Half of a Yellow Sun

  Olanna did not run across the square on her way to school the following day. Caution had become, to her, feeble and faithless. Her steps were sturdy and she looked up often at the clear sky to search for bomber jets, because she would stop and hurl stones and words up at them. About a quarter of her class attended school. She taught them about the Biafran flag. They sat on wooden planks and the weak morning sun streamed into the roofless class as she unfurled Odenigbo’s cloth flag and told them what the symbols meant. Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future. She taught them to raise their hand in the flying salute like His Excellency and she asked them to copy her drawings of the two leaders: His Excellency was burly, sketched with double lines, while Gowon’s effete body was outlined in single lines.

  Nkiruka, her brightest student, shaded contours into the faces and, with a few strokes of her pencil, gave Gowon a snarl and His Excellency a grin.

  “I want to kill all the vandals, miss,” she said, when she came up to hand in her drawing. She was smiling the smile of a precocious child who knew she had said the right thing.

  Olanna stared at her and did not know what to say. “Nkiruka, go and sit down,” she said at last.

  The first thing she told Odenigbo when he got home was how banal the word kill had sounded from the child’s mouth and how guilty she had felt. They were in their bedroom and the radio was turned on low and she could hear Baby’s high-pitched laughter from the next room.

  “She doesn’t actually want to kill anybody, nkem. You just taught her patriotism,” Odenigbo said, slipping off his shoes.

  “I don’t know.” But his words emboldened her, as did the pride in his face. He liked that she had spoken so forcefully, for once, about the cause; it was as if she had finally become an equal participant in the war effort.

  “The Red Cross people remembered our directorate today,” he said and pointed at the small carton he had brought back.

  Olanna opened it and placed the squat cans of condensed milk and the slender tin of Ovaltine and the packet of salt on the bed. They seemed luxurious. On the radio, a vibrant voice said that gallant Biafran soldiers were flushing out the vandals around Abakaliki.

  “Let’s have a party,” she said.

  “A party?”

  “A small dinner party. You know, that’s what we had often in Nsukka.”

  “This will be over soon, nkem, and we’ll have all the parties in a free Biafra.”

  She liked the way he said that, in a free Biafra, and she stood up and squashed her lips against his. “Yes, but we can have a wartime party.”

  “We hardly have enough for ourselves.”

  “We have more than enough for ourselves.” Her lips were still against his and her words suddenly took on a different meaning and she moved back and pulled her dress over her head in one fluid gesture. She unbuckled his trousers. She did not let him take them off. She turned her back and leaned on the wall and guided him into her, excited by his surprise, by his firm hands on her hips. She knew she should lower her voice because of Ugwu and Baby in the next room and yet she had no control over her own moans, over the raw primal pleasure she felt in wave after wave that ended with both of them leaning against the wall, gasping and giggling.

  26

  Ugwu hated the relief food. The rice was puffy, nothing like the slender grains in Nsukka, and the cornmeal never emerged smooth after being stirred in hot water, and the powdered milk ended up as stubborn clumps at the bottom of teacups. He squirmed now as he scooped up some egg yolk. It was difficult to think of the flat powder coming from the egg of a real chicken. He poured it into the dough mix and stirred. Outside, a pot half filled with white sand sat on the fire; he would give it a little more time to heat up before he placed the dough inside. He had been skeptical when Mrs. Muokelu first taught Olanna this baking method; he knew enough about Mrs. Muokelu’s ideas—Olanna’s homemade soap, that blackish-brown mash that reminded him of a child’s diarrhea, had come from her, after all. But the first pastry Olanna baked had turned out well; she laughed and said it was ambitious to call it a cake, this mix of flour and palm oil and dried egg yolk, but at least they had put their flour to good use.

  The Red Cross irritated Ugwu; the least they could do was ask Biafrans their preferred foods rather than sending so much bland flour. When the new relief center opened, the one Olanna went to wearing a rosary around her neck because Mrs. Muokelu said the Caritas people were more generous to Catholics, Ugwu hoped the food would be better. But what she brought back was familiar, the dried fish even saltier, and she sang, with an amused expression, the song the women sang at the center.

