The Thing Around Your Neck Read online

  That evening, Ujunwa tried to write, but her eyeballs were swimming and her head was aching and so she went to bed. After breakfast, she sat before the laptop and cradled a cup of tea.

  Chioma gets a call from Merchant Trust bank, one of the places her father contacted. He knows the chairman of the board. She is hopeful; all the bank people she knows drive nice secondhand Jettas and have nice flats in Gbagada. The deputy manager interviews her. He is dark and good-looking and his glasses have an elegant designer logo on the frames and, as he speaks to her, she desperately wishes he would notice her. He doesn’t. He tells her that they would like to hire her to do marketing, which will mean going out and bringing in new accounts. She will be working with Yinka. If she can bring in ten million naira during her trial period, she will be guaranteed a permanent position. She nods as he speaks. She is used to men’s attention and is sulky that he does not look at her as a man looks at a woman, and she does not quite understand what he means by going out to get new accounts until she starts the job two weeks later. A uniformed driver takes her and Yinka in an air-conditioned official Jeep—she runs her hand over the smooth leather seat, is reluctant to climb out—to the home of an alhaji in Ikoyi. The alhaji is avuncular and expansive with his smile, his hand gestures, his laughter. Yinka has already come to see him a few times before and he hugs her and says something that makes her laugh. He looks at Chioma. “This one is too fine,” he says. A steward serves frosted glasses of chapman. The alhaji speaks to Yinka but looks often at Chioma. Then he asks Yinka to come closer and explain the high-interest savings accounts to him and then he asks her to sit on his lap and doesn’t she think he’s strong enough to carry her? Yinka says of course he is and sits on his lap, smiling a serene smile. Yinka is small and fair; she reminds Chioma of the Yellow Woman.

  What Chioma knows of the Yellow Woman is what her mother told her. One slow afternoon, the Yellow Woman had walked into her mother’s boutique on Adeniran Ogunsanya Street. Her mother knew who the Yellow Woman was, knew the relationship with her husband had been on for a year, knew that he had paid for the Yellow Woman’s Honda Accord and her flat in Ilupeju. But what drove her mother crazy was the insult of this: the Yellow Woman coming to her boutique, looking at shoes and planning to pay for them with money that really belonged to her husband. So her mother yanked at the Yellow Woman’s weave-on that hung to her back and screamed “Husband snatcher!” and the salesgirls joined in, slapping and beating the Yellow Woman until she ran out to her car. When Chioma’s father heard of it, he shouted at her mother and said she had acted like one of those wild women from the street, had disgraced him, herself, and an innocent woman for nothing. Then he left the house. Chioma came back from National Youth Service and noticed that her father’s wardrobe was empty. Aunty Elohor, Aunty Rose, and Aunty Uche had all come and said to her mother, “We are prepared to go with you and beg him to come back home or we will go and beg on your behalf.” Chioma’s mother said, “Never, not in this world. I am not going to beg him. It is enough.” Aunty Funmi came and said the Yellow Woman had tied him up with medicine and she knew a good babalawo who could untie him. Chioma’s mother said, “No, I am not going.” Her boutique was failing, because Chioma’s father had always helped her import shoes from Dubai. So she lowered prices, advertised in Joy and City People, and started stocking shoes made in Aba. Chioma is wearing a pair of those shoes the morning she sits in the alhaji’s sitting room and watches Yinka, perched on the expansive lap, talking about the benefits of a savings account with Merchant Trust Bank.

  . . .

  At first, Ujunwa tried not to notice that Edward often stared at her body, that his eyes were never on her face but always lower. The workshop days had taken on a routine of breakfast at eight and lunch at one and dinner at six in the grand dining room. On the sixth day, a blisteringly hot day, Edward handed out copies of the first story to be reviewed, written by the Zimbabwean. The participants were all seated on the terrace, and after he handed out the papers, Ujunwa saw that all the seats under the umbrellas were occupied.

  “I don’t mind sitting in the sun,” she said, already getting up. “Would you like me to stand up for you, Edward?”

