Later, she told Kainene how afraid she was for Ugwu, how she felt as if she were about to turn a corner and be flattened by tragedy. Kainene placed an arm around her and told her not to worry. Madu had sent word to all battalion commanders to look for Ugwu; they would find out where he was. But when Baby asked, “Is Ugwu coming back today, Mummy Ola?” Olanna imagined it was because Baby, too, had the same premonition. When she returned to Umuahia and Mama Oji gave her a package somebody had delivered, she immediately wondered if it contained a message about Ugwu. Her hands shook as she held the brown-wrapped carton creased with excessive handling. Then she noticed Mohammed’s writing, addressed to her in care of the University of Biafra, in long elegant sweeps. Inside, she unfolded handkerchiefs, crisp white underwear, bars of Lux soap, and chocolate, and she marveled that they had reached her intact, even sent through the Red Cross. His letter was three months old but still smelled faintly of sweet musk. Detached sentences stuck to her mind.
I have sent so many letters and am unsure which has reached you. My sister, Hadiza, got married in June. I think constantly of you. My polo game is much improved. I am well and know you and Odenigbo must be too. Do try and send word back.
She turned a chocolate bar around in her hand, stared at the MADE IN SWITZERLAND, fiddled with the silver foil. Then she flung the bar across the room. Mohammed’s letter incensed her; it insulted her reality. But he could not possibly know that they had no salt and Odenigbo drank kai-kai every day and Ugwu was conscripted and she had sold her wig. He could not possibly know. Yet she felt angry that the patterns of his old life remained in place, so unquestioningly in place that he could write to her about his polo game.
Mama Oji knocked; Olanna took a deep calming breath before she opened the door and gave her a bar of soap.
“Thank you.” Mama Oji held the soap with both hands and raised it to her nose and sniffed it. “But that package was big. Is this the only thing you will give me? Is there no canned food there? Or are you saving it for your saboteur friend Alice?”
“Ngwa, give me back the soap,” Olanna said. “Mama Adanna will know how to be appreciative.”
Mama Oji swiftly raised her blouse and tucked the soap into her threadbare bra. “You know I am grateful.”
Raised voices came from the road, and they both went outside. A group of militia members holding machetes were pushing two women along. They cried as they staggered down the road; their wrappers were ripped and their eyes reddened. “What did we do? We are not saboteurs! We are refugees from Ndoni! We have done nothing!”
Pastor Ambrose ran out to the road and began to pray. “Father God, destroy the saboteurs that are showing the enemy the way! Holy-spirit fire!”
Some of the neighbors hurried out to spit and aim stones and jeer at the backs of the women. “Sabo! God punish you! Sabo!”
“They should throw tires round their necks and burn them,” Mama Oji said. “They should burn every single saboteur.”
Olanna folded Mohammed’s letter, thought of the slack halfexposed bellies of the women, and said nothing.
“You should be careful with that Alice,” Mama Oji said.
“Leave Alice alone. She is not a saboteur.”
“She is the kind of woman who will steal somebody’s husband.”
“What?”
“Every time you go to Orlu she will come out and sit with your husband.”
Olanna stared at Mama Oji, surprised, because it was the last thing she had expected to hear and because Odenigbo had never mentioned that Alice spent time with him when she was away. She had never even seen them speak to each other.
Mama Oji was watching her. “I am only saying that you should be careful with her. Even if she is not a saboteur, she is not a good woman.”
Olanna could not think of what to say. She knew that Odenigbo would never touch another woman, had quietly convinced herself of this, and knew too that Mama Oji nursed a deep resentment of Alice. Yet the very unexpectedness of Mama Oji’s words nagged her.
“I will be careful,” she said finally, with a smile.
Mama Oji looked as if she wanted to say something else but changed her mind and turned to shout at her son. “Get away from that place! Are you stupid? Ewu awusa! Don’t you know you will start coughing now?”
Later, Olanna took a bar of soap and knocked on Alice’s door, three sharp raps in quick succession to let Alice know it was she. Alice’s eyes looked sleepy, more shadowed than usual. “You’re back,” she said. “How is your sister?”
“Very well.”
