Happiness, Like Water Read online

  Well, needless to say, Ehoro’s Estate became a target for robbers. Months before the robbers came, the residents of Ehoro’s had held a meeting, suspecting that it was only a matter of time before they, too, were hit. There had been rumours as to the identities of the band of thieves, and so, during that meeting, the residents proposed that a collection be started. The plan was to make a peace offering to the robbers, to thwart their attempts on the estate. The residents all agreed that this was a more effective solution—better than, say, reporting the thieves to the police, which some said would only serve to ignite their anger. Also, with so many fake police officers running all over the place, who was to say that they wouldn’t be filing the report with the very robbers whom they were trying to apprehend? So the money offering was decided upon. The residents went about putting in their contributions. Everyone contributed. Everyone, except Eze.

  Not that he was stingy, he said, but it went against his morals and values. A collection like that was a way of condoning bad behaviour, and so they should count him out. Chinwe believed that Eze should have paid his share. Or else he should have moved them out to a less fancy neighbourhood and should have driven less fancy cars, not the 505 SRS or the Land Rover. Something less flashy, like Chinwe’s Beetle, or like a 504 or one of the old Fords.

  But he did none of that.

  By then, Chinwe had been baptized a Jehovah’s Witness, but it was a thing she had done out of duty to Eze. He had insisted on it, had even grown cross with her when she appeared to suggest otherwise. After all, he said, it had been a condition of the marriage from the beginning. And so Chinwe conceded. Of course, her concession pleased her mama.

  Chinwe attended the meetings with Eze: once a week, on Tuesdays, their congregation broke into small groups and met for Bible study at the houses of different elders. But for the remaining Bible study days (Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays), they met at the Kingdom Hall.

  The meetings began with a song, which they all sang, accompanied by the music that came from the cassette player at the back of the room. Then they’d sit and listen to the elder on stage who read from the New World Translation. This lecture took about an hour and sometimes Chinwe would stare at the walls and trace the cracks that ran along them, over and over again. It was a game she played with herself, to keep from falling asleep. Because whenever she fell asleep, Eze grew angry at her. He’d nudge her awake and then shake his head reproachfully at her right there in the Kingdom Hall. Sometimes, when they got home, he made jokes (he’d later call them jokes, anyway) about flogging her with a belt for having fallen asleep. Because she needed to learn to be more respectful to God, he said. And the first step in showing respect was to stay awake during discussions on God.

  The evening the robbers came, Chinwe and Eze had attended the Kingdom Hall. She’d not fallen asleep, so Eze had not scolded her afterwards about that. But the story goes that, when they returned home, she went in to work in the kitchen with the housegirls, to prepare dinner. Somehow, for one reason or another, the meal had turned out too spicy. In fact there was the hot scent of crushed peppers in the air throughout the bungalow. And, when she and Eze sat down to eat, their tongues seethed from the heat of the peppers. That gave Eze all the reason he needed to be cross with her.

  That night—the night of the robbery—Chinwe fell asleep in a sad state, still smarting from Eze’s scolding. She fell asleep to the sound of the floor fan, which stood at the corner of the room, humming softly with each oscillation, like a lullaby. Usually, she opened their bedroom windows halfway at night, and as she fell asleep, she listened to the sounds of the guava and plantain trees just outside, their leaves rustling in the breeze. But that night the air was still. And with the scent of crushed peppers strong in the air, travelling down their nostrils and into their throats, causing them all to cough drily, something had to be done. It followed that Chinwe turned on the fan and opened the windows all the way. Also, she left the door to their room open, the door that led to the corridor.

  She awoke to the sound of shattering glass and to the sight of two men entering the room. The room was dark, but owing to the moonlight which crept in through the open windows, she could see that the men were masked. There was a metal safe that Eze kept in the bottom shelf of the bedside table. One of the men went straight to the safe, picked it up, pointed the gun at Eze, ordered him to open up the safe. Of course, Eze refused.

  The man held the gun even closer to Eze’s head. There was a clicking sound. That was when Chinwe screamed, begging the man to stop. The second man, who had until then been lingering at the doorway, made his way to her side then. She could not see the look on his face owing to the mask that he wore, but it must have been sympathetic, because he tapped her on the shoulder and told her not to worry, that everything would be fine if she would only open the safe for him.

  So she grabbed the safe from Eze, dialled the combination and opened it up herself. She spilled its contents onto the white bedding: tangled-up necklaces of gold, rings whose jewels shone in the dark. And then, of course, there were the wads and wads of naira bills, which the men stuck into the bags that hung from their shoulders.

  ‘Good work,’ the second man said, patting her on the shoulder when he was done bagging the items. But still, his gun found its way behind her head.

  So, that night, the men hold their guns behind Chinwe’s and Eze’s heads, and lead them out into the corridor. Chinwe watches as Eze struggles with his man, refusing to move so that the man has to shove him forward. She knows that the housegirls are in the quarters at the back of the house. She wills them to appear, to somehow appear and scare the robbers away. She wills them to hear, but it doesn’t seem that they hear a thing.

