Half of a Yellow Sun

by Ngozi Adichie Chimamanda

  "Hello, Richard. Kedu?"

  "I'm well," he said. The skin of his face felt tight. "And you?"

  "We are fine," Olanna said. Her lips had a slight glisten of pink gloss. Richard did not miss her use of the plural. He was not sure if she meant herself and the child, or herself and Odenigbo, or perhaps we was meant to suggest that she had made peace with what had happened between them and what it had done to her relationship with Kainene.

  "Baby, have you greeted?" Olanna asked, looking down at the child, whose hand was enclosed in hers.

  "Good afternoon," Baby said, in a high voice.

  Richard bent and touched her cheek. There was a calmness about her that made her seem older and wiser than her four years. "Hello, Baby."

  "How is Kainene?" Olanna asked.

  Richard evaded her eyes, not sure what his expression should be. "She is well."

  "And your book is going well?"

  "Yes. Thank you."

  "Is it still called The Basket of Hands?"

  It pleased him that she had not forgotten. "No." He paused and tried not to think about what had happened to that manuscript, about the flames that must have charred it quickly. "It's called In the Time of Roped Pots"

  "Interesting title," Olanna murmured. "I hope there won't be war, but the seminar has been quite useful, hasn't it."

  "Yes."

  Phyllis came over, said hello to Olanna, and then tugged at Richard's arm. "They say Ojukwu is coming! Ojukwu is coming!" There was the sound of raised voices outside the hall.

  "Ojukwu?" Richard asked.

  "Yes, yes!" Phyllis was walking toward the door. "You know he dropped into Enugu campus for a surprise visit some days ago? It looks like it's our turn!"

  Richard followed her outside. They joined the cluster of lecturers standing by the statue of a lion; Olanna had disappeared.

  "He's at the library now," somebody said.

  "No, he's in the senate building."

  "No, he wants to address the students. He's at the admin block."

  Some people were already walking quickly toward the administration block, and Phyllis and Richard went along. They were close to the umbrella trees that lined the driveway when Richard saw the bearded man, in a severely smart, belted army uniform, striding across the corridor. A few reporters scrambled after him, holding out tape recorders like offerings. Students, so many that Richard wondered how they had congregated so quickly, began to chant. "Power! Power!" Ojukwu came downstairs and stood on top of some cement blocks on the grassy lawn. He raised his hands. Everything about him sparkled, his groomed beard, his watch, his wide shoulders.

  "I came to ask you a question," he said. His Oxford-accented voice was surprisingly soft; it did not have the timbre that it did over the radio and it was a little theatrical, a little too measured. "What shall we do? Shall we keep silent and let them force us back into Nigeria? Shall we ignore the thousands of our brothers and sisters killed in the North?"

  "No! No!" The students were filling the wide yard, spilling onto the lawn and the driveway. Many lecturers had parked their cars on the road and joined the crowd. "Power! Power!"

  Ojukwu raised his hands again and the chanting stopped. "If they declare war," he said. "I want to tell you now that it may become a long-drawn-out war. A long-drawn-out war. Are you prepared? Are we prepared?"

  "Yes! Yes! Ojukwu, nye anyi egbe! Give us guns! Iwe di anyi n'obi! There is anger in our hearts!"

  The chanting was constant now-give us guns, there is anger in our hearts, give us guns. The rhythm was heady. Richard glanced across at Phyllis, thrusting a fist in the air as she shouted, and he looked around for a little while at everyone else, intense and intent in the moment, before he too began to wave and chant. "Ojukwu, give us guns! Ojukwu, nye anyi egbe!"

  Ojukwu lit a cigarette and threw it down on the lawn. It flared for a while, before he reached out and squashed it underneath a gleaming black boot. "Even the grass will fight for Biafra," he said.

  Richard told Kainene how charmed he had been by Ojukwu even though the man showed signs of early balding and was vaguely histrionic and wore a gaudy ring. He told her about the seminar. Then he wondered whether to tell her that he had run into Olanna. They were sitting on the veranda. Kainene was peeling an orange with a knife, and the slender peel dropped into a plate on the floor.

