Читать книгу Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, Purple Hibiscus: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Three-Book Collection - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Страница 27

17

Olanna leaned on the veranda railing of Odenigbo’s house in Abba, looking out at the yard. Near the gate, Baby was on her knees playing in the sand while Ugwu watched her. The wind rustled the leaves of the guava tree. Its bark fascinated Olanna, the way it was discoloured and patchy, a light clay alternating with a darker slate, much like the skin of village children with the nlacha skin disease. Many of those children had stopped by to say ‘nno nu, welcome,’ on the day they arrived from Nsukka, and their parents and uncles and aunts had come too, bearing good wishes, itching for gossip about the evacuation. Olanna had felt a fondness for them; their welcome made her feel protected. Her warmth had extended even to Odenigbo’s mother. She wondered now why she did not pull Baby away from the grandmother who had rejected her at birth and why she herself did not move away from Mama’s hug. But there was a haunting, half-finished quality to all that happened that day – cooking in the kitchen with Ugwu, the departure so hasty that she worried the oven was left on, the crowds on the road, the sound of shelling – so she took Mama’s hug in her stride, even hugged her back. Now they had gone back to being civil, Mama often came over to see Baby, through the wooden gate in the mud wall that separated her home from Odenigbo’s. Sometimes Baby went across to visit her and run after the goats that wandered in her courtyard. Olanna was never sure how clean were the pieces of dried fish or smoked meat Baby came back chewing, but she tried not to mind, just as she tried to stifle her resentment; Mama’s affection for Baby had always been half-baked, half-hearted, and it was too late for Olanna to feel anything but resentment.

Baby was laughing at something Ugwu said; her pure high-pitched laughter made Olanna smile. Baby liked it here; life was slower and simpler. Because their stove and toaster and pressure cooker and imported spices were left behind in Nsukka, their meals were simpler too, and Ugwu had more time to play with her.

‘Mummy Ola!’ Baby called. ‘Come and see!’

Olanna waved. ‘Baby, it’s time for your evening bath.’

She watched the outline of the mango trees in the next yard; some of them had fruit drooping down like heavy earrings. The sun was falling. The chickens were clucking and flying up into the kola nut tree, where they would sleep. She could hear some villagers exchanging greetings, in the same loud-voiced way that the women in the sewing group did. She had joined them two weeks ago, in the town hall, sewing singlets and towels for the soldiers. She felt bitter towards them at first, because when she tried to talk about the things she had left behind in Nsukka – her books, her piano, her clothes, her china, her wigs, her Singer sewing machine, the television – they ignored her and started to talk about something else. Now she understood that nobody talked about the things left behind. Instead, they talked about the win-the-war effort. A teacher had donated his bicycle to the soldiers, cobblers were making soldiers’ boots for free, and farmers were giving away yams. Win the war. It was difficult for Olanna to visualize a war happening now, bullets falling on the red dust of Nsukka while the Biafran troops pushed the vandals back. It was often difficult to visualize anything concrete that was not dulled by memories of Arize and Aunty Ifeka and Uncle Mbaezi, that did not feel like life being lived on suspended time.

She kicked off her slippers and walked barefoot across the front yard and over to Baby’s sand hut. ‘Very nice, Baby. Maybe it will still be standing tomorrow, if the goats don’t come in the yard in the morning. Now, time for a bath.’

‘No, Mummy Ola!’

‘I think Ugwu is going to carry you off right now.’ Olanna glanced at Ugwu.

‘No!’

Ugwu picked Baby up and ran off towards the house. Baby’s slipper fell off and they stopped to pick it up, Baby saying ‘No!’ and laughing at the same time. Olanna wondered how Baby would take their leaving the following week for Umuahia, three hours away, where Odenigbo had been deployed to the Manpower Directorate. He had hoped to work at the Research and Production Directorate, but there were too many overqualified people and too few jobs; even she had been told there was no vacancy for her at any of the directorates. She would teach at the primary school, her own win-the-war effort. It did have a certain melody to it: win-the-war, win-the-war, win-the-war. She hoped Professor Achara had found them accommodation close to other university people so that Baby would have the right kind of children to play with.

