“How did Mama die?”
“From coughing.”
She didn’t answer any of his other questions in the way that he had expected, there were no energetic gestures, no sharp wit in her answers: yes, they had the wine-carrying just before the vandals occupied the village. Onyeka was well; he had gone to the farm. They did not have children yet. She looked away often, as if she felt uncomfortable sitting with him, and Ugwu wondered if he had imagined the easy bond they had shared. She looked relieved when Chioke called her, and she got up quickly and left.
Ugwu was watching the children running around the breadfruit tree, taunting and shouting, when Nnesinachi arrived with a baby on her hip and a sparkle in her eyes. She looked unchanged; unlike the others, she was not thinner than he remembered. Her breasts were a little larger, though, prodding the fabric of her blouse. She pressed herself against him in a hug. The baby yelped.
“I knew you did not die,” she said. “I knew your chi was wide awake.”
Ugwu touched the baby’s cheek. “You married during the war?”
“I did not marrry.” She moved the baby to the other hip. “I lived with a Hausa soldier.”
“A vandal?” It was almost inconceivable to him.
Nnesinachi nodded. “They were living in our town and he was good to me, a very kind man. If I had been here at the time, what happened to Anulika would not have happened at all. But I had traveled to Enugu with him to buy some things.”
“What happened to Anulika?”
“You didn’t know?”
“What?”
“They forced themselves on her. Five of them.” Nnesinachi sat down and placed the baby on her lap.
Ugwu stared at the distant sky. “Where did it happen?”
“It has been more than a year.”
“I asked where?”
“Oh.” Nnesinachi’s voice quavered. “Near the stream.”
“Outside?”
“Yes.”
Ugwu bent down and picked up a stone.
“They said the first one that climbed on top of her, she bit him on the arm and drew blood. They nearly beat her to death. One of her eyes has refused to open well since.”
Later, Ugwu took a walk around the village, and when he got to the stream he remembered the line of women going to fetch water in the mornings, and he sat down on a rock and sobbed.
Back in Nsukka, Ugwu did not tell Olanna about his sister’s rape. She was often away. She was receiving message after message about where women who looked like Kainene had been seen, and so she went to Enugu, Onitsha, and Benin and came back humming under her breath. “I will find my sister,” she would say when Ugwu asked her how it had gone.
“Yes, mah, you will,” Ugwu said, because he had to believe, for her sake, that she would.
He cleaned the house. He went to the market. He went to Freedom Square to see the mound of blackened books that the vandals had emptied out of the library and set on fire. He played with Baby. He sat outside on the steps that led to the backyard and wrote on scraps of paper. Chickens were squawking in the yard next door. He looked at the hedge and wondered about Chinyere, what she had thought of him, if she had survived. Dr. Okeke and his family had not returned, and now a bowlegged man, a professor of chemistry who cooked on firewood and had a chicken coop, lived there. One day, in the failing light of dusk, Ugwu looked up and saw three soldiers barge into the compound and leave moments later, dragging the professor.
Ugwu had heard that the Nigerian soldiers had promised to kill five percent of Nsukka academics, and nobody had heard of Professor Ezeka since he was arrested in Enugu, but it was suddenly real to him, seeing the professor next door dragged off. So, days later, when he heard the loud banging on the front door, he thought they had come for Master. He would tell them Master was not home; he would even tell them Master had died. He dashed first to the study, whispered, “Hide under the table, sah!” and then ran to the front door and wore a dumb look on his face. Instead of the menacing green of army uniforms, the shine of boot and gun, he saw a brown caftan and flat slippers and a familiar face that took him a moment to recognize: Miss Adebayo.
“Good evening,” Ugwu said. He felt something close to disappointment.
She was peering in, behind him, and on her face was a great and stark fear; it made her look stripped down to nothing, like a skull with gaping holes as eyes.
“Odenigbo?” she was whispering. “Odenigbo?”
