No Longer at Ease (3 page)

Beyond the storm drain there was a meat stall. It was quite empty of meat or meat-sellers. But a man was working a little machine on one of the tables. It looked like a sewing machine except that it ground maize. A woman stood by watching the man turn the machine to grind her maize.

On the other side of the road a little boy wrapped in a cloth was selling bean cakes or
akara
under a lamppost. His bowl of
akara
was lying in the dust and he seemed half asleep. But he really wasn’t, for as soon as the night-soilman passed swinging his broom and hurricane lamp and trailing clouds of putrefaction the boy quickly sprang to his feet and began calling him names. The man made for him with his broom but the boy was already in flight, his bowl of
akara
on his head. The man grinding maize burst into laughter, and the woman joined in. The night-soilman smiled and went his way, having said something very rude about the boy’s mother.

Here was Lagos, thought Obi, the real Lagos he hadn’t imagined existed until now. During his first winter in England he had written a callow, nostalgic poem about Nigeria. It wasn’t about Lagos in particular, but Lagos was part of the Nigeria he had in mind.

“
How sweet it is to lie beneath a tree
At eventime and share the ecstasy
Of jocund birds and flimsy butterflies;
How sweet to leave our earthbound body in its mud
,
And rise towards the music of the spheres
,
Descending softly with the wind
,
And the tender glow of the fading sun
.”

He recalled this poem and then turned and looked at the rotting dog in the storm drain and smiled. “I have tasted putrid flesh in the spoon,” he said through clenched teeth. “Far more apt.” At last Clara emerged from the side street and they drove away.

They drove for a while in silence through narrow overcrowded streets. “I can’t understand why you should choose your dressmaker from the slums.” Clara did not reply. Instead she started humming “
Che sarà sarà
.”

The streets were now quite noisy and crowded, which was to be expected on a Saturday night at nine o’clock. Every few yards one met bands of dancers often wearing identical dress or “
aso ebi
.” Gay temporary sheds were erected in front of derelict houses and lit with brilliant fluorescent tubes for the celebration of an engagement or marriage or birth or promotion or success in business or the death of an old relative.

Obi slowed down as he approached three drummers and a large group of young women in damask and velvet swivelling their waists as effortlessly as oiled ball bearings. A taxi driver hooted impatiently and overtook him, leaning out at
the same time to shout: “
Ori oda
, your head no correct!” “
Ori oda
—bloody fool!” replied Obi. Almost immediately a cyclist crossed the road without looking back or giving any signal. Obi jammed on his brakes and his tires screamed on the tarmac. Clara let out a little scream and gripped his left arm. The cyclist looked back once and rode away, his ambition written for all to see on his black bicycle bag—
FUTURE MINISTER
.

Going from the Lagos mainland to Ikoyi on a Saturday night was like going from a bazaar to a funeral. And the vast Lagos cemetery which separated the two places helped to deepen this feeling. For all its luxurious bungalows and flats and its extensive greenery, Ikoyi was like a graveyard. It had no corporate life—at any rate for those Africans who lived there. They had not always lived there, of course. It was once a European reserve. But things had changed, and some Africans in “European posts” had been given houses in Ikoyi. Obi Okonkwo, for example lived there, and as he drove from Lagos to his flat he was struck again by these two cities in one. It always reminded him of twin kernels separated by a thin wall in a palm-nut shell. Sometimes one kernel was shiny black and alive, the other powdery white and dead.

“What is making you so moody?” He looked sideways at Clara, who was ostentatiously sitting as far away from him as she could, pressed against the left door. She did not answer. “Tell me, darling,” he said, holding her hand in one of his
while he drove with the other. “Leave me,
ojare
,” she said, snatching her hand away.

Obi knew very well why she was moody. She had suggested in her tentative way that they should go to the films. At this stage in their relationship, Clara never said: “Let us go to films.” She said instead: “There is a good film at the Capitol.” Obi, who did not care for films, especially those that Clara called good, had said after a long silence: “Well, if you insist, but I’m not keen.” Clara did not insist, but she felt very much hurt. All evening she had been nursing her feelings. “It’s not too late to go to your film,” said Obi, capitulating, or appearing to do so. “You may go if you want to, I’m not coming,” she said. Only three days before they had gone to see “a very good film” which infuriated Obi so much that he stopped looking at the screen altogether, except when Clara whispered one explanation or another for his benefit. “That man is going to be killed,” she would prophesy, and sure as death, the doomed man would be shot almost immediately. From downstairs the shilling-ticket audience participated noisily in the action.

It never ceased to amaze Obi that Clara should take so much delight in these orgies of killing on the screen. Actually it rather amused him when he thought of it outside the cinema. But while he was there he could feel nothing but annoyance. Clara was well aware of this, and tried her best to ease the tedium for him by squeezing his arm or biting his ear after whispering something into it. “And after all,” she would say sometimes, “I don’t quarrel with you when you start reading your poems to me.” Which was quite true. Only
that very morning he had rung her up at the hospital and asked her to come to lunch to meet one of his friends who had recently come to Lagos on transfer from Enugu. Actually Clara had seen the fellow before and didn’t like him. So she had said over the telephone that she wasn’t keen on meeting him again. But Obi was insistent, and Clara had said: “I don’t know why you should want me to meet people that I don’t want to meet.” “You know, you are a poet, Clara,” said Obi. “To meet people you don’t want to meet, that’s pure T. S. Eliot.”

