Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

I twirled back in defiance, twirled so fast that the flared skirt of my dress came up as high as hers had, only I made no move to push it back down. Soon she was twirling with me. I heard her laugh, and I laughed with her, and soon we were falling down with all that laughter, at a joke that neither of us could quite have explained.

We sat on the ground to catch our breath, just looking at each other. The straps of her dress had fallen down her shoulders. I tugged at them, pulled them lower, looked longingly at her.

“Will you—” she began in a whisper.

“Will I?”

She moved closer to me.

“This?” I asked, pulling her straps lower.

She sighed, like a gasp, but she moved closer, her eyes steady on me.

I allowed my fingers to trace the upper part of her dress, its bodice, where the lace hem met her skin. She pulled my hand lower, just above her breast. I felt the thumping of her heart. She leaned into me and sighed again. We stayed a moment like that. Suddenly she turned her eyes from me, looked downward, as if suddenly self-conscious. Her dress still covered her body, everything but her shoulders, but she must have felt more naked than that, because she proceeded to wrap her arms over her shoulders.

We returned to campus in the dark, not saying a word, walking along the roads lined with palm and plantain trees, her yellow dress and my cream-colored one billowing in the breeze.

Back on school grounds, I started to go in the direction of my dorm, but she grasped my hand and we both walked in the direction of hers.

In her dorm room, we kicked off our shoes and sat on opposite ends of the bed. Her roommate had gone home for the weekend. My heart raced, a mixture of terror and excitement at the possibility of finally arriving at something that I had for some time begun to think of as a hopeless dream.

She rose from her end of the bed and moved so that she was next to me. After a while we stretched ourselves flat on the mattress. The room was dark, but the moon, through the horizontal slits of the shutters, shone through.

We watched each other by the light of the moon. We fell asleep that way.

It must have been sometime in the middle of the night that she woke up with a start, asking me if I had seen it, if I had heard it. “Hailstones,” she blurted out, “and fire, pouring down and forming craters where they landed.” Her body shook as she spoke, almost as if she were shivering from a fever.

She described the dream, something about a carriage in the sky pulled by golden horses with no horseman. People were lining up, marching toward the bright light that encircled the carriage in the sky.

I hadn’t meant to do so, but I found myself laughing in her face. “I see you’ve been reading your Bible,” I said. “Sounds to me like the book of Revelation.” I laughed some more.

“The children,” she cried, her voice shaky now. “Small children, sweat dripping from their heads. So much sweat that their clothes were soaking wet.” With all that marching, she said, those poor children must have been achy, on the brink of exhaustion, some of them probably even beyond that, because every once in a while one fell to the ground, and the others simply stepped over him.

Maybe it was a sign, she said. Maybe we were the fallen children, the sinful ones without the strength to continue in the path of righteousness.

“No,” I replied, taking her dream more seriously now. I shook my head, told her that it was all just a dream. I pulled her close to me and held her, my face in the crook of her neck. Was it her scent that gave me a feeling of joyful deliriousness? I kissed her, from her neck to her jawline and then to her lips. Her dress had come unbuttoned at the front, and I ran my hands across her chest, caressed her breasts. “We are far from fallen children,” I said. “It’s only a dream.”

Her hand was moist on my lap. She leaned into me, stroked my face, returned my kiss with one full of yearning, deeper and more longing than mine. But I had already lost her. As soon as she parted from the kiss, she rose from the bed. She buttoned up her dress, found her sandals, and strapped them on. She walked over to the door and opened it. Cold air came in from outside. She stood there in the doorframe, her body faltering a little, like a shadow on the verge of fading. After some time just standing there, she walked out of the room, closing the door gently behind her.

FOR A COUPLE of weeks after that dream incident, Amina and I did not eat together, did not meet to go to the river, barely spoke to each other on our way to and from classes.

About the third Saturday after the dream, I was getting fed up with the way things were, fed up that everything between us should suddenly change again, and all on account of a stupid dream.

All day that Saturday, I had stayed in the library, hoping that Amina would stop in, but she didn’t.

Now the sun was setting, and though I was not outside with the rest of the students, I knew that the teachers were announcing the end of visiting hours. From the open windows near where I sat, I could see that one by one the boys were sauntering away. Cardinal Rex’s highlife music, Ibi Na Bo , was playing, coming from a veranda near the library building. Some people hummed along to it as they walked by on their way to let themselves out through the school gate.

I made up my mind then that I would get to the bottom of things. I closed the book I was reading and stood up. It was as if there was a fire at my feet, propelling me to move, to do something.

At her door, I knocked, three firm taps that I knew she would hear, if she was inside to hear. There was no answer.

In the distance, I could hear that Ibi Na Bo had finished playing, and now Love Mu Adure had taken over.

I knocked again. Tap. Tap. Tap. Still nothing.

Just as I turned to walk away, I heard the rattling of the doorknob.

She came out, closed the door behind her. “My roommate is sleeping,” she said in a low voice. “She’s not feeling well today.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry she’s sick.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Just a stomachache. I picked some lemongrass and boiled it for her to drink.”

“That was nice of you to do,” I said. “I hope it helps.”

She nodded.

I said, “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“I know,” she said. “Things have been busy.”

“What’s making them so busy?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “School. Reading. Sick roommate.”

We were standing face to face. I moved closer to her, took her hand in mine. “We missed all the music and the dancing today,” I said.

“I know,” she said, pulling her hand out of mine. “Maybe next time.”

I said, “We don’t have to wait till next time. We can hear the music all the way from here.” I took her hand in mine again, pulled her close to me. She did not pull away this time; instead she held on tightly. But she was wide-eyed and unsmiling. I moved closer, raised my hands to hold her by the waist. My hands had hardly touched her waist when she cried out, “Please stop!”

She said it again, more quietly this time, “ Please. Stop. ”

I let go of her.

She brought her hand to her forehead and said, “You know, actually, I have a headache. I think I need to sleep myself. I hope you have a good rest of the day. I’ll see you around.”

She turned and stepped into the room, shutting the door behind her, not bothering to wait for my response.

BY THE END of that second year, no amount of persuasion or cajoling or flat-out rationalizing had managed to take away the standoffishness that Amina had acquired as a result of that dream.