He held his breath and went back to the palm fronds. The crying woman was nursing her baby on a drooping breast.
“Our town would not have fallen but for the saboteurs in our midst!” the man with the braided beard said. “I was a Civil Defender. I know how many infiltrators we discovered, and all of them were Rivers people. What I am telling you is that we can no longer trust these minorities who don’t speak Igbo.” He paused and turned when he heard a shout from some young boys playing War in the middle of the school compound. They looked about ten or eleven years old, wore banana leaves on their heads, and held mock guns made from bamboo. The longest gun belonged to the commander of the Biafran side, a tall stern child with sharp cheekbones. “Advance!” he shouted.
The boys crept forward.
“Fire!”
They flung stones with wide sweeps of their arms and then, clutching their guns, they rushed toward the other boys, the Nigerian side, the losers.
The bearded man began to clap. “These boys are wonderful! Just give them arms and they will send the vandals back.”
Other people clapped and cheered the boys. The palm fronds were ignored for a while.
“You know I kept trying to join the army when this war started,” the bearded man said. “I went everywhere but they kept rejecting me because of my leg so I had to join the Civil Defenders.”
“What is wrong with your leg?” the woman grinding melon seeds asked.
He raised his leg. Half of his foot was gone and what was left looked like a shriveled piece of old yam. “I lost it in the North,” he said.
In the silence that followed, the crackling of the palm fronds was too loud. Then a woman came out of a classroom, after a small child, slapping the child’s head again and again. “So you broke only one plate? No, go ahead and break all my plates. Break them! Kuwa ha! We have many, don’t we? We came with all our plates, didn’t we? Break them!” she said. The little girl ran off toward the mango tree. Before the mother went back into the classroom, she stood there and cursed for a while, muttering that those spirits that had sent the child to break her few plates would not succeed.
“Why should the child not break a plate? What food is there to eat from it anyway?” the breast-feeding woman asked sourly, still sniffling. They laughed, and Eberechi leaned toward Ugwu and whispered that the bearded man had bad breath, which was probably why they did not take him in the army. Ugwu ached to press his body against hers.
They left together and Ugwu looked back to make sure that everyone had noticed that they were together. A soldier in a Biafran Army uniform and a helmet walked past them, speaking a mangled Pidgin English that made little sense, his voice too loud. He swayed as he walked, as if he would tip over sideways. He had one full arm, the other was a stump that stopped before his elbow. Eberechi watched him.
“His people do not know,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“His people think he is well and fighting for our cause.”
The soldier was shouting, “Don’t waste your bullet! I say one vandal one bullet with immediate effect!” while the little boys gathered around him, taunting him, laughing at him, singing praise names for him.
Eberechi was walking a little faster. “My brother joined the army in the beginning.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Yes. He has come home only once. Everybody on the street came out to greet him and the children were fighting to touch his uniform.”
She said nothing else until they got to the front of her house and she turned away. “Let the day break,” she said.
“See you tomorrow,” Ugwu said. He wished he had said more to her.
———
Ugwu arranged three benches on the veranda for Olanna’s class and two by the compound entrance for Mrs. Muokelu’s; for his own class with the youngest pupils, he placed two benches near the pile of cement blocks.
“We will teach mathematics, English, and civics every day,” Olanna said to Ugwu and Mrs. Muokelu a day before the classes began. “We have to make sure that when the war is over, they will all fit back easily into regular school. We will teach them to speak perfect English and perfect Igbo, like His Excellency. We will teach them pride in our great nation.”
Ugwu watched her and wondered if she had tears in her eyes or if it was simply the glare of the sun. He wanted to learn all he could from her and Mrs. Muokelu, to excel at teaching, to show her that he could do it. He was arranging his blackboard against a tree stump on the first day of classes when a woman, some relative of Special Julius’s, brought her daughter. She stared at Ugwu.
“Is this one a teacher?” she asked Olanna.
“Yes.”
“Is he not your houseboy?” Her voice was shrill. “Since when has a servant started to teach, bikokwa?”
“If you do not want your child to learn, take her home,” Olanna said.
The woman pulled her daughter by the hand and left. Ugwu was certain that Olanna would look at him with a sympathy that would annoy him more than the woman had. But she shrugged and said, “Good riddance. Her daughter has lice. I saw the eggs in her hair.”
Other parents were different. They looked at Olanna, her beautiful face, her undemanding fees, and her perfect English, with awe-filled respect. They brought palm oil and yams and garri. A woman who traded across enemy lines brought a chicken. An army contractor brought two of his children and a carton of books—early readers, six copies of Chike and the River, eight simplified editions of Pride and Prejudice; when Olanna opened the carton and threw her arms around him, Ugwu resented the startled leering pleasure on the man’s face.