  Caritas, thank you,

  Caritas si anyi taba okporoko

  na kwashiorkor ga-ana.

  She did not sing on the days she came back with nothing. She would sit on the veranda and look up at the thatch roof and say, “Do you remember, Ugwu, how we used to throw away soup with meat after only a day?”

  “Yes, mah,” Ugwu would say. If only he could go to the relief center himself. He suspected that Olanna, with her English-speaking properness, waited her turn until everything was gone. But he could not go because she no longer allowed him out during the day. Stories of forced conscription were everywhere. He did not doubt that a boy down the street had been dragged away in the afternoon and taken, with a shaved head and no training, straight to the front in the evening. But he thought Olanna was overreacting. Surely he could still go to the market. Surely he did not have to wake up before dawn to fetch water.

  He heard voices in the living room. Special Julius sounded almost as loud as Master. He would take the cake out and then weed the vegetable patch with its gnarled greens or perhaps go and sit on the pile of cement blocks and look across at the opposite house, to see if Eberechi would come out and shout, “Neighbor, how are you?” He would wave back a hello and imagine himself grasping those buttocks. It surprised him, how happy he was when she greeted him. The cake turned out crisp on the outside and moistly soft inside, and he cut slim slices and took them out in saucers. Special Julius and Olanna were sitting down while Master was standing, gesturing, talking about the last village he visited, how the people had sacrificed a goat at the shrine of oyi to keep the vandals away.

  “A whole goat! All that wasted protein!” Special Julius said and laughed.

  Master did not laugh. “No, no, you must never underestimate the psychological importance of such things. We never ask them to eat the goat instead.”

  “Ah, cake!” Special Julius said. He ignored the fork and stuffed the piece in his mouth. “Very good, very good. Ugwu, you have to teach the people in my house because all they do with our flour is chin-chin, every day is chin-chin, chin-chin, and it is the hard kind with no taste! My teeth have finished.”

  “Ugwu is a wonder at everything,” Olanna said. “He would easily put that woman in Rising Sun Bar out of business.”

  Professor Ekwenugo knocked on the open door and walked in. His hands were swathed in cream-colored bandages.

  “Dianyi, what happened to you?” Master asked.

  “Just a little burn.” Professor Ekwenugo stared at his bandaged hands as if he had only just realized that they meant he no longer had a long nail to stroke. “We are putting together something very big.”

  “Is it our first Biafran-built bomber jet?” Olanna teased.

  “Something very big that will reveal itself with time,” Professor Ekwenugo said, with a mysterious smile. He ate clumsily; bits of cake fell away before they got to his mouth.

  “It should be a saboteur-detecting machine,” Master said.

  “Yes! Bloody saboteurs.” Special Julius made the sound of spitting. “They sold Enugu out. How can you leave civilians to defend our capital with mere machetes? This is the same way they lost Nsukka, by pulling back for no reason. Doesn’t one of the commanding offic
ers have a Hausa wife? She has put medicine in his food.”

  “We will recapture Enugu,” Professor Ekwenugo said.

  “How can we recapture Enugu when the vandals have occupied it?” Special Julius said. “They are even looting toilet seats! Toilet seats! A man who escaped from Udi told me. And they choose the best houses and force people’s wives and daughters to spread their legs for them and cook for them.”

  Images of his mother and Anulika and Nnesinachi splayed out underneath a dirty sun-blackened Hausa soldier came to Ugwu so clearly that he shivered. He went out and sat on a cement block and wished, desperately, that he could go home, if only for a minute, to make sure that nothing had happened to them. Perhaps the vandals were already there and had taken over his aunty’s hut with the corrugated iron roof. Or perhaps his family had fled with their goats and chickens, like all the people streaming into Umuahia. The refugees: Ugwu saw them, more and more each day, new faces on the streets, at the public borehole, in the market. Women knocked on the door often to ask if there was any work they could do in exchange for food. They came with their thin naked children. Sometimes, Olanna gave them garri soaked in cold water before telling them she had no work. Mrs. Muokelu had taken in a family of eight relatives. She brought the children to play with Baby, and each time, after they left Olanna asked Ugwu to search Baby’s hair carefully for lice. The neighbors took in relatives. Master’s cousins came for a few weeks and slept in the living room until they left to join the army. There were so many fleeing, tired, homeless people that Ugwu was not surprised the afternoon Olanna came home and said that Akwakuma Primary School would be turned into a refugee camp.

