“Not at all.” Okeoma stifled a yawn. “I do have a poem in my head.” He sat up and straightened his back and began to recite. He sounded different. In Nsukka, he had read his poetry dramatically, as though convinced that his art mattered more than anything else. Now he had a tone of unwilling banter, but still banter.
“Brown
With the fish-glow sheen of a mermaid,
She appears,
Bearing silver dawn; And the sun attends her,
The mermaid
Who will never be mine.”
“Odenigbo would have said, ‘The voice of a generation!’” Olanna said.
“What would you say?”
“The voice of a man.”
Okeoma smiled shyly, and she remembered how Odenigbo teased her about his being secretly infatuated with her. The poem was about her, and he had wanted her to know it. They sat in silence until his eyes began to close and soon his snoring became regular. She watched him and wondered what he was dreaming about. He was still sleeping, often mumbling and rolling his head from side to side, when Professor Achara arrived in the evening.
“Oh, your friend the commando is here,” he said. “Please call Odenigbo. Let’s go out to the veranda.”
They sat on the bench on the veranda. Professor Achara kept glancing down, clasping and unclasping his hands.
“I have come on a difficult matter,” he said.
Fear constricted Olanna’s chest: something had happened to Kainene and they had sent Professor Achara to tell her. She wanted Professor Achara to leave right away without telling her, because what she did not know would not hurt her.
“What is it?” Odenigbo asked sharply.
“I have tried to make your landlord change his mind. I have done everything I can. But he refused. He wants you to pack out in two weeks.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Odenigbo said.
But Olanna was sure he did. They were being asked to move out of the house because the landlord had found somebody who would pay him twice or perhaps three times the rent.
“I’m so sorry, Odenigbo. He is usually a most reasonable man, but I suppose the times have taken away a bit of our reason.”
Odenigbo sighed.
“I will help find another place,” Professor Achara said.
They were lucky to find one room, now that Umuahia was thronged with refugees. The long strip of a building had nine rooms, side by side, with doors that led out onto a narrow veranda. The kitchen was at one end and the bathroom at the other, next to a grove of banana trees. Their room was closer to the bathroom and, on the first day, Olanna looked at it and could not imagine how she would live here with Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu, eat and dress and make love in a single room. Odenigbo set about separating their sleeping area with a thin curtain, and afterward Olanna looked at the sagging string he had tied to nails on the wall, remembered Uncle Mbaezi and Aunty Ifeka’s room in Kano, and began to cry.
“We’ll get something better soon,” Odenigbo said, and she nodded and did not tell him that she was not crying about their room.
Mama Oji lived next door. She had a hard face and blinked so rarely that Olanna was disconcerted by her wide-eyed stare the first time they spoke.
“Welcome, nno,” she said. “Your husband is not here?”
“He’s at work,” Olanna said.
“I wanted to see him before the others do; it is about my children.”
“Your children?”
“The landlord called him doctor.”