After the broadcast, Olanna felt dizzy with disbelief. She sat down.
“What now, mah?” Ugwu asked, expressionless.
She looked away, at the cashew trees covered in dust, at the sky that curved to the earth in a cloudless wall ahead.
“Now I can go and find my sister,” she said quietly.
A week passed. A Red Cross van arrived at the refugee camp and two women handed out cups of milk. Many families left the camp, to search for relatives or to hide in the bush from the Nigerian soldiers who were coming with whips. But the first time Olanna saw Nigerian soldiers, on the main road, they did not hold whips. They walked up and down and spoke loud Yoruba to one another and laughed and gestured to the village girls. “Come marry me now, I go give you rice and beans.”
Olanna joined the crowd that watched them. Their pressed smart-fitting uniforms, their polished black boots, their confident eyes filled her with that hollowness that came with having been robbed. They had blocked the road and turned cars back. No movement yet. No movement. Odenigbo wanted to go to Abba, to see where his mother lay, and each day he walked to the main road to find out whether the Nigerian soldiers were letting cars pass.
“We should pack,” he told Olanna. “The roads will open in a day or two. We will leave early so we can stop in Abba and then get to Nsukka before dark.”
Olanna did not want to pack—there was little to pack anyway—and did not want to go anywhere. “What if Kainene comes back?” she asked.
“Nkem, Kainene will find us easily.”
She watched him leave. It was easy enough for him to say that Kainene would find them. How did he know? How did he know she had not been wounded, for example, and unable to travel long distances? She would stagger back, thinking they would be here to care for her, and find an empty house.
A man walked into the compound. Olanna stared at him for a while before she recognized her cousin Odinchezo, and then she shouted and ran to him and hugged him and moved back to look at him. She had last seen him at her wedding, him and his brother, in their militia uniforms.
“What of Ekene?” she asked fearfully. “Ekene kwanu?”
“He is in Umunnachi. I came immediately I heard where you were. I am on my way to Okija. They say that some of our mother’s people are there.”
Olanna led the way inside and brought him a cup of water. “How have you been, my brother?”
“We did not die,” he said.
Olanna sat down beside him and took his hand; there were bloated white calluses on his palms. “How did you manage on the road with the Nigerian soldiers?”
“They did not give me trouble. I spoke Hausa to them. One of them brought out a picture of Ojukwu and asked me to piss on it and I did.” Odinchezo smiled, a tired, gentle smile and looked so much like Aunty Ifeka that tears filled Olanna’s eyes.
“No, no, Olanna,” he said and held her. “Kainene will come back. One woman from Umudioka went on afia attack and the vandals occupied that sector so she was cut off for four months. She came back to her family yesterday.”
Olanna shook her head but she did not tell him that it was not Kainene, not just Kainene, that she was crying about. She wiped her eyes. He held her for a moment longer and, before he got up, he pressed a five-pound note into her hand. “Let me go,” he said. “The road is long.”
Olanna stared at the money. The magical red crispness startled her. “Odinchezo! This is too much!”
“Some of us in Biafra-Two had Nigerian money and we traded with them even though we were in the militia,” Odinchezo said, and shrugged. “And you don’t have Nigerian money, do you?”
She shook her head; she had never even seen the new Nigerian money.
“I hope it is not true what they are saying, that the government will take over all Biafran bank accounts.”
Olanna shrugged. She did not know. The news about everything was confusing and contradictory. They had first heard that all Biafran university staff was to report for military clearance at Enugu. Then they were to report at Lagos. Then only those involved in the Biafran military were to report.
Later, when she went to the market with Baby and Ugwu, she gaped at the rice and beans displayed in basins in the shape of mountains, the deliciously foul-smelling fish, the bloodied meat that drew flies. They seemed to have fallen from the sky, they seemed filled with a wonder that was almost perverse. She watched the women, Biafran women, haggling, giving out change in Nigerian pounds as if it was currency they had used all their lives. She bought a little rice and dried fish. She would not part with much of her money; she did not know what lay ahead.
