Tanie’s tears

The voice was not only pleading and a tad forceful, it was also insistent, coaxing. “Can you hear me? Did you hear what I have just said to you?” “Have you heard a word of what I have been saying to you?” There was no response from Tanie, neither was there any change in her […]

The voice was not only pleading and a tad forceful, it was also insistent, coaxing. “Can you hear me? Did you hear what I have just said to you?” “Have you heard a word of what I have been saying to you?” There was no response from Tanie, neither was there any change in her demeanor or position signifying she had heard her husband. Her spine was as still as a leafless iroko tree in harmattan. Looking as she usually did after her one hour preparation for bed, she was wearing Musa’s favourite silk nightwear with pink background and lilac flowers – it bared more than it covered and Musa just loved it. Her shoulder length hair was packed atop her head, making her shadow look like a picture from an Igbo story book. Tonight though, she lost her usual bedtime radiance a few minutes after “the conversation” started. Her shoulders were slumped and her neck bent so low, Musa could not see her face. Additionally, the bedside lamp was dim, therefore did not aid Musa’s short sightedness as he kept struggling to look upon her face.
She had no idea how long she had been sitting there, wasn’t even sure she was there because she felt removed from herself, as though the real her was in a corner in the bedroom watching and the imposter was sitting with her husband and being mean to him, making him look like a whipped dog, begging master to take him in after eating the Russell and Bromley shoe.
Musa on the other hand, had been sitting opposite Tanie for over an hour, trying to gauge her reaction to the news he had just spilled. In the 10 years he had been married to her, he had never seen her react to anything like this. She looked helplessly broken and extremely delicate. She had always been an emotional person so he was always sure of getting a reaction from her and always braced himself for Tanie’s full weight on his body when she threw herself at him on hearing exciting news. This was almost always accompanied by a scream of something usually incoherent. Like the first time he announced that they would travel to Saudi Arabia for Umrah. She flung herself so hard at him that they toppled over the stool he was sitting on. Luckily, they fell on the soft bedside rug and no harm was done. In fact, they had good reason to remain there because they both looked at each other and burst out laughing. They laughed so hard, their ribs ached, they hugged and things progressed. Musa made a habit of jokingly announcing that they would be travelling for Umrah if he wanted her to know the kind of passion he wanted her to exhibit towards him. That way, Tanie also knew what Musa needed and never disappointed him.
Tanie, with the sweetest of tempers, hardly expressed her anger and would go all lengths to prevent Musa from seeing “my ugly side” as she called it, because she said anger made her ugly and she wanted her husband to see only her beauty. So she would control her tears till Musa was out of sight and hearing, then lock herself up in the bathroom and cry herself out. If he made an early return home, her visine would be readily available to cover up. Indeed, she kept a steady supply of visine. Although she succeeded in covering up her distress from others, Musa mostly saw through her facades. For him, Tanie would do anything, go all lengths and always put him first. Her love for him was immeasurable.
Her life stopped when she started living for him. At 20, she quit school because he said the hot sun of Maiduguri distorted her complexion and he didn’t like the way she came back home tired after hectic lectures. She lost her best friends because he thought they were feeding her with venomous ideas – encouraging her to choose a career pattern early in life; she quit Facebook because those friends could teach her bad things, and the list goes on. The only time Tanie openly cried in Musa’s arms, holding nothing back, was when they lost their only child to malaria. It was devastating for both of them but the unvoiced consensus was that it affected her more because from that time, she shut everyone out and only Musa could catch a glimpse of the fun loving, easy going and open hearted person that lived inside Tanie.
Musa sighed yet again and reached out for her hand. It was limp. He lifted her face with his forefinger and searched her face, then her eyes. She was not there, she was far away and the vacancy in her eyes shook him. In the gentlest of voices, he tried again, “Tanie, my heart, my love, please say something to me. Share your thoughts with me please.” The same blank stare faced him, so he sat beside her on the queen-sized bed they agreed would keep them closer than a king-size. He held her in his arms. She was stiff.
“Please talk to me darling, I know that it is hard for you but it is harder for me. You know that I can never love another woman as much as I love you and no woman can take your place in my heart. What I am about to do is for both of us, it’s not for me alone.” This last bit elicited a reaction from Tanie. The switch to her vocals came on. Only the quavering in her voice and the low tone made it clear that Tanie was holding her temper down.
What she was going through was not a mere emotional constipation but a fully-fledged emotional stroke. “No Musa, you are doing this for you. How can you bring another woman into my matrimonial home and claim that you are doing it for me? Or is it because I have not been able to c-co-conceive since…” She stopped because she could not bear to hear herself talk of the demise of their child. She only held her head in her hands and took in deep breaths. When she looked up again, her eyes had gone to a distance, further than before.
Mohammed is an Abuja-based legal practitioner.