31   

Olanna 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.”

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.

Kainene hugged Olanna, picked Baby up, and then turned to Odenigbo. “What an interesting beard,” she said. “Are we trying to copy His Excellency?”

“I never try to copy anyone.”

“Of course. I had forgotten how original you are.”

Kainene’s voice was thick with the tension that surrounded them all. Olanna could feel it, moisture-heavy, hanging over the room when Richard came back and stiffly shook hands with Odenigbo and, later, when they sat at the table and ate the yam slices Harrison served on enamel plates.

“We’re here until we can find a place to rent,” Odenigbo said, looking at Kainene.

Kainene stared back at him, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Harrison! Bring some more palm oil for Chiamaka.”

Harrison came in and placed a bowl of oil before Baby. After he left, Kainene said, “He roasted a fantastic bush rat for us last week. But you would have thought it was a rack of lamb the way he went on about it.”

Olanna laughed. Richard’s laughter was tentative. Baby laughed too, as if she understood. And Odenigbo focused, unsmiling, on his plate. On the radio, there was a repeat broadcast of the Ahiara declaration, His Excellency’s voice measured and determined.

Richard excused himself and came back with a bottle of brandy and gestured toward Odenigbo. “An American journalist gave it to me.”

Odenigbo stared at the bottle.

“It’s brandy,” Richard said, holding it out, as if Odenigbo did not know. They had not spoken since Odenigbo drove to his house years ago to shout at him. They had not spoken even after they shook hands today.

Odenigbo did not reach out to take the bottle.

“You can have Biafran sherry instead,” Kainene said. “Possibly more suitable for your tough revolutionary liver.”

Odenigbo looked at her and there was a small, sneering smile on his face, as though he was both amused and annoyed by her. He stood up. “No brandy for me, thank you. I should get to bed. I have quite a walk ahead of me, now that Manpower has moved to the bush.”

Olanna watched him go inside. She did not look at Richard.

“Bedtime, Baby,” she said.

“No,” Baby said, and pretended to focus on her empty plate.

“Come right now,” Olanna said, and Baby got up.

In the room, Odenigbo was tying his wrapper around his waist. “I was just coming to put Baby to bed,” he said. Olanna ignored him.

“Sleep well, Baby, ka chi fo,” he said.

“Good night, Daddy.”

Olanna placed Baby down on the mattress, covered her with a wrapper, kissed her forehead, and felt the sudden urge to cry at the thought of Ugwu. He would have slept on a mat in the living room.

Odenigbo came and stood close to her and she wanted to back away, unsure what he was trying to do. He touched her collarbone. “Look how bony you are.”

She glanced down, irritated by his touch, surprised to see how it jutted out; she did not know she had lost so much weight. She said nothing and went back to the living room. Richard was no longer there.

Kainene was still at the table. “So you and Odenigbo decided to look for a place?” she asked. “My humble home is not good enough?”

“Are you listening to him? We didn’t decide anything. If he wants to find a place he can go ahead and live there alone,” Olanna said.

Kainene looked at her. “What is the matter?”

Olanna shook her head.

Kainene dipped a finger in palm oil and brought it to her mouth. “Ejima m, what is the matter?” she asked again.

“Nothing, really. There is nothing I can point at,” Olanna said, looking at the bottle of brandy on the table. “I want this war to end so that he can come back. He has become somebody else.”

“We are all in this war, and it is up to us to decide to become somebody else or not,” Kainene said.

“He just drinks and drinks cheap kai-kai. The few times they pay him, the money goes quickly. I think he slept with Alice, that Asaba woman in our yard. I can’t stand him. I can’t stand him close to me.”

“Good,” Kainene said.

“Good?”

“Yes, good. There’s something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You’ve never even accepted that the man is ugly,” Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.

In the morning, Kainene showed Olanna a small pear-shaped vial of face cream. “Look at this. Somebody went abroad and brought it for me. My face creams finished months ago and I’ve been using that horrible Biafran-made oil.”

