Under the Udala Trees (7 page)

I nodded and then hung my head so that all I could see now were our feet, hers and mine both, covered to the ankles in dust.

Mama lifted my chin with her hand. I looked into her unsmiling face. “Cheer up,” she said. “Remember what I said. I will think of you every minute that I am away from you. And I will send for you as soon as I can.”

She stroked my hair, as if to put back any stray strands in place, like she used to do before the war came, early in the morning before she sent me off to school. It was as if she were once more getting me ready for school.

“
Nee anya
,” she said. “You must be respectful, always do as they say. Are you hearing me?”

“Yes, Mama,” I replied.

“They are your father's very close friends, almost family, so you can call them Aunty and Uncle. I'm sure they will like that. Are you hearing me?”

“Yes, Mama,” I said.

She fumbled with her bag, searching for something in it. When she found what she was looking for, she pulled it out. It was Papa's old Bible, the one he used to read from every Sunday at church. She handed it to me, holding my hand in hers even as I held the book in my hand.

“If God dishes you rice in a basket . . . ,” she said.

I knew the second half of the proverb. “Do not wish for soup,” I finished.

She smiled. “
Ngwa
,” she said. “
Gawazie.
Go on. They are expecting you any minute, and I have to be off myself before the Aba lorry leaves me behind.”

I turned around and began walking, forcing myself to hold back my tears, forcing myself not to look back, forcing myself to resist the temptation to run shamelessly back to her.

T
HE GRAMMAR SCHOOL
teacher was corpulent, and he walked with the gait of a man who had always been so. His skin was almost as dark as his hair, which did not grow very high from his head—it was hard to tell where the hair stopped and his face began. His belly stuck out, rotund as an udu, the kind made from the roundest of calabash gourds. His body appeared to lean backward at the hips, as if it were a struggle for it to follow any forward movement of his feet.

His wife's skin was not exactly light, but neither was it as dark as her husband's. But her eyes were just like his, a dark shade of brown. She had long hair, straightened, not natural like mine. She held it up in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her brows were penciled in and formed perfect arcs above her eyes. Her lips were a dark shade of red. Where his body leaned backward, she was so full of chest in an otherwise small frame that it appeared she had no choice but to lean forward, in the direction of the weight.

They met me at their gate.

She had a handkerchief with her. “On account of my asthma,” she explained, and began to cough. When she finished coughing, she asked, “How are you?”

“I'm well, Aunty,” I said.

Her husband stood just watching me, then he said my name. “Ijeoma,” he uttered enthusiastically. He repeated it, as if tasting it in his mouth.

I stared at the ground, my mind pondering the way he was saying my name. I hoped he would not taste it only to turn around and spit it out. By the sound of things, probably not. There was, after all, a warmth to his voice that reminded me of Papa's voice. But then he was not Papa. He was fat and awkward-moving where Papa was thin and lithe. Would he really be warm like Papa, or was this warmth in his voice just a trick? Would it melt away the way a candle melts away with fire?

I had been looking down while he uttered my name, but now I looked up to find him peering at me. He said my name again. “
Ijeoma, ke kwanu?
Welcome! How are you?”

My mouth felt dry, like I had somehow gotten a mouthful of sand. But I forced myself to speak. “Fine, Uncle,” I said.

“It's been such a long time since we last saw you,” his wife said.

“Yes, yes,” he said, reaching out to pat me on the shoulder. “It's been a long time.” In a more quiet voice he said, “I'm sorry about your father.”

“Yes, we are both sorry about your father,” his wife echoed.

I nodded, then looked around the front yard. It was a neat yard, but it was easy to see the effects of the war on it: A shattered dresser sat in front of the veranda. Next to it, some downfallen branches and what looked to be shattered glass. Their hedges were just as withered as ours had become in Ojoto, and the palm fronds they were using to camouflage their compound appeared to be losing their green, just like our Ojoto palm fronds.

He broke the silence. “
Ngwa
, let's go,” he said in a spirited sort of way, as if he had suddenly remembered what he had been planning to do next.

“Yes, let's go,” his wife repeated.

He led us from the gate to a small house-like structure in the yard behind the main home. The structure was something like a boys' quarters, only a bit too small to be one. And anyway, there was no indication that the grammar school teacher and his wife had ever had any household help. As he walked, he made his apologies. “We don't have extra room in the house, or else we would have . . .”

“Yes, we would have put you in the house with us if only we had the room,” his wife said.

“Surely she understands,” he said.

“I'm sure she does,” she said.

“We've made the place as comfortable as possible,” he said.

A padlock hung near the top of the door. He unlocked it with a key.

His wife and I remained outside as he took my bag in.

When he came back out, he said, “You'll be fine here.”

She nodded and said, “Yes, you'll be fine here.”

“You'll be a good girl for us,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “A good girl indeed. Helping us around the house as needed. That sort of thing.”

She appeared to be examining me. After a moment, she said, “Yellow skin, the color of a ripe pawpaw. That's very lucky for a girl. It should be easy for her mother to marry her off.”

“There's still plenty of time before that,” he said. “But, yes, I imagine. When the time comes for it.”

She nodded.

They observed me a moment longer, very awkwardly, and then they were off.

I sat on the yellow foam mattress that was to be my new bed, taking in the place. Far from being a self-contained mini-home, it was a very basic, open one-room space. Just four cement walls patched with zinc pieces, a wooden floor, and a ceiling. Neither a kitchen nor a bathroom inside. Maybe they had used it for storage before my arrival. Whatever the case, it was a crude construction, more a hovel than a home. But it was sturdy enough.

After some time, I lay down and drifted into sleep. I did not wake up until much later, four or five hours it must have been, after having arrived. Evening had faded into a dark night. No one had come to call me or check on me. Or, if they had come, perhaps I simply had not heard.

