She took my hand in hers and brought it to her waistline. In one swift motion, she unzipped her skirt at the side zipper. The skirt loosened, and she brought my hand inside. She wore no undergarments, not even a slip. Her skin where my hand landed was warm. But she moved it lower, pausing momentarily at the curls of hair that started low beneath her belly. She stopped only when my hand arrived at the wet flesh at the center. I felt a slight insecurity, having done this only with Amina before. What if the things that Amina had enjoyed were not the same things that would please Ndidi? What if I was somehow insufficient?
I would try anyway. I moved to her front, knelt before her. I pressed her wet flesh firmly with the tips of my fingers, then my fingers found themselves inside, enveloped by her warmth.
She gasped. The gasping transformed into moaning. I moved my fingers slowly in and out. I rubbed gently in small circles, slow at first and then faster, the way I had done with Amina and with myself.
Her hips moved along.
It did not take much time. She let out a cry, and I found myself overcome by emotion—warm feelings, feelings of affection, of happiness, of something like love; feelings of elation at being able to connect so intimately with her, at being able to elicit such an intense reaction from her. It was as if her pleasure was in that moment my own, ours, a shared fulfillment.
I held her, whispered her name, placed soft kisses on her face, her neck, her lips. If I could have stayed forever this way with her, there would have been no greater gift.
She let out another cry, and then her entire body stiffened in my embrace, with recurrent shudders, until finally she relaxed into my arms.
At home that night, the panicked dreams were worse than on all the preceding nights combined. Throughout my sleep I was confronted with Mama’s scolding face, her reprimanding finger wagging at me, threatening to poke out an eye. The images of Mama were interspersed with a thunderous sound that, in the dream, was the voice of God, scolding also like Mama, reprimanding, condemning me for my sins. Each time I fell back to sleep, the same dream. Eventually I rose from bed, no longer willing myself to sleep. I pulled off my nightgown, changed into one of my day gowns. Dressed, I went back to bed and sat, not daring even to lie down. I sat there for hours, wide awake, waiting for day to break.
As the sun peeked through the sky and darkness turned to a light gray, I climbed out once more from bed, picked up my Bible and prayer scarf, and headed out of my room. It was still early enough that Mama would not yet have awoken.
I walked briskly out the front door and along the path leading across the yard. I stepped outside the gate and switched to a running pace until I arrived at church.
I went down the aisle to the front of the church, as I had done the time before. I knelt down before God. I would have prayed, but somehow I could not find the words to do so. I took a deep breath, slowly exhaling, attempting to steady myself that way. And then another deep breath. And another.
My breathing finally stabilized. I attempted once more to string together the words to form a prayer, but nothing came. I remained mute. Not a single word to express myself, not a single one to explain or to defend myself, not one single word to apologize and beg forgiveness for my sins. All I felt within me was a trembling from this questionable sort of guilt. A sense of defeat washed over me. Tears spilled out, forming tiny dark spots on the gray cement floor of the church. I took in a deep breath and then exhaled. The exhalation came out as a long, tumbling sigh. Somewhere in the middle of it, I remembered John 8. I knelt there at the front of the church and at last the words came out of my mouth, Jesus’ words: He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
I felt a slow rising of relief. A steady dispersion of it, and then an overshadowing of that earlier sense of defeat. I exhaled once more. The air smelled of tears and sweat and that sharp scent of wet concrete.
50
I WAS GOING BACK and forth between the front and the rear of the store, dusting shelves and restocking, when I saw the man enter. His hair rose high above his head as if to form a black halo around him. He had a beard, a mustache, and sideburns trailing down his cheeks.
He headed toward the crates of drinks and picked up a bottle of Guinness. He wore a watered-down smile, the kind that matched the dull and wrinkled shirt he was wearing, the kind that matched the faded blue tie around his neck.
“Ego one ka ifa bu?” he asked Mama, holding the bottle out toward her when he had reached the counter. How much?
He had just collected his change and turned to leave when I recognized him. Also at that moment, I heard, “Na wa-oh!” The tone of Mama’s voice was a mixture of glee and surprise.
“Chibundu!” she exclaimed.
At that moment he recognized her too.
He greeted Mama, and then he turned to me. “Ijeoma! Is it you?” He turned back to Mama. “Mrs. Okoli, long time!”
Memories flooded back, of Chibundu pulling my hair, of us climbing trees, of running around church together. Of him saying, “Look really closely at us so that you never forget that we were friends.”
“Long time,” Mama was saying. She had come around the counter and was greeting him with a hug, saying, “Welcome o. Welcome. Nno.”
His shirt was wrinkled and untucked at the waist. Ridges had formed on his forehead, age lines that made him seem far older than the image of him in my mind. But of course. He was no longer a boy.
Back in Ojoto, Mama never seemed to have a soft spot for Chibundu, but now it appeared that she did. She spent the remainder of that day, and the rest of the week, talking to me about him.
“He has done very well for himself. Imagine, little Chibundu, a graduate of the University of Ibadan and now doing Youth Service here in Aba! His mother and father must be very proud.”
“Yes,” I said. “They must be very proud.”
