Half of a Yellow Sun

Mohammed left and came back moments later, holding what looked like a pamphlet. "They're rioting," he said.

"It's the students, isn't it?" Ola

"I think it's religious. You must leave right away." His eyes avoided hers.

"Mohammed, calm down."

"Sule said they are blocking the roads and searching for infidels. Come, come." He was already heading indoors. Ola

Mohammed went into a room and came out with a long scarf. "Wear this, so you can blend in," he said.

Ola

But Mohammed barely smiled. "Let's go. I know a shortcut to the train station."

"Train station? Arize and I are not leaving until tomorrow, Mohammed," Ola

"Ola

"What do you mean?" She tugged at the scarf; the embroidery at the edges felt coarse and uncomfortable against her neck.

"Sule said they are well organized."

Ola

His voice was low. "He said Igbo bodies are lying on Airport Road."

Ola

Mohammed headed toward Sabon Gari. A bus drove past, dusty and yellow; it looked like one of those campaign buses that politicians used to tour rural areas and give out rice and cash to villagers. A man was hanging out of the door, a loudspeaker pressed to his mouth, his slow Hausa words resonating. "The Igbo must go. The infidels must go. The Igbo must go." Mohammed reached out and squeezed her hand and held on to it as they drove past a crowd of young men on the roadside, chanting, "Araba, araba!" He slowed down and blew the horn a few times in solidarity; they waved and he picked up speed again.

In Sabon Gari, the first street was empty. Ola

"Stay here," Mohammed said, as he stopped the car outside Uncle Mbaezi's compound. She watched him run out. The street looked strange, unfamiliar; the compound gate was broken, the metal flattened on the ground. Then she noticed Aunty Ifeka's kiosk, or what remained of it: splinters of wood, packets of groundnuts lying in the dust. She opened the car door and climbed out. She paused for a moment because of how glaringly bright and hot it was, with flames billowing from the roof, with grit and ash floating in the air, before she began to run toward the house. She stopped when she saw the bodies. Uncle Mbaezi lay facedown in an ungainly twist, legs splayed. Something creamy-white oozed through the large gash on the back of his head. Aunty Ifeka lay on the veranda. The cuts on her naked body were smaller, dotting her arms and legs like slightly parted red lips.

Ola

"Arize," she said. "Arize is down the road."

The smoke was thickening around her so that she was not sure if the crowd of men drifting into the yard were real or just plumes of smoke, until she saw the shiny metal blades of their axes and machetes, the bloodstained caftans that flapped around their legs.

Mohammed pushed her into the car and then went around and got in. "Keep your face down," he said.

"We finished the whole family. It was Allah's will!" one of the men called out in Hausa. The man was familiar. It was Abdulmalik. He nudged a body on the ground with his foot and Ola

"Who are you?" another asked, standing in front of the car.

Mohammed opened his door, the car still on, and spoke in rapid, coaxing Hausa. The man stood aside. Ola

"Don't raise your face!" Mohammed said. He narrowly missed a kuka tree; one of the large pods had fallen down and Ola

"Allah does not allow this," Mohammed said. He was shaking; his entire body was shaking. "Allah will not forgive them. Allah will not forgive the people who have made them do this. Allah will never forgive this."

They drove in a frenzied silence, past policemen in blood-splattered uniforms, past vultures perched by the roadside, past boys carrying looted radios, until he parked at the train station and shoved her onto a crowded train.

Ola

A young man in front of her screamed and placed his hands on his head. The train swerved and Ola

A liquid-urine-was spreading on the floor of the train. Ola

She opened the calabash.

"Take a look," she said again.

Ola

The woman closed the calabash. "Do you know," she said, "it took me so long to plait this hair? She had such thick hair."