Half of a Yellow Sun (30 page)

R
ichard was surprised
when he heard the announcement that the federal government had declared a
police action to bring the rebels to order
. Kainene was not.

“It’s the oil,” she said. “They can’t let us go easily with all that oil. But the war will be brief. Madu says Ojukwu has big plans. He suggested I donate some foreign exchange to the war cabinet, so that when this ends I’ll get any contract I bid for.”

Richard stared at her. She did not seem to understand that he could not comprehend a war at all, brief or not.

“It’s best if you move your things to Port Harcourt until we drive the Nigerians back,” Kainene said. She was scanning a newspaper and nodding her head to the Beatles on the stereo and she made it seem normal, that war was the inevitable outcome of events and that moving his things from Nsukka was simply as it should be.

“Yes, of course,” he said.

Her driver took him. Checkpoints had sprung up everywhere, tires and nail-studded boards placed across the road, men and women in khaki shirts with expressionless, disciplined demeanors standing by. The first two were easy to pass. “Where are you going?” they asked, and waved the car through. But near Enugu, the civil defenders had blocked the road with tree trunks and old rusty drums. The driver stopped.

“Turn back! Turn back!’ A man peered through the window; he was holding a long piece of wood carefully carved to look like a rifle. “Turn back!”

“Good afternoon,” Richard said. “I work at the university in Nsukka and I am on my way there. My houseboy is there. I have to get my manuscript and some personal belongings.”

“Turn back, sah. We will drive the vandals back soon.”

“But my manuscript and my papers and my houseboy are there. You see, I didn’t take anything. I didn’t know.”

“Turn back, sah. That is our order. It is not safe. But soon, when we drive the vandals back, you can return.”

“But you must understand.” Richard leaned farther forward.

The man’s eyes narrowed while the large eye painted on his shirt underneath the word
VIGILANCE
seemed to widen. “Are you sure you are not an agent of the Nigerian government? It is you white people who allowed Gowon to kill innocent women and children.”

“Abu m onye
Biafra,” Richard said.

The man laughed, and Richard was not sure if it was a pleasant or an unpleasant laugh. “Eh, a white man who is saying that he is a Biafran! Where did you learn to speak our language?”

“From my wife.”

“Okay, sah. Don’t worry about your things in Nsukka. The roads will be clear in a few days.”

The driver reversed, and as he drove back the way they had come, Richard kept looking back at the blocked road until he could no longer see it. He thought about how easily those Igbo words had slipped out of him. “I am a Biafran.” He did not know why, but he hoped the driver would not tell Kainene that he had said that. He hoped, too, that the driver would not tell Kainene that he had referred to her as his wife.

Susan called some days later. It was late morning and Kainene was at one of her factories.

“I didn’t know you had Kainene’s number,” Richard said. Susan laughed.

“I heard Nsukka was evacuated and I knew you would be with her. So how are you? Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t have trouble evacuating, did you?” Susan asked. “You’re all right?”

“I’m all right.” He was touched by her concern.

“Right. So what are your plans?”

“I will be here for now.”

“It’s not safe, Richard. I’m not staying here longer than another week. These people never fight civilized wars, do they? So much for calling it a civil war.” Susan paused. “I rang the British Council in Enugu and I can’t believe our people there are still going off to play water polo and have cocktails at the Hotel Presidential! There’s a bloody war going on.”

“It will be cleared up soon.”

“Cleared up, ha! Nigel is leaving in two days. Nothing is going to clear up; this war will drag on for years. Look what happened in the Congo. These people have no sense of peace. They’d sooner fight until the last man is down—”

Richard hung up while Susan was still speaking, surprising himself by the rudeness. There was a part of him that wished he could help her, throw away the bottles of liquor in her cabinet and wipe away the paranoia that scarred her life. Perhaps it was a good thing she was leaving. He hoped she would find happiness, with Nigel or otherwise. He was still occupied with thoughts of Susan, half hoping she would not call again and half hoping she would, when Kainene came home. She kissed his cheeks, his lips, his chin. “Did you spend the day worrying about Harrison and
In the Time of Roped Pots?”
she asked.

“Of course not,” he said, even though they both knew it was a lie.

“Harrison will be fine. He must have packed up and gone to his village.”

“Yes, he must have,” Richard said.

“He probably took the manuscript with him.”

“Yes.” Richard remembered how she had destroyed his first real manuscript,
The Basket of Hands
, how she had led him to the orchard, to the pile of charred paper under his favorite tree, her face all the time expressionless; and how afterward he had felt not blame or anger but hope.

“There was another rally in town today, at least a thousand people walking, and many cars covered in green leaves,” she said. “I wish they would stick to fields instead of blocking major roads. I’ve already donated money and I won’t be held up in the hot sun just to help further Ojukwu’s ambition.”

“It’s about a cause, Kainene, not a man.”

“Yes, the cause of benign extortion. You know taxi drivers no longer charge soldiers? They get offended when a soldier offers to pay the fare. Madu says there is a group of women at the barracks every other day, from all sorts of backwater villages, bringing yams and plantains and fruit to the soldiers. These are people who have nothing themselves.”

“It’s not extortion. It’s the cause.”

