Nwabundu woke up with the taste of bile on her tongue, her head throbbing as if it were a mortar and someone was pounding into it. Not just someone. A giant someone. Goliath from the Bible. Ojadili from her grandmother’s folktales. The giant wrestler who could pick up and flick off grown men like mere lice. Kadoom. Kadoom. Kadoom. It was a struggle to think. She hurt all over. She reached out and rubbed her temples. Her head was so heavy that she wondered if this was how people felt after an encounter with ghosts.

Her grandmother used to tell her stories of a market in Umuofia—before the white men came, long before Umuofia became the sprawling, crowded, almost-metropolis it now was—where ghosts borrowed human bodies and came all dressed up to shop. They haggled for yams and pepper, speaking like humans, but if you touched any of the ghosts, if your body brushed theirs, her grandmother said, “Your head would grow so big and so heavy that you’d need help carrying it, if you were lucky. One boy’s head grew so big with spirit-touch, it burst like an overripe ukwa fruit. Tawa! His brains spilled everywhere and carved a trail that became a magic pond that slurped up naughty children.”

“How would you know?” her grandfather would often tease his wife. “You aren’t even from Umuofia!”

Her grandmother insisted that the stories were true nevertheless. She’d heard it from her own grandparents who knew Umuofia well. Nwabundu believed her and imagined heads so heavy and so full they burst like ukwa. She made sure to behave because she did not want to be swallowed by the magic pond that grew hands and grabbed children who asked too many questions or stole fish or were in any other way so naughty they didn’t deserve to live with their human parents. The stories had scared Nwabundu back then into being a model child.

Nwabundu still believed in toeing the straight and the narrow, but she was fearful of other things now.

From the bedroom’s open door, she could hear her husband, Obi, rattling around in the kitchen like dice shaken in a Ludo cup. She smelt fresh coffee and egg stew, heard the sizzling of something frying in deep oil, but the thought of eating anything made her nauseous. She wanted darkness so thick that no light could penetrate it. Mottled sunlight flittered in through the gauze curtains which she’d never liked but which Obi favored, and they’d bought it because what Obi wanted, he got.

Saliva pooled in Nwabundu’s mouth. Metallic, as if she’d been sucking on a coin. She lurched out of bed and barely made it to the bathroom before she vomited into the toilet. She walked to the sink to rinse her mouth and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the sink. A black eye. Scratches on her cheeks. A torn lip. Still, it could have been worse, she thought automatically. It had been worse before.

The first time Obi hit her, they were arguing about something trivial, and she had called him silly. They had only been married a few months, a marriage so new that if it were a polaroid picture, its colors would still dazzle. “You’re a silly man!” she’d said, laughing, and turned to the newspaper she was reading. The slap he had landed on her cheek seemed to have come from someone else. He pulled her hair, plucking out a braid, and told her to never, ever speak to him like that again. She had called her mother to tell her that she was done. “Obi hit me!” she said. Not even saying it had made it seem any more real to her.  

“And?” her mother asked. “You want to come back to your father’s house and do what? Marry your father? Listen to me. Listen to me. Whatever you did to make him angry, don’t do it again. You create the peace you want in your marriage.”

 “But—”

“No ‘buts’, nne. Marriage is management, biko.”

Nwabundu splashed more water on her face. In college, a boyfriend had shoved her, and she had broken up with him without hesitation. “How dare you?” she’d asked him. When he sent a delegation of friends to beg her to return, and one of them said, “All he did was push you,” Nwabundu retorted that assault was assault. She didn’t have to wait for him to do “more than push” to walk away. She thought now of why she stayed with Obi. Not just after that first beating, but after each one, no matter how much her inner voice—closer to the girl she had been in college than to her present self—told her to leave. She stayed because Obi—short for Obierika—was not just a husband; he was restoration. The London-trained lawyer, budding statesman, Umuofia’s shining light, had married her despite knowing of her family’s curse.

