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Clara begged him not to misunderstand her. She said she was taking her present step because she did not want to ruin his life. “I have thought about the whole matter very carefully. There are two reasons why we should not get married.”
“What are they?”
“Well, the first is that your family will be against it. I don’t want to come between you and your family.”
“Bunk! Anyway, what is the second reason?” She could not remember what it was. It didn’t matter, anyway. The first reason was quite enough.
“I’ll tell you what the second reason is,” said Obi.
“What is it?”
“You don’t want to marry someone who has to borrow money to pay for his insurance.” He knew it was a grossly unfair and false accusation, but he wanted her to be on the defensive. She nearly started crying again. He pulled her towards him and began to kiss her passionately. She soon responded with equal spirit. “No, no, no! Don’t be a naughty boy.… You should apologize first for what you said.”
“I’m very sorry, darling.”
“O.K. I forgive you. No! Wait a minute.”
Obi set out just before six in the morning. If Clara had not been there he would not have been able to wake up as early as five-thirty. He felt a little light in the head and heavy in the eyes. He had a cold bath, washing his arms and legs first, then the head, the stomach, and the back in that order. He hated cold baths, but he could not afford to switch on the electric heater, and there was no doubt, he thought as he dried himself, that one felt very brisk after a cold bath. As with weeping, it was only the beginning that was difficult.
Although he had two weeks, he proposed to spend only one at home for reasons of money. To home people, leave meant the return of the village boy who had made good in the town, and everyone expected to share in his good fortune. “After all,” they argued, “it was our prayers and our libations that did it for him.” They called leave lifu, meaning to squander.
Obi had exactly thirty-four pounds, nine and three-pence when he set out. Twenty-five pounds was his local leave allowance, which was paid to all senior civil servants for no other reason than that they went on local leave. The rest was the remains of his January salary. With thirty-four pounds one might possibly last two weeks at home, although a man like Obi, with a car and a “European post,” would normally be expected to do better. But sixteen pounds ten shillings was to go into brother John’s school fees for the second term, which began in April. Obi knew that unless he paid the fees now that he had a lump sum in his pocket he might not be able to do so when the time came.
Obi seemed to look over the shoulders of everyone who came out to welcome him home.
“Where is Mother?” his eyes kept asking. He did not know whether she was still in hospital or at home, and he was afraid to ask.
“Your mother returned from hospital last week,” said his father as they entered the house.
“Where is she?”
“In her room,” said Eunice, his youngest sister.
Mother’s room was the most distinctive in the whole house, except perhaps for Father’s. The difficulty in deciding arose from the fact that one could not compare incomparable things. Mr. Okonkwo believed utterly and completely in the things of the white man. And the symbol of the white man’s power was the written word, or better still, the printed word. Once before he went to England, Obi heard his father talk with deep feeling about the mystery of the written word to an illiterate kinsman:
“Our women made black patterns on their bodies with the juice of the uli tree. It was beautiful, but it soon faded. If it lasted two market weeks it lasted a long time. But sometimes our elders spoke about uli that never faded, although no one had ever seen it. We see it today in the writing of the white man. If you go to the native court and look at the books which clerks wrote twenty years ago or more, they are still as they wrote them. They do not say one thing today and another tomorrow, or one thing this year and another next year. Okoye in the book today cannot become Okonkwo tomorrow. In the Bible Pilate said: ‘What is written is written.’ It is uli that never fades.”
The kinsman had nodded his head in approval and snapped his fingers.
The result of Okonkwo’s mystic regard for the written word was that his room was full of old books and papers—from Blackie’s Arithmetic, which he used in 1908, to Obi’s Durrell, from obsolete cockroach-eaten translations of the Bible into the Onitsha dialect to yellowed Scripture Union Cards of 1920 and earlier. Okonkwo never destroyed a piece of paper. He had two boxes full of them. The rest were preserved on top of his enormous cupboard, on tables, on boxes and on one corner of the floor.
Mother’s room, on the other hand, was full of mundane things. She had her box of clothes on a stool. On the other side of the room were pots of solid palm-oil with which she made black soap. The palm-oil was separated from the clothes by the whole length of the room, because, as she always said, clothes and oil were not kinsmen, and just as it was the duty of clothes to try and avoid oil it was also the duty of the oil to do everything to avoid clothes.
Apart from these two, Mother’s room also had such things as last year’s coco yams, kola nuts pres
erved with banana leaves in empty oil pots, palm-ash preserved in an old cylindrical vessel which, as the older children told Obi, had once contained biscuits. In the second stage of its life it had served as a water vessel until it sprang about five leaks which had to be carefully covered with paper before it got its present job.
As he looked at his mother on her bed, tears stood in Obi’s eyes. She held out her hand to him and he took it—all bone and skin like a bat’s wing.
“You did not see me when I was ill,” she said. “Now I am as healthy as a young girl.” She laughed without mirth. “You should have seen me three weeks ago. How is your work? Are Umuofia people in Lagos all well? How is Joseph? His mother came to see me yesterday and I told her we were expecting you.…”
Obi answered: “They are well, yes, yes and yes.” But his heart all the while was bursting with grief.
Later that evening a band of young women who had been making music at a funeral was passing by Okonkwo’s house when they heard of Obi’s return, and decided to go in and salute him.
Obi’s father was up in arms. He wanted to drive them away, but Obi persuaded him that they could do no harm. It was ominous the way he gave in without a fight and went and shut himself up in his room. Obi’s mother came out to the pieze and sat on a high chair by the window. She liked music even when it was heathen music. Obi stood in the main door, smiling at the singers who had formed themselves on the clean-swept ground outside. As if from a signal the colorful and noisy weaver birds on the tall palm tree flew away in a body, deserting temporarily their scores of brown nests, which looked like giant bootees.
Obi knew some of the singers well. But there were others who had been married into the village after he had gone to England. The leader of the song was one of them. She had a strong piercing voice that cut the air with a sharp edge. She sang a long recitative before the others joined in. They called it “The Song of the Heart.”
