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The day seemed to go by in a blur; it now hung in that dim zone
that was neither night nor day. The ceremonies of the first day
were almost over, but the smell of the burnt skin of the cows that
had been killed the night before still lingered. The akwunechenyi
music produced by rhythmic drums, beat by well-dressed drummers
dancing to the sound of their own music, and the piping sound of
the oja, the small wooden flute that praised the deserving
and those who had come of age, got fainter as the musicians moved
farther away from the ceremonies. Most of the guests – and
there had been many – had gone home too. But a few people
were still sitting out front, under the brightly coloured canopies,
talking and smiling, asking to be served with food and drinks, as
if this was a party. Some asked for the more expensive bottles of
small stout and Guinness malt in place of the cheaper Coca Cola.
Mrs Anoliefo could not see any of this from where she was sat on
a small stool in front of what used to be the kitchen. But she could
hear the noises and having attended, and even helped organise events
like this, she saw the scene in her mind’s eye: young men
lounging around, drinks in hand, showing off their youth as if they
would never die, young women asking for food for their children
who had eaten more than once, old women saying their soup lacked
meat, all having a good time. As if they had come to a party.
Ogonna, her younger sister who had been chatting with her, went
into the house to get something to eat. This seemed to signal that
the performance was over. She stretched and yawned and wondered
silently at her tiredness. She had been sitting down all day, in
the bungalow beside the main house, the house she and Innocent had
lived in before his business started doing well and they built the
big one-story. That was where she received the guests who came to
give their sympathies. They told her ndo, sorry, for her
loss, and put money in the tray on the table by the side. But now
the ceremony was over, at least for today. She tied her scarf more
securely on her bald head. She ignored the young, thin woman seated
on a mat by the side of the house, almost hidden. She ignored Okeoma,
her second daughter who had been hovering around, looking as if
her mother had suddenly become helpless, and walked into the main
house though a back door. She could not abide her daughter’s
mothering attitude, practiced too often with her brothers, not today.
She took charge – that was her character: she refused others
permission to act or decide for her. She had been in Enugu when
Innocent suffered the stroke. When Afam, her eldest son, called
her, she had wasted no time wondering what she should do. She had
quickly gone to the hospital in Awka where he was. She had taken
charge, dismissing the hapless girl who had no idea what to do or
who to talk to. She had had him transferred to the Teaching Hospital
in Enugu, where the best doctors in the East practiced, doctors
who were friends to her and Innocent. She was the one whom the doctors
reassured, telling her that people survived strokes so much better
these days. But they promptly put him into the 144 bed-end ward,
where they put the seriously ill, and where people died everyday
like flies.
She had been there when he died; she had made the arrangements for
the mortuary. She had contacted the Bishop and begged him to preside
over the funeral. She had told Afam, her eldest son, which printer
to use for the funeral programme. She had told him which caterer
to contact for the food. She had told her children to make sure
there were souvenirs for the guests who would attend the funeral.
That was the fashion these days – souvenirs at birthday parties,
souvenirs at weddings, souvenirs at funerals. Her friend Mrs Uzondu
had had umbrellas distributed to important guests when her husband
died the previous year, the people in the village got plastic buckets
and washing bowls. She was the one who shouted at the catering women
when they arranged their big cooking pots and pans and began to
make a fire too close to her orange tree. That orange tree was special;
she had planted it in her first year with Innocent. Although she
did not ask to see him where he lay in state in the main sitting
room downstairs, she knew what he looked like; she had selected
his clothes, the clothes he would meet his Maker in.
Just the day before she had been making sure that everything went
smoothly, from instructing her son to contact the rainmaker to ensure
that the day was bright and clear, to demanding that Ada supervise
the caterers and the men who came to kill the cows. It was fitting
that a cow be killed for Innocent. For all his faults, he was certainly
deserving of that honour, she thought, an honour given mostly by
those who could afford it to themselves. Innocent had taken the
ozo title years ago; another chieftaincy title had been
conferred on both she and Innocent seven years before. So she had
ordered that two cows be bought for the ceremony, the funeral of
a titled man. Two cows had been killed, along with several goats
and chickens. And she told her children to make sure none of the
meat went into the bags of the women in the village who came to
help out; it seemed part of the tradition that village women would
steal meat and mgbaduga, the round cassava flour wrapped
in cellophane.
