Under the Udala Trees

by Chinelo Okparanta

  We sat on the ground to catch our breath, just looking at each other. The straps of her dress had fallen down her shoulders. I tugged at them, pulled them lower, looked longingly at her.

  “Will you—” she began in a whisper.

  “Will I?”

  She moved closer to me.

  “This?” I asked, pulling her straps lower.

  She sighed, like a gasp, but she moved closer, her eyes steady on me.

  I allowed my fingers to trace the upper part of her dress, its bodice, where the lace hem met her skin. She pulled my hand lower, just above her breast. I felt the thumping of her heart. She leaned into me and sighed again. We stayed a moment like that. Suddenly she turned her eyes from me, looked downward, as if suddenly self-conscious. Her dress still covered her body, everything but her shoulders, but she must have felt more naked than that, because she proceeded to wrap her arms over her shoulders.

  We returned to campus in the dark, not saying a word, walking along the roads lined with palm and plantain trees, her yellow dress and my cream-colored one billowing in the breeze.

  Back on school grounds, I started to go in the direction of my dorm, but she grasped my hand and we both walked in the direction of hers.

  In her dorm room, we kicked off our shoes and sat on opposite ends of the bed. Her roommate had gone home for the weekend. My heart raced, a mixture of terror and excitement at the possibility of finally arriving at something that I had for some time begun to think of as a hopeless dream.

  She rose from her end of the bed and moved so that she was next to me. After a while we stretched ourselves flat on the mattress. The room was dark, but the moon, through the horizontal slits of the shutters, shone through.

  We watched each other by the light of the moon. We fell asleep that way.

  It must have been sometime in the middle of the night that she woke up with a start, asking me if I had seen it, if I had heard it. “Hailstones,” she blurted out, “and fire, pouring down and forming craters where they landed.” Her body shook as she spoke, almost as if she were shivering from a fever.

  She described the dream, something about a carriage in the sky pulled by golden horses with no horseman. People were lining up, marching toward the bright light that encircled the carriage in the sky.

  I hadn’t meant to do so, but I found myself laughing in her face. “I see you’ve been reading your Bible,” I said. “Sounds to me like the book of Revelation.” I laughed some more.

  “The children,” she cried, her voice shaky now. “Small children, sweat dripping from their heads. So much sweat that their clothes were soaking wet.” With all that marching, she said, those poor children must have been achy, on the brink of exhaustion, some of them probably even beyond that, because every once in a while one fell to the ground, and the others simply stepped over him.

  Maybe it was a sign, she said. Maybe we were the fallen children, the sinful ones without the strength to continue in the path of right­eousness.

  “No,” I replied, taking her dream more seriously now. I shook my head, told her that it was all just a dream. I pulled her close to me and held her, my face in the crook of her neck. Was it her scent that gave me a feeling of joyful deliriousness? I kissed her, from her neck to her jawline and then to her lips. Her dress had come unbuttoned at the front, and I ran my hands across her chest, caressed her breasts. “We are far from fallen children,” I said. “It’s only a dream.”

  Her hand was moist on my lap. She leaned into me, stroked my face, returned my kiss with one full of yearning, deeper and more longing than mine. But I had already lost her. As soon as she parted from the kiss, she rose from the bed. She buttoned up her dress, found her sandals, and strapped them on. She walked over to the door and opened it. Cold air came in from outside. She stood there in the doorframe, her body faltering a little, like a shadow on the verge of fading. After some time just standing there, she walked out of the room, closing the door gently behind her.

  37

  FOR A COUPLE of weeks after that dream incident, Amina and I did not eat together, did not meet to go to the river, barely spoke to each other on our way to and from classes.

  About the third Saturday after the dream, I was getting fed up with the way things were, fed up that everything between us should suddenly change again, and all on account of a stupid dream.

  All day that Saturday, I had stayed in the library, hoping that Amina would stop in, but she didn’t.

  Now the sun was setting, and though I was not outside with the rest of the students, I knew that the teachers were announcing the end of visiting hours. From the open windows near where I sat, I could see that one by one the boys were sauntering away. Cardinal Rex’s highlife music, Ibi Na Bo, was playing, coming from a veranda near the library building. Some people hummed along to it as they walked by on their way to let themselves out through the school gate.

  I made up my mind then that I would get to the bottom of things. I closed the book I was reading and stood up. It was as if there was a fire at my feet, propelling me to move, to do something.

  At her door, I knocked, three firm taps that I knew she would hear, if she was inside to hear. There was no answer.

  In the distance, I could hear that Ibi Na Bo had finished playing, and now Love Mu Adure had taken over.

  I knocked again. Tap. Tap. Tap. Still nothing.

  Just as I turned to walk away, I heard the rattling of the doorknob.

  She came out, closed the door behind her. “My roommate is sleeping,” she said in a low voice. “She’s not feeling well today.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry she’s sick.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Just a stomachache. I picked some lemongrass and boiled it for her to drink.”

  “That was nice of you to do,” I said. “I hope it helps.”

  She nodded.

