At the flat, Aunty Uju handed Ifemelu’s father a plastic bag swollen with cash. “It’s rent for two years, Brother,” she said, with an embarrassed casualness, and then made a joke about the hole in his singlet. She did not look him in the face as she spoke and he did not look her in the face as he thanked her.
THE GENERAL HAD yellowed eyes, which suggested to Ifemelu a malnourished childhood. His solid, thickset body spoke of fights that he had started and won, and the buckteeth that gaped through his lips made him seem vaguely dangerous. Ifemelu was surprised by the gleeful coarseness of him. “I’m a village man!” he said happily, as though to explain the drops of soup that landed on his shirt and on the table while he ate, or his loud burping afterwards. He arrived in the evenings, in his green uniform, holding a gossip magazine or two, while his ADC, at an obsequious pace behind him, brought his briefcase and put it on the dining table. He rarely left with the gossip magazines; copies of Vintage People and Prime People and Lagos Life littered Aunty Uju’s house, with their blurry photos and garish headlines.
“If I tell you what these people do, eh,” Aunty Uju would say to Ifemelu, tapping at a magazine photo with her French-manicured nail. “Their real stories are not even in the magazines. Oga has the real gist.” Then she would talk about the man who had sex with a top general to get an oil bloc, the military administrator whose children were fathered by somebody else, the foreign prostitutes flown in weekly for the Head of State. She repeated the stories with affectionate amusement, as though she thought The General’s keenness on raunchy gossip was a charming and forgivable indulgence. “Do you know he is afraid of injections? A whole General Officer Commanding and if he sees a needle, he is afraid!” Aunty Uju said, in the same tone. It was, to her, an endearing detail. Ifemelu could not think of The General as endearing, with his loud, boorish manner, the way he reached out to slap Aunty Uju’s backside as they went upstairs, saying, “All this for me? All this for me?” and the way he talked and talked, never acknowledging an interruption, until he finished a story. One of his favorites, which he often told Ifemelu, while drinking Star beer after dinner, was the story of how Aunty Uju was different. He told it with a self-congratulatory tone, as if her difference reflected his own good taste. “The first time I told her I was going to London and asked what she wanted, she gave me a list. Before I looked at it, I said I already know what she wants. Is it not perfume, shoes, bag, watch, and clothes? I know Lagos girls. But you know what was in it? One perfume and four books! I was shocked. Chai. I spent one good hour in that bookshop in Piccadilly. I bought her twenty books! Which Lagos babe do you know that will be asking for books?”
Aunty Uju would laugh, suddenly girlish and pliant. Ifemelu would smile dutifully. She thought it undignified and irresponsible, this old married man telling her stories; it was like showing her his unclean underwear. She tried to see him through Aunty Uju’s eyes, a man of wonders, a man of worldly excitements, but she could not. She recognized the lightness of being, the joyfulness that Aunty Uju had on weekdays; it was how she felt when she was looking forward to seeing Obinze after school. But it seemed wrong, a waste, that Aunty Uju should feel this for The General. Aunty Uju’s ex-boyfriend, Olujimi, was different, nice-looking and smooth-voiced; he glistened with a quiet polish. They had been together for most of university and when you saw them, you saw why they were together. “I outgrew him,” Aunty Uju said.
“Don’t you outgrow and move on to something better?” Ifemelu asked. And Aunty Uju laughed as though it was really a joke.
On the day of the coup, a close friend of The General’s called Aunty Uju to ask if she was with him. There was tension; some army officers had already been arrested. Aunty Uju was not with The General, did not know where he was, and she paced upstairs and then downstairs, worried, making phone calls that yielded nothing. Soon, she began to heave, struggling to breathe. Her panic had turned into an asthma attack. She was gasping, shaking, piercing her arm with a needle, trying to inject herself with medicine, drops of blood staining the bedcovers, until Ifemelu ran down the street to bang on the door of a neighbor whose sister was also a doctor. Finally, The General called to say that he was fine, the coup had failed and all was well with the Head of State; Aunty Uju’s trembling stopped.
ON A MUSLIM HOLIDAY, one of those two-day holidays when non-Muslims in Lagos said “Happy Sallah” to whoever they assumed to be a Muslim, often gatemen from the north, and NTA showed footage after footage of men slaughtering rams, The General promised to visit; it would be the first time he spent a public holiday with Aunty Uju. She was in the kitchen the entire morning supervising Chikodili, singing loudly from time to time, being a little too familiar with Chikodili, a little too quick to laugh with her. Finally, the cooking done and the house smelling of spices and sauces, Aunty Uju went upstairs to shower.
