Under the Udala Trees

by Chinelo Okparanta

  “How many special man friends are you even talking about? And if there are so many of them, how can they all be special?”

  “Daaaarling,” she said, dragging out the word. She had recently started calling me “darling” because she could just tell, she said, that I was the kind of close friend she’d always wished for. Now she was calling me it again, saying, in a mawkish voice, “Daaaarling, that’s for me to know and for you—not to find out.”

  Laughter sneaked out of my lips. “One of these days you’ll get caught,” I teased. “Sneaking in and out of campus like you’re always doing. Don’t be surprised when you finally get caught.”

  She shook her head. “Ye of little faith,” she said. “Don’t you worry about me. I know what I’m doing. I’ve got these things covered.”

  When the knock came, she had just finished packing her bag. She zipped the bag up and went to answer.

  Through the window by my bed, I could see by the swooshing of leaves that a breeze was blowing.

  The door swung open from the force of the breeze. Someone took a step inside. At first all I saw was the silhouette of a girl in a long dark dress. I could not make out her features, and if she had hair on her head, I could not have said. She took a few more steps into the dorm room. “I’m looking for Ijeoma,” she said. It was the last voice that I had expected to hear.

  Ugochi stepped aside and pointed the girl in my direction, and then she went back to her bed, picked up her bag, slung it across her shoulder. “See you later, daaaarling,” she said teasingly. “I have some important business to take care of, as you know, but I shall be back.” She winked.

  I waved at her, but I was startled by the sudden awareness of myself and of everything around me. For one thing, I felt an urge to explain, even to apologize, to Amina for Ugochi’s use of “darling,” because what if Amina thought that it meant something more than just the word? I didn’t want her to get the wrong impression, whatever that impression might be.

  Amina glanced around the room, not saying a word. Finally she said, very timidly, “How are you?”

  By now, some weeks had passed since my initial attempts to get back with her.

  Her hair was braided loosely, and the braids fell down her shoulders. I thought back to the times when I used to braid it for her.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “And you?”

  “I’m fine too,” she said. After a brief silence she said, “I’ve missed you.”

  I felt a flutter in my chest, and I replied, very truthfully, “I’ve missed you too.”

  That evening, we headed off together on a walk on the campus grounds. We walked slowly, zigzagging and weaving circles across the lawn.

  When we spoke, it was only about school, about the strict methods of the headmistress, the way she made us hold out our hands during morning assemblies, the way she walked around inspecting them for dirt, inspecting our uniforms for tears and wrinkles and stains. Have you ever been caned on the palm with the headmistress’s ruler for not having clean enough nails? we asked each other. We walked separately. We did not hold hands or even allow our bodies to touch. We talked about our schoolmates, which of them we liked and which we didn’t. We talked about the books we were reading and how we were finding our classes.

  In the time that we had been separated, she had held on to the hope that perhaps some family member of hers would appear and reclaim her. It was not that the grammar school teacher and his wife were cruel to her, but that she had been craving her own family more than ever. Owing to this, the grammar school teacher and his wife had even made efforts to see if they could locate any of her extended family members. But word of mouth was only so effective. Anyway, perhaps her extended family, like her immediate family, had also been casualties of the war.

  We did not talk about what happened in Nnewi. Not about getting caught, or the scolding that followed, or the meeting with Mama, or of our separate Bible studies.

  By the look of things, she was still the same Amina I remembered, quiet and serious, only a little more contemplative than before.

  31

  THE FIRST HOLIDAY of the semester arrived. Many students packed their bags and headed home. Amina and I were among the few remaining.

  One day during that holiday, with permission from the gate prefects we walked out of the campus and down the road beyond the school.

  The Ekulo River, at the tip of the road where we met it, was narrow, but from where we stood, a point slightly elevated from the water, it appeared to grow increasingly wide. Weak waves crept up now and then, bathing the reddish-brown earth that flanked the river at its sides.

  We walked farther and made ourselves seats on a tiny patch of grass under one of the palm trees. The earth was warm underneath us, having soaked up the sun’s rays. Off and on, a cool breeze blew, and the palm leaves made whipping sounds as they thrashed against one another. Those leaves that had previously fallen tumbled on the sand.

  At a distance, a woman washed her clothes. Sparrows flew. The air smelled of earth and river water.

  At first there was some space between us, but I moved closer to her. We sat silently like that for a while, and then after some time I reached from behind, covered her eyes with my hands. “Hear it?” I asked.

  “Hear what?”

  “The water. Calming, no?”

  “No,” she said. She turned to face me. Wrinkles formed on her forehead. “Restless,” she said. “It makes me restless.”

  My Bible lessons with Mama came flooding back in my head. Restless, I thought. Images of cattle and of creeping things and of wild animals and of the birds. God created them all, and on the seventh day He rested. Even God rested. But here was Amina, claiming to be restless—to be without rest.

  I saw a stick on the ground near where we sat. I picked it up and mindlessly began clearing the sand in front of us of the larger pebbles.

  “Why are you restless?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. But she appeared to think about it for a moment, then she said, “For all sorts of reasons.”

