14
Richard did not think it would be so easy to find Nnaemeka’s family, but when he arrived at Obosi and stopped at the Anglican church to ask, the catechist told him they lived just down the road, in the unpainted house flanked by palm trees. Nnaemeka’s father was small and albino, copper-colored, his eyes a grayish-hazel that brightened as soon as Richard spoke Igbo. He was so different from the large, dark customs officer at the airport that for a moment Richard wondered if perhaps he was in the wrong house and this was not Nnaemeka’s father. But the older man blessed the kola nut in a voice so similar to Nnaemeka’s that it took Richard back to the airport lounge that hot afternoon and to Nnaemeka’s irritating chatter before the door burst open and the soldiers ran in.
“He who brings the kola nut brings life. You and yours will live, and I and mine will live. Let the eagle perch and let the dove perch and, if either decrees that the other not perch, it will not be well for him. May God bless this kola in Jesus’ name.”
“Amen,” Richard said. He could see other resemblances now. The man’s gestures as he broke the kola nut apart into five lobes were eerily like Nnaemeka’s, as was the set of his mouth, with the lower lip jutting out. Richard waited until they had chewed the kola nut, until Nnaemeka’s mother appeared, dressed in black, before he said, “I saw your son at the airport in Kano, the day it happened. We talked for a while. He spoke about you and his family.” Richard paused and wondered whether they would prefer to hear that their son had remained stoic in the face of death or if they would want to hear that he fought it, that he charged toward the gun. “He told me that his grandmother from Umunnachi was a respected herbal doctor known far and wide for her cure of malaria, and that it was because of her that he first wanted to be a doctor.”
“Yes, that is so,” Nnaemeka’s mother said.
“He spoke only good words about his family,” Richard said. He chose his Igbo words carefully.
“Of course he would speak good words about his family.” Nnaemeka’s father gave Richard a long look as if he did not understand why Richard had to say what they already knew.
Richard shifted on the bench. “Did you have a funeral?” he asked, and then wished he had not.
“Yes,” Nnaemeka’s father said; he fixed his gaze on the enamel bowl that held the last lobe of kola nut. “We waited for him to return from the North and he did not return, so we had a funeral. We buried an empty coffin.”
“It was not empty,” Nnaemeka’s mother said. “Did we not put that old book he used to read for the civil service exam inside?”
They sat in silence. Dust motes swam in the slice of sunlight that came through the window.
“You must take the last piece of kola nut with you,” Nnaemeka’s father said.
“Thank you.” Richard slipped the lobe into his pocket.
“Shall I send the children to the car?” Nnaemeka’s mother asked. It was difficult to tell what she looked like, with the black scarf that covered all of her hair and much of her forehead.
“The car?” Richard asked.
“Yes. Did you not bring us things?”
Richard shook his head. He should have brought yams and drinks. It was after all a condolence visit, and he knew how things were done. He had been caught up in himself, in thinking that his coming was enough, that he would be the magnanimous angel who brought the last hours of their son to them and, by doing so, would assuage their grief and redeem himself. But to them he was just like any other person who had come to pay condolences. His visit made no difference to the only reality that mattered: their son was gone.