Ugwu understood right away that it was all she could say, that perhaps she had not even recognized him and could not get herself to ask the full question: Is Odenigbo alive?
“My master is well,” Ugwu said. “He is inside.”
She was staring at him. “Oh, Ugwu! Look how grown you are.” She came inside. “Where is he? How is he?”
“I will call him, mah.”
Master was standing by his study door. “What is going on, my good man?” he asked.
“It is Miss Adebayo, sah.”
“You asked me to hide under a table because of Miss Adebayo?”
“I thought it was the soldiers, sah.”
Miss Adebayo hugged Master and held on for too long. “They told me that either you or Okeoma didn’t make it back—”
“Okeoma didn’t make it back.” Master repeated her expression as if he somehow disapproved of it.
Miss Adebayo sat down and began to sob. “You know, we didn’t really understand what was happening in Biafra. Life went on and women were wearing the latest lace in Lagos. It was not until I went to London for a conference and read a report about the starvation.” She paused. “Once it ended, I joined the Mayflower volunteers and crossed the Niger with food …”
Ugwu disliked her. He disliked her Nigerianness. Yet a part of him was prepared to forgive it if that would bring back those evenings of long ago, when she argued with Master in a living room that smelled of brandy and beer. Now, nobody visited, except for Mr. Richard. There was a new familiarity to his presence. It was as if he was more like family, the way he would sit reading in the living room while Olanna went about her business and Master was in the study.
The banging on the door some evening later, when Mr. Richard was visiting, annoyed Ugwu. He put his sheets of paper down in the kitchen. Couldn’t Miss Adebayo understand that it was best to go back to Lagos and leave them alone? At the door, he moved a step back when he saw the two soldiers through the glass. They grabbed the handle and jerked at the locked door. Ugwu opened it. One of them was wearing a green beret and the other had a white mole on his chin like a fruit seed.
“Everybody in this house, come out and lie down flat!”
Master, Olanna, Ugwu, Baby, and Mr. Richard all stretched out on the living room floor while the soldiers searched the house. Baby closed her eyes and lay perfectly still on her belly.
The one with the green beret had eyes that blazed red, and he shouted and shredded some papers on the table. It was he who pressed the sole of his boot on Mr. Richard’s backside and said, “White man! Oyinbo! Don’t shit hot shit here, oh!” It was he, too, who placed his gun to Master’s head and said, “Are you sure you are not hiding Biafran money here?”
The other one, with the mole on his chin, said, “We are searching for any materials that will threaten the unity of Nigeria,” and then went to the kitchen and came out with two plates heaped with Ugwu’s jollof rice. After they ate, after they drank some water and belched loudly, they got into their station wagon and drove away. They had left the front door open. Olanna stood up first. She walked into the kitchen and poured the rest of the jollof rice into the dustbin. Master locked the door. Ugwu helped Baby up and took her inside. “Bath time,” he said, although it was a little early.
“I can do it myself,” Baby said, and so he stood by and watched her bathe herself for the first time. She splashed some water on him, laughing, and he realized that she would not always need him.
Back in the kitchen, he found Mr. Richard reading the sheets of paper he
had left on the countertop.
“This is fantastic, Ugwu.” Mr. Richard looked surprised. “Olanna told you about the woman carrying her child’s head on the train?”
“Yes, sah. It will be part of a big book. It will take me many more years to finish it and I will call it ‘Narrative of the Life of a Country.’”
“Very ambitious,” Mr. Richard said.
“I wish I had that Frederick Douglass book.”
“It must have been one of the books they burned,” Mr. Richard said and shook his head. “Well, I’ll look for it when I’m in Lagos next week. I’m going to see Kainene’s parents. But I’ll go first to Port Harcourt and Umuahia.”
“Umuahia, sah?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Richard said nothing else; he never spoke about his search for Kainene.
“If you have time, sah, please find out about somebody for me.”
“Eberechi?”
A smile creased Ugwu’s face before he hastily looked solemn again. “Yes, sah.”
