“Take her outside and stay in the veranda and be on the alert,” Olanna said finally, wearily, to Ugwu.
“We are not staying in the bunker again?”
“Just take her outside to the veranda.”
“Yes, mah.”
Olanna tuned the radio; it was too early for the war broadcasts, for the fire-filled monologues on Biafra’s greatness that she desperately needed to hear. On BBC, there was a news update on the war—emissaries from the pope, from the Organization of African Unity, from the Commonwealth, were coming to Nigeria to propose peace. She listened listlessly and turned it off when she heard Ugwu talking to somebody. She went outside to see who it was. Mrs. Muokelu was standing behind Baby, rebraiding the braids Olanna had loosed. The hair on her arms shone glossily, as if she had used too much palm kernel oil.
“You did not go to school as well?” Olanna asked.
“I knew that parents would keep their children at home.”
“Who wouldn’t? What kind of nonstop bombing campaign is this?”
“It is because Harold Wilson came.” Mrs. Muokelu snorted. “They want to impress him so he will bring in the British army.”
“Special Julius said that too, but it’s impossible.”
“Impossible?” Mrs. Muokelu smiled as though Olanna had no idea what she was talking about. “That Special Julius, by the way—you know he sells forged passes?”
“He is an army contractor.”
“I am not saying he does not do small-small contracts with the army, but he sells forged passes. His brother is a director and they do it together. It is because of them that all sorts of crooks are running around with special passes.” Mrs. Muokelu finished a braid and patted Baby’s hair. “That his brother is a criminal. They say he gave army exemption passes to all his male relatives, everyone in his umunna. And you need to hear what he does with those young-young girls that crawl around looking for sugar daddies. They say he takes up to five of them into his bedroom at the same time. Tufia! It is people like him who must be executed when the state of Biafra is fully established.”
Olanna jumped. “Was that a plane? Was that a plane?”
“Plane, kwa?” Mrs. Muokelu laughed. “Somebody closed their door in the next house and you say it is a plane?”
Olanna sat down on the floor and stretched out her legs. She was exhausted from fear.
“Did you hear that we shot down their bomber around Ikot-Ekpene?” Mrs. Muokelu asked.
“I didn’t hear.”
“And this was done by a common civilian with his hunting gun! You know, it is as if the Nigerians are so stupid that whoever works for them becomes stupid too. They are too stupid to fly the planes that Russia and Britain gave them, so they brought in white people, and even those white people can’t hit any target. Ha! Half their bombs don’t even explode.”
“The half that explodes is enough to kill us,” Olanna said.
Mrs. Muokelu kept speaking as though she had not heard Olanna. “I hear that our ogbunigwe is putting the fear of God into them. In Afikpo, it killed only a few hundred men, but the entire Nigerian battalion withdrew from fear. They have never seen a weapon like that. They don’t know what we still have for them.” She chuckled and shook her head and tugged at the half of a yellow sun around her neck. “Gowon sent them to bomb Awgu Market in the middle of the afternoon while women were buying and selling. He has refused to let the Red Cross bring us food, refused kpam-kpam, so that we will starve to death. But he will not succeed. If we had people pouring guns and planes into our hands as they pour into Nigeria, this thing would have ended a long time ago and everybody would be in his own house now. But we will conquer them. Is God sleeping? No!” Mrs. Muokelu laughed. The siren went off. Olanna had been expecting the harsh sound for so long that a prescient shiver went through her just before she heard it. She turned to Baby but Ugwu had already picked her up and begun to run for the bunker. Olanna could hear the sound of the planes far off, like gathering thunder, and soon the scattered sharp cracks of antiaircraft fire. Before she crawled into the bunker, she looked up and saw the gliding bomber jets, hawklike, flying startlingly low, with balls of gray smoke around them.
As they climbed out of the bunker later, somebody said, “They targeted the primary school!”
“Those heathens have bombed our school,” Mrs. Muokelu said.
“Look! Another bomber!” a young man said, laughing, and pointed at a vulture flying overhead.
They joined the crowd hurrying toward Akwakuma Primary School. Two men walked past, in the opposite direction, carrying a blackened corpse. A bomb crater, wide enough to swallow a lorry, had split the road at the school entrance in two. The roof of the classroom block was crushed into a jumble of wood and metal and dust. Olanna did not recognize her room. All the windows were blown out, but the walls still stood. Just outside, where her pupils played in the sand, a piece of shrapnel had drilled an elegant hole in the ground. And as she joined in carrying out the few salvageable chairs, it was the hole she thought about: how hot carnivorous metal could draw such pretty ringlets in the soil.
The siren did not go off early in the morning, and so when the fierce wah-wah
-wah sounds of the bombers appeared from nowhere, as Olanna dissolved corn flour to make Baby’s pap, she knew this was it. Somebody would die. Perhaps they would all die. Death was the only thing that made any sense as she hunched underground, plucked some soil, rubbed it between her fingers, and waited for the bunker to explode. The bombing was louder and closer. The ground pulsed. She felt nothing. She was floating away from inside herself. Another explosion came and the earth vibrated, and one of the naked children crawling after crickets giggled. Then the explosions stopped and the people around her began to move. If she had died, if Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu had died, the bunker would still smell like a freshly tilled farm and the sun would still rise and the crickets would still hop around. The war would continue without them. Olanna exhaled, filled with a frothy rage. It was the very sense of being inconsequential that pushed her from extreme fear to extreme fury. She had to matter. She would no longer exist limply, waiting to die. Until Biafra won, the vandals would no longer dictate the terms of her life.
She was first to climb out of the bunker. A woman had thrown herself down near the body of a child and was rolling around in the dirt, crying. “Gowon, what have I done to you? Gowon, olee ihe m mere gi?” A few women gathered around and helped her up. “Stop crying, it is enough,” they said. “What do you want your other children to do?”
Olanna went to the backyard and began to sift through the metal bucket of ash. She coughed as she started a fire; the wood smoke stung.
Ugwu was watching her. “Mah? Do you want me to do it?”