  “What would it take to make you no longer feel restless?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Above us, birds were chirping. With the stick I sketched a bird in the sand. “Birds are happy and free,” I said. “Listen to them—don’t they make you feel happy and free? We could come here as often as possible just to listen to the birds.”

  Amina drew her thighs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs.

  I scattered the sand, erasing the sketch of the bird. I put down the drawing stick.

  To my surprise, she picked it up and began drawing in the sand. She drew two figures who stood holding hands. Clouds made of circles hung above them.

  She smiled when she was done, a half-smile.

  “It’s a nice picture,” I said, looking at her.

  She reached over and placed her hand above mine. “Maybe just holding hands will be all it takes,” she said. “Maybe just holding hands will be enough.”

  She was cupping handfuls of sand with her free hand now, letting the grains trickle out between her fingers. I replied, “Yes, maybe just holding hands will be enough.”

  The next morning, very early, she knocked on my door, and I answered.

  Across her shoulders was a small blanket. She held the blanket tight. Underneath the blanket she was already dressed for the day in a periwinkle gown that I had never before seen on her. Her braids were gathered loosely into a bun at the nape of her neck. She looked worn-out.

  “Didn’t you sleep last night?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “My mind was thinking so hard I couldn’t sleep. I get worried sometimes.”

  “What are you so worried about?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Everything.” She paused. “Us.”

  “Don’t be worried,” I said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  She stayed just looking at me a moment, then she said, “Anyway, I ca
me because I was wondering if you’d like to go again to the river. I’d like it if you could.”

  “Of course,” I replied. There was nothing I would have loved more to do.

  32

  SCHOOL HAD NOT yet resumed. It had been an ordinary day, and now Amina and I sat on the steps of the veranda of her dorm building, about to eat. There was an ashy smell coming out of the bowls of rice and beans.

  “It’s too burnt,” I said.

  She was the one who had prepared the meal. But as she cooked, she had been reading The Drummer Boy, which, before the holidays came, she had borrowed from the school library. The beans had sat on the fire while she got carried away with the book. As she was the one who was in charge of making the food, I had been blissfully tuned out, or else I would have gone and checked on it for her. Now it was too late.

  She sat across from me, looking very apologetic.

  “It’s like eating ashes,” I teased, lifting a spoonful of the beans to my mouth.

  She hung her head a little. “I don’t think it’s that bad.”

  I teased some more. “Even worse than eating ashes. I don’t know, this might very well poison us, char up our insides like burnt toast and leave us hacking our lungs out.”

  She rose angrily and began to gather the plates of food and the spoons, everything clanging with everything else. Ruckus here, ruckus there.

  “I was just joking,” I said, reaching out to stop her.

  She paused in the middle of her gathering.

  “I was just joking,” I said again.

  It was late in the evening. The sky was dark. With so many of the students still gone, there was no one nearby. I moved close to her, took the plates from her hands, set them down on the floor. I took her by the hand and led her to the far corner of the veranda, by the wall. I pushed her gently until her back was against the wall. We found ourselves in a tangle, our hands all around us, then settling on our waists. I placed my lips on the crook of her neck, and she moaned, holding me tighter by the waist. When our lips finally met, she kissed me hungrily, as if she’d been waiting for this all along. I breathed in the scent of her, deeply, as if to take in an excess of it, as if to build a reserve for that one day when she would be gone.

  33

  AT FIRST MAMA had come at least every other weekend to visit me at the school, as if to keep an eye out that I was not falling back into temptation with Amina. The school was a three-hour trip from her bungalow in Aba, and given that she was now running her shop, which was open every day of the week, locking up and coming to the school was a sacrifice where income was concerned, but she did it anyway.

  Whenever she visited, she brought provisions for me: Cabin biscuits, tinned Titus sardines, garri, sugar, Peak milk, a can of Milo, a loaf of bread, and some cooked rice and stew. She and I would sit on the veranda of my dorm building and eat the rice and stew.

  She’d stay with me for several hours. Amina knew to keep away during these times.

  This was the way it went:

  Me, taking one spoon for every five of Mama’s.

  “Eat more,” she’d say.

  “Mama, I’m not hungry,” I’d reply.

  “How can it be afternoon, you haven’t eaten any lunch, and you tell me you’re not hungry?”

  I’d simply shrug.

  When she could no longer persuade me to eat more, she’d shake her head and say something to the effect of, “This child, I don’t know what I will do with you!”

  We always sat around for a while afterward as Mama drilled me on my courses and general welfare. Sometimes we’d take a stroll outside the school compound before she then prepared to leave.

  “You make sure you eat the remaining food,” she’d say. “Don’t let me hear that you threw it away or let it go to waste. Remember Biafra.” Almost always, the same reminder of the war and how hard food was to come by during those days.

  “I won’t throw it away or let it go to waste,” I always responded. Which was the truth, because after I had walked Mama to the school gate and seen her off, I returned to my room only to pick up the remaining food and take it to Amina’s dorm. She was the reason that I was careful not to eat too much with Mama. Amina was the one I looked forward to sharing my meals with.

