage,” he said. When he undressed her, he did not stop, as usual, at her underwear. He pulled it down and she raised her legs to aid him.
“Ceiling,” she said, half-certain. She did not want him to stop, but she had imagined this differently, assumed they would make a carefully planned ceremony of it.
“I’ll come out,” he said.
“You know it doesn’t always work.”