Olanna examined the pink jar. They took turns dabbing the cream on their faces, slowly, sensually, and afterward went down to the refugee camp. They went every morning. The new harmattan winds blew dust everywhere, and Baby joined the thin children who ran around with their naked bellies wreathed in brown. Many of the children collected pieces of shrapnel, played with them, traded them. When Baby came back with two bits of jagged metal, Olanna shouted at her and pulled her ear and took them away. She hated to think that Baby was playing with the cold leftovers of things that killed. But Kainene asked her to give them back to Baby. Kainene gave Baby a can to store the shrapnel. Kainene asked Baby to join the older children making lizard traps, to learn how to mat the palm fronds and place the cocoon full of iddo ants inside. Kainene let Baby hold the dagger of the emaciated man who paraded the compound, muttering, “Ngwa, let the vandals come, let them come now.” Kainene let Baby eat a lizard leg.

“Chiamaka should see life as it is, ejima m,” Kainene said, as they moisturized their faces. “You protect her too much from life.”

“I just want to keep my child safe,” Olanna said. She took a small dash of cream and began to rub it into her face with the tips of her fingers.

“They protected us too much,” Kainene said.

“Daddy and Mom?” Olanna asked, although she knew.

“Yes.” Kainene spread the cream on her face with her palms. “Good thing Mom left. Can you imagine her ever living without things like this? Or using palm-kernel oil?”

Olanna laughed. She wished, though, Kainene would not take so much of the cream, so that it would last as long as possible.

“Why were you always so keen to please Mom and Dad?” Kainene asked.

Olanna held her hands to her face, silent for a while. “I don’t know. I think I felt sorry for them.”

“You have always felt sorry for people who don’t need you to feel sorry for them.”

Olanna said nothing because she did not know what to say. It was the kind of thing she would have discussed with Odenigbo, Kainene’s voicing for the first time a resentment with their parents and with her, but she and Odenigbo hardly talked. He had found a bar close by; only last week, the bar owner had come to the house asking for him because he had not paid his balance. Olanna said nothing to him after the bar owner left. She was no longer sure when he went to the Manpower Directorate and when he simply went to the bar. She refused to worry about him.

She worried about other things: how her periods were sparse and no longer red but a muddy brown, how Baby’s hair was falling out, how hunger was stealing the memories of the children. She was determined that their minds be kept alert; they were Biafra’s future, after all. So every day she taught them under the flame tree, away from the horrible smells toward the back of the buildings. She would have them memorize one line of a poem, and the next day they would have forgotten it. They chased after lizards. They ate garri and water once a day now instead of twice because Kainene’s suppliers could no longer cross over to Mbosi to buy garri; all the roads were occupied. Kainene launched a Plant Our Own Food movement, and when she joined the men and women and children in making ridges, Olanna wondered where she had learned to hold a hoe. But the soil was parched. The harmattan cracked lips and feet. Three children died in one day. Father Marcel said Mass without Holy Communion. The belly of a young girl named Urenwa began to grow and Kainene was not sure if it was kwashiorkor or pregnancy until the girl’s mother slapped her and asked, “Who? Who did this to you? Where did you see the man that did this to you?” The doctor no longer visited because there was no petrol and there were too many dying soldiers to treat. The well dried up. Kainene went often to the Directorate at Ahiara to get a water tanker, but each time she came back with a vague promise from the director. The thick ugly odors of unwashed bodies and rotting flesh from the shallow graves behind the buildings grew stronger. Flies flew over the sores on children’s bodies. Bedbugs and kwalikwata crawled; women would untie their wrappers to reveal an ugly rash of reddened bites around their waists, like hives steeped in blood. Oranges were in season and Kainene asked them to eat oranges from the trees, although it gave them diarrhea, and then to squeeze the peels against their skin because the smell of citrus masked the smell of dirt.

In the evenings, Olanna and Kainene walked home together. They talked about the people at the camp, about their school days at Heathgrove, about their parents, about Odenigbo.

