Half of a Yellow Sun (67 page)

Ugwu was first to go into the house. Olanna and Baby followed. Milky cobwebs hung in the living room. He looked up and saw a large black spider moving slowly in its web, as if uncaring of their presence and still secure that this was its home. The sofas and curtains and carpet and shelves were gone. The louvers, too, had been slipped off and the windows were gaping
holes and the dry harmattan winds had blown in so much dust that the walls were now an even brown. Dust motes swam ghostlike in the empty room. In the kitchen, only the heavy wood mortar was left behind. In the corridor, Ugwu picked up a dust-coated bottle; when he raised it to his nose it still smelled of coconuts. Olanna’s perfume.

Baby began to cry when they got to the bathroom. The piles of feces in the bathtub were dried, obscene stonelike lumps. Pages had been ripped out of
Drum
magazine and used as toilet paper, crusty stains smearing the print. They lay strewn on the floor. Olanna hushed her and Ugwu thought of her playing with her yellow plastic duck in that tub. He turned the tap, and it squeaked but did not run. The grass in the backyard grazed his shoulders, too tall to walk across, so he found a stick to beat his way through. The beehive on the cashew tree was gone. The door to the Boys’ Quarters hung half open on crushed hinges and he pushed it back and remembered the shirt he had left hanging on a nail on the wall. He knew it would be gone, of course, and yet he looked at the wall for it. Anulika had admired that shirt. It thrilled and frightened him, the thought that he would see Anulika in a few hours, that he would finally go home. He would not allow himself to think of who was left and who was not. He picked up the things on the filthy floor, a rusting gun and a bloated half-eaten copy of the
Socialist Review
. He threw them back down and, in the reverberating echo, something, perhaps a mouse, dashed across.

He wanted to clean. He wanted to scrub furiously. He feared, though, that it would change nothing. Perhaps the house was stained to its very foundation and that smell of something long dead and dried would always cling to the rooms and the rustle of rats would always come from the ceiling. Master found a broom and swept the study himself and left the pile of lizard droppings and dust just outside the door. Ugwu looked inside the study and
saw him sitting on the only chair left, with a broken-off leg, so that he propped it against the wall for balance, hunched over half-burned papers and files.

Ugwu poked at the feces in the bathroom with a stick, muttering curses to the vandals and all their offspring, and he had cleared the tub when Olanna asked him to leave the cleaning until he came back from seeing his family.

Ugwu stood still as Chioke, his father’s second wife, threw sand at him. “Are you real, Ugwu?” she asked. “Are you real?”

She bent and grabbed handfuls of sand, throwing in rapid movements, and the sand fell on his shoulder, arms, belly. Finally, she stopped and hugged him. He had not disappeared; he was not a ghost. Other people came out to hug him, to rub his body in disbelief as though the sand-pouring had still not proved to them that he was not a ghost. Some of the women were crying. Ugwu examined the faces around him, all of them thinner, all with a deep exhaustion etched on their skin, even the children. But it was Anulika who looked most changed. Her face was covered in blackheads and pimples and she did not look him in the eyes as she said, in tears, “You did not die, you did not die.” He was startled to discover that the sister he had remembered as beautiful was not at all. She was an ugly stranger who squinted with one eye.

“They told me my son had died,” his father said, gripping his shoulders.

“Where is Mama?” he asked.

Before his father spoke, Ugwu knew. He had known from the moment Chioke ran out. It should have been his mother; she would have sensed his presence and met him at the grove of
ube
trees.

“Your mother is no longer with us,” his father said.

Hot tears swarmed Ugwu’s eyes. “God will never forgive them.”

“Be careful what you say!” His father looked around fearfully, although he and Ugwu were alone. “It was not the vandals. She died of the coughing. Let me show you where she is lying.”

The grave was unmarked. A vibrantly green cocoyam plant was growing on the spot.

“When?” Ugwu asked. “When did she die?”

It felt surreal, asking
When did she die?
about his own mother. And it did not matter when she died. As his father spoke words that made no sense, Ugwu sank to his knees, placed his forehead on the ground, and wrapped his hands around his head, as if to shield himself from something that would fall from above, as if it were the only position he could adopt to absorb his mother’s death. His father left him and walked back into the hut. Later, Ugwu sat with Anulika under the breadfruit tree.