He got up to leave, knowing that nothing had changed for him either; he would feel the same way he had felt since he returned from Kano. He had often wished that he would lose his mind, or that his memory would suppress itself, but instead everything took on a terrible transparence and he had only to close his eyes to see the freshly dead bodies on the floor of the airport and to recall the pitch of the screams. His mind remained lucid. Lucid enough for him to write calm replies to Aunt Elizabeth’s frantic letters and tell her that he was fine and did not plan to return to England, to ask her to please stop sending flimsy air-mail editions of newspapers with articles about the Nigerian pogroms circled in pencil. The articles annoyed him. “Ancient tribal hatreds,” the Herald wrote, was the reason for the massacres. Time magazine titled its piece MAN MUST WHACK, an expression printed on a Nigerian lorry, but the writer had taken whack literally and gone on to explain that Nigerians were so naturally prone to violence that they even wrote about the necessity of it on their passenger lorries. Richard sent a terse letter off to Time. In Nigerian Pidgin English, he wrote, whack meant eat. At least the Observer was a little more adroit, in writing that if Nigeria survived the massacres of the Igbo it would survive anything. But there was a hollowness to all the accounts, an echo of unreality. So Richard began to write a long article about the massacres. He sat at the dining table in Kainene’s house and wrote on long sheets of unlined paper. He had brought Harrison to Port Harcourt, and while he worked he could hear Harrison talking to Ikejide and Sebastian. “You are not knowing how to bake German chocolate cake?” A cackle. “You are not knowing what is rhubarb crumble?” Another scornful cackle.
Richard started by writing about the refugee problem, a result of the massacres, about the traders who fled their markets in the North, university lecturers who left their campuses, civil servants who fled their jobs in the ministries. He struggled over the closing paragraph.
It is imperative to remember that the first time the Igbo people were massacred, albeit on a much smaller scale than what has recently occurred, was in 1945. That carnage was precipitated by the British colonial government when it blamed the Igbo people for the national strike, banned Igbo-published newspapers, and generally encouraged anti-Igbo sentiment. The notion of the recent killings being the product of “age-old” hatred is therefore misleading. The tribes of the North and the South have long had contact, at least as far back as the ninth century, as some of the magnificent beads discovered at the historic Igbo-Ukwu site attest. No doubt these groups also fought wars and slave-raided each other, but they did not massacre in this manner. If this is hatred, then it is very young. It has been caused, simply, by the informal divide-and-rule policies of the British colonial exercise. These policies manipulated the differences between the tribes and ensured that unity would not exist, thereby making the easy governance of such a large country practicable.
When he gave Kainene the article, she read it carefully, with her eyes narrowed, and afterward told him, “Very fierce.”
He was not sure what very fierce meant or whether she liked it.
He desperately wanted her to approve. Her aura of distance had returned since she came back from visiting Olanna in Nsukka. She had put up a photograph of her murdered relatives—Arize laughing in her wedding dress, Uncle Mbaezi ebullient in a tight suit next to a solemn Aunty Ifeka in a print wrapper—but she said very little about them and nothing about Olanna. She often withdrew into silence in the middle of a conversation, and when she did he let her be; sometimes he envied her the ability to be changed by what had happened.
“What do you think of it?” he asked, and before she could answer, he asked what he really wanted to. “Do you like it? How do you feel about it?”
“I think it sounds exceedingly formal and stuffy,” she said. “But what I feel about it is pride. I feel proud.”
He sent it off to the Herald. When he got a response two weeks later, he ripped the letter up after reading it. The international press was simply saturated with stories of violence from Africa, and this one was particularly bland and pedantic, the deputy editor wrote, but perhaps Richard could do a piece on the human angle? Did they mutter any tribal incantations while they did the killings, for example? Did they eat body parts like they did in the Congo? Was there a way of trying truly to understand the minds of these people?
Richard put the article away. It frighte
ned him that he slept well at nights, that he was still calmed by the scent of orange leaves and the turquoise stillness of the sea, that he was sentient.
“I’m going on. Life is the same,” he told Kainene. “I should be reacting; things should be different.”
“You can’t write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be, Richard,” she said quietly.
But he couldn’t let himself be. He didn’t believe that life was the same for all the other people who had witnessed the massacres.
Then he felt more frightened at the thought that perhaps he had been nothing more than a voyeur. He had not feared for his own life, so the massacres became external, outside of him; he had watched them through the detached lens of knowing he was safe. But that couldn’t be; Kainene would not have been safe if she had been there.
