Under the Udala Trees (23 page)

All night I had listened to Mama's voice—not her voice in real time, but her voice in the dream—warning me about following the devil to the grave. By the time day rolled around, my mind was infested with images of graves. I had become a little like a coffin: I felt a hollowness in me and a rattling at my seams.

Mama's voice was the source of all my turmoil, so I could hardly stand to be around her. At about noon, I asked permission to leave the shop. I could not tell her why. I simply requested an hour away. I carried the handbag I had packed for myself with my Bible and prayer scarf in it and headed to Mama's and my regular church.

When I got there it was empty. I sat for some time at the back of the church, my thoughts racing in no particular direction. I must have sat for half an hour before going up to the front. Just before reaching the pulpit, I knelt down, pulled out my Bible and prayer scarf from my bag. I tied the scarf around my head.

I opened the Bible, placed my palms firmly on its pages. I closed my eyes and prayed:

Dear God, what is the meaning of all of this?

Instantly I felt guilt stirring as a result of my daring to ask God this kind of question.

I tried a different tactic. I pleaded:

Dear God, I am a sinner, and I come before you to beg you to please show me the path to righteousness.

But what if I was not, in fact, sinning? What if I was subjecting myself to all this guilt for no reason at all?

Lord, I am confused. Please give me a sign. If there is any evil in my heart, please give me a sign so that I might recognize it and, in doing so, avoid it.

My eyes had been closed all along. I had hardly opened them when I caught a flicker of light in the direction of the pulpit, like a piece of jewelry reflecting the sunlight. Then it appeared that the flicker was growing bigger, approaching.

I grew eager and afraid at once, because this was, after all, the sign that I had asked for.

I heard the sound of footsteps behind me. I turned around.

I screamed at the sight, because if this was God's sign, then Mama was the evil in my heart.

M
AMA RAN TO ME
, muffled my screams. “What is the matter with you? This is the house of God, for God's sake! What is possessing you to scream this way?”

I collected myself. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I was praying. I didn't expect anyone to come walking in.”

“I've been running around looking for you. Of course I came! Do you realize you've been gone over two hours?”

“Two hours?” I asked, genuinely surprised.

She nodded. “What's the matter with you?”

“I'm just a little sick,” I said. “I think I'll go back home and sleep. That should help.”

She placed the back of her palm on my forehead. “Is it stomach trouble or a headache?”

“Mostly just a headache.”

“All right.
Ngwa.
Let's go. I will walk back with you. I have some Panadol at home you can take. Hopefully it's not the onset of malaria. Obiageli down the road just came down with a bad case of malaria.”

“I don't think it's malaria,” I replied. “A small headache, that's all.”

D
ESPITE THE PANICKED
dreams, as soon as Monday rolled around, and as soon as we closed up the shop, I went to Ndidi's. It was like having an addiction to chili peppers, or to beans. You sensed that eating too much of them would overwhelm your system. That afterward there would be consequences. Your mouth would burn; you would surely get the runs. The dreams would come again. But you did it anyway.

I sat on her sofa listening to Fela Kuti on her record player, and again watching her mark her students' assignments.

I peered at her off and on, scrutinizing, because maybe God would give me a different sign where she was concerned, a clearer one, and if I looked closely, maybe I would see.

After a while, she must have felt the weight of my scrutiny. She lifted her eyes and very softly said, “Ijeoma, what?”

I allowed my eyes to drop. “Nothing,” I said.

She went back to the papers in front of her. A few minutes went by.

She felt my gaze again and said, “Ijeoma, what's the matter?”

“I'm just checking to see if you're done yet,” I replied.

She put her pen down, rose from the table, and came to me on the sofa. “And if I say I'm done, then what? Do you have special plans for us this evening?”

I shook my head. “No plans. Was just checking to see if you were done.”

Now she was the one scrutinizing me, studying me with her eyes. She took my hand, began stroking it. “Well, if you have no plans for us, I might have a plan.”

