Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

I thought these things: What if he were on the verge of dying? What if he wound up dying right before my eyes? What if all he needed was water to be able to keep on living? Was he not, anyway, one of the soldiers fighting on our side, on Biafra’s side? More than anything, it was the thought of his dying before me that terrified me.

There was a borehole in our backyard which connected to our water tank. I knew that there was still a good supply of water in the tank. Even if Mama was against it, I could give the men just a bit of water, not even half a jerry can.

I took the container from the man’s hand.

In the backyard, on my way to the water tank, I saw Mama. She was seated at the side of the steps that led outside from the kitchen door. A swallow was hopscotching around near where she sat.

The bird sprang away, up to the top of our fence.

She had been watching the bird, but now her eyes fell on me.

There was a way in which Mama’s lips had begun curling, followed by a widening, the top and bottom halves pressing into each other and becoming thinner that way. In that moment her lips did that very thing, followed by the question, “What do you think you are doing?”

Then she exhaled so that a soft whistling noise came from her nostrils. She shook her head slightly. Her eyes fell closed. Fatigue, I reasoned silently. It must be fatigue from hardly eating anymore.

But then she opened her eyes, and I saw a fury in them.

“Stupid girl,” she shouted. As if to say, “What kind of child is it that goes against her own mother’s word?” Or, “Did you not hear me say that we did not have any water?”

She reached out and slapped the jerry can from my hand. The can dropped at my feet. She pulled me by the ear, twisted my ear. “Disobedient child!”

She had become something outside of herself. Very different from the Mama I knew. She picked the jerry can up from the ground and stormed back to the gate. I followed her, out of shock and of not knowing what else to do.

Just outside the gate, the soldiers stood leaning on the fence, waiting. Mama tossed the empty container out to them. It landed lightly on the ground and tumbled halfway across the road.

“Did you not hear me say that we have no water?” she shouted at the soldiers. She closed the gate and locked it too.

I followed her again to the backyard. I crouched near the water tank, waiting. For what? I wasn’t quite sure.

“What are you doing crouching here? Get up and find something to do,” she said. It was not forceful, the way she spoke this time. She had calmed down by now. But the way the words came out — the tone of them, as if to say that I should just disappear from there ( Biko, comot from here! ) — and with everything that had come before, I knew well that Mama was somehow beginning to see me as a burden, the same way that she saw the soldiers as a burden, the same way the war was in fact a burden to us all. She was overwhelmed. No other explanation for it.

It must have been shortly after this incident that she began to make plans to get rid of me. In a warped, war-induced sort of way, it made sense that she should find ways to shed us all: the soldiers, me, and the house. To shed, if she could have, all memories of the war. To shed, and shed, and shed. Like an animal casting off old hair or skin. A lizard. A snake. A cat or a dog. Even chickens molt.

To shed us all like a bad habit. Or maybe, simply, the way one casts off a set of dirty, thorn-infested clothes.

AUGUST HAD COME and gone, and it was once again relief day, but morning had also come and gone with no sign of the Red Cross workers.

Usually by now there would have been a ruckus not far from our house, from those makeshift sheds where the village volunteers turned the relief packages into meals and portioned them out to the queue of villagers.

Rumors told of a blockade around Biafra by Gowon and the Nigerian forces that prevented the Red Cross from delivering us food. But rumors also had it that relief organizations were strategizing ways to break the blockade. It appeared there was still hope.

It was a school day, but the schools were by this time permanently closed.

I stood outside the gate, keeping an eye out for the relief lorry. Two older girls from school came strolling by, their hair in disarray, strands sticking out at odd angles. There was something in the manner of their movements that reminded me of old dishrags, worn and poked through with holes. But there was something beautiful about them too. Something about the way their bodies swayed as they walked.

Their skin was dark as cacao, which made me think of my own light skin, the kind of skin on which every scratch and bruise and scar showed, the kind of skin that people were always saying was so beautiful, but only because they didn’t know, the way I did, that there was nothing beautiful about having marks like chicken pox scars all over your body.

But the girls, their skin would hardly have shown any marks, not with the way it was nice and brown and smooth in its brownness. Papa’s skin was like mine, but a little darker. “The effect of age and the sun,” he once said. As I looked at the girls, I found myself thinking that maybe in time, with age, the sun would darken my skin enough that I would be at least a shade closer to theirs.

Beyond their skin there was something else that made me think: their chests. They actually had chests. Mine, on the other hand, was hardly a chest at all, more like two tiny balls of pounded yam, flattened, each about the size of a tablespoon, not even enough to fill a palm.

Maybe it was a side effect of envy, or maybe it was a side effect of the awe I felt for them. Or maybe it was something else. Whatever the case, I felt suddenly shy and inadequate, and it would have required too much courage on my part to call out to them and let them know that the relief food had not yet come. I watched as they passed by in the direction of the relief center, only to watch again as they turned back around when they realized no one was there. Inside the house, Mama was likely still sitting in the parlor, on the mattress or on the sofa, praying fervently with her Bible, the way she had begun to do these days.

The streets were silent. Across from our gate, a pair of dogs lay sleepily on the dusty earth, dirty and sickly, corpses in the making. A light drizzle was falling, but the sun through the clouds was strong. Pink roses hung pitifully from their bushes, as if weakened or weighed down by the daylight. Before the war came, the land, where there were plants, was covered with lush green grass. On the grass grew weeds, and among the weeds, and from the bushes, grew flowers. The wind carried the dandelion clocks, and the hibiscus flowers painted the bushes red, and it was barely remarkable a thing, that deep redness of theirs. But now almost all the plants had withered, and the wind carried in it only traces of destruction. The hibiscus flowers all appeared to have lost their color.

I had gone back into our yard when I heard Mama calling my name.

By now she had moved from inside the house to a spot in the far corner of the veranda where the shrubs formed gaunt shadows on the outer walls of the house.

I joined her, taking a seat beside her on the orange and yellow bamboo mat where she sat.

“Did the relief lorry come today?” she asked.

I shook my head no.

She sighed. There was that now-familiar tired look on her face. She turned her gaze away from me.

After some time she spoke again. “There’s no way we can remain here. If it’s not enough that there is no more food, I’m also still having nightmares of your papa.”

Smaller episodes now, she explained, not enough to wake me anymore, but still, they were there. To make matters worse, every once in a while, she said, she caught a whiff of him — of his death, something like the scent of blood. All the sights were a constant reminder that he was gone, she explained: the way gummy, oozing lesions sheathed the trees, cracks and cankers all over the bark. Dry brittle branches snapping at every turn of the wind. The way the petals of the hibiscus flowers had begun to dry out too. She imagined them choking — the trees and the flowers. She imagined them growing lifeless, no air, no breath, just like Papa.