Half of a Yellow Sun (33 page)

Ugwu sang along and wished, again, that he could join the Civil Defense League or the militia, who went combing for Nigerians hiding in the bush. The war reports had become the highlights of his day, the fast-paced drumming, the magnificent voice saying,

After the glowing news—Biafran troops were flushing out the last remnants of the enemy, Nigerian casualties were high,
mopping-up operations were concluding—he would fantasize about joining the army. He would be like those recruits who went into training camp—while their relatives and well-wishers stood by the sidelines and cheered—and who emerged bright-eyed, in brave uniforms stiff with starch, half of a yellow sun gleaming on their sleeves.

He longed to play a role, to act. Win the war. So when the news that Biafra had captured the midwest and Biafran troops were marching to Lagos came over the radio, he felt a strange mix of relief and disappointment. Victory was theirs and he was eager to go back to the house on Odim Street, to be close to his family, to see Nnesinachi. Yet it seemed that the war had ended too soon and he had not contributed. Special Julius brought a bottle of whisky, and the guests sang and shouted drunkenly about the might of Biafra, the stupidity of the Nigerians, the foolishness of those newscasters on BBC radio.

“Look at their dirty English mouths. ‘Astonishing move by Biafra’ indeed!”

“They are surprised because the arms Harold Wilson gave those Muslim cattle-rearers have not killed us off as quickly as they had hoped!”

“It is Russia you should blame, not Britain.”

“Definitely Britain. Our boys brought us some Nigerian shell cases from the Nsukka sector for analysis. Every single one had
UK WAR DEPARTMENT
on it.”

“We keep intercepting British accents on their radio messages too.”

“Britain
and
Russia, then. That unholy alliance will not succeed.”

The voices rose higher and higher, and Ugwu stopped listening. He got up and went out through the back and sat on the mound of cement blocks beside the house. Some little boys in the Biafran Boys Brigade were practicing on the street, with sticks
shaped like guns, doing frog jumps, calling one another
captain!
and
adjutant!
in high voices.

A hawker with a tray balanced on her head ambled past. “Buy
garri!
Buy
garri!”

She stopped when a young woman from the opposite house called out to her. They bargained for a while and then the young woman shouted, “If you want to rob people, then do so. Don’t say you are selling
garri
for that price.”

The hawker hissed and walked off.

Ugwu knew the young woman. He had first noticed her because of how perfectly rounded her buttocks were, how they rolled rhythmically, from side to side, as she walked. Her name was Eberechi. He had heard the neighbors talking about her; the story was that her parents had given her to a visiting army officer, as one would give kola nut to a guest. They had knocked on his door at night, opened it, and gently pushed her in. The next morning, the beaming officer thanked her beaming parents while Eberechi stood by.

Ugwu watched her go back indoors and wondered how she had felt about being offered to a stranger and what had happened after she was pushed into his room and who was to blame more, her parents or the officer. He didn’t want to think too much about blame, though, because it would remind him of Master and Olanna during those weeks before Baby’s birth, weeks he preferred to forget.

Master found a rain-holder on the wedding day. The elderly man arrived early and dug a shallow pit at the back of the house, made a bonfire in it, and then sat in the thick of the bluish smoke, feeding dried leaves to the fire.

“No rain will come, nothing will happen until the wedding is over,” he said, when Ugwu took him a plate of rice and meat.
Ugwu smelled the harsh gin on his breath. He turned and went back indoors so the smoke would not soak into his carefully ironed shirt. Olanna’s cousins Odinchezo and Ekene were sitting out on the veranda in their militia uniforms. The photographer was fiddling with his camera. Some guests were in the living room, talking and laughing, waiting for Olanna, and once in a while somebody went over and placed something—a pot, a stool, an electric fan—in the pile of presents.

Ugwu knocked on her door and opened it.

“Professor Achara is ready to take you to the church, mah,” he said.

“Okay.” Olanna looked away from the mirror. “Where is Baby? She hasn’t gone out to play, has she? I don’t want any dirt on that dress.”

“She is in the living room.”

Olanna sat in front of the crooked mirror. Her hair was held up so that all of her radiant, flawlessly smooth face was exposed. Ugwu had never seen her look so beautiful, and yet there was a sad reluctance in the way she patted the ivory and pink hat on one side of her head to make sure the pins were secure.

“We’ll do the wine-carrying later, when our troops recover Umunnachi,” she said, as though Ugwu did not know.