Her great-grandfather, Okonkwo, had been a respected warrior until he mistook his own will for the collective will. Overestimating both his own power and that of a community already weakened by colonial rule, he confronted the British messengers sent to Umuofia and killed one of them. To avoid the humiliation of being judged by a government he recognized no authority in, Okonkwo killed himself, and Ani, the earth goddess, cursed him. His children inherited the disgrace in their blood. In Umuofia, his descendants were considered Osu. Outcast. Her father grew up under the weight of that word. “You know, some of the children called me osu to my face. Once, I visited a classmate and the mother spat on me and chased me out with a broom. I was ten! What did I have to do with whatever my papa nnukwu had done?” He had left Umuofia for Nsukka for university, graduated, married a woman from Enugu, and moved to Lagos, where his only daughter was born and raised. He’d sworn never to return. Yet, when Obi asked him for his blessing to marry Nwabundu, her father’s eyes had sparkled like something new. “Do you know what this means?” he had said later to Nwabundu. “It means we can become freeborn citizens of Umuofia again.” Freeborn meant he could walk around Umuofia with his head held high. He could tend to his parents’ grave. He walked around his sitting room, shoulders raised to show Nwabundu and his wife how he would strut when next he was in Umuofia. He stuck his buttocks out like a peacock, and Nwabundu and her mother laughed raucously.

Nwabundu turned off the tap and returned to her bed. The clattering in the kitchen had ceased, and her trained ears could pick up the sound of footsteps. She shut her eyes and pretended to sleep.

“Babe?” Obi called softly from the doorway.

Nwabundu stayed still.  Every inch of her battered body ached with remembered pain. She felt him stand over her, plant a kiss on her forehead. His cologne filled her nose, and she fought the urge to pinch it. She hoped she would not throw up again. She ordered her stomach to behave and not betray her. If she as much as twitched, or showed any sign of being awake, Obi would sit down there and apologize and not budge until she said she forgave him. She lacked the energy of that familiar drama today.

**

She must have fallen asleep for real because when next she opened her eyes, there was a pot of coffee and a plate of fried yam and egg stew on her nightstand, and the house had settled into an unfamiliar quietness. He did this all the time. After the tempest calmed, he always tried to make amends. The doting and uxorious husband. The first time it happened, he had taken her out to dinner later that day. By the end of the meal, Obi paying attention to even needs she hadn’t articulated, she had forgotten how angry she had been at him, how tempted she had been to pack up her luggage and leave until her mother talked her out of it. They had gone home and made love. That was why he was a good lawyer, she thought now. He knew how to navigate landmines, to argue his point until you were convinced, to talk sweet. He had a sugar tongue. Wasn’t that how he had won her over? Flattened all the signs she should have paid attention to, soaked them in sweetness, and squashed them under his tongue. He noticed when she got a haircut. Noticed her clothes. The second time they went on a date, he complimented her shoes, told her what great taste she had. How could she have paid attention to anything else? To how he changed stations when they were in the car without asking if she minded? How he insisted that she wore the outfit he picked out for her when they went out because “it really suits you.”

In the face of his solicitousness, of her father’s joy and her mother’s relief, that she would agree to marry him seemed inevitable. At their wedding reception, when they had their first dance as a couple and Obi held her around the waist but did not look into her face, whipping his head left and right instead, as if to tell guests that all this—the expensive drinks, the wedding cake as tall as a house, a DJ from London, food catered by Genesis and served by uniformed waiters—was down to him, Nwabundu reminded herself that no other man had pursued her so single-mindedly and as persistently as he had. And she reminded herself of how happy his proposal had made her parents, especially her father. The sparkle in her father’s eyes as he danced filled her like food. She hadn’t even minded trading Lagos, where she was raised and where all her friends were, for Umuofia; trading her PhD studies for a job as a math teacher at Umuofia Girls High School because the town had no job for a software engineer. Umuofia wasn’t the village it had been in her grandmother’s time, but it wasn’t cosmopolitan Lagos with movie theatres and international restaurants. But like Obi’d  convinced her that she would, she did  like living there. She loved teaching math to her students, unravelling the magic of Pythagoras’ Theorem and quadratic equations to young girls she hoped would take over the world. The pay was modest, but life in Umuofia was cheap. And Obi brought in more than enough.

