[4 of 4] Half of a Yellow Sun, Part Four: The Late Sixties, Chapters 25 - 37, Author's Note

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. "Part Four: The Late Sixties." Half of a Yellow Sun, Anchor Books, 2006, Chapters 25 - 37, Author's Note.

The Late Sixties

25

Olanna jumped each time she heard the thunder. She imagined another air raid, bombs rolling out of a plane and exploding in the compound before she and Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu could reach the bunker down the street. Sometimes she imagined the bunker itself collapsing, squashing them all into mud. Odenigbo and some of the neighborhood men had built it in a week; after they dug the pit, as wide as a hall, and after they roofed it with clay-layered palm trunks, he told her, “We're safe now, nkem.We're safe.” But the first time he showed her how to climb down the jagged steps, Olanna saw a snake coiled in a corner. Its black skin glistened with silver markings and tiny crickets hopped about and, in the silence of the damp underground that made her think of a grave, she screamed.

Odenigbo bashed the snake with a stick and told her he would make sure the zinc sheet at the entrance of the bunker was more secure. His calmness bewildered her. The tranquil tone he used to confront their new world, their changed circumstances, bewildered her. When the Nigerians changed their currency and Radio Biafra hurriedly announced a new currency too, Olanna stood in the bank line for four hours, dodging flogging men and pushing women, until she exchanged their Nigerian money for the prettier Biafran pounds. Later, during breakfast, she held up the medium-size envelope of notes and said, “All the cash we have.”

Odenigbo looked amused. “We're both earning money, nkem.”

“This is the second month the directorate has delayed your salary,” she said, and put the tea bag on his saucer in her own cup. “And you can't call what they pay me at Akwakuma earning money.”

“We'll get our life back soon, in a free Biafra,” he said, his usual words lined with his usual forceful reassurance, and sipped his tea.

Olanna placed her cup against her cheek, to warm it, to delay the first sip of weak tea made from a reused tea bag. When he stood up and kissed her goodbye, she wondered why he was not frightened by how little they had. Perhaps it was because he did not go to the market himself. He did not notice how a cup of salt cost a shilling more each week and how chickens were chopped into bits that were still too expensive and how nobody sold rice in large bags anymore because nobody could buy them. That night, she was silent as his thrusts became faster. It was the first time she felt detached from him; while he was murmuring in her ear, she was mourning her money in the bank in Lagos.

“Nkem? Are you all right?” he asked, raising himself to look at her. “Yes.”

He sucked her lower lip before he rolled off and fell asleep. She had never known his snoring to be so rasping. He was tired. The long walk to the Manpower Directorate, the sheer mindlessness of compiling names and addresses day after day, exhausted him, she knew, yet he came home each day with lit-up eyes. He had joined the Agitator Corps; after work, they went into the interior to educate the people. She often imagined him standing in the middle of a gathering of rapt villagers, talking in that sonorous voice about the great nation that Biafra would be. His eyes saw the future. And so she did not tell him that she grieved for the past, different things on different days, her tablecloths with the silver embroidery, her car, Baby's strawberry cream biscuits. She did not tell him that sometimes when she watched Baby running around with the neighborhood children, so helpless and happy, she wanted to gather Baby in her arms and apologize. Not that Baby would understand.

Ever since Mrs. Muokelu, who taught Elementary One at Akwakuma, had told her about the children forced into a truck by soldiers and returned at night with their palms chafed and bleedingfrom grinding cassava, she had asked Ugwu never to let Baby out of his sight. But she did not really believe the soldiers would have much use for a child as young as Baby. She worried, instead, about air raids. She had a recurring dream: She forgot about Baby and ran to the bunker and after the bombs had fallen, she tripped on the burnt body of a child with its features so blackened that she could not be certain it was Baby. The dream haunted her. She made Baby practice running to the bunker. She asked Ugwu to practice picking Baby up and running. She taught Baby how to take cover if there was no time for the bunker—to lie flat on her belly, hands wrapped around her head.

Still, she worried that she had not done enough and that the dream portended some negligence of hers that would harm Baby. When, toward the end of the rainy season, Baby began to cough in drawn-out whistles, Olanna felt relief.Somethinghad happened to Baby. If the heavens were fair, wartime misfortunes would be mutually exclusive; since Baby was sick, she could not be harmed in an air raid. A cough was something Olanna could exercise control over, an air raid was not.

She took Baby to Albatross Hospital. Ugwu removed the palm fronds piled on top of Odenigbo's car, but each time she turned the key, the engine wheezed and died out. Finally Ugwu pushed it before it started. She drove slowly and stepped on the brake when Baby started to cough. At the checkpoint, where a huge tree trunk lay across the road, she told the civil defenders that her child was very sick and they said sorryand did not search the car or her handbag. The dim hospital corridor smelled of urine and penicillin. Women were sitting with babies on their laps, standing with babies on their hips, and their chatter mixed with crying. Olanna remembered Dr. Nwala from the wedding. She had barely noticed him until after the bombing, when he said, “The mud will stain your dress,” and helped her up, Okeoma's shirt still wrapped around her.

She told the nurses that she was an old colleague of his.

“It's terribly urgent,” she said, and kept her English accent crisp and her head held high. A nurse showed her into his office promptly. One of the women sitting in the corridor cursed. “Tufiakwa!We have been waiting since dawn! Is it because we don't talk through our nose like white people?”

Dr. Nwala raised his willowy body from his seat and came around to shake her hand. “Olanna,” he said, looking into her eyes.

“How are you, doctor?”

“We are managing,” he said, and patted Baby's shoulder. “How are you?” “Very well. Okeoma visited us last week.”

“Yes, he stayed a day with me.” He was staring at her, but she felt as if he were not listening, as if he were not really there. He looked lost.

“Baby has been coughing for some days now,” Olanna said loudly.

“Oh.” He turned to Baby. He placed the stethoscope on her chest and murmured ndoas she coughed. When he walked over to the cupboard to look through some bottles and packets of medicine, Olanna felt sorry for him and was not sure why. He spent too long looking through so few things.

“I'll give you a cough syrup, but she needs antibiotics and I'm afraid we've run out,” he said, staring at her again, in that odd way that locked his eyes with hers. His expression was filled with melancholy fatigue. Olanna wondered if perhaps he had recently lost a person he loved.

“I'll write a prescription and you can try one of those people who trade, but it should be somebody reliable, of course.”

“Of course,” Olanna repeated. “I have a friend, Mrs. Muokelu, who can help.” “Very good.”

“You should come and visit us when you have time,” Olanna said, standing up. “Yes.” He took her hand in his and held it for a little too long.

“Thank you, doctor.”

“For what? I can't do much.” He gestured toward the door, and Olanna knew he meant the womenwho were waiting outside. As she left, she glanced at the near-empty cupboard of medicine.

Olanna ran past the town square on her way to Akwakuma Primary School in the morning. She always did that in open spaces, running until she got to the thick shade of trees that would give good cover in case of an air raid. Some children were standing under the mango tree in the school compound, throwing stones up at the fruit. She shouted, “Go to your classes, osiso!” and they scattered briefly before coming back to aim at the mangoes. She heard a cheer when one fell, and then the raised voices as they quarreled over whose throw had brought the fruit down.

Mrs. Muokelu was in front of her classroom fiddling with the bell. The thick black hair on her arms and legs, the fuzz on her upper lip, the curled strands on her chin, and the squat muscular limbs often made Olanna wonder if perhaps Mrs. Muokelu would have been better off being born a man.

“Do you know where I can buy antibiotics, my sister?” Olanna asked, after they hugged. “Baby has a cough, and they did not have any at the hospital.”

Mrs. Muokelu hummed for a while to show that she was thinking. His Excellency's face glared from the fabric of the boubou she wore every day; she often announced that she would wear nothing else until the state of Biafra was fully established.

“Anybody can sell medicine, but you don't know who is mixing chalk in his backyard and calling it Nivaquine,” she said. “Give me the money and I will go to Mama Onitsha. She is authentic. She will sell you Gowon's dirty pant if you pay the right price.”

“Let her keep the pant and just give us medicine.” Olanna was laughing.

Mrs. Muokelu smiled and picked up the bell. “I saw a vision yesterday,” she said. Her boubou was too long for her short body; it dragged along the ground and Olanna feared that she would trip on it and fall.

“What was the vision?” Olanna asked. Mrs. Muokelu always had visions. In the last one, she had seen Ojukwu personally leading the battle in the Ogoja sector, which meant that the enemy had been completely wiped out there.

“Traditional warriors from Abiriba used their bows and arrows and finished the vandals in the Calabar sector.Imakwa, children were walking over their bones to go to the stream.”

“Really,” Olanna said, and kept her face serious.

“It means Calabar will never fall,” Mrs. Muokelu said, and began to ring the bell. Olanna watched the swift movements of the masculine arm. They really had nothing in common, herself and this barely educated primary-school teacher from Eziowelle who believed in visions. Yet Mrs. Muokelu had always seemed familiar. It was not because Mrs. Muokelu plaited her hair and went with her to the Women's Voluntary Services meetings and taught her how to preserve vegetables, but because Mrs. Muokelu exuded fearlessness, a fearlessness that reminded Olanna of Kainene.

That evening, when Mrs. Muokelu brought the antibiotic capsules wrapped in newspaper, Olanna asked her to come inside and showed her a photo of Kainene, sitting by the pool with a cigarette between her lips.

“This is my twin sister. She lives in Port Harcourt.”

“Your twin!” Mrs. Muokelu exclaimed, fingering the plastic half of a yellow sun that she wore on a string around her neck. “Wonders shall never end. I did not know you were a twin, and, nekene, she does not look like you at all.”

“We have the same mouth,” Olanna said.

Mrs. Muokelu glanced at the photo again and shook her head. “She does not look like you at all,” she repeated.The antibiotics yellowed Baby's eyes. Her coughing got better, less chesty and less whistling, but her appetite disappeared. She pushed her garriaround her plate and left her pap uneaten until it congealed in a waxy lump. Olanna spent most of the cash in the envelope and bought biscuits and toffees in shiny wrappers from a woman who traded behind enemy lines, but Baby only nibbled at them. She placed Baby on her lap and forced bits of mashed yam into her mouth, and when Baby choked and started to cry, Olanna, too, fought tears. Her greatest fear was that Baby would die. It was there, the festering fear, underlying everything she thought and did. Odenigbo skipped the Agitator Corps activities and rushed home earlier, and Olanna knew he shared her fear. But they did not talk about it, as though verbalizing it would make Baby's death imminent, until the morning she sat watching Baby sleep while Odenigbo got dressed for work. The resonating voice on Radio Biafra filled the room.

These African states have fallen prey to the British-American imperialist conspiracy to use
the committee's recommendations as a pretext for a massive arms support for their puppet and
tottering neocolonialist regime in Nigeria….

“That's right!” Odenigbo said, buttoning his shirt with quick movements.

On the bed, Baby stirred. Her face had lost its fat and was eerily adult, sunken and thin-skinned. Olanna watched her.

“Baby won't make it,” she said quietly.

Odenigbo stopped and looked at her. He turned the radio off and came over and held her head against his belly. Because he said nothing at first, his silence became a confirmation that Baby would die. Olanna shifted away.

“It's only normal that she doesn't have an appetite,” he said finally. But his tone lacked the certitude she was used to.

“Look how much weight she's lost!” Olanna said.

“Nkem, her cough is getting better and her appetite will come back.” He began to comb his hair. She was angry with him for not saying what she wanted to hear, for not assuming the power of fate and telling her that Baby would be well, for being normal enough to continue to dress for work. His kiss before he left was quick, not the usual lingering press of lips, and that too she held against him. Tears filled her eyes. She thought about Amala. Amala had made no contact with them since the day at the hospital but she wondered now if she would be expected to tell Amala if Baby were to die.

Baby yawned and woke up. “Good morning, Mummy Ola.” Even her voice was thin.

“Baby, ezigbonwa, how are you?” Olanna picked her up, hugged her, blew into her neck, and struggled with her tears. Baby felt so slight, so light. “Will you eat some pap, my baby? Or some bread? What do you want?”

Baby shook her head. Olanna was trying to cajole Baby into drinking some Ovaltine when Mrs. Muokelu arrived with a knotted raffia bag and a self-satisfied smile.

“They have opened a relief center on Bishop Road and I went very early this morning,” she said. “Ask Ugwu to bring me a bowl.”

She poured some yellow powder into the bowl Ugwu brought. “What is that?” Olanna asked.

“Dried egg yolk.” Mrs. Muokelu turned to Ugwu. “Fry it for Baby.” “Fry it?”

“Is something wrong with your ears? Mix it with some water and fry it, osiso! They say children love the taste of this thing.”

Ugwu gave her a slow look before he went into the kitchen. The dried egg yolk, fried in red palm oil, looked soggy and unnervingly bright-colored on the plate. Baby ate all of it.The relief center used to be a girls' secondary school. Olanna imagined the grassy walled compound before the war, young women hurrying to classes in the morning and sneaking to the gate in the evening to meet young men from the government college down the road. Now it was dawn and the gate was locked. A large crowd had gathered outside. Olanna stood awkwardly among the men and women and children, who all seemed used to standing and waiting for a rusted iron gate to be opened so they could go in and be given food donated by foreign strangers. She felt discomfited. She felt as if she were doing something improper, unethical: expecting to get food in exchange for nothing. Inside the compound, she could see people moving about, tables set out with sacks of food, a board that said world council of churches. Some of the women clutched their baskets and peered over the gate and muttered about these relief people wasting time. The men were talking among themselves; the oldest-looking man wore his red chieftaincy hat with a feather stuck in it. A young man's voice stood out from the others, high-pitched, shouting gibberish, like a child learning to speak.

“He has serious shell shock,” Mrs. Muokelu whispered, as if Olanna did not know. It was the only time Mrs. Muokelu spoke. She had slowly edged her way to the front of the gate, nudging Olanna to follow her each time. Somebody behind had begun a story about a Biafran victory. “I am telling you, all of the Hausa soldiers turned and ran, they had seen what was bigger than them….” The voice trailed away as a man inside the compound strode toward the gate. His T-shirt, land of the rising sun written on it in black, was loose around his slim body and he carried a sheaf of papers. He walked with an air of importance, his shoulders held high. He was the supervisor.

“Order! Order!” he said, and opened the gate.

The swift scrambling rush of the crowd surprised Olanna. She felt jostled; she swayed. It was as if they all shoved her aside in one calculated move since she was not one of them. The firm elbow of the elderly man beside her landed painfully on her side as he launched his run into the compound. Mrs. Muokelu was ahead, dashing toward one of the tables. The old man in the feathered hat fell down, promptly picked himself up, and continued his lopsided run to the queue. Olanna was surprised, too, by the militia members flogging with long whips and shouting “Order! Order!” and by the stern faces of the women at the tables, who bent and scooped into the bags held out before them and then said, “Yes! Next!”

“Join that one!” Mrs. Muokelu said, when Olanna moved to stand some way behind her. “That is the egg-yolk line! Join it! This one is stockfish.”

Olanna joined the queue and held herself from pushing back at the woman who tried to nudge her out. She let the woman stand in front of her. The incongruity of queuing to beg for food made her feel uncomfortable, blemished. She folded her arms, then let them lie by her sides, and then folded them again. She was close to the front when she noticed that the powder being scooped into bags and bowls was not yellow but white. Not egg yolk but cornmeal. The egg-yolk line was the next one. Olanna hurried over to join it, but the woman who was dishing out the yolk stood up and said, “Egg yolk is finished!Ogwula!”

Panic rose in Olanna's chest. She ran after the woman. “Please,” she said.

“What is it?” the woman asked. The supervisor, standing close by, turned to stare at Olanna. “My little child is sick—” Olanna said.

The woman cut her short. “Join that line for milk.”

“No, no, she has not been eating anything, but she ate egg yolk.” Olanna held the woman's arm. “Biko, please; I need the egg yolk.”

The woman pulled her arm away and hurried into the building and slammed the door. Olanna stood there. The supervisor, still staring, fanned himself with his sheaf of papers and said, “Ehe!I know you.”

His bald head and bearded face did not look familiar at all. Olanna turned to walk away because shewas sure he was one of those men who claimed to have met her before only to have a chance to make a pass.

“I have seen you before,” he said. He moved closer, smiling now, but without the leer she expected; his face was frank and delighted. “Some years ago at Enugu Airport when I went to meet my brother who was returning from overseas. You talked to my mother. Ikasiriyaobi.You calmed her down when the plane landed and did not stop right away.”

That day at the airport came back to Olanna hazily. It had to be about seven years ago. She remembered his bush accent and his nervous excitement and that he had seemed older than he looked now.

“Is it you?” she asked. “But how did you recognize me?”

“How can anybody forget a face like your own? My mother has always told the story of a beautiful woman who held her hand. All the members of my family know the story. Every time somebody talks about my brother's return, she will tell it.”

“And how is your brother?”

Pride lit up his face. “He is a senior man in the directorate. He is the one who gave me this job with relief.”

Olanna immediately wondered whether he could help her get some egg yolk. But what she asked was, “And your mother is well?”

“Very well. She is at Orlu in my brother's house. She was very ill when my elder sister did not return from Zaria at first; we all thought those animals had done to her what they did to the others, but my sister returned—she had Hausa friends who helped her—so my mother got better. She will be happy when I tell her that I saw you.”

He paused to glance at one of the food tables where two young girls were fighting, one saying, “I am telling you that this stockfish is mine,” and the other saying, “Ngwanu, both of us will die today.”

He turned back to her. “Let me go and see what is going on there. But wait by the gate. I will send somebody to you with egg yolk.”

“Thank you.” Olanna was relieved that he had offered and yet felt awkward at the exchange. At the gate, she skulked; she felt like a thief.

“Okoromadu sent me to you,” a young woman said beside her, and Olanna almost jumped. The woman slid a bag into her hand and walked back into the compound. “Thank him for me,” Olanna called out. If the woman heard, she did not turn. The weight of the bag felt reassuring as she waited for Mrs. Muokelu; later, as she watched Baby eat until only the palm oil grease was left on the plate, she wondered how Baby could stand the awful plastic taste of the dried egg yolk.

The next time Olanna went to the relief center, Okoromadu was talking to the crowd at the gate. Some women held rolled-up mats under their arms; they had spent the night outside the gates.

“We have nothing for you today. The lorry carrying our supplies from Awomama was hijacked on the road,” he said, in the measured tone of a politician addressing his supporters. Olanna watched him. He enjoyed this, the power that came with knowing whether or not a group of people would eat. “We have military escorts, but it is soldiers who are hijacking us. They set up roadblocks and take everything from the lorry; they even beat the drivers. Come on Monday, and maybe we will be open.”

A woman walked briskly up to him and thrust her baby boy into his arms. “Then take him! Feed him until you open again!” She began to walk away. The baby was thin, jaundiced, squalling.

“Bianwanyi! Come back, woman!” Okoromadu was holding the baby with stiff arms, away from his body.

The other women in the crowd began to chide the mother— Are you throwing your child away?Ujo anaghi atu gi? Are you walking in God's face?—but it was Mrs. Muokelu who went over and took the baby from Okoromadu and placed it back in the mother's arms.“ Take your child,” she said. “It is not his fault that there is no food today.” The crowd dispersed. Olanna and Mrs. Muokelu walked slowly.

“Who knows if it is true that soldiers really hijacked their lorry?” Mrs. Muokelu said. “Who knows how much they have kept for themselves to sell? We never have salt here because they keep all the salt to trade.”

Olanna was thinking of the way that Mrs. Muokelu had returned the baby to the mother. “You remind me of my sister,” she said.

“How?”

“She's very strong. She's not afraid.”

“She was smoking in that picture you showed me. Like a common prostitute.” Olanna stopped and stared at Mrs. Muokelu.

“I am not saying she is a prostitute,” Mrs. Muokelu said hastily. “I am only saying that it is not good that she smokes because women who smoke are prostitutes.”

Olanna looked at her and saw a malevolence in the beard and hairy arms. She walked faster, silent, ahead of Mrs. Muokelu, and did not say goodbye before she turned in to her street. Baby was sitting outside with Ugwu.

“Mummy Ola!”

Olanna hugged her, smoothed her hair. Baby was holding her hand, looking up at her. “Did you bring egg yolk, Mummy Ola?”

“No, my baby. But I will bring some soon,” she said.

“Good afternoon, mah. You didn't bring anything?” Ugwu asked.

“Can't you see that my basket is empty?” Olanna snapped. “Are you blind?”

On Monday, she went alone to the relief center. Mrs. Muokelu did not come by to call her before dawn and was not there among the crowd. The gate was locked, the compound empty and she waited around for an hour until the crowd began to disperse. On Tuesday, the gate was locked. On Wednesday, there was a new padlock on the gate. It was not until Saturday that the gate swung open and Olanna surprised herself by how easily she joined in the inward rush of the crowd, how she moved nimbly from line to line, dodged the swinging canes of the militia, pushed back when somebody pushed her. She was leaving with small bags of cornmeal and egg yolk and two pieces of stockfish when Okoromadu arrived.

He waved. “Beautiful woman. Nwanyioma!” he said. He still did not know her name. He came over and slipped a tin of corned beef into her basket and then hurried away as if he had done nothing. Olanna looked down at the long red tin and nearly burst out laughing from sheer unexpected pleasure. She brought it out, examined it, ran a hand over the cold metal, and looked up to find a shell-shocked soldier watching her. His stare was blunt; it did not care to disguise itself. She put the corned beef back into her basket and covered it with a bag. She was pleased Mrs. Muokelu was not with her, so she would not have to share it. She would ask Ugwu to make a stew with it. She would save some to make sandwiches and she and Odenigbo and Baby would have an English-style tea with corned beef sandwiches.

The shell-shocked soldier followed her out of the gate. She quickened her pace on the dusty stretch that led to the main road, but five of them, all in tattered army uniforms, soon surrounded her. They babbled and gestured toward her basket, their movements disjointed, their tones raised, and Olanna made out some of the words. “Aunty!” “Sister!” “Bring am now!” “Hungry go kill all of us!”

Olanna clutched her basket tight. A hot childish urge to cry rose in her. “Go away! Come on, go away!” They looked surprised at her outburst and for a moment they were still. Then they began to come closer, all together, as if some internal voice were directing them. They were bearing down on her. They could do anything; there was something desperately lawless about them and their noise-deadened brains. Olanna's fear came with rage, a fierce and emboldening rage, and she imagined fighting them, strangling them, killing them. The corned beef was hers. Hers. She moved a few steps back. In a flash, done so quickly that she did not realize it until afterward, the one wearing a blue beret grasped her basket, took the tin of corned beef, and ran off. Others followed. The last stood there watching her, his slack mouth hanging open, before he turned to run too, but in the opposite direction, away from the others. The basket lay on the ground. Olanna stood still and cried silently because the corned beef had never been hers. Then she picked up the basket, dusted some sand from her bag of cornmeal, and walked home.

Olanna and Mrs. Muokelu had avoided each other in school for almost two weeks and so the afternoon Olanna came home and saw Mrs. Muokelu sitting outside with a metal bucket full of gray wood ash, she was surprised.

Mrs. Muokelu stood up. “I came to teach you how to make soap. Do you know how much they are selling common bar soap now?”

Olanna looked at the threadbare cotton boubou plastered with His Excellency's glowering face and realized that this unsolicited lesson was an apology. She took the bucket of ash. She led the way to the backyard, and after Mrs. Muokelu had explained and demonstrated how to make soap she stowed the ash near the pile of cement blocks.

Later, Odenigbo shook his head when she told him about it. They were under the thatch awning of the veranda, on a wood bench placed against the wall.

“She didn't need to teach you how to make soap. I don't see you making soap anyway.” “You think I can't?”

“She should simply have apologized.”

“I think I overreacted because it was about Kainene.” Olanna shifted. “I wonder if Kainene got my letters.”

Odenigbo said nothing. He took her hand and she felt grateful that there were things she did not need to explain to him.

“How much hair does Mrs. Muokelu have on her chest?” he asked. “Do you know?”

Olanna was not sure if he began to laugh first or if she did, but suddenly they were laughing, raucously, almost falling off the bench. Other things became hilarious. Odenigbo said that the sky was completely cloudless and Olanna told him that it was perfect weather for bomber planes, and they laughed. A little boy walking past wearing a pair of shorts with large holes that showed his dry-skinned buttocks greeted them and they had hardly responded goodafternoonbefore they burst into more laughter. The laughter had not died on their faces and their hands were still clasped on the bench when Special Julius walked into the compound. His tunic glittered with sequins.

“I've brought the best palm wine in Umuahia! Ask Ugwu to bring some glasses,” he said, and put a small jerry can down. There was an optimistic affluence about him and his flamboyant clothes, as if there were no problem he could not solve. After Ugwu brought the glasses, Special Julius said, “Have you heard that Harold Wilson is in Lagos? He is bringing the British army to finish us off. They say he came with two battalions.”

“Sit down, my friend, and stop talking rubbish,” Odenigbo said.

Special Julius laughed and slurped his drink noisily. “I am talking rubbish, okwaya? Where is the radio? Lagos may not tell the world that the British prime minister has come to help them kill us, butmaybe those crazy people in Kaduna will.”

Baby came out. “Uncle Julius, good afternoon.”

“Baby-Baby. How is your cough? Is it better?” He dipped a finger into his palm wine and put it in her mouth. “This should help your cough.”

Baby licked her lips, looking pleased. “Julius!” Olanna said.

Special Julius waved airily. “Never underestimate the power of alcohol.”

“Come and sit with me, Baby,” Olanna said. Baby's dress was frayed, worn too often. Olanna settled her on her lap and held her close. At least Baby was not coughing so much now; at least Baby was eating.

Odenigbo picked up the radio from underneath the bench. A shrill sound pierced the air, and at first Olanna thought it had come from the radio before she realized it was the air raid alarm. She sat still. Somebody from the house nearby screamed, “Enemy plane!” at the same time as Special Julius shouted, “Take cover!” and leaped across the veranda, overturning the palm wine. Neighbors were running, shouting words that Olanna could not understand because the stubborn searing sound had shrilled its way into her head. She slipped on the wine and fell on her knee. Odenigbo pulled her up before he grabbed Baby and ran. The strafing had started—pellets raining down from above—as Odenigbo held the zinc sheet open while they all crawled down into the bunker. Odenigbo climbed in last. Ugwu was clutching a spoon smeared with soup. Olanna slapped at the crickets; their faintly moist bodies felt slimy against her fingers, and even when they were no longer perched on her, she still slapped her arms and legs. The first explosion sounded distant. Others followed, closer, louder, and the earth shook. Voices around her were shouting, “Lord Jesus! Lord Jesus!” Her bladder felt painfully, solidly full, as though it would burst and release not urine but the garbled prayers she was muttering. A woman was crumpled next to her, holding a child, a little boy younger than Baby. The bunker was dim but Olanna could see crusty-white ringworm marks all over the child's body. Another explosion shook the ground. Then the sounds stopped. The air was so still that, as they climbed out of the bunker, they could hear the caw-caw-caw of some birds far off. Burning smells filled the air.

“Our antiaircraft fire was wonderful!Odiegwu!” somebody said.

“Biafra win the war!” Special Julius started the song and soon most of the people on the street had gathered to join in.

Biafra win the war.
Armored car, shelling machine,
Fighter and bomber,
Ha enweghi ike imeri Biafra!

Olanna watched as Odenigbo sang lustily, and she tried to sing too, but the words lay stale on her tongue. There was a sharp pain in her knee; she took Baby's hand and went indoors.

She was giving Baby an evening bath when the siren alarm sounded again and she grabbed Baby naked and ran from the outhouse. Baby nearly slipped from her grasp. The swift roar of planes and the sharp ka-ka-ka of antiaircraft gunfire came from above and from below and from the sides and made her teeth chatter. She slumped in the bunker and ignored the crickets.

“Where is Odenigbo?” she asked, after a while, grabbing Ugwu's arm. “Where is your master?” “He is here, mah,” Ugwu said, looking around.

“Odenigbo!” Olanna called. But he did not answer. She did not remember seeing him come into the bunker. He was still up there somewhere. The explosion that followed shook the inside of her ear loose; she was sure that if she bent her head sideways, something hard-soft like cartilage would fall out. She moved to the entrance of the bunker. Behind her, she heard Ugwu say, “Mah? Mah?” A woman from down the street said, “Come back! Where are you going? Ebe ka I na-eje?” but sheignored them both and scrambled out of the bunker.

The sun's brilliance was startling; it made her feel faint. She ran, her heart hurting her chest, shouting, “Odenigbo! Odenigbo!” until she saw him bent over somebody on the ground. She looked at his bare hairy chest and his new beard and his torn slippers, and suddenly his mortality—their mortality—struck her with a clutch at her throat, a squeeze of alarm. She held him tightly. A house down the road was on fire.

“Nkem, it's okay,” Odenigbo said. “A bullet hit him but it looks like a flesh wound.” He pushed her away and went back to the man, whose arm he was tying up with his shirt.

In the morning, the sky was like a calm sea. Olanna told Odenigbo that he would not go to the directorate and that she would not teach; they would spend the day in the bunker.

He laughed. “Don't be silly.”

“Nobody will send their children to school,” she said.

“What will you do then?” His tone was as normal as his snoring throughout the night had been, while she lay awake, sweating, imagining the sound of bombing.

“I don't know.”

He kissed her. “Just head for the bunker if the alarm goes off. Nothing will happen. I may be a little late if we go educating in Mbaise today.”

At first she was annoyed by his casualness and then she felt comforted by it. She believed his words, but only for as long as he was there. After he left, she felt vulnerable, exposed. She did not take a bath. She was afraid to go outside to the pit latrine. She was afraid to sit down because she might doze off and be unprepared when the siren went off. She drank cup after cup of water until her belly swelled up, yet she felt as if all the saliva had been sucked out of her mouth and she was about to choke on clumps of dry air.

“We are going to stay in the bunker today,” she told Ugwu. “The bunker, mah?”

“Yes, the bunker. You heard me.”

“But we cannot just stay in the bunker, mah.”

“Did I speak with water in my mouth? I said we will stay in the bunker.” Ugwu shrugged. “Yes, mah. Should I bring Baby's food?”

She did not respond. She would slap him if he so much as smiled, because she could see the muted amusement on his face at the thought of taking a dish with Baby's pap and crawling into a damp hole in the ground to spend the day.

“Get Baby ready,” she said, and turned the radio on.

“Yes, mah,” Ugwu said. “Onwere igwu. I found lice eggs in her hair this morning.” “What?”

“Lice eggs. But there were only two and I did not find any others.”

“Lice? What are you saying? How can Baby have lice? I keep her clean. Baby! Baby!”

Olanna pulled Baby forward and began to loosen her braids and search through her thick hair. “It must be those dirty neighbors you play with, those dirty neighbors.” Her hands were shaking and she yanked at a tuft of hair to maintain her grip. Baby began to cry.

“Stay still!” Olanna said.

Baby wriggled free, ran to Ugwu, and stood there looking at Olanna with baffled eyes as if she no longer recognized her. From the radio, the Biafran national anthem burst out and filled the silence.

Land of the rising sun, we love and cherish,
Beloved homeland of our brave heroes;
We must defend our lives or we shall perish.
We shall protect our hearts from all our foes;
But if the price is death for all we hold dear,
Then let us die without a shred of fear….
They listened until it ended.

“Take her outside and stay in the veranda and be on the alert,” Olanna said finally, wearily, to Ugwu.

“We are not staying in the bunker again?” “Just take her outside to the veranda.” “Yes, mah.”

Olanna tuned the radio; it was too early for the war broadcasts, for the fire-filled monologues on Biafra's greatness that she desperately needed to hear. On BBC, there was a news update on the war— emissaries from the pope, from the Organization of African Unity, from the Commonwealth, were coming to Nigeria to propose peace. She listened listlessly and turned it off when she heard Ugwu talking to somebody. She went outside to see who it was. Mrs. Muokelu was standing behind Baby, rebraiding the braids Olanna had loosed. The hair on her arms shone glossily, as if she had used too much palm kernel oil.

“You did not go to school as well?” Olanna asked.

“I knew that parents would keep their children at home.”

“Who wouldn't? What kind of nonstop bombing campaign is this?”

“It is because Harold Wilson came.” Mrs. Muokelu snorted. “They want to impress him so he will bring in the British army.”

“Special Julius said that too, but it's impossible.”

