He stared at the e-mail. This was what he had longed for, for so long. To hear from her. When she first stopped contacting him, he had worried himself into weeks of insomnia, roaming the house in the middle of the night, wondering what had happened to her. They had not fought, their love was as sparkling as always, their plan intact, and suddenly there was silence from her, a silence so brutal and complete. He had called and called until she changed her phone number, he had sent e-mails, he had contacted her mother, Aunty Uju, Ginika. Ginika’s tone, when she said, “Ifem needs some time, I think she has depression,” had felt like ice pressed against his body. Ifemelu was not crippled or blinded from an accident, not suddenly suffering amnesia. She was in touch with Ginika and other people but not with him. She did not want to keep in touch with him. He wrote her e-mails, asking that she at least tell him why, what had happened. Soon, his e-mails bounced back, undeliverable; she had closed the account. He missed her, a longing that tore deep into him. He resented her. He wondered endlessly what might have happened. He changed, curled more inwardly into himself. He was, by turns, inflamed by anger, twisted by confusion, withered by sadness.
And now here was her e-mail. Her tone the same, as though she had not wounded him, left him bleeding for more than five years. Why was she writing him now? What was there to tell her, that he cleaned toilets and had only just today encountered a curled turd? How did she know he was still alive? He could have died during their silence and she would not have known. An angry sense of betrayal overwhelmed him. He clicked Delete and Empty Trash.
HIS COUSIN NICHOLAS HAD the jowly face of a bulldog, yet still somehow managed to be very attractive, or perhaps it was not his features but his aura that appealed, the tall, broad-shouldered, striding masculinity of him. In Nsukka, he had been the most popular student on campus; his beat-up Volkswagen Beetle parked outside a beer parlor lent the drinkers there an immediate cachet. Two Big Chicks once famously fought over him in Bello Hostel, tearing each other’s blouses, but he remained roguishly unattached until he met Ojiugo. She was Obinze’s mother’s favorite student, the only one good enough to be a research assistant, and had stopped by their house one Sunday to discuss a book. Nicholas had stopped by, too, on his weekly ritual, to eat Sunday rice. Ojiugo wore orange lipstick and ripped jeans, spoke bluntly, and smoked in public, provoking vicious gossip and dislike from other girls, not because she did these things but because she dared to without having lived abroad, or having a foreign parent, those qualities that would have made them forgive her lack of conformity. Obinze remembered how dismissive she first was of Nicholas, ignoring him while he, unused to a girl’s indifference, talked more and more loudly. But in the end, they left together in his Volkswagen. They would speed around campus in that Volkswagen, Ojiugo driving and Nicholas’s arm hanging from the front window, music blaring, bends taken sharply, and once with a friend lodged in the open front boot. They smoked and drank publicly together. They created glamorous myths. Once they were seen at a beer parlor, Ojiugo wearing Nicholas’s large white shirt and nothing below, and Nicholas wearing a pair of jeans and nothing above. “Things are hard, so we are sharing one outfit,” they said nonchalantly to friends.
That Nicholas had lost his youthful outrageousness did not surprise Obinze; what surprised him was the loss of even the smallest memory of it. Nicholas, husband and father, homeowner in England, spoke with a soberness so forbidding that it was almost comical. “If you come to England with a visa that does not allow you to work,” Nicholas told him, “the first thing to look for is not food or water, it is an NI number so you can work. Take all the jobs you can. Spend nothing. Marry an EU citizen and get your papers. Then your life can begin.” Nicholas seemed to feel that he had done his part, delivered words of wisdom, and in the following months, he hardly spoke to Obinze at all. It was as if he was no longer the big cousin who had offered Obinze, at fifteen, a cigarette to try, who had drawn diagrams on a piece of paper to show Obinze what to do when his fingers were between a girl’s legs. On weekends Nicholas walked around the house in a tense cloud of silence, nursing his worries. Only during Arsenal matches did he relax a little, a can of Stella Artois in hand, shouting “Go, Arsenal!” with Ojiugo and their children, Nna and Nne. After the game, his face would congeal once again. He would come home from work, hug his children and Ojiugo, and ask, “How are you? What did you people do today?” Ojiugo would list what they had done. Cello. Piano. Violin. Homework. Kumon. “Nne is really improving her sight reading,” she would add. Or “Nna was careless with his Kumon and he got two wrong.” Nicholas would praise or reprimand each child, Nna who had a chubby bulldog-like face and Nne who had her mother’s dark broad-faced beauty. He spoke to them only in English, careful English, as though he thought that the Igbo he shared with their mother would infect them, perhaps make them lose their precious British accents. Then he would say, “Ojiugo, well done. I’m hungry.”
