Page 30 of The Death of Vivek Oji

Juju stared at the ceiling until her vision blurred with tears. “My dad’s having an affair.”

“What?” He shifted closer to her and put his hand on her braids. “How do you know?”

“They’ve been fighting and shouting. And I saw him today in the market with his... hisother family, Vivek. With this woman and a little boy.” The tears slipped out of her eyes and ran down the sides of her face, spilling into her ears. Vivek wiped some of them away.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “Come here.”

Juju wrapped her arms around his neck, sobbing into his shoulder. “I feel like a mistake,” she said, her voice muffled and thick. “He always wanted a boy. Maybe if I’d been a boy he wouldn’t hit Mama so much.”

“Shh, don’t say that. It’s not true.”

Juju tried to stop crying, but she couldn’t. “He hates us,” she sobbed. “He went and replaced us and he won’t let Mama go home and her teeth are falling out and he keeps beating her and I can’t do anything, Vivek, I can’tdo anything.” Her voice choked on itself, knots of pain clogging up her throat, and Vivek just held her tighter, whispering to her, locking her body against his. Juju wept in his arms for hours, as the afternoon crawled into evening and the light outside dimmed and the sun set and Vivek held her the whole time.

Sixteen

Ebenezer was good at his job.

He’d been a vulcanizer for fifteen years, fixing tires at the same junction the whole time. He was quick with his hands and reliable. Even customers who could have gone to a vulcanizer closer to them would come all the way to Chief Michael Road just to do business with him. All the okada boys in the area preferred him over the other vulcanizers because he never tried to overcharge them; sometimes, if business had been bad for them, he would do repairs on credit. They called him Dede, and when his competitors tried to make trouble for him, the okada boys intervened and there was no more trouble.

Okada drivers were a pack, as anyone who knocked one of them down on the road soon discovered. The boys would surround the car and prevent the driver from escaping, smashing windows and denting doors if they saw fit. Ebenezer liked them, though. They were loud and rough, but they were boys and they reminded him of his junior brothers.

His wife, Chisom, was a trader at the market just down the road, selling fabric and sewing goods. They had been married for six years, but they had no children, which in the past year or two had become a problem. Ebenezer’s family blamed Chisom, saying that she was barren or cursed, that something she’d done had blocked her womb. They never liked her because she had managed for herself before she married Ebenezer.

“Be careful of women like that,” one of Ebenezer’s brothers had told him. “They start feeling like they’re men, and before you know it they’re trying to run the household themselves, as if you’re their houseboy.”

Ebenezer had ignored them. He wanted a woman with some business sense, not someone who would be sitting in the house every day waiting for him to provide everything. Besides, she didn’t mind the scar on this face, didn’t think he was ugly. Someone like Chisom would concentrate on her business, he knew, because that’s what she’d always done. Even if—no,when—they had a baby, Ebenezer already knew Chisom would tie it to her back, like the other women at the market, and just continue. He saw himself building a family of hard workers, pulling themselves up in the world, but the absence of a child was obstructing this vision. Everywhere the walls were decked with posters and advertisements about family planning, trying to convince people to slow down on having children, and here they were struggling to have even one. It was humiliating.

Once, after they’d quarreled about it, Chisom had thrown her hands up.

“Every time it’s me going to a doctor. Ah-ahn! I don tire. You sef, why don’t you go and see if the problem is with you?”

Ebenezer had recoiled in shock. Before he could even reply, she turned over in their bed and pulled her wrapper to cover her, pretending to fall asleep. He sat there for a few minutes, and by the time he thought of something to say, it seemed childish to wake her up, so he went to sleep, too. When he mentioned the conversation to one of his brothers a few days later, his brother laughed.

“Shey I told you?” he said. “Na so she dey blame you because say her womb dey dry. You see wetin you don start?” He went and told the rest of the family, and from there everyone got involved in condemning Chisom and telling Ebenezer what a useless wife he had.

Chisom stopped speaking to her husband because of it, and they started to move around each other like strangers. Ebenezer missed her, but he didn’t feel he should apologize for talking to his own family members about his marital problems. Chisom thought that, if he already knew how they felt about her, why would he tell them and give them more ammunition against her? So a silence grew up between them, and Ebenezer was too proud to break it.

