The Thing Around Your Neck Read online

  “Hello? Good evening.” It is a male voice. Uneducated.

  Rural Igbo accent. “This is Madam from America.” “Ah, madam!” The voice changes, warms up. “Good evening, madam.”

  “Who is speaking?”

  “Uchenna, madam. I am the new houseboy.”

  “When did you come?”

  “Two weeks now, madam.”

  “Is Oga Obiora there?”

  “No, madam. Not back from Abuja.”

  “Is anybody else there?”

  “How, madam?”

  “Is anybody else there?”

  “Sylvester and Maria, madam.”

  Nkem sighs. She knows the steward and cook would be there, of course, it is midnight in Nigeria. But does this new houseboy sound hesitant, this new houseboy that Obiora forgot to mention to her? Is the girl with the curly hair there? Or did she go with Obiora on the business trip to Abuja?

  “Is anybody else there?” Nkem asks again.

  A pause. “Madam?”

  “Is anybody else in that house except for Sylvester and Maria?”

  “No, madam. No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  A longer pause. “Yes, madam.”

  “Okay, tell oga Obiora that I called.”

  Nkem hangs up quickly. This is what I have become, she thinks. I am spying on my husband with a new houseboy I don’t even know.

  “Do you want a small drink?” Amaechi asks, watching her, and Nkem wonders if it is pity, that liquid glint in Amaechi’s slightly slanted eyes. A small drink has been their tradition, hers and Amaechi’s, for some years now, since the day Nkem got her green card. She had opened a bottle of champagne that day and poured for Amaechi and herself, after the children went to bed. “To America!” she’d said, amid Amaechi’s too-loud laughter. She would no longer have to apply for visas to get back into America, no longer have to put up with condescending questions at the American embassy. Because of the crisp plastic card sporting the photo in which she looked sulky. Because she really belonged to this country now, this country of curiosities and crudities, this country where you could drive at night and not fear armed robbers, where restaurants served one person enough food for three.

  She does miss home, though, her friends, the cadence of Igbo and Yoruba and pidgin English spoken around her. And when the snow covers the yellow fire hydrant on the street, she misses the Lagos sun that glares down even when it rains. She has sometimes thought about moving back home, but never seriously, never concretely. She goes to a Pilates class twice a week in Philadelphia with her neighbor; she bakes cookies for her children’s classes and hers are always the favorites; she expects banks to have drive-ins. America has grown on her, snaked its roots under her skin. “Yes, a small drink,” she says to Amaechi. “Bring the wine that is in the fridge and two glasses.”

  . . .

  Nkem has not waxed her pubic hair; there is no thin line between her legs as she drives to the airport to pick Obiora up. She looks in the rearview mirror, at Okey and Adanna strapped in the backseat. They are quiet today, as though they sense her reserve, the laughter that is not on her face. She used to laugh often, driving to the airport to pick Obiora up, hugging him, watching him hug the children. They would have dinner out the first day, Chili’s or some other restaurant where Obiora would look on as the children colored their menus. Obiora would give out presents when they got home and the children would stay up late, playing with new toys. And she would wear whatever heady new perfume he’d bought her to bed, and one of the lacy nightdresses she wore only two months a year.

  He always marveled at what the children could do, what they liked and didn’t like, although they were all things she had told him on the phone. When Okey ran to him with a boo-boo, he kissed it, then laughed at the quaint American custom of kissing wounds. Does spit make a wound heal? he would ask. When his friends visited or called, he asked the children to greet Uncle, but first he teased his friends with “I hope you understand the big-big English they speak; they are Americanah now, oh!”

  At the airport, the children hug Obiora with the same old abandon, shouting, “Daddy!”

  Nkem watches them. Soon they will stop being lured by toys and summer trips and start to question a father they see so few times a year.

  After Obiora kisses her lips, he moves back to look at her. He looks unchanged: a short, ordinary light-skinned man wearing an expensive sports jacket and a purple shirt. “Darling, how are you?” he asks. “You cut your hair?”

