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"Goodness. I didn't know how much time had passed," Kainene said.
"Will you visit again?"
There was a pause before Kainene said, "I spend most of the day at the refugee camp. Maybe you can come and see it." She fumbled for a piece of paper in her handbag and wrote down the directions to her house.
"Yes, I'll come. I'll come next Wednesday."
"Will you drive?"
"No. Because of the soldiers. And we never have much petrol."
"Greet the revolutionary for me." Kainene climbed into the car and started it.
"Your number plates are different," Ola
"I paid extra to stamp my patriotism on my car. Vigilance!" Kainene raised her eyebrows and a hand before she drove off. Ola
On Wednesday, Ola
"How are you, Harrison?"
"Fine, madam," he said, and bowed, finally.
Ola
"Ejima m," she said, hugging Ola
"No, not now." Ola
"I was listening to Nigerian radio. Lagos says Chinese soldiers are fighting for us and Kaduna says every Igbo woman deserves to be raped," Kainene said. "Their imagination impresses me."
"I never listen to them."
"Oh, I listen more to Lagos and Kaduna than to Radio Biafra. You have to keep your enemy close."
Harrison came in and bowed. "Madam? I am bringing drinks?"
"The way he goes on you would think we had a grand cellar in this half-built house in the middle of nowhere," Kainene muttered, combing her wig with her fingers.
"Madam?"
"No, Harrison, don't bring drinks. We're leaving now. Remember, lunch for two."
"Yes, madam."
Ola
" Harrison is the most pretentious peasant I have ever seen," Kainene said, as she started the car. "I know you don't like the word peasant."
"No."
"But he is, you know."
"We are all peasants."
'Are we? It's the sort of thing Richard would say."
Ola
Kainene glanced at her. "Richard left very early today. He's going to Gabon to visit the kwashiorkor center next week and he said he needed to see to the arrangements. But I think he left so early because he felt awkward about seeing you."
"Oh." Ola
Kainene steered with a careless confidence, past potholes on the road, past palm trees stripped of fronds, past a thin soldier pulling along a thi
"Do you ever dream of that child's head in the calabash?" she asked.
Ola
"Grandpapa used to say, about difficulties he had gone through, 'It did not kill me, it made me knowledgeable.' O gburo m egbu, o mee ka m main ife."
"I remember."
"There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable," Kainene said.
There was a pause. Inside Ola
"Do you know what I mean?" Kainene asked.
"Yes."
At the research center, Kainene parked under a tree and Ola
"Father Marcel, my twin sister, Ola
The priest looked surprised. "Welcome," he said, and then added, u
They stood under a flame tree while he told Kainene that the bag of crayfish had been delivered, that the Red Cross really had suspended relief flights, that Inatimi had come earlier with somebody else from the Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters and said he would return later. Ola
"Let's give you a tour," Kainene said to Ola
Ola
Kainene was watching her. "You don't have to go in."
"I want to," Ola
"That woman is dead. We have to get her removed," Kainene said.
"No!" Ola
"What is that?" Ola
"Protein tablet. I'll give you some for Chiamaka. They taste horrible. I finally got the Red Cross to give me some last week. We don't have enough, of course, so I save them for the children. If I gave it to most of the people in there it would make no difference. But maybe it will for this baby. Maybe."