when your father sucked his mother's?'
'Leave my house!' Papa pointed at the gate. Two men slowly ushered Anikwenwa out of the compound. He did not resist; he was too old to, anyway. But he kept looking back and throwing words at Papa. 'Ifukwa gi! You are like a fly blindly following a corpse into the grave!'
I followed the old man's unsteady gait until he walked out through the gates.
Aunty Ifeoma came the next day, in the evening, when the orange trees started to cast long, wavy shadows across the water fountain in the front yard. Her laughter floated upstairs into the living room, where I sat reading. I had not heard it in two years, but I would know that cackling, hearty sound anywhere. Aunty Ifeoma was as tall as Papa, with a well-proportioned body. She walked fast, like one who knew just where she was going and what she was going to do there. And she spoke the way she walked, as if to get as many words out of her mouth as she could in the shortest time.
'Welcome, Aunty, nno,' I said, rising to hug her. She did not give me the usual brief side hug. She clasped me in her arms and held me tightly against the softness of her body. The wide lapels of her blue, A-line dress smelled of lavender. 'Kambili, kedu?' A wide smile stretched her dark-complected face, revealing a gap between her front teeth.
'I'm fine, Aunty.'
'You have grown so much. Look at you, look at you.' She reached out and pulled my left breast. 'Look how fast these are growing!'
I looked away and inhaled deeply so that I would not start to stutter. I did not know how to handle that kind of playfulness.
'Where is Jaja?' she asked.
'He's asleep. He has a headache.'
'A headache three days to Christmas? No way. I will wake him up and cure that headache.' Aunty Ifeoma laughed. 'We got here before noon; we left Nsukka really early and would have gotten here sooner if the car didn't break down on the road, but it was near Ninth Mile, thank God, so it was easy finding a mechanic.'
'Thanks be to God,' I said. Then, after a pause I asked, 'How are my cousins?'
It was the polite thing to say; still, I felt strange asking about the cousins I hardly knew.
'They're coming soon. They're with your Papa-Nnukwu, and he had just started one of his stories. You know how he likes to go on and on.'
'Oh,' I said. I did not know that Papa-Nnukwu liked to go on and on. I did not even know that he told stories.
Mama came in holding a tray piled high with bottles of soft and malt drinks lying on their sides. A plate of chin-chin was balanced on top of the drinks. 'Nwunye m, who are those for?' Aunty Ifeoma asked.
'You and the children,' Mama said. 'Did you not say the children were coming soon, okwia?'
'You should not have bothered, really. We bought okpa on our way and just ate it.'
'Then I will put the chin-chin in a bag for you,' Mama said. She turned to leave the room. Her wrapper was dressy, with yellow print designs, and her matching blouse had yellow lace sewn onto the puffy, short sleeves. 'Ntvunye m,' Aunty Ifeoma called, and Mama turned back.
The first time I heard Aunty Ifeoma call Mama 'nwunye m,' years ago, I was aghast that a woman called another woman 'my wife.' When I asked, Papa said it was the remnants of ungodly traditions, the idea that it was the family and not the man alone that married a wife, and later Mama whispered, although we were alone in my room, 'I am her wife, too, because I am your father's wife. It shows that she accepts me.'
'Nivunye m, come and sit down. You look tired. Are you well?' Aunty Ifeoma asked.
A tight smile appeared on Mama's face. 'I am well, very well. I have been helping the wives of our umunna with the cooking.'
'Come and sit down,' Aunty Ifeoma said again. 'Come and sit down and rest. The wives of our umunna can look for the salt themselves and find it. After all, they are all here to take from you, to wrap meat in banana leaves when nobody is looking and then sneak it home.' Aunty Ifeoma laughed.
Mama sat down next to me. 'Eugene is arranging for extra chairs to be put outside, especially on Christmas day. So many people have come already.'
'You know our people have no other work at Christmas than to go from house to house,' Aunty Ifeoma said. 'But you can't stay here serving them all day. We should take the children to Abagana for the Aro festival tomorrow, to look at the mmuo.'
'Eugene will not let the children go to a heathen festival,' Mama said.
'Heathen festival, kwa? Everybody goes to Aro to look at the mmuo.'
'I know, but you know Eugene.'
Aunty Ifeoma shook her head slowly. 'I will tell him we are going for a drive, so we can all spend time together, especially the children.'
Mama fiddled with her fingers and said nothing for a while. Then she asked, 'When will you take the children to their father's hometown?'
'Perhaps today, although I don't have the strength for Ifediora's family right now. They eat more and more shit every year. The people in his umunna said he left money somewhere and I have been hiding it. Last Christmas, one of the women from their compound even told me I had killed him. I wanted to stuff sand in her mouth. Then I thought that I should sit her down, eh, and explain that you do not kill a husband you love, that you do not orchestrate a car accident in which a trailer rams into your husband's car, but again, why waste my time? They all have the brains of guinea fowls.' Aunty Ifeoma made a loud hissing sound. 'I don't know how much longer I will take my children there.'
Mama clucked in sympathy. 'People do not always talk with sense. But it is good that the children go, especially the boys. They need to know their father's homestead and the members of their father's umunna.'
'I honestly do not know how Ifediora came from an umunna like that.'
I I watched their lips move as they spoke; Mama's bare lips were pale compared to Aunty Ifeoma's, covered in a shiny bronze lipstick.
'Umunna will always say hurtful things,' Mama said. 'Did our own umunna not tell Eugene to take another wife because a man of his stature cannot have just two children? If people like you had not been on my side then…'
'Stop it, stop being grateful. If Eugene had done that, he would have been the loser, not you.'
'So you say. A woman with children and no husband, what is that?'
'Me.' Mama shook her head. 'You have come again, Ifeoma. You know what I mean. How can a woman live like that?' Mama's eyes had grown round, taking up more space on her face.
'Nwunye m, sometimes life begins when marriage ends.'
'You and your university talk. Is this what you tell your students?' Mama was smiling.
'Seriously, yes. But they marry earlier and earlier these days. What is the use of a degree, they ask me, when we cannot find a job after graduation?'
'At least somebody will take care of them when they marry.'
'I don't know who will take care of whom. Six girls in my first-year seminar class are married, their husbands visit in Mercedes and Lexus cars every weekend, their husbands buy them stereos and textbooks and refrigerators, and when they graduate, the husbands own them and their degrees. Don't you see?'
Mama shook her head. 'University talk again. A husband crowns a woman's life, Ifeoma. It is what they want.'
'It is what they think they want. But how can I blame them? Look what this military tyrant is doing to our country.' Aunty Ifeoma closed her eyes, in the way that people do when they want to remember something unpleasant. 'We have not had fuel for three months in Nsukka. I spent the night in the petrol station last week, waiting for fuel. And at the end, the fuel did not come. Some people left their cars in the station because they did not have enough fuel to drive back home. If you could see the mosquitoes that bit me that night, eh, the bumps on my skin were as big as cashew nuts.'
'Oh.' Mama shook her head sympathetically. 'How are things generally at the university, though?'
'We just called off yet another strike, even though no lecturer has been paid for the last two months. They tell us the Federal Government has no money.' Aunty Ifeoma chuckled with little humor. 'Ifukwa, people are leaving the country. Phillipa left two months ago. You remember my friend Phillipa?'
