Half of a Yellow Sun (60 page)

She smiled. “Oh, you are the
onye ocha
who speaks Igbo. You are the one who is writing wonderful things about our cause. Well done.”

“Are you going to Gabon?”

“Yes.” She asked the children to sit on the wood slabs. Richard went closer to look at them. In the dim light, the milky foam of mucus in their eyes was thick. The nun cradled the smallest, a shriveled doll with stick legs and a pregnant belly. Richard could not tell if the child was a boy or a girl and suddenly that made him angry, so angry that when the redhead asked, “How do we know when to get on the plane?” Richard ignored him.

One of the children made to get up. She toppled over and fell and lay face down and unmoving. The nun placed the smallest down on the ground and picked up the fallen child. “Sit here. If you go anywhere I will smack you,” she said to the others before she hurried away.

The plump man asked. “The kid fell asleep or what?”

Richard ignored him too.

Finally, the plump man muttered, “Fucking American policy.”

“Nothing wrong with our policy,” the redhead said.

“Power comes with responsibility. Your government knows that people are dying!” Richard said, his voice rising.

“Of course my government knows people are dying,” the redhead said. “People are dying in Sudan and Palestine and Vietnam. People are dying everywhere.” He sat down on the floor. “They brought my kid brother’s body back from Vietnam last month, for God’s sake.”

Neither Richard nor the plump one said anything. In the long silence that followed, even the pilots and the sounds of unloading dimmed. Later, after they had been driven hurriedly to the tarmac and dashed into the planes and the planes took off in the on-again, off-again lighting, the title of the book came to Richard: “The World Was Silent When We Died.” He would write it after the war, a narrative of Biafra’s difficult victory, an indictment of the world. Back in Orlu, he told Kainene about the journalists and how he had felt both angry with and sorry for the redhead and how he had felt incredibly alone in their presence and how the book title had come to him.

She arched her eyebrows. “We? The world was silent when
we
died?”

“I’ll make sure to note that the Nigerian bombs carefully avoided anybody with a British passport,” he said.

Kainene laughed. She laughed often these days. She laughed as she told him about the motherless baby who still clung to life, about the young girl that Inatimi was falling in love with, about the women who sang in the evenings. She laughed, too, on the morning that he and Olanna finally saw each other. Olanna spoke first. “Hello, Richard,” she said and he said, “Olanna, hello,” and Kainene laughed and said, “Richard couldn’t invent any more trips.”

He watched Kainene’s face carefully for withdrawal, for returning anger, for
something
. But there was nothing; her laughter softened the angles of her chin. And the tension he had expected, the weight of memory and regret that would come with seeing Olanna again in her presence, were absent.

For the epilogue, he writes a poem, modeled after one of Okeoma’s poems. He calls it:

“WERE YOU SILENT WHEN WE DIED?”

   31   

O
lanna saw the four ragged soldiers
carrying a corpse on their shoulders. Wild panic made her woozy. She stopped, certain it was Ugwu’s body, until the soldiers walked quickly, silently, past and she realized that the dead man was too tall to be Ugwu. His feet were cracked and caked in dried mud; he had fought without shoes. Olanna stared at the soldiers’ retreating backs and tried to calm her queasiness, to shrug off the foreboding that had fogged her mind for days.

Later, she told Kainene how afraid she was for Ugwu, how she felt as if she were about to turn a corner and be flattened by tragedy. Kainene placed an arm around her and told her not to worry. Madu had sent word to all battalion commanders to look for Ugwu; they would find out where he was. But when Baby asked, “Is Ugwu coming back today, Mummy Ola?” Olanna imagined it was because Baby, too, had the same premonition. When she returned to Umuahia and Mama Oji gave her a package somebody had delivered, she immediately wondered if it contained a message about Ugwu. Her hands shook as she held the brown-wrapped carton creased with excessive handling. Then she noticed Mohammed’s writing, addressed to her in care of the University of Biafra, in long elegant sweeps. Inside, she unfolded handkerchiefs, crisp white underwear, bars of Lux soap, and chocolate, and she marveled that they had reached her intact, even sent through the Red Cross. His letter was three months old but still smelled faintly of sweet musk. Detached sentences stuck to her mind.

She turned a chocolate bar around in her hand, stared at the
MADE IN SWITZERLAND
, fiddled with the silver foil. Then she flung the bar across the room. Mohammed’s letter incensed her; it insulted her reality. But he could not possibly know that they had no salt and Odenigbo drank
kai-kai
every day and Ugwu was conscripted and she had sold her wig. He could not possibly know. Yet she felt angry that the patterns of his old life remained in place, so unquestioningly in place that he could write to her about his polo game.

Mama Oji knocked; Olanna took a deep calming breath before she opened the door and gave her a bar of soap.

“Thank you.” Mama Oji held the soap with both hands and raised it to her nose and sniffed it. “But that package was big. Is this the only thing you will give me? Is there no canned food there? Or are you saving it for your saboteur friend Alice?”

