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"It is only the first page of your book." High-Tech smiled and offered Ugwu the joint.
Ugwu did not take it. "You tore my book?"
"It is only the first page. My paper finished."
Rage pumped through Ugwu. His slap was swift, powerful, furious, but High-Tech avoided the full impact because he moved back at the last second and Ugwu's hand only scraped his cheek. Ugwu raised his hand again but the other soldiers held him, dragged him away, said it was just a book after all, told him to drink some more gin.
"Sorry," High-Tech mumbled.
Ugwu's head ached. Everything was moving so fast. He was not living his life; life was living him. He drank steadily and watched the others, their mouths opening and closing, rancid jibes and conceited boasts and magnified memories coming out of them. Soon the bar itself, the benches placed around a table, became a sour-scented blur. The bar girl changed the bottles one after the other; Ugwu thought the gin was probably brewed in their backyard down the road. He got up to urinate outside and, afterward, leaned against a tree and breathed in the fresh air. It was like sitting in the backyard in Nsukka, looking at the lemon tree and his herb garden and Jomo's manicured plants. He stayed there for a while until he heard loud shouts from the bar. Perhaps somebody had won some bet or other. They tired him. The war tired him. When he finally went back inside, he stopped at the door. The bar girl was lying on her back on the floor, her wrapper bunched up at her waist, her shoulders held down by a soldier, her legs wide, wide ajar. She was sobbing, "Please, please, biko." Her blouse was still on. Between her legs, High-Tech was moving. His thrusts were jerky, his small buttocks darker-colored than his legs. The soldiers were cheering.
"High-Tech, enough! Discharge and retire!"
High-Tech groaned before he collapsed on top of her. A soldier pulled him off and was fumbling at his own trousers when somebody said, "No! Target Destroyer is next!"
Ugwu backed away from the door.
" Ujo abiala o! Target Destroyer is afraid!"
Ugwu shrugged and moved forward. "Who is afraid?" he said disdainfully. "I just like to eat before others, that is all."
"The food is still fresh!"
"Target Destroyer, aren't you a man? I bukwa nwoke?"
On the floor, the girl was still. Ugwu pulled his trousers down, surprised at the swiftness of his erection. She was dry and tense when he entered her. He did not look at her face, or at the man pi
There were more operations. Ugwu's fear sometimes overwhelmed him, froze him. He unwrapped his mind from his body, separated the two, while he lay in the trench, pressing himself into the mud, luxuriating in how close and co
One afternoon, the commander's jeep drove in with a sickly goat lying on its side, legs tied together. It had been commandeered from an idle civilian. It bleated meekly and the soldiers gathered, excited at the thought of meat. Two of them killed it and made a fire and when the large-cut chunks had been cooked, the commander asked that all of it be brought to his quarters. He spent long minutes checking through the basin to make sure the goat was complete: the legs, the head, the balls. Later, two village women came and were taken in to the commander's quarters; much later, the soldiers threw stones at them as they left. Ugwu dreamed that the commander had given half of the goat to the soldiers and that they had chewed everything and swallowed the bones.
When he woke up, a radio was turned on high and High-Tech was sobbing. Umuahia had fallen. Biafra 's capital was lost. A soldier threw his hands up and said, "That goat, that goat was a bad omen! All is lost! We have to surrender!" The other soldiers were subdued. Even the commander's saying that he was aware of a secret counterattack plan to recover Umuahia did not lift their spirits. But the a
Ugwu's salute was slack, because he was worried about Ola
30
Richard shifted as far away as he could from the two American journalists in the car, pressing himself against the door of the Peugeot. He really should have sat in front and asked the orderly to sit in back with them. But he had not imagined that they would smell so bad, Charles the plump one wearing a squashed hat and Charles the redhead with his chin covered in ginger hair.
"One Midwestern and one New York journalist coming to Biafra, and we're both named Charles. What were the odds?" the plump one said, laughing, after they introduced themselves. "And both our moms call us Chuck!"
Richard was not sure how long they had waited before boarding their flight at Lisbon, but the wait at Sao Tome for a relief flight to Biafra had stretched to seventeen hours. They needed a bath. When the plump one, sitting next to Richard, began to talk about his first visit to Biafra at the begi
"I came in a real plane and we landed at Port Harcourt airport," he said. "But this time I was sitting on the floor of a plane flying with no lights, alongside twenty tons of dried milk. We flew so fucking low, I looked out and could see the orange bursts of the Nigerian antiaircraft. I was scared shitless." He laughed, his fat-padded face broad and pleasant.
The redhead did not laugh. "We don't know for sure that it was Nigerian fire. The Biafrans could have put it on."
"Oh, come on!" The plump one glanced at Richard, but Richard kept his face straight. "Of course it was Nigerian fire."
"The Biafrans are mixing up food and guns in their planes, anyway," the redhead said. He turned to Richard. "Aren't they?"