Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

“Uzo!” she cried. Never before had I heard her scream this way in her sleep.

I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Mama, can you hear me? Mama, it’s me, Ijeoma. Quiet down. It’s only a dream.”

She opened her eyes.

Mama used to say that our dreams were the way in which we resolved our problems, that every problem could be solved if we paid close attention to the tiniest details in our dreams. I used to have those dreams where I would get stuck in my sleep and couldn’t move. It was the kind of dream where you were fully aware that you were in a dream, only you were stuck and couldn’t get yourself to snap out of it. Sometimes the walls around me were a light shade of green, other times they were a light shade of gray. Either way, they were nothing like the rose-colored walls in our Ojoto house. I would try to scream, to cry out loud so that Mama or Papa would hear and come and wake me up. But neither could I scream in the dream. Eventually I would resign myself to being stuck. Only then would I somehow come out of it.

That night, even after she had opened her eyes, Mama continued to scream. “Uzo!” She turned to me. “Where is your papa?”

She looked frantically around in the darkness. “Uzo!” she called out. “Uzo, do you hear me?”

Had she begun to lose her senses? Had she forgotten that Papa was gone?

I leaned in to her and very gently said, “Papa is dead. Do you forget?” I whispered it to her over and over again.

Papa is dead. Do you forget?

Papa is dead. Do you forget?

Papa is dead. Do you forget?

She began to cry, as if hearing the news for the first time. Her shoulders heaved. Her breaths caught.

I held her, rocked her in my arms.

It was some time before her crying subsided. Finally she looked up at me, looked into my face. “Your papa is gone,” she whispered.

“Yes, Mama,” I replied, nodding. “Yes, my papa is gone,” I said.

I PULLED OPEN THE window shutters. It was a cloudless morning, and bright. The swing of the wooden beams sent warm light surging into the room.

In the kitchen the pantry was near empty.

I pulled out a can of sardines and the last remaining tuber of yam.

I had begun to do much of the housework. Mama no longer seemed interested in the day-to-day things of life. It didn’t appear that she cared any longer to live. Perhaps she was at a stage in her mourning in which she saw life as a thing she could not possibly go through without Papa. I had no choice but to take over.

It wasn’t too difficult to boil things. The hardest part was fetching the wood and lighting the fire. The rest was just keeping an eye out to make sure nothing burned. There had been a small bag of rice, not enough to feed one person, let alone two. I had left it in the cupboard, but now I looked for it and, not seeing it, I remembered that we had already eaten it — mostly me, because Mama was barely eating anything by then.

My eyes fell back on the sardines and yam.

I cut the yam into cubes, removed the burner, filled the stove with wood, replaced the burner. The yam cubes sat boiling while I divided the sardines into two bowls, one for myself and the other for Mama. In the distance a gate was squealing.

I heard a thump, like something heavy falling to the ground, but it was only the door swinging open, hitting the wall.

Mama entered the kitchen. Her face was pale and there was a sense of disorientation about her.

“Mama, odimma? Are you all right?” I asked.

“Fine enough,” she responded.

She walked up to the stove, lifted the lid of the pot.

“The relief lorry did not come,” I said. “I’m making us yam.”

She nodded.

“You will eat today?” I asked.

Mama was silent for some time, as if considering the food.

“We don’t have anything else,” I said. “No matter if you don’t like it, you need to try and eat it.”

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

I was eleven years old, a couple of months shy of twelve, but I knew by then the ways in which worry dulled the appetite, the ways in which too much anxiety made it so that even the best-tasting food had the same appeal as a leaf of paper or a palmful of sand. But there were also those days when food was like consolation. And anyway, people had taken to saying all over Ojoto, “You better eat up now. You never know, one day there might be no food left to eat.” Someone had said it again just the day before, and perhaps as a result, my hunger was full; my appetite must have been listening. I wished the same were true for Mama.

“Just a few spoonfuls,” I said.

She stared blankly at me, shook her head, turned around, and left.

I WAS WATCHING FOR the relief lorry from just outside our front gate. A gentle morning breeze was blowing and the scent of earth was strong in the air. Not far from where I stood waiting, three soldiers were gathered, guns slung across their shoulders. Near them, an armored car, one of those with twelve thin, bicycle-looking wheels and a square cabin made entirely of metal. One of the soldiers was carrying a string of ammunition on his head. The ammunition appeared like a headpiece. The bullets, strung together as they were, fell in an almost decorative way, like a hat-turned-chain that extended to the front of his face.

Across the street, on the other side of the soldiers, a shirtless man was walking alongside his bicycle. On the back of the bicycle was a coffin, too small to fit the body inside, so that the feet of the deceased — perhaps his child or other family member — stuck out from the bottom end of the wooden box.

A toddler-aged boy was leaning against the cement wall near a gate down the road, as if to catch his breath.

Behind him several other children stood, a little older than the toddler, their bellies swollen like inflated balls from kwashiorkor, holding small plastic begging pans in their hands. If someone were to have snapped their picture, it could have been another one of Papa’s newspaper front pages.

The soldier with the ammunition approached, his face sunken and sad-looking with mud stains all around. “Sista,” he said. “Abeg, make I get wata.”

I stared blankly at him, distracted, not really taking in his words.

“Make I get wata, abeg, obere mmiri ,” he said again, pleading.

The other two soldiers approached. The shorter of the two was holding a small, dirty white jerry can, empty, which he uncapped and then held out in my direction without saying a word.

A motorcycle sped by, sending dust like flames rising from the dry earth.

“Abeg, sista,” the shorter soldier joined in. “Small wata.”

They had captured my full attention by now.

From inside the compound Mama appeared, a wrapper tied around her chest, blinking with irritation at the men.

She looked at the jerry can and then back up at the faces of the men.

Unexpectedly, she snapped, “Don’t you see that this is private property? Don’t you know you can’t go around begging like this?” She pointed her index finger at them as she spoke, brandishing it like a schoolteacher scolding a misbehaving child. She sucked in the air between her teeth and rolled her eyes, that combination of gestures that was a sign of a condescending sort of dismissal, of rejection. Before returning to the gate, she said, in pidgin this time, “Na who even tell you say I get wata?”

She stepped back into the compound, stopping only to call me to follow along.

I had not intended to disrespect Mama, but the soldier with the jerry can was now looking at me with eyes full of both longing and surrender.

“Abeg, sista,” he said. His voice was weak, as if he were using his last ounce of strength to ask the favor.