Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

That particular day, we had eaten yam porridge for breakfast, boiled yam with palm oil for lunch, and pounded yam with soup for dinner. By now the war had been over for about seven months. Schools had not yet reopened, but the palm fronds were regaining their green. Yam was not exactly abundant, but people celebrated the festival all the same.

It must have happened on a Saturday, because Saturdays were when the grammar school teacher brought his dirty shirts and trousers, along with his wife’s dirty blouses and wrappers and gowns, in a pail for us to wash. He always made sure to bring the pail early in the day, usually in the morning. Never later than two or three in the afternoon.

But that Saturday, he brought it late.

If only he had remembered to bring the pail just a couple of hours before he did. Then we would still have been outside running our errands, or in the kitchen cooking or cleaning, or just sitting on the steps of our hovel, waiting for him to arrive.

If he’d remembered, there would have been nothing to be discovered: we would simply have collected the pail, set out immediately to wash the clothes, and then hung the items out in the sun to dry.

Papa used to talk a lot about infinity. He used to harp on how there were infinite possibilities for the way anything in life could turn out. Even with a limited number of building blocks, he said, the possibilities were endless.

These days, when I think of that particular Saturday, I think of Papa and of his infinite possibilities, of the way they applied even in the framework of something as routine as the handing over of a pail of dirty clothes.

It was long after supper, and Amina and I had by then finished cleaning up the kitchen.

Out at the tap, we had taken our night baths and had returned to the hovel to sleep.

It was dark inside but for the kerosene lantern that sat on the table next to Papa’s old Bible. We settled ourselves in our usual positions on the mattress: she by the wall, and me on the side nearer the door.

We lay facing each other, ready to fall into sleep, but sleep refused to come. By the light of the lantern, I watched the blinking of her eyes. For a long time we said nothing. Finally she said, “Every morning while we ate breakfast, my mother used to ask me what I dreamed at night.”

Mama used to talk a lot about dreams too. I told Amina as much. Maybe that was a trait shared by all mothers, we decided.

I thought about my dreams that night. The first one that came to mind was not the one where I was getting stuck in the dream, but rather the one where my teeth were all aching, all falling out.

Amina said, “Did you ever have the one where you continued to rise from the ground for no reason at all, like a balloon floating in the air, higher and higher, and all you wanted to do was come back down, but you were unable to do so?”

“Yes, those were my scariest dreams,” I said. “What do you imagine a dream like that means?”

She said, “My mother told me once that it means you will continue to rise, but eventually you will fall. Good things will happen to you for some time, and then the bad will follow.”

I almost wished I had not asked.

I tried to remember the last time I had had that dream. I could not remember. Well, maybe I had already fallen. Maybe being here, working as a housegirl for the grammar school teacher, maybe that was my falling.

“The day before the house burned down, I dreamed of a yellow flower growing alone in a field,” Amina said. “I would have told it to my mother when I returned from fetching the kosai, but I never got the chance.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

The sheet was pulled up to our chests, but now she pulled her side higher, up to her shoulders. We lay there quietly. Neither one of us spoke.

Finally I said, “Dreams are not always sad. Or at least they don’t have to be. Not even the scary ones have to mean something bad.”

I shifted my body, lifted myself, and turned so that I was no longer facing her.

The flame in the kerosene lantern shivered. Papa’s Bible lay next to the lantern. I tried to think of some Bible stories in which there were mentions of dreams. Almost immediately the story of Joseph came to me. I turned back to Amina. “Did you ever hear of Joseph and his dreams?”

“Who is Joseph?” she asked.

“You know, Joseph from the Old Testament.”

She shook her head, told me that she did not know who Joseph was.

I filled her in on him. How God had given him a sign by way of his dreams. How, in one dream, Joseph and his brothers were tying wheat into bundles when suddenly Joseph’s bundle of wheat stood up straight, nice and tall. Meanwhile, his brothers’ bundles of wheat folded over, bowing to Joseph’s bundle of wheat. In another dream, the sun and the moon and the stars all bowed down to Joseph.

I said, “At first when Joseph told his brothers of the dream, they were angry with him because they thought Joseph was trying to say that he was better than them. It seemed at first that the dream would only end up causing trouble. His brothers sold him into slavery because they were so angry with him. But many years later, it all worked out. Joseph was reunited with his brothers. In the end they found out that the dreams, and everything that came from the dreams, were part of God’s plan for them. Imagine, all of it was part of the plan all along. Because from them came the twelve tribes of Israel.”

She sighed and pressed herself against me. “I don’t understand why God made them to first have to go through all that wahala. Why have his brothers sell him off as a slave for all those years? It’s like going around in a circle instead of taking a straight line home. Doesn’t make any sense to me.”

I said, “Maybe sometimes it’s worth it to go around in circles. Maybe you learn more lessons that way.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I suppose that could be true too.”

Amina was so close to me now that I felt an urge to lean in and kiss her. I began with her forehead. I took a stop at her nose. Soon I was at her lips, then at the crook of her neck, which was exposed by her loose nightgown.

She rose so that she was above me, straddling me at the waist, on her knees. There was a sadness to the way she moved, to the way her lips lingered in the crook of my neck. She might have stopped out of all that sadness, but she continued, as if she were determined to fight off the sadness this way.

Slowly she made her way to my chest. We’d never gone farther than the chest. But now she gently removed my nightgown, and then removed hers. She cupped her hands around my breasts, took turns with them, fondling and stroking and caressing them with her tongue. I felt the soft tug of her teeth on the peaks of my chest. Euphoria washed over me.

She continued along, leaving a trail of kisses on her way down to my belly. She traveled farther, beyond the belly, farther than we had ever gone. I moaned and surrendered myself to her. I did not until then know that a mouth could make me feel that way when placed in that part of the body where I had never imagined a mouth to belong.

The knock snapped us back to reality. The grammar school teacher had knocked like that many times before. But always he’d waited for permission to enter. Only when we answered the knock did he walk in to find us just lounging about — chatting, or plaiting hair, or maybe eating a snack.

The door opened before we were able to pull our nightgowns back on. He walked in in a bustle, talking about how he had lost track of time. Explaining that he would leave the pail for us right outside the door and we should see about washing the clothes first thing in the morning.

And then his eyes settled on us. Amina had been lying on the mattress, flat on her back, my head hovering in the space above her legs. We had done our best to scramble away from each other as he entered the room. But we had not managed to get very far apart. I had only succeeded in lifting my head, and Amina had only managed to pull together her legs.