Half of a Yellow Sun

  Richard stayed at home the following days. He wrote about the forest markets and stood often on the veranda, looking down the stretch of road, half expecting a mob of youths to rush toward the house with flaming torches. Kainene had seen one of the burned houses on her way to work. A mild effort, she had called it; they had only blackened the walls. Richard wanted to see it too, to write about it and perhaps link it to the burning of effigies of Wilson and Kosygin he had seen recently at the government field, but he waited for a week to make sure it was safe to be a British man on the road before he left very early in the morning for a tour of the city.

  He was surprised to see a new checkpoint on Aggrey Road and even more surprised that it was guarded by soldiers. Perhaps it was because of the burned houses. The road was empty, all the shouting hawkers with their groundnuts and newspapers and fried fish were gone. A soldier stood in the middle of the road, swinging his gun as they approached, motioning that they go back. The driver stopped and Richard held out his pass. The soldier ignored the pass and kept swinging his gun. “Turn back! Turn back!”

  “Good morning,” Richard began. “I am Richard Churchill and I am—”

  “Turn back or I shoot! Nobody is leaving Port Harcourt! There is no cause for alarm!”

  The man’s fingers were twitchy on the gun. The driver turned around. Richard’s foreboding had become hard pebbles in his nostrils, but he made himself sound casual when he got back home and told Kainene what had happened.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said. “There are so many rumors flying around, the army probably wants to put a stop to the panic.”

  “Certainly a fine way to do it,” Kainene said, and there was that wary expression of hers again. She was placing some papers in a file. “We should call Madu and find out what’s going on.”

  “Yes,” Richard said. “Well, I’ll go and shave. I didn’t have time to shave before I left.”

  He heard the first boom from the bathroom. He kept running the stick over his chin. It came again: boom, boom, boom. The window louvers shattered and the glass shards clinked as they fell to the floor. Some of them landed close to his feet.

  Kainene opened the bathroom door. “I’ve asked Harrison and Ikejide to put a few things in the car,” she said. “We’ll leave the Ford and take the Peugeot.”

  Richard turned and stared at her and felt the urge to cry. He wished he were as calm as she was, that his hands would not shake as he washed them. He took his shaving cream, her soaps, and some sponges and threw them in a bag.

  “Richard, we should hurry, the shelling sounds very close by,” Kainene said, and again there was a series of boom, boom, boom. She was putting her things and his into a suitcase. The drawers that held his shirts and his underwear were pulled out, and her packing was quick and methodical. He ran a hand over his books lined on the shelf and then began to search for the sheets where he had written notes for his piece about ogbunigwe, the fantastic Biafran-made land mines. He had left them on the table, he was sure. He looked inside the drawers.

  “Have you seen my papers?” he asked.

  “We have to get past the main road before they advance, Richard,” Kainene said. She stuffed two fat envelopes into her bag.

  “What are those envelopes?” he asked.

  “Emergency cash.”

  Harrison and Ikejide came in and began to drag the two packed suitcases out. Richard heard the roar of planes above. It couldn’t possibly be. There had never been an air raid in Port Harcourt and it made no sense that there would be one now, when Port Harcourt was about to fall and the vandals were shelling close by. But the sound was unmistakable, and when Harrison shouted, “Enemy plane, sah!” his words felt redundant.

  Richard ran toward Kainene, but she was already running out of the room, and he followed. She said, “Come out to the orchard!” when she ran past Harrison and Ikejide crouched under the kitchen table.

  Outside, the air was humid. Richard looked up and saw them, two planes flying low, with an ominously streamlined efficiency to their shape, trailing silver-white lines in the sky. Fear spread helplessness throughout his body. They lay under the orange trees, he and Kainene, side by side, silent. Harrison and Ikejide had run out of the house; Harrison threw himself flat on the ground while Ikejide kept running, his body arched slightly forward, his arms flying around, his head bobbing. Then came the cold whistle of a mortar in the air and the crash as it landed and the boom as it exploded. Richard pressed Kainene to him. A piece of shrapnel, the size of a fist, wheezed past. Ikejide was still running and, in the moment that Richard glanced away and back, Ikejide’s head was gone. The body was running, arched slightly forward, arms flying around, but there was no head. There was only a bloodied neck. Kainene screamed. The body crashed down near her long American car, the planes receded and disappeared into the distance, and they all lay still for long minutes, until Harrison got up and said, “I am getting bag.”

