Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

Just past a grove of withering palm trees some puppies lay in crescent-shaped mounds, fetal-like, nipping at the dusty earth as if to bury themselves within. Not too far from the dogs were several kwashiorkor children, carrying their begging bowls.

In a field right next to the road, a policeman was moving through a row of corpses, using a long cane to prod them or mark them as he went. He was a stone-faced officer, with a crinkly sort of nose and a mouth that appeared permanently upturned so that his lips seemed to cover his nostrils. Perhaps he carried his face this way deliberately, owing to the odor that the job required him to endure.

Maybe he was counting the bodies, or maybe he was inspecting them for something. I watched as he went about prodding them one by one.

Up till now, I had seen so many images of death — Papa’s corpse, for one. For another, all those decapitated bodies that Mama and I had seen flanking the road on our way to Nnewi. Death was all over the place. But in this moment I observed its opposite.

More people had gathered near the field: A singlet-wearing, shoeless man in khaki trousers, who seemed unable to stop scratching his head. A stick-thin woman holding a small girl’s hand. A boy who looked to have been not much older than me, carrying another, smaller, wounded boy on his back. A gray-haired old woman with a tree branch walking stick, breathing hard.

They all stood watching as a body — a boy’s, naked — proceeded to rise from the field of corpses, like a resurrection. As the boy rose, all the people around me gasped, one perfectly synchronized, collective intake of breath.

The boy wore a startled expression. Perhaps he had fallen asleep among the corpses, or perhaps somehow he had been stunned into imagining himself dead. The policeman, who had jumped back as the boy rose, quickly recovered from his shock, raised his cane, and began whipping it into the air like a warning. The boy recoiled, taking backward steps, tripping over the corpses among which he had been sleeping. The policeman raised his cane over and over again, using both of his hands, raising the whip and bringing it down with such force that it made a sound like the shot of a gun, and as it did, the boy ran off into the distance, naked as the day he was born.

Okeke was a tall man whose wiry thin face drooped on one side, as if half his face was always sad. The rest of his body was like his face: altogether wiry thin and a little sad-looking.

Everyone knew him by that name, and everyone called him by it: Okeke. It made no difference if it was a child or an adult referring to him. They all called him Okeke.

I also had begun referring to him as Okeke, but never to his face. It was a thing I had been trained not to do as far back as I could remember, never to refer to an adult by his or her first name. Each time I went to Okeke, I simply called him “Sir.”

Everyone must have been out of kerosene that day, because the line was long, circling out of the doorway of the small cement-walled shop and meandering out onto the tip of the main road. After over an hour of waiting, I finally neared the front of the line, third in line. The kerosene was stored in large translucent plastic jerry cans through which the liquid line was visible. From where I stood, I could see that all of the large jerry cans holding the kerosene behind where Okeke stood were empty, no liquid to speak of. He had different sizes of funnels that he used to transfer the kerosene from the larger jerry cans into his customers’ containers. Now he was gathering all the funnels together, as if to pack them up.

Another tall wiry man at the head of the line called out, “Brother, abeg-o! Make say we get kerosene-o!”

Okeke continued to pack up the funnels. Not bothering to respond to the man, he set the funnels on the countertop near where the jerry cans sat.

“Nawa-o! E don finish?” a woman behind me asked. The way she said “finish,” it was as if she were saying “dead,” as if she were lamenting the death of a family member. “What am I to do now?” she asked. “How am I to cook my food? How am I to light my lanterns?”

A sliver of panic blossomed in me. What was I also to do now? I could go back home and report to the grammar school teacher and his wife that there was no kerosene, but it meant that there would be at least one more day without any real food to eat, not having any oil with which to light up the cooking fire. There was garri, which we could soak in cold water and eat, but not much of anything else, not even some groundnuts to mix into the garri. At this point there was not even bread.

The man who was first in line raised his hands in the air, in a gesture of both frustration and resignation, then turned to leave. The second man turned and left as well.

I looked behind me. All the people who had been standing behind me were now leaving. Okeke was moving the empty jerry cans, taking them one at a time through the door at the rear of the shed. After the second trip outside, he came back and simply regarded the open area of the shop. There was no one left but me. He looked at me.

My hands were clenched in tight fists. I was holding, crinkled up in my palms, the Biafran pounds that the grammar school teacher had given to me to buy the kerosene.

“Still standing here,” Okeke said to me, not quite a question.

Papa used to say, whenever I began pleading or whining or complaining about something, that the hunter who makes too much noise goes home empty-handed. And anyway, I already knew, just from the experience of being a child, that the children who got what they wanted were, more often than not, the ones who were quiet and behaved the best. I remained silent and tried to be on my best behavior, which wasn’t very hard to do, seeing as how there was not much else I could have done.

The last time I had come, about two weeks earlier, I had been sent for bread and a can of Titus sardines, along with kerosene. I had not come with enough money for the sardines, and yet Okeke had given me the sardines anyway. “On credit,” he had said. “Next time you come, just bring me the sardine money.”

I realized that I had forgotten about the owed money. In fact, not only had I forgotten to bring it, I had even forgotten to mention it to the grammar school teacher in the first place, those two weeks ago. Perhaps it was just as well, then, I thought to myself, that the kerosene had run out, because what money would I have used for the kerosene after paying back the sardine money?

Okeke looked at me as if inspecting me. His eyes went down to the empty bottle in my hand.

I knew by now, from snippets of talk between the grammar school teacher and his wife, as well as from talk around the village, that Okeke had a family of his own — a wife, three daughters, a son. The son, Dubem, had, some months ago, joined the Biafran army. There were whispers that he might not make it back home, that Okeke might soon find himself without a son.

Somehow it occurred to me to tell him about the scene I had just witnessed, the one of the dead boy rising. The whole thing was still fresh in my mind.

I would have told it to him to give him hope about his son. To say that perhaps his son would be like that one boy, the one resurrected boy in a field of dead people. Because maybe this was what war was about: the dying of the masses in exchange for the resurrection of one.

Before I could open my mouth to speak, my mind began to wander. Inside my head it was as if a grasshopper were hopping about, this way and that, not knowing where it wanted to land. Or maybe as if my mind was playing hopscotch in the sand, the ground all marked up with a stick, deep depressions forming boxes, each numbered from one to ten. My mind was hopping from one box to the next, trying to make it to the ten.