lambofgod
Apollo
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
wbi
Twice a month, like a dutiful son, I visited my parents in Enugu, in their small over-furnished flat that grew dark in the afternoon. Retirement had changed them, shrunk them. They were in their late eighties, both small and mahogany-skinned, with a tendency to stoop. They emed to look more and more alike, as though all the years together had made their features blend and bleed into one another. They even smelled alike—a menthol scent, from the green vial of Vicks VapoRub they pasd to each other, carefully rubbing a little in their nostrils and on aching joints. When I arrived, I would find them either sitting out on the veranda overlooking the road or sunk into the living-room sofa, watching Animal Planet. They had a new, simple n of wonder. They marvelled at the wiliness of wolves, laughed at the cleverness of apes, and asked each other, “Ifukwa? Did you e that?”六级试题
They had, too, a new, baffling patience for incredible stories. Once, my mother told me that a sick neighbor in Abba, our ancestral hometown, had vomited a grasshopper—a living, writ
agenda是什么意思hing inct, which, she said, was proof that wicked relatives had poisoned him. “Somebody texted us a picture of the grasshopper,” my father said. They always supported each other’s stories. When my father told me that Chief Okeke’s young hou help had mysteriously died, and the story around town was that the chief had killed the teenager and ud her liver for money making rituals, my mother added, “They say he ud the heart, too.”
Fifteen years earlier, my parents would have scoffed at the stories. My mother, a professor of political science, would have said “Nonn” in her crisp manner, and my father, a professor of education, would merely have snorted, the stories not worth the effort of speech. It puzzled me that they had shed tho old lves, and become the kind of Nigerians who told anecdotes about diabetes cured by drinking holy water.
bookdown>eachtime
Still, I humored them and half listened to their stories. It was a kind of innocence, this new childhood of old age. They had grown slower with the passing years, and their faces lit up at the sight of me and even their prying questions—“When will you give us a grandchild?
When will you bring a girl to introduce to us?”—no longer made me as ten as before. Each time I drove away, on Sunday afternoons after a big lunch of rice and stew, I wondered if it would be the last time I would e them both alive, if before my next visit I would receive a phone call from one of them telling me to come right away. The thought filled me with a nostalgic sadness that stayed with me until I got back to Port Harcourt. And yet I knew that if I had a family, if I could complain about rising school fees as the children of their friends did, then I would not visit them so regularly. I would have nothing for which to make amends.
During a visit in November, my parents talked about the increa in armed robberies all over the east. Thieves, too, had to prepare for Christmas. My mother told me how a vigilante mob in Onitsha had caught some thieves, beaten them, and torn off their clothes—how old tires had been thrown over their heads like necklaces, amid shouts for petrol and matches, before the police arrived, fired shots in the air to disper the crowd, and took the robbers away. My mother paud, and I waited for a supernatural detail that would embellish the story. Perhaps, just as they arrived at the police station, the thieves h
ad turned into vultures and flown away.
“Do you know,” she continued, “one of the armed robbers, in fact the ring leader, was Raphael? He was our houboy years ago. I don’t think you’ll remember him.” I stared at my mother. “Raphael?”
“It’s not surprising he ended like this,” my father said. “He didn’t start well.”
My mind had been submerged in the foggy lull of my parents’ storytelling, and I struggled now with the sharp awakening of memory.
广州雅思考试My mother said again, “You probably won’t remember him. There were so many of tho houboys. You were young.”
autocraticBut I remembered. Of cour I remembered Raphael.
Nothing changed when Raphael came to live with us, not at first. He emed like all the others, an ordinary-looking teen from a nearby village. The houboy before him, Hyginu
s, had been nt home for insulting my mother. Before Hyginus was John, whom I remembered becau he had not been nt away; he had broken a plate while washing it and, fearing my mother’s anger, had packed his things and fled before she came home from work. All the houboys treated me with the contemptuous care of people who disliked my mother. Plea come and eat your food, they would say—I don’t want trouble from Madam. My mother regularly shouted at them, for being slow, stupid, hard of hearing; even her bell-ringing, her thumb resting on the red knob, the shrillness aring through the hou, sounded like shouting. How difficult could it be to remember to fry the eggs differently, my father’s plain and hers with onions, or to put the Russian dolls back on the same shelf after dusting, or to iron my school uniform properly?