“Yes, Nicholas.”
She would serve his food, a plate on a tray taken to him in his study or in front of the TV in the kitchen. Obinze sometimes wondered if she bowed while putting it down or whether the bowing was merely in her demeanor, in the slump of her shoulders and curve of her neck. Nicholas spoke to her in the same tone as he spoke to his children. Once Obinze heard him say to her, “You people have scattered my study. Now please leave my study, all of you.”
“Yes, Nicholas,” she said, and took the children out. “Yes, Nicholas” was her response to almost everything he said. Sometimes, from behind Nicholas, she would catch Obinze’s eye and make a funny face, inflating her cheeks into small balloons, or pushing her tongue out of the corner of her mouth. It reminded Obinze of the gaudy theatrics of Nollywood films.
“I keep thinking of how you and Nicholas were in Nsukka,” Obinze said one afternoon as he helped her cut up a chicken.
“Ahn-ahn! Do you know we used to fuck in public? We did it at the Arts Theater. Even in the engineering building one afternoon, in a quiet corner of the corridor!” She laughed. “Marriage changes things. But this country is not easy. I got my papers because I did postgraduate school here, but you know he only got his papers two years ago and so for so long he was living in fear, working under other people’s names. That thing can do wonders to your head, eziokwu. It has not been easy at all for him. This job he has now is very good but he’s on contract. He never knows if they will renew. He got a good offer in Ireland, you know Ireland is seriously booming now and computer programmers do well there, but he doesn’t want us to move there. Education for the kids is much better here.”
Obinze selected some spice bottles from the cupboard, sprinkled them on the chicken, and put the pot on the stove.
“You put nutmeg in chicken?” Ojiugo asked.
“Yes,” Obinze said. “Don’t you?”
“Me, what do I know? Whoever marries you will win a lottery, honestly. By the way, what did you say happened to you and Ifemelu? I so liked her.”
“She went to America and her eyes opened and she forgot me.”
Ojiugo laughed.
The phone rang. Because Obinze was all the time willing a call from his job agency, each time the phone did ring, a mild panic would seize his chest, and Ojiugo would say, “Don’t worry, The Zed, things will work out for you. Look at my friend Bose. Do you know she applied for asylum, was denied, and went through hell before she finally got her papers? Now she owns two nurseries and has a holiday home in Spain. It will happen for you, don’t worry, rapuba.” There was a certain vapidity to her reassurance, an automatic way of expressing goodwill, which did not require any concrete efforts on her part to help him. Sometimes he wondered, not resentfully, whether she truly wanted him to find a job, because he would no longer be able to watch the children while she popped out to Tesco to buy milk, no longer be able to make their breakfast while she supervised their practice before school, Nne on the piano or violin and Nna on the cello. There was something about those days that Obinze would come to miss, buttering toast in the weak light of morning while the sounds of music floated through the house, and sometimes, too, Ojiugo’s voice, raised in praise or impatience, saying, “Well done! Try once more!” or “What rubbish are you doing?”
Later that afternoon, after Ojiugo brought the children home from school, she told Nna, “Your Uncle Obinze cooked the chicken.”
“Thank you for helping Mummy, Uncle, but I don’t think I’ll be having any chicken.” He had his mother’s playful manner.
“Look at this boy,” Ojiugo said. “Your uncle is a better cook than I am.”
Nna rolled his eyes. “Okay, Mummy, if you say so. Can I watch TV? Just for ten minutes?”
“Okay, ten minutes.”
It was the half-hour break after their homework and before their French tutor arrived, and Ojiugo was making jam sandwiches, carefully cutting off the crusts. Nna turned on the television, to a music performance by a man wearing many large shiny chains around his neck.
“Mummy, I’ve been thinking about this,” Nna said. “I want to be a rapper.”