Americanah

The cake a driver delivered the next morning, with “I’m sorry my love” written on it in blue frosting, had a bitter aftertaste, but Aunty Uju kept it in the freezer for months.

AUNTY UJU’S PREGNANCY CAME, like a sudden sound in a still night. She arrived at the flat wearing a sequined bou-bou that caught the light, glistening like a flowing celestial presence, and said that she wanted to tell Ifemelu’s parents about it before they heard the gossip. “Adi m ime,” she said simply.

Ifemelu’s mother burst into tears, loud dramatic cries, looking around, as though she could see, lying around her, the splintered pieces of her own story. “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

“I did not plan this, it happened,” Aunty Uju said. “I fell pregnant for Olujimi in university. I had an abortion and I am not doing it again.” The word “abortion,” blunt as it was, scarred the room, because they all knew that what Ifemelu’s mother did not say was that surely there were ways to take care of this. Ifemelu’s father put his book down and picked it up again. He cleared his throat. He soothed his wife.

“Well, I cannot ask about the man’s intentions,” he said finally to Aunty Uju. “So I should ask what your own intentions are.”

“I will have the baby.”

He waited to hear more, but Aunty Uju said nothing else, and so he sat back, assailed. “You are an adult. This is not what I hoped for you, Obianuju, but you are an adult.”

Aunty Uju went over and sat on the arm of his sofa. She spoke in a low, pacifying voice, stranger for being formal, but saved from falseness by the soberness of her face. “Brother, this is not what I hoped for myself either, but it has happened. I am sorry to disappoint you, after everything you have done for me, and I beg you to forgive me. But I will make the best of this situation. The General is a responsible man. He will take care of his child.”

Ifemelu’s father shrugged wordlessly. Aunty Uju put an arm around him, as though it were he who needed comforting.

LATER, Ifemelu would think of the pregnancy as symbolic. It marked the beginning of the end and made everything else seem rapid, the months rushing past, time hurtling forward. There was Aunty Uju, dimpled with exuberance, her face aglow, her mind busy with plans as her belly curved outwards. Every few days, she came up with a new girl’s name for the baby. “Oga is happy,” she said. “He is happy to know that he can still score a goal at his age, old man like him!” The General came more often, even on some weekends, bringing her hot water bottles, herbal pills, things he had heard were good for pregnancy.

He told her, “Of course you will deliver abroad,” and asked which she preferred, America or England. He wanted England, so that he could travel with her; the Americans had barred entry to high-ranking members of the military government. But Aunty Uju chose America, because her baby could still have automatic citizenship there. The plans were made, a hospital picked, a furnished condo rented in Atlanta. “What is a condo, anyway?” Ifemelu asked. And Aunty Uju shrugged and said, “Who knows what Americans mean? You should ask Obinze, he will know. At least it is a place to live. And Oga has people there who will help me.” Aunty Uju was dampened only when her driver told her that The General’s wife had heard about the pregnancy and was furious; there had, apparently, been a tense family meeting with his relatives and hers. The General hardly spoke about his wife, but Aunty Uju knew enough: a lawyer who had given up working to raise their four children in Abuja, a woman who looked portly and pleasant in newspaper photographs. “I wonder what she is thinking,” Aunty Uju said sadly, musingly. While she was in America, The General had one of the bedrooms repainted a brilliant white. He bought a cot, its legs like delicate candles. He bought stuffed toys, and too many teddy bears. Inyang propped them in the cot, lined some up on a shelf and, perhaps because she thought nobody would notice, she took one teddy bear to her room in the back. Aunty Uju had a boy. She sounded high and elated over the phone. “Ifem, he has so much hair! Can you imagine? What a waste!”

She called him Dike, after her father, and gave him her surname, which left Ifemelu’s mother agitated and sour.

“The baby should have his father’s name, or is the man planning to deny his child?” Ifemelu’s mother asked, as they sat in their living room, still digesting the news of the birth.

“Aunty Uju said it was just easier to give him her name,” Ifemelu said. “And is he behaving like a man that will deny his child? Aunty told me he’s even talking about coming to pay her bride price.”

