Under the Udala Trees (30 page)

Behind him was a van, its driver in the middle of taking out a number of baby's things: a dark-wood crib, a small natural-colored Moses basket, a stack of cloth diapers, a Fisher-Price swing, a box on which were images of baby bottles.

I opened the door wide for him to enter, which he then did, transferring the briefcase so that he was now holding the stroller and the case all in one hand. With his free hand he stroked me on the cheek.

“After this baby will be another and another and maybe even another. All of these will be a good investment, passed down from one child to the next.”

“Another and another and maybe even another?”

He nodded, smiling brightly, and now he was off, going back and forth from the doorway into the parlor, now he and the deliveryman, as they carried in the rest of the items.

When they were done with the unloading, and when Chibundu had paid the man and sent him off, the two of us sat alone in the parlor. Chibundu reached into the pocket of his trousers, took out an envelope, and handed it to me.

“This came in our post office box. It's for you.”

On the envelope were two addresses, one of them ours, the other a return address. No name appeared above the return address, and I did not take the time to read what exactly the address was. I knew that something about the writing looked familiar, and that was enough for me to get my hopes up. How many times had I sat across from Ndidi at her table, watching her write notes on her students' essays? I should have known that the letter was not from her, but for that moment my mind somehow made itself up that it was indeed from her. My heart began to race, and I tore into the envelope like a wildcat clawing hungrily into a package of hard-earned meat, baring its teeth, getting ready to devour. Only when I had ripped apart the envelope and was at the point of folding open the card inside did my mind begin to place the handwriting. Inside the card, I read a confirmation, a brief message:

We heard the wonderful news. Congratulations to you and Chibundu on the pregnancy! We are so happy for you and looking very much forward to soon meeting your precious bundle of joy!

At the bottom of the note, the grammar school teacher and his wife signed their names, bold curvy letters that screamed of excitement, letters that looked like the sound of “Joy to the World” or “Jingle Bells.”

Until that day, I had never been so disappointed to see a pair of names on a greeting card. Beyond the disappointment, I felt anger at Ndidi, a full and overwhelming kind of anger like wasted energy, and I was out of breath with it, because what was I, chicken feed? What was I, the kind of thing you threw out after you were done using it? Toilet paper, an old toothbrush, shards of broken glass? Suddenly I was remembering how discarded the whole situation with Amina had left me feeling. It felt like the cruelest kind of déjà vu. Like the beginnings of a condemnation to a lifetime of the same kind of role.

That night, after Chibundu had fallen asleep, I took out my chest from the bottom drawer of the bedside table. I unfolded a sheet of paper and wrote to Ndidi:

I banish all thoughts of you. I banish you. I banish you. I banish you.

I folded the paper back into fourths and eighths, and put it safely into the back of the bedside drawer.

I
HAD CUT UP
the peppers, the tomatoes, and the onions, and had finished grinding them for the stew, when the pain began. It had started the night before, that first pang disappearing quickly, and each time it returned, it was hardly a pain at all. But there it was again, excruciating, and I knocked over the mixture of peppers and onions and tomatoes, pinkish-red sauce scattering across the kitchen floor.

I calmed myself. Surely I had some time. No need to panic.

Chibundu was at work. I went to the phone, dialed his work number.

His voice came over the line. “Hello?”

“Chibundu,” I said, “I think the baby's coming.
Obiawana.
She's coming. You have to come.”

For a moment I heard several voices on the line. I could not make out what was being said, and whether it was to me.

“Chibundu! Are you there? Are you hearing me? I said the baby is coming!”

“Yes, yes!” he shouted excitedly. “I hear you.
Obiawana.
Baby's coming. I was just letting my coworkers know. How much time do we have? I'm on my way right now. I can be there before you know it.”

“Maybe I should catch a taxi and you can meet me at the hospital,” I said, thinking aloud.

“No, no,” he said. “
Mba.
I'm coming right now. I'll be there right away. I'll catch a taxi and head there right now and we can take that same taxi together to the hospital.” The line went dead.

