Under the Udala Trees

by Chinelo Okparanta

  I did not go back to sleep right away. Instead, I sat by the open door of the hovel, on the small steps that led out of it. The moon shone, and the air was only a little cold. The crickets sang. I held Papa’s Bible in my hand and stared into the vast sky, and I wondered what Mama was doing at that very moment in time.

  When I finally went back into the hovel, I stood by its door for some time, just to get a sense of the place, even in the darkness. I observed the room by the light of my kerosene lantern. There was a part of the zinc walling where the metal was clear and a little bright, so that it appeared like added light. I scanned with bewildered eyes. Again, the yellow foam mattress. The desk and table. The otherwise bareness of the place.

  Would I survive here? If so, how long would I need to survive? Mama had said that I’d be with the grammar school teacher for only a short while, maybe just a few days. What were the chances that it would be just a few days? How long was a short while? A few weeks? A couple of months? Would she really send for me? What if she somehow forgot?

  No matter, I decided. If this was the rice that God was putting in my basket . . . there was no point wishing for soup.

  PART II

  12

  SOMETIMES I THINK back to the year 1970—the year the lessons began—and it feels like I’m reliving it all over again in my mind: sitting rigidly at the kitchen table with Mama, or in the parlor, my heart racing inside of me, my mind struggling to digest the verses, turning them inside out and upside down and sideways, trying hard to understand.

  Time and time again I’ve tried to bury the memory of those lessons, to act as if they were not part of my reality, because claiming them would be like continuing to remember that former version of Mama, the one who believed so much that there was a demon in me.

  Still, I remember.

  Speaking of Mama. By 1970, about a year and a half had gone by without my seeing her. I had spent the tail end of 1968, all of 1969, and the beginning of 1970 at the grammar school teacher’s, during which time Mama never once sent for me. True that she had not known for how long we would be separated. True that a part of her really did imagine that my stay in Nnewi would be for a short while. But time went on, and the grammar school teacher and his wife grew comfortable in their use of me as a housegirl. My papa was, after all, gone, and no matter that he would not have tolerated my working as a housegirl, no matter that he would have frowned upon them using their friend’s daughter as a housegirl. But he was gone, and as for Mama, she had convinced herself that she was only doing what she had to do. Anyway, the truth is, though we had been an upper-middle-class family before Papa’s death, with his death, and with the war, we plummeted with full force to lower class. What Mama was doing was nothing different from what lower-class families sometimes did, sending their children off as housegirls and houseboys. It made sense. Some other family could then assume responsibility for the children—for their food, their shelter, and, more important, the cost of their education.

  Mama has said many times that she had been just on her way to get me when she got the grammar school teacher’s call. At first it struck me as dishonest. No way could she have sworn on a Bible. Hardly would she have laid her palms on it and the thing would have blasted up in flames. But then, with all those Bible lessons—all those times she held her Bible downright in her hands—she would very well have blasted up into flames if she had been lying, so chances are that she really had been getting ready to come collect me at the exact moment when I made it so that she had to come get me. Sometimes that’s the way coincidences are.

  In a way it all worked out. As I had been good for them—with the exception of that final incident—as I had worked hard for them around the house and mostly behaved myself, the grammar school teacher and his wife had, like upstanding ogas and madams, agreed to see to it that I got a proper education. Mama said, “Remember what I said a long time ago about using your brain? They will keep their end of the bargain. They will pay your school fees, buy your school uniforms, your textbooks, all your school supplies, so that you can study hard and make something of yourself. It is important to think of your future. I was only thinking of your future . . .”

  The bungalow that I met with when I joined her in Aba was a beautiful little ivory-colored thing, but it had not always been so—neither beautiful nor ivory.

  The way Mama tells it these days, it’s a little like a Hollywood drama, or maybe a James Bond film—so many parts to it, and even some surprises. But I do believe her, down to the smallest details, because her memory of those days—even of the lessons—has remained very sharp and has been consistent throughout the years.

  As she tells it, she had returned to Aba to find holes in the roof of the house, to find the grass overgrown, extending almost halfway the height of the walls of the bungalow. At first she had not recognized the place. She had gone past a field of green and yellow grass, and after six or so kilometers of trekking up the road, she reached an area where the land appeared to rise more abruptly than before. She thought that she had come close to where the house was, because she knew well that the house was on a bit of a knoll, almost overlooking the village. She continued to walk, ten more minutes of climbing the small incline, but the house was nowhere in sight.

  She put down the bag that she was carrying and took a rest. She wiped her forehead with her handkerchief; she remembers this, she says, because the handkerchief was one of Papa’s old ones, with the letter U embroidered on it. U for Uzo. She remembers thinking of Papa then.

