“Have you drunk enough, eh?” she asked him quietly. “Ugwu anwugo. Did you hear me? Ugwu has died.”
Odenigbo stood up and looked at her. The rims of his eyes were puffy.
“Go on and drink,” Olanna said. “Drink and drink and don’t stop. Ugwu has died.”
The woman who owned the bar came across and said, “Oh! Sorry, ndo,” and made to hug her but Olanna shrugged her off. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Leave me alone!” It was only then she realized that Kainene had come with her and was silently holding her as she shouted, “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” at the bar owner, who backed away.
In the following days, days filled with dark gaps of time, Odenigbo did not go to Tanzania Bar. He gave Baby a bath, made their garri, came home earlier from work. Once he tried to hold Olanna, to kiss her, but his touch made her skin crawl and she turned away from him and went outside to sleep on a mat on the veranda, where Ugwu had sometimes slept. She did not cry. The only time she cried was after she went to Eberechi’s house to tell her that Ugwu had died and Eberechi screamed and called her a liar; at nights those screams rang in Olanna’s head. Odenigbo sent word to Ugwu’s people through three different women who went across enemy lines to trade. And he organized a service of songs in the yard. Some of the neighbors helped Alice bring out her piano and set it down near the banana trees. “I will play as you sing,” Alice said to the gathered women. But whenever somebody started a song, Mama Oji would clap, insistently, loudly, in accompaniment, and soon all the other neighbors would join in the clapping and Alice could not play. She sat helplessly by her piano with Baby on her lap.
The first songs were vigorous and then Mama Adanna’s voice broke out, husky and elegiac.
Naba na ndokwa,
Ugwu, naba na ndokwa.
O ga-adili gi mma,
Naba na ndokwa.
Odenigbo half stumbled out of the yard before they finished singing, a livid incredulity in his eyes, as if he could not believe the words of the song: Go in peace, it will be well with you. Olanna watched him go. She did not entirely understand the resentment she felt. There was nothing he could have done to prevent Ugwu’s death, but his drinking, his excessive drinking, had somehow made him complicit. She did not want to speak to him, to sleep beside him. She slept on the mat outside, and even the routine of the mosquito bites became a comfort. She said little to him. They spoke only of necessities, what Baby would eat, what they would do if Umuahia fell.
“We will stay in Kainene’s house only until we find a place,” he said, as if they had many choices, as if he had forgotten that, before, he would have said that Umuahia would not fall; and she said nothing in response.
She told Baby that Ugwu had gone to heaven.
“But he’s coming back soon, Mummy Ola?” Baby asked.
And Olanna said yes. It was not that she wanted to soothe Baby; it was that, day after day, she found herself rejecting the finality of Ugwu’s death. She told herself that he was not dead; he might be close to dead but he was not dead. She willed a message to come to her about his whereabouts. She bathed outside now—the bathroom was slimy with mold and urine, so she woke up very early to take a bucket and go behind the building—and one morning she caught a movement at the corner and saw Pastor Ambrose watching her. “Pastor Ambrose!” she called out, and he dashed off. “You are not ashamed of yourself? If only you would spend your time praying for somebody to come and tell me what happened to Ugwu instead of spying on a married woman taking a bath.”
She visited Mrs. Muokelu’s home, hoping for a story of a vision that involved Ugwu’s safety, but a neighbor told her that Mrs. Muokelu’s whole family was gone. They had left without telling anybody. She listened to the war reports on Radio Biafra more carefully, as if there might be clues about Ugwu in the ebullient voice reporting the pushback of the vandals, the successes of gallant Biafran soldiers. A man wearing a stained white caftan walked into the yard on a Saturday afternoon, and Olanna hurried up to him, certain that he had come with news of Ugwu.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me where Ugwu is.”
The man looked confused. “Dalu. I am looking for Alice Njokamma from Asaba.”
“Alice?” Olanna stared at the man, as
though to give him a chance to take it back and ask for her instead. “Alice?”
“Yes, Alice from Asaba. I am her kinsman. My family’s compound is next to theirs.”
Olanna pointed at Alice’s door. He went over and knocked and knocked.
“She is in?” he asked.
Olanna nodded, resentful that he had not brought news of Ugwu.
The man knocked again and called out, “I am from the Isioma family in Asaba.”
Alice opened the door and he went in. Moments later, Alice rushed out and threw herself on the ground, rolling this way and that; in the evening sunlight, her sand-patched skin was tinted with gold.
“O gini mere? What happened?” the neighbors asked, gathering around Alice.
“I am from Asaba and I got word about our hometown this morning,” the man said. His accent was thicker than Alice’s, and Olanna understood his Igbo a moment after he had spoken. “The vandals took our town many weeks ago and they announced that all the indigenes should come out and say ‘One Nigeria’ and they would give them rice. So people came out of hiding and said ‘One Nigeria’ and the vandals shot them, men, women, and children. Everyone.” The man paused. “There is nobody left in the Njokamma family. Nobody left.”
Alice was lying on her back, rubbing her head frantically against the ground, moaning. Clumps of sand were in her hair. She jumped up and ran toward the road but Pastor Ambrose ran after her and dragged her back. She jerked away and threw herself down again, her lips pulled back, her teeth bared. “What am I doing still alive? They should come and kill me now! I said they should come and kill me!”
She was strengthened, emboldened, by the madness of grief and she fought off everyone who tried to hold her. She rolled on the ground with such force that the stones cut her skin in tiny red gashes. The neighbors said oh and shook their heads. Odenigbo came out of the room then and went over and picked Alice up and held her, and she stayed still and began to weep, her head resting on his shoulder. Olanna watched them. There was a familiar melding to the curve of Odenigbo’s arms around Alice. He held her with the ease of someone who had held her before.