Olanna had seen little of Mrs. Ezeka in Nsukka; she was timid and barely educated, the kind of wife his village had found him, Odenigbo had said once. Olanna struggled to hide her surprise, then, when Mrs. Ezeka came out and hugged her twice in the spacious living room.
“It’s so nice to see old friends! Our socializing these days is so official, this government-house event today and another one tomorrow.” Mrs. Ezeka’s gold pendant hung low on a chain around her neck. “Pamela! Come and greet Aunty.”
The little girl who came out holding a doll was older than Baby, perhaps about eight years old. She had her mother’s fat-cheeked face, and the pink satin ribbons in her hair swayed.
“Good afternoon,” she said. She was undressing her doll, prising the skirt off the plastic body.
“How are you?” Olanna asked.
“Fine, thank you.”
Olanna sank into a plush red sofa. A dollhouse, with tiny exquisite doll plates and teacups, was set out on the center table.
“What will you drink?” Mrs. Ezeka asked brightly. “I remember Odenigbo loved his brandy. We do have some rather good brandy.”
Olanna looked at Mrs. Ezeka. She could not possibly remember what Odenigbo drank because she had never visited in the evenings with her husband.
“I’d like some cold water, please,” Olanna said.
“Just cold water?” Mrs. Ezeka asked. “Anyway, we can have something else after lunch. Steward!”
The steward appeared right away, as if he had been standing by the door. “Bring cold water and Coke,” Mrs. Ezeka said.
Pamela began to whine, still tugging at the doll’s clothes.
“Come, come, let me do it for you,” Mrs. Ezeka said. She turned to Olanna. “She’s so restless now. You see, we should have gone abroad last week. The two older ones have gone. His Excellency gave us permission ages ago. We were supposed to leave on a relief plane, but none of them landed. They said there were too many Nigerian bombers. Can you imagine? Yesterday, we waited in Uli, inside that unfinished building they call a terminal, for more than two hours and no plane landed. But hopefully we’ll leave on Sunday. We will fly to Gabon and then on to England—on our Nigerian passports, of course! The British have refused to recognize Biafra!” Her laughter filled Olanna with a resentment as fine, as painful, as the prick of a new pin.
The steward brought the water on a silver tray.
“Are you sure that water is properly cold?” Mrs. Ezeka asked. “Was it in the new freezer or the old one?”
“The new one, mah, like you tell me.”
“Will you eat cake, Olanna?” Mrs. Ezeka asked, after the steward left. “We made it today.”
“No, thank you.”
Professor Ezeka came in holding some files. “Is that all you’re drinking? Water?”
“Your house is surreal,” Olanna said.
“What a choice of words, surreal,” Professor Ezeka said.
“Odenigbo is very unhappy in his directorate. Can you help transfer him somewhere else?” The words moved slowly out of Olanna’s mouth and she realized how much she hated to ask, how much she wanted to get it over with and leave this house with the red rug and the matching red sofas and the television set and the fruity scent of Mrs. Ezeka’s perfume.
“Everything is tight now, really, very tight,” Professor Ezeka said. “Requests pour in from everywhere.” He sat down, placed the files on his lap, and crossed his legs. “But I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you,” Olanna said. “And thank you again for the provisions.”
“Have some cake,” Mrs. Ezeka said.
“No, I don’t want any cake.”
“Maybe after lunch.”
Olanna stood up. “I can’t stay for lunch. I must go. I teach some children in the yard and I told them to come in an hour’s time.”
“Oh, how lovely,” Mrs. Ezeka said, walking her to the door. “If only I wasn’t going overseas so soon, we would have done something together too, for the win-the-war effort.”
Olanna forced her lips to form a smile.
“The driver will take you back,” Professor Ezeka said.
“Thank you,” Olanna said.
Before she climbed into the car, Mrs. Ezeka asked her to come to the back and see the new bunker her husband had had built; it was concrete, sturdy.