  He came back with a raffia bag. Richard did not look as Harrison went over to pick up Ikejide’s head and put it in the bag. Later, as he grasped the still-warm ankles and walked, with Harrison holding the wrists, to the shallow grave at the bottom of the orchard, he did not once look directly at it.

  Kainene sat on the ground and watched them.

  “Are you all right?” Richard asked her. She did not respond. There was an eerie blankness in her eyes. Richard was not sure what to do. He shook her gently but the blank look remained, so he went to the tap and splashed a bucket of cold water on her.

  “Stop it, for heaven’s sake,” she said, and got up. “You’ve wet my dress.”

  She pulled out another dress from a suitcase and changed in the kitchen before they left for Orlu. She no longer hurried; slowly, she straightened the collar, smoothed down the rumpled bodice with her hands. The jumble of sounds jarred Richard as he drove—the boom-boom-boom of mortars, the quickening rattle of gunshots—and he expected to see a Nigerian soldier stop them or attack them or throw a grenade at them at any time. Nothing happened. The roads were crowded. The checkpoints were gone. From the backseat, Harrison said in a cowed whisper, “They are using everything they are having to take Port Harcourt.”

  Kainene said little when they arrived in Orlu and saw no carpenter and no furniture; the men had disappeared with the advance payment. She simply walked to the refugee camp down the road and found another carpenter, a sallow-skinned man who wanted to be paid in food. In the following days, she was mostly silent, withdrawn, as they sat outside and watched the carpenter cutting, hammering, smoothing.

  “Why don’t you want money?” Kainene asked him.

  “What will I buy with the money?” he asked.

  “You must be a foolish man,” Kainene said. “There is much you can buy with money.”

  “Not in this Biafra.” The man shrugged. “Just give me garri and rice.”

  Kainene did not respond. A bird’s dropping fell on the floor of the veranda, and Richard picked up a cashew leaf and wiped it off.

  “You know Olanna saw a mother carrying her child’s head,” Kainene said.

  “Yes,” Richard said, although he did not know. She had never told him about Olanna’s experience during the massacres.

  “I want to see her.”

  “You should go.” Richard took a deep breath to steady himself and stared at one of the finished chairs. It was sharp-angled and ugly.

  “How could shrapnel cut off Ikejide’s head so completely?” Kainene asked, as if she wanted him to tell her that she was mistaken about the whole thing. He wished he could. At nights, she cried. She told him she wanted to dream of Ikejide but she woke up every morning and remembered his running headless body clearly while, in the safer blurred territory of her dreams, she saw herself smoking a cigarette in an elegant gold holder.

  ———

  A van delivered bags of garri to the house, and Kainene asked Harrison not to touch them because they were for the refugee camp. She was the new food supplier.


  “I’ll distribute the food to the refugees myself and I’m going to ask the Agricultural Research Center for some shit,” she told Richard.

  “Shit?”

  “Manure. We can start a farm at the camp. We’ll grow our own protein, soya beans, and akidi.”

  “Oh.”

  “There’s a man from Enugu who has a fantastic talent for making baskets and lamps. I’ll have him teach others. We can create income here. We can make a difference! And I’ll ask the Red Cross to send us a doctor every week.”

  There was a manic vibrancy about her, about the way she left for the refugee camp each day, about the exhaustion that shadowed her eyes when she returned in the evenings. She no longer spoke of Ikejide. Instead, she spoke about twenty people living in a space meant for one and about the little boys who played War and the women who nursed babies and the selfless Holy Ghost priests Father Marcel and Father Jude. But it was Inatimi she spoke about the most. He was in the Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters, had lost his entire family in the massacres, and often infiltrated enemy camps. He came by to educate the refugees.