He started to look more at other women—not with intent, just a lazy wondering, about what kind of wives they would have been, what it would be like if he’d married one of them and had some children. There was an Abiriba woman who ran a small food stall across the junction from where he worked. Everyone called her Mama Ben and she made the best beansEbenezer had ever tasted. She had maybe four or five children, he wasn’t sure, and she was still pretty: very clear skin, a nice smile, and she dressed well. Ebenezer wondered what it would be like if he was her husband, with all these children and his wife with a business of her own, just like he always wanted.

He started going to Mama Ben’s food stall more and more, sitting at the round plastic table with cardboard folded under one leg to balance it. She always welcomed him with a smile, like she did with every customer, and while it was tempting to believe that the smile she gave him was different, special, Ebenezer knew it wasn’t. Still, it was nice to sit there, drink Pepsi, and talk with her other customers. Mama Ben looked at him as if he didn’t have that scar on his face, and the only other woman who had done that was Chisom. Ebenezer would stay at the food stall until it was late, keeping an eye out across the road in case a customer stopped by, and then he would wander home filled with goodwill and contentment. He ignored his wife’s silence and went to sleep with the memory of Mama Ben’s smile in his head.

One evening, when her other customers were gone, he offered to help her out with something in the kitchen, which gave him an excuse to get her alone. There, in a back corner, he plied her with sweet nonsense words and she giggled and he kissed the side of her sweaty neck. She tasted like salt. That night, he reached out in the dark of his bed and tugged at Chisom’s hip and she gave in to him, but he wasn’t thinking of her, not for any of the time. In fact, it was only with effort that he managed to say her name at one point, and then only because he didn’tknow Mama Ben’s given name, and what else could you call out when you were in bed, really?

Chisom still slept as far away from him on the mattress as she could get, even after they’d had sex. The next morning she didn’t speak to him, and this time Ebenezer didn’t care. He wasn’t even thinking about Mama Ben. No, the woman on his mind now was this orange-seller he’d seen last week, with a sweet voice and a nyash that rolled seductively under her wrapper. She had shown up in his dreams, and he considered this to be a sign. Her hips looked like those of someone who could have children easily. Ebenezer had woken from the dream with an erection, and he thought of the woman as he had a quick breakfast of bread and tea. He looked for her on his way to work, and as he handled his first customer of the day, but he didn’t see her. The customer was a banker from Emerald Bank around the corner, sweating in his buttoned shirt and making small talk with a colleague he was giving a lift to, a short woman with fat braids cornrowed onto her head and a sharply ironed polyester skirt.

“I know the manager is afraid I will take his job,” the banker was saying. “And why not? The man is lazy! I could be doing the same work that he’s doing, if only I was provided the opportunity. You know, that is the key to success.” He looked down at his colleague, his face arranged with the seriousness of someone imparting great life advice. “Mark my words. Opportunity is what will land you success in life. When you see the door opening, you must step in! I’m sure your husband has experienced this. Ask him. He will know.”

The woman shot him a nasty look but the man completely missed it, his attention diverted by yet another woman, this one walking past Mama Ben’s canteen across the street. She was tall with long mammy-water hair in two plaits down her back, wearing a flowered dress that cut off at her calves. Her sandals were plain and brown but her toes had been painted a bright red. She walked like a model and looked like one, thin arms and sharp cheekbones. The banker ogled her, then made kissing noises at her, puckering his lips. When she didn’t turn her head, he shouted, “Tall babe! Come make I climb you small!” then burst into uproarious laughter, as if he’d said the wittiest thing. “Is that your hair?” he continued.

“What kind of nonsense question is that?” interrupted his colleague. “Does it look like her hair?”

The banker gave her a contemptuous glance. “Just because your own hair resembles broken broomstick, can somebody not grow their own?”

She ignored the insult. “As long as that? Abeg, it’s weave-on. Use common sense.”

“It’s a lie, I’ve seen plenty babes with long hair before.”

“Biko, all of them are weave-on! Are you stupid?”