Under the Udala Trees

by Chinelo Okparanta

  “Look what I brought for you!” Her eyes shone with self-satisfaction. She was waiting for my reaction, which I knew should be a mixture of shock and gratitude.

  I replied weakly, “Mama, thank you, but you didn’t need to.”

  She looked at me aghast. “I buy you a sewing machine—not just buy it, but also pay someone to carry it here for me—and you have the audacity to tell me I didn’t need to? Where are your manners?”

  She continued: “This is exactly the thing you need so that your guests will know that a woman lives here. I regret that the war came and made it so that I never had a chance to really teach you these things. But better late than never. It’s never too late to learn how to keep a beautiful home.”

  “Mama, none of this is really necessary.”

  “The place needs some curtains, a proper tablecloth for the kitchen table. Some pillows for the sofa. What kind of place is this that you call a home, and yet there are no curtains on the windows, no tablecloth on the table? This is what the machine is for. And speaking of the sofa, why did you two go and buy secondhand? All those holes in it, and then add to it the peeling walls. Holes everywhere.” She waved her hand as if to say none of it mattered now. “Lucky for you, all of these things can be fixed. Remember what I told you about the Aba house and how we fixed it up? We can do the same here. We will make you a beautiful home.” She rambled on and on, all in that same vein.

  New curtains: a cornsilk-colored brocade fabric with an olive-green lace valance.

  “This will be perfect,” she said. “You see, these windows get a lot of sun. With brocade you won’t have to worry so much about sun rot.”

  “Sun rot, Mama?”

  “When the sun eats into and discolors the fabric. You won’t have that to worry about. Not for a long time, anyway.”

  Other new additions: a coral-colored cover for the sofa, a matching tablecloth.

  Food and more food, enough to leave the pantry overflowing, as if our flat were a rich, fat man’s house.

  In the hours when Chibundu was at work, we cleaned, fixed, rearranged.

  I worked dutifully at my new machine, making decorative covers for our new sofa pillows, my eyes taking turns between the fabric that I was sewing and the large bold letters on the machine. SINGER. I pedaled, and I turned the wheel. The needle bobbed up and down, up and down, and I imagined that the sound from the machine was a song, and that the machine was singing sweetly to me. I lost myself in the features of the machine, in its curves, in the color of it, a shiny, unapologetic shade of brown, sticking out in regal fashion from its encasement of wood. I hummed along with the sound of its sewing, a different song each time.

  We taped up the peeling walls, again. We sealed up the holes, again.

  Those hours after Chibundu returned from work, he made sure to express to us just how much he was liking the changes. “Incredible!” he exclaimed. “Just incredible!”

  We washed clothes, swept floors. We peeled yams and corn, soaked beans and palm kernels. When all of that was done, she made lists of items to be bought at the market. We went together to the market, bought the items, brought them back home to cook.

  Another day done. Another day gone.

  The afternoon of her second week in Port Harcourt, I was in the middle of preparing to go to the market when I noticed Mama looking closely at me. “You’re looking very pale,” she said.

  I nodded. “I’m feeling very pale,” I replied.

  “You might hurry, then,” she said. “There are quite a few more items to be bought and, afterward, food to be made.”

  I nodded.

  She looked at me some more.

  The plan had been that I go to the market on my own while she took care of other things. But now she said, “I could go with you.”

  I nodded. “That would be nice,” I said.

  She grabbed the market bag. We made our way out the door.

  The bus station was just up the road from our flat. We climbed onto the bus, rode it until our stop, still a distance from the market but as close as the bus could get us.

  As we walked the rest of the way to the market, I got a whiff of something roasting, something sweet, like ripe plantains. I ran to the bushes on the side of the road, parted the tall green shrubs, bent over, my hands at my knees. I allowed it all to gush out, to flow out of me, that disease that had been for all this time inside me.

  Minutes passed before I noticed Mama standing at my side. She simply stood there, her feet visible through the overgrown grass. I straightened up, wiped my mouth with the backs of my hands. I could see tears in her eyes almost right away. She wrapped her arms around me, very unexpectedly, as soon as I was done wiping off my mouth. “You’ve done well,” she said. “You’ve made your mother proud. Do you know what this means?”

  I shook my head.

  There is a story about a snake that, out of stubbornness, decided that it would not swim across the river. Near the edge of the river was a crocodile, getting ready to cross. The snake twisted itself into a tight ball and set itself atop the crocodile. The crocodile went ahead and crossed the river, too foolish, or just too plain oblivious, to realize that it was carrying a curled-up constrictor on its back. By the time the crocodile noticed, there was no use in fighting. The snake had unraveled itself and wrapped itself around the crocodile. It didn’t take long before the snake devoured the crocodile. Then it let out one tumbling burp, and then another, brushed itself off, and said thank you to the crocodile in its stomach, not only for being its food, but also for helping it to cross the river.

  Chidinma was by no means a snake, but only that she had come upon me the same way that the snake had come upon the crocodile. Somehow it had not occurred to me that all those weeks I was carrying a baby inside me. But of course, Mama was right.