“Did you see the poor women they are harassing and calling saboteurs?” she asked, and before Olanna could respond, she continued, “Yesterday it was a man from Ogoja. This is nonsense. We cannot keep beating people just because Nigeria is beating us. Somebody like me, I have not eaten proper food in two years. I have not tasted sugar. I have not drunk cold water. Where will I find the energy to aid the enemy?” Alice gestured with her tiny hands, and what Olanna had once thought to be an elegant fragility suddenly became a self-absorbed conceit, a luxurious selfishness; Alice spoke as if she alone suffered from the war.
Olanna gave her the soap. “Somebody sent a few bars to me.”
“Oh! So I will join those using Lux in this Biafra. Thank you.” Alice’s smile transformed her face, brightened her eyes, and Olanna wondered if Odenigbo found her pretty. She looked at Alice’s yellow-skinned face and narrow waist and realized that what she had once admired now threatened her.
“Ngwanu, let me go and make Baby’s lunch,” she said, and turned to leave.
That evening, she visited Mrs. Muokelu with a bar of soap.
“Is this you? Anya gi! It has been long!” Mrs. Muokelu said. A hole had split up His Excellency’s face on the sleeve of her boubou.
“You look well,” Olanna lied. Mrs. Muokelu was gaunt; her body was built for thickness and now, with so much weight loss, she drooped, as though she could no longer stand straight. Even the hair on her arms drooped.
“You, ever beautiful,” Mrs. Muokelu said, and hugged Olanna again.
Olanna gave her the soap, and because she knew that Mrs. Muokelu would not touch anything sent from Nigeria by a Nigerian, she said, “My mother sent it from England.”
“God bless you,” Mrs. Muokelu said. “Your husband and Baby, kwanu?”
“They are well.”
“And Ugwu?”
“He was conscripted.”
“After that first time?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Muokelu paused and fingered the plastic half of a yellow sun around her neck. “It will be well. He will come back. Somebody has to fight for our cause.”
They saw very little of each other now that Mrs. Muokelu had started her trade. Olanna sat down and listened to her stories—about the vision that revealed that the saboteur responsible for the fall of Port Harcourt was a general of the Biafran Army; about another vision in which a dibia from Okija gave His Excellency some powerful medicine that would recapture all the fallen towns.
“They have started the rumor that Umuahia is threatened, okwa ya?” Mrs. Muokelu asked, staring into Olanna’s eyes.
“Yes.”
“But Umuahia will not fall. There is no need for people to panic and start packing.”
Olanna shrugged; she wondered why Mrs. Muokelu was looking at her so intently.
“They say people with cars have started looking for petrol.” Mrs. Muokelu’s eyes were unwavering. “They have to be careful, very careful, before somebody will ask them how they knew that Umuahia would fall if not that they are saboteurs.”
Olanna realized, then, that Mrs. Muokelu was warning her, telling her to be prepared.
“Yes, they have to be careful,” she said.
Mrs. Muokelu rubbed her hands together. Something had changed with her; she had allowed her faith to slip from her fingers. Biafra would win, Olanna knew, because Biafra had to win, but that Mrs. Muokelu of all people believed that the fall of the capita
l was imminent dampened her. When she hugged Mrs. Muokelu goodbye, it was with the hollow feeling that she would never see her again. She seriously contemplated, for the first time, the fall of Umuahia as she walked home. It would mean a delayed victory, a tighter squeezing of Biafra’s territory, but it would also mean that they would go and live in Kainene’s house in Orlu until the war ended.
She stopped by the petrol station near the hospital and was not surprised to see the sign scrawled in chalk: NO PETROL. They had stopped selling Biafran-made petrol since the talk of Umuahia’s fall began, so that people would not panic. That night, Olanna told Odenigbo, “We need to get some petrol on the black market; we don’t have enough in case anything happens.” He nodded vaguely and mumbled something about Special Julius. He had just come back from Tanzania Bar and lay on the bed with the radio turned on low. Across the curtain, Baby was asleep on the mattress.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“We can’t afford petrol right now. It’s a pound a gallon.”
“They paid you last week. We have to be sure that the car will move.”
