“I hate this place,” Binyere said. “It smells too much of antiseptics and medicines. The lighting is intense, and I always feel either too hot or too cold—no in-between.” She wanted to add that the white blanket scratched her skin. The pillow suffocated her at night. The bed was too narrow. But she swallowed the words, afraid that if she complained too much, Evelyn would give her that look that was simultaneously benign and dispassionate, the look she reserved for when someone—mostly Binyere—made a stupid joke.

“It’s not that bad,” Evelyn said. She was seated on a stool beside the bed, peeling a tangerine. Her nails, polished pink, expertly separated skin from fruit. Her tongue peeked out slightly between her lips, the way it usually did when she was focused on something.

It was one of the few days Evelyn came to see her at noon and stayed until mid-afternoon. Evelyn’s gray blouse was still damp around the armpits and under her breasts. When she’d swept into the ward earlier, three bags in one hand, the other hand fanning herself, and beads of sweat running down her face and neck, she stood in front of the air conditioning unit for six minutes. “It’s blazing out there. It’s not supposed to be this hot yet,” she’d puffed.

They had lunch together, spicy jollof macaroni with recooked chicken that still carried the faint taste of five-spice and white pepper. Evelyn often bought cooked meat from restaurants—roast beef, fried chicken, roast duck, braised chicken—and recooked them, either frying them again or attempting to boil the spices out of them before using them in her stews and sauces. The meat sometimes ended up disintegrating completely in the sauce, but not in a way that made it unpleasant.

“Three weeks now, but I can’t get used to being here. It’s hard not to feel miserable lying here all day.” Binyere adjusted herself on the bed. Her lower back continued to hurt no matter what position she lay in; the ache spread to her pelvic bone if she sat up for too long. “It makes me think, too, about my grandmother. She died nine years ago.”

“You’ve told me before.” The roll of her eyes was audible in Evelyn’s voice.

Binyere wasn’t sure why she felt the need to tell Evelyn the story again. She wanted to keep talking, to hold her friend’s ear, like a neglected lover seeking attention. If Evelyn got bored, if Binyere didn’t give her something else to focus on, she would start to brood over her scholarship application that had fallen through. Her mood would get bitter. She would snap at Binyere for complaining when she really had nothing to complain about. So, she related the story again, her voice raised to a prim falsetto, injecting a fervor she did not feel. “She was always sickly, even before I was born. Every time we traveled to the village the person who prepared her food had to tuck drugs into the fufu. Her fufu was made with unripe plantains instead of cassava or yam. I tasted it once. It tasted like papier mache.

“Our parents made me and my cousins eat with her on the veranda so she wouldn’t feel lonely. She talked a lot, mostly about people we didn’t know, and she complained that we only visited during Christmas and Easter. Ezinne, one of my cousins, often took meat from her plate when she wasn’t paying attention. After she finished her food, we were always in a hurry to leave. No one liked to stay around.”

The hospital, with its chalky white walls and immaculate floors, smelled very different from her late grandma’s veranda, but both places made Binyere think of urine and vomit. She paused to eat the half of a perfectly peeled tangerine that Evelyn handed her. Evelyn peeled tangerines and oranges down to the last bit of pith. She detested the skin of fruits, even mango, which was tastier with its skin. Most recently, she had taken to peeling apples because one of her course mates had told her they carried remnants of preservative chemicals.

Binyere scrunched up her face after eating a segment “Where did you buy them from? This is so dry and unsweet.”

“There’s a woman selling fruits at the entrance. She promised they were going to be juicy. Maybe it’s just this one,” Evelyn said through a mouthful of tangerine. She reached for another one from the plastic bag on the white cabinet beside the bed. The top of the cabinet was a mess of empty bottles of vitamin drinks, a water flask, an electric kettle, used and unused tissues, wraps of Snickers, and a vase of wilting flowers. It reminded Binyere of Evelyn’s room in the dormitory. She could easily clean it up, as she did whenever she went to Evelyn’s room, but for once, she appreciated the mess, regularly looking at it to assure herself that Evelyn had visited and would still visit.

Evelyn motioned at her. “Continue.”

Binyere finished the tangerine in her hand. “My younger brother was frequently knocked on the head for asking when she was going to die. But I think that secretly, most of them wanted her to die—my father and his siblings. They argued over whose child should stay in the village to take care of her, who would pay for her medications, and who would foot the bill when she had to be admitted to the hospital. They brought a girl from grandma’s maternal side; then they argued about who would sponsor her education.”

