Half of a Yellow Sun (61 page)

Olanna realized, then, that Mrs. Muokelu was warning her, telling her to be prepared.

“Yes, they have to be careful,” she said.

Mrs. Muokelu rubbed her hands together. Something had changed with her; she had allowed her faith to slip from her fingers. Biafra would win, Olanna knew, because Biafra had to win, but that Mrs. Muokelu of all people believed that the fall of the capital was imminent dampened her. When she hugged Mrs. Muokelu goodbye, it was with the hollow feeling that she would never see her again. She seriously contemplated, for the first time, the fall of Umuahia as she walked home. It would mean a delayed victory, a tighter squeezing of Biafra’s territory, but it would also mean that they would go and live in Kainene’s house in Orlu until the war ended.

She stopped by the petrol station near the hospital and was not surprised to see the sign scrawled in chalk:
NO PETROL
. They had stopped selling Biafran-made petrol since the talk of Umuahia’s fall began, so that people would not panic. That night, Olanna told Odenigbo, “We need to get some petrol on the black market; we don’t have enough in case anything happens.” He nodded vaguely and mumbled something about Special Julius. He had just come back from Tanzania Bar and lay on the bed with the radio turned on low. Across the curtain, Baby was asleep on the mattress.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“We can’t afford petrol right now. It’s a pound a gallon.”

“They paid you last week. We have to be sure that the car will move.”

“I’ve asked Special Julius to do a check exchange. He has not brought the money.”

Olanna knew immediately that it was a lie. They did check exchanges with Special Julius all the time; it never took more than a day for Special Julius to give Odenigbo cash in exchange for a check.

“How are we going to buy petrol then?” she asked.

He said nothing.

She walked past him and outside. The moon was behind a cloud and, sitting out in the blackness of the yard, she could still smell that cheap vapor-heavy scent of local gin. It trailed him, it clouded the paths that he walked. His drinking in Nsukka—his auburn, finely refined brandy—had sharpened his mind, distilled his ideas and his confidence so that he sat in the living room and talked and talked and everybody listened. This drinking here silenced him. It made him retreat into himself and look out at the world with bleary weary eyes. And it made her furious.

Olanna changed what was left of her British pounds and bought petrol from a man who led her into a dank outhouse with creamy-fat maggots crawling all over the floor. He poured carefully from his metal container into hers. She took the container home wrapped in a sack that had contained cornmeal and had just stored it in the boot of the Opel when a
BIAFRAN ARMY
open jeep drove in. Kainene climbed out, followed by a soldier wearing a helmet. And Olanna knew, with an immediate sinking wail of a feeling, that it was about Ugwu. It was about Ugwu. The sun burned hotly and liquids began to spin in her head and she looked around for Baby but could not find her. Kainene came up and held her firmly by the shoulders and said,
“Ejima m
, hold your heart, be strong. Ugwu has died,” and it was not the news but the tight grip of Kainene’s bony fingers that Olanna recognized.

“No,” she said calmly. The air was charged with unreality, as if she would certainly wake up in a minute. “No,” she said again, shaking her head.

“Madu sent his batman with the message. Ugwu was with the field engineers, and they suffered massive casualties in an operation last week. Only a few came back and Ugwu was not one of
them. They did not find his body, but they did not find many of the bodies.” Kainene paused. “There was not much that was whole to find.”

Olanna kept shaking her head, waiting to wake up.

“Come with me. Bring Chiamaka. Come and stay in Orlu.” Kainene was holding her, Baby was saying something, and a haze shrouded everything until she looked up and saw the sky. Blue and clear. It made the present real, the sky, because she had never seen the sky in her dreams. She turned and marched down the road to Tanzania Bar. She walked past the dirty curtain at the door and pushed Odenigbo’s cup off the table; a pale liquid spread on the cement floor.

“Have you drunk enough, eh?” she asked him quietly.
“Ugwu anwugo
. Did you hear me? Ugwu has died.”

Odenigbo stood up and looked at her. The rims of his eyes were puffy.

“Go on and drink,” Olanna said. “Drink and drink and don’t stop. Ugwu has died.”

