Papa looked at my report card for a while longer; then he said, “Come down for dinner.”
I walked downstairs, my legs feeling joint-free, like long strips of wood. Papa had come home with samples of a new biscuit, and he passed the green packet around before we started dinner. I bit into the biscuit. “Very good, Papa.”
Papa took a bite and chewed, then looked at Jaja.
“It has a fresh taste,” Jaja said.
“Very tasty,”
Mama said.
“It should sell by God’s grace,” Papa said. “Our wafers lead the market now and this should join them.”
I did not, could not, look at Papa’s face when he spoke. The boiled yam and peppery greens refused to go down my throat; they clung to my mouth like children clinging to their mothers’ hand at a nursery school entrance. I downed glass after glass of water to push them down, and by the time Papa started the grace, my stomach was swollen with water. When he was done, Papa said, “Kambili, come upstairs.”
I followed him. As he climbed the stairs in his red silk pajamas, his buttocks quivered and shook like akamu, properly made akamu, jellylike. The cream decor in Papa’s bedroom was changed every year but always to a slightly different shade of cream. The plush rug that sank in when you stepped on it was plain cream; the curtains had only a little brown embroidery at the edges; the cream leather armchairs were placed close together as if two people were sitting in an intimate conversation. All that cream blended and made the room seem wider, as if it never ended, as if you could not run even if you wanted to, because there was nowhere to run to. When I had thought of heaven as a child, I visualized Papa’s room, the softness, the creaminess, the endlessness. I would snuggle into Papa’s arms when harmattan thunderstorms raged outside, flinging mangoes against the window netting and making the electric wires hit each other and spark bright orange flames. Papa would lodge me between his knees or wrap me in the cream blanket that smelled of safety.
I sat on a similar blanket now, on the edge of the bed. I slipped off my slippers and sank my feet into the rug and decided to keep them sunk in so that my toes would feel cushioned. So that a part of me would feel safe.
“Kambili,” Papa said, breathing deeply. “You didn’t put in your best this term. You came second because you chose to.” His eyes were sad. Deep and sad. I wanted to touch his face, to run my hand over his rubbery cheeks. There were stories in his eyes that I would never know.
The phone rang then; it had been ringing more often since Ade Coker was arrested. Papa answered it and spoke in low tones. I sat waiting for him until he looked up and waved me away. He did not call me the next day, or the day after, to talk about my report card, to decide how I would be punished. I wondered if he was too preoccupied with Ade Coker’s case, but even after he got him out of jail a week later, he did not talk about my report card. He did not talk about getting Ade Coker out of jail, either; we simply saw his editorial back in the Standard, where he wrote about the value of freedom, about how his pen would not, could not, stop writing the truth. But he did not mention where he had been detained or who had arrested him or what had been done to him. There was a postscript in italics where he thanked his publisher: “a man of integrity, the bravest man I know.” I was sitting next to Mama on the couch, during family time, and I read that line over and over and then closed my eyes, felt a surge run through me, the same feeling I got when Father Benedict talked about Papa at Mass, the same feeling I got after I sneezed: a clear, tingling sensation.
“Thank God Ade is safe,” Mama said, running her hands over the newspaper.
“They put out cigarettes on his back,” Papa said, shaking his head. “They put out so many cigarettes on his back.”
“They will receive their due, but not on this earth, mba,” Mama said. Although Papa did not smile at her—he looked too sad to smile—I wished I had thought to say that, before Mama did. I knew Papa liked her having said that.
“We are going to publish underground now,” Papa said. “It is no longer safe for my staff.”
I knew that publishing underground meant that the newspaper would be published from a secret location. Yet I imagined Ade Coker and the rest of the staff in an office beneath the ground, a fluorescent lamp flooding the dark damp room, the men bent over their desks, writing the truth.
That night, when Papa prayed, he added longer passages urging God to bring about the downfall of the Godless men ruling our country, and he intoned over and over, “Our Lady Shield of the Nigerian People, pray for us.”
