The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (4 page)

"Princess!" Chief said to Kosi and hugged her, pressing her close; Obinze wondered if Chief had propositioned her in the past. It would not surprise him. He had once been at Chief's house when a man brought his girlfriend to visit, and when she left the room to go to the toilet, Obinze heard Chief tell the man, "I like that girl. Give her to me and I will give you a nice plot in Victoria Island."

"You look so well, Chief," Kosi said. "Ever young!"

"Ah, my dear, I try, I try." Chiefjokingly tugged at the satin lapels of his black jacket. He did look well, spare and upright unlike many of his peers in their sixties. "My boy!" he said to Obinze.

"Good evening, Chief." Obinze shook him with both hands, bowing slightly. He watched the other men at the party bow too, crowding around Chief, jostling to outlaugh one another when Chief made a joke. They were all men who wore conspicuous watches, who had loud conversations about the things they owned, the sort of men that
City People
referred to as "Lagos Big Boys." They reminded Obinze of the three men he saw in Chief's house the first day his cousin took him there. They had been in the living room sipping cognac while Chief pontificated about politics. "Exactly! Correct! Thank you! You have just nailed the exact problem, Chief!" they crowed from time to time. Obinze had watched, fascinated. He was only a month in Lagos after being deported from England, but his cousin Amaka had started to grumble about how he could not just stay in her flat reading and moping, how he was not the first person to be deported, after all, and how he needed to hustle. Lagos was about hustling. His mates were hustling. She was Chief's girlfriend—
he has many but I am one of the serious ones; he doesn't buy cars for everyone
, she said—and so she brought him to Chief's house to introduce them and see if Chief would help him. Chief was a difficult man, she told him, and it was important to catch him in a good mood when he was at his most expansive. They had, apparently, because after the three men left, Chief turned to Obinze and asked, "Do you know that song 'No One Knows Tomorrow'?" Then he proceeded to sing the song with childish gusto.
No one knows tomorrow! To-mo-rrow! No one knows tomorrow!
Another generous splash of cognac in his glass. "That is the principle on which the ambitious segment of the Nigerian society is based. No one knows tomorrow. Look at those big bankers with all their money and the next thing they knew, they were in prison. Look at that pauper who could not pay his rent yesterday and now because Babangida gave him an oil well, he has a private jet!" Chief always spoke with a triumphant tone, mundane observations delivered as grand discoveries. After Obinze had visited a few more times, drawn in part because Chief's steward always served fresh pepper soup, and because Amaka told him to just keep hanging around until Chief did something for him, Chief told him, "You are hungry and honest, that is very rare in this country. Is that not so?"

"Yes," Obinze said, even though he was not sure whether he was agreeing about his own quality or the rarity of it.

"Everybody is hungry, even the rich men are hungry, but nobody is honest. Twenty years ago I had nothing until somebody introduced me to General Babangida's brother. He saw that I was hungry and honest and he gave me some contacts. Look at me today. I have money. Even my great-grandchildren will not finish eating my money. But power? Yes, that one I work hard to have. I was Babangida's friend. I was Abacha's friend. Now that the military has gone, Obasanjo is my friend. The man has created opportunities in this country. Big opportunities for people like me. I know they are going to privatize the National Farm Support Corporation because they said it is bankrupt. Do you know this? No. By the time you know it, I would have taken a position and I would have benefited from the arbitrage. That is our free market!" Chief laughed. "The corporation was set up in the 1960s and it owns property everywhere. The houses are all rotten and termites are eating the roofs. But they are selling them. I'm going to buy seven properties for five million each. You know what they are listed for in the books? One million. You know what the real worth is? Fifty million." Chief stopped again to laugh and swallow some cognac. "So I will put you in charge of that deal. They need somebody to do the evaluation consulting, and I will put you there. Amaka said you are sharp and I can see it in your face. Your first job will be to help me make money, but your second job will be to make your own money. You will make sure you undervalue the properties and make sure it looks as if we are all following due process. It's not difficult. You acquire the property, sell off half to pay your purchase price, and you are in business! You'll build a house in Lekki and buy some cars and ask your hometown to give you some titles and your friends to put congratulatory messages in the newspapers for you and before you know, any bank you walk into, they will want to package a loan immediately and give you, because they think you no longer need the money. Ah, Nigeria! No one knows tomorrow!" Chief paused to stare at one of his ringing cell phones—four were placed on the table next to him—and then ignored it and leaned back on his leather sofa. "And after you register your own company, you must find a white man. You had friends in England before you were deported? Find one white man. Tell everybody he is your general manager. It gives you immediate legitimacy with many idiots in this country. This is how Nigeria works, I'm telling you."

