That night that Dylann Roof shot some worshippers in a church at Charleston, Efe Osemeghe told his wife that she had three months to become pregnant or else he would take a second wife. It was a cold night.
After he’d made this unscrupulous announcement, he tuned in to CNN and learnt of what had just happened in the US—he sighed and sighed again. His wife, her head pounding like a brick-making machine, looked fixedly at the television wondering what had elicited the sighs. She picked up her iPad to read him a story, eager to please him, perhaps to ward off from his mind thoughts of taking a second wife. For a year and counting she had been reading him a story before he dropped off to sleep. It had all started one night when a friend sent her a short story by one Donald Barthelme, about a man who bought himself a little city and was like God.
So the night he talked about a second wife, she read him Haruki Murakami’s Scheherazade. He found it interesting. When the story ended, he took the iPad from her, placed it on the bedside stool and wrapped her in his arms; perhaps the affection between the characters in the story had affected him. She thought it possible that if they made love that night, she might conceive, and she cried—the kind of weeping that one does without producing any sound, yet tears stream down from the eyes.
Barely four months later, she told him she was with child. She’d worried every day that he was going to return one evening with a woman. It was a fear so strong that it had arrested her whole being, shut down her brain, and made her too weak to even talk to people in her office or gossip with her friends who visited often—she couldn’t afford to tell them about her husband’s decision to find a new wife—she had feared that if she divulged that, most of her friends who were not with men might begin to make some moves to catch her husband’s eye.
The night he told her that they would try for the last time, he had just returned from visiting his father—a nagging, stubborn old man who still thought he should control his son. Whenever his father visited them, he would initiate conversation with her, steering the discussion around to the issue of children,
“Chinwe, tell me,” he would say, “Are you people not planning on giving me a grandchild, eh?”
The woman’s countenance would change instantly. “We are trying, papa—”
“Trying? I don’t understand . . . he has a penis dangling in between his legs, or doesn’t he?”
She would look away, shyly. “He does.”
“And you have a womb . . . or tell me, did you subject yourself to pills or abortions when you were not yet with my son?”
She would look down and say, “No, papa. How can you say that?” Then the old man would extract from his trouser pocket a container of tobacco snuff, tip some of the contents into his cupped palm, and using his right forefinger would scoop large quantities into this nostril, sneeze, and into the other nostril, sneeze, talking endlessly about how the world was a wreck and nothing was what it used to be.
So her becoming pregnant was a big deal, for not only was she scared of the second-wife threats, she was sure that her husband’s father was planning on bringing this second wife himself. Tales were rife of women who lost their places in their husbands’ homes because they failed to have a child suckling their breasts—in fact, there was this story one of her friends told her of a young lady who came for a vacation to her sister’s house, got pregnant by her sister’s husband, and drove the sister away.
“Men are scarce these days, Chinwe,” her friends would say and shake their heads.
“Count yourself lucky that you have a husband. The worst thing that could happen to a woman is not to have a man’s name attached to hers,” one of her friends, still single, would inform them with a melancholic voice. Another would say, “Married ones like us ought to hold our husbands with chains, oh. One wonders at the speed women are increasingly losing their husbands to young girls . . . small—small girls of yesterday.”
So every time her friends visited and they had such conversations, she would not be at ease. Read full story in The Temz Review.
