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SPEAKING WITH OUR SPIRITS

Before Palm Sunday

I was at my study desk when Mama came into my room, my school uniforms piled on the crook of her arm. She placed them on my bed. She had brought them in from the lines in the backyard, where I had hung them to dry that morning. Jaja and I washed our school uniforms while Sisi washed the rest of our clothes. We always soaked tiny sections of fabric in the foamy water first to check if the colors would run, although we knew they would not. We wanted to spend every minute of the half hour Papa allocated to uniform washing.

“Thank you, Mama, I was about to bring them in,” I said, getting up to fold the clothes. It was not proper to let an older person do your chores, but Mama did not mind; there was so much that she did not mind.

“A drizzle is coming. I did not want them to get wet.” She ran her hand across my uniform, a gray skirt with a darker-toned waistband, long enough to show no calf when I wore it. “Nne, you’re going to have a brother or a sister.”

I stared. She was sitting on my bed, knees close together. “You’re going to have a baby?”

“Yes.” She smiled, still running her hand over my skirt.

“When?”

“In October. I went to Park Lane yesterday to see my doctor.”

“Thanks be to God.” It was what Jaja and I said, what Papa expected us to say, when good things happened.

“Yes.” Mama let go of my skirt, almost reluctantly. “God is faithful. You know after you came and I had the miscarriages, the villagers started to whisper. The members of our umunna even sent people to your father to urge him to have children with someone else. So many people had willing daughters, and many of them were university graduates, too. They might have borne many sons and taken over our home and driven us out, like Mr. Ezendu’s second wife did. But your father stayed with me, with us.” She did not usually say so much at one time. She spoke the way a bird eats, in small amounts.

“Yes,” I said. Papa deserved praise for not choosing to have more sons with another woman, of course, for not choosing to take a second wife. But then, Papa was different. I wished that Mama would not compare him with Mr. Ezendu, with anybody; it lowered him, soiled him.

“They even said somebody had tied up my womb with ogwu.” Mama shook her head and smiled, the indulgent smile that stretched across her face when she talked about people who believed in oracles, or when relatives suggested she consult a witch doctor, or when people recounted tales of digging up hair tufts and animal bones wrapped in cloth that had been buried in their front yards to ward off progress. “They do not know that God works in mysterious ways.”

“Yes,” I said. I held the clothes carefully, making sure the folded edges were even. “God works in mysterious ways.” I did not know she had been trying to have a baby since the last miscarriage almost six years ago. I could not even think of her and Papa together, on the bed they shared, custom-made and wider than the conventional king-size. When I thought of affection between them, I thought of them exchanging the sign of peace at Mass, the way Papa would hold her tenderly in his arms after they had clasped hands.

“Did school go well?” Mama asked, rising. She had asked me earlier.

“Yes.”

“Sisi and I are cooking moi-moi for the sisters; they will be here soon,” Mama said, before going back downstairs. I followed her and placed my folded uniforms on the table in the hallway, where Sisi would get them for ironing.

The sisters, members of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal prayer group, soon arrived, and their Igbo songs, accompanied by robust hand clapping, echoed upstairs. They would pray and sing for about half an hour, and then Mama would interrupt in her low voice, which barely carried upstairs even with my door open, to tell them she had prepared a “little something” for them. When Sisi started to bring in the platters of moi-moi and jollof rice and fried chicken, the women would gently chastise Mama. “Sister Beatrice, what is it? Why have you done this? Are we not content with the anara we are offered in other sisters’ homes? You shouldn’t have, really.” Then a piping voice would say, “Praise the Lord!” dragging out the first word as long as she could. The “Alleluia” response would push against the walls of my room, against the glass furnishings of the living room. Then they would pray, asking God to reward Sister Beatrice’s generosity, and add more blessings to the many she already had. Then the clink-clink-clink of forks and spoons scraping against plates would echo over the house. Mama never used plastic cutlery, no matter how big the group was.

They had just started to pray over the food when I heard Jaja bound up the stairs. I knew he would come into my room first because Papa was not home. If Papa was home, Jaja would go into his own room first to change.

“Ke kwanu?” I asked when he came in. His school uniform, blue shorts, and white shirt with the St. Nicholas badge blazing from his left breast still had the ironed lines running down the front and back. He was voted neatest junior boy last year, and Papa had hugged him so tight that Jaja thought his back had snapped.

