The voices rose higher and higher, and Ugwu stopped listening. He got up and went out through the back and sat on the mound of cement blocks beside the house. Some little boys in the Biafran Boys Brigade were practicing on the street, with sticks shaped like guns, doing frog jumps, calling one another captain! and adjutant! in high voices.
A hawker with a tray balanced on her head ambled past. “Buy garri! Buy garri!”
She stopped when a young woman from the opposite house called out to her. They bargained for a while and then the young woman shouted, “If you want to rob people, then do so. Don’t say you are selling garri for that price.”
The hawker hissed and walked off.
Ugwu knew the young woman. He had first noticed her because of how perfectly rounded her buttocks were, how they rolled rhythmically, from side to side, as she walked. Her name was Eberechi. He had heard the neighbors talking about her; the story was that her parents had given her to a visiting army officer, as one would give kola nut to a guest. They had knocked on his door at night, opened it, and gently pushed her in. The next morning, the beaming officer thanked her beaming parents while Eberechi stood by.
Ugwu watched her go back indoors and wondered how she had felt about being offered to a stranger and what had happened after she was pushed into his room and who was to blame more, her parents or the officer. He didn’t want to think too much about blame, though, because it would remind him of Master and Olanna during those weeks before Baby’s birth, weeks he preferred to forget.
Master found a rain-holder on the wedding day. The elderly man arrived early and dug a shallow pit at the back of the house, made a bonfire in it, and then sat in the thick of the bluish smoke, feeding dried leaves to the fire.
“No rain will come, nothing will happen until the wedding is over,” he said, when Ugwu took him a plate of rice and meat. Ugwu smelled the harsh gin on his breath. He turned and went back indoors so the smoke would not soak into his carefully ironed shirt. Olanna’s cousins Odinchezo and Ekene were sitting out on the veranda in their militia uniforms. The photographer was fiddling with his camera. Some guests were in the living room, talking and laughing, waiting for Olanna, and once in a while somebody went over and placed something—a pot, a stool, an electric fan—in the pile of presents.
Ugwu knocked on her door and opened it.
“Professor Achara is ready to take you to the church, mah,” he said.
“Okay.” Olanna looked away from the mirror. “Where is Baby? She hasn’t gone out to play, has she? I don’t want any dirt on that dress.”
“She is in the living room.”
Olanna sat in front of the crooked mirror. Her hair was held up so that all of her radiant, flawlessly smooth face was exposed. Ugwu had never seen her look so beautiful, and yet there was a sad reluctance in the way she patted the ivory and pink hat on one side of her head to make sure the pins were secure.
“We’ll do the wine-carrying later, when our troops recover Umunnachi,” she said, as though Ugwu did not know.
“Yes, mah.”
“I sent a message to Kainene in Port Harcourt. She won’t come, but I wanted her to know.”
Ugwu paused. “They are waiting, mah.”
Olanna got up and surveyed herself. She ran a hand over the sides of her pink and ivory dress, which flared from the waist and stopped just below her knees. “The stitches are so uneven. Arize could have done this better.”
Ugwu said nothing. If only he could reach out and tug at her lips to remove the sad smile on her face. If only it took that little.
Professor Achara knocked on the half-open door. “Olanna? Are you ready? They say Odenigbo and Special Julius are already at the church.”
“I’m ready; please come in,” Olanna said. “Did you bring the flowers?”
Professor Achara handed her a plastic bouquet of multicolored flowers. Olanna moved back. “What is this? I wanted fresh flowers, Emeka.”
“But nobody grows flowers in Umuahia. People here grow what they can eat,” Professor Achara said, laughing.
“I won’t hold flowers, then,” Olanna said.
For an uncertain moment, neither of them knew what to do with the plastic flowers: Olanna held them half extended while Professor Achara touched but did not grasp them. Finally he took them back and said, “Let me see if we can find anything else,” and left the room.
The wedding was simple. Olanna didn’t hold flowers. St. Sebastian’s Catholic Church was small and filled only halfway with the friends who had come. Ugwu did not pay close attention to who was there, though, because, as he stared at the shabby white altar cloth, he imagined that he was getting married. At first his bride was Olanna and then she transformed into Nnesinachi and then into Eberechi with the perfectly rounded buttocks, all in the same pink and ivory dress and tiny matching hat.
It was Okeoma’s appearance, back at the house, that brought Ugwu out of his imagined world. Okeoma looked nothing like Ugwu remembered: the untidy hair and rumpled shirt of the poet were gone. His smart-fitting army uniform made him look straighter, leaner, and the sleeve had a skull-and-bones image next to the half of a yellow sun. Master and Olanna hugged him many times. Ugwu wanted to hug him too, because Okeoma’s laughing face brought back the past with such force that for a moment Ugwu felt as if the room blurred with the rain-holder’s smoke was the living room on Odim Street.
Okeoma had brought his lanky cousin, Dr. Nwala.
“He’s a chief medical officer at Albatross Hospital,” Okeoma said, introducing him. Dr. Nwala kept staring at Olanna with such annoyingly open adoration that Ugwu wanted to tell him to keep his froglike eyes away from her, chief medical officer or not. Ugwu felt not just involved in but responsible for Olanna’s happiness. As she and Master danced outside, circled by clapping friends, he thought, They belong to me. It was like a seal of stability, their wedding, because as long as they were married, his world with them was safe. They danced body to body for a while until Special Julius changed the ballroom music to High Life, and they pulled apart and held hands and looked into each other’s faces, moving to the tune of Rex Lawson’s new song, “Hail Biafra, the Land of Freedom.” In her high heels, Olanna was taller than Master. She was smiling and glowing and laughing. When Okeoma started his toast, she wiped her eyes and told the photographer standing behind the tripod, “Wait, wait, don’t take it yet.”
Ugwu heard the sound just before they cut their cake in the living room, the swift wah-wah-wah roar in the sky. At first it was thunderous, and then it receded for a moment and came back again, louder and swifter. From somewhere close by, chickens began to squawk wildly.