  60

  I BEGAN THE FIRST of this particular set of letters the night Mama left, because that very night, Ndidi appeared to me, more vividly than ever, in a dream.

  There were, in fact, two dreams. In the first, she was dressed in a calf-length romper, walking in slow, measured steps, all zombie-like, holding out her arms to me. It was outdoors, and above her an orange sun was peeking through the clouds and causing her to glow, almost electric-like, a human bulb. She was saying, like a chant, “One day I will need you to carry me on your shoulders the way Atlas carried the world.”

  The scene changed abruptly, and just as soon she was in a field of whitish-gray dandelion clocks. Above her, an overcast sky, clouds on the verge of raining down tears.

  I woke up with a start, expecting to find myself also in the field. Instead, I looked to my left, laid my eyes on a set of rumpled sheets and a sleeping Chibundu by my side.

  In the second dream, Ndidi and I were in that double-functioning construction of a church in Aba, seated face to face at one of its tables. She handed me a glass of kai kai. I took a sip and, not wanting any more, gave it back to her.

  She pushed the glass back to me.

  I said, “I’ve already had a taste. It’s nice of you to offer, but I don’t like its taste.”

  She said, “You don’t drink kai kai for its taste. You’re focusing on the wrong sense. You drink it to feel its effect on you. Feel, not taste.”

  Before leaving Aba for Port Harcourt, I left our new address with Ndidi. Within a week of Chibundu’s and my arrival in Port Harcourt, I also made it a point to write Ndidi a letter, and then a couple of more letters, at three- or four-week intervals. But the days passed, and more days still, with no response from Ndidi. She did not have a phone in her flat, or else I would have simply called.

  The absence of any kind of communication from her was not at all like an absence. It was instead a presence: of mind-pain, like a thick, rusted arrow shooting straight into my head, poisoning my mind with something like tetanus, causing my thoughts to go haywire, a spasm here, a spasm there.

  If there were a muscle relaxant equivalent for the mind, I would have been first in line for i
t. But not having that option, I found other ways to cope. For instance, each time I spoke with Mama on the phone, I found relief in bringing up Ndidi’s name. Just a few seconds of speaking about her was like a temporary medicine.

  One phone conversation with Mama:

  “Any new customers?”

  “No, no new customers.”

  “None at all?”

  “Well, there’s that old vagabond who showed up one day out of the blue. Did I tell you about him?”

  “No, I don’t believe you did.”

  “Well, the long and short of it is that he showed up one day in the unexpected way that bird excrement drops from the sky. Can you imagine what it must be like to be at least fifty years old and yet manage to have made nothing of yourself? A fully grown man roaming about the place with nothing to his name!”

  “Unexpected things happen to people, Mama. Tragedy happens.”

  “Well, regardless, it just infuriates me to no end that he keeps wandering around here, all drunk and reeking of whiskey and ale. Several times he’s come by eating a large orange, sucking at the pulp, his cheeks puffed up, and all the while he grimaces as if he’s sucking urine or catarrh, and then he spits out the seeds. Can you believe—he spits them all out right in front of my shop! Now, you know a shop owner’s best friend is her broom, and so I race out with my broom and make to sweep him away. But the following day he’s back again. Tufiakwa! Some people don’t have any decency . . .”

  Speaking of infuriation, something about the way she was speaking was starting to infuriate me. Out the kitchen window, a heavy rain was falling. There was a steady rapping above. I could not tell what amount of it was the sound of my head thumping and what amount was the sound of the rain beating on the roof.

  Mama continued on about the man and about his lack of decency, as if decency were some kind of religion. Because I could no longer just sit and listen, I asked, “What if his behavior has nothing to do with decency?”

  There was something red and bright and burning like firewood in her voice now, and she said, “How can it not, ehn? In fact, the first few times he came loitering in front of the shop, I went up to him, pointed a finger at him, and gave him a good talking-to. If you’ve ever heard a lecture on decency, that’s what I gave to him, and still, Ijeoma, I tell you, the man is incapable of simple decency. Imagine, he still continues to place his raggedy, disheveled self right in front of my store! A person like that, in front of the store every day, will eventually cost me my customers!”

  It was clear that she had a point. Still, a feeling of sadness descended upon me in hearing her words. I thought: The poor man. What if he had nowhere better to go? And I thought of Mama. How terrible the way she was actually trying to make herself the victim in someone else’s tragedy.

  I said, “But Mama, what if he turned it back around on you? What if he asked you, out of decency, to stop shooing him away with your broom? What if he explained to you that he was more than a fly and that he had nowhere else to go? What if he told you that you were the one being indecent by shooing him away?”

  Her voice was very quiet now. “He really should try harder to find another place to go.”

  I could have said more, but instead I asked, “And what about Ndidi? Does she still stop in?”

  “Every once in a while, but not as often as before,” Mama replied.

  I got off the phone with Mama and went about the remainder of my day the same way I always did. When night came, I sat in bed and wrote to Ndidi. Maybe I would send the letter, or maybe not. Either way, better to get out the things on my mind than to allow them to fester and grow mold and cause my insides to feel rotten. Better to get them out before they became the worst kind of wound: oozing with pus and with a pungent kind of odor, oozing and decaying and stinking up the place like a dead and decomposing body.

