It is 2024, nearly a year after Nigeria’s general elections, and the youths have finally taken over the government. Seven months after the presidential inauguration, the country hasn’t fared better. Every day, my husband and I watch the news. It is about the fundamental disagreements over new economic and foreign policies. For instance, my husband asserts the President’s impulsive action of closing the land borders to cut down imports and increase local production is great, but I think it’s futile.
It is a Monday evening in February. I’m on the Nsukka—Enugu, Chinese-built train heading home from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka Campus, where I had gone to submit yet another application for a teaching position. The air is hot. We have gone five months without rain. I’m fixated on the passing view outside the window: cashew trees, a community secondary school, farmlands, palm oil trees, mountains and hills, more farmlands, residential buildings, people, cars, a market, a Catholic Church, more cashew trees.
I can feel the vibrations of the train wheels throbbing on the tracks under my feet. The train, which did not exist one year ago, is quieter and emptier than it used to be. Maybe it’s because people have become accustomed to it. China funded and built all the trains in Nigeria today. I think the Chinese are going to run our rail transportation forever. My husband says we can pay them back, but I don’t think so.
On the train, there is a thin, nervous-looking young man with a sweaty face sitting across from me. He’s been staring at me. I glance at him now, and he waves at me.
“Hi,” he says.
Not wishing to converse with him, I ignore him and turn on my mobile data connection. An email from Fide Okolo, my former university classmate who is now a cabinet minister, lands in my inbox. For three months, I have been waiting for his email. Excited and a little nervous, I open the email and see that he is celebrating his birthday and wants me to be present at the party —which will happen two weeks from today at his official residence in Abuja. “Nice chance to meet up again after many years of no see and no talk,” he says in the email. “Look forward to seeing you.”
It has been eleven years since we separated from each other. Eleven years, and now we will get together again over a birthday party.
Home is about forty-five minutes away, so I spend the rest of the journey contemplating whether the invitation will impress my husband.
*
My husband is sitting at his desk, hunched over some primary school exam papers, when I get home. I tell him about the invitation. He looks away from the pile of papers on the desk to face me. He glares at me through his heavy spectacles, eyeballs magnified to the size of the entire lenses.
“I don’t understand,” he says, shaking his head. “You seriously want to travel to Abuja because of a birthday party?”
Because the man I married cannot easily be swayed and always demands concrete explanations for the choices I make, I try to persuade him of the possibilities that can result from honoring that invitation. Halfway through making my point, he cuts me short,
“I tell you, this whole thing makes no sense to me.”
My husband used to be a bank cashier until he was laid-off last year. Although he recently started teaching at a primary school, I think he plans to move us permanently to his hometown, Umutu—more than five hours away by road. He has told me about the twenty plots of fallow farmland his late father left him in the village and the prospect of going into agriculture. But following him to the village will make me a full-time housewife and crush my dreams. And I don’t want to settle down to that kind of life. My freelance writing job at an online local newspaper doesn’t pay much, but I like it because it allows me to occasionally rant about the state of the nation for my blog.
Anyway, I have acquired a master’s degree from Nsukka, and at thirty-two, it will be unfair for my husband to treat me like the little girls in his classroom.
So I ask him, “Why doesn’t it make sense? And why do you make it seem like I can’t tell right from left?”
“Please let me go back to my work, Adaobi,” he says. “We shouldn’t even be discussing this, I tell you.”
“Fide Okolo could ask me to assume a relevant position in his cabinet or recommend me for the teaching position at Nsukka,” I insist.
My husband shakes his head. “You don’t have to attend his party before he can offer you a job or recommend you for one. Simple!”
At this moment, I know my husband is trying to make me give up that invitation. But I’m determined to honor it. Not because I want to challenge him, and surely not because I care about Fide Okolo’s birthday party. I’m only concerned that by going to Abuja, doors will be opened up for me.
*
A week later, my husband is in our bedroom sorting through the wardrobe for his washing.