Odenigbo came home to say the roads were open. “We’ll leave tomorrow.”
Olanna went into the bedroom and began to cry. Baby climbed onto the mattress beside her and hugged her.
“Mummy Ola, don’t cry; ebezi na,” Baby said, and the warm smallness of Baby’s arms around her made her sob louder. Baby stayed there, holding her, until she stopped crying and wiped her eyes.
Richard left that evening.
“I’m going to look for Kainene in the towns outside Ninth Mile,” he said.
“Wait until morning,” Olanna said.
Richard shook his head.
“Do you have fuel?” Odenigbo asked.
“Enough to get me to Ninth Mile if I roll down slopes.”
Olanna gave him some of her Nigerian money before he left with Harrison. And the next morning, with their things in the car, she wrote a hasty note and left it in the living room.
Ejima m, we are going to Abba and Nsukka. We will be back to check on the house in a week. O.
She wanted to add I’ve missed you or I hope you went well but decided not to. Kainene would laugh and say something like, I didn’t go on vacation, for goodness’ sake, I was cut off in enemy territory.
She climbed into the car and stared at the cashew trees.
“Will Aunty Kainene come to Nsukka?” Baby asked.
Olanna turned and looked carefully at Baby’s face, to search for clairvoyance, a sign that Baby knew Kainene was coming back. At first she thought she saw it, and then she was not sure she did.
“Yes, my baby,” she said. “Aunty Kainene will come to Nsukka.”
“Is she still trading at afia attack?”
“Yes.”
Odenigbo started the car. He took off his glasses and wrapped them in a piece of cloth. Nigerian soldiers, they had heard, did not like people who looked like intellectuals.
“Can you see well enough to drive?” Olanna asked.
“Yes.” He glanced behind at Ugwu and Baby before easing the car out of the compound. They passed a few checkpoints manned by Nigerian soldiers, and Odenigbo muttered something under his breath each time they were waved past. At Abagana, they drove past the destroyed Nigerian fleet, a long, long column of burned and blackened vehicles. Olanna stared. We did this. She reached out and held Odenigbo’s hand.
“They won but we did this,” she said, and realized how odd it felt to say they won, to voice a defeat she did not believe. Hers was not a feeling of having been defeated; it was one of having been cheated. Odenigbo squeezed her hand. She sensed his nervousness in the tense set of his jaw as they approached Abba.
“I wonder if my house is still standing,” he said.
Bushes had sprung up everywhere; small huts were completely swallowed in browned grass. A shrub was growing at the gate of their compound and he parked near it, his chest rising and falling, his breathing loud. The house still stood. They waded through thick drying grass to get to it and Olanna looked around, half fearing she would see Mama’s skeleton lying somewhere. But his cousin had buried her; near the guava tree there was a slight elevation of earth and a cross roughly made from two branches. Odenigbo knelt down there and pulled out a tuft of grass and held it in his hand.
They drove to Nsukka on roads pockmarked with bullets and bomb craters; Odenigbo swerved often. The buildings were blackened, roofs blown off, walls half standing.
Here and there were black carcasses of burned cars. An eerie quiet reigned. Curved profiles of flying vultures filled the horizon. They came to a checkpoint. Some men were cutting the tall grass on the roadside, their cutlasses swinging up and down; others were carrying thick wood planks up to a house with walls that looked like Swiss cheese, riddled with bullet holes, some large, others small.
Odenigbo stopped beside the Nigerian officer. His belt buckle gleamed and he bent to peer into the car, a dark face with very white teeth.
“Why do you still have Biafran number plates? Are you supporters of the defeated rebels?” His voice was loud, contrived; it was as if he was acting and very aware of himself in the role of the bully. Behind him, one of his boys was shouting at the laboring men. A dead male body lay by the bush.
“We will change it when we get to Nsukka,” Odenigbo said.