  "I saw Olanna," he said.

  "Did you?"

  "At the seminar. We said hello and she asked about you."

  "I see." The orange slipped from her hand, or perhaps she dropped it, because she left it there on the terrazzo floor of the veranda.

  "I'm sorry," Richard said. "I thought I should mention that I saw her."

  He picked up the orange and held it out to her but she did not take it. She got up and walked to the railing.

  "War is coming," she said. "Port Harcourt is going crazy."

  She was looking in the far distance, as if she could actually see the city in its frenzy of excessive parties and frenetic couplings and speeding cars. Earlier that afternoon, a well-dressed young woman had come up to Richard at the train station and taken his hand. "Come to my flat. I never do it with oyinbo man before, but I want try everything now, oh!" she had said, laughing, although the delirious desire in her eyes was serious enough. He had shrugged his hand free and walked away, strangely sad at the thought that she would end up with another stranger in her bed. It was as if the people in this city with the tall whistling pines wanted to grab all they could before the war robbed them of choices.

  Richard got up and stood beside Kainene.

  "There won't be war," he said.

  "How did she ask about me?"

  "She said, How is Kainene?"

  "And you said I was well?"

  "Yes."

  She said nothing else about it; he did not expect that she would.

  15

  Ugwu climbed out of the car and went around to the boot. He placed the bag of dried fish on top of the larger bag of garri, hoisted both onto his head, and followed Master up the cracked stairs and into the dim building that was the town union office. Mr. Ovoko came up to meet them. "Take the bags into the store," he told Ugwu, pointing, as if Ugwu did not know from all the times he had come in the past to bring food for the refugees. The store was empty except for a small bag of rice in the corner; weevils crawled all over it.

  "How are things? A na-emekwa?" Master asked.

  Mr. Ovoko rubbed his hands together. He had the lugubrious face of one who simply refuses to be consoled. "Nobody is donating much these days. These people keep coming here and asking me for food, and then they start to ask for jobs. You know, they came back from the North with nothing. Nothing."

  "I know they came back with nothing, my friend! Don't lecture me!" Master snapped.

  Mr. Ovoko moved back. "I am only saying that the situation is serious. In the beginning our people rushed to donate food, but now they have forgotten. It will be a disaster if war comes."

  "War will not come."

  "Then why has Gowon continued to blockade us?"

  Master ignored the question and turned to leave. Ugwu followed.

  "Of course people are still donating food. That dull fellow must be taking the food to his own family," Master said, as he started the car.

  "Yes, sah," Ugwu said. "Even his stomach is very big."

  "That ignoramus Gowon pledged a miserable, measly amount for more than two million refugees. Did he think it was chickens that died and it is the surviving relatives of those chickens who have returned home?"

  "No, sah." Ugwu looked out of the window. It filled him with sadness, coming here to give garri and fish to people who had fed themselves in the North, listening week after week to Master saying the same things. He reached out and straightened the rope that dangled from the rearview mirror. The plastic keepsake attached to it was a painting of half of a yellow sun on a black background.

  Later, as he sat on the backyard steps reading The Pickwick Papers, stopping
often to think and to watch the slender leaves of corn swish in the breeze, he was not surprised to hear Master's raised voice from the living room. Master was always short-tempered on days like this.

  "And what about our university colleagues in Ibadan and Zaria and Lagos? Who is speaking out about this? They kept silent while white expatriates encouraged the rioters to kill Igbo people. You would be one of them if you didn't happen to be in Igboland! How much sympathy can you have?" Master shouted.

  "Don't you dare say I have no sympathy! To say that secession is not the only way to security does not mean I don't have sympathy!" It was Miss Adebayo.

  "Did your cousins die? Did your uncle die? You're going back to your people in Lagos next week and nobody will harass you for being Yoruba. Is it not your own people who are killing the Igbo in Lagos? Didn't a group of your chiefs go to the North to thank the emirs for sparing Yoruba people? So what are you saying? How is your opinion relevant?"

  "You insult me, Odenigbo."

  "The truth has become an insult."

