Under the Udala Trees (3 page)

At the window, only one glass pane remained in its frame, and on it, cracks in an almost circular pattern, as if a spider web had been stretched across its surface. She went up to that pane, touched it, stroked its fissures with her fingers, stared accusingly at it.

At the onset of the war, our social studies teacher, Mrs. Enwere, had, one afternoon, given us a history lesson that, so long as I live, I will not forget.

All the students in class were sitting as they usually did, two to a desk. It was nearing the end of the school day. The day had been stuffy and humid, the kind of weather that seemed to make everyone more miserable than they already were. Mrs. Enwere had certainly been in a miserable mood all of that day, her face so downcast you'd have thought she'd lost a parent or a child. Now she was speaking to us, no longer consulting the book in front of her, but speaking freestyle, as if the words of the textbook had somehow registered themselves in her mind.

“First a coup, and then a countercoup. Coup,” she said. She repeated the word, “A coup.” Then, “Who knows what that means?”

Mrs. Enwere must have pronounced the word correctly, but somehow, in my tired, end-of-school-day child's mind, I heard instead: coop. I could even see it in my mind's eye: a hutch, a cage, red-tailed chickens and golden chickens and white chickens, chickens with wattles of different colors—yellow, brown, pink. A coop.

But what exactly about coops? How was it that chickens were all of a sudden the topic of our social studies class? The context for it, there in the classroom and in the middle of what appeared to be a history lesson, kept me from being sure that I really knew the word.

Mrs. Enwere waited only a moment for a response, and getting none, she continued. “I shall define ‘mutiny' for you,” she said, looking around the class. She spoke loudly: “Mutiny is a revolt or rebellion against authority.”

The classroom was a large cement room, all gray, no paint on the walls. There were three other classroom buildings in the compound, in the midst of which was a courtyard, made up of lush green grass and strategically planted flowers, and a sandy brown area where we had our morning assemblies. The assemblies were the period during which we underwent inspections—the time when the headmistress and teachers checked to see if our fingernails were cut and if our uniforms were ironed and if our hair was combed. During the morning assemblies, we sang the school anthem, and then the national anthem, and from there our teachers led us to class.

The windows were located on the side of the classroom facing the courtyard. This was the way all the windows in all the classrooms in the school were, as if to prevent the students from looking the other way, out into the world.

I was staring out one of those courtyard-facing windows, thinking of the moment when school would be dismissed. What path would I take? The one that cut through the large overgrown field? Or the path alongside the road, alongside the bicyclists and the occasional motorists?

“Repeat after me,” Mrs. Enwere was saying. “Mutiny is a revolt or rebellion against authority.” And now I turned back from the window to Mrs. Enwere to find that she was looking directly at me. “Repeat,” Mrs. Enwere said, like a reprimand.

I repeated: “Mutiny is a revolt or rebellion against authority.”

“Very good. Let me not have to remind you again to pay attention,” she said, tapping the cane in her hand on my portion of the desk.

“Now, all of you know of Government House in Ibadan,” she continued. This was the way Mrs. Enwere asked her questions, questions that came out more like statements. Questions that were too far above our minds, questions whose answers we could not possibly have known.

The class remained silent.

“Who can tell me about the Prime Minister and about Sardauna of Sokoto?”

More silence.

At this point, Mrs. Enwere began speaking quickly, her words coming out like a storm:
Ahmadu Bello, dead. Tafawa Balewa, dead. Akintola, dead. Dead, dead, dead.

We listened with alarm, or at least I did, trying to make sense of the words.
Soldiers. Bullets. Head of State. Military.

Mrs. Enwere went on like that for some time before turning her attention to Ironsi.

“Ironsi,” she said. She repeated the name. “Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi.”

Head of State. Ironsi, his body in a forest, still dressed in his military apparel. Holes and holes scattered across his corpse, holes out of which blood flowed like the waters of a fountain, only red.

