She did not respond. Perhaps she had not heard him. It was clear that the file, the new contract, occupied her mind. She got up. “I’ll just make some notes for a minute in the study and join you.”
He wondered why he could simply not ask if she found Madu attractive and if she had ever been involved with him or, worse yet, was still involved with him. He was afraid. He moved toward her and put his arms around her and held her tightly, wanting to feel the beat of her heart. It was the first time in his life he felt as if he could belong somewhere.
1. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died
For the prologue, he recounts the story of the woman with the calabash. She sat on the floor of a train squashed between crying people, shouting people, praying people. She was silent, caressing the covered calabash on her lap in a gentle rhythm until they crossed the Niger, and then she lifted the lid and asked Olanna and others close by to look inside.
Olanna tells him this story and he notes the details. She tells him how the bloodstains on the woman’s wrapper blended into the fabric to form a rusty mauve. She describes the carved designs on the woman’s calabash, slanting lines crisscrossing each other, and she describes the child’s head inside: scruffy braids falling across the dark-brown face, eyes completely white, eerily open, a mouth in a small surprised O.
After he writes this, he mentions the German women who fled Hamburg with the charred bodies of their children stuffed in suitcases, the Rwandan women who pocketed tiny parts of their mauled babies. But he is careful not to draw parallels. For the book cover, though, he draws a map of Nigeria and traces in the Y shape of the rivers Niger and Benue in bright red. He uses the same shade of red to circle the boundaries of where, in the Southeast, Biafra existed for three years.
4
Ugwu cleared the dining table slowly. He removed the glasses first, then the stew-smeared bowls and the cutlery, and finally he stacked plate on top of plate. Even if he hadn’t peeked through the kitchen door as they ate, he would still know who had sat where. Master’s plate was always the most rice-strewn, as if he ate distractedly so that the grains eluded his fork. Olanna’s glass had crescent-shaped lipstick marks. Okeoma ate everything with a spoon, his fork and knife pushed aside. Professor Ezeka had brought his own beer, and the foreign-looking brown bottle was beside his plate. Miss Adebayo left onion slices in her bowl. And Mr. Richard never chewed his chicken bones.
In the kitchen, Ugwu kept Olanna’s plate aside on the Formica counter and emptied the rest, watching rice, stew, greens, and bones slide into the dustbin. Some of the bones were so well cracked they looked like wood shavings. Olanna’s did not, though, because she had only lightly chewed the ends and all three still had their shape. Ugwu sat down and selected one and closed his eyes as he sucked it, imagining Olanna’s mouth enclosing the same bone.
He sucked languidly, one bone after another, and did not bother to tone down the slurpy sounds his mouth made. He was alone. Master had just left for the staff club with Olanna and their friends. The house was always quietest now, when he could linger over nothing, with the lunch dishes in the sink and dinner far off and the kitchen bathed in incandescent sunlight. Olanna called this his Schoolwork Time, and when she was home she would ask him to take his homework into the bedroom. She didn’t know that his homework never took long, that he would sit by the window afterward and struggle through difficult sentences in one of Master’s books, looking up often to watch the butterflies dipping and rising above the white flowers in the front yard.
He picked up his exercise book while sucking the second bone. The cold marrow was tart on his tongue. He read the verse, which he had copied so carefully from the blackboard that it looked like Mrs. Oguike’s handwriting, and then closed his eyes and recited it.
I can’t forget that I’m bereft
Of all the pleasant sights they see,
Which the Piper also promised me.
For he led us, he said, to a joyous land,
Joining the town and just at hand,
Where waters gushed and fruit trees grew,
And flowers put forth a fairer hue,
And everything was strange and new.