  I said, “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “I know,” she said. “Things have been busy.”

  “What’s making them so busy?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “School. Reading. Sick roommate.”

  We were standing face to face. I moved closer to her, took her hand in mine. “We missed all the music and the dancing today,” I said.

  “I know,” she said, pulling her hand out of mine. “Maybe next time.”

  I said, “We don’t have to wait till next time. We can hear the music all the way from here.” I took her hand in mine again, pulled her close to me. She did not pull away this time; instead she held on tightly. But she was wide-eyed and unsmiling. I moved closer, raised my hands to hold her by the waist. My hands had hardly touched her waist when she cried out, “Please stop!”

  She said it again, more quietly this time, “Please. Stop.”

  I let go of her.

  She brought her hand to her forehead and said, “You know, actually, I have a headache. I think I need to sleep myself. I hope you have a good rest of the day. I’ll see you around.”

  She turned and stepped into the room, shutting the door behind her, not bothering to wait for my response.

  38

  BY THE END of that second year, no amount of persuasion or cajoling or flat-out rationalizing had managed to take away the standoffishness that Amina had acquired as a result of that dream.

  If I said, “God loves us all the same,” she said, “Not the thieves and the liars and the cheats, not the murderers, not the disobedient. He couldn’t possibly love us all the same.”

  Once, I went so far as to quote her John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” And I said, “You see, God loves us all the same. He gave His only son to save us all. All of us, even the thieves and liars and cheats, even the murderers and the disobedient. Even those of us accused of abominations.” By this time, a large part of me did not believe I had committed any type of abomination, but I said it anyway. Just to point
out to her that God loved us all. Just to point out to her that He didn’t put any qualifiers on His love. Not even when He said to love your neighbor as yourself. He didn’t say don’t love the thieving neighbors, or don’t love the adulterers, or don’t love the liars or the cheats or the disobedient children. He simply said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

  All of this explaining. Still, Amina would not budge.

  By our third year, it was as if she had become a secondary-school-aged, Nigerian version of Margaret Thatcher, iron lady through and through.

  Then one day, as if by a miracle, on a Sunday around the middle of our third year, the headmistress announced the upcoming visit of an onye ocha minister, who promised to perform wonders through prayer. I was all ears.

  He would be the special guest at our revival ceremony the following Sunday, the headmistress said.

  During the war, some of the villagers in Ojoto had gone around saying that the Red Cross ndi ocha workers had been sent to Biafra by God to save us. Once, I watched as several of the villagers threw their hands above their heads and exclaimed, “Glory be to God! The ndi ochas can even bring back the dead!” I have no idea what led them to say that—maybe one of the Red Cross nurses had successfully treated a dying person, returning him to health. Whatever the case, the idea of an onye ocha minister coming to our school to perform miracles instantly reminded me of what the villagers had been saying during the war, so that, for me, the impending visit took on the feel of medicine. In my mind, it was as if all I’d have to do was show up at the revival, take a full Sunday regimen of onye ocha prayer tablets, and just like that, everything would be fixed.

  The Sunday of the minister’s revival, it rained. The senior prefects led the way. We followed, all of us trudging along through the pouring rain, through swampy marshlands and mud-caked trails.

  We reached an open field several kilometers from our campus, gathered in a large circle around the minister and his small crew of ndi ochas, the rain beating down on us.

  The minister wore a short-sleeved white oxford shirt and a pair of brown trousers, both of which, soaked, clung to his body. He was pale, like any other white man, but he was dark too, tanned from the sun, so much so that the skin on his face and on his arms reminded me of a belt, or a cattle hide, owing to that leathery look of it.

  By his side, a gray-haired onye ocha woman sat in a silver and black wheelchair. She was a cripple, the minister explained, speaking in his rambling, onye ocha way, one word melting into the next.

  Another onye ocha man stood by the crippled woman, holding a long stick. “Look upon him and bear witness to the power of God!” the minister announced. “Look and marvel at a man who has spent all his life deprived of sight. But today, my brothers and sisters in Christ, today he shall see!”

  All around I heard the collective “Amen” of fellow students.

  The minister began with the crippled woman. He wheeled her to the very middle of the crowd and asked us to position ourselves in the field so that we could properly see. The praying began:

  “Dear Almighty Lord in heaven, we are gathered here today to ask Your mercies. We come to You to ask You to strengthen us and lead us into the light, so that we might not, through our weaknesses, remain in the dark. O font of life and blood and water, we acknowledge that we exist in this world only in order to allow You to exercise Your admirable grace and divine power on us. Eternal Father, we beg You to shower on us Your tender love so that we might see on our persons the changes we seek . . .”

  He went on that way for some time when, abruptly, his words morphed from English into something I could not understand. He continued along the lines of: “Devetium nahalesh divium namaha selelehakim danashanka levan balaton zaphan alatay fakani . . .” He flailed his arms as he spoke. His eyes fell closed.

