Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

WE BECAME AS inseparable as moisture and air, Chidinma and I. Sometimes she hung in my arms, mindlessly suspended like fog. And sometimes she fell, but I was there to lift her back up. The months flew by. One month gone, and then the next, and still the next.

December arrived, and Mama was back again. All over Port Harcourt, the usual end-of-year festivities had begun. Masquerades — colorful ojuju dancers dancing to the beat of their metal ogene bells. Ojuju dancers dancing to the beat of clay udu drums, soft bass sounds forming the music that guided their steps. Ojujus in glittering gowns, shaking their ichaka gourds, causing the bead coverings to rattle. Frightening ojujus dressed in grass and raffia skirts dancing to the beat of some ekwe and igba drums. Ojujus with lion heads and covered in lion hides.

It was the season when the ojujus paraded on the roads, dancing and collecting money and sweets. The time of year when the children ran toward the ojujus, then ran away from them with fright, back and forth, back and forth, because between their bouts of fear was a heightened state of enjoyment. The ojuju dancers blocked the roadways so that even automobile drivers had to stop their cars and pay their passage in order to be allowed to go.

Neither Chibundu nor I had been particularly interested in celebrating Christmas, and Chidinma was too little yet to care. But by the end of her first day back, Mama was concocting ways to celebrate.

“We’ve not had a real Christmas since the year before the war came. I just imagined that maybe, with Chidinma here, we could get back to the way things used to be. How about a trip to Kingsway?”

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” I said to Mama. We were in the parlor. Mama was looking at me with such excitement and anticipation. Chidinma was napping in my arms.

“You don’t know if it’s a good idea?” Mama asked.

She too had been a new mother, but it seemed that she had forgotten how hard it could be to go traipsing around with a small baby, how inconvenient it was to have to nurse outside of home.

Mama sighed, then painted the reminder: “Don’t you remember the way Christmas festivities used to be, those days when your father would take us on those trips to Port Harcourt? I remember it like it was yesterday,” she said, “the way we headed straight to Kingsway, and your little face full of excitement as you rode the toy train that ran through the entire shopping center, which dropped off all the children at Father Christmas’s little alcove of a hut? Do you remember the gifts you got from Father Christmas?”

I remembered. One year, he had given me a set of plastic plates that could be used as Frisbees. I used them to play with my primary school classmates during recess and after school. Another year he had given me an oyibo doll, a baby with eyes so big and lashes so long that it had frightened me, and I had thrown it and ran. Father Christmas had then exchanged the doll for a children’s tea set.

“I can just see it all over again, you and Father Christmas in that small, artificial hut of his, covered with small chunks of artificial snow. And your papa, the way he always crouched down to smile at you as you sat on Father Christmas’s lap.” Mama sighed a lengthy sigh.

Nothing could have made me feel worse than to hear her sigh this way. There was something incandescent about it, a sigh that glowed with a sad kind of nostalgia.

“Okay,” I said. “We can go.”

Mama smiled brightly and stood up to embrace me.

That December would become one of my most vivid Christmases of all time.

Mama led us all, Chibundu included, to Kingsway. She had insisted that he accompany us, because this would, after all, become a new family tradition, which he and I and Chidinma would spend years reminiscing about, just like she and I had just done.

At Kingsway, I rode on the little train, carrying a wide-eyed Chidinma on my lap. Mama and Chibundu waved at us as the train rode, very slowly, past them. Chidinma giggled and smiled back. The driver of the train, a young man with a chubby face, came around to help me out after the ride ended.

We did not stay at Kingsway very long, but for those couple of hours that we did, Chibundu beamed with what appeared to be happiness, reminding me of his former child self. We returned home with him carrying a full ghana-must-go. But instead of the bag’s being filled with heavy produce — yam, cassava, maize, for instance — like those used in the markets, ours was filled with toys for Chidinma and gifts for us — dresses and shoes for me, shirts and trousers and ties for Chibundu — Christmas presents that Mama insisted on buying for us in order to ensure that we passed a good holiday.

For those hours at Kingsway, things were indeed looking up, but by nightfall, Chibundu was somehow back to his pouting self.

EVENING. I SAT in the parlor, cradling Chidinma in my arms, nursing her. She was then around seven or eight months old.

The windows in the parlor hung open, their curtains tied to the sides. The harmattan had arrived, and in the distance a dense swirl of dust hung like clouds descended upon the earth.

The room was cool, and the table fan atop the television sat, not oscillating, not rattling or buzzing the way it did on hotter afternoons.

The front door, like the windows, lay open. Outside, I could see Chibundu sharpening the blade of his machete with a stone. He always used the same stone — not really a stone, but a large piece of cement that had cracked and fallen off the side of the back steps. If you looked at it a certain way, it had a shape like the middle of a woman, from shoulders to hips — large breasts but a sunken belly. No matter how many times he ran his machete against it, the piece of cement seemed to hold its shape.

He moved on from sharpening the machete to trimming the hedges with it. He worked at the hedges with the fervor of a man killing a bush animal. I rose from the couch, moved closer to watch him work. The machete’s blade glowed, even in the dim harmattan sun. The strokes of his arm sent green leaves and brown twigs flying all over the place. Every now and then a breeze blew, which caught the scent of chopped plants and carried it in through the open windows, seeming to deposit it right before my nostrils.

His thrashing made a loud sound. Slash, slash, slash. Quick, sharp, hacking strokes. Twigs and leaves falling dead in the yard. His machete rising and falling. He continued that way for some time.

The baby began to fuss. I stopped nursing her, stood up from the couch, and walked around the parlor, gently rocking her and patting her back to see if she was in need of burping.

A sound came, like the cracking of knuckles. Chibundu always cracked his knuckles after he was done with the hedges and the grass, but this sound was louder and more long lasting than his usual knuckle-cracking. After a while it went away.

The baby settled down. I made my way to the couch and took a seat, still keeping her in my arms.

I looked in the direction of the window. On the sill was a jerry can whose top half I had cut off to make a vase. Dried-up hibiscus flowers stuck out of it, some fallen red petals floating atop the water. Just outside the window, by the door, the movements of Chibundu’s shadow.

The knuckle-cracking came again. But this time it was more like a knocking on the door: several slightly muffled thwacks at a time.

I rose to answer, but hardly had I taken a step when Chibundu opened the door and entered, the machete in his hand. It all happened so quickly and unexpectedly that I took a step back out of the surprise of his entry.

He walked toward where I stood near the sofa. The blade of the machete bumped one of the metal legs of the center table, making a scraping sound, a little like a shriek.