Half of a Yellow Sun

by Ngozi Adichie Chimamanda

  "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 hin
ges 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.

  "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 afire. 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 sta
ring 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.