Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, Purple Hibiscus: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Three-Book Collection

Odenigbo moved towards Amala, but stopped a little way away so that he had to stretch out and lengthen his arm to give her the key. She took it carefully from his fingers; they did not touch each other. It was a tiny moment, brief and fleeting, but Olanna noticed how scrupulously they avoided any contact, any touch of skin, as if they were united by a common knowledge so monumental that they were determined not to be united by anything else.

‘Go well,’ she said. She watched the car ease out of the compound and stood there, telling herself she was mistaken; there had been nothing in that gesture. But it bothered her. She felt something similar to what she had felt while waiting for the gynaecologist: convinced that something was wrong with her body and yet willing him to tell her that all was well.

‘Mah, will you eat? Should I warm rice?’ Ugwu asked.

‘Not now.’ For a moment, she wanted to ask Ugwu if he too had observed that gesture, if he had observed anything at all. ‘Go and see if any avocados are ripe.’

‘Yes, mah.’ Ugwu hesitated ever so slightly before he left.

She stood at the front door until Odenigbo came back. She was not sure what the shrivelling in her stomach and the racing in her chest meant. She opened the door and searched his face.

‘Did anything happen?’ she asked.

‘What do you mean?’ He held some newspapers in his hand. ‘One of my students missed the last test, and this morning he came and offered me some money to pass him, the ignoramus.’

‘I didn’t know Amala came with Mama,’ she said.

‘Yes.’ He began to rearrange the newspapers, avoiding her eyes. And, slowly, shock spread over Olanna. She knew. She knew from the jerky movements he made, from the panic on his face, from the hasty way he was trying to look normal again, that something that should not have happened had happened.

‘You touched Amala,’ Olanna said. It was not a question, and yet she wanted him to respond as if it were; she wanted him to say no and get upset with her for even thinking that. But Odenigbo said nothing. He sat down on his armchair and looked at her.

‘You touched Amala,’ Olanna repeated. She would always remember his expression, him looking at her as if he could never have imagined this scene and so did not know how to think about thinking about what to say or do.

She turned towards the kitchen and nearly fell beside the dining table because the weight in her chest was too large, not measured to fit her size.

‘Olanna,’ he said.

She ignored him. He would not come after her because he was frightened, full of the fear of the guilty. She did not get in her car right away and drive to her flat. Instead, she went outside and sat on the backyard steps and watched a hen near the lemon tree, guarding six chicks, nudging them towards crumbs on the ground. Ugwu was plucking avocados from the tree near the Boys’ Quarters. She was not sure how long she sat there before the hen began to squawk loudly and spread its wings to shield the chicks, but they did not run into the shelter quickly enough. A kite swooped down and carried one of them off, a brown-and-white chick. It was so fast, the descent of the kite and the gliding away with the chick grasped in hooked claws, that Olanna thought she might have imagined it. She couldn’t have, though, because the hen was running around in circles, squawking, raising clouds of dust. The other chicks looked bewildered. Olanna watched them and wondered if they understood their mother’s mourning dance. Then, finally, she started to cry.

* * *

The blurred days crawled into one another. Olanna grasped for thoughts, for things to do. The first time Odenigbo came to her flat she was unsure whether to let him in. But he knocked and knocked and said, ‘Nkem, please open, biko, please open,’ until she did. She sat sipping some water while he told her that he had been drunk, that Amala had forced herself on him, that it had been a brief rash lust. Afterwards, she told him to get out. It was grating that he remained self-assured enough to call what he had done a brief rash lust. She hated that expression and she hated the firmness of his tone the next time he came and said, ‘It meant nothing, nkem, nothing.’ What mattered to her was not what it meant but what had happened: his sleeping with his mother’s village girl after only three weeks away from her. It seemed too easy, the way he had broken her trust. She decided to go to Kano because, if there was a place where she could think clearly, it was in Kano.

Her flight stopped first in Lagos, and as she sat waiting in the lounge a tall, thin woman hurried past. She stood up and was about to call out Kainene! when she realized it could not be. Kainene was darker-skinned than the woman and would never wear a green skirt with a red blouse. She wished so much that it were Kainene, though. They would sit next to each other and she would tell Kainene about Odenigbo and Kainene would say something clever and sarcastic and comforting all at once.

In Kano, Arize was furious.

‘Wild animal from Abba. His rotten penis will fall off soon. Doesn’t he know he should wake up every morning and kneel down and thank his God that you looked at him at all?’ she said, while showing Olanna sketches of bouffant wedding gowns. Nnakwanze had finally proposed. Olanna looked at the drawings. She thought them all to be ugly and overdesigned, but she was so pleased by the rage felt on her behalf that she pointed at one of them and murmured, ‘O maka. It’s lovely.’

