She arched her eyebrows. “We? The world was silent when we died?”
“I’ll make sure to note that the Nigerian bombs carefully avoided anybody with a British passport,” he said.
Kainene laughed. She laughed often these days. She laughed as she told him about the motherless baby who still clung to life, about the young girl that Inatimi was falling in love with, about the women
who sang in the evenings. She laughed, too, on the morning that he and Olanna finally saw each other. Olanna spoke first. “Hello, Richard,” she said and he said, “Olanna, hello,” and Kainene laughed and said, “Richard couldn’t invent any more trips.”
He watched Kainene’s face carefully for withdrawal, for returning anger, for something. But there was nothing; her laughter softened the angles of her chin. And the tension he had expected, the weight of memory and regret that would come with seeing Olanna again in her presence, were absent.
7. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died
For the epilogue, he writes a poem, modeled after one of Okeoma’s poems. He calls it:
“WERE YOU SILENT WHEN WE DIED?”
Did you see photos in sixty-eight
Of children with their hair becoming rust:
Sickly patches nestled on those small heads,
Then falling off, like rotten leaves on dust?
Imagine children with arms like toothpicks,
With footballs for bellies and skin stretched thin.
It was kwashiorkor—difficult word,
A word that was not quite ugly enough, a sin.
You needn’t imagine. There were photos
Displayed in gloss-filled pages of your Life.
Did you see? Did you feel sorry briefly,
Then turn round to hold your lover or wife?
Their skin had turned the tawny of weak tea
And showed cobwebs of vein and brittle bone;
Naked children laughing, as if the man
Would not take photos and then leave, alone.
31
Olanna saw the four ragged soldiers carrying a corpse on their shoulders. Wild panic made her woozy. She stopped, certain it was Ugwu’s body, until the soldiers walked quickly, silently, past and she realized that the dead man was too tall to be Ugwu. His feet were cracked and caked in dried mud; he had fought without shoes. Olanna stared at the soldiers’ retreating backs and tried to calm her queasiness, to shrug off the foreboding that had fogged her mind for days.
Later, she told Kainene how afraid she was for Ugwu, how she felt as if she were about to turn a corner and be flattened by tragedy. Kainene placed an arm around her and told her not to worry. Madu had sent word to all battalion commanders to look for Ugwu; they would find out where he was. But when Baby asked, “Is Ugwu coming back today, Mummy Ola?” Olanna imagined it was because Baby, too, had the same premonition. When she returned to Umuahia and Mama Oji gave her a package somebody had delivered, she immediately wondered if it contained a message about Ugwu. Her hands shook as she held the brown-wrapped carton creased with excessive handling. Then she noticed Mohammed’s writing, addressed to her in care of the University of Biafra, in long elegant sweeps. Inside, she unfolded handkerchiefs, crisp white underwear, bars of Lux soap, and chocolate, and she marveled that they had reached her intact, even sent through the Red Cross. His letter was three months old but still smelled faintly of sweet musk. Detached sentences stuck to her mind.
I have sent so many letters and am unsure which has reached you. My sister, Hadiza, got married in June. I think constantly of you. My polo game is much improved. I am well and know you and Odenigbo must be too. Do try and send word back.
She turned a chocolate bar around in her hand, stared at the MADE IN SWITZERLAND, fiddled with the silver foil. Then she flung the bar across the room. Mohammed’s letter incensed her; it insulted her reality. But he could not possibly know that they had no salt and Odenigbo drank kai-kai every day and Ugwu was conscripted and she had sold her wig. He could not possibly know. Yet she felt angry that the patterns of his old life remained in place, so unquestioningly in place that he could write to her about his polo game.
Mama Oji knocked; Olanna took a deep calming breath before she opened the door and gave her a bar of soap.