After that, she had decided that if she could do something for a job, she would much rather own a food store than be a nutritionist. All that reading she had done in the name of protein had been quite a lot of work. And she was slow at it—every word a crawl. (All those big words that she did not understand didn’t make it any easier on her.) After spending all afternoon reading, she spent her evenings and nights with a headache.
Maybe she herself had needed to be eating some protein back then, I’ve sometimes told her. Maybe that would have been just the thing to help with the reading and understanding of those big words.
In any case, as I sat there in the kitchen with her, I wondered what exactly it was I needed my brain for anymore, now that the war was making it so that soon enough there would probably no longer be any school for me to use my brain in. School was the reason why I read, and why I memorized the multiplication tables and learned history and geography and followed up with my Bible knowledge. School was what was supposed to develop my brain. How was protein supposed to do the work of school?
But Mama said that it would.
“As soon as the war is over,” she said, “school will resume full time, and you will see that your brain will be just as intact as ever, even better.”
I looked suspiciously at her, and she must have seen the suspicion on my face.
She smiled slightly and said that maybe one day I would use my brain to become a teacher or a doctor or a businesswoman. Because, she hated to break it to me, but I had better begin thinking about these things now. Because, God willing, I would one day marry, but what if one day I found myself like her, suddenly without a husband? “What if?” she asked, staring blankly at a spot behind my head.
After some time, she appeared to collect herself. Her eyes focused on me, and she said, “Well, all I’m saying is that you will have to use your brain for work, that is a fact. And no better way to start than with protein.”
We continued to sit there at the table, eating our soaked garri and groundnuts, Mama going on with her lecture on the benefits of protein for my brain, neither of us talking about what was really on our minds, which was that Papa was dead and gone, and no amount of protein could bring him back to life.
5
BY THE END of July, over a month had passed and Mama had not so much as mentioned Papa.
I took the hint. I resigned myself to just thinking of him. But the way I thought of him, it was the way a starving child thinks about food: he was always on my mind. Each time I heard a man’s voice, or each time I saw anyone reading a newspaper, I thought of him. Mama never turned on the radio-gramophone. It was as if she had made it a point not to turn it on. But she didn’t need to. Just seeing it was enough of a trigger for me to think of Papa.
One day, when it seemed that I had reached my max of missing him—one day when it seemed that I could not possibly miss him more without dying of the feeling—I found myself, out of the blue, blurting out to Mama, “Mama, do you miss Papa like I do?”
We were at the dining table, eating our dinner of yam porridge.
She snapped, her head whipping up with a sudden, unexpected anger. In a low, grumbling voice she replied: “Why should I miss him? Was he not the same man who made a widow of me and almost an orphan out of you? Tell me, just why should I miss him?”
I went back to my yam porridge.
Some minutes passed, and she said, very quietly: “Anger, that is what I feel toward him. Anger. Sometimes I feel like I will just explode with it.”
I listened, not saying a word.
She let it all out then, the words tumbling from her mouth in a sputtering rage: “What kind of man pollutes his own land and his own house by allowing himself to be killed in it? Lucky for him that there’s a war going on, so he cannot entirely be blamed for taking his own life. Lucky for him that his death can simply be explained as just another war death. But still, the atrocity!”
Our bedrooms, both on the second story of the house, had been destroyed by the same bombs that had killed Papa, and since there was a chance they might soon be destroyed again, Mama had decided that there was no sense fixing them back up.
We’d pulled down the mattress that Mama and Papa shared from their bedroom to the parlor floor. Each night we slept together on it.
At something like one or two a.m. on the night of Mama’s anger confession, her scream came piercing a hole into the darkness, a hole so big that I felt as if I were spiraling at full speed down the length of it.
“Uzo!” she cried. Never before had I heard her scream this way in her sleep.
I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Mama, can you hear me? Mama, it’s me, Ijeoma. Quiet down. It’s only a dream.”
She opened her eyes.
Mama used to say that our dreams were the way in which we resolved our problems, that every problem could be solved if we paid close attention to the tiniest details in our dreams. I used to have those dreams where I would get stuck in my sleep and couldn’t move. It was the kind of dream where you were fully aware that you were in a dream, only you were stuck and couldn’t get yourself to snap out of it. Sometimes the walls around me were a light shade of green, other times they were a light shade of gray. Either way, they were nothing like the rose-colored walls in our Ojoto house. I would try to scream, to cry out loud so that Mama or Papa would hear and come and wake me up. But neither could I scream in the dream. Eventually I would resign myself to being stuck. Only then would I somehow come out of it.
That night, even after she had opened her eyes, Mama continued to scream. “Uzo!” She turned to me. “Where is your papa?”
She looked frantically around in the darkness. “Uzo!” she called out. “Uzo, do you hear me?”
Had she begun to lose her senses? Had she forgotten that Papa was gone?
