Under the Udala Trees (18 page)

“Hush with your surprise,” the headmistress was saying. “Now, I ask you all before me, why are you surprised? Is it a surprise? Is it not true that bad company corrupts good character?

“But let it be known that this was not the result of any negligence on the part of your teachers or on my part. Between assemblies and Sunday services and revivals, you certainly have been taught right from wrong. Those of you who have made a habit of sneaking out of school grounds, take note.”

She finished: “A word is enough for the wise. Let this be a warning. Be wary of becoming like Ozioma, of allowing your good character to be soiled by bad company.”

It was in this vein that Tuesday turned to Wednesday, and Wednesday to Thursday, and so on until the weekend rolled around. Many of the students packed their bags and went home for the weekend. Amina and I remained again, only this time with the headmistress's warning in mind.

B
ECAUSE IT WAS
primarily an Igbo school, it was also a Christian school, and because it was a Christian school, all of the students were required to go to Sunday services and Sunday revivals, as well as Wednesday-evening devotionals. This was a requirement even on holidays, for those who stayed behind. If Amina had not taken issue with the grammar school teacher's decision to conduct Bible studies on her behalf—there was no indication that she had remonstrated—she was not now taking issue with having to attend services and practice the Christian faith. She attended and participated just like any of the other girls, the Hausa/Igbo girl included.

Early on a Sunday Amina and I had gone to the service with all the girls who had not gone home. Then we had whiled away time reading at the library.

Now we were once again at the river, sitting in our usual spot, observing as the sky changed from bright blue to gray. After a while, the sun appeared to dissolve, and we watched as the sky turned a deeper shade of gray.

Amina took my hand and pulled me up, smiling all the while. She held my hand that way for a few moments, then stepped back from where I stood, letting go of my hand. She twirled then, so fast that her pleated skirt rose flat around her, like an upside-down plate. She giggled, as if embarrassed that her skirt should come up so far. She pushed it back down with her hands, looking into my eyes, searching, as if to find out exactly how much I had seen.

I twirled back in defiance, twirled so fast that the flared skirt of my dress came up as high as hers had, only I made no move to push it back down. Soon she was twirling with me. I heard her laugh, and I laughed with her, and soon we were falling down with all that laughter, at a joke that neither of us could quite have explained.

We sat on the ground to catch our breath, just looking at each other. The straps of her dress had fallen down her shoulders. I tugged at them, pulled them lower, looked longingly at her.

“Will you—” she began in a whisper.

“Will I?”

She moved closer to me.

“This?” I asked, pulling her straps lower.

She sighed, like a gasp, but she moved closer, her eyes steady on me.

I allowed my fingers to trace the upper part of her dress, its bodice, where the lace hem met her skin. She pulled my hand lower, just above her breast. I felt the thumping of her heart. She leaned into me and sighed again. We stayed a moment like that. Suddenly she turned her eyes from me, looked downward, as if suddenly self-conscious. Her dress still covered her body, everything but her shoulders, but she must have felt more naked than that, because she proceeded to wrap her arms over her shoulders.

We returned to campus in the dark, not saying a word, walking along the roads lined with palm and plantain trees, her yellow dress and my cream-colored one billowing in the breeze.

Back on school grounds, I started to go in the direction of my dorm, but she grasped my hand and we both walked in the direction of hers.

In her dorm room, we kicked off our shoes and sat on opposite ends of the bed. Her roommate had gone home for the weekend. My heart raced, a mixture of terror and excitement at the possibility of finally arriving at something that I had for some time begun to think of as a hopeless dream.

She rose from her end of the bed and moved so that she was next to me. After a while we stretched ourselves flat on the mattress. The room was dark, but the moon, through the horizontal slits of the shutters, shone through.

We watched each other by the light of the moon. We fell asleep that way.

It must have been sometime in the middle of the night that she woke up with a start, asking me if I had seen it, if I had heard it. “Hailstones,” she blurted out, “and fire, pouring down and forming craters where they landed.” Her body shook as she spoke, almost as if she were shivering from a fever.

She described the dream, something about a carriage in the sky pulled by golden horses with no horseman. People were lining up, marching toward the bright light that encircled the carriage in the sky.

I hadn't meant to do so, but I found myself laughing in her face. “I see you've been reading your Bible,” I said. “Sounds to me like the book of Revelation.” I laughed some more.

“The children,” she cried, her voice shaky now. “Small children, sweat dripping from their heads. So much sweat that their clothes were soaking wet.” With all that marching, she said, those poor children must have been achy, on the brink of exhaustion, some of them probably even beyond that, because every once in a while one fell to the ground, and the others simply stepped over him.

Maybe it was a sign, she said. Maybe we were the fallen children, the sinful ones without the strength to continue in the path of right­eousness.

“No,” I replied, taking her dream more seriously now. I shook my head, told her that it was all just a dream. I pulled her close to me and held her, my face in the crook of her neck. Was it her scent that gave me a feeling of joyful deliriousness? I kissed her, from her neck to her jawline and then to her lips. Her dress had come unbuttoned at the front, and I ran my hands across her chest, caressed her breasts. “We are far from fallen children,” I said. “It's only a dream.”

Her hand was moist on my lap. She leaned into me, stroked my face, returned my kiss with one full of yearning, deeper and more longing than mine. But I had already lost her. As soon as she parted from the kiss, she rose from the bed. She buttoned up her dress, found her sandals, and strapped them on. She walked over to the door and opened it. Cold air came in from outside. She stood there in the doorframe, her body faltering a little, like a shadow on the verge of fading. After some time just standing there, she walked out of the room, closing the door gently behind her.

F
OR A COUPLE
of weeks after that dream incident, Amina and I did not eat together, did not meet to go to the river, barely spoke to each other on our way to and from classes.

