Dream Count

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This White man in front of me is suspect; he came in a massive truck and he’s wearing a red hat.” We never spoke pure Igbo—English words always littered our sentences—but Zikora had vigilantly shed all English in case strangers overheard, and now she sounded contrived, like a bad TV drama about precolonial times. A man riding a big land boat and wearing a hat the color of blood.

He was trying to look unafraid, which only made him look afraid, and I thought how breakable we all are, and how easily we forget how breakable we are.

At the end of each call, I felt lonelier than before, not because the call had ended but that it had been made at all.

A single gray hair with a slight sheen to it. I unfurled it to its full length, let it go, and then unfurled it again. I didn’t pull it out. I thought: I’m growing old. I’m growing old and the world has changed and I have never been truly known. A rush of raw melancholy brought tears to my eyes. This is all there is, this fragile breathing in and out. Where have all the years gone, and have I made the most of life? But what is the final measure for making the most of life, and how would I know if I have?

I did, and I knew, too, that if he was writing in Korean, then he must have come from Korea; he was not an American, we were similar, and so his days, like mine, must be owned by loneliness.

Paris wears its badge of specialness too heavily, and therefore gracelessly; Paris assumes it will charm you merely because it is charming.

The pull I felt was immediate, consuming, elemental, every granular part of me suddenly rushing toward him. In that moment, something was not so much lost as surrendered.

would say, feeling desperate, and unable to quell my desperation. He would respond only with a look, that withering look, so eloquent in its lordly disappointment, that said “your needs are so ordinary.” I wanted love, old-fashioned love. I wanted my dreams afloat with his. To be faithful, to share our truest selves, to fight and be briefly bereft, always knowing that the sweetness of reconciliation was afoot. But it was pedestrian, he said, this idea of love, bourgeois juvenilia that Hollywood had been feeding people for years. He wanted me to be unusual, interesting, and it took a while before I understood what that meant.

“I love you,” he said. A mumble, but to me a victory. I was a beggar without shame.

One magazine sent back the cover letter page, across which was written, in capital letters, the word “NO,” followed by an exclamation mark. The exclamation mark unnerved me. So aggressive, that line and dot.

My father hummed, a neutral, peace-seeking sound. Somewhere underneath his shrewd, cautious nature, a part of him dreamed, and recognized dreaming, and let others dream. My mother protected me the only way she knew how, with blunt slabs of pragmatic sense, tried and true, the norm.

They were ironic about liking what they liked, for fear of liking what they were not supposed to like, and they were unable to feel admiration, and so criticized people they could simply have admired.

I wondered if that house, too, was a “violence,” or maybe violence was done only when people who were unlike her owned second homes.

“They can’t stand rich people from poor countries, because it means they can’t feel sorry for you.”

Our close friends are small glimpses into us, after all, we choose them, they are not grants from nature like relatives are, and being close to Charlotte said something about Darnell.

“I don’t know,” he said doubtfully, but I knew he would come. He just needed, first, to perform his ritual of reluctance. He always said no when I paid for things, although I knew he wanted me to pay. Sometimes he delayed in bringing out his wallet, even for the smallest of things, like a late-night pack of beer at Walgreens.

Then I erupted in sobs. It was all too much, Darnell’s iciness that, try as I might, I could not thaw, the subservience in Mauritius, as if people were inhaling and exhaling not air but fumes of servility. Omelogor once said she was happy Nigeria wasn’t a tourist country because “people become props, and countries become performances instead of places.”

my mother didn’t like to spend time in America. “This country is not civilized. Everything is ‘Do It Yourself.’ Everything is too casual. Look at their airlines, their first class is rubbish. They don’t know how to provide service with finesse. Even the way they talk. ‘Let’s go and grab lunch.’ How can you be grabbing your lunch?”

“My child, my sunshine, is everything okay?” she asked, her eyes wary with worry. Underneath her faultless ability to find faults lay a deep apprehension. She wanted the world to be perfect for the deserving, and the deserving were those she loved.

I would sit at her enormous dressing table while she held my hair in bunny-tails, never too tight, all the time song-praising me: Omalicha m, nwa m mulu n’afo, anyanwu ututu m. My beautiful one. Child of my womb. My sunshine in the morning.

Nnamdi, the trembling delicious wetness of my life’s first kiss, both of us standing pressed together beneath the eave outside our kitchen. Nnamdi. Would we have stayed together? Would life have separated us? At seventeen, I was so sure. I had picked out the names of our two children—Richard and Daphne—this was before I became sophisticated enough to reject English names.

He must have been a prefect in secondary school, the kind liked by both students and teachers,

giving me the look you gave to Westerners who did foolish Westerner things, like not greeting their elders.

anachronism.

“What did you just do to me?” Already I wanted a repeat. Already I wanted and wanted.

