The smoke was thickening around her so that she was not sure if the crowd of men drifting into the yard were real or just plumes of smoke, until she saw the shiny metal blades of their axes and machetes, the bloodstained caftans that flapped around their legs.
Mohammed pushed her into the car and then went around and got in. “Keep your face down,” he said.
“We finished the whole family. It was Allah’s will!” one of the men called out in Hausa. The man was familiar. It was Abdulmalik. He nudged a body on the ground with his foot and Olanna noticed, then, how many bodies were lying there, like dolls made of cloth.
“Who are you?” another asked, standing in front of the car.
Mohammed opened his door, the car still on, and spoke in rapid, coaxing Hausa. The man stood aside. Olanna turned to look closely, to see if it really was Abdulmalik.
“Don’t raise your face!” Mohammed said. He narrowly missed a kuka tree; one of the large pods had fallen down and Olanna heard the crunching squash as the car ran over it. She lowered her head. It was Abdulmalik. He had nudged another body, a woman’s headless body, and stepped over it, placed one leg down and then the other, although there was enough room to step to the side.
“Allah does not allow this,” Mohammed said. He was shaking; his entire body was shaking. “Allah will not forgive them. Allah will not forgive the people who have made them do this. Allah will never forgive this.”
They drove in a frenzied silence, past policemen in blood-splattered uniforms, past vultures perched by the roadside, past boys carrying looted radios, until he parked at the train station and shoved her onto a crowded train.
Olanna sat on the floor of the train with her knees drawn up to her chest and the warm sweaty pressure of bodies around her. Outside the train, people were strapped to the coaches and some stood on the steps holding on to the railings. She had heard muted shouts when a man fell off. The train was a mass of loosely held metal, the ride unsteady as if the rails were crossed by speed bumps, and each time it jolted, Olanna was thrown against the woman next to her, against something on the woman’s lap, a big bowl, a calabash. The woman’s wrapper was dotted with splotchy stains that looked like blood, but Olanna was not sure. Her eyes burned. She felt as if there were a mixture of peppers and sand inside them, pricking and burning her lids. It was agony to blink, agony to keep them closed, agony to leave them open. She wanted to rip them out. She wet her fingers with saliva and rubbed her eyes. She sometimes did that to Baby when Baby got a minor scratch. “Mummy Ola!” Baby would wail, raising the offending arm or leg, and Olanna would stick a finger in her mouth and run it over Baby’s injury. But the saliva only made her burning eyes worse.
A young man in front of her screamed and placed his hands on his head. The train swerved and Olanna bumped against the calabash again; she liked the firm feel of the wood. She edged her hand forward until it was gently caressing the carved lines that crisscrossed the calabash. She closed her eyes, because they burned less that way, and kept them closed for hours, her hand against the calabash, until somebody shouted in Igbo, “Anyi agafeela! We have crossed the River Niger! We have reached home!”
A liquid—urine—was spreading on the floor of the train. Olanna felt it coldly soaking into her dress. The woman with the calabash nudged her, then motioned to some other people close by. “Bianu, come,” she said. “Come and take a look.”
She opened the calabash.
“Take a look,” she said again.
Olanna looked into the bowl. She saw the little girl’s head with the ashy-gray skin and the braided hair and rolled-back eyes and open mouth. She stared at it for a while before she looked away. Somebody screamed.
The woman closed the calabash. “Do you know,” she said, “it took me so long to plait this hair? She had such thick hair.”
The train had stopped with a rusty screech. Olanna got down and stood in the jostling crowd. A woman fainted. Motor boys were hitting the sides of lorries and chanting, “Owerri! Enugu! Nsukka!” She thought about the plaited hair resting in the calabash. She visualized the mother braiding it, her fingers oiling it with pomade before dividing it into sections with a wooden comb.
12
Richard was rereading Kainene’s note when the plane touched down in Kano. He had only just found it while searching in his briefcase for a magazine. He wished he had known it was lying there the ten days he was in London, waiting to be read.
Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?
He was smiling as he read; Kainene had never written anything like this to him before. He doubted that she had ever written him anything at all, except for the generic Love, Kainene, on his birthday cards. He read over and over, lingering on each I that was so elaborately curved it looked like a sterling sign. Suddenly he didn’t mind that the flight had been delayed in London and that this stop at Kano to change planes before going on to Lagos
would delay him even longer. An absurd lightness draped itself around him; all things were possible, all things were manageable. He got up and helped the woman seated next to him carry her bag down. Is love this safety I feel in our silences?
“You’re so kind,” the woman told him in an Irish accent. The flight was full of non-Nigerians. If Kainene were here, she would certainly say something mocking—There go the marauding Europeans. He shook hands with the stewardess at the foot of the ramp and walked quickly across the tarmac; the sun was intense, a piercing white hotness that made him imagine his body fluids evaporating, drying out, and he was relieved to get inside the cool building. He stood in the customs line and reread Kainene’s note. Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? He would ask her to marry him when he returned to Port Harcourt. She would first say something like, “A white man and no money to speak of. My parents will be scandalized.” But she would say yes. He knew she would say yes. It was something about her lately, a mellowing, a softening from which this note had come. He was not sure if she had forgiven him for the incident with Olanna—they had never talked about it—but this note, this new openness, meant that she was ready to move forward. He was smoothing the note on his palm, when a young very dark-skinned customs officer asked, “Anything to declare, sir?”
“No,” Richard said, and handed over his passport. “I’m going on to Lagos.”
“Okay, well done, sir! Welcome to Nigeria,” the young man said. He had a large, chubby body that looked sloppy in his uniform.
“You work here?” Richard asked him.
“Yes, sir. I am in training. By December, I will be a full customs officer.”
“Excellent,” Richard said. “And where are you from?”
“I come from the Southeastern region, a town called Obosi.”
“Onitsha’s little neighbor.”
“You know the place, sir?”