Even the miracle of Abagana did not loosen his knots. Before, they would have celebrated it as if it were a personal triumph. They would have held each other and kissed and she would have tickled her cheek with his new beard. But when they heard the first radio announcement he simply said, “Excellent, excellent,” and later he watched the dancing neighbors with a blank expression.
Mama Oji started the song, “Onye ga-enwe mmeri?” and the other women responded “Biafra ga-enwe mmeri, igba!” and formed a circle and swayed with graceful motions and stamped down hard as they said igba! Billows of dust rose and fell. Olanna joined them, buoyed by the words—Who will win? Biafra will win, igba!—and wishing Odenigbo would not just sit there with that empty expression.
“Olanna dances like white people!” Mama Oji said, laughing. “Her buttocks do not move at all!”
It was the first time Olanna had seen Mama Oji laugh. The men were telling and retelling the story—some said the Biafran forces had laid ambush and set fire to a column of one hundred vehicles, while others said there had in fact been a thousand destroyed armored cars and trucks—but they all agreed that if the convoy had reached its destination, Biafra would have been finished. Radios were turned on loud, placed on the veranda in front of the rooms. The news was broadcast over and over, and each time it ended many of the neighbors joined the voice intoning, To save Biafra for the free world is a task that must be done! Even Baby knew the words. She repeated them while patting Bingo’s head. Alice was the only neighbor who had not come out, and Olanna wondered what she was doing.
“Alice thinks she is too good for all of us in this yard,” Mama Oji said. “Look at you. Did they not say that you are a Big Man’s daughter? But you treat people like people. Who does she think she is?”
“Maybe she’s asleep.”
“Asleep indeed. That Alice is a saboteur. It is on her face. She is working for the vandals.”
“Since when have saboteurs had it written on their faces?” Olanna asked, amused.
Mama Oji shrugged, as though she would not bother convincing Olanna of something she was sure of.
Professor Ezeka’s driver arrived hours later when the yard was emptier and quieter. He handed Olanna a note and then went around and opened the boot and carried out two cartons. Ugwu hurried indoors with them.
“Thank you,” Olanna said. “Greet your master.”
“Yes, mah.” He stood there still.
“Is there anything else?”
“Please, mah, I am to wait until you check that everything is complete.”
“Oh.” Ezeka’s crabbed handwriting had listed all he had sent on the front of the sheet. Please make sure the driver has not tampered with anything was scrawled at the back. Olanna went inside to count the cans of dried milk, tea, biscuits, Ovaltine, sardines, the cartons of sugar, the bags of salt—and she could not help the gasp when she saw the toilet tissue. At least Baby would not have to use old newspapers for a while. She wrote a quick effusive thank-you note and gave it to the driver; if Ezeka had done this to further show how superior he was, it did not dampen her pleasure. Ugwu’s pleasure seemed even greater than hers.
“This is like Nsukka, mah!” he said. “Look at the sardines!”
“Please put some salt in a bag. A quarter of that packet.”
“Mah? For who?” Ugwu looked suspicious.
“For Alice. And don’t tell the neighbors what we have. If they ask, say an old friend sent books to your master.”
“Yes, mah.”
Olanna felt Ugwu’s disapproving eyes following her as she took the bag over to Alice’s room. There was no response to her knock. She had turned to walk away when Alice opened the door.
“A friend of ours brought us some provisions,” Olanna said, holding out the bag of salt.
“Hei! I can’t take all of this,” Alice said, as she reached out and took it. “Thank you. Oh, thank you so much!”
“We haven’t seen him in a while. It came as a surprise.”
“And you are bothering with me. You shouldn’t have.” Alice was clutching the bag of salt to her chest. Her eyes were darkly shadowed, traces of green veins crawled just underneath her pale skin, and Olanna wondered if she was sick.
