Under the Udala Trees

by Chinelo Okparanta

  “What a wonderful day for all of us,” she said. “The day we’ve all been waiting for.”

  I did not see fit to respond.

  “Is something wrong?” Mama asked, but then she quickly brushed away the question, so determined was she that nothing would spoil this day for her.

  I sat fussing with my hands, tangling and untangling my fingers. “Mama,” I began, but I stopped. There was suddenly a startled look on her face, as if she already knew the words I was about to speak.

  “This is the way things go,” she said firmly. An exasperated laugh escaped from her. “The will of God.”

  She repeated it: “The wonderful will of God.”

  The white wedding came next, and there we were, in one of the small prayer rooms in the church. Mama slipped the gown over my head, zipped up the back so that its tight bodice hugged me. There was a bit of claustrophobia in its embrace. Sweat formed on my forehead. Several times I reached up and wiped it away. Eventually Mama folded a newspaper in half and began fanning me with it. “We can’t have sweat spoiling this day for us,” she said, her voice very impatient.

  We stayed silent a while.

  “What if it’s not for me?” I said after some time. Perfect pleats ran down the waistline of the dress. I traced the pleats with my fingers, up and down, up and down. There was a tremor in my hands.

  “What if what’s not for you?” Mama retorted, like a dare. She looked down and observed my trembling hands.

  “Marriage,” I said. “What if marriage is not—”

  I did not finish, because Mama’s voice came booming: “Hush before you breathe life into your doubts! Marriage is for everyone! Remember, a woman without a man is hardly a woman at all. Besides, good men are rare these days. Now that you’ve found one, you must do what you can to keep him.”

  She studied me for some minutes, peering at me with hard eyes. Then she softened, shook her head slowly, and studied me some more. Finally she said, “Nwa m, ke ihe ichoro ka m me? My child, what do you want me to do? A woman and a woman cannot be. That’s not the way it’s done. You must let go of any remaining thoughts you have of that.” She said it very softly, but firmly too. “If that’s what this is all about, you must let go of it. It’s not the way things are done.” She took a deep breath, then exhaled, composed herself. “You’ll see. This will all work out. Bia ka ayi je. Come, let’s go.”

  Soon I was going through with the sermon, the prayers, the kiss, the handshakes, the smiles, the nods, and the tangential congratulations. Because that’s what you do when you find yourself married to a man who both logic and your mother insist is the right man for you.

  PART VI

  56

  Port Harcourt, Rivers State

  1980

  THE SUN WAS relentless, its heat so oppressive that even the flies appeared too tired to fly.

  I forced one foot in front of the other. Even with my body heavy and distended at the middle, I continued to walk.

  The woman in front of me was wearing a colorful wrapper and matching blouse and carrying a hen in her hand, its legs tied together by a string. The hen was clucking. A motorcycle sped by, blowing its horn and adding to the noise.

  I crossed the tar-and-chip road, wrapping my hands underneath my belly like a brace. The road opened up on the right into a smaller, winding, dusty path. Along the path, two brown dogs were barking and a woman was shooing them away.

  The church was a small rectangle of a church, unremarkable aside from its zinc roof, which shone like tinsel in the sun.

  Inside, I took a seat at the front, in one of the pews, a simple bench like all the rest: one long plank set on two thin, cylindrical cement blocks. All over the place, the waxy scent of burning candles, though it did not appear that any candles were lit.

  Every day for nearly two months I had been coming and taking a seat in that same spot. Every day the same routine, in the morning or in the early afternoon while Chibundu was away at work, until late afternoon just before he returned home. And I would continue to come, because all the women were talking about it still, even if nearly two months had since passed. The women did not seem to be able to stop talking about it: How the cursed mother’s cries had been heard day in and day out in all the flats surrounding the clinic as she pushed and screamed and pushed and screamed. How, when the baby finally slid out, a sigh was heard, not just the woman’s, but an exhale of multitudes, a collective flicker of relief. Everything should have been fine after that, and things were, in fact, fine. But then the midwife took one clean look at the baby boy’s face and saw the horror that he was: a hole in his upper lip where flesh should have been, his left nostril spread wide and flat, not circling above the mouth as it should have been. Not surprising that it did not circle above: it could not be expected to. Not above what was an imperfect reproduction of a mouth, soggy and half-baked, like undercooked batter. A sight to see. A curse, they agreed. A bad omen. A harelip.

  By the following morning the woman had fled. After two days of labor she had simply fled. Fled, of course, without her baby boy. And the boy? Maybe he would be sent away to some orphanage, or maybe one of the midwives would take pity on him and resign herself to taking care of him. But more than likely he would be left to perish, unwanted and unloved. Because this was the nature of such things, of anything that was outside the norm. They were labeled with such words as “curse,” and wasn’t it wise to keep curses at bay?

  I settled into my seat on the bench. “Lord, have mercy,” I whispered, as I had been whispering every day now for the previous two months. If there were ever another person to be cursed, to be punished in the same way as the harelip’s mother, it was me. If it wasn’t bad enough that I had lived in sin all those years, lying with woman as I should instead have done with man, here I was, carrying Chibundu’s child, yet still allowing thoughts of Ndidi to linger in my mind. Thoughts of Amina, even. Thoughts of loving these two women.

