Gods and Soldiers (14 page)

Nnamdi appeared at our door on a dry-aired morning, with a scar above his eye and the skin of his face stretched too thin and his worn trousers barely staying on his waist. Mama dashed out to the market and bought three chicken necks and two wings, and fried them in a little palm oil. “Especially for Nnamdi,” she said gaily. Mama, who used to make Coq au Vin without a cookbook.

I took Nnamdi to the nearby farm that had been harvested too early. All the farms looked that way now, raided at night, raided of corn so tender they had not yet formed kernels and yams so young they were barely the size of my fist. Harvest of desperation, Obi called it.

Nnamdi pulled me down to the ground, under an ukpaka tree. I could feel his bones through his skin. He scratched my back, bit my sweaty neck, held me down so hard I felt the sand pierce my skin. And he stayed inside me so long, so tightly, that I felt our hearts were pumping blood at the same rhythm. I wished in a twisted way that the war would never end so that it would always have this quality, this quality of nutmeg, tart and lasting. Afterwards, Nnamdi started to cry. I had never even considered that he could cry. He said the British were giving more arms to Nigeria, Nigeria had Russian planes and Egyptian pilots, the Americans didn't want to help us, we were still blockaded, his battalion was down to two men using one gun, some battalions had resorted to machetes and cutlasses. “Didn't they kill babies for being born Igbo, eh?” he asked.

I pressed my face to his, but he wouldn't stop crying. “Is there a God?” he asked me. “Is there a God?” So I held him close and listened to him cry, and listened to the shrilling of the crickets. He said goodbye two days later, holding me too long. Mama gave him a small bag of boiled rice.

I hoarded that memory, and every other memory of Nnamdi, used each sparingly. I used them most during the air raids, when the screeching
ka-ka-ka
of the anti-aircraft guns disrupted a hot afternoon and everybody in the yard dashed to the bunker—the room-sized hole in the ground covered with logs—and slid into the moist earth underneath. Exhilarating, Obi called it, even though he got scratches and cuts. I would smell the organic scent, like a freshly tilled farm, and watch the children crawl around looking for crickets and earthworms, until the bombing stopped. I would rub the soil between my fingers and savor thoughts of Nnamdi's teeth, tongue, voice.

The Igbo say—let us salute the deaf, for if the heavens don't hear, then the earth will hear.

So many things became transient, and more valuable. It was not that these things had value, it was that the ephemeral quality hanging over me, over life, gave value to them. And so I savored a plate of cornmeal, which tasted like cloth, because I might have to leave it and run into the bunker, because when I came out a neighbor may have eaten it, or given it to one of the children.

Obi suggested that we teach classes for those children, so many of them running around the yard chasing lizards. “They think bombings are normal,” Obi said, shaking his head. He picked a cool spot under the kolanut tree for our classroom. I placed planks across cement blocks for chairs, a wooden sheet against the tree for a blackboard. I taught English, Obi taught Mathematics and History and the children did not whisper and giggle in his class as they did in mine. He seemed to hold them somehow, as he talked and gestured and scrawled on the board with charcoal (later he ran his hands over his sweaty face and left black patterns like a design). Perhaps it was that he mixed learning and playing—once he asked the children to role-play the Berlin conference; they became Europeans partitioning Africa, giving hills and rivers to each other although they didn't know where the hills and rivers were. Obi played Bismarck. “My contribution to the young Biafrans, our leaders of tomorrow,” he said, glowing with mischief.

I laughed, because he seemed to forget that he, too, was a future Biafran leader. Sometimes even I forgot how young he was. “Do you remember when I used to half-chew your beef and then put it in your mouth so it would be easier for you to chew?” I teased. And Obi made a face and said he did not remember.