She had not argued with their clansmen, the umunna, not
this time. She had quarrelled with them during Adanna’s traditional
marriage ceremony when they demanded that a leg of the cow that
was killed for the ceremony be given to them. For years, she had
stood her ground against them, greedy men trying to rob their clansman
who had done well in life. And she had been mostly successful. They
considered her mean for protecting her husband and she knew that
they were complicit in Innocent’s last deception. This time
she let them have a goat, a big Hausa goat. She gave it to them
before they asked. It would not buy them over – they had being
on opposite sides of the fence too long. But, perhaps, even though
she anticipated no roadblocks, it would soften their opposition
to her plans. And she wanted them to know that she was still in
charge.
She kept all the other traditions:
She allowed the umuada, the daughters of the clan, to shave
her head bald. Indeed, even with the new gospel being spread by
the new churches that the Bible did not require it, or the position
of the women’s rights groups to which her friend Dr. Mrs.
Onyeso belonged that it was denigrating to women because men did
not have to do it, Mrs. Anoliefo did not see anything wrong with
shaving one’s head at a husband’s death. She did not
insist on seeing her husband’s dead body; she knew well what
he looked like after all. She thought it was a stupid tradition
to disallow women from seeing their husbands’ corpses before
it entered the ground, but it was a tradition that was taken very
seriously – hundreds of people had died in Etti, the next
village, when a woman who had been deceived by her church into thinking
that it was her right to see her husband’s corpse after it
came back from the mortuary. With the plan that she had in mind,
every little bit that would soften the umunna helped.
So, while Mrs Anoliefo dutifully kept the low profile of a mourning
widow, she was fully in charge of the funeral ceremony. That is,
until the brown, shiny, wooden coffin went into the grave. Standing
with the other members of the family, dressed in their blue abada
uniform which she had chosen herself, the Bishop blessed the freshly
dug grave. Young men from the village began to lower the coffin
into the grave. That was when the first signal came: she almost
asked out loud what they were doing, why they were putting Innocent
in the big hole in the ground. “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,”
the Bishop intoned, reading from the funeral programme. “…
he signaled to Afam, and he bent down and took some of the fresh
red earth and threw it into the coffin. It landed with a resounding
thud. That was when the pain and anger struck and all the careful,
cultivated self-control vanished as if it had never been there.
She let out a shriek, and bawled like a mad woman, her head scarf
flapping slightly in the wind. She swayed from side to side from
the pain that death had inflicted, intensified by Innocent’s
last betrayal. Her eldest son, Afam, tears streaming from his eyes,
caught hold of her.
At the corner, a thin girl who looked out of place, wearing a black
shapeless dress, was crying too. Why was she crying, Mrs Anoliefo
wondered angrily? It was not her husband, not her Innocent, who
had died.
***
She was forced to mourn with
the girl. Custom required that she stay in the village for three
months after the funeral; so she did. Her children remained with
her, before they went back to their respective jobs and families
in Lagos, Port Harcourt and London. It still surprised her how her
children had turned out differently. The girls instinctively knew
what their mother needed. They made themselves useful, cleaning
up and receiving guests. Okeoma, her second daughter, slept with
her in the bedroom downstairs; it would have been uncomfortable
sleeping in their large bedroom upstairs. Okeoma had always been
the soft one, the one who wanted to take care of everyone, the one
who disliked quarrel. She remembered Okeoma when she was ten or
eleven years old offering to give her packets of cornflakes and
cabin biscuits, the supplements that boarding students took back
with them, to her whiny brother, Afam, who had more than she did.
Ada, her first daughter, was the most difficult. She found that
she harbouredsome anger against Ada, who had been the apple of her
father’s eyes. Even at thirty-five with a husband and children
of her own, Ada could still not see how her mother had been the
one who had ensured that they were taken care of, that she was the
one who bought provisions for them at boarding school, visited them
on visiting days, and did those little things that mothers did.
