“Water, please,” he croaked. They would not give him any; if he had the energy, he would invoke all the curses he knew on them. If he had a gun he would have shot them all and then shot himself.
Now, in the hospital where they had left him, he no longer wanted to die, but he feared he would; there were so many bodies littered around him, on mats, on mattresses, on the bare floor. There was so much blood everywhere. He heard the sharp screams of men when the doctor examined them and knew that his was not the worst case, even as he felt his own blood seeping out, first warm and then clammy cold against his side. The blood took his will; he was too exhausted to do anything about it and when the nurses hurried past him and left his bandaging unchanged, he did not call out to them. He said nothing, either, when they came and pushed him to his side and gave him quick unceremonious injections. In his delirious moments, he saw Eberechi wearing her tight skirt and making gestures to him that he could not understand. And in his lucid moments, death occupied him. He tried to visualize a heaven, a God seated on a throne, but could not. Yet the alternative vision, that death was nothing but an endless silence, seemed unlikely. There was a part of him that dreamed, and he was not sure if that part could ever retreat into an interminable silence. Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.
In the evenings, in the dim half-light, the people from Caritas came, a priest and two helpers carrying kerosene lanterns, giving out milk and sugar to the soldiers, asking their names and where they had come from.
“Nsukka,” Ugwu said, when he was asked. He thought the priest’s voice was vaguely familiar, but then everything was vaguely familiar here: The blood of the man next to him smelled like his, the nurse who placed a bowl of thin akamu next to him smiled like Eberechi.
“Nsukka? What is your name?” the priest asked.
Ugwu struggled to focus on the rounded face, the glasses, the browned collar. It was Father Damian. “I am Ugwu. I used to come with my madam Olanna to St. Vincent de Paul.”
“Ah!” Father Damian squeezed his hand and Ugwu winced. “You fought for the cause? Where were you wounded? What have they done for you?”
Ugwu shook his head. One part of his buttocks was wrapped in fiery red pain; it consumed him. Father Damian spooned some powdered milk into his mouth and then placed a bag of sugar and milk next to him.
“I know Odenigbo is with Manpower. I will send word to them,” Father Damian said. Before he left, he slipped a wooden rosary onto Ugwu’s wrist.
The rosary was there, a cold pressure against his skin, when Mr. Richard came some days later.
“Ugwu, Ugwu.” The fair hair and the strange-colored eyes swam above him, and Ugwu was not sure who it was.
“Can you hear me, Ugwu? I’ve come to take you.” It was the same voice that had asked Ugwu questions about his village festival years ago. Ugwu knew then who it was. Mr. Richard tried to help him get up and the pain shot up from his side and buttock to his head and eyes. Ugwu cried out, then clenched his teeth and bit his lip and sucked his own blood.
“Easy now, easy now,” Mr. Richard said.
The bumpy ride lying in the backseat of the Peugeot 404 and the fierce sun that sparkled the windscreen made Ugwu wonder if he had died and this was what happened at death: an unending journey in a car. Finally, they stopped at a hospital that smelled not of blood but of disinfectant. Only when Ugwu lay in a real bed did he think that perhaps he was not going to die after all.
“This place has been bombed quite a bit in the past week, and we will have to leave right after the doctor sees you. He’s really not a doctor—he was in his fourth year in university when the war started—but he’s done very well,” Mr. Richard said. “Olanna and Odenigbo and Baby have been with us in Orlu since Umuahia fell, and of course Harrison is there too. Kainene needs help at the refugee camp, so you better hurry up and be well.”
Ugwu sensed that Mr. Richard was talking too much, for his benefit, perhaps to keep him awake until the doctor came. But he was grateful for Mr. Richard’s laughter, the normality of it, the way it came back with a force of memory and made him inhabit the time when Mr. Richard wrote his answers in a leather-covered book.
“We all had a bit of a shock when we heard you were alive and at Emekuku Hospital—a good kind of shock, of course. Thank heavens there actually hadn’t been a symbolic burial, although there was some sort of memorial service before Umuahia fell.”