But Alice looked different, fresher-skinned, in the evening, when she came outside and sat next to Olanna on the floor of the veranda and stretched out her legs. Perhaps she had put on some powder. Her feet were tiny. She smelled of a familiar body cream. Mama Adanna walked past and said, “Eh! Alice, we have never seen you sitting outside before!” and Alice’s lips moved slightly in a smile. Pastor Ambrose was praying by the banana trees. His red long-sleeved robe shimmered in the waning sun. “Holy Jehovah destroy the vandals with holy-ghost fire! Holy Jehovah fight for us!”
“God is fighting for Nigeria,” Alice said. “God always fights for the side that has more arms.”
“God is on our side!” Olanna surprised herself by how sharp she sounded. Alice looked taken aback and, from somewhere behind the house, Bingo howled.
“I only think that God fights with the just side,” Olanna added gently.
Alice slapped away a mosquito. “Ambrose is pretending to be a pastor to avoid the army.”
“Yes, he is.” Olanna smiled. “Do you know that strange church on Ogui Road in Enugu? He looks like one of those pastors.”
“I am not really from Enugu.” Alice drew up her knees. “I am from Asaba. I left after I finished at the Teacher Training College there and went to Lagos. I was working in Lagos before the war. I met an army colonel and in a few months he asked me to marry him, but he did not tell me that he was already married and his wife was abroad. I got pregnant. He kept postponing going to Asaba to do the traditional ceremonies. But I believed him when he said that he was busy and under pressure with all that was happening in the country. After they killed the Igbo officers, he escaped and I came to Enugu with him. I had my baby in Enugu. I was with him in Enugu when his wife came back just before the war started and he left me. Then my baby died. Then Enugu fell. So here I am.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I am a stupid woman. I am the one who believed all his lies.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You are lucky. You have your husband and daughter. I don’t know how you do it, keeping everything together and teaching children and all that. I wish I were like you.”
Alice’s admiration warmed and surprised her. “There is nothing special about me,” Olanna said.
Pastor Ambrose was getting frenzied. “Devil, I shoot you! Satan, I bomb you!”
“How did you manage evacuating Nsukka?” Alice asked. “Did you lose much?”
“Everything. We left in a rush.”
“It was the same for me in Enugu. I don’t know why they will never tell us the truth so we can prepare. The people in the Ministry of Information took their public-address van all over the city telling us everything was okay, it was only our boys practicing with the shelling. If they had told us the truth, many of us would have been better prepared and would not have lost so much.”
“But you brought your piano.” Olanna didn’t like the way Alice said they, as if she was not on their side.
“It is the only thing I took from Enugu. He sent me money and a van to help me on the very day Enugu fell. His guilty conscience was working overtime. The driver told me later that he and his wife had moved their own things to their hometown some weeks before. Imagine!”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“I don’t want to know. If I see that man again, ezi okwu m, I will kill him with my own hands.” Alice raised her tiny hands. She was speaking Igbo for the first time, and in her Asaba dialect, the F’s sounded like W’s. “When I think of what I went through for that man. I gave up my job in Lagos, I kept telling lies to my family, and I cut off my friends who told me he was not serious.” She bent down to pick up something from the sand. “And he could not even do.”
“What?”
“He would jump on top of me, moan oh-oh-oh like a goat, and that was it.” She raised her finger. “With something this small. And afterward he would smile happily without ever wondering if I had known when he started and stopped. Men! Men are hopeless!”
“No, not all of them. My husband knows how to do, and with something like this.” Olanna raised a clenched fist. They laughed and she sensed, between them, a vulgar and delicious female bond.
Olanna waited for Odenigbo to come home so that she could tell him about her new friendship with Alice, about what she had told Alice. She wanted him to come home and pull her forcefully to him in the way he had not done in a long time. But when he did come home from Tanzania Bar, it was with a gun. The double-barreled gun, long and black and dull, lay on the bed. “Gini bu ife a? What is this?” Olanna asked.
“Somebody at the directorate gave it to me. It’s quite old. But it’s good to have just in case.”
“I don’t want a gun here.”