Her neighbor groaned noisily in her sleep. Binyere waited until she quieted to continue. “When the girl started running away, they argued about whose house grandma would live in. She was in Onitsha with Uncle Naeto for two months, stayed in Aunty Njideka’s house for ten weeks, and in ours for eleven days. She kept complaining about the weather—you know how cold Jos can get. My parents sent her back to the village. They employed another boy to take care of her.”

Binyere started to cough; a tiny seed had lodged in her throat. Evelyn handed her the water flask. “You shouldn’t talk too much.”

After she washed down the seed, Binyere laid back on the bed and closed her eyes. But she continued to think about her grandma. The whole family had returned for her funeral, held during the Easter period. Even Uncle Osita came from Switzerland, bringing his wife and three children home for the first time. He had given each family a pack of Swiss Miss, which Binyere’s mother said contained more sugar than actual cocoa. The month following the burial, Uncle Naeto demolished the rundown village house and built the three-story mansion that now stood in its place.

When she thought about the burial, she often recalled the many exciting things that had happened, like how she lost her virginity to Chijioke, Uncle Naeto’s godson/apprentice; how her older cousins deemed her old enough to hang with them and she smoked weed, drank vodka, and played truth-or-dare; how she squeezed in between her female cousins at night and listened to them gossip about boys; how on Easter Sunday, she stumbled around, to church and to visit distant relatives, in a pair of bulky, red wedge shoes. It was the most fun she had ever had on her family’s biannual trips to the village.

Recently, though, she thought more about her grandma before her death. Her frailty had made her reliant on others to bathe and use the toilet; she peed on herself when there was no one to help her to the toilet. Eating became a chore, accompanied by a paid stranger who looked on with a sneer when food slipped out of her mouth. She mixed up the names of her children and grandchildren and forgot she had great-grandchildren, mistaking them for the two children she had lost in childbirth. She was a prisoner to her small, musty room, also home to well-fed rats and cockroaches that skittered through trunks of molt-ridden wrappers and cartons of old books, cassettes, and newspapers.

Binyere wondered if her grandma had felt as she did now. She might have felt worse, being passed between her children like a sack of unwanted clothes. With her admission to the hospital came a crushing feeling of helplessness that didn’t dim even as the pain in her abdomen ebbed. She watched Evelyn closely for any sign of discomfort or impatience. She worried that her best friend would soon grow weary of coming to visit her every day. So, she keenly asked, “Will you come tomorrow?” every time Evelyn told her she was leaving and bit her lips when Evelyn shrugged and said, “Maybe.” And while Evelyn had not missed a day since three weeks ago, she spent her nights and most of her days in trepidation, waiting, eyes locked on the door, for Evelyn to sweep into the ward, sweating profusely and clutching a bag of small, yellow tangerines.

*

Evelyn was gone when Binyere woke up. She lingered on the bed, waiting for the angst in her gut to ease before getting out. She always felt a moment of disorientation each time she woke up, struggling to remember where she was. And when she did, she felt an acute sense of isolation; she was in a foreign country, surrounded by doctors and nurses who spoke a different language. Binyere couldn’t give voice to the loneliness she felt waking up in the ward—a loneliness that not even Evelyn’s daily visits or the prayers of the church group could douse. It gnawed at her every morning through the awkward, stilted conversations with the doctors. It wound itself around her neck at night, suffocating her, so that when she woke, her throat felt dry, as though someone had tried to strangle her. It would have been a lonely way to die—away from home, surrounded by people who thought she was peculiar.

It was a different kind of loneliness than what she had felt when she first arrived six months ago. Then, on one of those nights that Binyere knocked on her door at two a.m., Evelyn had told her that the feeling would disappear after a few months. True, the loneliness had dimmed, only returning in short, sudden bursts that went away as quickly as they had come. Yet, even then, she could easily take the elevator to Evelyn’s room, two floors above hers, knowing that Evelyn wouldn’t mind sharing her narrow bed with her, also knowing that Evelyn wouldn’t mind being dragged out for a late-night walk because the pale blue dormitory walls were closing in on her. In the cold hospital ward, surrounded by genial yet alien faces, Binyere’s breath sometimes caught in her throat, heavily shrouded in the feeling of alienation.