  A woman was passing by, carrying a bucket of water on her head, and though Mama knew it would be an inconvenience to interfere with the woman’s errand, she did, out of a feeling of helplessness, of turned-upside-downness, of extreme disorientation, which was a little like a blow to the face, given the fact that she was in a town she thought she knew, a town she thought she would always know, because Aba was where she had been born and raised.

  She had just opened her mouth to ask the question when her eyes fell on it. The house was there after all, barely visible on the slight incline ahead. It was a brittle box of worn cement and zinc, barely peeking out from the middle of some overgrown bushes.

  She apologized to the woman for troubling her. As the woman proceeded on her way, Mama looked around the area again, taking it in more fully with her eyes. She had been aware that the war would change things for the worse, and so she reasoned that perhaps this was exactly what it should be: the windows broken; the orange and guava trees fruitless, their leaves dry and cracking, having the appearance of hunger. Some animals had been on the premises—grasscutters or bush squirrels, goats or stray dogs. She could see their paw marks on the earth.

  She set her bag down at the entrance of the bungalow. She had just gone through the doorway when she saw the person, presumably a man, crouched on the floor to her right. She screamed, “Chi m o!”

  He was almost all skeleton by now, if he was not beforehand already so. It appeared that his flesh had been eaten into, likely by the same animals whose tracks she had seen earlier outside.

  She continued to scream, and several villagers came running in response. She felt their hands on her, their attempts to hold her, to calm her. “Rapum aka!” she screamed. Leave me alone! “E metukwana m aka!” Don’t touch me!

  She decided then and there that Aba was no better than Ojoto, at least not in the way she had hoped, this fact of her having once more been subjected to the vision of death.

  What was the meaning of all of this? Wasn’t the point of coming to Aba to escape all the reminders of what had happened to Papa? But here was this corpse in the house, soiling the energy of the place, making it so that her home was marked all over again with memories of death.

  A feeling of faintness overcame her, and she broke out in a sweat. She crouched to the floor to steady herself. A woman nearby offered her a decanter of water. She gulped down the water, sprinkled a bit of it on her face. She returned the decanter to the woman when she was done. She look
ed around in order to further examine the place. On the ground not far from her, shards of glass.

  She screamed some more.

  “Madam,” the woman next to her said in a mollifying voice. “Madam.”

  She turned to look at the woman. She wanted to explain that she had come so far only to find things just as bad as where she had come from. “I can’t stay here either,” she said. She shook her head and body so erratically that the woman had to hold her to calm her down. Several men prepared to move the corpse. Who had he been? people asked in hushed tones. But they did not stay long questioning. The men removed the body with the resignation and stale sorrow of people who had confronted death far too many times.

  One of the men began picking up the shards of glass.

  The woman comforting her recognized her then. “Aren’t you Adaora of the late Kenneth and Flora Amaechi?”

  Mama nodded.

  The woman cried with excitement. “Welcome, Adaora,” she said. “Nno!”

  “This is no home to return—” Mama was saying.

  The woman interrupted, saying, “Not to worry. Your father’s land greets you. I tell you, don’t worry. All will be well again. Together we will fix up the place. One person alone cannot move an elephant, but an entire village, that is a different story.”

  “I can’t stay here,” Mama shouted. “Just how am I to stay here?” But deep inside she knew already that she would stay. Because if not, where else was there to go? And anyway, she could not continue to run forever.

  So it was that she remained in Aba. The villagers helped her rebuild the bungalow, its roof, its windows, its doors. They painted its walls ivory. They cut the overgrown grass with their machetes, and Mama irrigated the land with jerry cans full of water. For camouflage, they covered the place with palm fronds. Inside, they swept and washed the tile floors.

  It was they who helped her plant a garden and trees in her front yard after the war ended. Another guava tree and an orange tree. A mango tree and a pawpaw tree. Pineapples, their crowns sticking up in spikes above the surface of the earth.

  It was they who helped to put up the four walls of the little shop that stood in front of the bungalow, just behind the compound’s gate.

  All of this had taken some time. “Which is why I took so long to come for you,” Mama says, like a defense, each time she tells the story. “I had not forgotten you. Things were very difficult for a long time.”

  It was a small bungalow with a large parlor and two bedrooms, one of which Mama had prepared for me. The other room was hers.

  The first week I was back with Mama, she did not bother speaking to me. Every morning, I came out of my room, took my morning bath, and got dressed. I walked to the kitchen, found myself some food to eat, and went back to my room. For lunch and dinner I came back out. Each time I came out, she was not there. She either was already in the shop or doing something else around the house.

  Nearly a full week passed and not a word between Mama and me.

  Finally, when that first week came to an end, I found her in the kitchen as I entered to look for breakfast. She was wearing a black gown, as if in mourning. She also had a black cloth tied around her head.

  I stopped at the kitchen doorway and fought a mental battle over whether to stay or leave. The thought occurred to me that whatever I decided to do, I must do it respectfully, which essentially meant that, whatever I did, I must first greet her.

