Under the Udala Trees (13 page)

I turned to leave, but he stopped me. “Wait,” he said. “One more thing.”

He went back to a different cupboard. The loaf of bread that he took out of the cupboard was wrapped in a polythene bag, so he first had to unwrap it before tearing it in two, dividing it in an uneven half. He gave the larger piece to me, kept the smaller piece for himself.

He walked to the place where a tall stool sat, took a seat on the stool, began to eat his portion of the bread right there before me. He bit hungrily into it, catching the crumbs as they fell and eating them too. I remained standing where I was but followed his lead and began eating my portion as well.

A few moments later, it seemed he was about to speak, but suddenly there was a loud crashing sound outside. I startled, stared wide-eyed at Okeke.

He furrowed his brow, a look of concern, but then a thought appeared to occur to him. “Don't worry,” he said. “I remember now. This one is just the Biafran army. Practice rounds. They'll be finished within the hour.”

When he was through with his bread, he wiped his hands brusquely on his thighs. As I took the last bite of my bread, I realized that I had not yet thanked him for it. Hardly had I gotten out the thank-you when he said to me, “What are you waiting for?” His voice was soft. “Go on, you can go now. This is it. I don't have anything else to give. Go on. You may go now.”

I said, “But I have money for the kerosene.”

He shook his head, waved me away. “Just go,” he said. “Save it. Use it to buy something for yourself the next time you run out of kerosene to cook. Your oga won't know any better unless you tell him.”

I nodded. Thanked him. Turned around and left.

Heading back from Okeke's, the trees glistened, both the bare trees and those that had managed to retain their leaves. Sometimes when a leaf dangled low enough to fall within my reach, I turned my face upward and tapped it, and the water on it, left over from the earlier rain, sprinkled forth on me like a blessing.

I wasn't far into my return when I felt a shadow following me, a shadow other than my own. It crossed the roads with me, hopped over the puddles with me. It appeared to tap the leaves with me, or at least it stood close behind me as I did.

I stopped in order to allow the shadow to pass me. I found a large rock near where an udala tree stood and sat down there. I waited on the rock, hoping that the shadow would continue along, but it did not. Instead, it sat across from me, on another rock, eyes bright, like a pair of light bulbs. She was no longer a shadow.

She had skin as light as mine. Yellow, like a ripe pawpaw. She wore a tattered green pinafore that was bare at the sides. Her hair hung in long clumps around her face, like those images of Mami Wata, hair writhing like serpents. But there were no serpents on her. She looked too dazed or disoriented, or simply too exhausted, to speak.

Someone had discarded udala seeds near where I sat, forming a tiny mound on the ground. Ants had paved themselves a path to the mound. I watched the ants for some time, the way they lined up, one after the other, the way they gathered in circles around the seeds. There were crushed leaves all around. The sun hovered above, watchful over us.

We moved our plastic-slippered feet around the muddy earth. We looked down at the ground as we did, but I sneaked peeks at her, and I'm sure she did at me. A bird flew from the udala tree, its wings beating hard through the air. We tilted our heads and watched. Finally we gathered the courage to look into each other's faces. The moment our eyes locked, I knew I would not be leaving without her.

I arrived home, but later this time than ever before. I sensed deep inside that I would get a flogging. I resigned myself to it.

I lifted the metal latch to unlock the gate, pushed it open to let myself and her in. We cut through the backyard and walked the path leading to the house. We stopped outside the kitchen door.

The grammar school teacher and his wife stood leaning on opposite sides of the kitchen counter. There was a coolness about the kitchen, and a coldness in their faces. His eyes were very stern, hers even sterner.

She held her handkerchief to her chest. Her breathing suddenly became loud and labored. “Do you know what time it is?” she asked angrily.

“What possibly could have taken you this long?” he asked.

“There's really no excuse for it,” she interjected.

“No, there really is no excuse for it,” he agreed.

