WRECKED
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She had wanted something, and she had set out to get it, clear of her purpose and sure in her actions. But it had gotten confused in the way people live, in the way the heart attracts and repels the things it wants and fears. Her own heart had gone out in directions she never imagined, her hopes had become pinned to the things she would never have allowed.
She wore the blue dress she had been wearing on the day Kuku died. Kuku was dead. A whole life was dead to her.
She had no idea how things would turn out. Jubril had not spoken to her since the burial, and she had not interfered with his profound grief. They ate together on the long table, but there was no discussion, no argument, no sumptuous feast of esh in the dark, no matter how forced it was. She had formed the habit of retiring to her room to weep in private for all she lost.
She was afraid. Afraid for her girls. Afraid for the rest of her life. When Jubril disposed of her, as she supposed he would, she would have nowhere to go, her girls would be back to the society that had turned its back on them. And as much as she loved her girls she didn't want to end up like them. She didn't even want to end up like Kuku, dying alone in the kitchen, remembering how nice it had once been, glad to have the burden of an exhausting life lifted from her, abandoned even by the angels and laughing at the death squeezing her with cold fingers by the throat. Her whole world, what was left of it, was here, and there was no way to get back to where she had been before.
It was obviously over with Jubril, Kuku had seen to that, her last act of human cruelty. There was no way to judge what the depth of his sorrow would drive him to do and she stood, knowing she had done him wrong as a wife but unable to imagine the consequences. He couldn't stay silent. The truth about their marriage was too blatant to ignore, and he had been through it before. Perhaps it was simple weariness that had kept him from striking her all those times.
She had something she wanted to say to him, not about the life which was growing inside her, stronger and stronger every day, but about the virtues of his heart, about the years he had waited in patient humiliation for a wife that would bring him happiness and been horribly deceived. There was no apology she could make; her frigidity had surprised her as well.
She didn't know where he was in the house. She hadn't seen him since lunch. He retired to his study or to his bedroom, and she had no way of knowing what he did or what he thought about. His silence was suffocating to her, his distance unbearable. She would die for him if her death would do him any good. But it wouldn't do anything except to add to the anguish of events that he had never anticipated.
She had never before had anything to hold on to, nothing to root her to a place or a time, not until Jubril. And she had brought sadness to him, in the belief that nothing mattered, that no moment had consequences beyond the moment itself. She had agreed to marry him without realizing that marriage brought a kind of simple pleasure, a pleasure in the continued company of another human being, the act of caring, of carrying with you the thought of someone else. She would, she supposed, never see him age beyond the present day, and found that the thought made her immeasurably sad.
Somewhere, for those other people she so often thought about, for her girls, there was the comfort of continuance and of habit. She realized it wasn't easy. Even now in the country, the madness of the time would not leave people untouched. Throughout her life, people came and went, some amusing, most not, but their leaving was no more surprising to her than their coming. Jubril had arrived, and leaving him now would be the end of comfort for Anaya.
She didn't know what to do to her hands. She wasn't cold, and the house looked warm as the lights began to come on, Eni moving slowly from room to room. For the young girl, life went on, the house was well run, dinners were made, lights got turned on and that was the way she got from one day to the next.
It was almost dark, and the darkest owers vanished into the twilight, even as the palest roses seemed to give out a richer fragrance. The first star appeared above the brick wall.
The star brightened and was joined by the other paler stars as the dark deepened into the night. She heard her name and turned toward the golden brightness of the house.
"Anaya."
She turned and Jubril was standing on the steps. He wore the black shirt he had worn to the funeral. She turned away, her long bubu sweeping the ground.
"Anaya." She turned to him again, afraid of him for the first time, afraid of his anger and his pain and his disapproval, and afraid also, of her own shame.
"Don't leave." His voice was clear in the darkness, his body a silhouette, his face lost in the shadow. "I don't want you to leave me."
"You don't?"
"I don't."
Anaya stared at him. How could he forgive so much? How could he be so patient? So much depended on her now, on her answer, and she tried to wait as long as she could.
"I'm going to have a baby."
He stood for a long time, until she shivered with the sudden cold.
"We're going to have a child," she rephrased.
In the darkness, she could see just enough to know the stillness in his tired face. He reached out his arm toward her. The lights shone bright from the house. "Well then," he said. "Well then. You'd better come into the house."
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She took one last look around. The air had turned suddenly cold, but it was a good kind of cold, without threat. Things wait, she thought. Not everything dies. Living takes time. She walked towards the beautiful house and took his outstretched hand in her own. Such things happen.
Chapter end
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