Half of a Yellow Sun (53 page)

“But is it not you refugees who have finished all our food?” Mama Adanna said.

“Shut up your stinking mouth!” Mama Oji said. And Mama Adanna promptly did, as if she knew there was no way she could outshout Mama Oji, with her shrill swiftness, the way she never lacked for words or the speed with which to say them.

In the evenings, when Mama Oji fought with her husband, her voice tore across the yard. “You castrated sheep! You call yourself a man, and yet you deserted the army! Let me just hear you tell anybody again that you were wounded in battle! Just open that dirty mouth one more time, and I will go and call the soldiers and show them where you have been hiding!”

Her tirade was a staple of the yard. So was Pastor Ambrose’s loud praying as he walked up and down. So was the piano playing
from the room right next to the kitchen. Olanna was startled when she first heard the melancholy tones, music so pure and so confidently played that it charged the air and held the swaying banana trees still.

“That is Alice,” Mama Oji said. “She came here when Enugu fell. She was not even talking to anybody before. At least now she responds to greetings. She lives alone in that room. She never comes out and she never cooks. Nobody knows what she eats. The other time when we went combing, she felt too big to join us. Everybody else in the compound came out and went into the bushes and looked for vandals hiding there, but she did not come out. Some of the women even said they would report her to the militia.”

The music still floated out. It sounded like Beethoven, but Olanna was not certain. Odenigbo would know. Then the tones changed to something faster, with an angry urgency that soared higher and higher until it stopped. Alice came out of her room. She was small-boned, petite, and Olanna felt gawkily overgrown just looking at her; there was something childlike about her light-skinned, almost translucent complexion and tiny hands.

“Good evening,” Olanna said. “I’m Olanna. We just moved into that room.”

“Welcome. I’ve seen your daughter.” Alice’s handshake was a weak clasp, as if she handled herself with much care, as if she would never scrub herself too vigorously.

“You play so well,” Olanna said.

“Oh, no, I’m no good.” Alice shook her head. “Where did you come from?”

“Nsukka University. And you?”

Alice hesitated. “I came from Enugu.”

“We had friends there. Did you know anybody in the Nigerian College of Arts?”

“Oh, the bathroom is free.” She turned and hurried away. Her
abruptness surprised Olanna. When she came out, she walked past with a vague nod and went into her room. Soon, Olanna heard the piano, something stretched out and slow, and she felt a desire to walk across and open Alice’s door and watch her play.

She thought often about Alice, the delicate quality to her smallness and fairness, the incredible strength of her piano playing. When she gathered Baby and Adanna and a few other children in the compound and read to them, she hoped Alice would come out and join her. She wondered whether Alice liked High Life. She wanted to talk about music and art and politics with Alice. But Alice came out of her room only to hurry to the bathroom and did not respond when Olanna knocked on her door. “I must have been asleep,” she would say later, but would not ask Olanna to come by another time.

Finally, they met again in the market. It was just after dawn and the air was heavy with dew and Olanna wandered around in the damp coolness, under the green foliage of the forest, sidestepping thick roots. She haggled quietly, consistently, with a hawker before she bought cassava tubers with pinkish skin that she had once thought were poisonous, because the pink was so bright, until Mrs. Muokelu assured her they were not. A bird cawed from a tree above. Once in a while, a leaf would flutter down. She stood before a table with graying pieces of raw chicken and imagined grabbing them and running away as fast as she could. If she bought the chicken, it would be all she would buy. So she bought four medium-sized snails instead. The smaller spiral-shelled snails were cheaper, piled high in baskets, but she could not buy them, could not think of them as food; they had always been, to her, playthings for village children. She was leaving when she saw Alice.

“Good morning, Alice,” she said.

“Good morning,” Alice said.

Olanna made to hug her, the usual brief greeting hug, but
Alice extended her hand for a formal shake as though they were not neighbors.

“I cannot find salt anywhere, no salt at all,” Alice said. “And the people who put us in this thing have all the salt they want.”

Olanna was surprised; of course she would not find salt here; there was hardly salt anywhere. Alice looked precise and petite in a neatly belted wool dress that Olanna imagined hanging in a London shop. Nothing like a Biafran woman in a forest market at dawn.

