Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

Food and more food, enough to leave the pantry overflowing, as if our flat were a rich, fat man’s house.

In the hours when Chibundu was at work, we cleaned, fixed, rearranged.

I worked dutifully at my new machine, making decorative covers for our new sofa pillows, my eyes taking turns between the fabric that I was sewing and the large bold letters on the machine. SINGER. I pedaled, and I turned the wheel. The needle bobbed up and down, up and down, and I imagined that the sound from the machine was a song, and that the machine was singing sweetly to me. I lost myself in the features of the machine, in its curves, in the color of it, a shiny, unapologetic shade of brown, sticking out in regal fashion from its encasement of wood. I hummed along with the sound of its sewing, a different song each time.

We taped up the peeling walls, again. We sealed up the holes, again.

Those hours after Chibundu returned from work, he made sure to express to us just how much he was liking the changes. “Incredible!” he exclaimed. “Just incredible!”

We washed clothes, swept floors. We peeled yams and corn, soaked beans and palm kernels. When all of that was done, she made lists of items to be bought at the market. We went together to the market, bought the items, brought them back home to cook.

Another day done. Another day gone.

The afternoon of her second week in Port Harcourt, I was in the middle of preparing to go to the market when I noticed Mama looking closely at me. “You’re looking very pale,” she said.

I nodded. “I’m feeling very pale,” I replied.

“You might hurry, then,” she said. “There are quite a few more items to be bought and, afterward, food to be made.”

I nodded.

She looked at me some more.

The plan had been that I go to the market on my own while she took care of other things. But now she said, “I could go with you.”

I nodded. “That would be nice,” I said.

She grabbed the market bag. We made our way out the door.

The bus station was just up the road from our flat. We climbed onto the bus, rode it until our stop, still a distance from the market but as close as the bus could get us.

As we walked the rest of the way to the market, I got a whiff of something roasting, something sweet, like ripe plantains. I ran to the bushes on the side of the road, parted the tall green shrubs, bent over, my hands at my knees. I allowed it all to gush out, to flow out of me, that disease that had been for all this time inside me.

Minutes passed before I noticed Mama standing at my side. She simply stood there, her feet visible through the overgrown grass. I straightened up, wiped my mouth with the backs of my hands. I could see tears in her eyes almost right away. She wrapped her arms around me, very unexpectedly, as soon as I was done wiping off my mouth. “You’ve done well,” she said. “You’ve made your mother proud. Do you know what this means?”

I shook my head.

There is a story about a snake that, out of stubbornness, decided that it would not swim across the river. Near the edge of the river was a crocodile, getting ready to cross. The snake twisted itself into a tight ball and set itself atop the crocodile. The crocodile went ahead and crossed the river, too foolish, or just too plain oblivious, to realize that it was carrying a curled-up constrictor on its back. By the time the crocodile noticed, there was no use in fighting. The snake had unraveled itself and wrapped itself around the crocodile. It didn’t take long before the snake devoured the crocodile. Then it let out one tumbling burp, and then another, brushed itself off, and said thank you to the crocodile in its stomach, not only for being its food, but also for helping it to cross the river.

Chidinma was by no means a snake, but only that she had come upon me the same way that the snake had come upon the crocodile. Somehow it had not occurred to me that all those weeks I was carrying a baby inside me. But of course, Mama was right.

I BEGAN THE FIRST of this particular set of letters the night Mama left, because that very night, Ndidi appeared to me, more vividly than ever, in a dream.

There were, in fact, two dreams. In the first, she was dressed in a calf-length romper, walking in slow, measured steps, all zombie-like, holding out her arms to me. It was outdoors, and above her an orange sun was peeking through the clouds and causing her to glow, almost electric-like, a human bulb. She was saying, like a chant, “One day I will need you to carry me on your shoulders the way Atlas carried the world.”

The scene changed abruptly, and just as soon she was in a field of whitish-gray dandelion clocks. Above her, an overcast sky, clouds on the verge of raining down tears.

I woke up with a start, expecting to find myself also in the field. Instead, I looked to my left, laid my eyes on a set of rumpled sheets and a sleeping Chibundu by my side.

In the second dream, Ndidi and I were in that double-functioning construction of a church in Aba, seated face to face at one of its tables. She handed me a glass of kai kai. I took a sip and, not wanting any more, gave it back to her.

She pushed the glass back to me.

I said, “I’ve already had a taste. It’s nice of you to offer, but I don’t like its taste.”

She said, “You don’t drink kai kai for its taste. You’re focusing on the wrong sense. You drink it to feel its effect on you. Feel, not taste.”

Before leaving Aba for Port Harcourt, I left our new address with Ndidi. Within a week of Chibundu’s and my arrival in Port Harcourt, I also made it a point to write Ndidi a letter, and then a couple of more letters, at three- or four-week intervals. But the days passed, and more days still, with no response from Ndidi. She did not have a phone in her flat, or else I would have simply called.

The absence of any kind of communication from her was not at all like an absence. It was instead a presence: of mind-pain, like a thick, rusted arrow shooting straight into my head, poisoning my mind with something like tetanus, causing my thoughts to go haywire, a spasm here, a spasm there.

If there were a muscle relaxant equivalent for the mind, I would have been first in line for it. But not having that option, I found other ways to cope. For instance, each time I spoke with Mama on the phone, I found relief in bringing up Ndidi’s name. Just a few seconds of speaking about her was like a temporary medicine.

One phone conversation with Mama:

“Any new customers?”

“No, no new customers.”

“None at all?”

“Well, there’s that old vagabond who showed up one day out of the blue. Did I tell you about him?”

“No, I don’t believe you did.”

“Well, the long and short of it is that he showed up one day in the unexpected way that bird excrement drops from the sky. Can you imagine what it must be like to be at least fifty years old and yet manage to have made nothing of yourself? A fully grown man roaming about the place with nothing to his name!”

“Unexpected things happen to people, Mama. Tragedy happens.”

“Well, regardless, it just infuriates me to no end that he keeps wandering around here, all drunk and reeking of whiskey and ale. Several times he’s come by eating a large orange, sucking at the pulp, his cheeks puffed up, and all the while he grimaces as if he’s sucking urine or catarrh, and then he spits out the seeds. Can you believe — he spits them all out right in front of my shop! Now, you know a shop owner’s best friend is her broom, and so I race out with my broom and make to sweep him away. But the following day he’s back again. Tufiakwa! Some people don’t have any decency…”