The classes were in the morning, before the afternoon sun turned fierce. After the classes, Obi and I joined the local militia—a mix of young people and married women and injured men—and went “combing,” to root out Federal soldiers or Biafran saboteurs hiding in the bush although all we found were dried fruits and groundnuts. We talked about dead Nigerians, we talked about the braveness of the French and Tanzanians in supporting Biafra, the evil of the British. We did not talk about dead Biafrans. We talked about anti-kwash, too, how it really worked, how many children in the early stages of kwashiorkor had been cured. I knew that anti-kwash was absolute nonsense, those leaves were from a tree nobody used to eat, they filled the children's bellies but gave no nourishment, definitely no proteins. But we
needed
to believe stories like that. When you were stripped down to sickly cassava, you used everything else fiercely and selfishly—especially the ability to choose what to believe and what not to believe.

I enjoyed those stories we told, the lull of our voices. Until one day, we were at an abandoned farm wading through tall grass when we stumbled upon something. A body. I smelled it before I saw it, a smell that gagged me, suffocated me, a smell so bad it made me light-headed. “Hei! He's a Nigerian!” a woman said. The flies rose from the bloated body of the Nigerian soldier as we gathered round. His skin was ashy, his eyes were open, his tribal marks were thick eerie lines running across his swollen face. “I wish we had seen him alive,” a young boy said. “
Nkakwu,
ugly rat,” somebody else said. A young girl spit at the body. Vultures landed a few feet away. A woman vomited. Nobody suggested burying him. I stood there, dizzy from the smell and the buzzing flies and the heat, and wondered how he had died, what his life had been like. I wondered about his family. A wife, who would be looking outside, her eyes on the road, for news of her husband. Little children who would be told, “Papa will be home soon.” A mother who had cried when he left. Brothers and sisters and cousins. I imagined the things he left behind—clothes, a prayer mat, a wooden cup used to drink kunu.

I started to cry.

Obi held me and looked at me with a calm disgust. “It was people like him who killed Aunty Ifeka,” Obi said. “It was people like him who beheaded unborn babies.”

I brushed Obi away and kept crying.

The Igbo say that a fish that does not swallow other fish does not grow fat.

There was no news of Nnamdi. When a neighbor heard from their son or husband in the front, I hung around their room for days willing their good fortune to myself. Nnamdi is fine, Obi said in a tone so normal I wanted to believe him. He said it often during those months of boiled cassava, months of moldy yams, months when we shared our dreams of vegetable oil and fish and salt.

I hid what little food we had because of the neighbors, wrapped in a mat and stuck behind the door. The neighbors hid their own food too. In the evenings, we all unwrapped our food and clustered in the kitchen, cooking and talking about salt. There was salt in Nigeria, salt was the reason our people were crossing the border to the other side, salt was the reason a woman down the road was said to have run out of her kitchen and tore her clothes off and rolled in the dirt, wailing. I sat on the kitchen floor and listened to the chatter and tried to remember what salt tasted like. It seemed surreal now, that we had a crystal saltshaker back home. That I had even wasted salt, rinsing away the clumpy bottom before re-filling the shaker. Fresh salt. I interspersed thoughts of Nnamdi with thoughts of salty food.

And when Akubueze told us that our old pastor, Father Damian, was working in a refugee camp in Amandugba, two towns away, I thought about salt. Akubueze was not sure, stories drifted around about so many people being at so many places. Still, I suggested to Mama that we go and see Father Damian. Mama said yes, we would go to see if he was well, it had been two long years since we saw him. I humored her and said it
had
been long—as though we still paid social calls. We did not say anything about the food that Caritas Internationalis sent to priests by secret night flights, the food that the priests gave away, the corned beef and glucose and dried milk. And salt.

Father Damian was thinner, with hollows and shadows on his face. But he looked healthy next to the children in the refugee camp. Stick-thin children whose bones stuck out, so unnaturally, so sharply. Children with rust-colored hair and stomachs like balloons. Children whose eyes were swallowed deep in their faces. Father Damian introduced Mama and me to the other priests, Irish missionaries of the Holy Ghost, white men with sun-reddened skin and smiles so brave I wanted to tug at their faces and see if they were real. Father Damian talked a lot about his work, about the dying children, but Mama kept changing the subject. It was so unlike her, something she would call
unmannered
if somebody else did it. Father Damian finally stopped talking about the children, about kwashiorkor, and he looked almost disappointed as he watched us leave, Mama holding the bag of salt and corned beef and fish powder he gave us.