Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

In the weeks following Papa’s death, it seemed that we had lost our way, Mama and I. It seemed as if we could no longer tell up from down, left from right. But no matter how turned around we were, we at least knew enough to continue running into the bunker as soon as we heard the sound of the bomber engines. And no matter how turned around our lives had become, Mama knew enough to make sure to give Papa a proper send-off, so that he would be able to take his place among his ancestors.

There was an extensive wake-keeping — people coming in steady streams to give their condolences. This continued for over a week, with Papa laid out in the parlor on a four-poster bed, borrowed for the occasion from one of our church members. Mama, dressed in white, sat on a chair by his side surrounded by a troop of female parishioners. She wept and wailed for her dead husband while the women around her sang their funereal songs in chorus, like an accompaniment to her wails.

After Papa had been taken away and buried in the far corner of our backyard, there was the daylong ikwa ozu ceremony: trays of kola nuts and jerry cans of palm wine, prayers and libations, village elders invoking the spirits of Papa’s ancestors, asking them to guide him into the world of the deceased.

One morning after the ikwa ozu had been performed, Mama called me for breakfast.

I went to her, sat with her in our dining room, where she had two bowls of soaked garri ready for us. If it had been before the war, we would have been eating bread with tea and one boiled egg each, or maybe we would have been having some cornflakes with the eggs, the kind of cornflakes that came in the Kellogg’s box with the red-combed and yellow-beaked rooster. It was cornflakes imported from out of the country, and we would have been having it with Peak or Carnation evaporated milk, also from out of the country. But it had been some time since we’d had any bread or tea or Kellogg’s cornflakes, or Peak milk or Carnation evaporated milk. And as for eggs, they were a thing like peace of mind, like calm, even like a smile. They were a thing we had begun to have only once in a while.

Mama sprinkled some groundnuts in our bowls of garri, and as she did, she said, “The protein in the groundnuts is just as rich as the protein in eggs. It will do the work of any other protein. It will help your brain to work well, think hard, and develop properly.”

When Mama had just delivered me — when she was a brand-new mother — she had taken up studying food, for the simple fact that I had been born a little under a month early, and one of the midwives had explained to her that, among other things, it would be important for her to feed me protein. She had not understood what exactly protein was, that abstraction of a thing, like a ghost of a word, a mystery. Not like orange or banana or table or desk, things you could see solidly with your eyes. It was a thing that could not quite be seen.

She had gone and asked people and picked up information on it here and there — whatever health books or magazines she could find. She wanted me to live. If I were to live, then she must figure out what protein was so that she could feed it to me.

After that, she had decided that if she could do something for a job, she would much rather own a food store than be a nutritionist. All that reading she had done in the name of protein had been quite a lot of work. And she was slow at it — every word a crawl. (All those big words that she did not understand didn’t make it any easier on her.) After spending all afternoon reading, she spent her evenings and nights with a headache.

Maybe she herself had needed to be eating some protein back then, I’ve sometimes told her. Maybe that would have been just the thing to help with the reading and understanding of those big words.

In any case, as I sat there in the kitchen with her, I wondered what exactly it was I needed my brain for anymore, now that the war was making it so that soon enough there would probably no longer be any school for me to use my brain in. School was the reason why I read, and why I memorized the multiplication tables and learned history and geography and followed up with my Bible knowledge. School was what was supposed to develop my brain. How was protein supposed to do the work of school?

But Mama said that it would.

“As soon as the war is over,” she said, “school will resume full time, and you will see that your brain will be just as intact as ever, even better.”

I looked suspiciously at her, and she must have seen the suspicion on my face.

She smiled slightly and said that maybe one day I would use my brain to become a teacher or a doctor or a businesswoman. Because, she hated to break it to me, but I had better begin thinking about these things now. Because, God willing, I would one day marry, but what if one day I found myself like her, suddenly without a husband? “What if?” she asked, staring blankly at a spot behind my head.

After some time, she appeared to collect herself. Her eyes focused on me, and she said, “Well, all I’m saying is that you will have to use your brain for work, that is a fact. And no better way to start than with protein.”

We continued to sit there at the table, eating our soaked garri and groundnuts, Mama going on with her lecture on the benefits of protein for my brain, neither of us talking about what was really on our minds, which was that Papa was dead and gone, and no amount of protein could bring him back to life.

BY THE END of July, over a month had passed and Mama had not so much as mentioned Papa.

I took the hint. I resigned myself to just thinking of him. But the way I thought of him, it was the way a starving child thinks about food: he was always on my mind. Each time I heard a man’s voice, or each time I saw anyone reading a newspaper, I thought of him. Mama never turned on the radio-gramophone. It was as if she had made it a point not to turn it on. But she didn’t need to. Just seeing it was enough of a trigger for me to think of Papa.

One day, when it seemed that I had reached my max of missing him — one day when it seemed that I could not possibly miss him more without dying of the feeling — I found myself, out of the blue, blurting out to Mama, “Mama, do you miss Papa like I do?”

We were at the dining table, eating our dinner of yam porridge.

She snapped, her head whipping up with a sudden, unexpected anger. In a low, grumbling voice she replied: “Why should I miss him? Was he not the same man who made a widow of me and almost an orphan out of you? Tell me, just why should I miss him?”

I went back to my yam porridge.

Some minutes passed, and she said, very quietly: “Anger, that is what I feel toward him. Anger. Sometimes I feel like I will just explode with it.”

I listened, not saying a word.

She let it all out then, the words tumbling from her mouth in a sputtering rage: “What kind of man pollutes his own land and his own house by allowing himself to be killed in it? Lucky for him that there’s a war going on, so he cannot entirely be blamed for taking his own life. Lucky for him that his death can simply be explained as just another war death. But still, the atrocity!”

Our bedrooms, both on the second story of the house, had been destroyed by the same bombs that had killed Papa, and since there was a chance they might soon be destroyed again, Mama had decided that there was no sense fixing them back up.

We’d pulled down the mattress that Mama and Papa shared from their bedroom to the parlor floor. Each night we slept together on it.

At something like one or two a.m. on the night of Mama’s anger confession, her scream came piercing a hole into the darkness, a hole so big that I felt as if I were spiraling at full speed down the length of it.