I replaced the receiver and stood there, not sure what to do with myself as I waited for him. It occurred to me to go grab my hospital bag, to have it waiting at the front door for the moment Chibundu arrived. I took some steps in the direction of the bedroom, but then the pain came again.

I squatted, grabbing on to the table, bracing myself that way and waiting for the pain to subside. But the pain only grew worse.

I stayed there on the kitchen floor for what felt like hours, screaming, clenching and unclenching my fists, struggling to catch my breath.

I crawled toward the phone, reached for it, not sure who exactly I'd be calling and why, because surely Chibundu was already on his way. Even if I phoned his office again, he would not be there to take the call.

Soon, it seemed the world was closing up around me. Everything turned to black.

I looked up to see Chibundu entering the kitchen, his footsteps loud and drum-like on the tile floor. Just that one brief moment of lucidity and then things returned to black. Eventually I opened my eyes once more to find that I was lying on a hospital bed. More screaming, more clenching and unclenching of my fists. Pushing and more pushing, and feeling myself empty out, like the way a river empties into the sea.

T
HE FESTIVE ATMOSPHERE
lasted the whole first week and into the second: the gathering of the neighbors, the gulping down of bottles of soft drinks—crates of them—and of gourds and jerry cans of palm wine. There was all the usual gift-giving, the well-wishing from family and friends. Mama and Chibundu's mother had come and had been waiting for me at the flat when I arrived from the hospital, all of them eager to welcome baby Chidinma home.

The first sign of trouble was when Chibundu refused to purchase a goat. Without the goat there would be no butchering, no digging of the hole, no letting of its blood into the earth. The roasting of the goat would have been the hallmark of the celebration, seasoning it with peppers and onions, and serving it for all to enjoy.

But Chibundu refused. Instead, he walked around moping, barely greeting the visitors.

Mama could not help but notice. She had taken the child and had been carrying her around the flat when she crossed paths with Chibundu. She returned to me immediately. “Whatever is the matter between you two,” she said in a low voice, “you must find a way to work it out. Do you hear me?”

I was in Chidinma's bedroom—the nursery—sitting on a recliner. I took the baby from her. “I hear you,” I said. “The only thing is that I actually don't know what the matter is.”

“What do you mean you don't know?”

“I mean I don't know,” I replied.

I began to rock the baby in my arms.

“He is your husband,” she said. “Something is wrong, and you are telling me you don't know what it is?”

I examined my baby, no longer listening to Mama's questioning. Here was my child, my flesh and my blood. Tiny hands and feet. Nails as thin as paper. Eyes hardly more than slits. Her skin was smooth and soft, and her scent was sweet and pure, a little like the aroma of fresh coconut oil.

My breasts were swollen, and there was a rush of pain in them as her mouth latched on to me. But I also felt a mixture of gratitude and delight. I held her tight against my body. Despite the pain, she was cause for celebration. A beautiful baby girl, healthy, no harelip, no curse. Here she was, a little human being whom I would love the way I saw fit—love overflowing, love unrestricted. Chigoziem was the name that Chibundu had picked out in the event that she had been a boy. Chigoziem, because he would have been our little blessing, and through that name we would have been, in turn, asking God to bless him.

But she had wound up a girl, which was just as well to me. Chidinma was the name I chose for her. Chibundu had allowed me to choose the girl name, his only stipulation being that it somehow reflect his own. Chidinma was the name I decided on, for “God is good,” because she was no curse of a child, no harelip. Through her, this perfect representation of me and of Chibundu, God had indeed been good.

I
HAD NO SHORTAGE
of help. Chibundu's mother stayed a week and did her best to help out around the house. Mama outdid her and stayed nearly two months, longer than I would ever have asked of her. She might have stayed even longer had I not encouraged her to go. Her shop was, after all, waiting. Two months was too long to keep it shut. Finally she conceded.

But I had been more than grateful for her stay, especially in those early days when I could not get Chidinma to latch on, and when there was all that pain.

Those days, she had brought a stool for me. “Here. Put your leg on this, it will bring the baby closer to your breast and make it easier for both of you.”

