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Agnes had been asked to carry the little children, who were already asleep on the floor, to their beds.
“Wake them up to urinate first or they will do it in their beds,” said Esther.
Agnes grabbed the first child by the wrist and pulled him up.
“Agnes! Agnes!” screamed their mother, who was sitting on a low stool beside the sleeping children, “I have always said that your head is not correct. How often must I tell you t
o call a child by name before waking him up?”
“Don’t you know,” Obi took up, pretending great anger, “that if you pull him up suddenly his soul may not be able to get back to his body before he wakes?”
The girls laughed. Obi had not changed a bit. He enjoyed teasing them, their mother not excepted. She smiled.
“You may laugh if laughter catches you,” she said indulgently. “It does not catch me.”
“That is why Father calls them the foolish virgins,” said Obi.
It was now beginning to rain with thunder and lightning. At first large raindrops drummed on the iron roof. It was as though thousands of pebbles, each wrapped separately in a piece of cloth to break its fall, had been let loose from the sky. Obi wished that it was daytime so that he could see a tropical rain once more. It was now gathering strength. The drumming of large single drops gave way to a steady downpour.
“I had forgotten it could rain so heavily in November,” he thought as he rearranged his loincloth to cover his whole body. Actually such rain was unusual. It was as though the deity presiding over the waters in the sky found, on checking his stock and counting off the months on his fingers, that there was too much rain left and that he had to do something drastic about it before the impending dry season.
Obi composed himself and went off to sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Obi’s first day in the civil service was memorable, almost as memorable as his first day at the bush mission school in Umuofia nearly twenty years before. In those days white men were very rare. In fact, Mr. Jones had been the second white man Obi had set eyes on, and he had been nearly seven then. The first white man had been the Bishop on the Niger.
Mr. Jones was the Inspector of Schools and was feared throughout the province. It was said that he had fought during the Kaiser’s war and that it had gone to his head. He was a huge man, over six feet tall. He rode a motorcycle which he always left about half a mile away so that he could enter a school unannounced. Then he was sure to catch somebody committing an offense. He visited a school about once in two years and he always did something which was remembered until his next visit. Two years before, he had thrown a boy out of a window. Now it was the headmaster who got into trouble. Obi never discovered what the trouble was because it had all been done in English. Mr. Jones was red with fury as he paced up and down, taking such ample strides that at one point Obi thought he was making straight for him. The headmaster, Mr. Nduka, was all the while trying to explain something.
“Shut up!” roared Mr. Jones, and followed it up with a slap. Simeon Nduka was one of those people who had taken to the ways of the white man rather late in life. And one of the things he had learnt in his youth was the great art of wrestling. In the twinkling of an eye Mr. Jones was flat on the floor and the school was thrown into confusion. Without knowing why, teachers and pupils all took to their heels. To throw a white man was like unmasking an ancestral spirit.
That was twenty years ago. Today few white men would dream of slapping a headmaster in his school and none at all would actually do it. Which is the tragedy of men like William Green, Obi’s boss.
Obi had already met Mr. Green that morning. As soon as he had arrived he had been taken in to be introduced to him. Without rising from his seat or offering his hand Mr. Green muttered something to the effect that Obi would enjoy his work, one, if he wasn’t bone-lazy, and two, if he was prepared to use his loaf. “I’m assuming you have one to use,” he concluded.
A few hours later he appeared in Mr. Omo’s office, where Obi had been posted for the day. Mr. Omo was the Administrative Assistant. He had put nearly thirty years’ service into thousands of files, and would retire, or so he said, when his son had completed his legal studies in England. Obi was spending his first day in Mr. Omo’s office to learn a few things about office administration.
Mr. Omo jumped to his feet as soon as Mr. Green came in. Simultaneously he pocketed the other half of the kola nut he was eating.
“Why hasn’t the Study Leave file been passed to me?” Mr. Green asked.
“I thought …”
“You are not paid to think, Mr. Omo, but to do what you are told. Is that clear? Now send the file to me immediately.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Green slammed the door behind him and Mr. Omo carried the file personally to him. When he returned he began to rebuke a junior clerk who, it seemed, had caused all the trouble.
Obi had now firmly decided that he did not like Mr. Green and that Mr. Omo was one of his old Africans. As if to confirm his opinion the telephone rang. Mr. Omo hesitated, as he always did when the telephone rang, and then took it up as if it was liable to bite.
“Hello. Yes, sir.” He handed it over to Obi with obvious relief. “Mr. Okonkwo, for you.”
Obi took the telephone. Mr. Green wanted to know whether he had received a formal offer of appointment. Obi said, no, he hadn’t.
“You say sir to your superior officers, Mr. Okonkwo,” and the telephone was dropped with a deafening bang.
Obi bought a Morris Oxford a week after he received his letter of appointment. Mr. Green gave him a letter to the dealers saying that he was a senior civil servant entitled to a car advance. Nothing more was required. He walked into the shop and got a brand-new car.
