Under the Udala Trees (36 page)

I was too late. By the time I reached her, her eyes had fallen closed. Her skin was still warm, but a coldness was setting in.

A new dream followed, and in it, I saw Chidinma all grown up: a beautiful woman with a rich brown complexion and full, shapely lips, and her eyes very sharp. She sat outside in a yard full of udala trees, holding a child in her arms.

All around were the sounds of helicopter and bomber engines, the thudding sounds of running feet, of things crashing into the earth. War sounds.

From where I stood, I screamed at Chidinma to get up from where she sat, to hurry so that we could run and hide in the bunker. It was nighttime, dark all around except for dull moonlight. “Chidinma, come!” I screamed. Chidinma looked up at me and caught my eyes with her own. Her eyes glowed in the darkness, appearing angry and wild.

Just then the child in her arms began to choke. Chidinma looked down at the child. But she did nothing more than look. I could have done something to help the choking child, but there seemed to be an invisible fence between me and the scene in front of me. I could no more reach in to grab Chidinma and drag her to the bunker than I could help soothe the choking child.

In her arms, the child gasped and gasped, bringing its hands to its neck, its pleading eyes turning up toward Chidinma. Its face appeared to swell. More gasping, more pleading with its eyes. Still, Chidinma only watched. She did not do a thing to help the choking child.

Sometimes a decision comes upon us that way—in a series of dreams, in a series of small epiphanies. Imagine that there is a murmur of a sound, something from somewhere in the distance. It is not quite noticeable, but the minutes go by and the sound gets stronger:
quonk, quonk, quonk
, and finally you look up and see a skein, a flock of geese, a perfect V up above in the sky.

I woke up with a start, frantic, drenched in sweat, gasping for air. It did not seem that I was at home, or that I was on my bed. I stared blankly around, trying to make sense of where I was. It was then that I made the realization: Chidinma and I were both choking under the weight of something larger than us, something heavy and weighty, the weight of tradition and superstition and of all our legends.

The bedroom took shape around me: the floral sheets and the wooden side table and the dresser on which I saw my reflection in the mirror. The dark curtains on the windows. Chibundu by my side.

I sat up in bed, set my feet firmly on the floor. The solution to my problems became clear. Why had it taken this long for me to act? There's a way in which life takes us along for a ride and we begin to think that our destinies are not in fact up to us.

Chidinma's crying now rang out in my mind. But the bedroom door was closed, so if she had truly cried, I could not possibly have heard. Still, her cry rang out.

Chibundu lay sleeping on his side of the bed, his snoring reverberating like a horn. I rose, quickly gathered some things into a bag, being very careful not to wake Chibundu. I tiptoed out of the room, carrying the bag with me. I went straight for Chidinma's room.

In her room, I bundled her against my chest, tying her in place with a wrapper stretched across my shoulder. She had been asleep when I came to her, but now she opened her eyes, and she squirmed a little, giving off her usual baby scent, of talc and fragrance, sweet and soft, a little like incense.

I carried her that way out of the room, into the parlor, and out the parlor door.

Outside, darkness wrapped itself around me like grace. The leaves were thrashing in the breeze, and along the road, by the side of a small shed, a woman was pouring soapy water out of a bucket. A man was sweeping the front stoop of his own shed.

At the taxi stand, I stood while the oga in a blue-and-black agbada and sokoto directed me to a cab. I walked, all the while rocking Chidinma in my arms.

Sitting in the taxi as it drove off, I thought once more about the way that life so often takes us the long way around. But perhaps it didn't matter, long or short, as long as we eventually found our way to where we needed to be.

The taxi dropped me a short distance from Mama's gate. Up the hill a light was shining like a bonfire.

I walked, not at all sure what I'd say when I reached Mama's gate, or when I was inside the gate, or when I knocked on the door and Mama opened it for me. Maybe something about wanting to be alone, like her. Wanting to be rid of all attachments to people, save for the ones I chose for myself.