Still, since that first slap, she’d thought often that she should have seen the red flags earlier and never introduced him to her parents. His monomaniac obsession with knowing where she was at all times which she’d thought was sweet. His referencing the Bible on their first date to tell her that she did not need to split the dinner bill with him, which had made her laugh. The man is the head! His interest in her great-grandfather, Okonkwo. He was a man’s man! I heard he knew how to keep his wives in form. She had laughed at that too, convinced it was a joke. Obi was an educated man, a modern man. Okonkwo disciplined his wives and children by beating them in public. “You do know that, right?” she had asked Obi. He’d winked mysteriously. It had unsettled her, but not enough for her to resist him when he kissed her, his tongue darting in and out of hers like an enthusiastic lizard, one hand cupping her chin, telling her how she was his akwa ugo. The most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His ijele. How fortuitous, he’d said, that of all the girls he’d meet at a Yoruba couple’s party, it would be an Igbo girl from Umuofia. She went on more dates with him and allowed herself to fall irretrievably in love. One Sunday afternoon, months later, she invited him home to meet her parents. The two of them held hands like schoolchildren as Nwabundu told them, “This is the Obi I’ve told you about.”

She shivered now when she remembered his hands around her throat last night. What if he had killed her, eh? The nausea returned, sharp and sudden. And as she lay there, she thought of her mother telling her that she’d been named Nwabundu because she’d had trouble carrying a pregnancy to full term. “Four miscarriages, and even my own mother said it was because I’d married an osu. She said that a seer had told her that we’d die without ever hearing the cry of a baby in our home. We named you Nwabundu because you gave us life.”

Nwabundu rubbed what felt like grit from her eyes. Obi wasn’t all bad. He had his moments, but he was generous—not just with her. He would have been successful anywhere, yet he had chosen to return to Umuofia and set up a practice there because he felt his people needed him. “Lagos and Abuja have more than enough capable lawyers. Let Umuofia have its own fair share too,” he’d told her when she asked why someone as accomplished as he was was making a reverse exodus.

**

Obi was a unicorn among his friends. He cooked and did housework. He vacuumed and mopped, and he did not care that some of his friends teased him for doing “women’s work.” When her periods came, accompanied by the dysmenorrhea that had plagued her since she first began menstruating, Obi massaged her back and made her pots of chamomile tea. When Obi beat her, he was careful not to cause permanent damage. She had once read about a woman in the U.S. whose husband had paralyzed her by shooting her in the back. Tufia! If Obi ever got a gun, she would leave.

She sat up finally, and poured out coffee into a mug. When she tried to sip it, the cut on her lip stung, and she quickly dropped the cup, spilling coffee on the tray. The pounding in her head had eased, but now she felt pain in other parts of her body that the headache had distracted her from. If Anwuli, her best friend saw her now, she’d ask her why she hadn’t already left. One time, Nawbundu had almost truly left—two years into their marriage when Obi had sprained her wrist from trying to pull her back into the room when she tried to leave during an argument. “You don’t get to walk out on me,” Obi had said, and pushed her down onto the couch. He sat on her for a while to restrain her, then got up, knelt in the manner of a man proposing, and said, “Please, please, Akwa ugo m, don’t push me like this again.”

After he left the house to buy her goat-meat pepper soup from Nwanyi Nri, who made the best pepper soup in Umuofia, Nwabundu called her mother again. Surely a strained wrist was grounds for breaking up? Two assaults in two years was a pattern, wasn’t it? He had sat on her—that could have killed her, couldn’t it? Her mother reminded Nwabundu that she was not a child. She was not a white woman. She was not a fool. If she left, how would she… how would they face society? The image of her, her parents, severed from Obi, floating like leaves carried by the wind, hovered in her mind’s eye.

