They were having dinner the following week, on Good Friday, when things started to go wrong. Tobe had just finished eating his onugbu soup and fufu when the telephone rang. Ogadinma went to answer it. The frantic voice at the other end said he wanted to speak with Tobe, and when he took the phone, he sat first, listening to the voice, and then he jerked to his feet and shouted, ‘God forbid it! What are you telling me, Ofoma? What kind of nonsense are you telling me?’ He dropped the phone and rushed out of the parlour. Ogadinma watched him. She knew that something bad had happened and that it had something to do with Ifeanyi. She wanted to go to Tobe and ask what it was, but she could not. She was too frightened to go to him. She could hear him shuffling in the room, pulling open cupboards, grabbing his car keys, and when he emerged, he dashed out of the door and didn’t even look in her direction. And when he returned an hour later, he did not respond to her greeting. He went into the parlour and sat down.
She stood by the door for a while, wringing her hands. When she entered the room later, she found him crumpled on his favourite seat, dolefully staring at the TV. She sat next to him and felt the urge to do things with her hands, to smooth her skirt, to reach out and scratch her suddenly itching back, to hold him. She wanted to do something but did not know what to do because he seemed impenetrable, his face crumpled into folds of tensed lines. And that was what terrified her: the angry set of his face.
‘What happened, Di m?’ she finally asked him.
He stared at her. For a long time he just looked at her. It didn’t seem like he was going to answer her question, and she felt fear, like hot pins, stinging the back of her eyes, clamping its fingers around her throat. She did not know what he was thinking, why he was looking at her like that, if what happened had something to do with her. She had begun to rearrange herself on her seat, shifting and smoothing her dress nervously, when he eventually spoke.
‘Why have things been going wrong since we married?’ he asked.
She opened and closed her mouth, and felt something wither insider her. ‘I don’t understand what you mean, my husband.’
‘Ifeanyi has ruined me,’ he said.
Ha! she thought, she was right about Ifeanyi after all. But she could not say this to Tobe, and besides, it was the worst time to say such a thing to anyone.
A nerve pulsed by the side of his head. And then, he began to laugh, like one who was on the verge of losing his mind. ‘I emptied my bank account and he fled with my money, his brother’s money, and even what he borrowed from his bank. I hear he ran to Germany.’
The room had grown chilly, her skin flushed with bumps. She threw her arms around him; she did not know what else to do. He sat stiffly at first, and then he held her. They stayed that way for a long time, the warmth sifting from the thin fabric of his t-shirt, shielding her from the cold.
‘Why is this happening to me?’ he muttered, almost to himself.
‘Don’t give up, my husband,’ she said.
He slipped away from her embrace. The lights went off at that time and she went to get the kerosene lamp. When she returned, he sat crumpled on his seat, his head buried in his hands. He looked like a sack of stringy clothes. Tobe, whose boxy shoulders swallowed her frame when he hugged her, now looked like a tired bag of skin and bones sinking into a corner of the sofa.
‘God, why is this happening to me?’ he muttered into his hands. ‘Why must everything crumble again after everything I went through, why?’
Ogadinma went and sat beside him. What was a wife supposed to do at such a time? Pray? Hold him and weep and everything would magically be all right? She reached for his hand; it lay limp in hers. He did not want the touch of her skin. He stood up and went into his room. She heard the click of the door and knew he wanted to be alone by himself.
She went into her room and crawled under her sheet, listened for his sounds, but the sturdy wall separating their rooms was unyielding. Later, he opened the door and went into the parlour. The lights had returned, and her room was brightly lit. She sat up. She hoped he would come over and they would hold and comfort each other. She hoped the telephone would ring and he would get a call saying Ifeanyi had been caught and his money retrieved. She waited for the miracle to happen, just one miracle, but the only thing that came were his cries. Deep, rumbling sobs that didn’t stop, that seemed to shake his whole body, that seemed to shake the very foundations of the house. He did not stop crying, and she tried not to imagine him crouching on the floor of the parlour, his arms wrapped around his midsection as his heart broke. She did not think of her own eyes that had filled with tears. Instead she pulled the sheets over her head and willed for sleep to come.
In the following days, Tobe spent most of his time at home. He would wake up in the morning and loiter from room to room, or he would stay in bed until past ten in the morning before he showered and left.
Food began to disappear from the cupboard. He left little money on the table, amounts that were never enough to make a full breakfast. And so, she began to substitute iced fish for meat, and tin tomatoes for the fresh, expensive ones. She bought cups of local rice instead of foreign rice, and she would pour the grains onto a tray, set it on her lap and pick out stones. The cooked rice was always too puffy and stuck to the stew like fufu to soup.
But Ogadinma did not yield to despair, not even when Tobe gradually became verbally abusive. He found every excuse to complain about the things she did, the ones she did not do well. ‘Does it mean that you can’t properly scrub the floors? Just negodinụ everywhere, see how dusty this passageway is and you said you scrubbed it?’ he said one morning. ‘Are you sure you sucked your mother’s breasts well? Nekwa anya, you have to be smart because this nonsense you are doing is itching my body.’
