Under the Udala Trees (16 page)

Mama led me down the road to the bus stop without uttering a single word. She simply maintained her grasp on my hand. In that stiff, unnerving silence we boarded the bus. Her grasp was tight, painful even.
Loosen up
, I imagined saying to her, to her fingers.
Loosen up.
And I imagined the reply something like this:
This is anger. It does as it pleases.

 

T
HE SECONDARY SCHOOL
, Obodoañuli Girls' Academy—Land of Joy Girls' Academy—ironically had a humble and subdued look to it, almost austere, like a place where girls went to become nuns. Based on appearances alone, there was nothing joyful about it.

The school was not in Nnewi proper, but rather outside of it and to the west, in the nearby community of Oraifite, where the Ekulo River bisected the land. Near the river, and also at some points in it, mangroves grew, leaning in the water like old men and old women permanently bent at the waist, cowering as if to eschew the sun.

It was a small enclave of a school, hemmed in by bushes and trees, mostly plantain and palm trees. The only road clear of the bushes and trees was the road one took to get to the school. It was a muddy and potholed road at the tip of which was a gate that led into the school compound.

The compound was large, with several buildings in it—between twelve and fifteen—all smallish in size, like oversized huts. The classrooms were the smallest of the buildings, each one decked with a meager pair of windows, open spaces with only wooden shutters for coverings, most of which remained flung wide.

The other buildings—those larger than the classrooms—served as dormitories, lavatories and washrooms, a library, and offices for the teachers and headmistress. Sometimes the senior students hung around in the offices with the teachers—in the evenings especially, but never on weekends. On weekends there was hardly anyone around. Many of the teachers and students went home.

Outside the front entrance of each dormitory building was a veranda. Fluorescent lights hung from the veranda ceilings; they came on at night. On the inside, the dorms consisted of open rooms lined with cots, with equal spaces between the cots. Each dorm held six beds, two or three girls to a room. Beside each bed was a small table and chair on which we sat to read and complete school assignments. On each desk was a lantern. There was not much else in the dorm rooms aside from what each girl brought for herself.

“No more of that nonsense between you and that girl,” Mama had said before sending me off to the school. “Remember, you're a new person now. And lucky for you that the grammar school teacher is still willing to live up to his end of the bargain by sending you to school, despite the shameful way that you behaved under his care. Now, look here.
Nee anya.
No matter what you do, stay away from that girl!”

“If you're so worried that I'll do it again, why send us to the same school?” I asked.

“It's the only school that the grammar school teacher can afford to send both of you to. If not, believe me, I would have seen to it that you two were sent to schools as far apart from each other as heaven and hell.”

The school was made up primarily of Igbo girls. There were a couple of Efik girls, no Yoruba girls, and aside from Amina, there was only one other Hausa girl, who was as good as Igbo because she had grown up entirely in Igboland and, as unlikely as the match was, one of her parents was Igbo.

We all stuck to our kind. The Efiks stuck to the Efiks, the Igbos to the Igbos. And, especially during those first weeks of school, every time I saw Amina around the compound, she was either by herself or with the other Hausa/Igbo girl.

The third day or so after I had arrived at the school, I had run into Amina on the way to class. She was by herself, and I had hugged her and attempted to make conversation, asking her how she was finding the school and how she was settling in. But Amina was stiff in my embrace, and afterward she barely looked my way, not even as I walked by her side. She gave only one-word answers to my questions.

We had been going to two separate classes. Eventually I left her and walked in the direction of my class. I tried again after my class session was over, waiting for Amina outside her own classroom. Just as she walked out of the door, I went up to her, but upon seeing me, she mumbled something about having to go, and off she went, her steps hurried, as if to get quickly away from me.

In the days that followed, no matter how hard I tried to get close to her, she continued to keep her distance from me. Those were days when I wondered if everything that had happened between us at the grammar school teacher's place had been a figment of my imagination. How was it that she could be so cold to me?

After several attempts, with no luck in getting her to return to her old self, I made it a point to keep away from her. There were close encounters, of course, those moments when we could not help but be in the same vicinity—morning assemblies, physical education classes, mealtimes in the school cafeteria—but for the most part we kept out of each other's way. Ugochi, my roommate, became the person whom I began to rely on for company.

Ugochi was sitting on her bed.

She was a dark-skinned Igbo girl whom we called
panla
, or stock fish, because she was very thin, and the way her body looked, it was as if all her flesh was so dried up that it clung to her bones. Even on her face, either the bones were too prominent or the skin was so tight around the bones that upon first glance she seemed to have a grave, almost angry look about her.

But at least she was endowed with a beautiful figure—a nice chest, curvy hips, very good proportions. Together with her rich, dark skin color, she wasn't altogether unattractive.

She was folding her scarf. I watched her from where I sat on my own bed. It was a soft beige scarf, embroidered with flower petals scattered across its surface.

Unlike the rest of us, who came to the school with very few personal items, all of which we used on a daily basis, Ugochi kept things she rarely used: a fancy, pastel pink hairpin which I had not yet seen her wear, a spool of satin ribbons which I'd not yet seen tied to her hair, a pair of yellow sandals with a big gold bow at the front. And the scarf. Every once in a while, she'd sit and admire it, then fold it back up and put it away. Sometimes I saw her packing the items into a bag and leaving with them. But aside from those times when she packed them up, her belongings remained in their little corners on her side of our room.

It was afternoon, just after morning classes. “I like your scarf,” I said. “Can I see?”

She seemed to think about it, then waved me over. “Yes, come see. But remember, you can see it, but you can't have it. It's my special scarf.”

“What makes it special?” I asked.

She placed it in my open hands, allowed me to hold and examine it. The petals were outlined in pink. The cloth was smooth and soft to the touch, like silk.

