Half of a Yellow Sun

When the doorbell rang, he muttered a curse under his breath about her stomach swelling from eating faeces. He heard Master’s raised voice, excited and childlike, followed by a long silence and he imagined their hug, and her ugly body pressed to Master’s. Then he heard her voice. He stood still. He had always thought that Master’s English could not be compared to anybody’s, not Professor Ezeka, whose English one could hardly hear, or Okeoma, who spoke English as if he were speaking Igbo, with the same cadences and pauses, or Patel, whose English was a faded lilt. Not even the white man Professor Lehman, with his words forced out through his nose, sounded as dignified as Master. Master’s English was music, but what Ugwu was hearing now, from this woman, was magic. Here was a superior tongue, a luminous language, the kind of English he heard on Master’s radio, rolling out with clipped precision. It reminded him of slicing a yam with a newly sharpened knife, the easy perfection in every slice.

‘Ugwu!’ Master called. ‘Bring Coke!’

Ugwu walked out to the living room. She smelt of coconuts. He greeted her, his ‘Good afternoon’ a mumble, his eyes on the floor.

‘Kedu?’ she asked.

‘I’m well, mah.’ He still did not look at her. As he uncorked the bottle, she laughed at something Master said. Ugwu was about to pour the cold Coke into her glass when she touched his hand and said, ‘Rapuba, don’t worry about that.’

Her hand was lightly moist. ‘Yes, mah.’

‘Your master has told me how well you take care of him, Ugwu,’ she said. Her Igbo words were softer than her English, and he was disappointed at how easily they came out. He wished she would stumble in her Igbo; he had not expected English that perfect to sit beside equally perfect Igbo.

‘Yes, mah,’ he mumbled. His eyes were still focused on the floor.

‘What have you cooked us, my good man?’ Master asked, as if he did not know. He sounded annoyingly jaunty.

‘I serve now, sah,’ Ugwu said, in English, and then wished he had said I am serving now, because it sounded better, because it would impress her more. As he set the table, he kept from glancing at the living room, although he could hear her laughter and Master’s voice, with its irritating new timbre.

He finally looked at her as she and Master sat down at the table.

Her oval face was smooth like an egg, the lush colour of rain-drenched earth, and her eyes were large and slanted and she looked like she was not supposed to be walking and talking like everyone else; she should be in a glass case like the one in Master’s study, where people could admire her curvy, fleshy body, where she would be preserved untainted. Her hair was long; each of the plaits that hung down to her neck ended in a soft fuzz. She smiled easily; her teeth were the same bright white of her eyes. He did not know how long he stood staring at her until Master said, ‘Ugwu usually does a lot better than this. He makes a fantastic stew.’

‘It’s quite tasteless, which is better than bad-tasting, of course,’ she said, and smiled at Master before turning to Ugwu. ‘I’ll show you how to cook rice properly, Ugwu, without using so much oil.’

‘Yes, mah,’ Ugwu said. He had invented what he imagined was fried rice, frying the rice in groundnut oil, and had half-hoped it would send them both to the toilet in a hurry. Now, though, he wanted to cook a perfect meal, a savoury jollof rice or his special stew with arigbe, to show her how well he could cook. He delayed washing up so that the running water would not drown out her voice. When he served them tea, he took his time rearranging the biscuits on the saucer so that he could linger and listen to her, until Master said, ‘That’s quite all right, my good man.’ Her name was Olanna. But Master said it only once; he mostly called her nkem, my own. They talked about the quarrel between the Sardauna and the premier of the Western Region, and then Master said something about waiting until she moved to Nsukka and how it was only a few weeks away after all. Ugwu held his breath to make sure he had heard clearly. Master was laughing now, saying, ‘But we will live here together, nkem, and you can keep the Elias Avenue flat as well.’

She would move to Nsukka. She would live in this house. Ugwu walked away from the door and stared at the pot on the stove. His life would change. He would learn to cook fried rice and he would have to use less oil and he would take orders from her. He felt sad, and yet his sadness was incomplete; he felt expectant, too, an excitement he did not entirely understand.

