Richard turned and stared at her and felt the urge to cry. He wished he were as calm as she was, that his hands would not shake as he washed them. He took his shaving cream, her soaps, and some sponges and threw them in a bag.

“Richard, we should hurry, the shelling sounds very close by,” Kainene said, and again there was a series of boom, boom, boom. She was putting her things and his into a suitcase. The drawers that held his shirts and his underwear were pulled out, and her packing was quick and methodical. He ran a hand over his books lined on the shelf and then began to search for the sheets where he had written notes for his piece about ogbunigwe, the fantastic Biafran-made land mines. He had left them on the table, he was sure. He looked inside the drawers.

“Have you seen my papers?” he asked.

“We have to get past the main road before they advance, Richard,” Kainene said. She stuffed two fat envelopes into her bag.

“What are those envelopes?” he asked.

“Emergency cash.”

Harrison and Ikejide came in and began to drag the two packed suitcases out. Richard heard the roar of planes above. It couldn’t possibly be. There had never been an air raid in Port Harcourt and it made no sense that there would be one now, when Port Harcourt was about to fall and the vandals were shelling close by. But the sound was unmistakable, and when Harrison shouted, “Enemy plane, sah!” his words felt redundant.

Richard ran toward Kainene, but she was already running out of the room, and he followed. She said, “Come out to the orchard!” when she ran past Harrison and Ikejide crouched under the kitchen table.

Outside, the air was humid. Richard looked up and saw them, two planes flying low, with an ominously streamlined efficiency to their shape, trailing silver-white lines in the sky. Fear spread helplessness throughout his body. They lay under the orange trees, he and Kainene, side by side, silent. Harrison and Ikejide had run out of the house; Harrison threw himself flat on the ground while Ikejide kept running, his body arched slightly forward, his arms flying around, his head bobbing. Then came the cold whistle of a mortar in the air and the crash as it landed and the boom as it exploded. Richard pressed Kainene to him. A piece of shrapnel, the size of a fist, wheezed past. Ikejide was still running and, in the moment that Richard glanced away and back, Ikejide’s head was gone. The body was running, arched slightly forward, arms flying around, but there was no head. There was only a bloodied neck. Kainene screamed. The body crashed down near her long American car, the planes receded and disappeared into the distance, and they all lay still for long minutes, until Harrison got up and said, “I am getting bag.”

He came back with a raffia bag. Richard did not look as Harrison went over to pick up Ikejide’s head and put it in the bag. Later, as he grasped the still-warm ankles and walked, with Harrison holding the wrists, to the shallow grave at the bottom of the orchard, he did not once look directly at it.

Kainene sat on the ground and watched them.

“Are you all right?” Richard asked her. She did not respond. There was an eerie blankness in her eyes. Richard was not sure what to do. He shook her gently but the blank look remained, so he went to the tap and splashed a bucket of cold water on her.

“Stop it, for heaven’s sake,” she said, and got up. “You’ve wet my dress.”

She pulled out another dress from a suitcase and changed in the kitchen before they left for Orlu. She no longer hurried; slowly, she straightened the collar, smoothed down the rumpled bodice with her hands. The jumble of sounds jarred Richard as he drove—the boom-boom-boom of mortars, the quickening rattle of gunshots—and he expected to see a Nigerian soldier stop them or attack them or throw a grenade at them at any time. Nothing happened. The roads were crowded. The checkpoints were gone. From the backseat, Harrison said in a cowed whisper, “They are using everything they are having to take Port Harcourt.”

Kainene said little when they arrived in Orlu and saw no carpenter and no furniture; the men had disappeared with the advance payment. She simply walked to the refugee camp down the road and found another carpenter, a sallow-skinned man who wanted to be paid in food. In the following days, she was mostly silent, withdrawn, as they sat outside and watched the carpenter cutting, hammering, smoothing.

“Why don’t you want money?” Kainene asked him.

“What will I buy with the money?” he asked.

“You must be a foolish man,” Kainene said. “There is much you can buy with money.”

“Not in this Biafra.” The man shrugged. “Just give me garri and rice.”

Kainene did not respond. A bird’s dropping fell on the floor of the veranda, and Richard picked up a cashew leaf and wiped it off.

“You know Olanna saw a mother carrying her child’s head,” Kainene said.

“Yes,” Richard said, although he did not know. She had never told him about Olanna’s experience during the massacres.

“I want to see her.”

“You should go.” Richard took a deep breath to steady himself and stared at one of the finished chairs. It was sharp-angled and ugly.

“How could shrapnel cut off Ikejide’s head so completely?” Kainene asked, as if she wanted him to tell her that she was mistaken about the whole thing. He wished he could. At nights, she cried. She told him she wanted to dream of Ikejide but she woke up every morning and remembered his running headless body clearly while, in the safer blurred territory of her dreams, she saw herself smoking a cigarette in an elegant gold holder.

———

A van delivered bags of garri to the house, and Kainene asked Harrison not to touch them because they were for the refugee camp. She was the new food supplier.

“I’ll distribute the food to the refugees myself and I’m going to ask the Agricultural Research Center for some shit,” she told Richard.

“Shit?”

“Manure. We can start a farm at the camp. We’ll grow our own protein, soya beans, and akidi.”

Tags: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net