“Imagine what these vandals have reduced us to. Pamela and I sometimes sleep here when they bomb us,” Mrs. Ezeka said. “But we shall survive.”
“Yes,” Olanna said and stared at the smooth floor and two beds, a furnished underground room.
When she got back to the yard, Baby was crying. Mucus ran thinly down her nose.
“They ate Bingo,” Baby said.
“What?”
“Adanna’s mummy ate Bingo.”
“Ugwu, what happened?” Olanna asked, taking Baby in her arms.
Ugwu shrugged. “That is what the people in the yard are saying. Mama Adanna took the dog out some time ago and does not answer when they ask her where it is. And she has just cooked her soup with meat.”
Olanna hushed Baby, wiped her eyes and nose, and thought for a moment about the dog with its head full of sores.
Kainene came in the middle of a hot afternoon. Olanna was in the kitchen soaking some dried cassava in water when Mama Oji called, “There is a woman in a car asking for you!”
Olanna hurried out and stopped when she saw her sister standing near the banana trees. She looked elegant in a knee-length tan dress.
“Kainene!” Olanna extended her arms slightly, uncertainly, and Kainene moved forward; their embrace was brief, their bodies barely touching before Kainene stepped back.
“I went to your old house and somebody told me to come here.”
“Our landlord kicked us out, we were not good for business.” Olanna laughed at her poor joke, although Kainene did not laugh. Kainene was peering into the room. Olanna wished so much that Kainene had come when they were still in a house, wished she did not feel so painfully self-conscious.
“Come in and sit down.”
Olanna dragged the bench in from the veranda and Kainene looked warily at it before she sat down and placed her hands on the leather bag that was the same earth-brown shade as her coiffed wig. Olanna raised the dividing curtain and sat on the bed and smoothed her wrapper. They did not look at each other. The silence was charged with things unsaid.
“So how have you been?” Olanna asked, finally.
“Things were normal until Port Harcourt fell. I was an army contractor, and I had a license to import stockfish. I’m in Orlu now. I’m in charge of a refugee camp there.”
“Oh.”
“Are you silently condemning me for profiteering from the war? Somebody had to import the stockfish, you know.” Kainene raised her eyebrows; they were penciled in, thin fluid arcs. “Many contractors were paid and didn’t deliver. At least I did.”
“No, no, I wasn’t thinking that at all.”
“You were.”
Olanna looked away. There were too many things swirling around in her head. “I was so worried when Port Harcourt fell. I sent messages.”
“I got the letter you sent to Madu.” Kainene rearranged the straps of her handbag. “You said you were teaching. Do you still? Your noble win-the-war effort?”
“The school is a refugee center now. I sometimes teach the children in the yard.”
“And how is the revolutionary husband?”
“He’s still with the Manpower Directorate.”
“You don’t have a wedding photo.”
“There was an air raid during our reception. The photographer threw his camera down.”
Kainene nodded, as if there were no need to feel sympathy at this news. She opened her bag. “I came to give you this. Mum sent it through a British journalist.”
Olanna held the envelope in her hand, unsure whether to open it in front of Kainene.
“I also brought two dresses for Baby,” Kainene said, and gestured to th
e bag she had placed on the floor. “A woman who came back from São Tomé had some good children’s clothes for sale.”
“You bought clothes for Baby?”
“How shocking indeed. And it’s about time the girl began to be called Chiamaka. This Baby business is tiresome.”
Olanna laughed.
To think that her sister was sitting across from her, that her sister had come to visit her, that her sister had brought clothes for her child. “Will you drink water? It’s all we have.”
“No, I’m fine.” Kainene got up and walked to the wall, where the mattress leaned, and then came back and sat down. “You didn’t know my steward Ikejide, did you?”
“Isn’t he the one Maxwell brought from his hometown?”
“Yes.” Kainene got up again. “He was killed in Port Harcourt. They were bombing and shelling us, and a piece of shrapnel cut off his head, completely beheaded him, and his body kept running. His body kept running and it didn’t have a head.”
“Oh, God.”
“I saw him.”