“Fine.” He stood by my desk, flipped idly through the Introductory Technology textbook open before me. “What did you eat?”

“Garri.”

I wish we still had lunch together, Jaja said with his eyes.

“Me, too,” I said, aloud.

Before, our driver, Kevin, would pick me up first at Daughters of the Immaculate Heart, and then we would drive over to get Jaja at St. Nicholas. Jaja and I would have lunch together when we got home. Now, because Jaja was in the new gifted student program at St. Nicholas, he attended after-school lessons. Papa had revised his schedule but not mine, and I could not wait to have lunch with him. I was to have had lunch, taken my siesta, and started studying by the time Jaja came home.

Still, Jaja knew what I ate for lunch every day. We had a menu on the kitchen wall that Mama changed twice a month. But he always asked me, anyway. We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.

“I have three assignments to do,” Jaja said, turning to leave.

“Mama is pregnant,” I said. Jaja came back and sat down at the edge of my bed. “She told you?”

“Yes. She’s due in October.”

Jaja closed his eyes for a while and then opened them. “We will take care of the baby; we will protect him.”

I knew that Jaja meant from Papa, but I did not say anything about protecting the baby. Instead, I asked, “How do you know it will be a he?”

“I feel it. What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

Jaja sat on my bed for a while longer before he went downstairs to have lunch; I pushed my textbook aside, looked up, and stared at my daily schedule, pasted on the wall above me. Kambili was written in bold letters on top of the white sheet of paper, just as Jaja was written on the schedule above Jaja’s desk in his room. I wondered when Papa would draw up a schedule for the baby, my new brother, if he would do it right after the baby was born or wait until he was a toddler. Papa liked order. It showed even in the schedules themselves, the way his meticulously drawn lines, in black ink, cut across each day, separating study from siesta, siesta from family time, family time from eating, eating from prayer, prayer from sleep. He revised them often. When we were in school, we had less siesta time and more study time, even on weekends. When we were on vacation, we had a little more family time, a little more time to read newspapers, play chess or monopoly, and listen to the radio.

It was during family time the next day, a Saturday, that the coup happened. Papa had just checkmated Jaja when we heard the martial music on the radio, the solemn strains making us stop to listen. A general with a strong Hausa accent came on and announced that there had been a coup and that we had a new government. We would be told shortly who our new head of state was.

Papa pushed the chessboard aside and excused himself to use the phone in his study. Jaja and Mama and I waited for him, silently. I knew he was calling his editor, Ade Coker, perhaps to tell him something about covering the coup. When he came back, we drank the mango juice, which Sisi served in tall glasses, while he talked about the coup. He looked sad; his rectangular lips seemed to sag. Coups begat coups, he said, telling us about the bloody coups of the sixties, which ended up in civil war just after he left Nigeria to study in England. A coup always began a vicious cycle. Military men would always overthrow one another, because they could, because they were all power drunk.

Of course, Papa told us, the politicians were corrupt, and the Standard had written many stories about the cabinet ministers who stashed money in foreign bank accounts, money meant for paying teachers’ salaries and building roads. But what we Nigerians needed was not soldiers ruling us, what we needed was a renewed democracy. Renewed Democracy. It sounded important, the way he said it, but then most of what Papa said sounded important. He liked to lean back and look upwards when he talked, as though he were searching for something in the air. I would focus on his lips, the movement, and sometimes I forgot myself, sometimes I wanted to stay like that forever, listening to his voice, to the important things he said. It was the same way I felt when he smiled, his face breaking open like a coconut with the brilliant white meat inside.

The day after the coup, before we left for evening benediction at St. Agnes, we sat in the living room and read the newspapers; our vendor delivered the major papers every morning, four copies each, on Papa’s orders. We read the Standard first. Only the Standard had a critical editorial, calling on the new military government to quickly implement a return to democracy plan. Papa read one of the articles in Nigeria Today out aloud, an opinion column by a writer who insisted that it was indeed time for a military president, since the politicians had gone out of control and our economy was in a mess.

“The Standard would never write this nonsense,” Papa said, putting the paper down. “Not to talk of calling the man a ‘president.’”

