“Anyi ga-achota ya, we will find her,” her mother said.
“We will find her,” her father repeated.
“Yes, we will find her,” Olanna said too, and she felt as if they were all scratching desperate fingernails on a hard scarred wall. They told one another stories of people who had been found, who had come back after months of being lost. They did not tell one another the other stories, of those still missing, of families burying empty caskets.
The two soldiers who had come and eaten her jollof rice filled her with rage. She lay on the living room floor and prayed that they would not find her Biafran pounds. After they left, she took the folded notes out from the envelope hidden in her shoe and went out and lit a match under the lemon tree. Odenigbo watched her. He disapproved, she knew, because he kept his flag folded inside the pocket of a pair of trousers.
“You’re burning memory,” he told her.
“I am not.” She would not place her memory on things that strangers could barge in and take away. “My memory is inside me.”
The weeks passed and the water started running again and the butterflies were back in the front yard and Baby’s hair grew jet-black. Boxes of books came for Odenigbo from overseas. For a war-robbed colleague, the notes read, from fellow admirers of David Blackwell in the brotherhood of mathematicians. Odenigbo spent days poring over them. “Look, I had the first edition of this one,” he said often.
Edna sent books and clothes and chocolate. Olanna looked at the enclosed pictures and Edna looked foreign, a woman who lived in Boston and had greasy-pressed hair. It seemed very long since Edna had lived next door to her flat on Elias Avenue, and it seemed even longer since this yard on Odim Street had formed the boundaries of her life. When she took long walks on campus, past the tennis courts and Freedom Square, she thought how quick leaving had been and how slow returning was.
Her bank account in Lagos was gone. It no longer existed. It was like being forcibly undressed; somebody had snatched at all her clothes and left her shivering naked in the cold. But she saw a good sign there. Since she had lost her savings, then she could not possibly lose her sister too; the custodians of fate were not that wicked.
“Why is Aunty Kainene still at afia attack?” Baby asked often, with a steady suspicious look.
“Stop asking me, this child!” Olanna said. But she saw a sign in Baby’s questions too, although she could not yet decipher its meaning. Odenigbo told her that she had to stop seeing signs in everything. She was angry that he could disagree with her seeing signs of Kainene’s return and then she was grateful that he did, because it meant he did not believe that anything had happened that would make his disagreeing inappropriate.
When some relatives came from Umunnachi and suggested that they consult a dibia, Olanna asked her Uncle Osita to go. She gave him a bottle of whisky and some money to buy a goat for the oracle. She drove to the River Niger to throw in a copy of Kainene’s photo. She went to Kainene’s house in Orlu and walked around it three times. And she waited for the week that the dibia had stipulated, but Kainene did not come home.
“Maybe I didn’t do something right,” she told Odenigbo. They were in his study. The floor was littered with blackened paper crisps from the pages of his half-burned books.
“The war has ended but hunger has not, nkem. That dibia was just hungry for goat meat. You can’t believe in that.”
“I do believe in it. I believe in everything. I believe in anything that will bring my sister home.” She stood up and went to the window.
“We come back again,” she said.
“What?”
“Our people say that we all reincarnate, don’t they?” she said. “Uwa m, uwa ozo. When I come back in my next life, Kainene will be my sister.”
She had started to cry softly. Odenigbo took her in his arms.
8. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died
Ugwu writes his dedication last: For Master, my good man.