“Impossible?” Mrs. Muokelu smiled as though Olanna had no idea what she was talking about. “That Special Julius, by the way—you know he sells forged passes?”

“He is an army contractor.”

“I am not saying he does not do small-small contracts with the army, but he sells forged passes. His brother is a director and they do it together. It is because of them that all sorts of crooks are running around with special passes.” Mrs. Muokelu finished a braid and patted Baby's hair. “That his brother is a criminal. They say he gave army exemption passes to all his male relatives, everyone in his umunna. And you need to hear what he does with those young-young girls that crawl around looking for sugar daddies. They say he takes up to five of them into his bedroom at the same time.Tufia! It is people like him who must be executed when the state of Biafra is fully established.”

Olanna jumped. “Was that a plane? Was that a plane?”

“Plane, kwa?” Mrs. Muokelu laughed. “Somebody closed their door in the next house and you say it is a plane?”

Olanna sat down on the floor and stretched out her legs. She was exhausted from fear. “Did you hear that we shot down their bomber around Ikot-Ekpene?” Mrs. Muokelu asked. “I didn't hear.”

“And this was done by a common civilian with his hunting gun! You know, it is as if the Nigerians are so stupid that whoever works for them becomes stupid too. They are too stupid to fly the planes that Russia and Britain gave them, so they brought in white people, and even those white people can't hit any target. Ha! Half their bombs don't even explode.”

“The half that explodes is enough to kill us,” Olanna said.

Mrs. Muokelu kept speaking as though she had not heard Olanna. “I hear that our ogbunigweis putting the fear of God into them. In Afikpo, it killed only a few hundred men, but the entire Nigerian battalion withdrew from fear. They have never seen a weapon like that. They don't know what we stillhave for them.” She chuckled and shook her head and tugged at the half of a yellow sun around her neck. “Gowon sent them to bomb Awgu Market in the middle of the afternoon while women were buying and selling. He has refused to let the Red Cross bring us food, refused kpam-kpam, so that we will starve to death. But he will not succeed. If we had people pouring guns and planes into our hands as they pour into Nigeria, this thing would have ended a long time ago and everybody would be in his own house now. But we will conquer them. Is God sleeping? No!” Mrs. Muokelu laughed. The siren went off. Olanna had been expecting the harsh sound for so long that a prescient shiver went through her just before she heard it. She turned to Baby but Ugwu had already picked her up and begun to run for the bunker. Olanna could hear the sound of the planes far off, like gathering thunder, and soon the scattered sharp cracks of antiaircraft fire. Before she crawled into the bunker, she looked up and saw the gliding bomber jets, hawklike, flying startlingly low, with balls of gray smoke around them.

As they climbed out of the bunker later, somebody said, “They targeted the primary school!” “Those heathens have bombed our school,” Mrs. Muokelu said.

“Look! Another bomber!” a young man said, laughing, and pointed at a vulture flying overhead. They joined the crowd hurrying toward Akwakuma Primary School. Two men walked past, in the

opposite direction, carrying a blackened corpse. A bomb crater, wide enough to swallow a lorry, had split the road at the school entrance in two. The roof of the classroom block was crushed into a jumble of wood and metal and dust. Olanna did not recognize her room. All the windows were blown out, but the walls still stood. Just outside, where her pupils played in the sand, a piece of shrapnel had drilled an elegant hole in the ground. And as she joined in carrying out the few salvageable chairs, it was the hole she thought about: how hot carnivorous metal could draw such pretty ringlets in the soil.

The siren did not go off early in the morning, and so when the fierce wah-wah-wahsounds of the bombers appeared from nowhere, as Olanna dissolved corn flour to make Baby's pap, she knew this was it. Somebody would die. Perhaps they would all die. Death was the only thing that made any sense as she hunched underground, plucked some soil, rubbed it between her fingers, and waited for the bunker to explode. The bombing was louder and closer. The ground pulsed. She felt nothing. She was floating away from inside herself. Another explosion came and the earth vibrated, and one of the naked children crawling after crickets giggled. Then the explosions stopped and the people around her began to move. If she had died, if Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu had died, the bunker would still smell like a freshly tilled farm and the sun would still rise and the crickets would still hop around. The war would continue without them. Olanna exhaled, filled with a frothy rage. It was the very sense of being inconsequential that pushed her from extreme fear to extreme fury. She had to matter. She would no longer exist limply, waiting to die. Until Biafra won, the vandals would no longer dictate the terms of her life.

She was first to climb out of the bunker. Awoman had thrown herself down near the body of a child and was rolling around in the dirt, crying. “Gowon, what have I done to you? Gowon, oleeihemmere gi?” A few women gathered around and helped her up. “Stop crying, it is enough,” they said. “What do you want your other children to do?”

Olanna went to the backyard and began to sift through the metal bucket of ash. She coughed as she started a fire; the wood smoke stung.

Ugwu was watching her. “Mah? Do you want me to do it?”

“No.” She dissolved the ash in a basin of cold water, stirring with a force that made the water splatter on her legs. She put the drippings on the fire and ignored Ugwu. He must have sensed the anger that was rising up her body and making her lightheaded because he went back indoors silently. From the street, the crying woman's voice rose again and again, hoarser and thinner than the last time.Gowon, what have I done to you? Gowon, oleeihemmeregi?Olanna poured some palm oil into the cooled mixture and stirred and stirred until her arms stiffened from fatigue. There was something delicious in the sweat that trickled under her arms, in the surge of vigor that made her heart thump, in the odd-smelling mash that emerged after cooling. It lathered. She had made soap.

Olanna did not run across the square on her way to school the following day. Caution had become, to her, feeble and faithless. Her steps were sturdy and she looked up often at the clear sky to search for bomber jets, because she would stop and hurl stones and words up at them. About a quarter of her class attended school. She taught them about the Biafran flag. They sat on wooden planks and the weak morning sun streamed into the roofless class as she unfurled Odenigbo's cloth flag and told them what the symbols meant. Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future. She taught them to raise their hand in the flying salute like His Excellency and she asked them to copy her drawings of the two leaders: His Excellency was burly, sketched with double lines, while Gowon's effete body was outlined in single lines.

Nkiruka, her brightest student, shaded contours into the faces and, with a few strokes of her pencil, gave Gowon a snarl and His Excellency a grin.

“I want to kill all the vandals, miss,” she said, when she came up to hand in her drawing. She was smiling the smile of a precocious child who knew she had said the right thing.

Olanna stared at her and did not know what to say. “Nkiruka, go and sit down,” she said at last.

The first thing she told Odenigbo when he got home was how banal the word killhad sounded from the child's mouth and how guilty she had felt. They were in their bedroom and the radio was turned on low and she could hear Baby's high-pitched laughter from the next room.

“She doesn't actually want to kill anybody, nkem.You just taught her patriotism,” Odenigbo said, slipping off his shoes.

“I don't know.” But his words emboldened her, as did the pride in his face. He liked that she had spoken so forcefully, for once, about the cause; it was as if she had finally become an equal participant in the war effort.

“The Red Cross people remembered our directorate today,” he said and pointed at the small carton he had brought back.

Olanna opened it and placed the squat cans of condensed milk and the slender tin of Ovaltine and the packet of salt on the bed. They seemed luxurious. On the radio, a vibrant voice said that gallant Biafran soldiers were flushing out the vandals around Abakaliki.

“Let's have a party,” she said. “A party?”

“A small dinner party. You know, that's what we had often in Nsukka.” “This will be over soon, nkem, and we'll have all the parties in a free Biafra.”

She liked the way he said that, inafreeBiafra, and she stood up and squashed her lips against his. “Yes, but we can have a wartime party.”

“We hardly have enough for ourselves.”

“We have more than enough for ourselves.” Her lips were still against his and her words suddenly took on a different meaning and she moved back and pulled her dress over her head in one fluid gesture. She unbuckled his trousers. She did not let him take them off. She turned her back and leaned on the wall and guided him into her, excited by his surprise, by his firm hands on her hips. She knew she should lower her voice because of Ugwu and Baby in the next room and yet she had no control over her own moans, over the raw primal pleasure she felt in wave after wave that ended with both ofthem leaning against the wall, gasping and giggling.

26

Ugwu hated there lief food. The rice was puffy, nothing like the slender grains in Nsukka, and the cornmeal never emerged smooth after being stirred in hot water, and the powdered milk ended up as stubborn clumps at the bottom of teacups. He squirmed now as he scooped up some egg yolk. It was difficult to think of the flat powder coming from the egg of a real chicken. He poured it into the dough mix and stirred. Outside, a pot half filled with white sand sat on the fire; he would give it a little more time to heat up before he placed the dough inside. He had been skeptical when Mrs. Muokelu first taught Olanna this baking method; he knew enough about Mrs. Muoke-lu's ideas—Olanna's homemade soap, that blackish-brown mash that reminded him of a child's diarrhea, had come from her, after all. But the first pastry Olanna baked had turned out well; she laughed and said it was ambitious to call it a cake, this mix of flour and palm oil and dried egg yolk, but at least they had put their flour to good use.

The Red Cross irritated Ugwu; the least they could do was ask Biafrans their preferred foods rather than sending so much bland flour. When the new relief center opened, the one Olanna went to wearing a rosary around her neck because Mrs. Muo-kelu said the Caritas people were more generous to Catholics, Ugwu hoped the food would be better. But what she brought back was familiar, the dried fish even saltier, and she sang, with an amused expression, the song the women sang at the center.

Caritas, thank you,
Caritas si anyi taba okporoko
na kwashiorkor ga-ana.

She did not sing on the days she came back with nothing. She would sit on the veranda and look up at the thatch roof and say, “Do you remember, Ugwu, how we used to throw away soup with meat after only a day?”

“Yes, mah,” Ugwu would say. If only he could go to the relief center himself. He suspected that Olanna, with her English-speaking properness, waited her turn until everything was gone. But he could not go because she no longer allowed him out during the day. Stories of forced conscription were everywhere. He did not doubt that a boy down the street had been dragged away in the afternoon and taken, with a shaved head and no training, straight to the front in the evening. But he thought Olanna was overreacting. Surely he could still go to the market. Surely he did not have to wake up before dawn to fetch water.

He heard voices in the living room. Special Julius sounded almost as loud as Master. He would take the cake out and then weed the vegetable patch with its gnarled greens or perhaps go and sit on the pile of cement blocks and look across at the opposite house, to see if Eberechi would come out and shout, “Neighbor, how are you?” He would wave back a hello and imagine himself grasping those buttocks. It surprised him, how happy he was when she greeted him. The cake turned out crisp on the outside and moistly soft inside, and he cut slim slices and took them out in saucers. Special Julius and Olanna were sitting down while Master was standing, gesturing, talking about the last village he visited, how the people had sacrificed a goat at the shrine of oyito keep the vandals away.

“A whole goat! All that wasted protein!” Special Julius said and laughed.

Master did not laugh. “No, no, you must never underestimate the psychological importance of such things. We never ask them to eat the goat instead.”

“Ah, cake!” Special Julius said. He ignored the fork and stuffed the piece in his mouth. “Very good, very good. Ugwu, you have to teach the people in my house because all they do with our flour is chin-chin, every day is chin-chin, chin-chin, and it is the hard kind with no taste! My teeth have finished.” “Ugwu is a wonder at everything,” Olanna said. “He would easily put that woman in Rising Sun Bar out of business.”

Professor Ekwenugo knocked on the open door and walked in. His hands were swathed in cream-colored bandages.

“Dianyi, what happened to you?” Master asked.

“Just a little burn.” Professor Ekwenugo stared at his bandaged hands as if he had only just realized that they meant he no longer had a long nail to stroke. “We are putting together something very big.”

“Is it our first Biafran-built bomber jet?” Olanna teased.

“Something very big that will reveal itself with time,” Professor Ekwenugo said, with a mysterious smile. He ate clumsily; bits of cake fell away before they got to his mouth.

“It should be a saboteur-detecting machine,” Master said.

“Yes! Bloody saboteurs.” Special Julius made the sound of spitting. “They sold Enugu out. How can you leave civilians to defend our capital with mere machetes? This is the same way they lost Nsukka, by pulling back for no reason. Doesn't one of the commanding officers have a Hausa wife? She has put medicine in his food.”

“We will recapture Enugu,” Professor Ekwenugo said.

“How can we recapture Enugu when the vandals have occupied it?” Special Julius said. “They are even looting toilet seats! Toilet seats! Aman who escaped from Udi told me. And they choose the best houses and force people's wives and daughters to spread their legs for them and cook for them.”

Images of his mother and Anulika and Nnesinachi splayed out underneath a dirty sun-blackened Hausa soldier came to Ugwu so clearly that he shivered. He went out and sat on a cement block and wished, desperately, that he could go home, if only for a minute, to make sure that nothing had happened to them. Perhaps the vandals were already there and had taken over his aunty's hut with the corrugated iron roof. Or perhaps his family had fled with their goats and chickens, like all the people streaming into Umuahia. The refugees: Ugwu saw them, more and more each day, new faces on the streets, at the public borehole, in the market. Women knocked on the door often to ask if there was any work they could do in exchange for food. They came with their thin naked children. Sometimes, Olanna gave them garrisoaked in cold water before telling them she had no work. Mrs. Muokelu had taken in a family of eight relatives. She brought the children to play with Baby, and each time, after they left Olanna asked Ugwu to search Baby's hair carefully for lice. The neighbors took in relatives. Master's cousins came for a few weeks and slept in the living room until they left to join the army. There were so many fleeing, tired, homeless people that Ugwu was not surprised the afternoon Olanna came home and said that Akwakuma Primary School would be turned into a refugee camp.

“They have brought bamboo beds and cooking utensils already. And the new Director for Mobilization is coming next week.” She sounded tired. She opened the pot on the stove and stared at the slices of boiled yam.

“What about the children, mah?”

“I was asking Headmistress if we could be relocated, and she looked at me and started laughing. We are the last. All the schools in Umuahia have become refugee camps or army training camps.” She closed the pot. “I'm going to organize classes here in the yard.”

“With Mrs. Muokelu?”

“Yes, and you too, Ugwu. You will teach a class.”

“Yes, mah.” The thought excited and flattered him. “Mah?” “Yes?”

“Do you think the vandals are in my hometown?”

“Of course not,” Olanna said sharply. “Your hometown is too small. If they stay anywhere, it willbe in the university.”

“But if they took the Opi road into Nsukka—”

“I said your hometown is too small! They will not be interested in staying there. There is nothing there to stay for, you see. It is just a small bush.”

Ugwu looked at her and she looked at him. The silence was heavy and accusing.

“I'm going to sell my brown shoes to Mama Onitsha, and I will make a new pretty dress for Baby,” Olanna said finally and Ugwu thought her voice was forced.

He began to wash the plates.

Ugwu saw the black Mercedes-Benz gliding down the road; the word director written on its metallic number plate sparkled in the sun. Near Eberechi's house, it slowed down, shiny and enormous, and Ugwu hoped they would stop and ask him where the primary school was so he would get a good look at the dashboard. They did not just stop, though; they drove past him and into the compound. An orderly in a stiff uniform jumped out to open the back door before the car came to a complete halt. He saluted as the director climbed out.

It was Professor Ezeka. He did not look as tall as Ugwu remembered; he had put on some weight and his thin neck had filled out. Ugwu stared. There was something sleek and new about him, about the fine cut of his suit, but his supercilious expression was the same, as was his hoarse voice. “Young man, is your master in?”

“No, sah,” Ugwu said. In Nsukka, Professor Ezeka had called him Ugwu; now he looked as if he did not recognize him. “He has gone to work, sah.”

“And your madam?”

“She has gone to the relief center, sah.”

Professor Ezeka motioned for his orderly to bring a piece of paper and he scribbled a note and gave it to Ugwu. His silver pen gleamed. “Tell them the Director for Mobilization came.”

“Yes, sah.” Ugwu remembered his fastidious peering at glasses in Nsukka, his thin legs always crossed, disagreeing with Master. After the car drove down the street very slowly, as if the driver knew how many people were watching, Eberechi walked across. She was wearing that tight skirt that molded her buttocks to a perfect roundness.

“Neighbor, how are you?” she asked. “I am well. How are you?”

She shrugged to say she was so-so. “Was that the Director for Mobilization himself who just left?” “Professor Ezeka?” he asked breezily. “Yes, we knew him well in Nsukka. He used to come to our

house every day to eat my pepper soup.”

“Eh!” She laughed, wide-eyed. “He is a Big Man.Ihukwara moto? Did you see that car?” “Original imported chassis.”

They were silent for a while. He had never had a conversation this long with her before and had never seen her so close up. It was difficult to keep his eyes from moving down to that magnificent flare of buttocks. He struggled to focus on her face, her large eyes, the rash of pimples on her forehead, her hair plaited in thread-covered spikes. She was looking at him, too, and he wished he was not wearing the trousers with the hole near the knee.

“How is the small girl?” she asked. “Baby is fine. She's asleep.”

“Are you coming to do the primary school roof?”

Ugwu knew that an army contractor had donated some corrugated iron for replacing the blown-off roof and that volunteers were camouflaging it with palm fronds. But he had not planned to join them.“ Yes, I shall come,” he said. “See you then.”

“Bye-bye.” Ugwu waited for her to turn so that he could stare at her retreating backside.

When Olanna came back, her basket empty, she read Professor Ezeka's note with a half smile on her face. “Yes, we just heard yesterday that he's the new director. And how like him to write something like this.”

Ugwu had read the note—OdenigboandOlanna,droppedbytosayhello.Shalldropbyagainnext week, ifthistediousnewjob allows. Ezeka—but he asked, “How, mah?”

“Oh, he's always felt a bit better than everybody else.” Olanna placed the note on the table. “Professor Achara is going to help get us some books and benches and blackboards. Many women have told me they will send their children to us next week.” She looked excited.

“That is good, mah.” Ugwu shifted on his feet. “I'm going down to help with the school roof. I'll be back to make Baby's food.”

“Oh,” Olanna said.

Ugwu knew she was thinking about the conscriptions. “I think it is important to help in something like this, mah,” he said.

“Of course. Yes, you should help. But please be careful.”

Ugwu saw Eberechi right away; she was with some men and women who were bent over a pile of palm fronds, cutting, matting, passing them on to a man on a wooden ladder.

“Neighbor!” she said. “I have been telling everyone that your people know the director personally.” Ugwu smiled and said a general good afternoon. The men and women murmured good afternoon and ehe, kedu, and nno with the admiring respect that came with knowing who he knew. He felt suddenly important. Somebody gave him a cutlass. A woman sat on the stairs grinding melon seeds, and some little girls were playing cards under the mango tree, and a man was carving a walking stick whose handle was the carefully realized bearded face of His Excellency. There was a rotten smell in the air.

“Imagine living in this kind of place.” Eberechi leaned close to him to whisper. “And many more will come now that Abakaliki has fallen. You know that since Enugu fell, accommodation has been a big problem. Some people who work in the directorates are even sleeping in their cars.”

“That is true,” Ugwu agreed, although he did not know this for sure. He loved that she was talking to him, loved her familiar friendliness. He began to trim some palm fronds with firm strokes. From the classroom, someone turned the radio on: gallant Biafran soldiers were completing a mopping-up operation in a sector Ugwu did not hear clearly.

“Our boys are showing them!” the woman grinding melon seeds said.

“Biafra will win this war, God has written it in the sky,” said a man with a beard braided in a single thin strand.

Eberechi giggled and whispered to Ugwu, “Bush man. He does not know it is Beeafra, not Ba-yafra.”

Ugwu laughed. Fat black ants were crawling all over the palm fronds, and she squealed and looked helplessly at him when one crawled onto her arm. Ugwu brushed it off and felt the warm moistness of her skin. She had wanted him to brush it off; she did not seem like the kind of person who was truly afraid of ants.

One of the women had a baby boy tied to her back. She adjusted the wrapper that held him and said, “We were on our way back from the market when we discovered the vandals had occupied the junction and were shelling inside the village. We could not go home. We had to turn and run. I had only this wrapper and blouse and the small money from selling my pepper. I don't know where my two children are, the ones I left at home to go to the market.” She started to cry. The abruptness of her tears, theway they gushed out of her, startled Ugwu.

“Woman, stop crying,” the man with the braided beard said curtly. The woman continued to cry. Her baby, too, began to cry.

When Ugwu took a batch of fronds across to the ladder, he stopped to peer into one of the classrooms. Cooking pots, sleeping mats, metal boxes, and bamboo beds cluttered it so completely that the room did not look as though it had ever been anything else but a home for disparate groups of people with nowhere else to go. A bright poster on the wall read: in case of air raid, do not panic. if you see the enemy, mow him down. Another woman with a baby tied to her back was washing peeled cassava tubers in a pan of filthy water. Her baby's face was wrinkled. Ugwu nearly choked when he came close and realized that the rotten smell came from her water: it had previously been used to soak cassava, perhaps for days, and was being reused. The smell was awful, nose-filling, the smell of a dirty toilet and rancid steamed beans and boiled eggs gone bad.

He held his breath and went back to the palm fronds. The crying woman was nursing her baby on a drooping breast.

“Our town would not have fallen but for the saboteurs in our midst!” the man with the braided beard said. “I was a Civil Defender. I know how many infiltrators we discovered, and all of them were Rivers people. What I am telling you is that we can no longer trust these minorities who don't speak Igbo.” He paused and turned when he heard a shout from some young boys playing War in the middle of the school compound. They looked about ten or eleven years old, wore banana leaves on their heads, and held mock guns made from bamboo. The longest gun belonged to the commander of the Biafran side, a tall stern child with sharp cheekbones. “Advance!” he shouted.

The boys crept forward. “Fire!”

They flung stones with wide sweeps of their arms and then, clutching their guns, they rushed toward the other boys, the Nigerian side, the losers.

The bearded man began to clap. “These boys are wonderful! Just give them arms and they will send the vandals back.”

Other people clapped and cheered the boys. The palm fronds were ignored for a while.

“You know I kept trying to join the army when this war started,” the bearded man said. “I went everywhere but they kept rejecting me because of my leg so I had to join the Civil Defenders.”

“What is wrong with your leg?” the woman grinding melon seeds asked.

He raised his leg. Half of his foot was gone and what was left looked like a shriveled piece of old yam. “I lost it in the North,” he said.

In the silence that followed, the crackling of the palm fronds was too loud. Then a woman came out of a classroom, after a small child, slapping the child's head again and again. “So you broke only one plate? No, go ahead and break all my plates. Break them! Kuwa ha! We have many, don't we? We came with all our plates, didn't we? Break them!” she said. The little girl ran off toward the mango tree. Before the mother went back into the classroom, she stood there and cursed for a while, muttering that those spirits that had sent the child to break her few plates would not succeed.

“Why should the child not break a plate? What food is there to eat from it anyway?” the breast-feeding woman asked sourly, still sniffling. They laughed, and Eberechi leaned toward Ugwu and whispered that the bearded man had bad breath, which was probably why they did not take him in the army. Ugwu ached to press his body against hers.

They left together and Ugwu looked back to make sure that everyone had noticed that they were together. A soldier in a Biafran Army uniform and a helmet walked past them, speaking a mangled Pidgin English that made little sense, his voice too loud. He swayed as he walked, as if he would tip over sideways. He had one full arm, the other was a stump that stopped before his elbow. Eberechiwatched him.

“His people do not know,” she said quietly. “What?”

“His people think he is well and fighting for our cause.”

The soldier was shouting, “Don't waste your bullet! I say one vandal one bullet with immediate effect!” while the little boys gathered around him, taunting him, laughing at him, singing praise names for him.

Eberechi was walking a little faster. “My brother joined the army in the beginning.” “I didn't know.”

“Yes. He has come home only once. Everybody on the street came out to greet him and the children were fighting to touch his uniform.”

She said nothing else until they got to the front of her house and she turned away. “Let the day break,” she said.

“See you tomorrow,” Ugwu said. He wished he had said more to her.

———

Ugwu arranged three benches on the veranda for Olanna's class and two by the compound entrance for Mrs. Muokelu's; for his own class with the youngest pupils, he placed two benches near the pile of cement blocks.

“We will teach mathematics, English, and civics every day,” Olanna said to Ugwu and Mrs. Muokelu a day before the classes began. “We have to make sure that when the war is over, they will all fit back easily into regular school. We will teach them to speak perfect English and perfect Igbo, like His Excellency. We will teach them pride in our great nation.”

Ugwu watched her and wondered if she had tears in her eyes or if it was simply the glare of the sun. He wanted to learn all he could from her and Mrs. Muokelu, to excel at teaching, to show her that he could do it. He was arranging his blackboard against a tree stump on the first day of classes when a woman, some relative of Special Julius's, brought her daughter. She stared at Ugwu.

“Is this one a teacher?” she asked Olanna. “Yes.”

“Is he not your houseboy?” Her voice was shrill. “Since when has a servant started to teach, bikokwa?”

“If you do not want your child to learn, take her home,” Olanna said.

The woman pulled her daughter by the hand and left. Ugwu was certain that Olanna would look at him with a sympathy that would annoy him more than the woman had. But she shrugged and said, “Good riddance. Her daughter has lice. I saw the eggs in her hair.”

Other parents were different. They looked at Olanna, her beautiful face, her undemanding fees, and her perfect English, with awe-filled respect. They brought palm oil and yams and garri.Awoman who traded across enemy lines brought a chicken. An army contractor brought two of his children and a carton of books—early readers, six copies of Chike and the River, eight simplified editions of Pride and Prejudice; when Olanna opened the carton and threw her arms around him, Ugwu resented the startled leering pleasure on the man's face.

After the first week, Ugwu became quietly convinced that Mrs. Muokelu knew very little. She calculated simple divisions with uncertainty, spoke in a low mumble when she read, as though she was afraid of the sentences, and scolded her pupils for getting something wrong without telling them what the correct thing was. And so he watched only Olanna. “Enunciate! Enunciate!” Olanna would say to her students, her voice rising. “Set-tle. Settle. The word has no R!” Because she made each of herstudents read aloud every day, Ugwu made his own class recite simple words aloud. Baby often went first. She was the youngest, not yet six in a class of seven-year-olds, but she flawlessly read cat,pan, bedin an accent that was like Olanna's. She did not remember, though, to call him teacherlike everyone else and Ugwu hid his amusement when she said, “Ugwu!”

At the end of the second week, after the children left, Mrs. Muokelu asked Olanna to sit down with her in the living room. She pulled the edges of her too-long boubou together and tucked them between her legs.

“I have twelve people to feed,” she said. “And that is not counting my husband's relatives who have just come from Abakaliki. My husband has returned from the war front with one leg. What can he do? I am going to start afia attack and see if I can buy salt. I can no longer teach.”

“I understand,” Olanna said. “But must you join them in buying from enemy territory?” “What is there to buy in Biafra? They have blockaded us kpam-kpam.”

“But how will you go?”

“There is a woman I know. She supplies garrito the army, so they give her lorry a military escort. The lorry will take us to Ufuma and then we will walk across to where the border is porous in Nkwerre-Inyi.”

“How long is the walk?”

“About fifteen or twenty miles, nothing a determined person cannot do. We will carry our Nigerian coins and buy salt and garriand then walk back to the lorry.”

“Please be careful, my sister.”

“Many are doing it and nothing has happened to them.” She got up. “Ugwu will have to handle my class. But I know he can manage.”

From the dining table where he was giving Baby her garri and soup, Ugwu pretended not to have heard them.

He took over her class the next day. He loved the light of recognition in the older children's eyes when he explained the meaning of a word, loved the loud way Master said to Special Julius, “My wife and Ugwu are changing the face of the next generation of Biafrans with their Socratic pedagogy!” and loved, most of all, the teasing way Eberechi called him teacher.She was impressed. When he saw her standing by her house and watching him teach, he would raise his voice and pronounce his words more carefully. She began to come over after classes. She would sit in the backyard with him, or play with Baby, or watch him weed the vegetable patch. Sometimes Olanna asked her to take some corn down to the grinding station down the road.

Ugwu stole some of the milk and sugar that Master brought home from the directorate and put them in old tins and gave them to her. She said thank you but she looked unimpressed, and so, in the middle of a searing afternoon, he sneaked into Olanna's room and poured some scented talcum powder into a folded piece of paper. He had to impress her. Eberechi sniffed it and dabbed a little on her neck before she said, “I did not ask you for powder.”

Ugwu laughed. He felt, for the first time, completely at ease in her presence. She told him about her parents' pushing her into the army officer's room, and he listened as if he had not heard it before.

“He had a big belly,” she said, in a detached tone. “He did it quickly and then told me to lie on top of him. He fell asleep and I wanted to move away and he woke up and told me to stay there. I could not sleep so the whole night I looked at the saliva coming down the side of his mouth.” She paused. “He helped us. He put my brother in essential services in the army.”

Ugwu looked away. He felt angry that she had gone through what she had, and he felt angry with himself because the story had involved imagining her naked and had aroused him. He thought, in the following days, about him and Eberechi in bed, how different it would be from her experience with the colonel. He would treat her with the respect she deserved and do only what she liked, only what shewanted him to do. He would show her the positions he had seen in Master's ConciseCouples Handbookin Nsukka. The slender book had been squashed into a dusty corner of the study shelf, and the first time Ugwu saw it while he was cleaning, he looked through it hurriedly, sweeping past the pencil-sketched diagrams that somehow became more exciting because they were unreal. Later, he realized that Master probably didn't remember that the book existed so he took it to the Boys' Quarters to study over a few nights. He had thought about trying some of the positions out with Chinyere but never did: there was something about the methodical silence of her night visits that made any novelty impossible. He wished so much that he had brought the book from Nsukka. He wanted to remember some finer details, what the woman had done with her hands in the sideways-from-behind position, for example. He searched in Master's bedroom and felt foolish because he knew there was no way the ConciseCouplesHandbookwould be there. Then he felt a deep sadness at how few books there were on the table, in the whole house.

Ugwu was making Baby's breakfast and Master was taking a bath when Olanna began to shout from the living room. The radio was turned on very loud. She ran out to the back, to the outhouse, carrying it in her hand. “Odenigbo! Odenigbo! Tanzania has recognized us!”

Master came out with his moist wrapper barely tied around his waist, his chest covered in lustrous wet hair. His smiling face without the thick glasses looked funny. “Gini? What?”

“Tanzania has recognized us!” Olanna said.

“Eh?” Master said and they hugged and pressed their lips, their faces, close together as though inhaling each other's breath.

Then Master took the radio and tuned it. “Let's make sure. Let's hear it from others.”

Voice of America was reporting it, as was French radio, which Olanna translated: Tanzania was the first country to recognize the existence of the independent nation of Biafra. Finally, Biafra existed. Ugwu tickled Baby and she laughed.

“Nyerere will go down in history as a man of truth,” Master said. “Of course, many other countries want to recognize us but they won't because of America. America is the stumbling block!”

Ugwu was not sure how America was to blame for other countries not recognizing Biafra—he thought Britain really was to blame—but he repeated Master's words to Eberechi that afternoon, with authority, as though they were his. It was hot and he found her asleep on a mat in the shade of their veranda.

“Eberechi, Eberechi,” he said.

She sat up with the red-eyed, wounded look of a person jerked from sleep. But she smiled when she saw him. “Teacher, have you finished for today?”

“You heard that Tanzania has recognized us?”

“Yes, yes.” She rubbed her eyes and laughed, a happy sound that made Ugwu happier.

“America is the reason many other countries will not recognize us; America is the stumbling block,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. They were sitting side by side on the stairs. “We got double good news today. My aunty is now the provincial representative of Caritas. She said she will give me a job at the relief center in St. John's. It means I will get extra stockfish!”

She reached out and playfully pinched the skin of his neck, a gentle pressure between her fingers. He looked at her. He not only wanted to squeeze her naked buttocks, he also wanted to wake up next to her and know he would sleep next to her every day, wanted to talk to her and listen to her laughter. She was nothing like Chinyere, a fond convenience, but rather like a real Nnesinachi, one he had come to care for because of what she said and did, and not what he imagined she would say and do. He waswelling up with a surge of recognition and wanted to say, over and over, that he loved her. He loved her. But he didn't. They sat and praised Tanzania and dreamed about stockfish and were still talking desultorily when a Peugeot 403 sped across the street. It reversed, in loud screeches, as if the driver wanted to make as much of an impression as possible, and stopped in front of the house. biafran army was roughly handwritten on it in red paint. Asoldier climbed out, holding a gun, wearing a uniform so smart that the lines of ironing were visible down the front. Eberechi stood up as he walked up to them.

