PATTY ONAH AND OLUOHA ARE OUT OF DETENTION. The news spreads through the village. People rush off to see them as if they are creatures in a zoo. They come back broken, looking malnourished and sickly, with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. Still, they entertain their guests—friends and relatives who visit them—with distressing stories of the life of pro-Biafra detainees in prison cells across the country.
“I advise anyone who will listen to me to keep away from any kind of pro-Biafra activities,” Patty Onah says in a faint, sickly voice, his porcine features gone. “We saw hell in detention these past few years. The food is terrible. They dumped and forgot us there, ten men packed in one tiny, infested cell. We slept with an epidemic of mice and ticks, and woke up with the smell of our own stool right there in a bucket next to us. The soup looked like diarrhea, tasteless and watery. The garri was as hard as stone, and a meal was hardly sufficient for a little child, not to talk of an adult. At times we were not fed for days. Four men lost their lives in the cell where I was incarcerated. Their families did not even see their corpses.” He shook his head. “They abandoned us there to die, the same people we were loyal to.”
But Oluoha has a different story. “They did not abandon us,” he insists. “The government was hell-bent on breaking us. It is not even the inhumanity of government that is the issue; what is heartbreaking is that our brothers have turned around to stab us in the back. The leaders of Biafra Zionist Movement are traitors. They are self-centred people trying to reap where they did not sow. They don’t deserve the support of any well-meaning Igboman.”
They may have been freed, but they are terribly malnourished and jaundiced, and no longer have the strength to carry loads or dig pit latrines, and their wives face the huge task of nursing them back to life. The fear of being arrested and detained in such inhuman circumstances jolts me. Their grim and conflicting accounts of their lives in detention fill me with horror and doubt. Ikuku says the leaders of MASSOB are traitors. Oluoha says Biafra Zionist Movement is a fraud. I figure they did not make the decision to abandon Biafra alone; it was made in agreement with the ticks, the spiders, and the cockroaches that shared the cell, crept out at night encouraged by the silence of sleep, stopped to listen, and then inched forward again drawn to filth and the smell of blood.
They probably would not have ticks feast on them if they had money. The warders would allow them to sleep in the VIP section of the prison yard reserved for people with the right connections. They might even swap their names and get released, but all of this depends on the size of your “Ghana Must Go” bag or your big-big connection. I didn’t know that politicians took stolen money home in “Ghana Must Go” bags and hoarded them away in underground vaults until I heard it from the gamblers who have slowly returned now to Uwakwe’s corner.
“Yes. The warders can do anything for you,” explained the wizened little man. “They can swap your name with someone else’s name—that’s to say that someone without connections or money for bribes can be substituted for you. All you have to do is drop out of sight long enough for attention to shift. And trust Nigerian leaders to have the attention span of a two-year-old child. And why not, when they are busy chasing oil money and bribes they hoard in household strongrooms. The warders can do that for you even if you are on death row. They can make someone else die for your crime the way Jesus Christ died for our sins.”
My head reels with conflicting thoughts. The nocturnal meetings at the primary school are becoming more frequent, more interesting. I always sit in the front row to watch Ikuku as he speaks to his ever-growing audience. Sometimes he sounds like a historian. He tells us how the Igbo ancestry is linked to the ancient Israelites. He recounts the biblical story of events in the eighth century BC when the Assyrians invaded Israel’s northern kingdom, forcing ten tribes into exile. Ndigbo, he says, are descended from those “lost tribes” of Israel.
Gad, the seventh son of Jacob, had three sons: Eri, Arodi, and Areli. They settled in Igboland and fathered clans, established kingdoms, and founded the towns of Owerri, Umuleri, Arochukwu, and Aguleri. That is why there are many similarities between Igbo rituals and customs and those practiced by Jews. Traditional practices such as circumcising male children eight days after birth, refraining from eating taboo foods, mourning the dead for seven days, and celebrating the new moon.
