Under the Udala Trees

by Chinelo Okparanta

  It was outside on the concrete steps of the church that I liked to sit after service and watch as Chibundu Ejiofor and the other boys played their silly games, like Police: an officer making an arrest. And Chibundu, with his mischievous childhood eyes, his quick wit, would always declare himself the policeman. Then, “You’re under arrest,” he would say eagerly, holding his hand to another boy’s chest, his fingers shaped to resemble a gun.

  Sometimes a handful of the girls came out and watched the boys with me. But mostly they preferred to remain inside with their parents so as not to risk having the boys dirty their fine Sunday clothes.

  It was in that church, at the tail end of the harmattan, that I prayed my war prayer, because it was there and then, just before the morning service, that Chibundu had joked that soon bomber planes would be everywhere. This was shortly before the war started, and before the bombers began coming into Ojoto. Chibundu made a buzzing sound from his mouth, like an aeroplane engine, and I laughed because of the silly way that his face puffed out, like a blowfish. But it was no laughing matter really, and so I gathered myself and told him, “Not so,” that he was wrong, that the planes would never be everywhere. And I was confident in saying this, because those were the days when Papa was going around saying that the war was just a figment of some adults’ imaginations, and that chances were that bomber planes would never see the light of day anywhere in Nigeria, let alone in Ojoto. Those were the days when Papa was certain of this, and so I was certain with him.

  Chibundu’s mother had overheard us, and just as I had finished responding to him, she came up to Chibundu—walked up to him and very offhandedly and unceremoniously slapped him on the side of his head. “Ishi-gi o mebiri e mebi?” she asked. Is your head broken? How dare you open your mouth and breathe life into something so terrible!

  For the remainder of that day, Chibundu walked around moping like a wounded dog. Later, during the morning service, when the pastor asked us to carry on with our silent prayers, I prayed about the war, pleaded with God to make like a magician and cause all the talk of war, even the idea of it, to disappear. So that Chibundu would not be right. So that the bomber planes would never surround us. So that a day would not come when we had to carry a war everywhere we went, like a second skin, not a single moment of relief.

  Dear God, I prayed, please help us.

  All that time had passed, and Chibundu had been right in the end. It didn’t appear that God had been bothered to answer my prayer.

  June 23, 1968. We scrambled our way through the shrubbery and down the carved mud steps that led into the bunker. We breathed raspy, thick breaths. We sat in silence in that all-earth room, a space that was hardly big enough to contain a double bed. It was high enough for me to stand upright, but not high enough for Mama, or any other average-sized adult, let alone a tall adult, to do so, not without her head touching the top.

  We crouched. Sometimes we turned our eyes to the entranceway above, where a plank of wood concealed by palm fronds served as both cover and camouflage.

  In addition to the palm fronds that he had spread all over our compound, Papa had also spread palm fronds on the roof of our house. Maybe the camouflage would work for the house the way it worked for the bunker, I reasoned that day. Maybe the enemy planes would see the palm fronds and would not know to bomb the house.

  In the bunker, I prayed to God again: Dear God, please help Papa. Please make it so that the bomber planes don’t go crashing into him.

  Mama remained crouched by my side, not saying a word, as if at any moment she would rush out and go looking for Papa. I scooted nearer to her, bit my lips and my nails. I held my breath and repeated my prayer over and over again: Dear God, please help Papa. Please make it so that the bomber planes don’t go crashing into him.

  I reasoned the way any other child my age might have: maybe this time God would lift His eyes from whatever else was taking up His attention in heaven—maybe disciplining some misbehaving angels or managing some natural disaster, maybe creating more humans, or taking care of dead human souls, or even doing housework (cloud work? heaven work?). What kinds of things occupied Him up there in heaven and kept Him from answering our prayers? He probably didn’t sleep or eat, so what, then? What kinds of things were more important to Him than us, His very own children?

