No Longer at Ease Read Online Free

European reserve. But things had changed, and some Africans in “European posts” had been given houses in Ikoyi. Obi Okonkwo, for example lived there, and as he drove from Lagos to his flat he was struck again by these two cities in one. It always reminded him of twin kernels separated by a thin wall in a palm-nut shell. Sometimes one kernel was shiny black and alive, the other powdery white and dead.
    “What is making you so moody?” He looked sideways at Clara, who was ostentatiously sitting as far away from him as she could, pressed against the left door. She did not answer. “Tell me, darling,” he said, holding her hand in one of hiswhile he drove with the other. “Leave me, ojare ,” she said, snatching her hand away.
    Obi knew very well why she was moody. She had suggested in her tentative way that they should go to the films. At this stage in their relationship, Clara never said: “Let us go to films.” She said instead: “There is a good film at the Capitol.” Obi, who did not care for films, especially those that Clara called good, had said after a long silence: “Well, if you insist, but I’m not keen.” Clara did not insist, but she felt very much hurt. All evening she had been nursing her feelings. “It’s not too late to go to your film,” said Obi, capitulating, or appearing to do so. “You may go if you want to, I’m not coming,” she said. Only three days before they had gone to see “a very good film” which infuriated Obi so much that he stopped looking at the screen altogether, except when Clara whispered one explanation or another for his benefit. “That man is going to be killed,” she would prophesy, and sure as death, the doomed man would be shot almost immediately. From downstairs the shilling-ticket audience participated noisily in the action.
    It never ceased to amaze Obi that Clara should take so much delight in these orgies of killing on the screen. Actually it rather amused him when he thought of it outside the cinema. But while he was there he could feel nothing but annoyance. Clara was well aware of this, and tried her best to ease the tedium for him by squeezing his arm or biting his ear after whispering something into it. “And after all,” she would say sometimes, “I don’t quarrel with you when you start reading your poems to me.” Which was quite true. Onlythat very morning he had rung her up at the hospital and asked her to come to lunch to meet one of his friends who had recently come to Lagos on transfer from Enugu. Actually Clara had seen the fellow before and didn’t like him. So she had said over the telephone that she wasn’t keen on meeting him again. But Obi was insistent, and Clara had said: “I don’t know why you should want me to meet people that I don’t want to meet.” “You know, you are a poet, Clara,” said Obi. “To meet people you don’t want to meet, that’s pure T. S. Eliot.”
    Clara had no idea what he was talking about but she went to lunch and met Obi’s friend, Christopher. So the least that Obi could do in return was to sit through her “very good film,” just as she had sat through a very dull lunch while Obi and Christopher theorized about bribery in Nigeria’s public life. Whenever Obi and Christopher met they were bound to argue very heatedly about Nigeria’s future. Whichever line Obi took, Christopher had to take the opposite. Christopher was an economist from the London School of Economics and he always pointed out that Obi’s arguments were not based on factual or scientific analysis, which was not surprising since he had taken a degree in English.
    “The civil service is corrupt because of these so-called experienced men at the top,” said Obi.
    “You don’t believe in experience? You think that a chap straight from university should be made a permanent secretary?”
    “I didn’t say straight from the university, but even thatwould be better than filling our top posts with old men who have no