Kainene steered with a careless confidence, past potholes on the road, past palm trees stripped of fronds, past a thin soldier pulling along a thinner goat.
“Do you ever dream of that child’s head in the calabash?” she asked.
Olanna looked out of the window and remembered the slanting lines crisscrossing the calabash, the white blankness of the child’s eyes. “I don’t remember my dreams.”
“Grandpapa used to say, about difficulties he had gone through, ‘It did not kill me, it made me knowledgeable.’ O gburo m egbu, o mee ka m malu ife.”
“I remember.”
“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable,” Kainene said.
There was a pause. Inside Olanna, something calcified leaped to life.
“Do you know what I mean?” Kainene asked.
“Yes.”
At the research center, Kainene parked under a tree and Olanna waited in the car. She hurried back moments later. “The man I want isn’t there,” she said, and started the car. Olanna said nothing else until they arrived at the refugee camp. It was a primary school before the war. The buildings looked faded, most of the once-white paint peeled off. Some refugees who were standing outside stopped to stare at Olanna and to say nno to Kainene. A young lean priest in a discolored soutane came up to the car.
“Father Marcel, my twin sister, Olanna,” Kainene said.
The priest looked surprised. “Welcome,” he said, and then added, unnecessarily, “You are not identical.”
They stood under a flame tree while he told Kainene that the bag of crayfish had been delivered, that the Red Cross really had suspended relief flights, that Inatimi had come earlier with somebody else from the Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters and said he would return later. Olanna watched Kainene speak. She did not hear much of what Kainene said, because she was thinking of how unrelenting Kainene’s confidence was.
“Let’s give you a tour,” Kainene said to Olanna, after Father Marcel left. “I always start with the bunker.” Kainene showed her the bunker, a roughly dug pit covered with logs, before she began to walk toward the building at the far end of the compound. “Now to the Point of No Return.”
Olanna followed. The smell hit her at the first door. It went straight from her nose to her stomach, turning it, churning the boiled yam she’d had for breakfast.
Kainene was watching her. “You don’t have to go in.”
“I want to,” Olanna said, because she felt she should. She didn’t want to. She didn’t know what the smell was but it was enlarging and she could almost see it, a foul brown cloud. She felt faint. They went into the first classroom. About twelve people were lying on bamboo beds, on mats, on the floor. Not one of them reached out to slap away the fat flies. The only movement Olanna saw was that of a child si
tting by the door: he unfolded and refolded his arms. His bones were clearly outlined and the wrap of his arms was flat, in a way that would be impossible if he had some flesh underneath the skin. Kainene scanned the room quickly and then turned to the door. Outside, Olanna gulped in air. In the second classroom, she felt that even the air inside her was becoming soiled and she wanted to press her nostrils shut to stop the mingling of the air outside and that inside her. A mother was sitting on the floor with two children lying next to her. Olanna could not tell how old they were. They were naked; the taut globes that were their bellies would not fit in a shirt anyway. Their buttocks and chests were collapsed into folds of rumpled skin. On their head, spurts of reddish hair. Olanna’s eyes met their mother’s steady stare and Olanna looked away quickly. She slapped a fly away from her face and thought how healthy all the flies looked, how alive, how vibrant.
“That woman is dead. We have to get her removed,” Kainene said.
“No!” Olanna blurted, because that woman with the steady stare could not be dead. But Kainene meant another woman, who lay facedown on the floor, with a thin baby clutching her back. Kainene walked over and plucked the baby away. She went outside and called out, “Father! Father! One for burial,” and then sat on the steps outside and held the baby. The baby should have cried. Kainene was trying to force a soft yeast-colored pill into its mouth.
“What is that?” Olanna asked.
“Protein tablet. I’ll give you some for Chiamaka. They taste horrible. I finally got the Red Cross to give me some last week. We don’t have enough, of course, so I save them for the children. If I gave it to most of the people in there it would make no difference. But maybe it will for this baby. Maybe.”
“How many die a day?” Olanna asked.
Kainene looked down at the baby. “His mother came from somewhere that fell very early. They had gone through about five refugee camps before they came here.”
“How many die a day?” Olanna asked again. But Kainene did not respond. The baby finally let out a thin squall and Kainene forced the powdery tablet into the small open mouth. Olanna watched Father Marcel and another man carry the dead woman, by her ankles and wrists, out of the classroom and to the back of the building.
“Sometimes I hate them,” Kainene said.
“The vandals.”
“No, them.” Kainene pointed back at the room. “I hate them for dying.”
Kainene took the baby inside and gave it to another woman, a relative of the dead woman’s whose bony body was quivering; because her eyes were dry, it took Olanna a moment to realize that she was crying, the baby pressed against her flattened, dry breasts.
Later, as they walked to the car, Kainene slipped her hand into Olanna’s.