“‘President’ assumes he was elected,” Jaja said. “‘Head of state’ is the right term.”

Papa smiled, and I wished I had said that before Jaja had.

“The Standard editorial is well done,” Mama said.

“Ade is easily the best out there,” Papa said, with an offhand pride, while scanning another paper. “‘Change of Guard.’ What a headline. They are all afraid. Writing about how corrupt the civilian government was, as if they think the military will not be corrupt. This country is going down, way down.”

“God will deliver us,” I said, knowing Papa would like my saying that.

“Yes, yes,” Papa said, nodding. Then he reached out and held my hand, and I felt as though my mouth were full of melting sugar.

In the following weeks, the newspapers we read during family time sounded different, more subdued. The Standard, too, was different; it was more critical, more questioning than it used to be. Even the drive to school was different. The first week after the coup, Kevin plucked green tree branches every morning and stuck them to the car, lodged above the number plate, so that the demonstrators at Government Square would let us drive past. The green branches meant Solidarity. Our branches never looked as bright as the demonstrators’, though, and sometimes as we drove past, I wondered what it would be like to join them, chanting “Freedom,” standing in the way of cars.

In later weeks, when Kevin drove past Ogui Road, there were soldiers at the roadblock near the market, walking around, caressing their long guns. They stopped some cars and searched them. Once, I saw a man kneeling on the road beside his Peugeot 504, with his hands raised high in the air.

But nothing changed at home. Jaja and I still followed our schedules, still asked each other questions whose answers we already knew. The only change was Mama’s belly: it started to bulge, softly and subtly. At first it looked like a deflated football, but by Pentecost Sunday, it had elevated her red and gold-embroidered church wrapper just enough to hint that it was not just the layer of cloth underneath or the knotted end of the wrapper. The altar was decorated in the same shade of red as Mama’s wrapper. Red was the color of Pentecost. The visiting priest said Mass in a red robe that seemed too short for him. He was young, and he looked up often as he read the gospel, his brown eyes piercing the congregation. He kissed the Bible slowly when he was done. It could have seemed dramatic if someone else had done it, but with him it was not. It seemed real. He was newly ordained, waiting to be assigned a parish, he told us. He and Father Benedict had a close mutual friend, and he was pleased when Father Benedict asked him to visit and say Mass. He did not say how beautiful our St. Agnes altar was, though, with its steps that glowed like polished ice blocks. Or that it was one of the best altars in Enugu, perhaps even in the whole of Nigeria. He did not suggest, as all the other visiting priests had, that God’s presence dwelled more in St. Agnes, that the iridescent saints on the floor-to-ceiling stained-glass windows stopped God from leaving. And halfway through his sermon, he broke into an Igbo song: “Bunie ya enu…”

The congregation drew in a collective breath, some sighed, some had their mouths in a big O. They were used to Father Benedict’s sparse sermons, to Father Benedict’s pinch-your-nose monotone. Slowly they joined in. I watched Papa purse his lips. He looked sideways to see if Jaja and I were singing and nodded approvingly when he saw our sealed lips.

After Mass, we stood outside the church entrance, waiting while Papa greeted the people crowded around him.

“Good morning, praise God,” he said, before shaking hands with the men, hugging the women, patting the toddlers, and tugging at the babies’ cheeks. Some of the men whispered to him, Papa whispered back, and then the men thanked him, shaking his hand with both of theirs before leaving. Papa finally finished the greetings, and, with the wide churchyard now mostly emptied of the cars that had cluttered it like teeth in a mouth, we headed to our car.

“That young priest, singing in the sermon like a Godless leader of one of these Pentecostal churches that spring up everywhere like mushrooms. People like him bring trouble to the church. We must remember to pray for him,” Papa said, as he unlocked the Mercedes door and placed the missal and bulletin on the seat before turning toward the parish residence. We always dropped in to visit Father Benedict after Mass.

“Let me stay in the car and wait, biko,” Mama said, leaning against the Mercedes. “I feel vomit in my throat.”

Papa turned to stare at her. I held my breath. It seemed a long moment, but it might have been only seconds.

“Are you sure you want to stay in the car?” Papa asked.

