Under the Udala Trees (6 page)

The Ejiofors arrived sometime between eleven o'clock and noon on that penultimate day. A bowl of garden eggs and groundnut paste sat on the center table, along with a jerry can of water and some drinking cups, to welcome them. This was as much as Mama could gather for their visit, which was not really a problem, as they would not be staying long.

Mama went out to the front yard to greet them. She embraced Mrs. Ejiofor first. I watched from the parlor window. “
Unu a biana! Nno nu!
Welcome o!” She stepped aside and did the same with Mr. Ejiofor. She had hardly finished exchanging greetings with Chibundu's parents when I watched Chibundu race to the front of the house, across the veranda, and through the front door.

“Ije!” he called out, his nickname for me.

He found me standing by the parlor window.

“Why can't you come stay with me and my mama and papa?” he burst out.

I turned to face him. The aroma of groundnut paste was strong in the parlor. “Mama says it's hard enough for any family to take care of their own child, let alone take care of someone else's child,” I replied. She had said exactly that. The day after she had told me about sending me off, I had come up with a list of my school and church friends whose families I would rather have gone and stayed with, but she had given me this response as a reason why none of my friends' homes was a viable option for me.

“I don't know why both of you can't stay in Ojoto,” Chibundu said.

“I want to stay,” I replied simply.

Mr. and Mrs. Ejiofor entered the parlor along with Mama. On the wall between the parlor's two windows was a silver-trimmed mirror, all damaged and strewn with crack lines but still intact enough for us to see ourselves. Chibundu walked toward it, pulling me along with him.

We stood in front of the mirror together. His parents settled themselves on the sofa, getting ready to eat the garden eggs.

Chibundu said, “Look very closely into the mirror and see us standing together. Look really closely at us so that you never forget that we were friends.”

“Are we not going to remain friends?” I asked.

He was staring at me now, and suddenly I remembered the time when he had loosened the thread from my plaited hair, pulled on the tip of the plait so that the knotted end came undone, so that the thread flowed out in one continuous and wave-like strand. When I had begun to shout at him—
Look what you've done to my hair!
—and when Mrs. Ejiofor had joined in scolding him for it, he put his hands in the air, as if this was some part of his Police game. He held his hands up, all innocent-like, saying he did not understand what the big deal was, that he only did it because he needed some thread for a project he was in the middle of out in the yard—a small toy lorry that he was trying to build out of some discarded pieces of wood.

Whatever became of the lorry I cannot now remember, but what I knew even then was that this Chibundu standing by my side in front of the mirror was certainly not the same one who had caused my hair to be undone. There was something pitiful about him, and I thought that perhaps this was the effect the war was having on him.

I smiled at him instinctively. He smiled awkwardly back, then looked away in the direction of the parlor where his parents were seated.

“You won't forget, will you?” he asked, but he did not wait for me to answer. Instead, he began walking to the center of the parlor near where the sofas were. I followed him. He went straight to the center table. There, he poured himself a cup of water and invited me to drink with him, saying, “Between true friends even water drunk together is sweet.”

Our parents were chatting away, not paying us any mind. I felt more pity for him, the way he stood there, looking expectantly at me. I took the water from him and drank.

Outside, the air was heavy, and if you breathed deeply, you could smell the rainwater in it, as if it were about to pour from the sky. Chibundu and I made our way to the front yard and perched ourselves on a branch of the orange tree just outside the compound gate.

Down below, on the road, a woman was carrying a tray of groundnuts or cashews, and loaves of bread. A man in a bright white shirt went by on a bicycle, riding zigzaggedly and recklessly down the road. Chibundu and I sat together on the branch, just watching.

“He is going to jam her!” Chibundu said.

I pictured all the items on the tray falling, the poor woman struggling to gather her items back together again.

But the bicycle man stopped at the point just before he would have rammed into the woman. He got off his bicycle.

“Wetin be your problem? You dey blind?” the vendor woman shouted. She set her tray on the ground and then, positioning herself directly in front of the man, she stood with her hands on her hips.

It was always serious when people spoke this way in pidgin. Pidgin was the language of amusement and relaxation, but it was also the language of conflict.

We sat watching from our spot in the tree. We were close enough to see and hear, but far enough that we could not readily be seen by passersby.

The bicycle man spoke. “Sorry,” he said, after which he made to move around the vendor woman, but each time he tried, she stepped in front of him, preventing him from passing.

“Biko make I pass,” he said, impatient to be on his way.

“Ehn-ehn!” the vendor woman shouted, shaking her head from side to side. “Which kain sorry be that? You no fit say sorry proper?”

“I don say sorry already,” the bicycle man said, and he tried once more to move around her.

By now people were beginning to gather. The man appeared to take a deep breath, and then he tried a third time, only to be met with the woman's thundering voice, and her body once more blocking his escape.

It was a bit comical the way the wide-hipped, rather large vendor woman was refusing to let the man pass. The man was rail-thin in comparison to her and looked like he could have used some of her fat.

Chibundu brought his hands to his mouth, began to laugh quietly at the silliness of the whole scene, soft chuckles that he made sure to contain with the cupping of his hands.

The bicycle man tried the vendor woman's left side, and then her right, and her left again, but no luck.

I started to laugh too. Little by little, Chibundu and I moved closer to each other on the branch, huddling together, trying to muffle each other's laughter. Soon we were no longer listening to the dispute on the road, and we were no longer laughing. Chibundu was staring at me, just staring at me.

“What?” I asked in a whisper.

He remained silent, but continued to stare.

I looked down at the road. The man and woman had somehow worked it out. They were walking their separate ways. I turned back around to see Chibundu's face close to mine, and soon the tip of his nose was nearly touching mine.