  “He thinks it’s important for our people to know that our cause is just and to understand why this is true. I’ve told him not to bother teaching them about federalism and the Aburi accord and whatnot. They will never grasp it. Some of them didn’t even go to primary school. But he just ignores me and goes on spending time with little groups of people.” Kainene sounded admiring, as if his ignoring her was further proof of his heroism. Richard resented Inatimi. In his mind, Inatimi became perfect, brave and bracing, made intrepid and sensitive by loss. When he finally met Inatimi he nearly laughed in the face of this small pimpled man with a bulb of a nose. But he could see, right away, that Inatimi’s god was Biafra. His was a fervent faith in the cause.

  “When I lost my whole family, every single one, it was as if I had been born all over again,” Inatimi told Richard in his quiet way. “I was a new person because I no longer had family to remind me of what I had been.”

  The priests, too, were nothing like Richard had expected. He was surprised by their quiet cheer. When they told him, “We are amazed at the good work God is doing here,” Richard wanted to ask why God had allowed the war to happen in the first place. Yet their faith moved him. If God could make them care so genuinely, God was a worthy concept.

  Richard was talking to Father Marcel about God on the morning the doctor arrived. Her dusty Morris Minor had red cross painted on it in red. Even before she said “I’m Dr. Inyang,” with an easy handshake, Richard knew she was from one of the minority tribes. He prided himself on his ability to recognize an Igbo person. It was nothing to do with how they looked; it was, instead, a fellow feeling.

  Kainene led Dr. Inyang straight to the sickroom, the classroom at the end of the block. Richard followed; he watched while Kainene talked about the refugees lying on bamboo pallets. A pregnant young woman sat up and held her chest and began to cough, unending chesty coughing that was painful to hear.

  Dr. Inyang bent over her with a stethoscope and said, in gentle Pidgin English, “How are you? How you dey?”

  First the pregnant young woman recoiled and then she spat with a vicious intensity that wrinkled her forehead. The watery smear of saliva landed on Dr. Inyang’s chin.

  “Saboteur!” the pregnant woman said. “It is you non-Igbo who are showing the enemy the way! Hapu m! It is you people that showed them the way to my hometown!”

  Dr. Inyang’s hand rested on her chin, too stunned to wipe the saliva off. The silence was thickened by uncertainty. Kainene walked over briskly and slapped the pregnant woman, two hard smacks in quick succession on her cheek.

  “We are all Biafrans! Anyincha bu Biafra!” Kainene said. “Do you understand me? We are all Biafrans!”

  The pregnant woman fell back on her bed.

  Richard was startled by Kainene’s violence. There was something brittle about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would destroy her.

  28

  Olanna had a happy dream. She did not remember what it was about but she remembered that it had been happy, and so she woke up warming herself with the thought that she could still have a happy dream. She wished Odenigbo had not gone to work so she could tell him about it and trace his gently indulgent smile as he listened, the smile that said he did not need to agree with her to believe her. But she had not seen that smile since his mother died, since he tried to go to Abba and came back clutching a shadow, since he began to leave for work too early and to stop at Tanzania Bar on his way home. If only he had not tried to cross the occupied roads, he would not be so gaunt and withdrawn now; his grief would not be burdened by failure. She should never have let him go. But his determination had been quietly hostile, as though he felt she had no right to stop him. His words—“I have to bury what the vultures left behind”—dug a gully between them that she had not known how to bridge. Before he climbed into the car and drove off, she had told him, “Somebody must have buried her.”

  And later, as she sat on the veranda waiting for him, she loathed herself for not finding better words. Somebody must have buried her. It sounded so trivial. What she meant was that surely his cousin Aniekwena buried her. Aniekwena’s message, sent through a soldier on leave, was brief: Abba was occupied and he had sneaked back to try and evacuate some property and found Mama lying dead from gunshot wounds near the compound wall. He had said nothing more, but Olanna assumed he must have dug a grave. He could not have left her lying there, decaying.