“Ifem, please come and help me trim my hair down there. Oga said it disturbs him!” Aunty Uju said, laughing, and then lay on her back, legs spread and held high, an old gossip magazine beneath her, while Ifemelu worked with a shaving stick. Ifemelu had finished and Aunty Uju was coating an exfoliating mask on her face when The General called to say he could no longer come. Aunty Uju, her face ghoulish, covered in chalk-white paste except for the circles of skin around her eyes, hung up and walked into the kitchen and began to put the food in plastic containers for the freezer. Chikodili looked on in confusion. Aunty Uju worked feverishly, jerking the freezer compartment, slamming the cupboard, and as she pushed back the pot of jollof rice, the pot of egusi soup fell off the cooker. Aunty Uju stared at the yellowish-green sauce spreading across the kitchen floor as though she did not know how it had happened. She turned to Chikodili and screamed, “Why are you looking like a mumu? Come on, clean it up!”
Ifemelu was watching from the kitchen entrance. “Aunty, the person you should be shouting at is The General.”
Aunty Uju stopped, her eyes bulging and enraged. “Is it me you are talking to like that? Am I your agemate?”
Aunty Uju charged at her. Ifemelu had not expected Aunty Uju to hit her, yet when the slap landed on the side of her face, making a sound that seemed to her to come from far away, finger-shaped welts rising on her cheek, she was not surprised. They stared at each other. Aunty Uju opened her mouth as though to say something and then she closed it and turned and walked upstairs, both of them aware that something between them was now different. Aunty Uju did not come downstairs until evening, when Adesuwa and Uche came to visit. She called them “my friends in quotes.” “I’m going to the salon with my friends in quotes,” she would say, a wan laughter in her eyes. She knew they were her friends only because she was The General’s mistress. But they amused her. They visited her insistently, comparing notes on shopping and travel, asking her to go to parties with them. It was strange what she knew and did not know about them, she once told Ifemelu. She knew that Adesuwa owned land in Abuja, given to her when she dated the Head of State, and that a famously wealthy Hausa man had bought Uche’s boutique in Surulere, but she did not know how many siblings either of them had or where their parents lived or whether they had gone to university.
Chikodili let them in. They wore embroidered caftans and spicy perfume, their Chinese weaves hanging down to their backs, their conversation lined with a hard-edged worldliness, their laughter short and scornful. I told him he must buy it in my name o. Ah, I knew he would not bring the money unless I said somebody was sick. No now, he doesn’t know I opened the account. They were going to a Sallah party in Victoria Island and had come to take Aunty Uju.
“I don’t feel like going,” Aunty Uju told them, while Chikodili served orange juice, a carton on a tray, two glasses placed beside it.
“Ahn-ahn. Why now?” Uche asked.
“Serious big men are coming,” Adesuwa said. “You never know if you will meet somebody.”
“I don’t want to meet anybody,” Aunty Uju said, and there was quiet, as though each of them had to catch their breath, Aunty Uju’s words a gale that tore through their assumptions. She was supposed to want to meet men, to keep her eyes open; she was supposed to see The General as an option that could be bettered. Finally, one of them, Adesuwa or Uche, said, “This your orange juice is the cheap brand o! You don’t buy Just Juice anymore?” A lukewarm joke, but they laughed to ease the moment away.
After they left, Aunty Uju came over to the dining table, where Ifemelu sat reading.
“Ifem, I don’t know what got into me. Ndo.” She held Ifemelu’s wrist, then ran her hand, almost meditatively, over the embossed title of Ifemelu’s Sidney Sheldon novel. “I must be mad. He has a beer belly and Dracula teeth and a wife and children and he’s old.”
For the first time, Ifemelu felt older than Aunty Uju, wiser and stronger than Aunty Uju, and she wished that she could wrest Aunty Uju away, shake her into a clear-eyed self, who would not lay her hopes on The General, slaving and shaving for him, always eager to fade his flaws. It was not as it should be. Ifemelu felt a small gratification to hear, later, Aunty Uju shouting on the phone. “Nonsense! You knew you were going to Abuja from the beginning so why let me waste my time preparing for you!”