“This is your home for now,” he said as we stepped into an air-conditioned landing on the fifth floor with rose-colored walls and ceiling-high canvasses depicting men clad in batakaris and knee-high leather boots, drumming and twirling so that their batakaris lifted off their bodies and encircled them. Empty gold-painted clay pots sat on black wrought-iron stands in all corners and two large windows at both ends gave us views of the traffic and streets outside but kept out the noise. There were three doors on the floor. The one closest to us had a brass number fifteen on it. Richard opened it and we followed him inside.
My mother and I paused in the doorway as our feet sank into the soft, cream-colored carpet beneath us. Was this a luxury hotel or my home? The brightly lit entryway led into a sitting room, a dining room, and a kitchen. To my left was the kitchen with its stainless-steel fixtures: a fridge, a stove and extractor, and a dishwasher. A silver toaster and an electric kettle sat on a marble-topped island and the deep brown of the cabinets matched the floor tiles in the kitchen. Between the kitchen and the sitting room was the dining room, bordered by the back of the sofa on one side and the high stools placed against the island on the other. It held a polished glass table and six dining chairs in the same brown of the table legs and the kitchen cabinets. There were many other pieces of furniture, all of them sleek and modern. A coffee table held books that were stacked to form a small pyramid, and a widescreen TV was mounted on the white wall without a wire in sight. Beyond the sitting room was a corridor that I knew would lead to the bedrooms and baths.
Richard threw his arm up as though to embrace the room and asked, “Do you like it?”
My mother chuckled and I nodded; was that a question that had to be asked?
“This kitchen is not for cooking akple or pounding fufu,” my mother said as she ran her hand on the shining island surface.
“You can cook akple on the stove, it’s easy. And we have a special kitchen downstairs for pounding fufu in a mortar. Or you can use the fufu-pounding machine that’s in the cabinet beneath the sink,” Richard said from the other corner of the room where he was pressing some buttons on a white panel on the wall. A blast of cool air shot out from a vent above him.
“Even palm soup; in fact, anything with oil, you can’t cook on this stove,” she continued, as though Richard had not spoken. “Can you imagine palm soup bubbling over and spilling onto this glass stove?” she asked as she turned to me.
“It’s like any normal stove, AfinÉ”, you only have to wipe it clean,” Richard said, trying to assure her. He reached for my suitcase and began pulling it down the short corridor. “Come and see the bedrooms,” he said to us.
There were three bedrooms, two with en suite bathrooms, and one guest bathroom. We placed my bags in the biggest bedroom, which I thought was decorated rather simply. I would later learn that a bedroom does not need to have a dresser and a wardrobe and shoe racks and all the other things I had grown up seeing. Two brown doors interrupted the whiteness of the wall. A walk-in closet—big enough to hold a bed—was behind one and behind the other was the bathroom, which was white and had both a Jacuzzi and a glass-enclosed shower.
“Where are Fo Eli’s things?” I asked after I’d inspected the closet in the second guestroom and hadn’t found a single item of clothing. It was clear that no one lived in the flat.
“He doesn’t keep his things here, you know he has many houses in Accra,” my brother-in-law said very quickly, as though he had prepared for this question.
“Which house does he keep his things in?”
“Several, they are all over the place.”
“But not this one?”
“I’m sure he’ll start keeping things here,” Richard said, walking back into the hallway.
“But . . .” I began before my mother pinched my arm to shut me up. I pulled my arm out of her reach.
“That is okay. There’s nothing wrong with having more than one place to lay your head. In fact, it is a sign of God’s blessings,” she said loudly enough for Richard to hear. She then turned to me and frowned. I instantly knew not to pursue this line of questioning, at least not while she was there.
The flat had been readied for our arrival. The fridge was stocked with everything imaginable, including koobi. The beds had been made, towels hung on racks, potted plants on the balcony watered.
“Who did all of this?” I asked Richard as he waited for the lift to take him down.
“We have people for these things; you’ll see them,” he told me. I nodded. Who were these people? Was this their full-time job? Watering flowers and buying salted fish for people they had never met? Would they be doing this every week or would we have to go to the market ourselves? And where was the market and how could we get there?
As if he could read my mind, Richard said, “I’ll send a car to take you shopping at the end of the week.” He then handed me a crisp wad of notes. “Take this for anything you need to buy,” he said. I slowly extended my hand for the money. Gifts from the Ganyos usually passed from my mother to me.
“Thank you,” I said. I had brought all of my savings, tucked into my handbag, but had been thinking about what I would do once it was gone. Was this wad of cash a monthly allowance? If I knew how often it would come I would know how to budget. I did not ask him this, but I did ask again about my husband, now that my mother was out of earshot.
“He’s coming back next week,” Richard said.
“Coming here?”
“Partly . . . we’ll see,” he answered, his words halting. “You only need to focus on enjoying yourself,” he said as he stepped into the lift with a big smile.
I stood in front of the silver doors long after they had closed. My fears pushed my excitement aside as they had done on my wedding day. I really wished that the Ganyos would tell me what exactly was happening instead of holding everything to their chests and only throwing scraps of information my way. I knew my mother would disagree, but I thought that they should have told me, before I even left Ho, that I wouldn’t be living under the same roof as my husband. I had been under the impression that he would be in Accra when we arrived there. They should have told me that this wasn’t the case; they should have told me when he would be returning from his Hong Kong trip. In fact, he should have called me to tell me these things himself; after all, I was his wife and he knew my phone number. Instead they had put me in this tower and given me pocket money like a schoolgirl. What was I supposed to do? Just sit in this building and wait?
My mother became angry with me when I said this to her after we had cooked and eaten rice and beef stew with the ingredients we had found in the kitchen. She said that I was being ungrateful by asking so many questions and didn’t understand why I needed to know everything the future held. “Isn’t it enough to know that Elikem Ganyo is your husband?” she asked.
I became angry and retreated into my room to speak with Mawusi on the phone.
“I can’t imagine marrying Yao and not living in the same house with him! You should ask Richard what’s happening the next time he comes,” she said.
“That’s what I’m saying: he doesn’t want to tell me anything proper, he’s just talking in circles.”