“God forbid,” Ifemelu’s mother said, almost spitting the words out, and Ifemelu thought of all those fervent prayers for Aunty Uju’s mentor. Her mother, when Aunty Uju came back, stayed in Dolphin Estate for a while, bathing and feeding the gurgling, smooth-skinned baby, but she faced The General with a cold officiousness. She answered him in monosyllables, as though he had betrayed her by breaking the rules of her pretense. A relationship with Aunty Uju was acceptable, but such flagrant proof of the relationship was not. The house smelled of baby powder. Aunty Uju was happy. The General held Dike often, suggesting that perhaps he needed to be fed again or that a doctor needed to see the rash on his neck.

FOR DIKE’S FIRST BIRTHDAY PARTY, The General brought a live band. They set up in the front garden, near the generator house, and stayed until the last guests left, all of them slow and sated, taking food wrapped in foil. Aunty Uju’s friends came, and The General’s friends came, too, their expressions determined, as though to say that no matter the circumstances, their friend’s child was their friend’s child. Dike, newly walking, tottered around in a suit and red bow tie, while Aunty Uju followed him, trying to get him to be still for a few moments with the photographer. Finally, tired, he began to cry, yanking at his bow tie, and The General picked him up and carried him around. It was the image of The General that would endure in Ifemelu’s mind, Dike’s arms around his neck, his face lit up, his front teeth jutting out as he smiled, saying, “He looks like me o, but thank God he took his mother’s teeth.”

The General died the next week, in a military plane crash. “On the same day, the very same day, that the photographer brought the pictures from Dike’s birthday,” Aunty Uju would often say, in telling the story, as though this held some particular significance.

It was a Saturday afternoon, Obinze and Ifemelu were in the TV room, Inyang was upstairs with Dike, Aunty Uju was in the kitchen with Chikodili when the phone rang. Ifemelu picked it up. The voice on the other end, The General’s ADC, crackled through a bad connection, but was still clear enough to give her details: the crash happened a few miles outside Jos, the bodies were charred, there were already rumors that the Head of State had engineered it to get rid of officers who he feared were planning a coup. Ifemelu held the phone too tightly, stunned. Obinze went with her to the kitchen, and stood by Aunty Uju as Ifemelu repeated the ADC’s words.

“You are lying,” Aunty Uju said. “It is a lie.”

She marched towards the phone, as though to challenge it, too, and then she slid to the floor, a boneless, bereft sliding, and began to weep. Ifemelu held her, cradled her, all of them unsure of what to do, and the silence in between her sobs seemed too silent. Inyang brought Dike downstairs.

“Mama?” Dike said, looking puzzled.

“Take Dike upstairs,” Obinze told Inyang.

There was banging on the gate. Two men and three women, relatives of The General, had bullied Adamu to open the gate, and now stood at the front door, shouting. “Uju! Pack your things and get out now! Give us the car keys!” One of the women was skeletal, agitated and red-eyed, and as she shouted—“Common harlot! God forbid that you will touch our brother’s property! Prostitute! You will never live in peace in this Lagos!”—she pulled her headscarf from her head and tied it tightly around her waist, in preparation for a fight. At first, Aunty Uju said nothing, staring at them, standing still at the door. Then she asked them to leave in a voice hoarse from tears, but the relatives’ shouting intensified, and so Aunty Uju turned to go back indoors. “Okay, don’t go,” she said. “Just stay there. Stay there while I go and call my boys from the army barracks.”

Only then did they leave, telling her, “We are coming back with our own boys.” Only then did Aunty Uju begin to sob again. “I have nothing. Everything is in his name. Where will I take my son to now?”

She picked up the phone from its cradle and then stared at it, uncertain whom to call.

“Call Uche and Adesuwa,” Ifemelu said. They would know what to do.

Aunty Uju did, pressing the speaker button, and then leaned against the wall.

“You have to leave immediately. Make sure you clear the house, take everything,” Uche said. “Do it fast-fast before his people come back. Arrange a tow van and take the generator. Make sure you take the generator.”

“I don’t know where to find a van,” Aunty Uju mumbled, with a helplessness foreign to her.

“We’re going to arrange one for you, fast-fast. You have to take that generator. That is what will pay for your life until you gather yourself. You have to go somewhere for a while, so that they don’t give you trouble. Go to London or America. Do you have American visa?”