She was presently alone in the ward built to accommodate six patients; there were three patients, including her, currently admitted to the ward. Outside, the sky had begun to darken. Soon, a nurse would come in to pull the gray-white curtains shut and change the ambiance of the fluorescent lights. She moved with the IV drip to the adjoining bathroom, mechanically small and sterile, to relieve herself. After that, she leaned on the door to the ward, waiting for the prickly, numb sensation in her calves to subside. The air in the hospital was usually different around this time. Its corridors were more crowded and boisterous. The sounds of machines beeping, the unmistakable hurried steps of nurses and doctors, and the alarms that rang at intervals were muted under the sounds of visitors exchanging pleasantries, their children still buzzing from the excitement of a school day, and the distant cry of a roadside vendor selling rat control medicine.

Most people, like the two men now passing in front of her wearing matching brown jackets and clutching distinctive red gift bags that probably contained health supplements, liked to peer into the wards as they passed by. Binyere guessed that they had come to visit a co-worker or a distant friend. They didn’t carry the tight expression of people who had to worry about hospital bills or a loved one still in a coma. They raised their hands in greeting when she met their eyes. She smiled in return. They kept turning their heads to look back at her until they disappeared into another corridor. The curiosity on their faces was familiar. When they saw her, some of the visitors and patients took time from their private worries for some curiosity over the foreigner in hospital garb. Sometimes children clutching their parents’ hands pointed at her and squealed some words. She had heard the words repeated enough times to translate what they said into “Look, an African” or “Ma, a foreigner.” And when she was in a good mood, she would say, “Hi, how are you?” to children bold enough to wave at her. Binyere imagined that she would grace the stories that they would later tell their family and friends; they could talk about her bright red braids reaching down to her buttocks or wonder which African country she came from. The attention unnerved her, but it gave her something else to dwell on. It was a brief escape from her circumstantial isolation.

She sat on the blue plastic bench in front of the ward. There was one like that in front of the other wards. Once, Binyere saw a woman come out of a ward laughing loudly, and after closing the door, she slumped down on the bench, her shoulders heaving. She cried silently, cupping her face in both hands. After some minutes, she wiped her face with the bright-blue shawl around her shoulders and reapplied pale pink lipstick to her thin lips. When she stood up, she stumbled and had to clutch the arm of the bench. Another time, a man sat staring into space for a long time, only coming out of his reverie when someone from the ward called for him. She often wondered if Evelyn had ever sat in the same way they did, staring and sighing into space, before entering the ward with her wide, gap-toothed smile.

Her neighbor returned to the ward with her daughter, Nanyue, who stopped to chat with Binyere. Nanyue was a petite woman with fine, thin hair always tied in a low ponytail. She wore braces and covered her mouth when she talked, ate, or laughed. She snorted when she found something incredulous, like when Evelyn explained how they had to renew their student visas every year. At first, Binyere suspected that Nanyue only talked to her and Evelyn to practice her English since she was going to take IELTS in August. But even then, she didn’t mind. The first time they met, Nanyue gave her a broad, sisterly smile and offered her strawberries, even before knowing her name. The same way Binyere had walked up to Evelyn years ago, asked her, “You’re also here for Ling 101?” and offered her one of the two egg rolls she had bought at Bamboo.

Binyere envied her Chinese neighbors for having a steady stream of visitors. They received visits from close and distant relatives, co-workers, current and former classmates, and even casual acquaintances from an anime expo. It wasn’t that she didn’t have visitors. She had her own share of visitors: people from the church, Nigerians from the Nigerians in L.C. Wechat group, two or three classmates, and of course, Michael.

Four days ago, on Sunday, six people from the church had come to see her with fruits, flowers, and goodwill messages from other church members. They held hands to pray for her. The pianist, Kit, had come as well. Her chest thumped with remnants of her crush on him when he held her hand and told her to be strong. She felt light when he promised to put her in his prayers, even though he had announced his engagement to one of the liturgists in January. After they left, Binyere ate bananas and wondered if the church would hold a contribution for her, as they had done when Manny from the sports university needed surgery. She wondered, too, if they would visit again. She longed for more familial visits: uncles stopping by on their way to their shops; friends and cousins taking time to drop in and gist about drama at work; her mother visiting day and night with flasks of pepper soup and ji agworago and washed onugbu that was still bitter squeezed like fufu in plastic film; a restive younger sibling that would only pester her for her phone to play games. But they were all too far away. She squeezed her eyes shut. She should be grateful, at least, that she still had visitors in this foreign land.

Evelyn returned some minutes later, just after the nurse who shut the curtains left. Michael, who had on three different occasions asked Binyere to be his girlfriend, came with her. Evelyn helped Binyere up from the bench, and as they walked into the ward, Michael asked how she was faring: How long did she have to remain in the hospital? Was she feeding well? Was the environment okay for her? Were the doctors treating her fairly? The same questions he had asked on Tuesday, leaving only enough time for a short reply.

