Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

“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.

SOMETIMES 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.