Mama was looking down; her hands were placed on her belly, to hold the wrapper from untying itself or to keep her bread and tea breakfast down. “My body does not feel right,” she mumbled.

“I asked if you were sure you wanted to stay in the car.”

Mama looked up. “I’ll come with you. It’s really not that bad.”

Papa’s face did not change. He waited for her to walk toward him, and then he turned and they started to walk to the priest’s house. Jaja and I followed. I watched Mama as we walked. Till then I had not noticed how drawn she looked. Her skin, usually the smooth brown of groundnut paste, looked like the liquid had been sucked out of it, ashen, like the color of cracked harmattan soil. Jaja spoke to me with his eyes: What if she vomits? I would hold up my dress hems so Mama could throw up into it, so we wouldn’t make a big mess in Father Benedict’s house.

The house looked as though the architect had realized too late that he was designing residential quarters, not a church. The arch that led to the dining area looked like an altar entrance; the alcove with the cream telephone looked ready to receive the Blessed Sacrament; the tiny study room off the living room could have been a sacristy crammed with holy books and Mass vestments and extra chalices.

“Brother Eugene!” Father Benedict said. His pale face broke into a smile when he saw Papa. He was at the dining table, eating. There were slices of boiled yam, like lunch, but then a plate of fried eggs, too, more like breakfast. He asked us to join him. Papa refused on our behalf and then went up to the table to talk in muted tones.

“How are you, Beatrice?” Father Benedict asked, raising his voice so Mama would hear from the living room. “You don’t look well.”

“I’m fine, Father. It’s only my allergies because of the weather, you know, the clash of harmattan and rainy season.”

“Kambili and Jaja, did you enjoy Mass, then?”

“Yes, Father.” Jaja and I spoke at the same time.

We left shortly afterward, a little sooner than on the usual visit to Father Benedict. Papa said nothing in the car, his jaw moving as if he were gritting his teeth. We all stayed silent and listened to the “Ave Maria” on the cassette player. When we got home, Sisi had Papa’s tea set out, in the china teapot with a tiny, ornate handle. Papa placed his missal and bulletin on the dining table and sat down. Mama hovered by him.

“Let me pour your tea,” she offered, although she never served Papa’s tea.

Papa ignored her and poured his tea, and then he told Jaja and me to take sips. Jaja took a sip, placed the cup back on the saucer. Papa picked it up and gave it to me. I held it with both hands, took a sip of the Lipton tea with sugar and milk, and placed it back on the saucer.

“Thank you, Papa,” I said, feeling the love burn my tongue.

We went upstairs to change, Jaja and Mama and I. Our steps on the stairs were as measured and as silent as our Sundays: the silence of waiting until Papa was done with his siesta so we could have lunch; the silence of reflection time, when Papa gave us a scripture passage or a book by one of the early church fathers to read and meditate on; the silence of evening rosary; the silence of driving to the church for benediction afterward. Even our family time on Sundays was quiet, without chess games or newspaper discussions, more in tune with the Day of Rest.

“Maybe Sisi can cook lunch by herself today,” Jaja said, when we got to the top of the curved staircase. “You should rest before lunch, Mama.”

Mama was going to say something, but then she stopped, her hand flew to her mouth, and she hurried into her room. I stayed to hear the sharp groans of vomiting from deep in her throat before I went into my room.

Lunch was jollof rice, fist-size chunks of azu fried until the bones were crisp, and ngwo-ngwo. Papa ate most of the ngwo-ngwo, his spoon swooping through the spicy broth in the glass bowl. Silence hung over the table like the blue-black clouds in the middle of rainy season. Only the chirping of the ochiri birds outside interrupted it. Every year, they arrived before the first rains came and nested on the avocado tree right outside the dining room. Jaja and I sometimes found fallen nests on the ground, nests made of entwined twigs and dried grass and bits of thread that Mama had used to plait my hair, which the ochiri picked out of the backyard dustbin.

I finished lunch first. “Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Papa. Thank you, Mama.” I folded my arms and waited until everybody was done so we could pray. I did not look at anybody’s face; I focused instead on the picture of Grandfather that hung on the opposite wall.

When Papa started the prayer, his voice quavered more than usual. He prayed for the food first, then he asked God to forgive those who had tried to thwart His will, who had put selfish desires first and had not wanted to visit His servant after Mass. Mama’s “Amen!” resounded throughout the room.

