Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

“ Kedu? ” he asked.

He drew me close, and I leaned into him, but I remained silent, unsure of how to respond. How was I?

I could have given him the usual response to that question, just answered that I was fine, but how could anyone have been fine during those days? Only a person who was simultaneously blind and deaf and dumb, and generally senseless and unfeeling, could possibly have been fine given the situation with the war and the always-looming raids.

Or if the person were already dead.

We stayed in silence, and I observed the rigidness of his posture, the way his back refused to lean against the chair. His legs appeared to be stuck firmly to the ground. His lips spread, not in a smile, but like a child about to cry. He opened his mouth to speak, but words did not come out.

The night before, late, when I should already have been asleep, but when sleep was refusing to come, I had snuck down to the parlor out of not knowing what else to do with myself. Just outside my bedroom door, I saw that a soft light was coming from the direction of the parlor. I tiptoed toward the light, and toward the soft sounds that were also coming from that direction. Behind the slight wall where the parlor met the dining room, in that little space, barely a nook, I stopped, peeked, and I saw Papa in that now-familiar position, sitting on his chair, leaning on his desk, listening intently to his radio. So late at night, and yet there he was.

I stood quietly and eavesdropped, and I heard the story. Of one Mr. Njoku, an Igbo man who was tied up with a rope, doused with petrol, and then set on fire. Right here in the South, the announcer said. It’d been happening all over the place in the North, but suddenly it had begun happening in the South as well. Hausas setting us on fire, trying hard to destroy us, and our land, and everything we owned.

“Papa? Has something happened?” I asked. By “something” I meant something bad, something like the petrol-dousing that I had heard of the night before.

Papa shook his head as if to try again. In a faint voice, he said, “What can we do? There’s not much any one person can do. And to worry over it would be like pouring water over stone. The stone just gets wet. Eventually it dries. But nothing changes.”

For a moment, the only sound was the clanging of Mama’s pots and pans in the kitchen. Soon the akara would be done, and she would call us to eat the way she always did, even before the war.

Papa took me by both arms, looked me in the eyes. Very softly, he said: “I want to tell you something. It’s nothing you don’t already know, but I want to tell it to you again, like a reminder. So you don’t forget.”

“What?” I asked, wondering what it was that I already knew but might soon forget.

He said: “I want you to know that your papa loves you very much. I want you to always know it and to never forget it.”

I sighed, out of a sort of disappointment that it should be something so obvious. I said, “Papa, I already know.”

In the moment that followed, it seemed as if he were suddenly feeling all the weight and pain and hollowness of the world inside of him. There was a distant look on his face, as if he were estranged from everything he knew and also more profoundly than ever connected to it.

The muttering began. Something about the way Nigeria was already making a skeleton out of Biafra. Nsukka and then Enugu had been seized, followed by Onitsha. And, just last month, Port Harcourt.

He rambled on like that. His voice was a monotone. He seemed to have fallen into a trance.

It wouldn’t be much longer before there was no more Biafra left to seize, he said. “Will Ojukwu surrender to Nigeria? Or will he fight until all of us Biafrans are dead and gone?” He looked toward the parlor window, his eyes even more glazed over.

Maybe it had nothing to do with the weight or pain or hollowness of the world. Maybe it was simply about his role in the world. Maybe it was that he could not have imagined himself in a Nigeria in which Biafra had been defeated. Maybe the thought of having to live out his life under a new regime where he would be forced to do without everything he had worked for — all those many years of hard work — a new regime where Biafrans would be considered lesser citizens — slaves — like the rumors claimed, was too much for him to bear.

Whatever the case, he had lost hope. Mama says that war has a way of changing people, that even a brave man occasionally loses hope, and sometimes all the pleading in the world cannot persuade him to begin hoping again.

June 23, 1968. About a year into the war, and the bomber planes were at it again, like lorries that had somehow forgotten the road and were instead tearing through the sky. Papa must have heard it just as it began — the same time that I heard it too — because he stood up from his desk, grabbed my hand. The sun, which had been shining strongly through the open windows, suddenly seemed to disappear. Now the sky seemed overcast.

First he pulled me along with him, the way he usually did when it was time to head to the bunker. But then he did something that he had never done before: at the junction between the dining room and the kitchen, he stopped in his tracks. There was something corpse-like about him, the look of a man who was on the verge of giving up on life. Very pale. More than a little zombie-like.

He let go of my hand and nudged me to go on without him. But I would not go. I remained, and I watched as he went back into the parlor, took a seat on the edge of the sofa, and fixed his gaze in the direction of the windows.

Mama ran into the parlor, hollering, calling out to us, “ Unu abuo, bia ka’yi je! ” You two, come, let’s go! “You don’t hear the sounds? Binie! Get up! Let’s go!”

She ran to Papa, pulled him by the arms, and I pulled him too, but Papa continued to sit. In that moment his body could have been a tower of hardened cement, a molding of ice, or maybe even, like Lot’s wife, a pillar of salt. “ Unu abuo, gawa. You two go on,” he said. “I’ll be all right. Just let me be.”

His voice was raspy, something in it like the feel of sandpaper, or like the sound of a crate being dragged down a concrete corridor.

That was the way we left him, sitting on the edge of the sofa, his eyes fixed in the direction of the windows.

The bunker was in the back of our house, a few yards beyond where our fence separated the compound from the bush lot. We ran out the back door without him, stepping over the palm fronds that, months before, he had spread around the compound for camouflage.

At the back gate, Mama stopped once more to call out to Papa.

“Uzo! Uzo! Uzo!”

The saying goes that things congealed by cold shall be melted by heat. But even in the heat of the moment, he did not melt.

“Uzo! Uzo! Uzo!” she called again.

If he had heard, still, he refused to come.

OUR CHURCH WAS not too far down the road from our two-story house. It sat at the corner near where the row of houses ended and the open-air market began.

It was over a year prior to that June 23 that I prayed my first prayer to God regarding the war. Early March, to be exact. I know, because it was ripening season for guavas and pepperfruit and velvet tamarinds, that period of the year when the dry season was just getting over and the wet about to begin. The harmattan winds were still blowing, but our hair and skin were no longer as dry and brittle as in mid-harmattan. Our catarrhs had come and gone. It was no longer too dusty or too cool.

For all the years that we lived in Ojoto, it was to that church, Holy Sabbath Church of God, that we went every Sunday. It was in that church that we sat, on the parallel wooden benches that ran in even rows, listening to Bible sermons. Together with the sermons, we prayed; and together with the praying, we clapped and we sang. By the time morning turned into afternoon, we exhausted our prayers, grew out of breath with singing. Our arms dangled, limp from so much clapping, all that fervent worship.