“Have you asked him again about that Asaba woman?” Kainene said.

“Not yet.”

“Before you ask him, just walk up to him and slap his face. If he dares to slap you back, I will come at him with Harrison’s kitchen knife. But the slap will shake the truth out of him.”

Olanna laughed and noticed that they were both walking at a leisurely pace and that their steps were in harmony, their slippers coated in brown dust.

“Grandpapa used to say that it gets worse and then it gets better. O dikata njo, o dikwa mma,” Kainene said.

“I remember.”

“The world will turn around soon, and Nigeria will stop this,” Kainene said quietly. “We’ll win.”

“Yes.” Olanna believed it more because Kainene said it.

There were evenings when Kainene was distant, immersed in herself. Once she said, “I never really noticed Ikejide,” and Olanna placed an arm on her sister’s shoulder and said nothing. Mostly, though, Kainene was in high spirits and they would sit outside and talk and listen to the radio and to the bats flying around the cashew trees. Sometimes Richard joined them. Odenigbo never did.

Then, one evening, it rained, a flinty blustery rain, a strange shower in the dry season, and perhaps it was why Odenigbo did not go to the bar. It was the evening that he finally accepted Richard’s brandy, holding it to his nose and inhaling deeply before he drank, he and Richard still saying very little to each other. And it was the evening that Dr. Nwala came to tell them that Okeoma had been killed. Lightning flashed across the sky and thunder rumbled and Kainene said, laughing, “It sounds like shelling.”

“I’m worried that they have not bombed us in a while,” Olanna said. “I wonder what they are planning.”

“Perhaps an atomic bomb,” Kainene said.

They heard the car drive in then and Kainene stood up. “Who is visiting in this kind of weather at night?”

She opened the door and Dr. Nwala came in, water dripping down his face. Olanna recalled how he had extended his hand to help her up after the air raid on her wedding day, how he had said that her dress would get dirty—as though it were not already dirty from lying on the ground. He was thinner and lankier than she remembered and looked as though he would break in two if he sat down abruptly. He did not sit down. He did not waste time with greetings. He had raised his loose shirt away from his body, was rapidly flipping it to get the water off when he said, “Okeoma has gone, o jebego. They were on a mission to retake Umuahia when it happened. I saw him last month, and he told me he was writing some poems and Olanna was his muse, and if anything happened to him I should make sure the poems went to her. But I can’t find them. The people who brought the message said that they never saw him writing anything. So I said I would come and tell you he has gone but I did not find the poems.”

Olanna was nodding without quite understanding because Dr. Nwala was saying too many words too quickly. Then she stopped. He meant that Okeoma was dead. It was raining in harmattan and Okeoma was dead.

“Okeoma?” Odenigbo spoke in a cracked whisper. “Onye? Are you talking about Okeoma?”

Olanna reached out and grasped Odenigbo’s arm and the screams came out of her, screeching, piercing screams, because something in her head was stretched taut. Because she felt attacked, relentlessly clobbered, by loss. She did not let go of his arm until Dr. Nwala stumbled back into the rain, until they climbed silently onto their mattress on the floor. When he slid into her, she thought how different he felt, lighter and narrower, on top of her. He was still, so still she thrashed around and pulled at his hips. But he did not move. Then he began to thrust and her pleasure multiplied, sharpened on stone so that each tiny spark became a pleasure all its own. She heard herself crying, her sobbing louder and louder until Baby stirred and he placed his palm against her mouth. He was crying too; she felt the tears drop on her body before she saw them on his face.

Later, he propped himself on his elbow and watched her. “You’re so strong, nkem.”

Those were words she had never heard from him. He looked old; there was a wetness in his eyes, a crumpled defeat in his face, that made him look older. She wanted to ask him why he had said that, what he meant, but she didn’t and she was not sure who fell asleep first. The next morning, she woke up too early, smelling her own bad breath and feeling a sad and unsettling peace.