Girls at War (11 page)

Yes, near enemies came too. Like our big man across the road, a one-time Protestant clergyman they said, now unfrocked, a pompous ass if ever there was one, who had early in the war wangled himself into the venal position of controlling and dispensing scarce materials imported by the government, especially women’s fabrics. He came like a Nichodemus as I was about to turn in. I wouldn’t have thought he knew the likes of us existed. But there he came nodding in his
walk like an emir on horseback and trailing the aroma of his Erinmore tobacco. He wondered if I could buy him two bottles of a special pomade for dying grey hair and held out a five-dollar bill. This was the wretch who once asked my girlfriend when she went to file an application to buy a bra to spend a weekend with him in some remote village!

By forgoing lunch daily in São Tomé I was able at the end of the week to save up from my miserable allowance enough foreign exchange to buy myself a few things including those antihistamine tablets (for I had abandoned in our hasty retreat the bottle that Father Doherty gave me). For Cletus—and this gave me the greatest happiness of all—I bought a tin of Lipton’s tea and two half-pound packets of sugar. Imagine then my horrified fury when one of the packets was stolen on my arrival home at the airport while (my eyes turned momentarily away from my baggage) I was put through make-believe immigration. Perhaps if that packet had not been stolen Cletus might have been spared the most humiliating defeat that sugar was yet to inflict on him.

Mercy came to see him (and me) the day I returned from São Tomé. I had a tablet of Lux soap for her and a small tube of hand cream. She was ecstatic.

“Would you like some tea?” asked Cletus.

“Oh yes,” she said in her soft, purring voice. “Do you have tea? Great! And sugar too! Great! Great! I must take some.”

I wasn’t watching but I think she thrust her hand into the opened packet of sugar and grabbed a handful and was about to put it into her handbag. Cletus dropped the kettle of hot water he was bringing in and pounced on her.
That
I saw clearly. For a brief moment she must have thought it was some kind of grotesque
joke. I knew it wasn’t and in that moment I came very near to loathing him. He seized her hand containing the sugar and began to prize it open, his teeth clenched.

“Stop it, Cletus!” I said.

“Stop, my arse,” he said. “I am sick and tired of all these grab-grab girls.”

“Leave me alone,” she cried, sudden tears of anger and shame now running down her face. Somehow she succeeded in wrenching her hand free. Then she stepped back and threw the sugar full in his face, snatched her handbag and ran away, crying. He picked up the sugar, about half-a-dozen cubes.

“Sam!” shouted Cletus across to his houseboy. “Put some more water on the fire.” And then turning to me he said again, his eyes glazed in crazy reminiscence: “Mike, you must tell them the battle I waged with sugar.”

“He was called Sugar Baby at school,” I said, dodging again.

“Oh, Mike, you’re no bloody good with stories. I wonder who ever recommended you for the Propaganda Directorate.” The other two laughed. Beads of perspiration trembled on his forehead. He was desperate. He was on heat begging, pleading, touting for the sumptuous agony of flagellation.

“And he lost his girlfriend,” I said turning brutal. “Yes, he lost a nice, decent girl because he wouldn’t part with half-a-dozen cubes of the sugar I bought him.”

“You know that’s not fair,” he said turning on me sharply. “Nice girl indeed! Mercy was just a shameless grabber like all the rest of them.”

“Like all the rest of us. What interests me, Cletus,
is that you didn’t find out all those months you went with her and slept with her until I brought you a packet of sugar. Then your eyes were opened.”

“We know
you
brought it, Mike. You’ve told us already. But that’s not the point …”

“What then is the point?” Then I realized how foolish it was and how easy, even now, to slip back into those sudden irrational acrimonies of our recent desperate days when an angry word dropping in unannounced would start a fierce war like the passage of Esun between two peace-loving friends. So I steered myself to a retrieving joke, retrieving albeit with a razor-edge.

“When Cletus is ready to marry,” I said, “they will have to devise a special marriage vow for him. With all my worldly goods—except my Tate and Lyle—I thee honour. Father Doherty if they ever let him back in the country will no doubt understand.”

Umera and his friend laughed again.

