“They are well.”
“And Ugwu?”
“He was conscripted.”
“After that first time?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Muokelu paused and fingered the plastic half of a yellow sun around her neck. “It will be well. He will come back. Somebody has to fight for our cause.”
They saw very little of each other now that Mrs. Muokelu had started her trade. Olanna sat down and listened to her stories—about the vision that revealed that the saboteur responsible for the fall of Port Harcourt was a general of the Biafran Army; about another vision in which a dibia from Okija gave His Excellency some powerful medicine that would recapture all the fallen towns.
“They have started the rumor that Umuahia is threatened, okwa ya?” Mrs. Muokelu asked, staring into Olanna’s eyes.
“Yes.”
“But Umuahia will not fall. There is no need for people to panic and start packing.”
Olanna shrugged; she wondered why Mrs. Muokelu was looking at her so intently.
“They say people with cars have started looking for petrol.” Mrs. Muokelu’s eyes were unwavering. “They have to be careful, very careful, before somebody will ask them how they knew that Umuahia would fall if not that they are saboteurs.”
Olanna realized, then, that Mrs. Muokelu was warning her, telling her to be prepared.
“Yes, they have to be careful,” she said.
Mrs. Muokelu rubbed her hands together. Something had changed with her; she had allowed her faith to slip from her fingers. Biafra would win, Olanna knew, because Biafra had to win, but that Mrs. Muokelu of all people believed that the fall of the capita
l was imminent dampened her. When she hugged Mrs. Muokelu goodbye, it was with the hollow feeling that she would never see her again. She seriously contemplated, for the first time, the fall of Umuahia as she walked home. It would mean a delayed victory, a tighter squeezing of Biafra’s territory, but it would also mean that they would go and live in Kainene’s house in Orlu until the war ended.
She stopped by the petrol station near the hospital and was not surprised to see the sign scrawled in chalk: NO PETROL. They had stopped selling Biafran-made petrol since the talk of Umuahia’s fall began, so that people would not panic. That night, Olanna told Odenigbo, “We need to get some petrol on the black market; we don’t have enough in case anything happens.” He nodded vaguely and mumbled something about Special Julius. He had just come back from Tanzania Bar and lay on the bed with the radio turned on low. Across the curtain, Baby was asleep on the mattress.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“We can’t afford petrol right now. It’s a pound a gallon.”
“They paid you last week. We have to be sure that the car will move.”
“I’ve asked Special Julius to do a check exchange. He has not brought the money.”
Olanna knew immediately that it was a lie. They did check exchanges with Special Julius all the time; it never took more than a day for Special Julius to give Odenigbo cash in exchange for a check.
“How are we going to buy petrol then?” she asked.
He said nothing.
She walked past him and outside. The moon was behind a cloud and, sitting out in the blackness of the yard, she could still smell that cheap vapor-heavy scent of local gin. It trailed him, it clouded the paths that he walked. His drinking in Nsukka—his auburn, finely refined brandy—had sharpened his mind, distilled his ideas and his confidence so that he sat in the living room and talked and talked and everybody listened. This drinking here silenced him. It made him retreat into himself and look out at the world with bleary weary eyes. And it made her furious.
Olanna changed what was left of her British pounds and bought petrol from a man who led her into a dank outhouse with creamy-fat maggots crawling all over the floor. He poured carefully from his metal container into hers. She took the container home wrapped in a sack that had contained cornmeal and had just stored it in the boot of the Opel when a BIAFRAN ARMY open jeep drove in. Kainene climbed out, followed by a soldier wearing a helmet. And Olanna knew, with an immediate sinking wail of a feeling, that it was about Ugwu. It was about Ugwu. The sun burned hotly and liquids began to spin in her head and she looked around for Baby but could not find her. Kainene came up and held her firmly by the shoulders and said, “Ejima m, hold your heart, be strong. Ugwu has died,” and it was not the news but the tight grip of Kainene’s bony fingers that Olanna recognized.
“No,” she said calmly. The air was charged with unreality, as if she would certainly wake up in a minute. “No,” she said again, shaking her head.
“Madu sent his batman with the message. Ugwu was with the field engineers, and they suffered massive casualties in an operation last week. Only a few came back and Ugwu was not one of them. They did not find his body, but they did not find many of the bodies.” Kainene paused. “There was not much that was whole to find.”
Olanna kept shaking her head, waiting to wake up.
“Come with me. Bring Chiamaka. Come and stay in Orlu.” Kainene was holding her, Baby was saying something, and a haze shrouded everything until she looked up and saw the sky. Blue and clear. It made the present real, the sky, because she had never seen the sky in her dreams. She turned and marched down the road to Tanzania Bar. She walked past the dirty curtain at the door and pushed Odenigbo’s cup off the table; a pale liquid spread on the cement floor.