“Good afternoon,” she said. “Are you Eberechi?”

She nodded. “Is it about my brother? Has something happened to my brother?”

“No, no.” There was a knowing leer on his face that Ugwu in stantly disliked. “Major Nwogu is calling you. He is at the bar down the road.”

“Oh!” Eberechi left her mouth open, her hand on her chest. “I am coming, I am coming.” She turned and ran indoors. Ugwu felt betrayed by her excitement. The soldier was staring at him.

“Good afternoon,” Ugwu said.

“Who are you?” the soldier asked. “Are you an idle civilian?” “I am a teacher.”

“A teacher?Onyenkuzi?” He swung his gun back and forth.

“Yes,” Ugwu responded in English. “We organize classes in this neighborhood and teach the young ones the ideals of the Biafran cause.” He hoped his English sounded like Olanna's; he hoped, too, that his affectation would frighten this soldier into not asking him any more questions.

“Which classes?” the soldier asked, in a near mumble. He looked both impressed and uncertain. “We focus on civics and mathematics and English. The Director of Mobilization has sponsored our efforts.”

The soldier stared.

Eberechi hurried out; her face wore a thin coat of white powder, her eyebrows were darkened, her lips a red gash.

“Let's go,” she said to the soldier. Then she bent and whispered to Ugwu, “I am coming. If they look for me, please say I went to get something from Ngozi's house.”

“Okay, Mr. Teacher! See you!” the soldier said and Ugwu thought he saw a glimmer of triumph in his eyes, the illiterate fool. Ugwu could not bear to watch them go; he studied his nails instead. The mix of hurt and confusion and embarrassment weakened him. He could not believe she had just asked him to lie for her while she ran off to see a man she had never mentioned to him. His legs were sluggish as he walked across the road. Everything he did for the rest of the day was colored with a bitter dye, and he thought, more than once, about walking down to the bar to see what was going on.

It was dark when she knocked on the back door.

“Do you know they have already renamed the Rising Sun Bar?” she asked, laughing. “It is now called Tanzania Bar!”

He looked at her and said nothing.

“People were playing Tanzanian music and dancing, and one businessman came and ordered chicken and beer for everybody,” she said.

His jealousy was visceral; it clutched at his throat and tried to strangle him. “Where is Aunty Olanna?” she asked.

“She is reading with Baby,” Ugwu managed to say. He wanted to shake her until she told him the full truth of the afternoon, what she had done with the man, why the lipstick was gone from her lips.

Eberechi sighed. “Is there some water? I am thirsty. I drank beer today.”

Ugwu could not believe how casual and comfortable she was. He poured some water into a cup and she drank it slowly.“ I met the major some weeks ago; he gave me a lift when I went to Orlu, but I did not think he would even remember me. He is such a nice man.” Eberechi paused. “I told him you are my brother. He said he will make sure nobody comes here to conscript you.” She looked proud of what she had accomplished, and Ugwu felt as if she were deliberately pulling out his teeth, one after the other.

He turned away. He needed no favors from her lover. “I have to clean up,” he said stiffly. She drank another cup of water before she said, “Ngwanu;let the day break,” and left.

———

Ugwu stopped going over to Eberechi's house. He ignored her greetings, was angered by her wide-eyed look and her asking, “What is it, Ugwu? What did I do to offend you?” Eventually, she stopped asking or speaking to him. He didn't care. Yet when he heard a car drive past, he rushed to see if it was the biafran army Peugeot 403. He saw her leave in the mornings and thought perhaps she and the major had arranged a regular meeting place until she came by one evening to give some stockfish to Olanna. He opened the door and took the small package without a word.

“Such a nice girl, ezigbo nwa, ” Olanna said. “She must be doing well at that relief center.”

Ugwu said nothing. Olanna's affection offended him, as did the way Baby asked when Aunty Eberechi would come and play with her. He wanted them to feel the same sense of angry betrayal that he did. He would tell Olanna what had happened. It was true that he had never spoken of such personal things to her before but he felt that he could. He planned it carefully for Friday, the day Master went to Tanzania Bar with Special Julius after work. Olanna had taken Baby to visit Mrs. Muokelu, and while he waited for them to come back Ugwu weeded the garden and worried that his story was insubstantial. Olanna would laugh at him in that patient way she laughed at Master when he said something ridiculous. Eberechi had never spoken about her feelings for him, after all. But surely she could not pretend not to know how he felt about her. It was callous to have thrown her army-officer lover in his face like that, even if she did not feel the same way about him.

He steeled himself and went inside when he heard Olanna. They were in the living room, Baby was sitting on the floor and unwrapping something in an old newspaper.

“Welcome, mah,” Ugwu said.

Olanna turned to look at him, and the blankness in her eyes startled him. Something was wrong. Perhaps she had discovered that he had given some of the condensed milk to Eberechi. But her eyes were too hollow, too depthless, to be just about her anger at his milk theft of weeks ago. Something was very wrong. Was Baby sick again? Ugwu glanced at Baby, who was occupied with the newspaper wrapping. His stomach cramped at the prospect of bad news.

“Mah? Did something happen?” “Your master's mother is dead.”

Ugwu moved closer because her words had solidified, become suspended objects hovering just above his reach. It took him a moment to understand.

“His cousin sent a message,” Olanna said. “They shot her in Abba.”

“Hei!” Ugwu placed his hand on his head and struggled to remember what Mama had looked like the last time he saw her, standing by the kola nut tree, refusing to leave home. But he could not visualize her. Instead he recalled a blurred image of her in the kitchen in Nsukka, opening a pod of peppercorns. His eyes filled with tears. He wondered what other calamities he was yet to learn of. Perhaps the Hausa vandals had stayed back in his hometown; perhaps they had killed his own mother too.

When Master came home and went into his bedroom, Ugwu was unsure whether to go to the bedroom or wait for him to come out. He decided to wait. He lit the kerosene stove and mixed Baby'spap. He wished that he had been less resentful of Mama's strong-smelling soups. Olanna walked into the kitchen.

“Why are you using the kerosene stove?” she shouted. “Ina-ezuzuezuzu?Are you stupid? Haven't I told you to save our kerosene?”

Ugwu was startled. “But mah, you said I should cook Baby's food on the stove.” “I did not say that! Go outside and light a fire!”

“Sorry, mah.” But she had indeed said that; only Baby ate three times a day now—the rest of them ate twice—and Olanna had asked him to cook her food on the kerosene stove because the smell of firewood smoke made Baby cough.

“Do you know how much kerosene costs? Just because you don't pay for the things you use you think you can do with them as you like? Is firewood itself not a luxury where you come from?”

“Sorry, mah.”

Olanna sat down on a cement block in the backyard. Ugwu made a fire and finished making Baby's dinner. He was aware of her eyes on him.

“Your master won't talk to me,” she said.

The long pause that followed filled Ugwu with a deeply uncomfortable sense of intimacy; she had never before spoken to him about Master like this.

“Sorry, mah,” he said, and sat next to her; he wanted to place a hand on her back to comfort her but he couldn't and so he left his hand suspended, inches from touching her, until she sighed and got up and went inside.

Master came out to go to the outhouse.

“My madam told me what happened, sah,” Ugwu said. “Ndo. Sorry.” “Yes, yes,” Master said, and walked on briskly.

It was inadequate to Ugwu, their exchange; he felt as if Mama's death required more words, more gestures, more shared time between them. But Master had barely glanced at him. And when Special Julius came by later to say ndo, Master was just as brisk and brief.

“Certainly one must expect casualties. Death is the price of our liberty,” he said, and abruptly got up and went back into the bedroom, leaving Olanna to shake her head at Special Julius, her eyes tear-filled.

Ugwu thought Master would stay home from work the next day, but he took a bath earlier than he usually did. He did not drink his tea or touch the yam slices Ugwu had warmed up from the night before. He did not tuck in his shirt.

“You just can't cross to Biafra-Two, Odenigbo,” Olanna said, as she followed him out to the car. Master pushed down the palm fronds piled on top of it. Olanna kept saying something that Ugwu could not hear while Master silently bent over the open bonnet. He climbed in and drove off with a slight wave. Olanna ran off down the road. Ugwu thought, for one absurd moment, that she was chasing after Master's car but she came back to say that she had asked Special Julius to follow him and bring him back.

“He said he has to go and bury her. But the roads are occupied. The roads are occupied,” she said. Her eyes were focused on the compound entrance. With each sound she heard—a lorry rumbling past, a chirping bird, a child's cry—she ran from the veranda bench to peer down the road. A group of people armed with machetes walked past, singing. Their leader had one arm.

“Teacher! Well done!” one of them called, when they saw Olanna. “We are going combing! We are going to root out the infiltrators!”

They had almost passed when Olanna jerked up and shouted, “Please look out for my husband in a blue Opel.”

One of them turned and waved with a slightly puzzled look.Ugwu could feel the heat of the bright afternoon sun even under the thatch awning. Baby was playing barefoot in the front yard. Special Julius's long American car drove in and Olanna leaped up.

“He's not back?” Special Julius asked from the car. “You didn't see him,” Olanna said.

Special Julius looked worried. “But who told Odenigbo that he can make it past occupied roads? Who told him?”

Ugwu wanted the man to shut up. He had no right to criticize Master, and rather than sitting there in his ugly tunic he might turn around and go search properly for Master.

After Special Julius left, Olanna sat down and leaned forward and placed her head in her hands. “Do you want some water, mah?” Ugwu asked.

She shook her head. Ugwu watched the sun fall. Darkness came swiftly, brutally; there was no gradual change from light to dark.

“What am I going to do?” Olanna asked. “What am I going to do?” “Master will come back, mah.”

But Master did not come back. Olanna sat on the veranda until past midnight, resting her head against the wall.

27

Richard was at the dining table when the doorbell rang. He reduced the volume of the radio and rearranged the sheets of writing paper before he opened the door. Harrison stood there, his forehead, his neck, his arms, and his legs beneath his khaki shorts all wrapped in bloody bandages.

The red wetness made Richard feel faint. “Harrison! Good God. What happened to you?” “Good afternoon, master.”

“Were you attacked?” Richard asked.

Harrison came inside and placed his tattered bag down and began to laugh. Richard stared at him. When Harrison raised his hands to untie the bloody bandage on his head, Richard said, “No, no, there's no need to do that. No need at all. I'll call the driver right away. We'll take you to the hospital.”

Harrison yanked the bandage off. His head was smooth; there was no gash, no mark to show where the blood had come from.

“It is beets, sah,” Harrison said, and laughed again. “Beets?”

“Yes, sah.”

“It isn't blood then, you mean?”

“No, sah.” Harrison moved farther into the living room and made to stand at the corner, but Richard asked him to sit. He perched on the edge of the chair. The smile left his face as he began to speak.

“I am coming from my hometown, sah. I am not telling anybody that our hometown is falling soon so that they are not saying I am saboteur. But everybody is knowing that the vandals are close. Even two days ago we are hearing shelling, but the town council say it is our troops practicing. So I'm taking my family and our goats to the inside-inside farm. Then I begin coming Port Harcourt because I am not knowing what happened to Master. Even I am sending message with the driver of Professor Blyden since many weeks ago.”

“I didn't get any message.”

“Foolish man,” Harrison muttered, before he continued. “I am soaking cloth in fresh beet water and tying them in bandage and I am saying I am survivor of air raid. It is only how the militia people are allowing me to enter lorry. Only men with wounds is following the women and children.”

“So what happened in Nsukka? How did you leave?”

“It is many months now, sah. When I am hearing shelling I am packing your things and I am burying the manscrit inside box in the garden, near that small flower Jomo is planting the last time.”

“You buried the manuscript?”

“Yes, sah, because if not they are taking it from me on the road.”

“Yes, of course,” Richard said. It was unreasonable to hope that Harrison had brought In the Time of Roped Pots with him. “So how have you been getting on?”

Harrison shook his head. “Hunger is bad, sah. My people are watching the goats.” “Watching the goats?”

“To see what they are eating, and after seeing they are boiling the same leaves and giving their children to drink. It is stopping kwashiorkor.”

“I see,” Richard said. “Now go to the Boys' Quarters and have a wash.” “Yes, sah.” Harrison stood up.

“And what are your plans now?” “Sah?”“ Do you plan to go back to your hometown?”

Harrison fiddled with the arm bandage, thick with false blood. “No, sah. I am waiting until the war is ending so I am cooking for master.”

“Of course,” Richard said. It was a good thing two of Kainene's stewards had gone off to join the army and only Ikejide was left.

“But, sah, they are saying that Port Harcourt is falling soon. The vandals are coming with many ships from Britain. They are shelling outside Port Harcourt now.”

“Go on and have a bath, Harrison.” “Yes, sah.”

After Harrison left, Richard turned up the volume of the radio. He liked the cadence of the Arabic-inflected voice on Radio Kaduna, but he did not like the gleeful certitude with which it said “Port Harcourt is liberated! Port Harcourt is liberated!” They had been talking about the fall of Port Harcourt for the past two days. So had Lagos radio, although with a little less glee. The BBC, too, had announced that the imminent fall of Port Harcourt was the fall of Biafra; Biafra would lose its viable seaport, its airport, its control of oil.

Richard pulled the bamboo stopper from the bottle on the table and poured himself a drink. The pink liquid spread a pleasant warmth through his body. Emotions swirled in his head—relief that Harrison was alive, disappointment that his manuscript was buried in Nsukka, anxiety about the fate of Port Harcourt. Before he poured a second drink, he read the label on the bottle: republic of biafra, research and production directorate, nene sherry, 45%. He sipped slowly. Madu had brought two cartons the last time he visited, joking that locally made liquor in old beer bottles was part of the win-the-war effort.

“The RAP people claim that Ojukwu drinks this, though I doubt it,” he said. “I drink only the clear ones myself because I don't trust that coloring.”

Madu's irreverence, calling His Excellency Ojukwu, always bothered Richard but he said nothing because he did not want to see Madu's amused smirk, the same smirk Madu had when he told Kainene, “We are running our cars with a mix of kerosene and palm oil” or “We've perfected the flying ogbunigwe” or “We've made an armored car from scrap.” His we was edged with exclusion. The deliberate emphasis, the deepened voice, meant that Richard was not part of we;a visitor could not take the liberties of the homeowners.

And so, weeks ago, Richard was confused when Kainene first told him, “Madu would like you to write for the Propaganda Directorate. He'll get you a special pass and petrol supplies so you can move around. They'll send your pieces to our public relations people overseas.”

“Why me?”

Kainene shrugged. “Why not?” “The man hates me.”

“Don't be so dramatic. I think they want experienced insiders to do stories that are about more than just the number of Biafran dead.”

At first the word insider thrilled Richard. But doubts soon crawled out; insider had been Kainene's word, after all, and not Madu's. Madu saw him as a foreigner, which perhaps was why he thought he would be good at this. When Madu called and asked if he would do it, Richard said no.

“Have you thought about it?” Madu asked.

“You would not have asked me if I were not white.”

“Of course I asked because you are white. They will take what you write more seriously because you are white. Look, the truth is that this is not your war. This is not your cause. Your government will evacuate you in a minute if you ask them to. So it is not enough to carry limp branches and shout power, power to show that you support Biafra. If you really want to contribute, this is the way that youcan. The world has to know the truth of what is happening, because they simply cannot remain silent while we die. They will believe a white man who lives in Biafra and who is not a professional journalist. You can tell them how we continue to stand and prevail even though Nigerian MiG-Seventeens, Il-Twenty-eights, and L-Twenty-nine Delfins flown by Russians and Egyptians are bombing us every day, and how some of them are using transport planes and just crudely rolling out bombs to kill women and children, and how the British and the Soviets are in an unholy alliance giving more and more arms to Nigeria, and how the Americans have refused to help us, and how our relief flights come in at night with no lights because the Nigerians will shoot them down during the day….”

Madu paused to catch his breath, and Richard said, “Yes, I'll do it.” They simply cannot remain silent while we die rang in his head.

His first article was about the fall of Onitsha. He wrote that the Nigerians had tried many times to take this ancient town but the Biafrans fought valiantly, that hundreds of popular novels had been published here before the war, that the thick sad smoke of the burning Niger Bridge had risen like a defiant elegy. He described the Holy Trinity Catholic Church, where soldiers of the Nigeria Second Division first defecated on the altar before killing two hundred civilians. He quoted a calm eyewitness: “The vandals are people who shit on God. We will overcome them.”

As he wrote the article, he felt as if he were a schoolboy again, writing letters to Aunt Elizabeth while his headmaster monitored them. Richard remembered him clearly, his mottled complexion, how he called science “muck,” how he ate his porridge walking about in the dining hall because he said it was what gentlemen did. Richard was still not sure which he hated more at the time, being forced to write letters home or having the letter-writing session monitored. And he was not sure what he disliked more now, imagining Madu as his monitor or realizing that he cared very much what Madu thought. A note came from Madu some days later. It was very well done (perhaps a little less flowery next time?) and they have sent it off to Europe. Madu's handwriting was crabbed, and on the writing paper the nigerian of nigerian army had been crossed out in ink and biafran written in hasty block letters. But Madu's words convinced Richard that he had made the right decision. He imagined himself as the young Winston Churchill covering Kitchener's battle at Omdurman, a battle of superior versus inferior arms, except that, unlike Churchill, he sided with the moral victor.

Now, weeks later, after more articles, he felt a part of things. He found pleasure in the new respect in the driver's eyes, jumping out to open the door although Richard told him not to bother. He found pleasure in how quickly the civil defenders' suspicious glances at his special duties pass changed to wide grins when he greeted them in Igbo, in how willing people were to answer his questions. He found pleasure in the superiority he adopted with foreign journalists, speaking vaguely about the background to the war—the implications of the national strike and the census and the Western Region chaos—knowing all the while they had no idea what he was talking about.

But his greatest pleasure had come from meeting His Excellency. It was at the staging of a play in Owerri. An air raid had shattered all the louvers in the windows of the theater and the evening breeze blew some of the actors' words away. Richard sat some rows behind His Excellency, and, after the play, a top man at the Mobilization Directorate introduced them. The solid handshake, the “Thank you for the good work you're doing” in that soft Oxford-accented voice had filled Richard with equanimity. Even though he found the political play too obvious, he did not say so. He agreed with His Excellency: It was wonderful, just wonderful.

Richard could hear Harrison in the kitchen. He tuned to Radio Biafra, to the ending of an announcement about the enemy's being wedged in Oba, before he turned the radio off. He poured a smaller drink and reread his last sentence. He was writing about Commando Special Forces, how popular and revered they were by civilians, but his dislike of their commander, a German mercenary,made his words stiff. The writing was stilted. The sherry had sharpened his anxiety rather than deadened it. He got up and picked up the phone and called Madu.

“Richard,” Madu said. “How lucky. I just stepped in.” “Is there news on Port Harcourt?”

“News?”

“Is it threatened? There's been shelling in Umuokwurusi, hasn't there?”

“Oh, we have secure information that some saboteurs got their hands on some shells. You think if the vandals were really that close they would do that kind of halfhearted shelling?”

The amused tone in Madu's voice made him feel instantly foolish. “Sorry for the bother. I just thought …” He let his voice trail off.

“Not at all. Greet Kainene when she comes back,” Madu said, before hanging up.

Richard finished his drink and made to pour himself another but decided not to. He forced the stopper back into the mouth of the bottle and went out to the veranda. The sea was still. He stretched and ran a quick hand through his hair, as if to shrug off the foreboding. If Port Harcourt fell, he would lose the town he had come to love, the town in which he loved; he would lose a bit of himself. But Madu had to be right. Madu would not be in denial about a town that was about to fall, certainly not a town where Kainene lived. If he said Port Harcourt was not under threat, it was not.

Richard looked at his hazy reflection in the glass door. He had a tan and his hair looked fuller, slightly tousled, and he thought of Rimbaud's words:Iis someone else.

Kainene laughed when Richard told her about Harrison's beets. Then she touched his arm and said, “Don't worry, if he put the manuscript in a box, it will be safe from termites.” She slipped out of her work clothes and stretched languorously, and he admired the lean grace of her arched back. Desire reeled inside him, but he would wait for evening, after dinner, after they had entertained any guests, after Ikejide had retired. They would go out to the veranda and he would push the table aside and spread out the soft rug and lie on his naked back. When she climbed astride, he would hold her hips and stare up at the night sky and, for those moments, be sure of the meaning of bliss. It was their new ritual since the war started, the only reason he was grateful for the war.

“Colin Williamson stopped by my office today,” Kainene said.

“I didn't know he was back,” Richard said, and Colin's sunburned face came to his mind, the flash of discolored teeth as he talked, too often, about how he left the BBC because his editors were supportive of Nigeria.

“He brought a letter from my mother,” Kainene said. “From your mother!”

“She read his story in the Observerand contacted him to ask whether he would be returning to Biafra and would he deliver a letter to her daughter in Port Harcourt. She was surprised when he said he knew us.”

Richard loved the way she said us.“Are they all right?”

“Of course they are; nobody is bombing London. She says she has nightmares about Olanna and me dying, she's saying prayers, and they're involved with the Save Biafra Campaign in London—which must mean they sent a small donation.” Kai-nene paused and handed him an envelope. “She rather cleverly taped some British pounds into the inner lining of a card. Quite impressive. She sent one for Olanna too.”

He read the letter quickly. Regards to Richard was the only reference to him, at the bottom of the blue paper. He wanted to ask Kainene how she planned to deliver Olanna's but he would not. Silence had enshrined the subject of Olanna with each month, each year, that passed without their bringing itup. When Kai-nene received the three letters Olanna had written since the war started, she had said nothing except that she received them. And she had not replied.

“I'll send somebody to Umuahia next week to deliver Olanna's,” Kainene said. He gave the letter back to her. The silence was becoming curdled.

“The Nigerians won't stop talking about Port Harcourt,” he said.

“They won't take Port Harcourt. Our best battalion is here.” Kainene sounded casual enough, but there was a new wariness in her eyes, the same wariness she had when she told him, months ago, that she wanted to buy an uncompleted house in Orlu. She had said it was better to own property rather than cash but he suspected that, for her, it was a safety net in case Port Harcourt fell. For him, considering the fall of Port Harcourt was blasphemous. Every weekend, when they inspected the house to make sure her builders were not stealing the materials, he never spoke of their living there, as though to absolve himself from the blasphemy.

And he no longer wanted to travel. He wanted to guard Port Harcourt with his presence; as long as he was there, he felt, nothing would happen. But the public relations people in Europe had asked for an article about the airstrip in Uli, so he left reluctantly, very early in the morning, so he would be back before midday when Nigerian planes strafed vehicles driving on major roads. A wide bomb crater loomed ahead on Okigwe Road. The driver swerved to avoid it and Richard felt a familiar foreboding, but his thoughts lightened as they approached Uli. It was his first visit to Biafra's only link to the outside world, this wonder of an airstrip where food and arms evaded Nigerian bombers. He climbed out of the car and looked at the strip of tarmac with thick bush on either side and thought of the people who did so much with so little. A tiny jet was parked at the far end. The morning sun was hot; three men were spreading palm fronds on the tarmac, working swiftly and sweating, pushing along large carts piled with fronds. Richard went over to say, “Well done, jisienu ike.”

An official came out of the unfinished terminal building nearby and shook Richard's hand. “Don't write too much, oh! Don't give away our secrets,” he joked.

“Of course not,” Richard said. “Can I interview you?”

The man beamed and flexed his shoulders and said, “Well, I am in charge of customs and immigration.” Richard hid a smile; people always felt important when he asked for an interview. They talked standing by the tarmac, and shortly after the man returned to the building, a tall fair-haired man walked out. Richard recognized him: Count Von Rosen. He looked older than in the picture Richard had seen, closer to seventy than sixty, but his was an elegant aging; his strides were long and his chin firm.

“They told me you were out here and I thought I'd say hello,” he said, his handshake as unwavering as his green eyes. “I've just read your excellent article on the Biafran Boys Brigade.”

“Apleasure to meet you, Count Von Rosen,” Richard said. And it wasa pleasure. Ever since he read about this Swedish aristocrat who bombed Nigerian targets with his own small plane, he had wanted to meet him.

“Remarkable men,” the count said, glancing at the workers who were making sure that, from above, the black stretch of tarmac would look like bush. “Remarkable country.”

“Yes,” Richard said.

“Do you like cheese?” the count asked. “Cheese? Yes. Yes, of course.”

The count dug into his pocket and brought out a small packet. “Excellent cheddar.” Richard took it and tried to shield his surprise. “Thank you.”

The count fumbled in his pocket again and Richard worried that he might be bringing out more cheese. But he pulled out a pair of sunglasses and put them on. “I'm told your wife is a wealthy Igbo, one of those who stayed back to fight for the cause.” Richard had never thought about it like that, Kainene staying back to fight for the cause, but he was pleased that the count had been told this and told also that he and Kainene were married. He felt a sudden fierce pride for Kainene. “Yes. She's an extraordinary woman.”

There was a pause. The intimacy of the cheese present required a reciprocating gesture, so Richard opened his diary and showed the count first a photo of Kainene, taken by the pool with a cigarette between her lips, and then the photo of the roped pot.

“I fell in love with Igbo-Ukwu art and then fell in love with her,” he said.

“Beautiful, both,” the count said, before he took his sunglasses off to examine the photos. “Are you going on a mission today?” Richard asked.

“Yes.”

“Why are you doing this, sir?”

He put his glasses back on. “I worked with the freedom fighters in Ethiopia and before that I flew in relief to the Warsaw ghetto,” he said with a slight smile, as if that answered the question. “Now I must get on. Keep up the good work.”

Richard watched him walk away, a straight-backed courtier, and thought how different he was from the mercenary. “I love the Biafrans,” the red-faced German had said. “Nothing like the bloody kaffirs in Congo.” He had spoken to Richard in his house in the middle of the bush, drinking from a large bottle of whisky, watching his adopted child—a pretty Biafran toddler—playing with a collection of old shrapnel on the floor. Richard had felt annoyed by the affectionate contempt with which he treated the child and by the exception he made of Biafrans. It was as though the mercenary felt that here finally were black people he could like. The count was different. Richard glanced at the tiny jet again before he climbed into the car.

On the way back, just outside Port Harcourt, he heard the distant rattle of gunfire. It was not long before it stopped. It worried him. And when Kainene suggested they go to Orlu the next day to find a carpenter for her new house, Richard wished they did not have to go. Two consecutive days away from Port Har-court worried him.

The new house was surrounded by cashew trees. Richard remembered how dejected it had looked when Kainene bought it–half-finished with layers of green mold on the unpainted walls—how the flies and bees clustered over the fallen cashews had nauseated him. The owner had been principal of the community secondary school down the road. Now that the school was a refugee camp, now that his wife had died, he was going into the interior with his goats and his children. He repeated, “This house is out of shelling range, completely out of shelling range,” until Richard wondered how he could possibly know where the Nigerians would shell from. There was an unobtrusive charm about the bungalow, Richard conceded, as they walked through the empty, newly painted rooms. Kainene hired two carpenters from the refugee camp, made sketches on a sheet of paper, and, back in the car, told Richard, “I don't trust them to make a decent table.”

A shrill sound went off as they drove out of Orlu. The driver stopped with a jerk, in the middle of the road, and they jumped out of the car and into the thick green bush. Some women who had been walking along the road ran too, looking up as they did, twisting their necks. It was the first time Richard had taken cover with Kainene; she lay flat and rigid on the ground next to him. Their shoulders touched. The driver was a little way behind them. The silence was absolute. A loud rustling nearby made Richard tense until a redheaded lizard crawled out. They waited and waited and finally got up when they heard the revving of a car engine and rising voices from nearby, “My money is gone! My money is gone!” There was a market only yards away. Somebody had stolen from one of the traders while she was taking cover. Richard could see her and some other women underneath openstalls, shouting and gesticulating. It was difficult to believe how silent it all had been a moment ago, and how Biafran markets now thrived so easily in the bush since the Nigerians bombed the open-air Awgu market.

“False alarm is worse than the real one,” the driver said.

Kainene dusted herself down carefully, but the ground was wet and the mud had stuck to her clothes; her blue dress looked designed with chocolate-colored smudges. They climbed into the car and continued the journey. Richard sensed that Kainene was angry.

“Look at the tree,” he told her, pointing. It had been cleanly split in two, from the branches down to the stem. One half still stood, slightly tilted, while the other lay on the ground.

“It seems recent,” Kainene said.

“My uncle flew a plane in the war. He bombed Germany. It's strange to think of him doing something like this.”

“You don't talk about him.”

“He died. He was shot down.” Richard paused. “I'm going to write about our new forest markets.” The driver had stopped at a checkpoint. Alorry loaded with sofas and shelves and tables was parked

by the side, and a man stood beside it talking to a young female civil defender wearing khaki jeans and canvas shoes. She left him and came up and peered at Richard and Kainene. She asked the driver to open the boot, looked inside the glove compartment, and then extended her hand for Kainene's handbag.

“If I had a bomb, I would not hide it in my bag,” Kainene muttered. “What did you say, madam?” the young woman asked.

Kainene said nothing. The woman looked through the bag carefully. She brought out a small radio. “What is this? Is this a transmitter?”

“It is not a transmitter. It is a ra-di-o,” Kainene said, with a mocking slowness. The young woman examined their special duties passes, smiled, and adjusted her beret. “Sorry, madam. But you know we have many saboteurs who use strange gadgets to transmit to Nigeria. Vigilance is our watchword!”

“Why have you stopped that man with the lorry?” Kainene asked. “We are turning back people evacuating furniture.”

“Why?”

“Evacuations like this cause panic in the civil population.” She sounded as if she were reciting something rehearsed. “There is no cause for alarm.”

“But what if his town is about to fall? Do you know where he has come from?” She stiffened. “Good day, madam.”

As soon as the driver started the car, Kainene said, “It's such an awful joke, isn't it?” “What?” Richard asked, although he knew what she meant.

“This fear we are whipping up in our people. Bombs in women's bras! Bombs in tins of baby milk! Saboteurs everywhere! Watch your children because they could be working for Nigeria!”

“It's normal for wartime.” He sometimes wished she would not be so arch about things. “It's important for people to be aware that there are saboteurs in our midst.”

“The only saboteurs we have are the ones Ojukwu invented so he can lock up his opponents and the men whose wives he wants. Did I ever tell you about the Onitsha man who bought up all of the cement we had in the factory shortly after the refugees started coming back? Ojukwu is having an affair with the man's wife and has just had the man arrested for nothing.”

She was tapping her foot on the car floor. She always sounded like Madu when she spoke about His Excellency. Her disdain did not convince Richard; it began when Madu complained that His Excellency had bypassed him and made his junior a commanding officer. If His Excellency had not bypassed Madu, perhaps she would be less critical.“ Do you know how many officers he's locked up? He is so suspicious of his officers that he's using civilians to buy arms. Madu said they just bought some miserable bolt-action rifles in Europe. Really, when Biafra is established, we will have to remove Ojukwu.”

“And replace him with who, Madu?”

Kainene laughed, and it pleased and surprised him that she had enjoyed his sarcasm. His foreboding returned, a rumbling rush in his stomach, as they approached Port Harcourt.

“Stop so that we can buy akara and fried fish,” Kainene said to the driver, and even the driver's stepping on the brake made Richard nervous.

When they got home, Ikejide said Colonel Madu had called four times.

“I hope nothing is wrong,” Kainene said, opening the oil-smeared newspaper package of fried fish and bean cakes. Richard took a still-hot akaraand blew on it and told himself that Port Harcourt was safe. Nothing was wrong. The phone rang and he grabbed it and felt his heart begin to jog when he heard Madu's voice.

“How are you? Any problems?” Madu asked. “No. Why?”

“There's a rumor that Britain supplied five warships to Nigeria, so youths have been burning British shops and houses all over Port Harcourt today. I wanted to be sure you hadn't been bothered. I can send one or two of my boys down.”

First, Richard was irritated at the thought that he still was a foreigner who could be attacked, and then he felt grateful for Madu's concern.

“We're fine,” he said. “We've just come back from seeing the house in Orlu.”

“Oh, good. Let me know if anything develops.” Madu paused and spoke to somebody in muffled tones before he came back on the line. “You should write about what the French ambassador said yesterday.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I was told that Biafrans fought like heroes, but now I know that heroes fight like Biafrans,” Madu intoned proudly, as if the compliment was one given him personally and he wanted to make sure Richard knew it.