  Maybe this time, I mused, I would manage to get His attention and He would lift His eyes and look upon me and soak up my prayer the way that a sponge soaks up water, the way that a drunkard soaks up his booze, the way that clothes soak up rainwater, the way that blotting paper soaks up ink. He would soak up my prayer and be full with it so that He would be compelled to do something.

  Maybe this time He would be bothered to answer my prayer.

  The sounds of the planes grew louder above us, followed by screams, followed by thuds of feet, or of objects, or even of bodies crashing into the land. We shivered through all of it, and the murky, sepulchral soil of the bunker appeared to shiver with us. The raid seemed longer that day than ever before.

  3

  THE BACK OF our concrete fence had come down in parts, and the shattered cement blocks all around the area made it so that we could not reenter the compound through the back, so we went around the fence and out onto the road, from which we would then make our way to the front of the house and try to reenter that way.

  Up and down the road voices were calling out sharply—questioning voices—the way they always called out after a raid. Howling voices, as if all that shouting could somehow restore order.

  “Have you seen my veranda chair?” a woman was shouting, a shrill voice, as if she were on the verge of tears. If luck was on her side, she would find the chair—most likely in broken pieces scattered across the road, one shattered limb after another. If luck was on her side, she would find it and be able to piece it back together again.

  “Have you seen my son?” a second woman was asking. In between the questioning, she cried out her son’s name. “Amanze, where are you? The aeroplanes have come and gone. It’s time for you to come out of hiding! Amanze, do you hear me?”

  More voices, and soon they all seemed to merge. A chorus of voices, a mixed collection, like an assortment of varying hopes tossed together into one great big wishing well.

  “I’m looking for my mother,” a small voice now came crying, distinct from all the rest, a girl’s, four or five years old. Something Mama used to say: if you are looking for something, chances are you will find it in the last place you think to look. I wondered if the girl would find her mother in the graveyard.

  A dog was barking as we hastened across heaps of crumbled concrete, across fallen tree branches, across pieces of zinc siding and toppled roofs.

  The front gate was clear enough. We entered. Behind us the gate door swayed. The sound was something like a wail.

  We did not stop on the veranda to dust off our blouses and wrappers, the way we always did. We ran, instead, clear past the veranda and into the house, me following close behind Mama.

  Later, Mama would say that she had been aware of the scent even from the veranda. Later, she would say that she had been aware of it the way a person is aware of the perch of a mosquito: it would be a moment before she felt its sting.

  She says if someone were to have asked her in that very instant, she would have explained it as a musty scent, a little metallic, something like the scent of rusting iron.

  Inside the parlor, she caught a glint of the sun reflecting through the windows. Tiptoeing around the shattered glass on the floor, she followed the light with her eyes. I followed close behind.

  At the window, only one glass pane remained in its frame, and on it, cracks in an almost circular pattern, as if a spider web had been stretched across its surface. She went up to that pane, touched it, stroked its fissures with her fingers, stared accusingly at it.

  At the onset of the war, our social studies teacher, Mrs. Enwere, had, one afternoon, given us a history lesson that, so long as I live, I will not forge
t.

  All the students in class were sitting as they usually did, two to a desk. It was nearing the end of the school day. The day had been stuffy and humid, the kind of weather that seemed to make everyone more miserable than they already were. Mrs. Enwere had certainly been in a miserable mood all of that day, her face so downcast you’d have thought she’d lost a parent or a child. Now she was speaking to us, no longer consulting the book in front of her, but speaking freestyle, as if the words of the textbook had somehow registered themselves in her mind.

  “First a coup, and then a countercoup. Coup,” she said. She repeated the word, “A coup.” Then, “Who knows what that means?”

  Mrs. Enwere must have pronounced the word correctly, but somehow, in my tired, end-of-school-day child’s mind, I heard instead: coop. I could even see it in my mind’s eye: a hutch, a cage, red-tailed chickens and golden chickens and white chickens, chickens with wattles of different colors—yellow, brown, pink. A coop.

