No Better Way to Recollect
Photo: Alessandro Fasari
The first thing known of Okorie is that he was a nineteen-year-old soldier that Uka had taken to loving so much. He was, in fact, Uka’s first and only true love. It was as if Okorie was a key specially designed to lock Uka, and no one else could fit into her but him. The second is that he, Okorie, died while fighting for the nation that never lived. The third is that Okorie was just too young to understand what he was getting into—the love and the war, the gestures only he and Uka could interpret, the tons of sex he had with Uka, who, also, was full of youthful flare. Love and lust burned in both lovers, and they realized a way to fuse them, finding gratification in what this thing they were doing produced.
The year was 1967. And this year, like several others after it, had so much hotness and coldness at the same time. Tales of massacres of children and adults, hunger, displacements; and then tales of entirely different things, like new love. It was a different time, those days, with teenagers seriously falling and helplessly hiding. Not like the children of these days who flaunt opportunities their parents would have been too ashamed to flaunt as teens. If you were a teenager then, and you fell in love with someone, it was best to keep such a relationship, as the children say now, on the down low, away from the sniffing noses of the public, lest you earned names that meant disrespect for yourself and your family. The stray child. The uncouth child. The family’s shame.
So, though their parents always saw them both together, saw how they ambled to the Community Comprehensive Secondary School or St. Martins Cathedral together, saw how they fetched water from the public manual water pump together, saw how the boy eagerly accompanied Uka to Dosu market, even returned to assist her in her mother’s kitchen, they assumed that they were this close because they were children of very close families.
But then the war came, and they rapidly became adults, people who could make their own decisions. In their bones, zeal burned for the course that was going to make them free at last: free from a nation that wasn’t there’s in the first place, free from the bonds of adolescence. Free to explore their individual lives, to cuddle beside the window of a seaside house, letting the soft rays of the morning sun and the breeze from the ocean fill them.
“It was Okeoma—one of their kinsmen trading in the same district as her father and brother—who came home to inform Uka and her mother that “ndi Awusa” had butchered her father and brother like chickens.”
They felt this freedom a few times before this same zeal led Okorie to the army. The same zeal that snatched him away. Away from Uka. Forever. Faraway. The first time was when Uka went to Okorie’s family house to deliver the uneh that his mother had asked for. Nobody was home but Okorie. His mother had gone to the market, his father was away in Ibadan, trading, and Nne—his father’s mother who would have been in her hut chasing flies with a broom—had died the year before. When he called her achalugo nwanyi, omalicha m, she blushed, her cheeks felt cold, she could feel it in her mouth.
“I have never known beauty in this form.”
“I’ve always told you you’d make a good poet.”
“If I were ever a poet, I’d only write poems for you, no other person.”
His smile was enough to sprinkle sugar all over her brain, but it was the words and the way he said each of them that did it. She was flirting, and she knew it, and she loved it.
He uttered more words that stocked ice in her belly. His words chilled her, and that was why when he began to bring his hands sluggishly to her chest—the region her mother always warned her against letting any boy touch—she didn’t resist. The less resistance she put up, the more confident he became. They lured themselves into his father’s obi, and on the mattress, Okorie’s dreams of his hands over her breasts and his mouth over her nipples finally came true. There they were, on his father’s mattress, fondling themselves.
The second time was in the bush behind St. Martin’s Cathedral. It was early. They could still hear Fada’s voice from the megaphone facing the town as he preached that morning. There, in the bush behind St. Martins, they fondled again—quick, sensual, inaudible.
The third time was the first time they went all the way. Uka’s moans were intense. She couldn’t understand how this thing that caused her pain still pleasured her. With time, they lost count. Everything was perfect except the sad realization that they couldn’t just be like normal adults, settled, doing this sort of thing without having to hide from their families.
So, they swore, under the ube tree in front of St. Martin’s, to be together.
“I shall always love you all my life.
“Me, too, I shall ever be yours.”