  Nkem shrugs, smiles in the way that says Pay attention to the children first. Adanna is pulling at Obiora’s hand, asking what did Daddy bring and can she open his suitcase in the car.

  After dinner, Nkem sits on the bed and examines the Ife bronze head, which Obiora has told her is actually made of brass. It is stained, life-size, turbaned. It is the first original Obiora has brought.

  “We’ll have to be very careful with this one,” he says.

  “An original,” she says, surprised, running her hand over the parallel incisions on the face.

  “Some of them date back to the eleventh century.” He sits next to her to take off his shoes. His voice is high, excited. “But this one is eighteenth-century. Amazing. Definitely worth the cost.”

  “What was it used for?”

  “Decoration for the king’s palace. Most of them are made to remember or honor the kings. Isn’t it perfect?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I’m sure they did terrible things with this one, too.”

  “What?”

  “Like they did with the Benin masks. You told me they killed people so they could get human heads to bury the king.”

  Obiora’s gaze is steady on her.

  She taps the bronze head with a fingernail. “Do you think the people were happy?” she asks.

  “What people?”

  “The people who had to kill for their king. I’m sure they wished they could change the way things were, they couldn’t have been happy.”

  Obiora’s head is tilted to the side as he stares at her. “Well, maybe nine hundred years ago they didn’t define ‘happy’ like you do now.”

  She puts the bronze head down; she wants to ask him how he defines “happy.”

  “Why did you cut your hair?” Obiora asks.

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “I loved your long hair.”

  “You don’t like short hair?”

  “Why did you cut it? Is it the new fashion trend in America?” He laughs, taking his shirt off to get in the shower.

  His belly looks different. Rounder and riper. She wonders how girls in their twenties can stand that blatant sign of self-indulgent middle age. She tries to remember the married men she had dated. Had they ripe bellies like Obiora? She can’t recall. Suddenly, she can’t remember anything, can’t remember where her life has gone.

  “I thought you would like it,” she says.

  “Anything will look good with your lovely face, darling, but I liked your long hair better. You should grow it back. Long hair is more graceful on a Big Man’s wife.” He makes a face when he says “Big Man,” and laughs.

  He is naked now; he stretches and she watches the way his belly bobs up and down. In the early years, she would shower with him, sink down to her knees and take him in her mouth, excited by him and by the steam enclosing them. But now, things are different. She has softened like his belly, become pliable, accepting. She watches him walk into the bathroom.

  “Can we cram a year’s worth of marriage into two months in the summer and three weeks in December?” she asks. “Can we compress marriage?”

  Obiora flushes the toilet, door open. “What?”

  “Rapuba. Nothing.”

  “Shower with me.”

  She turns the TV on and pretends she has not heard him. She wonders about the girl with the short curly hair, if she showers with Obiora. She tries, but she cannot visualize the shower in the house in Lagos. A lot of gold trimmings—but she might be confusing it wi
th a hotel bathroom.

  “Darling? Shower with me,” Obiora says, peeking out of the bathroom. He has not asked in a couple of years. She starts to undress.

  In the shower, as she soaps his back, she says, “We have to find a school for Adanna and Okey in Lagos.” She had not planned to say it, but it seems right, it is what she has always wanted to say.

  Obiora turns to stare at her. “What?”

  “We are moving back at the end of the school year. We are moving back to live in Lagos. We are moving back.” She speaks slowly, to convince him, to convince herself as well. Obiora continues to stare at her and she knows that he has never heard her speak up, never heard her take a stand. She wonders vaguely if that is what attracted him to her in the first place, that she deferred to him, that she let him speak for both of them.

  “We can spend holidays here, together,” she says. She stresses the “we.”

  “What … ? Why?” Obiora asks.

  “I want to know when a new houseboy is hired in my house,” Nkem says. “And the children need you.”