The woman who owned the bar came across and said, “Oh! Sorry,
ndo,”
and made to hug her but Olanna shrugged her off. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Leave me alone!” It was only then she realized that Kainene had come with her and was silently holding her as she shouted, “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” at the bar owner, who backed away.

In the following days, days filled with dark gaps of time, Odenigbo did not go to Tanzania Bar. He gave Baby a bath, made their
garri
, came home earlier from work. Once he tried to hold Olanna, to kiss her, but his touch made her skin crawl and she turned away from him and went outside to sleep on a mat on the veranda, where Ugwu had sometimes slept. She did not cry. The only time she cried was after she went to Eberechi’s house to tell her that Ugwu had died and Eberechi screamed and called her a liar; at nights those screams rang in Olanna’s head.
Odenigbo sent word to Ugwu’s people through three different women who went across enemy lines to trade. And he organized a service of songs in the yard. Some of the neighbors helped Alice bring out her piano and set it down near the banana trees. “I will play as you sing,” Alice said to the gathered women. But whenever somebody started a song, Mama Oji would clap, insistently, loudly, in accompaniment, and soon all the other neighbors would join in the clapping and Alice could not play. She sat helplessly by her piano with Baby on her lap.

The first songs were vigorous and then Mama Adanna’s voice broke out, husky and elegiac.

Odenigbo half stumbled out of the yard before they finished singing, a livid incredulity in his eyes, as if he could not believe the words of the song:
Go in peace, it will be well with you
. Olanna watched him go. She did not entirely understand the resentment she felt. There was nothing he could have done to prevent Ugwu’s death, but his drinking, his excessive drinking, had somehow made him complicit. She did not want to speak to him, to sleep beside him. She slept on the mat outside, and even the routine of the mosquito bites became a comfort. She said little to him. They spoke only of necessities, what Baby would eat, what they would do if Umuahia fell.

“We will stay in Kainene’s house only until we find a place,” he said, as if they had many choices, as if he had forgotten that, before, he would have said that Umuahia would not fall; and she said nothing in response.

She told Baby that Ugwu had gone to heaven.

“But he’s coming back soon, Mummy Ola?” Baby asked.

And Olanna said yes. It was not that she wanted to soothe Baby; it was that, day after day, she found herself rejecting the finality of Ugwu’s death. She told herself that he was not dead; he might be close to dead but he was not dead. She willed a message to come to her about his whereabouts. She bathed outside now—the bathroom was slimy with mold and urine, so she woke up very early to take a bucket and go behind the building—and one morning she caught a movement at the corner and saw Pastor Ambrose watching her. “Pastor Ambrose!” she called out, and he dashed off. “You are not ashamed of yourself? If only you would spend your time praying for somebody to come and tell me what happened to Ugwu instead of spying on a married woman taking a bath.”

She visited Mrs. Muokelu’s home, hoping for a story of a vision that involved Ugwu’s safety, but a neighbor told her that Mrs. Muokelu’s whole family was gone. They had left without telling anybody. She listened to the war reports on Radio Biafra more carefully, as if there might be clues about Ugwu in the ebullient voice reporting the pushback of the vandals, the successes of gallant Biafran soldiers. A man wearing a stained white caftan walked into the yard on a Saturday afternoon, and Olanna hurried up to him, certain that he had come with news of Ugwu.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me where Ugwu is.”

The man looked confused.
“Dalu
. I am looking for Alice Njokamma from Asaba.”

“Alice?” Olanna stared at the man, as though to give him a chance to take it back and ask for her instead. “Alice?”

“Yes, Alice from Asaba. I am her kinsman. My family’s compound is next to theirs.”

Olanna pointed at Alice’s door. He went over and knocked and knocked.

“She is in?” he asked.

Olanna nodded, resentful that he had not brought news of Ugwu.

The man knocked again and called out, “I am from the Isioma family in Asaba.”

Alice opened the door and he went in. Moments later, Alice rushed out and threw herself on the ground, rolling this way and that; in the evening sunlight, her sand-patched skin was tinted with gold.

“O
gini mere?
What happened?” the neighbors asked, gathering around Alice.