“Yes, of course,” Richard said again. “Port Harcourt is safe, isn't it?”

There was a pause on Madu's end. “Some saboteurs have been arrested and all of them are non-Igbo minorities. I don't know why these people insist on aiding the enemy. But we will overcome. Is Kainene there?”

Richard handed Kainene the phone. The sacrilege of it, that some people could betray Biafra. He remembered the Ijaw and Efik men he had spoken to at a bank in Owerri, who said the Igbo would dominate them when Biafra was established. Richard had told them that a country born from the ashes of injustice would limit its practice of injustice. When they looked at him doubtfully, he mentioned the army general who was Efik, the director who was Ijaw, the minority soldiers who were fighting so brilliantly for the cause. Still, they looked unconvinced.

Richard stayed at home the following days. He wrote about the forest markets and stood often on the veranda, looking down the stretch of road, half expecting a mob of youths to rush toward the house with flaming torches. Kainene had seen one of the burned houses on her way to work. A mild effort, she had called it; they had only blackened the walls. Richard wanted to see it too, to write about it and perhaps link it to the burning of effigies of Wilson and Kosygin he had seen recently at the government field, but he waited for a week to make sure it was safe to be a British man on the road before he left very early in the morning for a tour of the city.He was surprised to see a new checkpoint on Aggrey Road and even more surprised that it was guarded by soldiers. Perhaps it was because of the burned houses. The road was empty, all the shouting hawkers with their groundnuts and newspapers and fried fish were gone. A soldier stood in the middle of the road, swinging his gun as they approached, motioning that they go back. The driver stopped and Richard held out his pass. The soldier ignored the pass and kept swinging his gun. “Turn back! Turn back!”

“Good morning,” Richard began. “I am Richard Churchill and I am—”

“Turn back or I shoot! Nobody is leaving Port Harcourt! There is no cause for alarm!”

The man's fingers were twitchy on the gun. The driver turned around. Richard's foreboding had become hard pebbles in his nostrils, but he made himself sound casual when he got back home and told Kainene what had happened.

“I'm sure it's nothing,” he said. “There are so many rumors flying around, the army probably wants to put a stop to the panic.”

“Certainly a fine way to do it,” Kainene said, and there was that wary expression of hers again. She was placing some papers in a file. “We should call Madu and find out what's going on.”

“Yes,” Richard said. “Well, I'll go and shave. I didn't have time to shave before I left.”

He heard the first boom from the bathroom. He kept running the stick over his chin. It came again: boom, boom, boom. The window louvers shattered and the glass shards clinked as they fell to the floor. Some of them landed close to his feet.

Kainene opened the bathroom door. “I've asked Harrison and Ikejide to put a few things in the car,” she said. “We'll leave the Ford and take the Peugeot.”

Richard turned and stared at her and felt the urge to cry. He wished he were as calm as she was, that his hands would not shake as he washed them. He took his shaving cream, her soaps, and some sponges and threw them in a bag.

“Richard, we should hurry, the shelling sounds very close by,” Kainene said, and again there was a series of boom, boom, boom. She was putting her things and his into a suitcase. The drawers that held his shirts and his underwear were pulled out, and her packing was quick and methodical. He ran a hand over his books lined on the shelf and then began to search for the sheets where he had written notes for his piece about ogbunigwe, the fantastic Biafran-made land mines. He had left them on the table, he was sure. He looked inside the drawers.

“Have you seen my papers?” he asked.

“We have to get past the main road before they advance, Richard,” Kainene said. She stuffed two fat envelopes into her bag.

“What are those envelopes?” he asked. “Emergency cash.”

Harrison and Ikejide came in and began to drag the two packed suitcases out. Richard heard the roar of planes above. It couldn't possibly be. There had never been an air raid in Port Harcourt and it made no sense that there would be one now, when Port Harcourt was about to fall and the vandals were shelling close by. But the sound was unmistakable, and when Harrison shouted, “Enemy plane, sah!” his words felt redundant.

Richard ran toward Kainene, but she was already running out of the room, and he followed. She said, “Come out to the orchard!” when she ran past Harrison and Ikejide crouched under the kitchen table.

Outside, the air was humid. Richard looked up and saw them, two planes flying low, with an ominously streamlined efficiency to their shape, trailing silver-white lines in the sky. Fear spread helplessness throughout his body. They lay under the orange trees, he and Kainene, side by side, silent. Harrison and Ikejide had run out of the house; Harrison threw himself flat on the ground while Ikejidekept running, his body arched slightly forward, his arms flying around, his head bobbing. Then came the cold whistle of a mortar in the air and the crash as it landed and the boom as it exploded. Richard pressed Kainene to him. A piece of shrapnel, the size of a fist, wheezed past. Ikejide was still running and, in the moment that Richard glanced away and back, Ikejide's head was gone. The body was running, arched slightly forward, arms flying around, but there was no head. There was only a bloodied neck. Kainene screamed. The body crashed down near her long American car, the planes receded and disappeared into the distance, and they all lay still for long minutes, until Harrison got up and said, “I am getting bag.”

He came back with a raffia bag. Richard did not look as Harrison went over to pick up Ikejide's head and put it in the bag. Later, as he grasped the still-warm ankles and walked, with Harrison holding the wrists, to the shallow grave at the bottom of the orchard, he did not once look directly at it.

Kainene sat on the ground and watched them.

“Are you all right?” Richard asked her. She did not respond. There was an eerie blankness in her eyes. Richard was not sure what to do. He shook her gently but the blank look remained, so he went to the tap and splashed a bucket of cold water on her.

“Stop it, for heaven's sake,” she said, and got up. “You've wet my dress.”

She pulled out another dress from a suitcase and changed in the kitchen before they left for Orlu. She no longer hurried; slowly, she straightened the collar, smoothed down the rumpled bodice with her hands. The jumble of sounds jarred Richard as he drove—the boom-boom-boom of mortars, the quickening rattle of gunshots—and he expected to see a Nigerian soldier stop them or attack them or throw a grenade at them at any time. Nothing happened. The roads were crowded. The checkpoints were gone. From the backseat, Harrison said in a cowed whisper, “They are using everything they are having to take Port Harcourt.”

Kainene said little when they arrived in Orlu and saw no carpenter and no furniture; the men had disappeared with the advance payment. She simply walked to the refugee camp down the road and found another carpenter, a sallow-skinned man who wanted to be paid in food. In the following days, she was mostly silent, withdrawn, as they sat outside and watched the carpenter cutting, hammering, smoothing.

“Why don't you want money?” Kainene asked him. “What will I buy with the money?” he asked.

“You must be a foolish man,” Kainene said. “There is much you can buy with money.” “Not in this Biafra.” The man shrugged. “Just give me garri and rice.”

Kainene did not respond. Abird's dropping fell on the floor of the veranda, and Richard picked up a cashew leaf and wiped it off.

“You know Olanna saw a mother carrying her child's head,” Kainene said.

“Yes,” Richard said, although he did notknow. She had never told him about Olanna's experience during the massacres.

“I want to see her.”

“You should go.” Richard took a deep breath to steady himself and stared at one of the finished chairs. It was sharp-angled and ugly.

“How could shrapnel cut off Ikejide's head so completely?” Kainene asked, as if she wanted him to tell her that she was mistaken about the whole thing. He wished he could. At nights, she cried. She told him she wanted to dream of Ikejide but she woke up every morning and remembered his running headless body clearly while, in the safer blurred territory of her dreams, she saw herself smoking a cigarette in an elegant gold holder.
———

A van delivered bags of garrito the house, and Kainene asked Harrison not to touch them because they were for the refugee camp. She was the new food supplier.

“I'll distribute the food to the refugees myself and I'm going to ask the Agricultural Research Center for some shit,” she told Richard.

“Shit?”

“Manure. We can start a farm at the camp. We'll grow our own protein, soya beans, and akidi.” “Oh.”

“There's a man from Enugu who has a fantastic talent for making baskets and lamps. I'll have him teach others. We can create income here. We can make a difference! And I'll ask the Red Cross to send us a doctor every week.”

There was a manic vibrancy about her, about the way she left for the refugee camp each day, about the exhaustion that shadowed her eyes when she returned in the evenings. She no longer spoke of Ikejide. Instead, she spoke about twenty people living in a space meant for one and about the little boys who played War and the women who nursed babies and the selfless Holy Ghost priests Father Marcel and Father Jude. But it was Inatimi she spoke about the most. He was in the Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters, had lost his entire family in the massacres, and often infiltrated enemy camps. He came by to educate the refugees.

“He thinks it's important for our people to know that our cause is just and to understand why this is true. I've told him not to bother teaching them about federalism and the Aburi accord and whatnot. They will never grasp it. Some of them didn't even go to primary school. But he just ignores me and goes on spending time with little groups of people.” Kainene sounded admiring, as if his ignoring her was further proof of his heroism. Richard resented Inatimi. In his mind, Inatimi became perfect, brave and bracing, made intrepid and sensitive by loss. When he finally met Inatimi he nearly laughed in the face of this small pimpled man with a bulb of a nose. But he could see, right away, that Inatimi's god was Biafra. His was a fervent faith in the cause.

“When I lost my whole family, every single one, it was as if I had been born all over again,” Inatimi told Richard in his quiet way. “I was a new person because I no longer had family to remind me of what I had been.”

The priests, too, were nothing like Richard had expected. He was surprised by their quiet cheer. When they told him, “We are amazed at the good work God is doing here,” Richard wanted to ask why God had allowed the war to happen in the first place. Yet their faith moved him. If God could make them care so genuinely, God was a worthy concept.

Richard was talking to Father Marcel about God on the morning the doctor arrived. Her dusty Morris Minor had red cross painted on it in red. Even before she said “I'm Dr. Inyang,” with an easy handshake, Richard knew she was from one of the minority tribes. He prided himself on his ability to recognize an Igbo person. It was nothing to do with how they looked; it was, instead, a fellow feeling.

Kainene led Dr. Inyang straight to the sickroom, the classroom at the end of the block. Richard followed; he watched while Kainene talked about the refugees lying on bamboo pallets. A pregnant young woman sat up and held her chest and began to cough, unending chesty coughing that was painful to hear.

Dr. Inyang bent over her with a stethoscope and said, in gentle Pidgin English, “How are you? How you dey?”

First the pregnant young woman recoiled and then she spat with a vicious intensity that wrinkled her forehead. The watery smear of saliva landed on Dr. Inyang's chin.

“Saboteur!” the pregnant woman said. “It is you non-Igbo who are showing the enemy the way!Hapu m!It is you people that showed them the way to my hometown!” Dr. Inyang's hand rested on her chin, too stunned to wipe the saliva off. The silence was thickened by uncertainty. Kainene walked over briskly and slapped the pregnant woman, two hard smacks in quick succession on her cheek.

“We are all Biafrans! Anyincha bu Biafra!” Kainene said. “Do you understand me? We are all Biafrans!”

The pregnant woman fell back on her bed.

Richard was startled by Kainene's violence. There was something brittle about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would destroy her.

28

Olanna had a happy dream. She did not remember what it was about but she remembered that it had been happy, and so she woke up warming herself with the thought that she could still have a happy dream. She wished Odenigbo had not gone to work so she could tell him about it and trace his gently indulgent smile as he listened, the smile that said he did not need to agree with her to believe her. But she had not seen that smile since his mother died, since he tried to go to Abba and came back clutching a shadow, since he began to leave for work too early and to stop at Tanzania Bar on his way home. If only he had not tried to cross the occupied roads, he would not be so gaunt and withdrawn now; his grief would not be burdened by failure. She should never have let him go. But his determination had been quietly hostile, as though he felt she had no right to stop him. His words—“I have to bury what the vultures left behind”—dug a gully between them that she had not known how to bridge. Before he climbed into the car and drove off, she had told him, “Somebody must have buried her.”

And later, as she sat on the veranda waiting for him, she loathed herself for not finding better words. Somebody must have buried her. It sounded so trivial. What she meant was that surely his cousin Aniekwena buried her. Aniekwena's message, sent through a soldier on leave, was brief: Abba was occupied and he had sneaked back to try and evacuate some property and found Mama lying dead from gunshot wounds near the compound wall. He had said nothing more, but Olanna assumed he must have dug a grave. He could not have left her lying there, decaying.

Olanna no longer remembered the hours of waiting for Odenigbo to come back, but she did remember the sensation of blindness, of cold sheaths being drawn over her eyes. She had worried from time to time about Baby and Kainene and Ugwu dying, vaguely acknowledged the possibilities of future grief, but she had never conceived of Odenigbo's death. Never. He was her life's constant. When he came back, long after midnight, with his shoes covered in mud, she knew he would not be the same again. He asked Ugwu for a glass of water and told her in a calm voice, “They kept asking me to go back, so I parked the car and hid it and began to walk. Finally, one Biafran officer cocked his gun and said he would shoot and save the vandals the trouble if I didn't turn around.”

She held him close to her and sobbed. Her relief was stained with desolation.

“I'm fine, nkem, ” he said. But he no longer went into the interior with the Agitator Corps, no longer returned with lit-up eyes. Instead, he went to Tanzania Bar every day and came back with a taciturn set to his mouth. When he did talk, he spoke of his unpublished research papers left behind in Nsukka, how they were almost enough to make him a full professor, and heaven knew what the vandals would do with them. She wanted him to truly talk to her, help her to help him grieve, but each time she told him, he said, “It's too late, nkem.” She was not sure what he meant. She sensed the layers of his grief —he would never know how Mama had died and would always struggle with old resentments—but she did not feel connected to his mourning. Sometimes she wondered if this was her own failure rather than his, if perhaps she lacked a certain strength that would compel him to include her in his pain.
———

Okeoma visited to pay condolences.

“I heard what happened,” he said, when Olanna opened the door. She hugged him and looked at the jagged, swollen scar that ran from his chin to his neck and thought how quickly it spread, news ofdeath.

“He has not really spoken to me,” she said. “What he says to me makes no sense.”

“Odenigbo has never known how to be weak. Be patient with him.” Okeoma spoke in a near whisper because Odenigbo had come out. After they hugged and thumped each other's backs, Okeoma looked at him.

“Ndo, ” he said. “Sorry.”

“I think she must have been surprised when they shot her,” Odenigbo said. “Mama never understood that we were really at war and that her life was in danger.”

Olanna stared at him.

“What has happened has happened,” Okeoma said. “You must be strong.” A short and shabby silence fell across the room.

“Julius brought some fresh palm wine,” Odenigbo said finally. “You know, they mix in too much water these days, but this one is very good.”

“I'll drink that later. Where is that White Horse whisky you save for special occasions?” “It is almost finished.”

“Then I will finish it,” Okeoma said.

Odenigbo brought the bottle and they sat in the living room, the radio turned low and the aroma of Ugwu's soup in the air.

“My commander drinks this like water,” Okeoma said, and shook the bottle to see how much was left.

“And how is he, your commander, the white-man mercenary?” Odenigbo asked.

Okeoma darted an apologetic glance at Olanna before he said, “He throws girls on their backs in the open where the men can see him and does them, all the time holding his bag of money in one hand.” Okeoma drank from the bottle and scrunched up his face for a moment. “We could easily have retaken Enugu if the man only listened, but he thinks he knows more about our own land than we do. He has started commandeering relief cars. He threatened His Excellency last week that he would leave if he doesn't get his balance.”

Okeoma took another swig from the bottle.

“Two days ago I went out in mufti and a ranger stopped me on the road and accused me of deserting. I warned him never to try that again or I would show him why we commandos are different from regular soldiers. I heard him laughing as I walked away. Imagine that! Before, he would never have dared to laugh at a commando. If we don't reorganize soon we will lose our credibility.”

“Why should white people be paid to fight our war anyway?” Odenigbo leaned back on the chair. “There are many of us who can truly fight because we are willing to give ourselves for Biafra.”

Olanna stood up. “Let's eat,” she said. “I'm sorry our soup has no meat, Okeoma.”

“I'm sorry our soup has no meat, ” Okeoma mimicked. “Does this place look like a meat shop? I did not come looking for meat.”

Ugwu placed the plates of garri on the table.

“Please remove your grenade while we eat, Okeoma,” Olanna said.

He dislodged it from his waist and placed it in the corner. They ate in silence for a while, molding their garri into balls, dipping in soup, swallowing.

“What is that scar?” Olanna asked.

“Oh, it's nothing,” Okeoma said, and ran his hand lightly over it. “It looks more serious than it is.” “You should join the Biafran Writers League,” she said. “You should be one of those going abroad

to publicize our cause.”

Okeoma started to shake his head while Olanna was still speaking. “I am a soldier,” he said. “Do you still write?” Olanna asked.He shook his head again.

“Do you have a poem for us, though? From your head?” she asked, and sounded desperate even to herself.

Okeoma swallowed a ball of garri, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. “No,” he said. He turned to Odenigbo. “Did you hear what our shore batteries did to the vandals in the Onitsha sector?”

After lunch, Odenigbo went into the bedroom. Okeoma finished the whisky and then drank glass after glass of palm wine and fell asleep in the living room chair. His breathing was labored; he mumbled and twice flayed his arms as if to shake some invisible attackers off. Olanna patted his shoulder to wake him up.

“Kunie. Come and lie down inside,” she said.

He opened reddened, bewildered eyes. “No, no, I'm really not sleeping.” “Look at you. You were gone.”

“Not at all.” Okeoma stifled a yawn. “I do have a poem in my head.” He sat up and straightened his back and began to recite. He sounded different. In Nsukka, he had read his poetry dramatically, as though convinced that his art mattered more than anything else. Now he had a tone of unwilling banter, but still banter.

“Brown
With the fish-glow sheen of a mermaid,
She appears,
Bearing silver dawn;
And the sun attends her,
The mermaid
Who will never be mine.”

“Odenigbo would have said, ‘The voice of a generation!' ” Olanna said. “What would you say?”

“The voice of a man.”

Okeoma smiled shyly, and she remembered how Odenigbo teased her about his being secretly infatuated with her. The poem was about her, and he had wanted her to know it. They sat in silence until his eyes began to close and soon his snoring became regular. She watched him and wondered what he was dreaming about. He was still sleeping, often mumbling and rolling his head from side to side, when Professor Achara arrived in the evening.

“Oh, your friend the commando is here,” he said. “Please call Odenigbo. Let's go out to the veranda.”

They sat on the bench on the veranda. Professor Achara kept glancing down, clasping and unclasping his hands.

“I have come on a difficult matter,” he said.

Fear constricted Olanna's chest: something had happened to Kainene and they had sent Professor Achara to tell her. She wanted Professor Achara to leave right away without telling her, because what she did not know would not hurt her.

“What is it?” Odenigbo asked sharply.

“I have tried to make your landlord change his mind. I have done everything I can. But he refused. He wants you to pack out in two weeks.”

“I'm not sure I understand,” Odenigbo said.

But Olanna was sure he did. They were being asked to move out of the house because the landlord had found somebody who would pay him twice or perhaps three times the rent.

“I'm so sorry, Odenigbo. He is usually a most reasonable man, but I suppose the times have taken away a bit of our reason.” Odenigbo sighed. “I will help find another place,” Professor Achara said.They were lucky to find one room, now that Umuahia was thronged with refugees. The long strip of a building had nine rooms, side by side, with doors that led out onto a narrow veranda. The kitchen was at one end and the bathroom at the other, next to a grove of banana trees. Their room was closer to the bathroom and, on the first day, Olanna looked at it and could not imagine how she would live here with Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu, eat and dress and make love in a single room. Odenigbo set about separating their sleeping area with a thin curtain, and afterward Olanna looked at the sagging string he had tied to nails on the wall, remembered Uncle Mbaezi and Aunty Ifeka's room in Kano, and began to cry.

“We'll get something better soon,” Odenigbo said, and she nodded and did not tell him that she was not crying about their room.

Mama Oji lived next door. She had a hard face and blinked so rarely that Olanna was disconcerted by her wide-eyed stare the first time they spoke.

“Welcome, nno, ” she said. “Your husband is not here?” “He's at work,” Olanna said.

“I wanted to see him before the others do; it is about my children.” “Your children?”

“The landlord called him doctor.” “Oh, no. He has a doctorate.”

Mama Oji's cool uncomprehending eyes drilled holes into Olanna. “He is a doctor of books,” Olanna said, “not a doctor for sick people.”

“Oh.” Mama Oji's expression did not change. “My children have asthma. Three have died since the war started. Three are left.”

“Sorry. Ndo, ” Olanna said.

Mama Oji shrugged and then told her that all the neighbors were accomplished thieves. If she left a container of kerosene in the kitchen, it would be empty when she came out. If she left her soap in the bathroom it would walk away. If she hung out her clothes and did not keep an eye on them, they would fly off the lines.

“Be very careful,” she said. “And lock your door even when you are just going to urinate.”

Olanna thanked her and wished, for her sake, that Odenigbo really was a medical doctor. She thanked the other neighbors who came to the door to greet and gossip. There were too many people in the yard; a family of sixteen lived in the room next to Mama Oji. The bathroom floor was slimy with too much dirt washed off too many bodies, and the toilet was thick with the smells of strangers. On humid evenings when the odors sat heavy in the moist air, Olanna longed for a fan, for electricity. Their house in the other part of town had had electricity until 8 p.m., but here in the interior there was none. She bought oil lamps made from milk tins. Whenever Ugwu lit them, Baby squealed and ran back at the leap of naked flame. Olanna watched her, grateful that Baby did not look at yet another move, yet another new life, with any confusion at all; that instead she played with her new friend Adanna every day, shouting “Take cover!” and laughing and hiding among the banana leaves to avoid imaginary planes. Olanna worried, though, that Baby would pick up Adanna's bush Umuahia accent or some disease from the liquid-looking boils on Adanna's arms or fleas from Adanna's scrawny dog Bingo.

The first day Olanna and Ugwu cooked in the kitchen, Adanna's mother came in and held out an enamel bowl and said, “Please, give me small soup.”

“No, we don't have enough,” Olanna said. Then she thought of Adanna's only dress, which was made from the sack used to package relief food so that flou was plastered on her back, with the r swallowed into the seam, and she scooped some of the thin, meatless soup into the enamel bowl. The next day, Mama Adanna came in and asked for small garri, and Olanna gave her half a cup. The third day shecame in when the kitchen was full of other women and again asked Olanna for soup.

“Stop giving her your food!” Mama Oji screamed. “This is what she does with every new tenant. She should go and farm cassava and feed her family and stop disturbing people! After all, she is an indigene of Umuahia! She is not a refugee like us! How can she be begging a refugee for food?” Mama Oji hissed loudly and then continued to pound palm fruit in her mortar. The efficient set to her fleshless face fascinated Olanna. She had never seen Mama Oji smile.

“But is it not you refugees who have finished all our food?” Mama Adanna said.

“Shut up your stinking mouth!” Mama Oji said. And Mama Adanna promptly did, as if she knew there was no way she could outshout Mama Oji, with her shrill swiftness, the way she never lacked for words or the speed with which to say them.

In the evenings, when Mama Oji fought with her husband, her voice tore across the yard. “You castrated sheep! You call yourself a man, and yet you deserted the army! Let me just hear you tell anybody again that you were wounded in battle! Just open that dirty mouth one more time, and I will go and call the soldiers and show them where you have been hiding!”

Her tirade was a staple of the yard. So was Pastor Ambrose's loud praying as he walked up and down. So was the piano playing from the room right next to the kitchen. Olanna was startled when she first heard the melancholy tones, music so pure and so confidently played that it charged the air and held the swaying banana trees still.

“That is Alice,” Mama Oji said. “She came here when Enugu fell. She was not even talking to anybody before. At least now she responds to greetings. She lives alone in that room. She never comes out and she never cooks. Nobody knows what she eats. The other time when we went combing, she felt too big to join us. Everybody else in the compound came out and went into the bushes and looked for vandals hiding there, but she did not come out. Some of the women even said they would report her to the militia.”

The music still floated out. It sounded like Beethoven, but Olanna was not certain. Odenigbo would know. Then the tones changed to something faster, with an angry urgency that soared higher and higher until it stopped. Alice came out of her room. She was small-boned, petite, and Olanna felt gawkily overgrown just looking at her; there was something childlike about her light-skinned, almost translucent complexion and tiny hands.

“Good evening,” Olanna said. “I'm Olanna. We just moved into that room.”

“Welcome. I've seen your daughter.” Alice's handshake was a weak clasp, as if she handled herself with much care, as if she would never scrub herself too vigorously.

“You play so well,” Olanna said.

“Oh, no, I'm no good.” Alice shook her head. “Where did you come from?” “Nsukka University. And you?”

Alice hesitated. “I came from Enugu.”

“We had friends there. Did you know anybody in the Nigerian College of Arts?”

“Oh, the bathroom is free.” She turned and hurried away. Her abruptness surprised Olanna. When she came out, she walked past with a vague nod and went into her room. Soon, Olanna heard the piano, something stretched out and slow, and she felt a desire to walk across and open Alice's door and watch her play.

She thought often about Alice, the delicate quality to her smallness and fairness, the incredible strength of her piano playing. When she gathered Baby and Adanna and a few other children in the compound and read to them, she hoped Alice would come out and join her. She wondered whether Alice liked High Life. She wanted to talk about music and art and politics with Alice. But Alice came out of her room only to hurry to the bathroom and did not respond when Olanna knocked on her door. “I must have been asleep,” she would say later, but would not ask Olanna to come by another time.Finally, they met again in the market. It was just after dawn and the air was heavy with dew and Olanna wandered around in the damp coolness, under the green foliage of the forest, sidestepping thick roots. She haggled quietly, consistently, with a hawker before she bought cassava tubers with pinkish skin that she had once thought were poisonous, because the pink was so bright, until Mrs. Muokelu assured her they were not. A bird cawed from a tree above. Once in a while, a leaf would flutter down. She stood before a table with graying pieces of raw chicken and imagined grabbing them and running away as fast as she could. If she bought the chicken, it would be all she would buy. So she bought four medium-sized snails instead. The smaller spiral-shelled snails were cheaper, piled high in baskets, but she could not buy them, could not think of them as food; they had always been, to her, playthings for village children. She was leaving when she saw Alice.

“Good morning, Alice,” she said. “Good morning,” Alice said.

Olanna made to hug her, the usual brief greeting hug, but Alice extended her hand for a formal shake as though they were not neighbors.

“I cannot find salt anywhere, no salt at all,” Alice said. “And the people who put us in this thing have all the salt they want.”

Olanna was surprised; of course she would not find salt here; there was hardly salt anywhere. Alice looked precise and petite in a neatly belted wool dress that Olanna imagined hanging in a London shop. Nothing like a Biafran woman in a forest market at dawn.

“They said the Nigerians have been bombing and bombing Uli and no relief plane has been able to land in a week,” Alice said.

“Yes, I heard,” Olanna said. “Are you going home?”

Alice looked away, toward the thick wood. “Not right away.” “I'll wait for you so we can walk back together.”

“No, don't bother,” Alice said. “Bye-bye.”

Alice turned and walked back to the cluster of stalls, her gait dainty and contrived, as though a misguided person had taught her how to walk “like a lady.” Olanna stood watching her, wondering what lay underneath her surface, before she headed home. She stopped by the relief center to see if there was any food, if a plane had finally managed to land. The compound was deserted and she peered through the locked gate for a while. A half-torn poster was nailed to the wall. Somebody had run charcoal over the WCC: WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES and scribbled WCC: WAR CAN CONTINUE.

She was close to the corn-grinding station when a woman ran out of a roadside house, crying, following two soldiers who were pulling a tall boy along with them. “I said you should take me!” she screamed. “Take me instead! Have we not sacrificed Abuchi to you people already?” The soldiers ignored her and the boy kept his posture straight-backed, as if he could not trust himself to look back at his mother.

Olanna stood aside as they passed and, back home, she was furious to see Ugwu standing in front of the yard, talking to some elderly neighbors. Any soldier on a conscripting mission could see him there.

“Bia nwoke m, is something wrong with your head? Haven't I told you not to be out here?” she asked him in a hiss.

Ugwu took her basket and mumbled, “Sorry, mah.” “Where is Baby?”

“In Adanna's room.” “Give me the key.” “Master is inside, mah.” Olanna glanced at her watch although she did not need to. It was too early for Odenigbo to be home. He was sitting on their bed, his back hunched, his shoulders heaving silently.

“Ogini? What happened?” she asked. “Nothing happened.”

She went to him. “Ebezina, stop crying,” she murmured. But she did not want him to stop. She wanted him to cry and cry until he dislodged the pain that clogged his throat, until he rinsed away his sullen grief. She cradled him, wrapped her arms around him, and slowly he relaxed against her. His arms circled her. His sobs became audible. With each intake of breath, they reminded her of Baby; he cried like his daughter.

“I never did enough for Mama,” he said finally.

“It's okay,” she murmured. She too wished she had tried harder with his mother before settling for easy resentment. There was so much she would take back if she could.

“We never actively remember death,” Odenigbo said. “The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that we will die. We will all die.”

“Yes,” Olanna said; there was a slump to his shoulders.

“But perhaps it is the whole point of being alive? That life is a state of death denial?” he asked. Olanna cradled him closer.

“I've been thinking of the army, nkem, ” he said. “Maybe I should join His Excellency's new S-brigade.”

Olanna said nothing for a while. She felt the urge to yank at his new beard and pull out hair and draw blood. “You might as well find a sturdy tree and a rope, Odenigbo, because that's an easier way to commit suicide,” she said.

He moved back to look at her, but she kept her gaze averted and got up and turned on the radio and increased the volume, filling the room with the sound of a Beatles song; she would no longer discuss this desire to join the army.

“We should build a bunker,” he said, and went to the door. “Yes, we certainly need a bunker here.” The flat glassiness in his eyes, the slump to his shoulders, worried her. If he had to do something, though, better he build a bunker than join the army.

Outside, he was talking to Papa Oji and some of the other men who were standing by the compound entrance.

“Don't you see those banana trees?” Papa Oji asked. “All the air raids we have had, we went there, and nothing happened to us. We don't need a bunker. Banana trees absorb bullets and bombs.”

Odenigbo's eyes were as cold as his response. “What does an army deserter know about bunkers?” He left the men and, moments later, he and Ugwu started to map out and dig an area behind the building. Soon, the young men joined in the work and, when the sun fell, the older ones did too, including Papa Oji. Olanna watched them work and wondered what they thought of Odenigbo. When the other men cracked jokes and laughed, he did not. He spoke only about the work. No, mba, move it farther down. Yes, let's hold it there. No, shift it a little. His sweaty singlet clung to his body and she noticed, for the first time, how much weight he had lost, how shrunken his chest looked.

That night, she lay with her cheek against his. He had not told her what made him stay home to cry for his mother. She hoped, though, that whatever it was would loosen some of the knots that had tightened inside him. She kissed his neck, his ear, in the way that always made him pull her close on the nights that Ugwu slept out on the veranda. But he shrugged her hand off and said, “I'm tired, nkem.” She had never heard him say that before. He smelled of old sweat, and she felt a sudden piercing longing for that Old Spice left behind in Nsukka.Even the miracle of Abagana did not loosen his knots. Before, they would have celebrated it as if it were a personal triumph. They would have held each other and kissed and she would have tickled her cheek with his new beard. But when they heard the first radio announcement he simply said, “Excellent, excellent,” and later he watched the dancing neighbors with a blank expression.

Mama Oji started the song, “Onye ga-enwe mmeri?” and the other women responded “Biafra gaenwe mmeri, igba!” and formed a circle and swayed with graceful motions and stamped down hard as they said igba!Billows of dust rose and fell. Olanna joined them, buoyed by the words—Who will win? Biafra will win, igba!—and wishing Odenigbo would not just sit there with that empty expression.

“Olanna dances like white people!” Mama Oji said, laughing. “Her buttocks do not move at all!”

It was the first time Olanna had seen Mama Oji laugh. The men were telling and retelling the story —some said the Biafran forces had laid ambush and set fire to a column of one hundred vehicles, while others said there had in fact been a thousand destroyed armored cars and trucks—but they all agreed that if the convoy had reached its destination, Biafra would have been finished. Radios were turned on loud, placed on the veranda in front of the rooms. The news was broadcast over and over, and each time it ended many of the neighbors joined the voice intoning, To save Biafra for the free world is a task that must be done! Even Baby knew the words. She repeated them while patting Bingo's head. Alice was the only neighbor who had not come out, and Olanna wondered what she was doing.