I WAS IN MY ROOM after lunch, reading James chapter five because I would talk about the biblical roots of the anointing of the sick during family time, when I heard the sounds. Swift, heavy thuds on my parents’ hand-carved bedroom door. I imagined the door had gotten stuck and Papa was trying to open it. If I imagined it hard enough, then it would be true. I sat down, closed my eyes, and started to count. Counting made it seem not that long, made it seem not that bad. Sometimes it was over before I even got to twenty. I was at nineteen when the sounds stopped. I heard the door open. Papa’s gait on the stairs sounded heavier, more awkward, than usual.

I stepped out of my room just as Jaja came out of his. We stood at the landing and watched Papa descend. Mama was slung over his shoulder like the jute sacks of rice his factory workers bought in bulk at the Seme Border. He opened the dining room door. Then we heard the front door open, heard him say something to the gate man, Adamu.

“There’s blood on the floor,” Jaja said. “I’ll get the brush from the bathroom.”

We cleaned up the trickle of blood, which trailed away as if someone had carried a leaking jar of red watercolor all the way downstairs. Jaja scrubbed while I wiped.

MAMA DID NOT COME home that night, and Jaja and I had dinner alone. We did not talk about Mama. Instead, we talked about the three men who were publicly executed two days before, for drug trafficking. Jaja had heard some boys talking about it in school. It had been on television. The men were tied to poles, and their bodies kept shuddering even after the bullets were no longer being pumped into them. I told Jaja what a girl in my class had said: that her mother turned their TV off, asking why she should watch fellow human beings die, asking what was wrong with all those people who had gathered at the execution ground.

After dinner, Jaja said grace, and at the end he added a short prayer for Mama. Papa came home when we were in our rooms studying, according to our schedules. I was drawing pregnant stick images on the inner flap of my Introductory Agriculture for Junior Secondary Schools when he came into my room. His eyes were swollen and red, and somehow that made him look younger, more vulnerable.

“Your mother will be back tomorrow, about the time you get back from school. She will be fine,” he said.

“Yes, Papa.” I looked away from his face, back at my books.

He held my shoulders, rubbing them in gentle circular motions.

“Stand up,” he said. I stood up and he hugged me, pressed me close so that I felt the beat of his heart under his soft chest.

MAMA CAME HOME the next afternoon. Kevin brought her in the Peugeot 505 with the factory name emblazoned on the passenger door, the one that often took us to and from school. Jaja and I stood waiting by the front door, close enough for our shoulders to touch, and we opened the door before she got to it.

“Umu m,” she said, hugging us. “My children.” She wore the same white T-shirt with GOD IS LOVE written on the front. Her green wrapper hung lower than usual on her waist; it had been knotted with a lazy effort at the side. Her eyes were vacant, like the eyes of those mad people who wandered around the roadside garbage dumps in town, pulling grimy, torn canvas bags with their life fragments inside.

“There was an accident, the baby is gone,” she said.

I moved back a little, stared at her belly. It still looked big, still pushed at her wrapper in a gentle arc. Was Mama sure the baby was gone? I was still staring at her belly when Sisi came in. Sisi’s cheekbones were so high they gave her an angular, eerily amused expression, as if she were mocking you, laughing at you, and you would never know why. “Good afternoon, Madam, nno,” she said. “Will you eat now or after you bathe?” “Eh?” For a moment Mama looked as though she did not know what Sisi had said. “Not now, Sisi, not now. Get me water and a towel.”

Mama stood hugging herself in the center of the living room, near the glass table, until Sisi brought a plastic bowl of water and a kitchen towel. The étagère had three shelves of delicate glass, and each one held beige ballet-dancing figurines. Mama started at the lowest layer, polishing both the shelf and the figurines. I sat down on the leather sofa closest to her, close enough to reach out and straighten her wrapper.

“Nne, this is your study time. Go upstairs,” she said.

“I want to stay here.”

She slowly ran the cloth over a figurine, one of its matchstick-size legs raised high in the air, before she spoke. “Nne, go.”

I went upstairs then and sat staring at my textbook. The black type blurred, the letters swimming into one another, and then changed to a bright red, the red of fresh blood. The blood was watery, flowing from Mama, flowing from my eyes.