  “If that is what you want,” Obiora says finally. “We’ll talk about it.”

  She gently turns him around and continues to soap his back. There is nothing left to talk about, Nkem knows; it is done.

  A PRIVATE EXPERIENCE

  Chika climbs in through the store window first and then holds the shutter as the woman climbs in after her. The store looks as if it was deserted long before the riots started; the empty rows of wooden shelves are covered in yellow dust, as are the metal containers stacked in a corner. The store is small, smaller than Chika’s walk-in closet back home. The woman climbs in and the window shutters squeak as Chika lets go of them. Chika’s hands are trembling, her calves burning after the unsteady run from the market in her high-heeled sandals. She wants to thank the woman, for stopping her as she dashed past, for saying “No run that way!” and for leading her, instead, to this empty store where they could hide. But before she can say thank you, the woman says, reaching out to touch her bare neck, “My necklace lost when I’m running.”

  “I dropped everything,” Chika says. “I was buying oranges and I dropped the oranges and my handbag.” She does not add that the handbag was a Burberry, an original one that her mother had bought on a recent trip to London.

  The woman sighs and Chika imagines that she is thinking of her necklace, probably plastic beads threaded on a piece of string. Even without the woman’s strong Hausa accent, Chika can tell she is a Northerner, from the narrowness of her face, the unfamiliar rise of her cheekbones; and that she is Muslim, because of the scarf. It hangs around the woman’s neck now, but it was probably wound loosely round her face before, covering her ears. A long, flimsy pink and black scarf, with the garish prettiness of cheap things. Chika wonders if the woman is looking at her as well, if the woman can tell, from her light complexion and the silver finger rosary her mother insists she wear, that she is Igbo and Christian. Later, Chika will learn that, as she and the woman are speaking, Hausa Muslims are hacking down Igbo Christians with machetes, clubbing them with stones. But now she says, “Thank you for calling me. Everything happened so fast and everybody ran and I was suddenly alone and I didn’t know what I was doing. Thank you.”

  “This place safe,” the woman says, in a voice that is so soft it sounds like a whisper. “Them not going to small-small shop, only big-big shop and market.”

  “Yes,” Chika says. But she has no reason to agree or disagree, she knows nothing about riots: the closest she has come is the pro-democracy rally at the university a few weeks ago, where she had held a bright green branch and joined in chanting “The military must go! Abacha must go! Democracy now!” Besides, she would not even have participated in that rally if her sister Nnedi had not been one of the organizers who had gone from hostel to hostel to hand out fliers and talk to students about the importance of “having our voices heard.”

  Chika’s hands are still trembling. Just half an hour ago, she was in the market with Nnedi. She was buying oranges and Nnedi had walked farther down to buy groundnuts and then there was shouting in English, in pidgin, in Hausa, in Igbo. “Riot! Trouble is coming, oh! They have killed a man!” Then people around her were running, pushing against one another, overturning wheelbarrows full of yams, leaving behind bruised vegetables they had just bargained hard for. Chika smelled the sweat and fear and she ran, too, across wide streets, into this narrow one, which she feared—felt—was dangerous, until she saw the woman.

  She and the woman stand silently in the store for a while, looking out of the window they have just climbed through, its squeaky wooden shutters swinging in the air. The street is quiet at first, and then they hear the sound of running feet. They both move away from the window, instinctively, although Chika can still see a man and a woman walking past, the woman holding her wrapper up above her knees, a baby tied to her back. The man is speaking swiftly in Igbo and all Chika hears is “She may have run to Uncle’s house.”

  “Close window,” the woman says.

  Chika shuts the windows and without the air from the street flowing in, the dust in the room is suddenly so thick she can see it, billowing above her. The room is stuffy and smells nothing like the streets outside, which smell like the kind of sky-colored smoke that wafts around during Christmas when people throw goat carcasses into fires to burn the hair off the skin. The streets where she ran blindly, not sure in which direction Nnedi had run, not sure if the man running beside her was a friend or an enemy, not sure if she should stop and pick up one of the bewildered-looking children separated from their mothers in the rush, not even sure who was who or who was killing whom.

