Under the Udala Trees (15 page)

I almost wished I had not asked.

I tried to remember the last time I had had that dream. I could not remember. Well, maybe I had already fallen. Maybe being here, working as a housegirl for the grammar school teacher, maybe that was my falling.

“The day before the house burned down, I dreamed of a yellow flower growing alone in a field,” Amina said. “I would have told it to my mother when I returned from fetching the kosai, but I never got the chance.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

The sheet was pulled up to our chests, but now she pulled her side higher, up to her shoulders. We lay there quietly. Neither one of us spoke.

Finally I said, “Dreams are not always sad. Or at least they don't have to be. Not even the scary ones have to mean something bad.”

I shifted my body, lifted myself, and turned so that I was no longer facing her.

The flame in the kerosene lantern shivered. Papa's Bible lay next to the lantern. I tried to think of some Bible stories in which there were mentions of dreams. Almost immediately the story of Joseph came to me. I turned back to Amina. “Did you ever hear of Joseph and his dreams?”

“Who is Joseph?” she asked.

“You know, Joseph from the Old Testament.”

She shook her head, told me that she did not know who Joseph was.

I filled her in on him. How God had given him a sign by way of his dreams. How, in one dream, Joseph and his brothers were tying wheat into bundles when suddenly Joseph's bundle of wheat stood up straight, nice and tall. Meanwhile, his brothers' bundles of wheat folded over, bowing to Joseph's bundle of wheat. In another dream, the sun and the moon and the stars all bowed down to Joseph.

I said, “At first when Joseph told his brothers of the dream, they were angry with him because they thought Joseph was trying to say that he was better than them. It seemed at first that the dream would only end up causing trouble. His brothers sold him into slavery because they were so angry with him. But many years later, it all worked out. Joseph was reunited with his brothers. In the end they found out that the dreams, and everything that came from the dreams, were part of God's plan for them. Imagine, all of it was part of the plan all along. Because from them came the twelve tribes of Israel.”

She sighed and pressed herself against me. “I don't understand why God made them to first have to go through all that wahala. Why have his brothers sell him off as a slave for all those years? It's like going around in a circle instead of taking a straight line home. Doesn't make any sense to me.”

I said, “Maybe sometimes it's worth it to go around in circles. Maybe you learn more lessons that way.”

“I don't know,” she said. “But I suppose that could be true too.”

Amina was so close to me now that I felt an urge to lean in and kiss her. I began with her forehead. I took a stop at her nose. Soon I was at her lips, then at the crook of her neck, which was exposed by her loose nightgown.

She rose so that she was above me, straddling me at the waist, on her knees. There was a sadness to the way she moved, to the way her lips lingered in the crook of my neck. She might have stopped out of all that sadness, but she continued, as if she were determined to fight off the sadness this way.

Slowly she made her way to my chest. We'd never gone farther than the chest. But now she gently removed my nightgown, and then removed hers. She cupped her hands around my breasts, took turns with them, fondling and stroking and caressing them with her tongue. I felt the soft tug of her teeth on the peaks of my chest. Euphoria washed over me.

She continued along, leaving a trail of kisses on her way down to my belly. She traveled farther, beyond the belly, farther than we had ever gone. I moaned and surrendered myself to her. I did not until then know that a mouth could make me feel that way when placed in that part of the body where I had never imagined a mouth to belong.

The knock snapped us back to reality. The grammar school teacher had knocked like that many times before. But always he'd waited for permission to enter. Only when we answered the knock did he walk in to find us just lounging about—chatting, or plaiting hair, or maybe eating a snack.

The door opened before we were able to pull our nightgowns back on. He walked in in a bustle, talking about how he had lost track of time. Explaining that he would leave the pail for us right outside the door and we should see about washing the clothes first thing in the morning.

