Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

Finally he said, “Go in peace, my child.” He seemed to be panting a little, struggling a bit for air. What hard work, performing miracles, his panting seemed to say.

“How long before my prayers are answered?” I asked.

He looked taken aback by the question, but he quickly replied, “By the time you return to the school compound, you should start to see changes.” For a moment he looked at me with scrutinizing eyes, and then he said, “Don’t worry. As an emissary of God, I can tell you that your prayers will be answered. Your heart will be just fine.”

Until now, Amina and I had managed to stay out of each other’s paths. But at that moment I looked up to find that she was standing next in line. As she walked up to the minister she hardly looked my way. Her face was somber, and though at the time I did not have the slightest clue what miracle she was asking the onye ocha to perform for her, sometimes these days I think I know. Sometimes I speculate that she must have gotten exactly what she asked for. But at the time, it appeared that it was I who would get my wish. Maybe this is the way it goes when people approach God with contrary requests. How does God choose whose request to fulfill? Does God fight a battle of wills on their behalf? Does God play favorites? Humans double-deal. If it is true that we are made in His likeness, then does God double-deal?

UGOCHI WAS IN her nightgown, sitting on the chair by her bed. On her desk, the flame of her lantern flickered, casting shadows like wandering scars on her face. She had not been at her desk long, because earlier she was out on the river, in a canoe with a boy. All evening, too, she had been with the boy. They had simply drifted on the river, she said, drinking Fanta and Coke and watching the flocks of swallows fly around in the blue skies.

“Just drifting and drinking soft drinks and watching the birds?” I asked. “Just how much drifting could you both have possibly done on that river, being that the river is not all that big, more like a narrow stream flanked at the sides by the jagged earth? Was there even room in it for a canoe?”

“ Na wa-oh ,” she said, rolling her eyes accusingly, as if to declare me the guilty one for daring to ask the question. “Little Miss Innocent, what do you even know of these things? You must know more than I think you do.” She pursed her lips so that they formed a tight circle with only a bit of an opening between. She sucked air into her mouth so that out came a sound somewhere between a shush and a whistle.

I rolled my eyes back at her. “I know enough to know that you weren’t just drifting and drinking soft drinks,” I said.

Slowly her lips relaxed themselves into a naughty smile. “ Ngwa , I will tell you,” she said. “But, nee anya , you cannot tell anybody. Not a soul, you hear me? I don’t want to become the subject of gossip-gossip like Ozioma.”

“If you’re not careful, that’s exactly what will happen, only worse than Ozioma — you won’t even know which man is the father of your child.”

She laughed and said, “You know, sha, I have decided to do away with all those man friends and try a few younger boys. You know, secondary school boys my age. The men are good for money, but they are not looking to marry. All they want is a sweetheart on the side. I have to begin thinking of my future sooner or later.”

“So you were with one of the younger boys today?”

Out of the blue there was a timid look on her face.

“Since when are you shy?” I asked.

She giggled. “The young ones do have their pluses. He’s a really good one, you know,” she said quietly. I’d never seen her act like this before. If she had been light-complexioned, her face would have glowed a shade of red.

“You like him that much?” I asked.

She nodded. “I really like am o.”

“Enough to marry him if he asked?”

She laughed. “Marriage is still a long way off. Didn’t you hear me? I said ‘try a few younger boys.’ Boys. Plural. Why must I choose one, and so early?”

There was a faraway look in her eyes. She said, “Anyway, boys and men do it all the time — they have many girls on the side. Why can’t I?”

She stayed sitting on her chair but her arms were now folded at the elbows and resting on her desk. “And even if I must choose, it’s not as if I would know where to begin. I like this one, yes. But there are others too. The one who hardly talks, or the one who talks a bit too much? The very tall one, or the one not quite my height? She wore a look of mock confusion. “Tough decisions. This kain life. E no easy o!”

“Well, if worse comes to worst,” I said, “you can just line them up in a row and sing tumboko tumboko beskelebe ti ti alaba bust. If your finger lands on him, you eliminate him. Simple. You marry the last man standing.”

She laughed deeply now, her shoulders heaving. “Tomorrow sef, I will be with another boy. Maybe we will go to the river and borrow the same canoe from today, or maybe we will try something else. The possibilities are endless. But I will say that it’s been very nice spending time with today’s boy. Some secondary school boys really do know how to treat a girl well. It’s too bad so many of them wind up turning into cheating, two-timing men.”

I would have said that she was well on her way to becoming just like the men she was condemning. But I held my tongue, and instead I pictured her at the river with the secondary school boy. In my mind’s eye, I watched as they climbed into the canoe, as the sunlight caught their bare arms and legs. In my mind’s eye, they had gone prepared with fishing gear, and they were getting ready to cast their lines after some fish — maybe for okpo isiukwu, the big-headed catfish, or afor, the moonfish, or croaker or red snapper. Not that there was any indication that the river had any of these. I pictured it anyway. At last evening would come, and, tired, she and the boy would fall into those things that boys and girls did when alone and in the dark. By the end of it all he would reach into his pocket and pull out a beautiful bracelet for her. I imagined it all this way.

I kept a journal that year, at first writing on loose leaves of paper, which I folded into fourths and then again into eighths and stored in the wooden chest where I kept my pens and pencils. Eventually I found a small notebook. I kept the notebook also in the chest.

That night, I took out the notebook, and as Ugochi rambled on about boys, I wrote to Amina in it. Just a pledge of a note. Nothing that I actually intended to give to Amina, not in that moment at least. It was simply for purposes of catharsis.

I wrote:

All the things the boy will do, I promise to do better.

In all the ways he can love you, I promise to love you better.

ONE DAY, STILL our third year, I went beyond the river, where rocks rose like hills and where the plantain trees grew high. Beyond the rocks was a narrow path. A rope bridge led to more plantain trees, and some banana plants in between. I stood at the entrance of the bridge, in the part of the forest where banana hearts hung, purple flowers dangling from stocky stems. In the distance, grasscutters and other bush animals stirred. A few steps in front of me, the ground plunged. The gorge it formed was deep and narrow and very rocky. I stood there and thought, If I should plummet to my death, would she come for me?

That day was again a visiting day. The sun had begun to set by the time I returned to the school grounds, and when I got back to my dorm I found that the party I had tried to avoid earlier was still going on on the veranda. Music was playing as it usually did on these days. The boys and girls were moving to the music, their arms and hips swaying like extensions of the beat.