Under the Udala Trees

by Chinelo Okparanta

“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.

  10

  BUSES 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 loo
ked 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.

  I nodded and then hung my head so that all I could see now were our feet, hers and mine both, covered to the ankles in dust.

  Mama lifted my chin with her hand. I looked into her unsmiling face. “Cheer up,” she said. “Remember what I said. I will think of you every minute that I am away from you. And I will send for you as soon as I can.”

  She stroked my hair, as if to put back any stray strands in place, like she used to do before the war came, early in the morning before she sent me off to school. It was as if she were once more getting me ready for school.

  “Nee anya,” she said. “You must be respectful, always do as they say. Are you hearing me?”

  “Yes, Mama,” I replied.

  “They are your father’s very close friends, almost family, so you can call them Aunty and Uncle. I’m sure they will like that. Are you hearing me?”

  “Yes, Mama,” I said.

  She fumbled with her bag, searching for something in it. When she found what she was looking for, she pulled it out. It was Papa’s old Bible, the one he used to read from every Sunday at church. She handed it to me, holding my hand in hers even as I held the book in my hand.

  “If God dishes you rice in a basket . . . ,” she said.

  I knew the second half of the proverb. “Do not wish for soup,” I finished.

  She smiled. “Ngwa,” she said. “Gawazie. Go on. They are expecting you any minute, and I have to be off myself before the Aba lorry leaves me behind.”

  I turned around and began walking, forcing myself to hold back my tears, forcing myself not to look back, forcing myself to resist the temptation to run shamelessly back to her.

  11

  THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL teacher was corpulent, and he walked with the gait of a man who had always been so. His skin was almost as dark as his hair, which did not grow very high from his head—it was hard to tell where the hair stopped and his face began. His belly stuck out, rotund as an udu, the kind made from the roundest of calabash gourds. His body appeared to lean backward at the hips, as if it were a struggle for it to follow any forward movement of his feet.

  His wife’s skin was not exactly light, but neither was it as dark as her husband’s. But her eyes were just like his, a dark shade of brown. She had long hair, straightened, not natural like mine. She held it up in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her brows were penciled in and formed perfect arcs above her eyes. Her lips were a dark shade of red. Where his body leaned backward, she was so full of chest in an otherwise small frame that it appeared she had no choice but to lean forward, in the direction of the weight.

  They met me at their gate.

  She had a handkerchief with her. “On account of my asthma,” she explained, and began to cough. When she finished coughing, she asked, “How are you?”

  “I’m well, Aunty,” I said.

  Her husband stood just watching me, then he said my name. “Ijeoma,” he uttered enthusiastically. He repeated it, as if tasting it in his mouth.

  I stared at the ground, my mind pondering the way he was saying my name. I hoped he would not taste it only to turn around and spit it out. By the sound of things, probably not. There was, after all, a warmth to his voice that reminded me of Papa’s voice. But then he was not Papa. He was fat and awkward-moving where Papa was thin and lithe. Would he really be warm like Papa, or was this warmth in his voice just a trick? Would it melt away the way a candle melts away with fire?

  I had been looking down while he uttered my name, but now I looked up to find him peering at me. He said my name again. “Ijeoma, ke kwanu? Welcome! How are you?”

  My mouth felt dry, like I had somehow gotten a mouthful of sand. But I forced myself to speak. “Fine, Uncle,” I said.

  “It’s been such a long time since we last saw you,” his wife said.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, reaching out to pat me on the shoulder. “It’s been a long time.” In a more quiet voice he said, “I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Yes, we are both sorry about your father,” his wife echoed.

  I nodded, then looked around the front yard. It was a neat yard, but it was easy to see the effects of the war on it: A shattered dresser sat in front of the veranda. Next to it, some downfallen branches and what looked to be shattered glass. Their hedges were just as withered as ours had become in Ojoto, and the palm fronds they were using to camouflage their compound appeared to be losing their green, just like our Ojoto palm fronds.