  Chinwe and Eze stand quietly in the corridor for a while, Chinwe listening to the sound of the oscillating fan in their room. Even though it is a distance away, its sound is loud, because, of course, everything is quiet now. (This is also the first time the two robbers appear to communicate with each other, but even that is a silent sort of communication, one which they do solely with their eyes.)

  After the silence, the man holding the gun to Eze’s head says: ‘That car outside, the white one, we’ll be needing the keys.’

  Eze has a look of horror in his face, as if he’s just seen death, which is funny, because until then, he’s been acting bold and courageous, resisting and all.

  ‘The keys,’ the man repeats. ‘And actually, we’ll also be needing you to come out and start it for us.’

  One can only imagine the emotions Eze must have been feeling inside, because that car was his prized possession. (Every once in a while, before the robbery, that is, he’d taken to reminding Chinwe that it was the only one of its kind in the whole of Rivers State, that there were only two of them in the whole of Nigeria, the other owner being a ‘big’ man, a governor of one of the other states.)

  In any case, the robber has to drag Eze again in order to get him to move, smacking Eze’s head every so often with the gun. ‘Start the car, and no wahala for you; don’t start the car, and we’ll shoot,’ the man says as he drags Eze.

  Chinwe and Eze manage to make eye contact somewhere in the middle of all the dragging and head smacking. Chinwe looks at Eze with pleading eyes. Just give them the car. Give them the car and spare our lives. But the more she looks at him, the more defeat she feels, because she knows that she’s no match for the car.

  So she just stands there, watching the man drag Eze outside. She remains inside with the second robber still pointing his gun at her head. But even if she is inside, she knows what things are like outside: the ground paved with gravel and grass, and the bush near where the 505 is parked—green, saturated with the red of the hibiscus flowers. She and Eze stood in front of that bush for a picture on the day that Eze brought home the 505 SRS.

  It was her mama who took the picture. Here and there lizards were crawling over the gravel stones. As she stands there, with the robber holding a gun to her head, she remembers her
mama holding the camera, taking a picture of her and Eze, and of the car. And somehow, she thinks of the wedding game she used to play with her papa. Suddenly, she imagines that if the camera could have spoken the day her mama took the picture, it would have said something like this: The step which you are about to take is the most important into which you will come . . . Do you take this car to be your wedded wife, as long as you both shall live? And Eze would nod ecstatically at the camera, and he would fervently say, ‘I do.’

  And that answer would be correct.

  In any case, the way she tells the story, some more time passes, quiet time, and Chinwe allows herself to get lost in her thoughts. She moves on from the memory of the wedding game, and she remembers that the police station is not too far down the street. She starts to think that maybe one of the real police officers will somehow see or hear something. She also thinks of Ehoro, the estate’s owner. She remembers that he had begun carrying a gun the moment the threat of the robbers became real, around the time they held that ‘anti-robbery collection’ meeting. She becomes hopeful that someone, either a real police officer, or Ehoro himself, will come to the rescue.

  She hears the gunshot then. She shrieks, as if the bullet had been fired at her, as if it were piercing her own body.

  The story goes that after the robber leads Eze to the 505 SRS (somehow the man gets Eze to produce the key), the man opens the car door, asks Eze to enter and to start the car. Eze gets in, puts the key into the ignition, but the car refuses to start. The man asks him to try again. Eze turns the key in the ignition, the engine makes a squeaking sound, but it still does not start. Meanwhile, Eze holds his hands up in the air, at the sides of his face, shakes his head, continues to shake it, as if he does not know why the car won’t start.

  The man pulls Eze out of the car, drags him to the Land Rover, which is on the other side of the front yard. He believes that Eze is purposefully doing something to prevent the car from starting (and he is right). In any case, when he’s dragged Eze to the Land Rover, he asks Eze to raise his hands over his head, all the way up, as if Eze himself is the criminal, as if he is under arrest.

  The man steps back so that there is some distance between him and Eze. Then he aims the gun at Eze. Maybe he is just about to fire when he hears the gunshot. Maybe he had no intention of firing at all—just a little something to scare Eze into starting the 505. Whatever the case, Eze’s robber hears the gunshot too, and suddenly he is on the tips of his toes, running away with his gun, across the front yard, even jumping over the glass-lined gate of the estate to escape.

  At least, this is how Eze told the story of what happened outside.

  Inside, after they hear the shot, the robber who is holding the gun to Chinwe’s head lowers his gun. He appears confused, puzzled, then he turns to the door that leads to the garage and out to the driveway, and he too runs off.

  There is some screaming outside, and the sound of racing feet, but Chinwe stays inside and just waits, too stunned even to know what she is waiting for.

  Not very long after, Mr Ehoro enters the corridor with Eze by his side. There is sweat dripping from Ehoro’s forehead, and he wipes it with the back of his hand. There is sweat also dripping from Eze’s forehead, but Chinwe pays that no mind. Instead, she looks for the blood on Eze’s chest. But there is none.