And it was, indeed, how it worked and still worked for Obinze. The ease of it had disoriented him. The first time he took his offer letter to the bank, he had felt surreal saying "fifty" and "fifty-five" and leaving out the "million" because there was no need to state the obvious. That day he had written an e-mail to Ifemelu, which was still in the drafts folder of his old Hotmail account, unsent after six years. She was the only person who would understand, and yet he was afraid that she would feel contempt for the person he had become. He still did not understand why Chief had decided to help him; there was, after all, a trail of eager visitors to Chief's house, people bringing relatives and friends, all of them with pleas in their eyes. He sometimes wondered if Chief would one day ask something of him, the hungry and honest boy he had groomed, and in his more mel2odramatic moments, he imagined Chief asking him to organize an assassination.

The party was more crowded, suffocating. Chief was saying something to a group of men and Obinze heard the end: "But you know that as we speak, oil is flowing through illegal pipes and they sell it in bottles in Cotonou!" He was distracted. He reached into his pocket to touch his BlackBerry. Kosi was asking if he wanted more food. He didn't. He wanted to go home. A rash eagerness had overcome him, to go into his study and reply to Ifemelu's e-mail, something he had unconsciously been composing in his mind. If she was considering coming back to Nigeria, then it meant she was no longer with the black American. But she might be bringing him with her; she was, after all, the kind of woman who would make a man easily uproot his life, the kind who, because she did not expect certainty, made a certain kind of sureness somehow become possible. When she held his hand during those campus days, she would squeeze until both palms became slick with sweat, and each time she would say, "Just in case this is the last time we hold hands, let's really hold hands. Because a motorcycle or a car can kill us now, or I might see the real man of my dreams down the street and leave you, or you might see the real woman of your dreams and leave me."

Perhaps the black American would come back to Nigeria too, clinging on to her. Still, there was something about the e-mail that made him feel she was single. He brought out his BlackBerry to calculate the American time when it had been sent. In the car on the way home, Kosi asked what was wrong. He pretended not to have heard and asked Gabriel to turn off the radio and put in a Fela CD. He had introduced Ifemelu to Fela at university. She had, before then, thought of Fela as the mad weed-smoker who wore only underwear while performing, but she had come to love the Afro-beat sound, and they would lie on his mattress and listen to it and then she would leap up and make swift, slightly vulgar movements with her hips when the run-run-run chorus came on. He wondered if she remembered that. Kosi was asking again what was wrong.

"Nothing," he said.

"You didn't eat very much," she said.

"Too much pepper in the rice."

"Darling, you didn't even eat the rice. Was it Mrs. Akin-Cole?"

He shrugged and told her he was thinking about the new block of flats he had just completed in Parkview. He hoped Shell would rent it because the oil companies were always the best renters, never complaining about abrupt hikes, paying easily in American dollars so that nobody had to deal with the fluctuating naira.

"Don't worry. God will bring Shell. We will be okay, darling," she said and touched his shoulder.

The flats were in fact already rented by an oil company, but he sometimes told her senseless lies such as this, because a part of him hoped she would ask a question or challenge him about something, but he knew she would not, because all she wanted was to make sure the conditions of their life remained the same, and how he made that happen she left entirely to him. She had never asked him about his time in England either. Of course she knew that he was deported, but she had never asked him for details. He was no longer sure that he wanted her to, or even whether he would have told her about feeling invisible in that removal center, but it suddenly became a glaring failing of hers. Ifemelu would have asked. Ifemelu would not have been content to ignore the past as long as the present existed. He knew very well what he was doing, fashioning a perfect doll from ten-year-old memories of Ifemelu, but he could not help himself.