The first time their paths crossed nothing happened. That was in the first heady days of warlike preparation when thousands of young men (and sometimes women too) were daily turned away from enlistment centres because far too many of them were coming forward burning with readiness to bear arms in defence of the exciting new nation.

The second time they met was at a check-point at Awka. Then the war had started and was slowly moving southwards from the distant northern sector. He was driving from Onitsha to Enugu and was in a hurry. Although intellectually he approved of thorough searches at road-blocks, emotionally he was always offended whenever he had to submit to them. He would probably not admit it but the feeling people got was that if you were put through a search then you could not really be one of the big people. Generally he got away without a search by pronouncing in his deep, authoritative voice: “Reginald Nwankwo, Ministry of
Justice.” That almost always did it. But sometimes either through ignorance or sheer cussedness the crowd at the odd check-point would refuse to be impressed. As happened now at Awka. Two constables carrying heavy Mark 4 rifles were watching distantly from the roadside leaving the actual searching to local vigilantes.

“I am in a hurry,” he said to the girl who now came up to his car. “My name is Reginald Nwankwo, Ministry of Justice.”

“Good afternoon, sir. I want to see your trunk.”

“O Christ! What do you think is in the trunk?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

He got out of the car in suppressed rage, stalked to the back, opened the trunk and holding the lid up with his left hand he motioned with the right as if to say: After you!

“Are you satisfied?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir. Can I see your pigeon-hole?”

“Christ Almighty!”

“Sorry to delay you, sir. But you people gave us this job to do.”

“Never mind. You are damn right. It’s just that I happen to be in a hurry. But never mind. That’s the glovebox. Nothing there as you can see.”

“All right, sir, close it.” Then she opened the rear door and bent down to inspect under the seats. It was then he took the first real look at her, starting from behind. She was a beautiful girl in a breasty blue jersey, khaki jeans and canvas shoes with the new-style hair-plait which gave a girl a defiant look and which they called—for reasons of their own—“air force base”; and she looked vaguely familiar.

“I am all right, sir,” she said at last meaning she was through with her task. “You don’t recognize me?”

“No. Should I?”

“You gave me a lift to Enugu that time I left my school to go and join the militia.”

“Ah, yes, you were the girl. I told you, didn’t I, to go back to school because girls were not required in the militia. What happened?”

“They told me to go back to my school or join the Red Cross.”

“You see I was right. So, what are you doing now?”

“Just patching up with Civil Defence.”

“Well, good luck to you. Believe me you are a great girl.”

That was the day he finally believed there might be something in this talk about revolution. He had seen plenty of girls and women marching and demonstrating before now. But somehow he had never been able to give it much thought. He didn’t doubt that the girls and the women took themselves seriously; they obviously did. But so did the little kids who marched up and down the streets at the time drilling with sticks and wearing their mothers’ soup bowls for steel helmets. The prime joke of the time among his friends was the contingent of girls from a local secondary school marching behind a banner:
WE ARE IMPREGNABLE
!

But after that encounter at the Awka check-point he simply could not sneer at the girls again, nor at the talk of revolution, for he had seen it in action in that young woman whose devotion had simply and without self-righteousness convicted him of gross levity. What were her words? We are doing the work you asked us to do. She wasn’t going to make an exception even for one who once did her a favour. He was sure she would have searched her own father just as rigorously.

When their paths crossed a third time, at least
eighteen months later, things had got very bad. Death and starvation having long chased out the headiness of the early days, now left in some places blank resignation, in others a rock-like, even suicidal, defiance. But surprisingly enough there were many at this time also who had no other desire than to corner whatever good things were still going and to enjoy themselves to the limit. For such people a strange of normalcy had returned to the world. All those nervous check-points disappeared. Girls became girls once more and boys boys. It was a tight, blockaded and desperate world but none the less a world—with some goodness and some badness and plenty of heroism which, however, happened most times far, far below the eye-level of the people in this story—in out-of-the-way refugee camps, in the damp tatters, in the hungry and bare-handed courage of the first line of fire.

Reginald Nwankwo lived in Owerri then. But that day he had gone to Nkwerri in search of relief. He had got from Caritas in Owerri a few heads of stockfish, some tinned meat, and the dreadful American stuff called Formula Two which he felt certain was some kind of animal feed. But he always had a vague suspicion that not being a Catholic put one at a disadvantage with Caritas. So he went now to see an old friend who ran the WCC depot at Nkwerri to get other items like rice, beans and that excellent cereal commonly called Gabon gari.