I leaned in to her and very gently said, “Papa is dead. Do you forget?” I whispered it to her over and over again.
Papa is dead. Do you forget?
Papa is dead. Do you forget?
Papa is dead. Do you forget?
She began to cry, as if hearing the news for the first time. Her shoulders heaved. Her breaths caught.
I held her, rocked her in my arms.
It was some time before her crying subsided. Finally she looked up at me, looked into my face. “Your papa is gone,” she whispered.
“Yes, Mama,” I replied, nodding. “Yes, my papa is gone,” I said.
6
I PULLED OPEN THE window shutters. It was a cloudless morning, and bright. The swing of the wooden beams sent warm light surging into the room.
In the kitchen the pantry was near empty.
I pulled out a can of sardines and the last remaining tuber of yam.
I had begun to do much of the housework. Mama no longer seemed interested in the day-to-day things of life. It didn’t appear that she cared any longer to live. Perhaps she was at a stage in her mourning in which she saw life as a thing she could not possibly go through without Papa. I had no choice but to take over.
It wasn’t too difficult to boil things. The hardest part was fetching the wood and lighting the fire. The rest was just keeping an eye out to make sure nothing burned. There had been a small bag of rice, not enough to feed one person, let alone two. I had left it in the cupboard, but now I looked for it and, not seeing it, I remembered that we had already eaten it—mostly me, because Mama was barely eating anything by then.
My eyes fell back on the sardines and yam.
I cut the yam into cubes, removed the burner, filled the stove with wood, replaced the burner. The yam cubes sat boiling while I divided the sardines into two bowls, one for myself and the other for Mama. In the distance a gate was squealing.
I heard a thump, like something heavy falling to the ground, but it was only the door swinging open, hitting the wall.
Mama entered the kitchen. Her face was pale and there was a sense of disorientation about her.
“Mama, odimma? Are you all right?” I aske
d.
“Fine enough,” she responded.
She walked up to the stove, lifted the lid of the pot.
“The relief lorry did not come,” I said. “I’m making us yam.”
She nodded.
“You will eat today?” I asked.
Mama was silent for some time, as if considering the food.
“We don’t have anything else,” I said. “No matter if you don’t like it, you need to try and eat it.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
I was eleven years old, a couple of months shy of twelve, but I knew by then the ways in which worry dulled the appetite, the ways in which too much anxiety made it so that even the best-tasting food had the same appeal as a leaf of paper or a palmful of sand. But there were also those days when food was like consolation. And anyway, people had taken to saying all over Ojoto, “You better eat up now. You never know, one day there might be no food left to eat.” Someone had said it again just the day before, and perhaps as a result, my hunger was full; my appetite must have been listening. I wished the same were true for Mama.
“Just a few spoonfuls,” I said.
She stared blankly at me, shook her head, turned around, and left.
7
I WAS WATCHING FOR the relief lorry from just outside our front gate. A gentle morning breeze was blowing and the scent of earth was strong in the air. Not far from where I stood waiting, three soldiers were gathered, guns slung across their shoulders. Near them, an armored car, one of those with twelve thin, bicycle-looking wheels and a square cabin made entirely of metal. One of the soldiers was carrying a string of ammunition on his head. The ammunition appeared like a headpiece. The bullets, strung together as they were, fell in an almost decorative way, like a hat-turned-chain that extended to the front of his face.
Across the street, on the other side of the soldiers, a shirtless man was walking alongside his bicycle. On the back of the bicycle was a coffin, too small to fit the body inside, so that the feet of the deceased—perhaps his child or other family member—stuck out from the bottom end of the wooden box.
A toddler-aged boy was leaning against the cement wall near a gate down the road, as if to catch his breath.
Behind him several other children stood, a little older than the toddler, their bellies swollen like inflated balls from kwashiorkor, holding small plastic begging pans in their hands. If someone were to have snapped their picture, it could have been another one of Papa’s newspaper front pages.
The soldier with the ammunition approached, his face sunken and sad-looking with mud stains all around. “Sista,” he said. “Abeg, make I get wata.”
I stared blankly at him, distracted, not really taking in his words.
“Make I get wata, abeg, obere mmiri,” he said again, pleading.
The other two soldiers approached. The shorter of the two was holding a small, dirty white jerry can, empty, which he uncapped and then held out in my direction without saying a word.
A motorcycle sped by, sending dust like flames rising from the dry earth.
“Abeg, sista,” the shorter soldier joined in. “Small wata.”
They had captured my full attention by now.
From inside the compound Mama appeared, a wrapper tied around her chest, blinking with irritation at the men.
She looked at the jerry can and then back up at the faces of the men.
Unexpectedly, she snapped, “Don’t you see that this is private property? Don’t you know you can’t go around begging like this?” She pointed her index finger at them as she spoke, brandishing it like a schoolteacher scolding a misbehaving child. She sucked in the air between her teeth and rolled her eyes, that combination of gestures that was a sign of a condescending sort of dismissal, of rejection. Before returning to the gate, she said, in pidgin this time, “Na who even tell you say I get wata?”