That evening, he was washing Master’s linen in the backyard, near the lemon tree, when he looked up from the basin of soapy water and saw her standing by the back door, watching him. At first, he was sure it was his imagination, because the people he thought the most about often appeared to him in visions. He had imaginary conversations with Anulika all the time, and, right after he touched himself at night, Nnesinachi would appear briefly with a mysterious smile on her face. But Olanna was really at the door. She was walking across the yard towards him. She had only a wrapper tied around her chest, and as she walked, he imagined that she was a yellow cashew, shapely and ripe.

‘Mah? You want anything?’ he asked. He knew that if he reached out and touched her face, it would feel like butter, the kind Master unwrapped from a paper packet and spread on his bread.

‘Let me help you with that.’ She pointed at the bedsheet he was rinsing, and slowly he took the dripping sheet out. She held one end and moved back. ‘Turn yours that way,’ she said.

He twisted his end of the sheet to his right while she twisted to her right, and they watched as the water was squeezed out. The sheet was slippery.

‘Thank, mah,’ he said.

She smiled. Her smile made him feel taller. ‘Oh, look, those pawpaws are almost ripe. Lotekwa, don’t forget to pluck them.’

There was something polished about her voice, about her; she was like the stone that lay right below a gushing spring, rubbed smooth by years and years of sparkling water, and looking at her was similar to finding that stone, knowing that there were so few like it. He watched her walk back indoors.

He did not want to share the job of caring for Master with anyone, did not want to disrupt the balance of his life with Master, and yet it was suddenly unbearable to think of not seeing her again. Later, after dinner, he tiptoed to Master’s bedroom and rested his ear on the door. She was moaning loudly, sounds that seemed so unlike her, so uncontrolled and stirring and throaty. He stood there for a long time, until the moans stopped, and then he went back to his room.

2

Olanna nodded to the High Life music from the car radio. Her hand was on Odenigbo’s thigh; she raised it whenever he wanted to change gears, placed it back, and laughed when he teased her about being a distracting Aphrodite. It was exhilarating to sit beside him, with the car windows down and the air filled with dust and Rex Lawson’s dreamy rhythms. He had a lecture in two hours but had insisted on taking her to Enugu airport, and although she had pretended to protest, she wanted him to. When they drove across the narrow roads that ran through Milliken Hill, with a deep gully on one side and a steep hill on the other, she didn’t tell him that he was driving a little fast. She didn’t look, either, at the handwritten sign by the road that said, in rough letters, BETTER BE LATE THAN THE LATE.

She was disappointed to see the sleek, white forms of aeroplanes gliding up as they approached the airport. He parked beneath the colonnaded entrance. Porters surrounded the car and called out, ‘Sah? Madam? You get luggage?’ but Olanna hardly heard them because he had pulled her to him.

‘I can’t wait, nkem,’ he said, his lips pressed to hers. He tasted of marmalade. She wanted to tell him that she couldn’t wait to move to Nsukka either, but he knew anyway, and his tongue was in her mouth, and she felt a new warmth between her legs.

A car horn blew. A porter called out, ‘Ha, this place is for loading, oh! Loading only!’

Finally, Odenigbo let her go and jumped out of the car to get her bag from the boot. He carried it to the ticket counter. ‘Safe journey, ije oma,’ he said.

‘Drive carefully,’ she said.

She watched him walk away, a thickly built man in khaki trousers and a short-sleeved shirt that looked crisp from ironing. He threw his legs out with an aggressive confidence: the gait of a person who would not ask for directions but remained sure that he would somehow get there. After he drove off, she lowered her head and sniffed herself. She had dabbed on his Old Spice that morning, impulsively, and didn’t tell him because he would laugh. He would not understand the superstition of taking a whiff of him with her. It was as if the scent could, at least for a while, stifle her questions and make her a little more like him, a little more certain, a little less questioning.

She turned to the ticket seller and wrote her name on a slip of paper. ‘Good afternoon. One way to Lagos, please.’

‘Ozobia?’ The ticket seller’s pockmarked face brightened in a wide smile. ‘Chief Ozobia’s daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh! Well done, madam. I will ask the porter to take you to the VIP lounge.’ The ticket seller turned around. ‘Ikenna! Where is that foolish boy? Ikenna!’

Olanna shook her head and smiled. ‘No, no need for that.’ She smiled again, reassuringly, to make it clear it was not his fault that she did not want to be in the VIP lounge.

