Half of a Yellow Sun

  “I’m sorry our soup has no meat,” Okeoma mimicked. “Does this place look like a meat shop? I did not come looking for meat.”

  Ugwu placed the plates of garri on the table.

  “Please remove your grenade while we eat, Okeoma,” Olanna said.

  He dislodged it from his waist and placed it in the corner. They ate in silence for a while, molding their garri into balls, dipping in soup, swallowing.

  “What is that scar?” Olanna asked.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” Okeoma said, and ran his hand lightly over it. “It looks more serious than it is.”

  “You should join the Biafran Writers League,” she said. “You should be one of those going abroad to publicize our cause.”

  Okeoma started to shake his head while Olanna was still speaking. “I am a soldier,” he said.

  “Do you still write?” Olanna asked.

  He shook his head again.

  “Do you have a poem for us, though? From your head?” she asked, and sounded desperate even to herself.

  Okeoma swallowed a ball of garri, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “No,” he said. He turned to Odenigbo. “Did you hear what our shore batteries did to the vandals in the Onitsha sector?”

  After lunch, Odenigbo went into the bedroom. Okeoma finished the whisky and then drank glass after glass of palm wine and fell asleep in the living room chair. His breathing was labored; he mumbled and twice flayed his arms as if to shake some invisible attackers off. Olanna patted his shoulder to wake him up.

  “Kunie. Come and lie down inside,” she said.

  He opened reddened, bewildered eyes. “No, no, I’m really not sleeping.”

  “Look at you. You were gone.”

  “Not at all.” Okeoma stifled a yawn. “I do have a poem in my head.” He sat up and straightened his back and began to recite. He sounded different. In Nsukka, he had read his poetry dramatically, as though convinced that his art mattered more than anything else. Now he had a tone of unwilling banter, but still banter.

  “Brown

  With the fish-glow sheen of a mermaid,

  She appears,

  Bearing silver dawn; And the sun attends her,

  The mermaid

  Who will never be mine.”

  “Odenigbo would have said, ‘The voice of a generation!’” Olanna said.

  “What would you say?”

  “The voice of a man.”

  Okeoma smiled shyly, and she remembered how Odenigbo teased her about his being secretly infatuated with her. The poem was about her, and he had wanted her to know it. They sat in silence until his eyes began to close and soon his snoring became regular. She watched him and wondered what he was dreaming about. He was still sleeping, often mumbling and rolling his head from side to side, when Professor Achara arrived in the evening.

  “Oh, your friend the commando is here,” he said. “Please call Odenigbo. Let’s go out to the veranda.”

  They sat on the bench on the veranda. Professor Achara kept glancing down, clasping and unclasping his hands.

  “I have come on a difficult matter,” he said.

  Fear constricted Olanna’s chest: something had happened to Kainene and they had sent Professor Achara to tell her. She wanted Professor Achara to leave right away without telling her, because what she did not know would not hurt her.

  “What is it?” Odenigbo asked sharply.

  “I have tried to make your landlord change his mind. I have done everything I can. But he refused. He wants you to pack out in two weeks.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Odenigbo said.

  But Olanna was sure he did. They were being asked to move out of the house because the landlord had found somebody who would pay him twice or perhaps three times the rent.

  “I’m so sorry, Odenigbo. He is usually a most reasonable man, but I suppose the times have taken away a bit of our reason.”

  Odenigbo sighed.

  “I will help find another place,” Professor Achara said.

  They were lucky to find one room, now that Umuahia was thronged with refugees. The long strip of a building had nine rooms, side by side, with doors that led out onto a narrow veranda. The kitchen was at one end and the bathroom at the other, next to a grove of banana trees. Their room was closer to the bathroom and, on the first day, Olanna looked at it and could not imagine how she would live here with Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu, eat and dress and make love in a single room. Odenigbo set about separating their sleeping area with a thin curtain, and afterward Olanna looked at the sagging string he had tied to nails on the wall, remembered Uncle Mbaezi and Aunty Ifeka’s room in Kano, and began to cry.

