The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [61]
“No survivors,” she said.
“Father, take control,” Chinedu said, exhaling loudly. He came and sat beside her to read from her laptop, their bodies close, the smell of her peppery stew on his breath. There were more photographs from the crash site. Ukamaka stared at one of shirtless men carrying a piece of metal that looked like the twisted frame of a bed; she could not imagine what part of the plane it could possibly have been.
“There is too much iniquity in our country,” Chinedu said, getting up. “Too much corruption. Too many things that we have to pray about.”
“Are you saying the crash was a punishment from God?”
“A punishment and a wake-up call.” Chinedu was eating the last of his rice. She found it distracting when he scraped the spoon against his teeth.
“I used to go to church every day when I was a teenager, morning Mass at six. I did it by myself, my family was a Sunday-Sunday family,” she said. “Then one day I just stopped going.”
“Everybody has a crisis of faith. It’s normal.”
“It wasn’t a crisis of faith. Church suddenly became like Father Christmas, something that you never question when you are a child but when you become an adult you realize that the man in that Father Christmas costume is actually your neighbor from down the street.”
Chinedu shrugged, as though he did not have much patience for this decadence, this ambivalence of hers. “Is the rice finished?”
“There’s more.” She took his plate to warm up some more rice and stew. When she handed it to him, she said, “I don’t know what I would have done if Udenna had died. I don’t even know what I would have felt.”
“You just have to be grateful to God.”
She walked to the window and adjusted the blinds. It was newly autumn. Outside, she could see the trees that lined Lawrence Drive, their foliage a mix of green and copper.
“Udenna never said ‘I love you’ to me because he thought it was a cliché. Once I told him I was sorry he felt bad about something and he started shouting and said I should not use an expression like ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ because it was unoriginal. He used to make me feel that nothing I said was witty enough or sarcastic enough or smart enough. He was always struggling to be different, even when it didn’t matter. It was as if he was performing his life instead of living his life.”
Chinedu said nothing. He took full mouthfuls; sometimes he used a finger as a wedge to nudge more rice onto his spoon.
“He knew I loved being here, but he was always telling me how Princeton was a boring school, and that it was out of touch. If he thought I was too happy about something that did not have to do with him, he always found a way to put it down. How can you love somebody and yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?”
Chinedu nodded; he both understood her and sided with her, she could tell. In the following days, days now cool enough for her knee-length leather boots, days in which she took the shuttle to campus, researched her dissertation at the library, met with her advisor, taught her undergraduate composition class, or met with students asking for permission to hand in assignments late, she would return to her apartment in the late evening and wait for Chinedu to visit so she could offer him rice or pizza or spaghetti. So she could talk about Udenna. She told Chinedu things she could not or did not want to tell Father Patrick. She liked that Chinedu said little, looking as if he was not only listening to her but also thinking about what she was saying. Once she thought idly of starting an affair with him, of indulging in the classic rebound, but there was a refreshingly asexual quality to him, something about him that made her feel that she did not have to pat some powder under her eyes to hide her dark circles.
Her apartment building was full of other foreigners. She and Udenna used to joke that it was the uncertainty of the foreigners’ new surroundings that had congealed