“The cause indeed.” Kainene shook her head but she looked amused. “Madu told me today that the army has nothing, absolutely nothing. They thought Ojukwu had arms piled up somewhere, given the way he’s been talking, ‘No power in Black Africa can defeat us!’ So Madu and some of the officers who came back from the North went to tell him that we have no arms, no mobilization of troops, and that our men are training with wooden guns, for goodness’ sake! They wanted him to release his stockpiled arms. But he turned around and said they were plotting to overthrow him. Apparently he has no arms at all and he plans to defeat Nigeria with his fists.” She raised a fist and smiled. “But I do think he is terribly attractive: that beard alone.”

Richard said nothing. He wondered, fleetingly, if he should grow a beard.

   17   

O
lanna leaned on the veranda
railing of Odenigbo’s house in Abba, looking out at the yard. Near the gate, Baby was on her knees playing in the sand while Ugwu watched her. The wind rustled the leaves of the guava tree. Its bark fascinated Olanna, the way it was discolored and patchy, a light clay alternating with a darker slate, much like the skin of village children with the
nlacha
skin disease. Many of those children had stopped by to say “nno
nu
, welcome,” on the day they arrived from Nsukka, and their parents and uncles and aunts had come too, bearing good wishes, itching for gossip about the evacuation. Olanna had felt a fondness for them; their welcome made her feel protected. Her warmth had extended even to Odenigbo’s mother. She wondered now why she did not pull Baby away from the grandmother who had rejected her at birth and why she herself did not move away from Mama’s hug. But there was a haunting, half-finished quality to all that happened that day—cooking in the kitchen with Ugwu, the departure so hasty that she worried the oven was left on, the crowds on the road, the sound of shelling—so she took Mama’s hug in her stride, even hugged her back. Now they had gone back to being civil, Mama often came over to see Baby, through the wooden gate in the mud wall that separated her home from Odenigbo’s. Sometimes Baby went across to visit her and run after the goats that wandered in her courtyard. Olanna was never sure how clean were the pieces of dried fish or smoked meat Baby came back chewing, but she tried not to mind, just as she tried to stifle her resentment; Mama’s
affection for Baby had always been half-baked, halfhearted, and it was too late for Olanna to feel anything but resentment.

Baby was laughing at something Ugwu said; her pure high-pitched laughter made Olanna smile. Baby liked it here; life was slower and simpler. Because their stove and toaster and pressure cooker and imported spices were left behind in Nsukka, their meals were simpler too, and Ugwu had more time to play with her.

“Mummy Ola!” Baby called. “Come and see!”

Olanna waved. “Baby, it’s time for your evening bath.”

She watched the outline of the mango trees in the next yard; some of them had fruit drooping down like heavy earrings. The sun was falling. The chickens were clucking and flying up into the kola nut tree, where they would sleep. She could hear some villagers exchanging greetings, in the same loud-voiced way that the women in the sewing group did. She had joined them two weeks ago, in the town hall, sewing singlets and towels for the soldiers. She felt bitter toward them at first, because when she tried to talk about the things she had left behind in Nsukka—her books, her piano, her clothes, her china, her wigs, her Singer sewing machine, the television—they ignored her and started to talk about something else. Now she understood that nobody talked about the things left behind. Instead they talked about the win-the-war effort. A teacher had donated his bicycle to the soldiers, cobblers were making soldiers’ boots for free, and farmers were giving away yams. Win the war. It was difficult for Olanna to visualize a war happening now, bullets falling on the red dust of Nsukka while the Biafran troops pushed the vandals back. It was often difficult to visualize anything concrete that was not dulled by memories of Arize and Aunty Ifeka and Uncle Mbaezi, that did not feel like life being lived on suspended time.

She kicked off her slippers and walked barefoot across the
front yard and over to Baby’s sand hut. “Very nice, Baby. Maybe it will still be standing tomorrow, if the goats don’t come in the yard in the morning. Now, time for a bath.”

“No, Mummy Ola!”

“I think Ugwu is going to carry you off right now.” Olanna glanced at Ugwu.

“No!”

Ugwu picked Baby up and ran off toward the house. Baby’s slipper fell off and they stopped to pick it up, Baby saying “No!” and laughing at the same time. Olanna wondered how Baby would take their leaving the following week for Umuahia, three hours away, where Odenigbo had been deployed to the Manpower Directorate. He had hoped to work at the Research and Production Directorate, but there were too many overqualified people and too few jobs; even she had been told there was no vacancy for her at any of the directorates. She would teach at the primary school, her own win-the-war effort. It did have a certain melody to it: win-the-war, win-the-war, win-the-war. She hoped Professor Achara had found them accommodation close to other university people so that Baby would have the right kind of children to play with.

She sat down on one of the low wooden chairs that slanted so that she had to recline in them in order to rest her back. They were chairs she saw only in the village, made by village carpenters who set up dusty signs by the corners of the dirt roads, often with
CARPENTER
misspelled: capinter, capinta, carpentar. You could not sit up on such chairs; they assumed a life of hard-earned rest, of evenings reclining in fresh air after a day of farm-work. Perhaps they assumed, also, a life of ennui.

It was dark and the bats were flying noisily above when Odenigbo came home. He was always out during the day, attending meeting after meeting, all of them on how Abba would contribute to the win-the-war effort, how Abba would play a major
role in establishing the state of Biafra; sometimes she saw men returning from the meetings, holding mock guns carved from wood. She watched Odenigbo walk across the veranda, aggressive confidence in his stride. Her man. Sometimes when she looked at him she felt gripped by proud possession.