  “We’ll get something better soon,” Odenigbo said, and she nodded and did not tell him that she was not crying about their room.

  Mama Oji lived next door. She had a hard face and blinked so rarely that Olanna was disconcerted by her wide-eyed stare the first time they spoke.

  “Welcome, nno,” she said. “Your husband is not here?”

  “He’s at work,” Olanna said.

  “I wanted to see him before the others do; it is about my children.”

  “Your children?”

  “The landlord called him doctor.”

  “Oh, no. He has a doctorate.”

  Mama Oji’s cool uncomprehending eyes drilled holes into Olanna.

  “He is a doctor of books,” Olanna said, “not a doctor for sick people.”

  “Oh.” Mama Oji’s expression did not change. “My children have asthma. Three have died since the war started. Three are left.”

  “Sorry. Ndo,” Olanna said.

  Mama Oji shrugged and then told her that all the neighbors were accomplished thieves. If she left a container of kerosene in the kitchen, it would be empty when she came out. If she left her soap in the bathroom it would walk away. If she hung out her clothes and did not keep an eye on them, they would fly off the lines.

  “Be very careful,” she said. “And lock your door even when you are just going to urinate.”

  Olanna thanked her and wished, for her sake, that Odenigbo really was a medical doctor. She thanked the other neighbors who came to the door to greet and gossip. There were too many people in the yard; a family of sixteen lived in the room next to Mama Oji. The bathroom floor was slimy with too much dirt washed off too many bodies, and the toilet was thick with the smells of strangers. On humid evenings when the odors sat heavy in the moist air, Olanna longed for a fan, for electricity. Their house in the other part of town had had electricity until 8 p.m., but here in the interior there was none. She bought oil lamps made from milk tins. Whenever Ugwu lit them, Baby squealed and ran back at the leap of naked flame. Olanna watched her, grateful that Baby did not look at yet another move, yet another new life, with any confusion at all; that instead she played with her new friend Adanna every day, shouting “Take cover!” and laughing and hiding among the banana leaves to avoid imaginary planes. Olanna worried, though, that Baby would pick up Adanna’s bush Umuahia accent or some disease from the liquid-looking boils on Adanna’s arms or fleas from Adanna’s scrawny dog Bingo.

  The first day Olanna and Ugwu cooked in the kitchen, Adanna’s mother came in and held out an enamel bowl and said, “Please, give me small soup.”

  “No, we don’t have enough,” Olanna said. Then she thought of Adanna’s only dress, which was made from the sack used to package relief food so that FLOU was plastered on her back, with the R swallowed into the seam, and she scooped some of the thin, meatless soup into the enamel bowl. The next day, Mama Adanna came in and asked for small garri, and Olanna gave her half a cup. The third day she came in when the kitchen was full of other women and again asked Olanna for soup.

  “Stop giving her your food!” Mama Oji screamed. “This is what she does with every new tenant. She should go and farm cassava and feed her family and stop disturbing people! After all, she is an indigene of Umuahia! She is not a refugee like us! How can she be begging a refugee for food?”
Mama Oji hissed loudly and then continued to pound palm fruit in her mortar. The efficient set to her fleshless face fascinated Olanna. She had never seen Mama Oji smile.

  “But is it not you refugees who have finished all our food?” Mama Adanna said.

  “Shut up your stinking mouth!” Mama Oji said. And Mama Adanna promptly did, as if she knew there was no way she could outshout Mama Oji, with her shrill swiftness, the way she never lacked for words or the speed with which to say them.

  In the evenings, when Mama Oji fought with her husband, her voice tore across the yard. “You castrated sheep! You call yourself a man, and yet you deserted the army! Let me just hear you tell anybody again that you were wounded in battle! Just open that dirty mouth one more time, and I will go and call the soldiers and show them where you have been hiding!”

  Her tirade was a staple of the yard. So was Pastor Ambrose’s loud praying as he walked up and down. So was the piano playing from the room right next to the kitchen. Olanna was startled when she first heard the melancholy tones, music so pure and so confidently played that it charged the air and held the swaying banana trees still.

