“I don’t see your point,” Kainene said.
“The white man brought racism into the world. He used it as a basis of conquest. It is always easier to conquer a more humane people.”
“So when we conquer the Nigerians we will be the less humane?” Kainene asked.
Odenigbo said nothing. Something rustled near the cashew trees, and Harrison leaped up and ran over to see if it was a bush rat he could catch.
“Inatimi has given me some Nigerian coins,” Kainene said finally. “You know these Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters people have quite a bit of Nigerian money. I want to go to Ninth Mile and see what I can buy, and if that goes well, I will sell some of the things our people at the camp have made.”
“That’s trading with the enemy,” Odenigbo said.
“It’s trading with illiterate Nigerian women who have what we need.”
“It’s dangerous, Kainene,” Odenigbo said; the softness in his voice surprised Richard.
“That sector is free,” Olanna said. “Our people are trading freely there.”
“Are you going too?” Surprise lifted Odenigbo’s voice as he stared at Olanna.
“No. At least not tomorrow. Maybe the next time Kainene goes.”
“Tomorrow?” It was Richard’s turn to be surprised. Kainene had mentioned it once, wanting to trade across enemy lines, but he did not know she had already decided when to go.
“Yes, Kainene is going tomorrow,” Olanna said.
“Yes,” Kainene said. “But don’t mind Olanna, she will never come with me. She’s always been terribly frightened of honest free enterprise.” Kainene laughed and Olanna laughed and slapped her arm; Richard saw the similarity in the curve of their lips, in the shape of their slightly larger front teeth.
“Hasn’t Ninth Mile Road been occupied on and off?” Odenigbo asked. “I don’t think you should go.”
“It’s all decided. I leave with Inatimi early tomorrow morning, and we’ll be back by evening,” Kainene said, with that finality to her tone that Richard knew well. He was not opposed to the trip, though; he knew many people who did what she wanted to do.
That night, he dreamed that she came back with a basket full of chicken boiled in herbs, spicy jollof rice, soup thick with fish, and he felt irritable when he was jerked awake by raised voices just outside their window. He was reluctant to leave the dream. Kainene had woken up too and they hurried outside, Kainene with a wrapper tied around her chest and he in his shorts. It was only just dawn. The light was weak. A small crowd from the refugee camp was beating and kicking a young man crouched on the ground, his hands placed on his head to shield some of the blows. His trousers were splattered with holes and his collar was almost ripped off but the half of a yellow sun still clung to his torn sleeve.
“What is it?” Kainene asked. “What is it?”
Before anyone spoke, Richard knew. The soldier had been stealing from the farm. It happened everywhere now, farms raided at night, raided of corn so tender they had not yet formed kernels and yams so young they were barely the size of a cocoyam.
“Do you see why anything we plant will not bear fruit?” said a woman whose child had died the week before. Her wrapper was tied low, exposing the tops of drooping breasts. “People like this thief come and harvest everything so that we will starve to death.”
“Stop it!” Kainene said. “Stop it right now! Leave him alone!”
“You are telling us to leave a thief? If we leave him today, tomorrow ten of them will come.”
“He is not a thief,” Kainene said. “Did you hear me? He is not a thief. He is a hungry soldier.”
The crowd stilled at the quiet authority in her voice. Slowly, they shuffled away, back to the classrooms. The soldier got up and dusted himself off.
“Have you come from the front?” Kainene asked.
He nodded. He looked about eighteen. There were two angry bumps on either side of his forehead and blood trailed from his nostrils.
“Are you running? I na-agba oso? Have you deserted?” Kainene asked.
He did not respond.
“Come. Come and take some garri before you go,” Kainene said.
Tears crawled down from his swollen left eye and he placed a palm on it as he followed her. He did not speak except to mumble “Dalu—thank you” before he left, clutching the small bag of garri. Kainene was silent as she got dressed to go down and meet Inatimi at the camp.
“You’ll leave early won’t you, Richard?” she asked. “Those Big Men may be in the office for just thirty minutes today.”
