Page 74

“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.

Olanna hired a pickup truck and a driver and went to Odenigbo’s house. Ugwu followed her around as she packed books and pointed at things for the driver to pick up.

“Master looks like somebody that is crying every day, mah,” Ugwu said to her in English.

“Put my blender in a carton,” she said. My blender sounded strange; it had always been the blender, unmarked by her ownership.

“Yes, mah.” Ugwu went to the kitchen and came back with a carton. He held it tentatively. “Mah, please forgive Master.”

Olanna looked at him. He had known; he had seen this woman share his master’s bed; he too had betrayed her. “Osiso! Put my blender in the car!”

“Yes, mah.” Ugwu turned to the door.

“Do the guests still come in the evenings?” Olanna asked.

“It’s not like before when you were around, mah.”

“But they still come?”

“Yes.”

“And your master still plays tennis and goes to the staff club?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She did not mean that. She had wanted to hear that Odenigbo could no longer bear to live the life that had been theirs.

When he visited her, she tried not to feel disappointment at how normal he looked. She stood at the door and gave noncommittal answers, resentful of his effortless volubility, of how casually he said, “You know I will never love another woman, nkem,” as if he was certain that, with time, everything would be the same again. She resented, too, the romantic attention of other men. The single men took to stopping by her flat, the married ones to bumping into her outside her department. Their courting upset her because it—and they—assumed that her relationship with Odenigbo was permanently over. “I am not interested,” she told them, and even as she said it, she hoped that it would not get back to Odenigbo because she did not want him to think she was pining. And she did not pine: she added new material to her lectures, cooked long meals, read new books, bought new records. She became secretary of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and after they donated food to the villages she wrote the minutes of their meetings in a notebook. She cultivated zinnias in her front yard and, finally, she cultivated a friendship with her black American neighbor, Edna Whaler.

Edna had a quiet laugh. She taught music and played jazz records a little too loudly and cooked tender pork chops and talked often about the man who had left her a week before their wedding in Montgomery and the uncle who had been lynched when she was a child. “You know what always amazed me?” she would ask Olanna, as if she had not told her only a day previously. “That civilized white folk wore nice dresses and hats and gathered to watch a white man hang a black man from a tree.”

She would laugh her quiet laugh and pat her hair, which had the greasy shine of hot-pressing. At first, they did not talk about Odenigbo. It was refreshing for Olanna to be with somebody who was far removed from the circle of friends she had shared with Odenigbo. Then, once, as Edna sang along to Billie Holiday’s “My Man,” she asked, “Why do you love him?”

Olanna looked up. Her mind was a blank board. “Why do I love him?”