“Certainly.”
Ugwu gave him the family’s name and address, and Mr. Richard wrote it down, and afterward they were both silent and Ugwu fumbled, awkwardly, for something to say. “Are you still writing your book, sah?”
“No.”
“‘The World Was Silent When We Died.’ It is a good title.”
“Yes, it is. It came from something Colonel Madu said once.” Richard paused. “The war isn’t my story to tell, really.”
Ugwu nodded. He had never thought that it was.
“Can I give you a letter, in case you see Eberechi, sah?”
“Of course.”
Ugwu took the sheets of paper from Mr. Richard and, as he turned to make Baby’s dinner, he sang under his breath.
36
Richard walked into the orchard and toward the spot where he had sat to watch the sea. His favorite orange tree was gone. Many of the trees had been cut, and the orchard now had stretches of cultivated grass. He stared at the point where Kainene had burned his manuscript and remembered days ago in Nsukka, how he had felt nothing, absolutely nothing, watching Harrison dig and dig in the garden. “Sorry, sah. Sorry, sah. I am burying the manscrit here, I know I am burying it here.”
Kainene’s house was repainted a muted green; the bougainvillea that had wreathed it was cut down. Richard went around to the front door and rang the doorbell and imagined Kainene coming to the door and telling him she was fine, she had simply wanted to spend some time alone. The woman who came out had slender tribal marks on her face, two lines on each cheek. She opened the door a crack. “Yes?”
“Good afternoon,” Richard said. “My name is Richard Churchill. I’m Kainene Ozobia’s fiancé.”
“Yes?”
“I used to live here. This is Kainene’s house.”
The woman’s face tightened. “This was abandoned property. It is now my house.” She started to close the door.
“Please, wait,” Richard said. “I’d like our photos, please. Can I have some of Kainene’s photographs? The album on the shelf in the study?”
The woman whistled. “I have a vicious dog, and if you don’t go now I will turn it on you.”
“Please, just the photographs.”
The woman whistled again. From somewhere inside, Richard heard a dog growl. He slowly turned and left. As he drove, his windows down, the smell of the sea in his nose, he thought about the many times Kainene had driven him down the same lonely road. Inside the town, he slowed down as he passed a tall woman, but she was too light-skinned to be Kainene. He had delayed coming to Port Harcourt because he first wanted to find her so that they would visit the house together, look together at what they had lost. She would try to get it back, he was sure, she would write petitions and go to court and tell everyone that the federal government had stolen her house, in that fearless way of hers. The same way she had stopped the beating of the young soldier. It was his last full memory of her, and his mind edited it of its own accord—sometimes the sleep-tussled wrapper tied across her waist was flaked with gold, other times with red.
He would not have come to the house now if her mother had not asked him to.
“Go to the house, Richard, please just go and see.” Her voice was small on the phone. During his first conversations with her, when they first returned from London, she had sounded so different, so full of certitude.
“Kainene must have been wounded somewhere. We must get the word out. We have to do it quickly so we can move her to a better hospital. When she is well, I will ask her what we can do about that Yoruba sheep we thought was our friend. Imagine the man making us buy our own house. Imagine forging ownership papers and everything and saying we should be happy he was not asking for much; on top of that he took the furniture. Kainene’s father is too afraid to say anything. He is grateful they let him keep a house that is his own. Kainene would never tolerate that.”
She was different now. It was as if the more time had passed, the more her faith had leaked away. Just go and see the house, she had said. Just go and see. She no longer spoke in specifics, in definites. Madu was staying with them in Lagos, now that he had been released from his long detention at Alagbon Close; now that he had been dismissed from the Nigerian Army; now that he had been given twenty pounds for all the money he had before and during the war. It was Madu who had received word that a thin, tall educated woman had been found wandering in Onitsha. Richard went with Olanna to Onitsha and her mother met them there, but the woman was not Kainene. Richard had been so certain that it was Kainene—she had amnesia, she had forgotten herself, it all made sense—and when he looked into the stranger’s eyes, he had felt for the first time a deep hate for a person he did not know.
