There was something sad, almost tragic about her beauty, and
from the moment she opened the door and looked at him in a kind,
patient way, Yakubu felt drawn to her. It was as if she had reached
out and pulled him into a circle in which only he and she existed.
‘Are you Mrs Osasa?’ he asked. She gave a whoop of
joy when she opened the bulky brown envelope he brought her and
saw the flight ticket inside. Still standing, she read the short
letter accompanying the ticket.
‘I arrived yesterday and I am going back next week. Your
husband wants me to travel back with you,’ Yakubu said.
He hadn’t expected someone like his neighbour, Osasa, who
was almost fifty, to be married to someone so young. She couldn’t
be up to thirty. When she asked him to stay for lunch he said
yes, even though he had planned to have lunch with his friends.
At lunch he found out more about her: she was a nurse, she had
no children, and she lived with her sister-in-law because they
had sold their house two years ago when Osasa was leaving for
America after winning the diversity visa lottery. She said this
innocently, ‘He needed to go with some money because we
weren’t sure what America was going to be like.’
They were seated at a square dining table, Naomi to his left,
and opposite him was her sister-in-law sitting close to her five-year-old
daughter, Abigail, as if to protect her from the stranger. The
sister-in-law had returned from work a few minutes after his arrival,
with her daughter in tow, and appeared disconcerted to find a
strange man in the living room. She passed him without a word
and from where he sat he heard her voice in the kitchen querying
Naomi: ‘Who is he?’
She had a long scrawny neck, which he tried hard not to stare
at as the eba progressed visibly down it. She didn’t say
much, but her eyes were fixed on the big brown envelope resting
on the center-table. And when she wasn’t looking at the
envelope she was covertly assessing Yakubu. He thought, what a
cheerless woman.
‘What’s America like?’ Abigail asked and her
mother promptly rebuked her for speaking while eating.
‘It is a big country, with lots of opportunities,’
he said.
‘And how is my brother; he must be rich by now?’ the
sister in-law asked. Yakubu answered truthfully and briefly, addressing
himself to Naomi, ‘He has a good job, and two cars - one
for himself, the other waiting for you.’
He told her of the nice apartment, which she’d soon call
home, and the friendly neighbours who all looked forward to her
coming, but he didn’t say her husband was dying.
*
They left on a cool Sunday afternoon. On the plane, seated next
to Naomi, Yakubu suddenly grew talkative. He wanted to ask her
about her plans, her expectations, but she was so sleepy because
she had spent most of last night with friends, saying goodbye,
too excited to sleep. For two years she had waited for this trip,
and now that it was happening it seemed almost untrue. She slept
all the way, waking up only to eat and go to the bathroom. He
watched movies, and in between he flipped through the pages of
the in-flight magazine. He looked at her sleeping soundly beside
him and he had to remind himself she was a married woman just
to stop himself from reaching out and stroking her braided hair.
He remembered his first year in America, four years ago. He had
gone to do his MBA at the MIT in Boston. It snowed so hard that
year that he spent weeks in his room, seated before the radiator,
miserable and scared to death by the white deluge outside his
window. He felt as if the world was going to end. From then on
he had developed a visceral hatred for winter, and once he had
broken up with a girlfriend who loved snow so much that she wrote
sonnets about it. Although he had stayed on in Boston after his
graduation, he never took a permanent job because he wanted to
be free to seek warmer climates as soon as the first snow fell.
He’d look out the window, see the vast whiteness and feel
a sudden panic, and the next day he’d be gone.
His yearly migrations had come to take on a peripatetic quality,
he went from city to city, taking on adjunct positions, trying
to make sense of this enormous land, seeking something in the
distance. Recently he had noticed a desperate, almost aimless
side to his travels, and so this spring when he found himself
teaching at a university in Minnesota, he began toying with the
idea of staying on through the winter, and if he survived that,
he might apply for a permanent post.
