Operation, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

GRANTA 99 

           

L

agos in June is steamy. But that Thursday afternoon at the Champion newspaper office, I did not notice how difficult it was to breathe or how the air was like a hot, moist blanket. I swaggered and smiled, too full of a sense of accomplishment. I had just had my collection of watery poetry published by a vanity press in London. I was doing my first newspaper interview. I was nineteen years old.

Kate, the woman who interviewed me, was squat, friendly, full of praise for the poems although she had not read them. After the questions—Where do you get your inspiration? Do you write indoors or outdoors?—she told me I was a role model for young Nigerians. I glowed. She took me downstairs to have my picture taken in a wide room that smelled of chemicals. Matt photographs were plastered on the wall. Most of them were of prominent people—Fela, Abacha, Gani—but it was the more mundane subjects, beggars under bridges and children playing football and soldiers by the roadsides, that I stopped to admire.

'They put up the best on the wall,' Kate said.

Later, as we left, I turned to glance again at the wall of photographs and that was when I saw it, the photo of Nnamdi. I may have let out a sound, I may have only shivered, but Kate noticed and asked if something was wrong.

I pointed. 'I knew him,' I said.

Kate shook her head in the way people do to show sympathy. 'Oh, sorry, sorry. It was an operation at the bank just across the road,' she said.

I remember the splashes of blood on Nnamdi's face, his head slumped against the front seat of the car; the blood was a deep grey in the black-and-white photo.

A

t my university secondary school in Nsukka, there were two groups of students. The staff group, which I belonged to, was made up of students whose parents were university lecturers, who lived on the campus and had little money and spoke good English. The other group was the Omata. They came mostly from Onitsha and the name Omata somehow conjured the chaos of that large commercial town. Their parents were rich, illiterate traders; they lived in the dormitories and often missed the first week of term. Most of us staff students thought, smugly, that they aspired to be like us: their parents had sent them to our school so that our university polish would rub off on them after all. We mimicked their mixed-up tenses and their saying SH for CH: sit down on that sheer. We laughed at their poor grades, their bush manners. We mocked their bluster. And, secretly, we coveted what they had: the gold watches that we saw only on the wrists of adults, the priceless gullibility of uneducated parents, the imported sandals that cost more than our families made in a month.

Nnamdi owned such sandals; his were a sparkly brown, almost orange, and had wedge heels. Nnamdi was an archetype of the unrefined Ornata student, down to his inelegant swaying-to-the-side strut and his trousers pulled halfway up his belly. Of course this made him unsuitable for me, particularly since I was an academic star of sorts, and of course I found him terribly attractive.

Nnamdi was in Form 4, a popular senior student, while I was in Form 2, a junior student. Still, he must have thought me intimidating because it was his friends who called me at first to say, 'Ima, Nnamdi really likes you.' I was noncommittal, tough because I was expected to be. Finally, he came himself. I wish I remembered the first day I talked to him, or what we said. I remember his walking me home after school, though, and his saying very little. I knew him because he was the kind of student everybody knew and I had always thought him to be larger than life, taller than life. But there he was, shy beside me, looking down as we walked, reduced to a nervously solemn wreck. He had the strangest voice, so hoarse and scratchy it was barely audible, a voice that earned him a lot of jokes and that I would later fondly ape. That day, his shy muttering made it difficult to understand even the little that he said. I was attracted to this shyness. I was attracted, too, to his height; I barely reached his chest and there was something protective about his being so tall.

He took to walking me home. He took to calling me GB, like most of my family and friends. 'Bikonu, please, GB, I want you to be my wife,' he said nearly every day, in Igbo. And I would say, in English, with a thoroughly false coolness, 'I have to think about it,' even though I wanted nothing more than to be his girlfriend. I have come to reject the rituals of pretence that females are taught to practise in courtship: to say no when we mean yes, to be bashful and evasive, to coat our intelligence in coyness. Yet pretence was magical during those weeks when I said no although I meant yes. Nnamdi 'chased' me for a long time. Later, he would tease me about how I gave him a high jump to scale. I like to think now that he knew how much I liked him, from the beginning, and that we were both equal participants in the ritual.

The afternoon I said yes, we were standing in front of our garage and he went over and plucked a flower—one of my mother's carefully preserved yellow roses—and held it out to me.

'What is this for?' I asked sharply. (I had said yes, but it didn't mean I was no longer tough.)

'A sign. I won't leave until you take it.'

'I won't take it until you tell me what it means.'

We went back and forth until Nnamdi said, in English, 'It means love,' and I took the flower and he added, 'If your mother asks who plucked it, say you don't know.'

Ileft the Champion office and sat in a hot taxi and looked at Lagos inching past the window, the hawkers pressing sunglasses against my window, the buses spitting out thick, grey smoke, the cars stuck bumper to bumper in traffic.

'See this stupid man! He wan scratch me!' my taxi driver said, gesturing to the car beside us. Then he stuck his head out and cursed in rapid Yoruba.