Clara had no idea what he was talking about but she went to lunch and met Obi’s friend, Christopher. So the least that Obi could do in return was to sit through her “very good film,” just as she had sat through a very dull lunch while Obi and Christopher theorized about bribery in Nigeria’s public life. Whenever Obi and Christopher met they were bound to argue very heatedly about Nigeria’s future. Whichever line Obi took, Christopher had to take the opposite. Christopher was an economist from the London School of Economics and he always pointed out that Obi’s arguments were not based on factual or scientific analysis, which was not surprising since he had taken a degree in English.

“The civil service is corrupt because of these so-called experienced men at the top,” said Obi.

“You don’t believe in experience? You think that a chap straight from university should be made a permanent secretary?”

“I didn’t say
straight
from the university, but even that
would be better than filling our top posts with old men who have no intellectual foundations to support their experience.”

“What about the Land Officer jailed last year? He is straight from the university.”

“He is an exception,” said Obi. “But take one of these old men. He probably left school thirty years ago in Standard Six. He has worked steadily to the top through bribery—an ordeal by bribery. To him the bribe is natural. He gave it and he expects it. Our people say that if you pay homage to the man on top, others will pay homage to you when it is your turn to be on top. Well, that is what the old men say.”

“What do the young men say, if I may ask?”

“To most of them bribery is no problem. They come straight to the top without bribing anyone. It’s not that they’re necessarily better than others, it’s simply that they can afford to be virtuous. But even that kind of virtue can become a habit.”

“Very well put,” conceded Christopher as he took a large piece of meat from the
egusi
soup. They were eating pounded yams and
egusi
soup with their fingers. The second generation of educated Nigerians had gone back to eating pounded yams or
garri
with their fingers for the good reason that it tasted better that way. Also for the even better reason that they were not as scared as the first generation of being called uncivilized.

“Zacchaeus!” called Clara.

“Yes, madam,” answered a voice from the pantry.

“Bring us more soup.”

Zacchaeus had half a mind not to reply, but he thought better of it and said grudgingly: “Yes, madam.” Zacchaeus had made up his mind to resign as soon as Master married Madam. “I like Master too much, but this Madam no good,” was his verdict.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

The affair between Obi and Clara could not strictly be called love at first sight. They met at a dance organized by the London branch of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons at the St. Pancras Town Hall. Clara had come with a student who was fairly well known to Obi and who introduced them. Obi was immediately struck by her beauty and followed her with his eyes round the hall. In the end he succeeded in getting a dance with her. But he was so flustered that the only thing he could find to say was: “Have you been dancing very long?” “No. Why?” was the curt reply. Obi was never a very good dancer, but that night he was simply appalling. He stepped on her toes about four times in the first half-minute. Thereafter she concentrated all her attention on moving her foot sideways just in time. As soon as the dance ended she fled. Obi pursued her to her seat to say: “Thank you very much.” She nodded without looking.

They did not meet again until almost eighteen months later at the Harrington Dock in Liverpool. For it happened that they were returning to Nigeria the same day on the same boat.

It was a small cargo boat carrying twelve passengers and a crew of fifty. When Obi arrived at the dock the other passengers had all embarked and completed their customs formalities. The short bald-headed customs officer was very friendly. He began by asking Obi whether he had had a happy stay in England. Did he go to a university in England? He must have found the weather very cold.

“I didn’t mind the weather very much in the end,” said Obi, who had learnt that an Englishman might grumble about his weather but did not expect a foreigner to join in.

When he went into the lounge Obi nearly fell over himself at the sight of Clara. She was talking to an elderly woman and a young Englishman. Obi sat with them and introduced himself. The elderly woman, whose name was Mrs. Wright, was returning to Freetown. The young man was called Macmillan, an administrative officer in Northern Nigeria. Clara introduced herself as Miss Okeke. “I think we have met before,” said Obi. Clara looked surprised and somewhat hostile. “At the N.C.N.C. dance in London.” “I see,” she said, with as much interest as if she had just been told that they were on a boat in the Liverpool Docks, and resumed her conversation with Mrs. Wright.

The boat left the docks at 11
A.M
. For the rest of the day Obi kept to himself, watching the sea or reading in his cabin. It was his first sea voyage, and he had already decided that it was infinitely better than flying.

He woke up the following morning without any sign of
the much talked about seasickness. He had a warm bath before any of the other passengers were up, and went to the rails to look at the sea. Last evening it had been so placid. Now it had become an endless waste of restless, jaggy hillocks topped with white. Obi stood at the rails for nearly an hour drinking in the unspoilt air. “They that go down to the sea in ships …” he remembered. He had very little religion nowadays, but he was nevertheless deeply moved.

When the gong sounded for breakfast his appetite was as keen as the morning air. The seating arrangement had been fixed on the previous day. There was a big central table which seated ten, and six little two-seaters ranged round the room. Eight of the twelve passengers sat on the middle table with the captain at the head and the chief engineer at the other end. Obi sat between Macmillan and a Nigerian civil servant called Stephen Udom. Directly in front of him was Mr. Jones, who was something or other in the United Africa Company. Mr. Jones always worked solidly through four of the five heavy courses and then announced to the steward with self-righteous continence: “Just coffee,” with the emphasis on the “just.”

In contrast to Mr. Jones, the chief engineer hardly touched his food. Watching his face, one would think they had served him portions of Epsom Salts, rhubarb, and mist. alba. He held his shoulders up, his arms pressed against his sides as though he was in constant fear of evacuating.