He opened his eyes and scanned the verse to make sure he had missed nothing. He hoped Master would not remember to ask him to recite it because, although he had memorized the verse correctly, he would have no answer when Master asked, What does it mean? Or, What do you think it is really saying? The pictures in the book Mrs. Oguike gave out, of the long-haired man with happy rats following him, were incomprehensible, and the more Ugwu looked at them, the more certain he became that it was all some sort of senseless joke. Even Mrs. Oguike did not seem to know what it meant. Ugwu had come to like her—Mrs. Oguike—because she did not treat him with special concern, did not seem to notice that he sat alone in the classroom at break time. But she had noticed how fast he learned the very first day when she gave him oral and written tests while Master waited outside the airless room. “The boy will surely skip a class at some point, he has such an innate intelligence,” she had told Master afterward, as if Ugwu were not standing right beside them, and innate intelligence instantly became Ugwu’s favorite expression.
He closed the exercise book. He had sucked all the bones, and he imagined that the taste of Olanna’s mouth was in his as he started to wash the dishes. The first time he sucked her bones, weeks ago, it was after he saw her and Master kissing in the living room on a Saturday morning, their open mouths pressed together. The thought of her saliva in Master’s mouth had both repelled and excited him. It still did. It was the same way he felt about her moaning at night; he did not like to hear her and yet he often went to their door to press his ear against the cold wood and listen. Just as he examined the underwear she hung in the bathroom—black slips, slippery bras, white pants.
She had blended so easily into the house. In the evenings, when guests filled the living room, her voice stood out in its clear perfection, and he fantasized about sticking out his tongue at Miss Adebayo and saying, “You cannot speak English like my madam, so shut your dirty mouth.” It seemed as if her clothes had always been in the wardrobe, her High Life music always come from the radiogram, her coconut scent always wafted over every room, and her Impala always parked in the driveway. Still, he missed the old days with Master. He missed the evenings when he would sit on the floor of the living room while Master talked in his deep voice and the mornings when he served Master’s breakfast, knowing that the only voices that could be heard were theirs.
Master had changed; he looked at Olanna too often, touched her too much, and when Ugwu opened the front door for him, his eyes expectantly darted past into the living room to see if Olanna was there. Only yesterday, Master told Ugwu, “My mother will be visiting this weekend, so clean the guest room.” Before Ugwu could say Yes, sah, Olanna said, “I think Ugwu should move to the Boys’ Quarters. That way we’ll have a free guest room. Mama may stay a while.”
“Yes, of course,” Master said, so promptly that it annoyed Ugwu; it was as if Master would stick his head in a raging fire if Olanna asked him to. It was as if she had become the master. But Ugwu didn’t mind moving to the room in the Boys’ Quarters, which was empty except for some cobwebs and cartons. He could hide things he had saved there; he could make it fully his. He had never heard Master speak about his mother, and, as he cleaned the guest room later, he imagined what she would be like, this woman who had bathed Master as a baby, fed him, wiped his running nose. Ugwu was in awe of her already, for having produced Master.
He finished the lunch dishes quickly. If he was as quick in preparing the greens for the dinner pottage, he could go down to Mr. Richard’s house and talk to Harrison for a little while before Master and Olanna came back. These days, he shredded the greens with his hands instead of slicing them. Olanna liked them that way; she said they retained more of their vitamins. He, too, had started to like them, just as he liked the way she taught him to fry eggs with a little milk, to cut fried plantains in da
inty circles rather than ungainly ovals, to steam moi-moi in aluminum cups rather than banana leaves. Now that she left most of the cooking to him, he liked to look through the kitchen door from time to time, to see who murmured the most compliments, who liked what, who took second helpings. Dr. Patel liked the chicken boiled with uziza. So did Mr. Richard, although he never ate the chicken skin. Perhaps the pale chicken skin reminded Mr. Richard of his own skin. There was no other reason Ugwu could think of; the skin was, after all, the tastiest part. Mr. Richard always said, “Fantastic chicken, Ugwu, thank you,” when Ugwu came out to bring more water or to clear something away. Sometimes, while the other guests retired to the living room, Mr. Richard would come into the kitchen to ask Ugwu questions. They were laughable questions. Did his people have carvings or sculptures of gods? Had he ever been inside the shrine by the river? Ugwu was even more amused that Mr. Richard wrote his answers down in a small book with a leather cover. Some days ago, when Ugwu offhandedly mentioned the ori-okpa festival, Mr. Richard’s eyes turned a brighter blue and he said he wanted to see the festival; he would ask Master if he and Ugwu could drive to his hometown.