51
“THERE WAS A beating yesterday,” Ndidi said very softly one evening. She appeared to be speaking to herself or into the air, rather than to me.
“They were two men. I never knew them. They were friends of Adanna from the university. For days they seemed to have disappeared, fallen off the face of the earth. And then yesterday she heard something at the market, whispers about a pair of ‘sissies’ being beaten by a crowd of people. She went to the bushes behind the dirt road not far from where they lived, and she found the two of them there, naked and beaten to death.”
Her voice was soft and raspy now, as if her throat was parched.
“This sort of thing has always happened. Like several years ago when they burned down that other church I told you about. But I hadn’t been going to that church, so the burning did not feel completely real. And no one died. This time it’s different. This time it basically happened right before my eyes, and I can’t shake the feeling that it could easily have been me or you.”
I went to her and wrapped my arms around her.
“We called the police. They couldn’t even be bothered to do anything, not even to take the bodies away. ‘Let them rot like the faggots they are,’ one of the officers said. The other one said, ‘If they were not dead already, we would beat them some more.’ In the end, it was Adanna and I who took their bodies,” she said. “We carried them and cleaned them and prepared them for burial. Imagine, holding their bodies in my arms.”
Her voice by now was a trembling whisper.
52
THERE HAD BEEN nothing extraordinary about the events of the first half of the following day: Mama and I worked at the shop as usual. In the evening I went to Ndidi’s, where she and I ate some garri and okra soup for dinner. Afterward, Ndidi and I went to the church.
First we had danced in the middle of the floor, to the sound of Fela Kuti’s voice, “Shakara Oloje” flowing loudly from the record player. Then we pushed ourselves deep into the corner of the church, at the rear, where the table of beer and jugs of kai kai and crates of soft drinks sat. We had become like all the other girls by now, kissing and fo
ndling and making out in the dark.
I had not intended to stay so long. My plan had been to return home earlier than last time, before eleven p.m. Mama would scold me again for being late, but at least it would not be a new grievance. She might be worried, but not overly so, since it was something I’d done before.
But things did not go as I had planned.
The knocking at the front door of the church came when Ndidi and I stood making out at the rear of the dance floor. It might have been soft at first, but soon it was a loud banging sound.
We watched as several of the girls peeked out from the heavy drapes at the windows. A heavy hush fell over the place, and for a moment Fela Kuti’s music was the only audible sound. Then there was the hurried scrambling of feet, and one of the girls, Chichi, herded the rest of the girls to the back of the church where Ndidi and I stood. “Shhhh,” Chichi repeated, her index finger meeting her lips.
Outside, behind the church, it was that time of the morning when the moon is looming, the sky is still dark, and the cocks have not yet crowed. Midnight had come and gone.
Ndidi held my hand as we ran. The palm fronds were not quite covering the wooden slab at the entrance of the pit. We recognized the bunker that way.
In front of us and behind us, in the quiet of night, the girls, a dozen or so of us, lined up quietly to make our way into the bunker. Chichi pulled open the wooden slab and allowed us to climb into the hole.
We packed the bunker tightly like stacked-up tubers of yam. Chichi pulled the wooden slab back over the entrance of the pit. We stood quietly, our breaths hushed, the way we used to do those days during the war.
Above us, but a little distance away, we heard a scream, and then another. Then there were the sounds of men’s and women’s voices, talking, shouting, and then another scream.
Chichi raised herself, reached for the cover of the pit as if to open it up, but several of the girls pulled her arm back.
“They’ve caught someone,” she whispered to us. She looked frantically around. “There must be at least a couple of us missing.”
“Where is Adanna?” someone whispered.
Chichi reached again for the wooden cover.
The same group of girls pulled her arm back once more. “So you’ll allow the rest of us to die to save one?” a girl asked.
“Shhhh,” another girl said. “You don’t want them to know where we are hiding.” And of course the attackers would not have known unless we made it evident to them. These particular bunkers, I’d find out later, were very well concealed, palm covering and grass and all. Harder to detect than those of our war days. As if one or more of the girls had known to plan ahead. As if they had known that a raid like this would be inevitable.
Chichi no longer reached for the pit cover. We all returned to silence.
There was nothing else to do but to study the hole. All around, nothing but darkness, the smell of fresh earth, and in all that darkness the faint contour of bodies. Other sounds above us—of screams and cries and a man’s thundering voice, as if reciting a prayer. In my mind, I saw the walls of the earth collapsing around us like the pillars of the Temple of Dagon, the walls of our pit crumbling all around us, and we, Samson-like in our decline, crumbling along with the walls. So was this how we would meet our end? An image of Mama came to my mind, Mama weeping before my dead body, Mama at my grave, mourning over me. Or perhaps she would not mourn. Perhaps she would be too angry to mourn. Perhaps she would not even bother with a burial for me.
By my side, Ndidi held my hand.
The sound of the screaming grew louder, and for a moment I thought I heard the thuds of feet approaching the bunker. But seconds and then minutes passed and no one came.
Everything seemed to settle above us. The screaming died out. The praying faded away. We stood rigidly breathing in the scent of our bodies, of our collective sweat. Breathing in the scent of our collective fear.