In the taxi from the airport he sighed as he saw the leaves on
the maple trees by the roadside beginning to lose their green
colour. Soon it would be autumn. The leaves would grow pink, then
red, then brown before finally falling to the ground.
*
Naomi woke up at 5 AM and slipped out of bed quietly, careful
not to wake her snoring husband. She was able to wake up every
day at exactly this time without an alarm clock. She went to the
bathroom and had a quick shower and began to dress for work. This
was her third month in America and already she was learning to
understand how merciless this country was in its insistence on
self-sufficiency. Already she had a driver’s license, and
she held two jobs – one at the nearby MacDonald’s
and the other as a nurse in a private clinic. As she dressed in
the half-darkness she could feel Osasa’s eyes following
her. She ignored his eyes as she moved about in the gloom. An
anger that had refused to leave her since her arrival smouldered
in her chest. No one had told her. The day she arrived she thought
she was seeing a stranger when she met him at the door, struggling
to stand up straight, his eyes sunken, and his body skeletal.
She had turned to Yakubu who was holding her bag as if to ask
him if there wasn’t a mistake, and he had turned away, unable
to meet her eyes. That first night as they sat facing each other,
she discovered just how bad things really were. Osasa was suffering
from some sort of liver problem. He had no health insurance, the
doctors thought the illness was terminal, and he didn’t
have a dime in the bank. She didn’t ask him what happened
to the money from the house they sold, or why the room was so
bare of furniture. All she asked was: ‘How do I get a job?’
The week of her arrival Osasa showed a momentary recovery and
threw a surprise welcome party. She came back from a job search
and found the living room full of people, with Osasa in the centre,
all beaming at her, and soon everyone was welcoming her and offering
her a drink. Strange faces. She recognized the landlord, Mr Malum,
and his family. He was a short, hirsute man in his sixties and
had lived in America for over ten years now. He spoke with an
American accent, though when excited the underlying Nigerian accent
threatened to pop up. He ended every sentence with, ‘You
know.’ He had five children, three from his first marriage
and two from his second marriage. He had come to America on a
visitor’s visa and stayed on. His wife and three children
joined him later. His wife couldn’t adjust to the new life.
She kept traveling back to Nigeria to visit, and on one such visit
she simply didn’t return. After the divorce he married a
white American woman, Vanessa, who came with the two-story house
she had inherited from her late husband, it was an old, colonial
style structure, the ground floor, let out to Osasa and Yakubu,
had two flats with a common living room and kitchen.
‘Feel free in this house, you know,’ he said to Naomi
pumping her hand. ‘You are now family, you know. Welcome
to America. This is real America. You will get used to things,
you know. It takes a while.’
Vanessa, a tall, fat, red head, looked rather comical in her Nigerian
buba and wrapper, which she had apparently put on for the party.
Yakubu sat in a corner with a drink in his hand, his eyes on Naomi
as she was taken round the room and introduced to the people by
Osasa. He felt something close to hatred for the gloating, ever
smiling Osasa. How could he fail to see how tired she looked,
and that her smile was strained and fixed as she kept whispering
‘Thank you’ to the smiling faces. He had seen that
same gloating smile on Osasa’s face the week he moved in
as Osasa’s neighbour almost eight months ago. He had heard
a knock on his door, and when he opened up he found Osasa standing
there with a buxom blonde. He had one arm behind her, the hand
casually cupping her buttock; his shirt was open at the chest,
his chest hairs screaming his virility, his beer gut hanging out
of his unbuttoned shirt like a polished calabash.
‘My name is Osasa. I am your neighbour, a fellow Nigerian.
I came to welcome you. This is Melanie, my darling. Say hello
Melanie.’
‘Hello,’ Melanie said.
In the following days Yakubu became used to his neighbour’s
hedonistic lifestyle: Osasa slept all day, then in the evening
he’d hire a limousine to take him to the casino, where he’d
gamble all night, to return home in the wee hours with one of
his girlfriends. He’d sometimes sit with a girlfriend in
the living room, flaunting her at whoever happened to pass by.