  “I’d rather like you to lie down for me,” he said. The moment was humid, thick; a bird cawed from far away. Edward was grinning. Only the Ugandan and the Tanzanian had heard him. Then the Ugandan laughed. And Ujunwa laughed, because it was funny and witty, she told herself, when you really thought about it. After lunch, she took a walk with the Zimbabwean and as they stopped to pick up shells by the sea, Ujunwa wanted to tell her what Edward had said. But the Zimbabwean seemed distracted, less chatty than usual; she was probably anxious about her story. Ujunwa read it that evening. She thought the writing had too many flourishes, but she liked the story and wrote appreciations and careful suggestions in the margins. It was familiar and funny, about a Harare secondary schoolteacher whose Pentecostal minister tells him that he and his wife will not have a child until they get a confession from the witches who have tied up his wife’s womb. They become convinced that the witches are their next-door neighbors, and every morning they pray loudly, throwing verbal Holy Ghost bombs over the fence.

  After the Zimbabwean read an excerpt the next day, there was a short silence around the dining table. Then the Ugandan spoke and said there was much energy in the prose. The white South African nodded enthusiastically. The Kenyan disagreed. Some of the sentences tried so hard to be literary that they didn’t make sense, he said, and he read one such sentence. The Tanzanian man said a story had to be looked at as a whole and not in parts. Yes, the Kenyan agreed, but each part had to make sense in order to form a whole that made sense. Then Edward spoke. The writing was certainly ambitious, but the story itself begged the question “So what?” There was something terribly passé about it when one considered all the other things happening in Zimbabwe under the horrible Mugabe. Ujunwa stared at Edward. What did he mean by “passé”? How could a story so true be passé? But she did not ask what Edward meant and the Kenyan did not ask and the Ugandan did not ask and all the Zimbabwean did was shove her dreadlocks away from her face, cowries clinking. Everyone else remained silent. Soon they all began to yawn and say good night and walk to their cabins.

  The next day, they did not talk about the previous evening. They talked about how fluffy the scrambled eggs were and how eerie the jacaranda leaves that rustled against their windows at night were. After dinner, the Senegalese read from her story. It was a windy night and they shut the door to keep out the sound of the whirling trees. The smoke from Edward’s pipe hung over the room. The Senegalese read two pages of a funeral scene, stopping often to sip some water, her accent thickening as she became more emotional, each t sounding like a z. Afterwards, everyone turned to Edward, even the Ugandan, who seemed to have forgotten that he was workshop leader. Edward chewed at his pipe thoughtfully before he said that homosexual stories of this sort weren’t reflective of Africa, really.

  “Which Africa?” Ujunwa blurted out.

  The black South African shifted on his seat. Edward chewed further at his pipe. Then he looked at Ujunwa in the way one would look at a child who refused to keep still in church and said that he wasn’t speaking as an Oxford-trained Africanist, but as one who was keen on the real Africa and not the imposing of Western ideas on African venues. The Zimbabwean and Tanzanian and white South African began to shake their heads as Edward was speaking.

  “This may indeed be the year 2000, but how African is it for a person to tell her family that she is homosexual?” Edward asked.

  The Senegalese burst out in incomprehensible French and then, a minute of fluid speech later, said, “I am Senegalese! I am Senegalese!” Edward responded in equally swift French and then said in English, with a soft smile, “I think she had too much of that excellent Bordeaux,” and some of the participants chuckled.