Ugwu’s eyelids throbbed. “They said I was dead, sah?”
“Oh, yes, they did. It seems your battalion thought you had died during the operation.”
Ugwu’s eyes were closing and would not stay open when he forced them. Finally he got them open and Mr. Richard was looking down at him. “Who is Eberechi?”
“Sah?”
“You kept saying Eberechi.”
“She is somebody I know, sah.”
“In Umuahia?”
“Yes, sah.”
Mr. Richard’s eyes softened. “And you don’t know where she is now?”
“No, sah.”
“Have you been wearing those clothes since you were wounded?”
“Yes, sah. The infantrymen gave me the trousers and shirt.”
“You need a wash.”
Ugwu smiled. “Yes, sah.”
“Were you afraid?” Mr. Richard asked, after a while.
He shifted; the pain was everywhere and there was no comfortable position. “Afraid, sah?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes, sah.” He paused. “I found a book at our camp. I was so sad and angry for the writer.”
“What book was it?”
“The autobiography of a black American called Frederick Douglass.”
Mister Richard wrote something down. “I shall use this anecdote in my book.”
“You are writing a book.”
“Yes.”
“What is it about, sah?”
“The war, and what happened before, and how much should not have happened. It will be called ‘The World Was Silent When We Died.’”
Later, Ugwu murmured the title to himself: The World Was Silent When We Died. It haunted him, filled him with shame. It made him think about that girl in the bar, her pinched face and the hate in her eyes as she lay on her back on the dirty floor.
Master and Olanna wrapped their arms around Ugwu, but lightly, without pressure, so as not to cause him pain. He felt acutely uncomfortable; they had never hugged him before.
“Ugwu,” Master said, shaking his head. “Ugwu.”
Baby clung to his hand and refused to let go and Ugwu’s whole life suddenly gathered in a lump in his throat, and he was sobbing and the tears hurt his eyes. He was angry with himself for crying, and later, as he recounted the story of what had happened to him, he spoke in a detached voice. He lied about how he had been conscripted; he said Pastor Ambrose had pleaded with him to help carry his sick sister to the herbalist’s and he was on his way back when the soldiers caught him. He used words like enemy fire and Attack HQ with a casual coldness, as if to make up for his crying.
“And they told us you were dead,” Olanna said, watching him. “Maybe Okeoma is alive too.”
Ugwu stared at her.
“They said he was killed in action,” Olanna said. “And I got word that kwashiorkor has finally taken Adanna. Baby doesn’t know, of course.”
Ugwu looked away. Her news provoked him. He felt angry with her for telling him what he did not want to hear.
“Too many people are dying,” he said.
“It is what happens in war, too many people die,” Olanna said. “But we will win this thing. Is your pillow in a good position?”
“Yes, mah.”
He could not sit on one part of his buttocks and so, during the first few weeks in Orlu, he lay on his side. Olanna was always beside him, forcing him to eat and willing him to live. His mind wandered often. He did not need the echo of pain on his side and in his butto
cks and on his back to remember his ogbunigwe exploding, or High-Tech’s laughter, or the dead hate in the eyes of the girl. He could not remember her features, but the look in her eyes stayed with him, as did the tense dryness between her legs, the way he had done what he had not wanted to do. In that gray space between dreaming and daydreaming, where he controlled most of what he imagined, he saw the bar, smelled the alcohol, and heard the soldiers saying “Target Destroyer,” but it was not the bar girl that lay with her back on the floor, it was Eberechi. He woke up hating the image and hating himself. He would give himself time to atone for what he had done. Then he would go and look for Eberechi. Perhaps she and her family had gone to their village in Mbaise or perhaps they were here in Orlu somewhere. She would wait for him; she would know he would come for her. That Eberechi would wait for him, that her waiting for him was proof of his redemption, gave him comfort as he healed. It surprised him that it was possible for his body to return to what it had been and for his mind to function with permanent lucidity.
