“Biafra will win this war, God has written it in the sky,” said a man with a beard braided in a single thin strand.
Eberechi giggled and whispered to Ugwu, “Bush man. He does not know it is Bee-afra, not Ba-yafra.”
Ugwu laughed. Fat black ants were crawling all over the palm fronds, and she squealed and looked helplessly at him when one crawled onto her arm. Ugwu brushed it off and felt the warm moistness of her skin. She had wanted him to brush it off; she did not seem like the kind of person who was truly afraid of ants.
One of the women had a baby boy tied to her back. She adjusted the wrapper that held him and said, “We were on our way back from the market when we discovered the vandals had occupied the junction and were shelling inside the village. We could not go home. We had to turn and run. I had only this wrapper and blouse and the small money from selling my pepper. I don’t know where my two children are, the ones I left at home to go to the market.” She started to cry. The abruptness of her tears, the way they gushed out of her, startled Ugwu.
“Woman, stop crying,” the man with the braided beard said curtly.
The woman continued to cry. Her baby, too, began to cry.
When Ugwu took a batch of fronds across to the ladder, he stopped to peer into one of the classrooms. Cooking pots, sleeping mats, metal boxes, and bamboo beds cluttered it so completely that the room did not look as though it had ever been anything else but a home for disparate groups of people with nowhere else to go. A bright poster on the wall read: IN CASE OF AIR RAID, DO NOT PANIC. IF YOU SEE THE ENEMY, MOW HIM DOWN. Another woman with a baby tied to her back was washing peeled cassava tubers in a pan of filthy water. Her baby’s face was wrinkled. Ugwu nearly choked when he came close and realized that the rotten smell came from her water: it had previously been used to soak cassava, perhaps for days, and was being reused. The smell was awful, nose-filling, the smell of a dirty toilet and rancid steamed beans and boiled eggs gone bad.
He held his breath and went back to the palm fronds. The crying woman was nursing her baby on a drooping breast.
“Our town would not have fallen but for the saboteurs in our midst!” the man with the braided beard said. “I was a Civil Defender. I know how many infiltrators we discovered, and all of them were Rivers people. What I am telling you is that we can no longer trust these minorities who don’t speak Igbo.” He paused and turned when he heard a shout from some young boys playing War in the middle of the school compound. They looked about ten or eleven years old, wore banana leaves on their heads, and held mock guns made from bamboo. The longest gun belonged to the commander of the Biafran side, a tall stern child with sharp cheekbones. “Advance!” he shouted.
The boys crept forward.
“Fire!”
They flung stones with wide sweeps of their arms and then, clutching their guns, they rushed toward the other boys, the Nigerian side, the losers.
The bearded man began to clap. “These boys are wonderful! Just give them arms and they will send the vandals back.”
Other people clapped and cheered the boys. The palm fronds were ignored for a while.
“You know I kept trying to join the army when this war started,” the bearded man said. “I went everywhere but they kept rejecting me because of my leg so I had to join the Civil Defenders.”
“What is wrong with your leg?” the woman grinding melon seeds asked.
He raised his leg. Half of his foot was gone and what was left looked like a shriveled piece of old yam. “I lost it in the North,” he said.
In the silence that followed, the crackling of the palm fronds was too loud. Then a woman came out of a classroom, after a small child, slapping the child’s head again and again. “So you broke only one plate? No, go ahead and break all my plates. Break them! Kuwa ha! We have many, don’t we? We came with all our plates, didn’t we? Break them!” she said. The little girl ran off toward the mango tree. Before the mother went back into the classroom, she stood there and cursed for a while, muttering that those spirits that had sent the child to break her few plates would not succeed.
“Why should the child not break a plate? What food is there to eat from it anyway?” the breast-feeding woman asked sourly, still sniffling. They laughed, and Eberechi leaned toward Ugwu and whispered that the bearded man had bad breath, which was probably why they did not take him in the army. Ugwu ached to press his body against hers.
They left together and Ugwu looked back to make sure that everyone had noticed that they were together. A soldier in a Biafran Army uniform and a helmet walked past them, speaking a mangled Pidgin English that made little sense, his voice too loud. He swayed as he walked, as if he would tip over sideways. He had one full arm, the other was a stump that stopped before his elbow. Eberechi watched him.
“His people do not know,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“His people think he is well and fighting for our cause.”
The soldier was shouting, “Don’t waste your bullet! I say one vandal one bullet with immediate effect!” while the little boys gathered around him, taunting him, laughing at him, singing praise names for him.
Eberechi was walking a little faster. “My brother joined the army in the beginning.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Yes. He has come home only once. Everybody on the street came out to greet him and the children were fighting to touch his uniform.”
She said nothing else until they got to the front of her house and she turned away. “Let the day break,” she said.
“See you tomorrow,” Ugwu said. He wished he had said more to her.
———