  Olanna no longer remembered the hours of waiting for Odenigbo to come back, but she did remember the sensation of blindness, of cold sheaths being drawn over her eyes. She had worried from time to time about Baby and Kainene and Ugwu dying, vaguely acknowledged the possibilities of future grief, but she had never conceived of Odenigbo’s death. Never. He was her life’s constant. When he came back, long after midnight, with his shoes covered in mud, she knew he would not be the same again. He asked Ugwu for a glass of water and told her in a calm voice, “They kept asking me to go back, so I parked the car and hid it and began to walk. Finally, one Biafran officer cocked his gun and said he would shoot and save the vandals the trouble if I didn’t turn around.”

  She held him close to her and sobbed. Her relief was stained with desolation.

  “I’m fine, nkem,” he said. But he no longer went into the interior with the Agitator Corps, no longer returned with lit-up eyes. Instead, he went to Tanzania Bar every day and came back with a taciturn set to his mouth. When he did talk, he spoke of his unpublished research papers left behind in Nsukka, how they were almost enough to make him a full professor, and heaven knew what the vandals would do with them. She wanted him to truly talk to her, help her to help him grieve, but each time she told him, he said, “It’s too late, nkem.” She was not sure what he meant. She sensed the layers of his grief—he would never know how Mama had died and would always struggle with old resentments—but she did not feel connected to his mourning. Sometimes she wondered if this was her own failure rather than his, if perhaps she lacked a certain strength that would compel him to include her in his pain.

  ———

  Okeoma visited to pay condolences.

  “I heard what happened,” he said, when Olanna opened the door. She hugged him and looked at the jagged, swollen scar that ran from his chin to his neck and thought how quickly it spread, news of death.

  “He has not really spoken to me,” she said. “What he says to me makes no sense.”

  “Odenigbo has never known how to be weak. Be patient with him.” Okeoma spoke in a near whisper because Odenigbo had come out. After they hugged and thumped each other’s backs, Okeoma looked at him.

  “Ndo,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “I think she must have been surprised when they shot her,” Odenigbo said. “Mama never understood that we were really at war and that her life was in dan
ger.”

  Olanna stared at him.

  “What has happened has happened,” Okeoma said. “You must be strong.”

  A short and shabby silence fell across the room.

  “Julius brought some fresh palm wine,” Odenigbo said finally. “You know, they mix in too much water these days, but this one is very good.”

  “I’ll drink that later. Where is that White Horse whisky you save for special occasions?”

  “It is almost finished.”

  “Then I will finish it,” Okeoma said.

  Odenigbo brought the bottle and they sat in the living room, the radio turned low and the aroma of Ugwu’s soup in the air.

  “My commander drinks this like water,” Okeoma said, and shook the bottle to see how much was left.

  “And how is he, your commander, the white-man mercenary?” Odenigbo asked.

  Okeoma darted an apologetic glance at Olanna before he said, “He throws girls on their backs in the open where the men can see him and does them, all the time holding his bag of money in one hand.” Okeoma drank from the bottle and scrunched up his face for a moment. “We could easily have retaken Enugu if the man only listened, but he thinks he knows more about our own land than we do. He has started commandeering relief cars. He threatened His Excellency last week that he would leave if he doesn’t get his balance.”

  Okeoma took another swig from the bottle.

  “Two days ago I went out in mufti and a ranger stopped me on the road and accused me of deserting. I warned him never to try that again or I would show him why we commandos are different from regular soldiers. I heard him laughing as I walked away. Imagine that! Before, he would never have dared to laugh at a commando. If we don’t reorganize soon we will lose our credibility.”

  “Why should white people be paid to fight our war anyway?” Odenigbo leaned back on the chair. “There are many of us who can truly fight because we are willing to give ourselves for Biafra.”

  Olanna stood up. “Let’s eat,” she said. “I’m sorry our soup has no meat, Okeoma.”