After the first week, Ugwu became quietly convinced that Mrs. Muokelu knew very little. She calculated simple divisions with uncertainty, spoke in a low mumble when she read, as though she was afraid of the sentences, and scolded her pupils for getting something wrong without telling them what the correct thing was. And so he watched only Olanna. “Enunciate! Enunciate!” Olanna would say to her students, her voice rising. “Set-tle. Set-tle. The word has no R!” Because she made each of her students read aloud every day, Ugwu made his own class recite simple words aloud. Baby often went first. She was the youngest, not yet six in a class of seven-year-olds, but she flawlessly read cat, pan, bed in an accent that was like Olanna’s. She did not remember, though, to call him teacher like everyone else and Ugwu hid his amusement when she said, “Ugwu!”
At the end of the second week, after the children left, Mrs. Muokelu asked Olanna to sit down with her in the living room. She pulled the edges of her too-long boubou together and tucked them between her legs.
“I have twelve people to feed,” she said. “And that is not counting my husband’s relatives who have just come from Abakaliki. My husband has returned from the war front with one leg. What can he do? I am going to start afia attack and see if I can buy salt. I can no longer teach.”
“I understand,” Olanna said. “But must you join them in buying from enemy territory?”
“What is there to buy in Biafra? They have blockaded us kpam-kpam.”
“But how will you go?”
“There is a woman I know. She supplies garri to the army, so they give her lorry a military escort. The lorry will take us to Ufuma and then we will walk across to where the border is porous in Nkwerre-Inyi.”
“How long is the walk?”
“About fifteen or twenty miles, nothing a determined person cannot do. We will carry our Nigerian coins and buy salt and garri and then walk back to the lorry.”
“Please be careful, my sister.”
“Many are doing it and nothing has happened to them.” She got up. “Ugwu will have to handle my class. But I know he can manage.”
From the dining table where he was giving Baby her garri and soup, Ugwu pretended not to have heard them.
He took over her class the next day. He loved the light of recognition in the older children’s eyes when he explained the meaning of a word, loved the loud w
ay Master said to Special Julius, “My wife and Ugwu are changing the face of the next generation of Biafrans with their Socratic pedagogy!” and loved, most of all, the teasing way Eberechi called him teacher. She was impressed. When he saw her standing by her house and watching him teach, he would raise his voice and pronounce his words more carefully. She began to come over after classes. She would sit in the backyard with him, or play with Baby, or watch him weed the vegetable patch. Sometimes Olanna asked her to take some corn down to the grinding station down the road.
Ugwu stole some of the milk and sugar that Master brought home from the directorate and put them in old tins and gave them to her. She said thank you but she looked unimpressed, and so, in the middle of a searing afternoon, he sneaked into Olanna’s room and poured some scented talcum powder into a folded piece of paper. He had to impress her. Eberechi sniffed it and dabbed a little on her neck before she said, “I did not ask you for powder.”
Ugwu laughed. He felt, for the first time, completely at ease in her presence. She told him about her parents’ pushing her into the army officer’s room, and he listened as if he had not heard it before.
“He had a big belly,” she said, in a detached tone. “He did it quickly and then told me to lie on top of him. He fell asleep and I wanted to move away and he woke up and told me to stay there. I could not sleep so the whole night I looked at the saliva coming down the side of his mouth.” She paused. “He helped us. He put my brother in essential services in the army.”
Ugwu looked away. He felt angry that she had gone through what she had, and he felt angry with himself because the story had involved imagining her naked and had aroused him. He thought, in the following days, about him and Eberechi in bed, how different it would be from her experience with the colonel. He would treat her with the respect she deserved and do only what she liked, only what she wanted him to do. He would show her the positions he had seen in Master’s Concise Couples Handbook in Nsukka. The slender book had been squashed into a dusty corner of the study shelf, and the first time Ugwu saw it while he was cleaning, he looked through it hurriedly, sweeping past the pencil-sketched diagrams that somehow became more exciting because they were unreal. Later, he realized that Master probably didn’t remember that the book existed so he took it to the Boys’ Quarters to study over a few nights. He had thought about trying some of the positions out with Chinyere but never did: there was something about the methodical silence of her night visits that made any novelty impossible. He wished so much that he had brought the book from Nsukka. He wanted to remember some finer details, what the woman had done with her hands in the sideways-from-behind position, for example. He searched in Master’s bedroom and felt foolish because he knew there was no way the Concise Couples Handbook would be there. Then he felt a deep sadness at how few books there were on the table, in the whole house.
Ugwu was making Baby’s breakfast and Master was taking a bath when Olanna began to shout from the living room. The radio was turned on very loud. She ran out to the back, to the outhouse, carrying it in her hand. “Odenigbo! Odenigbo! Tanzania has recognized us!”
Master came out with his moist wrapper barely tied around his waist, his chest covered in lustrous wet hair. His smiling face without the thick glasses looked funny. “Gini? What?”
“Tanzania has recognized us!” Olanna said.
“Eh?” Master said and they hugged and pressed their lips, their faces, close together as though inhaling each other’s breath.
Then Master took the radio and tuned it. “Let’s make sure. Let’s hear it from others.”