Ironsi, bullet-riddled and left to decay in the bush.

“A real shame what is happening in this country,” Mrs. Enwere said. But in any case, she said, this was how we had arrived at Gowon for Head of State. Before Ironsi, Azikiwe. After Ironsi, Gowon.

We all sat there dumbfounded. You could have heard a pin drop in all that silence.

The silence in the house was as heavy as the one that day in school. Mama calling out Papa's name, and I taking in the dead air that greeted her after each call, complete emptiness in response.

We found him face-down on the black-and-white-tiled floor of the dining room. Mama leapt to him, bent over his body, resumed calling out his name.

His hands and legs were tangled strangely around his body, dying branches twisted around a dying trunk. Pieces of wood from the dining table lay scattered around him. A purple-brown hue had formed where the pool of his blood was collecting.

She stayed bent over his body, the cloth of her wrapper soaking up his blood.
“Uzo, biko, mepe anya gi! Ana m ayo gi!”
I'm begging you, Uzo. Please open your eyes for me!

She continued to call his name, and each new call was louder than the one before. “Open your eyes, my husband.
Mepe, i nu go?
” she said. “Open, do you hear me?!”

Her calling became shouting, and soon the shouting turned into wailing.

I remained where I stood, steps behind her, stunned. My father was dying or already dead, and even if I would have liked to do something to make it otherwise, I must have known already that there was nothing I could do.

In a whisper this time, Mama called Papa again by his name. For minutes she continued that way, just whispering his name, and as she did, she pleaded with him. “My husband, please. Please, get up and walk.”

But of course he lay there still.

That evening, a handful of parishioners from church came and lifted Papa's body, cleaned it off, and took it with them. Where they took it I did not exactly know, but I watched as Mama handed to one of the men Papa's gold-patterned isiagu, hanging neatly on a hanger. They must have been the ones who put the isiagu on for him. When they returned with him and laid him back down in our parlor, he was clean and perfect-looking, as if he had gotten all dressed up for a big occasion only to suddenly fall asleep.

P
APA'S NAME, UZO
, meant “door,” or “the way.” It was a solid kind of name, strong-like and self-reliant, unlike mine, Ijeoma (which was just a wish: “safe journey”), or Mama's, Adaora (which was just saying that she was the daughter of all, daughter of the community, which was really what all daughters were, when you thought about it).

Uzo. It was the kind of name I'd have liked to fold up and hold in the palm of my hand, if names could be folded and held that way. So that if I were ever lost, all I'd have to do would be to open up my palm and allow the name, like a torchlight, to show me the way.

In the weeks following Papa's death, it seemed that we had lost our way, Mama and I. It seemed as if we could no longer tell up from down, left from right. But no matter how turned around we were, we at least knew enough to continue running into the bunker as soon as we heard the sound of the bomber engines. And no matter how turned around our lives had become, Mama knew enough to make sure to give Papa a proper send-off, so that he would be able to take his place among his ancestors.

There was an extensive wake-keeping—people coming in steady streams to give their condolences. This continued for over a week, with Papa laid out in the parlor on a four-poster bed, borrowed for the occasion from one of our church members. Mama, dressed in white, sat on a chair by his side surrounded by a troop of female parishioners. She wept and wailed for her dead husband while the women around her sang their funereal songs in chorus, like an accompaniment to her wails.

After Papa had been taken away and buried in the far corner of our backyard, there was the daylong
ikwa ozu
ceremony: trays of kola nuts and jerry cans of palm wine, prayers and libations, village elders invoking the spirits of Papa's ancestors, asking them to guide him into the world of the deceased.

One morning after the
ikwa ozu
had been performed, Mama called me for breakfast.