**

“Who’s society?” Anwuli asked her once. Anwuli had been visiting from Lagos for Nwabundu’s third wedding anniversary and, one day over breakfast—despite the preparations for the anniversary party, despite Obi flitting in and out of every room Nwabundu entered to plant kisses on her lips—she asked Nwabundu if she was happy, in a tone that suggested she already knew her friend was not.

 “And if I’m not, what am I to do?” Nwabundu responded with a tight smile.

“Leave. You always have a choice.”

She shouldn’t have expected Anwuli to understand. Anwuli lived a charmed life: husband, children, a family with no tarnished history. She could afford to ask so casually who “society” was. “If this marriage isn’t working out, you need to leave. You can look after yourself. You don’t have to stay.” Anwuli’s wedding band glittered as she waved her hands while she spoke, and Nwabundu thought rather uncharitably, very easy for you to say. Anwuli did not carry the burden of cleansing her family name.

“Marriage is sacrifice,” Nwabundu said. She’d startled herself by how much like her mother she sounded. Anwuli never asked about her marriage again.

Nwabundu hadn’t always sounded like her mother. At the University of Nigeria, where she had got her first degree, she had been a student leader. Ferocious and loud, she was told by many of her peers that men found her intimidating. Who will marry you? one of her many male classmates asked her once when Nwabundu got an A in a calculus exam—the only A in a class where she was one of only three females. Nwabundu had told the classmate that she didn’t care whether she got married or not, and would certainly not stay with a man who felt intimidated by her. She had meant it then. The person she was at university would have left after the first time Obi assaulted her.

The person she was now wore the heavy armor of duty. She wished she could slip out of this body that weighed her down, as if she were a bag of cement left out in the rain. She remembered reading a story once in which people sloughed off their skin and took on new ones. She imagined reaching out behind her to unzip her body, and the image made her laugh. She felt something rush to her throat, and she rolled out of bed and went to the bathroom. She knelt over the toilet and began to throw up again, her stomach emptying itself of everything inside it . She took a shower, and meticulously covered the cuts on her with foundation and powder. On her lips, she had a splash of blood red lipstick. It made her feel better. She started the laundry and then went into the study to work on the pile of grading she had to finish before Monday morning. No matter how hard life was. She told herself, it went on. The sun rose every morning and dipped every evening.

**

After what might have been an hour—or three—Nwabundu heard Obi come in with a guest and shout for her. She put the exercise book she was grading aside and went out into the living room.

Obi had held up his favorite T-shirt, fresh from the dryer, frayed from being dried too hot. Nwabundu must have tossed it in with the towels.  

“See what she’s done to my shirt?” he said, holding it up to Mr. Okeke, an attorney at his firm, and a man with whom Obi often played tennis every Saturday evening. “Women…” he said, shaking his head the way adults did when they reprimanded children. Mr. Okeke laughed along, his jowls shaking, and the sight loosened Nwabundu’s tongue and made her rash.

“Fucking do your own laundry,” she said, angry and humiliated. She was exhausted. She tired easily  these days. Her headache had returned. Mr. Okeke let out a low whistle, and Obi started to say something, but Nwabundu didn’t stay to hear it. She went to the room and lay down. If the sky wants to fall, let it fall, she said to herself as she draped a blanket over her against the chill of the air conditioner and fell asleep.

When she woke, it was to Obi dragging her out of bed and pummeling her. Maybe it was because the previous beating was still raw, but Nwabundu lifted her hands and hit him back wherever she could. Her arms flailed; she punched and scratched. She closed her eyes and kept punching even after she no longer felt Obi’s blows on her back. And then she began to sob.

