Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

Down below, on the road, a woman was carrying a tray of groundnuts or cashews, and loaves of bread. A man in a bright white shirt went by on a bicycle, riding zigzaggedly and recklessly down the road. Chibundu and I sat together on the branch, just watching.

“He is going to jam her!” Chibundu said.

I pictured all the items on the tray falling, the poor woman struggling to gather her items back together again.

But the bicycle man stopped at the point just before he would have rammed into the woman. He got off his bicycle.

“Wetin be your problem? You dey blind?” the vendor woman shouted. She set her tray on the ground and then, positioning herself directly in front of the man, she stood with her hands on her hips.

It was always serious when people spoke this way in pidgin. Pidgin was the language of amusement and relaxation, but it was also the language of conflict.

We sat watching from our spot in the tree. We were close enough to see and hear, but far enough that we could not readily be seen by passersby.

The bicycle man spoke. “Sorry,” he said, after which he made to move around the vendor woman, but each time he tried, she stepped in front of him, preventing him from passing.

“Biko make I pass,” he said, impatient to be on his way.

“Ehn-ehn!” the vendor woman shouted, shaking her head from side to side. “Which kain sorry be that? You no fit say sorry proper?”

“I don say sorry already,” the bicycle man said, and he tried once more to move around her.

By now people were beginning to gather. The man appeared to take a deep breath, and then he tried a third time, only to be met with the woman’s thundering voice, and her body once more blocking his escape.

It was a bit comical the way the wide-hipped, rather large vendor woman was refusing to let the man pass. The man was rail-thin in comparison to her and looked like he could have used some of her fat.

Chibundu brought his hands to his mouth, began to laugh quietly at the silliness of the whole scene, soft chuckles that he made sure to contain with the cupping of his hands.

The bicycle man tried the vendor woman’s left side, and then her right, and her left again, but no luck.

I started to laugh too. Little by little, Chibundu and I moved closer to each other on the branch, huddling together, trying to muffle each other’s laughter. Soon we were no longer listening to the dispute on the road, and we were no longer laughing. Chibundu was staring at me, just staring at me.

“What?” I asked in a whisper.

He remained silent, but continued to stare.

I looked down at the road. The man and woman had somehow worked it out. They were walking their separate ways. I turned back around to see Chibundu’s face close to mine, and soon the tip of his nose was nearly touching mine.

There on the branch, nose to nose with him, I knew I could not go on sitting there. I knew I should jump off the tree, and after I landed, I should put one foot in front of the other. One foot and then the next, and then the next. It was like taking a spoonful of chloroquine when you had malaria. There was hardly another option, so you just did it. The first spoonful and then the next, and then the next. If not, things would only get worse.

But I did nothing.

Some seconds went by. There was an awkwardness to it all. I knew Chibundu felt the awkwardness too. I knew that he bore the brunt of it. As well he should. He was, after all, responsible for it much more than I was.

But for some strange reason, I found myself feeling a need to equalize the awkwardness between us. I found myself feeling a need to relieve him of the burden of it. I felt distressed on his behalf — felt his distress as if it were my own.

And so, after no more than a few seconds, I leaned in and gave him the kiss I knew he sought.

BUSES WERE FEW and far between, so we found ourselves in the back section of a small passenger lorry instead.

Before the war came, Papa drew plans: he was a drafter, on his way to becoming an architect. During the daytime he worked at his company’s offices, but even in the evenings and on weekends, when he was not working in an office, he could be found at his desk at home, tracing the graphite tips of his pencils across fancy white and blue-tinted paper, carefully measuring the placement of vertical and horizontal lines. He used to talk with Mama and me while he worked, about when and where the next bungalow or two-story would be put up, about the size of it and all the rooms that it would have. Sometimes he would tease us, talking about how one day he would design a new house for us, one so big that it would be like a castle. “Can you imagine a castle right in the middle of Ojoto?” he’d ask. Mama would laugh and say that this was not England. Castles did not belong in Ojoto. But me, I’d tell Papa that I wanted one anyway, whether or not it belonged. I had my castle-in-the-village dreams, after all. Could he please design me one that was as wide as the sky and rose all the way up to it, as tall as the tallest of iroko trees? One that was the same color as our house: a bright shade of yellow.

Even when the sky grew dark, he continued to work, his kerosene lantern flickering and making a shadow of itself on the wall. He drew, and there was no indication that he’d ever cease to draw.

But now so many of the buildings in Ojoto had crumbled with each strike of the bombers. Now he himself was gone. Now there was not an iota of a dream of any kind of castle gracing the land of our dear little Ojoto.

Riding in the back of the gwon-gworo to Nnewi, I hardly thought of much other than how I would miss our Ojoto house, if for no other reason than for the memory of Papa in it, the way he used to sit and draw his designs at his desk. The way he used to lounge on the couch reading his newspapers.

In the back section of the lorry, benches stood in rows. In the spaces between the benches, people crowded together, hanging on to the ropes that dangled from the lorry’s ceiling.

Mama and I sat on one of the benches at the opening of the lorry’s back. We had come upon our seats just in time, which was lucky, Mama said, and even luckier that our position allowed us to look outside as the vehicle drove along. Through the open back, we watched the scene on the road. Biafran soldiers were marching, about a dozen young men in singlets and khaki shorts or trousers, axes and guns slung across their shoulders. They chanted as they marched:

Ojukwu bu eze Biafra nine

Emere ya na Aburi,

Na Aburi!

Enahoro, Yakubu Gowon, ha enweghi ike imeri Biafra!

Biafra win the war!

Armored car, shelling machine,

Fighter and bomber,

Ha enweghi ike imeri Biafra!

Corpses flanked the roads. Decapitated bodies. Bodies with missing limbs. All around was the persistent smell of decaying flesh. Even if I was no stranger to these sights and smells, Papa’s case being the foremost in my mind, still I felt a lurching in my stomach. I swallowed, rapid intakes of saliva, in order to settle myself back down again.

The marching soldiers crossed the road, now singing a new song:

Ayi na cho isi Gowon

Ayi na cho isi Gowon

Ayi na cho isi Gowon

Ka egbu o ya,

Ka egbu o ya, we gara ya Ojukwu.

Our lorry continued to wait as they crossed.

“But why are they looking for Gowon’s head?” I asked Mama.

“To kill him,” Mama replied plainly.

“Why do they want to kill him?” I asked.

“Didn’t you hear the last part of the song?” she replied. “They want to kill him so they can deliver his head to Ojukwu.”