My life had become a scattering of unexpected eroticism.

“Do you sometimes want to escape and find another life?” I asked him. “Find another life?” He propped himself up to look at me, waiting for more details, but some things resist explanation; it takes instinct, intuition, a knowing at your center that is either there or isn’t. From the moment I saw his dutiful living room, its matching furniture, I knew there were large swaths of me that he would never understand.

Chuka said his father was already making plans for the iku aka ceremony, and I thought how beautiful it sounded, the first stage of an Igbo marriage: iku aka, to knock on the door, to seek permission, to hope.

At the high-school graduation party of Enyinnaya’s son, he called out “Baby!” and at least five women looked up. They, too, were Baby. I had joined a cadre of women called Baby. I got up and went to him, smiling, thinking that the picture I carried in my mind of the life I wanted was not one in which I was called Baby. Babe or Babes, maybe, but not Baby.

The root of his loving was duty; he loved as an act of dependable duty, and wasn’t it childish of me to think this dull, to want an incandescent love, consuming, free of all onus?

But something was missing; it was there in the echo after sex, the silence we slipped into, which was not uncomfortable but empty.

Febechi meant the gratitude of a woman to be loved at all, which was not the same as a woman being loved in a way that made her feel whole.

Perhaps I fell in love that day; love happens long before we call it love.

“Americans have a sort of aggressive lack of sophistication, don’t they?” he said. I knew what he meant, I agreed even, but his words rankled. “Every country has its philistines,” I said.

It didn’t feel physical. It was a merging of those parts of us that dream, a full unmasking of two human beings. Afterwards he went to the bathroom and returned and began swiftly to get dressed. He sat on a chair, away from me, and I saw in his eyes something like regret, a faraway look. Moments before, hovering above me, he had said, “I want to look at you,” and now there he was upright and remote, his face shuttered, his shirt slightly creased. I wanted to cry. I sensed his withdrawal, this man who was not at ease with lies, who had never cheated on his wife.

He held my hand for a long time before he let go. I did not go into that station for many years, and when one day I did, I walked in and memory came at me, swift as a punch. The smell of a busy London train station, coffee and food and perfume and people, display boards blinking their train times, the bright shops and the escalators. My body stalled, by itself, on its own. I stumbled. So visceral, so deep, was the tidal rush of memory and regret, and loss, and longing for what could have been.

It felt like the Old Testament. A plague. Her body forsaken, a primitive storm raging at will.

Hold yourself together. It was a warning and a lament, saying don’t let things spill out, and if they have, then gather back what you have revealed. Weakness and need, but especially need; her mother despised her showing any kind of need, no matter how benign.

Part of her mother’s philosophy was to endure pain with pride, especially the kind of pain that belonged to women alone. When she had cramps as a teenager, her mother would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,” and it was years before she knew

Whenever he was ready, there would be another woman willing to make his sandwiches and slip an apple into his bag for work. Zikora almost envied him this, the luxury of walking at his own pace, free of biology’s hysterical constraints.

profligate

He was able do that, just leave unscathed, choose the option of doing nothing, but she would never have that option, because it was her body, and a baby must either be birthed or not. In this way, the decision could never be truly shared. If he was to become a father, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say she did not know, since Nature demanded so much more of the mother.

Now she was flagellating herself, slipping on the cloak of responsibility, looking for a reason to excuse him. But the alternative was to accept that she did not truly know Kwame, that perhaps we can never truly know another human being.

“It’s funny how pregnancy is like body hair. We scrub and scrape our armpits and upper lip and legs, because we hate to have hair there. Then we pamper and treat the hair on our heads, because we love hair there. But it’s all hair. It’s the wanting that makes the difference.”

Her presence instantly felt soothing; she had an elegant calmness, a lack of abrasiveness, that Zikora thought of as a trait of Francophone Africans. A Nigerian version of Kadiatou would bring a different, more bracing energy and leave the air unsettled, even unpleasant.

They were having a mundane conversation while this man slid a needle and thread in and out of her flesh. She didn’t matter to them, just as she didn’t matter to Kwame; she was a threadbare wrung-out rag, a thing without feeling, easy to ignore and discard.

import of the moment.

He often said, “I don’t do commitment,” with a rhythm in his voice, as though miming a rap song, but she didn’t hear what he said; she heard what she wanted to hear: he hadn’t done commitment yet.

The first time she knelt naked in front of him, he yanked a fistful of her braids, then pushed at her head so that she gagged. It was a gesture brimming with unkindness, an action whose theme was the word “bitch.”

When her grandmother died, she called him crying and he said sorry and then, in the next breath, “Has your period ended so I can stop by?” Her period had not ended and so he did not stop by. She believed then that love had to feel like hunger to be true.