She cleared her throat and said, “And now it's well past dinnertime, and here we are with nothing to eat.” She began to cough lightly. Three little coughs.

By now it was clear to me that her asthma was just a manifestation of her aversion to doing housework.

“I could really flog you for this,” he said. “Twelve strokes for each of your twelve years. Or is it now thirteen? Whatever it is, I could even multiply it by two. Twenty-six strokes for good measure.”

“Yes, we really could flog you for this,” she said. “Twenty-six strokes for good measure,” she repeated.

I hung my head. “I'm very sorry,” I said.

“You are lucky,” he said. “Very lucky, for the simple fact that I'm too tired to do any flogging today. Anyway, I'm sure you can already see how upset you've made us. That should be enough punishment for you this time. But as long as you live under our roof, you are never, ever again to return this late.”

I nodded and told them again how very sorry I was.

“Luckily, in the time that you were gone, your oga did manage to find some yams from the vendor down the road,” she said. “The tubers are there in the cupboard. Take them out, peel them, cut them up, and boil them.
Osiso-osiso.
Quick, quick. Any longer and I'm sure I'll die of hunger.”

She turned, began walking in the direction of the dining room. At first he followed along, but then he stopped. She stopped with him. Almost simultaneously they turned around and looked at the girl next to me. They appeared to study her intensely before turning back to me.

“Who is she?” the grammar school teacher's wife asked.

A minute went by while I thought of how to answer. I cleared my throat and replied simply, “Aunty, a friend.”

“She looks like a street urchin, a homeless little imp,” the grammar school teacher said.

“A friend?” she asked. Her voice was raspy and harsh.

Now the grammar school teacher's wife's face was more than mildly thoughtful. “Well, street urchin or homeless imp, never mind that for now,” she said. “Boil the yams. She can help you. The more help we have for dinner, the faster it will be done.”

He appeared to think about what she had said. “Yes, I suppose that's true. Yes, you certainly have a point.”

Finally there was the tap-tapping of their feet, and then the increasing distance between us and their words.

That evening, Amina and I peeled the yams together, rinsed them together, our fingers brushing against each other's in the bowl. I doused the wood with the kerosene and lit the cooking fire, and she set the pot of yams on top to boil.

After the grammar school teacher and his wife had eaten, after we ourselves had eaten, and after we had washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen, I filled the bucket at the tap outside my hovel. We rinsed ourselves off together on the cement slab. The crickets sang their usual night songs, and the mosquitoes perched on us, and the fireflies glowed green, like luminous droplets of grass.

At the end of it all, I carried my lantern and led Amina into my hovel, where I offered half of my mattress to her.

T
HE WEEK FOLLOWING
her arrival, the grammar school teacher and his wife made remarks about throwing Amina out. “What are you still doing here?” he asked. “You must go back to where you came from. Better find your way before I make you find it.”

I knew why the grammar school teacher was so ill at ease with her. I was not oblivious to the rifts between the tribes, especially between the Hausas and the Igbos. Chances were that had Amina been an Igbo girl, or even from Cross River State, he would not have been so agitated by her presence. Maybe even if she had been Yoruba, he would have been more at ease with her. But there she was, a Hausa girl, an enemy of the Igbo people.

It was the first time that I was befriending a Hausa person. Until then, I'd seen them only as they walked along the roads and in the markets where they sold their goods. This was my first time getting to know one in an intimate way.

It made sense that the grammar school teacher and his wife would be worried. Given how relentlessly they were killing us Igbos, to keep a Hausa was a safety hazard. If she had any relatives, they might come find her and kill us in the process.

Amina always responded by looking blankly at him.

One afternoon, he came out to the veranda, his face looking very cross. Amina and I were chopping wood at the left side of the front yard. The sky was overcast, but the rain had not yet come.

He stood watching us, just watching and looking very annoyed. Half an hour must have passed by while he simply stood and watched. Finally he called her to him.