THE SCHOOL BREAK was short, only two weeks, and the Saturday before school resumed, Mama took Jaja and me to the market to get new sandals and bags. We didn’t need them; our bags and brown leather sandals were still new, only a term old. But it was the only ritual that was ours alone, going to the market before the start of each new term, rolling the car window down as Kevin drove us there without having to ask permission from Papa. In the outskirts of the market, we let our eyes dwell on the half-naked mad people near the rubbish dumps, on the men who casually stopped to unzip their trousers and urinate at corners, on the women who seemed to be haggling loudly with mounds of green vegetables until the head of the trader peeked out from behind.
Inside the market, we shrugged off traders who pulled us along the dark passages, saying, “I have what you want,” or “Come with me, it’s here,” even though they had no idea what we wanted. We scrunched up our noses at the smells of bloody fresh meat and musty dried fish, and lowered our heads from the bees that buzzed in thick clouds over the sheds of the honey sellers.
As we left the markets with our sandals and some fabric Mama had bought, we saw a small crowd gathered around the vegetable stalls we had passed earlier, the ones lining the road. Soldiers were milling around. Market women were shouting, and many had both hands placed on their heads, in the way that people do to show despair or shock. A woman lay in the dirt, wailing, tearing at her short afro. Her wrapper had come undone and her white underwear showed.
“Hurry up,” Mama said, moving closer to Jaja and me, and I felt that she wanted to shield us from seeing the soldiers and the women. As we hurried past, I saw a woman spit at a soldier, I saw the soldier raise a whip in the air. The whip was long. It curled in the air before it landed on the woman’s shoulder. Another soldier was kicking down trays of fruits, squashing papayas with his boots and laughing. When we got into the car, Kevin told Mama that the soldiers had been ordered to demolish the vegetable stalls because they were illegal structures. Mama said nothing; she was looking out of the window, as though she wanted to catch the last sight of those women.
I thought about the woman lying in the dirt as we drove home. I had not seen her face, but I felt that I knew her, that I had always known her. I wished I could have gone over and helped her up, cleaned the red mud from her wrapper.
I thought about her, too, on Monday, as Papa drove me to school. He slowed down on Ogui Road to fling some crisp naira notes at a beggar sprawled by the roadside, near some children hawking peeled oranges. The beggar stared at the note, then stood up and waved after us, clapping and jumping. I had assumed he was lame. I watched him in the rearview mirror, my eyes steadily on him, until he disappeared from sight. He reminded me of the market woman in the dirt. There was a helplessness to his joy, the same kind of helplessness as in that woman’s despair.
The walls that surrounded Daughters of the Immaculate Heart Secondary School were very high, similar to our compound walls, but instead of coiled electrified wires, they were topped by jagged pieces of green glass with sharp edges jutting out. Papa said the walls had swayed his decision when I finished elementary school. Discipline was important, he said. You could not have youngsters scaling walls to go into town and go wild, the way they did at the federal government colleges.
“These people cannot drive,” Papa muttered when we got to the school gates, where cars nosed up to each other, horning. “There is no prize for being first to get into the school compound.”
Hawkers, girls much younger than I, defied the school gate men, edging closer and closer to the cars to offer peeled oranges and bananas and groundnuts, their moth-eaten blouses slipping off their shoulders. Papa finally eased the car into the wide school compound and parked near the volleyball court, beyond the stretch of manicured lawn.
“Where is your class?” he asked.
I pointed to the building by the group of mango trees. Papa came out of the car with me and I wondered what he was doing, why he was here, why he had driven me to school and asked Kevin to take Jaja.
Sister Margaret saw him as we walked to my class. She waved gaily, from the midst of students and a few parents, then quickly waddled over to us. Her words flew generously out of her mouth: how was Papa doing, was he happy with my progress at Daughters of the Immaculate Heart, would he be at the reception for the bishop next week?