The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [20]
The streets are silent. The sun is falling, and in the evening dimness Chika looks around, unsure which way to go. She prays that a taxi will appear, by magic, by luck, by God’s hand. Then she prays that Nnedi will be inside the taxi, asking her where the hell she has been, they have been so worried about her. Chika has not reached the end of the second street, toward the market, when she sees the body. She almost doesn’t see it, walks so close to it that she feels its heat. The body must have been very recently burned. The smell is sickening, of roasted flesh, unlike that of any she has ever smelled.
Later, when Chika and her aunt go searching throughout Kano, a policeman in the front seat of her aunt’s air-conditioned car, she will see other bodies, many burned, lying lengthwise along the sides of the street, as though someone carefully pushed them there, straightening them. She will look at only one of the corpses, naked, stiff, facedown, and it will strike her that she cannot tell if the partially burned man is Igbo or Hausa, Christian or Muslim, from looking at that charred flesh. She will listen to BBC radio and hear the accounts of the deaths and the riots—“religious with undertones of ethnic tension” the voice will say. And she will fling the radio to the wall and a fierce red rage will run through her at how it has all been packaged and sanitized and made to fit into so few words, all those bodies. But now, the heat from the burned body is so close to her, so present and warm that she turns and dashes back toward the store. She feels a sharp pain along her lower leg as she runs. She gets to the store and raps on the window, and she keeps rapping until the woman opens it.
Chika sits on the floor and looks closely, in the failing light, at the line of blood crawling down her leg. Her eyes swim restlessly in her head. It looks alien, the blood, as though someone had squirted tomato paste on her.
“Your leg. There is blood,” the woman says, a little wearily. She wets one end of her scarf at the tap and cleans the cut on Chika’s leg, then ties the wet scarf around it, knotting it at the calf.
“Thank you,” Chika says.
“You want toilet?”
“Toilet? No.”
“The containers there, we are using for toilet,” the woman says. She takes one of the containers to the back of the store, and soon the smell fills Chika’s nose, mixes with the smells of dust and metallic water, makes her feel light-headed and queasy. She closes her eyes.
“Sorry, oh! My stomach is bad. Everything happening today,” the woman says from behind her. Afterwards, the woman opens the window and places the container outside, then washes her hands at the tap. She comes back and she and Chika sit side by side in silence; after a while they hear raucous chanting in the distance, words Chika cannot make out. The store is almost completely dark when the woman stretches out on the floor, her upper body on the wrapper and the rest of her not.
Later, Chika will read in The Guardian that “the reactionary Hausa-speaking Muslims in the North have a history of violence against non-Muslims,” and in the middle of her grief, she will stop to remember that she examined the nipples and experienced the gentleness of a woman who is Hausa and Muslim.
Chika hardly sleeps all night. The window is shut tight; the air is stuffy, and the dust, thick and gritty, crawls up her nose. She keeps seeing the blackened corpse floating in a halo by the window, pointing accusingly at her. Finally she hears the woman get up and open the window, letting in the dull blue of early dawn. The woman stands there for a while before climbing out. Chika can hear footsteps, people walking past. She hears the woman call out, voice raised in recognition, followed by rapid Hausa that Chika does not understand.
The woman climbs back into the store. “Danger is finished. It is Abu. He is selling provisions. He is going to see his store. Everywhere