“Oh,” Major Udodi said, his eyes narrowing. He poured some whisky into a glass, drank it in one gulp, and said something in Igbo to which Kainene replied, in cold clear English, “My choice of lovers is none of your business, Udodi.”
Richard wished he could open his mouth and fluidly tell the man off, but he said nothing. He felt helplessly weak, the kind of weakness that came with illness, with grief. The music had stopped and he could hear the far-off whooshing of the sea’s waves.
“Sorry, oh! I did not say it was my business!” Major Udodi laughed and reached again for the bottle of whisky.
“Easy now,” Major Madu said. “You must have started early at the mess.”
“Life is short, my brother!” Major Udodi said, pouring another drink. He turned to Kainene. “I magonu, you know, what I am saying is that our women who follow white men are a certain type, a poor family and the kind of bodies that white men like.” He stopped and continued, in a mocking mimicry of an English accent, “Fantastically desirable bottoms.” He laughed. “The white men will poke and poke and poke the women in the dark but they will never marry them. How can! They will never even take them out to a good place in public. But the women will continue to disgrace themselves and struggle for the men so they will get chicken-feed money and nonsense tea in a fancy tin. It’s a new slavery, I’m telling you, a new slavery. But you are a Big Man’s daughter, so what you are doing with him?”
Major Madu stood up. “Sorry about this, Kainene. The man isn’t himself.” He pulled Major Udodi up and said something in swift Igbo.
Major Udodi was laughing again. “Okay, okay, but let me tak
e the whisky. The bottle is almost empty. Let me take the whisky.”
Kainene said nothing as Major Udodi took the bottle from the table. After they left, Richard sat next to her and took her hand. He felt as if he had disappeared, as if that was the reason Major Madu did not include him in the apology. “He was dreadful. I’m sorry he did that.”
“He was hopelessly drunk. Madu must feel terrible right now,” Kainene said. She gestured to the file on the table and added, “I’ve just got the contract to supply army boots for the battalion in Kaduna.”
“That’s nice.” Richard drank the last drop from his glass and watched as Kainene looked through the file.
“The man in charge was Igbo, and Madu said he was keen to give the contract to a fellow Igbo. So I was lucky. And he’s asking only for a five percent cut.”
“A bribe?”
“Oh, aren’t we innocent.”
Her mockery irritated him, as did the speed with which she had absolved Major Madu of any responsibility for Major Udodi’s boorish behavior. He stood up and began to pace the veranda. Insects were humming around the fluorescent bulb.
“You’ve known Madu for very long then,” he said finally. He hated calling the man by his first name; it assumed a cordiality he did not feel. But then he had no choice. He would certainly not call him Major; using a title would be too elevating.
Kainene looked up. “Forever. His family and ours are very close. I remember once, years ago, when we went to Umunnachi to spend Christmas, he gave me a tortoise. The strangest and best present I ever got from anybody. Olanna thought it was wrong of Madu to take the poor thing out of its natural habitat and whatnot, but she didn’t much get along with Madu anyway. I put it in a bowl, and of course it died soon afterward.” She went back to looking through the file.
“He’s married, isn’t he?”
“Yes. Adaobi is doing her bachelor’s in London.”
“Is that why you’re seeing him so often?” His question came out in a near-croak, as though he needed to clear his throat.
She did not respond. Perhaps she had not heard him. It was clear that the file, the new contract, occupied her mind. She got up. “I’ll just make some notes for a minute in the study and join you.”
He wondered why he could simply not ask if she found Madu attractive and if she had ever been involved with him or, worse yet, was still involved with him. He was afraid. He moved toward her and put his arms around her and held her tightly, wanting to feel the beat of her heart. It was the first time in his life he felt as if he could belong somewhere.
1. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died
For the prologue, he recounts the story of the woman with the calabash. She sat on the floor of a train squashed between crying people, shouting people, praying people. She was silent, caressing the covered calabash on her lap in a gentle rhythm until they crossed the Niger, and then she lifted the lid and asked Olanna and others close by to look inside.
Olanna tells him this story and he notes the details. She tells him how the bloodstains on the woman’s wrapper blended into the fabric to form a rusty mauve. She describes the carved designs on the woman’s calabash, slanting lines crisscrossing each other, and she describes the child’s head inside: scruffy braids falling across the dark-brown face, eyes completely white, eerily open, a mouth in a small surprised O.
After he writes this, he mentions the German women who fled Hamburg with the charred bodies of their children stuffed in suitcases, the Rwandan women who pocketed tiny parts of their mauled babies. But he is careful not to draw parallels. For the book cover, though, he draws a map of Nigeria and traces in the Y shape of the rivers Niger and Benue in bright red. He uses the same shade of red to circle the boundaries of where, in the Southeast, Biafra existed for three years.
4
Ugwu cleared the dining table slowly. He removed the glasses first, then the stew-smeared bowls and the cutlery, and finally he stacked plate on top of plate. Even if he hadn’t peeked through the kitchen door as they ate, he would still know who had sat where. Master’s plate was always the most rice-strewn, as if he ate distractedly so that the grains eluded his fork. Olanna’s glass had crescent-shaped lipstick marks. Okeoma ate everything with a spoon, his fork and knife pushed aside. Professor Ezeka had brought his own beer, and the foreign-looking brown bottle was beside his plate. Miss Adebayo left onion slices in her bowl. And Mr. Richard never chewed his chicken bones.
In the kitchen, Ugwu kept Olanna’s plate aside on the Formica counter and emptied the rest, watching rice, stew, greens, and bones slide into the dustbin. Some of the bones were so well cracked they looked like wood shavings. Olanna’s did not, though, because she had only lightly chewed the ends and all three still had their shape. Ugwu sat down and selected one and closed his eyes as he sucked it, imagining Olanna’s mouth enclosing the same bone.
He sucked languidly, one bone after another, and did not bother to tone down the slurpy sounds his mouth made. He was alone. Master had just left for the staff club with Olanna and their friends. The house was always quietest now, when he could linger over nothing, with the lunch dishes in the sink and dinner far off and the kitchen bathed in incandescent sunlight. Olanna called this his Schoolwork Time, and when she was home she would ask him to take his homework into the bedroom. She didn’t know that his homework never took long, that he would sit by the window afterward and struggle through difficult sentences in one of Master’s books, looking up often to watch the butterflies dipping and rising above the white flowers in the front yard.