He left Owerri at six in the morning so as to catch his friend at the depot where he was known never to linger beyond 8:30 for fear of air-raids. Nwankwo was very fortunate that day. The depot had received on the previous day large supplies of new stock as a result of an unusual number of plane landings a few nights earlier. As his driver loaded tins and bags and cartons
into his car the starved crowds that perpetually hung around relief centres made crude, ungracious remarks like “War Can Continue!” meaning the WCC! Somebody else shouted “Irevolu!” and his friends replied “shum!” “Irevolu!” “shum!” “Isofeli?” “shum!” “Isofeli?” “Mba!”

Nwankwo was deeply embarrassed not by the jeers of this scarecrow crowd of rags and floating ribs but by the independent accusation of their wasted bodies and sunken eyes. Indeed he would probably have felt much worse had they said nothing, simply looked on in silence, as his trunk was loaded with milk, and powdered egg and oats and tinned meat and stockfish. By nature such singular good fortune in the midst of a general desolation was certain to embarrass him. But what could a man do? He had a wife and four children living in the remote village of Ogbu and completely dependent on what relief he could find and send them. He couldn’t abandon them to kwashiokor. The best he could do—and did do as a matter of fact—was to make sure that whenever he got sizeable supplies like now he made over some of it to his driver, Johnson, with a wife and six, or was it seven? children and a salary of ten pounds a month when gari in the market was climbing to one pound per cigarette cup. In such a situation one could do nothing at all for crowds; at best one could try to be of some use to one’s immediate neighbours. That was all.

On his way back to Owerri a very attractive girl by the roadside waved for a lift. He ordered the driver to stop. Scores of pedestrians, dusty and exhausted, some military, some civil, swooped down on the car from all directions.

“No, no, no,” said Nwankwo firmly. “It’s the young
woman I stopped for. I have a bad tyre and can only take one person. Sorry.”

“My son, please,” cried one old woman in despair, gripping the door-handle.

“Old woman, you want to be killed?” shouted the driver as he pulled away, shaking her off. Nwankwo had already opened a book and sunk his eyes there. For at least a mile after that he did not even look at the girl until she finding, perhaps, the silence too heavy said:

“You’ve saved me today. Thank you.”

“Not at all. Where are you going?”

“To Owerri. You don’t recognize me?”

“Oh yes, of course. What a fool I am … You are …”

“Gladys.”

“That’s right, the militia girl. You’ve changed, Gladys. You were always beautiful of course, but now you are a beauty queen. What do you do these days?”

“I am in the Fuel Directorate.”

“That’s wonderful.”

It was wonderful, he thought, but even more it was tragic. She wore a high-tinted wig and a very expensive skirt and low-cut blouse. Her shoes, obviously from Gabon, must have cost a fortune. In short, thought Nwankwo, she had to be in the keep of some well-placed gentleman, one of those piling up money out of the war.

“I broke my rule today to give you a lift. I never give lifts these days.”

“Why?”

“How many people can you carry? It is better not to try at all. Look at that old woman.”

“I thought you would carry her.”

He said nothing to that and after another spell of
silence Gladys thought maybe he was offended and so added: “Thank you for breaking your rule for me.” She was scanning his face, turned slightly away. He smiled, turned, and tapped her on the lap.

“What are you going to Owerri to do?”

“I am going to visit my girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend? You sure?”

“Why not?… If you drop me at her house you can see her. Only I pray God she hasn’t gone on weekend today; it will be serious.”

“Why?”

“Because if she is not at home I will sleep on the road today.”

“I pray to God that she is not at home.”

“Why?”

“Because if she is not at home I will offer you bed and breakfast … What is that?” he asked the driver who had brought the car to an abrupt stop. There was no need for an answer. The small crowd ahead was looking upwards. The three scrambled out of the car and stumbled for the bush, necks twisted in a backward search of the sky. But the alarm was false. The sky was silent and clear except for two high-flying vultures. A humourist in the crowd called them Fighter and Bomber and everyone laughed in relief. The three climbed into their car again and continued their journey.