“Alice thinks she is too good for all of us in this yard,” Mama Oji said. “Look at you. Did they not say that you are a Big Man's daughter? But you treat people like people. Who does she think she is?”

“Maybe she's asleep.”

“Asleep indeed. That Alice is a saboteur. It is on her face. She is working for the vandals.” “Since when have saboteurs had it written on their faces?” Olanna asked, amused.

Mama Oji shrugged, as though she would not bother convincing Olanna of something she was sure of.

Professor Ezeka's driver arrived hours later when the yard was emptier and quieter. He handed Olanna a note and then went around and opened the boot and carried out two cartons. Ugwu hurried indoors with them.

“Thank you,” Olanna said. “Greet your master.” “Yes, mah.” He stood there still.

“Is there anything else?”

“Please, mah, I am to wait until you check that everything is complete.”

“Oh.” Ezeka's crabbed handwriting had listed all he had sent on the front of the sheet. Please make sure the driver has not tampered with anything was scrawled at the back. Olanna went inside to count the cans of dried milk, tea, biscuits, Ovaltine, sardines, the cartons of sugar, the bags of salt—and she could not help the gasp when she saw the toilet tissue. At least Baby would not have to use old newspapers for a while. She wrote a quick effusive thank-you note and gave it to the driver; if Ezeka had done this to further show how superior he was, it did not dampen her pleasure. Ugwu's pleasure seemed even greater than hers.

“This is like Nsukka, mah!” he said. “Look at the sardines!” “Please put some salt in a bag. A quarter of that packet.” “Mah? For who?” Ugwu looked suspicious.

“For Alice. And don't tell the neighbors what we have. If they ask, say an old friend sent books to your master.”

“Yes, mah.”

Olanna felt Ugwu's disapproving eyes following her as she took the bag over to Alice's room. Therewas no response to her knock. She had turned to walk away when Alice opened the door. “A friend of ours brought us some provisions,” Olanna said, holding out the bag of salt.

“Hei! I can't take all of this,” Alice said, as she reached out and took it. “Thank you. Oh, thank you so much!”

“We haven't seen him in a while. It came as a surprise.”

“And you are bothering with me. You shouldn't have.” Alice was clutching the bag of salt to her chest. Her eyes were darkly shadowed, traces of green veins crawled just underneath her pale skin, and Olanna wondered if she was sick.

But Alice looked different, fresher-skinned, in the evening, when she came outside and sat next to Olanna on the floor of the veranda and stretched out her legs. Perhaps she had put on some powder. Her feet were tiny. She smelled of a familiar body cream. Mama Adanna walked past and said, “Eh! Alice, we have never seen you sitting outside before!” and Alice's lips moved slightly in a smile. Pastor Ambrose was praying by the banana trees. His red long-sleeved robe shimmered in the waning sun. “Holy Jehovah destroy the vandals with holy-ghost fire! Holy Jehovah fight for us!”

“God is fighting for Nigeria,” Alice said. “God always fights for the side that has more arms.”

“God is on our side!” Olanna surprised herself by how sharp she sounded. Alice looked taken aback and, from somewhere behind the house, Bingo howled.

“I only think that God fights with the just side,” Olanna added gently.

Alice slapped away a mosquito. “Ambrose is pretending to be a pastor to avoid the army.”

“Yes, he is.” Olanna smiled. “Do you know that strange church on Ogui Road in Enugu? He looks like one of those pastors.”

“I am not really from Enugu.” Alice drew up her knees. “I am from Asaba. I left after I finished at the Teacher Training College there and went to Lagos. I was working in Lagos before the war. I met an army colonel and in a few months he asked me to marry him, but he did not tell me that he was already married and his wife was abroad. I got pregnant. He kept postponing going to Asaba to do the traditional ceremonies. But I believed him when he said that he was busy and under pressure with all that was happening in the country. After they killed the Igbo officers, he escaped and I came to Enugu with him. I had my baby in Enugu. I was with him in Enugu when his wife came back just before the war started and he left me. Then my baby died. Then Enugu fell. So here I am.”

“I'm so sorry.”

“I am a stupid woman. I am the one who believed all his lies.” “Don't say that.”

“You are lucky. You have your husband and daughter. I don't know how you do it, keeping everything together and teaching children and all that. I wish I were like you.”

Alice's admiration warmed and surprised her. “There is nothing special about me,” Olanna said. Pastor Ambrose was getting frenzied. “Devil, I shoot you! Satan, I bomb you!”

“How did you manage evacuating Nsukka?” Alice asked. “Did you lose much?” “Everything. We left in a rush.”

“It was the same for me in Enugu. I don't know why they will never tell us the truth so we can prepare. The people in the Ministry of Information took their public-address van all over the city telling us everything was okay, it was only our boys practicing with the shelling. If they had told us the truth, many of us would have been better prepared and would not have lost so much.”

“But you brought your piano.” Olanna didn't like the way Alice said they, as if she was not on their side.

“It is the only thing I took from Enugu. He sent me money and a van to help me on the very day Enugu fell. His guilty conscience was working overtime. The driver told me later that he and his wife had moved their own things to their hometown some weeks before. Imagine!”“ Do you know where he is now?”

“I don't want to know. If I see that man again, eziokwu m, I will kill him with my own hands.” Alice raised her tiny hands. She was speaking Igbo for the first time, and in her Asaba dialect, the F's sounded like W's. “When I think of what I went through for that man. I gave up my job in Lagos, I kept telling lies to my family, and I cut off my friends who told me he was not serious.” She bent down to pick up something from the sand. “And he could not even do.”

“What?”

“He would jump on top of me, moan oh-oh-ohlike a goat, and that was it.” She raised her finger. “With something this small. And afterward he would smile happily without ever wondering if I had known when he started and stopped. Men! Men are hopeless!”

“No, not all of them. My husband knows how to do, and with something like this.” Olanna raised a clenched fist. They laughed and she sensed, between them, a vulgar and delicious female bond.

Olanna waited for Odenigbo to come home so that she could tell him about her new friendship with Alice, about what she had told Alice. She wanted him to come home and pull her forcefully to him in the way he had not done in a long time. But when he did come home from Tanzania Bar, it was with a gun. The double-barreled gun, long and black and dull, lay on the bed. “Gini bu ife a? What is this?” Olanna asked.

“Somebody at the directorate gave it to me. It's quite old. But it's good to have just in case.” “I don't want a gun here.”

“We're fighting a war. There are guns everywhere.” He slipped out of his trousers and tied a wrapper around his waist before he took his shirt off.

“I talked to Alice today.” “Alice?”

“The neighbor that plays the piano.”

“Oh, yes.” He was staring at the separating curtain.

“You look tired,” she said. What she wanted to say was, Youlooksad.If only he was better occupied, if only he had something to do in which the moments of grief that sneaked up on him could be immersed.

“I'm fine,” he said.

“I think you should go and see Ezeka. Ask him to help move you somewhere else. Even if it isn't his directorate, he must have some influence with the other directors.”

Odenigbo hung his trousers on a nail in the wall. “Did you hear me?” Olanna asked.

“I won't ask Ezeka.”

She recognized his expression: He was disappointed. She had forgotten that they had high ideals. They were people of principle; they did not ask favors of highly placed friends.

“You can serve Biafra better if you work somewhere else where you can use your brain and talent,” she said.

“I'm serving Biafra well enough at the Manpower Directorate.”

Olanna glanced at the clutter that was their room and home—the bed, two yam tubers, and the mattress that leaned against the dirt-smeared wall, the cartons and bags piled in a corner, the kerosene stove that she took to the kitchen only when it was needed—and felt a surge of revulsion, the urge to run and run and run until she was far away from it all.

They slept with their backs turned to each other. He was gone when she woke up. She touched his side of the bed, ran her hand over it, savored the last of the rumpled warmth that lingered on the sheet.She would go and see Ezeka herself. She would ask him to do something for Odenigbo. She went outside to the bathroom, saying “Good morning” and “Did you come out well this morning?” to some neighbors as she went. Baby was with the younger children, crowded near the banana trees, listening to Papa Oji telling a story of how he shot down an enemy plane in Calabar with his pistol. The older children were sweeping the yard and singing.

Biafra, kunie, buso Nigeria agha,
Anyi emelie ndi awusa,
Ndi na-amaro chukwu,
Tigbue fa, zogbue fa,
Nwelu nwude Gowon.

When their singing stopped, Pastor Ambrose's morning prayers sounded even louder. “God bless His Excellency! God give Tanzania and Gabon strength! God destroy Nigeria and Britain and Egypt and Algeria and Russia! In the mighty name of Jesus!”

Some people shouted Amen! from their rooms. Pastor Ambrose held his Bible up, as if some solid miracle would fall on it from the sky, and shouted nonsensical words: she baba she baba she baba.

“Stop babbling, Pastor Ambrose, and go and join the army! How is your speaking-in-tongues helping our cause?” Mama Oji said. She was in front of her room with her son, his cloth-covered head bent over a steaming bowl. When he raised his head to get a breath of air, Olanna looked at the concoction of urine and oils and herbs and God knew what else that Mama Oji had decided was the cure for asthma.

“Was the night bad for him?” she asked Mama Oji.

Mama Oji shrugged. “It was bad but not too bad.” She turned to her son. “Do you want me to slap you before you inhale it? Why are you letting the thing evaporate and waste?”

He bent his head over the bowl again.

“Jehovah destroy Gowon and Adekunle!” Pastor Ambrose screamed. “Be quiet and join the army!” Mama Oji said.

Somebody shouted from one of the rooms. “Mama Oji, leave Pastor alone! First let your husband go back to the army he ran away from!”

“At least he went!” Mama Oji's retort was swift. “While your own husband lives the shivering life of a coward in the forest of Ohafia so that the soldiers will not see him.”

Baby came around from behind the house; the dog trailed behind her. “Mummy Ola! Bingo can see spirits. When he barks at night it means he sees spirits.”

“There are no such things as spirits, Baby,” Olanna said. “Yes, there are.”

It troubled Olanna, the things Baby was picking up here. “Did Adanna tell you that?” “No, Chukwudi told me.”

“Where is Adanna?”

“She's sleeping. She's sick,” Baby said, and began to shoo away the flies that circled over Bingo's head.

Mama Oji muttered, “I have been telling Mama Adanna that the child's illness is not malaria. But she keeps giving her neem medicine that does nothing for her. If nobody else will say it, then I will: What Adanna has is Harold Wilson Syndrome, ho-ha.”

“Harold Wilson Syndrome?” “Kwashiorkor. The child has kwashiorkor.”

Olanna burst out laughing. She did not know they had renamed kwashiorkor after the British prime minister, but her amusement dissipated when she went to Adanna's room. Adanna was lying on a mat, her eyes half closed. Olanna touched her face with the back of a palm, to check for a fever, althoughshe knew there would be none. She should have realized it earlier; Adan-na's belly was swollen and her skin was a sickly tone, much lighter than it was only weeks ago.

“This malaria is very stubborn,” Mama Adanna said. “She has kwashiorkor,” Olanna said quietly.

“Kwashiorkor,” Mama Adanna repeated, and looked at Olanna with frightened eyes. “You need to find crayfish or milk.”

“Milk, kwa? From where?” Mama Adanna asked. “But we have anti-kwash nearby. Mama Obike was telling me the other day. Let me go and get some.”

“What?”

“Anti-kwashiorkor leaves,” Mama Adanna said, already on her way out.

Olanna was surprised by how quickly she hitched up her wrapper and began to wade into the bush on the other side of the road. She came back moments later holding a bunch of slender green leaves. “I will cook porridge now,” she said.

“Adanna needs milk,” Olanna said. “Those won't cure kwashi-orkor.”

“Leave Mama Adanna alone. The anti-kwash leaves will work as long as she does not boil them for too long,” Mama Oji said. “Besides, the relief centers have nothing. And did you not hear that all the children in Nnewi died after drinking relief milk? The vandals had poisoned it.”

Olanna called Baby and took her inside and undressed her. “Ugwu already gave me a bath,” Baby said, looking puzzled.

“Yes, yes, my baby,” Olanna said, examining her carefully. Her skin was still the dark color of mahogany and her hair was still black and, although she was thinner, her belly was not swollen. Olanna wished so much that the relief center was open and that Okoromadu was still there, but he had moved to Orlu after the World Council of Churches gave his job to one of the many pastors who no longer had parishes.

Mama Adanna was cooking the leaves in the kitchen. Olanna took a tin of sardines and some dried milk from the carton Ezeka sent and gave them to her. “Don't tell anybody I gave you this. Give it to Adanna little by little.”

Mama Adanna grasped Olanna. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. I will not tell anybody.”

But she did tell because, as Olanna left for Professor Ezeka's office later, Mama Oji called out, “My son has asthma and milk will not kill him!”

Olanna ignored her.
———

She walked to the major road and stood under a tree. Each time a car drove past, she tried to flag it down. A soldier in a rusty station wagon stopped. She saw the leer in his eyes even before she climbed in beside him, so she exaggerated her English accent, certain that he did not understand all she said, and spoke throughout the drive about the cause and mentioned that her car and driver were at the mechanic. He said very little until he dropped her off at the directorate building. He did not know who she was or who she knew.

Professor Ezeka's hawk-faced secretary slowly looked at Olanna, from her carefully brushed wig to her shoes, and said, “He's not in!”

“Then ring him right now and tell him I am waiting. My name is Olanna Ozobia.” The secretary looked surprised. “What?”

“Do I need to say it again?” Olanna asked. “I'm sure Prof will want to hear about this. Where shall I sit while you ring him?”

The secretary stared at her and Olanna stared back steadily. Then she mutely gestured to a chair andpicked up the phone. A half hour later, Professor Ezeka's driver came in to take her to his house, tucked onto a hidden dirt road.

“I thought a VIP like you would live in the Government Reserved Area, Prof,” Olanna said, after she greeted him.

“Oh, certainly not. It's too obvious a target for bombings.” He had not changed. His fastidious sense of superiority lined his voice as he waved her in and asked her to wait for him while he finished up in his study.

Olanna had seen little of Mrs. Ezeka in Nsukka; she was timid and barely educated, the kind of wife his village had found him, Odenigbo had said once. Olanna struggled to hide her surprise, then, when Mrs. Ezeka came out and hugged her twice in the spacious living room.

“It's so nice to see old friends! Our socializing these days is so official, this government-house event today and another one tomorrow.” Mrs. Ezeka's gold pendant hung low on a chain around her neck. “Pamela! Come and greet Aunty.”

The little girl who came out holding a doll was older than Baby, perhaps about eight years old. She had her mother's fat-cheeked face, and the pink satin ribbons in her hair swayed.

“Good afternoon,” she said. She was undressing her doll, prising the skirt off the plastic body. “How are you?” Olanna asked.

“Fine, thank you.”

Olanna sank into a plush red sofa. A dollhouse, with tiny exquisite doll plates and teacups, was set out on the center table.

“What will you drink?” Mrs. Ezeka asked brightly. “I remember Odenigbo loved his brandy. We do have some rather good brandy.”

Olanna looked at Mrs. Ezeka. She could not possibly remember what Odenigbo drank because she had never visited in the evenings with her husband.

“I'd like some cold water, please,” Olanna said.

“Just cold water?” Mrs. Ezeka asked. “Anyway, we can have something else after lunch. Steward!” The steward appeared right away, as if he had been standing by the door. “Bring cold water and

Coke,” Mrs. Ezeka said.

Pamela began to whine, still tugging at the doll's clothes.

“Come, come, let me do it for you,” Mrs. Ezeka said. She turned to Olanna. “She's so restless now. You see, we should have gone abroad last week. The two older ones have gone. His Excellency gave us permission ages ago. We were supposed to leave on a relief plane, but none of them landed. They said there were too many Nigerian bombers. Can you imagine? Yesterday, we waited in Uli, inside that unfinished building they call a terminal, for more than two hours and no plane landed. But hopefully we'll leave on Sunday. We will fly to Gabon and then on to England—on our Nigerian passports, of course! The British have refused to recognize Biafra!” Her laughter filled Olanna with a resentment as fine, as painful, as the prick of a new pin.

The steward brought the water on a silver tray.

“Are you sure that water is properly cold?” Mrs. Ezeka asked. “Was it in the new freezer or the old one?”

“The new one, mah, like you tell me.”

“Will you eat cake, Olanna?” Mrs. Ezeka asked, after the steward left. “We made it today.” “No, thank you.”

Professor Ezeka came in holding some files. “Is that all you're drinking? Water?” “Your house is surreal,” Olanna said.

“What a choice of words, surreal,” Professor Ezeka said.

“Odenigbo is very unhappy in his directorate. Can you help transfer him somewhere else?” Thewords moved slowly out of Olanna's mouth and she realized how much she hated to ask, how much she wanted to get it over with and leave this house with the red rug and the matching red sofas and the television set and the fruity scent of Mrs. Ezeka's perfume.

“Everything is tight now, really, very tight,” Professor Ezeka said. “Requests pour in from everywhere.” He sat down, placed the files on his lap, and crossed his legs. “But I'll see what I can do.”

“Thank you,” Olanna said. “And thank you again for the provisions.” “Have some cake,” Mrs. Ezeka said.

“No, I don't want any cake.” “Maybe after lunch.”

Olanna stood up. “I can't stay for lunch. I must go. I teach some children in the yard and I told them to come in an hour's time.”

“Oh, how lovely,” Mrs. Ezeka said, walking her to the door. “If only I wasn't going overseas so soon, we would have done something together too, for the win-the-war effort.”

Olanna forced her lips to form a smile.

“The driver will take you back,” Professor Ezeka said. “Thank you,” Olanna said.

Before she climbed into the car, Mrs. Ezeka asked her to come to the back and see the new bunker her husband had had built; it was concrete, sturdy.

“Imagine what these vandals have reduced us to. Pamela and I sometimes sleep here when they bomb us,” Mrs. Ezeka said. “But we shall survive.”

“Yes,” Olanna said and stared at the smooth floor and two beds, a furnished underground room. When she got back to the yard, Baby was crying. Mucus ran thinly down her nose.

“They ate Bingo,” Baby said. “What?”

“Adanna's mummy ate Bingo.”

“Ugwu, what happened?” Olanna asked, taking Baby in her arms.

Ugwu shrugged. “That is what the people in the yard are saying. Mama Adanna took the dog out some time ago and does not answer when they ask her where it is. And she has just cooked her soup with meat.”

Olanna hushed Baby, wiped her eyes and nose, and thought for a moment about the dog with its head full of sores.

Kainene came in the middle of a hot afternoon. Olanna was in the kitchen soaking some dried cassava in water when Mama Oji called, “There is a woman in a car asking for you!”

Olanna hurried out and stopped when she saw her sister standing near the banana trees. She looked elegant in a knee-length tan dress.

“Kainene!” Olanna extended her arms slightly, uncertainly, and Kainene moved forward; their embrace was brief, their bodies barely touching before Kainene stepped back.

“I went to your old house and somebody told me to come here.”

“Our landlord kicked us out, we were not good for business.” Olanna laughed at her poor joke, although Kainene did not laugh. Kainene was peering into the room. Olanna wished so much that Kainene had come when they were still in a house, wished she did not feel so painfully self-conscious.

“Come in and sit down.”

Olanna dragged the bench in from the veranda and Kainene looked warily at it before she sat down and placed her hands on the leather bag that was the same earth-brown shade as her coiffed wig.Olanna raised the dividing curtain and sat on the bed and smoothed her wrapper. They did not look at each other. The silence was charged with things unsaid.

“So how have you been?” Olanna asked, finally.

“Things were normal until Port Harcourt fell. I was an army contractor, and I had a license to import stockfish. I'm in Orlu now. I'm in charge of a refugee camp there.”

“Oh.”

“Are you silently condemning me for profiteering from the war? Somebody had to import the stockfish, you know.” Kainene raised her eyebrows; they were penciled in, thin fluid arcs. “Many contractors were paid and didn't deliver. At least I did.”

“No, no, I wasn't thinking that at all.” “You were.”

Olanna looked away. There were too many things swirling around in her head. “I was so worried when Port Harcourt fell. I sent messages.”

“I got the letter you sent to Madu.” Kainene rearranged the straps of her handbag. “You said you were teaching. Do you still? Your noble win-the-war effort?”

“The school is a refugee center now. I sometimes teach the children in the yard.” “And how is the revolutionary husband?”

“He's still with the Manpower Directorate.” “You don't have a wedding photo.”

“There was an air raid during our reception. The photographer threw his camera down.”

Kainene nodded, as if there were no need to feel sympathy at this news. She opened her bag. “I came to give you this. Mum sent it through a British journalist.”

Olanna held the envelope in her hand, unsure whether to open it in front of Kainene.

“I also brought two dresses for Baby,” Kainene said, and gestured to the bag she had placed on the floor. “A woman who came back from São Tomé had some good children's clothes for sale.”

“You bought clothes for Baby?”

“How shocking indeed. And it's about time the girl began to be called Chiamaka. This Baby business is tiresome.”

Olanna laughed.

To think that her sister was sitting across from her, that her sister had come to visit her, that her sister had brought clothes for her child. “Will you drink water? It's all we have.”

“No, I'm fine.” Kainene got up and walked to the wall, where the mattress leaned, and then came back and sat down. “You didn't know my steward Ikejide, did you?”

“Isn't he the one Maxwell brought from his hometown?”

“Yes.” Kainene got up again. “He was killed in Port Harcourt. They were bombing and shelling us, and a piece of shrapnel cut off his head, completely beheaded him, and his body kept running. His body kept running and it didn't have a head.”

“Oh, God.” “I saw him.”

Olanna got up and sat next to Kainene on the bench and put an arm around her. Kainene smelled of home. They said nothing for long minutes.

“I thought about changing your money for you,” Kainene said. “But you can do it at the bank and then deposit, can't you?”

“Haven't you seen the bomb craters all around the bank? My money is staying under my bed.” “Make sure the cockroaches don't get to it. Life is harder for them these days.” Kainene leaned

against Olanna and then, as if she had suddenly remembered something, she got up and straightened her dress; Olanna felt the slow sadness of missing a person who was still there.“ Goodness. I didn't know how much time had passed,” Kainene said. “Will you visit again?”

There was a pause before Kainene said, “I spend most of the day at the refugee camp. Maybe you can come and see it.” She fumbled for a piece of paper in her handbag and wrote down the directions to her house.

“Yes, I'll come. I'll come next Wednesday.” “Will you drive?”

“No. Because of the soldiers. And we never have much petrol.”

“Greet the revolutionary for me.” Kainene climbed into the car and started it.

“Your number plates are different,” Olanna said, looking at the vig printed before the numbers.

“I paid extra to stamp my patriotism on my car. Vigilance!” Kainene raised her eyebrows and a hand before she drove off. Olanna watched the Peugeot 404 disappear down the road and stood there for a while, feeling as if she had swallowed a sparkling sliver of light.
———

On Wednesday, Olanna arrived early. Harrison opened the door and stared, so surprised he seemed to have forgotten his usual bow. “Madam, good morning! It is a long time!”

“How are you, Harrison?”

“Fine, madam,” he said, and bowed, finally.

Olanna sat on one of the two sofas in the bright and bare living room with flung-open windows. A radio was turned on high somewhere inside, and when she heard approaching footsteps, she forced her mouth to relax, not sure what she would say to Richard. But it was Kainene, in a rumpled black dress, holding her wig in her hand.

“Ejimam, ” she said, hugging Olanna. Their embrace was close, their bodies pressed warmly against each other. “I was hoping you would come in time so we could go together to the research center first before the refugee camp. Will you have some rice? I didn't realize how long it's been since I ate rice until the relief people gave me a bag last week.”

“No, not now.” Olanna wanted to hold her sister for much longer, to smell that familiar scent of home.

“I was listening to Nigerian radio. Lagos says Chinese soldiers are fighting for us and Kaduna says every Igbo woman deserves to be raped,” Kainene said. “Their imagination impresses me.”

“I never listen to them.”

“Oh, I listen more to Lagos and Kaduna than to Radio Biafra. You have to keep your enemy close.” Harrison came in and bowed. “Madam? I am bringing drinks?”

“The way he goes on you would think we had a grand cellar in this half-built house in the middle of nowhere,” Kainene muttered, combing her wig with her fingers.

“Madam?”

“No, Harrison, don't bring drinks. We're leaving now. Remember, lunch for two.” “Yes, madam.”

Olanna wondered where Richard was.

“Harrison is the most pretentious peasant I have ever seen,” Kainene said, as she started the car. “I know you don't like the word peasant.”

“No.”

“But he is, you know.” “We are all peasants.”

“Are we? It's the sort of thing Richard would say.” Olanna's throat felt instantly parched.

Kainene glanced at her. “Richard left very early today. He's going to Gabon to visit the kwashiorkor center next week and he said he needed to see to the arrangements. But I think he left so early because he felt awkward about seeing you.”

“Oh.” Olanna pursed her lips.

Kainene steered with a careless confidence, past potholes on the road, past palm trees stripped of fronds, past a thin soldier pulling along a thinner goat.

“Do you ever dream of that child's head in the calabash?” she asked.

Olanna looked out of the window and remembered the slanting lines crisscrossing the calabash, the white blankness of the child's eyes. “I don't remember my dreams.”

“Grandpapa used to say, about difficulties he had gone through, ‘It did not kill me, it made me knowledgeable.' Ogburo megbu, o mee ka mmalu ife.”

“I remember.”

“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable,” Kainene said.

There was a pause. Inside Olanna, something calcified leaped to life. “Do you know what I mean?” Kainene asked.

“Yes.”

At the research center, Kainene parked under a tree and Olanna waited in the car. She hurried back moments later. “The man I want isn't there,” she said, and started the car. Olanna said nothing else until they arrived at the refugee camp. It was a primary school before the war. The buildings looked faded, most of the once-white paint peeled off. Some refugees who were standing outside stopped to stare at Olanna and to say nnoto Kainene. A young lean priest in a discolored soutane came up to the car.

“Father Marcel, my twin sister, Olanna,” Kainene said.

The priest looked surprised. “Welcome,” he said, and then added, unnecessarily, “You are not identical.”

They stood under a flame tree while he told Kainene that the bag of crayfish had been delivered, that the Red Cross really had suspended relief flights, that Inatimi had come earlier with somebody else from the Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters and said he would return later. Olanna watched Kainene speak. She did not hear much of what Kainene said, because she was thinking of how unrelenting Kainene's confidence was.

“Let's give you a tour,” Kainene said to Olanna, after Father Marcel left. “I always start with the bunker.” Kainene showed her the bunker, a roughly dug pit covered with logs, before she began to walk toward the building at the far end of the compound. “Now to the Point of No Return.”

Olanna followed. The smell hit her at the first door. It went straight from her nose to her stomach, turning it, churning the boiled yam she'd had for breakfast.

Kainene was watching her. “You don't have to go in.”

“I want to,” Olanna said, because she felt she should. She didn't want to. She didn't know what the smell was but it was enlarging and she could almost see it, a foul brown cloud. She felt faint. They went into the first classroom. About twelve people were lying on bamboo beds, on mats, on the floor. Not one of them reached out to slap away the fat flies. The only movement Olanna saw was that of a child sitting by the door: he unfolded and refolded his arms. His bones were clearly outlined and the wrap of his arms was flat, in a way that would be impossible if he had some flesh underneath the skin. Kainene scanned the room quickly and then turned to the door. Outside, Olanna gulped in air. In the second classroom, she felt that even the air inside her was becoming soiled and she wanted to press her nostrils shut to stop the mingling of the air outside and that inside her. Amother was sitting on thefloor with two children lying next to her. Olanna could not tell how old they were. They were naked; the taut globes that were their bellies would not fit in a shirt anyway. Their buttocks and chests were collapsed into folds of rumpled skin. On their head, spurts of reddish hair. Olanna's eyes met their mother's steady stare and Olanna looked away quickly. She slapped a fly away from her face and thought how healthy all the flies looked, how alive, how vibrant.

“That woman is dead. We have to get her removed,” Kainene said.

“No!” Olanna blurted, because that woman with the steady stare could not be dead. But Kainene meant another woman, who lay facedown on the floor, with a thin baby clutching her back. Kainene walked over and plucked the baby away. She went outside and called out, “Father! Father! One for burial,” and then sat on the steps outside and held the baby. The baby should have cried. Kainene was trying to force a soft yeast-colored pill into its mouth.

“What is that?” Olanna asked.

“Protein tablet. I'll give you some for Chiamaka. They taste horrible. I finally got the Red Cross to give me some last week.

We don't have enough, of course, so I save them for the children. If I gave it to most of the people in there it would make no difference. But maybe it will for this baby. Maybe.”

“How many die a day?” Olanna asked.

Kainene looked down at the baby. “His mother came from somewhere that fell very early. They had gone through about five refugee camps before they came here.”

“How many die a day?” Olanna asked again. But Kainene did not respond. The baby finally let out a thin squall and Kainene forced the powdery tablet into the small open mouth. Olanna watched Father Marcel and another man carry the dead woman, by her ankles and wrists, out of the classroom and to the back of the building.

“Sometimes I hate them,” Kainene said. “The vandals.”

“No, them.” Kainene pointed back at the room. “I hate them for dying.”

Kainene took the baby inside and gave it to another woman, a relative of the dead woman's whose bony body was quivering; because her eyes were dry, it took Olanna a moment to realize that she was crying, the baby pressed against her flattened, dry breasts.

Later, as they walked to the car, Kainene slipped her hand into Olanna's.

29

Ugwu knew the story from Pastor Ambrose was implausible, that some people from a foundation abroad had set up a table at the end of St. John's Road and were giving away boiled eggs and bottles of refrigerated water to anyone who passed by. He knew, too, that he should not leave the compound; Olanna's warnings echoed in his head. But he was bored. It was sticky hot and he hated the ashy taste of the water stored in a clay pot behind the house. He longed for water, for anything, cooled by electricity. And the story could well be true; anything was possible. Baby was playing with Adanna and he could take the shortcut and be back before she even noticed he was gone.

He had just rounded the corner past the Church of St. John when he saw, farther down the road, a group of men standing in a single line with their hands placed on their heads. The two soldiers with them were very tall and one held his gun pointed forward. Ugwu stopped. The soldier with the gun began to shout something and to run toward him. Ugwu's heart jumped in his chest; he looked at the bush by the roadside but it was too thin to hide in. He looked back and the road was clear and unending; there was nothing to shield him from the soldier's bullet. He turned and dashed into the church compound. An elderly priest wearing white was standing at the top of the steps by the main door. Ugwu bounded up, relieved, because the soldier would not come inside the church to take him. Ugwu tugged at the door but it was locked.

“Biko, Father, let me go inside,” he said.

The priest shook his head. “Those outside who are being conscripted, they are God's children too.” “Please, please.” Ugwu yanked at the door.

“God's blessings will go with you,” the priest said. “Open this door!” Ugwu shouted.

The priest shook his head and backed away.

The soldier ran into the church compound. “Stop or I shoot!” Ugwu stood staring, his mind blank.

“You know what they call me?” the soldier shouted. “Kill And Go!” He was too tall for the tattered trousers that stopped long before his black boots started. He spat on the ground and pulled Ugwu's arm. “Bloody civilian! Follow me!”

Ugwu stumbled along. Behind them, the priest said, “God bless Biafra.”

Ugwu did not look at the faces of the other men as he joined the line and raised his hands to his head. He was dreaming; he had to be dreaming. A dog was barking from somewhere close by. Kill And Go shouted at one of the men, cocked his gun, and shot into the air. Some women had gathered a little way away and one of them was speaking to Kill And Go's partner. At first, she spoke in low, pleading tones, then she raised her voice and gesticulated wildly. “Can't you see he cannot talk well? He is an imbecile! How will he carry a gun?”

Kill And Go tied the men up in pairs, their hands behind their backs and the rope stretched taut between them. The man Ugwu was tied to jerked at the rope as if to see how strong it was and Ugwu was almost thrown off balance.

“Ugwu!”

The voice had come from the group of women. He turned. Mrs. Muokelu was looking at him with shocked eyes. He nodded at her, in a way that he hoped was respectful, because he could not take the risk of talking. She began to half walk, half run down the road and he watched her go, disappointed and yet not sure what he had expected her to do.“ Get ready to move!” Kill And Go shouted. He looked up and saw a boy at the end of the road and ran off after him. His partner pointed a gun at the line. “Anybody run I shoot.”