True, Innocent made most of the money. But she did most of the hard
work and the planning; Innocent did not know much about handling
servants, or arranging birthday parties and she had made sure he
never worried about things like that. Yet it was Ada who was most
like her – strong-willed, decisive. It was Ada who said that
the girl had to go.
The boys hovered a bit, trying to prove their manliness. Trying
to take over decisions she normally made. As if something told them
that having lost her husband, she had lost her senses as well. Like
telling the girl that she could stay in one of the small bedrooms
in the main house. She had quickly countermanded that of course.
Imagine having the stupid, husband-snatcher sleeping in the same
house as she, she fumed. How senseless could they be? Did they not
see any danger because the girl had only a baby girl? Had she given
them the go-crazy potion she gave their father? The next day before
the after-funeral ceremonies, the akwa, began, with Afam,
Chukwuemeka and Elozona her three sons at her side, each standing
tall with the imposing height they had got from their father, she
banished the girl to the small bungalow beside the big house. It
would not do to send her home before the time was ripe.
After three months, Mrs. Anoliefo went back to Enugu, there to continue
her angry mourning. She was angry that she could not go back to
work at the supermarket immediately because she was worried about
what people think. She wallowed shamelessly in self-pity in her
heart. She refused to be kind to the people who came to comfort
her, not helping them with the difficulties of expressing condolences,
not filling in the silences with small talk, smiling coldly and
acting unmoved by events past. She did not tell them that their
commiserations made her humiliation more palpable, that she knew
that all they talked about in their cars as they drove home with
pity in their voices was how Innocent got himself entangled with
that young woman.
Not for the first time she asked herself what she had done wrong.
Had she not been a good wife? How could God let this happen
to her? Her life had been typical. Grow up, marry a man acceptable
to your parents, a man that could feed her. Have children with him.
Make good meals. Sleep with him as often as you can comfortably.
Go to church together. Make good friends with the same social status.
Build a house and a home together. Send the children to school.
Then send them out to the world to be useful to themselves and the
society, and reflect well on you. Grow old together. It had all
seemed so simple. But now it seemed silly, stupid even to think
that a man who did not know his own needs could provide all of yours.
Truly foolish, that.
Sitting in her favorite sofa directly opposite the television in
the sitting room which she had not changed at all since Innocent
left her, she stared at the wall. They had made a good life for
themselves after the Biafran war, she thought now, looking at the
framed pictures on the sitting room wall. Life looked simple in
those black and white pictures they took in the early years –
she in a long gown which Ada said looked like a maternity gown,
Innocent with his abundant hair cut into a funny square shape and
a suit that now looked jumped-up, the trousers barely covering his
socks-clad ankles. That was taken soon after they married in 1964,
when Innocent was working in the Ministry of Finance. They looked
young and she wondered where that full, smooth skin on her face
had gone. She remembered her delighted pride when Innocent came
to ask for her hand from her parents. She had everything to be proud
of – he was tall and handsome, he had graduated from the University
of London and was working in the civil service in Enugu. She was
the envy of her friends.
In another picture, she and Innocent were sitting down, and the
five children – Ozioma had not come along then – were
standing ramrod straight like soldiers behind them. It was taken
on the large veranda in front of the rented flat in Chiene Street
before they moved to their own house in Independence Layout. So
that must have been taken in 1977. Innocent had begun to lose his
hair and his lean tall frame of the years before the Biafran war
had begun to fill out with flesh, with a particular emphasis on
the middle. The belly did not show very much in the traditional
clothes he had begun to wear in the eighties, the ones he called
‘chieftain.’ He was wearing one of those in the other
picture that they had taken together with Ada at her matriculation
in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 1982. How proud they had
been when she got admitted to study medicine. She was serious; he
was smiling into the camera, his right hand around their daughter.