At home, the housegirl, Marie, opened the door and Kosi said, "Please make food for your
oga.
"

"Yes, ma."

She was slight, and Obinze was not sure whether she was timid or whether her not speaking English well made her seem so. She had been with them only a month. The last housegirl, brought by a relative of Gabriel's, was stocky and had arrived clutching a duffel bag. He was not there when Kosi looked through it—she did that routinely with all domestic help because she wanted to know what was being brought into her home—but he came out when he heard Kosi shouting. He stood by the door and watched her, holding two packets of condoms by their very tips, swinging them in the air. "What is this for? Eh? You came to my house to be a prostitute?"

The girl looked down at first, silent, then she looked Kosi in the face and said quietly, "In my last job, my madam's husband was always harassing me, forcing me."

Kosi's eyes bulged. She moved forward for a moment, as though to attack the girl in some way, and then stopped.

"Please carry your bag and go now-now," she said.

The girl shifted, looking a little surprised, and then she picked up her bag and turned to the door. After she left, Kosi said, "Can you believe the nonsense? She brought condoms to my house and she opened her mouth to say that rubbish. Can you believe it?"

"Her former employer raped her so she decided to protect herself this time," Obinze said.

Kosi stared at him. "You feel sorry for her. You don't know these housegirls. How can you feel sorry for her?"

He wanted to ask, "
How can you not?
" But the tentative fear in her eyes silenced him. Her insecurity was so great and so ordinary. She was not worried about his lassitude, or about their not having real conversations, or indeed about their not truly knowing each other. Instead she was worried about a housegirl whom it would never even occur to him to seduce. It was not as if he did not know what living in Lagos could do to a woman married to a young and wealthy man, how easy it was to slip into paranoia about "Lagos girls," those sophisticated monsters of glamour who swallowed husbands whole, slithering them down their throats. But he wished she handled her fear a little differently, pushed back a little more. Once he had told her about the attractive banker who had come to his office to talk to him about opening an account. He had found it amusing and sad, how desperate the woman had been, in her tight pencil skirt and fitted shirt with one button that should not have been open, trying to pretend that she was in control of it all. Kosi had not been amused. "I know Lagos girls, she can do anything," she had said, and what had struck him was that Kosi seemed no longer to see him, Obinze, and instead she saw blurred figures who were types: a wealthy man, a female banker who had been given a target amount to bring in as deposits, an easy exchange.

She had, in the years since they got married, developed an inordinate dislike of single women and an inordinate love of God. Before they got married, she went to Sunday mass once a week at the Catholic church, but afterward she had thrown her rosary in the dustbin and told him she would now go to the House of David because it was a Bible-believing and spirit-filled church. Later, when he found out that House of David had a special prayer service for Keeping Your Husband, he had been flattered and revolted. Just as he was when he once asked why her best friend from university, Elohor, hardly visited them, and Kosi said, "She's still single," as though that were a self-evident reason.

Marie knocked on his study door and came in with a tray of rice and fried plantains. He ate slowly. He thought of the day he was frying plantains for Ifemelu in the tiny room he rented on campus, how he had insisted on washing the plantain slices even though she had asked him not to, and how hot oil from the pan came flying out and left ovals of burned skin on his neck. Perhaps he should include this memory in the e-mail.
Remember the fried plantain accident?
He decided not to. It would be too odd, too much a specific memory. He wrote and rewrote the e-mail, deliberately not mentioning his wife or using the first-person plural, trying for a balance between earnest and funny. He did not want to alienate her. He wanted to make sure she would reply this time. It was alarming to him how happy that e-mail had made him, how his mind had become busy with her, possessed by her. He clicked Send and then minutes later checked to see if she had replied. What was this? Was he unhappy? It was not that he was unhappy, he told himself, it was simply that he had been long enough in his new life that he had begun to think of alternative lives, people he might have become, and doors he had not opened. He got up and went out to the veranda; the sudden hot air, the roar of his neighbor's generator, the smell of diesel exhaust fumes brought a lightness to his head. Frantic winged insects flitted around the electric bulb. He felt, looking out at the muggy darkness farther away, as if he could float, and all he needed was to let himself go.