About the third Saturday after the dream, I was getting fed up with the way things were, fed up that everything between us should suddenly change again, and all on account of a stupid dream.

All day that Saturday, I had stayed in the library, hoping that Amina would stop in, but she didn't.

Now the sun was setting, and though I was not outside with the rest of the students, I knew that the teachers were announcing the end of visiting hours. From the open windows near where I sat, I could see that one by one the boys were sauntering away. Cardinal Rex's highlife music,
Ibi Na Bo
, was playing, coming from a veranda near the library building. Some people hummed along to it as they walked by on their way to let themselves out through the school gate.

I made up my mind then that I would get to the bottom of things. I closed the book I was reading and stood up. It was as if there was a fire at my feet, propelling me to move, to do something.

At her door, I knocked, three firm taps that I knew she would hear, if she was inside to hear. There was no answer.

In the distance, I could hear that
Ibi Na Bo
had finished playing, and now
Love Mu Adure
had taken over.

I knocked again.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Still nothing.

Just as I turned to walk away, I heard the rattling of the doorknob.

She came out, closed the door behind her. “My roommate is sleeping,” she said in a low voice. “She's not feeling well today.”

“Oh,” I said. “I'm sorry she's sick.”

“It's okay,” she said. “Just a stomachache. I picked some lemongrass and boiled it for her to drink.”

“That was nice of you to do,” I said. “I hope it helps.”

She nodded.

I said, “I haven't seen you in a while.”

“I know,” she said. “Things have been busy.”

“What's making them so busy?”

“I don't know,” she said. “School. Reading. Sick roommate.”

We were standing face to face. I moved closer to her, took her hand in mine. “We missed all the music and the dancing today,” I said.

“I know,” she said, pulling her hand out of mine. “Maybe next time.”

I said, “We don't have to wait till next time. We can hear the music all the way from here.” I took her hand in mine again, pulled her close to me. She did not pull away this time; instead she held on tightly. But she was wide-eyed and unsmiling. I moved closer, raised my hands to hold her by the waist. My hands had hardly touched her waist when she cried out, “Please stop!”

She said it again, more quietly this time, “
Please. Stop.
”

I let go of her.

She brought her hand to her forehead and said, “You know, actually, I have a headache. I think I need to sleep myself. I hope you have a good rest of the day. I'll see you around.”

She turned and stepped into the room, shutting the door behind her, not bothering to wait for my response.

B
Y THE END
of that second year, no amount of persuasion or cajoling or flat-out rationalizing had managed to take away the standoffishness that Amina had acquired as a result of that dream.

If I said, “God loves us all the same,” she said, “Not the thieves and the liars and the cheats, not the murderers, not the disobedient. He couldn't possibly love us all the same.”

Once, I went so far as to quote her John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” And I said, “You see, God loves us all the same. He gave His only son to save us all. All of us, even the thieves and liars and cheats, even the murderers and the disobedient. Even those of us accused of abominations.” By this time, a large part of me did not believe I had committed any type of abomination, but I said it anyway. Just to point out to her that God loved us all. Just to point out to her that He didn't put any qualifiers on His love. Not even when He said to love your neighbor as yourself. He didn't say don't love the thieving neighbors, or don't love the adulterers, or don't love the liars or the cheats or the disobedient children. He simply said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

All of this explaining. Still, Amina would not budge.

By our third year, it was as if she had become a secondary-school-aged, Nigerian version of Margaret Thatcher, iron lady through and through.

Then one day, as if by a miracle, on a Sunday around the middle of our third year, the headmistress announced the upcoming visit of an
onye ocha
minister, who promised to perform wonders through prayer. I was all ears.

He would be the special guest at our revival ceremony the following Sunday, the headmistress said.

During the war, some of the villagers in Ojoto had gone around saying that the Red Cross
ndi ocha
workers had been sent to Biafra by God to save us. Once, I watched as several of the villagers threw their hands above their heads and exclaimed, “Glory be to God! The
ndi ochas
can even bring back the dead!” I have no idea what led them to say that—maybe one of the Red Cross nurses had successfully treated a dying person, returning him to health. Whatever the case, the idea of an
onye ocha
minister coming to our school to perform miracles instantly reminded me of what the villagers had been saying during the war, so that, for me, the impending visit took on the feel of medicine. In my mind, it was as if all I'd have to do was show up at the revival, take a full Sunday regimen of
onye ocha
prayer tablets, and just like that, everything would be fixed.

The Sunday of the minister's revival, it rained. The senior prefects led the way. We followed, all of us trudging along through the pouring rain, through swampy marshlands and mud-caked trails.

We reached an open field several kilometers from our campus, gathered in a large circle around the minister and his small crew of
ndi ochas
, the rain beating down on us.

The minister wore a short-sleeved white oxford shirt and a pair of brown trousers, both of which, soaked, clung to his body. He was pale, like any other white man, but he was dark too, tanned from the sun, so much so that the skin on his face and on his arms reminded me of a belt, or a cattle hide, owing to that leathery look of it.

By his side, a gray-haired
onye ocha
woman sat in a silver and black wheelchair. She was a cripple, the minister explained, speaking in his rambling,
onye ocha
way, one word melting into the next.

Another
onye ocha
man stood by the crippled woman, holding a long stick. “Look upon him and bear witness to the power of God!” the minister announced. “Look and marvel at a man who has spent all his life deprived of sight. But today, my brothers and sisters in Christ, today he shall see!”

All around I heard the collective “Amen” of fellow students.

The minister began with the crippled woman. He wheeled her to the very middle of the crowd and asked us to position ourselves in the field so that we could properly see. The praying began: