Our gateman threw the gates open. "Thank you, Lord, for journey mercies," Papa said as he drove into the compound, crossing himself.
"Amen," we said. Our house still took my breath away, the four-story white majesty of it, with the spurting fountain in front and the coconut trees flanking it on both sides and the orange trees dotting the front yard.
Three little boys rushed into the compound to greet Papa. They had been chasing our cars down the dirt road. "Omelora! Good afun, sah!" they chorused. They wore only shorts, and each one's belly button was the size of a small balloon. "Kedu nu?" Papa gave them each ten naira from a wad of notes he pulled out of his hold-all. "Greet your parents, make sure you show them this money."
"Yes sah! Tank sah!" They dashed out of the compound, laughing loudly.
Kevin and Sunday unpacked the foodstuffs while Jaja and I unpacked the suitcases from the Mercedes. Mama went to the backyard with Sisi to put away the cast iron cooking tripods. Our food would be cooked on the gas cooker inside the kitchen, but the metal tripods would balance the big pots that would cook rice and stews and soups for visitors. Some of the pots were big enough to fit a whole goat. Mama and Sisi hardly did any of that cooking; they simply stayed around and provided more salt, more Maggi cubes, more utensils, because the wives of the members of our umunna came over to do the cooking. They wanted Mama to rest, they said, after the stress of the city. And every year they took the leftovers-the fat pieces of meat, the rice and beans, the bottles of soft drink and maltii and beer-home with them afterward. We were always prepared to feed the whole village at Christmas, always prepared so that none of the people who came in would leave without eating and drinking to what Papa called a reasonable level of satisfaction. Papa's title was omelora, after all, The One Who Does for the Community.
But it was not only Papa who received visitors; the villagers trooped to every big house with a big gate, and sometimes they took plastic bowls with firm covers. It was Christmas.
Jaja and I were upstairs unpacking when Mama came in and said, "Ade Coker came by with his family to wish us a merry Christmas. They are on their way to Lagos. Come downstair and greet them."
Ade Coker was a small, round, laughing man. Every time I saw him, I tried to imagine him writing those editorials in the Standard; I tried to imagine him defying the soldiers. And I could not. He looked like a stuffed doll, and because he was always smiling, the deep dimples in his pillowy cheeks looked like permanent fixtures, as though someone had sunk a stick into his cheeks. Even his glasses looked dollish: they were thicker than window louvers, tinted a strange bluish shade, and framed in white plastic. He was throwing his baby, a perfectly round copy of himself, in the air when we came in. His little daughter was standing close to him, asking him to throw her in the air, too.
"Jaja, Kambili, how are you?" he said, and before we could reply, he laughed his tinkling laugh and, gesturing to the baby, said, "You know they say the higher you throw them when they're young, the more likely they are to learn how to fly!"
The baby gurgled, showing pink gums, and reached out for his father's glasses. Ade Coker tilted his head back, threw the baby up again. His wife, Yewande, hugged us, asked how we were, then slapped Ade Coker's shoulder playfully and took the baby from him. I watched her and remembered her loud, choking cries to Papa.
"Do you like coming to the village?" Ade Coker asked us.
We looked at Papa at the same time; he was on the sofa, reading a Christmas card and smiling. "Yes," we said.
"Eh? You like coming to this bush place?" His eyes widened theatrically. "Do you have friends here?"
"No," we said.
"So what do you do in this back of beyond, then?" he teased.
Jaja and I smiled and said nothing. "They are always so quiet," he said, turning to Papa. "So quiet."
"They are not like those loud children people are raising these days, with no home training and no fear of God," Papa said, and I was certain that it was pride that stretched Papa's lips and lightened his eyes. "Imagine what the Standard would be if we were all quiet." It was a joke. Ade Coker was laughing; so was his wife, Yewanda. But Papa did not laugh.
Jaja and I turned and went back upstairs, silently.
The rustling of the coconut fronds woke me up. Outside our high gates, I could hear goats bleating and cocks crowing and people yelling greetings across mud compound walls. "Gudu morni. Have you woken up, eh? Did you rise well?" "Gudu morni. Did the people of your house rise well, oh?"*.
I reached out to slide open my bedroom window, to hear they sounds better and to let in the clean air tinged with goat droppings and ripening oranges. Jaja tapped on my door before ha came into my room. Our rooms adjoined; back in Enugu, they were far apart.
"Are you up?" he asked. "Let's go down for prayers before Papa calls us."
I tied my wrapper, which I had used as a light cover in the warm night, over my nightdress, knotted it under my arm, and followed Jaja downstairs.
The wide passages made our house feel like a hotel, as did the impersonal smell of doors kept locked most of the year, of unused bathrooms and kitchens and toilets, of uninhabited rooms. We used only the ground floor and first floor; the other two were last used years ago, when Papa was made a chief and took his omelora title. The members of our umunna had urged him for so long, even when he was still a manager at Leventis and had not bought the first factory, to take a title. He was wealthy enough, they insisted; besides, nobody among our umunna had ever taken a title. So when Papa finally decided to after extensive talks with the parish priest and insisting that all pagan undertones be removed from his title-taking ceremony, it was like a mini New Yam festival. Cars had taken up every inch of the dirt road running through Abba. The third and fourth floors had swarmed with people. Now I went up there only when I wanted to see farther than the road just outside our compound walls.
"Papa is hosting a church council meeting today," Jaja said. "I heard him telling Mama."
"What time is the meeting?"
"Before noon." And with his eyes he said, We can spend time together then. In Abba, Jaja and I had no schedules. We talked more and sat alone in our rooms less, because Papa was too busy entertaining the endless stream of visitors and attending church council meetings at five in the morning and town council meetings until midnight. Or maybe it was because Abba was different, because people strolled into our compound at will, because the very air we breathed moved more slowly.
Papa and Mama were in one of the small living rooms that led off the main living room downstairs. "Good morning, Papa. Good morning, Mama," Jaja and I said.
"How are you both?" Papa asked.
"Fine," we said.
Papa looked bright-eyed; he must have been awake for hours. He was flipping through his Bible, the Catholic version with the deuterocanonical books, bound in shiny black leather. Mama looked sleepy. She rubbed her crusty eyes as she asked if we had slept well.
I could hear voices from the main living room. Guests arrived with dawn here. When we had made the sign of the cross and gotten down on our knees, around the table, someone knocked on the door. A middle-aged man in a threadbare T-shirt peeked in.
"Omelora!" the man said in the forceful tone people used when they called others by their titles. "I am leaving now. I want to see if I can buy a few Christmas things for my children at Oye Abagana." He spoke English with an Igbo accent so strong it decorated even the shortest words with extra vowels. Papa liked it when the villagers made an effort to speak English around him. He said it showed they had good sense.