But the idea of a brand-new Republic of Biafra recedes into the background of my life as school terms come and go. I am now a senior student studying hard for the West African Secondary School Certificate Examination. Anytime I remember the exam, I get lightning streaks in my stomach. I have to pass to shame those who robbed my father of his inheritance. I have to pass to silence my critics, especially Machebe. But each time I try to study, my thoughts keep drifting to Nnamdi Adaka’s bullying and my feelings for Grace. Nnamdi Adaka is the proverbial horsefly on the scrotum. Grace is like a pageant, parading the close periphery of my mind, her soft laughter lending to the emptiness a sure feeling of her presence.
I keep having premonitions about Grace. What if she gets knocked down by a car or even an okada while on her way to Ogige market to buy things for her mother? What if a snake bites her or if some jealous girl who resents her beauty throws acid into her face? I keep imagining all sorts of things happening to her, and, after each long and boring weekend, I run off to school to see her face.
I walk her home after school one afternoon. She lives in a small, shadowy village buried in the woods, where birds and beetles welcome you with their songs. You can hear owls hooting and see millipedes and earthworms slithering around in damp corners. The houses, some tin and some thatch, nuzzle up against one another as though to keep each other warm in the chill and silence of the wood.
“You ought to be going back now,” she says after the long trek. “I am almost home.”
We stop and link our hands, hers as soft as warm cornbread, and in that moment we seem to conquer our small universe: the quiet conspiracy of the woods, the nyala’s spiral-horned curve of the road, and a bicyclist who looms into sight at the far tree line.
Snatching her hand away, Grace gestures towards the approaching bicyclist and whispers, “He looks like my uncle.”
I look up the curling vista, amazed at how the road braids itself impeccably then curves out of sight where the bicyclist has emerged.
“It’s him,” she says as he pedals into a recognizable distance. And then she’s gone like a butterfly, in a lilting, fluttering flight.
I turn towards home, passing the pedaller: a scraggy old man in a raffia hat with a basket of cassava roots tied to his bicycle.
Grace is not in school the next day, and, worried she might be in some sort of trouble from yesterday, I go back to the woods. She had described her father’s house to me, but the compounds here look confusingly the same. Luckily, I run into a little boy.
“I am looking for a girl named Grace,” I ask the little boy.
He frowns, and then, remembering, points towards a newly renovated house in a small compound with a few shady trees. A kitchen with a crumbled side wall and a roof hanging askew faces the main house. In front sits a girl. I can see the inside of the kitchen: the soot-blackened back wall, three large stones set in a heap of ash for cooking, a pot on the fire. The girl sitting in the compound under a small orange tree has her legs stretched out in front of her. I can see her short skirt, her bare arms. My heart beats fast as I recognize Grace in the lively company of goats and poultry bleating and clucking. A black goat with white patches takes her by surprise and grabs a mouthful of grains drying in the sun. I can see that she has been keeping an eye on them and only glanced away for a moment. She shoos the goat away distractedly, her eyes fixed in my direction. I watch as the other goats suddenly determine to take their share, drawing her up on her feet, and, whilst she chases one goat away, another one helps itself. I admire her self-conscious grace, the poetry in her movements.
I’d not have seen the large new house in the background if I hadn’t caught a glimpse of its fiberglass roof and sliding windows. The house is hidden in a lattice of branches. I know that only a few rich men around here can afford such a luxurious house. Grace probably forgot to mention the house, but every other thing is as she had described it: from a clump of trees by the side, to a banana bush carrying huge bunches of green bananas, to a coconut tree. She signals to tell me she has seen me. I slide out of sight to wait under a tree, straighten myself out, confident in jeans, T-shirt, and a face cap. The face cap is pushed to an angle to hide my half ear.
She comes tripping towards me like a butterfly.
“Egoyibo.” I stare into her eyes to see how she reacts to my calling her by her native name, which means “banknote.”
She blushes, then giggles. I can see she likes it.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
“You were not in school today, so I came to know why.”
Her dress is off-white, with a skewed neckline, and her dark eyes are creased with worry, her hair flecked with ash. She has a dark smudge on her left cheek, which she brushes off with a shy smile when I draw her attention to it, making me wish I had summoned the courage to reach out and brush it off her. She takes my hand and herds me down the road.