And then his eyes settled on us. Amina had been lying on the mattress, flat on her back, my head hovering in the space above her legs. We had done our best to scramble away from each other as he entered the room. But we had not managed to get very far apart. I had only succeeded in lifting my head, and Amina had only managed to pull together her legs.

The sight of us must have startled him, because he gasped like a dying man taking his final breath.

He went immediately for the lantern on the table, lifted it in our direction, leaned closer, his eyes peering, as if to make sure that what he was seeing was indeed what was before his eyes.

The sight of us startled him all over again, and he gasped once more.

The whole incident was startling to me too, and must have been startling to Amina as well, not only for our having to endure the discomfort of his looking at us in this way, but also for our having to endure the misfortune of being forced to see ourselves through his eyes.

He walked over, pulled us off the mattress one at a time, slapped us on our cheeks. Over a year with him, sometimes the threat of a beating, but never an actual beating, until then.

He must have noticed the Bible on the table when he grabbed the lantern, because he turned back to the table, set the lantern back down, and grabbed the Bible. Pointing to it, he cried, “An abomination!”

The word reverberated in my head.

He looked directly at me. He shouted, “That is what it is, if a name is to be given to it! That is what the Bible calls it!”

Now he turned to Amina. He shouted at her too. “The Koran condemns it as well. I don't know much of Islam, but I know enough to know that the Koran and the Bible see eye to eye on this matter!”

He paced back and forth as he spoke, made frantic gestures with his hands as he told us that we would be held accountable for our actions. He had heard of such cases, in which the accused were stoned all the way to the river. Stoned even as they drowned in the waters of the river. Of course, it was rare that such cases were spoken of. So taboo the whole thing was, anathema, unmentionable, not even deserving a name.

Amina and I began to cry, deep cries that made our shoulders heave. Our clothes lay scattered on the floor, dispersed like discarded seeds. We were naked, and we felt our nakedness as Adam and Eve must have felt it in the garden, at the time of that evening breeze. Our eyes had become open, and we too sought to hide ourselves. But first we had to endure the grammar school teacher's lecturing. There he went, pacing back and forth in our little hovel, going on and on about our shame, his eyes furious, his mouth opening wider and wider.

He lectured and he lectured, and he lectured. As God must have lectured Eve.

T
HAT WAS THE
way in which Mama came back to me. Nearly two years gone by, and then that incident, and at last she found herself coming back for me.

The first thing I did when I saw her was run up and embrace her. I did so just as she was entering the gate. Despite the unfortunate circumstances under which she had sent me off, and despite the unfortunate circumstance under which we were all now gathering, I was genuinely glad to see her. So much time had passed, and I had missed her.

Mama had never been a buxom woman, but she appeared even less so now, a little withered.

When I came out of the embrace, we stood there face to face, taking each other in with our eyes.

Even today, I remember the way her clothes draped over her body with no discernible shape, the way she smelled of stale sweat—not terribly unfamiliar, but a little off-putting.

I remained with her, standing and tugging gently at her clothes in the mindless way that people who know each other well sometimes do. I tugged at the flap of her top wrapper.

Finally I moved from the wrapper and slid my hand into hers. The skin of her hand was wrinkled, as if from too many washes. Or from overuse. Or from age. I felt the quivering, what seemed to be tremors in her palm. My eyes had been lowered all along, but now I raised my head and saw in my mother's eyes a wetness: tears glistening before me like those silvery raindrops of the rainy season. Her cheeks appeared sunken. In that moment I wished that I could crawl back into her womb, if only to thicken her out, to put flesh upon her hips, into her breasts, to put life back into her sunken cheeks.

She began humming, as if unaware of herself, and as she hummed, she laughed at nothing at all, a soft laugh, a smooth sound. I leaned in close to her and fastened my arms around her legs, praying that the day did not come when she would slip completely away from me: shrinking, shrinking, shrinking until there was nothing of her left on this earth.

The grammar school teacher must have been watching the whole time. After Mama and I had come out of our last embrace, he cleared his throat, signaling that it was time for the meeting to begin.