  “That is Alice,” Mama Oji said. “She came here when Enugu fell. She was not even talking to anybody before. At least now she responds to greetings. She lives alone in that room. She never comes out and she never cooks. Nobody knows what she eats. The other time when we went combing, she felt too big to join us. Everybody else in the compound came out and went into the bushes and looked for vandals hiding there, but she did not come out. Some of the women even said they would report her to the militia.”

  The music still floated out. It sounded like Beethoven, but Olanna was not certain. Odenigbo would know. Then the tones changed to something faster, with an angry urgency that soared higher and higher until it stopped. Alice came out of her room. She was small-boned, petite, and Olanna felt gawkily overgrown just looking at her; there was something childlike about her light-skinned, almost translucent complexion and tiny hands.

  “Good evening,” Olanna said. “I’m Olanna. We just moved into that room.”

  “Welcome. I’ve seen your daughter.” Alice’s handshake was a weak clasp, as if she handled herself with much care, as if she would never scrub herself too vigorously.

  “You play so well,” Olanna said.

  “Oh, no, I’m no good.” Alice shook her head. “Where did you come from?”

  “Nsukka University. And you?”

  Alice hesitated. “I came from Enugu.”

  “We had friends there. Did you know anybody in the Nigerian College of Arts?”

  “Oh, the bathroom is free.” She turned and hurried away. Her abruptness surprised Olanna. When she came out, she walked past with a vague nod and went into her room. Soon, Olanna heard the piano, something stretched out and slow, and she felt a desire to walk across and open Alice’s door and watch her play.

  She thought often about Alice, the delicate quality to her smallness and fairness, the incredible strength of her piano playing. When she gathered Baby and Adanna and a few other children in the compound and read to them, she hoped Alice would come out and join her. She wondered whether Alice liked High Life. She wanted to talk about music and art and politics with Alice. But Alice came out of her room only to hurry to the bathroom and did not respond when Olanna knocked on her door. “I must have been asleep,” she would say later, but would not ask Olanna to come by another time.

  Finally, they met again in the market. It was just after dawn and the air was heavy with dew and Olanna wandered around in the damp coolness, under the green foliage of the forest, sidestepping thick roots. She haggled quietly, consistently, with a hawker before she bought cassava tubers with pinkish skin that she had once thought were poisonous, because the pink was so bright, until Mrs. Muokelu assured her they were not. A bird cawed from a tree above. Once in a while, a leaf would flutter down. She stood before a table with graying pieces of raw chicken and imagined grabbing them and running away as fast as she could. If she bought the chicken, it would be all she would buy. So she bought four medium-sized snails instead. The smaller spiral-shelled snails were cheaper, piled high in baskets, but she could not buy them, could not think of them as food; they had always been, to her, playthings for village children. She was leaving when she saw Alice.

  “Good morning, Alice,” she said.

  “Good morning,” Alice said.

  Olanna made to hug her, the usual brief greeting hug, but Alice extended her hand for a formal shake as though they were not neighbors.

  “I cannot find salt anywhere, no salt at all,” Alice said. “And the people who put us in this thing have all the salt they want.”

  Olanna was surprised; of course she would not find salt here; there was hardly salt anywhere. Alice looked precise and petite in a neatly belted wool dress that Olanna imagined hanging in a London shop. Nothing like a Biafran woman in a forest market at dawn.

  “They said the Nigerians have been bombing and bombing Uli and no relief plane has been able to land in a week,” Alice said.

  “Yes, I heard,” Olanna said. “Are you going home?”

  Alice looked away, toward the thick wood. “Not right away.”

  “I’ll wait for you so we can walk back together.”

  “No, don’t bother,” Alice said. “Bye-bye.”

  Alice turned and walked back to the cluster of stalls, her gait dainty and contrived, as though a misguided person had taught her how to walk “like a lady.” Olanna stood watching her, wondering what lay underneath her surface, before she headed home. She stopped by the relief center to see if there was any food, if a plane had finally managed to land. The compound was deserted and she peered through the locked gate for a while. A half-torn poster was nailed to the wall. Somebody had run charcoal over the WCC: WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES and scribbled WCC: WAR CAN CONTINUE.