  “Mama, good morning,” I said.

  There was the kitchen table along with its two chairs where we should have already been sharing our meals. But the whole week, if we had not so much as spoken, then we had certainly not eaten together, so we had yet to sit at the table together.

  This particular morning, she must have made it a point to be there waiting for me. She was sitting at the table, stirring a cup of tea with a spoon. She must have just eaten a tangerine, because the crisp citrus scent of freshly peeled tangerines filled the air.

  The kitchen was a wide, well-lit room with two large louver windows. The panes of the windows were open, and sunlight was filtering through.

  Mama looked up at me, responded to my greeting very solemnly. “Good morning, Ijeoma,” she said, and returned to stirring her tea.

  I remained at the doorway. I said, “I’m sorry for interrupting you. I’ll come back when you’re done.”

  She shook her head. Still looking down at her tea, she said, “You may stay. I was just thinking that today might be a good day to speak with you about things.” She pointed at the empty chair at the table. “Come, take a seat,” she said.

  I moved toward the chair, pulled it out, sat.

  Mama spoke again. “Now that you have had the week to settle in, we must make a schedule for you. There’s nothing more important now than for us to begin working on cleansing your soul.”

  13

  THOSE INITIAL SESSIONS, the lessons took place right there at the kitchen table, with the two of us seated across from each other. They took place in the evenings, after Mama had closed up the shop, but before supper.

  That first session, Mama opened the pages of her Bible. Page one, chapter one, verse one. She began:

  1 Na mbu Chineke kere elu-igwe na uwa.

  2 Uwa we buru ihe toboro n’efu na ihe toboro nkiti; ochichiri di kwa n’elu obu-miri: Mo Chineke nerughari kwa n’elu miri.

  1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

  2 The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

  Her voice was gentle and calm. There was a steady cadence to it as she went down the page and then back up to chapter two. I followed along with my own Bible, Papa’s old one, as we made our way through.

  20 . . . but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.

  21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.

  22 The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.

  23 The man said,

  “This is now bone of my bones,

  And flesh of my flesh;

  She shall be called Woman,

  Because she was taken out of Man.”

  24 For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.

  She repeated that last part:

  24 N’ihi nka ka nwoke garapu nna-ya na nne-ya, rapara n’aru nwunye-ya: ha ewe gho otu anu-aru.

  She said, “Nwoke na nwunye. Man and wife. Adam na Eve. I ne ghe nti? Are you listening?” She was shaking her finger, a reminder and a warning.

  I nodded.

  She said it again: “Nwoke na nwunye. Adam na Eve. Man and wife.”

  I nodded but remained quiet, keeping my eyes steady on her. The look on her face was the look of a person watching a gradually sinking boat from afar. She seemed about ready to scream at the captain of the boat, but she seemed also to understand that if she screamed, the captain could not possibly hear. Not from so far away. So she talked softly instead, as if in prayer, as if prayer might have the effect that shouting could not.

  I listened to her, watched her brow furrow, her lips tighten and loosen, tighten and loosen again.

  Before the session began, Mama had handed me a black prayer scarf and instructed me to tie it on my head. “The mark of true penitence,” she had said. I tugged at the scarf now.

  “I ne ghe nti?” she asked. “Are you listening?”

  I nodded.

  “I na aghota? Are you understanding?”

  I nodded again.

  She smiled at me, tugged at my headscarf, perhaps to pull it forward to cover more of my hair. She patted me on the head.

  “The bottom line, Ijeoma, my dear,” she said, “is that if God wanted it to be otherwise, would He not have included it that other way in the Bible?”

 
She closed her Bible and announced that we would stop there today. The session must have lasted all of fifteen minutes in total, but the discomfort of it made it feel as if it had lasted for much longer.

  She rose from her chair. Over at the cupboards, she pulled out two plates and walked with them to the stove. She dished out the rice and stew at the stove and brought them back to the table for us.

  We ate silently that evening. Afterward, we both retreated to our rooms.

  14

  THE NEXT MORNING, I met Mama again in the kitchen, at breakfast time. We sat together at the table, soaking our slices of bread in tea, when her eyes narrowed at me, and she said, “It’s not easy getting set up in a place. You really must understand that it took me all this time to get it looking the way it does now.”

  I replied that I understood, and I thanked her, though at the time I had not yet understood, and was not yet to the level of gratitude, because I was still smarting from her desertion of me and the memory of all that time at the grammar school teacher’s when my mind tortured itself with all the possible reasons for why my own mother had thought it best to abandon me.

  “All that work and now here we are with our very own home. A new life with new memories to be made. I can tell you I’m no longer having those terrible nightmares.”

  There was something desperate and pleading in her face as she spoke. In that moment it was as if she were the child and I were the parent; she was seeking validation, trying to convince me of why I should be proud of her.

  “That’s good, Mama,” I said. “I’m glad the nightmares are gone.”