  I could have waxed poetic, said something about my love for her being as large and wide as a whole country. I could have written sappy lines that floated thinly in the air without any grounding in reality. But it would have been risky to do so—to let out all of my emotion in a letter. What if someone else got ahold of the letter and exposed our relationship?

  Anyway, it didn’t seem to me that flamboyant flourishes should have any place in love letters. Love cannot live by poetry alone.

  I simply wrote:

  I am pregnant with Chibundu’s child, and yet I keep thinking of you. Last night I dreamed you in a field of dandelion clocks, and in our church. Do you still think of me?

  Chibundu, by my side, was snoring slightly. I folded the paper in fourths and then again into eighths and placed it in the wooden hand-painted chest where I kept my pens and pencils and my journal. I made sure to put the letter at the bottom, beneath the pens and pencils, even beneath the journal, where I was certain Chibundu could not see it.

  I bent over the side of the bed, placed the chest in the bottom drawer of my bedside table, pushing it safely behind all the other odds and ends—a small sewing kit, a pair of scissors, containers of pomade, my Bible. I slid the drawer closed, set myself back down on my side of the bed, and allowed myself to drift peacefully into sleep.

  61

  CHIBUNDU WAS IN the bathroom carrying on with his morning rituals. I got up and walked out of the bedroom and outside the flat, the way I had begun to do those days.

  I took my place out on the front stoop. Day was breaking and the sky was growing light.

  My eyes found the hedges. These hedges were nothing as majestic as the ones in our old Ojoto house. But they were fine enough. I rose from my seat on the stoop and walked over to them. The leaves and flower petals were glossy with dew. I picked a small ixora flower and placed it in my hair. If my child were to be a girl, I would pick even more of them and place them like decorations all around her little head.

  The night before, Chibundu and I had been at it like a baboon and a leopard, snapping at each other at the supper table, each of us threatening to pounce on the other.

  “This food is tasteless,” he said.

  “Then next time you can make your food yourself.”

  “I go to work all day and you have the audacity to look at me and tell me that to my face?”

  “I cook for you all day and you have the audacity to complain that the food is no good to my face?”

  His lips folded out like two thick millipedes, one on top of the other. If he were Mama, this sort of complaint would be expected, and I would just take it in and let it come out my underside. But this type of complaint was not at all usual for him.

  He continued to sit there, silently moping and fuming.

  I watched him for some time, then finally I said, “What exactly is the matter with you tonight anyway? Did something happen?”

  For some weeks now his eyes were appearing heavy, but now they were heavier than usual.

  I said again, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How was work?”

  “Fine.”

  After a while, he said, “Funny how life has a tendency to go unexpectedly downhill.”

  “Is something going unexpectedly downhill for you?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said.

  “Aha!” I muttered. “That’s what you’ve been doing wrong!” I added, “Don’t you know that thinking is like carrying a large stone in your stomach? Not only the pain of it, but also the feeling of your insides being all muddled and clogged up. And I bet you’ve not just been thinking. I bet you’ve been overthinking. Imagine a tall heap of stones just sitting in you. Take it from me, I know.”

  He said, “I’ve been thinking that I’m not too happy about the way things are around here.”

  “You’re not too happy about what, exactly?”

  “And it’s not just me. Even at work, everyone seems to be sad and depressed. It must be something in the air. Like everybody got caught in a monsoon and came to work all soaked and sulking from it. I know it’s just the state of things. Bu
t I am determined to be happy. Where happiness is concerned, there’s a lot to be said for simple determination.”

  I thought about it. Finally I said, “Yes, it’s certainly true. There’s certainly something to be said for simple determination.”

  I was sitting outside, clearing my head with the fresh morning air, daydreaming about a girl child with a crown of ixora flowers.

  I felt a kick in my stomach, and then I felt exhilaration wash over me. I thought of God. Maybe this was the way that God was choosing to talk to me. Maybe He was choosing to speak through my child. So what was He saying? I tried to still my mind, so that maybe I could hear God’s voice within me.

  Try as I might, I could not clear my head.

  I prayed:

  Dear God, I am unhappy. Even as I carry my child, and even as the thought of this child makes me happy, I am yet unhappy. Dear God, I want to be happy. Please help me to be happy.

  Maybe all I could do was carry on with my life the way it was. Become a mother to one or more children, follow through with all that motherhood entailed.

  I rose and went back into the house to iron Chibundu’s work clothes. I had lost track of time and stayed outside longer than planned. Chibundu would be out of the bathroom at any moment, wondering where his clothes were.

  From the bedroom I could hear him in the bathroom, could hear those final sounds that meant he was about to come out: a gargling, a spitting. Soon he would turn the knob and the door would whine open. I quickly ironed the shirt and trousers and then spread them out flat across the bed.

  I moved to the kitchen, began to fry his eggs and make his toast.

  Minutes passed, and soon I watched as he came into the kitchen, fully dressed, briefcase and watch in hand.

  He set his briefcase down on the floor, then sat, adjusting the watch on his wrist, hurried-like, as if he hardly had time, not even for that.