“Yes, mah.”

“I sent a message to Kainene in Port Harcourt. She won’t come, but I wanted her to know.”

Ugwu paused. “They are waiting, mah.”

Olanna got up and surveyed herself. She ran a hand over the sides of her pink and ivory dress, which flared from the waist and stopped just below her knees. “The stitches are so uneven. Arize could have done this better.”

Ugwu said nothing. If only he could reach out and tug at her lips to remove the sad smile on her face. If only it took that little.

Professor Achara knocked on the half-open door. “Olanna?
Are you ready? They say Odenigbo and Special Julius are already at the church.”

“I’m ready; please come in,” Olanna said. “Did you bring the flowers?”

Professor Achara handed her a plastic bouquet of multicolored flowers. Olanna moved back. “What is this? I wanted fresh flowers, Emeka.”

“But nobody grows flowers in Umuahia. People here grow what they can eat,” Professor Achara said, laughing.

“I won’t hold flowers, then,” Olanna said.

For an uncertain moment, neither of them knew what to do with the plastic flowers: Olanna held them half extended while Professor Achara touched but did not grasp them. Finally he took them back and said, “Let me see if we can find anything else,” and left the room.

The wedding was simple. Olanna didn’t hold flowers. St. Sebastian’s Catholic Church was small and filled only halfway with the friends who had come. Ugwu did not pay close attention to who was there, though, because, as he stared at the shabby white altar cloth, he imagined that he was getting married. At first his bride was Olanna and then she transformed into Nnesinachi and then into Eberechi with the perfectly rounded buttocks, all in the same pink and ivory dress and tiny matching hat.

It was Okeoma’s appearance, back at the house, that brought Ugwu out of his imagined world. Okeoma looked nothing like Ugwu remembered: the untidy hair and rumpled shirt of the poet were gone. His smart-fitting army uniform made him look straighter, leaner, and the sleeve had a skull-and-bones image next to the half of a yellow sun. Master and Olanna hugged him many times. Ugwu wanted to hug him too, because Okeoma’s laughing face brought back the past with such force that for a
moment Ugwu felt as if the room blurred with the rain-holder’s smoke was the living room on Odim Street.

Okeoma had brought his lanky cousin, Dr. Nwala.

“He’s a chief medical officer at Albatross Hospital,” Okeoma said, introducing him. Dr. Nwala kept staring at Olanna with such annoyingly open adoration that Ugwu wanted to tell him to keep his froglike eyes away from her, chief medical officer or not. Ugwu felt not just involved in but responsible for Olanna’s happiness. As she and Master danced outside, circled by clapping friends, he thought,
They belong to me
. It was like a seal of stability, their wedding, because as long as they were married, his world with them was safe. They danced body to body for a while until Special Julius changed the ballroom music to High Life, and they pulled apart and held hands and looked into each other’s faces, moving to the tune of Rex Lawson’s new song, “Hail Biafra, the Land of Freedom.” In her high heels, Olanna was taller than Master. She was smiling and glowing and laughing. When Okeoma started his toast, she wiped her eyes and told the photographer standing behind the tripod, “Wait, wait, don’t take it yet.”

Ugwu heard the sound just before they cut their cake in the living room, the swift
wah-wah-wah
roar in the sky. At first it was thunderous, and then it receded for a moment and came back again, louder and swifter. From somewhere close by, chickens began to squawk wildly.

Somebody said, “Enemy plane! Air raid!”

“Outside!” Master shouted, but some guests were running into the bedroom, screaming, “Jesus! Jesus!”

The sounds were louder now, overhead.

They ran—Master, Olanna, holding Baby, Ugwu, some guests—to the cassava patch beside the house and lay on their bellies. Ugwu looked up and saw the planes, gliding low beneath
the blue sky like two birds of prey. They spurted hundreds of scattered bullets before dark balls rolled out from underneath, as if the planes were laying large eggs. The first explosion was so loud that Ugwu’s ear popped and his body shivered alongside the vibrating ground. A woman from the opposite house tugged at Olanna’s dress. “Remove it! Remove that white dress! They will see it and target us!”

Okeoma yanked off his uniform shirt, buttons flying off, and wrapped it around Olanna. Baby began to cry. Master held his hand loosely over her mouth, as if the pilots might hear her. The second explosion followed and then the third and fourth and fifth, until Ugwu felt the warm wetness of urine on his shorts and was convinced that the bombs would never end; they would continue to fall until everything was destroyed and everyone died. But they stopped. The planes moved farther away in the sky. Nobody moved or spoke for a long time, until Special Julius got up and said, “They have gone.”