He was always smiling; their children said that she was the serious
one. But someone had had to take charge, wield the cane and enforce
discipline, she told herself in an argument now as old as her now
wrinkling face. She looked serious in all the pictures, even at
a time of great happiness in her life – in the picture she
had taken in front of the Pitman College in London where she studied
in 1975 before coming home to teach in the primary school. Her friends
had all been envious that her husband would pay for her to go abroad
and become a ‘been-to.’ She had been pregnant with Elozona
her fifth child, but there was no stopping her. She had hid the
pregnancy from Innocent, only telling him when she got to London
because she was afraid that he would try to persuade her to have
the baby first and then going to London would possibly never happen.
As it happened, it had all worked out better than she planned –
having Elozona in London had given her son what was these days a
vital United Kingdom citizenship, and he now lived and worked there,
she thought proudly. It seemed to her that having climbed the oji
tree, she had got firewood too. Then there was the picture of them
at Afam’s wedding, only five years before. Had it really been
that recent? Those framed pictures told a story of a good family
life. The family that Innocent had thrown away.
It was not as if they had a perfect marriage. But who did? He said
she nagged too much. But that was what women were for. They told
men what to do because men frequently did not know what to do. And
so it had been since the day of Adam and Eve. It was Eve who set
things in motion; Adam was – wisely in Mrs. Anoliefo’s
opinion – only too happy to go along with whatever worked.
Nagging worked. That was how they had built their homes –
a big house in Enugu, a block of flats in Awka and a big house in
the village. That was how they had scraped the money together to
send Elozona to the London School of Economics, even though it almost
killed them. Perception was not her strongest points and it did
not cross her mind that her in-charge attitude gave him nothing
to do but be a figure in her dreams, one that she could parade as
her husband. And why would it? Not when she had done much of the
hard work. Not when she had given him the best years of her life,
been the best wife she knew how to be, and carried six of his children
– three boys and three girls – in her womb. She had
stood by him when he decided to take an early retirement from the
civil service and go into business. She had assured him that her
headmistress salary would sustain the family while he established
the biscuit factory that eventually became a booming biscuit business.
She counted her efforts to compel the primary school pupils in her
school buy the biscuits as the most important factor in the success
of that business venture. She was the one who stood between him
and his relatives, his umunna, when they would have milked
him dry with their endless requests for money. And all she had gained
from that was their undying hatred. But none of that had mattered;
his comfort was sufficient reward.
She had known from early on that he was unfaithful, which man wasn’t?
All her friends – Mrs. Okeke, whose husband always came back
with the tell-tale lipstick on his shirt even after he had been
caught several times, Mrs. Okorafor, whose professor husband spent
all his salary on the university girls he taught, Mrs. Akosa whose
husband had apparently kept a mistress and a young son in Onitsha
– knew that men could not be trusted. The restlessness between
their legs, that no one woman could hope to satisfy, took them from
one woman to the next. But none of them ever married their girlfriends.
None of them ever left home to live with another woman in full view
of the public, openly and without regard for their families. Except
Innocent.
Her knowledge of his last infidelity was forever attached to the
loss of her womb. She remembered that morning well. She had been
feeling the pains for a while. The extra amounts of blood that came
for longer and longer periods preceded the pains. She had mentioned
the pains to him and he had asked her to go and see their friend
and her gynaecologist,Dr Uzochukwu. Dr Uzochukwu said it was a fibroid
and recommended a hysterectomy. Innocent had encouraged her to have
the operation. After having six grown children, what did she really
need a womb at fifty-six for, he asked?
She was due to enter the hospital in two days when her sister told
her. “You will have to deal with this when you come out,”
Ogonna had said, “All these young women who steal other women’s
husbands,” she hissed. What would she know about it, Mrs Anoliefo
had thought irritably, her husband would not look at another woman
if she were the Queen of Sheba. Ogonna’s husband was too miserly
to spend his money on anybody else, not even himself. He still wore
shirts that he had worn in the university in the seventies, with
their old, brown, fraying collars. She did not rebuke herself for
having such hurtful, if honest, thoughts of her sister and her family;
she had not spoken them out loud after all. She wondered at the
appropriateness of the timing of this information, but perhaps Ogonna
wanted to make sure she would put everything into not dying on an
operating table, knowing that she had a fight awaiting her. That
was indeed good incentive, she thought angrily. But her annoyance
was better reserved for her husband of thirty-two years who was
being unfaithful to her. She resolved to deal with it when she got
out of hospital – she needed all her strength for the operation
and she would not confront him immediately. She would warn him,
shout and scream as she had done in earlier years, threaten the
woman and get her fired from her job, like she had done with that
thin girl who had been Innocent’s first secretary in the business.
