Half of a Yellow Sun

  “You’re not paying much attention, are you?” she asked after a while. Her ears were red.

  “Of course I am.”

  “I heard about your lady love, Chief Ozobia’s daughter,” Susan said, lady love in the comic caricature that she assumed was an uneducated accent.

  “Her name is Kainene.”

  “Will you make sure always to use a rubber? One must be careful, even with the most educated of these people.”

  Richard looked out at the calm unending greenness. He would never have been happy with her—life would be gossamer, all his days merging into one long sheer sheet of nothingness.

  “I had an affair with John Blake,” she said.

  “Did you?”

  Susan laughed. She was playing with her glass, running it along the table, smearing the water that had collected on it. “You seem surprised.”

  “I’m not,” he said, although he was. Not because she had an affair but because it was with John, who was married to her good friend Caroline. But this was expatriate life. All they did, as far as he was concerned, was have sex with one another’s wives and husbands, illicit couplings that were more a way of passing heat-blanched time in the tropics than they were genuine expressions of passion.

  “It means nothing, absolutely nothing,” Susan said. “But I did want you to know that I shall keep busy while I wait for you to finish with your dusky affair.”

  Richard wanted to say something about her disloyalty to her friend and then realized how hypocritical it would sound, even if only to himself.

  5. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died

  He writes about starvation. Starvation was a Nigerian weapon of war. Starvation broke Biafra and brought Biafra fame and made Biafra last as long as it did. Starvation made the people of the world take notice and sparked protests and demonstrations in London and Moscow and Czechoslovakia. Starvation made Zambia and Tanzania and Ivory Coast and Gabon recognize Biafra, starvation brought Africa into Nixon’s American campaign and made parents all over the world tell their children to eat up. Starvation propelled aid organizations to sneak-fly food into Biafra at night since both sides could not agree on routes. Starvation aided the careers of photographers. And starvation made the International Red Cross call Biafra its gravest emergency since the Second World War.

  22

  Ugwu’s diarrhea was cramping and painful. It did not get better when he chewed the bitter tablets in Master’s cabinet or the sour leaves Jomo gave him, and it had nothing to do with food because the sudden dashes to the Boys’ Quarters happened with whatever he ate. It was about his worry. Master’s fear worried him.

  Since Mama brought the news of Amala’s pregnancy, Master half stumbled around as if his glasses were blurred, called for his tea in a subdued voice, and asked Ugwu to tell the guests he had gone out, even though his car was in the garage. He stared into space often. He listened to High Life often. He spoke of Olanna often. “We’ll leave that for when your madam moves back” or “Your madam would prefer it in the corridor,” he would say, and Ugwu would say, “Yes, sah,” although he knew Master would not bother saying any of that if Olanna were really coming back.

  Ugwu’s diarrhea got worse when Mama visited with Amala. He watched Amala carefully; she did not look pregnant, still slender and flat-bellied, and he hoped that the medicine had not worked after all. But Mama told him, as she peeled hot cocoyams, “When this baby boy comes, I will have somebody to keep me company and my fellow women will no longer call me the mother of an impotent son.”

  Amala sat in the living room. Her pregnancy had elevated her, so she could sit idly listening to the radiogram, no longer Mama’s help but now the woman who would give birth to Mama’s grandchild. Ugwu watched her from the kitchen door. It was a good thing she had not chosen Master’s armchair or Olanna’s favorite puff because he would have asked her to get up right away. She sat with her knees pressed together, her eyes focused on the pile of newspapers on the center table, her face blank. It was so wrong that such an ordinary person in a nondescript dress and a cotton scarf around her forehead was in the middle of all this. She was neither beautiful nor ugly; she was like the many young women he used to watch going to the stream in his village every morning. Nothing distinguished her. Watching her, Ugwu suddenly felt angry. His anger was not directed at Amala, though, but at Olanna. She should not have run away from her own house because Mama’s medicine had pushed Master into the arms of this common slip of a girl. She should have stayed and showed Amala and Mama who was truly mistress here.

  The days were suffocating and repetitive, Mama cooking strong-smelling soups that she ate alone because Master stayed out late and Amala felt nauseated and Ugwu had diarrhea. But Mama did not seem to mind; she hummed and cooked and cleaned and praised herself when she finally learned to turn the stove on. “One day I will have my own stove; my grandson will buy one for me,” she said, and laughed.

  She finally decided to go back to the village after more than a week and said she would leave Amala behind. “You see how ill she is?” she asked Master. “My enemies want to harm the pregnancy, they do not want somebody to carry on our family name, but we will defeat them.”

  “You must take her with you,” Master said. It was past midnight. Mama had stayed up until Master came home and Ugwu was in the kitchen, half asleep, waiting to lock up.

  “Did you not hear me say that she is ill?” Mama said. “It is better for her to stay here.”

  “She will see a doctor, but you must take her with you.”

  “You are refusing your child and not Amala,” Mama said.

  “You must take her with you,” Master repeated. “Olanna may return soon, and things will not stand right if Amala is here.”

