Under the Udala Trees (14 page)

“Maybe one day you can teach me Arabic,” I said.

She laughed. “Maybe one day.”

We were silent for a while, and then she said, “You know, I could have been married by now.”

I looked at her, startled. “But you're barely thirteen.”

She laughed. “I had my dowry, marriage pots and bowls, plenty of gifts already. Just a little bit more and I would have been married and entered purdah, secluded, no longer able to come out. If things had gone like that, I probably would never have met you.”

I said, “It's good that things happened the way they did, so we could meet.”

She scowled at me, and immediately I knew that I had mis­spoken.

“You're happy that they set fire to my family's house?” she shouted. “You're happy that my father and mother died? You're happy that my brother is somewhere in the war, or probably dead too?”

I shook my head. “I didn't mean it that way.”

“How else could you have meant it?” she shouted. “You weren't there. You didn't see it. I leave to buy some kosai. Not more than thirty minutes later, I come back and the house is gone and everyone in it is gone.”

Now all I could see in my mind was her house burning down and her arriving to find it so. I saw her screaming, running toward the burning house, all the while pleading for help.

She was crying now.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm really sorry. I really didn't mean it that way.”

W
E COULD NOT
have known it for sure at the time, but by early January 1970 the war was nearing its end. All the radios were hissing with news about an operation. Operation Tail-Wind, they called it. The final Nigerian offensive. First there was talk that Owerri had fallen once again to the Nigerians. And there was talk that Uli had fallen as well. Then one day we heard the announcement.

Amina and I had just returned from the market. We were both in the kitchen. I was pounding yam; she was at the sink washing plates.

Earlier, outside the compound, there had been an unusual flurry of action, a sort of commotion. Several men were conversing vehemently while pushing their wheelbarrows down the road. A couple of women were chatting loudly as they peeled corn in front of their gates. A third woman was speaking forcefully to another woman while feeding her small child tidbits from a fist-sized roll of bread. Several girls were carrying buckets of water on their heads, and the way they talked, their voices surged, and with their arms they gesticulated as widely as the buckets on their heads would allow.

Now, as I stood in the kitchen, Amina out by the sink, the grammar school teacher's radio came on. It started off softly, but soon he turned it up so high that even from the kitchen we could hear clearly when the Radio Biafra announcer said that Ojukwu had fled, that he had gone off on a plane to Ivory Coast. Something about his going for the sake of exploring possibilities for peace.

But we all knew what it meant. Ojukwu had surrendered.

The grammar school teacher shouted, “Traitor!” It came out like an expletive.

“Coward that he is,” his wife said, “he would have killed us all if we had given him the chance.”

The radio broadcast continued.

The yam that I had been in the middle of pounding was still sitting in the mortar, the pestle idle in my hands. I stayed staring at the cubes of yam and listening, thinking of all that it would mean now that the war was over. For example, it was over, but even the fact of that could not bring Papa back. It was over, but nothing could be done to bring Amina's family back. The dead would not suddenly leap out of the grave. Chances were that not a single one of them would rise the way Jesus rose from the dead. No resurrection for them.

At the sink, Amina stood, looking very alert, listening to the fading voice of the Radio Biafra announcer.

I imagined Ojukwu riding in the sky on that plane. I imagined him landing in an open space, a quiet and peaceful space, a land full of white sand, gray sand, brown sand. Where he landed there was no war. There, elephants roamed lazily about, those elephants from whose tusks, I'd read, ivory somehow came.

“To be on a plane headed somewhere else,” I finally said to Amina, leaning into the pestle, which was propped up by the mortar.

“What for?” she asked. She turned from the sink to face me. Her eyebrows scrunched together and her eyes narrowed. “What would be the point of leaving now that the war is over? If you wanted to leave, wouldn't it have been while the war was going on?”

“I know, I know,” I said. “But what if you could go anywhere in the world? Even to
Obodo ndi ocha!
Do they even have wars in the white man's land? Just think about it! Anywhere in the world!”

She shook her head as if to erase the question from her consciousness.

The grammar school teacher entered the kitchen then, clearing his throat loudly to announce his presence. I returned to the yam that I should already have been done pounding. I heard Amina sigh as she walked out the door.

Some days later, Gowon declared the official end of the war. Again we listened to it on the radio, from the kitchen. Outside, the sun was high in the sky, and Gowon said:

Citizens of Nigeria,

It is with a heart full of gratitude to God that I announce to you that today marks the formal end of the civil war . . . The so-called Rising Sun of Biafra is set forever. It will be a great disservice for anyone to continue to use the word “Biafra” to refer to any part of the East Central State of Nigeria . . .

Gowon had not finished when the grammar school teacher said, “That imbecile!” His wife joined in: “Murderer!”

. . . The tragic chapter of violence is just ended. We are at the dawn of national reconciliation. Once again we have an opportunity to build a new nation . . .

Gowon went on like that.

That evening, we were outside by the gate when the soldiers came, Nigerian army men, Hausa soldiers, marching in a parade along the road.

“One Nigeria! One Nigeria!” they called out. They lifted their legs high as they marched, all dressed up in green uniforms, berets on their heads, their guns held firmly across their chests.

T
HE SAYING GOES
that wood already touched by fire isn't hard to set alight.

We had finished our dinner, some garri and vegetable soup. Then we'd stepped out to the backyard, onto the slab of cement at the side of our hovel, to take our night baths.

Near the bucket, on the corner of the cement slab, was a stool that we'd left there from early in the morning. On the stool, the comb we shared, some hairpins, our body cream, and a small mirror. We had just dried ourselves with our towels when Amina lifted the mirror. Our towels were tied around our chests, extending down to our thighs. She leaned so that her face came close to the kerosene lantern. Its rays illuminated her face. She tugged at the loose braids on her head. “Does it look all right?” she asked.