Kill And Go came back with the boy walking ahead of him.

“Shut up!” he said, as he tied the boy's hands behind his back. “Everybody move! Our van is on the next road!”

They had just begun to walk at an awkward pace, Kill And Go shouting, “Lep!Ai!” when Ugwu saw Olanna. She was hurrying, panicky, wearing her wig, which she hardly wore these days, and she had hastily put it on because it was lopsided on her head. She smiled and motioned to Kill And Go, and he shouted, “Stop!” before he went over to her. They talked with his back to the men and, moments later, he turned around and slashed at the rope that bound Ugwu's hands.

“He is already serving our nation. We are only interested in idle civilians,” he called out to the other soldier, who nodded.

Ugwu's relief made him dizzy. He rubbed his wrists. Olanna did not say a word to him as they walked home, and he sensed her silent fury only in the force with which she unlocked and threw open the door.

“I'm sorry, mah,” he said.

“You are so stupid you do not deserve the luck you had today,” she said. “I bribed that soldier with all the money I have. Now you will produce what I will feed my child, do you understand?”

“I'm sorry, mah,” he said again.

She said little to him in the following days. She made Baby's pap herself as if she no longer trusted him. Her responses to his greetings were frosty nods. And he woke up earlier to fetch water and scrubbed the room floor harder and waited to win back her friendship.

Finally, he won it back with the help of roasted lizards. It was the morning that she and Baby were getting ready to go to Orlu to visit Kainene. A hawker walked into the compound with an enamel tray covered in newspapers, holding up a browned lizard on a stick, chanting, “Mmemmesuya!Mmemme suya!”

“I want some, Mummy Ola, please,” Baby said.

Olanna ignored her and continued to brush her hair. Pastor Ambrose had come out of his room and was bargaining with the lizard hawker.

“I want some, Mummy Ola,” Baby said.

“Those things are not good for you,” Olanna said.

Pastor Ambrose went back to his room with a newspaper-wrapped package. “Pastor bought some,” Baby said.

“But we are not buying any.”

Baby began to cry. Olanna turned and looked at Ugwu in exasperation and suddenly they were both smiling at the situation: Baby was crying to be allowed to eat a lizard.

“What do lizards eat, Baby?” Ugwu asked. Baby mumbled, “Ants.”

“If you eat one, all the ants the lizard ate will crawl around inside your stomach and bite you,” Ugwu said calmly.

Baby blinked. She looked at him for a while, as if deciding whether or not to believe him, before she wiped her tears.

On the day that Olanna and Baby left to spend a week with Kainene in Orlu, Master came home from work earlier than usual and did not go to Tanzania Bar; Ugwu hoped that their absence had pulled him out of the ditch he sunk into when his mother died. He sat on the veranda listening to theradio. Ugwu was surprised to see Alice stop by on her way to the bathroom. He assumed Master would give her his distant yes-and-no answers and she would go back to her piano. But they spoke in low tones, most of which Ugwu did not hear; once in a while he heard her giggly laughter. The next day, she was sitting on the bench beside Master. Then she stayed until the whole yard was asleep. Then Ugwu came around from the backyard, days later, and found the veranda empty and the room door firmly shut. His stomach tightened; memories of those days of Amala left a difficult-to-swallow lump in his throat. Alice was different. There was a deliberate childlike aura to her that Ugwu distrusted. He could see why she would not need any medicine from a dibiato tempt Master; she would do it with that pale skin and helpless manner. Ugwu walked to the banana trees and back and then went to the door and knocked loudly. He was determined to stop them, to stop it. He heard sounds inside. He knocked again. And again.

“Yes?” Master's voice was muffled.

“It is me, sah. I want to ask if I can take the kerosene stove, sah.” After he took the cooker, he would pretend to have forgotten the garricup, the last bit of yam, the ladle. He was prepared to fake a seizure, an epileptic fit, anything that would keep Master from continuing what he was doing with that woman. It took long minutes before Master opened the door. His glasses were off and his eyes looked swollen.

“Sah?” Ugwu asked, looking past him. The room was empty. “Is it well, sah?”

“Of course it's not well, you ignoramus,” Master said, staring at the pair of slippers on the floor. He looked lost in his own mind. Ugwu waited. Master sighed. “Professor Ekwenugo was on his way to lay land mines with the Science Group when they went over some potholes and the mines went off.”

“The mines went off?”

“Ekwenugo was blown up. He's dead.” Blown up rang in Ugwu's ears.

Master moved back. “Take the stove, then.”

Ugwu came in and picked up the kerosene stove that he did not need and thought of Professor Ekwenugo's long tapering nail. Blown up. Professor Ekwenugo had always been his proof that Biafra would triumph, with the stories of rockets and armored cars and fuel made from nothing. Would Professor Ekwenugo's body parts be charred, like bits of wood, or would it be possible to recognize what was what? Would there be many dried fragments, like squashing a harmattan-dried leaf ?Blown up.

Master left moments later for Tanzania Bar. Ugwu changed into his good trousers and hurried to Eberechi's house. It seemed the most natural thing, the only thing, to do. He refused to think of how upset Olanna would be if Mama Oji told her that he had gone out, or of what Eberechi's reaction would be, whether she would ignore him or welcome him or shout at him. He needed to see her.

She was sitting on the veranda alone, wearing that buttocks-molding tight skirt he remembered, but her hair was different, cut in a short rounded shape rather than plaited with thread.

“Ugwu!” she said, surprised, and stood up. “You cut your hair.”

“Is there thread anywhere, talk less of the money to buy it?” “It suits you,” he said.

She shrugged.

“I should have come since,” he said. He should never have stopped speaking to her because of an army officer he did not know. “Forgive me.Gbaghalu.”

They looked at each other, and she reached out and pinched the skin of his neck. He slapped her hand away, playfully, and then held on to it. He did not let go when they both sat on the steps, and she told him how the family renting Master's former house was wicked, how the boys on the street hid inthe ceiling when the conscripting soldiers came, how the last air raid had left a hole in their wall that rats came through.

Finally, Ugwu said that Professor Ekwenugo had died. “You remember I told you about him? The one in the Science Group, the one who made great things,” he said.

“I remember,” she said. “The one with the long nail.”

“It was cut,” Ugwu said and started to cry; his tears were sparse and itchy. She placed a hand on his shoulder and he sat very still so as not to move her hand, so as to keep it where it was. There was a newness to her, or perhaps it was his perception of things that had become new. He believed now in precious-ness.

“You said he cut his long nail?” she asked.

“He cut it,” Ugwu said. It was suddenly a good thing he had cut his nail; Ugwu could not bear the thought of that nail being blown up.

“I should go,” he said. “Before my master comes home.”

“I shall come and visit you tomorrow,” she said. “I know a shortcut to your place.”

Master was not back when Ugwu got home. Mama Oji was screaming, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” at her husband, and Pastor Ambrose was praying that God scatter Britain with holy-spirit dynamite, and a child was crying. Slowly, one after the other, the sounds ceased. Darkness fell. Oil lamps went off. Ugwu sat outside the room and waited until, finally, Master walked in with a small smile on his face and his eyes a glaring red.

“My good man,” he said.

“Welcome, sah. Nno.” Ugwu stood up. Master was unsteady on his feet, swaying ever so slightly to the left. Ugwu hurried forward and placed his arm around him and supported him. They had just stepped inside the room when Master doubled over with a fierce jerk and threw up. The foaming vomit splattered on the floor. Sour smells filled the room. Master sat down on the bed. Ugwu brought a rag and some water and, while he cleaned, he listened to Master's uneven breathing.

“Don't tell any of this to your madam,” Master said. “Yes, sah.”

Eberechi visited often, and her smile, a brush of her hand, or her pinching his neck became exquisite joys. The afternoon he first kissed her, Baby was asleep. They were inside, sitting on the bench and playing Biafran whotand she had just said “Check up!” and placed down her last card when he leaned closer and tasted the tart dirt behind her ear. Then he kissed her neck, her jaw, her lips; under the pressure of his tongue, she opened her mouth and the gushing warmth of it overwhelmed him. His hand moved to her chest and enclosed her small breast. She pushed it away. He lowered it to her belly and kissed her mouth again before quickly slipping his hand under her skirt.

“Just let me see,” he said, before she could stop him. “Just see.”

She stood up. She did not hold him back as he raised her skirt and pulled down the cotton underwear with a small tear at the waistband and looked at the large rounded lobes of her buttocks. He pulled the underwear back up and let go of her skirt. He loved her. He wanted to tell her that he loved her.

“I am going,” she said, and straightened her blouse. “What of your friend the army officer?”

“He is in another sector.” “What did you do with him?”

She rubbed the back of her hand against her lips as if to wipe something off. “Did you do anything with him?” Ugwu asked.

She walked to the door, still silent.“ You like him,” Ugwu said, feeling desperate now. “I like you more.”

It didn't matter that she was still seeing the officer. What mattered was the more, whom she preferred. He pulled her to him but she moved away.

“You will kill me,” she said, and laughed. “Let me go.” “I'll escort you halfway,” he said.

“No need. Baby will be alone.” “I'll be back before she wakes up.”

He wanted to hold her hand; instead, he walked so close to her that, once in a while, their bodies brushed against each other. He didn't go far before turning back. He was a short pathway away from home when he saw two soldiers standing next to a van and holding guns.

“You! Stop there!” one of them called.

Ugwu began to run until he heard the gunshot, so deafening, so alarmingly close that he fell to the ground and waited for the pain to drill into his body, certain he had been hit. But there was no pain. When the soldier ran up to him, the first thing Ugwu saw was the pair of canvas shoes, before he looked up at the wiry body and scowling face. A rosary hung around his neck. The burnt smell of gunpowder came from his gun.

“Come on, stand up, you bloody civilian! Join them there!”

Ugwu stood up and the soldier slapped the back of his head and a splintering light spread to his eyes; he dug his feet into the loose sand to steady himself for a moment before he walked over to join the two men standing with their arms raised high. One was elderly, at least sixty-five, while the other was a teenager of perhaps fifteen. Ugwu mumbled a “good afternoon” to the elderly man and stood next to him, arms raised.

“Enter the van,” the second soldier said. His thick beard covered most of his cheeks.

“If it has come to this, that you are conscripting somebody my age, then Biafra has died,” the elderly man said quietly.

The second soldier was watching him.

The first soldier shouted, “Shut up your stinking mouth, agadi!” and slapped the elderly man. “Stop that!” the second soldier said. He turned to the elderly man. “Papa, go.”

“Eh?” The elderly man looked uncertain. “Go, gawa.”

The elderly man began to walk away, at first slowly and uncertainly, his hand rubbing the cheek where he had been slapped; then he broke into an unsteady run. Ugwu watched him disappear down the road and wished he could leap across and clutch his hand and be propelled along to freedom.

“Get into the van!” the first soldier said. It was as if the elderly man's leaving had angered him and that he held not the second soldier but the new conscripts responsible. He shoved the teenager and Ugwu. The teenager fell and quickly scrambled to his feet before they climbed into the back of the van. There were no seats; old raffia bags and rawhide canes and empty bottles lay scattered on the rusting floor. Ugwu was startled to see a boy sitting there, humming a song and drinking from an old beer bottle. Ugwu smelled the harshness of local gin as he lowered himself next to the boy and thought that perhaps he was a stunted man and not a boy.

“I am High-Tech,” he said, and the scent of local gin became stronger.

“I am Ugwu.” Ugwu glanced at his oversize shirt, tattered shorts, boots, and beret. He was indeed a boy. No more than thirteen. But the dry cynicism in his eyes made him seem much older than the teenager crumpled down opposite them.

“Gikwanu? What is your own name?” High-Tech asked the teenager.

The teenager was sobbing. He looked familiar; perhaps he was one of the neighborhood boys whohad fetched water at the borehole before dawn. Ugwu felt sorry for him and yet angry, too, because the teenager's crying made the hopelessness of their situation stark and final. They really had been conscripted. They really would be sent to the war front with no training.

“Aren't you a man?” High-Tech asked the teenager. “Ibunwanyi?Why are you behaving like a woman?”

The teenager had his hand pressed against his eyes as he cried. High-Tech's sneer turned into mocking laughter. “This one doesn't want to fight for our cause!”

Ugwu said nothing; High-Tech's laughter and the smell of gin nauseated him.

“I do rayconzar meechon,” High-Tech announced, speaking English for the first time. Ugwu wanted to correct his pronunciation of reconnaissance mission;the boy certainly would benefit from Olanna's class.

“Our battalion is made up of field engineers and we use only the mighty ogbunigwe.” High-Tech paused and belched, as if he expected delight from his listeners. The teenager kept crying. Ugwu listened without expression. He suspected it would be important to win High-Tech's respect, and he would succeed only by showing nothing of the fear that was crawling all over him.

“I am the one who detects where the enemy is. I move close by and climb trees and find out the exact location and then our commander will use my information to decide where to set up for our operation.” High-Tech watched Ugwu and Ugwu kept his face indifferent. “With my last battalion I used to pretend that I was an orphan and infiltrate the enemy camp. They call me High-Tech because my first commander said I am better than any high-technology spying gadget.” He sounded eager to impress Ugwu. Ugwu stretched out his legs.

“That word you call re-con-zaris reconnaissance, ” he said.

High-Tech looked at him for a moment and laughed and offered the bottle, but Ugwu shook his head. High-Tech shrugged and drank and hummed “Biafra Win the War,” tapping his foot on the floor of the van. The teenager kept crying. The first soldier was at the wheel, smoking dried leaves rolled in paper and the smoke was pungent and the drive took so long that Ugwu could no longer hold his urge to urinate.

“Please, I want to piss!” he called out.

The soldier stopped the van and pointed his gun. “Step down and piss. You run, I shoot.”

It was the same soldier who, when they arrived at the training camp, a former primary school with buildings sheathed in palm fronds, shaved Ugwu's hair with a piece of broken glass. The rough scraping left his scalp tender, littered with nicks. The mats and mattresses arranged in the classrooms crawled with vicious bedbugs. The skinny soldiers—with no boots, no uniforms, no half of a yellow sun on their sleeves—kicked and slapped and mocked Ugwu during physical training. The parade left Ugwu's arms stiff. The obstacles training left his calves throbbing. The rope-climbing left his palms bleeding. The wraps of garrihe stood in line to receive, the thin soup scooped from a metal basin once a day, left him hungry. And the casual cruelty of this new world in which he had no say grew a hard clot of fear inside him.

A family of birds had nested on the roof of the classroom. In the mornings their chirping was interrupted by the sharp trill of the commander's whistle, a voice shouting “Fall in, fall in!” and the running and scrambling of men and boys. In the afternoons, the sun sapped energy and goodwill and the soldiers quarreled and played Biafran whotand spoke of the vandals they had blown up in past operations. When one of them said, “Our next operation will be very soon!” Ugwu's fear mixed with excitement at the thought that he was a soldier fighting for Biafra. If only he was with a real battalion, fighting with a gun. He remembered Professor Ekwenugo describing the ogbunigwe: “high-impact landmine.” How glamorous it sounded, this Biafran-made mine, this Ojukwu Bucket, this wonder that was so perplexing to the vandals that they were said to send cattle herds ahead to understand just how the ogbunigwe killed so many. But when he went to the first training session, he stared at what was before him: a dull metal container full of scrap metal.

He wished he could tell Eberechi about his disappointment. He wanted to tell her, too, about the commander, the only one with a full uniform, sharply ironed and stiff, how he often barked into a two-way radio, and how, when the teenager tried to run away during a training session, he beat him with his bare hands until blood ran down the teenager's nose and then screamed, “Lock him in the guardroom!” Ugwu thought most about Eberechi when the village women came with wraps of garri, thin soup, and, once in a while, win-the-war rice cooked with some palm oil and little else. Sometimes younger women came and went in the commander's quarters and emerged with sheepish smiles. The sentries at the entrance always raised the barriers to let the women in, although they did not have to, since the women could easily walk in by the sides. Once Ugwu saw a figure with rounded rolling buttocks leaving the compound and he wanted to call out, Eberechi! although he knew it was not her. It was while looking for bits of paper on which he could write down what he did from day to day, for whenever he saw Eberechi again, that he found the book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself slipped into a tight corner beneath the blackboard. On the front page, property of government college was printed in dark blue. He sat on the floor and read. He finished it in two days and started again, rolling the words round his tongue, memorizing some sentences:

The slaves became as fearful of the tar as of the lash. They find less difficulty from the want
of beds, than from the want of time to sleep.

High-Tech liked to sit next to him while he read. Sometimes he would hum Biafran songs in an annoying monotone, and other times he would chatter about this and that. Ugwu ignored him. But one afternoon the women did not bring any food, and a whole day went by with the grumbling of men. High-Tech nudged Ugwu at night and held out a tin of sardines. Ugwu grasped it. High-Tech laughed. “We have to share it,” he said and Ugwu wondered how he managed to get it, how a child so young seemed so flexibly in control. They went to the back of the building and shared the oily fish.

“The vandals eat well, oh!” High-Tech said. “The last camp I infiltrated, when I was with the battalion at Nteje, their women were cooking soup with big-big pieces of meat. They even gave some to our men when they stopped fighting for one week to celebrate Easter.”

“They stopped fighting to celebrate Easter?” Ugwu asked.

High-Tech looked pleased to have finally caught his attention. “Yes. They even played cards together and drank whisky. Sometimes they agree not to fight so that everybody will rest.” High-Tech glanced at Ugwu and laughed. “Your haircut is so ugly.”

Ugwu touched his head, with the odd tufts of hair that the jagged glass had missed. “Yes.”

“It is because they shaved it dry,” High-Tech said. “I can do it better for you with a razor and soap.” High-Tech produced a bar of green soap and lathered Ugwu's head and shaved it with a razor blade until it was smooth and soft to the touch. Later, when High-Tech told him, “Operation in two days,” in a whisper, Ugwu thought about the people who shaved their hair off as an act of mourning. Shaving as

a memorial to death. He lay face up on his thin mattress and listened to the ugly sounds of snoring around him. He had proved himself to the other men by how well he did at training, how he scaled the obstacles and shimmied up the rough rope, but he had made no friend. He said very little. He did not want to know their stories. It was better to leave each man's load unopened, undisturbed, in his own mind. He thought about the upcoming operation, about blowing up vandals with his ogbunigwe, about Professor Ekwenugo's blown-up body. He imagined himself getting up in the moonlit quiet, leaping out, running until he got back to the yard in Umuahia and greeted Master and Olanna and huggedBaby. But he would not even try, he knew, because a part of him wanted to be here.

In the trench, the earth felt like soaked bread. Ugwu lay still. A spider clambered up his arm but he did not slap it away. The darkness was black, complete, and Ugwu imagined the spider's hairy legs, its surprise to find not cold underground soil but warm human flesh. The moon floated out once in a while, and the thick trees ahead became dimly outlined. The vandals were somewhere there. Ugwu hoped for a little more light; the moon had been more generous earlier when he buried his ogbunigwe about thirty yards ahead. Now the darkness brooded. The cable felt cold in his hand. Next to him, a soldier was mumbling prayers in the softest voice, so soft that Ugwu felt he was whispering in his ear. “Mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” He shook the spider off and stood up when the vandals started shooting. The rattle of gunfire was scattered, loud then faint; the infantry was returning the vandals' fire from different directions and those vandals, those dirty cattle rearers, would be confused and would have no idea that the ogbunigwe mines were waiting for them.

Ugwu thought of Eberechi's fingers pulling the skin of his neck, the wetness of her tongue in his mouth. The vandals began to shell. There was first the whistle of a mortar in the air and then the boom as the mortar fell and hot shrapnel flew around. A patch of grass caught fire, lit up, and Ugwu saw a ferret by the cluster of trees ahead, hunched like a giant tortoise. Then he saw them: crouched silhouettes moving forward, a herd of men. They were in his killing range and it felt too soon, he had expected more to happen before they delivered themselves to him, before he detonated his ogbunigwe and it pushed outward in a spray of violent metal. He took a deep breath. Carefully, firmly, he connected the cable and the plug in his hands and the immediate forceful blow-up startled him, although he had expected it. For the briefest moment, fear clenched his bowels. Perhaps he had not calculated well enough. Perhaps he had missed them. But he heard somebody close to him shout, “Target!” The word reverberated in his head as they waited for long minutes before hauling themselves out of the trench and going over to the scattered corpses of the vandals.

“Naked them! Take the trousers and shirts!” somebody shouted.

“Boots and guns only!” another voice shouted. “No time. No time.Ngwa-ngwa!Their reinforcements are on the way!”

Ugwu bent over a lean body. He yanked off the boots. In the pockets, he felt a cold hard kola nut and warm thick blood. The second body, close by, stirred when Ugwu touched it and he moved back. There was a forced gasping breath before it became still. Ugwu shivered. Beside him, a soldier held up a few guns and was shouting.

“Let's go!” Ugwu called out, wiping his bloodied hands on his trousers.

The others thumped him on the back and called him “Target Destroyer!” as they trooped to headquarters to hand in their cables. “You learn this from that book you read?” they teased. Success hauled him up above the ground. He floated through the following days as they played Biafran whot and drank gin and waited for the next operation. He lay face up on the ground while High-Tech rolled up some wee-wee, the leaves crisply dried, in old paper and they smoked together. He preferred Mars cigarettes; the wee-wee made him feel disjointed, created a thin slice of space between his legs and hips. They didn't bother to hide their smoking because the commander was happy and the news was hope-filled now that Biafra had recaptured Owerri from the vandals. Rules relaxed; they could go out to the bar near the expressway.

“It's a long walk,” somebody said, and High-Tech laughed and said, “We will commandeer a car, of course.”

When High-Tech laughed, Ugwu remembered he was a child. Only thirteen. Among nine men he looked incongruously small, Ugwu thought, as they walked along. The sound of rubber slippers echoedon the silent road. Two of them were barefoot. They waited awhile before a dusty Volkswagen Beetle drove toward them and then spread across the road and blocked it. The car stopped, and a few of them banged on the bonnet.

“Get out! Bloody civilians!”

The man who was driving looked stern, as if determined to show that he could not be intimidated. Beside him, his wife began to cry and plead. “Please, we are going to look for our son.”

A soldier was violently hitting the bonnet of the car. “We need this for an operation!”

“Please, please, we are going to look for our son. They told us he was seen in the refugee camp.” The woman stared at High-Tech for a while, her brows furrowed. Perhaps she thought he might be her son.

“We are dying for you and you are here driving a pleasure car?” a soldier asked, pulling her out of the car. Her husband climbed out himself, but still stood by the car. His fist was tight with the key inside.

“This is wrong, officers. You have no right to take this car. I have my pass. I am working for our government.”

One of the soldiers slapped him. The man staggered and the soldier slapped him again and again and again and he crashed to the ground and the key slipped out of his hand.

“It is enough!” Ugwu said.

Another soldier touched the man's neck and wrist to make sure he was breathing. The wife was bent over her husband as the soldiers squashed into the car and drove to the bar.

The bar girl greeted them and said there was no beer.

“Are you sure you don't have beer? Are you hiding it because you think we will not pay you?” one of the soldiers said to her.

“No, there is no beer.” She was thin and sharp-featured and unsmiling. “We destroyed the enemy!” he said. “Give us beer!”

“She has said there is no beer,” Ugwu snapped. The soldier's loudness annoyed him; this was a man who had abandoned his ogbunigwe and run off long before the vandals were close. “Let her bring kai-kai.”

As the girl set out the local gin and small metal cups, the soldiers talked about the Nigerian officers, about how they would hang Danjuma, Adekunle, and Gowon upside down after Biafra's victory. High-Tech began to roll some wee-wee. Ugwu thought he made out something familiar on an unrolled portion of paper, the word narrative, but it could not be. He looked again. “What paper is that?” he asked.

“It is only the first page of your book.” High-Tech smiled and offered Ugwu the joint. Ugwu did not take it. “You tore my book?”

“It is only the first page. My paper finished.”

Rage pumped through Ugwu. His slap was swift, powerful, furious, but High-Tech avoided the full impact because he moved back at the last second and Ugwu's hand only scraped his cheek. Ugwu raised his hand again but the other soldiers held him, dragged him away, said it was just a book after all, told him to drink some more gin.

“Sorry,” High-Tech mumbled.

Ugwu's head ached. Everything was moving so fast. He was not living his life; life was living him. He drank steadily and watched the others, their mouths opening and closing, rancid jibes and conceited boasts and magnified memories coming out of them. Soon the bar itself, the benches placed around a table, became a sour-scented blur. The bar girl changed the bottles one after the other; Ugwuthought the gin was probably brewed in their backyard down the road. He got up to urinate outside and, afterward, leaned against a tree and breathed in the fresh air. It was like sitting in the backyard in Nsukka, looking at the lemon tree and his herb garden and Jomo's manicured plants. He stayed there for a while until he heard loud shouts from the bar. Perhaps somebody had won some bet or other. They tired him. The war tired him. When he finally went back inside, he stopped at the door. The bar girl was lying on her back on the floor, her wrapper bunched up at her waist, her shoulders held down by a soldier, her legs wide, wide ajar. She was sobbing, “Please, please, biko.” Her blouse was still on. Between her legs, High-Tech was moving. His thrusts were jerky, his small buttocks darker-colored than his legs. The soldiers were cheering.

“High-Tech, enough! Discharge and retire!”

High-Tech groaned before he collapsed on top of her. A soldier pulled him off and was fumbling at his own trousers when somebody said, “No! Target Destroyer is next!”

Ugwu backed away from the door.

“Ujo abiala o!Target Destroyer is afraid!”

Ugwu shrugged and moved forward. “Who is afraid?” he said disdainfully. “I just like to eat before others, that is all.”

“The food is still fresh!”

“Target Destroyer, aren't you a man?Ibukwa nwoke?”

On the floor, the girl was still. Ugwu pulled his trousers down, surprised at the swiftness of his erection. She was dry and tense when he entered her. He did not look at her face, or at the man pinning her down, or at anything at all as he moved quickly and felt his own climax, the rush of fluids to the tips of himself: a self-loathing release. He zipped up his trousers while some soldiers clapped. Finally he looked at the girl. She stared back at him with a calm hate.

There were more operations. Ugwu's fear sometimes overwhelmed him, froze him. He unwrapped his mind from his body, separated the two, while he lay in the trench, pressing himself into the mud, luxuriating in how close and connected he was to the mud. The ka-ka-kaof shooting, the cries of men, the smell of death, the blasts of explosions above and around him were distant. But back at the camp his memory became clear; he remembered the man who placed both hands on his blown-open belly as though to hold his intestines in, the one who mumbled something about his son before he stiffened. And, after each operation, everything became new. Ugwu looked at his daily wrap of garriin wonder. He read pages of his book over and over. He touched his own skin and thought of its decay.

One afternoon, the commander's jeep drove in with a sickly goat lying on its side, legs tied together. It had been commandeered from an idle civilian. It bleated meekly and the soldiers gathered, excited at the thought of meat. Two of them killed it and made a fire and when the large-cut chunks had been cooked, the commander asked that all of it be brought to his quarters. He spent long minutes checking through the basin to make sure the goat was complete: the legs, the head, the balls. Later, two village women came and were taken in to the commander's quarters; much later, the soldiers threw stones at them as they left. Ugwu dreamed that the commander had given half of the goat to the soldiers and that they had chewed everything and swallowed the bones.

When he woke up, a radio was turned on high and High-Tech was sobbing. Umuahia had fallen. Biafra's capital was lost. A soldier threw his hands up and said, “That goat, that goat was a bad omen! All is lost! We have to surrender!” The other soldiers were subdued. Even the commander's saying that he was aware of a secret counterattack plan to recover Umuahia did not lift their spirits. But the announcement that His Excellency would be visiting did. The soldiers swept the compound, washed their clothes, lined themselves on benches to welcome him. When the convoy of jeeps and Pontiacsdrove into the compound, they all stood up and saluted.

Ugwu's salute was slack, because he was worried about Olanna and Master and Baby in Umuahia, because he was not interested in His Excellency, because he did not care for the commander. He did not care for any of the officers, with their superior sneers and the way they treated their soldiers like sheep. But there was a captain he admired, a solitary and disciplined man called Ohaeto. And so the day that Ugwu found himself in the trench next to Captain Ohaeto, he was determined to impress him. The trench was not wet; there were more ants than spiders. Ugwu could tell that the vandals were closer, from the clatter of gunfire and the boom of mortars. But there was not enough light to see for certain. He really wanted to impress Captain Ohaeto; if only the light were not so poor. He was about to connect the cable and plug when something whistled past his ear and then, right afterward, a stinging pain burned into his back. Beside him, Captain Ohaeto was a bloodied, mangled mass. Then Ugwu felt himself lifted up above the trench, helplessly, haplessly. And when he landed, it was the force of his own weight, rather than the pain firing up his whole body, that stunned him into silence.

30

Richard shifted as far away as he could from the two American journalists in the car, pressing himself against the door of the Peugeot. He really should have sat in front and asked the orderly to sit in back with them. But he had not imagined that they would smell so bad, Charles the plump one wearing a squashed hat and Charles the redhead with his chin covered in ginger hair.

“One Midwestern and one New York journalist coming to Biafra, and we're both named Charles. What were the odds?” the plump one said, laughing, after they introduced themselves. “And both our moms call us Chuck!”

Richard was not sure how long they had waited before boarding their flight at Lisbon, but the wait at São Tomé for a relief flight to Biafra had stretched to seventeen hours. They needed a bath. When the plump one, sitting next to Richard, began to talk about his first visit to Biafra at the beginning of the war, Richard thought he needed mouthwash, too.

“I came in a real plane and we landed at Port Harcourt airport,” he said. “But this time I was sitting on the floor of a plane flying with no lights, alongside twenty tons of dried milk. We flew so fucking low, I looked out and could see the orange bursts of the Nigerian antiaircraft. I was scared shitless.” He laughed, his fat-padded face broad and pleasant.

The redhead did not laugh. “We don't know for sure that it was Nigerian fire. The Biafrans could have put it on.”

“Oh, come on!” The plump one glanced at Richard, but Richard kept his face straight. “Of course it was Nigerian fire.”

“The Biafrans are mixing up food and guns in their planes, anyway,” the redhead said. He turned to Richard. “Aren't they?”

Richard disliked him. He disliked his washed-out green eyes and his red-freckled face. When he had met them at the airport and handed them their passes and told them he would be their guide and that the Biafran government welcomed them, he had disliked the redhead's expression of scornful amusement. It was as if he were saying, You are speaking for the Biafrans?

“Our relief planes carry only food supplies,” Richard said. “Of course,” the redhead said. “Only food supplies.”

The plump one leaned across Richard to look out of the window. “I can't believe people are driving cars and walking around. It's not like there's a war going on.”

“Until an air raid happens,” Richard said. He had moved his face back and was holding his breath. “Is it possible to see where the Biafran soldiers shot the Italian oil worker?” the redhead asked.

“We've done something on that at the Tribune, but I'd like to do a longer feature.” “No, it's not possible,” Richard said sharply.

The redhead was watching him. “Okay. But can you tell me anything new?”

Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal one dead white person. “There is nothing new to tell,” he said. “The area is occupied now.”

At the checkpoint, Richard spoke Igbo to the civil defender. She examined their passes and smiled suggestively and Richard smiled back; her thin tall breastlessness reminded him of Kainene.

“She looked like she was real interested,” the plump one said. “I hear there's a lot of free sex here. But the girls have some kind of sexually transmitted disease? The Bonny disease? You guys have to becareful so you don't take anything back home.”

His presumptuousness annoyed Richard. “The refugee camp we are going to is run by my wife.” “Really? She been here long?”

“She's Biafran.”

The redhead had been staring out of the window; he turned now toward Richard. “I had an English friend at college who really went for colored girls.”

The plump one looked embarrassed. He spoke quickly. “You speak Igbo pretty well?”

“Yes,” Richard said. He wanted to show them the photos of Kainene and the roped pot, but then he thought better of it.

“I'd love to meet her,” the plump one said.

“She's away today. She's trying to get more supplies for the camp.”

He climbed out of the car first and saw the two interpreters waiting. Their presence annoyed him. It was true that idioms and nuances and dialects often eluded him in Igbo, but the directorate was always too prompt in sending interpreters. Most of the refugees sitting outside watched them with vague curiosity. An emaciated man was walking around, a dagger strapped to his waist, talking to himself. Rotten smells hung heavy in the air. A group of children was roasting two rats around a fire.