She had learnt her lesson after that – she would not hear
of women working directly under Innocent.
She did not confront him; instead he came to her three weeks after
the operation. He said simply that he was leaving. Lying in their
large bed, she had stared up at him, lost for speech for perhaps
the first time in her life. Their children were grown, he said.
They did not have much in common at all, not in a long time. He
wanted to be happy, he continued. He was moving to their block of
flats in Awka to live with the girl. He did not say she was already
pregnant for him, but she found this out later. His eyes went all
around their wide room, anywhere but at her. He had moved some of
his things to Awka already, he told her. While she lay in a hospital
bed, giving away her womb at his suggestion, she thought bitterly.
He had not even waited for her to recover fully after the operation.
Men were wicked, she thought. But she knew that he was only capitalizing
on her momentary weakness; he would not have been able to do what
he did if she were herself, she told herself reassuringly. She shouted
insults at him, but they came out without the customary bite. She
was still weak after the operation and she could not hold on to
him even though she got up from the bed and clutched at him.
She could not believe what appeared to be happening. They had been
married forever, it seemed. This was not England or America where
men left their wives after more than thirty years of marriage. Other
men had affairs and got whatever it was out of their system, why
did he not do the same? This was not England or America where
women left their husbands because they were unfaithful to their
wives. This was Nigeria, where people were realistic and knew, from
the day he was born, that a man would stray.
She remembered her dubiousness when she was told about this latest
affair, and that it seemed very serious. She had not had the slightest
suspicion; it was really late in the marriage to worry too much
about that, or so she had thought. She should have known that men
could not be trusted, not while one of their members remained active.
Did the great Zik not remarry at age seventy? At least, Zik
had waited for his first wife to die. Still, it was incredulous
that Innocent, at over sixty nearly an old man with one foot in
the grave, would be thinking of taking another wife. Not when they
had reached the point in their lives when most of the troubles that
plagued marriages in the early years were no longer issues, except
for the obligatory nagging and complaining. The age when people
knew on which side of the bed they preferred to sleep and had slept
in that spot for years. That age when people understood, if not
loved, their spouses. Not with a grandchild on the way – Ada
was then pregnant with her first child. What would now happen to
their membership of the Rotary Club? She had thought they
might vie for the District Governor position that year. How would
he explain her absence to the Old Boys of DMGS? How could
she continue to chair the Christian Women’s Meeting in church?
How could she attend church without his tall frame beside her, receiving
greetings from everyone – including the priests who knew how
much money they gave in support to the church – and counseling
young couples who aspired to their enviable stability and success?
She would have to cancel performing the solo rendition of “Bless
This House’ that she had promised the Okechukwus, the young
couple at church, who had asked her to sing at their house opening
in a few months. She would not be able to hold her head up anymore,
she thought, how could he humiliate her so publicly?
In her heart she called herself Nkiruka, the name her parents had
given her, but ‘Mrs. Anoliefo’ was her identity, the
person she presented to the world. That was what her customers at
the supermarket called her. Before she retired from teaching that
was what the children in Ekulu primary school had called her. She
remembered going to antenatal classes when she was pregnant with
Afam, her first child. When it was her turn to see the doctor, the
nurse would respectfully call out, “Mrs. Anoliefo.”
That was when it began to dawn on her that she really was somebody.
He would take that from her, her identity, and give it to another
woman, she thought angrily. Just like he had taken her womb and
handed her a bombshell. That was forever the way the event etched
itself in her mind – the theft of a womb. It did not matter
that she had had children, did not want more and was unlikely to
have more. It did not matter that the doctor had taken out a fibroid
as large as a Christmas chicken attached to her womb. Nor did it
matter that she had reached the age of menopause. All that seemed
irrelevant to her husband’s grave duplicity – encouraging
her to have a hysterectomy, when he was sleeping, and making a baby,
with another woman. She tortured herself unflinchingly with thoughts
of what the two of them would have done in a bedroom – they
had after all produced a child – he with his sagging skin
and flabby beer belly and she with her young, thin body.