My throat was suddenly dry, and I felt heat rising in my cheeks. “What kind of plan?” I asked hoarsely.

She leaned in so that I could feel the warmth of her breath on my ear and on the side of my face. Her voice was strong even if it was only a whisper. She said, “This kind of plan.”

She took my hand in hers and brought it to her waistline. In one swift motion, she unzipped her skirt at the side zipper. The skirt loosened, and she brought my hand inside. She wore no undergarments, not even a slip. Her skin where my hand landed was warm. But she moved it lower, pausing momentarily at the curls of hair that started low beneath her belly. She stopped only when my hand arrived at the wet flesh at the center. I felt a slight insecurity, having done this only with Amina before. What if the things that Amina had enjoyed were not the same things that would please Ndidi? What if I was somehow insufficient?

I would try anyway. I moved to her front, knelt before her. I pressed her wet flesh firmly with the tips of my fingers, then my fingers found themselves inside, enveloped by her warmth.

She gasped. The gasping transformed into moaning. I moved my fingers slowly in and out. I rubbed gently in small circles, slow at first and then faster, the way I had done with Amina and with myself.

Her hips moved along.

It did not take much time. She let out a cry, and I found myself overcome by emotion—warm feelings, feelings of affection, of happiness, of something like love; feelings of elation at being able to connect so intimately with her, at being able to elicit such an intense reaction from her. It was as if her pleasure was in that moment my own, ours, a shared fulfillment.

I held her, whispered her name, placed soft kisses on her face, her neck, her lips. If I could have stayed forever this way with her, there would have been no greater gift.

She let out another cry, and then her entire body stiffened in my embrace, with recurrent shudders, until finally she relaxed into my arms.

At home that night, the panicked dreams were worse than on all the preceding nights combined. Throughout my sleep I was confronted with Mama's scolding face, her reprimanding finger wagging at me, threatening to poke out an eye. The images of Mama were interspersed with a thunderous sound that, in the dream, was the voice of God, scolding also like Mama, reprimanding, condemning me for my sins. Each time I fell back to sleep, the same dream. Eventually I rose from bed, no longer willing myself to sleep. I pulled off my nightgown, changed into one of my day gowns. Dressed, I went back to bed and sat, not daring even to lie down. I sat there for hours, wide awake, waiting for day to break.

As the sun peeked through the sky and darkness turned to a light gray, I climbed out once more from bed, picked up my Bible and prayer scarf, and headed out of my room. It was still early enough that Mama would not yet have awoken.

I walked briskly out the front door and along the path leading across the yard. I stepped outside the gate and switched to a running pace until I arrived at church.

I went down the aisle to the front of the church, as I had done the time before. I knelt down before God. I would have prayed, but somehow I could not find the words to do so. I took a deep breath, slowly exhaling, attempting to steady myself that way. And then another deep breath. And another.

My breathing finally stabilized. I attempted once more to string together the words to form a prayer, but nothing came. I remained mute. Not a single word to express myself, not a single one to explain or to defend myself, not one single word to apologize and beg forgiveness for my sins. All I felt within me was a trembling from this questionable sort of guilt. A sense of defeat washed over me. Tears spilled out, forming tiny dark spots on the gray cement floor of the church. I took in a deep breath and then exhaled. The exhalation came out as a long, tumbling sigh. Somewhere in the middle of it, I remembered John 8. I knelt there at the front of the church and at last the words came out of my mouth, Jesus' words:
He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

I felt a slow rising of relief. A steady dispersion of it, and then an overshadowing of that earlier sense of defeat. I exhaled once more. The air smelled of tears and sweat and that sharp scent of wet concrete.

I
WAS GOING BACK
and forth between the front and the rear of the store, dusting shelves and restocking, when I saw the man enter. His hair rose high above his head as if to form a black halo around him. He had a beard, a mustache, and sideburns trailing down his cheeks.

He headed toward the crates of drinks and picked up a bottle of Guinness. He wore a watered-down smile, the kind that matched the dull and wrinkled shirt he was wearing, the kind that matched the faded blue tie around his neck.