“Oh, my God.” The plump one removed his hat and stared.

“Niggers are never choosy about what they eat,” the redhead muttered. “What did you say?” Richard asked.

But the redhead pretended not to have heard and hurried ahead with one interpreter, to speak to a group of men playing draughts.

The plump one said, “You know there's food piled in São Tomé crawling with cockroaches because there's no way to bring it in.”

“Yes.” Richard paused. “Would it be all right if I gave you some letters? They're to my wife's parents in London.”

“Sure, I'll put them in the mail as soon as I get out of here.” The plump one brought out a large chocolate bar from his knapsack, unwrapped it, and took two bites. “Listen, I wish I could do more.”

He walked over to the children and gave them some sweets and took photographs of them and they clamored around him and begged for more. Once, he said, “That's a lovely smile!” and after he left them, the children went back to their roasting rats.

The redhead walked across quickly, the camera around his neck swinging as he moved. “I want to see the real Biafrans,” he said.

“The real Biafrans?” Richard asked.

“I mean, look at them. They can't have eaten a meal in two years. I don't see how they can still talk about the cause and Biafra and Ojukwu.”

“Do you usually decide what answers you will believe before you do an interview?” Richard asked mildly.

“I want to go to another refugee camp.” “Of course, I will take you to another one.”

The second refugee camp, farther inside the town, was smaller, smelled better, and used to be a town hall. Awoman with one arm was sitting on the stairs telling a story to a group of people. Richard caught the end of it—“But the man's ghost came out and spoke to the vandals in Hausa and they left his house alone”—and he envied her belief in ghosts.

The redhead lowered himself on the step next to her and began to talk through the interpreter. Are you hungry? Of course, we are all hungry.

Do you understand the cause of the war? Yes, the Hausa vandals wanted to kill all of us, but God was not asleep.Do you want the war to end? Yes, Biafra will win very soon. What if Biafra does not win?

The woman spat on the ground and looked at the interpreter first and then at the redhead, a long pitying look. She got up and went inside.

“Unbelievable,” the redhead said. “The Biafran propaganda machine is great.”

Richard knew his type. He was like President Nixon's fact finders from Washington or Prime Minister Wilson's commission members from London who arrived with their firm protein tablets and their firmer conclusions: that Nigeria was not bombing civilians, that the starvation was overflogged, that all was as well as it should be in the war.

“There isn't a propaganda machine,” Richard said. “The more civilians you bomb, the more resistance you grow.”

“Is that from Radio Biafra?” the redhead asked. “It sounds like something from the radio.” Richard did not respond.

“They are eating everything,” the plump one said, shaking his head. “Every fucking green leaf has become a vegetable.”

“If Ojukwu wanted to stop the starving, he could simply say yes to a food corridor. Those kids don't have to be eating rodents,” the redhead said.

The plump one had been taking photographs. “But it's really not that simple,” he said. “He's got to think of security too. He's fighting a fucking war.”

“Ojukwu will have to surrender. This is Nigeria's final push, and there's no way Biafra will recover all the lost territory,” the redhead said.

The plump one brought out a half-eaten chocolate bar from his pocket.

“So what's Biafra doing about oil now that they've lost the port?” the redhead asked.

“We are still extracting from some fields we control in Egbema,” Richard said, not bothering to explain where Egbema was. “We move the crude to our refineries at night, in tankers with no headlights, to avoid the bombers.”

“You keep saying we, ” the redhead said.

“Yes, I keep saying we.” Richard glanced at him. “Have you been to Africa before?” “No, first visit. Why?”

“I just wondered.”

“Am I supposed to feel inexperienced in jungle ways? I covered Asia for three years,” the redhead said, and smiled.

The plump one fumbled in his knapsack and brought out a bottle of brandy. He gave it to Richard. “I bought it in São Tomé. Never got to take a shot. Great stuff.”

Richard took the bottle.

Before he drove them to Uli to catch their flight out, they went to a guesthouse and ate a dinner of rice and chicken stew; he hated to think that the Biafran government had paid for the redhead's meal. A few cars were leaving and arriving at the terminal building; farther ahead, the airstrip was pitch black. The airport manager in his tight-fitting khaki suit came out and shook their hands and said, “The plane is expected any minute now.”

“It's ridiculous that they still follow protocol in this shithole,” the redhead said. “They stamped my passport when I got here and asked if I had anything to declare.”

Aloud explosion shattered the air. The airport manager shouted, “This way!” and they ran after him to the uncompleted building. They lay flat on the ground. The window louvers rattled and clattered. The ground quivered. The explosions stopped and scattered gunfire followed, and the airport managerstood up and brushed his clothes down. “No more problems. Let's go.” “Are you crazy?” the redhead screamed.

“They start shooting only when the bombs run out, nothing to worry about now,” the airport manager said airily, already on his way out.

On the tarmac, a lorry was repairing the bomb craters, filling them in with gravel. The runway lights blinked on and off and the darkness was complete again, absolute; in the blue-blackness Richard felt his head swimming. The lights came on for a little longer and then off. On again and then off. A plane was descending; there was the bumpy trailing sound on the tarmac.

“It's landed?” the plump one asked. “Yes,” Richard said.

The lights blinked on and off. Three planes had landed and it amazed Richard how quickly some lorries, without headlights, had already driven up to them. Men were hauling sacks from the planes. The lights went on and off. Pilots were screaming. “Hurry up, you lazy boys! Get them off! We're not going to be bombed here! Get a move on, boys! Hurry up, damn it!” There was an American accent, an Afrikaans accent, an Irish accent.

“The bastards could be a little more gracious,” the plump one said. “They're fucking paid thousands of dollars to fly the relief in.”

“Their lives are at risk,” the redhead said.

“So are the lives of the men who are fucking unloading the planes.”

Somebody lit a hurricane lamp and Richard wondered if the Nigerian bomber hovering above could see it, wondered how many Nigerian bombers were hovering above.

“Some of our men have walked into the propellers in the dark,” Richard said calmly. He was not sure why he had said that, perhaps to shock the redhead out of his complacent superiority.

“And what happened to them?” the plump one asked. “What do you think happened to them?”

A car was driving in toward them, slowly, with no headlights. It parked close by, doors opened and shut, and soon five emaciated children and a nun in a blue-and-white habit joined them. Richard greeted her. “Good evening.Kee ka Ime?”

She smiled. “Oh, you are the onye ochawho speaks Igbo. You are the one who is writing wonderful things about our cause. Well done.”

“Are you going to Gabon?”

“Yes.” She asked the children to sit on the wood slabs. Richard went closer to look at them. In the dim light, the milky foam of mucus in their eyes was thick. The nun cradled the smallest, a shriveled doll with stick legs and a pregnant belly. Richard could not tell if the child was a boy or a girl and suddenly that made him angry, so angry that when the redhead asked, “How do we know when to get on the plane?” Richard ignored him.

One of the children made to get up. She toppled over and fell and lay face down and unmoving. The nun placed the smallest down on the ground and picked up the fallen child. “Sit here. If you go anywhere I will smack you,” she said to the others before she hurried away.

The plump man asked. “The kid fell asleep or what?” Richard ignored him too.

Finally, the plump man muttered, “Fucking American policy.” “Nothing wrong with our policy,” the redhead said.

“Power comes with responsibility. Your government knows that people are dying!” Richard said, his voice rising.

“Of course my government knows people are dying,” the redhead said. “People are dying in Sudan and Palestine and Vietnam. People are dying everywhere.” He sat down on the floor. “They broughtmy kid brother's body back from Vietnam last month, for God's sake.”

Neither Richard nor the plump one said anything. In the long silence that followed, even the pilots and the sounds of unloading dimmed. Later, after they had been driven hurriedly to the tarmac and dashed into the planes and the planes took off in the on-again, off-again lighting, the title of the book came to Richard: “The World Was Silent When We Died.” He would write it after the war, a narrative of Biafra's difficult victory, an indictment of the world. Back in Orlu, he told Kainene about the journalists and how he had felt both angry with and sorry for the redhead and how he had felt incredibly alone in their presence and how the book title had come to him.

She arched her eyebrows. “We? The world was silent when we died?”

“I'll make sure to note that the Nigerian bombs carefully avoided anybody with a British passport,” he said.

Kainene laughed. She laughed often these days. She laughed as she told him about the motherless baby who still clung to life, about the young girl that Inatimi was falling in love with, about the women who sang in the evenings. She laughed, too, on the morning that he and Olanna finally saw each other. Olanna spoke first. “Hello, Richard,” she said and he said, “Olanna, hello,” and Kainene laughed and said, “Richard couldn't invent any more trips.”

He watched Kainene's face carefully for withdrawal, for returning anger, for something.But there was nothing; her laughter softened the angles of her chin. And the tension he had expected, the weight of memory and regret that would come with seeing Olanna again in her presence, were absent.

7. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died

For the epilogue, he writes a poem, modeled after one of Okeoma's poems. He calls it:

“WERE YOU SILENT WHEN WE DIED?”

Did you see photos in sixty-eight

Of children with their hair becoming rust: Sickly patches nestled on those small heads, Then falling off, like rotten leaves on dust?

Imagine children with arms like toothpicks, With footballs for bellies and skin stretched thin. It was kwashiorkor—difficult word,

A word that was not quite ugly enough, a sin. You needn't imagine. There were photos

Displayed in gloss-filled pages ofyourLife. Did you see? Did you feel sorry briefly, Then turn round to hold your lover or wife?

Their skin had turned the tawny of weak tea And showed cobwebs of vein and brittle bone; Naked children laughing, as if the man

Would not take photos and then leave, alone.

31

Olanna saw the four ragged soldiers carrying a corpse on their shoulders. Wild panic made her woozy. She stopped, certain it was Ugwu's body, until the soldiers walked quickly, silently, past and she realized that the dead man was too tall to be Ugwu. His feet were cracked and caked in dried mud; he had fought without shoes. Olanna stared at the soldiers' retreating backs and tried to calm her queasiness, to shrug off the foreboding that had fogged her mind for days.

Later, she told Kainene how afraid she was for Ugwu, how she felt as if she were about to turn a corner and be flattened by tragedy. Kainene placed an arm around her and told her not to worry. Madu had sent word to all battalion commanders to look for Ugwu; they would find out where he was. But when Baby asked, “Is Ugwu coming back today, Mummy Ola?” Olanna imagined it was because Baby, too, had the same premonition. When she returned to Umuahia and Mama Oji gave her a package somebody had delivered, she immediately wondered if it contained a message about Ugwu. Her hands shook as she held the brown-wrapped carton creased with excessive handling. Then she noticed Mohammed's writing, addressed to her in care of the University of Biafra, in long elegant sweeps. Inside, she unfolded handkerchiefs, crisp white underwear, bars of Lux soap, and chocolate, and she marveled that they had reached her intact, even sent through the Red Cross. His letter was three months old but still smelled faintly of sweet musk. Detached sentences stuck to her mind.

I have sent so many letters and am unsure which has reached you. My sister, Hadiza, got
married in June. I think constantly of you. My polo game is much improved. I am well and know
you and Odenigbo must be too. Do try and send word back.

She turned a chocolate bar around in her hand, stared at the MADE IN SWITZERLAND, fiddled with the silver foil. Then she flung the bar across the room. Mohammed's letter incensed her; it insulted her reality. But he could not possibly know that they had no salt and Odenigbo drank kai-kai every day and Ugwu was conscripted and she had sold her wig. He could not possibly know. Yet she felt angry that the patterns of his old life remained in place, so unquestioningly in place that he could write to her about his polo game.

Mama Oji knocked; Olanna took a deep calming breath before she opened the door and gave her a bar of soap.

“Thank you.” Mama Oji held the soap with both hands and raised it to her nose and sniffed it. “But that package was big. Is this the only thing you will give me? Is there no canned food there? Or are you saving it for your saboteur friend Alice?”

“Ngwa, give me back the soap,” Olanna said. “Mama Adanna will know how to be appreciative.” Mama Oji swiftly raised her blouse and tucked the soap into her threadbare bra. “You know I am grateful.”

Raised voices came from the road, and they both went outside. A group of militia members holding machetes were pushing two women along. They cried as they staggered down the road; their wrappers were ripped and their eyes reddened. “What did we do? We are not saboteurs! We are refugees from Ndoni! We have done nothing!”

Pastor Ambrose ran out to the road and began to pray. “Father God, destroy the saboteurs that are showing the enemy the way! Holy-spirit fire!”

Some of the neighbors hurried out to spit and aim stones and jeer at the backs of the women. “Sabo! God punish you! Sabo!”

“They should throw tires round their necks and burn them,” Mama Oji said. “They should burnevery single saboteur.”

Olanna folded Mohammed's letter, thought of the slack half-exposed bellies of the women, and said nothing.

“You should be careful with that Alice,” Mama Oji said. “Leave Alice alone. She is not a saboteur.”

“She is the kind of woman who will steal somebody's husband.” “What?”

“Every time you go to Orlu she will come out and sit with your husband.”

Olanna stared at Mama Oji, surprised, because it was the last thing she had expected to hear and because Odenigbo had never mentioned that Alice spent time with him when she was away. She had never even seen them speak to each other.

Mama Oji was watching her. “I am only saying that you should be careful with her. Even if she is not a saboteur, she is not a good woman.”

Olanna could not think of what to say. She knew that Odenigbo would never touch another woman, had quietly convinced herself of this, and knew too that Mama Oji nursed a deep resentment of Alice. Yet the very unexpectedness of Mama Oji's words nagged her.

“I will be careful,” she said finally, with a smile.

Mama Oji looked as if she wanted to say something else but changed her mind and turned to shout at her son. “Get away from that place! Are you stupid?Ewuawusa!Don't you know you will start coughing now?”

Later, Olanna took a bar of soap and knocked on Alice's door, three sharp raps in quick succession to let Alice know it was she. Alice's eyes looked sleepy, more shadowed than usual. “You're back,” she said. “How is your sister?”

“Very well.”

“Did you see the poor women they are harassing and calling saboteurs?” she asked, and before Olanna could respond, she continued, “Yesterday it was a man from Ogoja. This is nonsense. We cannot keep beating people just because Nigeria is beating us. Somebody like me, I have not eaten proper food in two years. I have not tasted sugar. I have not drunk cold water. Where will I find the energy to aid the enemy?” Alice gestured with her tiny hands, and what Olanna had once thought to be an elegant fragility suddenly became a self-absorbed conceit, a luxurious selfishness; Alice spoke as if she alone suffered from the war.

Olanna gave her the soap. “Somebody sent a few bars to me.”

“Oh! So I will join those using Lux in this Biafra. Thank you.” Alice's smile transformed her face, brightened her eyes, and Olanna wondered if Odenigbo found her pretty. She looked at Alice's yellow-skinned face and narrow waist and realized that what she had once admired now threatened her.

“Ngwanu, let me go and make Baby's lunch,” she said, and turned to leave. That evening, she visited Mrs. Muokelu with a bar of soap.

“Is this you?Anyagi!It has been long!” Mrs. Muokelu said. A hole had split up His Excellency's face on the sleeve of her boubou.

“You look well,” Olanna lied. Mrs. Muokelu was gaunt; her body was built for thickness and now, with so much weight loss, she drooped, as though she could no longer stand straight. Even the hair on her arms drooped.

“You, ever beautiful,” Mrs. Muokelu said, and hugged Olanna again.

Olanna gave her the soap, and because she knew that Mrs. Muokelu would not touch anything sent from Nigeria by a Nigerian, she said, “My mother sent it from England.”

“God bless you,” Mrs. Muokelu said. “Your husband and Baby, kwanu?” “They are well.”“ And Ugwu?”

“He was conscripted.” “After that first time?” “Yes.”

Mrs. Muokelu paused and fingered the plastic half of a yellow sun around her neck. “It will be well. He will come back. Somebody has to fight for our cause.”

They saw very little of each other now that Mrs. Muokelu had started her trade. Olanna sat down and listened to her stories— about the vision that revealed that the saboteur responsible for the fall of Port Harcourt was a general of the Biafran Army; about another vision in which a dibiafrom Okija gave His Excellency some powerful medicine that would recapture all the fallen towns.

“They have started the rumor that Umuahia is threatened, okwaya?” Mrs. Muokelu asked, staring into Olanna's eyes.

“Yes.”

“But Umuahia will not fall. There is no need for people to panic and start packing.” Olanna shrugged; she wondered why Mrs. Muokelu was looking at her so intently.

“They say people with cars have started looking for petrol.” Mrs. Muokelu's eyes were unwavering. “They have to be careful, very careful, before somebody will ask them how they knew that Umuahia would fall if not that they are saboteurs.”

Olanna realized, then, that Mrs. Muokelu was warning her, telling her to be prepared. “Yes, they have to be careful,” she said.

Mrs. Muokelu rubbed her hands together. Something had changed with her; she had allowed her faith to slip from her fingers. Biafra would win, Olanna knew, because Biafra had to win, but that Mrs. Muokelu of all people believed that the fall of the capital was imminent dampened her. When she hugged Mrs. Muokelu goodbye, it was with the hollow feeling that she would never see her again. She seriously contemplated, for the first time, the fall of Umuahia as she walked home. It would mean a delayed victory, a tighter squeezing of Biafra's territory, but it would also mean that they would go and live in Kainene's house in Orlu until the war ended.

She stopped by the petrol station near the hospital and was not surprised to see the sign scrawled in chalk: no petrol. They had stopped selling Biafran-made petrol since the talk of Umuahia's fall began, so that people would not panic. That night, Olanna told Odenigbo, “We need to get some petrol on the black market; we don't have enough in case anything happens.” He nodded vaguely and mumbled something about Special Julius. He had just come back from Tanzania Bar and lay on the bed with the radio turned on low. Across the curtain, Baby was asleep on the mattress.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“We can't afford petrol right now. It's a pound a gallon.”

“They paid you last week. We have to be sure that the car will move.”

“I've asked Special Julius to do a check exchange. He has not brought the money.”

Olanna knew immediately that it was a lie. They did check exchanges with Special Julius all the time; it never took more than a day for Special Julius to give Odenigbo cash in exchange for a check.

“How are we going to buy petrol then?” she asked. He said nothing.

She walked past him and outside. The moon was behind a cloud and, sitting out in the blackness of the yard, she could still smell that cheap vapor-heavy scent of local gin. It trailed him, it clouded the paths that he walked. His drinking in Nsukka—his auburn, finely refined brandy—had sharpened his mind, distilled his ideas and his confidence so that he sat in the living room and talked and talked and everybody listened. This drinking here silenced him. It made him retreat into himself and look out at the world with bleary weary eyes. And it made her furious.Olanna changed what was left of her British pounds and bought petrol from a man who led her into a dank outhouse with creamy-fat maggots crawling all over the floor. He poured carefully from his metal container into hers. She took the container home wrapped in a sack that had contained cornmeal and had just stored it in the boot of the Opel when a biafran army open jeep drove in. Kainene climbed out, followed by a soldier wearing a helmet. And Olanna knew, with an immediate sinking wail of a feeling, that it was about Ugwu. It was about Ugwu. The sun burned hotly and liquids began to spin in her head and she looked around for Baby but could not find her. Kainene came up and held her firmly by the shoulders and said, “Ejima m, hold your heart, be strong. Ugwu has died,” and it was not the news but the tight grip of Kainene's bony fingers that Olanna recognized.

“No,” she said calmly. The air was charged with unreality, as if she would certainly wake up in a minute. “No,” she said again, shaking her head.

“Madu sent his batman with the message. Ugwu was with the field engineers, and they suffered massive casualties in an operation last week. Only a few came back and Ugwu was not one of them. They did not find his body, but they did not find many of the bodies.” Kainene paused. “There was not much that was whole to find.”

Olanna kept shaking her head, waiting to wake up.

“Come with me. Bring Chiamaka. Come and stay in Orlu.” Kainene was holding her, Baby was saying something, and a haze shrouded everything until she looked up and saw the sky. Blue and clear. It made the present real, the sky, because she had never seen the sky in her dreams. She turned and marched down the road to Tanzania Bar. She walked past the dirty curtain at the door and pushed Odenigbo's cup off the table; a pale liquid spread on the cement floor.

“Have you drunk enough, eh?” she asked him quietly. “Ugwu anwugo. Did you hear me? Ugwu has died.”

Odenigbo stood up and looked at her. The rims of his eyes were puffy.

“Go on and drink,” Olanna said. “Drink and drink and don't stop. Ugwu has died.”

The woman who owned the bar came across and said, “Oh! Sorry, ndo, ” and made to hug her but Olanna shrugged her off. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Leave me alone!” It was only then she realized that Kainene had come with her and was silently holding her as she shouted, “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” at the bar owner, who backed away.

In the following days, days filled with dark gaps of time, Odenigbo did not go to Tanzania Bar. He gave Baby a bath, made their garri, came home earlier from work. Once he tried to hold Olanna, to kiss her, but his touch made her skin crawl and she turned away from him and went outside to sleep on a mat on the veranda, where Ugwu had sometimes slept. She did not cry. The only time she cried was after she went to Eberechi's house to tell her that Ugwu had died and Eberechi screamed and called her a liar; at nights those screams rang in Olanna's head. Odenigbo sent word to Ugwu's people through three different women who went across enemy lines to trade. And he organized a service of songs in the yard. Some of the neighbors helped Alice bring out her piano and set it down near the banana trees. “I will play as you sing,” Alice said to the gathered women. But whenever somebody started a song, Mama Oji would clap, insistently, loudly, in accompaniment, and soon all the other neighbors would join in the clapping and Alice could not play. She sat helplessly by her piano with Baby on her lap.

The first songs were vigorous and then Mama Adanna's voice broke out, husky and elegiac.

Naba na ndokwa,
Ugwu, naba na ndokwa.
O ga-adili gi mma,
Naba na ndokwa.

Odenigbo half stumbled out of the yard before they finished singing, a livid incredulity in his eyes, as if he could not believe the words of the song: Go in peace, it will be well with you. Olanna watched him go. She did not entirely understand the resentment she felt. There was nothing he could have done to prevent Ugwu's death, but his drinking, his excessive drinking, had somehow made him complicit. She did not want to speak to him, to sleep beside him. She slept on the mat outside, and even the routine of the mosquito bites became a comfort. She said little to him. They spoke only of necessities, what Baby would eat, what they would do if Umuahia fell.

“We will stay in Kainene's house only until we find a place,” he said, as if they had many choices, as if he had forgotten that, before, he would have said that Umuahia would not fall; and she said nothing in response.

She told Baby that Ugwu had gone to heaven.

“But he's coming back soon, Mummy Ola?” Baby asked.

And Olanna said yes. It was not that she wanted to soothe Baby; it was that, day after day, she found herself rejecting the finality of Ugwu's death. She told herself that he was not dead; he might be close to dead but he was not dead. She willed a message to come to her about his whereabouts. She bathed outside now—the bathroom was slimy with mold and urine, so she woke up very early to take a bucket and go behind the building—and one morning she caught a movement at the corner and saw Pastor Ambrose watching her. “Pastor Ambrose!” she called out, and he dashed off. “You are not ashamed of yourself ? If only you would spend your time praying for somebody to come and tell me what happened to Ugwu instead of spying on a married woman taking a bath.”

She visited Mrs. Muokelu's home, hoping for a story of a vision that involved Ugwu's safety, but a neighbor told her that Mrs. Muokelu's whole family was gone. They had left without telling anybody. She listened to the war reports on Radio Biafra more carefully, as if there might be clues about Ugwu in the ebullient voice reporting the pushback of the vandals, the successes of gallant Biafran soldiers. A man wearing a stained white caftan walked into the yard on a Saturday afternoon, and Olanna hurried up to him, certain that he had come with news of Ugwu.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me where Ugwu is.”

The man looked confused. “Dalu. I am looking for Alice Njokamma from Asaba.”

“Alice?” Olanna stared at the man, as though to give him a chance to take it back and ask for her instead. “Alice?”

“Yes, Alice from Asaba. I am her kinsman. My family's compound is next to theirs.” Olanna pointed at Alice's door. He went over and knocked and knocked.

“She is in?” he asked.

Olanna nodded, resentful that he had not brought news of Ugwu.

The man knocked again and called out, “I am from the Isioma family in Asaba.”

Alice opened the door and he went in. Moments later, Alice rushed out and threw herself on the ground, rolling this way and that; in the evening sunlight, her sand-patched skin was tinted with gold.

“Oginimere? What happened?” the neighbors asked, gathering around Alice.

“I am from Asaba and I got word about our hometown this morning,” the man said. His accent was thicker than Alice's, and Olanna understood his Igbo a moment after he had spoken. “The vandals took our town many weeks ago and they announced that all the indigenes should come out and say ‘One Nigeria' and they would give them rice. So people came out of hiding and said ‘One Nigeria' and the vandals shot them, men, women, and children. Everyone.” The man paused. “There is nobody left in the Njo-kamma family. Nobody left.”

Alice was lying on her back, rubbing her head frantically against the ground, moaning. Clumps of sand were in her hair. She jumped up and ran toward the road but Pastor Ambrose ran after her and dragged her back. She jerked away and threw herself down again, her lips pulled back, her teeth bared. “What am I doing still alive? They should come and kill me now! I said they should come and kill me!” She was strengthened, emboldened, by the madness of grief and she fought off everyone who tried to hold her. She rolled on the ground with such force that the stones cut her skin in tiny red gashes. The neighbors said ohand shook their heads. Odenigbo came out of the room then and went over and picked Alice up and held her, and she stayed still and began to weep, her head resting on his shoulder. Olanna watched them. There was a familiar melding to the curve of Odenigbo's arms around Alice. He held her with the ease of someone who had held her before.

Finally Alice sat down on a bench, blank and stricken. From time to time, she would scream “Hei!” and stand up and place her hands on her head. Odenigbo sat by her and urged her to drink some water. He and the man from Asaba talked in low voices as if they alone were responsible for her, and afterward he came up to where Olanna was sitting on the veranda.

“Will you pack some of her things, nkem?” he asked. “The man says he has some Asaba people in his compound and he will take her to stay with them for a while.”

Olanna looked up at him, her face blank. “No,” she said. “No?”

“No,” she said again, loudly now. “No.” And she got up and went into the room. She would not pack anybody's clothes. She did not know who did pack Alice's things, perhaps Odenigbo did, but she heard the “Ijeoma, go well,” from many neighbors as Alice and the man left late in the evening. Olanna slept outside and dreamed of Alice and Odenigbo on the bed in Nsukka, their sweat on her newly washed sheet; she woke up with a raging suspicion in her heart and the boom of shelling in her ears.

“The vandals are close!” Pastor Ambrose cried, and he was first to run out of the compound, a stuffed duffel bag in his hand.

The yard erupted in activity, shouting, packing, leaving. The shelling, like burst after burst of horribly loud, vile coughing, did not stop. And the car did not start. Odenigbo tried and tried and the road was already crowded with refugees and the crashing explosions of mortars sounded as close as St. John's Road. Mama Oji was screaming at her husband. Mama Adanna was begging Olanna to let her get into the car with some of her children and Olanna said, “No, take your children and go.”

Odenigbo started the engine and it whined and died. The compound was almost empty. Awoman on the road was dragging a stubborn goat and finally left it behind and hurried ahead. Odenigbo turned the key and again the car stalled. Olanna could feel the ground underneath vibrating with each boom.

Odenigbo turned the key again and again. The car would not start. “Start walking with Baby,” he said. Sweat clung to his brow. “What?”

“I'll pick you both up when the car starts.” “If we are walking, we will walk together.”

Odenigbo tried to start the car again. Olanna turned, surprised at how quiet Baby was, sitting in the back beside their rolled-up mattresses. Baby was watching Odenigbo carefully, as though urging both him and the car on with her eyes.

Odenigbo came out and opened the bonnet and Olanna climbed out, too, and let Baby out and then wondered what she would take from the boot and what she would leave behind. The compound was empty and only one or two people walked past the road now. There was the rattle of gunfire nearby. She was frightened. Her hands were shaking.

“Let's start walking,” Olanna said. “Nobody is left in Umu-ahia!”

Odenigbo got in and took a deep breath and turned the key. The car started. He drove fast and, on the outskirts of Umuahia, Olanna asked, “Did you do anything with Alice?”

Odenigbo did not answer, looking straight ahead.“ I asked you a question, Odenigbo.”

“Mba, I didn't do anything with Alice.” He glanced at her and then looked ahead at the road.

They said nothing else to each other until they arrived in Orlu, and Kainene and Harrison came out of the house. Harrison began to unpack the things in the car.

Kainene hugged Olanna, picked Baby up, and then turned to Odenigbo. “What an interesting beard,” she said. “Are we trying to copy His Excellency?”

“I never try to copy anyone.”

“Of course. I had forgotten how original you are.”

Kainene's voice was thick with the tension that surrounded them all. Olanna could feel it, moisture-heavy, hanging over the room when Richard came back and stiffly shook hands with Odenigbo and, later, when they sat at the table and ate the yam slices Harrison served on enamel plates.

“We're here until we can find a place to rent,” Odenigbo said, looking at Kainene.

Kainene stared back at him, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Harrison! Bring some more palm oil for Chiamaka.”

Harrison came in and placed a bowl of oil before Baby. After he left, Kainene said, “He roasted a fantastic bush rat for us last week. But you would have thought it was a rack of lamb the way he went on about it.”

Olanna laughed. Richard's laughter was tentative. Baby laughed too, as if she understood. And Odenigbo focused, unsmiling, on his plate. On the radio, there was a repeat broadcast of the Ahiara declaration, His Excellency's voice measured and determined.

Biafra will not betray the black man. No matter the odds, we will fight with all our might
until black men everywhere can point with pride to this Republic, standing dignified and defiant,
an example of African nationalism….

.Richard excused himself and came back with a bottle of brandy and gestured toward Odenigbo. “An American journalist gave it to me.”

Odenigbo stared at the bottle.

“It's brandy,” Richard said, holding it out, as if Odenigbo did not know. They had not spoken since Odenigbo drove to his house years ago to shout at him. They had not spoken even after they shook hands today.

Odenigbo did not reach out to take the bottle.

“You can have Biafran sherry instead,” Kainene said. “Possibly more suitable for your tough revolutionary liver.”

Odenigbo looked at her and there was a small, sneering smile on his face, as though he was both amused and annoyed by her. He stood up. “No brandy for me, thank you. I should get to bed. I have quite a walk ahead of me, now that Manpower has moved to the bush.”

Olanna watched him go inside. She did not look at Richard. “Bedtime, Baby,” she said.

“No,” Baby said, and pretended to focus on her empty plate. “Come right now,” Olanna said, and Baby got up.

In the room, Odenigbo was tying his wrapper around his waist. “I was just coming to put Baby to bed,” he said. Olanna ignored him.

“Sleep well, Baby, ka chifo,” he said. “Good night, Daddy.”

Olanna placed Baby down on the mattress, covered her with a wrapper, kissed her forehead, and felt the sudden urge to cry at the thought of Ugwu. He would have slept on a mat in the living room.

Odenigbo came and stood close to her and she wanted to back away, unsure what he was trying to do. He touched her collarbone. “Look how bony you are.” She glanced down, irritated by his touch, surprised to see how it jutted out; she did not know she had lost so much weight. She said nothing and went back to the living room. Richard was no longer there.

Kainene was still at the table. “So you and Odenigbo decided to look for a place?” she asked. “My humble home is not good enough?”

“Are you listening to him? We didn't decide anything. If he wants to find a place he can go ahead and live there alone,” Olanna said.

Kainene looked at her. “What is the matter?” Olanna shook her head.

Kainene dipped a finger in palm oil and brought it to her mouth. “Ejima m, what is the matter?” she asked again.

“Nothing, really. There is nothing I can point at,” Olanna said, looking at the bottle of brandy on the table. “I want this war to end so that he can come back. He has become somebody else.”

“We are all in this war, and it is up to us to decide to become somebody else or not,” Kainene said. “He just drinks and drinks cheap kai-kai.The few times they pay him, the money goes quickly. I think he slept with Alice, that Asaba woman in our yard. I can't stand him. I can't stand him close to me.”

“Good,” Kainene said. “Good?”

“Yes, good. There's something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You've never even accepted that the man is ugly,” Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.