  She was close to the corn-grinding station when a woman ran out of a roadside house, crying, following two soldiers who were pulling a tall boy along with them. “I said you should take me!” she screamed. “Take me instead! Have we not sacrificed Abuchi to you people already?” The soldiers ignored her and the boy kept his posture straight-backed, as if he could not trust himself to look back at his mother.

  Olanna stood aside as they passed and, back home, she was furious to see Ugwu standing in front of the yard, talking to some elderly neighbors. Any soldier on a conscripting mission could see him there.

  “Bia nwoke m, is something wrong with your head? Haven’t I told you not to be out here?” she asked him in a hiss.

  Ugwu took her basket and mumbled, “Sorry, mah.”

  “Where is Baby?”

  “In Adanna’s room.”

  “Give me the key.”

  “Master is inside, mah.”

  Olanna glanced at her watch although she did not need to. It was too early for Odenigbo to be home. He was sitting on their bed, his back hunched, his shoulders heaving silently.

  “O gini? What happened?” she asked.

  “Nothing happened.”

  She went to him. “Ebezi na, stop crying,” she murmured. But she did not want him to stop. She wanted him to cry and cry until he dislodged the pain that clogged his throat, until he rinsed away his sullen grief. She cradled him, wrapped her arms around him, and slowly he relaxed against her. His arms circled her. His sobs became audible. With each intake of breath, they reminded her of Baby; he cried like his daughter.

  “I never did enough for Mama,” he said finally.

  “It’s okay,” she murmured. She too wished she had tried harder with his mother before settling for easy resentment. There was so much she would take back if she could.

  “We never actively remember death,” Odenigbo said. “The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that we will die. We will all die.”

  “Yes,” Olanna said; there was a slump to his shoulders.

  “But perhaps it is the whole point of being alive? That life is a s
tate of death denial?” he asked.

  Olanna cradled him closer.

  “I’ve been thinking of the army, nkem,” he said. “Maybe I should join His Excellency’s new S-brigade.”

  Olanna said nothing for a while. She felt the urge to yank at his new beard and pull out hair and draw blood. “You might as well find a sturdy tree and a rope, Odenigbo, because that’s an easier way to commit suicide,” she said.

  He moved back to look at her, but she kept her gaze averted and got up and turned on the radio and increased the volume, filling the room with the sound of a Beatles song; she would no longer discuss this desire to join the army.

  “We should build a bunker,” he said, and went to the door. “Yes, we certainly need a bunker here.”

  The flat glassiness in his eyes, the slump to his shoulders, worried her. If he had to do something, though, better he build a bunker than join the army.

  Outside, he was talking to Papa Oji and some of the other men who were standing by the compound entrance.

  “Don’t you see those banana trees?” Papa Oji asked. “All the air raids we have had, we went there, and nothing happened to us. We don’t need a bunker. Banana trees absorb bullets and bombs.”

  Odenigbo’s eyes were as cold as his response. “What does an army deserter know about bunkers?”

  He left the men and, moments later, he and Ugwu started to map out and dig an area behind the building. Soon, the young men joined in the work and, when the sun fell, the older ones did too, including Papa Oji. Olanna watched them work and wondered what they thought of Odenigbo. When the other men cracked jokes and laughed, he did not. He spoke only about the work. No, mba, move it farther down. Yes, let’s hold it there. No, shift it a little. His sweaty singlet clung to his body and she noticed, for the first time, how much weight he had lost, how shrunken his chest looked.

  That night, she lay with her cheek against his. He had not told her what made him stay home to cry for his mother. She hoped, though, that whatever it was would loosen some of the knots that had tightened inside him. She kissed his neck, his ear, in the way that always made him pull her close on the nights that Ugwu slept out on the veranda. But he shrugged her hand off and said, “I’m tired, nkem,” She had never heard him say that before. He smelled of old sweat, and she felt a sudden piercing longing for that Old Spice left behind in Nsukka.