Half of a Yellow Sun (63 page)

U
gwu wanted to die
, at first. It was not because of the hot tingle in his head or the stickiness of blood on his back or the pain in his buttocks or the way he gasped for air, but because of his thirst. His throat was scorched. The infantrymen carrying him were talking about how rescuing him had given them a reason to run away, how their bullets had finished and they had sent for reinforcements and nothing was forthcoming and the vandals were advancing. But Ugwu’s thirst clogged his ears and muffled their words. He was on their shoulders, bandaged with their shirts, the pain shooting all over his body as they walked. He gulped for air, gasped, and sucked but somehow he could not get enough. His thirst nauseated him.

“Water, please,” he croaked. They would not give him any; if he had the energy, he would invoke all the curses he knew on them. If he had a gun he would have shot them all and then shot himself.

Now, in the hospital where they had left him, he no longer wanted to die, but he feared he would; there were so many bodies littered around him, on mats, on mattresses, on the bare floor. There was so much blood everywhere. He heard the sharp screams of men when the doctor examined them and knew that his was not the worst case, even as he felt his own blood seeping out, first warm and then clammy cold against his side. The blood took his will; he was too exhausted to do anything about it and when the nurses hurried past him and left his bandaging unchanged,
he did not call out to them. He said nothing, either, when they came and pushed him to his side and gave him quick unceremonious injections. In his delirious moments, he saw Eberechi wearing her tight skirt and making gestures to him that he could not understand. And in his lucid moments, death occupied him. He tried to visualize a heaven, a God seated on a throne, but could not. Yet the alternative vision, that death was nothing but an endless silence, seemed unlikely. There was a part of him that dreamed, and he was not sure if that part could ever retreat into an interminable silence. Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.

In the evenings, in the dim half-light, the people from Caritas came, a priest and two helpers carrying kerosene lanterns, giving out milk and sugar to the soldiers, asking their names and where they had come from.

“Nsukka,” Ugwu said, when he was asked. He thought the priest’s voice was vaguely familiar, but then everything was vaguely familiar here: The blood of the man next to him smelled like his, the nurse who placed a bowl of thin
akamu
next to him smiled like Eberechi.

“Nsukka? What is your name?” the priest asked.

Ugwu struggled to focus on the rounded face, the glasses, the browned collar. It was Father Damian. “I am Ugwu. I used to come with my madam Olanna to St. Vincent de Paul.”

“Ah!” Father Damian squeezed his hand and Ugwu winced. “You fought for the cause? Where were you wounded? What have they done for you?”

Ugwu shook his head. One part of his buttocks was wrapped in fiery red pain; it consumed him. Father Damian spooned some powdered milk into his mouth and then placed a bag of sugar and milk next to him.

“I know Odenigbo is with Manpower. I will send word to them,” Father Damian said. Before he left, he slipped a wooden rosary onto Ugwu’s wrist.

The rosary was there, a cold pressure against his skin, when Mr. Richard came some days later.

“Ugwu, Ugwu.” The fair hair and the strange-colored eyes swam above him, and Ugwu was not sure who it was.

“Can you hear me, Ugwu? I’ve come to take you.” It was the same voice that had asked Ugwu questions about his village festival years ago. Ugwu knew then who it was. Mr. Richard tried to help him get up and the pain shot up from his side and buttock to his head and eyes. Ugwu cried out, then clenched his teeth and bit his lip and sucked his own blood.

“Easy now, easy now,” Mr. Richard said.

The bumpy ride lying in the backseat of the Peugeot 404 and the fierce sun that sparkled the windscreen made Ugwu wonder if he had died and this was what happened at death: an unending journey in a car. Finally, they stopped at a hospital that smelled not of blood but of disinfectant. Only when Ugwu lay in a real bed did he think that perhaps he was not going to die after all.

“This place has been bombed quite a bit in the past week, and we will have to leave right after the doctor sees you. He’s really not a doctor—he was in his fourth year in university when the war started—but he’s done very well,” Mr. Richard said. “Olanna and Odenigbo and Baby have been with us in Orlu since Umuahia fell, and of course Harrison is there too. Kainene needs help at the refugee camp, so you better hurry up and be well.”