“The planes were so low,” a boy said excitedly. “I saw the pilot!”

Master and Okeoma were first to walk out to the road. Okeoma looked smaller wearing only a singlet and trousers. Olanna continued to sit on the ground holding Baby, the camouflage-print army shirt wrapped around her wedding dress. Ugwu got up and headed down the road. He heard Dr. Nwala say to Olanna, “Let me help you up. The dirt will stain your dress.”

Smoke rose from a compound near the corn-grinding station a street away. Two houses had collapsed into dusty rubble and some men were digging frantically through the jumbled cement, saying, “Did you hear that cry? Did you?” A fine haze of silvery dust covered their entire bodies so that they looked like limbless ghosts with open eyes.

“The child is alive, I heard the cry, I heard it,” somebody said. Men and women had gathered to help and to stare; some dug
through the rubble too, others stood and looked and still others shrieked and snapped their fingers. A car was on fire; the body of a woman lay next to it, her clothes burned off, flecks of pink all over her blackened skin, and when somebody covered it with a torn jute sack, Ugwu could still see the stiff charcoal-black legs. The sky was overcast. The wet smell of coming rain mixed with the smoky smell of burning. Okeoma and Master had joined in digging through the rubble. “I heard the child,” somebody said again. “I heard the child.”

Ugwu turned to leave. A stylish sandal lay on the ground and he picked it up and looked at the leather straps, the thick wedge heel, before he left it where it had been. He imagined the chic young woman who had been wearing it, who had discarded it to run to safety. He wondered where the other sandal was.

When Master came back home, Ugwu was sitting on the floor of the living room, his back against the wall. Olanna was picking at a piece of cake on a saucer. She was still wearing her wedding dress; Okeoma’s uniform shirt was neatly folded on a chair. The guests had all left slowly, saying little, their faces shadowed with guilt, as if embarrassed that they had allowed the air raid to ruin the wedding.

Master poured himself a glass of palm wine. “Did you listen to the news?”

“No,” Olanna said.

“Our troops have lost all the captured territory in the midwest and the march to Lagos is over. Nigeria now says this is war, no longer a police action.” He shook his head. “We were sabotaged.”

“Would you like some cake?” Olanna asked. The cake sat on the center table, whole but for the thin slice she had cut off.

“Not now.” He drank his palm wine and poured another. “We will build a bunker in case of another air raid.” His tone was normal, calm, as if air raids were benign, as if it were not death that
had come so close moments ago. He turned to Ugwu. “Do you know what a bunker is, my good man?”

“Yes, sah,” Ugwu said. “Like the one Hitler had.”

“Well, yes, I suppose.”

“But, sah, people are saying that bunkers are mass graves,” Ugwu said.

“Absolute nonsense. Bunkers are safer than lying in a cassava patch.”

Outside, darkness had fallen and the sky was lit once in a while by lightning. Olanna suddenly jumped up from a chair and screamed, “Where is Baby?
Ke
Baby?” and started to run into the bedroom.

“Nkem!
” Master went after her.

“Can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear them bombing us again?”

“It’s thunder.” Master grabbed Olanna from behind and held her. “It’s only the thunder. What our rain-holder kept back is finally unleashing itself. It’s only the thunder.”

He held her for a while longer until, finally, Olanna sat down and cut another slice of cake for herself.

He argues that Nigeria did not have an economy until Independence. The colonial state was authoritarian, a benignly brutal dictatorship designed to benefit Britain. What the economy consisted of in 1960 was potential—raw materials, human beings, high spirits, some money from the marketing board reserves left over from what the British had taken to rebuild their postwar economy. And there was the newly discovered oil. But the new Nigerian leaders were too optimistic, too ambitious with development projects that would win their people’s credibility, too naïve in accepting exploitative foreign loans, and too interested in aping the British and in taking over the superior attitudes and better hospitals and
better salaries long denied Nigerians. He gestures to complex problems facing the new country but focuses on the 1966 massacres. The ostensible reasons—revenge for the “Igbo coup,” protest against a unitary decree that would make Northerners lose out in the civil service—did not matter. Nor did the varying numbers of the dead: three thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand. What mattered was that the massacres frightened and united the Igbo. What mattered was that the massacres made fervent Biafrans of former Nigerians.