He began to write about Nnaemeka and the astringent scent of liquor mixing with fresh blood in that airport lounge where the bartender lay with a blown-up face, but he stopped because the sentences were risible. They were too melodramatic. They sounded just like the articles in the foreign press, as if these killings had not happened and, even if they had, as if they had not quite happened that way. The echo of unreality weighed each word down; he clearly remembered what had happened at that airport, but to write about it he would have to reimagine it, and he was not sure if he could.
The day the secession was announced, he stood with Kainene on the veranda and listened to Ojukwu’s voice on the radio and afterward took her in his arms. At first he thought they were both trembling, until he moved back to look at her face and realized that she was perfectly still. Only he was trembling.
“Happy independence,” he told her.
“Independence,” she said, before she added, “Happy independence.”
He wanted to ask her to marry him. This was a new start, a new country, their new country. It was not only because secession was just, considering all that the Igbo had endured, but because of the possibility Biafra held for him. He would be Biafran in a way he could never have been Nigerian—he was here at the beginning; he had shared in the birth. He would belong. He said, Marry me, Kainene in his head many times but he did not say it aloud. The next day, he returned to Nsukka with Harrison.
———
Richard liked Phyllis Okafor. He liked the verve of her bouffant wigs, the drawl of her native Mississippi, as well as the severe eyeglass frames that belied the warmth in her eyes. Since he had stopped going to Odenigbo’s house, he often spent evenings with her and her husband, Nnanyelugo. It was as if she knew he had lost a social life, and she insistently invited him to the arts theater, to public lectures, to play squash. So when she asked him to come to the “In Case of War” seminar that the university women’s association was organizing, he accepted. It was a good idea to be prepared, of course, but there would be no war. The Nigerians would let Biafra be; they would never fight a people already battered by the massacres. They would be pleased to be rid of the Igbo anyway. Richard was certain about this. He was less certain about what he would do if he ran into Olanna at the seminar. It had been easy to avoid her thus far; in four years he had driven past her only a few times, he never went to the tennis courts or the staff club, and he no longer shopped at Eastern Shop.
He stood near Phyllis at the entrance of the lecture hall and scanned the room. Olanna was sitting in front with Baby on her lap. Her lushly beautiful face seemed very familiar, as did her blue dress with the ruffled collar, as if he had seen both very recently. He looked away and could not help feeling relieved that Odenigbo had not come. The hall was full. The woman talking at the podium repeated herself over and over. “Wrap your certificates in waterproof bags and make sure those are the first things you take if we have to evacuate. Wrap your certificates in waterproof bags …”
More people spoke. Then it was over. People were mingling, laughing and talking and exchanging more “in case of war” tips. Richard knew that Olanna was nearby, talking to a bearded man who taught music. He turned, casually, to slip away, and was close to the door when she appeared beside him.
“Hello, Richard. Kedu?”
“I’m well,” he said. The skin of his face felt tight. “And you?”
“We are fine,” Olanna said. Her lips had a slight glisten of pink gloss. Richard did not miss her use of the plural. He was not sure if she meant herself and the child, or herself and Odenigbo, or perhaps we was meant to suggest that she had made peace with what had happened between them and what it had done to her relationship with Kainene.
“Baby, have you greeted?” Olanna asked, looking down at the child, whose hand was enclosed in hers.
“Good afternoon,” Baby said, in a high voice.
Richard bent and touched her cheek. There was a calmness about her that made her seem older and wiser than her four years. “Hello, Baby.”
“How is Kainene?” Olanna asked.
Richard evaded her eyes, not sure what his expression should be. “She is well.”
“And your book is going well?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Is it still called The Basket of Hands?”
It pleased him that she had not forgotten. “No.” He paused and tried not to think about what had happened to that manuscript, about the flames that must have charred it quickly. “It’s called In the Time of Roped Pots.”
“Interesting title,” Olanna murmured. “I hope there won’t be war, but the seminar has been quite useful, hasn’t it.”
“Yes.”