“
Ego one ka ifa bu?
” he asked Mama, holding the bottle out toward her when he had reached the counter. How much?

He had just collected his change and turned to leave when I recognized him. Also at that moment, I heard, “
Na wa-oh!
” The tone of Mama's voice was a mixture of glee and surprise.

“Chibundu!” she exclaimed.

At that moment he recognized her too.

He greeted Mama, and then he turned to me. “Ijeoma! Is it you?” He turned back to Mama. “Mrs. Okoli, long time!”

Memories flooded back, of Chibundu pulling my hair, of us climbing trees, of running around church together. Of him saying, “Look really closely at us so that you never forget that we were friends.”

“Long time,” Mama was saying. She had come around the counter and was greeting him with a hug, saying, “Welcome o. Welcome.
Nno.
”

His shirt was wrinkled and untucked at the waist. Ridges had formed on his forehead, age lines that made him seem far older than the image of him in my mind. But of course. He was no longer a boy.

Back in Ojoto, Mama never seemed to have a soft spot for Chibundu, but now it appeared that she did. She spent the remainder of that day, and the rest of the week, talking to me about him.

“He has done very well for himself. Imagine, little Chibundu, a graduate of the University of Ibadan and now doing Youth Service here in Aba! His mother and father must be very proud.”

“Yes,” I said. “They must be very proud.”

“T
HERE WAS A
beating yesterday,” Ndidi said very softly one evening. She appeared to be speaking to herself or into the air, rather than to me.

“They were two men. I never knew them. They were friends of Adanna from the university. For days they seemed to have disappeared, fallen off the face of the earth. And then yesterday she heard something at the market, whispers about a pair of ‘sissies' being beaten by a crowd of people. She went to the bushes behind the dirt road not far from where they lived, and she found the two of them there, naked and beaten to death.”

Her voice was soft and raspy now, as if her throat was parched.

“This sort of thing has always happened. Like several years ago when they burned down that other church I told you about. But I hadn't been going to that church, so the burning did not feel completely real. And no one died. This time it's different. This time it basically happened right before my eyes, and I can't shake the feeling that it could easily have been me or you.”

I went to her and wrapped my arms around her.

“We called the police. They couldn't even be bothered to do anything, not even to take the bodies away. ‘Let them rot like the faggots they are,' one of the officers said. The other one said, ‘If they were not dead already, we would beat them some more.' In the end, it was Adanna and I who took their bodies,” she said. “We carried them and cleaned them and prepared them for burial. Imagine, holding their bodies in my arms.”

Her voice by now was a trembling whisper.

T
HERE HAD BEEN
nothing extraordinary about the events of the first half of the following day: Mama and I worked at the shop as usual. In the evening I went to Ndidi's, where she and I ate some garri and okra soup for dinner. Afterward, Ndidi and I went to the church.

First we had danced in the middle of the floor, to the sound of Fela Kuti's voice, “Shakara Oloje” flowing loudly from the record player. Then we pushed ourselves deep into the corner of the church, at the rear, where the table of beer and jugs of kai kai and crates of soft drinks sat. We had become like all the other girls by now, kissing and fondling and making out in the dark.

I had not intended to stay so long. My plan had been to return home earlier than last time, before eleven p.m. Mama would scold me again for being late, but at least it would not be a new grievance. She might be worried, but not overly so, since it was something I'd done before.

But things did not go as I had planned.

The knocking at the front door of the church came when Ndidi and I stood making out at the rear of the dance floor. It might have been soft at first, but soon it was a loud banging sound.

We watched as several of the girls peeked out from the heavy drapes at the windows. A heavy hush fell over the place, and for a moment Fela Kuti's music was the only audible sound. Then there was the hurried scrambling of feet, and one of the girls, Chichi, herded the rest of the girls to the back of the church where Ndidi and I stood. “Shhhh,” Chichi repeated, her index finger meeting her lips.