Chief looked at him, a long, shrewd look. “We need more people like you in this country. People from good families, with good home training. You are a gentleman, I see it in your eyes. And your mother is a professor. It is not easy.”
Obinze half smiled, to seem humble in the face of this odd praise.
“You are hungry and honest, that is very rare in this country. Is that not so?” Chief asked.
“Yes,” Obinze said, even though he was not sure whether he was agreeing about his having this quality or about the rarity of this quality. But it did not matter, because Chief sounded certain.
“Everybody is hungry in this country, even the rich men are hungry, but nobody is honest.”
Obinze nodded, and Chief gave him another long look, before silently turning back to his cognac. On his next visit, Chief was his usual garrulous self.
“I was Babangida’s friend. I was Abacha’s friend. Now that the military has gone, Obasanjo is my friend,” he said. “Do you know why? Is it because I am stupid?”
“Of course not, Chief,” Obinze said.
“They said the National Farm Support Corporation is bankrupt and they’re going to privatize it. Do you know this? No. How do I know this? Because I have friends. By the time you know it, I would have taken a position and I would have benefited from the arbitrage. That is our free market!” Chief laughed. “The corporation was set up in the sixties and it owns property everywhere. The houses are all rotten and termites are eating the roofs. But they are selling them. I’m going to buy seven properties for five million each. You know what they are listed for in the books? One million. You know what the real worth is? Fifty million.” Chief paused to stare at one of his ringing cell phones—four were placed on the table next to him—and then ignored it and leaned back on the sofa. “I need somebody to front this deal.”
“Yes, sir, I can do that,” Obinze said.
Later, Nneoma sat on her bed, excited for him, giving him advice while smacking her head from time to time; her scalp was itchy beneath her weave and this was the closest she could come to scratching.
“This is your opportunity! The Zed, shine your eyes! They call it a big-big name, evaluation consulting, but it is not difficult. You undervalue the properties and make sure it looks as if you are following due process. You acquire the property, sell off half to pay your purchase price, and you are in business! You’ll register your own company. Next thing, you’ll build a house in Lekki and buy some cars and ask our hometown to give you some titles and your friends to put congratulatory messages in the newspapers for you and before you know, any bank you walk into, they will want to package a loan immediately and give it to you, because they think you no longer need the money! And after you register your own company, you must find a white man. Find one of your white friends in England. Tell everybody he is your General Manager. You will see how doors will open for you because you have an oyinbo General Manager. Even Chief has some white men that he brings in for show when he needs them. That is how Nigeria works. I’m telling you.”
And it was, indeed, how it worked and still worked for Obinze. The ease of it had dazed him. The first time he took his offer letter to the bank, he had felt surreal saying “fifty” and “fifty-five” and leaving out the “million” because there was no need to state the obvious. It had startled him, too, how easy many other things became, how even just the semblance of wealth oiled his paths. He had only to drive to a gate in his BMW and the gatemen would salute and open it for him, without asking questions. Even the American embassy was different. He had been refused a visa years ago, when he was newly graduated and drunk with American ambitions, but with his new bank statements, he easily got a visa. On his first trip, at the airport in Atlanta, the immigration officer was chatty and warm, asking him, “So how much cash you got?” When Obinze said he didn’t have much, the man looked surprised. “I see Nigerians like you declaring thousands and thousands of dollars all the time.”
This was what he now was, the kind of Nigerian expected to declare a lot of cash at the airport. It brought to him a disorienting strangeness, because his mind had not changed at the same pace as his life, and he felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be.
He still did not understand why Chief had decided to help him, to use him while overlooking, even encouraging, the astonishing collateral benefits. There was, after all, a trail of prostrating visitors to Chief’s house, relatives and friends bringing other relatives and friends, their pockets full of requests and appeals. He sometimes wondered if Chief would one day ask something of him, the hungry and honest boy he had made big, and in his more melodramatic moments, he imagined Chief asking him to organize an assassination.
