Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

Chibundu continued to stroke me. Then, seeing that I had awakened, he said, “Soon the doctors will have you back to normal. One hundred percent. They say we can try again.” He shifted Chidinma in his arms, leaned closer to me, and said, as he had now taken to saying, “If the man who comes back with no cassava is a true farmer, he will return to the farm and put in the work necessary, so that one day he too will return from the farm with cassava in his basket.”

I grew lightheaded with the sound of those words. They appeared to whirl around in my head, causing me to grow anxious, making it a struggle to breathe.

Following the miscarriage, Chibundu could almost always be found outside in the front yard, dusting, polishing, holding long drawn-out conversations on the veranda with that good-luck charm of a car. It was as if he was coaxing it to do better, reasoning with it: what good is a good-luck charm if it fails to do its job? His posture betrayed his disappointment in the car.

The way I saw it, if his good-luck charm had not worked, perhaps he would have no choice but to let me be. And anyway, wasn’t it the nature of people that after obsessing over something for so long, eventually they moved on? No matter how fervently we set our minds on a venture, if time after time that venture proved too hard to attain, sooner or later it only made sense to move on to something else.

Maybe.

For the umpteenth day in a row, I walked out to the front yard to call him in for supper, only to find him with the car.

Chidinma was with me. She had learned by now that the toy car was not for her. She had also learned, perhaps, that many things could be taken away as soon as they were given. Even a mother’s affection. She stood rigidly by my side, not moving toward the car.

The previous weekend, Chibundu had invited one of the neighborhood boys to drive the car, a little boy, about four or five years old, by the name of Somto. Chidinma and I had come out to find the boy huddled tightly in the driver’s seat, his knees sticking up in front of the steering wheel, his legs too long for the car.

Still, he drove, and Chibundu followed behind, heartily clapping. Finally he lifted the boy out of the car, set him down on the ground, and patted him on the head. The boy wrapped his small arms around Chibundu’s legs in return, gratitude for this unexpected opportunity to drive the little car.

Now, a week after the incident with Somto, Chibundu lifted the car from the veranda and set it down in the yard.

Looking up at me, he said, “It was a mistake on my part not to share this with the girl. What was I thinking? How could I have been so foolish? It would probably have brought us the good luck we wanted if only I had shared it with her. After all, she would have been his sister, and that’s what siblings are supposed to do. They are supposed to share.”

He was looking at me as he spoke. I wanted to tell him that there was no indication that the baby had been a boy. At three months, it had been too soon to tell.

His eyes turned to Chidinma.

“Come here,” he said to her.

Chidinma remained where she was.

“Come,” he said, and this time he reached for her, lifted her in his arms, and set her into the front seat of the car.

As he instructed her on what to do, moved her hands and legs this way and that, I examined her face, looking for signs of gratification from having been finally given this opportunity to do what long ago she had wanted.

Her face showed no happiness. She sat stiffly, apprehensively, one hand hesitantly placed on the steering wheel, the other tugging nervously at one of the plastic hairpins that decorated the tips of her braided hair.

The car finally began to move, but only because Chibundu took to pushing it along by hand. There she went, little Chidinma, gripping the steering wheel and being pushed around in the toy car that was never meant to be hers.

And there was no sign of gratification in her.

Later that night, she curled herself in a tight ball in bed, as if she wished to disappear. Her eyes remained open, steady on me, deep in contemplation.

Time passed, and then, in a muted and dismal way, she let out a sigh. I watched as she turned her body away from me. In that instant my eyelids became a little like the windshield wipers on a car. I tried to blink away the moment of her turning from me. I blinked, and I blinked, and I blinked. But still, I could not blink the image away.

LEGEND HAS IT that spirit children, tired of floating aimlessly between the world of the living and that of the dead, take to gathering above udala trees. In exchange for the dwelling, they cause to be exceptionally fertile any female who comes and stays, for even the briefest period of time, under any one of the trees. They cause her to bear sons and daughters, as many as her heart desires.

Back in Ojoto, some years before the war came, I heard of this legend from one of my schoolmates, a pudgy little bright-eyed girl whose head was shaped like a flattened loaf of bread. She had a scar on the very top of her forehead, running horizontally from left to right. All the children at school whispered that it was because she had fallen out of her parents’ second-story window when she was a baby. But no one ever asked her about it to her face. And no one ever knew. Her name was Osita.

One lazy afternoon while we sat on the steps of the classroom during afternoon recess, she begged me to go with her, after school let out, to the udala grove that was not far from the school. She and I, we must have been eight or nine years old at the time.

We made ourselves seating places under the trees: piles of leaves placed one next to the other, and we lingered there on our seats, under the trees.

“We have to remain here until the count of a hundred,” Osita said.

“Why a hundred?”

“Because a hundred is a very long time to stay under the tree. A hundred because that way we can be sure that we will receive every single drop of our blessing from the hands of the spirit children. Not like when we drink a bottle of soft drink and there’s still that tiny little bit left in the bottle. With this, we have to try and get even the tiniest drop of our blessing.”

She began to count, painfully slowly, as if the numbers were flour, as if she had measured them and was now gradually sifting them out of the sieve. One… two… three…

Because nine was not too young to prepare, she said. Because sooner or later we would each become somebody’s wife, and as wives, it would be our obligation to be fertile, to bear children for our husbands, sons especially, to carry on the family name.

I went along with her in all that she proposed we do, even if to me the gap between legend and reality was not one that my mind was prepared to leap across. To me, the legend was a little like making a wish: it was anyone’s guess if the wish ever came true.

My last night under Chibundu’s roof, I dreamed of udala trees.

In my dream, I saw Chidinma dressed in a yellow dress with a sequined bodice and a hem of lace. On her hair was a ribbon, which the wind lifted gently from her head. Around her was a circle of gray and beige stones, big stones, about the size of cement blocks. Set atop of each stone was a tall, white wax candle, seven or eight of them in total, their flames burning blue and orange and yellow, and flickering this way and that in the night.

Her expression was mournful and sad, and there was a paleness to her face.

She stood under one of the udala trees, a tree much taller and more fruitful than any I had ever seen before. It was speckled throughout with udala fruit of a brighter than usual orange. Its leaves glowed by the light of the candles, a dark shade of green.