  There was silence and then the squeaking sound of the front door being opened and banged shut. Miss Adebayo had left. Ugwu stood up when he heard Olanna's voice. "This is unacceptable, Odenigbo! You owe her an apology!"

  It frightened him to hear her shout because she rarely did, and because the last time he had heard her shout was during those fractured weeks before Baby's birth, when Mr. Richard stopped visiting and everything seemed to be on the brink of drowning. For a moment Ugwu heard nothing-perhaps Olanna, too, had walked out-and then he heard Okeoma reading. Ugwu knew the poem: If the sun refuses to rise, we will make it rise. The first time Okeoma read it, the same day the Renaissance newspaper was renamed the Biafran Sun, Ugwu had listened and felt buoyed by it, by his favorite line, Clay pots fired in zeal, they will cool our feet as we climb. Now, though, it made him teary. It made him long for the days when Okeoma recited poems about people getting buttocks rashes after defecating in imported buckets, the days when Miss Adebayo and Master shouted and yet did not end the evening with her storming off, the days when he still served pepper soup. Now, he served only kola nut.

  Okeoma left a little while later, and Ugwu heard Olanna's voice rise again. "You must, Odenigbo. You owe her an apology!"

  "It is not a question of whether or not I owe her an apology. It is a question of whether or not I spoke the truth," Master said. Olanna said something Ugwu did not hear and then Master spoke in a calmer tone, "All right, nkem, I will."

  Olanna came into the kitchen. "We are going out," she said. "Come and lock the door."

  "Yes, mah."

  After they left in Master's car, Ugwu heard a tap on the back door and went to see who it was.

  "Chinyere," he said, surprised. She never came over this early, and never to the main house either.

  "Me and my madam and the children are leaving tomorrow morning for the village. I came to tell you to stay well. Ka o di."

  Ugwu had never heard her say so much. He was not sure what to say. They looked at each other for a while.

  "Go well," he said. He watched her walk to the hedge that separated the two compounds and slip underneath it. She would no longer appear at his door at night and lie on her back and spread her legs silently, at least not for a while. He felt a strange crushing weight in his head. Change was hurtling toward him, bearing down on him, and there was nothing he could do to make it slow down.

  He sat down and stared at the cover of The Pickwick Papers. There was a serene calm in the backyard, in the gentle wave of the mango tree and the winelike scent of ripening cashews. It belied what he saw around him. Fewer and fewer guests visited now, and in the evenings the campus streets were ghostly, covered by the pearly light of silence and emptiness. Eastern Shop had closed. Chinyere's mistress was only one of many families on campus who were leaving; house-boys bought huge cartons in the market and cars drove out of compounds with their boots sunken by heavy loads. But Olanna and Master had not packed a single thing. They said that war would not come and that people were simply panicking. Ugwu knew that families had been told they could send women and children to the hometowns, but the men could not leave, because if the men left it would mean that they were panicking and there was nothing to panic about. "No cause for alarm" was what Master said often. "No cause for alarm." Professor Uzomaka who lived opposite Dr. Okeke had been turned back three times by the militiamen at the campus gates. They let him pass the third day after he swore that he would come back, that he was only taking his family to their hometown because his wife worried so much.

  "Ugwuanyi!"

  Ugwu looked up and saw his aunty coming toward him from the front yard. He stood up.

  "Aunty! Welcome."

  "I was knocking on the front door."

  "Sorry. I did not hear."

  "Are you alone at home? Where is your master?"

  "They went out. They took Baby with them." Ugwu examined her face. "Aunty, is it well?"

  She smiled. "It is well, o di mma. I bring a message from your father. They will have Anulika's wine-carrying ceremony next Saturday."

  "Eh! Next Saturday?"

  "It is better they do it now, before war comes, if war is going to come."

  "That is true." Ugwu looked away, toward the lemon tree. "So. Anulika is really getting married."

  "Did you think you would marry your own sister?"

  "God forbid."

  His aunty reached out and pinched his arm. "Look at you, a man has emerged. Eh! In a few years it will be your turn."