  Ujunwa was the first to leave. She was close to her cabin when she heard somebody call her and she stopped.
It was the Kenyan. The Zimbabwean and the white South African were with him. “Let’s go to the bar,” the Kenyan said. She wondered where the Senegalese was. In the bar, she drank a glass of wine and listened to them talk about how the other guests at Jumping Monkey Hill—all of whom were white—looked at the participants suspiciously. The Kenyan said a youngish couple had stopped and stepped back a little as he approached them on the path from the swimming pool the day before. The white South African said she got suspicious looks, too, perhaps because she wore only kente-print caftans. Sitting there, staring out into the black night, listening to the drink-softened voices around her, Ujunwa felt a self-loathing burst open in the bottom of her stomach. She should not have laughed when Edward said “I’d rather like you to lie down for me.” It had not been funny. It had not been funny at all. She had hated it, hated the grin on his face and the glimpse of greenish teeth and the way he always looked at her chest rather than her face, the way his eyes climbed all over her, and yet she had made herself laugh like a deranged hyena. She put down her half-finished glass of wine and said, “Edward is always looking at my body.” The Kenyan and the white South African and Zimbabwean stared at her. Ujunwa repeated, “Edward is always looking at my body.” The Kenyan said it was clear from the first day that the man would be climbing on top of that flat stick of a wife and wishing it were Ujunwa; the Zimbabwean said Edward’s eyes were always leering when he looked at Ujunwa; the white South African said Edward would never look at a white woman like that because what he felt for Ujunwa was a fancy without respect.

  “You all noticed?” Ujunwa asked them. “You all noticed?” She felt strangely betrayed. She got up and went to her cabin. She called her mother, but the metallic voice kept saying “The number you are calling is not available at the moment, please try later,” and so she hung up. She could not write. She lay in bed and stayed awake for so long that when she finally fell asleep, it was dawn.

  That evening, the Tanzanian read an excerpt of his story about the killings in the Congo, from the point of view of a militiaman, a man full of prurient violence. Edward said it would be the lead story in the Oratory, that it was urgent and relevant, that it brought news. Ujunwa thought it read like a piece from The Economist with cartoon characters painted in. But she didn’t say that. She went back to her cabin and, although she had a stomachache, she turned on her laptop.

  As Chioma sits and stares at Yinka, settled on the alhaji’s lap, she feels as if she is acting a play. She wrote plays in secondary school. Her class staged one during the school’s anniversary celebration and, at the end, there was a standing ovation and the principal said, “Chioma is our future star!” Her father was there, sitting next to her mother, clapping and smiling. But when she said she wanted to study literature in university, he told her it was not viable. His word, “viable.” He said she had to study something else and could always write on the side. The alhaji is lightly running a finger over Yinka’s arm and saying, “But you know Savanna Union Bank sent people to me last week.” Yinka is still smiling and Chioma wonders whether her cheeks are aching. She thinks about the stories in a metal box under her bed. Her father read them all and sometimes he wrote in the margins: Excellent! Cliché! Very good! Unclear! It was he who had bought novels for her; her mother thought novels a waste of time and felt that all Chioma needed were her textbooks.

  Yinka says, “Chioma!” and she looks up. The alhaji is talking to her. He looks almost shy and his eyes do not meet hers. There is a tentativeness toward her that he does not show toward Yinka. “I am saying you are too fine. Why is it that a Big Man has not married you?” Chioma smiles and says nothing. The alhaji says, “I have agreed that I will do business with Merchant Trust but you will be my personal contact.” Chioma is uncertain what to say. “Of course,” Yinka says. “She will be your contact. We will take care of you. Ah, thank you, sir!”

  The alhaji gets up and says, “Come, come, I have some nice perfumes from my last trip to London. Let me give you something to take home.” He starts to walk inside and then turns. “Come, come, you two.” Yinka follows. Chioma gets up. The alhaji turns again toward her, to wait for her to follow. But she does not follow. She turns to the door and opens it and walks out into the bright sunlight and past the Jeep in which the driver is sitting with the door hanging open, listening to the radio. “Aunty? Aunty, something happen?” he calls. She does not answer. She walks and walks, past the high gates and out to the street where she gets in a taxi and goes to the office to clear out her almost-empty desk.

  Ujunwa woke up to the crashing sound of the sea, to a nervous clutch in her belly. She did not want to read her story tonight. She did not want to go to breakfast, either, but she went anyway and said a general good morning with a general smile. She sat next to the Kenyan and he leaned toward her and whispered that Edward had just told the Senegalese that he had dreamed of her naked navel. Naked navel. Ujunwa watched the Senegalese, delicately raising her teacup to her lips, sanguine, looking out at the sea. Ujunwa envied her confident calm. She felt upset, too, to hear that Edward was making suggestive remarks to someone else, and she wondered what her pique meant. Had she come to see his ogling as her due? She was uncomfortable thinking about this, about reading that night, and so in the afternoon, lingering over lunch, she asked the Senegalese what she had said when Edward spoke of her naked navel.