In the morning, Kainene showed Olanna a small pear-shaped vial of face cream. “Look at this. Somebody went abroad and brought it for me. My face creams finished months ago and I've been using that horrible Biafran-made oil.”

Olanna examined the pink jar. They took turns dabbing the cream on their faces, slowly, sensually, and afterward went down to the refugee camp. They went every morning. The new har-mattan winds blew dust everywhere, and Baby joined the thin children who ran around with their naked bellies wreathed in brown. Many of the children collected pieces of shrapnel, played with them, traded them. When Baby came back with two bits of jagged metal, Olanna shouted at her and pulled her ear and took them away. She hated to think that Baby was playing with the cold leftovers of things that killed. But Kainene asked her to give them back to Baby. Kainene gave Baby a can to store the shrapnel. Kainene asked Baby to join the older children making lizard traps, to learn how to mat the palm fronds and place the cocoon full of iddoants inside. Kainene let Baby hold the dagger of the emaciated man who paraded the compound, muttering, “Ngwa, let the vandals come, let them come now.” Kainene let Baby eat a lizard leg.

“Chiamaka should see life as it is, ejimam, ” Kainene said, as they moisturized their faces. “You protect her too much from life.”

“I just want to keep my child safe,” Olanna said. She took a small dash of cream and began to rub it into her face with the tips of her fingers.

“They protected us too much,” Kainene said.

“Daddy and Mom?” Olanna asked, although she knew.

“Yes.” Kainene spread the cream on her face with her palms. “Good thing Mom left. Can you imagine her ever living without things like this? Or using palm-kernel oil?” Olanna laughed. She wished, though, Kainene would not take so much of the cream, so that it would last as long as possible.

“Why were you always so keen to please Mom and Dad?” Kainene asked.

Olanna held her hands to her face, silent for a while. “I don't know. I think I felt sorry for them.” “You have always felt sorry for people who don't need you to feel sorry for them.”

Olanna said nothing because she did not know what to say. It was the kind of thing she would have discussed with Odenigbo, Kainene's voicing for the first time a resentment with their parents and with her, but she and Odenigbo hardly talked. He had found a bar close by; only last week, the bar owner had come to the house asking for him because he had not paid his balance. Olanna said nothing to him after the bar owner left. She was no longer sure when he went to the Manpower Directorate and when he simply went to the bar. She refused to worry about him.

She worried about other things: how her periods were sparse and no longer red but a muddy brown, how Baby's hair was falling out, how hunger was stealing the memories of the children. She was determined that their minds be kept alert; they were Biafra's future, after all. So every day she taught them under the flame tree, away from the horrible smells toward the back of the buildings. She would have them memorize one line of a poem, and the next day they would have forgotten it. They chased after lizards. They ate garriand water once a day now instead of twice because Kainene's suppliers could no longer cross over to Mbosi to buy garri;all the roads were occupied. Kainene launched a Plant Our Own Food movement, and when she joined the men and women and children in making ridges, Olanna wondered where she had learned to hold a hoe. But the soil was parched. The harmattan cracked lips and feet. Three children died in one day. Father Marcel said Mass without Holy Communion. The belly of a young girl named Urenwa began to grow and Kainene was not sure if it was kwashiorkor or pregnancy until the girl's mother slapped her and asked, “Who? Who did this to you? Where did you see the man that did this to you?” The doctor no longer visited because there was no petrol and there were too many dying soldiers to treat. The well dried up. Kainene went often to the Directorate at Ahiara to get a water tanker, but each time she came back with a vague promise from the director. The thick ugly odors of unwashed bodies and rotting flesh from the shallow graves behind the buildings grew stronger. Flies flew over the sores on children's bodies. Bedbugs and kwalikwatacrawled; women would untie their wrappers to reveal an ugly rash of reddened bites around their waists, like hives steeped in blood. Oranges were in season and Kainene asked them to eat oranges from the trees, although it gave them diarrhea, and then to squeeze the peels against their skin because the smell of citrus masked the smell of dirt.

In the evenings, Olanna and Kainene walked home together. They talked about the people at the camp, about their school days at Heathgrove, about their parents, about Odenigbo.

“Have you asked him again about that Asaba woman?” Kainene said. “Not yet.”

“Before you ask him, just walk up to him and slap his face. If he dares to slap you back, I will come at him with Harrison's kitchen knife. But the slap will shake the truth out of him.”

Olanna laughed and noticed that they were both walking at a leisurely pace and that their steps were in harmony, their slippers coated in brown dust.

“Grandpapa used to say that it gets worse and then it gets better.Odikatanjo,odikwamma, ” Kainene said.

“I remember.”

“The world will turn around soon, and Nigeria will stop this,” Kainene said quietly. “We'll win.” “Yes.” Olanna believed it more because Kainene said it.

There were evenings when Kainene was distant, immersed in herself. Once she said, “I never really noticed Ikejide,” and Olanna placed an arm on her sister's shoulder and said nothing. Mostly, though,Kainene was in high spirits and they would sit outside and talk and listen to the radio and to the bats flying around the cashew trees. Sometimes Richard joined them. Odenigbo never did.

Then, one evening, it rained, a flinty blustery rain, a strange shower in the dry season, and perhaps it was why Odenigbo did not go to the bar. It was the evening that he finally accepted Richard's brandy, holding it to his nose and inhaling deeply before he drank, he and Richard still saying very little to each other. And it was the evening that Dr. Nwala came to tell them that Okeoma had been killed. Lightning flashed across the sky and thunder rumbled and Kainene said, laughing, “It sounds like shelling.”

“I'm worried that they have not bombed us in a while,” Olanna said. “I wonder what they are planning.”

“Perhaps an atomic bomb,” Kainene said.

They heard the car drive in then and Kainene stood up. “Who is visiting in this kind of weather at night?”

She opened the door and Dr. Nwala came in, water dripping down his face. Olanna recalled how he had extended his hand to help her up after the air raid on her wedding day, how he had said that her dress would get dirty—as though it were not already dirty from lying on the ground. He was thinner and lankier than she remembered and looked as though he would break in two if he sat down abruptly. He did not sit down. He did not waste time with greetings. He had raised his loose shirt away from his body, was rapidly flipping it to get the water off when he said, “Okeoma has gone, ojebego. They were on a mission to retake Umuahia when it happened. I saw him last month, and he told me he was writing some poems and Olanna was his muse, and if anything happened to him I should make sure the poems went to her. But I can't find them. The people who brought the message said that they never saw him writing anything. So I said I would come and tell you he has gone but I did not find the poems.”

Olanna was nodding without quite understanding because Dr. Nwala was saying too many words too quickly. Then she stopped. He meant that Okeoma was dead. It was raining in har-mattan and Okeoma was dead.

“Okeoma?” Odenigbo spoke in a cracked whisper. “Onye? Are you talking about Okeoma?”

Olanna reached out and grasped Odenigbo's arm and the screams came out of her, screeching, piercing screams, because something in her head was stretched taut. Because she felt attacked, relentlessly clobbered, by loss. She did not let go of his arm until Dr. Nwala stumbled back into the rain, until they climbed silently onto their mattress on the floor. When he slid into her, she thought how different he felt, lighter and narrower, on top of her. He was still, so still she thrashed around and pulled at his hips. But he did not move. Then he began to thrust and her pleasure multiplied, sharpened on stone so that each tiny spark became a pleasure all its own. She heard herself crying, her sobbing louder and louder until Baby stirred and he placed his palm against her mouth. He was crying too; she felt the tears drop on her body before she saw them on his face.

Later, he propped himself on his elbow and watched her. “You're so strong, nkem.”

Those were words she had never heard from him. He looked old; there was a wetness in his eyes, a crumpled defeat in his face, that made him look older. She wanted to ask him why he had said that, what he meant, but she didn't and she was not sure who fell asleep first. The next morning, she woke up too early, smelling her own bad breath and feeling a sad and unsettling peace.

32

Ugwu wanted to die, at first. It was not because of the hot tingle in his head or the stickiness of blood on his back or the pain in his buttocks or the way he gasped for air, but because of his thirst. His throat was scorched. The infantrymen carrying him were talking about how rescuing him had given them a reason to run away, how their bullets had finished and they had sent for reinforcements and nothing was forthcoming and the vandals were advancing. But Ugwu's thirst clogged his ears and muffled their words. He was on their shoulders, bandaged with their shirts, the pain shooting all over his body as they walked. He gulped for air, gasped, and sucked but somehow he could not get enough. His thirst nauseated him.

“Water, please,” he croaked. They would not give him any; if he had the energy, he would invoke all the curses he knew on them. If he had a gun he would have shot them all and then shot himself.

Now, in the hospital where they had left him, he no longer wanted to die, but he feared he would; there were so many bodies littered around him, on mats, on mattresses, on the bare floor. There was so much blood everywhere. He heard the sharp screams of men when the doctor examined them and knew that his was not the worst case, even as he felt his own blood seeping out, first warm and then clammy cold against his side. The blood took his will; he was too exhausted to do anything about it and when the nurses hurried past him and left his bandaging unchanged, he did not call out to them. He said nothing, either, when they came and pushed him to his side and gave him quick unceremonious injections. In his delirious moments, he saw Eberechi wearing her tight skirt and making gestures to him that he could not understand. And in his lucid moments, death occupied him. He tried to visualize a heaven, a God seated on a throne, but could not. Yet the alternative vision, that death was nothing but an endless silence, seemed unlikely. There was a part of him that dreamed, and he was not sure if that part could ever retreat into an interminable silence. Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.

In the evenings, in the dim half-light, the people from Caritas came, a priest and two helpers carrying kerosene lanterns, giving out milk and sugar to the soldiers, asking their names and where they had come from.

“Nsukka,” Ugwu said, when he was asked. He thought the priest's voice was vaguely familiar, but then everything was vaguely familiar here: The blood of the man next to him smelled like his, the nurse who placed a bowl of thin akamu next to him smiled like Eberechi.

“Nsukka? What is your name?” the priest asked.

Ugwu struggled to focus on the rounded face, the glasses, the browned collar. It was Father Damian. “I am Ugwu. I used to come with my madam Olanna to St. Vincent de Paul.”

“Ah!” Father Damian squeezed his hand and Ugwu winced. “You fought for the cause? Where were you wounded? What have they done for you?”

Ugwu shook his head. One part of his buttocks was wrapped in fiery red pain; it consumed him. Father Damian spooned some powdered milk into his mouth and then placed a bag of sugar and milk next to him.

“I know Odenigbo is with Manpower. I will send word to them,” Father Damian said. Before he left, he slipped a wooden rosary onto Ugwu's wrist.

The rosary was there, a cold pressure against his skin, when Mr. Richard came some days later. “Ugwu, Ugwu.” The fair hair and the strange-colored eyes swam above him, and Ugwu was not sure

who it was.“ Can you hear me, Ugwu? I've come to take you.” It was the same voice that had asked Ugwu questions about his village festival years ago. Ugwu knew then who it was. Mr. Richard tried to help him get up and the pain shot up from his side and buttock to his head and eyes. Ugwu cried out, then clenched his teeth and bit his lip and sucked his own blood.

“Easy now, easy now,” Mr. Richard said.

The bumpy ride lying in the backseat of the Peugeot 404 and the fierce sun that sparkled the windscreen made Ugwu wonder if he had died and this was what happened at death: an unending journey in a car. Finally, they stopped at a hospital that smelled not of blood but of disinfectant. Only when Ugwu lay in a real bed did he think that perhaps he was not going to die after all.

“This place has been bombed quite a bit in the past week, and we will have to leave right after the doctor sees you. He's really not a doctor—he was in his fourth year in university when the war started —but he's done very well,” Mr. Richard said. “Olanna and Odenigbo and Baby have been with us in Orlu since Umuahia fell, and of course Harrison is there too. Kainene needs help at the refugee camp, so you better hurry up and be well.”

Ugwu sensed that Mr. Richard was talking too much, for his benefit, perhaps to keep him awake until the doctor came. But he was grateful for Mr. Richard's laughter, the normality of it, the way it came back with a force of memory and made him inhabit the time when Mr. Richard wrote his answers in a leather-covered book.

“We all had a bit of a shock when we heard you were alive and at Emekuku Hospital—a good kind of shock, of course. Thank heavens there actually hadn't been a symbolic burial, although there was some sort of memorial service before Umuahia fell.”

Ugwu's eyelids throbbed. “They said I was dead, sah?”

“Oh, yes, they did. It seems your battalion thought you had died during the operation.”

Ugwu's eyes were closing and would not stay open when he forced them. Finally he got them open and Mr. Richard was looking down at him. “Who is Eberechi?”

“Sah?”

“You kept saying Eberechi.” “She is somebody I know, sah.” “In Umuahia?”

“Yes, sah.”

Mr. Richard's eyes softened. “And you don't know where she is now?” “No, sah.”

“Have you been wearing those clothes since you were wounded?” “Yes, sah. The infantrymen gave me the trousers and shirt.” “You need a wash.”

Ugwu smiled. “Yes, sah.”

“Were you afraid?” Mr. Richard asked, after a while.

He shifted; the pain was everywhere and there was no comfortable position. “Afraid, sah?” “Yes.”

“Sometimes, sah.” He paused. “I found a book at our camp. I was so sad and angry for the writer.” “What book was it?”

“The autobiography of a black American called Frederick Douglass.”

Mister Richard wrote something down. “I shall use this anecdote in my book.” “You are writing a book.”

“Yes.”

“What is it about, sah?”

“The war, and what happened before, and how much should not have happened. It will be called‘The World Was Silent When We Died.' ”

Later, Ugwu murmured the title to himself:TheWorldWasSilentWhenWeDied.It haunted him, filled him with shame. It made him think about that girl in the bar, her pinched face and the hate in her eyes as she lay on her back on the dirty floor.

Master and Olanna wrapped their arms around Ugwu, but lightly, without pressure, so as not to cause him pain. He felt acutely uncomfortable; they had never hugged him before.

“Ugwu,” Master said, shaking his head. “Ugwu.”

Baby clung to his hand and refused to let go and Ugwu's whole life suddenly gathered in a lump in his throat, and he was sobbing and the tears hurt his eyes. He was angry with himself for crying, and later, as he recounted the story of what had happened to him, he spoke in a detached voice. He lied about how he had been conscripted; he said Pastor Ambrose had pleaded with him to help carry his sick sister to the herbalist's and he was on his way back when the soldiers caught him. He used words like enemy fire and Attack HQ with a casual coldness, as if to make up for his crying.

“And they told us you were dead,” Olanna said, watching him. “Maybe Okeoma is alive too.” Ugwu stared at her.

“They said he was killed in action,” Olanna said. “And I got word that kwashiorkor has finally taken Adanna. Baby doesn't know, of course.”

Ugwu looked away. Her news provoked him. He felt angry with her for telling him what he did not want to hear.

“Too many people are dying,” he said.

“It is what happens in war, too many people die,” Olanna said. “But we will win this thing. Is your pillow in a good position?”

“Yes, mah.”

He could not sit on one part of his buttocks and so, during the first few weeks in Orlu, he lay on his side. Olanna was always beside him, forcing him to eat and willing him to live. His mind wandered often. He did not need the echo of pain on his side and in his buttocks and on his back to remember his ogbunigwe exploding, or High-Tech's laughter, or the dead hate in the eyes of the girl. He could not remember her features, but the look in her eyes stayed with him, as did the tense dryness between her legs, the way he had done what he had not wanted to do. In that gray space between dreaming and daydreaming, where he controlled most of what he imagined, he saw the bar, smelled the alcohol, and heard the soldiers saying “Target Destroyer,” but it was not the bar girl that lay with her back on the floor, it was Eberechi. He woke up hating the image and hating himself. He would give himself time to atone for what he had done. Then he would go and look for Eberechi. Perhaps she and her family had gone to their village in Mbaise or perhaps they were here in Orlu somewhere. She would wait for him; she would know he would come for her. That Eberechi would wait for him, that her waiting for him was proof of his redemption, gave him comfort as he healed. It surprised him that it was possible for his body to return to what it had been and for his mind to function with permanent lucidity.

During the day he helped out at the refugee camp, and in the evenings he wrote. He sat under the flame tree and wrote in small careful letters on the sides of old newspapers, on some paper Kainene had done supply calculations on, on the back of an old calendar. He wrote a poem about people getting a buttocks rash after defecating in imported buckets, but it did not sound as lyrical as Okeoma's and he tore it up; then he wrote about a young woman with a perfect backside who pinched the neck of a young man and tore that up too. Finally, he started to write about Aunty Arize's anonymous death in Kano and about Olanna losing the use of her legs, about Okeoma's smart-fitting army uniform and Professor Ekwenugo's bandaged hands. He wrote about the children of the refugee camp, howdiligently they chased after lizards, how four boys had chased a quick lizard up a mango tree and one of them climbed up after it and the lizard leaped off the tree and into the outstretched hand of one of the other three surrounding the tree.

“The lizards have become smarter. They run faster now and hide under blocks of cement,” the boy who had climbed told Ugwu. They roasted and shared the lizard, shooing other children away. Later, the boy offered Ugwu a tiny bit of his stringy share. Ugwu thanked him and shook his head and realized that he would never be able to capture that child on paper, never be able to describe well enough the fear that dulled the eyes of mothers in the refugee camp when the bomber planes charged out of the sky. He would never be able to depict the very bleakness of bombing hungry people. But he tried, and the more he wrote the less he dreamed.

Olanna was teaching some children to recite the multiplication tables the morning that Kainene rushed up to the flame tree.

“Can you believe who is responsible for that small girl Ure-nwa's pregnancy?” Kainene asked, and Ugwu almost did not recognize her. Her eyes bulged out of her angular face, filled with rage and tears. “Can you believe it is Father Marcel?”

Olanna stood up. “Gini? What are you saying?”

“Apparently I've been blind; she's not the only one,” Kainene said. “He fucks most of them before he gives them the crayfish that I slave to get here!”

Later, Ugwu watched Kainene push at Father Marcel's chest with both hands, shouting into his face, shoving him so hard that Ugwu feared the man would fall. “Amosu!You devil!” Then she turned to Father Jude. “How could you stay here and let him spread the legs of starving girls? How will you account for this to your God? You both are leaving now, right now. I will take this to Ojukwu myself if I have to!”

There were tears running down her face. There was something magnificent in her rage. Ugwu felt stained and unworthy as he went about his new duties after the priests left—distributing garri, breaking up fights, supervising the scorched and failing farms. He wondered what Kainene would say, what she would do to him, feel about him, if she ever knew about the girl in the bar. She would loathe him. So would Olanna. So would Eberechi.

He listened to the conversations in the evenings, writing in his mind what he would later transfer to paper. It was mostly Kainene and Olanna who talked, as though they created their own world that Master and Mr. Richard could never quite enter. Sometimes Harrison would come and sit with Ugwu but say very little, as though he was both puzzled by and respectful of him. Ugwu was no longer just Ugwu, he was now one of “our boys;” he had fought for the cause. The moon was always a brilliant white, and once in a while the night wind brought the hooting of owls and the rise and fall of voices from the refugee camp. Baby slept on a mat with Olanna's wrapper over her to keep the mosquitoes away. Whenever they heard the far-off drone of the relief planes, nothing like the low-flying swiftness of the bombers, Kainene would say, “I hope that one will manage to land.” And Olanna would respond with a light laugh. “We have to cook our next soup with stockfish.”

When they listened to Radio Biafra, Ugwu would get up and walk away. The shabby theatrics of the war reports, the voice that forced morsels of invented hope down people's throats, did not interest him. One afternoon, Harrison came up to the flame tree carrying the radio turned up high to Radio Biafra.

“Please turn that thing off,” Ugwu said. He was watching some little boys playing on the nearby patch of grass. “I want to hear the birds.”

“There are no birds singing,” Harrison said. “Turn it off.”

“His Excellency is about to give a speech.” “Turn it off or carry it away.”“ You don't want to hear His Excellency?” “Mba, no.”

Harrison was watching him. “It will be a great speech.” “There is no such thing as greatness,” Ugwu said.

Harrison walked away looking wounded and Ugwu did not bother to call him; he went back to watching the children. They ran sluggishly on the parched grass, holding sticks as guns, making shooting sounds with their mouths, raising clouds of dust as they chased one another. Even the dust seemed listless. They were playing War. Four boys. Yesterday, they had been five. Ugwu did not remember the fifth child's name—was it Chi-diebele or Chidiebube?—but he remembered how the child's belly had lately started to look as if he had swallowed a fat ball, how his hair had fallen off in tufts, how his skin had lightened, from the color of mahogany to a sickly yellow. The other children had teased him often.Afommiliukwa, they called him: Breadfruit Belly. Once, Ugwu wanted to ask them to stop, so he could explain what kwashiorkor was—perhaps he could read out to them how he described kwashiorkor on his writing sheet. But he decided not to. There was no need to prepare them for what he was sure they would all get anyway. Ugwu did not remember the child's ever playing a Biafran officer, like His Excellency or Achuzie; he always played a Nigerian, either Gowon or Adekunle, which meant he was always defeated and had to fall down at the end and act dead. Sometimes, Ugwu wondered if the child had liked it because it gave him a chance to rest, lying down on the grass.

The child and his family had come from Oguta, one of those families who did not believe their town would fall, and so his mother looked defiant when they first arrived, as if she dared anybody to tell her she was not dreaming and would not be waking up soon. The evening they arrived, the sound of the antiaircraft guns cut through the refugee camp just before dusk. The mother ran out and held him, her only child, in a confused hug. The other women shook her roughly, as the wa-wa-waroar of the overhead planes came closer.Cometo thebunker!Are you mad? Come to the bunker!

The woman refused and stood there holding her son, shaking. Ugwu still did not know why he had done what he did. Perhaps it was because Olanna had already grabbed Baby and run ahead of him and his hands were free. But he reached out and pulled the child from the woman's embrace and ran. The child was still heavy then, still weighed something; his mother had no choice but to follow. The planes were strafing and, just before Ugwu shoved the child down the bunker, a bullet flew closely past; he smelled rather than saw it, the acridness of hot metal.

It was in the bunker, while playing with the damp soil that crawled with crickets and ants, that the child had told Ugwu his name. Chidiebele or Chidiebube, he was not sure. But it was Chidi-something. Perhaps Chidiebele, the more common name. The name almost sounded like a joke now. Chidiebele: God is merciful.

Later, the four boys had stopped playing War and had gone inside when Ugwu heard the thin, strangled wail from the classroom at the end of the building. He knew that that child's aunt would come out soon and bravely tell the people nearby, that the mother would throw herself in the dirt and roll and shout until she lost her voice, and then she would take a razor and leave her scalp bare and bleeding.

He put on his singlet and went out to offer to help dig the small grave.

33

Richard sat next to Kainene and rubbed her shoulder as she laughed at something Olanna was saying. He loved the way her neck looked longer when she threw back her head and laughed. He loved the evenings spent with her and Olanna and Odenigbo; they reminded him of Odenigbo's dimly lit living room in Nsukka, of tasting beer on his pepper-drenched tongue. Kainene reached out for the enamel plate of roasted crickets, Harrison's new specialty; he seemed to know just where to dig for them in the dry earth and how to break them up into bits after roasting, so that they lasted a bit longer. Kainene placed a piece in her mouth. Richard took two pieces and crunched slowly. It was getting dark, and the cashew trees had become silent gray silhouettes. A dust haze hung above them all.

“What do you think accounts for the success of the white man's mission in Africa, Richard?” Odenigbo asked.

“The success?” Odenigbo unnerved him, the way he would brood for long moments and then abruptly ask or say something unexpected.

“Yes, the success. I think in English,” Odenigbo said.

“Perhaps you should first account for the failure of the black man to curb the white man's mission,” Kainene said.

“Who brought racism into the world?” Odenigbo asked. “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?” Ode-nigbo 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? Ina-agba oso? Have you deserted?” Kai-nene 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 garriand 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 EzeGoesto School.

“Carry me on your shoulders, Uncle Richard,” Baby said, running to him. Richard pretended to tryand 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 recent 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 garriand 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.

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 any-way—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 attackand 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; ebezina, ” 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.Wedidthis.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. Ashrub 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. “Ona-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 boysare 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 Drummagazine 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 ubetrees.

“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 chiwas 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:IsOdenigbo 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 Ade-bayo?” “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 jollofrice. 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 jollofrice 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 bougain-villea 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 giventwenty 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 tightly, 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 silverswimming 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.

“Of course I love her.” “Did you ever touch her?”

Madu's laugh was short and harsh.

“Did you ever touch her?” Richard asked again, and Madu was suddenly responsible for Kainene's disappearance. “Did you ever touch her?”

Madu got up. Richard reached out and grasped his arm. Come back, he wanted to say, come back here and tell me if you ever laid your filthy black hand on her. Madu shrugged Richard's hand off. Richard hit him across the face and felt his hand begin to throb.

“You idiot,” Madu said, surprised, staggering slightly.

Richard saw Madu's arm raised, saw the swift blurred movement of a coming punch. It landed on his nose, and the pain exploded all over his face and his body felt very light as it sank down to the floor. When he touched his nose, there was blood on his fingers.

“You idiot,” Madu said again.

Richard could not get up. He pulled out his handkerchief; his hands trembled and he got some of the blood on his shirt. Madu watched him for a moment and then bent down and held his face between wide palms and examined his nose closely. Richard could smell the crayfish on Madu's breath.

“I didn't break it,” Madu said, and straightened up.

Richard dabbed at his nose. Darkness descended on him, and when it lifted he knew that he would never see Kainene again and that his life would always be like a candlelit room; he would see things only in shadow, only in half glimpses.

37

Olanna's moments of solid hope, when she was certain that Kainene would come back, were followed by stretches of raw pain, and then a surge of faith would make her hum under her breath, until the downward slide came and she would be crumpled on the floor, weeping and weeping. Miss Adebayo visited and said something about grief, something nice-sounding and facile: Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved. But it was not grief that Olanna felt, it was greater than grief. It was stranger than grief. She did not know where her sister was. She did not know. She raged at herself for not waking up early the day that Kainene left for afia attack and for not knowing what Kainene wore that morning and for not going with her and for trusting that Inatimi knew where he was leading her. She raged at the world when she boarded buses or climbed in beside Odenigbo or Richard to go to crowded hospitals and dusty buildings to search for Kainene and did not find her.

When she first saw her parents, her father called her “Ola m, ” my gold, and she wished he wouldn't because she felt tarnished.

“I did not even see Kainene before she left. When I woke up, she was gone,” she said to them. “Anyiga-achota ya, we will find her,” her mother said.

“We will find her,” her father repeated.

“Yes, we will find her,” Olanna said too, and she felt as if they were all scratching desperate fingernails on a hard scarred wall.

They told one another stories of people who had been found, who had come back after months of being lost. They did not tell one another the other stories, of those still missing, of families burying empty caskets.

The two soldiers who had come and eaten her jollofrice filled her with rage. She lay on the living room floor and prayed that they would not find her Biafran pounds. After they left, she took the folded notes out from the envelope hidden in her shoe and went out and lit a match under the lemon tree. Odenigbo watched her. He disapproved, she knew, because he kept his flag folded inside the pocket of a pair of trousers.

“You're burning memory,” he told her.

“I am not.” She would not place her memory on things that strangers could barge in and take away. “My memory is inside me.”

The weeks passed and the water started running again and the butterflies were back in the front yard and Baby's hair grew jet-black. Boxes of books came for Odenigbo from overseas.Forawar-robbed colleague, the notes read, from fellow admirers of David Blackwell in the brotherhood of mathematicians. Odenigbo spent days poring over them. “Look, I had the first edition of this one,” he said often.

Edna sent books and clothes and chocolate. Olanna looked at the enclosed pictures and Edna looked foreign, a woman who lived in Boston and had greasy-pressed hair. It seemed very long since Edna had lived next door to her flat on Elias Avenue, and it seemed even longer since this yard on Odim Street had formed the boundaries of her life. When she took long walks on campus, past the tennis courts and Freedom Square, she thought how quick leaving had been and how slow returning was.

Her bank account in Lagos was gone. It no longer existed. It was like being forcibly undressed; somebody had snatched at all her clothes and left her shivering naked in the cold. But she saw a good sign there. Since she had lost her savings, then she could not possibly lose her sister too; thecustodians of fate were not that wicked.

“Why is Aunty Kainene still at afia attack?” Baby asked often, with a steady suspicious look.

“Stop asking me, this child!” Olanna said. But she saw a sign in Baby's questions too, although she could not yet decipher its meaning. Odenigbo told her that she had to stop seeing signs in everything. She was angry that he could disagree with her seeing signs of Kainene's return and then she was grateful that he did, because it meant he did not believe that anything had happened that would make his disagreeing inappropriate.

When some relatives came from Umunnachi and suggested that they consult a dibia, Olanna asked her Uncle Osita to go. She gave him a bottle of whisky and some money to buy a goat for the oracle. She drove to the River Niger to throw in a copy of Kainene's photo. She went to Kainene's house in Orlu and walked around it three times. And she waited for the week that the dibiahad stipulated, but Kainene did not come home.

“Maybe I didn't do something right,” she told Odenigbo. They were in his study. The floor was littered with blackened paper crisps from the pages of his half-burned books.

“The war has ended but hunger has not, nkem.That dibia was just hungry for goat meat. You can't believe in that.”

“I do believe in it. I believe in everything. I believe in anything that will bring my sister home.” She stood up and went to the window.

“We come back again,” she said. “What?”

“Our people say that we all reincarnate, don't they?” she said. “Uwam,uwaozo.When I come back in my next life, Kainene will be my sister.”

She had started to cry softly. Odenigbo took her in his arms.

8. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died

Ugwu writes his dedication last: For Master, my good man.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This book is based on the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967–70. While some of the characters are based on actual persons, their portrayals are fictitious as are the events surrounding them. I have listed below the books (most use the anglicized spelling Ibo for Igbo) that helped in my research. I owe much thanks to their authors. In particular, Chukwuemeka Ike's SunsetatDawnand Flora Nwapa's NeverAgainwere indispensable in creating the mood of middle-class Biafra; Christopher Okigbo's own life and Labyrinthsinspired the character of Okeoma; while Alexander Madiebo's TheNigerian Revolution and the Biafran Warwas central to the character of Colonel Madu.

However, I could not have written this book without my parents. My wise and wonderful father, Professor Nwoye James Adichie, OdeluOraAbba, ended his many stories with the words aghaajoka, which in my literal translation is “war is very ugly.” He and my defending and devoted mother, Mrs. Ifeoma Grace Adichie, have always wanted me to know, I think, that what matters is not what they went through but that they survived. I am grateful to them for their stories and for so much more.

I salute my Uncle Mai, Michael E. N. Adichie, who was wounded while fighting with the 21st Battalion of the Biafran Army, and who spoke to me of his experience with much grace and humor. I salute, also, the sparkling memories of my Uncle CY(Cyprian Odigwe, 1949–98) who fought with the Biafran Commandos, my cousin Pauly (Paulinus Ofili, 1955–2005) who shared his memories of life in Biafra as a thirteen-year-old, and my friend Okla (Okoloma Maduewesi, 1972–2005) who will now not clutch this under his arm as he did the last.

Thanks to my family: Toks Oremule and Arinze Maduka, Chisom and Amaka Sonny-Afoekelu, Chinedum and Kamsi Adichie, Ijeoma and Obinna Maduka, Uche and Sonny Afoekelu, Chukwunwike and Tinuke Adichie, Nneka Adichie Okeke, Okechukwu Adichie, and especially Kenechukwu Adichie; all the Odigwes of Umunnachi and the Adichies of Abba; my “sisters” Urenna Egonu and Uju Egonu, and my “baby bro,” Oji Kanu, for believing I am better than I am.

Thanks to Ivara Esege; to Binyavanga Wainaina for his excellent complaints; to Amaechi Awurum for teaching me about faith; to Ike Anya, Muhtar Bakare, Maren Chumley, Laura Bramon Good, Martin Kenyon, and Ifeacho Nwokolo for being draft-reading friends; to Susan Buchan for those photographs taken in Biafra; to the Vermont Studio Center for the gift of space and time; and to Professor Michael J. C. Echeruo, whose erudite and generous comments made me search for the other half of the sun.

I am grateful to my inimitable agent Sarah Chalfant for making me feel safe; and to Mitzi Angel, Anjali Singh, and Robin Desser, my brilliantly discerning editors.

May we always remember.

DMU Timestamp: November 21, 2024 01:28