Half of a Yellow Sun (49 page)

R
ichard 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 you can. 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:
I is 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
Observer
and 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.” Kainene 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.”