  “They have brought bamboo beds and cooking utensils already. And the new Director for Mobilization is coming next week.” She sounded tired. She opened the pot on the stove and stared at the slices of boiled yam.

  “What about the children, mah?”

  “I was asking Headmistress if we could be relocated, and she looked at me and started laughing. We are the last. All the schools in Umuahia have become refugee camps or army training camps.” She closed the pot. “I’m going to organize classes here in the yard.”

  “With Mrs. Muokelu?”

  “Yes, and you too, Ugwu. You will teach a class.”

  “Yes, mah.” The thought excited and flattered him. “Mah?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think the vandals are in my hometown?”

  “Of course not,” Olanna said sharply. “Your hometown is too small. If they stay anywhere, it will be in the university.”

  “But if they took the Opi road into Nsukka—”

  “I said your hometown is too small! They will not be interested in staying there. There is nothing there to stay for, you see. It is just a small bush.”

  Ugwu looked at her and she looked at him. The silence was heavy and accusing.

  “I’m going to sell my brown shoes to Mama Onitsha, and I will make a new pretty dress for Baby,” Olanna said finally and Ugwu thought her voice was forced.

  He began to wash the plates.

  Ugwu saw the black Mercedes-Benz gliding down the road; the word DIRECTOR written on its metallic number plate sparkled in the sun. Near Eberechi’s house, it slowed down, shiny and enormous, and Ugwu hoped they would stop and ask him where the primary school was so he would get a good look at the dashboard. They did not just stop, though; they drove past him and into the compound. An orderly in a stiff uniform jumped out to open the back door before the car came to a complete halt. He saluted as the director climbed out.

  It was Professor Ezeka. He did not look as tall as Ugwu remembered; he had put on some weight and his thin neck had filled out. Ugwu stared. There was something sleek and new about him, about the fine cut of his suit, but his supercilious expression was the same, as was his hoarse voice. “Young man, is your master in?”

  “No, sah,” Ugwu said. In Nsukka, Professor Ezeka had called him Ugwu; now he looked as if he did not recognize him. “He has gone to work, sah.”

  “And your madam?”

  “She has gone to the relief center, sah.”

  Professor Ezeka motioned for his orderly to bring a piece of paper and he scribbled a note and gave it to Ugwu. His silver pen gleamed. “Tell them the Director for Mobilization came.”

  “Yes, sah.” Ugwu remembered his fastidious peering at glasses in Nsukka, his thin legs always crossed, disagreeing with Master. After the car drove down the street very slowly, as if the driver knew how many people were watching, Eberechi walked across. She was wearing that tight skirt that molded her buttocks to a perfect roundness.

  “Neighbor, how are you?” she asked.

  “I am well. How are you?”

  She shrugged to say she was so-so. “Was that the Director for Mobilization himself who just left?”

  “Professor Ezeka?” he asked breezily. “Yes, we knew him well in Nsukka. He used to come to our house every day to eat my pepper soup.”

  “Eh!” She laughed, wide-eyed. “He is a Big Man. Ihukwara moto? Did you see that car?”

  “Original imported chassis.”

  They were silent for a while. He had never had a conversation this long with her before and had never seen her so close up. It was difficult to keep his eyes from moving down to that magnificent flare of buttocks. He struggled to focus on her face, her large eyes, the rash of pimples on her forehead, her hair plaited in thread-covered spikes. She was looking at him, too, and he wished he was not wearing the trousers with the hole near the knee.

  “How is the small girl?” she asked.

  “Baby is fine. She’s asleep.”

  “Are you coming to do the primary school roof?”

  Ugwu knew that an army contractor had donated some corrugated iron for replacing the blown-off roof and that volunteers were camouflaging it with palm fronds. But he had not planned to join them.

  “Yes, I shall come,” he said.

  “See you then.”

