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The woman continued to cry. Her baby, too, began to cry.
When Ugwu took a batch of fronds across to the ladder, he stopped to peer into one of the classrooms. Cooking pots, sleeping mats, metal boxes, and bamboo beds cluttered it so completely that the room did not look as though it had ever been anything else but a home for disparate groups of people with nowhere else to go. A bright poster on the wall read: in case of air raid, do not panic. if you see the enemy, mow him down. Another woman with a baby tied to her back was washing peeled cassava tubers in a pan of filthy water. Her baby's face was wrinkled. Ugwu nearly choked when he came close and realized that the rotten smell came from her water: it had previously been used to soak cassava, perhaps for days, and was being reused. The smell was awful, nose-filling, the smell of a dirty toilet and rancid steamed beans and boiled eggs gone bad.
He held his breath and went back to the palm fronds. The crying woman was nursing her baby on a drooping breast.
"Our town would not have fallen but for the saboteurs in our midst!" the man with the braided beard said. "I was a Civil Defender. I know how many infiltrators we discovered, and all of them were Rivers people. What I am telling you is that we can no longer trust these minorities who don't speak Igbo." He paused and turned when he heard a shout from some young boys playing War in the middle of the school compound. They looked about ten or eleven years old, wore banana leaves on their heads, and held mock guns made from bamboo. The longest gun belonged to the commander of the Biafran side, a tall stern child with sharp cheekbones. "Advance!" he shouted.
The boys crept forward.
"Fire!"
They flung stones with wide sweeps of their arms and then, clutching their guns, they rushed toward the other boys, the Nigerian side, the losers.
The bearded man began to clap. "These boys are wonderful! Just give them arms and they will send the vandals back."
Other people clapped and cheered the boys. The palm fronds were ignored for a while.
"You know I kept trying to join the army when this war started," the bearded man said. "I went everywhere but they kept rejecting me because of my leg so I had to join the Civil Defenders."
"What is wrong with your leg?" the woman grinding melon seeds asked.
He raised his leg. Half of his foot was gone and what was left looked like a shriveled piece of old yam. "I lost it in the North," he said.
In the silence that followed, the crackling of the palm fronds was too loud. Then a woman came out of a classroom, after a small child, slapping the child's head again and again. "So you broke only one plate? No, go ahead and break all my plates. Break them! Kuwa ha! We have many, don't we? We came with all our plates, didn't we? Break them!" she said. The little girl ran off toward the mango tree. Before the mother went back into the classroom, she stood there and cursed for a while, muttering that those spirits that had sent the child to break her few plates would not succeed.
"Why should the child not break a plate? What food is there to eat from it anyway?" the breast-feeding woman asked sourly, still sniffling. They laughed, and Eberechi leaned toward Ugwu and whispered that the bearded man had bad breath, which was probably why they did not take him in the army. Ugwu ached to press his body against hers.
They left together and Ugwu looked back to make sure that everyone had noticed that they were together. A soldier in a Biafran Army uniform and a helmet walked past them, speaking a mangled Pidgin English that made little sense, his voice too loud. He swayed as he walked, as if he would tip over sideways. He had one full arm, the other was a stump that stopped before his elbow. Eberechi watched him.
"His people do not know," she said quietly.
"What?"
"His people think he is well and fighting for our cause."
The soldier was shouting, "Don't waste your bullet! I say one vandal one bullet with immediate effect!" while the little boys gathered around him, taunting him, laughing at him, singing praise names for him.
Eberechi was walking a little faster. "My brother joined the army in the begi
"I didn't know."
"Yes. He has come home only once. Everybody on the street came out to greet him and the children were fighting to touch his uniform."
She said nothing else until they got to the front of her house and she turned away. "Let the day break," she said.
"See you tomorrow," Ugwu said. He wished he had said more to her.
Ugwu arranged three benches on the veranda for Ola
"We will teach mathematics, English, and civics every day," Ola
Ugwu watched her and wondered if she had tears in her eyes or if it was simply the glare of the sun. He wanted to learn all he could from her and Mrs. Muokelu, to excel at teaching, to show her that he could do it. He was arranging his blackboard against a tree stump on the first day of classes when a woman, some relative of Special Julius's, brought her daughter. She stared at Ugwu.
"Is this one a teacher?" she asked Ola
"Yes."
"Is he not your houseboy?" Her voice was shrill. "Since when has a servant started to teach, bikokwa?"
"If you do not want your child to learn, take her home," Ola
The woman pulled her daughter by the hand and left. Ugwu was certain that Ola
Other parents were different. They looked at Ola
After the first week, Ugwu became quietly convinced that Mrs. Muokelu knew very little. She calculated simple divisions with uncertainty, spoke in a low mumble when she read, as though she was afraid of the sentences, and scolded her pupils for getting something wrong without telling them what the correct thing was. And so he watched only Ola
At the end of the second week, after the children left, Mrs. Muokelu asked Ola
"I have twelve people to feed," she said. "And that is not counting my husband's relatives who have just come from Abakaliki. My husband has returned from the war front with one leg. What can he do? I am going to start afia attack and see if I can buy salt. I can no longer teach."