“Yes. Harrison has all sorts of ideas. He took out the insides and filled them with cheese, I think, and spices.”
“You know the Europeans took out the insides of an African woman and then stuffed and exhibited her all over Europe?” Odenigbo asked.
“Odenigbo, we are eating!” Miss Adebayo said, although she was stifling laughter.
The other guests laughed. Odenigbo did not. “It’s the same principle at play,” he said. “You stuff food, you stuff people. If you don’t like what is inside a particular food, then leave it alone, don’t stuff it with something else. A waste of garden eggs, in my opinion.”
Even Ugwu looked amused as he came into the dining room to clear up. “Mr. Richard, sah? I put the food in container for you?”
“No, keep it or throw it away,” Richard said. He never took any leftover food back; what he took back to Harrison were the compliments from the guests about how pretty everything was, but he did not add that the guests then bypassed his canapés to eat Ugwu’s pepper soup and moi-moi and chicken boiled in bitter herbs.
Everyone was moving to the living room. Soon, Olanna would turn off the light because the fluorescent glare was too bright, and Ugwu would bring more drinks, and they would talk and laugh and listen to music, and the light that spilled in from the corridor would fill the room with shadows. It was his favorite part of their evenings, although he sometimes wondered if Olanna and Odenigbo touched each other in the dimness. He shouldn’t think about them, he knew; it was no business of his. But he did. He noticed the way Odenigbo looked at her in the middle of an argument, not as if he needed her to be on his side, because he didn’t seem ever to need anybody, but simply to know that she was there. He saw, too, how Olanna sometimes blinked at Odenigbo, communicating things he would never know.
Richard placed his glass of beer on a side table and sat next to Miss Adebayo and Okeoma. His peppery tongue still tingled. Olanna got up to change the music. “My favorite Rex Lawson first, before some Osadebe,” she said.
“He’s a little derivative, isn’t he, Rex Lawson?” Professor Ezeka asked. “Uwaifo and Dairo are better musicians.”
“All music is derivative, Prof,” Olanna said, her tone teasing.
“Rex Lawson is a true Nigerian. He does not cleave to his Kalabari tribe; he sings in all our major languages. That’s original—and certainly reason enough to like him,” Miss Adebayo said.
“That’s reason not to like him,” Odenigbo said. “This nationalism that means we should aspire to indifference about our own individual cultures is stupid.”
“Don’t waste your time asking Odenigbo about High Life. He’s never understood it,” Olanna said, laughing. “He’s a classical music person but loath to admit it in public because it’s such a Western taste.”
“Music has no borders,” Professor Ezeka said.
“But surely it is grounded in culture, and cultures are specific?” Okeoma asked. “Couldn’t Odenigbo then be said to adore the Western culture that produced classical music?”
They all laughed, and Odenigbo looked at Olanna in that way that softened his eyes. Miss Adebayo launched into the French ambassador issue again. She did not think the French should have tested atomic weapons in Algeria, of course, but she did not understand why it mattered enough for Balewa to break off diplomatic relations with France. She sounded puzzled, which was unusual.
“It’s quite clear Balewa did it because he wants to take away attention from his defense pact with the British,” Odenigbo said. “And he knows that slighting the French will always please his masters the British. He’s their stooge. They put him there, and they tell him what to do, and he does it, Westminster parliament model indeed.”
“No Westminster model today,” Dr. Patel said. “Okeoma promised to read us a poem.”
“I have told you that Balewa simply did it because he wants the North Africans to like him,” Professor Ezeka said.
“North Africans to like him? You think he cares much for other Africans? The white man is the only master Balewa knows,” Odenigbo said. “Didn’t he say that Africans are not ready to rule themselves in Rhodesia? If the British tell him to call himself a castrated monkey, he will.”
“Oh, rubbish,” Professor Ezeka said. “You are digressing.”
“You refuse to see things as they truly are!” Odenigbo shifted on his seat. “We are living in a time of great white evil. They are dehumanizing blacks in South Africa and Rhodesia, they fermented what happened in the Congo, they won’t let American blacks vote, they won’t let the Australian aborigines vote, but the worst of all is what they are doing here. This defense pact is worse than apartheid and segregation, but we don’t realize it. They are controlling us from behind drawn curtains. It is very dangerous!”
Okeoma leaned closer to Richard. “These two won’t let me read my poem today.”
“They’re in fine fighting form,” Richard said.
“As usual.” Okeoma laughed. “How is your book coming along, by the way?”
“I’m plowing on.”
“Is it a novel about expatriates?”
“Well, no, not quite.”
“But it’s a novel, isn’t it?”
Richard sipped his beer and wondered what Okeoma would think if he knew the truth—that even he did not know whether it was a novel or not because the pages he had written did not make any coherent whole.