“I’ll leave in an hour.” He was going to Ahiara to try and get some provisions from relief headquarters.
“Tell them I’m dying and we desperately need milk and corned beef to keep me alive,” she said. There was a new bitter undertone in her voice.
“I will,” he said. “And go well. Ije oma. Come back with lots of garri and salt.”
They kissed, a brief press of their lips before she left. He knew that seeing that pathetic young soldier had upset her, and he knew, too, that she was thinking that the young soldier was not the reason the crops failed. They failed because the land was poor and the harmattan was harsh and there was no manure and there was nothing to plant, and when she managed to get some seed yams, the people ate half before they planted them. He wished he could reach out and twist the sky and bring victory to Biafra right away. For her.
She was not back when he returned from Ahiara in the evening. The living room smelled of bleached palm oil that came from the kitchen and Baby was lying on a mat, looking through the pages of Eze Goes to School.
“Carry me on your shoulders, Uncle Richard,” Baby said, running to him. Richard pretended to try and pick her up and then collapsed on a chair.
“You’re a big girl now, Baby. You’re too heavy to be picked up.”
“No!”
Olanna was standing by the kitchen, watching them. “You know, Baby has grown wiser but she hasn’t grown taller since the war started.”
Richard smiled. “Better wisdom than height,” he said, and she smiled too. He realized how little they said to each other, how carefully they avoided being alone together.
“No luck at Ahiara?” Olanna asked.
“No. I tried everywhere. The relief centers are empty. I saw a grown man sitting on the floor in front of one building and sucking his thumb,” he said.
“What about the people you know at the directorates?”
“They said they have nothing and that our emphasis now is self-sufficiency and farming.”
“Farming with what? And how are we going to feed millions of people on the tiny territory we hold now?”
Richard looked at her. Even the slightest hint of criticism of Biafra made him uncomfortable. Worries had lodged in the cracks in his mind since Umuahia fell, but he did not voice them.
“Is Kainene at the camp?” he asked.
Olanna wiped her brow. “I think so. She and Inatimi should be back by now.”
Richard went outside to play with Baby. He placed her on his shoulders so that she could grasp at a cashew leaf above and then put her down, thinking how tiny, how light, she was for a six-year-old. He drew lines on the ground and asked her to pick up some stones and tried to teach her to play nchokolo. He watched her lay out and arrange the pieces of jagged metal from a tin: her shrapnel collection. Kainene was not back an hour later. Richard took Baby down the road to the camp. Kainene was not sitting on the steps in front of the Point of No Return, as she sometimes did. She was not in the sickroom. She was not in any of the classrooms. Richard saw Ugwu under the flame tree, writing on a piece of paper.
“Aunty Kainene is not back,” Ugwu said, before Richard asked.
“You’re sure she didn’t come back and then go off somewhere else?”
“I’m sure, sah. But I expect she will be back soon.”
Richard was amused by the formal precision in the way Ugwu said expect; he admired Ugwu’s ambition and his rec
ent scribbling on any paper he could find. Once he had tried to find where Ugwu left some of them so he could take a look, but he had found none. They were probably all tucked into his shorts.
“What are you writing now?” he asked.
“A small thing, sah,” Ugwu said.
“I’ll stay with Ugwu,” Baby said.
“Okay, Baby.” Richard knew that she would hurry to the classrooms to find some of the children and begin hunting for lizards or crickets. Or she would look for the self-styled militiaman who wore a dagger round his waist and ask if she could hold it. He walked back to the house. Odenigbo had just returned from work and, in the bright evening sun, his shirt was worn so thin in front that Richard could see the curled hair on his chest.
“Is Kainene back?” Odenigbo asked.
“Not yet.”
Odenigbo gave him a long accusing glance before he went inside to change. He came back out with a wrapper slung around his body and tied behind his neck and sat with Richard in the living room. On the radio, His Excellency announced that he was going abroad to search for peace.
In accord with my own frequent affirmations that I would personally go anywhere to secure peace and security for my people, I am now traveling out of Biafra to explore …
The sun was falling when Ugwu and Baby came home.