Later, at dinner, Papa said we would recite sixteen different novenas. For Mama’s forgiveness. And on Sunday, the first Sunday of Trinity, we stayed back after Mass and started the novenas. Father Benedict sprinkled us with holy water. Some of the holy water landed on my lips, and I tasted the stale saltiness of it as we prayed. If Papa felt Jaja or me beginning to drift off at the thirteenth recitation of the Plea to St. Jude, he suggested we start all over. We had to get it right. I did not think, I did not even think to think, what Mama needed to be forgiven for.

The words in my textbooks kept turning into blood each time I read them. Even as my first-term exams approached, even when we started to do class reviews, the words still made no sense.

A few days before my first exam, I was in my room studying, trying to focus on one word at a time, when the doorbell rang. It was Yewande Coker, the wife of Papa’s editor. She was crying. I could hear her because my room was directly above the living room and because I had never heard crying that loud before.

“They have taken him! They have taken him!” she said, between throaty sobs.

“Yewande, Yewande,” Papa said, his voice much lower than hers.

“What will I do, sir? I have three children! One is still sucking my breast! How will I raise them alone?” I could hardly hear her words; instead, what I heard clearly was the sound of something catching in her throat. Then Papa said, “Yewande, don’t talk that way. Ade will be fine, I promise you. Ade will be fine.”

I heard Jaja leave his room. He would walk downstairs and pretend that he was going to the kitchen to drink water and stand close to the living room door for a while, listening. When he came back up, he told me soldiers had arrested Ade Coker as he drove out of the editorial offices of the Standard. His car was abandoned on the roadside, the front door left open. I imagined Ade Coker being pulled out of his car, being squashed into another car, perhaps a black station wagon filled with soldiers, their guns hanging out of the windows. I imagined his hands quivering with fear, a wet patch spreading on his trousers.

I knew his arrest was because of the big cover story in the last Standard, a story about how the Head of State and his wife had paid people to transport heroin abroad, a story that questioned the recent execution of three men and who the real drug barons were.

Jaja said that when he looked through the keyhole, Papa was holding Yewande’s hand and praying, telling her to repeat “none of those who trust in Him shall be left desolate.”

Those were the words I said to myself as I took my exams the following week. And I repeated them, too, as Kevin drove me home on the last day of school, my report card tightly pressed to my chest. The Reverend Sisters gave us our cards unsealed. I came second in my class. It was written in figures: “2/25.” My form mistress, Sister Clara, had written, “Kambili is intelligent beyond her years, quiet and responsible.” The principal, Mother Lucy, wrote, “A brilliant, obedient student and a daughter to be proud of.” But I knew Papa would not be proud. He had often told Jaja and me that he did not spend so much money on Daughters of the Immaculate Heart and St. Nicholas to have us let other children come first. Nobody had spent money on his own schooling, especially not his Godless father, our Papa-Nnukwu, yet he had always come first. I wanted to make Papa proud, to do as well as he had done. I needed him to touch the back of my neck and tell me that I was fulfilling God’s purpose. I needed him to hug me close and say that to whom much is given, much is also expected. I needed him to smile at me, in that way that lit up his face, that warmed something inside me. But I had come second. I was stained by failure.

Mama opened the door even before Kevin stopped the car in the driveway. She always waited by the front door on the last day of school, to sing praise songs in Igbo and hug Jaja and me and caress our report cards in her hands. It was the only time she sang aloud at home.

“O me mma, Chineke, o me mma…” Mama started her song and then stopped when I greeted her.

“Good afternoon, Mama.”

“Nne, did it go well? Your face is not bright.” She stood aside to let me pass.

“I came second.”

Mama paused. “Come and eat. Sisi cooked coconut rice.”

I was sitting at my study desk when Papa came home. He lumbered upstairs, each heavy step creating turbulence in my head, and went into Jaja’s room. He had come first, as usual, so Papa would be proud, would hug Jaja, leave his arm resting around Jaja’s shoulders. He took a while in Jaja’s room, though; I knew he was looking through each individual subject score, checking to see if any had decreased by one or two marks since last term. Something pushed fluids into my bladder, and I rushed to the toilet. Papa was in my room when I came out.