“Nsukka?” The officer straightened up and laughed. “Ah, Nsukka University. You are the ones who planned the rebellion with Ojukwu, you book people.”
Odenigbo said nothing, looking straight ahead. The officer yanked his door open with a sudden movement. “Oya! Come out and carry some wood for us. Let’s see how you can help a united Nigeria.”
Odenigbo looked at him. “What is this for?”
“You are asking me? I said you should come on come out!”
A soldier stood behind the officer and cocked his gun.
“This is a joke,” Odenigbo muttered. “O na-egwu egwu.”
“Come out!” the officer said.
Olanna opened her door. “Come out, Odenigbo and Ugwu. Baby, sit in the car.”
When Odenigbo climbed out, the officer slapped his face, so violently, so unexpectedly, that Odenigbo fell against the car. Baby was crying.
“You are not grateful that we didn’t kill all of you? Come on carry those wood planks quickly, two at a time!”
“Let my wife stay with our daughter, please,” Odenigbo said.
The sound of the second slap from the officer was not as loud as the first. Olanna did not look at Odenigbo; she carefully focused on one of the men carrying a pile of cement blocks, his thin naked back coated in sweat. Then she walked to the pile of wood planks and picked two up. At first she staggered under the weight—she had not expected that they would be so heavy—then she steadied herself and began to walk up to the house. She was sweating when she came down. She noticed the hard eyes of a soldier following her, burning through her clothes. On her second trip up, he had come closer to stand by the pile.
Olanna looked at him and then called, “Officer!”
The officer had just waved a car on. He turned. “What is it?”
“You had better tell your boy here that it will be better for him not to even think about touching me,” Olanna said.
Ugwu was behind her, and she sensed his intake of breath, his panic at her boldness. But the officer was laughing; he looked both surprised and impressed. “Nobody will touch you,” he said. “My boys are well trained. We are not like those dirty rebels you people called an army.”
He stopped another car, a Peugeot 403. “Come out right now!”
The smallish man came out and stood by his car. The officer reached out and pulled his glasses from his face and flung them into the bush. “Ah, now you cannot see? But you could see enough to write propaganda for Ojukwu? Is that not what all of you civil servants did?”
The man squinted and rubbed his eyes.
“Lie down,” the officer said. The man lay down on the coal tar. The officer took a long cane and began to flog the man across his back and buttocks, ta-wai, ta-wai, ta-wai, and the man cried out something Olanna did not understand.
“Say Thank you, sah!” the officer said.
The man said, “Thank you, sir!”
“Say it again!”
“Thank you, sir!”
The officer stopped and gestured to Odenigbo. “Oya, book people, go. Make sure you change those number plates.”
They hurried silently to the car. Olanna’s palms ached. As they drove away, the officer was still flogging the man.
35
Ugwu stooped down beside the wildly overgrown bush with the white flowers and stared at the pile of burned books. They had been heaped together before being set on fire, so he dug through with his hands, to see if the flames had missed any underneath. He extricated two whole books and wiped the covers on his shirt. On the half-burned ones, he still made out words and figures.
“Why did they have to burn them?” Olanna asked mildly. “Just think of the effort.”
Master squatted beside him and began to search through the charred paper, muttering, “My research papers are all here, nekene nke, this is the one on my rank tests for signal detection …” After a while, he sat down on the bare earth, his legs stretched in front of him, and Ugwu wished he had not; there was something so undignified, so unmasterly about it. Olanna was holding Baby’s hand and looking at the whistling pine and ixora and lilies, all shapeless and tangled. Odim Street itself was shapeless and tangled, with both sides knotted in thick bush. Even the Nigerian armored car, left abandoned at the end of the street, had grass growing from its tires.