Ugwu laughed as he brought the greens out of the refrigerator. He could not imagine Mr. Richard during the ori-okpa festival, where the mmuo (Mr. Richard said they were masquerades, weren’t they, and Ugwu agreed, as long as masquerades meant spirits) paraded the village, flogged young men, and chased after young women. The mmuo themselves might even laugh at the sight of a pale stranger scribbling in a notebook. But he was pleased that he had mentioned the festival to Mr. Richard, because it meant an opportunity to see Nnesinachi before she left for the North. To think how impressed she would be when he arrived in a white man’s car, driven by the white man himself! She would certainly notice him this time, he was sure, and he could not wait to impress Anulika and his cousins and relatives with his English, his new shirt, his knowledge of sandwiches and running tap water, his scented powder.
Ugwu had just washed the shredded greens when he heard the doorbell. It was too early for Master’s friends. He went to the door, wiping his hands on his apron. For a moment, he wondered if his aunty was really standing there or if he was seeing an image of her only because he had been thinking about home.
“Aunty?”
“Ugwuanyi,” she said, “you have to come home. Oga gi kwanu? Where is your master?”
“Come home?”
“Your mother is very sick.”
Ugwu examined the scarf tied round his aunty’s head. He could see where it was threadbare, the fabric stretched thin. He remembered that when his cousin’s father died, the family had sent word to her in Lagos, telling her to come home because her father was very sick. If you were far from home, they told you the dead person was very sick.
“Your mother is sick,” his aunty repeated. “She is asking for you. I will tell Master that you will be back tomorrow, so he will not think we are asking for too much. Many houseboys do not even get to go home in years, you know that.”
Ugwu did not move, rolling the edge of the apron around his finger. He wanted to ask his aunt to tell him the truth, to say so if his mother was dead. But his mouth would not form the words. Remembering his mother’s last illness, when she had coughed and coughed until his father left before dawn to get the dibia while the junior wife, Chioke, rubbed her back, frightened him.
“Master is not in,” he said finally. “But he will be back soon.”
“I will wait and plead with him to let you come home.”
He led the way to the kitchen, where his aunty sat down and watched him slice a yam and then cut the slices into cubes. He worked fast, feverishly. The sunlight that came in through the window seemed too bright for late afternoon, too full of an ominous radiance.
“Is my father well?” Ugwu asked.
“He is well.” His aunty’s face was opaque, her tone flat: the demeanor of a person who carried more bad news than she had delivered. She must be hiding something. Perhaps his mother really was dead; perhaps both his parents had fallen down dead that morning. Ugwu continued to slice, in a turgid silence, until Master came home, tennis whites plastered to his back with sweat. He was alone. Ugwu wished that Olanna had come home as well so that he could look at her face as he spoke.
“Welcome, sah.”
“Yes, my good man.” Master placed his racket down on the kitchen table. “Some water, please. I lost all my games today.”
Ugwu had the water ready, ice cold in a glass placed on a saucer.
“Good evening, sah,” his aunty greeted.
“Good evening,” Master said, looking slightly perplexed, as if he was not certain who she was. “Oh, yes. How are you?”
Before she could say more, Ugwu said, “My mother is sick, sah. Please, sah, if I go to see her I will return tomorrow.”
“What?”
Ugwu repeated himself. Master stared at him and then at the pot on the stove. “Have you finished cooking?”
“No, sah. I will finish fast-fast, before I go. I will set the table and arrange everything.”
Master turned to Ugwu’s aunty. “Gini me? What is wrong with his mother?”
“Sah?”
“Are you deaf?” Master jabbed at his ear as if Ugwu’s aunty did not know what it meant to be deaf. “What is wrong with his mother?”
“Sah, her chest is on fire.”
“Chest on fire?” Master snorted. He drank all his water and then turned to Ugwu and spoke English. “Put on a shirt and get in the car. Your village isn’t far away, really. We should be back in good time.”
“Sah?”