  34

  “THE DEVIL HAS returned again to cast his net on you,” Mama would surely say of what I was doing. Or “Adam and Eve, not Eve and Eve.” But even with those words in my head, I could not help myself.

  I continued to see Amina. On evenings after classes, we ate our meals together, if not in the cafeteria, then on the veranda steps or inside our dorms, at our desks.

  On weekends when we were allowed, or when more holidays rolled around, those holidays during which we did not go home, we strolled over to the river together. Sometimes we held hands as we walked, as inconspicuously as we could, making sure to present ourselves in a manner more like that of regular schoolgirls than that of two girls in love.

  But we were in love, or at least I believed myself completely to be. I craved Amina’s presence for no other reason than to have it. It was certainly friendship too, this intimate companionship with someone who knew me in a way that no one else did: it was a heightened state of friendship. Maybe it was also a bit of infatuation. But what I knew for sure was that it was also love. Maybe love was some combination of friendship and infatuation. A deeply felt affection accompanied by a certain sort of awe. And by gratitude. And by a desire for a lifetime of togetherness.

  35

  THE DISCOVERY BEGAN with just a rumor and occurred well into our second year at the school.

  On visiting days, which usually fell on Saturdays, students from the neighboring boys’ school came. The teachers would walk around carrying their canes in their hands, chaperoning their visit. All over the campus, girls and boys gathered on the verandas in front of the buildings. No one was allowed to take a boy inside the dorm. But by the Monday following one Saturday visit from the boys, rumors began to spread.

  The story had it that long before this last visiting day, a boy had been sneaking onto the campus and even inside a girl’s dorm—or maybe the girl had been sneaking out to his dorm to be with him. Either way, now she was pregnant, and the rumors implied that she’d been pregnant for some time.

  Ugochi’s name was the first to pop into my mind. How long had I been watching her sneaking in and out of campus at night, meeting this man friend and that. It made sense to me that it must be her.

  Monday morning and afternoon came and went, and I did not see or hear from Ugochi. She did not come to the dorm room at all.

  Then, Monday evening, the whistle shrieked as one of the prefects came around announcing that morning assembly the following day would be earlier than usual. “Do not come a minute late or there will be consequences!” the prefect warned.

  I thought of poor Ugochi. Where was she now? How was she handling all that was befalling her? How terrible it must be for her to have people whispering about her behind her back.

  Tuesday morning came. We stood in rows, in our green and white uniforms, on the assembly grounds.

  “Many of you know Ozioma,” the headmistress began. “And by now many of you have heard that she is pregnant with a certain Nonso’s child.” There was a collective gasp at the revelation of the names. I sighed with relief that it was not Ugochi, and then it was a moment before I wrapped my brain around the fact that quiet Ozioma, whom everyone knew to be the headmistress’s pet, had somehow slipped up and, in the process, wound up pregnant.

  “Hush with your surprise,” the headmistress was saying. “Now, I ask you all before me, why are you surprised? Is it a surprise? Is it not true that bad company corrupts good character?

  “But let it be known that this was not the result of any negligence on the part of your teachers or on my part. Between assemblies and Sunday services and revivals, you certainly have been taught right from wrong. Those of you who have made a habit of sneaking out of school grounds, take note.” />
  She finished: “A word is enough for the wise. Let this be a warning. Be wary of becoming like Ozioma, of allowing your good character to be soiled by bad company.”

  It was in this vein that Tuesday turned to Wednesday, and Wednesday to Thursday, and so on until the weekend rolled around. Many of the students packed their bags and went home for the weekend. Amina and I remained again, only this time with the headmistress’s warning in mind.

  36

  BECAUSE IT WAS primarily an Igbo school, it was also a Christian school, and because it was a Christian school, all of the students were required to go to Sunday services and Sunday revivals, as well as Wednesday-evening devotionals. This was a requirement even on holidays, for those who stayed behind. If Amina had not taken issue with the grammar school teacher’s decision to conduct Bible studies on her behalf—there was no indication that she had remonstrated—she was not now taking issue with having to attend services and practice the Christian faith. She attended and participated just like any of the other girls, the Hausa/Igbo girl included.

  Early on a Sunday Amina and I had gone to the service with all the girls who had not gone home. Then we had whiled away time reading at the library.

  Now we were once again at the river, sitting in our usual spot, observing as the sky changed from bright blue to gray. After a while, the sun appeared to dissolve, and we watched as the sky turned a deeper shade of gray.

  Amina took my hand and pulled me up, smiling all the while. She held my hand that way for a few moments, then stepped back from where I stood, letting go of my hand. She twirled then, so fast that her pleated skirt rose flat around her, like an upside-down plate. She giggled, as if embarrassed that her skirt should come up so far. She pushed it back down with her hands, looking into my eyes, searching, as if to find out exactly how much I had seen.

  I twirled back in defiance, twirled so fast that the flared skirt of my dress came up as high as hers had, only I made no move to push it back down. Soon she was twirling with me. I heard her laugh, and I laughed with her, and soon we were falling down with all that laughter, at a joke that neither of us could quite have explained.