  He broke the silence. “Ngwa, let’s go,” he said in a spirited sort of way, as if he had suddenly remembered what he had been planning to do next.

  “Yes, let’s go,” his wife repeated.

  He led us from the gate to a small house-like structure in the yard behind the main home. The structure was something like a boys’ quarters, only a bit too small to be one. And anyway, there was no indication that the grammar school teacher and his wife had ever had any household help. As he walked, he made his apologies. “We don’t have extra room in the house, or else we would have . . .”

  “Yes, we would have put you in the house with us if only we had the room,” his wife said.

  “Surely she understands,” he said.

  “I’m sure she does,” she said.

  “We’ve made the place as comfortable as possible,” he said.

  A padlock hung near the top of the door. He unlocked it with a key.

  His wife and I remained outside as he took my bag in.

  When he came back out, he said, “You’ll be fine here.”

  She nodded and said, “Yes, you’ll be fine here.”

  “You’ll be a good girl for us,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “A good girl indeed. Helping us around the house as needed. That sort of thing.”

  She appeared to be examining me. After a moment, she said, “Yellow skin, the color of a ripe pawpaw. That’s very lucky for a girl. It should be easy for her mother to marry her off.”

  “There’s still plenty of time before that,” he said. “But, yes, I imagine. When the time comes for it.”

  She nodded.

  They observed me a moment longer, very awkwardly, and then they were off.

  I sat on the yellow foam mattress that was to be my new bed, taking in the place. Far from being a self-contained mini-home, it was a very basic, open one-room space. Just four cement walls patched with zinc pieces, a wooden floor, and a ceiling. Neither a kitchen nor a bathroom inside. Maybe they had used it for storage before my arrival. Whatever the case, it was a crude construction, more a hovel than a home. But it was sturdy enough.

  After some time, I lay down and drifted into sleep. I did not wake up until much later, four or five hours it must have been, after having arrived. Evening had faded into a dark night. No one had come to call me or check on me. Or, if they had come, perhaps I simply had not heard.

  On the table that formed my desk was a kerosene lantern and a pack of matches. I struck a match and lit the lantern.

  Outside the hovel was a water tank. A pipe came down the side of the tank, leading to a silver tap. A bucket sat by the tap, and a bar of soap.

  I removed my dress—my orange a
nd brown adire gown. I filled up the bucket that sat nearby with water from the tap. Near the tank was a cement slab. I squatted on the slab. Fireflies, the moon and the stars, and the flame in my kerosene lantern were the only lights that shone on me. I flicked away insects and slapped the tingling spots where the flies perched on me. I crouched tightly, an attempt to cover myself, because though I should have felt veiled, concealed by the night, there was that other element of darkness, the one that left me feeling more vulnerable, more naked than in the light. And there was still the war—the possibility of an arbitrary night raid.

  I bathed carefully and quickly, lathering up and rinsing away the suds, counting as I did to distract myself from all my fears. I was done bathing by the time my count reached fifteen.

  Back in the hovel, I put on an old nightgown, one of Mama’s ancient cotton frocks, passed down to me because, years ago, I had fallen in love with its floral design and begged her to give it to me. At one point it had been bursting with pinks and yellows and soft blues, but now, if you looked closely at it, you saw moth holes throughout the sleeves and bodice, and it was as if all the colors had reached a compromise and found a middle ground in the light and dark shades of beige.

  Some months before the war came, Mama had insisted that the nightgown was too old to continue to be worn and that I should allow her to throw it out. But I had refused.

  Now, as I slipped it on, it reminded me of Mama, and of Papa, and of Ojoto, and of peace and calm, and of our lives before the war. I was grateful to have it. What did it matter about the holes or the fading colors? My life had been turned upside down, so perhaps it was fitting that I should have such a nightgown—just the kind of thing that a castaway would wear. And I was indeed a castaway: no more the security of Papa or Mama. I might as well embrace and play the part of a derelict child.