  “Your own child,” Mama said, shaking her head mournfully, but she did not argue. “I will leave tomorrow because I must attend an umuada meeting. I will return at the end of the week to fetch her.”

  The afternoon Mama left, Ugwu found Amala in the vegetable garden, crouched on the ground with her knees drawn up, arms around her legs. She was chewing peppers.

  “Is it well?” Ugwu asked. Perhaps the woman was a spirit person and had come here to perform rituals with her fellow ogbanje.

  Amala said nothing for a while; she spoke so seldom that her voice always surprised Ugwu by how childishly high it was. “Pepper can remove pregnancy,” she said.

  “What?”

  “If you eat plenty of hot peppers, they will remove pregnancy.” She was huddled in the mud like a pathetic animal, chewing slowly, tears streaming down her face.

  “Peppers cannot do that,” Ugwu said. Yet he hoped that she was right, that peppers would indeed abort the pregnancy and his life would return to what it was before: Olanna and Master securely together.

  “If you eat enough, they can,” she insisted, and reached out to pluck another one.

  Ugwu did not want her to finish the peppers he so carefully cultivated for his stews, but if she was right about what the peppers could do, perhaps it was worth it to let her be. Her face was slick with the moisture of tears and mucus, and once in a while she opened her mouth and extended her pepper-burned tongue to pant like a dog. He wanted to ask why she had gone along with it if she did not want the baby. She had gone to Master’s room herself, after all, and she must have known about Mama’s plan. But he did not ask; he did not want her friendship. He turned and went back inside.

  Days after Amala left, Olanna visited. She sat upright on the sofa, legs crossed like an unfamiliar guest, and refused the chin-chin Ugwu brought on a saucer.

  “Take it back to the kitchen,” she said to Ugwu, at the same time as Master said, “Leave it on the table.”

  Ugwu stood uncertainly, holding the saucer.

  “Take it back to the kitchen, then!” Master snapped, as if Ugwu were somehow responsible for the tension that had settled in the room. Ugwu did not shut the kitchen door, so that he could stand by it and listen, but he might as well have clo
sed it because Olanna’s raised voice was audible enough. “It’s you and not your mother. It happened because you let it happen! You must take responsibility!”

  It startled Ugwu, how that soft voice could change to something so fierce.

  “I am not a philandering man, and you know that. This would not have happened if my mother didn’t have a hand!” Master should have lowered his voice; he should know very well that a beggar did not shout.

  “Did your mother pull out your penis and insert it into Amala as well?” Olanna asked.

  Ugwu felt the sudden rumbling rush in his stomach and he ran out to the toilet in the Boys’ Quarters. When he came out, he saw Olanna standing by the lemon tree. He searched her face to see how the conversation had ended, if it had ended; why she was out here. But he could make nothing of her face. There were tight lines around her mouth and a sleek confidence to the way she stood, wearing a new wig that made her seem much taller.

  “You want anything, mah?” he asked.

  She walked over to look at the anara plants. “These look very well. Did you use fertilizer?”

  “Yes, mah. From Jomo.”

  “And on the peppers?”

  “Yes, mah.”

  She turned to walk away. It was incongruous to see her there in her black shoes and her knee-length dress. She, who was always in a wrapper or a housedress in the garden.

  “Mah?”

  She turned.

  “I have one uncle who is trading in the North. People have been jealous of him because he is doing well. One day he washed his clothes, and when he brought them in from the sun, he saw that somebody had cut off a piece of his shirtsleeve.”

  Olanna was watching him; there was something in her expression that made him realize she would not be patient enough to listen much longer.

  “The person who cut it used it for bad medicine, but it did not work because my uncle burned the shirt immediately. That day, there were many flies near his hut.”

  “What are you talking about, for heaven’s sake?” Olanna asked in English. Because she hardly ever spoke English to him, it sounded cold, distancing.

  “Mama used bad medicine on my master, mah. I saw flies in the kitchen. I saw her putting something in his food. Then I saw her rubbing something on Amala’s body, and I know it is the medicine that she used to tempt my master.”

  “Rubbish,” Olanna said. It came out sounding like a hiss, rubbish, and Ugwu’s stomach tightened. She was different; her skin and clothes were crisper. She bent and flicked away a green aphid that had perched on her dress before she walked away. But she did not go around the house, past Master’s garage to her own car parked in front. Instead she went back into the house. He followed. In the kitchen, he heard her voice from the study, shouting a long string of words that he could not make out and did not want to. Then silence. Then the opening and closing of the bedroom door. He waited for a while before he tiptoed across the corridor and pressed his ear against the wood. She sounded different. He was used to her throaty moans but what he heard now was an outward, gasping ah-ah-ah, as if she was gearing up to erupt, as if Master was pleasing and angering her at the same time and she was waiting to see how much pleasure she could take before she let out the rage. Still, hope surged inside Ugwu. He would cook a perfect jollof rice for their reconciliation meal.

