Sweet things always rose like cigarette smokes in my life.

            Munachi fought with a youth for both our sakes. The boy had unwittingly beamed his torchlight on us while we lay sprawled out like mats on the football field. Then Munachi shot out like a mad dog and unleashed blows on him. The boy flailed helplessly on the field after futile efforts at disentangling his lean body.

            I wailed in the night.

            I bawled at Munachi to stop. ‘Stop beating him, my love – please stop what you are doing!’

            Munachi yelled back at me: ‘SHUT UP, YOU IDIOT. WHAT DO YOU KNOW?’

            I cried and cried and cried…

            Munachi was dismissed from Holy Trinity Church choir because he nearly killed the boy that night. The news spread quickly through the village like those fires people set on dry fields in December to prepare for the next planting season.

            The world about Munachi and me became warped like plywood in the harmattan. He seldom said things were ‘for both our sakes’. But he still loved me. And I loved him more and more, as if the unhappiness of one’s lover were an ingredient for one’s weedy growth of love. Now I thought more and more of Munachi, thought about him as if my head were the second hand of Papa’s Grandfather’s clock that went tick-tock, tick-tock through the cycles of time.

            I supported Munachi with my salary from the secondary school before he found another church to play for. Out in the field, I tried to relive the past. I talked of the stars, the shooting stars –

            ‘The stars are for both our sakes,’ I said.

            He was silent.

            I began to count the stars.

            I counted them in a very hollow way – as through each phosphorescent spot in the sky was a hole into nothing.

            ‘Nne, look, look, look,’ Munachi said to me in an indignant voice. ‘There are no stars in the night of a man whose girlfriend gives him money.’

            We quarrelled that night. How could he say that? I loved him and that was enough. Love without money was not enough, he said. I loved him even though he was without money, I said. I did not know what I was saying, he said.

            We quarrelled and quarrelled in the broadness of the night until he ended our row with a slap on my face!

            I staggered heavily to my father’s house; yet I loved him. I wouldn’t eat. I wouldn’t even sleep. I thought about Munachi. I wept in the night for Munachi. Nothing could erase his face from my head for a minute. The next morning when I shamefully looked myself in the mirror, I saw that my eyes had become red like like tatashi pepper. I wondered frightfully what had happened to me.

            Munachi came begging that morning. He, too, could not sleep the night before. I looked at my man: he was big and muscly, with eyes red like ripe, chewable ojukwu palm fruits. He had not slept a wink since last night, he said. He had been thinking about me all along. ‘Forgive me, Nne. Please forgive me.’ How could I say no to him when my heart had been hooked like a fish?

            I followed him to his house.

We sealed up our love with blood. Munachi got a razor and with it he made incisions into our thumbs. We pressed our thumbs together to let our bloods fuse. It was a ritual for both our sakes, we said. It didn’t seem painful to me, for the soothing herbs and fat of love had deadened all my fears and pain in that moment of bleeding.

And Munachi went on to cook a delicious meal for us to eat. It was ukwa, or breadfruit. Behind Munachi’s family house were gigantic trees that people never dared to sit under for fear of being smashed to death by the heavy breasts of breadfruit that hung ominously on them as if biding their time, waiting for who to fall upon. But those heavy green ukwa balls provided Munachi with food.   

Now those things come to me like mere memories. Munachi now says he shouldn’t have married me in the first place. He says things like: ‘I was warned not to marry you. Your palm wine spilled on the way. Yet I continued foolishly. I hate you! I hate you!’

            When he says he hates me I wonder what has happened to him. I wonder what has happened to me. What has happened for both our sakes.

            He did not give up smoking after all. Now he smoked packet after packet, as if in contest. When he came back from his drunken alliances with the bar and harlots, our house smouldered like a fire half-killed, half-quenched with water or sand, mourning silently and smelling badly.

            I could not sleep with him on the same bed. His body reeked. It was full of harlots’ kisses and hugs. His sweat was slime. Harlots’ slime.

            My Munachi! Yes, he often said I was a jealous crab and an insufferable scorpion because I would speak my mind for both our sakes and would never hide it like many old women in our village who tie the end of their wrappas round their smelly money and hide it in the bulging folds at their waists.

            When I looked at the manly body that was sweetly mine under the night sky in the football field, I questioned my memory.

            I questioned that we ever sat in the night counting our sons and daughters in the stars. Now we hadn’t got the stars. Not even one. In seven long years.

            And Munachi soured like soup. His words to me were hideous. ‘Worthless woman, you can’t cook! You can’t love. Prostitutes are better than you. Pack your things and go! I have no need of you!’

            He said that many times and beat me up; yet I felt my love for him held me from fighting back. I only cried like a child. ‘My Munachi! What have I done to you?’

            Then I began to decay myself. And I could not believe what I had done to his colour TV one day. I snatched a hammer from under my bed. Hmm! Straight at his TV. ‘For both our sakes.’

            He beat me thoroughly. He beat and slapped and kicked and boxed. He manhandled me until he was tired of his brutish discipline.

            I came out of that beating like an ancestral ghost. But with each blow from his muscly hand, he had fashioned out a defiant spirit in me. He had made me bloody and bold. Had made me more unwilling to think in terms of stars. Had made me more unattractive to himself and made me spurn every bulge of muscle on his sculpted body. Everything he did now, he did for both our sakes.

            Munachi’s parents and my parents became bitter with each other. My father said Munachi should not have ruined my beauty in – because my face was broken up and my eyes were swollen up like boils. Munachi’s father blamed me for smashing his son’s TV.

            ‘My son is ill,’ he said to me, ‘and you know it. You should be making him more relaxed like a good wife should do and not be destroying his things like a woman without home training.’

            Truly, Munachi’s health was ebbing. It was his lungs. The doctor said he must give up smoking or his emphysema would kill him.

            Munachi tried.

            But he smoked furtively in his own bedroom – we no longer slept in the same room – and the cigarette smell betrayed his secrecy.

            When I put in a word of the doctor’s warning, war broke out in our house again.