She sat down on one of the low wooden chairs that slanted so that she had to recline in them in order to rest her back. They were chairs she saw only in the village, made by village carpenters who set up dusty signs by the corners of the dirt roads, often with carpenter misspelt: capinter, capinta, carpentar. You could not sit up on such chairs; they assumed a life of hard-earned rest, of evenings reclining in fresh air after a day of farmwork. Perhaps they assumed, also, a life of ennui.

It was dark and the bats were flying noisily above when Odenigbo came home. He was always out during the day, attending meeting after meeting, all of them on how Abba would contribute to the win-the-war effort, how Abba would play a major role in establishing the state of Biafra; sometimes she saw men returning from the meetings, holding mock guns carved from wood. She watched Odenigbo walk across the veranda, aggressive confidence in his stride. Her man. Sometimes when she looked at him she felt gripped by proud possession.

‘Kedu?’ he asked, bending to kiss her lips. He examined her face carefully, as if he had to do so to make sure she was well. He had been doing that since she returned from Kano. He told her often that the experience had changed her and made her so much more inward. He used massacre when he spoke to his friends, but never with her. It was as if what had happened in Kano was a massacre but what she had seen was an experience.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you a little early?’

‘We finished early because there’s going to be a general meeting in the square tomorrow.’

‘Why?’ Olanna asked.

‘The elders decided it was time. There are all kinds of silly rumours about Abba evacuating soon. Some ignoramuses even say the federal troops have entered Awka!’ Odenigbo laughed and sat down next to Olanna. ‘Will you come?’

‘To the meeting?’ She had not even considered it. ‘I’m not from Abba.’

‘You could be, if you married me. You should be.’

She looked at him. ‘We are fine as we are.’

‘We are at war and my mother would have to decide what will be done with my body if anything happened to me. You should decide that.’

‘Stop it, nothing will happen to you.’

‘Of course nothing will happen to me. I just want you to marry me. We really should marry. It no longer makes sense. It never made sense.’

Olanna watched a wasp flit around the spongy nest lodged in the wall corner. It had made sense to her, the decision not to marry, the need to preserve what they had by wrapping it in a shawl of difference. But the old framework that fit her ideals was gone now that Arize and Aunty Ifeka and Uncle Mbaezi would always be frozen faces in her album. Now that bullets were falling in Nsukka. ‘You have to take wine to my father, then,’ she said.

‘Is that a yes?’

A bat swooped down and Olanna lowered her head. ‘Yes. It is a yes,’ she said.

In the morning, she heard the town crier walking past the house, beating a loud ogene. ‘There will be a meeting of all Abba tomorrow at four p.m. in Amaeze Square!’ Gom-gom-gom. ‘There will be a meeting of all Abba tomorrow at four p.m. in Amaeze Square!’ Gom-gom-gom. ‘Abba has said that every man and every woman must attend!’ Gom-gom-gom. ‘If you do not attend, Abba will fine you!’

‘I wonder how steep the fines are,’ Olanna said, watching Odenigbo dress. He shrugged. He had only the two shirts and pairs of trousers that Ugwu had hurriedly packed, and she smiled, thinking of how she knew what he would wear each morning before he dressed.

They had sat down to have breakfast when her parents’ Land Rover drove into the compound.

‘How fortuitous,’ Odenigbo said. ‘I’ll tell your dad right away. We can have the wedding here next week.’ He was smiling. There was something boyish about him since she’d said yes on the veranda, something naively gleeful that she wished she felt too.

‘You know it’s not done that way,’ she said. ‘You have to go to Umunnachi with your people and do it properly.’

‘Of course I know. I was only joking.’

