The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [19]
“The baby?” Chika asks, knowing how stupid she sounds even as she asks.
The woman shakes her head and there is a flash of impatience, even anger, in her eyes. “You have ear problem? You don’t hear what I am saying?”
“Sorry,” Chika says.
“Baby is at home! This one is first daughter. Halima.” The woman starts to cry. She cries quietly, her shoulders heaving up and down, not the kind of loud sobbing that the women Chika knows do, the kind that screams Hold me and comfort me because I cannot deal with this alone. The woman’s crying is private, as though she is carrying out a necessary ritual that involves no one else.
Later, when Chika will wish that she and Nnedi had not decided to take a taxi to the market just to see a little of the ancient city of Kano outside their aunt’s neighborhood, she will wish also that the woman’s daughter, Halima, had been sick or tired or lazy that morning, so that she would not have sold groundnuts that day.
The woman wipes her eyes with one end of her blouse. “Allah keep your sister and Halima in safe place,” she says. And because Chika is not sure what Muslims say to show agreement—it cannot be “amen”—she simply nods.
The woman has discovered a rusted tap at a corner of the store, near the metal containers. Perhaps where the trader washed his or her hands, she says, telling Chika that the stores on this street were abandoned months ago, after the government declared them illegal structures to be demolished. The woman turns on the tap and they both watch—surprised—as water trickles out. Brownish, and so metallic Chika can smell it already. Still, it runs.
“I wash and pray,” the woman says, her voice louder now, and she smiles for the first time to show even-sized teeth, the front ones stained brown. Her dimples sink into her cheeks, deep enough to swallow half a finger, and unusual in a face so lean. The woman clumsily washes her hands and face at the tap, then removes her scarf from her neck and places it down on the floor. Chika looks away. She knows the woman is on her knees, facing Mecca, but she does not look. It is like the woman’s tears, a private experience, and she wishes that she could leave the store. Or that she, too, could pray, could believe in a god, see an omniscient presence in the stale air of the store. She cannot remember when her idea of God has not been cloudy, like the reflection from a steamy bathroom mirror, and she cannot remember ever trying to clean the mirror.
She touches the finger rosary that she still wears, sometimes on her pinky or her forefinger, to please her mother. Nnedi no longer wears hers, once saying with that throaty laugh, “Rosaries are really magical potions, and I don’t need those, thank you.”
Later, the family will offer Masses over and over for Nnedi to be found safe, though never for the repose of Nnedi’s soul. And Chika will think about this woman, praying with her head to the dust floor, and she will change her mind about telling her mother that offering Masses is a waste of money, that it is just fund-raising for the church.
When the woman rises, Chika feels strangely energized. More than three hours have passed and she imagines that the riot is quieted, the rioters drifted away. She has to leave, she has to make her way home and make sure Nnedi and her Aunty are fine.
“I must go,” Chika says.
Again the look of impatience on the woman’s face. “Outside is danger.”
“I think they have gone. I can’t even smell any more smoke.”
The woman says nothing, seats herself back down on the wrapper. Chika watches her for a while, disappointed without knowing why. Maybe she wants a blessing from the woman, something. “How far away is your house?” she asks.
“Far. I’m taking two buses.”
“Then I will come back with my aunty’s driver and take you home,” Chika says.
The woman looks away. Chika walks slowly to the window and opens it. She expects to hear the