No Longer at Ease

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Book: No Longer at Ease Read Free
Author: Chinua Achebe
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are always walking about, that is, those who want to walk. If you don’t want to walk you only have to wave your hand and a pleasure car stops for you.” His audience made sounds of wonderment. Then by way of digression he said: “If you see a white man, take off your hat for him. The only thing he cannot do is mold a human being.”
    For many years afterwards, Lagos was always associated with electric lights and motorcars in Obi’s mind. Even after he had at last visited the city and spent a few days there before flying to the United Kingdom his views did not change very much. Of course, he did not really see much of Lagos then. His mind was, as it were, on higher things. He spent the few days with his “countryman,” Joseph Okeke, a clerk in the Survey Department. Obi and Joseph had been classmates at the Umuofia C.M.S. Central School. But Joseph had not gone on to a secondary school because he was too old and his parents were poor. He had joined the Education Corps of the 82nd Division and, when the war ended, the clerical service of the Nigerian Government.
    Joseph was at Lagos Motor Park to meet his lucky friend who was passing through Lagos to the United Kingdom. He took him to his lodgings in Obalende. It was only one room. A curtain of light-blue cloth ran the full breadth of the room separating the Holy of Holies (as he called his double spring bed) from the sitting area. His cooking utensils, boxes, and other personal effects were hidden away under the Holy of Holies. The sitting area was taken up with two armchairs, a settee (otherwise called “me and my girl”), and a round table on which he displayed his photo album. At night, his house-boy moved away the round table and spread his mat on the floor.
    Joseph had so much to tell Obi on his first night in Lagos that it was past three when they slept. He told him about the cinema and the dance halls and about political meetings.
    “Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can’t dance. I first met Joy at the dancing school.” “Who is Joy?” asked Obi, who was fascinated by what he was learning of this strange and sinful new world. “She was my girl friend for—let’s see …”—he counted off his fingers—“… March, April, May, June, July—for five months. She made these pillowcases for me.”
    Obi raised himself instinctively to look at the pillow he was lying on. He had taken particular notice of it earlier in the day. It had the strange word osculate sewn on it, each letter in a different color.
    “She was a nice girl but sometimes very foolish. Sometimes, though, I wish we hadn’t broken up. She was simplymad about me; and she was a virgin when I met her, which is very rare here.”
    Joseph talked and talked and finally became less and less coherent. Then without any pause at all his talk was transformed into a deep snore, which continued until the morning.
    The very next day Obi found himself taking a compulsory walk down Lewis Street. Joseph had brought a woman home and it was quite clear that Obi’s presence in the room was not desirable; so he went out to have a look round. The girl was one of Joseph’s new finds, as he told him later. She was dark and tall with an enormous pneumatic bosom under a tight-fitting red and yellow dress. Her lips and long fingernails were a brilliant red, and her eyebrows were fine black lines. She looked not unlike those wooden masks made in Ikot Ekpene. Altogether she left a nasty taste in Obi’s mouth, like the multicolored word osculate on the pillowcase.
    Some years later as Obi, newly returned from England, stood beside his car at night in one of the less formidable of Lagos slum areas waiting for Clara to take yards of material to her seamstress, his mind went over his earlier impressions of the city. He had not thought places like this stood side by side with the cars, electric lights, and brightly dressed girls.
    His car was parked close to a wide-open storm drain

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