There on the branch, nose to nose with him, I knew I could not go on sitting there. I knew I should jump off the tree, and after I landed, I should put one foot in front of the other. One foot and then the next, and then the next. It was like taking a spoonful of chloroquine when you had malaria. There was hardly another option, so you just did it. The first spoonful and then the next, and then the next. If not, things would only get worse.

But I did nothing.

Some seconds went by. There was an awkwardness to it all. I knew Chibundu felt the awkwardness too. I knew that he bore the brunt of it. As well he should. He was, after all, responsible for it much more than I was.

But for some strange reason, I found myself feeling a need to equalize the awkwardness between us. I found myself feeling a need to relieve him of the burden of it. I felt distressed on his behalf—felt his distress as if it were my own.

And so, after no more than a few seconds, I leaned in and gave him the kiss I knew he sought.

B
USES WERE FEW
and far between, so we found ourselves in the back section of a small passenger lorry instead.

Before the war came, Papa drew plans: he was a drafter, on his way to becoming an architect. During the daytime he worked at his company's offices, but even in the evenings and on weekends, when he was not working in an office, he could be found at his desk at home, tracing the graphite tips of his pencils across fancy white and blue-tinted paper, carefully measuring the placement of vertical and horizontal lines. He used to talk with Mama and me while he worked, about when and where the next bungalow or two-story would be put up, about the size of it and all the rooms that it would have. Sometimes he would tease us, talking about how one day he would design a new house for us, one so big that it would be like a castle. “Can you imagine a castle right in the middle of Ojoto?” he'd ask. Mama would laugh and say that this was not England. Castles did not belong in Ojoto. But me, I'd tell Papa that I wanted one anyway, whether or not it belonged. I had my castle-in-the-village dreams, after all. Could he please design me one that was as wide as the sky and rose all the way up to it, as tall as the tallest of iroko trees? One that was the same color as our house: a bright shade of yellow.

Even when the sky grew dark, he continued to work, his kerosene lantern flickering and making a shadow of itself on the wall. He drew, and there was no indication that he'd ever cease to draw.

But now so many of the buildings in Ojoto had crumbled with each strike of the bombers. Now he himself was gone. Now there was not an iota of a dream of any kind of castle gracing the land of our dear little Ojoto.

Riding in the back of the gwon-gworo to Nnewi, I hardly thought of much other than how I would miss our Ojoto house, if for no other reason than for the memory of Papa in it, the way he used to sit and draw his designs at his desk. The way he used to lounge on the couch reading his newspapers.

In the back section of the lorry, benches stood in rows. In the spaces between the benches, people crowded together, hanging on to the ropes that dangled from the lorry's ceiling.

Mama and I sat on one of the benches at the opening of the lorry's back. We had come upon our seats just in time, which was lucky, Mama said, and even luckier that our position allowed us to look outside as the vehicle drove along. Through the open back, we watched the scene on the road. Biafran soldiers were marching, about a dozen young men in singlets and khaki shorts or trousers, axes and guns slung across their shoulders. They chanted as they marched:

Ojukwu bu eze Biafra nine

Emere ya na Aburi,

Na Aburi!

Enahoro, Yakubu Gowon, ha enweghi ike imeri Biafra!

Biafra win the war!

Armored car, shelling machine,

Fighter and bomber,

Ha enweghi ike imeri Biafra!

Corpses flanked the roads. Decapitated bodies. Bodies with missing limbs. All around was the persistent smell of decaying flesh. Even if I was no stranger to these sights and smells, Papa's case being the foremost in my mind, still I felt a lurching in my stomach. I swallowed, rapid intakes of saliva, in order to settle myself back down again.

The marching soldiers crossed the road, now singing a new song:

Ayi na cho isi Gowon

Ayi na cho isi Gowon

Ayi na cho isi Gowon

Ka egbu o ya,

Ka egbu o ya, we gara ya Ojukwu.

Our lorry continued to wait as they crossed.

“But why are they looking for Gowon's head?” I asked Mama.

“To kill him,” Mama replied plainly.

“Why do they want to kill him?” I asked.

“Didn't you hear the last part of the song?” she replied. “They want to kill him so they can deliver his head to Ojukwu.”

For the rest of the trip, it was more of the same thing: more corpses, more soldiers marching, more chanting, all of the typical sights and sounds of a nation at war.

The Nnewi lorry dropped us off on the main Ojoto–Nnewi road, not far from the big market, at the opening of the small dirt road leading to the neighborhood where the grammar school teacher and his wife lived. We set off on foot from there.

We had almost reached the grammar school teacher's gate when Mama stopped and said, “I'll let you go on from here. It's not a long or difficult distance; it's the first house you get to where this road crosses with the next. It has a red gate. You can't miss it. The grammar school teacher will be there waiting for you.”

All this time she had been carrying her own bag along with mine. In my bag, a change of clothes, an extra pair of slippers, a small container of pomade, another of body cream, some chewing sticks for my teeth, a flask of water, a small blanket.

I looked at her face. There were wrinkles on her forehead. Her face as a whole reminded me of Papa, those moments before the raid took his life.

She handed my bag over to me so that she was carrying just her own bag in one hand. With her free hand she pulled me to her. We stayed that way, in an embrace, so that I felt the movement in her chest when she took a deep inhale. She held me for a moment longer before finally letting go of me.

She was wearing a multicolored adire gown, and on her head was a simple black scarf. Her feet, those areas not protected by her sandals, were covered in dust so that her toenails appeared the color of mud.

She said, “You will be better off this way. A mother always knows best.”

I could have argued even that late, but I acknowledged to myself that there was no sense in arguing anymore. All my arguments before this had gotten me nowhere.