“That small child, Nneka, just died and her mother has refused to let them take the body and bury,” Ugwu said, after he greeted them.
“Is Kainene there?” Richard asked.
“No,” Ugwu said.
Odenigbo got up and Richard got up and they walked down to the refugee camp together. They said nothing to each other. A woman was wailing from one of the classrooms. They asked questions and everyone said the same thing: Kainene had left with Inatimi early in the morning. She told them she was going on afia attack, to trade across enemy lines, and that she would be back by late afternoon.
A day passed, then a second day. Everything remained the same, the dryness in the air, the dusty winds, the refugees tilling dried soil, but Kainene was not back. Richard felt himself tumbling through a tunnel, felt the weight being sucked off him hour after hour. Odenigbo told him Kainene was probably just held up on the other side, waiting for the vandals to move before she came home. Olanna said this delay happened all the time to women who did the attack trade. But there was, in Olanna’s eyes, a furtive fear. Even Odenigbo looked fearful when he said he would not go with them to search for Kainene because he knew she would come home; it was as if he was afraid of what they would discover. Olanna sat beside Richard as he drove to Ninth Mile. They were silent, but when he stopped to ask people on the roadside if they had seen anybody who looked like Kainene, she would say, “O tolu ogo, di ezigbo oji;” as if repeating what Richard had already said, that Kainene was tall and very dark, would jog the people’s memory better. Richard showed them Kainene’s picture. Sometimes, in his rush, he pulled out the picture of the roped pot instead. Nobody had seen her. Nobody had seen a car like Inatimi’s. They even asked the Biafran soldiers, the ones who told them they could not go any farther because the roads were occupied. The soldiers shook their heads and said they had not seen her. On the drive back, Richard began to cry.
“Why are you crying?” Olanna snapped at him. “Kainene is just stuck on the other side for a few days.”
Richard’s tears blinded him. He veered off the road and the car screeched as it ran into the thick undergrowth of the bush.
“Stop! Stop!” Olanna said.
He stopped and she took the key from him and went around and opened his door. As she drove them home, she hummed steadily under her breath.
34
Olanna ran the wooden comb through Baby’s hair as gently as she could, and yet there was a large tuft left on the teeth. Ugwu was sitting on a bench writing. A week had passed and Kainene was not back. The harmattan winds were calmer today, they did not make the cashew trees swirl, but they blew sand everywhere and the air was thick with grit and with rumors that His Excellency had not gone in search of peace but had run away. Olanna knew it could not be. She believed, as firmly and as quietly as she believed that Kainene would come home soon, that His Excellency’s journey would be a success. He would come back with a signed document that would declare the war over, that would proclaim a free Biafra. He would come back with justice and with salt.
She combed Baby’s hair, and again some of it fell out. Olanna held the thin wisps in her hand, a sun-bleached yellow-brown that was nothing like Baby’s natural jet-black. It frightened her. Kainene had told her some weeks back that it was a sign of extreme wisdom, Baby’s hair falling off at only six years old, and afterward Kainene had gone out to look for more protein tablets for Baby.
Ugwu looked up from his writing. “Maybe you should not braid her hair, mah.”
“Yes. Maybe that’s why it’s falling out, too much braiding.”
“My hair is not falling out!” Baby said, and patted her head.
Olanna placed the comb down. “I keep thinking about the hair on that child’s head I saw on the train; it was very thick. It must have been work for her mother to plait it.”
“How was it plaited?” Ugwu asked.
Olanna was surprised, at first, by the question and then she realized that she clearly remembered how it was plaited and she began to describe the hairstyle, how some of the braids fell across the forehead. Then she described the head itself, the open eyes, the graying skin. Ugwu was writing as she spoke, and his writing, the earnestness of his interest, suddenly made her story important, made it serve a larger purpose that even she was not sure of, and so she told him all she remembered about the train full of people who had cried and shouted and urinated on themselves.