  “Ushku bilani arakesh rushki rohush ekeleledu skuda wudswia . . .” On and on he went, so much jibberish that by the time I finally wrapped my head around what was happening, he was already coming to an end. The ending at least was sprinkled with words I could recognize. For whatever reason, he finished with the words “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”

  He leaned over the woman in the wheelchair, helped her up so that she appeared to stand in an upright position. He proceeded to pull her wheelchair away slowly. The woman continued to stand after the wheelchair was a few feet away. A minute went by during which she appeared to stabilize herself on her two feet. She steadied herself some more, and then, quite unexpectedly, she began to walk.

  The crowd roared, raising their hands high toward the sky. “Praise the Lord!” All over the field, the collective rise of voices, thanking God and the Lord Jesus for the miracle before our eyes.

  “Are you ready for what God has in store for you next?” the minister cried.

  “We are ready!” the crowd screamed.

  “Are you ready to witness God’s next miracle before your very eyes?”

  “Yes, minister, we are ready to witness the next miracle of God!”

  The minister went over to the blind man, held him by the arm. The rain had stopped. Briefly the minister prayed again, distorted and unnatural-sounding words falling out hard from his mouth, words as hard as rocks.

  He picked up a small decanter from the ground, poured its contents into the palm of his hand. He sprinkled the liquid on the blind man’s head, on his shoulders, on his face. Finally he sprayed the liquid in the direction of the blind man’s eyes.

  “Now, brothers and sisters, bear witness to yet another miracle!”

  The crowd cheered.

  The minister held up two fingers. “How many fingers?” he asked the blind man.

  “Two!” the blind man cried.

  The minister held up his fingers once more, four fingers this time. “How many fingers?”

  “Four!” the blind man cried.

  “By the glory of God, this man has been healed! By the divine glory of God, he can see again!”

  Once more, the collective raising of hands high toward the sky, and the collective cry of “Praise the Lord!”

  Our voices were like eagles, and our amens soared.

  Later, we lined up to get our own personal miracles, everybody in a straight line behind a gray metal bucket where the minister stood. But first the donation, without which the miracle could not be performed. The minister oversaw as we dropped our money into the bucket, the coins clinking as they piled in heaps, one on top of the other.

  The naira notes he took himself, folded them, placed them carefully in the fanny pack he wore around his waist.

  I had come with some naira bills, money that was supposed to be for my meals and school supplies. I took a couple out of my pocket and handed them to the minister. I explained to him that my ailment pertained to the heart. He nodded sympathetically, his lips curving downward to demonstrate his empathy. Next came the sprinkles of holy water on my head and all over my face, over my shoulders. He began again to pray, a hurried prayer, his voice like a murmur, but somehow still quite loud.

  Finally he said, “Go in peace, my child.” He seemed to be panting a little, struggling a bit for air. What hard work, performing miracles, his panting seemed to say.

  “How long before my prayers are answered?” I asked.

  He looked taken aback by the question, but he quickly replied, “By the time you return to the school compound, you should start to see changes.” For a moment he looked at me with scrutinizing eyes, and then he said, “Don’t worry. As an emissary of God, I can tell you that your prayers will be answered. Your heart will be just fine.”

  Until now, Amina and I had managed to stay out of each other’s paths. But at that moment I looked up to find that she was standing next in line. As she walked up to the minister she hardly looked my way. Her face was somber, and though at the time I did not have the slightest clue what miracle she was asking the onye ocha to perform for her, sometimes these days I think I know. Sometimes I speculate that she must have gotten exactly what she a
sked for. But at the time, it appeared that it was I who would get my wish. Maybe this is the way it goes when people approach God with contrary requests. How does God choose whose request to fulfill? Does God fight a battle of wills on their behalf? Does God play favorites? Humans double-deal. If it is true that we are made in His likeness, then does God double-deal?

  39

  UGOCHI WAS IN her nightgown, sitting on the chair by her bed. On her desk, the flame of her lantern flickered, casting shadows like wandering scars on her face. She had not been at her desk long, because earlier she was out on the river, in a canoe with a boy. All evening, too, she had been with the boy. They had simply drifted on the river, she said, drinking Fanta and Coke and watching the flocks of swallows fly around in the blue skies.

  “Just drifting and drinking soft drinks and watching the birds?” I asked. “Just how much drifting could you both have possibly done on that river, being that the river is not all that big, more like a narrow stream flanked at the sides by the jagged earth? Was there even room in it for a canoe?”

  “Na wa-oh,” she said, rolling her eyes accusingly, as if to declare me the guilty one for daring to ask the question. “Little Miss Innocent, what do you even know of these things? You must know more than I think you do.” She pursed her lips so that they formed a tight circle with only a bit of an opening between. She sucked air into her mouth so that out came a sound somewhere between a shush and a whistle.

  I rolled my eyes back at her. “I know enough to know that you weren’t just drifting and drinking soft drinks,” I said.

  Slowly her lips relaxed themselves into a naughty smile. “Ngwa, I will tell you,” she said. “But, nee anya, you cannot tell anybody. Not a soul, you hear me? I don’t want to become the subject of gossip-gossip like Ozioma.”