  Later she will see the hulks of burned cars, jagged holes in place of their windows and windshields, and she will imagine the burning cars dotting the city like picnic bonfires, silent witnesses to so much. She will find out it had all started at the motor park, when a man drove over a copy of the Holy Koran that lay on the roadside, a man who happened to be Igbo and Christian. The men nearby, men who sat around all day playing draughts, men who happened to be Muslim, pulled him out of his pickup truck, cut his head off with one flash of a machete, and carried it to the market, asking others to join in; the infidel had desecrated the Holy Book. Chika will imagine the man’s head, his skin ashen in death, and she will throw up and retch until her stomach is sore. But now, she asks the woman, “Can you still smell the smoke?”

  “Yes,” the woman says. She unties her green wrapper and spreads it on the dusty floor. She has on only a blouse and a shimmery black slip torn at the seams. “Come and sit.”

  Chika looks at the threadbare wrapper on the floor; it is probably one of the two the woman owns. She looks down at her own denim skirt and red T-shirt embossed with a picture of the Statue of Liberty, both of which she bought when she and Nnedi spent a few summer weeks with relatives in New York. “No, your wrapper will get dirty,” she says.

  “Sit,” the woman says. “We are waiting here long time.”

  “Do you know how long … ?”

  “This night or tomorrow morning.”

  Chika raises her hand to her forehead, as though checking for a malaria fever. The touch of her cool palm usually calms her, but this time her palm is moist and sweaty. “I left my sister buying groundnuts. I don’t know where she is.”

  “She is going safe place.”

  “Nnedi.”

  “Eh?”

  “My sister. Her name is Nnedi.”

  “Nnedi,” the woman repeats, and her Hausa accent sheaths the Igbo name in a feathery gentleness.

  Later, Chika will comb the hospital mortuaries looking for Nnedi; she will go to newspaper offices clutching the photo of herself and Nnedi taken at a wedding just the week before, the one where she has a stupid half smile on her face because Nnedi pinched her just before the photo was taken, the two of them wearing matching off-the-shoulder Ankara gowns. She will tape copies of the photo on the walls of the market and the nearby stores. Sh
e will not find Nnedi. She will never find Nnedi. But now she says to the woman, “Nnedi and I came up here last week to visit our aunty. We are on vacation from school.”

  “Where you go school?” the woman asks.

  “We are at the University of Lagos. I am reading medicine. Nnedi is in political science.” Chika wonders if the woman even knows what going to university means. And she wonders, too, if she mentioned school only to feed herself the reality she needs now—that Nnedi is not lost in a riot, that Nnedi is safe somewhere, probably laughing in her easy, mouth-all-open way, probably making one of her political arguments. Like how the government of General Abacha was using its foreign policy to legitimize itself in the eyes of other African countries. Or how the huge popularity in blond hair attachments was a direct result of British colonialism.

  “We have only spent a week here with our aunty, we have never even been to Kano before,” Chika says, and she realizes that what she feels is this: she and her sister should not be affected by the riot. Riots like this were what she read about in newspapers. Riots like this were what happened to other people.

  “Your aunty is in market?” the woman asks.

  “No, she’s at work. She is the director at the secretariat.” Chika raises her hand to her forehead again. She lowers herself and sits, much closer to the woman than she ordinarily would have, so as to rest her body entirely on the wrapper. She smells something on the woman, something harsh like the bar soap their housegirl uses to wash the bed linen.

  “Your aunty is going safe place.”

  “Yes,” Chika says. The conversation seems surreal; she feels as if she is watching herself. “I still can’t believe this is happening, this riot.”

  The woman is staring straight ahead. Everything about her is long and slender, her legs stretched out in front of her, her fingers with henna-stained nails, her feet. “It is work of evil,” she says finally.