‘Ezeulu!’ he saluted.
‘My son.’
He turned to his father to take his message.
‘Tell your mother that Ezeulu is greeting her. If she has kolanut let her bring it.’ Obielue returned to the inner compound.
‘Although I ate no kolanut the last time I went to the house of my friend.’ Akuebue said this as though he talked to himself.
Ezeulu laughed. ‘What do w
e say happens to the man who eats and then makes his mouth as if it has never seen food?’
‘How should I know?’
‘It makes his anus dry up. Did your mother not tell you that?’
Akuebue rose to his feet very slowly because of the pain in his waist.
‘Old age is a disease,’ he said, struggling to unbend himself with one hand on the hip. When he was three-quarters erect he gave up. ‘Whenever I sit for any length of time I have to practise again to walk, like an infant.’ He smiled as he toddled to the low entrance wall of his obi, took from it a wooden bowl with a lump of chalk in it and offered it to his guest. Ezeulu picked up the chalk and drew five lines with it on the floor – three uprights, a flat one across the top and another below them. Then he painted one of his big toes and dubbed a thin coat of white around his left eye.
Only one of Akuebue’s two wives was at home and she soon came into the obi to salute Ezeulu and to say that the senior wife had gone to inspect her palm trees for ripe fruit. Obielue returned with a kolanut. He took the wooden bowl from his father, blew into it to remove dust and offered the kolanut in it to Ezeulu.
‘Thank you,’ said Ezeulu. ‘Take it to your father to break.’
‘No,’ said Akuebue. ‘I ask you to break it.’
‘That cannot be. We do not by-pass a man and enter his compound.’
‘I know that,’ said Akuebue, ‘but you see that my hands are full and I am asking you to perform the office for me.’
‘A man cannot be too busy to break the first kolanut of the day in his own house. So put the yam down; it will not run away.’
‘But this is not the first kolanut of the day. I have broken several already.’
‘That may be so, but you did not break them in my presence. The time a man wakes up is his morning.’
‘All right,’ said Akuebue. ‘I shall break it if you say so.’
‘Indeed I say so. We do not apply an ear-pick to the eye.’
Akuebue took the kolanut in his hand and said: ‘We shall both live,’ and broke it.
Two gunshots had sounded in the neighbourhood since Ezeulu came in. Now a third went off.
‘What is happening there?’ he asked. ‘Are men leaving the forest now to hunt in the compounds?’
‘Oh. You have not heard? Ogbuefi Amalu is very sick.’
‘True? And it has reached the point of shooting guns?’
‘Yes.’ Akuebue lowered his voice out of respect for the bad story. ‘What day was yesterday?’
‘Eke,’ replied Ezeulu.
‘Yes, it was on the other Eke that it happened. He was returning home from the farmland he had gone to clear when it struck him down. Before he reached home he was trembling with cold in the noonday heat. He could no longer hold his matchet because his fingers were set like crooks.’
‘What do they say it is?’