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"I wonder how steep the fines are," Ola
They had sat down to have breakfast when her parents' Land Rover drove into the compound.
"How fortuitous," Odenigbo said. "I'll tell your dad right away. We can have the wedding here next week." He was smiling. There was something boyish about him since she'd said yes on the veranda, something naively gleeful that she wished she felt too.
"You know it's not done that way," she said. "You have to go to Umu
"Of course I know. I was only joking."
Ola
The Land Rover parked under the kola nut tree, and her mother climbed out. She was alone. Ola
"Welcome, Mom,
Her mother shrugged in the way that was meant to say so-so. She was wearing a red george wrapper and pink blouse and her shoes were flat, a shiny black. "It is well." Her mother looked around, the same way she had looked around, furtively, the last time before pushing an envelope of money into Ola
"Odenigbo? He's inside, eating."
Her mother led the way to the veranda and leaned against a pillar. She opened her handbag, gestured for Ola
"Ah! Ah! Mom, what is all that for?"
"I carry them everywhere I go now. My diamonds are inside my bra." Her mother was whispering. "Nne, nobody knows what is going on. We are hearing that Umu
"The vandals are not close by. Our troops are driving them back around Nsukka."
"But how long is it taking to drive them back?"
Ola
"Anyway," her mother said, "your father and I have finalized our plans. We have paid somebody who will take us to Cameroon and get us on a flight from there to London. We will use our Nigerian passports; the Cameroonians will not give us trouble. It was not easy but it is done. We paid for four places." Her mother patted her headgear.
as if to ensure that it was still there. "Your father has gone to Port Harcourt to tell Kainene."
Ola
"You know I won't go," she said gently, wanting to reach out and touch her mother's perfect skin. "But you and Dad should go, if it will make you feel safer. I'll stay with Odenigbo and Baby. We'll be fine. We are going to Umuahia in a few weeks for Odenigbo to start work at the directorate." Ola
"But what if Nsukka is not recovered? What if this war drags on and on?"
"It won't."
"How can I leave my children and run to safety?"
But Ola
Her mother wiped her eyes with her palm, although there were no tears, before she brought out an airmail envelope from her handbag. "It's a letter from Mohammed. Somebody brought it to Umu
"Nothing dangerous?" Ola
"Who knows? Is he not the enemy now?"
Ola
"Thank God you didn't marry him," her mother said, watching her fold the letter. "Can you imagine what a situation you would have been in now? O di egwu!"
Ola
It surprised her, how many men and women were in Abba, gathered at the square for the meeting, crowded around the ancient udala tree. Odenigbo had told her how, as children, he and the others, sent to sweep the village square in the mornings, would instead spend most of their time fighting over the fallen udala fruit. They could not climb the tree or pluck the fruit because it was taboo; udala belonged to the spirits. She looked up at the tree as the elders addressed the crowd and imagined Odenigbo here as a boy, looking up as she was doing, hoping to see the shadowy outline of a spirit. Had he been energetic like Baby? Probably, perhaps more so than Baby
"Abba, kwenu!" the dibia Nwafor Agbada said, the man whose medicine was said to be the strongest in these parts.
"Yaa!" everyone said.
"Abba, kwezuenu!"
"Yaa!"
'Abba has never been defeated by anyone. I said that Abba has never been defeated." His voice was strong. He had only a few cotton-ball tufts of hair on his head, and his staff shook as he plunged it into the ground. "We do not look for quarrels, but when your quarrel finds us, we will crush you. We fought Ukwulu and Ukpo and finished them. My father never told me about a war where we were defeated, and his father never told him either. We will never run from our homeland. Our fathers forbid it. We will never run from our own land!"
The crowd cheered. So did Ola
She told Odenigbo about Mohammed's letter as they walked back from the village square after the meeting. "He must be so upset about all of this. I can't imagine how he must be feeling."
"How can you say that?" Odenigbo said.
She slowed her pace and turned to him, startled. "What's the matter?"
"What's the matter is that you are saying that a bloody Muslim Hausa man is upset! He is complicit, absolutely complicit, in everything that happened to our people, so how can you say he is upset?"
'Are you joking?"
"Am I joking? How can you sound this way after seeing what they did in Kano? Can you imagine what must have happened to Arize? They raped pregnant women before they cut them up!"