“They said the Nigerians have been bombing and bombing Uli and no relief plane has been able to land in a week,” Alice said.

“Yes, I heard,” Olanna said. “Are you going home?”

Alice looked away, toward the thick wood. “Not right away.”

“I’ll wait for you so we can walk back together.”

“No, don’t bother,” Alice said. “Bye-bye.”

Alice turned and walked back to the cluster of stalls, her gait dainty and contrived, as though a misguided person had taught her how to walk “like a lady.” Olanna stood watching her, wondering what lay underneath her surface, before she headed home. She stopped by the relief center to see if there was any food, if a plane had finally managed to land. The compound was deserted and she peered through the locked gate for a while. A half-torn poster was nailed to the wall. Somebody had run charcoal over the WCC:
WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES
and scribbled WCC:
WAR CAN CONTINUE
.

She was close to the corn-grinding station when a woman ran out of a roadside house, crying, following two soldiers who were pulling a tall boy along with them. “I said you should take me!” she screamed. “Take me instead! Have we not sacrificed Abuchi to you people already?” The soldiers ignored her and the boy kept his posture straight-backed, as if he could not trust himself to look back at his mother.

Olanna stood aside as they passed and, back home, she was furious to see Ugwu standing in front of the yard, talking to some elderly neighbors. Any soldier on a conscripting mission could see him there.

“Bia nwoke m
, is something wrong with your head? Haven’t I told you not to be out here?” she asked him in a hiss.

Ugwu took her basket and mumbled, “Sorry, mah.”

“Where is Baby?”

“In Adanna’s room.”

“Give me the key.”

“Master is inside, mah.”

Olanna glanced at her watch although she did not need to. It was too early for Odenigbo to be home. He was sitting on their bed, his back hunched, his shoulders heaving silently.

“O gini?
What happened?” she asked.

“Nothing happened.”

She went to him.
“Ebezi na
, stop crying,” she murmured. But she did not want him to stop. She wanted him to cry and cry until he dislodged the pain that clogged his throat, until he rinsed away his sullen grief. She cradled him, wrapped her arms around him, and slowly he relaxed against her. His arms circled her. His sobs became audible. With each intake of breath, they reminded her of Baby; he cried like his daughter.

“I never did enough for Mama,” he said finally.

“It’s okay,” she murmured. She too wished she had tried harder with his mother before settling for easy resentment. There was so much she would take back if she could.

“We never
actively
remember death,” Odenigbo said. “The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that
we will die
. We will all die.”

“Yes,” Olanna said; there was a slump to his shoulders.

“But perhaps it is the whole point of being alive? That life is a state of death denial?” he asked.

Olanna cradled him closer.

“I’ve been thinking of the army,
nkem,”
he said. “Maybe I should join His Excellency’s new S-brigade.”

Olanna said nothing for a while. She felt the urge to yank at his new beard and pull out hair and draw blood. “You might as well find a sturdy tree and a rope, Odenigbo, because that’s an easier way to commit suicide,” she said.

He moved back to look at her, but she kept her gaze averted and got up and turned on the radio and increased the volume, filling the room with the sound of a Beatles song; she would no longer discuss this desire to join the army.

“We should build a bunker,” he said, and went to the door. “Yes, we certainly need a bunker here.”

The flat glassiness in his eyes, the slump to his shoulders, worried her. If he had to do something, though, better he build a bunker than join the army.

Outside, he was talking to Papa Oji and some of the other men who were standing by the compound entrance.

“Don’t you see those banana trees?” Papa Oji asked. “All the air raids we have had, we went there, and nothing happened to us. We don’t need a bunker. Banana trees absorb bullets and bombs.”

Odenigbo’s eyes were as cold as his response. “What does an army deserter know about bunkers?”

He left the men and, moments later, he and Ugwu started to map out and dig an area behind the building. Soon, the young men joined in the work and, when the sun fell, the older ones did too, including Papa Oji. Olanna watched them work and wondered what they thought of Odenigbo. When the other men cracked jokes and laughed, he did not. He spoke only about the work. No,
mba
, move it farther down. Yes, let’s hold it there. No, shift it a little. His sweaty singlet clung to his body and she
noticed, for the first time, how much weight he had lost, how shrunken his chest looked.