  But what exactly about coops? How was it that chickens were all of a sudden the topic of our social studies class? The context for it, there in the classroom and in the middle of what appeared to be a history lesson, kept me from being sure that I really knew the word.

  Mrs. Enwere waited only a moment for a response, and getting none, she continued. “I shall define ‘mutiny’ for you,” she said, looking around the class. She spoke loudly: “Mutiny is a revolt or rebellion against authority.”

  The classroom was a large cement room, all gray, no paint on the walls. There were three other classroom buildings in the compound, in the midst of which was a courtyard, made up of lush green grass and strategically planted flowers, and a sandy brown area where we had our morning assemblies. The assemblies were the period during which we underwent inspections—the time when the headmistress and teachers checked to see if our fingernails were cut and if our uniforms were ironed and if our hair was combed. During the morning assemblies, we sang the school anthem, and then the national anthem, and from there our teachers led us to class.

  The windows were located on the side of the classroom facing the courtyard. This was the way all the windows in all the classrooms in the school were, as if to prevent the students from looking the other way, out into the world.

  I was staring out one of those courtyard-facing windows, thinking of the moment when school would be dismissed. What path would I take? The one that cut through the large overgrown field? Or the path alongside the road, alongside the bicyclists and the occasional motorists?

  “Repeat after me,” Mrs. Enwere was saying. “Mutiny is a revolt or rebellion against authority.” And now I turned back from the window to Mrs. Enwere to find that she was looking directly at me. “Repeat,” Mrs. Enwere said, like a reprimand.

  I repeated: “Mutiny is a revolt or rebellion against authority.”

  “Very good. Let me not have to remind you again to pay attention,” she said, tapping the cane in her hand on my portion of the desk.

  “Now, all of you know of Government House in Ibadan,” she continued. This was the way Mrs. Enwere asked her questions, questions that came out more like statements. Questions that were too far above our minds, questions whose answers we could not possibly have known.

  The class remained silent.

  “Who can tell me about the Prime Minister and about Sardauna of Sokoto?”

  More silence.

  At this point, Mrs. Enwere began speaking quickly, her words coming out like a storm: Ahmadu Bello, dead. Tafawa Balewa, dead. Akintola, dead. Dead, dead, dead.

  We listened with alarm, or at least I did, trying to make sense of the words. Soldiers. Bullets. Head of State. Military.

  Mrs. Enwere went on like that for some time before turning her attention to Ironsi.

  “Ironsi,” she said. She repeated the name. “Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi.”

  Head of State. Ironsi, his body in a forest, still dressed in his military apparel. Holes and holes scattered across his corpse, holes out of which blood flowed like the waters of a fountain, only red.

  Ironsi, bullet-riddled and left to decay in the bush.

  “A real shame what is happening in this country,” Mrs. Enwere said. But in any case, she said, this was how we had arrived at Gowon for Head of State. Before Ironsi, Azikiwe. After Ironsi, Gowon.

  We all sat there dumbfounded. You could have heard a pin drop in all that silence.

  The silence in the house was as heavy as the one that day in school. Mama calling out Papa’s name, and I taking in the dead air that greeted her after each call, complete emptiness in response.

  We found him face-down on the black-and-white-tiled floor of the dining room. Mama leapt to him, bent over his body, resumed calling out his name.

  His hands and legs were tangled strangely around his body, dying branches twisted around a dying trunk. Pieces of wood from the dining table lay scattered around him. A purple-brown hue had formed where the pool of his blood was collecting.

  She stayed bent over his body, the cloth of her wrapper soaking up his blood. “Uzo, biko, mepe anya gi! Ana m ayo gi!” I’m begging you, Uzo. Please open your eyes for me!

  She continued to call his name, and each new call was louder than the one before. “Open your eyes, my husband. Mepe, i nu go?” she said. “Open, do you hear me?!”

  Her calling became shouting, and soon the shouting turned into wailing.