She stepped back into the compound, stopping only to call me to follow along.
I had not intended to disrespect Mama, but the soldier with the jerry can was now looking at me with eyes full of both longing and surrender.
“Abeg, sista,” he said. His voice was weak, as if he were using his last ounce of strength to ask the favor.
I thought these things: What if he were on the verge of dying? What if he wound up dying right before my eyes? What if all he needed was water to be able to keep on living? Was he not, anyway, one of the soldiers fighting on our side, on Biafra’s side? More than anything, it was the thought of his dying before me that terrified me.
There was a borehole in our backyard which connected to our water tank. I knew that there was still a good supply of water in the tank. Even if Mama was against it, I could give the men just a bit of water, not even half a jerry can.
I took the container from the man’s hand.
In the backyard, on my way to the water tank, I saw Mama. She was seated at the side of the steps that led outside from the kitchen door. A swallow was hopscotching around near where she sat.
The bird sprang away, up to the top of our fence.
She had been watching the bird, but now her eyes fell on me.
There was a way in which Mama’s lips had begun curling, followed by a widening, the top and bottom halves pressing into each other and becoming thinner that way. In that moment her lips did that very thing, followed by the question, “What do you think you are doing?”
Then she exhaled so that a soft whistling noise came from her nostrils. She shook her head slightly. Her eyes fell closed. Fatigue, I reasoned silently. It must be fatigue from hardly eating anymore.
But then she opened her eyes, and I saw a fury in them.
“Stupid girl,” she shouted. As if to say, “What kind of child is it that goes against her own mother’s word?” Or, “Did you not hear me say that we did not have any water?”
She reached out and slapped the jerry can from my hand. The can dropped at my feet. She pulled me by the ear, twisted my ear. “Disobedient child!”
She had become something outside of herself. Very different from the Mama I knew. She picked the jerry can up from the ground and stormed back to the gate. I followed her, out of shock and of not knowing what else to do.
Just outside the gate, the soldiers stood leaning on the fence, waiting. Mama tossed the empty container out to them. It landed lightly on the ground and tumbled halfway across the road.
“Did you not hear me say that we have no water?” she shouted at the soldiers. She closed the gate and locked it too.
I followed her again to the backyard. I crouched near the water tank, waiting. For what? I wasn’t quite sure.
“What are you doing crouching here? Get up and find something to do,” she said. It was not forceful, the way she spoke this time. She had calmed down by now. But the way the words came out—the tone of them, as if to say that I should just disappear from there (Biko, comot from here!)—and with everything that had come before, I knew well that Mama was somehow beginning to see me as a burden, the same way that she saw the soldiers as a burden, the same way the war was in fact a burden to us all. She was overwhelmed. No other explanation for it.
It must have been shortly after this incident that she began to make plans to get rid of me. In a warped, war-induced sort of way, it made sense that she should find ways to shed us all: the soldiers, me, and the house. To shed, if she could have, all memories of the war. To shed, and shed, and shed. Like an animal casting off old hair or skin. A lizard. A snake. A cat or a dog. Even chickens molt.
To shed us all like a bad habit. Or maybe, simply, the way one casts off a set of dirty, thorn-infested clothes.
8
AUGUST HAD COME and gone, and it was once again relief day, but morning had also come and gone with no sign of the Red Cross workers.
Usually by now there would have been a ruckus not far from our house, from those makeshift sheds where the village volunteers turned the relief packages into meals and portioned them out to the queue of villagers.
Rumors told of a blockade around Biafra by Gowon and the Nigerian forces that prevented the Red Cross from delivering us food. But rumors also had it that relief organizations were strategizing ways to break the blockade. It appeared there was still hope.
It was a school day, but the schools were by this time permanently closed.
I stood outside the gate, keeping an eye out for the relief lorry. Two older girls from school came strolling by, their hair in disarray, strands sticking out at odd angles. There was something in the manner of their movements that reminded me of old dishrags, worn and poked through with holes. But there was something beautiful about them too. Something about the way their bodies swayed as they walked.
Their skin was dark as cacao, which made me think of my own light skin, the kind of skin on which every scratch and bruise and scar showed, the kind of skin that people were always saying was so beautiful, but only because they didn’t know, the way I did, that there was nothing beautiful about having marks like chicken pox scars all over your body.
But the girls, their skin would hardly have shown any marks, not with the way it was nice and brown and smooth in its brownness. Papa’s skin was like mine, but a little darker. “The effect of age and the sun,” he once said. As I looked at the girls, I found myself thinking that maybe in time, with age, the sun would darken my skin enough that I would be at least a shade closer to theirs.
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.
Under the Udala Trees Page 3
