“The ten percent is standard, so extras always help. The other bidders probably don’t have a beautiful daughter.” Kainene dragged the word out until it sounded cloying, sticky: beau-ti-ful. She was flipping through the copy of Lagos Life, her silk robe tied tight around her skinny waist. “The benefit of being the ugly daughter is that nobody uses you as sex bait.”
“They’re not using me as sex bait.”
Kainene did not respond for a while; she seemed focused on an article in the paper. Then she looked up. “Richard is going to Nsukka too. He’s received the grant, and he’s going to write his book there.”
“Oh, good. So that means you will be spending time in Nsukka?”
Kainene ignored the question. “Richard doesn’t know anybody in Nsukka, so maybe you could introduce him to your revolutionary lover.”
Olanna smiled. Revolutionary lover. The things Kainene could say with a straight face! “I’ll introduce them,” she said. She had never liked any of Kainene’s boyfriends and never liked that Kainene dated so many white men in England. Their thinly veiled condescension, their false validations irritated her. Yet she had not reacted in the same way to Richard Churchill when Kainene brought him to dinner. Perhaps it was because he did not have that familiar superiority of English people who thought they understood Africans better than Africans understood themselves and, instead, had an endearing uncertainty about him—almost a shyness. Or perhaps because her parents had ignored him, unimpressed because he didn’t know anyone who was worth knowing.
“I think Richard will like Odenigbo’s house,” Olanna said. “It’s like a political club in the evenings. He only invited Africans at first because the university is so full of foreigners, and he wanted Africans to have a chance to socialize with one another. At first it was BYOB, but now he asks them all to contribute some money, and every week he buys drinks and they meet in his house—” Olanna stopped. Kainene was looking at her woodenly, as if she had broken their unspoken rule and tried to start idle chatter.
Kainene turne
d toward the door. “When do you leave for Kano?”
“Tomorrow.” Olanna wanted Kainene to stay, to sit on the bed and hold a pillow on her lap and gossip and laugh into the night.
“Go well, jee ofuma. Greet Aunty and Uncle and Arize.”
“I will,” Olanna said, although Kainene had already left and shut the door. She listened for Kainene’s footsteps on the carpeted hallway. It was now that they were back from England, living in the same house again, that Olanna realized just how distant they had become. Kainene had always been the withdrawn child, the sullen and often acerbic teenager, the one who, because she did not try to please their parents, left Olanna with that duty. But they had been close, despite that. They used to be friends. She wondered when it all changed. Before they went to England, for sure, since they didn’t even have the same friends in London. Perhaps it was during their secondary-school years at Heathgrove. Perhaps even before. Nothing had happened—no momentous quarrel, no significant incident—rather, they had simply drifted apart, but it was Kainene who now anchored herself firmly in a distant place so that they could not drift back together.
Olanna chose not to fly up to Kano. She liked to sit by the train window and watch the thick woods sliding past, the grassy plains unfurling, the cattle swinging their tails as they were herded by bare-chested nomads. When she got to Kano, it struck her once again how different it was from Lagos, from Nsukka, from her hometown Umunnachi, how different the North as a whole was from the South. Here, the sand was fine, gray, and sun-seared, nothing like the clumpy red earth back home; the trees were tame, unlike the bursting greenness that sprang up and cast shadows on the road to Umunnachi. Here, miles of flat-land went on and on, tempting the eyes to stretch just a little farther, until they seemed to meet with the silver-and-white sky.
She took a taxi from the train station and asked the driver to stop first at the market, so that she could greet Uncle Mbaezi.
On the narrow market paths, she maneuvered between small boys carrying large loads on their heads, women haggling, traders shouting. A record shop was playing loud High Life music, and she slowed a little to hum along to Bobby Benson’s “Taxi Driver” before hurrying on to her uncle’s stall. His shelves were lined with pails and other housewares.
“Omalicha!” he said, when he saw her. It was what he called her mother, too—Beautiful. “You have been on my mind. I knew you would come to see us soon.”
“Uncle, good afternoon.”
They hugged. Olanna rested her head on his shoulder; he smelled of sweat, of the open-air market, of wares arranged on dusty wood shelves.
It was hard to imagine Uncle Mbaezi and her mother, growing up together, brother and sister. Not only because her uncle’s light-complexioned face had none of her mother’s beauty but also because there was an earthiness about him. Sometimes Olanna wondered if she would admire him as she did if he were not so different from her mother.
Whenever she visited, Uncle Mbaezi would sit with her in the yard after supper and tell her the latest family news—a cousin’s unmarried daughter was pregnant, and he wanted her to come and stay with them to avoid the malice of the village; a nephew had died here in Kano and he was looking into the cheapest way to take the body back home. Or he would tell her about politics: what the Igbo Union was organizing, protesting, discussing. They held meetings in his yard. She had sat in a few times, and she still remembered the meeting where irritated men and women talked about the northern schools not admitting Igbo children. Uncle Mbaezi had stood up and stamped his foot. “Ndi be anyi! My people! We will build our own school! We will raise money and build our own school!” After he spoke, Olanna had joined in clapping her approval, in chanting, “Well spoken! That is how it shall be!” But she had worried that it would be difficult to build a school. Perhaps it was more practical to try and persuade the Northerners to admit Igbo children.
Yet, now, only a few years later, her taxi was on Airport Road, driving past the Igbo Union Grammar School. It was break time and the schoolyard was full of children. Boys were playing football in different teams on the same field, so that multiple balls flew in the air; Olanna wondered how they could tell which ball was which. Clusters of girls were closer to the road, playing oga and swell, clapping rhythmically as they hopped first on one leg and then the other. Before the taxi parked outside the communal compound in Sabon Gari, Olanna saw Aunty Ifeka sitting by her kiosk on the roadside. Aunty Ifeka wiped her hands on her faded wrapper and hugged Olanna, pulled back to look at her, and hugged her again. “Our Olanna!”
“My aunty! Kedu?”
“I am even better now that I see you.”
“Arize is not back from her sewing class?”
“She will be back anytime now.”
“How is she doing? O na-agakwa? Is her sewing going well?”
“The house is full of patterns that she has cut.”
“What of Odinchezo and Ekene?”
“They are there. They visited last week and asked after you.”
“How is Maiduguri treating them? Is their trading picking up?”