Ogadinma watched the wall gecko run across the wall. A wasp flew in from the door leading to the back of their flat. ‘I will clean the floors again, my husband,’ she said, slowly. She did not look at Tobe when she said this, because she feared that it would anger him further.
Lunch that day was local rice and fish stew. The stew was watery, and the fish sliced so thinly it was the size of her two fingers pressed together. Tobe gaped at the helping in his bowl. She scooped the stew onto her rice, eating silently. She was certain that the fish tasted good, but Tobe was glaring down at it.
‘What is this nonsense?’ he asked.
She did not need to look at the bowl because she was eating the same thing, but she looked. ‘Rice and fish stew,’ she said.
Tobe was staring pointedly at her, then he scooped a portion of the stew, lifted the spoon higher above the bowl and tipped it, so that the stew trickled down, like red water speckled with bits of pepper and onions, into the bowl. ‘So, this is how your people taught you how to make stew, eh?’ He scooped the stew again, raised the spoon and let it drip. It spattered on the edge of the bowl, on the table, on his white shirt, on his trousers. A bad sign.
Fear clutched around her ankles and wrists and made her hands shake. She could sense the rage building inside him, turning his eyes dark, but she didn’t know what he was going to do to her. It would be better if she saw him draw up his fists, at least that way she would know to shield her face with her arms, and if she fell, she would curl into a tight ball and protect her baby. She was reaching for a table towel when he slapped the bowl with the back of his hand, like a bat to a tennis ball, and the bowl flew off the table, towards her; the stew spilled from the bowl and hit her smack on the chest. Hot, spicy stew splashed on her body, on her face, and even jumped into her eyes, before the bowl clattered to the floor and cracked. She screamed and jumped off her seat, grabbing her face, her eyes. She was temporarily blind and as she made to rush into the bathroom, to get some water to soothe her eyes and chest, she ran into the door and bumped her head against the wall. Excruciating pain rose in swift courses around her head. Her eyes were on fire. Her chest was burning. She found her way into the bathroom and sank her head into the bucket of water. When she stood up again, she still felt the unbearable needles of pain pricking her eyes, like grits of sand rubbing against her tender eyeballs. She was sobbing, throaty cries that shook her body. She walked blindly into the kitchen and reached for the salt shaker. She thought of her father and how he would make her lick a pinch of salt whenever pepper got into her eyes. It didn’t take all the pain away, but the burning sensation on her tongue took away the irritation in her eyes.
When she returned to the parlour, Tobe was glaring at the news report on TV, the picture grainy as though it was filmed under a heavy rainfall. She wished he would turn around and look at her, so he could see how red her eyes were, how the area around her eyes was swollen. But he did not look, not even when she lingered cleaning the table, the carpet. She hovered by him.
‘Let me make you some garri and egusi soup,’ she said. ‘We still have some soup left and it is very fresh.’
He ignored her and went over to the telephone. ‘Sister? Have you finished cooking?’ Tobe said into the mouthpiece. ‘No, I haven’t eaten since morning. I don’t know the nonsense this idiot cooked today.’ He glared in her direction and she bowed her head, and silently left.
Aunty Ngozi came later, clutching two large flasks. She was dressed in a yellow sequinned wrapper over a white lace blouse with puffy sleeves, and a gold ichafu wrapped in layers atop her head. She had just returned from church. She pulled Ogadinma to the kitchen after she had served Tobe the ofe akwu and white rice she had brought.
‘Nne, what happened?’ she asked, her voice quavering with concern. ‘Why didn’t you give your husband food?’
Words frothed in Ogadinma’s chest, her throat was squeezing and when she opened her mouth to speak, the first thing that surged out of her mouth were choking sobs.
Aunty Ngozi held her, saying, ‘O zugo, stop crying. Your husband is going through the most difficult moment.’
Ogadinma swiped at her face, breathing fast. ‘He threw a bowl of hot stew at me.’
Aunty Ngozi blanched, then mellowed. ‘He has lost everything again. So, don’t be upset that he takes out his frustrations on you; that is the burden we women have to bear, you hear me?’
‘So, I must continue to endure this abuse even though I am pregnant with our child?’ She sniffed into the hem of her dress.
Aunty Ngozi held her, whispering familiar things about endurance and forgiveness, and Ogadinma muttered an excuse and returned to her room.
She crawled into bed, her mind muddled by grief, and for a long time ‘this idiot’ played across her mind, formed a loop and haunted her. If anyone had told her that there would come a time when Tobe would assault her so viciously and dismiss her as an idiot, she would have said they were high on cheap drugs.
And in the following days, she woke each morning, frightened by the mere presence of Tobe. Fear calcified in her stomach and, like a stone, it jumped each time his eyes met hers, each time he opened his mouth to speak. She looked out of the window often and wondered why people still laughed. Sometimes, after Tobe had left in the morning, the thought of running away would come to her mind, but her knees melted as the thought flashed by, because she knew, even her body knew, that she could never run; there was no place to run to, there was no one to run to. She knew that even if she ran to her father, he would always bring her back to Tobe.