They all had similar sounding names: Melanie, Melissa, Melinda,
and the same hard unblinking eyes, the same big blonde hair, the
same oversized breasts trapped by the undersized bras. Yakubu
was amazed by the man’s appetite for dissipation, and at
such an age. It was as if this new country was a huge cake and
he wouldn’t rest till he had eaten it all up. Yakubu wondered
where the money for the limousines and the casinos came from.
And then suddenly Osasa fell ill, and for the first time Yakubu
found out that there was a Mrs Osasa back in Nigeria, and Osasa
wanted him to please return with her since he was visiting home.
*
Four months after the party, on the 15th of December, the first
snow of the year fell, and without opening his window Yakubu knew
what the landscape looked like: the trees bent under their load,
the roads blocked by inches of the white powdery, dry, wet stuff.
He made his way to the kitchen to get a cup of tea, and from the
hallway he saw Naomi through the open door. She was alone, in
her nurse’s uniform, her jacket hanging over a chair –
she was on her way to work and must have stopped to have a quick
cup of tea. Her hands were wrapped round the cup and she was staring
at the snow hanging from the leafless branches of the birch outside
the window. He felt his heart beat quicken as he watched her from
the door. And he had tried his best to keep out of her way, to
hide the confused emotions that always gripped him when she was
near. He was happy at the way she had quickly settled down to
the demand of things, how she had learned to be self-sufficient
in the way America demanded of every new comer. But whenever they
met, in the kitchen, or in the living room where she sometimes
sat alone to watch tv, he’d notice a look of perplexity,
confusion, and sometimes hurt on her face as she looked at him.
He could tell she wanted to talk, to confide in him. By now she
must have discovered the history of her husband’s two years
in America. A few weeks ago she had knocked on his door and asked
him if he knew a girl called Melodie. Immediately he knew it was
one of Osasa’s blonde girlfriends. ‘Why?’
‘Well, she came, and she knocked, and when I opened the
door she looked surprised, then she said she had the wrong flat…and
I thought perhaps it was you she came to see.’
They were standing in front of his door. Her head was lowered,
and she was in her nurse’s uniform, her shoes white and
crisp. ‘You were out then.’
‘I can’t recall the name,’ he said. He could
see the questions written in the lines on her face, in the way
her eyes looked into his face, begging him to say more, and yet
again begging him not to say anything. She looked tired, sleep-starved.
He changed the subject. ‘I see you’ve started another
job.’
‘Yes. Osasa talked to a friend of his who runs a nursing
agency.’
They stood there, she with her head slightly bowed, and he leaning
against his doorframe, a book in his hand. He wanted with all
his heart to take her hand, lead her into his room, and close
the door and never open it again. At last she sighed and said,
‘I have to go to work now.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
Then he stepped into the kitchen and said softly, ‘The snow
is here at last.’
She lowered her head quickly and wiped her eyes before turning
to him with a smile. He saw tear tracks clearly defined below
each eye. He sat down beside her and took her hand. ‘Is
something wrong, is your husband okay…?’ he asked.
And did his heart leap with hope for just a moment?
‘He is fine…well…as usual. I was just looking
at the snow and I felt sad. I don’t know why, but I just
feel tired, as if the snow is falling on me, weighing me down.’
‘I feel that way too whenever it snows,’ he said.
‘I can’t stand it.’
They sat like that for a moment, looking at the snow through the
window, and then she stood up and took her cup to the sink to
rinse it. He stood up and followed her. As he approached she turned
and looked at him questioningly, but he said nothing. He took
her in his arms and kissed her, and after a brief hesitation her
lips moved in response to his. Then she put her hands on his chest
and pushed him away gently. He moved back and watched her pick
her jacket off the chair and walk out.
It was a goodbye kiss. He had decided to leave for a warmer place
early in the morning. 