“We’re fighting a war. There are guns everywhere.” He slipped out of his trousers and tied a wrapper around his waist before he took his shirt off.
“I talked to Alice today.”
“Alice?”
“The neighbor that plays the piano.”
“Oh, yes.” He was staring at the separating curtain.
“You look tired,” she said. What she wanted to say was, You look sad. If only he was better occupied, if only he had something to do in which the moments of grief that sneaked up on him could be immersed.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“I think you should go and see Ezeka. Ask him to help move you somewhere else. Even if it isn’t his directorate, he must have some influence with the other directors.”
Odenigbo hung his trousers on a nail in the wall.
“Did you hear me?” Olanna asked.
“I won’t ask Ezeka.”
She recognized his expression: He was disappointed. She had forgotten that they had high ideals. They were people of principle; they did not ask favors of highly placed friends.
“You can serve Biafra better if you work somewhere else where you can use your brain and talent,” she said.
“I’m serving Biafra well enough at the Manpower Directorate.”
Olanna glanced at the clutter that was their room and home—the bed, two yam tubers, and the mattress that leaned against the dirt-smeared wall, the cartons and bags piled in a corner, the kerosene stove that she took to the kitchen only when it was needed—and felt a surge of revulsion, the urge to run and run and run until she was far away from it all.
They slept with their backs turned to each other. He was gone when she woke up. She touched his side of the bed, ran her hand over it, savored the last of the rumpled warmth that lingered on the sheet. She would go and see Ezeka herself. She would ask him to do something for Odenigbo. She went outside to the bathroom, saying “Good morning” and “Did you come out well this morning?” to some neighbors as she went. Baby was with the younger children, crowded near the banana trees, listening to Papa Oji telling a story of how he shot down an enemy plane in Calabar with his pistol. The older children were sweeping the yard and singing.
Biafra, kunie, buso Nigeria agha
Anyi emelie ndi awusa,
Ndi na-amaro chukwu, Tigbue fa, zogbue fa,
Nwelu nwude Gowon.
When their singing stopped, Pastor Ambrose’s morning prayers sounded even louder. “God bless His Excellency! God give Tanzania and Gabon strength! God destroy Nigeria and Britain and Egypt and Algeria and Russia! In the mighty name of Jesus!”
Some people shouted Amen! from their rooms. Pastor Ambrose held his Bible up, as if some solid miracle would fall on it from the sky, and shouted nonsensical words: she baba she baba she baba.
“Stop babbling, Pastor Ambrose, and go and join the army! How is your speaking-in-tongues helping our cause?” Mama Oji said. She was in front of her room with her son, his cloth-covered head bent over a steaming bowl. When he raised his head to get a breath of air, Olanna looked at the concoction of urine and oils and herbs and God knew what else that Mama Oji had decided was the cure for asthma.
“Was the night bad for him?” she asked Mama Oji.
Mama Oji shrugged. “It was bad but not too bad.” She turned to her son. “Do you want me to slap you before you inhale it? Why are you letting the thing evaporate and waste?”
He bent his head over the bowl again.
“Jehovah destroy Gowon and Adekunle!” Pastor Ambrose screamed.
“Be quiet and join the army!” Mama Oji said.
Somebody shouted from one of the rooms. “Mama Oji, leave Pastor alone! First let your husband go back to the army he ran away from!”
“At least he went!” Mama Oji’s retort was swift. “While your own husband lives the shivering life of a coward in the forest of Ohafia so that the soldiers will not see him.”
Baby came around from behind the house; the dog trailed behind her. “Mummy Ola! Bingo can see spirits. When he barks at night it means he sees spirits.”
“There are no such things as spirits, Baby,” Olanna said.
“Yes, there are.”
It troubled Olanna, the things Baby was picking up here. “Did Adanna tell you that?”
“No, Chukwudi told me.”
“Where is Adanna?”
“She’s sleeping. She’s sick,” Baby said, and began to shoo away the flies that circled over Bingo’s head.
