Aunty Ifeka walked casually towards a brown hen, grasped it quickly, and handed it to Arize to kill in the backyard. They sat outside the kitchen while Arize plucked it and Aunty Ifeka blew the chaff from the rice. A neighbour was boiling corn, and once in a while, when the water frothed over, the stove fire hissed. Children were playing in the yard now, raising white dust, shouting. A fight broke out under the kuka tree, and Olanna heard a child scream at another in Igbo, ‘Your mother’s pussy!’
The sun had turned red in the sky before it began its descent, when Uncle Mbaezi came home. He called out to Olanna to come and greet his friend Abdulmalik. Olanna had met the Hausa man once before; he sold leather slippers close to Uncle Mbaezi’s stall in the market, and she had bought a few pairs that she took back to England but never wore because it was then the middle of winter.
‘Our Olanna has just finished her master’s degree. Master’s degree at London University! It is not easy!’ Uncle Mbaezi said proudly.
‘Well done,’ Abdulmalik said. He opened his bag and brought out a pair of slippers and held them out to her, his narrow face creased in a smile, his teeth stained with kola nut and tobacco and whatever else Olanna did not know, stains of varying shades of yellow and brown. He looked as if it were he who was receiving a gift; he had that expression of people who marvelled at education with the calm certainty that it would never be theirs.
She took the slippers with both hands. ‘Thank you, Abdulmalik. Thank you.’
Abdulmalik pointed at the ripe gourdlike pods on the kuka tree and said, ‘You come my house. My wife cook very sweet kuka soup.’
‘Oh, I will come, next time,’ Olanna said.
He muttered more congratulations before he sat with Uncle Mbaezi on the veranda, with a bucket of sugar cane in front of them. They gnawed off the hard, green peels and chewed the juicy, white pulp, speaking Hausa and laughing. They spit the chewed cane out on the dust. Olanna sat with them for a while, but their Hausa was too swift, too difficult to follow. She wished she were fluent in Hausa and Yoruba, like her uncle and aunt and cousin were, something she would gladly exchange her French and Latin for.
In the kitchen, Arize was cutting open the chicken and Aunty Ifeka was washing the rice. She showed them the slippers from Abdulmalik and put them on; the pleated red straps made her feet look slender, more feminine.
‘Very nice,’ Aunty Ifeka said. ‘I shall thank him.’
Olanna sat on a stool and carefully avoided looking at the cockroach eggs, smooth black capsules, lodged in all corners of the table. A neighbour was building a wood fire in one corner and despite the slanting openings in the roof, the smoke choked the kitchen.
‘I makwa, all her family eats every day is stockfish,’ Arize said, gesturing towards the neighbour with pursed lips. ‘I don’t know if her poor children even know what meat tastes like.’ Arize threw her head back and laughed.
Olanna glanced at the woman. She was an Ijaw and could not understand Arize’s Igbo. ‘Maybe they like stockfish,’ she said.
‘O di egwu! Like it indeed! Do you know how cheap the thing is?’ Arize was still laughing as she turned to the woman. ‘Ibiba, I am telling my big sister that your soup always smells so delicious.’
The woman stopped blowing at the firewood and smiled, a knowing smile, and Olanna wondered if perhaps the woman understood Igbo but chose to humour Arize’s fun poking. There was something about Arize’s effervescent mischief that made people forgiving.
‘So you are moving to Nsukka to marry Odenigbo, Sister?’ Arize asked.
‘I don’t know about marriage yet. I just want to be closer to him, and I want to teach.’
Arize’s round eyes were admiring and bewildered. ‘It is only women that know too much Book like you who can say that, Sister. If people like me who don’t know Book wait too long, we will expire.’ Arize paused as she removed a translucently pale egg from inside the chicken. ‘I want a husband today and tomorrow, oh! My mates have all left me and gone to husbands’ houses.’
‘You are young,’ Olanna said. ‘You should focus on your sewing for now.’
‘Is it sewing that will give me a child? Even if I had managed to pass to go to school, I would still want a child now.’
‘There is no rush, Ari.’ Olanna wished she could shift her stool closer to the door, to fresh air. But she didn’t want Aunty Ifeka, or Arize, or even the neighbour to know that the smoke irritated her eyes and throat or that the sight of the cockroach eggs nauseated her. She wanted to seem used to it all, to this life.
‘I know you will marry Odenigbo, Sister, but honestly I am not sure I want you to marry a man from Abba. Men from Abba are so ugly, kai! If only Mohammed was an Igbo man, I would eat my hair if you did not marry him. I have never seen a more handsome man.’
‘Odenigbo is not ugly. Good looks come in different ways,’ Olanna said.
‘That is what the relatives of the ugly monkey, enwe, told him to make him feel better, that good looks come in different ways.’
‘Men from Abba are not ugly,’ Aunty Ifeka said. ‘My people came from there, after all.’
‘And do your people not resemble the monkey?’ Arize said.
‘Your full name is Arizendikwunnem, isn’t it? You come from your mother’s people. So perhaps you look like a monkey as well,’ Aunty Ifeka murmured.
Olanna laughed. ‘So why are you talking marriage-marriage like this, Ari? Have you seen anybody you like? Or should I find you one of Mohammed’s brothers?’
‘No, no!’ Arize waved her hands in the air in mock horror. ‘Papa would kill me first of all if he knew I was even looking at a Hausa man like that.’
‘Unless your father will kill a corpse, because I will start with you first,’ Aunty Ifeka said, and rose with the bowl of clean rice.
‘There is someone, Sister.’ Arize moved closer to Olanna. ‘But I am not sure he is looking at me, oh.’
‘Why are you whispering?’ Aunty Ifeka asked.
‘Am I talking to you? Is it not my big sister I am talking to?’ Arize asked her mother. But she raised her voice as she continued. ‘His name is Nnakwanze and he is from close to us, from Ogidi. He works at the railway. But he has not told me anything. I don’t know if he is looking at me hard enough.’
‘If he is not looking at you hard enough, there is something wrong with his eyes,’ Aunty Ifeka said.
‘Have you people seen this woman? Why can’t I talk to my big sister in peace?’ Arize rolled her eyes, but it was clear she was pleased and perhaps had used this opportunity to tell her mother about Nnakwanze.
That night, as Olanna lay on her uncle and aunt’s bed, she watched Arize through the thin curtain that hung on a rope attached to nails on the wall. The rope was not taut, and the curtain sagged in the middle. She followed the up-down movement of Arize’s breathing and imagined what growing up had been like for Arize and her brothers, Odinchezo and Ekene, seeing their parents through the curtain, hearing the sounds that might suggest an eerie pain to a child as their father’s hips moved and their mother’s arms clutched him. She had never heard her own parents making love, never even seen any indication that they did. But she had always been separated from them by hallways that got longer and more thickly carpeted as they moved from house to house. When they moved to their