The general lounge was crowded. Olanna sat opposite three little children in threadbare clothes and slippers who giggled intermittently while their father gave them severe looks. An old woman with a sour, wrinkled face, their grandmother, sat closest to Olanna, clutching a handbag and murmuring to herself. Olanna could smell the mustiness on her wrapper; it must have been dug out from an ancient trunk for this occasion. When a clear voice announced the arrival of a Nigeria Airways flight, the father sprang up and then sat down again.

‘You must be waiting for somebody,’ Olanna said to him in Igbo.

‘Yes, nwanne m, my brother is coming back from overseas after four years reading there.’ His Owerri dialect had a strong rural accent.

‘Eh!’ Olanna said. She wanted to ask him where exactly his brother was coming back from and what he had studied, but she didn’t. He might not know.

The grandmother turned to Olanna. ‘He is the first in our village to go overseas, and our people have prepared a dance for him. The dance troupe will meet us in Ikeduru.’ She smiled proudly to show brown teeth. Her accent was even thicker; it was difficult to make out everything she said. ‘My fellow women are jealous, but is it my fault that their sons have empty brains and my own son won the white people’s scholarship?’

Another flight arrival was announced and the father said, ‘Chere! It’s him? It’s him!’

The children stood up and the father asked them to sit down and then stood up himself. The grandmother clutched her handbag to her belly. Olanna watched the plane descend. It touched down, and just as it began to taxi on the tarmac, the grandmother screamed and dropped her handbag.

Olanna was startled. ‘What is it? What is it?’

‘Mama!’ the father said.

‘Why does it not stop?’ The grandmother asked, both hands placed on her head in despair. ‘Chi m! My God! I am in trouble! Where is it taking my son now? Have you people deceived me?’

‘Mama, it will stop,’ Olanna said. ‘This is what it does when it lands.’ She picked up the handbag and then took the older, callused hand in hers. ‘It will stop,’ she said again.

She didn’t let go until the plane stopped and the grandmother slipped her hand away and muttered something about foolish people who could not build planes well. Olanna watched the family hurry to the arrivals gate. As she walked towards her own gate minutes later, she looked back often, hoping to catch a glimpse of the son from overseas. But she didn’t.

Her flight was bumpy. The man seated next to her was eating bitter kola, crunching loudly, and when he turned to make conversation, she slowly shifted away until she was pressed against the aeroplane wall.

‘I just have to tell you, you are so beautiful,’ he said.

She smiled and said thank you and kept her eyes on her newspaper. Odenigbo would be amused when she told him about this man, the way he always laughed at her admirers, with his unquestioning confidence. It was what had first attracted her to him that June day two years ago in Ibadan, the kind of rainy day that wore the indigo colour of dusk although it was only noon. She was home on holiday from England. She was in a serious relationship with Mohammed. She did not notice Odenigbo at first, standing ahead of her in a queue to buy a ticket outside the university theatre. She might never have noticed him if a white man with silver hair had not stood behind her and if the ticket seller had not signalled to the white man to come forwards. ‘Let me help you here, sir,’ the ticket seller said, in that comically contrived ‘white’ accent that uneducated people liked to put on.

Olanna was annoyed, but only mildly, because she knew the queue moved fast anyway. So she was surprised at the outburst that followed, from a man wearing a brown safari suit and clutching a book: Odenigbo. He walked up to the front, escorted the white man back into the queue and then shouted at the ticket seller. ‘You miserable ignoramus! You see a white person and he looks better than your own people? You must apologize to everybody in this queue! Right now!’

Olanna had stared at him, at the arch of his eyebrows behind the glasses, the thickness of his body, already thinking of the least hurtful way to untangle herself from Mohammed. Perhaps she would have known that Odenigbo was different, even if he had not spoken; his haircut alone said it, standing up in a high halo. But there was an unmistakable grooming about him, too; he was not one of those who used untidiness to substantiate their radicalism. She smiled and said ‘Well done!’ as he walked past her, and it was the boldest thing she had ever done, the first time she had demanded attention from a man. He stopped and introduced himself, ‘My name is Odenigbo.’

‘I’m Olanna,’ she said and later, she would tell him that there had been a crackling magic in the air and he would tell her that his desire at that moment was so intense that his groin ached.