He had not even allowed her dignity in her mourning, she thought
now, staring at a picture of him in the garb of a Knight of St.
Christopher of the Anglican Diocese of Enugu. Her hope had been
that he would come back to his senses in due course. Instead, he
had died, leaving her to mourn without peace. To mourn him with
another woman. Suddenly she wanted to pull him out of that picture,
to bring him back from the absolute ending of death. And kill him
again. To take a knife to his torso and see if he could feel the
pain that he had caused her. This pain that brought back the utterly
foreign sensation of helplessness she had felt when he packed his
bags and moved to Awka to live with a girl younger than his first
two daughters. This pain that caused her to wake up every night
seething with an anger that almost overwhelmed
her.
***
It was a Friday morning when
she arrived at the block of flats in Awka. Morning was a good time
because many occupants would have gone to work. No matter, she had
come with reinforcements – she had hired two policemen from
Enugu. The gateman, who knew her well but had not seen her for the
past three years, greeted her with respect and a barely suppressed
excitement: he expected some drama today. She responded coldly;
she was unaccountably angry with all who had remained in Innocent’s
employment when he went to live with the girl. She had already fired
his driver. The gateman was next, as soon as she found a replacement.
She walked upstairs to the third floor. Why did Innocent want to
climb all these stairs, she wondered? It must have taken something
out of him. She was slightly out of breath by the time she got up
there, the policemen following respectfully behind. She knocked
on the door. The girl came out, dressed in a faded blouse and wrapper.
“Good morning,” she said to Mrs. Anoliefo.
Mrs Anoliefo did not answer. Instead she pushed into the sitting
room and said, “Go and pack your things and leave my house.”
“You cannot make me leave. This is my house too,” the
young woman said defiantly, turning to face her from the door. The
defiance was, however, blunted by the fear that gleamed so clearly
from her eyes when she looked up at Mrs Anoliefo, and the shaky
tone coated with tears in which she delivered this bold statement.
“Where were you when I built it with Innocent? Where
were you when I came to Awka to order the sand, the cement?
When I organized and paid the labourers? You were sitting
in your mother’s hut in the village, thinking of stealing
another woman’s husband instead of working hard and making
something of yourself. I am not here to argue with you. Just go
and pack up your things. And while we are at it, do not, I repeat,
do not ever step into my house in the village.”
“He married me,” the girl shouted, the muscles in her
thin neck working. “He paid my bride price. I am as entitled
as you are to this place and to the house in the village. The umunna
won’t let you do as you wish.”
“I let you come for the funeral. And that was generous of
me. If I ever see you in my home again, here or in the village,
your mother will regret the day she went into labour to have you,”
Mrs Anoliefo spat at her in a low bitter voice, shaking her index
finger in warning. “The umunna cannot make me do
anything. Go and ask them if you can come live with them since they
love you so much.” As she spoke, her thoughts were churning.
Innocent did not leave a will; she was certain of that. Not that
it would make any difference if he did because she would fight tooth
and nail for everything she had worked for, she told herself. As
for the umunna, she would take care of them if they tried
to cause her any trouble. It helped that the child was only a girl.
She was not entitled to property; that would make it more difficult
for her mother to enlist the umunna. A boy would have been
a more complicated matter.
The policemen knew what they were there for. The taller one said,
“Madam, oya go and pack your things. Otherwise we
will throw them out for you.” The shorter one moved closer
to the girl, a menacing look on his face.
“Move,” he snarled. “I say, move,” he pushed
the girl. The girl knew when she was overpowered. She went into
another room. Mrs. Anoliefo congratulated herself on her wisdom
in bringing them along. Although she had come prepared for anything,
she had not been sure how the girl would react. The last time she
came to the flat, a little over three years ago, she had been turned
away at the door. The girl had not had to do anything. Her husband,
crazy and suddenly powerful with the love potion the girl had fed
him, would not let her enter the flat and warned her not to come
back. Her friends and her sister had told her then to give him some
space, time for the potion to wear off. Her sister’s prophet
had given her some holy water to bath with at midnight every night,
calling his name aloud and ordering him to come back. But the love
potion never wore off, until he died. That stroke was a result of
overexertion, she was convinced. An old man trying to satisfy a
young, insatiable woman. She gagged at the picture this created
in her mind.
