Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

She shook her head and said, “No, Sir.”

“Uncles? Aunties? Cousins?”

She shook her head again and said no.

The grammar school teacher remained silent for a while. Amina stood before him, her head facing the ground.

His wife came out of the house at that moment, joined her husband in looking at Amina.

“She has no family,” the grammar school teacher said to his wife.

They stood there for a full minute, staring some more at Amina.

“When you think of it, she’s not exactly that much Hausa-looking,” the grammar school teacher’s wife said to him. “Actually, she is more Fulani-looking than Hausa-looking. Which means she could pass for Igbo.”

The grammar school teacher considered his wife’s words. “It’s true,” he said. “Some Igbos and Fulanis do have a certain similarity in their features. Their complexion, for one thing.”

“And she appears to be a hard worker,” the grammar school teacher’s wife said.

Her husband nodded.

“In the grand scheme of things, she’ll probably be doing more good than harm by staying.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding.

“We could always use an extra set of hands,” she said.

“I suppose that’s true,” he said. “But at the first sign of trouble, I’m sending her off.”

“Makes sense,” she said.

“Good,” he said.

The way things worked out, Amina was not exactly in the habit of talking much, so there was little or no risk of her revealing herself or being found out as Hausa. All the time that we went about our errands, no one ever raised the issue. With time, it must have settled on the grammar school teacher and his wife that she was no threat, at least not in the way that they had feared she would be.

LATE ONE EVENING, Amina and I, having finished our chores for the day, took our evening baths, then sat together in our nightgowns on the stoop of our hovel while I plaited her hair with thread.

Out of the blue, she said, “Did you used to go to school?”

She was sitting one step lower than me, and I was holding a lock of her hair in my hands, combing it out the way one does before wrapping it with thread. I held the thread between my lips as I combed.

By now I had learned that the reason she could not find her other family was that most everyone outside her immediate family was up north. The war being what it was, they might all have thought her dead. No one had come for her, and she had not gone to them. She would not have known a way to go finding them on her own anyway. She did not know where exactly they lived.

“Tell me,” she said. “Did you used to go to school?”

I took the thread out of my lips. “I used to go until the schools closed,” I said. “Until just a little before Mama sent me here to stay.”

She said, “Oga says that he will send me to school when the war finishes.”

I nodded and told her that he had also agreed to do the same for me.

“What was it like — your school?”

I was in the middle of plaiting, but she pulled out of my grasp and turned to face me.

I slapped her on the shoulder, more like a hard tap. “Look what you’ve gone and done! You’ve messed up this one and now I’ll have to do it all over again!”

“Sorry,” she replied in a very aloof way.

“Well, sorry is fine and all, but it doesn’t fix anything.” I exhaled exasperatedly, then said, “You need to turn around so I can get back to it.”

“Okay,” she said nonchalantly, ignoring my irritation. “But first, what was it like?”

“What was what like?”

“School!”

“What do you mean, what was school like? Don’t you already know what school is like?”

“I do,” she said. “But tell me anyway.”

There must have been a confused look on my face, because she chuckled softly and said, “Stop making that face. Are you going to tell me or not?”

“You sound like a person who has never been to school,” I said.

She said, “Of course I’ve been to school. Yes, I have.” Slowly, her face turned thoughtful, then she added, as if to clarify, “I’ve been to school, but only off and on. Not long enough to really know.” She stretched out the word. Reeeaaallly. Very plaintively, like a sigh.

“Oh,” I said.

“My mother needed me at home, for trading, for running errands, for hawking. That kind of thing.”

I said, “So, do you know how to read?”

She laughed. “Of course I know how to read. I used to read the Koran every day. But I know more than just Arabic. My mother used to let me read English books at home. Aladdin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Those kinds of books.”

“Maybe one day you can teach me Arabic,” I said.

She laughed. “Maybe one day.”

We were silent for a while, and then she said, “You know, I could have been married by now.”

I looked at her, startled. “But you’re barely thirteen.”

She laughed. “I had my dowry, marriage pots and bowls, plenty of gifts already. Just a little bit more and I would have been married and entered purdah, secluded, no longer able to come out. If things had gone like that, I probably would never have met you.”

I said, “It’s good that things happened the way they did, so we could meet.”

She scowled at me, and immediately I knew that I had misspoken.

“You’re happy that they set fire to my family’s house?” she shouted. “You’re happy that my father and mother died? You’re happy that my brother is somewhere in the war, or probably dead too?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“How else could you have meant it?” she shouted. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see it. I leave to buy some kosai. Not more than thirty minutes later, I come back and the house is gone and everyone in it is gone.”

Now all I could see in my mind was her house burning down and her arriving to find it so. I saw her screaming, running toward the burning house, all the while pleading for help.

She was crying now.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry. I really didn’t mean it that way.”

WE COULD NOT have known it for sure at the time, but by early January 1970 the war was nearing its end. All the radios were hissing with news about an operation. Operation Tail-Wind, they called it. The final Nigerian offensive. First there was talk that Owerri had fallen once again to the Nigerians. And there was talk that Uli had fallen as well. Then one day we heard the announcement.

Amina and I had just returned from the market. We were both in the kitchen. I was pounding yam; she was at the sink washing plates.

Earlier, outside the compound, there had been an unusual flurry of action, a sort of commotion. Several men were conversing vehemently while pushing their wheelbarrows down the road. A couple of women were chatting loudly as they peeled corn in front of their gates. A third woman was speaking forcefully to another woman while feeding her small child tidbits from a fist-sized roll of bread. Several girls were carrying buckets of water on their heads, and the way they talked, their voices surged, and with their arms they gesticulated as widely as the buckets on their heads would allow.

Now, as I stood in the kitchen, Amina out by the sink, the grammar school teacher’s radio came on. It started off softly, but soon he turned it up so high that even from the kitchen we could hear clearly when the Radio Biafra announcer said that Ojukwu had fled, that he had gone off on a plane to Ivory Coast. Something about his going for the sake of exploring possibilities for peace.

But we all knew what it meant. Ojukwu had surrendered.