When she finally felt that desire, she was surprised above everything else. She did not know that a man’s thrusts could suspend memory, that it was possible to be poised in a place where she could not think or remember, but only feel. The intensity had not abated after two years, nor had her awe at his self-assured eccentricities and his fierce moralities. But she feared that this was because theirs was a relationship consumed in sips: She saw him when she came home on holiday; they wrote to one another; they talked on the phone. Now that she was back in Nigeria they would live together, and she did not understand how he could not show some uncertainty. He was too sure.

She looked out at the clouds outside her window, smoky thickets drifting by, and thought how fragile they were.

* * *

Olanna had not wanted to have dinner with her parents, especially since they had invited Chief Okonji. But her mother came into her room to ask her to please join them; it was not every day that they hosted the finance minister, and this dinner was even more important because of the building contract her father wanted. ‘Biko, wear something nice. Kainene will be dressing up, too,’ her mother had added, as if mentioning her twin sister somehow legitimized everything.

Now, Olanna smoothed the napkin on her lap and smiled at the steward placing a plate of halved avocado next to her. His white uniform was starched so stiff his trousers looked as if they had been made out of cardboard.

‘Thank you, Maxwell,’ she said.

‘Yes, aunty,’ Maxwell mumbled, and moved on with his tray.

Olanna looked around the table. Her parents were focused on Chief Okonji, nodding eagerly as he told a story about a recent meeting with Prime Minister Balewa. Kainene was inspecting her plate with that arch expression of hers, as if she were mocking the avocado. None of them thanked Maxwell. Olanna wished they would; it was such a simple thing to do, to acknowledge the humanity of the people who served them. She had suggested it once; her father said he paid them good salaries, and her mother said thanking them would give them room to be insulting, while Kainene, as usual, said nothing, a bored expression on her face.

‘This is the best avocado I have tasted in a long time,’ Chief Okonji said.

‘It is from one of our farms,’ her mother said. ‘The one near Asaba.’

‘I’ll have the steward put some in a bag for you,’ her father said.

‘Excellent,’ Chief Okonji said. ‘Olanna, I hope you are enjoying yours, eh? You’ve been staring at it as if it is something that bites.’ He laughed, an overly hearty guffaw, and her parents promptly laughed as well.

‘It’s very good.’ Olanna looked up. There was something wet about Chief Okonji’s smile. Last week, when he thrust his card into her hand at the Ikoyi Club, she had worried about that smile because it looked as if the movement of his lips made saliva fill his mouth and threaten to trickle down his chin.

‘I hope you’ve thought about coming to join us at the ministry, Olanna. We need first-class brains like yours,’ Chief Okonji said.

‘How many people get offered jobs personally from the finance minister,’ her mother said, to nobody in particular, and her smile lit up the oval, dark-skinned face that was so nearly perfect, so symmetrical, that friends called her Art.

Olanna placed her spoon down. ‘I’ve decided to go to Nsukka. I’ll be leaving in two weeks.’

She saw the way her father tightened his lips. Her mother left her hand suspended in the air for a moment, as if the news were too tragic to continue sprinkling salt. ‘I thought you had not made up your mind,’ her mother said.

‘I can’t waste too much time or they will offer it to somebody else,’ Olanna said.

‘Nsukka? Is that right? You’ve decided to move to Nsukka?’ Chief Okonji asked.

‘Yes. I applied for a job as instructor in the Department of Sociology and I just got it,’ Olanna said. She usually liked her avocado without salt, but it was bland now, almost nauseating.

‘Oh. So you’re leaving us in Lagos,’ Chief Okonji said. His face seemed to melt, folding in on itself. Then he turned and asked, too brightly, ‘And what about you, Kainene?’

Kainene looked Chief Okonji right in the eyes, with that stare that was so expressionless, so blank, that it was almost hostile. ‘What about me, indeed?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘I, too, will be putting my newly acquired degree to good use. I’m moving to Port Harcourt to manage Daddy’s businesses there.’

Olanna wished she still had those flashes, moments when she could tell what Kainene was thinking. When they were in primary school, they sometimes looked at each other and laughed, without speaking, because they were thinking the same joke. She doubted that Kainene ever had those flashes now, since they never talked about such things any more. They never talked about anything any more.