  Why was it that I could not love Chibundu the way that I loved Amina and Ndidi? Why was it that I could not love a man? These days, I’ve heard it said that the gender of your first love determines the gender of all your future loves. Perhaps this was true for me. But back then, it was not a thing I ever heard. All I knew in that moment was that there was a real possibility of God punishing me for the nature of my love. My mind went back to the Bible. Because if people like Mama and the grammar school teacher were right, then the Bible was all the proof I needed to know that God would surely punish me.

  But if I were to go back to the Bible—to the New Testament specifically—what exactly were the consequences if we failed to do His will? Would God really carry out His will by way of punishment? Was not all our punishment taken care of by Jesus on the cross? What to make of God’s grace in combination with His punishment?

  Beyond welcoming thoughts of Ndidi, there was the matter of adultery. I acknowledged to myself that for all intents and purposes, I was an adulterer. Though I was not currently engaging in any physical acts with Ndidi, I knew well that, according to Matthew, everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. According to Matthew, I was in fact an adulterer.

  And so, the visits to church. Prayer would be the tool if I were to dominate my thoughts and desires. Prayer as a method of dousing my desires. Prayer, like water on fire.

  Prayer as a way to show God that He need not curse my child the way He had cursed the newborn at the clinic. If I could only pray enough, especially this last month of my pregnancy, perhaps all would be solved, done away with: the desires for Ndidi as well as the possibility of a harelip child.

  Now the sunlight was making its way inside the church through the slats of the wooden shutters, sun rays spreading out in long, tapering lines across the cement floor.

  I thought: So this is what it means to be married: to sit tensely in church, watching the sunlight spread itself all around me, with this constant fear of punishment. This must be married life: the daily at
tempt to pour out a basinful of hopeless desires. And yet the basin refuses to be emptied, as if the desires were wet cement that is already turning into concrete.

  This must be married life: to sit in church with so much unrest, but at home carry on the pretense that all is just as it should be.

  The clock inside the church was chiming half past the hour, playing a fragment of a tune, like a music box.

  I saw a shadow on the cement floor at the periphery of my eye, a gray silhouette of a person, elongated and approaching from the center aisle of the church.

  I was wearing my prayer scarf around my head. I tugged at it, out of a feeling of unease and apprehension over who it could possibly be.

  To my surprise, Chibundu approached. It was rare that he attended services on Sundays, let alone visit the church on a weekday. Long gone was the churchgoing child he used to be. And yet here he was.

  He took a seat next to me. We sat quietly on the bench for a while, then he said, “What is it? What’s making you come here so often? Ngozi from next door tells me that she’s seen you walking here quite a few times now.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “How can it be nothing?”

  “You should be at work,” I said. I had been thinking of telling him for all the time since we were married, but I could never quite get myself to do it. Now I reasoned again that he’d been nothing but kind to me, so perhaps I could just tell him. In fact, maybe it was best I told him, in case the baby should come out cursed, a harelip or such. I should tell him and apologize. So that he would know that I was sorry for it.

  “What are you doing away from work? Don’t tell me they’ve sacked you,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No, they haven’t sacked me. I had a consulting appointment in the area that finished early. I decided to stop home. You weren’t there. Ngozi said maybe I could find you here.”

  Silence.

  He said, “Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.”

  I had only been taking sideways glances at him. I turned now to look him square in the face. “It’s bad enough,” I said.

  Another silence.

  “Sometimes in Aba I used to catch Mama praying for me,” I said finally. “I would walk in on her accidentally as she knelt in the parlor, praying over me.”

  He was moving one foot across the cement floor, swinging it gently back and forth like a pendulum. His shoe against the coarse floor made a scraping sound. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound. Then I whispered, “An abomination.” I opened my eyes to catch the word’s effect on him.

  His eyes appeared to narrow. He looked suddenly deep in thought.

  “An abomination?” he repeated, a question.

  I nodded.

  Surely he must already have had his suspicions. But there was no way I could have known this at the time. And he was not yet ready to let me know that he knew. He did not bring it up. Maybe he simply felt a need to avoid the truth. Or maybe his silence on the topic was, at that point, something he wanted to do as a favor to me, for my sake, by virtue of his love. Because he did love me, or at least he had loved me as a boy, that former boyish sort of love.

  Or maybe his refusal to bring it up that day was a thing he did as a favor to himself, in order to allow himself the opportunity to continue to live out that old childhood love. Maybe he had, at some point before that day, decided that he could spend his whole life trying to fulfill a dream despite the unpromising circumstances.

  Whatever the case, he appeared to think about the word “abomination,” and then he said, “I myself, I’m no longer very much into church these days, as you know. See, I’m a businessman. And if you’re a businessman, then one thing you know is that business is all about gathering as many customers as possible and retaining them. Religion is basically a business, a very large corporation. Take the Anglican or Catholic Church, for instance. You have all these doctrines that are set up, and we are told that God is the reason for all of them.”