Ugwu sensed that Mr. Richard was talking too much, for his benefit, perhaps to keep him awake until the doctor came. But he was grateful for Mr. Richard’s laughter, the normality of it, the way it came back with a force of memory and made him inhabit the time when Mr. Richard wrote his answers in a leather-covered book.

“We all had a bit of a shock when we heard you were alive and at Emekuku Hospital—a good kind of shock, of course. Thank heavens there actually hadn’t been a symbolic burial, although there was some sort of memorial service before Umuahia fell.”

Ugwu’s eyelids throbbed. “They said I was dead, sah?”

“Oh, yes, they did. It seems your battalion thought you had died during the operation.”

Ugwu’s eyes were closing and would not stay open when he forced them. Finally he got them open and Mr. Richard was looking down at him. “Who is Eberechi?”

“Sah?”

“You kept saying Eberechi.”

“She is somebody I know, sah.”

“In Umuahia?”

“Yes, sah.”

Mr. Richard’s eyes softened. “And you don’t know where she is now?”

“No, sah.”

“Have you been wearing those clothes since you were wounded?”

“Yes, sah. The infantrymen gave me the trousers and shirt.”

“You need a wash.”

Ugwu smiled. “Yes, sah.”

“Were you afraid?” Mr. Richard asked, after a while.

He shifted; the pain was everywhere and there was no comfortable position. “Afraid, sah?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes, sah.” He paused. “I found a book at our camp. I was so sad and angry for the writer.”

“What book was it?”

“The autobiography of a black American called Frederick Douglass.”

Mister Richard wrote something down. “I shall use this anecdote in my book.”

“You are writing a book.”

“Yes.”

“What is it about, sah?”

“The war, and what happened before, and how much should not have happened. It will be called ‘The World Was Silent When We Died.’”

Later, Ugwu murmured the title to himself:
The World Was Silent When We Died
. It haunted him, filled him with shame. It made him think about that girl in the bar, her pinched face and the hate in her eyes as she lay on her back on the dirty floor.

Master and Olanna wrapped their arms around Ugwu, but lightly, without pressure, so as not to cause him pain. He felt acutely uncomfortable; they had never hugged him before.

“Ugwu,” Master said, shaking his head. “Ugwu.”

Baby clung to his hand and refused to let go and Ugwu’s whole life suddenly gathered in a lump in his throat, and he was sobbing and the tears hurt his eyes. He was angry with himself for crying, and later, as he recounted the story of what had happened to him, he spoke in a detached voice. He lied about how he had been conscripted; he said Pastor Ambrose had pleaded with him to help carry his sick sister to the herbalist’s and he was on his way back when the soldiers caught him. He used words like
enemy fire
and
Attack HQ
with a casual coldness, as if to make up for his crying.

“And they told us you were dead,” Olanna said, watching him. “Maybe Okeoma is alive too.”

Ugwu stared at her.

“They said he was killed in action,” Olanna said. “And I got word that kwashiorkor has finally taken Adanna. Baby doesn’t know, of course.”

Ugwu looked away. Her news provoked him. He felt angry with her for telling him what he did not want to hear.

“Too many people are dying,” he said.

“It is what happens in war, too many people die,” Olanna said. “But we will win this thing. Is your pillow in a good position?”

“Yes, mah.”

He could not sit on one part of his buttocks and so, during the first few weeks in Orlu, he lay on his side. Olanna was always beside him, forcing him to eat and willing him to live. His mind wandered often. He did not need the echo of pain on his side and in his buttocks and on his back to remember his
ogbunigwe
exploding, or High-Tech’s laughter, or the dead hate in the eyes of the girl. He could not remember her features, but the look in her eyes stayed with him, as did the tense dryness between her legs, the way he had done what he had not wanted to do. In that gray space between dreaming and daydreaming, where he controlled most of what he imagined, he saw the bar, smelled the alcohol, and heard the soldiers saying “Target Destroyer,” but it was not the bar girl that lay with her back on the floor, it was Eberechi. He woke up hating the image and hating himself. He would give himself time to atone for what he had done. Then he would go and look for Eberechi. Perhaps she and her family had gone to their village in Mbaise or perhaps they were here in Orlu somewhere. She would wait for him; she would know he would come for her. That Eberechi would wait for him, that her waiting for him was proof of his redemption, gave him comfort as he healed. It surprised him that it was possible for his body to return to what it had been and for his mind to function with permanent lucidity.

