with her mother about Amraibure, the young woman dreamed of the young man, who had proposed marriage to her; he was like an incubus pressing her hard. She woke with a shout that also awakened her mother sleeping nearby. There was something cumbersome about Amraibure that Kena started to hate. Within a few days, she had lost the very little interest she had had in Amraibure.
The following market-day, she wound her way to the same spot where they had met the previous one. Amraibure was already there, pricing articles that he would not buy but a strategy to while away time before she arrived. As soon as he saw her, he moved to some space where they could talk and not be disturbed by loud haggling.
“I didn't want to tell you the other time, but I am already given out to somebody else. Don't ask me any questions about it, but I can't marry you.”
“Did you tell your mother?” Amraibure asked.
“It doesn't matter if I told her or not. I won't marry you. She will not give her consent to our marriage anyway. She knows better than me,” she said.
Amraibure stood still, unable to say anything. Kena had again defeated him. What could he do to win her love? He asked himself.
“My mother is waiting for me. I can't stay here with you any longer. Try some other girls around,” she said, leaving Amraibure.
She had concluded instinctively that her fate and Amraibure's were different and she had better go her own way.
Twenty years later Amraibure was returning from checking his cone nets in the stream in the late afternoon and saw a wearied Kena. She was no doubt exhausted by the long journey and by the big baby on her back. Her face had creased from fatigue and deep thought about her plight. The usually vivacious personality had been shed for a sombre look. He had recognized her profile from afar before he drew closer to her. She had not changed much despite the years. She might be walking slowly but her gait was unmistakably hers and he would know her shadow from her walk among a hundred people. Her physical profile had obsessed him; or, rather, the rejection of long ago had made him think so much about her. She was impressed in his consciousness because he had not fully forgotten how she had shamed him. He still hoped a time would come when he would avenge what he considered to be defeat by a woman. Amraibure would never consider himself a full man in the presence of Kena or as long as she lived. And that he also related to his personal success. How could he be successful until Kena came back to beg him to be his second wife? Of course, it would then be his turn to ask her to leave him alone because he was a happily married man and did not want her.
Though downcast, Kena looked up to see who was passing her on the road. She also easily recognized Amraibure, who had not lost a bit of his energetic strides. He had grown more robust and taller but he remained the same person she knew. There was a moment of silence, as if each was gauging the situation and thinking who should greet the other first. It was such a brief period that there was not much time to delay reflection.
“Do-oooh!” she greeted him.
Her voice was feeble and not vibrant as it used to be but it was clear in a singsong tone.
“Do-oh!” he greeted back, as if responding to the greeting of someone he did not know.
It was more like a shout than a greeting. There was reluctance in his response, because he did not slow down, nor did he ask “How are you?” as he was supposed to. He did not stop to ask her any questions about her condition or offer any condolences, as if he had not heard that she had lost her husband six months earlier. The news of her husband's death had spread all over Okpara because of her mother's hysteric cry for days, and Amraibure had heard. However, walking at a fast pace and with long strides, Amraibure overtook her, not willing to walk abreast with her and strike a conversation, and went his own way to town. He even stifled a hiss at the woman who had rejected him so many years back.
Yes, she had married a man from outside Okpara and had spent the last twenty years or so away. The lure of the handsome outsider caught up with her, Amraibure thought scornfully. She should have known that the handsome outsider would lose his lustre sooner or later; more so after she had gone to his home. He wished she had married a skull or monster transformed into a handsome man, as in folktales, just to fill her fantasy and then torment her. He would have liked her to regret her marriage to somebody else. There was a resurgence of the spirit of vengeance he had kept under control for the so many years they had not seen. He had always wished that something would be missing from her life and she would be unhappy with another man. Only he would have made her happy and made her life complete.
Now she was coming back home after squandering her youth and liveliness elsewhere. He had cast a furtive glance at her even as he wanted her to see him not paying attention to her any longer. It was true that she still retained her beauty but she was no longer the young beauty of Eregbe Street and all of Okpara. Her skin no longer shone with the special complexion that she had carried as a young girl. She was no longer in her prime, he realized with a sense of glee.
The past came back to Amraibure vividly. After Kena rejected his proposal to marry him, he went through a period of sober reflection. He then came to the conclusion that he wanted to do whatever would make him a man, the sort who would appeal to Kena. It would take him extraordinary effort to be such a man, and would not be possible because that man would not be him; it was not in his nature to be what he was not. He wanted to change Kena's mind and make her accept him as her future husband by means he would practice. An impatient man, who abandoned breaking a rock if he did not make a dent with a few strikes, he changed his mind and took a different route. If he, a hunter, could not bring down the antelope, he went for a softer target that would bring him another game. At this point of his life, he felt a woman was a woman and forgot about his earlier obsession with conquering Kena, whom, he felt, had defeated him and would not allow her the last word or laugh on their relationship. He would gradually absorb the pain of rejection and move on without Kena, even as he looked forward to that unknown day in the future when he would “conquer” her.
And so as soon as Kena had married and it had become futile for him longing for another man's wife in a distant land he did not care to know about, he himself had gone on with his life, as he had to, to marry Ovwode. He had gone only three streets away from his Imodje Street in Okpara to marry her. Many people had wondered whether they were not related in one way or another, but there was no evidence of a close blood kinship. A man used to performing rituals, Amraibure listened to the advice that he should slaughter a big he-goat as a precautionary means of absolving them from whatever bad things happened to relatives who married themselves. He did not want to father handicapped children or be cursed by the gods and be childless, consequences the people attributed to incestuous marriages.
Amraibure and Kena did not meet all these years both were separately married but had not forgotten that moonlit night of their youthful experience. Nor had both of them forgotten the marriage proposal and the rejection by the next market-day. In that short instance, as the man overtook the woman on the homeward path, none of them could tell what their lives would have been like if they had married. In her reflection, Kena saw him as a tree, one who could only be bent by a non-human force as that of a strong hurricane. That was despite the force that filled his frame. Amraibure recollected the momentary stripping in the moonlight. How she was like a fruit plant he could not reach to pluck to fill his desire! She who had been an antelope that a great hunter could not shoot without transforming into a disarming beauty! But that was long ago, and whatever happened then did not matter now. The period of twenty years had separated them like a big river and they could only live safely on either side of it.
Kena's return coincided with Titi's visit, and the town was in a festive mood for the most part. Amraibure had objected to Titi's surprise