“How did Mama die?”

“From coughing.”

She didn’t answer any of his other questions in the way that he had expected, there were no energetic gestures, no sharp wit in her answers: yes, they had the wine-carrying just before the vandals occupied the village. Onyeka was well; he had gone to the farm. They did not have children yet. She looked away often, as if she felt uncomfortable sitting with him, and Ugwu wondered if he had imagined the easy bond they had shared. She looked relieved when Chioke called her, and she got up quickly and left.

Ugwu was watching the children running around the breadfruit tree, taunting and shouting, when Nnesinachi arrived with a baby on her hip and a sparkle in her eyes. She looked unchanged; unlike the others, she was not thinner than he remembered. Her breasts were a little larger, though, prodding the fabric of her blouse. She pressed herself against him in a hug. The baby yelped.

“I knew you did not die,” she said. “I knew your
chi
was wide awake.”

Ugwu touched the baby’s cheek. “You married during the war?”

“I did not marrry.” She moved the baby to the other hip. “I lived with a Hausa soldier.”

“A vandal?” It was almost inconceivable to him.

Nnesinachi nodded. “They were living in our town and he was good to me, a very kind man. If I had been here at the time, what happened to Anulika would not have happened at all. But I had traveled to Enugu with him to buy some things.”

“What happened to Anulika?”

“You didn’t know?”

“What?”

“They forced themselves on her. Five of them.” Nnesinachi sat down and placed the baby on her lap.

Ugwu stared at the distant sky. “Where did it happen?”

“It has been more than a year.”

“I asked where?”

“Oh.” Nnesinachi’s voice quavered. “Near the stream.”

“Outside?”

“Yes.”

Ugwu bent down and picked up a stone.

“They said the first one that climbed on top of her, she bit him on the arm and drew blood. They nearly beat her to death. One of her eyes has refused to open well since.”

Later, Ugwu took a walk around the village, and when he got to the stream he remembered the line of women going to fetch water in the mornings, and he sat down on a rock and sobbed.

Back in Nsukka, Ugwu did not tell Olanna about his sister’s rape. She was often away. She was receiving message after message
about where women who looked like Kainene had been seen, and so she went to Enugu, Onitsha, and Benin and came back humming under her breath. “I will find my sister,” she would say when Ugwu asked her how it had gone.

“Yes, mah, you will,” Ugwu said, because he had to believe, for her sake, that she would.

He cleaned the house. He went to the market. He went to Freedom Square to see the mound of blackened books that the vandals had emptied out of the library and set on fire. He played with Baby. He sat outside on the steps that led to the backyard and wrote on scraps of paper. Chickens were squawking in the yard next door. He looked at the hedge and wondered about Chinyere, what she had thought of him, if she had survived. Dr. Okeke and his family had not returned, and now a bowlegged man, a professor of chemistry who cooked on firewood and had a chicken coop, lived there. One day, in the failing light of dusk, Ugwu looked up and saw three soldiers barge into the compound and leave moments later, dragging the professor.

Ugwu had heard that the Nigerian soldiers had promised to kill five percent of Nsukka academics, and nobody had heard of Professor Ezeka since he was arrested in Enugu, but it was suddenly real to him, seeing the professor next door dragged off. So, days later, when he heard the loud banging on the front door, he thought they had come for Master. He would tell them Master was not home; he would even tell them Master had died. He dashed first to the study, whispered, “Hide under the table, sah!” and then ran to the front door and wore a dumb look on his face. Instead of the menacing green of army uniforms, the shine of boot and gun, he saw a brown caftan and flat slippers and a familiar face that took him a moment to recognize: Miss Adebayo.

“Good evening,” Ugwu said. He felt something close to disappointment.

She was peering in, behind him, and on her face was a great
and stark fear; it made her look stripped down to nothing, like a skull with gaping holes as eyes.

“Odenigbo?” she was whispering. “Odenigbo?”

Ugwu understood right away that it was all she could say, that perhaps she had not even recognized him and could not get herself to ask the full question:
Is Odenigbo alive?

“My master is well,” Ugwu said. “He is inside.”