**. 

What would be the worst that would happen? Anwuli had asked her that day, two years ago. Say you left, what would society do? She did not tell Anwuli, but she herself would suffer too. So, it was not true that she was staying solely to make her parents happy. She was staying for herself too. She had given up too much already. If she left Obi, she’d be an outcast. Tossed aside like rubbish by her family, by her community, by anyone who’d meant anything to her. Not even her own mother wanted her back home a divorcee. She could not stay on in Umuofia, either. She would lose her job, lose her home. What she had on her bank account didn’t amount to much. She wouldn’t survive a year in any big city on what she’d managed to save from her paltry salary. She was stuck. Obi knew this—Obi knew, she was sure, how much she needed him. Sometimes she wondered if he would be different if he feared that she would walk out. Would he control his temper better?

She heaved herself off the floor and went to his side of the room. She picked up his bottle of cologne from his night table and flung it at the wall. It bounced off and landed with a faint thud on the rug. She opened his closet, pulled out his shoes, and enjoyed the smack with which they hit the wall. She picked up his tennis racket and up it flew before landing on the rug. She pulled his books from the inbuilt case by the bed and began flinging them too, one by one. Heavy tomes. His law books. Then the smaller ones: The Hidden Brain. The Art of Living. 100 Best Baby Names. He had bought the name book five years earlier, just after they married, when he had hoped they would start a family immediately. She hadn’t seen it in a long time. She lifted it to hurl it, and at that moment her eyes widened with sudden knowledge. It could not be, could it? But why not? She touched her breasts. Yes, they felt tender. She tried to remember the last time she had seen her period.

**

Nwabundu sat on the floor of the bathroom, and stared at the two pink lines. She was going to be a mother. She smiled. She was going to be a mother. She and Obi had always wanted a child, but after years of trying, she had given up hope. Despite the doctors saying that there was no reason why they couldn’t have a child, despite the coconut milk she drank religiously to make her womb welcoming, she had not thought it would happen. In recent years, each time Obi hit her, she was secretly delighted that they didn’t have a child together. And now, like a surprise gift, she was pregnant. Then she immediately thought that Obi could have caused her to lose it. She wondered whether they were having a boy or a girl.

She picked up the phone to tell her mother but hung up immediately. She wanted to sit with the news alone for a while longer. She was going to be a mother. She imagined this child that would be hers and Obi’s, imagined raising the child in this house with Obi, imagined all the ways in which a child could be broken with a monster for a father. She remembered the boy in her grandmother’s folktale, brains spilling out from a head swollen from spirit-touch. In her first year of teaching, she had a student who came into class one day crying because her parents had fought, and her mother had hit her father over the head with a frying pan, and he had to be taken to the hospital. For years, she hadn’t thought of that girl, could not even recall her name, but she remembered her now.

Without allowing herself time to think, Nwabundu went to the room and began to pack, throwing things into a suitcase she hadn’t used in years. She shut off her inner voice, which sounded like her mother telling her not to be foolish. At the sink, she spat out the image of her parents—heads without bodies, hovering, rootless. Then she slipped off her wedding ring and felt dizzy with the sudden lightness of her body, as if she had stepped out of her old skin, as if she had shrugged off a curse. The ring twirled and landed with a clank on the dresser where she flung it. Car key in hand, she picked her way over the chaos that was Obi’s side of the room.

In the car, she stalled. Her heart hammered. What was she doing? There was still time to undo what she’d already done. She got out of the car, a familiar heaviness beginning to descend on her. A lethargy that forced her to lean against the car. In the distance, headlights approached. The fear that it could be Obi seemed to have transmitted itself to the baby in her womb, and Nwabundu would swear, whenever she recounted this moment, that the baby kicked. She touched her stomach, opened the door, and eased herself back in.

Her parents sometimes shortened her name to Ndu—Life. Her father liked to joke that it meant she always had to prove she was alive. “No lounging around for you,” he’d say. “You’ve got to be up, moving, doing—Ndu!” She called herself that now. Ndu, she told herself. Move. Let the sky fall if it wants to fall.

She turned on the ignition.

About the Author:

Chika Unigwe’s latest novel is Grace (Canongate, UK). She is an associate professor of writing at Georgia College and state University, Milledgeville, GA

*Feature image by Martin Martz on Unsplash