The knock seemed to come as gradually and steadily as the crawl of a snail. A tap, and then another quiet tap on the wooden slab of the bunker. We must have been inside for over an hour by then.
I watched—we all watched—as, above us, the cover was pulled open. There was the light of a kerosene lantern, followed by the squinting face of a woman. She called for us to come out.
We made our way out one by one. Back above ground, the smell of burning tires was strong in the air.
I recognized the woman who let us out as the one with the afro and short skirt who had led Adanna away during my first visit to the church. The woman had managed to hide in the small, cellar-like vault of the church and had not been found. Her face was tear-stricken. She was crying hard, coughing in fits, and she was pointing to something ahead.
We had hardly walked two yards when we saw, in the backyard of the church, a flame of orange and blue. A stack of burning logs. Ndidi began to cry, and then all of us were crying too, because we had all seen what remained of the face, and we had all recognized her: Adanna in the midst of the logs, burning and burning and turning to ashes right before our eyes.
I arrived back home at about seven in the morning. Mama was out by the gate.
“Where have you been?” she hollered. “What in God’s good name were you thinking to stay out all night? Do you know I have not slept a pinch? Are you that inconsiderate to make me wait up for you all through the night? Spending the night going back and forth from the gate to the bungalow and back, waiting for you. I was just getting ready to notify the police, and finally there you are. But what kind of thing was that to put me through? Do you not know better than to do that to me? Have I not trained you right?”
She caught her breath.
“That friend of yours, Ndidi, is she the reason for this? Tell me, is she? Is there something going on between the two of you?”
“Mama, I just fell asleep,” I replied. “Can you please stop with all your suspicions? I lost track of time and fell asleep, that’s all.”
I brushed past her, went through the gate, not waiting to hear what she said next. I made my way to my bedroom, where I could be alone with my thoughts.
53
RAIN CLOUDS HOVERED in the sky, spreading themselves over the sun like an ashen film. Through the shop door and window, it was the pallid gray of evening time. But it was yet afternoon.
Two weeks, nearly three, had gone by, and still all the talk in Aba continued to be about the discovery of the church and the burning. No one could say who had made the discovery, or who had taken part in the burning, but everyone seemed to agree that all of it was necessary, that the discovery was aided by God, that an example needed to be set in order to cleanse Aba of such sinful ways.
Ndidi and I kept a low profile. I stopped visiting her as much. Sometimes three days passed before I went to her place. I never stayed later than eight p.m.
“Lucky for you that the grammar school teacher and I warned you of this,” Mama said. She was standing behind the shop counter, writing my to-do list on a notepad, while I stood idly by her side. “That could have been you, Ijeoma. Imagine, not only would I be a widow, I would also have lost my only child.”
I listened quietly, gazing out into the gray outdoors, praying that Mama would move on to some other topic. The last thing I needed was to be reminded that it could have been me. And by extension that it could have been Ndidi. Since the incident, every couple of hours or so, the image of Adanna flashed through my mind. The recurring reminder that one of us had lost her life in that terrible way. The reminder that Adanna had burned at the stake while the rest of us were allowed to continue to live.
I wanted Mama to stop her preaching, to stop the reminders. As it was, I remembered the incident clearly enough on my own. I didn’t need any more reminders. Just stop, I prayed silently. Please, God, make her stop.
In that moment, as if to answer my prayer, Chibundu walked into the store. By now he had gotten into the habit of dropping by during his lunchtime. His visits were becoming a source of increasing anxi
ety for me—the fact of this unwanted attention that I did not know what to do about, how to dispose of. But at least he never visited in the evening, for which I was grateful. My evenings were, until the burning incident at least, reserved for Ndidi, and I could hardly imagine a better way to spend them.
I saw my moment to flee. I left Mama’s side, went into the stock room, and returned with a box of items to restock the shelves.
The beer cooler sat near the entrance of the store. Chibundu walked over to it, reached in, and brought out a bottle of Guinness. He straightened back up. The next step should have been for him to head to the counter to pay, or go to some other part of the store to pick up one or more items. But he did not move. He just stood there.
I had watched from behind the shelf as he reached in for the beer, but I had then returned to restocking, taking only momentary glimpses at him. My head was downturned in the direction of the box at my feet when I felt his gaze heavy on me. I looked up to find him still standing by the cooler, still gazing at me. In all the years that I was at the grammar school teacher’s and at Obodoañuli Academy, Chibundu and I had not kept in touch. Perhaps this was one reason why conversations between him and me during these afternoon visits were awkward. So many years had gone by that he seemed only a little less than a perfect stranger to me. But it was also true that I realized Chibundu might still hold a romantic interest in me. And if he did, how would I handle the situation? I found myself balking at the thought of it. How should I go about conversing with him without accidentally giving the wrong impression? How should I navigate the whole thing without giving Mama any ideas about a match between him and me?
My eyes darted to Mama at the counter to see if she was watching. I was relieved to find her head turned. She was flipping through the newspaper that lay open on the counter.
Under the Udala Trees Page 18