I passed a small patch of land, sprinkled here and there with green moss. I passed a tall iroko tree, and a chicken with red patches on its head, walking circles around the iroko tree.

Just before I reached Mama's gate, I stopped. On the side of the road where I stood was a tree stump. I took a seat on it. There, I prayed silently, asking God to forgive me for abandoning my marriage. I prayed for what might have amounted to seconds, or minutes, or perhaps even hours.

I stood up and, feeling ambitious and a little brave, brushed off my wrapper, ridding it of all the dust it had gathered on the walk. I brushed it fervently, as if to start my life anew.

Aba, Abia State

January 13, 2014

I
N A LIFE STORY
full of dreams, there are even more dreams.

From time to time Amina still comes to me at night. Three particular dreams. Each one takes its turn, and each turn, like a habit, recurs.

In the first, I have found my way back to Oraifite, to Amina's and my old secondary school there. The visit takes place in the evening. I get off the bus and make my way to the river. The sun is setting, causing the water to glisten. I find that spot where we once sat, and I grab a handful of sand and watch the grains trickle out from between my fingers, just as Amina had done that time long ago.

This is the first.

In the second dream, I have trekked all the way down to the grammar school teacher's house. The place has long been abandoned, but I approach anyway, make my way across its front yard, across the weeds that are creeping up, covering the path leading from the gate to the entrance of the house. Weeds on concrete, drowning the cement.

I enter and pass quickly through the house, go by way of the kitchen into the backyard. In the near distance, I see the old hovel, and a short distance from the hovel, the tap, the silver one that once glistened in the sun. Rust has built up all along the length of it. Grasshoppers skitter freely around.

I approach the tap, advance a few steps toward it, and suddenly there is Amina, just as she used to be, fetching a bucket of water.

I run to her, wrap my arms around her though she is still holding the bucket, and I ask, desperately, “Do you remember?
Do you remember?
This is where we walked. This is where we worked. This is where we grew. This is where we laughed. This is where we made love.
This is where I learned love.
”

Hardly have I finished speaking the words, and she vanishes, the way that people sometimes do, even from our minds.

Gowon had said in his speech:
The tragic chapter of violence is just ended. We are at the dawn of national reconciliation. Once again, we have an opportunity to build a new nation.

Forget that Gowon was a Northerner. Forget that his name is synonymous with the war and its atrocities.

But remember the war and its atrocities, and remember the speech, and remember that aspect of national reconciliation, and of the building of a new nation.

Forgive Gowon. Forgive Ojukwu. And forgive the war.

The third dream is as follows, and it is this one that, by far, recurs the most:

I am up north to visit Amina. Up there the sand is gray and fine, not reddish and heavy like the sand down south. The plains are grassy and stretch for miles on end, and on them cattle graze, their tails swinging in the sun, under the watch of Hausa and Fulani herdsmen.

In addition to the herdsmen are Hausa and Fulani vendors, dressed in traditional caftans and headscarves and shawls, carrying trays of bananas, of bread, and of nuts on their heads. There are Igbo and Yoruba vendors too: women in lace blouses or bubas, matching wrappers on the bottom; men in agbadas. And still others: men and women garbed in European and American clothes: dress shirts and T-shirts, trousers and skirts and shorts.

Amina meets me at the bus stop. Though her face and her long braids are masked by the veil, and though her body appears shapeless in the long flowing gown she wears, I recognize her all the same. She is young, shamefaced, guilt-ridden, and there is fear trailing after her, tacked onto the soles of her feet.