I sat back, silent and sweating, and thought of Kate's words, of how we Nigerians used the word operation to refer to armed robberies and how it had taken on an ominous pallor. Buses were stopped and people killed in operations on the Benin-Lagos expressway. Houses were broken into in night-time operations. Banks were raided in operations. One Christmas when we were travelling to our home town, Abba, our driver made a dangerous U-turn in the middle of the expressway. 'There is an operation in front!' he said, and my mother praised him for being so quick. Other cars were turning as well and we heard gunshots and, soon after, the swift crunch of metal as two of the cars collided.

My taxi driver had stopped cursing and asked what I had been doing in the Champion newspaper office. 'Wonderful!' he said when I told him. 'Small aunty like you can write book. Well done!'

I thanked him. But my earlier glow was gone, my poetry forgotten. I was trying instead to remember what I had felt, to describe it to myself, when I saw the photo of the dead person on the wall and realized that it was Nnamdi.

M

y friends, my smug staff friends, were appalled by how much time Nnamdi and I spent together. Could he even make one decent English sentence? What did we talk about? they wanted to know. Even I hardly know now. He made me laugh. We kissed with me standing on the short steps in our backyard so that we could be the same height. We fought about things I no longer remember and sometimes, when I pretended to be angrier than I was, he would threaten to throw himself in the path of a car or to kneel, in apology, at the entrance of my class. He would say this so earnestly that I would laugh and laugh. Just as I laughed when he suggested we go to a dibia to do the igba ndu, a blood betrothal of sorts that would keep us from ever breaking up. I was not familiar with this; the people in my world did not do things like the igba ndu rite, they sniffed at the supernatural and had sanitized engagements when the time was right. But the simplicity of Nnamdi's faith intrigued me. Nnamdi intrigued me. I did not tell my friends that I had heard stories of his stealing money from his father, bribing test questions from teachers, getting drunk in town. Or that he never seemed to study or take exams. Or that he told the most charmingly transparent lies. Once, after he missed an exam, he said, 'As I was walking to school, I tripped and broke my leg and had to be taken to hospital, but they mended the leg right away and so I didn't need a cast or bandage. You can ask Ojay if you don't believe me.'

Ojay, his friend, corroborated this story and added that he had taken Nnamdi to hospital himself. Years later, when Ojay told me that Nnamdi had died, I remembered how people used to taunt him and call him Nnamdi's houseboy, Nnamdi's errand boy. It was Ojay who delivered Nnamdi's letters to me. It was Ojay who wrote them, too, until I refused to read any more unless Nnamdi wrote them himself. So in the following letters, I could see that Ojay had written in pencil first and then Nnamdi's shaky hand in ink had carefully gone over every word. It was Ojay who brought Nnamdi's red sweater and gave it to me one cold harmattan morning. 'Nnamdi thinks you look cold,' he said. And I slipped my arms, my self, into that huge red sweater and felt safe. When the bitter harmattan morning had given way to a sunny afternoon, I still wore that sweater. Never mind that sweat had collected in my armpits.

Before I went to the Champion office that June day, I knew Nnamdi was dead. Ojay had already told me some months before. 'Something happened to Nnamdi,' he had said. His eyes did not meet mine as he told me that Nnamdi had just been at the wrong place at the wrong time, that the operation was over, the armed robbers had finished stealing from the bank, but Nnamdi happened to have parked his car in such a way that he blocked their getaway. I didn't cry that day after Ojay told me. It seemed so distant, so unlikely, and I had not seen him in years, but as I walked past Freedom Square I stared at the grassy plains where, during the weeks of 'chasing' me, Nnamdi once bought me a whole pack of suya at a bazaar and then ended up giving it to a friend because he was too shy to give it to me.

It was in the taxi from the Champion office that I began to cry. I thought about the last time I had seen him. It was at a beach in Lagos and he was riding a horse and we had not seen each other since his father transferred him to another secondary school. We were both self-consciously, unconvincingly mature about things at first. He said he was trying to get into the University of Lagos. I said I was preparing to take my final secondary school exams. He had not changed; the tall, thin body, the narrow face and hooked nose, the hoarse voice were all the same.

'Do you have a boyfriend?' he asked finally.

'Yes,' I replied, although I did not.

He had a girlfriend, too, he said, many girlfriends in fact. Before we parted, he added, 'You can have as many boyfriends as you want to. But when it comes to marriage, it's me and nobody else. God made you for me. If we marry other people, thunder will strike us down.'

We were no longer young teenagers, we were old enough to be truly separated by our different interests, but he spoke with that old earnestness on his face and I laughed.

On my birthday, the last birthday before Nnamdi left my school, he gave me a scented satin rose in a gilded case. I hid it from my mother: it looked expensive and I feared she would ask me to return it right away. Later, when he gave me a ring, with gold strips that curved across my finger, I hid that too and wore it only in school. But I did not hide the card he brought when I was sick with malaria. It looked like an ordinary get-well card, one of the many my friends had sent. When you opened Nnamdi's card, though, it sang: an upbeat take on Für Elise. Inside the card, Nnamdi had written in his unformed, childish hand, 'To my one love GB. From your own Nnamdi.'

In memoriam: Nnamdi Ezenwa