Binyere was relieved when Evelyn cut into his train of questions, saying, “I bought the Beijing kaoya from that restaurant you’ve been raving about.” She waited for Binyere to settle into the bed before setting up the overhead table.

When Binyere opened the plastic plates, a fatty, roasty smell snaked through the air, catching Nanyue’s attention. She edged closer and mumbled about getting hungry again despite having just had dinner. They laughed.

Michael and Evelyn refused Binyere’s offer to join her, though Evelyn ended up reaching for a fat piece of meat. They conversed with Nanyue while Binyere ate, speaking in fluent, heavily accented Chinese. Binyere paid little attention to them. Instead, she focused on picking fleshy duck meat with gloved hands to dip into plum sauce. Then she folded the meat with strips of scallions and cucumbers into thin pancake slices. She rolled it up and folded it into her mouth.

There was something comfortable about the way they surrounded her. Evelyn sat at the other end of the bed, one leg tucked under her buttocks while the other dangled over the side of the bed. She drank from a tall cup of boba milk tea, shaking it every so often. Nanyue stood, arms folded, so close to her that Binyere could catch a whiff of the malatang that she had eaten. Michael, sitting on the bedside stool, placed a hand on the bed, very close to her thigh, so close that she could actually feel his touch. Their voices bounced off her ears. Although she barely understood what they were saying, she knew how quickly they would revert to English if she showed interest in the conversation. In moments like this, she felt less alone, even a little special.

Her initial dislike for Michael had slowly abated with his frequent visits. Each time, he brought fruit bowls purchased from the campus supermarket, often a mix of diced cantaloupes and watermelons, her favorites. He stayed longer too—he’d once spent the entire afternoon with her. Tall and thin, Michael wasn’t exactly unattractive; his evenly dark skin accentuated the pearly whites of his eyes and teeth. It was easier to describe him as charming when he smiled. He also gave off an affable air that endeared him to many. Binyere thought he smelled a little funky, like someone who had spent a day in the sun. The white spittle always on the sides of his mouth was a little disconcerting. He talked too much, shared too much private information. Binyere sure could have done without an account of how he discovered acne on his buttocks.

They had met at the orientation for new students. He had been standing by the entrance with a file where new students were to sign their names. He struck up a conversation with every student that picked up the pen, made plans with the boys to play basketball and invited the girls to either join salsa class or the female basketball team. When Binyere arrived, he smiled widely and jabbered about Rema and Burna Boy and the egusi soup a Nigerian student had cooked for a New Year’s potluck. He added her WeChat contact and kept on inviting her to his room so he could entertain her with some Chadian dishes and music. Her constant rejection did little to put him off. Two days after she was admitted to the hospital, he came to visit her with flowers and a get-well-soon card. Since then, he had come every other day. She wasn’t sure when she started to look forward to his visits.

Evelyn and Michael stayed until 8 p.m. Before they left, Michael reached out to hug her. Her hands remained stiff on the bed, but she made no move to turn away, as she had done on Tuesday.

*

Two days later, it was the always edgy, balding doctor who came for the ward rounds. He rapidly fired questions at her, not caring if she could understand. Most of the time, Nanyue or Evelyn were around to translate for her. At other times, like this, one of the nurses, the one with a bob and dulcet voice, read out translations from her phone. She would be discharged in three days, and the bill was ready, the nurse told her with a kind smile. While she changed her drip, the nurse told Binyere that the cherry trees in the hospital courtyard had bloomed. And it would be worth a look before she left the hospital.

Later, before noon, Binyere went with Nanyue’s mother to the courtyard. The silence between them was comfortable. The older woman didn’t speak English, but Binyere could communicate with her using her limited reserve of simple Chinese phrases. There were a few people in the courtyard: an old man performing light Taichi movements, a woman sitting in the center pagoda fanning herself with a tuanshan, and a middle-aged couple taking photos under the trees that bloomed in a blanket of pink and white.

Binyere breathed in the floral scent, reminded of vanilla ice cream. It was a welcome change from the antiseptic smell of the ward. She took a few pictures, squinting her eyes, cursing at the relentless sun. The trees were the same as the ones in the pictures Evelyn had posted on her social media pages. In most of the pictures, Evelyn wore a two-piece George wrapper with rolls of beads adorning her waist and neck; the pictures were captioned Ada Igbo. Evelyn told her that many people had taken pictures with her because of her traditional attire. She said this while scrolling through the pictures, oftentimes pushing the phone in front of Binyere’s face and interjecting, “Look at this one.”

