Half of a Yellow Sun (45 page)

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

“Yes, mah,” Ugwu said.
“O nwere 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.

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
ogbunigwe
is 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 still have 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-wah
sounds 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. A woman 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,
olee ihe m mere 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,
olee ihe m mere gi?
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
kill
had 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,
in a free Biafra
, 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 of them leaning against the wall, gasping and giggling.

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