During the day he helped out at the refugee camp, and in the evenings he wrote. He sat under the flame tree and wrote in small careful letters on the sides of old newspapers, on some
paper Kainene had done supply calculations on, on the back of an old calendar. He wrote a poem about people getting a buttocks rash after defecating in imported buckets, but it did not sound as lyrical as Okeoma’s and he tore it up; then he wrote about a young woman with a perfect backside who pinched the neck of a young man and tore that up too. Finally, he started to write about Aunty Arize’s anonymous death in Kano and about Olanna losing the use of her legs, about Okeoma’s smart-fitting army uniform and Professor Ekwenugo’s bandaged hands. He wrote about the children of the refugee camp, how diligently they chased after lizards, how four boys had chased a quick lizard up a mango tree and one of them climbed up after it and the lizard leaped off the tree and into the outstretched hand of one of the other three surrounding the tree.

“The lizards have become smarter. They run faster now and hide under blocks of cement,” the boy who had climbed told Ugwu. They roasted and shared the lizard, shooing other children away. Later, the boy offered Ugwu a tiny bit of his stringy share. Ugwu thanked him and shook his head and realized that he would never be able to capture that child on paper, never be able to describe well enough the fear that dulled the eyes of mothers in the refugee camp when the bomber planes charged out of the sky. He would never be able to depict the very bleakness of bombing hungry people. But he tried, and the more he wrote the less he dreamed.

Olanna was teaching some children to recite the multiplication tables the morning that Kainene rushed up to the flame tree.

“Can you believe who is responsible for that small girl Urenwa’s pregnancy?” Kainene asked, and Ugwu almost did not recognize her. Her eyes bulged out of her angular face, filled with rage and tears. “Can you believe it is Father Marcel?”

Olanna stood up.
“Gini?
What are you saying?”

“Apparently I’ve been blind; she’s not the only one,” Kainene
said. “He fucks most of them before he gives them the crayfish that I slave to get here!”

Later, Ugwu watched Kainene push at Father Marcel’s chest with both hands, shouting into his face, shoving him so hard that Ugwu feared the man would fall.
“Amosu!
You devil!” Then she turned to Father Jude. “How could you stay here and let him spread the legs of starving girls? How will you account for this to your God? You both are leaving now, right now. I will take this to Ojukwu myself if I have to!”

There were tears running down her face. There was something magnificent in her rage. Ugwu felt stained and unworthy as he went about his new duties after the priests left—distributing
garri
, breaking up fights, supervising the scorched and failing farms. He wondered what Kainene would say, what she would do to him, feel about him, if she ever knew about the girl in the bar. She would loathe him. So would Olanna. So would Eberechi.

He listened to the conversations in the evenings, writing in his mind what he would later transfer to paper. It was mostly Kainene and Olanna who talked, as though they created their own world that Master and Mr. Richard could never quite enter. Sometimes Harrison would come and sit with Ugwu but say very little, as though he was both puzzled by and respectful of him. Ugwu was no longer just Ugwu, he was now one of “our boys;” he had fought for the cause. The moon was always a brilliant white, and once in a while the night wind brought the hooting of owls and the rise and fall of voices from the refugee camp. Baby slept on a mat with Olanna’s wrapper over her to keep the mosquitoes away. Whenever they heard the far-off drone of the relief planes, nothing like the low-flying swiftness of the bombers, Kainene would say, “I hope that one will manage to land.” And Olanna would respond with a light laugh. “We have to cook our next soup with stockfish.”

When they listened to Radio Biafra, Ugwu would get up and walk away. The shabby theatrics of the war reports, the voice that forced morsels of invented hope down people’s throats, did not interest him. One afternoon, Harrison came up to the flame tree carrying the radio turned up high to Radio Biafra.

“Please turn that thing off,” Ugwu said. He was watching some little boys playing on the nearby patch of grass. “I want to hear the birds.”

“There are no birds singing,” Harrison said.