The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [16]
“I dropped everything,” Chika says. “I was buying oranges and I dropped the oranges and my handbag.” She does not add that the handbag was a Burberry, an original one that her mother had bought on a recent trip to London.
The woman sighs and Chika imagines that she is thinking of her necklace, probably plastic beads threaded on a piece of string. Even without the woman’s strong Hausa accent, Chika can tell she is a Northerner, from the narrowness of her face, the unfamiliar rise of her cheekbones; and that she is Muslim, because of the scarf. It hangs around the woman’s neck now, but it was probably wound loosely round her face before, covering her ears. A long, flimsy pink and black scarf, with the garish prettiness of cheap things. Chika wonders if the woman is looking at her as well, if the woman can tell, from her light complexion and the silver finger rosary her mother insists she wear, that she is Igbo and Christian. Later, Chika will learn that, as she and the woman are speaking, Hausa Muslims are hacking down Igbo Christians with machetes, clubbing them with stones. But now she says, “Thank you for calling me. Everything happened so fast and everybody ran and I was suddenly alone and I didn’t know what I was doing. Thank you.”
“This place safe,” the woman says, in a voice that is so soft it sounds like a whisper. “Them not going to small-small shop, only big-big shop and market.”
“Yes,” Chika says. But she has no reason to agree or disagree, she knows nothing about riots: the closest she has come is the pro-democracy rally at the university a few weeks ago, where she had held a bright green branch and joined in chanting “The military must go! Abacha must go! Democracy now!” Besides, she would not even have participated in that rally if her sister Nnedi had not been one of the organizers who had gone from hostel to hostel to hand out fliers and talk to students about the importance of “having our voices heard.”
Chika’s hands are still trembling. Just half an hour ago, she was in the market with Nnedi. She was buying oranges and Nnedi had walked farther down to buy groundnuts and then there was shouting in English, in pidgin, in Hausa, in Igbo. “Riot! Trouble is coming, oh! They have killed a man!” Then people around her were running, pushing against one another, overturning wheelbarrows full of yams, leaving behind bruised vegetables they had just bargained hard for. Chika smelled the sweat and fear and she ran, too, across wide streets, into this narrow one, which she feared—felt—was dangerous, until she saw the woman.
She and the woman stand silently in the store for a while, looking out of the window they have just climbed through, its squeaky wooden shutters swinging in the air. The street is quiet at first, and then they hear the sound of running feet. They both move away from the window, instinctively, although Chika can still see a man and a woman walking past, the woman holding her wrapper up above her knees, a baby tied to her back. The man is speaking swiftly in Igbo and all Chika hears is “She may have run to Uncle’s house.”
“Close window,” the woman says.
Chika shuts the windows and without the air from the street flowing in, the dust in the room is suddenly so thick she can see it, billowing above her. The room is stuffy and smells nothing like the streets outside, which smell like the kind of sky-colored smoke that wafts around during Christmas when people throw goat carcasses into fires to burn the hair off the skin. The streets where she ran blindly, not sure in which direction Nnedi had run, not sure if the man running beside her was a friend or an enemy, not sure if she should stop and pick up one of the bewildered-looking children separated from their mothers in the rush, not even sure who was who or who was killing whom.
Later she will see the hulks of burned cars, jagged holes in place of their windows and windshields, and she will imagine the burning cars dotting