During the day he helped out at the refugee camp, and in the evenings he wrote. He sat under the flame tree and wrote in small careful letters on the sides of old newspapers, on some paper Kainene had done supply calculations on, on the back of an old calendar. He wrote a poem about people getting a buttocks rash after defecating in imported buckets, but it did not sound as lyrical as Okeoma’s and he tore it up; then he wrote about a young woman with a perfect backside who pinched the neck of a young man and tore that up too. Finally, he started to write about Aunty Arize’s anonymous death in Kano and about Olanna losing the use of her legs, about Okeoma’s smart-fitting army uniform and Professor Ekwenugo’s bandaged hands. He wrote about the children of the refugee camp, how diligently they chased after lizards, how four boys had chased a quick lizard up a mango tree and one of them climbed up after it and the lizard leaped off the tree and into the outstretched hand of one of the other three surrounding the tree.
“The lizards have become smarter. They run faster now and hide under blocks of cement,” the boy who had climbed told Ugwu. They roasted and shared the lizard, shooing other children away. Later, the boy offered Ugwu a tiny bit of his stringy share. Ugwu thanked him and shook his head and realized that he would never be able to capture that child on paper, never be able to describe well enough the fear that dulled the eyes of mothers in the refugee camp when the bomber planes charged out of the sky. He would never be able to depict the very bleakness of bombing hungry people. But he tried, and the more he wrote the less he dreamed.
Olanna was teaching some children to recite the multiplication tables the morning that Kainene rushed up to the flame tree.
“Can you believe who is responsible for that small girl Urenwa’s pregnancy?” Kainene asked, and Ugwu almost did not recognize her. Her eyes bulged out of her angular face, filled with rage and tears. “Can you believe it is Father Marcel?”
Olanna stood up. “Gini? What are you saying?”
“Apparently I’ve been blind; she’s not the only one,” Kainene said. “He fucks most of them before he gives them the crayfish that I slave to get here!”
Later, Ugwu watched Kainene push at Father Marcel’s chest with both hands, shouting into his face, shoving him so hard that Ugwu feared the man would fall. “Amosu! You devil!” Then she turned to Father Jude. “How could you stay here and let him spread the legs of starving girls? How will you account for this to your God? You both are leaving now, right now. I will take this to Ojukwu myself if I have to!”
There were tears running down her face. There was something magnificent in her rage. Ugwu felt stained and unworthy as he went about his new duties after the priests left—distributing garri, breaking up fights, supervising the scorched and failing farms. He wondered what Kainene would say, what she would do to him, feel about him, if she ever knew about the girl in the bar. She would loathe him. So would Olanna. So would Eberechi.
He listened to the conversations in the evenings, writing in his mind what he would later transfer to paper. It was mostly Kainene and Olanna who talked, as though they created their own world that Master and Mr. Richard could never quite enter. Sometimes Harrison would come and sit with Ugwu but say very little, as though he was both puzzled by and respectful of him. Ugwu was no longer just Ugwu, he was now one of “our boys;” he had fought for the cause. The moon was always a brilliant white, and once in a while the night wind brought the hooting of owls and the rise and fall of voices from the refugee camp. Baby slept on a mat with Olanna’s wrapper over her to keep the mosquitoes away. Whenever they heard the far-off drone of the relief planes, nothing like the low-flying swiftness of the bombers, Kainene would say, “I hope that one will manage to land.” And Olanna would respond with a light laugh. “We have to cook our next soup with stockfish.”
When they listened to Radio Biafra, Ugwu would get up and walk away. The shabby theatrics of the war reports, the voice that forced morsels of invented hope down people’s throats, did not interest him. One afternoon, Harrison came up to the flame tree carrying the radio turned up high to Radio Biafra.
“Please turn that thing off,” Ugwu said. He was watching some little boys playing on the nearby patch of grass. “I want to hear the birds.”
“There are no birds singing,” Harrison said.
“Turn it off.”
“His Excellency is about to give a speech.”
“Turn it off or carry it away.”
“You don’t want to hear His Excellency?”
“Mba, no.”
Harrison was watching him. “It will be a great speech.”
