“I’m sorry, Kainene.”
Richard felt transparent; she was looking at him but he felt as if she could see the wood carving that hung on the wall behind him. “So you have been lusting after my sister. How unoriginal,” she said.
“Kainene,” he said.
She stood up. “Ikejide!” she called. “Come and clear this place.”
They were leaving the dining room when the phone rang. She ignored it. It rang again and again and finally she went to it. She came back into the bedroom and said, “That was Olanna.”
Richard looked at her, pleaded with his eyes.
“It would be forgivable if it were somebody else. Not my sister,” she said.
“I am so sorry.”
“You should sleep in the guest room.”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
He did not know what she was thinking. It was what frightened him the most, that he had no idea what she was thinking. He patted his pillow and rearranged his blanket and sat up in bed and tried to read. But his mind was too active for his body to be still. He worried that Kainene would call Madu and tell him what had happened, and Madu would laugh and say, “He was a mistake from the beginning, leave him, leave him, leave him.” Finally, before he fell asleep, Molière’s words came to him, strangely comforting: Unbroken happiness is a bore; it should have ups and downs.
Kainene greeted him with a stoic face in the morning.
The rain was heavy on the roof and the overcast sky cast a pallor over the dining room. Kainene sat drinking a cup of tea and reading a newspaper with the light on.
“Harrison is making pancakes,” she said, and turned back to her paper. Richard sat opposite her, unsure of what to do, too guilty even to pour his tea. Her silence and the noises and smells from the kitchen made him feel claustrophobic.
“Kainene,” he said. “Can we speak, please?”
She looked up, and he noticed, first, that her eyes were swollen and raw, and then he saw the wounded rage in them. “We will talk when I want to talk, Richard.”
He looked down, like a child being reprimanded, and felt, again, afraid that she would ask him to get out of her life forever.
The doorbell rang before noon and, when Ikejide came in to say that madam’s sister was at the door, Richard thought that Kainene would ask him to shut the door in Olanna’s face. But she didn’t. She asked Ikejide to serve drinks and went down to the living room and from the top of the stairs where
he stood, Richard tried to hear what was said. He heard Olanna’s tearful voice but could not make out what she was saying. Odenigbo spoke briefly, in a tone that was unusually calm. Then Richard heard Kainene’s voice, clear and crisp. “It is stupid to expect me to forgive this.”
There was a short silence and then the sound of the door being opened. Richard hurried to the window to see Odenigbo’s car backing out, the same blue Opel that had parked in his own compound on Imoke Street before Odenigbo bounded out, a stocky man in well-ironed clothes shouting, “I want you to stay away from my house! Do you understand me? Stay away! Don’t ever come to my house again!” He had stood in front of the veranda and wondered if Odenigbo would punch him. Later, he realized that Odenigbo did not intend to punch him, perhaps did not consider him worthy of a punch, and the thought had depressed him.
“Did you eavesdrop?” Kainene asked, walking into the room. Richard turned away from the window, but she didn’t wait for his response before she added, mildly, “I’d forgotten how much the revolutionary looks like a wrestler, really—but one with finesse.”
“I will never forgive myself if I lose you, Kainene.”
Her face was expressionless. “I took your manuscript from the study this morning and I burned it,” she said.
Richard felt a soar in his chest of emotions he could not name. “The Basket of Hands,” the collection of pages that he was finally confident could become a book, was gone. He could never duplicate the unbridled energy that had come with the words. But it did not matter. What mattered was that by burning his manuscript she had shown him that she would not end the relationship; she would not bother to cause him pain if she was not going to stay. Perhaps he was not a true writer after all. He had read somewhere that, for true writers, nothing was more important than their art, not even love.
6. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died
He writes about the world that remained silent while Biafrans died. He argues that Britain inspired this silence. The arms and advice that Britain gave Nigeria shaped other countries. In the United States, Biafra was “under Britain’s sphere of interest.” In Canada, the prime minister quipped, “Where is Biafra?” The Soviet Union sent technicians and planes to Nigeria, thrilled at the chance to influence Africa without offending America or Britain. And from their white-supremacist positions, South Africa and Rhodesia gloated at further proof that black-run governments were doomed to failure.
Communist China denounced the Anglo-American-Soviet imperialism but did little else to support Biafra. The French sold Biafra some arms but did not give the recognition that Biafra most needed. And many Black African countries feared that an independent Biafra would trigger other secessions and so supported Nigeria.
PART FOUR
The Late Sixties
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