“I’ve asked Special Julius to do a check exchange. He has not brought the money.”
Olanna knew immediately that it was a lie. They did check exchanges with Special Julius all the time; it never took more than a day for Special Julius to give Odenigbo cash in exchange for a check.
“How are we going to buy petrol then?” she asked.
He said nothing.
She walked past him and outside. The moon was behind a cloud and, sitting out in the blackness of the yard, she could still smell that cheap vapor-heavy scent of local gin. It trailed him, it clouded the paths that he walked. His drinking in Nsukka—his auburn, finely refined brandy—had sharpened his mind, distilled his ideas and his confidence so that he sat in the living room and talked and talked and everybody listened. This drinking here silenced him. It made him retreat into himself and look out at the world with bleary weary eyes. And it made her furious.
Olanna changed what was left of her British pounds and bought petrol from a man who led her into a dank outhouse with creamy-fat maggots crawling all over the floor. He poured carefully from his metal container into hers. She took the container home wrapped in a sack that had contained cornmeal and had just stored it in the boot of the Opel when a BIAFRAN ARMY open jeep drove in. Kainene climbed out, followed by a soldier wearing a helmet. And Olanna knew, with an immediate sinking wail of a feeling, that it was about Ugwu. It was about Ugwu. The sun burned hotly and liquids began to spin in her head and she looked around for Baby but could not find her. Kainene came up and held her firmly by the shoulders and said, “Ejima m, hold your heart, be strong. Ugwu has died,” and it was not the news but the tight grip of Kainene’s bony fingers that Olanna recognized.
“No,” she said calmly. The air was charged with unreality, as if she would certainly wake up in a minute. “No,” she said again, shaking her head.
“Madu sent his batman with the message. Ugwu was with the field engineers, and they suffered massive casualties in an operation last week. Only a few came back and Ugwu was not one of them. They did not find his body, but they did not find many of the bodies.” Kainene paused. “There was not much that was whole to find.”
Olanna kept shaking her head, waiting to wake up.
“Come with me. Bring Chiamaka. Come and stay in Orlu.” Kainene was holding her, Baby was saying something, and a haze shrouded everything until she looked up and saw the sky. Blue and clear. It made the present real, the sky, because she had never seen the sky in her dreams. She turned and marched down the road to Tanzania Bar. She walked past the dirty curtain at the door and pushed Odenigbo’s cup off the table; a pale liquid spread on the cement floor.
“Have you drunk enough, eh?” she asked him quietly. “Ugwu anwugo. Did you hear me? Ugwu has died.”
Odenigbo stood up and looked at her. The rims of his eyes were puffy.
“Go on and drink,” Olanna said. “Drink and drink and don’t stop. Ugwu has died.”
The woman who owned the bar came across and said, “Oh! Sorry, ndo,” and made to hug her but Olanna shrugged her off. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Leave me alone!” It was only then she realized that Kainene had come with her and was silently holding her as she shouted, “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” at the bar owner, who backed away.
In the following days, days filled with dark gaps of time, Odenigbo did not go to Tanzania Bar. He gave Baby a bath, made their garri, came home earlier from work. Once he tried to hold Olanna, to kiss her, but his touch made her skin crawl and she turned away from him and went outside to sleep on a mat on the veranda, where Ugwu had sometimes slept. She did not cry. The only time she cried was after she went to Eberechi’s house to tell her that Ugwu had died and Eberechi screamed and called her a liar; at nights those screams rang in Olanna’s head. Odenigbo sent word to Ugwu’s people through three different women who went across enemy lines to trade. And he organized a service of songs in the yard. Some of the neighbors helped Alice bring out her piano and set it down near the banana trees. “I will play as you sing,” Alice said to the gathered women. But whenever somebody started a song, Mama Oji would clap, insistently, loudly, in accompaniment, and soon all the other neighbors would join in the clapping and Alice could not play. She sat helplessly by her piano with Baby on her lap.
The first songs were vigorous and then Mama Adanna’s voice broke out, husky and elegiac.
Naba na ndokwa,
Ugwu, naba na ndokwa.
O ga-adili gi mma,
Naba na ndokwa.