“You smell of onions and crayfish and smoke,” I say, smiling at her.
She giggles again, then balls her fist. “I think I should smell of anger instead.”
I am lost. “What do you mean?”
She laughs nervously. “It is good you did not come inside. My father is at home, and he is in a temper. He would have caused a huge scene.”
I let out a sigh of relief for being spared of the wrath of a father in a temper.
“Let me see you off. We can talk on the way,” she says.
We walk down the path. “What happened?”
She hesitates, her eyes shifting. “There was a quarrel between my father and my mother.”
That stops me dead in my tracks. Had her uncle seen us holding hands?
She walks back and takes my hand. “Not about you,” she says. “The truth is, my father wants to give my hand in marriage to a wealthy man who lives in Kano.”
Something shrinks inside me.
She glances at me with a mischievous smile. “You don’t want me to go? You are going to miss me?”
I have noticed how the atmosphere becomes charged when I am alone with her. I want to be with her morning, afternoon, and night. “Do you want to go?”
“No,” she says. “That’s why I was not in school today. The truth is, my uncle did see us yesterday and told my father. To avoid you getting me into trouble, my father then resolved to give my hand to this suitor who has been pestering me.” Pausing and giggling again. “He thinks you’re going to impregnate me!”
I sense myself scowling, then blushing, then wondering why she is making light of a situation as serious as this.
She takes my hand again. “But you know what? I am not going to marry him. My mother is angry with me for refusing. My stubbornness has put her in a very awkward situation with my father. He accuses us, my mother and me, of conspiracy to deny him a rich son-in-law who has already helped in building his new house and promises to do more if he convinces me to accept his proposal.”
I don’t know what to say, but her story is crushing.
“I fled the kitchen in the main house to my grandmother’s old kitchen to be in the company of her goats and poultry.”
I had judged her wrongly, I realize then. A proud person would never leave that stately home.
“I always slept with my grandmother in the old family house. She did not want to abandon the old house, where her husband breathed his last, to move into the new house with everyone. I kept her company. The poultry and goats are still in the old house.”
A thick cropland precedes us on both sides of the path that leads out of the village. Tall reeds rise along the edges of farmland and encroach on the path. In the mild wind, a reed assumes the posture of a striking cobra, now thrusting forward, now withdrawing.
“We are all alone here.” She laughs to ease the awkwardness of the moment. She’s all butterfly again, eyes sparkling with many small lights. “The only companions we have are the farmlands and the bushes around us. If a lion were to suddenly jump at us from the bush, what would you do? Run away and leave me here to be devoured or stay back and defend me?”
The answer to her question sticks like gluey cocoyam fufu in my throat. I am not sure I would stay if a dangerous animal were to show up here, say a mad or hungry dog. Maybe I am a coward, but that is the truth.
She laughs again, sliding her slim fingers between mine, her hand that feels warm and tender. “I got you there. Don’t be scared. I was only joking. We don’t have lions here.”
“As if I didn’t know.”
We laugh, and walk in silence, hand in hand, her breast brushing against my body, sending a ripple of excitement flowing up my spine, making me wonder if it is by accident or design. But I am enjoying it whichever way. We talk about the fast-approaching exam. Her restless eyes are settled again, dark and calm, like a sea after a storm has passed.
“I have some grains in the sun and at the mercy of the goats,” she says suddenly. “Thank you for coming. I will see you in school tomorrow. Bye.”
Her departure seems abrupt. I watch her tripping back home, fingers holding her dress at the tips of the flare to free her movement, each foot lifted clear off the ground, each step measured in that graceful way that girls skip. In that capricious way that butterflies swim the air. I muse over her on my way home. I am happy she will not marry her suitor. Tomorrow she will be in school. And the next day, too. I cannot imagine her going away, not seeing her ever again. She killed me when she said, He thinks you’re going to impregnate me! in that plainspoken and mischievous way that spread warmth in my stomach. I didn’t know she was already thinking of us in such conjugal terms.
That night, as I lie on the tomb with my thoughts drifting to her, a strange feeling possesses me in low waves of sadness.