Under the Udala Trees (5 page)

Beyond their skin there was something else that made me think: their chests. They actually had chests. Mine, on the other hand, was hardly a chest at all, more like two tiny balls of pounded yam, flattened, each about the size of a tablespoon, not even enough to fill a palm.

Maybe it was a side effect of envy, or maybe it was a side effect of the awe I felt for them. Or maybe it was something else. Whatever the case, I felt suddenly shy and inadequate, and it would have required too much courage on my part to call out to them and let them know that the relief food had not yet come. I watched as they passed by in the direction of the relief center, only to watch again as they turned back around when they realized no one was there. Inside the house, Mama was likely still sitting in the parlor, on the mattress or on the sofa, praying fervently with her Bible, the way she had begun to do these days.

The streets were silent. Across from our gate, a pair of dogs lay sleepily on the dusty earth, dirty and sickly, corpses in the making. A light drizzle was falling, but the sun through the clouds was strong. Pink roses hung pitifully from their bushes, as if weakened or weighed down by the daylight. Before the war came, the land, where there were plants, was covered with lush green grass. On the grass grew weeds, and among the weeds, and from the bushes, grew flowers. The wind carried the dandelion clocks, and the hibiscus flowers painted the bushes red, and it was barely remarkable a thing, that deep redness of theirs. But now almost all the plants had withered, and the wind carried in it only traces of destruction. The hibiscus flowers all appeared to have lost their color.

I had gone back into our yard when I heard Mama calling my name.

By now she had moved from inside the house to a spot in the far corner of the veranda where the shrubs formed gaunt shadows on the outer walls of the house.

I joined her, taking a seat beside her on the orange and yellow bamboo mat where she sat.

“Did the relief lorry come today?” she asked.

I shook my head no.

She sighed. There was that now-familiar tired look on her face. She turned her gaze away from me.

After some time she spoke again. “There's no way we can remain here. If it's not enough that there is no more food, I'm also still having nightmares of your papa.”

Smaller episodes now, she explained, not enough to wake me anymore, but still, they were there. To make matters worse, every once in a while, she said, she caught a whiff of him—of his death, something like the scent of blood. All the sights were a constant reminder that he was gone, she explained: the way gummy, oozing lesions sheathed the trees, cracks and cankers all over the bark. Dry brittle branches snapping at every turn of the wind. The way the petals of the hibiscus flowers had begun to dry out too. She imagined them choking—the trees and the flowers. She imagined them growing lifeless, no air, no breath, just like Papa.

The voices and all the sounds were also a reminder of his death. Not just the screaming and the war sounds, but now the floors of the house creaked, and each creak was something like the sound of his footsteps.

How could floors made of cement creak? I wondered, but I did not ask.

In the daytime she saw shadows, and each one was in the form of Papa. Sometimes she saw Papa's face jutting out of the walls, begging her to come with him.

“If we stay here any longer I will lose my mind!” Mama exclaimed.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who had an idea of the way the world should be: castles in the village, a papa and a mama who were alive and happy, and flowers and green grass that grew tall and bright.

Only, the girl's world was small, and not very representative of the real world, but she could not possibly have known this at the time. She was too small to know.

But she was older now, and she had begun to see the ways in which the world she had imagined was never going to be the world she would have. Of late, it seemed it was always one upheaval after another, one change and then the next. It was all overwhelming to her.

But she was old enough to know that not all change was bad. She was old enough, in fact, to have some awareness of the general tendency of things in life to change: night became day, the rainy season turned into the dry, today became tomorrow, and this year became the next.

She thought of church, and she thought that change was indeed a thing sanctioned by God, whether good change or bad change. Perhaps it was part of His aesthetic, part of His vision for the world. Perhaps everything was a reflection of that vision of change. Perhaps the nature of life was change. Wasn't creation the ultimate proof of this? The changing of something without form into something with form. Turning void into full. The division of light from darkness, of waters from waters, of sky from land. Maybe even death was a reflection of God's vision of change, the same way that birth was. Maybe it was the point of life, and of the Bible, that things had to change. Was this not what the pastor had said was the reason why the New Testament was created after the Old?

I was that girl, and even at eleven I reasoned it that way. Because a new change was looming, and I was finding myself forced to acknowledge that the limit of my imagination was by no means the limit of the world. I'd never known anywhere else but Ojoto. It was a scary thought to have to leave the only place I'd ever known. But if Mama was unhappy, then I wanted her to be happy. If leaving was what it would take her to feel better again, then leaving was what we should do. Maybe wherever it was that change took us would do us both some good.

When I was smaller and sulking for one reason or another, or having a tantrum, Mama used to make me dance with her, and she would say jokingly, “Dance your sadness away.” Or if she was too angry with me to be jokeful, and if it happened to be mealtime, she would make me wait to eat, saying, “We must learn to fast our sadnesses away.” Or if it was bedtime, she would pull me to her and begin praying, and afterward she would say, “It always helps to pray our sadnesses away.”

I was thinking of the ways in which I could dance or fast or pray this sadness away when Mama spoke. In the distance voices were rising and falling, children shouting at one another.

“I've been thinking,” Mama said. “Your grandparents—my parents—have that house in Aba. It's still there. If there's a place for me to go, that should be it.”

There was a dull, faraway look in her eyes, and a quiet laziness to the way she spoke, as if at any moment her words would fade out. But she continued to speak; the words continued to come. She said, “No matter what happens, you must keep in mind that not a day will go by that I will not think of you.”

Until now, I had been taking in her words as best as I could, digesting them without protest just as they came. They were the kinds of words that I had expected would come. But in this very moment my eyes snapped open. I looked at her, startled. “Not a day will go by that you will not think of me?” I asked.

She remained silent, her face very stoic.