That night, she lay with her cheek against his. He had not told her what made him stay home to cry for his mother. She hoped, though, that whatever it was would loosen some of the knots that had tightened inside him. She kissed his neck, his ear, in the way that always made him pull her close on the nights that Ugwu slept out on the veranda. But he shrugged her hand off and said, “I’m tired,
nkem,”
She had never heard him say that before. He smelled of old sweat, and she felt a sudden piercing longing for that Old Spice left behind in Nsukka.

Even the miracle of Abagana did not loosen his knots. Before, they would have celebrated it as if it were a personal triumph. They would have held each other and kissed and she would have tickled her cheek with his new beard. But when they heard the first radio announcement he simply said, “Excellent, excellent,” and later he watched the dancing neighbors with a blank expression.

Mama Oji started the song,
“Onye ga-enwe mmeri?”
and the other women responded
“Biafra ga-enwe mmeri, igba!
” and formed a circle and swayed with graceful motions and stamped down hard as they said
igba!
Billows of dust rose and fell. Olanna joined them, buoyed by the words—
Who will win? Biafra will win, igba!
—and wishing Odenigbo would not just sit there with that empty expression.

“Olanna dances like white people!” Mama Oji said, laughing. “Her buttocks do not move at all!”

It was the first time Olanna had seen Mama Oji laugh. The men were telling and retelling the story—some said the Biafran forces had laid ambush and set fire to a column of one hundred
vehicles, while others said there had in fact been a thousand destroyed armored cars and trucks—but they all agreed that if the convoy had reached its destination, Biafra would have been finished. Radios were turned on loud, placed on the veranda in front of the rooms. The news was broadcast over and over, and each time it ended many of the neighbors joined the voice intoning,
To save Biafra for the free world is a task that must be done!
Even Baby knew the words. She repeated them while patting Bingo’s head. Alice was the only neighbor who had not come out, and Olanna wondered what she was doing.

“Alice thinks she is too good for all of us in this yard,” Mama Oji said. “Look at you. Did they not say that you are a Big Man’s daughter? But you treat people like people. Who does she think she is?”

“Maybe she’s asleep.”

“Asleep indeed. That Alice is a saboteur. It is on her face. She is working for the vandals.”

“Since when have saboteurs had it written on their faces?” Olanna asked, amused.

Mama Oji shrugged, as though she would not bother convincing Olanna of something she was sure of.

Professor Ezeka’s driver arrived hours later when the yard was emptier and quieter. He handed Olanna a note and then went around and opened the boot and carried out two cartons. Ugwu hurried indoors with them.

“Thank you,” Olanna said. “Greet your master.”

“Yes, mah.” He stood there still.

“Is there anything else?”

“Please, mah, I am to wait until you check that everything is complete.”

“Oh.” Ezeka’s crabbed handwriting had listed all he had sent on the front of the sheet.
Please make sure the driver has not tampered with anything
was scrawled at the back. Olanna went inside
to count the cans of dried milk, tea, biscuits, Ovaltine, sardines, the cartons of sugar, the bags of salt—and she could not help the gasp when she saw the toilet tissue. At least Baby would not have to use old newspapers for a while. She wrote a quick effusive thank-you note and gave it to the driver; if Ezeka had done this to further show how superior he was, it did not dampen her pleasure. Ugwu’s pleasure seemed even greater than hers.

“This is like Nsukka, mah!” he said. “Look at the sardines!”

“Please put some salt in a bag. A quarter of that packet.”

“Mah? For who?” Ugwu looked suspicious.

“For Alice. And don’t tell the neighbors what we have. If they ask, say an old friend sent books to your master.”

“Yes, mah.”

Olanna felt Ugwu’s disapproving eyes following her as she took the bag over to Alice’s room. There was no response to her knock. She had turned to walk away when Alice opened the door.

“A friend of ours brought us some provisions,” Olanna said, holding out the bag of salt.