He got up to leave, knowing that nothing had changed for him either; he would feel the same way he had felt since he returned from Kano. He had often wished that he would lose his mind, or that his memory would suppress itself, but instead everything took on a terrible transparence and he had only to close his eyes to see the freshly dead bodies on the floor of the airport and to recall the pitch of the screams. His mind remained lucid. Lucid enough for him to write calm replies to Aunt Elizabeth’s frantic letters and tell her that he was fine and did not plan to return to England, to ask her to please stop sending flimsy airmail editions of newspapers with articles about the Nigerian pogroms circled in pencil. The articles annoyed him. ‘Ancient tribal hatreds’, the Herald wrote, was the reason for the massacres. Time magazine titled its piece man must whack, an expression printed on a Nigerian lorry, but the writer had taken whack literally and gone on to explain that Nigerians were so naturally prone to violence that they even wrote about the necessity of it on their passenger lorries. Richard sent a terse letter off to Time. In Nigerian Pidgin English, he wrote, whack meant eat. At least the Observer was a little more adroit, in writing that if Nigeria survived the massacres of the Igbo, it would survive anything. But there was a hollowness to all the accounts, an echo of unreality. So Richard began to write a long article about the massacres. He sat at the dining table in Kainene’s house and wrote on long sheets of unlined paper. He had brought Harrison to Port Harcourt, and while he worked he could hear Harrison talking to Ikejide and Sebastian. ‘You are not knowing how to bake German chocolate cake?’ A cackle. ‘You are not knowing what is rhubarb crumble?’ Another scornful cackle.
Richard started by writing about the refugee problem, a result of the massacres, about the traders who fled their markets in the North, university lecturers who left their campuses, civil servants who fled their jobs in the ministries. He struggled over the closing paragraph.
It is imperative to remember that the first time the Igbo people were massacred, albeit on a much smaller scale than what has recently occurred, was in 1945. That carnage was precipitated by the British colonial government when it blamed the Igbo people for the national strike, banned Igbo-published newspapers, and generally encouraged anti-Igbo sentiment. The notion of the recent killings being the product of ‘age-old’ hatred is therefore misleading. The tribes of the North and the South have long had contact, at least as far back as the ninth century, as some of the magnificent beads discovered at the historic Igbo-Ukwu site attest. No doubt these groups also fought wars and slave-raided each other, but they did not massacre in this manner. If this is hatred, then it is very young. It has been caused, simply, by the informal divide-and-rule policies of the British colonial exercise. These policies manipulated the differences between the tribes and ensured that unity would not exist, thereby making the easy gov ernance of such a large country practicable.
When he gave Kainene the article, she read it carefully, with her eyes narrowed, and afterwards told him, ‘Very fierce’.
He was not sure what very fierce meant or whether she liked it. He desperately wanted her to approve. Her aura of distance had returned since she came back from visiting Olanna in Nsukka. She had put up a photograph of her murdered relatives – Arize laughing in her wedding dress, Uncle Mbaezi ebullient in a tight suit next to a solemn Aunty Ifeka in a print wrapper – but she said very little about them and nothing about Olanna. She often withdrew into silence in the middle of a conversation, and when she did, he let her be; sometimes he envied her the ability to be changed by what had happened.
‘What do you think of it?’ he asked, and before she could answer, he asked what he really wanted to. ‘Do you like it? How do you feel about it?’
‘I think it sounds exceedingly formal and stuffy,’ she said. ‘But what I feel about it is pride. I feel proud.’
He sent it off to the Herald. When he got a response two weeks later, he ripped the letter up after reading it. The international press was simply saturated with stories of violence from Africa, and this one was particularly bland and pedantic, the deputy editor wrote, but perhaps Richard could do a piece on the human angle? Did they mutter any tribal incantations while they did the killings, for example? Did they eat body parts like they did in the Congo? Was there a way of trying truly to understand the minds of these people?
Richard put the article away. It frightened him that he slept well at nights, that he was still calmed by the scent of orange leaves and the turquoise stillness of the sea, that he was sentient.
‘I’m going on. Life is the same,’ he told Kainene. ‘I should be reacting; things should be different.’
‘You can’t write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be, Richard,’ she said quietly.
But he couldn’t let himself be. He didn’t believe that life was the same for all the other people who had witnessed the massacres. Then he felt more frightened at the thought that perhaps he had been nothing more than a voyeur. He had not feared for his own life, so the massacres became external, outside of him; he had watched them through the detached lens of knowing he was safe. But that couldn’t be; Kainene would not have been safe if she had been there.
He began to write about Nnaemeka and the astringent scent of liquor mixing with fresh blood in that airport lounge where the bartender lay with a blown-up face, but he stopped because the sentences were risible. They were too melodramatic. They sounded just like the articles in the foreign press, as if these killings had not happened and, even if they had, as if they had not quite happened that way. The echo of unreality weighed each word down; he clearly remembered what had happened at that airport, but to write about it he would have to reimagine it, and he was not sure if he could.
The day the secession was announced, he stood with Kainene on the veranda and listened to Ojukwu’s voice on the radio and afterward took her in his arms. At first he thought they were both trembling, until he moved back to look at her face and realized that she was perfectly still. Only he was trembling.
‘Happy independence,’ he told her.
‘Independence,’ she said, before she added, ‘Happy independence.’
He wanted to ask her to marry him. This was a new start, a new country, their new country. It was not only because secession was just, considering all that the Igbo had endured, but because of the possibility Biafra held for him. He would be Biafran in a way he could never have been Nigerian – he was here at the beginning; he had shared in the birth. He would belong. He said, Marry me, Kainene in his head many times but he did not say it aloud. The next day, he returned to Nsukka with Harrison.
Richard liked Phyllis Okafor. He liked the verve of her bouffant wigs, the drawl of her native Mississippi, as well as the severe eyeglass frames that belied the warmth in her eyes. Since he had stopped going to Odenigbo’s house, he often spent evenings with her and her husband, Nnanyelugo. It was as if she knew he had lost a social life, and she insistently invited him to the arts theatre, to public lectures, to play squash. So when she asked him to come to the ‘In Case of War’ seminar that the university women’s association was organizing, he accepted. It was a good idea to be prepared, of course, but there would be no war. The Nigerians would let Biafra be; they would never fight a people already battered by the massacres. They would be pleased to be rid of the Igbo anyway. Richard was certain about this. He was less certain about what he would do if he ran into Olanna at the seminar. It had been easy to avoid her thus far; in four years he had driven past her only a few times, he never went to the tennis courts or the staff club, and he no longer shopped at Eastern Shop.
He stood near Phyllis at the entrance of the lecture hall and scanned the room. Olanna was sitting in front with Baby on her lap. Her lushly beautiful face seemed very familiar, as did her blue dress with the ruffled collar, as if he had seen both very recently. He looked away and could not help feeling relieved