WHERE THE SUNFLOWERS GROW

The Achebe Question

In the third week of term, Adaeze learned three things about Emeka Nwosu that she had not expected to learn.

The first: he had read Things Fall Apart six times. She knew this because she asked him, with the directness she applied to most things when her curiosity outweighed her caution, why he carried the same copy of the book everywhere when he had presumably already read it.

"Six times," he said.

"Why?"

"Different reasons each time." He turned the book over in his hands with the careful, familiar gesture of someone handling something old and personally significant. "The first time I read it because it was assigned. The second because I was angry at the first reading and wanted to argue with it. The third because I realised I had been arguing with the wrong things. The fourth because a friend in Lagos told me I had missed everything important, and he was right. The fifth because my mother asked me what it was about, and I tried to explain it to her, and I could not, and I needed to go back and understand why." He paused.

"And the sixth?" Adaeze asked.

He was quiet for a moment. "Because we moved. And I needed something familiar."

She did not ask anything further about that. She understood, without needing it explained, the specific comfort of a book that has already asked you hard questions and waited patiently for your answers.

The second thing she learned was that Emeka was funny. Not performatively funny, not the kind of funny that announces itself and waits for applause, but quietly funny, the kind that surfaces in a single dry observation and then disappears before you have fully processed it. During their Thursday study group session, when their classmate Biodun Adeyemi spent eleven minutes explaining why he believed the WAEC examiners deliberately designed the Literature paper to punish people who had actually read the texts, Emeka leaned slightly toward Adaeze and said, very quietly, "He has a point but he is going to argue himself into failing."

He was right. Adaeze pressed her lips together to keep from laughing and focused very hard on her notes.

The third thing she learned was that Emeka missed Lagos in a way he tried not to show and failed.

She noticed it first in the way he talked about his former school, Federal Government College, Ijanikin, with a particular care that suggested he was editing as he spoke, leaving out the parts that would reveal how much the place had mattered to him. She noticed it in the way he sometimes looked at his phone during free periods with an expression that was not quite sadness and not quite longing but somewhere between the two, a specific frequency of missing that she recognised because she felt it herself about things, not places, but the feeling had the same resonance.

She did not comment on it directly. She had not earned the right to ask about it. But she noted it in the same interior catalogue where she was, without consciously deciding to, collecting small facts about him.

What she was less prepared to note was that he seemed to be doing the same thing with her.

She realised this on the Friday of the third week, when they were both in the library after school. She was working on the literary magazine. He was, apparently, doing supplementary reading for Government class. They had not planned to be there at the same time. They were not, technically, there together. They happened to be at adjacent tables, and the library was quiet enough that a person could, without being invasive, notice things about the person beside them.

He noticed that she was editing a poem submission with a red pen and making small sounds of either approval or frustration under her breath, the distinction not always clear.

"Good poem or bad poem?" he asked.

"Promising poem with structural problems," she said, without looking up.

"What kind of structural problems?"

"The imagery in the second stanza contradicts the emotional register of the first, but the third stanza recovers. The poet has something real to say but has not yet learned to trust that the saying is enough without the over-explaining."

Emeka was quiet for a moment. "That is also a problem in prose," he said.

"Most writing problems are the same problems in different clothes."

He looked at her for a moment with the expression she was beginning to recognise as his thinking face: slightly concentrated, slightly still.

"You are very certain about things," he said.

"Am I wrong?"

"No. I am just noting it."

She looked up from the poem submission at that. "Is that a criticism?"

"It is an observation. Certainty is not a flaw. Most people perform certainty. Yours seems actual."

She was not sure what to do with that, so she returned to the poem and pretended to read a line she had already read.

"Emeka," she said, after a moment.

"Yes?"

"The poem is by a Form Four student named Chinyere Obiora. She is seventeen and she has more talent than she knows. When I send it back with notes, I want to tell her something useful. What would you say to a writer who is over-explaining because they do not trust their own work?"

He thought about it. "I would say: the reader is smarter than you think, and your instincts are better than you believe. Write the thing. Trust the reader to meet you there."

Adaeze copied that down in the margin of the submission page, in her own handwriting, in brackets. She would find a way to include it in her editorial note.

She did not tell him she had written it down. She did not need to.

They stayed in the library for another hour, working separately and occasionally not quite separately, and when the library assistant announced the five-thirty closing time and they both began gathering their things, Emeka held the door open for her as they left, and Adaeze said thank you, and he said no problem, and they walked in opposite directions to their respective bus stops.

It was an ordinary evening. Nothing had happened.

She drew a sunflower in her journal that night, a larger one than usual, with more petals. She did not write anything beside it.

She fell asleep at ten-thirty, which was earlier than usual, and she slept without the particular restlessness that had been visiting her for most of the harmattan season.