Changes (2 page)

               
Just ask anybody. There are many thoughts that come into our minds which we are not aware of, at the time we are doing the thinking. Feelings can be even worse.

Ogyaanowa didn't feel like eating any porridge that morning. Therefore an accident happened, and the bowl of porridge fell off the table. The bowl, which was plastic, rolled away, building a solid line of porridge on the floor. Ogyaanowa started to cry.

The commotion that was coming out of her parents' room was terrible. They had turned the radio on, thinking the noise from it drowned their voices. It didn't though. True, if you were trying to listen from where Ogyaanowa was sitting, you wouldn't have been able to make out the words; although you would also have known that something was going on that was not quite normal. But for the child this had become quite regular. At least, that is what she might have said if anyone had asked her about it, and if she had had a more grown-up language. When Esi opened the door to the bedroom, she was quite surprised to see Oko still in bed.

               
Strange, she thought, for a man who takes his work as seriously as he does.

She unwrapped the cloth from her body, moved to the dressing table, took what she would need and brought the things to her side of the bed: some cream for her skin, a deodorant stick, a very mild toilet spray. She sat down, and picking these one by one, she started
getting her body ready for the day.

As for the day, it was very young; but already the breeze that was blowing was maturely hot, as expected. In the course of it, for the next ten hours or so, there might be slight variations in temperature, a centigrade down, a few fahrenheits up. No one would take notice.

As she picked this up and poured a bit of that into her palm and rubbed it on parts of her body, Oko looked at her. Lying down and watching her go through the motions of dressing was a pleasure he was fully enjoying this particular morning. It occurred to him then, as it had occurred to him on countless other mornings before, that Esi had not lost a bit of her schoolgirl looks or schoolgirl ways.

For a teacher in a co-educational school, and soon to be a headmaster of one, this is a very dangerous thought indeed. He scolded himself.

Esi was a tall woman. That fact made a short man of Oko, since people mostly expect any man to be taller than his wife, and he was the same height as her. She was quite thin too, which gave her an elegance that was recognised by all except members of her own family. When she was younger and growing up in the big compound with her cousins and other members of the extended family, she had had to be extremely careful about starting a quarrel with anyone. Because no one lost the chance to call her beanpole, bamboo, pestle or any such name which in their language described tall, thin and uncurved.

               
I love this body. But it is her sassy navel that kills me, thought Oko, watching the little protrusion, and feeling some heating up at the base of his own belly.

If Esi's mother could have read his thoughts, she would have told him that that dainty affair had nearly killed her daughter. For, instead of healing after a couple of weeks, like any baby's, Esi's had taken its time, going almost septic at one point. Meanwhile, as every old lady in the village reminded her throughout her childhood, Esi had been such a grouchy, wailing infant, her tummy had normally looked like a pumped balloon. So that even when the navel healed, it still stuck out.

Soon, the bedroom filled out with a mixture of scents.

‘Aren't you getting up at all this morning?' Esi finally asked. Following her question, relief flooded through her like the effect of a good drink. For these days communication between them had ground to a halt, each of them virtually afraid of saying anything
that might prove to be potentially explosive. And these days nearly everything was.

She needn't have worried. Oko had, on his own, decided that the months of frustrations and misunderstandings were behind him. Even hopefully behind them both. In any case, he had decided to give the relationship another chance.

If you are being honest with yourself, you would admit that you have always given this relationship a chance, he told himself.

Thinking of how much he had invested in the marriage with Esi, and how much he had fought to keep it going made him feel a little angry and a little embarrassed. With all that going on in his head, his penis, which had by then become really big and hard, almost collapsed. But since his eyes were still on Esi's navel, the thing jerked itself up again.

He had always loved Esi. And what was wrong with that?

‘It's not safe to show a woman you love her … not too much anyway,' some male voice was telling him. But whose voice was that? His father's? His Uncle Amoa's? He wasn't sure that the voice belonged to any of those two. Of course those men and their kind hid their hearts very well. They were brought up to know how. On the other hand, they were also brought up too well to go around saying anything crude. No, it must have been one of his friends from boarding school days. They were always saying things of that sort. ‘Showing a woman you love her is like asking her to walk over you. How much of your love for how heavy her kicks.' And were they wrong? Look at Esi. Two solid years of courtship, six years of marriage. And what had he got out of it? Little. Nothing. No affection. Not even plain warmth. Nothing except one little daughter! Esi had never stated it categorically that she didn't want any more children. But she was on those dreadful birth control things: pills, loops or whatever. She had gone on them soon after the child was born, and no amount of reasoning and pleading had persuaded her to go off them. He wanted other children, at least one more ... a boy if possible. But even one more girl would have been welcome.

The fact that his mother and his sisters were always complaining to him about the unsafety of having an only child only made him feel worse. One of them had even suggested that he did himself and them the favour of trying to be interested in other women. That way, he could perhaps make some other children ‘outside'. The idea hadn't appealed to him at all. In fact, for a long time, the thought of sleeping
with anyone other than Esi had left him quite cold, no matter how brightly the sun was shining, or how hot the day was. Yet, what was he to do? Esi definitely put her career well above any duties she owed as a wife. She was a great cook, who complained endlessly any time she had to enter the kitchen. Their home was generally run by an elderly house help, whom they both called ‘Madam' behind her back.

The bungalow came with her job as a data analyst with the government's statistical bureau; its urban department, that is.