Olanna walked to the door, wondering why her parents had come. They had visited only a week ago, after all, and she was not quite ready for another monologue from her jittery mother while her father stood by and nodded his agreement: Please come and stay with us in Umunnachi; Kainene should leave Port Harcourt until we know whether this war is coming or going; that Yoruba caretaker we left in Lagos will loot the house; I am telling you, we really should have arranged to bring all the cars back.

The Land Rover parked under the kola nut tree, and her mother climbed out. She was alone. Olanna felt slight relief that her father had not come. It was easier to deal with one at a time.

‘Welcome, Mom, nno,’ Olanna said, hugging her. ‘Is it well?’

Her mother shrugged in the way that was meant to say so-so. She was wearing a red george wrapper and pink blouse and her shoes were flat, a shiny black. ‘It is well.’ Her mother looked around, the same way she had looked around, furtively, the last time before pushing an envelope of money into Olanna’s hand. ‘Where is he?’

‘Odenigbo? He’s inside, eating.’

Her mother led the way to the veranda and leaned against a pillar. She opened her handbag, gestured for Olanna to look inside. It was full of the glitter and twinkle of jewellery, corals and metals and precious stones.

‘Ah! Ah! Mum, what is all that for?’

‘I carry them everywhere I go now. My diamonds are inside my bra.’ Her mother was whispering. ‘Nne, nobody knows what is going on. We are hearing that Umunnachi is about to fall and that the federals are very close by.’

‘The vandals are not close by. Our troops are driving them back around Nsukka.’

‘But how long is it taking to drive them back?’

Olanna disliked the petulant pout on her mother’s face, the way her mother lowered her voice as if doing so would exclude Odenigbo. She would not tell her mother that they had decided to get married. Not yet.

‘Anyway,’ her mother said, ‘your father and I have finalized our plans. We have paid somebody who will take us to Cameroon and get us on a flight from there to London. We will use our Nigerian passports; the Cameroonians will not give us trouble. It was not easy but it is done. We paid for four places.’ Her mother patted her headgear, as if to ensure that it was still there. ‘Your father has gone to Port Harcourt to tell Kainene.’

Olanna felt pity at the plea in her mother’s eyes. Her mother knew she would not run away to England with them, and that Kainene would not either. But it was so like her to try, to make this doomed, grasping, well-meaning effort.

‘You know I won’t go,’ she said gently, wanting to reach out and touch her mother’s perfect skin. ‘But you and Dad should go, if it will make you feel safer. I’ll stay with Odenigbo and Baby. We’ll be fine. We are going to Umuahia in a few weeks for Odenigbo to start work at the directorate.’ Olanna paused. She wanted to say that they would have their wedding in Umuahia but instead she said, ‘As soon as Nsukka is recovered, we’ll go back.’

‘But what if Nsukka is not recovered? What if this war drags on and on?’

‘It won’t.’

‘How can I leave my children and run to safety?’

But Olanna knew she could and she would. ‘We’ll be fine, Mum.’

Her mother wiped her eyes with her palm, although there were no tears, before she brought out an airmail envelope from her handbag. ‘It’s a letter from Mohammed. Somebody brought it to Umunnachi. Apparently he heard Nsukka was evacuated and he thought you had come to Umunnachi. Sorry; I had to open it, to make sure there was nothing dangerous in it.’

‘Nothing dangerous?’ Olanna asked. ‘Gini? What are you talking about, Mum?’

‘Who knows? Is he not the enemy now?’

Olanna shook her head. She was pleased her mother would be going abroad and she would not have to deal with her until this war was over. She wanted to wait until her mother left before she read the letter, so that her mother would not search her face for an expression, but she could not help pulling out the single sheet of paper right away. Mohammed’s handwriting was like him – patrician and long, with elegant flourishes. He wanted to know if she was well. He gave her phone numbers to call if she needed help. He thought the war was senseless and hoped it would end soon. He loved her.