Olanna got up and sat next to Kainene on the bench and put an arm around her. Kainene smelled of home. They said nothing for long minutes.
“I thought about changing your money for you,” Kainene said. “But you can do it at the bank and then deposit, can’t you?”
“Haven’t you seen the bomb craters all around the bank? My money is staying under my bed.”
“Make sure the cockroaches don’t get to it. Life is harder for them these days.” Kainene leaned against Olanna and then, as if she had suddenly remembered something, she got up and straightened her dress; Olanna felt the slow sadness of missing a person who was still there.
“Goodness. I didn’t know how much time had passed,” Kainene said.
“Will you visit again?”
There was a pause before Kainene said, “I spend most of the day at the refugee camp. Maybe you can come and see it.” She fumbled for a piece of paper in her handbag and wrote down the directions to her house.
“Yes, I’ll come. I’ll come next Wednesday.”
“Will you drive?”
“No. Because of the soldiers. And we never have much petrol.”
“Greet the revolutionary for me.” Kainene climbed into the car and started it.
“Your number plates are different,” Olanna said, looking at the VIG printed before the numbers.
“I paid extra to stamp my patriotism on my car. Vigilance!” Kainene raised her eyebrows and a hand before she drove off. Olanna watched the Peugeot 404 disappear down the road and stood there for a while, feeling as if she had swallowed a sparkling sliver of light.
———
On Wednesday, Olanna arrived early. Harrison opened the door and stared, so surprised he seemed to have forgotten his usual bow. “Madam, good morning! It is a long time!”
“How are you, Harrison?”
“Fine, madam,” he said, and bowed, finally.
Olanna sat on one of the two sofas in the bright and bare living room with flung-open windows. A radio was turned on high somewhere inside, and when she heard approaching footsteps, she forced her mouth to relax, not sure what she would say to Richard. But it was Kainene, in a rumpled black dress, holding her wig in her hand.
“Ejima m,” she said, hugging Olanna. Their embrace was close, their bodies pressed warmly against each other. “I was hoping you would come in time so we could go together to the research center first before the refugee camp. Will you have some rice? I didn’t realize how long it’s been since I ate rice until the relief people gave me a bag last week.”
“No, not now.” Olanna wanted to hold her sister for much longer, to smell that familiar scent of home.
“I was listening to Nigerian radio. Lagos says Chinese soldiers are fighting for us and Kaduna says every Igbo woman deserves to be raped,” Kainene said. “Their imagination impresses me.”
“I never listen to them.”
“Oh, I listen more to Lagos and Kaduna than to Radio Biafra. You have to keep your enemy close.”
Harrison came in and bowed. “Madam? I am bringing drinks?”
“The way he goes on you would think we had a grand cellar in this half-built house in the middle of nowhere,” Kainene muttered, combing her wig with her fingers.
“Madam?”
“No, Harrison, don’t bring drinks. We’re leaving now. Remember, lunch for two.”
“Yes, madam.”
Olanna wondered where Richard was.
“Harrison is the most pretentious peasant I have ever seen,” Kainene said, as she started the car. “I know you don’t like the word peasant.”
“No.”
“But he is, you know.”
“We are all peasants.”
“Are we? It’s the sort of thing Richard would say.”
Olanna’s throat felt instantly parched.
Kainene glanced at her. “Richard left very early today. He’s going to Gabon to visit the kwashiorkor center next week and he said he needed to see to the arrangements. But I think he left so early because he felt awkward about seeing you.”
“Oh.” Olanna pursed her lips.
Kainene steered with a careless confidence, past potholes on the road, past palm trees stripped of fronds, past a thin soldier pulling along a thinner goat.
“Do you ever dream of that child’s head in the calabash?” she asked.
Olanna looked out of the window and remembered the slanting lines crisscrossing the calabash, the white blankness of the child’s eyes. “I don’t remember my dreams.”
“Grandpapa used to say, about difficulties he had gone through, ‘It did not kill me, it made me knowledgeable.’ O gburo m egbu, o mee ka m malu ife.”