  I remained where I stood, steps behind her, stunned. My father was dying or already dead, and even if I would have liked to do something to make it otherwise, I must have known already that there was nothing I could do.

  In a whisper this time, Mama called Papa again by his name. For minutes she continued that way, just whispering his name, and as she did, she pleaded with him. “My husband, please. Please, get up and walk.”

  But of course he lay there still.

  That evening, a handful of parishioners from church came and lifted Papa’s body, cleaned it off, and took it with them. Where they took it I did not exactly know, but I watched as Mama handed to one of the men Papa’s gold-patterned isiagu, hanging neatly on a hanger. They must have been the ones who put the isiagu on for him. When they returned with him and laid him back down in our parlor, he was clean and perfect-looking, as if he had gotten all dressed up for a big occasion only to suddenly fall asleep.

  4

  PAPA’S NAME, UZO, meant “door,” or “the way.” It was a solid kind of name, strong-like and self-reliant, unlike mine, Ijeoma (which was just a wish: “safe journey”), or Mama’s, Adaora (which was just saying that she was the daughter of all, daughter of the community, which was really what all daughters were, when you thought about it).

  Uzo. It was the kind of name I’d have liked to fold up and hold in the palm of my hand, if names could be folded and held that way. So that if I were ever lost, all I’d have to do would be to open up my palm and allow the name, like a torchlight, to show me the way.

  In the weeks following Papa’s death, it seemed that we had lost our way, Mama and I. It seemed as if we could no longer tell up from down, left from right. But no matter how turned around we were, we at least knew enough to continue running into the bunker as soon as we heard the sound of the bomber engines. And no matter how turned around our lives had become, Mama knew enough to make sure to give Papa a proper send-off, so that he would be able to take his place among his ancestors.

  There was an extensive wake-keeping—people coming in steady streams to give their condolences. This continued for over a week, with Papa laid out in the parlor on a four-poster bed, borrowed for the occasion from one of our church members. Mama, dressed in white, sat on a chair by his side surrounded by a troop of female parishioners. She wept and wailed for her dead husband while the women around her sang their funereal songs in chorus, like an accompaniment to her wails.

  After Papa had been taken away and buried in the far corner of our backyard, there was the daylong ikwa ozu ceremony: trays of kola nuts and jerry cans of palm wine
, prayers and libations, village elders invoking the spirits of Papa’s ancestors, asking them to guide him into the world of the deceased.

  One morning after the ikwa ozu had been performed, Mama called me for breakfast.

  I went to her, sat with her in our dining room, where she had two bowls of soaked garri ready for us. If it had been before the war, we would have been eating bread with tea and one boiled egg each, or maybe we would have been having some cornflakes with the eggs, the kind of cornflakes that came in the Kellogg’s box with the red-combed and yellow-beaked rooster. It was cornflakes imported from out of the country, and we would have been having it with Peak or Carnation evaporated milk, also from out of the country. But it had been some time since we’d had any bread or tea or Kellogg’s cornflakes, or Peak milk or Carnation evaporated milk. And as for eggs, they were a thing like peace of mind, like calm, even like a smile. They were a thing we had begun to have only once in a while.

  Mama sprinkled some groundnuts in our bowls of garri, and as she did, she said, “The protein in the groundnuts is just as rich as the protein in eggs. It will do the work of any other protein. It will help your brain to work well, think hard, and develop properly.”

  When Mama had just delivered me—when she was a brand-new mother—she had taken up studying food, for the simple fact that I had been born a little under a month early, and one of the midwives had explained to her that, among other things, it would be important for her to feed me protein. She had not understood what exactly protein was, that abstraction of a thing, like a ghost of a word, a mystery. Not like orange or banana or table or desk, things you could see solidly with your eyes. It was a thing that could not quite be seen.

  She had gone and asked people and picked up information on it here and there—whatever health books or magazines she could find. She wanted me to live. If I were to live, then she must figure out what protein was so that she could feed it to me.