Odenigbo half stumbled out of the yard before they finished singing, a livid incredulity in his eyes, as if he could not believe the words of the song: Go in peace, it will be well with you. Olanna watched him go. She did not entirely understand the resentment she felt. There was nothing he could have done to prevent Ugwu’s death, but his drinking, his excessive drinking, had somehow made him complicit. She did not want to speak to him, to sleep beside him. She slept on the mat outside, and even the routine of the mosquito bites became a comfort. She said little to him. They spoke only of necessities, what Baby would eat, what they would do if Umuahia fell.
“We will stay in Kainene’s house only until we find a place,” he said, as if they had many choices, as if he had forgotten that, before, he would have said that Umuahia would not fall; and she said nothing in response.
She told Baby that Ugwu had gone to heaven.
“But he’s coming back soon, Mummy Ola?” Baby asked.
And Olanna said yes. It was not that she wanted to soothe Baby; it was that, day after day, she found herself rejecting the finality of Ugwu’s death. She told herself that he was not dead; he might be close to dead but he was not dead. She willed a message to come to her about his whereabouts. She bathed outside now—the bathroom was slimy with mold and urine, so she woke up very early to take a bucket and go behind the building—and one morning she caught a movement at the corner and saw Pastor Ambrose watching her. “Pastor Ambrose!” she called out, and he dashed off. “You are not ashamed of yourself? If only you would spend your time praying for somebody to come and tell me what happened to Ugwu instead of spying on a married woman taking a bath.”
She visited Mrs. Muokelu’s home, hoping for a story of a vision that involved Ugwu’s safety, but a neighbor told her that Mrs. Muokelu’s whole family was gone. They had left without telling anybody. She listened to the war reports on Radio Biafra more carefully, as if there might be clues about Ugwu in the ebullient voice reporting the pushback of the vandals, the successes of gallant Biafran soldiers. A man wearing a stained white caftan walked into the yard on a Saturday afternoon, and Olanna hurried up to him, certain that he had come with news of Ugwu.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me where Ugwu is.”
The man looked confused. “Dalu. I am looking for Alice Njokamma from Asaba.”
“Alice?” Olanna stared at the man, as
though to give him a chance to take it back and ask for her instead. “Alice?”
“Yes, Alice from Asaba. I am her kinsman. My family’s compound is next to theirs.”
Olanna pointed at Alice’s door. He went over and knocked and knocked.
“She is in?” he asked.
Olanna nodded, resentful that he had not brought news of Ugwu.
The man knocked again and called out, “I am from the Isioma family in Asaba.”
Alice opened the door and he went in. Moments later, Alice rushed out and threw herself on the ground, rolling this way and that; in the evening sunlight, her sand-patched skin was tinted with gold.
“O gini mere? What happened?” the neighbors asked, gathering around Alice.
“I am from Asaba and I got word about our hometown this morning,” the man said. His accent was thicker than Alice’s, and Olanna understood his Igbo a moment after he had spoken. “The vandals took our town many weeks ago and they announced that all the indigenes should come out and say ‘One Nigeria’ and they would give them rice. So people came out of hiding and said ‘One Nigeria’ and the vandals shot them, men, women, and children. Everyone.” The man paused. “There is nobody left in the Njokamma family. Nobody left.”
Alice was lying on her back, rubbing her head frantically against the ground, moaning. Clumps of sand were in her hair. She jumped up and ran toward the road but Pastor Ambrose ran after her and dragged her back. She jerked away and threw herself down again, her lips pulled back, her teeth bared. “What am I doing still alive? They should come and kill me now! I said they should come and kill me!”
She was strengthened, emboldened, by the madness of grief and she fought off everyone who tried to hold her. She rolled on the ground with such force that the stones cut her skin in tiny red gashes. The neighbors said oh and shook their heads. Odenigbo came out of the room then and went over and picked Alice up and held her, and she stayed still and began to weep, her head resting on his shoulder. Olanna watched them. There was a familiar melding to the curve of Odenigbo’s arms around Alice. He held her with the ease of someone who had held her before.
Half of a Yellow Sun Page 44