When Evelyn showed her a picture where she stood between two Chinese girls, Binyere pushed the phone away and said, “After I get discharged, we can also take pictures together.”

Yet, the day before, Evelyn had told her, with a sad look, that the flowers were slowly fading. By the time she returned, there would be no sign of the beautiful flowers.

Now, as Binyere stood awkwardly under a cherry tree, waiting for Nanyue’s mother to announce that she had taken a picture, she imagined that she was back on campus and Evelyn was standing beside her.

                                                                       *

When Evelyn came that evening, Binyere thought she smelled of cherry flowers. She guessed, correctly, that Evelyn had come directly from the dormitory, taking a cab instead of the metro, so that when she entered the ward, she still smelled and looked fresh, unperturbed by the raging heat outside. She came with a flask of meaty tomato stew and boiled basmati rice with plantains—she called them “fake plantains” as they were sold as bananas and were merely an inferior substitute for authentic plantains. She used fresh chicken thighs, boiled with spices, then fried and cooked in the stew so that they were not too tough or too tender.

There was no expression on Evelyn’s face when Binyere, while they were sucking on bones, her lips burning from the spiciness, told her that she was finally going to get discharged. After they cleared the contents of the flask, as Binyere’s tongue danced in her mouth, seeking to dislodge strands of meat from between her teeth, Evelyn said, “Someone told me that the cherry blossom trees on the medical campus have not yet bloomed. We can go there to take pictures then.” Binyere’s chest lifted.

Later, while Evelyn meticulously peeled tangerines, they talked about which clothes to wear for the pictures. Binyere would first wear her blue, off-shoulder Ankara gown that was ridiculously tight around the armpits, and then, because she really liked it, she would wear Evelyn’s two-piece wrapper.

The day before her discharge, Nanyue asked Binyere, in a low, confidential voice, if she and Evelyn were really just friends because they seemed more like sisters; they looked so alike that they could even pass off as fraternal twins. Binyere laughed so loudly that a passing nurse stopped to peer into the ward and shush her. Nanyue’s question reminded Binyere of the times, during their undergrad days, when people, including their coursemates, called them sisters. She remembered, too, moving into Evelyn’s lodge in her second year, sharing clothes and wigs with her, learning to eat spicy food because Evelyn couldn’t eat food that didn’t sting her tongue. They had separated during their service year, only commenting on each other’s posts and once in a while sending just-want-to-check-up-on-you texts. Yet, when early last year Binyere messaged Evelyn that she wanted to further her studies in China, Evelyn replied with so much enthusiasm that the three-year silence between them faded into long and regular video calls. They hugged at the airport when Evelyn came to pick her up, and Evelyn took her, along with her two massive bags, to have her first meal in China. Evelyn might have been busy with lab work and classes during Binyere’s first few months, yet she carved out time, as she did now, to show her around the school, to show her how to properly use Chinese rice to make non-mushy jollof rice, to take her to street markets where Binyere could get cheap winter jackets and blankets.

Binyere grinned at Nanyue. “She is my sister from another mother.”

She might not have had an array of family members visiting her every day with flasks of food and baskets of fruits. But she had had Evelyn, with her love for tangerines, her stiff, natural hair always sitting in a proud puff atop her head, and the constant chiding that Binyere was too much of a baby. That was enough for her.

She left the hospital in the afternoon. Michael came with Evelyn, clutching a bunch of pink carnations, to escort her back to campus. Nanyue followed them all the way to the entrance of the hospital and waited until they boarded a cab before going back into the hospital.

In the cab, Binyere leaned on Evelyn’s shoulder and whispered, “Thank you.”

Evelyn squeezed her arm, softly the first time, then tightly, patting her gently before letting go.

About the Author:

Cynthia Chukwuma is a graduate student at Wuhan University. She is an Igbo girl who is enthusiastic about Chinese language and literature. Depending on the volume of schoolwork, she occasionally freelances as a translator and spends her free time crocheting quirky bags and flowers. She was shortlisted for the 2021 Quramo Writers’ Prize for her unpublished novel. Her work has appeared in The Shallow Tales Review, Fiery Scribe Review, Kalahari Review and Writers Space Africa – Nigeria. Her article about Black women in early modern England is forthcoming in Luojia Shiyuan, the History Department’s journal at Wuhan University. Find her on Instagram @ cynthia.linlin and on Twitter/X @cfromthemoon.

*Feature image by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash