Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

“ Ego one ka ifa bu? ” he asked Mama, holding the bottle out toward her when he had reached the counter. How much?

He had just collected his change and turned to leave when I recognized him. Also at that moment, I heard, “ Na wa-oh! ” The tone of Mama’s voice was a mixture of glee and surprise.

“Chibundu!” she exclaimed.

At that moment he recognized her too.

He greeted Mama, and then he turned to me. “Ijeoma! Is it you?” He turned back to Mama. “Mrs. Okoli, long time!”

Memories flooded back, of Chibundu pulling my hair, of us climbing trees, of running around church together. Of him saying, “Look really closely at us so that you never forget that we were friends.”

“Long time,” Mama was saying. She had come around the counter and was greeting him with a hug, saying, “Welcome o. Welcome. Nno. ”

His shirt was wrinkled and untucked at the waist. Ridges had formed on his forehead, age lines that made him seem far older than the image of him in my mind. But of course. He was no longer a boy.

Back in Ojoto, Mama never seemed to have a soft spot for Chibundu, but now it appeared that she did. She spent the remainder of that day, and the rest of the week, talking to me about him.

“He has done very well for himself. Imagine, little Chibundu, a graduate of the University of Ibadan and now doing Youth Service here in Aba! His mother and father must be very proud.”

“Yes,” I said. “They must be very proud.”

“THERE WAS A beating yesterday,” Ndidi said very softly one evening. She appeared to be speaking to herself or into the air, rather than to me.

“They were two men. I never knew them. They were friends of Adanna from the university. For days they seemed to have disappeared, fallen off the face of the earth. And then yesterday she heard something at the market, whispers about a pair of ‘sissies’ being beaten by a crowd of people. She went to the bushes behind the dirt road not far from where they lived, and she found the two of them there, naked and beaten to death.”

Her voice was soft and raspy now, as if her throat was parched.

“This sort of thing has always happened. Like several years ago when they burned down that other church I told you about. But I hadn’t been going to that church, so the burning did not feel completely real. And no one died. This time it’s different. This time it basically happened right before my eyes, and I can’t shake the feeling that it could easily have been me or you.”

I went to her and wrapped my arms around her.

“We called the police. They couldn’t even be bothered to do anything, not even to take the bodies away. ‘Let them rot like the faggots they are,’ one of the officers said. The other one said, ‘If they were not dead already, we would beat them some more.’ In the end, it was Adanna and I who took their bodies,” she said. “We carried them and cleaned them and prepared them for burial. Imagine, holding their bodies in my arms.”

Her voice by now was a trembling whisper.

THERE HAD BEEN nothing extraordinary about the events of the first half of the following day: Mama and I worked at the shop as usual. In the evening I went to Ndidi’s, where she and I ate some garri and okra soup for dinner. Afterward, Ndidi and I went to the church.

First we had danced in the middle of the floor, to the sound of Fela Kuti’s voice, “Shakara Oloje” flowing loudly from the record player. Then we pushed ourselves deep into the corner of the church, at the rear, where the table of beer and jugs of kai kai and crates of soft drinks sat. We had become like all the other girls by now, kissing and fondling and making out in the dark.

I had not intended to stay so long. My plan had been to return home earlier than last time, before eleven p.m. Mama would scold me again for being late, but at least it would not be a new grievance. She might be worried, but not overly so, since it was something I’d done before.

But things did not go as I had planned.

The knocking at the front door of the church came when Ndidi and I stood making out at the rear of the dance floor. It might have been soft at first, but soon it was a loud banging sound.

We watched as several of the girls peeked out from the heavy drapes at the windows. A heavy hush fell over the place, and for a moment Fela Kuti’s music was the only audible sound. Then there was the hurried scrambling of feet, and one of the girls, Chichi, herded the rest of the girls to the back of the church where Ndidi and I stood. “Shhhh,” Chichi repeated, her index finger meeting her lips.

Outside, behind the church, it was that time of the morning when the moon is looming, the sky is still dark, and the cocks have not yet crowed. Midnight had come and gone.

Ndidi held my hand as we ran. The palm fronds were not quite covering the wooden slab at the entrance of the pit. We recognized the bunker that way.

In front of us and behind us, in the quiet of night, the girls, a dozen or so of us, lined up quietly to make our way into the bunker. Chichi pulled open the wooden slab and allowed us to climb into the hole.

We packed the bunker tightly like stacked-up tubers of yam. Chichi pulled the wooden slab back over the entrance of the pit. We stood quietly, our breaths hushed, the way we used to do those days during the war.

Above us, but a little distance away, we heard a scream, and then another. Then there were the sounds of men’s and women’s voices, talking, shouting, and then another scream.

Chichi raised herself, reached for the cover of the pit as if to open it up, but several of the girls pulled her arm back.

“They’ve caught someone,” she whispered to us. She looked frantically around. “There must be at least a couple of us missing.”

“Where is Adanna?” someone whispered.

Chichi reached again for the wooden cover.

The same group of girls pulled her arm back once more. “So you’ll allow the rest of us to die to save one?” a girl asked.

“Shhhh,” another girl said. “You don’t want them to know where we are hiding.” And of course the attackers would not have known unless we made it evident to them. These particular bunkers, I’d find out later, were very well concealed, palm covering and grass and all. Harder to detect than those of our war days. As if one or more of the girls had known to plan ahead. As if they had known that a raid like this would be inevitable.

Chichi no longer reached for the pit cover. We all returned to silence.

There was nothing else to do but to study the hole. All around, nothing but darkness, the smell of fresh earth, and in all that darkness the faint contour of bodies. Other sounds above us — of screams and cries and a man’s thundering voice, as if reciting a prayer. In my mind, I saw the walls of the earth collapsing around us like the pillars of the Temple of Dagon, the walls of our pit crumbling all around us, and we, Samson-like in our decline, crumbling along with the walls. So was this how we would meet our end? An image of Mama came to my mind, Mama weeping before my dead body, Mama at my grave, mourning over me. Or perhaps she would not mourn. Perhaps she would be too angry to mourn. Perhaps she would not even bother with a burial for me.

By my side, Ndidi held my hand.

The sound of the screaming grew louder, and for a moment I thought I heard the thuds of feet approaching the bunker. But seconds and then minutes passed and no one came.

Everything seemed to settle above us. The screaming died out. The praying faded away. We stood rigidly breathing in the scent of our bodies, of our collective sweat. Breathing in the scent of our collective fear.