  “Bye-bye.” Ugwu waited for her to turn so that he could stare at her retreating backside.

  When Olanna came back, her basket empty, she read Professor Ezeka’s note with a half smile on her face. “Yes, we just heard yesterday that he’s the new director. And how like him to write something like this.”

  Ugwu had read the note—Odenigbo and Olanna, dropped by to say hello. Shall drop by again next week, if this tedious new job allows. Ezeka—but he asked, “How, mah?”

  “Oh, he’s always felt a bit better than everybody else.” Olanna placed the note on the table. “Professor Achara is going to help get us some books and benches and blackboards. Many women have told me they will send their children to us next week.” She looked excited.

  “That is good, mah.” Ugwu shifted on his feet. “I’m going down to help with the school roof. I’ll be back to make Baby’s food.”

  “Oh,” Olanna said.

  Ugwu knew she was thinking about the conscriptions. “I think it is important to help in something like this, mah,” he said.

  “Of course. Yes, you should help. But please be careful.”

  Ugwu saw Eberechi right away; she was with some men and women who were bent over a pile of palm fronds, cutting, matting, passing them on to a man on a wooden ladder.

  “Neighbor!” she said. “I have been telling everyone that your people know the director personally.”

  Ugwu smiled and said a general good afternoon. The men and women murmured good afternoon and ehe, kedu, and nno with the admiring respect that came with knowing who he knew. He felt suddenly important. Somebody gave him a cutlass. A woman sat on the stairs grinding melon seeds, and some little girls were playing cards under the mango tree, and a man was carving a walking stick whose handle was the carefully realized bearded face of His Excellency. There was a rotten smell in the air.

  “Imagine living in this kind of place.” Eberechi leaned close to him to whisper. “And many more will come now that Abakaliki has fallen. You know that since Enugu fell, accomm
odation has been a big problem. Some people who work in the directorates are even sleeping in their cars.”

  “That is true,” Ugwu agreed, although he did not know this for sure. He loved that she was talking to him, loved her familiar friendliness. He began to trim some palm fronds with firm strokes. From the classroom, someone turned the radio on: gallant Biafran soldiers were completing a mopping-up operation in a sector Ugwu did not hear clearly.

  “Our boys are showing them!” the woman grinding melon seeds said.

  “Biafra will win this war, God has written it in the sky,” said a man with a beard braided in a single thin strand.

  Eberechi giggled and whispered to Ugwu, “Bush man. He does not know it is Bee-afra, not Ba-yafra.”

  Ugwu laughed. Fat black ants were crawling all over the palm fronds, and she squealed and looked helplessly at him when one crawled onto her arm. Ugwu brushed it off and felt the warm moistness of her skin. She had wanted him to brush it off; she did not seem like the kind of person who was truly afraid of ants.

  One of the women had a baby boy tied to her back. She adjusted the wrapper that held him and said, “We were on our way back from the market when we discovered the vandals had occupied the junction and were shelling inside the village. We could not go home. We had to turn and run. I had only this wrapper and blouse and the small money from selling my pepper. I don’t know where my two children are, the ones I left at home to go to the market.” She started to cry. The abruptness of her tears, the way they gushed out of her, startled Ugwu.

  “Woman, stop crying,” the man with the braided beard said curtly.

  The woman continued to cry. Her baby, too, began to cry.

  When Ugwu took a batch of fronds across to the ladder, he stopped to peer into one of the classrooms. Cooking pots, sleeping mats, metal boxes, and bamboo beds cluttered it so completely that the room did not look as though it had ever been anything else but a home for disparate groups of people with nowhere else to go. A bright poster on the wall read: IN CASE OF AIR RAID, DO NOT PANIC. IF YOU SEE THE ENEMY, MOW HIM DOWN. Another woman with a baby tied to her back was washing peeled cassava tubers in a pan of filthy water. Her baby’s face was wrinkled. Ugwu nearly choked when he came close and realized that the rotten smell came from her water: it had previously been used to soak cassava, perhaps for days, and was being reused. The smell was awful, nose-filling, the smell of a dirty toilet and rancid steamed beans and boiled eggs gone bad.