Stools were set up in the backyard of the grammar school teacher's house, in the area of land near where lush green grass carpeted the earth, the area between the bungalow and the hovel. It was late morning, and we sat in a circle, like a village council meeting except without all the flourishes and jubilant greetings that marked the beginning of one.

The sun was shining brightly. I felt the weight of its rays on my shoulders. On the cement wall that formed the fence of the compound, lizards scurried about.

“So, tell me what this is all about,” Mama said.

The grammar school teacher replied, “I will allow Ijeoma to tell it to you herself. Tell her,” he said, turning to me. “Go on. Tell her.”

I remained silent, my throat numb.

The grammar school teacher's wife had been silent up till this point, but now she spoke. “The day waits for no one,” she said sternly.

Mama glared at me. “Ijeoma,” she said. “What is it that you have done?”

Amina had been seated with us from the start, and Mama had paid her no mind the entire time, but now she seemed to notice her.

Mama smiled and spoke to her in Igbo, a series of rambling questions: How are you? Who are you? What exactly are you doing here?

To which Amina responded with silence, because though she had picked up some basic Igbo greetings, which came to the rescue with passersby and such, she did not know enough Igbo to understand all that Mama had rambled, let alone know how to go about responding to her.

The grammar school teacher piped in then and explained who Amina was, to which Mama scowled and expressed her dissatisfaction with the fact that he had allowed a Hausa into his home, and not only that, but had allowed her to share living quarters with me, her child. Did he not see how dangerous it was? Did he not already know that it was the Hausa army that had killed her husband, the very same Hausa people who had destroyed Biafra?

He replied that Amina had not once been a problem until now, and that, anyway, she was just a harmless little girl.

Still, Mama did not hold back her dissatisfaction. She continued to scowl.

The whole situation was very stressful for me and was causing my stomach to do frightful somersaults. I found myself fading into my thoughts. I imagined myself removed from time and place. Or rather, I imagined myself in a place where nothing had happened in the past and nothing was happening now, and in the future nothing would be the consequence of all the nothings that had come before.

I woke up to Mama's voice. “Ijeoma, do you hear me?” Her words were shrill with irritation. “Do you hear me, or am I talking to the air?”

I responded, “Yes, Mama. I hear you.”

“So, go ahead. Tell me what it is that has happened.”

I sputtered, my tongue tumbling over a string of words, before something coherent came out. “Amina and I, we didn't think anything of it,” I began.

“You didn't think anything of what?” she asked.

“Of what we were doing,” I said.

“And what exactly were you doing?”

“Our clothes,” I said.

“Your clothes?”

I nodded, but I could not go on.

Suddenly there was a look in her face that seemed to say that she was now understanding. Her eyes and mouth opened wide. “
Chi m o!
” she exclaimed in a whisper. My God! She was still sitting on her stool, but she was flailing her hands and then wringing them the way a thief who has been caught in the act sometimes does.

“We didn't think anything of it, Mama,” I said again.

Mama was making soft wailing sounds now.

“Mama, I'm sorry,” I said, going to her, kneeling before her, wrapping my arms around her knees. When I rose back up, I saw that Amina was standing by my side, her face coated in tears. She said, “Madam, I'm sorry too. Please don't be angry with us.”

Mama appeared even tinier now, smaller than before. She shook her head slowly at us. Then she lifted her hands slowly to her mouth, covering it, a feeble attempt to stop herself from weeping.

I stood there watching her weep, and I imagined the punishment that the grammar school teacher had described: all the villagers gathered together at the mouth of the river, Amina and I being dragged into the river, stones thrown at us until we were sore and bruised and weak from all that pelting. I imagined us being left there to drown.

That was the way in which I finally left the grammar school teacher's place. As for Amina, since she had no family, nowhere to be sent, she remained at the grammar school teacher's. He and his wife would do their part in straightening her out, and Mama would do her part in straightening me out.