Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [87]
After the first surge of anger Beatrice found herself feeling for the first time for this poor, twisted, desiccated, sanctimonious girl something she had never before thought of extending to her—pity. Yes, she thought, her Agatha deserved to be pitied; this girl who danced and raved about salvation from dawn to dusk every Saturday, who distributed free leaflets (she had once even sneaked up to Chris when Beatrice stepped out of the room and given him one). Yes, this Agatha who was so free with leaflets dripping with the saving blood of Jesus and yet had no single drop of charity in her own anaemic blood.
As she drank her coffee and nibbled at the bread and omelette she was having just to keep Elewa company and make sure she had a little something nourishing and needful for her condition she wondered why Agatha should want to be so beastly to the girl.
Of course being a servant could not be fun. Beatrice knew that. She had never belittled the problem or consciously looked down on anyone because she was a servant, so help her God. For she was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quite easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people’s shit in buckets on his head. So how could a girl like Beatrice, intelligent, compassionate, knowing that fact of our situation look down on another less lucky and see more to it than just that—blind luck?
But there was more to it. There had to be. Look at Elewa. Was she not as unlucky as Agatha in the grand capricious raffle? A half-literate salesgirl in a shop owned by an Indian; living in one room with a petty-trader mother deep in the slums of Bassa. Why had she not gone sour? Why did she radiate this warmth and attraction and self-respect and confidence? Why did it seem so natural to install her in the spare bedroom and not, like Agatha, in the servant’s quarters? She was Ikem’s girl, true. But was that all? And how come Ikem singled her out in the first place to be his girl from the millions just as unlucky as herself? There was something in her that even her luckless draw could not remove. That thing that drew Ikem to her, and for which she must be given credit.
Ikem! Oh yes, Ikem. Provocative, infuriating, endearing Ikem! He was, had to be, at the root of these unusual musings! She recalled the last visit he had paid her in this flat. Though she was to see him a couple of times again subsequently, the last time only the other day at Chris’s place when they had all watched the news of his suspension together, that last visit here at her flat had risen with his death to dominate her consciousness of him and driven earlier and even later memories firmly into the background.
It was perhaps the strong, spiritual light of that emergent consciousness that gave Elewa, carrying as it turned out a living speck of him within her, this new luminosity she seemed to radiate which was not merely a reflection of common grief which you could find anywhere any hour in Kangan, but a touch, distinct, almost godlike, able to transform a half-literate, albeit good-natured and very attractive, girl into an object of veneration.
But even more remarkable was the way this consciousness was now, at the ebb-tide of her anger impinging on despised Agatha, who had wilfully placed herself until now beyond the reach of Beatrice’s sympathy by her dry-as-dust, sanctimonious, born-again ways; yes, impinging on her of all people and projecting on to the screen of the mind a new image of her;