Mama Oji muttered, “I have been telling Mama Adanna that the child’s illness is not malaria. But she keeps giving her neem medicine that does nothing for her. If nobody else will say it, then I will: What Adanna has is Harold Wilson Syndrome, ho-ha.”
“Harold Wilson Syndrome?”
“Kwashiorkor. The child has kwashiorkor.”
Olanna burst out laughing. She did not know they had renamed kwashiorkor after the British prime minister, but her amusement dissipated when she went to Adanna’s room. Adanna was lying on a mat, her eyes half closed. Olanna touched her face with the back of a palm, to check for a fever, although she knew there would be none. She should have realized it earlier; Adanna’s belly was swollen and her skin was a sickly tone, much lighter than it was only weeks ago.
“This malaria is very stubborn,” Mama Adanna said.
“She has kwashiorkor,” Olanna said quietly.
“Kwashiorkor,” Mama Adanna repeated, and looked at Olanna with frightened eyes.
“You need to find crayfish or milk.”
“Milk, kwa? From where?” Mama Adanna asked. “But we have anti-kwash nearby. Mama Obike was telling me the other day. Let me go and get some.”
“What?”
“Anti-kwashiorkor leaves,” Mama Adanna said, already on her way out.
Olanna was surprised by how quickly she hitched up her wrapper and began to wade into the bush on the other side of the road. She came back moments later holding a bunch of slender green leaves. “I will cook porridge now,” she said.
“Adanna needs milk,” Olanna said. “Those won’t cure kwashiorkor.”
“Leave Mama Adanna alone. The anti-kwash leaves will work as long as she does not boil them for too long,” Mama Oji said. “Besides, the relief centers have nothing. And did you not hear that all the children in Nnewi died after drinking relief milk? The vandals had poisoned it.”
Olanna called Baby and took her inside and undressed her.
“Ugwu already gave me a bath,” Baby said, looking puzzled.
“Yes, yes, my baby,” Olanna said, examining her carefully. Her skin was still the dark color of mahogany and her hair was still black and, although she was thinner, her belly was not swollen. Olanna wished so much that the relief center was open and that Okoromadu was still there, but he had moved to Orlu after the World Council of Churches gave his job to one of the many pastors who no longer had parishes.
Mama Adanna was cooking the leaves in the kitchen. Olanna took a tin of sardines and some dried milk from t
he carton Ezeka sent and gave them to her. “Don’t tell anybody I gave you this. Give it to Adanna little by little.”
Mama Adanna grasped Olanna. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. I will not tell anybody.”
But she did tell because, as Olanna left for Professor Ezeka’s office later, Mama Oji called out, “My son has asthma and milk will not kill him!”
Olanna ignored her.
———
She walked to the major road and stood under a tree. Each time a car drove past, she tried to flag it down. A soldier in a rusty station wagon stopped. She saw the leer in his eyes even before she climbed in beside him, so she exaggerated her English accent, certain that he did not understand all she said, and spoke throughout the drive about the cause and mentioned that her car and driver were at the mechanic. He said very little until he dropped her off at the directorate building. He did not know who she was or who she knew.
Professor Ezeka’s hawk-faced secretary slowly looked at Olanna, from her carefully brushed wig to her shoes, and said, “He’s not in!”
“Then ring him right now and tell him I am waiting. My name is Olanna Ozobia.”
The secretary looked surprised. “What?”
“Do I need to say it again?” Olanna asked. “I’m sure Prof will want to hear about this. Where shall I sit while you ring him?”
The secretary stared at her and Olanna stared back steadily. Then she mutely gestured to a chair and picked up the phone. A half hour later, Professor Ezeka’s driver came in to take her to his house, tucked onto a hidden dirt road.
“I thought a VIP like you would live in the Government Reserved Area, Prof,” Olanna said, after she greeted him.
“Oh, certainly not. It’s too obvious a target for bombings.” He had not changed. His fastidious sense of superiority lined his voice as he waved her in and asked her to wait for him while he finished up in his study.
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