She waited a few minutes, and then followed her into the room, walking
with the assurance of a house owner. At the doorway, Mrs Anoliefo
stopped and watched the younger woman coldly. She was sitting on
the disheveled bed, her face in her hands. In the dim room darkened
by gloomy curtains, it was difficult to see a little girl no more
than three years old, younger than some of her grandchildren, sleeping
on the bed. Or the tears running down the young woman’s face.
In any event, these would have made no difference to Mrs Anoliefo:
this was no time for pity. If there was to be pity at all, she told
herself, she was the one to be pitied – she who had lost a
well-planned life, her dignity, even a womb. She wondered why the
silly girl was not packing up her things as she had instructed.
But perhaps it was just as well, she told herself, she could supervise
the packing and make sure the greedy thing would take only her filthy
rags.
What did Innocent see in this girl who, at this moment, seemed so
young, so lost, she asked herself? A little curiosity crept
without permission into the space occupied by her bitter outraged
anger. Although the tears poured out of her red, swollen eyes and
she wore a dirty-looking brown scarf over her hair which could not
have grown much – Mrs. Anoliefo knew because hers had not
grown much either, but she covered it with a fashionable wig –
one could still tell that the girl was somewhat pretty, if a little
young. But then he must have been going for young, Mrs Anoliefo
mused. The girl was only a year or two older than Ozioma, Mrs. Anoliefo’s
youngest daughter. She could not bring herself to think of her in
any way other than ‘the girl.’ She knew that the girl
was young, that she was from a neighbouring village and that, like
her, she was a teacher. But she knew little else. What was there
to know, except that she had stolen and killed another woman’s
husband, she asked herself, her anger returning with full force,
strangling the unwelcome curiosity.
“Why are you sitting down?” she asked the young
woman.
The young woman sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her
hand. Disgusting, Mrs. Anoliefo thought. She would have to get people
to clean the flat from top to bottom once the girl left. She found
it hard to believe that Innocent had left their tastefully furnished
house to live in this gloomy flat with dark curtains, non-descript
furniture and, if the messy flowery sheet on the bed and dirty clothes
piled by the wall were any indication, an inept housekeeper. The
bookcase with some of his books in a corner in the sitting room
was the only indication that her husband, who had enjoyed the immaculate
house that she kept, could ever have lived here.
“Please, ma,” she began to plead. “I have nowhere
to go. And my daughter is sick. She has been sick for the past one
week.”
“And why should that concern me?” Mrs. Anoliefo
asked the girl angrily, her voice shrill. “Did you think about
that when you stole my husband? Now that you have killed him,
did you think that I would let you live here on my years of toil
and sweat?”
It seemed like hours before the girl packed her things in three
suitcases, and a Ghana-must-go bag. Mrs. Anoliefo locked the door
of the flat herself. The policemen took the bags out and kept them
outside the gate. Mrs. Anoliefo warned the gateman, at the risk
of losing his job, not to let the girl back into the house. The
policemen remained to make sure she did not go back in. Mrs. Anoliefo
had paid them some money, and she promised to give them some more
when they came back to Enugu.
As Mrs. Anoliefo’s driver drove her away, the girl stood weeping
outside the gate, carrying her sick child lying limp in her arms,
her things on the ground beside her. The sky was dark, a storm was
coming. The sight of the girl crying reminded Mrs. Anoliefo of the
way she had stood crying by the side of the grave at the funeral
four months before – very visible evidence of Mrs. Anoliefo’s
public humiliation. Mrs. Anoliefo congratulated herself on taking
care of a long overdue matter – taking back her identity.
The girl could not convincingly call herself Mrs. Anoliefo, not
in her mother’s house in the village. Now Mrs. Anoliefo could
mourn in peace
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