Aunty Ifeka said nothing about Odenigbo until a few days had passed. Olanna was sitting on the veranda with her; the sun was fierce and the zinc awning crackled as if in protest. But it was cooler here than in the smoke-filled kitchen, where three neighbours were cooking at the same time. Olanna fanned herself with a small raffia mat. Two women were standing near the gate, one shouting in Igbo – ‘I said you will give me my money today! Tata! Today, not tomorrow! You heard me say so because I did not speak with water in my mouth!’ – while the other made pleading gestures with her hands and glanced skyward.

‘How are you?’ Aunty Ifeka asked. She was stirring a doughy paste of ground beans in a mortar.

‘I’m fine, Aunty. I’m finer for being here.’

Aunty Ifeka reached inside the paste to pick out a small black insect. Olanna fanned herself faster. Aunty Ifeka’s silence made her want to say more.

‘I think I will postpone my programme at Nsukka and stay here in Kano,’ she said. ‘I could teach for a while at the institute.’

‘No.’ Aunty Ifeka put the pestle down. ‘Mba. You will go back to Nsukka.’

‘I can’t just go back to his house, Aunty.’

‘I am not asking you to go back to his house. I said you will go back to Nsukka. Do you not have your own flat and your own job? Odenigbo has done what all men do and has inserted his penis in the first hole he could find when you were away. Does that mean somebody died?’

Olanna had stopped fanning herself and could feel the sweaty wetness on her scalp.

‘When your uncle first married me, I worried because I thought those women outside would come and displace me from my home. I now know that nothing he does will make my life change. My life will change only if I want it to change.’

‘What are you saying, Aunty?’

‘He is very careful now, since he realized that I am no longer afraid. I have told him that if he brings disgrace to me in any way, I will cut off that snake between his legs.’

Aunty Ifeka went back to her stirring, and Olanna’s image of their marriage began to come apart at the seams.

‘You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?’ Aunty Ifeka said. ‘Your life belongs to you and you alone, soso gi. You will go back on Saturday. Let me hurry up and make some abacha for you to take.’

She tasted a little of the paste and spat it out.

Olanna left on Saturday. The man sitting next to her on the plane, across the aisle, had the shiniest, darkest ebony complexion she had ever seen. She had noticed him earlier, in his three-piece wool suit, staring at her as they waited on the tarmac. He had offered to help her with her carry-on bag and, later, had asked the flight attendant if he could take the seat next to hers since it was vacant. Now, he offered her the New Nigerian and asked, ‘Would you like to read this?’ He wore a large opal ring on his middle finger.

‘Yes. Thank you.’ Olanna took the paper. She skimmed through the pages, aware that he was watching her and that the newspaper was his way of starting conversation. Suddenly she wished she could be attracted to him, that something mad and magical would happen to them both and, when the plane landed, she would walk away with her hand in his, into a new bright life.

‘They have finally removed that Igbo vice chancellor from the University of Lagos,’ he said.

‘Oh.’

‘It’s on the back cover.’

Olanna turned to the back cover. ‘I see.’

‘Why should an Igbo man be the vice chancellor in Lagos?’ he asked and, when Olanna said nothing, only half smiling to show she was listening, he added, ‘The problem with Igbo people is that they want to control everything in this country. Everything. Why can’t they stay in their East? They own all the shops; they control the civil service, even the police. If you are arrested for any crime, as long as you can say keda they will let you go.’

‘We say kedu, not keda,’ Olanna said quietly. ‘It means How are you?’

The man stared at her and she stared back and thought how beautiful he would have been if he had been a woman, with that perfectly shiny, near-black skin.

‘Are you Igbo?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘But you have the face of Fulani people.’ He sounded accusing.

Olanna shook her head. ‘Igbo.’

The man mumbled something that sounded like sorry before he turned away and began to look through his briefcase. When she handed the newspaper to him, he seemed reluctant to take it back, and although she glanced at him from time to time, his eyes did not meet hers again until they landed in Lagos. If only he knew that his prejudice had filled her with possibility. She did not have to be the wounded woman whose man had slept with a village girl. She could be a Fulani woman on a plane deriding Igbo people with a good-looking stranger. She could be a woman taking charge of her own life. She could be anything.

As they got up to leave, she looked at him and smiled but kept herself from saying thank you because she wanted to leave him with both his surprise and his remorse intact.