She turned away so that she was no longer looking at me. Rather, she looked upward in the direction of the sky. The sun was high and bright, and she said, “I'll need to send you off.”

I felt something sink inside my chest.

She turned so that she was again looking at me. She said, “They say Aba is not as bad as here, but who knows for sure.”

And how could she know for sure? Aba was far enough away, no less than three hours south of Ojoto by automobile, a trip that she had not made since the war began.

“I won't know until I get there,” she said.

She had yet to see for herself the consequences of the war on Aba. If the place was a disaster like Ojoto, she explained, then she might have to find another place to go, and what point was there in taking me with her until she figured it out? What if it turned out that the place was just as badly destroyed as Ojoto? And what if the food situation was just as bad as what we were now experiencing in Ojoto? “I'll have to send you off, at least until I get there and see how things are.”

Her voice cracked as she spoke, and there was a hurriedness to her words, as if she were struggling to get them all out before she ran out of breath.

Already I knew what was causing her to hurry that way. Already I knew what was causing her to seem so out of breath. It was a problem with her words. Because she did
not
in fact
have to
send me off. And yet there were the words, flowing out of her mouth, all of them justification for what was essentially a lie, though an honest kind of lie, an unintentional sort of self-delusion. She could not possibly have believed what she was saying. I could see this in the movement of her mouth. The way one corner of her lips twitched a bit as she spoke. Unconvincing lips. As if even her lips did not believe the words. And her eyes. The way she could not quite hold my gaze.

She had hardly finished speaking when I began to plead with her. Already I had lost Papa. How could I bear to lose her too?

I shook my head. “Mama, please, no. I want to go with you.”

But she was determined to follow through with the lie. “It has to be done,” she said. “It will be for a short while, maybe just a few days, and I have found a place where you can stay in the meantime, a place I know you will be taken care of. Just until I'm able to come fetch you and take care of you myself. I'm thinking of your safety, Ijeoma. It would be terrible for me to take you with me to Aba. If I did, who knows what could befall you there?”

I struggled to hold back tears, but they came out anyway.

“Stop your crying,” she said. “
Ebezina.
”

“But Mama—”

She pulled me close to her, held me tight in an embrace. “It has to be done,” she said. “You will be in Nnewi with a former friend of your father's. The grammar school teacher and his wife. You will help them around their house, and in return they will look after you. Like I said, it will be just for a short while. Believe me, it's the best place that I can think of to send you right now.”

“But Mama, please,” I continued to beg.

Her mood changed. “You're not hearing me,” she said, engaging with me now in a different manner than before: her eyes turned almost feral—biting eyes, like teeth severing flesh, teeth tearing into my insides. My insides could have bled.

She took me by the shoulders and, in a stern voice, she said, “Open your eyes, Ijeoma! Can't you see that all of this will be for your own good? For God's sake, I am doing this for your own good!”

No matter how much she tried to convince me of this, I knew the truth all the same: that she was doing it for
her
own good. At least, that it was more for her own good than it was for mine. That she was doing it because she was overwhelmed: by life, by the war, by the thought of having to try and make it without Papa. And she was overwhelmed even by me. Didn't matter that I myself was overwhelmed. My world had narrowed down to my mother, and now my mother was betraying me.

“What if the food situation in Aba is just as bad as it is here?” she repeated. “Then what will you eat? Are you ready to starve? Even more than you're already starving now? There are no miracles these days. Manna will not fall from the sky. Bombs, yes, enough to pierce our hearts, but manna, no.”

I looked at her with all the pleading my eyes could muster. But even as I begged, I knew there was no way out. Plans had, clearly, already been made. How else would she have been so certain that the grammar school teacher would accept the proposal?

Still I begged. I looked around frantically, as if all potential arguments in my favor were particles in the air, as if I only had to land on the right one in order to be able to convince her why I should go with her. But I was unable to land on the right particle.

She smiled at me, a tired smile. Her voice low and gravelly. “Do you remember the grammar school teacher and his wife?”

I nodded, though it was only a skeleton of a memory, hardly there at all.

“I know for a fact that you will be fine in Nnewi,” she said. “I have gone and seen it for myself.” Nnewi was a much shorter distance from Ojoto, she explained; south like Aba, but only something between ten and twelve kilometers away, which was less than half an hour by automobile and could be walked in well under two hours. Unlike Aba, she had actually made the trip to Nnewi to see it with her own eyes, and to visit with the grammar school teacher and his wife. Only now did I recall that day. A day when she claimed that she had been going to “run errands.” From those “errands,” apparently, she had found out that Nnewi, though close in proximity to Ojoto, was indeed faring better than Ojoto, at least where food supply was concerned.

Not only was my face covered in tears by now, but my nose had also begun to run. Mama reached into the folds at the waist of her wrapper, grabbed a handkerchief from there, and gently dabbed away the moisture on my face. “No more crying,” she said. But she herself was crying now. Soft crying, the kind that hardly had an effect on her breaths. But there were the tears for proof. In that brief moment, she appeared to be battling her own plan. She might have had a change of mind. In that moment, she might have sacrificed her own desires in exchange for mine. I held my breath and hoped. Moments passed, and then, instead of going back on her plan, as I was hoping, she took my hands in hers and prayed:
Dear God in heaven, I am placing my child in Your care. Please guide and protect her even as I cannot. There is power in the blood of Jesus. Amen.

She wiped the tears off her own face with the palms of her hands, and she said, “I promise that the grammar school teacher and his wife will look after you.”

A
NOTHER RAID HAD
come and demolished our church, torn a hole in it and then completely flattened out that holy construction of a place that was responsible for keeping our faith and hope intact. By the morning of the day before we left Ojoto, the church and everything inside it had disintegrated like cubes of sugar in water: none of the original structure was recognizable to the naked eye.