The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [21]
Chika stands slowly and stretches; her joints ache. She will walk all the way back to her aunty’s home in the gated estate, because there are no taxis on the street, there are only army Jeeps and battered police station wagons. She will find her aunty, wandering from one room to the next with a glass of water in her hand, muttering in Igbo, over and over, “Why did I ask you and Nnedi to visit? Why did my chi deceive me like this?” And Chika will grasp her aunty’s shoulders tightly and lead her to a sofa.
Now, Chika unties the scarf from her leg, shakes it as though to shake the bloodstains out, and hands it to the woman. “Thank you.”
“Wash your leg well-well. Greet your sister, greet your people,” the woman says, tightening her wrapper around her waist.
“Greet your people also. Greet your baby and Halima,” Chika says. Later, as she walks home, she will pick up a stone stained the copper of dried blood and hold the ghoulish souvenir to her chest. And she will suspect right then, in a strange flash while clutching the stone, that she will never find Nnedi, that her sister is gone. But now, she turns to the woman and adds, “May I keep your scarf? The bleeding might start again.”
The woman looks for a moment as if she does not understand; then she nods. There is perhaps the beginning of future grief on her face, but she smiles a slight, distracted smile before she hands the scarf back to Chika and turns to climb out of the window.
GHOSTS
Today I saw Ikenna Okoro, a man I had long thought was dead. Perhaps I should have bent down, grabbed a handful of sand, and thrown it at him, in the way my people do to make sure a person is not a ghost. But I am a Western-educated man, a retired mathematics professor of seventy-one, and I am supposed to have armed myself with enough science to laugh indulgently at the ways of my people. I did not throw sand at him. I could not have done so even if I had wished to, anyway, since we met on the concrete grounds of the university Bursary.
I was there to ask about my pension, yet again. “Good day, Prof,” the dried-up-looking clerk, Ugwuoke, said. “Sorry, the money has not come in.”
The other clerk, whose name I have now forgotten, nodded and apologized as well, while chewing on a pink lobe of kola nut. They were used to this. I was used to this. So were the tattered men who were clustered under the flame tree, talking loudly among themselves, gesturing. The education minister has stolen the pension money, one fellow said. Another said that it was the vice chancellor who had deposited the money in high-interest personal accounts. They cursed the vice chancellor: His penis will quench. His children will not have children. He will die of diarrhea. When I walked up to them, they greeted me and shook their heads apologetically about the situation, as if my professor-level pension were somehow more important than their messenger-level or driver-level pensions. They called me Prof, as most people do, as the hawkers sitting next to their trays under the tree did. “Prof! Prof! Come and buy good banana!”
I chatted with Vincent, who had been our driver when I was faculty dean in the eighties. “No pension for three years, Prof,” he said. “This is why people retire and die.”
“O joka,” I said, although he, of course, did not need me to tell him how terrible it was.
“How is Nkiru, Prof? I trust she is well in America?” He always asks about our daughter. He often drove my wife, Ebere, and me to visit her at the College of Medicine in Enugu. I remember that when Ebere died, he came with his relatives for mgbalu and gave a touching, if rather long, speech about how well Ebere had treated him when he was our driver, how she gave him our daughter’s old clothes for his children.
“Nkiru is well,” I said.
“Please greet her for me when she calls, Prof.”
“I will.”
He talked for a while longer, about ours being a country that has not learned to say thank you, about the students in the hostels