  Eze starts to tell the story of what happened outside then, how he refused to start the car by not pressing one of the buttons he should have pressed first before inserting the key into the ignition. He laughs at his cleverness. He winks at Chinwe, a self-congratulatory wink, as if to say, ‘Aren’t I something?’ It is now Friday, and Eze laments that it is not Thursday all over again, or Saturday, or Sunday, so that he can tell the story at once to the entire congregation at the Kingdom Hall. For now, his imagination will have to do, and so he imagines breaking the news, and he anticipates what their reaction will be—gratitude to God for the miracle.

  Chinwe listens to him for some time. Ehoro stands by Eze’s side, listening too. Sometimes he laughs at the things Eze says.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ Chinwe says, numbly. It comes out as a whisper, and Eze continues to speak, because he doesn’t hear her.

  She turns around and heads for their bedroom. The fan is still oscillating, and the metal safe lies open on their bed, empty. She moves it aside gently. She goes to her wardrobe, opens it, takes out a large suitcase from its bottom shelf. She removes a few of her clothes from their hangers, folds them one by one and puts them into the suitcase. She is still folding the items when she hears the sound of Eze’s footsteps approaching. She sits on the bed, by the open suitcase, and waits for him to walk into the room. As she waits, she imagines that he is already inside the room, that he has made his way to her in the still dark room. She imagines that he wrinkles his forehead, like a question, and reaches out with his arms to stop her from what she is doing.

  She imagines him telling her that she will break her mother’s heart by leaving him. Telling her that even her mother would want to know the meaning of all this. (Of course, he would be right.)

  She imagines that he runs off to find his New World Translation, and that he returns with it, and he reads from it to her, about marriage, about God’s disapprobation of divorce.

  She even imagines him asking her how she expects to survive without a job, without any income. ‘A grown woman like you living off your mama?’ she imagines him saying. When he asks it, she does not bother to respond. Instead, she thinks of herself back at her teaching job, and she thinks how grateful she will be to be back.

  In her imagination, Eze continues to chide, but she continues to pack her bag. When it is all packed, she lifts it from the bed and only pauses to say goodbye.

  She sits there and imagines all this, and she waits. But it is a long while before he enters the room, and a long time before she musters the courage to zip up the suitcase and leave.

  It is an even longer time before we meet each other by chance on Ohaeto Street; and it is a bit more time before Chinwe decides—without her mother’s influence—that she will try her hand at marriage again, this time by becoming my wife.

  Wahala!

  The healing was a thing that Ezinne’s mother, Nneka, told Chibuzo about weeks ago, nearly a month now. Afterwards, on the same night of the telling, he dreamed of it.

  In his dream, he watched the entire process as if watching it on a television screen. But it was not on a television screen that he watched it, rather on an old, brittle bar of Ivory soap.

  It was not easy watching the healing on the bar of soap: the images were small, and had missing portions in them—those places where fissures had formed on the soap, a result of desiccation. The fissures made it hard for him to see, but even without them, the viewing would have been difficult still, because the images were themselves like soap when wet: slippery, with bubbles all around, dissolving and hard to grasp.

  In the dream, his trouble viewing the images was what caused Chibuzo to pay a visit to the native doctor. He went to her in order to see if she could show them to him on something better than the bar of soap. He asked to see it on a kom kom of evaporated milk, after its paper label had been peeled off, or even just on the surface of a drinking gourd; and she, the dibia, did in fact show it to him more clearly: as he requested, on the can of evaporated milk.

  Now he stood by the kitchen door, bidding the visitors goodbye. Ezinne’s mother, Nneka, stood by his side.

  The kitchen smelled of tomato stew, the thin kind, with peppers and spices mixed in, but thin because it had been made with more water than usual, so that it would be enough to feed the mass of invited guests. (The guests had eaten the stew with rice, and afterwards they had chased the meal down with jugs of palm wine.)

  The purpose of the dinner was to ensure that Chibuzo’s wife, Ezinne, had the well-wishes, and sympathy, and even the gratitude of the neighbours. Because everyone knew what happened to Mbachu’s wife: first, going so many years without getting with child, an
d then finally getting with child only to lose it.

  It had been all over town, this case of Mbachu’s wife. Some said that her childlessness was due to the malice of jealous neighbours (Mbachu’s wife was after all very beautiful). Or perhaps her childlessness was simply a result of a general indifference on the part of the townspeople. Surely, the rumours said, apathy had a way of creating negative energy, and this negative energy had the ability to reinforce itself in the barrenness of one’s womb.

  Mbachu’s relatives eventually began prodding him to leave his wife and take another, one who could give him children, sons especially, to carry on the family name. Some time around then, his wife became with child. It was serendipitous, and owing to it, the rumours died down.

  But then, just as unexpectedly, it was announced that she had lost the child. This loss reignited the rumours, which then persisted well beyond the day that Mbachu cast her off, beyond the day that Mbachu took another wife, even beyond the day, years later, that this new wife bore him a son.

  The idea of malice and negative energy made sense to Chibuzo. And anyway, who was he to go against this collective explanation? It was after all agreed upon by so many. Who was he to say that malice and apathy weren’t indeed potential causes of barrenness?

  And so, the dinner: so that Chibuzo could avert any malice or negativity that was being directed at Ezinne. So that he could divert from her a fate similar to that of Mbachu’s wife.