“I am from Asaba and I got word about our hometown this morning,” the man said. His accent was thicker than Alice’s, and Olanna understood his Igbo a moment after he had spoken. “The vandals took our town many weeks ago and they announced that all the indigenes should come out and say ‘One Nigeria’ and they would give them rice. So people came out of hiding and said ‘One Nigeria’ and the vandals shot them, men, women, and children. Everyone.” The man paused. “There is nobody left in the Njokamma family. Nobody left.”

Alice was lying on her back, rubbing her head frantically against the ground, moaning. Clumps of sand were in her hair. She jumped up and ran toward the road but Pastor Ambrose ran after her and dragged her back. She jerked away and threw herself down again, her lips pulled back, her teeth bared. “What am I doing still alive? They should come and kill me now! I said they should come and kill me!”

She was strengthened, emboldened, by the madness of grief and she fought off everyone who tried to hold her. She rolled on the ground with such force that the stones cut her skin in tiny red gashes. The neighbors said
oh
and shook their heads. Odenigbo came out of the room then and went over and picked Alice up and held her, and she stayed still and began to weep, her head resting on his shoulder. Olanna watched them. There was a
familiar melding to the curve of Odenigbo’s arms around Alice. He held her with the ease of someone who had held her before.

Finally Alice sat down on a bench, blank and stricken. From time to time, she would scream
“Hei!
” and stand up and place her hands on her head. Odenigbo sat by her and urged her to drink some water. He and the man from Asaba talked in low voices as if they alone were responsible for her, and afterward he came up to where Olanna was sitting on the veranda.

“Will you pack some of her things,
nkem?”
he asked. “The man says he has some Asaba people in his compound and he will take her to stay with them for a while.”

Olanna looked up at him, her face blank. “No,” she said.

“No?”

“No,” she said again, loudly now. “No.” And she got up and went into the room. She would not pack anybody’s clothes. She did not know who did pack Alice’s things, perhaps Odenigbo did, but she heard the
“Ije oma
, go well,” from many neighbors as Alice and the man left late in the evening. Olanna slept outside and dreamed of Alice and Odenigbo on the bed in Nsukka, their sweat on her newly washed sheet; she woke up with a raging suspicion in her heart and the boom of shelling in her ears.

“The vandals are close!” Pastor Ambrose cried, and he was first to run out of the compound, a stuffed duffel bag in his hand.

The yard erupted in activity, shouting, packing, leaving. The shelling, like burst after burst of horribly loud, vile coughing, did not stop. And the car did not start. Odenigbo tried and tried and the road was already crowded with refugees and the crashing explosions of mortars sounded as close as St. John’s Road. Mama Oji was screaming at her husband. Mama Adanna was begging Olanna to let her get into the car with some of her children and Olanna said, “No, take your children and go.”

Odenigbo started the engine and it whined and died. The compound was almost empty. A woman on the road was dragging a stubborn goat and finally left it behind and hurried ahead. Odenigbo turned the key and again the car stalled. Olanna could feel the ground underneath vibrating with each boom.

Odenigbo turned the key again and again. The car would not start.

“Start walking with Baby,” he said. Sweat clung to his brow.

“What?”

“I’ll pick you both up when the car starts.”

“If we are walking, we will walk together.”

Odenigbo tried to start the car again. Olanna turned, surprised at how quiet Baby was, sitting in the back beside their rolled-up mattresses. Baby was watching Odenigbo carefully, as though urging both him and the car on with her eyes.

Odenigbo came out and opened the bonnet and Olanna climbed out, too, and let Baby out and then wondered what she would take from the boot and what she would leave behind. The compound was empty and only one or two people walked past the road now. There was the rattle of gunfire nearby. She was frightened. Her hands were shaking.

“Let’s start walking,” Olanna said. “Nobody is left in Umuahia!”

Odenigbo got in and took a deep breath and turned the key. The car started. He drove fast and, on the outskirts of Umuahia, Olanna asked, “Did you do anything with Alice?”

Odenigbo did not answer, looking straight ahead.

“I asked you a question, Odenigbo.”

“Mba
, I didn’t do anything with Alice.” He glanced at her and then looked ahead at the road.

They said nothing else to each other until they arrived in Orlu, and Kainene and Harrison came out of the house. Harrison began to unpack the things in the car.