“There is no such thing as greatness,” Ugwu said.
Harrison walked away looking wounded and Ugwu did not bother to call him; he went back to watching the children. They ran sluggishly on the parched grass, holding sticks as guns, making shooting sounds with their mouths, raising clouds of dust as they chased one another. Even the dust seemed listless. They were playing War. Four boys. Yesterday, they had been five. Ugwu did not remember the fifth child’s name—was it Chidiebele or Chidiebube?—but he remembered how the child’s belly had lately started to look as if he had swallowed a fat ball, how his hair had fallen off in tufts, how his skin had lightened, from the color of mahogany to a sickly yellow. The other children had teased him often. Afo mmili ukwa, they called him: Breadfruit Belly. Once, Ugwu wanted to ask them to stop, so he could explain what kwashiorkor was—perhaps he could read out to them how he described kwashiorkor on his writing sheet. But he decided not to. There was no need to prepare them for what he was sure they would all get anyway. Ugwu did not remember the child’s ever playing a Biafran officer, like His Excellency or Achuzie; he always played a Nigerian, either Gowon or Adekunle, which meant he was always defeated and had to fall down at the end and act dead. Sometimes, Ugwu wondered if the child had liked it because it gave him a chance to rest, lying down on the grass.
The child and his family had come from Oguta, one of those families who did not believe their town would fall, and so his mother looked defiant when they first arrived, as if she dared anybody to tell her she was not dreaming and would not be waking up soon. The evening they arrived, the sound of the antiaircraft guns cut through the refugee camp just before dusk. The mother ran out and held him, her only child, in a confused hug. The other women shook her roughly, as the wa-wa-wa roar of the overhead planes came closer. Come to the bunker! Are you mad? Come to the bunker!
The woman refused and stood there holding her son, shaking. Ugwu still did not know why he had done what he did. Perhaps it was because Olanna had already grabbed Baby and run ahead of him and his hands were free. But he reached out and pulled the child from the woman’s embrace and ran. The child was still heavy then, still weighed something; his mother had no choice but to follow. The planes were strafing and, just before Ugwu shoved the child down the bunker, a bullet flew closely past; he smelled rather than saw it, the acridness of hot metal.
It was in the bunker, whi
le playing with the damp soil that crawled with crickets and ants, that the child had told Ugwu his name. Chidiebele or Chidiebube, he was not sure. But it was Chidi-something. Perhaps Chidiebele, the more common name. The name almost sounded like a joke now. Chidiebele: God is merciful.
Later, the four boys had stopped playing War and had gone inside when Ugwu heard the thin, strangled wail from the classroom at the end of the building. He knew that that child’s aunt would come out soon and bravely tell the people nearby, that the mother would throw herself in the dirt and roll and shout until she lost her voice, and then she would take a razor and leave her scalp bare and bleeding.
He put on his singlet and went out to offer to help dig the small grave.
33
Richard sat next to Kainene and rubbed her shoulder as she laughed at something Olanna was saying. He loved the way her neck looked longer when she threw back her head and laughed. He loved the evenings spent with her and Olanna and Odenigbo; they reminded him of Odenigbo’s dimly lit living room in Nsukka, of tasting beer on his pepper-drenched tongue. Kainene reached out for the enamel plate of roasted crickets, Harrison’s new specialty; he seemed to know just where to dig for them in the dry earth and how to break them up into bits after roasting, so that they lasted a bit longer. Kainene placed a piece in her mouth. Richard took two pieces and crunched slowly. It was getting dark, and the cashew trees had become silent gray silhouettes. A dust haze hung above them all.
“What do you think accounts for the success of the white man’s mission in Africa, Richard?” Odenigbo asked.
“The success?” Odenigbo unnerved him, the way he would brood for long moments and then abruptly ask or say something unexpected.
“Yes, the success. I think in English,” Odenigbo said.
“Perhaps you should first account for the failure of the black man to curb the white man’s mission,” Kainene said.
“Who brought racism into the world?” Odenigbo asked.
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