I remember how I stood and waited in front of the wooden desk while the nurse searched through the drawers for my records. Ah, yes, she said presently, pulling a brown envelope from among many others. She bent her head to read what was written there.
‘Tubal ligation.’ I didn’t even know what the words meant.
‘Your tubes have been tied. So you won’t have any more children. It says here you have six already.’ She pointed at the words on the paper. Six! The way she said it sounded like an accusation.
While I listened to flute music in my dreams, while they pulled the dead baby out. This is what they had done to me.
Oh, I know what you would have done in my place. You would have talked about rights and consent: small words with big meanings. But I did not know how to think that way. I did not even insist she call the doctor for me. I asked no questions. I nodded as though I knew this already, accepting her words. I turned around and went home. Who was I to argue? In my mind I thought the doctor, whose qualifications hung on the wall behind polished glass, must have known better than me.
I told myself I still had three children. I had Okurgba, my youngest. And when I told my husband, no more children, I was thinking that perhaps then he might leave me alone.
And so my life continued. It was not the life I had chosen for myself, not the life that should have been mine. But I lived it anyway.
One day I saw the woman who had my life. She passed me, followed by a servant girl carrying a stack of differently coloured cloths. She did not recognise me. Why should she? She didn’t know I existed or that I had once been betrothed to her husband. I followed her to the tailor’s shop where I watched the owner jump up from her seat to greet her. I stood in the shadows of the entrance, next to a pile of offcuts. I bowed my head and pretended to search among the scraps. But I need not have worried, for nobody came to serve me.
I watched how they attended to her, flattering, praising her taste, holding samples of embroidery under her chin. She ordered maybe six or seven gowns, I never heard the cost discussed once.
Above me a shelf held stacks of coloured threads. Music from a plastic radio buzzed like a swarm of bees around my head. The sound of the treadles drummed in my ears. I wanted to knock the radio and spools from the shelf, upturn the Singer sewing machines, tear up the paper patterns. I wanted to run away as far as I could. But I did none of these things.
Instead I watched this woman through the half-light of the tailor’s shop. This woman living the life I should have lived. I knew I was no beauty. But I was prettier than this one. Maybe you wouldn’t believe it to look at me now? But then I possessed a complexion so fresh and smooth that even a fingerprint showed upon it. I had dimples high in my cheeks, and above my elbows, in the hollow of my back above each buttock. My waist was slim, my back curved just the right amount. By contrast this woman was as black and shapeless as a midday shadow.
On her way out she passed close by me. I turned away, but still I smelled her. Cloying and sickly. I almost choked on the odour. Vanilla.
You know what people here sometimes say, that death makes saints of us all. I was thinking about that only the other day. After my mother died suddenly all her co-wives who had thought of nothing but how to usurp her began to say what a sweet tempered person she was, how kind, how generous.
When somebody dies, look at how all the women go to sit for hours in the family’s front room, offering words of comfort when only the day before they bad-mouthed the lot of them. Look at the men giving money to the widows, even though they spent the last year trying to put this same man out of business. Today everybody will tell you what a good man your grandfather was. How wise, how honest. But there was a time when these people turned on us and drove us from our home. And now they pretend as if it never happened.
Of course nobody likes to speak of that time now. What’s past is past, they say. Too quickly. Wanting to shut you up. Well let them try now. Because now you are here, you want to know. And now I will tell you.
It was soon after I stopped working for the European, Mr Blue.
On that morning I woke up to the sound of singing. Not the joyful sound of a wedding party. No, something angry in the distance. I stepped out of the door of our house. All around me were people running, throwing sand on the cooking fires, slamming shutters. A child was standing by the well, wailing at all the uproar. A woman ran and grasped her by the arm, dragging her along the ground, causing the child to cry even louder. She pushed the child inside the door of her house and ran off in search of her other children.
The wind was blowing in great gusts that day. It raced through the village like an omen: whipping up whorls of red dust, scattering the grain drying in the sun, rolling balls of chicken feathers down the street.
Inside the big house Ya Namina was shouting orders to the servants. One of my small brothers stood at the open back door. My father pushed a box into his hands. The box was wrapped in tattered cloths, so I knew it must be very ancient. Out of the back of the house, I watched my brother dart into fields, his legs spinning like wheels. Then suddenly he tripped. I caught my breath as I watched him stumble for a few paces until he righted himself. My father looked around, saw me standing there.
‘Hawa, go with him. Help him! Run! Run!’
Out of the open door, through the banana groves, into the dappled shadows of the trees. I ran silently, not daring to shout to my brother. Just past the silk cotton tree, I caught him up. For a few seconds we ran abreast, like a pair of panicked animals. Then we turned off the path, out of sight, and dropped to the ground.
We waited. Catching our breath again. Then we climbed up to our old lookout at the top of the sapele tree from where we could see the houses. From there we watched the people marching through the village, up to our compound and the steps of my father’s house. The wind picked up their voices and threw them like echoes across the treetops. To this day I remember the words:
‘We have spoken. Who so denies us, he is lost.’
Then the singing turned into shouting, the shouting into a great howling. The wind joined in, shaking the branches of the tree, threatening to send us hurtling to the ground. We were frightened and slid back down the tree trunk to the forest floor.
Later in the day we waited with our backs against the tree. My brother complained he was hungry, but I did not have time for that kind of talk. I told him to dig the crickets out of their holes in the earth. He wandered around scratching at the ground and came back with a bundle wrapped up in his shirt. But we were too afraid to light a fire to roast them and so we waited with hunger growing in our bellies until we ate them raw and fell asleep.
Sometime in the night I woke abruptly. Somebody close by. I held my breath. A pangolin was watching us from a short distance away, weaving her head from side to side. Her den must have been close by. I sat up, the pangolin backed off. I could hear the caw of night birds. The air carried the smell of night blooms and rotting leaves. Somewhere close by a pod fell off a tree and split open, scattering seeds with giant-sized sounds, causing me to start. The fear settled in my bowels. I stood up, walked some small distance, propelled into the darkness by a sudden urgency.
How I wished to be at home! Safely asleep on my bed. How long we were supposed to stay out there in the forest, I had no idea.
Without realising it I was heading in the direction of the houses. Suddenly I heard voices, fleeing footfalls in the darkness. I pressed my back against a tree. The blood rushed around my head. I stood still, listening to the thud of my own heart, like the beating of a thousand bats’ wings. I pushed the heel of my hand against my chest to still the sound.