Phyllis came over, said hello to Olanna, and then tugged at Richard’s arm. “They say Ojukwu is coming! Ojukwu is coming!” There was the sound of raised voices outside the hall.
“Ojukwu?” Richard asked.
“Yes, yes!” Phyllis was walking toward the door. “You know he dropped into Enugu campus for a surprise visit some days ago? It looks like it’s our turn!”
Richard followed her outside. They joined the cluster of lecturers standing by the statue of a lion; Olanna had disappeared.
“He’s at the library now,” somebody said.
“No, he’s in the senate building.”
“No, he wants to address the students. He’s at the admin block.”
Some people were already walking quickly toward the administration block, and Phyllis and Richard went along. They were close to the umbrella trees that lined the driveway when Richard saw the bearded man, in a severely smart, belted army uniform, striding across the corridor. A few reporters scrambled after him, holding out tape recorders like offerings. Students, so many that Richard wondered how they had congregated so quickly, began to chant. “Power! Power!” Ojukwu came downstairs and stood on top of some cement blocks on the grassy lawn. He raised his hands. Everything about him sparkled, his groomed beard, his watch, his wide shoulders.
“I came to ask you a question,” he said. His Oxford-accented voice was surprisingly soft; it did not have the timbre that it did over the radio and it was a little theatrical, a little too measured. “What shall we do? Shall we keep silent and let them force us back into Nigeria? Shall we ignore the thousands of our brothers and sisters killed in the North?”
“No! No!” The students were filling the wide yard, spilling onto the lawn and the driveway. Many lecturers had parked their cars on the road and joined the crowd. “Power! Power!”
Ojukwu raised his hands again and the chanting stopped. “If they declare war,” he said. “I want to tell you now that it may become a long-drawn-out war. A long-drawn-out war. Are you prepared? Are we prepared?”
“Yes! Yes! Ojukwu, nye anyi egbe! Give us guns! Iwe di anyi n’obi! There is anger in our hearts!”
The chanting was constant now—give us guns, there is anger in our hearts, give us guns. The rhythm was heady. Richard glanced across at Phyllis, thrusting a fist in the air as she shouted, and he looked around for a little while at everyone else, intense and intent in the moment, before he too began to wave and ch
ant. “Ojukwu, give us guns! Ojukwu, nye anyi egbe!”
Ojukwu lit a cigarette and threw it down on the lawn. It flared for a while, before he reached out and squashed it underneath a gleaming black boot. “Even the grass will fight for Biafra,” he said.
Richard told Kainene how charmed he had been by Ojukwu even though the man showed signs of early balding and was vaguely histrionic and wore a gaudy ring. He told her about the seminar. Then he wondered whether to tell her that he had run into Olanna. They were sitting on the veranda. Kainene was peeling an orange with a knife, and the slender peel dropped into a plate on the floor.
“I saw Olanna,” he said.
“Did you?”
“At the seminar. We said hello and she asked about you.”
“I see.” The orange slipped from her hand, or perhaps she dropped it, because she left it there on the terrazzo floor of the veranda.
“I’m sorry,” Richard said. “I thought I should mention that I saw her.”
He picked up the orange and held it out to her but she did not take it. She got up and walked to the railing.
“War is coming,” she said. “Port Harcourt is going crazy.”
She was looking in the far distance, as if she could actually see the city in its frenzy of excessive parties and frenetic couplings and speeding cars. Earlier that afternoon, a well-dressed young woman had come up to Richard at the train station and taken his hand. “Come to my flat. I never do it with oyinbo man before, but I want try everything now, oh!” she had said, laughing, although the delirious desire in her eyes was serious enough. He had shrugged his hand free and walked away, strangely sad at the thought that she would end up with another stranger in her bed. It was as if the people in this city with the tall whistling pines wanted to grab all they could before the war robbed them of choices.
Richard got up and stood beside Kainene.
“There won’t be war,” he said.
“How did she ask about me?”
“She said, How is Kainene?”
“And you said I was well?”