She walked from the side of the front yard where the pile of firewood sat in small clumps to the side of the veranda where he stood.

“Is it that you don't have somewhere else you can go?” he asked.

She shook her head and said, “No, Sir.”

“Uncles? Aunties? Cousins?”

She shook her head again and said no.

The grammar school teacher remained silent for a while. Amina stood before him, her head facing the ground.

His wife came out of the house at that moment, joined her husband in looking at Amina.

“She has no family,” the grammar school teacher said to his wife.

They stood there for a full minute, staring some more at Amina.

“When you think of it, she's not exactly that much Hausa-looking,” the grammar school teacher's wife said to him. “Actually, she is more Fulani-looking than Hausa-looking. Which means she could pass for Igbo.”

The grammar school teacher considered his wife's words. “It's true,” he said. “Some Igbos and Fulanis do have a certain similarity in their features. Their complexion, for one thing.”

“And she appears to be a hard worker,” the grammar school teacher's wife said.

Her husband nodded.

“In the grand scheme of things, she'll probably be doing more good than harm by staying.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding.

“We could always use an extra set of hands,” she said.

“I suppose that's true,” he said. “But at the first sign of trouble, I'm sending her off.”

“Makes sense,” she said.

“Good,” he said.

The way things worked out, Amina was not exactly in the habit of talking much, so there was little or no risk of her revealing herself or being found out as Hausa. All the time that we went about our errands, no one ever raised the issue. With time, it must have settled on the grammar school teacher and his wife that she was no threat, at least not in the way that they had feared she would be.

L
ATE ONE EVENING
, Amina and I, having finished our chores for the day, took our evening baths, then sat together in our nightgowns on the stoop of our hovel while I plaited her hair with thread.

Out of the blue, she said, “Did you used to go to school?”

She was sitting one step lower than me, and I was holding a lock of her hair in my hands, combing it out the way one does before wrapping it with thread. I held the thread between my lips as I combed.

By now I had learned that the reason she could not find her other family was that most everyone outside her immediate family was up north. The war being what it was, they might all have thought her dead. No one had come for her, and she had not gone to them. She would not have known a way to go finding them on her own anyway. She did not know where exactly they lived.

“Tell me,” she said. “Did you used to go to school?”

I took the thread out of my lips. “I used to go until the schools closed,” I said. “Until just a little before Mama sent me here to stay.”

She said, “Oga says that he will send me to school when the war finishes.”

I nodded and told her that he had also agreed to do the same for me.

“What was it like—your school?”

I was in the middle of plaiting, but she pulled out of my grasp and turned to face me.

I slapped her on the shoulder, more like a hard tap. “Look what you've gone and done! You've messed up this one and now I'll have to do it all over again!”

“Sorry,” she replied in a very aloof way.

“Well, sorry is fine and all, but it doesn't fix anything.” I exhaled exasperatedly, then said, “You need to turn around so I can get back to it.”

“Okay,” she said nonchalantly, ignoring my irritation. “But first, what was it like?”

“What was
what
like?”

“School!”

“What do you mean, what was school like? Don't you already know what school is like?”

“I do,” she said. “But tell me anyway.”

There must have been a confused look on my face, because she chuckled softly and said, “Stop making that face. Are you going to tell me or not?”

“You sound like a person who has never been to school,” I said.

She said, “Of course I've been to school. Yes, I have.” Slowly, her face turned thoughtful, then she added, as if to clarify, “I've been to school, but only off and on. Not long enough to really know.” She stretched out the word.
Reeeaaallly.
Very plaintively, like a sigh.

“Oh,” I said.

“My mother needed me at home, for trading, for running errands, for hawking. That kind of thing.”

I said, “So, do you know how to read?”

She laughed. “Of course I know how to read. I used to read the Koran every day. But I know more than just Arabic. My mother used to let me read English books at home.
Aladdin
and
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
Those kinds of books.”