Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

The sight of us must have startled him, because he gasped like a dying man taking his final breath.

He went immediately for the lantern on the table, lifted it in our direction, leaned closer, his eyes peering, as if to make sure that what he was seeing was indeed what was before his eyes.

The sight of us startled him all over again, and he gasped once more.

The whole incident was startling to me too, and must have been startling to Amina as well, not only for our having to endure the discomfort of his looking at us in this way, but also for our having to endure the misfortune of being forced to see ourselves through his eyes.

He walked over, pulled us off the mattress one at a time, slapped us on our cheeks. Over a year with him, sometimes the threat of a beating, but never an actual beating, until then.

He must have noticed the Bible on the table when he grabbed the lantern, because he turned back to the table, set the lantern back down, and grabbed the Bible. Pointing to it, he cried, “An abomination!”

The word reverberated in my head.

He looked directly at me. He shouted, “That is what it is, if a name is to be given to it! That is what the Bible calls it!”

Now he turned to Amina. He shouted at her too. “The Koran condemns it as well. I don’t know much of Islam, but I know enough to know that the Koran and the Bible see eye to eye on this matter!”

He paced back and forth as he spoke, made frantic gestures with his hands as he told us that we would be held accountable for our actions. He had heard of such cases, in which the accused were stoned all the way to the river. Stoned even as they drowned in the waters of the river. Of course, it was rare that such cases were spoken of. So taboo the whole thing was, anathema, unmentionable, not even deserving a name.

Amina and I began to cry, deep cries that made our shoulders heave. Our clothes lay scattered on the floor, dispersed like discarded seeds. We were naked, and we felt our nakedness as Adam and Eve must have felt it in the garden, at the time of that evening breeze. Our eyes had become open, and we too sought to hide ourselves. But first we had to endure the grammar school teacher’s lecturing. There he went, pacing back and forth in our little hovel, going on and on about our shame, his eyes furious, his mouth opening wider and wider.

He lectured and he lectured, and he lectured. As God must have lectured Eve.

THAT WAS THE way in which Mama came back to me. Nearly two years gone by, and then that incident, and at last she found herself coming back for me.

The first thing I did when I saw her was run up and embrace her. I did so just as she was entering the gate. Despite the unfortunate circumstances under which she had sent me off, and despite the unfortunate circumstance under which we were all now gathering, I was genuinely glad to see her. So much time had passed, and I had missed her.

Mama had never been a buxom woman, but she appeared even less so now, a little withered.

When I came out of the embrace, we stood there face to face, taking each other in with our eyes.

Even today, I remember the way her clothes draped over her body with no discernible shape, the way she smelled of stale sweat — not terribly unfamiliar, but a little off-putting.

I remained with her, standing and tugging gently at her clothes in the mindless way that people who know each other well sometimes do. I tugged at the flap of her top wrapper.

Finally I moved from the wrapper and slid my hand into hers. The skin of her hand was wrinkled, as if from too many washes. Or from overuse. Or from age. I felt the quivering, what seemed to be tremors in her palm. My eyes had been lowered all along, but now I raised my head and saw in my mother’s eyes a wetness: tears glistening before me like those silvery raindrops of the rainy season. Her cheeks appeared sunken. In that moment I wished that I could crawl back into her womb, if only to thicken her out, to put flesh upon her hips, into her breasts, to put life back into her sunken cheeks.

She began humming, as if unaware of herself, and as she hummed, she laughed at nothing at all, a soft laugh, a smooth sound. I leaned in close to her and fastened my arms around her legs, praying that the day did not come when she would slip completely away from me: shrinking, shrinking, shrinking until there was nothing of her left on this earth.

The grammar school teacher must have been watching the whole time. After Mama and I had come out of our last embrace, he cleared his throat, signaling that it was time for the meeting to begin.

Stools were set up in the backyard of the grammar school teacher’s house, in the area of land near where lush green grass carpeted the earth, the area between the bungalow and the hovel. It was late morning, and we sat in a circle, like a village council meeting except without all the flourishes and jubilant greetings that marked the beginning of one.

The sun was shining brightly. I felt the weight of its rays on my shoulders. On the cement wall that formed the fence of the compound, lizards scurried about.

“So, tell me what this is all about,” Mama said.

The grammar school teacher replied, “I will allow Ijeoma to tell it to you herself. Tell her,” he said, turning to me. “Go on. Tell her.”

I remained silent, my throat numb.

The grammar school teacher’s wife had been silent up till this point, but now she spoke. “The day waits for no one,” she said sternly.

Mama glared at me. “Ijeoma,” she said. “What is it that you have done?”

Amina had been seated with us from the start, and Mama had paid her no mind the entire time, but now she seemed to notice her.

Mama smiled and spoke to her in Igbo, a series of rambling questions: How are you? Who are you? What exactly are you doing here?

To which Amina responded with silence, because though she had picked up some basic Igbo greetings, which came to the rescue with passersby and such, she did not know enough Igbo to understand all that Mama had rambled, let alone know how to go about responding to her.

The grammar school teacher piped in then and explained who Amina was, to which Mama scowled and expressed her dissatisfaction with the fact that he had allowed a Hausa into his home, and not only that, but had allowed her to share living quarters with me, her child. Did he not see how dangerous it was? Did he not already know that it was the Hausa army that had killed her husband, the very same Hausa people who had destroyed Biafra?

He replied that Amina had not once been a problem until now, and that, anyway, she was just a harmless little girl.

Still, Mama did not hold back her dissatisfaction. She continued to scowl.

The whole situation was very stressful for me and was causing my stomach to do frightful somersaults. I found myself fading into my thoughts. I imagined myself removed from time and place. Or rather, I imagined myself in a place where nothing had happened in the past and nothing was happening now, and in the future nothing would be the consequence of all the nothings that had come before.

I woke up to Mama’s voice. “Ijeoma, do you hear me?” Her words were shrill with irritation. “Do you hear me, or am I talking to the air?”

I responded, “Yes, Mama. I hear you.”

“So, go ahead. Tell me what it is that has happened.”

I sputtered, my tongue tumbling over a string of words, before something coherent came out. “Amina and I, we didn’t think anything of it,” I began.

“You didn’t think anything of what?” she asked.

“Of what we were doing,” I said.

“And what exactly were you doing?”

“Our clothes,” I said.

“Your clothes?”