She was still speaking when Odenigbo and Richard came back. They were walking; they had left in the Peugeot early in the morning to go and search for Kainene in the hospital in Ahiara.
Olanna sprang up. “Did you?”
“No,” Richard said, and walked inside.
“Where is the car? Did the soldiers take it?”
“The fuel finished on the road. I will find fuel and go back and get it,” Odenigbo said. He hugged her. “We saw Madu. He said he is certain she is still on the other side. The vandals must have blocked the way she had gone in and she is waiting for a new route to open. It happens all the time.”
“Yes, of course.” Olanna picked up the comb and began to untangle her own matted hair. Odenigbo was reminding her that she should be grateful that they had not found Kainene in hospital. It meant Kainene was well, only on the Nigerian side. And yet she did not want him to remind her. Days later, when she insisted on searching the mortuary, he told her the same thing, that Kainene had to be safely on the other side.
“I will go,” she said. Madu had sent them some garri and sugar and a little fuel. She would drive herself.
“There’s no point,” Odenigbo said.
“No point? There is no point in looking for my sister’s body?”
“Your sister is alive. There is no body.”
“Yes, God.”
She turned to leave.
“Even if they shot her, Olanna, they would not take her to a mortuary inside Biafra,” Odenigbo said, and she knew he was right but she hated him for saying it and for calling her Olanna instead of nkem and she went anyway, to the foul-smelling mortuary building, where bodies from a recent bombing were piled up outside, swelling in the sun. A crowd of people was begging to be let in to search.
“Please, my father is missing since the bombing.”
“Please, I cannot find my small girl.”
Olanna’s note from Madu made the caretaker smile at her and let her in and she insisted on looking at the face of every female body, even those that the caretaker said were too old, and afterward she stopped on the road to vomit. If the sun refuses to rise, we will make it rise. The title of Okeoma’s poem came to her. She did not remember the rest of it, something about placing clay pot on top of clay pot
to form a ladder to the sky. Back home, Odenigbo was talking to Baby. Richard sat staring at nothing. They did not ask her if she had found Kainene’s body. Ugwu told her that there was a large palm-oil-colored stain on her dress, his voice low, as if he knew it to be the remnants of her own vomit. Harrison told her there was nothing to eat and she stared at him blankly because it was Kainene who had been in charge of things, who knew what to do.
“You should lie down, nkem,” Odenigbo said.
“Do you remember the words of Okeoma’s poem about making the sun rise if it refused to rise?” she asked.
“‘Clay pots fired in zeal, they will cool our feet as we climb,’” he said.
“Yes, yes.”
“It was my favorite line. I can’t remember the rest.”
A woman from the refugee camp dashed into the yard, shouting, waving a green branch. Such a brilliant wet-looking green. Olanna wondered where she got it; the plants and trees around were scorched, blown bare by the dusty winds. The earth was sallow.
“It is over!” the woman shouted. “It is over!”
Odenigbo quickly turned the radio on, as though he had been expecting the woman with this news. The male voice was unfamiliar.
Throughout history, injured people have had to resort to arms in their self-defense where peaceful negotiations fail. We are no exception. We took up arms because of the sense of insecurity generated in our people by the massacres. We have fought in defense of that cause.
Olanna sat down; she liked the honesty, the firm vowels, and the quiet assuredness of the voice on the radio. Baby was asking Odenigbo why the woman from the camp was shouting like that. Richard got up and came closer to the radio. Odenigbo increased the volume. The woman from the refugee camp said, “They said the vandals are coming with canes to flog the hell out of civilians. We are going into the bush,” and then turned and ran back to the camp.
I take this opportunity to congratulate officers and men of our armed forces for their gallantry and bravery, which have earned for them the admiration of the whole world. I thank the civil population for their steadfastness and courage in the face of overwhelming odds and starvation. I am convinced that the suffering of our people must be brought to an immediate end. I have, therefore, instructed an orderly disengagement of troops. I urge General Gowon, in the name of humanity, to order his troops to pause while an armistice is negotiated.
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