She was staring at him. “Oh, Ugwu! Look how grown you are.” She came inside. “Where is he? How is he?”

“I will call him, mah.”

Master was standing by his study door. “What is going on, my good man?” he asked.

“It is Miss Adebayo, sah.”

“You asked me to hide under a table because of Miss Adebayo?”

“I thought it was the soldiers, sah.”

Miss Adebayo hugged Master and held on for too long. “They told me that either you or Okeoma didn’t make it back—”

“Okeoma didn’t make it back.” Master repeated her expression as if he somehow disapproved of it.

Miss Adebayo sat down and began to sob. “You know, we didn’t really understand what was happening in Biafra. Life went on and women were wearing the latest lace in Lagos. It was not until I went to London for a conference and read a report about the starvation.” She paused. “Once it ended, I joined the Mayflower volunteers and crossed the Niger with food …”

Ugwu disliked her. He disliked her Nigerianness. Yet a part of him was prepared to forgive it if that would bring back those evenings of long ago, when she argued with Master in a living room that smelled of brandy and beer. Now, nobody visited, except for Mr. Richard. There was a new familiarity to his presence. It was as if he was more like family, the way he would sit
reading in the living room while Olanna went about her business and Master was in the study.

The banging on the door some evening later, when Mr. Richard was visiting, annoyed Ugwu. He put his sheets of paper down in the kitchen. Couldn’t Miss Adebayo understand that it was best to go back to Lagos and leave them alone? At the door, he moved a step back when he saw the two soldiers through the glass. They grabbed the handle and jerked at the locked door. Ugwu opened it. One of them was wearing a green beret and the other had a white mole on his chin like a fruit seed.

“Everybody in this house, come out and lie down flat!”

Master, Olanna, Ugwu, Baby, and Mr. Richard all stretched out on the living room floor while the soldiers searched the house. Baby closed her eyes and lay perfectly still on her belly.

The one with the green beret had eyes that blazed red, and he shouted and shredded some papers on the table. It was he who pressed the sole of his boot on Mr. Richard’s backside and said, “White man!
Oyinbo!
Don’t shit hot shit here, oh!” It was he, too, who placed his gun to Master’s head and said, “Are you sure you are not hiding Biafran money here?”

The other one, with the mole on his chin, said, “We are searching for any materials that will threaten the unity of Nigeria,” and then went to the kitchen and came out with two plates heaped with Ugwu’s
jollof
rice. After they ate, after they drank some water and belched loudly, they got into their station wagon and drove away. They had left the front door open. Olanna stood up first. She walked into the kitchen and poured the rest of the
jollof
rice into the dustbin. Master locked the door. Ugwu helped Baby up and took her inside. “Bath time,” he said, although it was a little early.

“I can do it myself,” Baby said, and so he stood by and watched her bathe herself for the first time. She splashed some water on
him, laughing, and he realized that she would not always need him.

Back in the kitchen, he found Mr. Richard reading the sheets of paper he had left on the countertop.

“This is fantastic, Ugwu.” Mr. Richard looked surprised. “Olanna told you about the woman carrying her child’s head on the train?”

“Yes, sah. It will be part of a big book. It will take me many more years to finish it and I will call it ‘Narrative of the Life of a Country.’”

“Very ambitious,” Mr. Richard said.

“I wish I had that Frederick Douglass book.”

“It must have been one of the books they burned,” Mr. Richard said and shook his head. “Well, I’ll look for it when I’m in Lagos next week. I’m going to see Kainene’s parents. But I’ll go first to Port Harcourt and Umuahia.”

“Umuahia, sah?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Richard said nothing else; he never spoke about his search for Kainene.

“If you have time, sah, please find out about somebody for me.”

“Eberechi?”

A smile creased Ugwu’s face before he hastily looked solemn again. “Yes, sah.”

“Certainly.”

Ugwu gave him the family’s name and address, and Mr. Richard wrote it down, and afterward they were both silent and Ugwu fumbled, awkwardly, for something to say. “Are you still writing your book, sah?”

“No.”

“‘The World Was Silent When We Died.’ It is a good title.”

“Yes, it is. It came from something Colonel Madu said once.” Richard paused. “The war isn’t my story to tell, really.”