I went to her, sat with her in our dining room, where she had two bowls of soaked garri ready for us. If it had been before the war, we would have been eating bread with tea and one boiled egg each, or maybe we would have been having some cornflakes with the eggs, the kind of cornflakes that came in the Kellogg's box with the red-combed and yellow-beaked rooster. It was cornflakes imported from out of the country, and we would have been having it with Peak or Carnation evaporated milk, also from out of the country. But it had been some time since we'd had any bread or tea or Kellogg's cornflakes, or Peak milk or Carnation evaporated milk. And as for eggs, they were a thing like peace of mind, like calm, even like a smile. They were a thing we had begun to have only once in a while.

Mama sprinkled some groundnuts in our bowls of garri, and as she did, she said, “The protein in the groundnuts is just as rich as the protein in eggs. It will do the work of any other protein. It will help your brain to work well, think hard, and develop properly.”

When Mama had just delivered me—when she was a brand-new mother—she had taken up studying food, for the simple fact that I had been born a little under a month early, and one of the midwives had explained to her that, among other things, it would be important for her to feed me protein. She had not understood what exactly protein was, that abstraction of a thing, like a ghost of a word, a mystery. Not like orange or banana or table or desk, things you could see solidly with your eyes. It was a thing that could not quite be seen.

She had gone and asked people and picked up information on it here and there—whatever health books or magazines she could find. She wanted me to live. If I were to live, then she must figure out what protein was so that she could feed it to me.

After that, she had decided that if she could do something for a job, she would much rather own a food store than be a nutritionist. All that reading she had done in the name of protein had been quite a lot of work. And she was slow at it—every word a crawl. (All those big words that she did not understand didn't make it any easier on her.) After spending all afternoon reading, she spent her evenings and nights with a headache.

Maybe she herself had needed to be eating some protein back then, I've sometimes told her. Maybe that would have been just the thing to help with the reading and understanding of those big words.

In any case, as I sat there in the kitchen with her, I wondered what exactly it was I needed my brain for anymore, now that the war was making it so that soon enough there would probably no longer be any school for me to use my brain in. School was the reason why I read, and why I memorized the multiplication tables and learned history and geography and followed up with my Bible knowledge.
School
was what was supposed to develop my brain. How was protein supposed to do the work of school?

But Mama said that it would.

“As soon as the war is over,” she said, “school will resume full time, and you will see that your brain will be just as intact as ever, even better.”

I looked suspiciously at her, and she must have seen the suspicion on my face.

She smiled slightly and said that maybe one day I would use my brain to become a teacher or a doctor or a businesswoman. Because, she hated to break it to me, but I had better begin thinking about these things now. Because, God willing, I would one day marry, but what if one day I found myself like her, suddenly without a husband? “What if?” she asked, staring blankly at a spot behind my head.

After some time, she appeared to collect herself. Her eyes focused on me, and she said, “Well, all I'm saying is that you will have to use your brain for work, that is a fact. And no better way to start than with protein.”

We continued to sit there at the table, eating our soaked garri and groundnuts, Mama going on with her lecture on the benefits of protein for my brain, neither of us talking about what was really on our minds, which was that Papa was dead and gone, and no amount of protein could bring him back to life.

B
Y THE END
of July, over a month had passed and Mama had not so much as mentioned Papa.

I took the hint. I resigned myself to just thinking of him. But the way I thought of him, it was the way a starving child thinks about food: he was always on my mind. Each time I heard a man's voice, or each time I saw anyone reading a newspaper, I thought of him. Mama never turned on the radio-gramophone. It was as if she had made it a point not to turn it on. But she didn't need to. Just seeing it was enough of a trigger for me to think of Papa.

One day, when it seemed that I had reached my max of missing him—one day when it seemed that I could not possibly miss him more without dying of the feeling—I found myself, out of the blue, blurting out to Mama, “Mama, do you miss Papa like I do?”

We were at the dining table, eating our dinner of yam porridge.

She snapped, her head whipping up with a sudden, unexpected anger. In a low, grumbling voice she replied: “Why should I miss him? Was he not the same man who made a widow of me and almost an orphan out of you? Tell me, just why should I miss him?”