The Betrayal

by Isaac Attah Ogezi How could Akuna and Christy ever contemplate doing this to me? Is there nothing called responsibility in our quest to satisfy out unbridled desires? Oh, help me, Lord.    I was already a single mother when Akuna married me. Despite my challenges in giving birth for him, he was so supportive that when my daughter Christy came to live with us, he took her under his wings as though he were her biological father. After concluding her primary school education, he got her enrolled in a secondary school. By the time she was seventeen and in her final year at school, Christy had grown up into a slim beautiful girl. People said that she took after me in terms of my haunting beauty save for the slight, almost unobtrusive limp any time she walked, as a result of the abortion drugs I took in order to terminate the pregnancy. This naturally made her voluptuous hips twitch quiveringly, much to the luscious desires of men. One day when she walked past my husband and I, he pulled my head to his mouth and whispered: 'With those provocative hips, it won't be too long before you become a grandmother!' I pulled my head free from his grasp and said, 'Abeg, leave me!' As the months rolled by, it appeared my husband's prophecy was at the verge of being fulfilled sooner than I had expected after she wrote her final school certificate exams. Graduation seemed to have given her the airs of a grownup to keep late nights. Sometimes while returning from work, Akuna would run into her in unthinkable places like Otukpo and bring her home in his vehicle. Igunmale was now becoming too small and rustic for her quixotic spirit. She continued with this new-found rebellious lifestyle until I noticed one day when she stayed indoors, knocked down by some ailment which she was secretly battling since I had ceased to be her confidante. She shrugged it off as malaria yet she continued to look pale by the day accentuated by frequent vomiting. I didn't want to imagine what my mind was suspecting. No, it could not be! She rebuffed my offer to take her to the hospital, but eventually decided to go by herself after I had pleaded with her to go for a medical checkup. She didn't return home until late in the night, brought home in Akuna's Mercedes Benz. What did the doctors said was the matter with her? Was it so serious that they had to send for my husband at the hospital? I pelted her with my barrage of questions. 'Pull yourself together, Ori,' Akuna said in a calm voice that instilled confidence that everything was under control. ‘It's nothing to be worried about.’ With that assurance, I held my peace, and went to bed, praying for the best.   The following day, Akuna as usual left home as early as four-thirty with his Mercedes Benz. He told me he was going to Otukpo and from there to wherever the business of the day lay. After checking up on Christy and was satisfied that she was fast recuperating from whatever ailment that was troubling her, I left for the market to buy some ingredients for the okoho soup that I wanted to prepare much later in the day. You could imagine my shock when I returned home and discovered Christy wasn't at home. Where could she have gone in her condition? I was deeply disturbed. Immediately I dropped the soup ingredients I bought at the market and set out to look for her. I went to the houses of close friends and relatives, who all pleaded ignorant of her whereabouts. When I returned home, I went to her room again and I stumbled at the possible clue to her mysterious disappearance. Her big bag which normally contained most of her clothes was missing. Obviously, she must have travelled out of town but never deemed it fit to tell her beloved mother. But where could she have travelled to? I was confused and at the same time bewildered at the turn of events in my motherhood. When had I lost my daughter whose conception nearly cost me my education? Where had I shirked in my responsibility to her as a mother? The day broke, but Christy didn't come home. My husband too on whose shoulders I would often lean on to ventilate my pent-up emotions, didn't return home that night owing to the nature of his job.      One day dragged into another and then to the next, but there was no Christy nor my husband. On the third day's evening, while lying on the bed, the familiar sound of Akuna's Mercedes Benz brought me to my feet as it screeched to a halt in front of our house. I raced happily outside to meet him. Akuna gingerly alighted, while on the front seat was a pensive Christy visibly battling with herself whether to disembark from the car. Reluctantly, she opened the side door and came out. They were both attired in their best clothes, as though returning home from a wedding reception.    I rushed to Akuna's arms in welcome but I tried not to be excited about Christy's return because of the unfair treatment she had been treating me lately. Together we made for the house. While I was in fever-excitement for seeing my husband and the return of my prodigal daughter, there was this sombre - or should I say funereal? - air about them that censored my jubilation. Was anybody dead?   'Will you please sit down, Ori?' said Akuna. It was more like a bark. I quietly dropped unto the nearest seat, crestfallen. This is not the man that I had married, I said to myself. An electrifying hush fell over the room. When I tried to lock my eyes with Christy's to perhaps get a clue of what was afoot, she averted my gaze. Instinctively I knew that I was the outsider in this home. The suspense was simply killing me, and just when I was about to cry out in frustration, Akuna started to talk.   'We're just returning from Otukpa,' he'd begun. Yes, and so what about it? I said to myself.       'We had gone there to see the people of Christy's father.'      'About what?' I asked with feigned equanimity.       He stammered uncertainly for a while, and when he was able to pull himself together, he rambled on about the stigma of giving birth unmarried as a woman and all whatnots.        'Pray, what has that got to do with your going to Otukpa with my daughter to see Adeka's people?' I interrupted, unable to gird my emotions.       'We were not sure you would give us your blessing...,' he added in confused, singsong manner when he saw the alarmed expression on my face. I was visibly turning white, mortified beyond words. The rest of what he was saying came to me trance-like as though from a great distance.  Not in my wildest imagination did I believe that Akuna and my daughter could be having an affair behind my back let alone come to me after meeting with her father's people and had performed the traditional rites. I was in a state of inertia, horrified at this abomination wrought by the two people most dear to me on earth and wished God could just spare me further from witnessing this horror by striking me dead instantly.   As though from a blurred vision. I saw Christy saying something about my share. Yes, after they had fulfiled the demands of her father's people, they had now come to meet me with my share, the maternal share of the rite with the ultimatum from my daughter, 'You can either choose to accept your share of the rite as my mother or come in as my co-wife!'   'You …   you … Christy...?' I'd stuttered, pointing an accusing finger at her, but anger against such unspeakable betrayal choked the words back in my throat.   What a blight on motherhood! I'm still surprised how I comported myself without exploding on that accursed day. I played the coward and decided right there and then to let them be and packed out of my matrimonial home for my daughter to take over without taking any court action as some people later advised me. Not more than a week later, the clouds of discontent brewing over our skies in our country burst into a full-scale civil war. I remember Igunmale and our village Agila and all other border Idoma towns with southeastern Nigeria suffered the earliest casualties of the war, bombarded day and night by airstrikes from both the federal and Biafran forces. We all fled on foot for our dear lives to Otukpo.   It's now over two decades that that the war had ended and I’m yet to set eyes on either of them nor heard about what befell them or their whereabouts. Did they too survive the war?    It was tough but I survived.