I lean on the doorpost and say, “Honey, I have to attend that party.”
He says nothing but continues sorting through his wardrobe. It is as if he is allowing what I have said to make sense to him before he can respond to me. Then he throws some clothes into the laundry bag and pauses. He turns to look at me.
“Why?” he asks.
It took quite some nerve to reach my decision. My husband, accustomed to my submission in every matter, must be finding this experience difficult.
“Why?” he asks again, his anxious brown eyes cutting through me, maybe trying to catch any suggestion of something worth more than just an invitation to a birthday party.
“Because I have to,” I say.
He walks to the window and turns around. “Tell me, what do you want from Fide Okolo exactly?”
How could I have failed to realize that my husband is implying that there is something dishonorable about my longing to go to Abuja? Is he supposing that I’m secretly in love with Fide Okolo?
“Look,” I say, “I don’t want you to think I have something shameful to do with Fide Okolo. For God’s sake, he was my classmate.”
“I don’t care under what circumstance you two may have known each other. But why can’t this classmate of yours simply make a call and put you in one strategic job? Do you have to spend a day in Abuja for this to happen? Please don’t argue with me, Adaobi, I tell you. I know what I’m saying.”
I should have guessed. I told my husband about Fide Okolo the day he was appointed a minister and that was only because Fide Okolo has been thrust into the limelight. Otherwise, I would not have mentioned to him that in my student days at Nsukka, Fide Okolo and I had been in a relationship, and I had broken up with him because he kept other girlfriends. Maybe that is why my husband is losing sleep over my desire to go to Abuja, but Fide Okolo and I haven’t seen each other since we completed our undergraduate studies. I remember calling Fide from Sapele, where I was doing my compulsory national youth service, to tell him about my plan to teach and establish myself at Nsukka. He told me he’d decided to move to Canada to pursue a career in information technology. While he later left Nigeria, I went back to Nsukka as a graduate student to boost my prospects of securing a teaching position.
Around that time, my husband was just an aspiring husband warding off the advances of other eager men. I was twenty-six; he was thirty-five. He was doing very well at his bank job. I was freelancing and blogging. He liked that I was trying to make a living for myself, he would tell me, but I shouldn’t trouble myself so much because he was capable of taking care of me. I found him interesting because he was so confident about life, as though he already had everything planned, and I was convinced that things would get better.
But I did not want to depend solely on his promises. I applied for a graduate teaching position at Nsukka and hoped for an invitation to teach. But Nsukka conspired against me—I was not invited to teach. Soon after we got married, he found me a job at an ice-cream parlor located close to his workplace, and the job was to sell off as many ice creams to children. He told me the pay was not very good but explained that chatting with children could make us have our own children. I didn’t like the job, but I took it because my husband asked me to take it. However, when the pay could no longer sustain me, I quit the job. From then, whenever I mentioned any job opportunity to my husband, he would ask me silly questions like,
“What do you even want a job for? Tell me, is it that I cannot take care of you?”
Now, as I still lean on the doorpost of our bedroom, it seems my husband is holding me back. But that is my husband for you. He will say please don’t argue with me, I tell you, I know what I’m saying, whenever we are having a fight and he wants me to give up.
“I understand what you’re saying,” I finally tell him. “But just let me go to Abuja.”
He shrugs, and it seems like the fight has ended, with him, for once, submitting to my wish.
*
Before noon on the day of the party, my husband offers to drive me to the train station to catch the afternoon train to Abuja. Despite this, I know that he still wants me to abort the journey.
I know because he tells me before starting the car that I should not feel as though he doesn’t want my progress. “I tell you, nobody is restraining you,” he says and then, after a pause, adds that he is sure, because he knows how these things go, that I’m only going there to waste my time. I know, too, because when I enquire then why he still seems pessimistic about the invitation, he ignores me, turns the key in the ignition, and the engine starts with a squeaky quiver. Even as our deadbeat Volvo runs down the meandering street leading to the main road, my husband still ignores me.
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