Voice of America was reporting it, as was French radio, which Olanna translated: Tanzania was the first country to recognize the existence of the independent nation of Biafra. Finally, Biafra existed. Ugwu tickled Baby and she laughed.
“Nyerere will go down in history as a man of truth,” Master said. “Of course, many other countries want to recognize us but they won’t because of America. America is the stumbling block!”
Ugwu was not sure how America was to blame for other countries not recognizing Biafra—he thought Britain really was to blame—but he repeated Master’s words to Eberechi that afternoon, with authority, as though they were his. It was hot and he found her asleep on a mat in the shade of their veranda.
“Eberechi, Eberechi,” he said.
She sat up with the red-eyed, wounded look of a person jerked from sleep. But she smiled when she saw him. “Teacher, have you finished for today?”
“You heard that Tanzania has recognized us?”
“Yes, yes.” She rubbed her eyes and laughed, a happy sound that made Ugwu happier.
“America is the reason many other countries will not recognize us; America is the stumbling block,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. They were sitting side by side on the stairs. “We got double good news today. My aunty is now the provincial representative of Caritas. She said she will give me a job at the relief center in St. John’s. It means I will get extra stockfish!”
She reached out and playfully pinched the skin of his neck, a gentle pressure between her fingers. He looked at her. He not only wanted to squeeze her naked buttocks, he also wanted to wake up next to her and know he would sleep next to her every day, wanted to talk to her and listen to her laughter. She was nothing like Chinyere, a fond convenience, but rather like a real Nnesinachi, one he had come to care for because of what she said and did, and not what he imagined she would say and do. He was welling up with a surge of recognition and wanted to say, over and over, that he loved her. He loved her. But he didn’t. They sat and praised Tanzania and dreamed about stockfish and were still talking desultorily when a Peugeot 403 sped across the street. It reversed, in loud screeches, as if the driver wanted to make as much of an impression as possible, and stopped in front of the house. BIAFRAN ARMY was roughly handwritten on it in red paint. A soldier climbed out, holding a gun, wearing a uniform so smart that the lines of ironing were visible down the front. Eberechi stood up as he walked up to them.
“Good afternoon,” she said.
“Are you Eberechi?”
She nodded. “Is it about my brother? Has something happened to my brother?”
“No, no.” There was a knowing leer on his face that Ugwu in stantly disliked. “Major Nwogu is calling you. He is at the bar down the road.”
“Oh!” Eberechi left her mouth open, her hand on her chest. “I am coming, I am coming.” She turned and ran indoors. Ugwu felt betrayed by her excitement. The soldier was staring at him.
“Good afternoon,” Ugwu said.
“Who are you?” the soldier asked. “Are you an idle civilian?”
“I am a teacher.”
“A teacher? Onye nkuzi?” He swung his gun back and forth.
“Yes,” Ugwu responded in English. “We organize classes in this neighborhood and teach the young ones the ideals of the Biafran cause.” He hoped his English sounded like Olanna’s; he hoped, too, that his affectation would frighten this soldier into not asking him any more questions.
“Which classes?” the soldier asked, in a near mumble. He looked both impressed and uncertain.
“We focus on civics and mathematics and English. The Director of Mobilization has sponsored our efforts.”
The soldier stared.
Eberechi hurried out; her face wore a thin coat of white powder, her eyebrows were darkened, her lips a red gash.
“Let’s go,” she said to the soldier. Then she bent and whispered to Ugwu, “I am coming. If they look for me, please say I went to get something from Ngozi’s house.”
“Okay, Mr. Teacher! See you!” the soldier said and Ugwu thought he saw a glimmer of triumph in his eyes, the illiterate fool. Ugwu could not bear to watch them go; he studied his nails instead. The mix of hurt and confusion and embarrassment weakened him. He could not believe she had just asked him to lie for her while she ran off to see a man she had never mentioned to him. His legs were sluggish as he walked across the
road. Everything he did for the rest of the day was colored with a bitter dye, and he thought, more than once, about walking down to the bar to see what was going on.
It was dark when she knocked on the back door.
“Do you know they have already renamed the Rising Sun Bar?” she asked, laughing. “It is now called Tanzania Bar!”
He looked at her and said nothing.
“People were playing Tanzanian music and dancing, and one businessman came and ordered chicken and beer for everybody,” she said.
His jealousy was visceral; it clutched at his throat and tried to strangle him.
“Where is Aunty Olanna?” she asked.
“She is reading with Baby,” Ugwu managed to say. He wanted to shake her until she told him the full truth of the afternoon, what she had done with the man, why the lipstick was gone from her lips.
Eberechi sighed. “Is there some water? I am thirsty. I drank beer today.”
Ugwu could not believe how casual and comfortable she was. He poured some water into a cup and she drank it slowly.
“I met the major some weeks ago; he gave me a lift when I went to Orlu, but I did not think he would even remember me. He is such a nice man.” Eberechi paused. “I told him you are my brother. He said he will make sure nobody comes here to conscript you.” She looked proud of what she had accomplished, and Ugwu felt as if she were deliberately pulling out his teeth, one after the other.