‘So Kainene will manage the cement factory?’ Chief Okonji asked, turning to her father.

‘She’ll oversee everything in the east, the factories and our new oil interests. She has always had an excellent eye for business.’

‘Whoever said you lost out by having twin daughters is a liar,’ Chief Okonji said.

‘Kainene is not just like a son, she is like two,’ her father said. He glanced at Kainene and Kainene looked away, as if the pride on his face did not matter, and Olanna quickly focused on her plate so that neither would know she had been watching them. The plate was elegant, light green, the same colour as the avocado.

‘Why don’t you all come to my house this weekend, eh?’ Chief Okonji asked. ‘If only to sample my cook’s fish pepper soup. The chap is from Nembe; he knows what to do with fresh fish.’

Her parents cackled loudly. Olanna was not sure how that was funny, but then it was the minister’s joke.

‘That sounds wonderful,’ Olanna’s father said.

‘It will be nice for all of us to go before Olanna leaves for Nsukka,’ her mother said.

Olanna felt a slight irritation, a prickly feeling on her skin. ‘I would love to come, but I won’t be here this weekend.’

‘You won’t be here?’ her father asked. She wondered if the expression in his eyes was a desperate plea. She wondered, too, how her parents had promised Chief Okonji an affair with her in exchange for the contract. Had they stated it verbally, plainly, or had it been implied?

‘I have made plans to go to Kano, to see Uncle Mbaezi and the family, and Mohammed as well,’ she said.

Her father stabbed at his avocado. ‘I see.’

Olanna sipped her water and said nothing.

After dinner, they moved to the balcony for liqueurs. Olanna liked this after-dinner ritual and often would move away from her parents and the guests to stand by the railing, looking at the tall lamps that lit up the paths below, so bright that the swimming pool looked silver and the hibiscus and bougainvillea took on an incandescent patina over their reds and pinks. The first and only time Odenigbo visited her in Lagos, they had stood looking down at the swimming pool and Odenigbo threw a bottle cork down and watched it plunk into the water. He drank a lot of brandy, and when her father said that the idea of Nsukka University was silly, that Nigeria was not ready for an indigenous university, and that receiving support from an American university – rather than a proper university in Britain – was plain daft, he raised his voice in response. Olanna had thought he would realize that her father only wanted to gall him and show how unimpressed he was by a senior lecturer from Nsukka. She thought he would let her father’s words go. But his voice rose higher and higher as he argued about Nsukka being free of colonial influence, and she had blinked often to signal him to stop, although he may not have noticed since the veranda was dim. Finally the phone rang and the conversation had to end. The look in her parents’ eyes was grudging respect, Olanna could tell, but it did not stop them from telling her that Odenigbo was crazy and wrong for her, one of those hot-headed university people who talked and talked until everybody had a headache and nobody understood what had been said.

‘Such a cool night,’ Chief Okonji said behind her. Olanna turned around. She did not know when her parents and Kainene had gone inside.

‘Yes,’ she said.

Chief Okonji stood in front of her. His agbada was embroidered with gold thread around the collar. She looked at his neck, settled into rolls of fat, and imagined him prying the folds apart as he bathed.

‘What about tomorrow? There’s a cocktail party at Ikoyi Hotel,’ he said. ‘I want all of you to meet some expatriates. They are looking for land and I can arrange for them to buy from your father at five or six times the price.’

‘I will be doing a St Vincent de Paul charity drive tomorrow.’

Chief Okonji moved closer. ‘I can’t keep you out of my mind,’ he said, and a mist of alcohol settled on her face.

‘I am not interested, Chief.’

‘I just can’t keep you out of my mind,’ Chief Okonji said again.

‘Look, you don’t have to work at the ministry. I can appoint you to a board, any board you want, and I will furnish a flat for you wherever you want.’ He pulled her to him, and for a while Olanna did nothing, her body limp against his. She was used to this, being grabbed by men who walked around in a cloud of cologne-drenched entitlement, with the presumption that, because they were powerful and found her beautiful, they belonged together. She pushed him back, finally, and felt vaguely sickened at how her hands sank into his soft chest. ‘Stop it, Chief.’