AS SOON AS they arrived at Chief’s party, Kosi led the way around the room, hugging men and women she barely knew, calling the older ones “ma” and “sir” with exaggerated respect, basking in the attention her face drew but flattening her personality so that her beauty did not threaten. She praised a woman’s hair, another’s dress, a man’s tie. She said “We thank God” often. When one woman asked her, in an accusing tone, “What cream do you use on your face? How can one person have this kind of perfect skin?” Kosi laughed graciously and promised to send the woman a text message with details of her skin-care routine.
Obinze had always been struck by how important it was to her to be a wholesomely agreeable person, to have no sharp angles sticking out. On Sundays, she would invite his relatives for pounded yam and onugbu soup and then watch over to make sure everyone was suitably overfed. Uncle, you must eat o! There is more meat in the kitchen! Let me bring you another Guinness! The first time he took her to his mother’s house in Nsukka, just before they got married, she leaped up to help with serving the food, and when his mother made to clean up afterwards, she got up, offended, and said, “Mummy, how can I be here and you will be cleaning?” She ended every sentence she spoke to his uncles with “sir.” She put ribbons in the hair of his cousins’ daughters. There was something immodest about her modesty: it announced itself.
Now she was curtseying and greeting Mrs. Akin-Cole, a famously old woman from a famously old family, who had the supercilious expression, eyebrows always raised, of a person used to receiving homage; Obinze often imagined her belching champagne bubbles.
“How is your child? Has she started school?” Mrs. Akin-Cole asked. “You must send her to the French school. They are very good, very rigorous. Of course they teach in French but it can only be good for the child to learn another civilized language, since she already learns English at home.”
“Okay, ma. I’ll look at the French school,” Kosi said.
“The French school is not bad, but I prefer Sidcot Hall. They teach the complete British curriculum,” said another woman, whose name Obinze had forgotten. He knew she had made a lot of money during General Abacha’s government. She had been a pimp, as the story went, providing young girls for the army officers who, in turn, gave her inflated supply contracts. Now, in her tight sequinned dress that outlined the swell of her lower belly, she had become a certain kind of middle-aged Lagos woman, dried up by disappointments, blighted by bitterness, the sprinkle of pimples on her forehead smothered in heavy foundation.
“Oh, yes, Sidcot Hall,” Kosi said. “It’s already on top of my list because I know they teach the British curriculum.”
Obinze would ordinarily not have said anything at all, just watched and listened, but today, for some reason, he said, “Didn’t we all go to primary schools that taught the Nigerian curriculum?”
The women looked at him; their puzzled expressions implied that he could not possibly be serious. And in some ways, he was not. Of course he, too, wanted the best for his daughter. Sometimes, like now, he felt like an intruder in his new circle, of people who believed that the latest schools, the latest curriculums, would ensure the wholeness of their children. He did not share their certainties. He spent too much time mourning what could have been and questioning what should be.
When he was younger, he had admired people with moneyed childhoods and foreign accents, but he had come to sense an unvoiced yearning in them, a sad search for something they could never find. He did not want a well-educated child enmeshed in insecurities. Buchi would not go to the French school, of that he was sure.
“If you decide to disadvantage your child by sending her to one of these schools with half-baked Nigerian teachers, then you only have yourself to blame,” Mrs. Akin-Cole said. She spoke with the unplaceable foreign accent, British and American and something else all at once, of the wealthy Nigerian who did not want the world to forget how worldly she was, how her British Airways executive card was choking with miles.
“One of my friends, her son goes to a school on the mainland and do you know, they have only five computers in the whole school. Only five!” the other woman said. Obinze remembered her name now. Adamma.
Mrs. Akin-Cole said, “Things have changed.”
“I agree,” Kosi said. “But I also see what Obinze is saying.”
She was taking two sides at once, to please everyone; she always chose peace over truth, was always eager to conform. Watching her now as she talked to Mrs. Akin-Cole, the gold shadow on her eyelids shimmering, he felt guilty about his thoughts. She was such a devoted woman, such a well-meaning, devoted woman. He reached out and held her hand.