Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

No matter how much she tried to convince me of this, I knew the truth all the same: that she was doing it for her own good. At least, that it was more for her own good than it was for mine. That she was doing it because she was overwhelmed: by life, by the war, by the thought of having to try and make it without Papa. And she was overwhelmed even by me. Didn’t matter that I myself was overwhelmed. My world had narrowed down to my mother, and now my mother was betraying me.

“What if the food situation in Aba is just as bad as it is here?” she repeated. “Then what will you eat? Are you ready to starve? Even more than you’re already starving now? There are no miracles these days. Manna will not fall from the sky. Bombs, yes, enough to pierce our hearts, but manna, no.”

I looked at her with all the pleading my eyes could muster. But even as I begged, I knew there was no way out. Plans had, clearly, already been made. How else would she have been so certain that the grammar school teacher would accept the proposal?

Still I begged. I looked around frantically, as if all potential arguments in my favor were particles in the air, as if I only had to land on the right one in order to be able to convince her why I should go with her. But I was unable to land on the right particle.

She smiled at me, a tired smile. Her voice low and gravelly. “Do you remember the grammar school teacher and his wife?”

I nodded, though it was only a skeleton of a memory, hardly there at all.

“I know for a fact that you will be fine in Nnewi,” she said. “I have gone and seen it for myself.” Nnewi was a much shorter distance from Ojoto, she explained; south like Aba, but only something between ten and twelve kilometers away, which was less than half an hour by automobile and could be walked in well under two hours. Unlike Aba, she had actually made the trip to Nnewi to see it with her own eyes, and to visit with the grammar school teacher and his wife. Only now did I recall that day. A day when she claimed that she had been going to “run errands.” From those “errands,” apparently, she had found out that Nnewi, though close in proximity to Ojoto, was indeed faring better than Ojoto, at least where food supply was concerned.

Not only was my face covered in tears by now, but my nose had also begun to run. Mama reached into the folds at the waist of her wrapper, grabbed a handkerchief from there, and gently dabbed away the moisture on my face. “No more crying,” she said. But she herself was crying now. Soft crying, the kind that hardly had an effect on her breaths. But there were the tears for proof. In that brief moment, she appeared to be battling her own plan. She might have had a change of mind. In that moment, she might have sacrificed her own desires in exchange for mine. I held my breath and hoped. Moments passed, and then, instead of going back on her plan, as I was hoping, she took my hands in hers and prayed: Dear God in heaven, I am placing my child in Your care. Please guide and protect her even as I cannot. There is power in the blood of Jesus. Amen.

She wiped the tears off her own face with the palms of her hands, and she said, “I promise that the grammar school teacher and his wife will look after you.”

ANOTHER RAID HAD come and demolished our church, torn a hole in it and then completely flattened out that holy construction of a place that was responsible for keeping our faith and hope intact. By the morning of the day before we left Ojoto, the church and everything inside it had disintegrated like cubes of sugar in water: none of the original structure was recognizable to the naked eye.

The Ejiofors arrived sometime between eleven o’clock and noon on that penultimate day. A bowl of garden eggs and groundnut paste sat on the center table, along with a jerry can of water and some drinking cups, to welcome them. This was as much as Mama could gather for their visit, which was not really a problem, as they would not be staying long.

Mama went out to the front yard to greet them. She embraced Mrs. Ejiofor first. I watched from the parlor window. “ Unu a biana! Nno nu! Welcome o!” She stepped aside and did the same with Mr. Ejiofor. She had hardly finished exchanging greetings with Chibundu’s parents when I watched Chibundu race to the front of the house, across the veranda, and through the front door.

“Ije!” he called out, his nickname for me.

He found me standing by the parlor window.

“Why can’t you come stay with me and my mama and papa?” he burst out.

I turned to face him. The aroma of groundnut paste was strong in the parlor. “Mama says it’s hard enough for any family to take care of their own child, let alone take care of someone else’s child,” I replied. She had said exactly that. The day after she had told me about sending me off, I had come up with a list of my school and church friends whose families I would rather have gone and stayed with, but she had given me this response as a reason why none of my friends’ homes was a viable option for me.

“I don’t know why both of you can’t stay in Ojoto,” Chibundu said.

“I want to stay,” I replied simply.

Mr. and Mrs. Ejiofor entered the parlor along with Mama. On the wall between the parlor’s two windows was a silver-trimmed mirror, all damaged and strewn with crack lines but still intact enough for us to see ourselves. Chibundu walked toward it, pulling me along with him.

We stood in front of the mirror together. His parents settled themselves on the sofa, getting ready to eat the garden eggs.

Chibundu said, “Look very closely into the mirror and see us standing together. Look really closely at us so that you never forget that we were friends.”

“Are we not going to remain friends?” I asked.

He was staring at me now, and suddenly I remembered the time when he had loosened the thread from my plaited hair, pulled on the tip of the plait so that the knotted end came undone, so that the thread flowed out in one continuous and wave-like strand. When I had begun to shout at him— Look what you’ve done to my hair! — and when Mrs. Ejiofor had joined in scolding him for it, he put his hands in the air, as if this was some part of his Police game. He held his hands up, all innocent-like, saying he did not understand what the big deal was, that he only did it because he needed some thread for a project he was in the middle of out in the yard — a small toy lorry that he was trying to build out of some discarded pieces of wood.

Whatever became of the lorry I cannot now remember, but what I knew even then was that this Chibundu standing by my side in front of the mirror was certainly not the same one who had caused my hair to be undone. There was something pitiful about him, and I thought that perhaps this was the effect the war was having on him.

I smiled at him instinctively. He smiled awkwardly back, then looked away in the direction of the parlor where his parents were seated.

“You won’t forget, will you?” he asked, but he did not wait for me to answer. Instead, he began walking to the center of the parlor near where the sofas were. I followed him. He went straight to the center table. There, he poured himself a cup of water and invited me to drink with him, saying, “Between true friends even water drunk together is sweet.”

Our parents were chatting away, not paying us any mind. I felt more pity for him, the way he stood there, looking expectantly at me. I took the water from him and drank.

Outside, the air was heavy, and if you breathed deeply, you could smell the rainwater in it, as if it were about to pour from the sky. Chibundu and I made our way to the front yard and perched ourselves on a branch of the orange tree just outside the compound gate.