  Ugwu smiled. "It is you and my mother who will find a good person when the time comes, Aunty," he said, with a false demureness. There was no point in telling her that Olanna had told him they would send him to university when he finished secondary school. He would not marry until he had become like Master, until he had spent many years reading books.

  "I am going," his aunty said.

  "Won't you drink some water?"

  "I cannot stay. Ngwanu, let it be. Greet your master and give him my message."

  Even before his aunty left, Ugwu was already imagining his arrival for the ceremony. This time, he would finally hold Nnesinachi naked and pliant in his arms. His Uncle Eze's hut was a good place to take her, or perhaps even the quiet grove by the stream, as long as the little children did not bother them. He hoped she would not be silent like Chinyere; he hoped she would make the same sounds he heard from Olanna when he pressed his ear to the bedroom door.

  That evening, while he was cooking dinner, a quiet voice on the radio announced that Nigeria would embark on a police action to bring back the rebels of Biafra.

  Ugwu was in the kitchen with Olanna, peeling onions, watching the movement of Olanna's shoulder as she stirred the soup on the stove. Onions made him feel cleaned up, as if the tears they drew from him took away impurities. He could hear Baby's high voice in the living room, playing with Master. He did not want either of them to come into the kitchen now. They would destroy the magic he felt, the sweet sting of onions in his eyes, the glow of Olanna's skin. She was talking about the Northerners in Onitsha who had been killed in reprisal attacks. He liked the way reprisal attacks came out of her mouth.

  "It's so wrong," she said. "So wrong. But His Excellency has handled it all well; God knows how many would have been killed if he did not have the Northern soldiers sent back to the North."

  "Ojukwu is a great man."

  "Yes, he is, but we are all capable of doing the same things to one another, really."

  "No, mah. We are not like those Hausa people. The reprisal killings happened because they pushed us." His reprisal killings had come out sounding close to hers, he was sure.

  Olanna shook her head but said nothing for a while. "After your sister's wine-carrying, we will go to Abba to spend some time there since the campus is so empty," she said finally. "You can stay with your people if you want to. We will come back for you when we return; we won't be gone for more than a month, at the most. Our soldiers will driv
e the Nigerians back in a week or two."

  "I will come with you and Master, mah."

  Olanna smiled, as if she had wanted him to say that. "This soup is not thickening at all," she muttered. Then she told him about the first time she cooked soup as a young girl, how she managed to burn the bottom of the pot to a charred purple and yet the soup turned out very tasty. He was absorbed in Olanna's voice and so he did not hear the sound-boom-boom-boom-from somewhere distant outside the windows, until she stopped stirring and looked up.

  "What is that?" she asked. "Do you hear it, Ugwu? What is it?"

  Olanna dropped the ladle and ran into the living room. Ugwu followed. Master was standing by the window, holding a folded copy of the Biafran Sun.

  "What is that?" Olanna asked. She pulled Baby to her. "Odenigbo!"

  "They are advancing," Master said calmly. "I think we should plan on leaving today."

  Then Ugwu heard the loud honk of a car outside. Suddenly he was afraid to go to the door, even to go to the window and peek out.

  Master opened the door. The green Morris Minor had parked so hurriedly that one tire was outside the driveway, crushing the lilies that bordered the lawn; when the man came out of the car, Ugwu was shocked to see that he was only wearing a singlet and trousers. And bathroom slippers too!

  "Evacuate now! The federals have entered Nsukka! We are evacuating now! Right now! I am going to all the houses still occupied. Evacuate now!"

  It was after he had spoken and rushed back into his car and driven off, honking continuously, that Ugwu recognized him: Mr. Vincent Ikenna, the registrar. He had visited a few times. He drank his beer with Fanta.

  "Get a few things together, nkem," Master said. "I'll check the water in the car. Ugwu, lock up quick! Don't forget the Boys' Quarters."

  "Gini? What things?" Olanna asked. "What will I take?"

  Baby started to cry. There was the sound again, boom-boom-boom, closer and louder.

  "It won't be for long, we'll be back soon. Just take a few things, clothes." Master gestured vaguely before he grabbed the car keys from the shelf.

  "I'm still cooking," Olanna said.