‘Thank God you didn’t marry him,’ her mother said, watching her fold the letter. ‘Can you imagine what a situation you would have been in now? O di egwu!’

Olanna said nothing. Her mother left soon afterwards; she did not want to come inside and see Odenigbo. ‘You can still change your mind, nne, the four places are paid for,’ she said, climbing into the car, holding tightly to her jewellery-filled bag. Olanna waved until the Land Rover drove past the compound gates.

It surprised her, how many men and women were in Abba, gathered at the square for the meeting, crowded around the ancient udala tree. Odenigbo had told her how, as children, he and the others, sent to sweep the village square in the mornings, would instead spend most of their time fighting over the fallen udala fruit. They could not climb the tree or pluck the fruit because it was taboo; udala belonged to the spirits. She looked up at the tree as the elders addressed the crowd and imagined Odenigbo here as a boy, looking up as she was doing, hoping to see the shadowy outline of a spirit. Had he been energetic like Baby? Probably, perhaps more so than Baby

‘Abba, kwenu!’ the dibia Nwafor Agbada said, the man whose medicine was said to be the strongest in these parts.

‘Yaa!’ everyone said.

‘Abba, kwezuenu!’

‘Yaa!’

‘Abba has never been defeated by anyone. I said that Abba has never been defeated.’ His voice was strong. He had only a few cotton-ball tufts of hair on his head, and his staff shook as he plunged it into the ground. ‘We do not look for quarrels, but when your quarrel finds us, we will crush you. We fought Ukwulu and Ukpo and finished them. My father never told me about a war where we were defeated, and his father never told him either. We will never run from our homeland. Our fathers forbid it. We will never run from our own land!’

The crowd cheered. So did Olanna. She remembered the pro-Independence rallies at university; mass movements always made her feel empowered, the thought that for a thin slice of time all these people were united by a single possibility.

She told Odenigbo about Mohammed’s letter as they walked back from the village square after the meeting. ‘He must be so upset about all of this. I can’t imagine how he must be feeling.’

‘How can you say that?’ Odenigbo said.

She slowed her pace and turned to him, startled. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘What’s the matter is that you are saying that a bloody Muslim Hausa man is upset! He is complicit, absolutely complicit, in everything that happened to our people, so how can you say he is upset?’

‘Are you joking?’

‘Am I joking? How can you sound this way after seeing what they did in Kano? Can you imagine what must have happened to Arize? They raped pregnant women before they cut them up!’

Olanna recoiled. She tripped on a stone in her path. She could not believe he had brought Arize up like that, cheapened Arize’s memory in order to make a point in a spurious argument. Anger froze her insides. She started to walk fast, past Odenigbo, and when she got home, she lay down in the guest room and was not surprised when the Dark Swoop descended. She struggled to pull it off, to breathe, and finally lay in bed exhausted. She didn’t speak to Odenigbo the next day. Or the next. And, when her mother’s cousin, Uncle Osita, came from Umunnachi to tell her that she was being summoned to a meeting at her grandfather’s compound, she did not tell Odenigbo about it. She simply asked Ugwu to get Baby ready and, after Odenigbo left for a meeting, she drove off with them in his car.

She thought of the way Odenigbo had said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ with an edge of impatience, as if he felt entitled to her forgiveness. He must think that if she could be forgiving of what happened around Baby’s birth, she could be forgiving of anything. She resented that. Maybe it was why she didn’t tell him she was going to Umunnachi. Or maybe it was because she knew why she was being summoned to Umunnachi and did not want to talk about it with Odenigbo.

She drove over the bumpy dirt roads lined by tall grasses and thought how interesting it was, that villagers could tell you something like Umunnachi summons you, as though Umunnachi were a person rather than a town. It was raining. The roads were marshy. She glanced at the looming three storeys of her parents’ country home as she drove past it; they would be in Cameroon by now, or perhaps already in London or in Paris, reading the newspapers to learn what was happening back home. She parked in front of her grandfather’s house, near the thatch fence. Her tyres skidded a little in the clumpy soil. After Ugwu and Baby had come out of the car, she sat still for a while, watching the raindrops slide down the windscreen. Her chest felt tight and she needed some time to breathe slowly to free it, to free herself so she could answer the questions the elders would present to her at the meeting. They would be gentle, formal, everyone gathered in the musty living room: her elderly uncles and granduncles, their wives, some cousins, and perhaps a baby tied on someone’s back.