“Put on a shirt and get in the car!” Master scribbled a note on the back of a flyer and left it on the table. “We’ll bring your mother here and have Patel take a look at her.”
“Yes, sah.” Ugwu felt breakable as he walked to the car, beside his aunty and Master. He felt as though his bones were broomsticks, the kind that snapped easily during the harmattan. The ride to his village was mostly silent. As they drove past some farms with rows and rows of corn and cassava like a neatly plaited hairstyle, Master said, “See? This is what our government should focus on. If we learn irrigation technology, we can feed this country easily. We can overcome this colonial dependence on imports.”
“Yes, sah.”
“But instead, all the ignoramuses in government do is lie and steal. A number of my students joined the group that went to Lagos this morning to demonstrate, you know.”
“Yes, sah,” Ugwu said. “Why are they demonstrating, sah?”
“The census,” Master said. “The census was a mess, everybody forged figures. Not that Balewa will do anything about it, because he is as complicit as they all are. But we must speak out!”
“Yes, sah,” Ugwu replied, and in the midst of his worry about his mother, he felt a twinge of pride because he knew his aunty would have her eyes wide in wonder at the deep conversations he had with Master. And in English, too. They stopped a little way before the family hut.
“Get your mother’s things, quickly,” Master said. “I have friends visiting from Ibadan tonight.”
“Yes, sah!” Ugwu and his aunty spoke at the same time.
Ugwu climbed out of the car and stood there. His aunty dashed into the hut, and soon his father came out, eyes red-rimmed, looking more stooped than Ugwu remembered. He knelt in the dirt and clutched Master’s legs. “Thank, sah. Thank, sah. May another person do for you.”
Master stepped back and Ugwu watched his father sway, almost falling over backward. “Get up, kunie,” Master said.
Chioke came out of the hut. “This is my other wife, sah,” his father said, standing up.
Chioke shook Master’s hands with both of hers. “Thank you, Master. Deje!” She ran back inside and emerged with a small pineapple that she pressed into Master’s hand.
“No, no,” Master said, pushing the pineapple back. “Local pineapples are too acidic, they burn my mouth.”
The village children wer
e gathering around the car to peer inside and run awed fingers over the blue body. Ugwu shooed them away. He wished Anulika were home, so she would go with him into their mother’s hut. He wished Nnesinachi would drop by now and take his hand in hers and tell him soothingly that his mother’s illness was not serious at all, and then lead him to the grove by the stream and untie her wrapper and offer him her breasts, lifting them up and forward toward him. The children were chattering loudly. Some women stood by and spoke in lower tones, their arms folded. His father kept asking Master to have some kola nut, palm wine, a stool to sit down, some water, and Master kept saying no, no, no. Ugwu wanted his father to shut up. He moved closer to the hut and looked in. His eyes met his mother’s in the dim light. She looked shriveled.
“Ugwu,” she said. “Nno, welcome.”
“Deje,” he greeted, and then remained silent, watching, while his aunty helped her tie her wrapper around her waist and led her out.
Ugwu was about to help his mother into the car when Master said, “Step aside, my good man.” Master helped her into the car, asked her to lie down on the backseat, to stretch out as much as she could.
Ugwu suddenly wished that Master would not touch his mother because her clothes smelled of age and must, and because Master did not know that her back ached and her cocoyam patch always yielded a poor harvest and her chest was indeed on fire when she coughed. What did Master know about anything anyway, since all he did was shout with his friends and drink brandy at night?
“Stay well, we will send you word after a doctor has looked at her,” Master said to Ugwu’s father and aunty before they drove off.
Ugwu kept himself from glancing back at his mother; he rolled his window down so the air would rush loudly past his ears and distract him. When he finally turned to look at her, just before they got to the campus, his heart stopped at the sight of her shut eyes, her lax lips. But her chest was rising and falling. She was breathing. He exhaled slowly and thought about those cold evenings when she would cough and cough, and he would stand pressed to the flinty walls of her hut, listening to his father and Chioke ask her to drink the mixture.
Half of a Yellow Sun Page 11