Good God, what on earth did that mean?

He knew she was very much respected by her colleagues and other people who knew the work she did. So she should not really be trying so hard to impress: leaving the house virtually at dawn; returning home at dusk; often bringing work home? Then there were all those conferences. Geneva, Addis, Dakar one half of the year; Rome, Lusaka, Lagos the other half.

Is Esi too an African woman? She not only is, but there are plenty of them around these days … these days … these days.

Esi rose, picked up her tubes and bottles to return them to the dressing table. Oko's voice stopped her.

‘My friends are laughing at me,' he said.

Silence.

‘They think I'm not behaving like a man.'

Esi was trying to pretend she had not heard the declaration.

‘Aren't you saying anything?' Oko's voice was full of pleading.

‘What would you like me to say?' she spoke at last, trying very hard to keep the irritation out of her voice.

‘You don't care what my friends think of me?' he pressed.

When she spoke again, the irritation was out, strong and breathing. ‘Oko, you know that we have been over this so many times. We all make friends. They either respect us for what we are, or they don't. And whether we keep them or not depends on each one of us. I cannot take care of what your friends say to you, think of you or do to you.'

‘I need my friends,' he said.

‘I also need mine,' she said.

‘Opokuya is a good woman,' he said.

Esi yawned, groped for her wrist-watch from the table, and looked at it. Oko snatched the watch from her, and threw it on the bedside table on his side of the bed.

‘What did you do that for?' Esi demanded.

For an answer, Oko flung the bedcloth away from him, sat up, pulled her down, and moved on her. Esi started to protest. But he went on doing what he had determined to do all morning. He squeezed her breast repeatedly, thrust his tongue into her mouth, forced her unwilling legs apart, entered her, plunging in and out of her, thrashing to the left, to the right, pounding and just pounding away. Then it was all over. Breathing like a marathon runner at the end of a particularly gruelling race, he got off her, and fell heavily back on his side of the bed. He tried to draw the bedcloth to cover both of them again.

For some time, neither of them spoke. There was nothing else he wanted to say, and there was nothing she could say, at least, not for a while.

What does one do with this much rage? This much frustration? This much deliberate provocation so early in the morning, and early in the week?

She could go back to the bathroom and clean herself with a wet towel, just standing by the handbasin. She could go and run a full bath again and briefly soak her whole self up. Either way, she could be out of the house in another half-an-hour, drop Ogyaanowa at her school and be only a little late for work. Or she could forget about going to work altogether, wait until Oko had got himself up and taken the child to school, and then have a good cry. She preferred the latter option, but dared not take it. Not show up at work at all the whole day? And a Monday too? Impossible. It was bad enough that she was going to be late. A woman in her kind of job must be careful…

In the meantime, Oko was collecting his thoughts together. He was already feeling like telling Esi that he was sorry. But he was also convinced he mustn't. He got out of bed, taking the entire sleeping cloth with him. Esi's anger rose to an exploding pitch. Not just because Oko taking the cloth left her completely naked, or because she was feeling uncomfortably wet between her thighs. What really finished her was her eyes catching sight of the cloth trailing behind Oko who looked like some arrogant king, as he opened the door to get to the bathroom before her. She sucked her teeth, or made the noise which is normally described, inadequately, in English as a sucking of the teeth. It was thin, but loud, and very long. In a contest with any of the fishwives about ten kilometres down the road from the Hotel Twentieth Century, she would have won.

One full hour later, she was easing her car into the parking lot of the Department of Urban Statistics. The car came to a standstill. She turned off the engine, removed the keys from the ignition, dumped them irritably into her handbag, got out of the vehicle with an unconscious and characteristic haste, and literally ran to her office on the third floor of the building. This morning, she did not even bother to find out whether the lift was working. Since if it was, it would have been maybe only the sixth or seventh time the whole year, and most probably the last time before the end of the century.

Once in her office, she sat down, first to get her breath back. Then she just sat, uncharacteristically doing nothing at all. She became aware that she was in no hurry to do any work inside her office, or go out and meet anybody. In fact, she was rather surprised at the degree of lethargy she was feeling. She could not remember when last had she felt so clearly unwilling to face the world... and then with a kind of shock, she realised that in spite of the second bath she had had before leaving home, she was still not feeling fresh or clean.

Clean? It all came to her then. That what she had gone through with Oko had been marital rape.

‘Marital rape?!' She began to laugh rather uncontrollably, and managed to stop herself only when it occurred to her that anyone coming upon her that minute would think she had lost her mind, which would not have been too far from the truth. In fact, her professional self was coldly telling her that she was hysterical. And isn't hysteria a form of mental derangement? At that she got up and went to lock the door.

She could hardly remember what commitments were on her schedule for the day. Yes, there was some data analysing she and her colleague had to do for the Minister. But that, mercifully, was for three o'clock that afternoon.

Marital rape. She sat down again, this time almost making herself comfortable. As if the state paid her to come and sit in her office to try and sort out her personal life! One part of her was full of disapproval, while the other — a kind of brand new self — could not have cared less.

Marital rape. Suddenly, she could see herself or some other woman sociologist presenting a paper on:

               
‘The Prevalence of Marital Rape in the Urban African Environment'

to a packed audience of academics. Overwhelmingly male, of course. A few women. As the presentation progresses, there are boos from the men, and uncomfortable titters from the women. At the end of it, there is predictable hostile outrage.