“Special means it's for special occasions.”

“What special occasions?” I asked, staring questioningly at her.

She giggled. “Come on,” she said. “You mean you really don't know?”

I shook my head.

She spoke in pidgin now. “You sef, you no dey know these things. Which kain girl you be? Yellow sissy like you, you no get special man friend?”

I couldn't help myself: a laugh escaped my mouth. A special man friend was the last thing on my mind. I shook my head and told her that I did not have a special man friend.

Now Ugochi looked at me with what seemed to be a mixture of bafflement and pity. “Ah, well,” she said, “maybe one day you'll find yourself one. But anyway, the point is, men like these things. They want
ocho mma, nwa nlecha, asa mma, asa mpete.
” She laughed a brief, womanly laugh, almost a mockery of herself. “You know, beautiful, beautiful. No be small thing o! I save my pretty things for when I spend time with my special man friends. Special things for special people. You know?”

The whistle blew, calling us for afternoon classes. Outside, the sounds of feet and the rising of voices. “Time to go,” she said, and she reached out and collected the scarf.

E
ARLY ONE MORNING
, I sat at my desk dressed in my school uniform, a green-and-white-checkered blouse and the matching dark green pencil skirt that went with it. I was studying, and in the gaps between my studying, I thought of Amina and heard Mama's voice in my head saying, “
Nee anya.
No matter what you do, stay away from that girl!” If Mama only knew that there had not been a need for her warning, I mused.

All night and morning long, I had not seen Ugochi, but now she flung open the door and entered with her usual bravado.

I turned around and watched her walk in. Her makeup and clothes were disheveled. Her hair was pinned up with one of her ribbons, but it was disheveled too. All of that mess and still she was wearing a big smile on her face.

“What are you doing there at your desk?” she asked.

“Studying,” I said.

“Studying?”

“We have our history test today. Have you forgotten?”

She looked blankly at me, as if she were going through a stack of notecards in her mind. Finally she said, “Ah, that's right. Well, I'm sure it's not really something that needs studying for. I'm sure I'll do well enough even without studying.”

“And how will you manage that?” I asked.

She was untying the ribbon from her hair. She stuttered a bit, then said, “Well, you know. Most of those things we learned this time around have those songs to go with them.” She began singing: “There are seven rivers in Africa: Nile, Niger, Senegal, Congo, Orange, Limpopo, Zambezi. Azikiwe, Awolowo, Tafawa Balewa.
Onye ocha, sepu aka n'opu eze.

“And there you have it,” she said, stretching her arms wide open as if to say, Ta-da! “All in one song, you have the seven rivers and the first three founding fathers.”

“Good job,” I said. “But, you know,
that
will only get you so far. There's not a song for everything. And anyway, what if one of the questions is why the song ends with that last part: ‘White man, take your hand off the chief's hat'? Do you know that answer?”

She laughed. “Nobody's hand should ever be on anyone's hat. Not without permission, anyway. But my point with the song is, I will know
some
of the answers on the exam. Even a little is better than nothing at all,
abi?
”

“What about
Things Fall Apart
? Have you read it yet? We will probably have to write an essay on it.”

She waved her hand at me as if to brush the question away. As she did, she kicked off her skirt and said, “Everyone knows the story of Okonkwo.”

I had been looking at her as she spoke, following her movements with my eyes, but as her skirt came off, I turned around to keep from watching. “I will manage just fine with that one,” she was saying, and from the corner of my eye I could tell that she was now unbuttoning her blouse.

I continued to avert my eyes out of a feeling of self-consciousness, also out of a desire to be respectful to her. I looked up only when I was sure I had given her enough time to finish undressing and finish putting on her school uniform. But when I looked back at her she had still not managed to put on her uniform. Instead, she was wrapped in her towel and was holding her bathing bucket and bowl. She said, “I'm going to get a quick bath. Wait for me. Don't leave without me, okay?”

I nodded.

“As for studying,” she said, in a mixture of proper English and pidgin, “really, no be big problem. I go manage. See you in a few minutes.”

Her voice trailed off, and moments later the door was closing behind her.

“C
LASSES REALLY DO
get in the way of living,” Ugochi was saying as she bent to put some clothes in her bag again. “Imagine, the inconvenience of having to come back only to pack up and leave again!”

I laughed.

“But seriously,” she said, “I can't help looking forward to the weekend. Nothing like being able to have unlimited time with my”—she winked at me before continuing—“with my special man friends.”

“How many special man friends are you even talking about? And if there are so many of them, how can they all be special?”

“Daaaarling,” she said, dragging out the word. She had recently started calling me “darling” because she could just tell, she said, that I was the kind of close friend she'd always wished for. Now she was calling me it again, saying, in a mawkish voice, “Daaaarling, that's for me to know and for you—not to find out.”

Laughter sneaked out of my lips. “One of these days you'll get caught,” I teased. “Sneaking in and out of campus like you're always doing. Don't be surprised when you finally get caught.”

She shook her head. “Ye of little faith,” she said. “Don't you worry about me. I know what I'm doing. I've got these things covered.”

When the knock came, she had just finished packing her bag. She zipped the bag up and went to answer.

Through the window by my bed, I could see by the swooshing of leaves that a breeze was blowing.

The door swung open from the force of the breeze. Someone took a step inside. At first all I saw was the silhouette of a girl in a long dark dress. I could not make out her features, and if she had hair on her head, I could not have said. She took a few more steps into the dorm room. “I'm looking for Ijeoma,” she said. It was the last voice that I had expected to hear.

Ugochi stepped aside and pointed the girl in my direction, and then she went back to her bed, picked up her bag, slung it across her shoulder. “See you later, daaaarling,” she said teasingly. “I have some important business to take care of, as you know, but I shall be back.” She winked.