On the table that formed my desk was a kerosene lantern and a pack of matches. I struck a match and lit the lantern.

Outside the hovel was a water tank. A pipe came down the side of the tank, leading to a silver tap. A bucket sat by the tap, and a bar of soap.

I removed my dress—my orange and brown adire gown. I filled up the bucket that sat nearby with water from the tap. Near the tank was a cement slab. I squatted on the slab. Fireflies, the moon and the stars, and the flame in my kerosene lantern were the only lights that shone on me. I flicked away insects and slapped the tingling spots where the flies perched on me. I crouched tightly, an attempt to cover myself, because though I should have felt veiled, concealed by the night, there was that other element of darkness, the one that left me feeling more vulnerable, more naked than in the light. And there was still the war—the possibility of an arbitrary night raid.

I bathed carefully and quickly, lathering up and rinsing away the suds, counting as I did to distract myself from all my fears. I was done bathing by the time my count reached fifteen.

Back in the hovel, I put on an old nightgown, one of Mama's ancient cotton frocks, passed down to me because, years ago, I had fallen in love with its floral design and begged her to give it to me. At one point it had been bursting with pinks and yellows and soft blues, but now, if you looked closely at it, you saw moth holes throughout the sleeves and bodice, and it was as if all the colors had reached a compromise and found a middle ground in the light and dark shades of beige.

Some months before the war came, Mama had insisted that the nightgown was too old to continue to be worn and that I should allow her to throw it out. But I had refused.

Now, as I slipped it on, it reminded me of Mama, and of Papa, and of Ojoto, and of peace and calm, and of our lives before the war. I was grateful to have it. What did it matter about the holes or the fading colors? My life had been turned upside down, so perhaps it was fitting that I should have such a nightgown—just the kind of thing that a castaway would wear. And I was indeed a castaway: no more the security of Papa or Mama. I might as well embrace and play the part of a derelict child.

I did not go back to sleep right away. Instead, I sat by the open door of the hovel, on the small steps that led out of it. The moon shone, and the air was only a little cold. The crickets sang. I held Papa's Bible in my hand and stared into the vast sky, and I wondered what Mama was doing at that very moment in time.

When I finally went back into the hovel, I stood by its door for some time, just to get a sense of the place, even in the darkness. I observed the room by the light of my kerosene lantern. There was a part of the zinc walling where the metal was clear and a little bright, so that it appeared like added light. I scanned with bewildered eyes. Again, the yellow foam mattress. The desk and table. The otherwise bareness of the place.

Would I survive here? If so, how long would I need to survive? Mama had said that I'd be with the grammar school teacher for only a short while, maybe just a few days. What were the chances that it would be just a few days? How long was a short while? A few weeks? A couple of months? Would she really send for me? What if she somehow forgot?

No matter, I decided. If this was the rice that God was putting in my basket . . . there was no point wishing for soup.

 

S
OMETIMES I THINK
back to the year 1970—the year the lessons began—and it feels like I'm reliving it all over again in my mind: sitting rigidly at the kitchen table with Mama, or in the parlor, my heart racing inside of me, my mind struggling to digest the verses, turning them inside out and upside down and sideways, trying hard to understand.

Time and time again I've tried to bury the memory of those lessons, to act as if they were not part of my reality, because claiming them would be like continuing to remember that former version of Mama, the one who believed so much that there was a demon in me.

Still, I remember.

Speaking of Mama. By 1970, about a year and a half had gone by without my seeing her. I had spent the tail end of 1968, all of 1969, and the beginning of 1970 at the grammar school teacher's, during which time Mama never once sent for me. True that she had not known for how long we would be separated. True that a part of her really did imagine that my stay in Nnewi would be for a short while. But time went on, and the grammar school teacher and his wife grew comfortable in their use of me as a housegirl. My papa was, after all, gone, and no matter that he would not have tolerated my working as a housegirl, no matter that he would have frowned upon them using their friend's daughter as a housegirl. But he was gone, and as for Mama, she had convinced herself that she was only doing what she had to do. Anyway, the truth is, though we had been an upper-middle-class family before Papa's death, with his death, and with the war, we plummeted with full force to lower class. What Mama was doing was nothing different from what lower-class families sometimes did, sending their children off as housegirls and houseboys. It made sense. Some other family could then assume responsibility for the children—for their food, their shelter, and, more important, the cost of their education.

Mama has said many times that she had been just on her way to get me when she got the grammar school teacher's call. At first it struck me as dishonest. No way could she have sworn on a Bible. Hardly would she have laid her palms on it and the thing would have blasted up in flames. But then, with all those Bible lessons—all those times she held her Bible downright in her hands—she would very well have blasted up into flames if she had been lying, so chances are that she really had been getting ready to come collect me at the exact moment when I made it so that she
had
to come get me. Sometimes that's the way coincidences are.

In a way it all worked out. As I had been good for them—with the exception of that final incident—as I had worked hard for them around the house and mostly behaved myself, the grammar school teacher and his wife had, like upstanding ogas and madams, agreed to see to it that I got a proper education. Mama said, “Remember what I said a long time ago about using your brain? They will keep their end of the bargain. They will pay your school fees, buy your school uniforms, your textbooks, all your school supplies, so that you can study hard and make something of yourself. It is important to think of your future. I was only thinking of your future . . .”

The bungalow that I met with when I joined her in Aba was a beautiful little ivory-colored thing, but it had not always been so—neither beautiful nor ivory.

The way Mama tells it these days, it's a little like a Hollywood drama, or maybe a James Bond film—so many parts to it, and even some surprises. But I do believe her, down to the smallest details, because her memory of
those
days—even of the lessons—has remained very sharp and has been consistent throughout the years.