I attempt to appease her, to tell her that those things we did were not so bad, if bad at all. I attempt to say that soon there'll be no more fears of stoning, that soon all those stories of villagers sending lovers to drown in the rivers will be ancient, almost forgotten, like old light, barely visible in the sky. The words have just made their way out of my lips when a lorry passes by, a long, bulbous one, its engine racketing and rattling so loud that it drowns out my voice. And not just the buzzing and the bustling of the lorry, not just the clamor and the clangor, but also the fumes and the smog, black clouds rising. And we are breathing in the fumes, coughing and choking on all the fumes. And then another lorry. And another. And another. More fumes. More coughing. More choking. My words get lost in all of that ruckus, my sweet, consoling words becoming like sugar in the rain, like ghosts, like the sheerest of cobwebs: melted, vanishing, imperceptibly thin. Useless words, lost words, words as good as if they were never spoken at all.

Several years ago—2008—reports had it that a bunch of God-preaching hooligans stoned and beat several members of a gay and lesbian–affirming church in Lagos, bashed their faces, caused their flesh to become as swollen as purple-blue balloons.

Mama put down the newspaper from which she was reading about it and exclaimed, “
Tufiakwa!
” God forbid! “Even among Christians, it can't be the same God that we worship!”

Chidinma has been based in Lagos for the past three years.

Last year, a prefect found two female students making love to each other at the university in Lagos where Chidinma teaches. It happened in one of the student hostels, so Chidinma was not there to see it, or else she might have stepped in, might even have risked her own life as she did. She is, after all, of that particular new generation of Nigerians with a stronger bent toward love than fear. The fact that she herself is not of my orientation does not make her look upon gays and lesbians with the kind of fear that leads to hate. Besides, she knows my story too well to be insensitive to the cause.

In any case, the two female students' schoolmates, some of whom were Chidinma's own students, decided to take matters into their own hands. They stripped the lovers of their clothes and beat them all over until they were black and blue. They shouted “666” in their faces, and “God punish you!” Those who did not participate in the beating stood around watching and recording the incident with their mobile phones. No one made any move to help the women. They only stood and watched.

When she heard of it, Mama said, “God forbid! What has this world turned into?”

After a while, she joked, “You know, it really is a shame that our president, the really good-looking man that he is—between that handsome smile and his fashionable fedora hats—it's too bad he doesn't do anything to correct the situation. Such a waste of good looks. A handsome face has a way of persuading the masses. The least he can do is try and use his good looks for a noble cause.”

Later, I asked Chidinma whether she had mentioned the incident to her father. She had. Chibundu's response? “Well, that's life. These things happen.”

Chibundu still lives in Port Harcourt, but every once in a while he comes to Aba. Over thirty years of distance has led to a polite sort of estrangement between the two of us. Perhaps he still holds a grudge about the way our marriage turned out; perhaps he does not.

For some years after I left, he continued to implore me to go back to him. He arranged several meetings in the span of those years—with Mama and his parents in addition to the two of us—to try and see what could be done to salvage the marriage, but all of the meetings were to no avail. Through all of it I was indebted to him, because he was at least considerate enough to keep from revealing to his parents any information about me and Ndidi. After all these years, it still does not seem that he has revealed a thing to them or anyone else. If there is one way to describe him these days, it is that he generally appears resigned.

Growing up, Chidinma used to ask why her papa and I did not live together.

“Some papas and mamas love each other but not in the marrying or living together kind of way,” I often used to say. She would nod, and after some time she'd ask, “But why?”

I'd simply repeat, “Because some papas and mamas love each other but not in the marrying or living together kind of way.”

Though they've certainly had their rough patches, she has always loved her father; I know she feels a latent sympathy for him on my behalf. For several years now, she has expressed to me her concern that he is lonely. She wishes that he would remarry, because that might make him seem less lonely to her.

There was some talk, maybe seven or eight years ago, about Chibundu's plans to marry a young Yoruba woman by the name of Ayodele. The woman was only a few years older than Chidinma, and she, according to Chidinma, was the kind who loved to throw large, elaborate parties. Perhaps Ayodele and Chibundu did not see eye to eye on those parties, or maybe there was some other problem, but in the end there was no wedding.

Sometimes I feel that Chibundu is too busy pitying himself to fully invest in a new relationship. But of course I could be wrong.