“I remember.”
“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable,” Kainene said.
There was a pause. Inside Olanna, something calcified leaped to life.
“Do you know what I mean?” Kainene asked.
“Yes.”
At the research center, Kainene parked under a tree and Olanna waited in the car. She hurried back moments later. “The man I want isn’t there,” she said, and started the car. Olanna said nothing else until they arrived at the refugee camp. It was a primary school before the war. The buildings looked faded, most of the once-white paint peeled off. Some refugees who were standing outside stopped to stare at Olanna and to say nno to Kainene. A young lean priest in a discolored soutane came up to the car.
“Father Marcel, my twin sister, Olanna,” Kainene said.
The priest looked surprised. “Welcome,” he said, and then added, unnecessarily, “You are not identical.”
They stood under a flame tree while he told Kainene that the bag of crayfish had been delivered, that the Red Cross really had suspended relief flights, that Inatimi had come earlier with somebody else from the Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters and said he would return later. Olanna watched Kainene speak. She did not hear much of what Kainene said, because she was thinking of how unrelenting Kainene’s confidence was.
“Let’s give you a tour,” Kainene said to Olanna, after Father Marcel left. “I always start with the bunker.” Kainene showed her the bunker, a roughly dug pit covered with logs, before she began to walk toward the building at the far end of the compound. “Now to the Point of No Return.”
Olanna followed. The smell hit her at the first door. It went straight from her nose to her stomach, turning it, churning the boiled yam she’d had for breakfast.
Kainene was watching her. “You don’t have to go in.”
“I want to,” Olanna said, because she felt she should. She didn’t want to. She didn’t know what the smell was but it was enlarging and she could almost see it, a foul brown cloud. She felt faint. They went into the first classroom. About twelve people were lying on bamboo beds, on mats, on the floor. Not one of them reached out to slap away the fat flies. The only movement Olanna saw was that of a child si
tting by the door: he unfolded and refolded his arms. His bones were clearly outlined and the wrap of his arms was flat, in a way that would be impossible if he had some flesh underneath the skin. Kainene scanned the room quickly and then turned to the door. Outside, Olanna gulped in air. In the second classroom, she felt that even the air inside her was becoming soiled and she wanted to press her nostrils shut to stop the mingling of the air outside and that inside her. A mother was sitting on the floor with two children lying next to her. Olanna could not tell how old they were. They were naked; the taut globes that were their bellies would not fit in a shirt anyway. Their buttocks and chests were collapsed into folds of rumpled skin. On their head, spurts of reddish hair. Olanna’s eyes met their mother’s steady stare and Olanna looked away quickly. She slapped a fly away from her face and thought how healthy all the flies looked, how alive, how vibrant.
“That woman is dead. We have to get her removed,” Kainene said.
“No!” Olanna blurted, because that woman with the steady stare could not be dead. But Kainene meant another woman, who lay facedown on the floor, with a thin baby clutching her back. Kainene walked over and plucked the baby away. She went outside and called out, “Father! Father! One for burial,” and then sat on the steps outside and held the baby. The baby should have cried. Kainene was trying to force a soft yeast-colored pill into its mouth.
“What is that?” Olanna asked.
“Protein tablet. I’ll give you some for Chiamaka. They taste horrible. I finally got the Red Cross to give me some last week. We don’t have enough, of course, so I save them for the children. If I gave it to most of the people in there it would make no difference. But maybe it will for this baby. Maybe.”
“How many die a day?” Olanna asked.
Kainene looked down at the baby. “His mother came from somewhere that fell very early. They had gone through about five refugee camps before they came here.”
“How many die a day?” Olanna asked again. But Kainene did not respond. The baby finally let out a thin squall and Kainene forced the powdery tablet into the small open mouth. Olanna watched Father Marcel and another man carry the dead woman, by her ankles and wrists, out of the classroom and to the back of the building.
“Sometimes I hate them,” Kainene said.
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