Ugwu was first to go into the house. Olanna and Baby followed. Milky cobwebs hung in the living room. He looked up and saw a large black spider moving slowly in its web, as if uncaring of their presence and still secure that this was its home. The sofas and curtains and carpet and shelves were gone. The louvers, too, had been slipped off and the windows were gaping holes and the dry harmattan winds had blown in so much dust that the walls were now an even brown. Dust motes swam ghostlike in the empty room. In the kitchen, only the heavy wood mortar was left behind. In the corridor, Ugwu picked up a dust-coated bottle; when he raised it to his nose it still smelled of coconuts. Olanna’s perfume.
Baby began to cry when they got to the bathroom. The piles of feces in the bathtub were dried, obscene stonelike lumps. Pages had been ripped out of Drum magazine and used as toilet paper, crusty stains smearing the print. They lay strewn on the floor. Olanna hushed her and Ugwu thought of her playing with her yellow plastic duck in that tub. He turned the tap, and it squeaked but did not run. The grass in the backyard grazed his shoulders, too tall to walk across, so he found a stick to beat his way through. The beehive on the cashew tree was gone. The door to the Boys’ Quarters hung half open on crushed hinges and he pushed it back and remembered the shirt he had left hanging on a nail on the wall. He knew it would be gone, of course, and yet he looked at the wall for it. Anulika had admired that shirt. It thrilled and frightened him, the thought that he would see Anulika in a few hours, that he would finally go home. He would not allow himself to think of who was left and who was not. He picked up the things on the filthy floor, a rusting gun and a bloated half-eaten copy of the Socialist Review. He threw them back down and, in the reverberating echo, something, perhaps a mouse, dashed across.
He wanted to clean. He wanted to scrub furiously. He feared, though, that it would change nothing. Perhaps the house was stained to its very foundation and that smell of something long dead and dried would always cling to the rooms and the rustle of rats would always come from the ceiling. Master found a broom and swept the study himself and left the pile of lizard droppings and dust just outside the door. Ugwu looked inside the study and saw him sitting on the only chair left, with a broken-off leg, so that he propped it against the wall for balance, hunched over half-burned papers and files.
Ugwu poked at the feces in the bathroom with a stick, muttering curses to the vandals and all their offspring, and he had cleared the tub when Olanna asked him to leave the cleaning until he came back from seeing his family.
Ugwu stood still as Chioke, his father’s second wife, threw sand at him. “Are you real, Ugwu?” she asked. “Are you real?”
She bent and grabbed handfuls of sand, throwing in rapid movements, and the sand fell on his shoulder, arms, belly. Finally, she stopped and hugged him. He had not disappeared; he was not a ghost.
Other people came out to hug him, to rub his body in disbelief as though the sand-pouring had still not proved to them that he was not a ghost. Some of the women were crying. Ugwu examined the faces around him, all of them thinner, all with a deep exhaustion etched on their skin, even the children. But it was Anulika who looked most changed. Her face was covered in blackheads and pimples and she did not look him in the eyes as she said, in tears, “You did not die, you did not die.” He was startled to discover that the sister he had remembered as beautiful was not at all. She was an ugly stranger who squinted with one eye.
“They told me my son had died,” his father said, gripping his shoulders.
“Where is Mama?” he asked.
Before his father spoke, Ugwu knew. He had known from the moment Chioke ran out. It should have been his mother; she would have sensed his presence and met him at the grove of ube trees.
“Your mother is no longer with us,” his father said.
Hot tears swarmed Ugwu’s eyes. “God will never forgive them.”
“Be careful what you say!” His father looked around fearfully, although he and Ugwu were alone. “It was not the vandals. She died of the coughing. Let me show you where she is lying.”
The grave was unmarked. A vibrantly green cocoyam plant was growing on the spot.
“When?” Ugwu asked. “When did she die?”
It felt surreal, asking When did she die? about his own mother. And it did not matter when she died. As his father spoke words that made no sense, Ugwu sank to his knees, placed his forehead on the ground, and wrapped his hands around his head, as if to shield himself from something that would fall from above, as if it were the only position he could adopt to absorb his mother’s death. His father left him and walked back into the hut. Later, Ugwu sat with Anulika under the breadfruit tree.
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