I went closer to her, ran my fingers through her braids. Those were the braids that I had plaited for her just that morning. I held her face in the palms of my hands and pretended to inspect her hair. I nodded and smiled. She smiled back.

There were the usual night sounds: grasshoppers hopping, fireflies buzzing, crickets singing their songs, leaves rustling in the breeze. I ran my hands up and down Amina's braids some more, up and down her arms. And Amina did the same to me.

Back in the hovel, our towels fell to the floor.

In the near darkness, our hands moved across our bodies. We took in with our fingers the curves of our flesh, the grooves. Our hands, rather than our voices, seemed to do the speaking. Our breaths mingled with the night sounds. Eventually our lips met. This was the beginning, our bodies being touched by the fire that was each other's flesh.

“W
E MIGHT AS
well be married,” Amina said one day.

A moment passed and a thought occurred to me. I asked, “You mean to each other? Or do you mean to other people?”

She rolled her eyes at me. “Of course I mean to each other. I mean that it would be nice to be married to you.”

“It would be nice to be married to you too,” I said.

Silence.

“But that's not the way marriage works, you know,” I said. “Besides, we're still too young yet for it.”

Another silence.

“Have you kissed anyone before?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. Not at all. Where would I ever have kissed anyone before?” She looked skeptically at me. “What about you? Have you ever kissed anyone before?”

It had been on my mind, which was why I had brought it up. All this time it had been troubling me, feeling a little like a betrayal. Perhaps she would hate me for it, for having done this thing we did, this thing that was supposed to be special and only between us, with somebody else. But I owed her the truth.

I said, “Someone kissed me once before. My best friend from Ojoto. It didn't feel the way it feels with you.”

“Your best friend?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“What kind of best friend is that?”

“Just a friend,” I said.

“It happened just once?”

“It happened just once.”

“You promise it didn't feel as good as with me?”

It was a funny question, its answer being so obvious to me, so I laughed a little. Then, very honestly, I said, “I promise it didn't feel as good as with you.”

After some time she asked, “How exactly does it feel with me?”

I thought about it. How could I describe it? I could not think of the words. Eventually I simply said, “Tingly and good and like everything is perfect in the world.”

She smiled. “But maybe you were just too young to feel it with your best friend,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Do you think you could have married him?”

“No,” I said. “Anyway, if I'm too young to be married now, then I was really too young to be married back then.”

“You're always talking about being too young to marry,” she said.

“I suppose I am,” I said.

I
T HAPPENED AT
the beginning of August, the end of the rainy season, the day of the New Yam Festival.

Boutique shops had begun to open along the margins of the roads, small shops inside narrowly built zinc sheds. The items they carried were different from those sold at the old vendor stands. They included lipstick, perfume, and soap in green, red, blue, and purple packages—all colors—wrapped so delicately in their fancy boxes that they seemed like precious gifts. They included toothpaste in plastic tubes for those people who were ready to switch back from chewing sticks to toothbrushes.

That particular day, we had eaten yam porridge for breakfast, boiled yam with palm oil for lunch, and pounded yam with soup for dinner. By now the war had been over for about seven months. Schools had not yet reopened, but the palm fronds were regaining their green. Yam was not exactly abundant, but people celebrated the festival all the same.

It must have happened on a Saturday, because Saturdays were when the grammar school teacher brought his dirty shirts and trousers, along with his wife's dirty blouses and wrappers and gowns, in a pail for us to wash. He always made sure to bring the pail early in the day, usually in the morning. Never later than two or three in the afternoon.

But that Saturday, he brought it late.

If only he had remembered to bring the pail just a couple of hours before he did. Then we would still have been outside running our errands, or in the kitchen cooking or cleaning, or just sitting on the steps of our hovel, waiting for him to arrive.

If he'd remembered, there would have been nothing to be discovered: we would simply have collected the pail, set out immediately to wash the clothes, and then hung the items out in the sun to dry.

Papa used to talk a lot about infinity. He used to harp on how there were infinite possibilities for the way anything in life could turn out. Even with a limited number of building blocks, he said, the possibilities were endless.

These days, when I think of that particular Saturday, I think of Papa and of his infinite possibilities, of the way they applied even in the framework of something as routine as the handing over of a pail of dirty clothes.

It was long after supper, and Amina and I had by then finished cleaning up the kitchen.

Out at the tap, we had taken our night baths and had returned to the hovel to sleep.

It was dark inside but for the kerosene lantern that sat on the table next to Papa's old Bible. We settled ourselves in our usual positions on the mattress: she by the wall, and me on the side nearer the door.

We lay facing each other, ready to fall into sleep, but sleep refused to come. By the light of the lantern, I watched the blinking of her eyes. For a long time we said nothing. Finally she said, “Every morning while we ate breakfast, my mother used to ask me what I dreamed at night.”

Mama used to talk a lot about dreams too. I told Amina as much. Maybe that was a trait shared by all mothers, we decided.

I thought about my dreams that night. The first one that came to mind was not the one where I was getting stuck in the dream, but rather the one where my teeth were all aching, all falling out.

Amina said, “Did you ever have the one where you continued to rise from the ground for no reason at all, like a balloon floating in the air, higher and higher, and all you wanted to do was come back down, but you were unable to do so?”

“Yes, those were my scariest dreams,” I said. “What do you imagine a dream like that means?”

She said, “My mother told me once that it means you will continue to rise, but eventually you will fall. Good things will happen to you for some time, and then the bad will follow.”