  The Senegalese shrugged and said no matter how many dreams the old man had, she would still remain a happy lesbian and there was no need to say anything to him.

  “But why do we say nothing?” Ujunwa asked. She raised her voice and looked at the others. “Why do we always say nothing?”

  They looked at one another. The Kenyan told the waiter that the water was getting warm and could he please get some more ice. The Tanzanian asked the waiter where in Malawi he was from. The Kenyan asked him if the cooks, too, were from Malawi as all the waiters seemed to be. Then the Zimbabwean said she did not care where the cooks were from because the food at Jumping Monkey Hill was simply sickening, all that meat and cream. Other words tumbled out and Ujunwa was not sure who said what. Imagine an African gathering with no rice and why should beer be banned at the dinner table just because Edward thought wine was proper and breakfast at eight was too early, never mind that Edward said it was the “right” time and the smell of his pipe was nauseating and he had to decide which he liked to smoke, anyway, and stop rolling cigarettes halfway through a pipe.

  Only the black South African remained silent. He looked bereft, hands clasped in his lap, before he said that Edward was just an old man who meant no harm. Ujunwa shouted at him, “This kind of attitude is why they could kill you and herd you into townships and require passes from you before you could walk on your own land!” Then she stopped herself and apologized. She should not have said that. She had not meant to raise her voice. The Black South African shrugged, as if he understood that the devil would always do his work. The Kenyan was watching Ujunwa. He told her, in a low voice, that she was angry about more than just Edward and she looked away and wondered if “angry” was the right word.

  Later, she went to the souvenir shop with the Kenyan and the Senegalese and the Tanzanian and tried on jewelry made of faux ivory. They teased the Tanzanian about his interest in jewelry—perhaps he was gay, too? He laughed and said his possibilities were limitless. Then he said, more seriously, that Edward was connected and could find them a London agent; there was no need to antagonize the man, no need to close doors to opportunity. He, for one, didn’t want to end up at that dull teaching job in Arusha. He was speaking as though to everyone, but his eyes were on Ujunwa.

  Ujunwa bought a necklace and put it on and liked the look of the white, tooth-shaped pendant against her throat. That evening Isabel smiled when she saw it. “I wish people would see how faux ivory looks real and leave the animals alone,” she said. Ujunwa beamed and said that it was in fact real ivory and wondered whether to add that she had killed the elephant herself during a royal hunt.
Isabel looked startled, then pained. Ujunwa fingered the plastic. She needed to be relaxed, and she said this to herself over and over, as she started to read from her story. Afterwards, the Ugandan spoke first, saying how strong a story it was, how believable, his confident tone surprising Ujunwa even more than his words. The Tanzanian said she captured Lagos well, the smells and sounds, and it was incredible how similar Third World cities were. The white South African said she hated that term, Third World, but had loved the realistic portrayal of what women were going through in Nigeria. Edward leaned back and said, “It’s never quite like that in real life, is it? Women are never victims in that sort of crude way and certainly not in Nigeria. Nigeria has women in high positions. The most powerful cabinet minister today is a woman.”

  The Kenyan cut in and said he liked the story but didn’t believe Chioma would give up the job; she was, after all, a woman with no other choices, and so he thought the ending was implausible.

  “The whole thing is implausible,” Edward said. “This is agenda writing, it isn’t a real story of real people.”

  Inside Ujunwa, something shrank. Edward was still speaking. Of course one had to admire the writing itself, which was quite mah-ve-lous. He was watching her, and it was the victory in his eyes that made her stand up and start to laugh. The participants stared at her. She laughed and laughed and they watched her and then she picked up her papers. “A real story of real people?” she said, with her eyes on Edward’s face. “The only thing I didn’t add in the story is that after I left my coworker and walked out of the alhaji’s house, I got into the Jeep and insisted that the driver take me home because I knew it was the last time I would be riding in it.”