Half of a Yellow Sun

“It was nice of her.” Olanna knew she sounded stilted, knew Arize was watching her.

“You and Sister Kainene should talk. What happened in the past is in the past.”

“You can only talk to the person who wants to talk to you,” Olanna said. She wanted to change the subject. She always wanted to change the subject when Kainene came up. “I better take Baby to greet Aunty Ifeka.” She hurried out to fetch Baby before Arize could say anything else.

She washed some sand off Baby’s face and hands before they walked out of the compound and down the road. Uncle Mbaezi was not yet back from the market, and they sat with Aunty Ifeka on a bench in front of her kiosk, Baby on Olanna’s lap. The yard was filling with the chatter of neighbors and the shrieks of children running around under the kuka tree. Somebody was playing loud music from a gramophone; soon, a cluster of men by the compound gate began to laugh and jostle one another, mimicking the song. Aunty Ifeka laughed, too, and clapped her hands.

“What’s funny?” Olanna asked.

“That is Rex Lawson’s song,” Aunty Ifeka said.

“What is funny about it?”

“Our people say that the chorus sounds like mmee-mmee-mmee, the bleating of a goat.” Aunty Ifeka chuckled. “They say the Sardauna sounded like that when he was begging them not to kill him. When the soldiers fired a mortar into his house, he crouched behind his wives and bleated, ‘Mmee-mmee-mmee, please don’t kill me, mmee-mmee-mmee!’”

Aunty Ifeka laughed again, and so did Baby, as if she understood.

“Oh.” Olanna thought about Chief Okonji and wondered if he too was said to have bleated like a goat before he died. She looked away across the street, where children were playing with car tires, racing with one another as they rolled the tires along. A small sandstorm was gathering in the distance, and the dust rose and fell in gray-white clouds.

“The Sardauna was an evil man, ajo mmadu,” Aunty Ifeka said. “He hated us. He hated everybody who did not remove their shoes and bow to him. Is he not the one who did not allow our children to go to school?”

“They should not have killed him,” Olanna said quietly. “They should have put him in prison.”

Aunty Ifeka snorted. “Put him in which prison? In this Nigeria where he controlled everything?” She got up and began to close up the kiosk. “Come, let’s go inside so I can find Baby something to eat.”

The Rex Lawson song was playing loudly in Arize’s compound when Olanna returned. Nnakwanze found it hilarious too. He had two huge front teeth, and when he laughed it was as if too many teeth had been painfully crammed into his small mouth. Mmeee-mmeee-mmeee, a goat begging not to be killed: mmeee-mmeee-mmeee.

“It’s not funny,” Olanna said.

“Sister, but it is funny oh,” Arize said. “Because of too much Book, you no longer know how to laugh.”

Nnakwanze was sitting on the floor at Arize’s feet, rubbing her belly in light circular motions. He had worried a lot less than Arize when she did not get pregnant the first, second, and third year of their marriage; when his mother visited them too often, poking at Arize’s belly and urging her to confess how many abortions she had had before marriage, he asked his mother to stop visiting. He asked her, too, to stop bringing foul-smelling concoctions for Arize to drink in bitter gulps. Now that Arize was pregnant, he did more overtime at the railway and asked her to cut down on her sewing.

He was still singing the song and laughing. A goat begging not to be killed: mmeee-mmeee-mmeee.

Olanna got up. The night breeze was unpleasantly cool. “Ari, you should get to bed, so you are rested in the morning for Lagos.”

Nnakwanze made as if to help Arize up, but she brushed him aside. “I have told you people that I am not sick. I am only pregnant.”

Olanna was pleased that the house in Lagos would be empty. Her father had called to say they were going overseas. She knew it was because he wanted to be away until things calmed down, because he was wary of his ten percents and lavish parties and slick connections, but neither he nor her mother said so. They called it a holiday. It was their policy to leave things unsaid, the same way they pretended not to notice that she and Kainene no longer spoke and that she came home only when she was sure Kainene was not visiting.

In the airport taxi, Arize taught Baby a song while Olanna watched Lagos careen by: the tumultuous traffic, the rusty buses and exhausted masses waiting for them, the touts, the beggars sliding on flat wooden trolleys, the shabby hawkers thrusting trays toward people who either would not or could not buy.

The driver stopped in front of her parents’ walled compound in Ikoyi. He peered at the high gate. “The minister they killed used to live around here, abi, aunty?” he asked. Olanna pretended not to have heard and instead said to Baby, “Now, look what you did to your dress! Hurry inside so we can wash it off!”

Later, her mother’s driver, Ibekie, took them to Kingsway. The supermarket smelled of new paint. Arize walked from aisle to aisle, cooing, touching the plastic wrappings, picking out baby clothes, a pink pram, a plastic doll with blue eyes.

“Everything is so shiny in supermarkets, Sister,” Arize said, laughing. “No dust!”

Olanna held up a white dress trimmed with pink lace. “O maka. This is lovely.”

“It’s too expensive,” Arize said.

“Nobody asked you.”

Baby pulle

d down a doll from a low shelf and turned it upside down, and it let out a crying sound.