  Later, when he heard her car start and saw the glaring headlights near the bush with the white flowers, he thought she was going to collect a few things from her flat. He set two places for dinner but did not serve the food because he wanted to keep it warm in the pot.

  Master came into the kitchen. “Do you intend to eat alone today, my good man?”

  “I am waiting for madam.”

  “Serve my food, osiso!”

  “Yes, sah,” Ugwu said. “Will madam come again soon, sah?”

  “Serve my food!” Master repeated.

  23

  Olanna stood in Richard’s living room. Its austere emptiness made her nervous; she wished he had pictures or books or Russian dolls that she could look at. There was only a small photo of an Igbo-Ukwu roped pot on the wall, and she was peering at it when Richard came out. The uncertain half smile on his lips softened his face. She sometimes forgot what a handsome man he was, in that fair-haired blue-eyed sort of way.

  She spoke immediately. “Hello, Richard.” Without waiting for his response and the lull that came with greetings, she added, “Did you see Kainene last weekend?”

  “No. No, I didn’t.” His eyes avoided hers, focused on her glossy wig. “I was in Lagos. Sir Winston Churchill has died, you see.”

  “What happened was stupid of both of us,” Olanna said and noticed that his hands were shaking.

  Richard nodded. “Yes, yes.”

  “Kainene doesn’t forgive easily. It would make no sense at all to tell her.”

  “Of course not.” Richard paused. “You had emotional problems, and I should not have—”

  “What happened took two, Richard,” Olanna said, and suddenly felt contempt for his trembling hands and pale shyness and the vulnerabilities he wore so openly knotted at his throat like a tie.

  Harrison came in with a tray. “I am bringing drinks, sah.”

  “Drinks?” Richard turned quickly, jerkily, and Olanna was relieved that there was nothing close or he would have knocked it over. “Oh, no, really. Would you like something?”

  “I’m just leaving,” Olanna said. “How are you, Harrison?”

  “Fine, madam.”

  Richard followed her to the door.

  “I think we should keep things normal,” she said, before she hurried out to her car.

  She wondered if she should have been less histrionic and given them both the chance to have a calm conversation about what happened. But it would have achieved little, digging up the dirt of yesterday. They had both wanted it to happen and they both wished it had not; what mattered now was that nobody else should ever know.

  She surprised herself, then, when she told Odenigbo. She was lying down while he sat next to her on his bed—she thought of the bedroom itself now as his rather then theirs—and it was the second time they had slept together since she left. He was asking her to please move back to the house.

  “Let’s get married,” he said. “Mama will leave us alone then.”

  It may have been his smug tone or the flagrant way he continued to sidestep responsibility and blame his mother that made Olanna say, “I slept with Richard.”

  “No.” Odenigbo looked incredulous, shaking his head.

  “Yes.”

  He got up and walked to the wardrobe and looked at her, as if he could not be close to her at that moment because he was afraid of what he would do if he were. He took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. She sat up and realized that distrust would always lie between them, that disbelief would always be an option for them.

  “Do you have feelings for the man?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  He came back and sat next to her. He looked torn between shoving her off the bed and pulling her close, and then he got up abruptly and left the room. When she knocked later on his study door to say she was leaving, he did not respond.

  Back in her flat, she paced up and down. She should not have told him about Richard. Or she should have told him more: that she regretted betraying Kainene and him but did not regret the act itself. She should have said that it was not a crude revenge, or a scorekeeping, but took on a redemptive significance for her. She should have said the selfishness had liberated her.

  The loud knocking on her front door the next morning filled her with relief. She and Odenigbo would sit down and talk properly, and this time she would make sure that they did not circle each other without meeting. But it was not Odenigbo. Edna came in crying, her eyes swollen red, to tell her that white people had bombed the black Baptist church in her hometown. Four little girls had died. One of them was her niece’s schoolmate. “I saw her when I went back home six mont
hs ago,” Edna said. “Just six months ago I saw her.”

  Olanna made tea and sat next to Edna, their shoulders touching, while Edna cried in loud gasps that sounded like choking. Her hair did not have its usual greasy shine; it looked like the matted head of an old mop.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, between sobs. “Oh, my God.”

  Olanna reached out often to squeeze her arm. The rawness of Edna’s grief made her helpless, brought the urge to stretch her hand into the past and reverse history. Finally, Edna fell asleep. Olanna gently placed a pillow beneath her head and sat thinking about how a single act could reverberate over time and space and leave stains that could never be washed off. She thought about how ephemeral life was, about not choosing misery. She would move back to Odenigbo’s house.

  ———

  They had dinner in silence the first night. Odenigbo’s chewing irritated her, his bulging cheek and the grinding motion of his jaw. She ate little and looked across often at her box of books in the living room. Odenigbo was absorbed in separating his chicken from the bone, and for once he ate all of his rice until his plate was clean. When he finally spoke, he talked about the chaos in the Western Region.

  “They should never have reinstalled the premier. Why are they surprised now that thugs are burning cars and killing opponents in the name of elections? A corrupt brute will always behave like a corrupt brute,” he said.