It worked.

When the lumps came, Mama said, “It's nothing to worry about. Just a little lumping from congealed milk. A plugged duct. It will go away in a couple of days.”

She saw to it that I fed Chidinma more consistently—at least every two hours—so that the duct would drain. She reminded me to switch positions so that there was not too much pressure on any one side.

She brought me a hot washcloth every few hours, especially at night, told me to lay it on my chest, as the heat from it would help to dissolve the clog. She saw to it that I drank lots of fluids, water especially. She made sure that I slept on my back or side so that I did not put extra weight on my breasts. Sometimes at night, those nights when I fell asleep in the nursery, in the double bed there that I sometimes shared with Mama, I woke up to her hovering over me, saying, “Ijeoma, you're lying too far into your front again. Turn around so that you're completely on your back.”

I
T WAS ALL
Chidinma those days after Mama packed her bags and left. In the afternoon when, before giving birth to her, I'd usually be sitting in church, I instead tied Chidinma to my back with a wrapper and carried her on long walks, back and forth, with no real destination in mind.

Once, I waited until the evening to see if Chibundu wanted to come along. He was sitting in the parlor chewing on a garden egg. The question had hardly left my mouth when he looked sharply at me, his face twisted in a scowl. He responded that his work had rendered him useless for everyday life, that it wore him out so much that, he was sorry to say, he'd probably never have the energy to come along. Not in the evenings after he returned from work, and not in general, because didn't I see? Didn't I see that even on the weekends they were now sometimes calling him in? And those weekends when they did not, he preferred to rest, he said.

I had in fact noticed that he was starting to go in to work on some Saturdays.

I nodded, not saying a word, but it was clear that something had gotten into him. The way he was snapping more often than ever. As if all the world, and especially me and Chidinma, had become like thorns on his skin.

W
E BECAME AS
inseparable as moisture and air, Chi­dinma and I. Sometimes she hung in my arms, mindlessly suspended like fog. And sometimes she fell, but I was there to lift her back up. The months flew by. One month gone, and then the next, and still the next.

December arrived, and Mama was back again. All over Port Harcourt, the usual end-of-year festivities had begun. Masquerades—colorful ojuju dancers dancing to the beat of their metal ogene bells. Ojuju dancers dancing to the beat of clay udu drums, soft bass sounds forming the music that guided their steps. Ojujus in glittering gowns, shaking their ichaka gourds, causing the bead coverings to rattle. Frightening ojujus dressed in grass and raffia skirts dancing to the beat of some ekwe and igba drums. Ojujus with lion heads and covered in lion hides.

It was the season when the ojujus paraded on the roads, dancing and collecting money and sweets. The time of year when the children ran toward the ojujus, then ran away from them with fright, back and forth, back and forth, because between their bouts of fear was a heightened state of enjoyment. The ojuju dancers blocked the roadways so that even automobile drivers had to stop their cars and pay their passage in order to be allowed to go.

Neither Chibundu nor I had been particularly interested in celebrating Christmas, and Chidinma was too little yet to care. But by the end of her first day back, Mama was concocting ways to celebrate.

“We've not had a real Christmas since the year before the war came. I just imagined that maybe, with Chidinma here, we could get back to the way things used to be. How about a trip to Kingsway?”

“I don't know if it's a good idea,” I said to Mama. We were in the parlor. Mama was looking at me with such excitement and anticipation. Chidinma was napping in my arms.

“You don't know if it's a good idea?” Mama asked.

She too had been a new mother, but it seemed that she had forgotten how hard it could be to go traipsing around with a small baby, how inconvenient it was to have to nurse outside of home.

Mama sighed, then painted the reminder: “Don't you remember the way Christmas festivities used to be, those days when your father would take us on those trips to Port Harcourt? I remember it like it was yesterday,” she said, “the way we headed straight to Kingsway, and your little face full of excitement as you rode the toy train that ran through the entire shopping center, which dropped off all the children at Father Christmas's little alcove of a hut? Do you remember the gifts you got from Father Christmas?”