“Ngwa
, give me back the soap,” Olanna said. “Mama Adanna will know how to be appreciative.”

Mama Oji swiftly raised her blouse and tucked the soap into her threadbare bra. “You know I am grateful.”

Raised voices came from the road, and they both went outside. A group of militia members holding machetes were pushing two women along. They cried as they staggered down the road; their wrappers were ripped and their eyes reddened. “What did we do? We are not saboteurs! We are refugees from Ndoni! We have done nothing!”

Pastor Ambrose ran out to the road and began to pray.
“Father God, destroy the saboteurs that are showing the enemy the way! Holy-spirit fire!”

Some of the neighbors hurried out to spit and aim stones and jeer at the backs of the women. “Sabo! God punish you! Sabo!”

“They should throw tires round their necks and burn them,” Mama Oji said. “They should burn every single saboteur.”

Olanna folded Mohammed’s letter, thought of the slack halfexposed bellies of the women, and said nothing.

“You should be careful with that Alice,” Mama Oji said.

“Leave Alice alone. She is not a saboteur.”

“She is the kind of woman who will steal somebody’s husband.”

“What?”

“Every time you go to Orlu she will come out and sit with your husband.”

Olanna stared at Mama Oji, surprised, because it was the last thing she had expected to hear and because Odenigbo had never mentioned that Alice spent time with him when she was away. She had never even seen them speak to each other.

Mama Oji was watching her. “I am only saying that you should be careful with her. Even if she is not a saboteur, she is not a good woman.”

Olanna could not think of what to say. She knew that Odenigbo would never touch another woman, had quietly convinced herself of this, and knew too that Mama Oji nursed a deep resentment of Alice. Yet the very unexpectedness of Mama Oji’s words nagged her.

“I will be careful,” she said finally, with a smile.

Mama Oji looked as if she wanted to say something else but changed her mind and turned to shout at her son. “Get away from that place! Are you stupid?
Ewu awusa!
Don’t you know you will start coughing now?”

Later, Olanna took a bar of soap and knocked on Alice’s door, three sharp raps in quick succession to let Alice know it was she. Alice’s eyes looked sleepy, more shadowed than usual. “You’re back,” she said. “How is your sister?”

“Very well.”

“Did you see the poor women they are harassing and calling saboteurs?” she asked, and before Olanna could respond, she continued, “Yesterday it was a man from Ogoja. This is nonsense. We cannot keep beating people just because Nigeria is beating us. Somebody like me, I have not eaten proper food in two years. I have not tasted sugar. I have not drunk cold water. Where will I find the energy to aid the enemy?” Alice gestured with her tiny hands, and what Olanna had once thought to be an elegant fragility suddenly became a self-absorbed conceit, a luxurious selfishness; Alice spoke as if she alone suffered from the war.

Olanna gave her the soap. “Somebody sent a few bars to me.”

“Oh! So I will join those using Lux in this Biafra. Thank you.” Alice’s smile transformed her face, brightened her eyes, and Olanna wondered if Odenigbo found her pretty. She looked at Alice’s yellow-skinned face and narrow waist and realized that what she had once admired now threatened her.

“Ngwanu
, let me go and make Baby’s lunch,” she said, and turned to leave.

That evening, she visited Mrs. Muokelu with a bar of soap.

“Is this you?
Anya gi!
It has been long!” Mrs. Muokelu said. A hole had split up His Excellency’s face on the sleeve of her boubou.

“You look well,” Olanna lied. Mrs. Muokelu was gaunt; her body was built for thickness and now, with so much weight loss, she drooped, as though she could no longer stand straight. Even the hair on her arms drooped.

“You, ever beautiful,” Mrs. Muokelu said, and hugged Olanna again.

Olanna gave her the soap, and because she knew that Mrs. Muokelu would not touch anything sent from Nigeria by a Nigerian, she said, “My mother sent it from England.”

“God bless you,” Mrs. Muokelu said. “Your husband and Baby,
kwanu?”

“They are well.”

“And Ugwu?”

“He was conscripted.”

“After that first time?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Muokelu paused and fingered the plastic half of a yellow sun around her neck. “It will be well. He will come back. Somebody has to fight for our cause.”

They saw very little of each other now that Mrs. Muokelu had started her trade. Olanna sat down and listened to her stories—about the vision that revealed that the saboteur responsible for the fall of Port Harcourt was a general of the Biafran Army; about another vision in which a
dibia
from Okija gave His Excellency some powerful medicine that would recapture all the fallen towns.

“They have started the rumor that Umuahia is threatened,
okwa ya?”
Mrs. Muokelu asked, staring into Olanna’s eyes.

“Yes.”

“But Umuahia will not fall. There is no need for people to panic and start packing.”

Olanna shrugged; she wondered why Mrs. Muokelu was looking at her so intently.

“They say people with cars have started looking for petrol.” Mrs. Muokelu’s eyes were unwavering. “They have to be careful, very careful, before somebody will ask them how they knew that Umuahia would fall if not that they are saboteurs.”