“Me and my madam and the children are leaving tomorrow morning for the village. I came to tell you to stay well. Ka o di.”
Ugwu had never heard her say so much. He was not sure what to say. They looked at each other for a while.
“Go well,” he said. He watched her walk to the hedge that separated the two compounds and slip underneath it. She would no longer appear at his door at night and lie on her back and spread her legs silently, at least not for a while. He felt a strange crushing weight in his head. Change was hurtling toward him, bearing down on him, and there was nothing he could do to make it slow down.
He sat down and stared at the cover of The Pickwick Papers. There was a serene calm in the backyard, in the gentle wave of the mango tree and the winelike scent of ripening cashews. It belied what he saw around him. Fewer and fewer guests visited now, and in the evenings the campus streets were ghostly, covered by the pearly light of silence and emptiness. Eastern Shop had closed. Chinyere’s mistress was only one of many families on campus who were leaving; houseboys bought huge cartons in the market and cars drove out of compounds with their boots sunken by heavy loads. But Olanna and Master had not packed a single thing. They said that war would not come and that people were simply panicking. Ugwu knew that families had been told they could send women and children to the hometowns, but the men could not leave, because if the men left it would mean that they were panicking and there was nothing to panic about. “No cause for alarm” was what Master said often. “No cause for alarm.” Professor Uzomaka who lived opposite Dr. Okeke had been turned back three times by the militiamen at the campus gates. They let him pass the third day after he swore that he would come back, that he was only taking his family to their hometown because his wife worried so much.
“Ugwuanyi!”
Ugwu looked up and saw his aunty coming toward him from the front yard. He stood up.
“Aunty! Welcome.”
“I was knocking on the front door.”
“Sorry. I did not hear.”
“Are you alone at home? Where is your master?”
“They went out. They took Baby with them.” Ugwu examined her face. “Aunty, is it well?”
She smiled. “It is well, o di mma. I bring a message from your father. They will have Anulika’s wine-carrying ceremony next Saturday.”
“Eh! Next Saturday?”
“It is better they do it now, before war comes, if war is going to come.”
“That is true.” Ugwu looked away, toward the lemon tree. “So. Anulika is really getting married.”
“Did you think you would marry your own sister?”
“God forbid.”
His aunty reached out and pinched his arm. “Look at you, a man has emerged. Eh! In a few years it will be your turn.”
Ugwu smiled. ?
??It is you and my mother who will find a good person when the time comes, Aunty,” he said, with a false demureness. There was no point in telling her that Olanna had told him they would send him to university when he finished secondary school. He would not marry until he had become like Master, until he had spent many years reading books.
“I am going,” his aunty said.
“Won’t you drink some water?”
“I cannot stay. Ngwanu, let it be. Greet your master and give him my message.”
Even before his aunty left, Ugwu was already imagining his arrival for the ceremony. This time, he would finally hold Nnesinachi naked and pliant in his arms. His Uncle Eze’s hut was a good place to take her, or perhaps even the quiet grove by the stream, as long as the little children did not bother them. He hoped she would not be silent like Chinyere; he hoped she would make the same sounds he heard from Olanna when he pressed his ear to the bedroom door.
That evening, while he was cooking dinner, a quiet voice on the radio announced that Nigeria would embark on a police action to bring back the rebels of Biafra.
Ugwu was in the kitchen with Olanna, peeling onions, watching the movement of Olanna’s shoulder as she stirred the soup on the stove. Onions made him feel cleaned up, as if the tears they drew from him took away impurities. He could hear Baby’s high voice in the living room, playing with Master. He did not want either of them to come into the kitchen now. They would destroy the magic he felt, the sweet sting of onions in his eyes, the glow of Olanna’s skin. She was talking about the Northerners in Onitsha who had been killed in reprisal attacks. He liked the way reprisal attacks came out of her mouth.
“It’s so wrong,” she said. “So wrong. But His Excellency has handled it all well; God knows how many would have been killed if he did not have the Northern soldiers sent back to the North.”
“Ojukwu is a great man.”
“Yes, he is, but we are all capable of doing the same things to one another, really.”
“No, mah. We are not like those Hausa people. The reprisal killings happened because they pushed us.” His reprisal killings had come out sounding close to hers, he was sure.