Free Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Page A

the sun spoil that skin of yours.”
    “Na gode
. Thank you, Hajia,” Olanna said, wondering how it was possible for people to switch affection off and on, to tie and untie emotions.
    “I am no longer the Igbo woman you wanted to marry who would taint the lineage with infidel blood,” Olanna said, as they climbed into Mohammed’s red Porsche. “So I am a friend now.”
    “I would have married you anyhow, and she knew it. Her preference did not matter.”
    “Maybe not at first, but what about later? What about when we had been married for ten years?”
    “Your parents felt the same way as she did.” Mohammed turned to look at her. “Why are we talking about this now?” There was something inexpressibly sad in his eyes. Or maybeshe was imagining it. Maybe she wanted him to seem sad at the thought that they would never marry. She did not wish to marry him, and yet she enjoyed dwelling on the things they did not do and would never do.
    “Sorry,” she said.
    “There’s nothing to apologize for.” Mohammed reached out and took her hand. The car made rasping sounds as they drove past the gates. “There’s too much dust in the exhaust. These cars weren’t made for our parts.”
    “You should buy a hardy Peugeot.”
    “Yes, I should.”
    Olanna stared at the beggars clumped around the walls of the palace, their bodies and begging bowls covered in flies. The air smelled of the spicy-sour leaves from the neem tree.
    “I am not like white people,” she said quietly.
    Mohammed glanced at her. “Of course you’re not. You’re a nationalist and a patriot, and soon you will marry your lecturer the freedom fighter.”
    Olanna wondered if Mohammed’s lightness hid a more serious mockery. Her hand was still in his and she wondered, too, if he was having difficulty maneuvering the car with one hand.
    Olanna moved to Nsukka on a windy Saturday, and the next day Odenigbo left for a mathematics conference at the University of Ibadan. He would not have gone if the conference was not focused on the work of his mentor, the black American mathematician David Blackwell.
    “He is the greatest living mathematician, the greatest,” he said. “Why don’t you come with me,
nkem?
It’s only for a week.”
    Olanna said no; she wanted the chance to settle down when he was not there, to make peace with her fears in his absence. Thefirst thing she did after he left was to throw away the red and white plastic flowers on the center table.
    Ugwu looked horrified. “But mah, it is still good.”
    She led the way outside to the African lilies and pink roses, freshly watered by Jomo, and asked Ugwu to cut some. She showed him how much water to put in the vase. Ugwu looked at the flowers and shook his head, as if he could not believe her foolishness. “But it die, mah. The other one don’t die.”
    “Yes, but these are better,
fa makali,”
Olanna said.
    “How better, mah?” He always responded in English to her Igbo, as if he saw her speaking Igbo to him as an insult that he had to defend himself against by insistently speaking English.
    “They are just nicer,” she said, and realized that she did not know how to explain why fresh flowers were better than plastic ones. Later, when she saw the plastic flowers in a kitchen cupboard, she was not surprised. Ugwu had saved them, the same way he saved old sugar cartons, bottle corks, even yam peels. It came with never having had much, she knew, the inability to let go of things, even things that were useless. So when she was in the kitchen with him, she talked about the need to keep only things that were useful, and she hoped he would not ask her how the fresh flowers, then, were useful. She asked him to clean out the store and line the shelves with old newspapers, and as he worked she stood by and asked him about his family. It was difficult to picture them because, with his limited vocabulary, he described everyone as “very good.” She went to the market with him, and after they