“Thank you.” Mama Oji held the soap with both hands and raised it to her nose and sniffed it. “But that package was big. Is this the only thing you will give me? Is there no canned food there? Or are you saving it for your saboteur friend Alice?”
“Ngwa, give me back the soap,” Olanna said. “Mama Adanna will know how to be appreciative.”
Mama Oji swiftly raised her blouse and tucked the soap into her threadbare bra. “You know I am grateful.”
Raised voices came from the road, and they both went outside. A group of militia members holding machetes were pushing two women along. They cried as they staggered down the road; their wrappers were ripped and their eyes reddened. “What did we do? We are not saboteurs! We are refugees from Ndoni! We have done nothing!”
Pastor Ambrose ran out to the road and began to pray. “Father God, destroy the saboteurs that are showing the enemy the way! Holy-spirit fire!”
Some of the neighbors hurried out to spit and aim stones and jeer at the backs of the women. “Sabo! God punish you! Sabo!”
“They should throw tires round their necks and burn them,” Mama Oji said. “They should burn every single saboteur.”
Olanna folded Mohammed’s letter, thought of the slack halfexposed bellies of the women, and said nothing.
“You should be careful with that Alice,” Mama Oji said.
“Leave Alice alone. She is not a saboteur.”
“She is the kind of woman who will steal somebody’s husband.”
“What?”
“Every time you go to Orlu she will come out and sit with your husband.”
Olanna stared at Mama Oji, surprised, because it was the last thing she had expected to hear and because Odenigbo had never mentioned that Alice spent time with him when she was away. She had never even seen them speak to each other.
Mama Oji was watching her. “I am only saying that you should be careful with her. Even if she is not a saboteur, she is not a good woman.”
Olanna could not think of what to say. She knew that Odenigbo would never touch another woman, had quietly convinced herself of this, and knew too that Mama Oji nursed a deep resentment of Alice. Yet the very unexpectedness of Mama Oji’s words nagged her.
“I will be careful,” she said finally, with a smile.
Mama Oji looked as if she wanted to say something else but changed her mind and turned to shout at her son. “Get away from that place! Are you stupid? Ewu awusa! Don’t you know you will start coughing now?”
Later, Olanna took a bar of soap and knocked on Alice’s door, three sharp raps in quick succession to let Alice know it was she. Alice’s eyes looked sleepy, more shadowed than usual. “You’re back,” she said. “How is your sister?”
“Very well.”
“Did you see the poor women they are harassing and calling saboteurs?” she asked, and before Olanna could respond, she continued, “Yesterday it was a man from Ogoja. This is nonsense. We cannot keep beating people just because Nigeria is beating us. Somebody like me, I have not eaten proper food in two years. I have not tasted sugar. I have not drunk cold water. Where will I find the energy to aid the enemy?” Alice gestured with her tiny hands, and what Olanna had once thought to be an elegant fragility suddenly became a self-absorbed conceit, a luxurious selfishness; Alice spoke as if she alone suffered from the war.
Olanna gave her the soap. “Somebody sent a few bars to me.”
“Oh! So I will join those using Lux in this Biafra. Thank you.” Alice’s smile transformed her face, brightened her eyes, and Olanna wondered if Odenigbo found her pretty. She looked at Alice’s yellow-skinned face and narrow waist and realized that what she had once admired now threatened her.
“Ngwanu, let me go and make Baby’s lunch,” she said, and turned to leave.
That evening, she visited Mrs. Muokelu with a bar of soap.
“Is this you? Anya gi! It has been long!” Mrs. Muokelu said. A hole had split up His Excellency’s face on the sleeve of her boubou.
“You look well,” Olanna lied. Mrs. Muokelu was gaunt; her body was built for thickness and now, with so much weight loss, she drooped, as though she could no longer stand straight. Even the hair on her arms drooped.
“You, ever beautiful,” Mrs. Muokelu said, and hugged Olanna again.
Olanna gave her the soap, and because she knew that Mrs. Muokelu would not touch anything sent from Nigeria by a Nigerian, she said, “My mother sent it from England.”
“God bless you,” Mrs. Muokelu said. “Your husband and Baby, kwanu?”