  “Isn’t He?” I asked.

  Chibundu shook his head. “No. I don’t think He is.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you look deeply enough into those doctrines, you begin to see that the Church just wants to do whatever it can to get as many followers as possible and to keep them under control. This is the way business works. So the Catholic Church tells us that ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ means ‘Don’t use contraceptives.’ And people actually soak it up and wind up having twelve children that they can’t possibly take care of. And they continue to have more children for fear of using contraceptives and angering God. And really, it’s not even God who’s making them do it. It’s the Church that has interpreted God’s words to its own benefit. Because the Church wants as many members as possible, as many followers as possible.”

  “But that’s not us. We’re not even Catholics. What’s your point?”

  “My point is that business is the reason for things like doctrines. Business is the reason for words like ‘abomination.’ The Church is the oldest and most successful business known to man, because it knows not only how to recruit customers but also how to control them with things like doctrines and words like ‘abomination.’ Bottom line is, take your abomination with a grain of salt. My sense of it is that some things are called abominations that really aren’t. And anyway, like you said, your mama is praying over you. And here you are, praying for yourself. If I were God, and if it turned out that you were actually committing an abomination, then I’d forgive you.”

  “Don’t you want to know what my abomination is?”

  His face had been solemn as he spoke, very serious, but now his lips curved into a slight smile, and he said, “Actually, no. I guess I don’t see the use in knowing. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m your husband, and I know you well enough to know that you are a good person, and that’s enough for me.” His arms came around me, a quick embrace and then two soft pats, a little stiff. I closed my eyes and imagined a less stiff embrace. Something soft and gentle, and indulgent even in its hesitation. There he was, hard and manly, offering me a reassuring embrace, and all I could think was that it was just a bit lacking. All I could think was that his embrace fell quite a bit short of what Ndidi’s could have been.

  “There are punishments for people who’ve done what I’ve done,” I began again, pulling myself away from him. “Stoning and dro—”

  He placed a finger over my lips, and just like that, he hushed me, canceled all the words that had been getting ready to make their way out of my mouth.

  For a long time I sat there, twirling my wedding band around my finger. Chibundu continued to sit with me. A year of marriage and a baby on the way, and yet there was no indication that my love for him would ever develop into a romantic kind of love.

  I thought about the journey we had made: A small boy and girl up in an orange tree. A clumsy kiss. The passage of time. An awkward proposal, a lackluster acceptance, a wedding ceremony, a wedding prayer, a wedding kiss.

  Handshakes, smiles, nods. Congratulations.

  I thought about what my life had become: Daily visits to church. Daily unrequited conversations with God. Speaking more and more to God, demanding that He speak back to me. Dear God, can you please just open Your mouth and say something? Anything. I need Your guidance. I need you. I need. Dear God. Please, just open Your mouth and speak.

  In the end, after about half an hour of sitting there with me, Chibundu said, “I have to get back to work now, but I’ll see you at home in the evening.” He stood up, placed a kiss on my forehead, and turned around to leave. His footsteps thumped gently on the cement floor.

  57

  I ACKNOWLEDGE TO MYSELF that sometimes I am a snail. I move myself by gliding. I contract my muscles and produce a slime of tears. Sometimes you see the tears and sometimes you don’t. It is my tears that allow me to glide. I glide slowly. But, slowly, I glide. It is a while before I am gone.

  That first night of our marriage, I wa
s a snail. We were all of us once snails.

  In the beginning, we had stayed with Mama in Aba, and we had slept in my room, just for that first month of marriage, that one-month space before Chibundu got the Port Harcourt job. Mama had found a second twin bed and mattress, and pushed them together so that they appeared to be a double bed. She had spread new sheets that she had purchased as our wedding gift.

  This is how our first night together went: Imagine a snail protected by its hard shell. Imagine a snail when it is alarmed. Imagine the snail retreating into its shell.

  That first night, Chibundu called me to him. He was wearing remnants of his tuxedo—the tie, the white shirt, the trousers. He sat on the edge of the mattress.

  I went to him, sat by his side. No alarm yet.

  “You’ve made me a very happy man,” he said, leaning over, wrapping his arm around me.

  He leaned in further, began kissing me. I allowed him to do so.

  “There is no more complete happiness than the one I’m feeling now,” he said between kisses. “Look at me. I feel like I can fly.”

  A slight bit of alarm was rising in me now. “Go ahead and fly,” I wanted to say. “Go ahead and fly, so long as you land far enough away from me.”

  Instead, I said, “We should try and get some sleep.”

  He laughed. Not disrespectfully. Almost appreciatively, for the sexual banter he perceived was going on. “Nawa o!” he said. “Women and their teasing! But of course, Ijeoma, you do know that sleep is the very last thing on my mind!” He made a sudden movement with his hands, and I watched as he began tugging at the front of his trousers. Then came that dreaded sound: just the sound of a man undoing his zipper, but it was as if a sharp object had somehow been jabbed into my ears.