He thought of it now as he drove to Umuahia, to the center for displaced persons. The building was empty. Nearby, a bomb crater gaped unfilled. He drove around for a while before he found the address Ugwu had given him. The elderly woman he greeted looked completely indifferent, as though it was often that an Igbo-speaking white man came in to ask about her relative. It surprised Richard; he was used to his Igbo-speaking whiteness being noticed, being marveled at. She brought him a seat. She told him she was the sister of Eberechi’s father and, as soon as she told him what had happened to Eberechi, Richard decided that he would not tell Ugwu. He would never tell Ugwu. Eberechi’s aunty had a white scarf tied around her head and a soiled wrapper around her chest and she spoke so quietly that Richard had to ask her to repeat herself. She looked at him for a moment before she told him, again, that Eberechi had been killed by shelling, that it had happened on the day that Umuahia fell, and that, only days later, Eberechi’s brother in the army came back alive and well. Richard did not know why, but he sat down and told the woman about Kainene.
“My wife went on afia attack some days before the war ended, and we have not seen her since.”
The woman shrugged. “One day you will know,” she said.
Richard thought about those words on his way to Lagos the next day and he became even more convinced that he would not tell Ugwu that Eberechi was dead. One day Ugwu would know. For now, he would not break Ugwu’s dream.
It was raining when he arrived in Lagos. On the car radio, Gowon’s speech was broadcast yet again: No victor and no vanquished. Newspaper vendors were running around in traffic with their papers wrapped in polythene bags. He no longer read newspapers because each one he opened seemed to have the advertisement that Kainene’s parents had placed, with the photo of Kainene taken by the pool, under the heading MISSING. It was oppressive, as oppressive as Aunt Elizabeth telling him to “be strong,” her voice warbly over the phone, as if there were something she knew that he did not. He did not need to be strong for anything. And Kainene was not missing; she was just taking her time before she came home.
Her mother hugged him. “Have you been eating, Richard?” she asked, in a fond familiar way, the way a mother would speak to a son who had neglected to take care of himself. She held him tig
htly, leaning on him, when they walked into the sparse living room, and he had the glorious and uncomfortable feeling that she thought she was somehow holding on to Kainene by holding on to him.
Kainene’s father was sitting with Madu and two other men from Umunnachi. Richard shook hands and joined them. They were drinking beer and talking about the indigenization decree, the civil servants being jobless. Their voices were low, as though being indoors was not secure enough. Richard got up and climbed the stairs to Kainene’s old room, but nothing of hers was left. The walls were studded with nails; perhaps the Yoruba occupier had hung up many photos.
The stew that was served at lunch had too much crayfish; Kainene would not have liked it and she would have leaned toward him and said so. After lunch, Richard and Madu went out to sit on the veranda. The rain had stopped, and the leaves of the plants down below looked greener.
“The foreigners say that one million died,” Madu said. “That can’t be.”
Richard waited. He was not sure he wanted to have one of those conversations so many Biafrans had now, passing kernels of blame to others, oiling their own faces with a valor they had never had. He wanted to remember how he and Kainene had often stood here and looked down at the silver swimming pool.
“It can’t be just one million.” Madu sipped his beer. “Will you go back to England?”
The question annoyed him. “No.”
“You’ll stay in Nsukka?”
“Yes. I’m joining the new Institute for African Studies.”
“Are you writing anything?”
“No.”
Madu placed his glass of beer down; water droplets clustered on it like tiny see-through pebbles. “I don’t understand how we have found out nothing about Kainene, I don’t understand it at all,” Madu said.
Richard did not like the sound of we, did not know who Madu included in it. He got up and walked across the balcony and looked down at the drained pool; the floor was made of polished whitish stone, visible through the thin sheet of rainwater. He turned back to Madu. “You love her, don’t you?” he asked.
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