She would speak in a clear voice and look down at the white chalk lines all over the floor, some faded from years, some simple, straight lines, others elaborate curves, still others plain initials. As a child, she had watched her grandfather present the piece of nzu to his guests, and she would follow every movement of the men as they drew on the floor and the women as they smeared it on their faces and, sometimes, even nibbled it. Once, when her grandfather stepped out, Olanna had chewed the piece of chalk too and still remembered the dulling potash taste.

Her grandfather, Nweke Udene, would have led this meeting if he were alive. But Nwafor Isaiah would lead; he was now the oldest member of their umunna. He would say, ‘Others have come back and we have kept our eyes on the road for our son Mbaezi and our wife Ifeka and our daughter Arize as well as our in-law from Ogidi. We have waited and waited and we have not seen them. Many months have passed and our eyes ache from being focused on the road. We have asked you to come today and tell us what you know. Umunnachi is asking about all her children who did not return from the North. You were there, our daughter. What you tell us, we will tell Umunnachi.’

It was mostly what happened. The only thing Olanna had not expected was the raised voice of Aunty Ifeka’s sister, Mama Dozie. A fierce woman, she was said to have beat up Papa Dozie once, after he left their sick child and went off to visit his mistress. Mama Dozie herself had been away harvesting cocoyams in the agu. The child nearly died. Mama Dozie, it was said, had threatened to cut off Papa Dozie’s penis first, before strangling him, if the child were to die.

‘Do not lie, Olanna Ozobia, i sikwana asi!’ Mama Dozie shouted. ‘May chickenpox afflict you if you lie. Who told you it was my sister’s body that you saw? Who told you? Do not lie here. Cholera will strike you dead.’

Her son Dozie led her away. He had grown so tall, Dozie, since the last time Olanna saw him a couple of years ago. He was holding his mother tightly and she was trying to push him aside, as if to be allowed to pummel Olanna, and Olanna wished she could let her. She wanted Mama Dozie to hit her and slap her if it would make Mama Dozie feel better, if it would turn everything she had just told the members of her extended family gathered in this room into a lie. She wished that Odinchezo and Ekene would shout at her too, and question her for being alive, instead of dead like their sister and parents and brother-in-law. She wished that they would not sit there, quiet, looking down as men in mourning often did and later tell her they were happy she did not see Arize’s body; everyone knew what those monsters did to pregnant women.

Odinchezo broke off a large leaf from the ede plant and gave it to her to use as a makeshift umbrella. But Olanna didn’t place it above her head as she hurried to her car. She took her time unlocking the door and let the rain run over her plaited hair and past her eyes and down her cheeks. It struck her how quickly the meeting had unfolded, how little time it took to confirm four of her family dead. She had given those left behind a right to mourn and wear black and receive visitors who would come in, saying ‘Ndo nu.’ She had given them a right to move on after the mourning and count Arize and her husband and parents as gone forever. The heavy weight of four muted funerals weighed on her head, funerals based not on physical bodies but on her words. And she wondered if she was mistaken, if she had perhaps imagined the bodies lying in the dust, so many bodies in the yard that recalling them made salt rush to her mouth. When she finally got the car open and Ugwu and Baby had dashed in, she sat motionless for a while, aware that Ugwu was watching her with concern and that Baby was almost falling asleep.

‘Do you want me to get you water to drink?’ Ugwu asked.

Olanna shook her head. Of course he knew she didn’t want water. He wanted to get her out of her trance so she would start the car and drive them back to Abba.