And together they really were, until the war that taught them what life meant—nothing, just nothing. At first, like every other person caught in the war, they sang, “Biafra will win the war.” But when hopes were dashed, and homes were lost to bomb explosions and raids, and poverty and lack enthroned themselves before people who used to swim in the ocean of plenty, their songs changed. In fact, they didn’t have the strength to sing war songs anymore. The only things their mouth—because somehow their heart still wanted Biafra—could mutter were prayers for the war’s end, for Ojukwu to surrender to the Nigerian government, to be reunited with the Nigerians. Because, unlike the Nigerians, they had nothing for the war: no weapons, no food, no drugs, no foreign aid. And how do you fight a war with nothing?
“But then the war came, and they rapidly became adults, people who could make their own decisions. ”
It was the day before the capture of Umuahia that Okorie died. At the moment he died, his lover was running through bushes with a protruded tummy, guided by her mother. Even though all she really knew was that he was somewhere at the war front, at that moment she felt a deep melancholy; intuition, perhaps, was telling her something had happened to her lover. And even though she was too weak to pay any attention to the feeling, she somehow did.
Paying attention to the feeling built fear in her. The fear that still lives with her today, making her wish she could erase every bit of Okorie from her memory, preventing her from doing so.
Though she didn’t see him or his body even after the war ended in January of 1970, she knew that the war had taken him—just as it’d taken her father and her only brother and sibling who was learning a trade in Sabon Gari. It was Okeoma—one of their kinsmen trading in the same district as her father and brother—who came home to inform Uka and her mother that “ndi Awusa” had butchered her father and brother like chickens. “Ka fa-abu okukor.” Uka didn’t seem to mind that Okeoma had pronounced Hausa as Awusa. There was nothing she could mind, in fact, but the imaginations of her father and her brother lying stone cold in the brown hot sand of the North. She pictured her father in the hands of an angry black youth, begging for his life, and the youth paying no heed to his pleas. She imagined the angry youth sliding a dagger across her father’s neck and then her brother’s. Mba! No!
The day Okeoma came in November to narrate his tales of woe was especially sunny. The sun kissed the earth so severely it left trademarks on it, the ground cracked, thin hollow lines appeared like veins, and the earth resembled baked clay near ruin. Okeoma told them how lucky he was to have had a good Hausa friend. During the riot, Alhaji Mustafa took him into his house, hid him, and told his three wives, each with a dozen skinny children, to deny seeing any person that wasn’t a member of the family in the compound. When the boys with stony faces came to Alhaji Mustafa’s compound to search for anyone who was Igbo, all Mustafa’s children, even the very senseless ones, one after the other, denied that anyone who was not one of them came into the compound. As they left to look for more Igbos, satisfied that Mustafa was protecting no one, each of the boys bowed to the Alhaji: “Na gode, Alhaji.”
“When the heat died down after two days, I came out and found them”—by them, he meant Uka’s father and brother—“lying lifeless like they were skin bags stuffed with foam, no breath.”
He didn’t tell them that Uka’s brother wasn’t just killed, that he was decapitated and his head thrown to one side of the road, far away from the body. That the head had eyes wide open and lips that formed an “O”, displaying yellowish teeth. That giant flies perched on the bodies, buzzing irritatingly. That he almost threw up but had to maintain the serenity of the setting and return to Alhaji’s compound lest he be discovered. He wasn’t going to let them know all that. Those were not stories to tell a grieving family. He just told them that some days after, Alhaji Mustafa made arrangements for him to be brought back to the East, to this their village in Ihite Azia.
“Oh, what a good man Alhaji is,” he said solemnly, like a part of his heart ached. Uka resented him a bit though: why would he run to safety without his brothers? Why would he let people he called “umu nwannem” die like that while he ran to safety? But what Uka didn’t know was he was trying to save his own self, that there was no way he could return to call them to safety without himself being killed.
The fears that overpowered Uka made her believe Okeoma’s stories with her whole heart. Maybe because it seemed like the truth. Maybe because it seemed better to even know that they were killed and not sit down every day hoping that they’d return one day.
And to be said, this was unlike her. Unlike Uka. Uka the questionnaire. The Pocket Lawyer. The girl who questioned every damn thing, had always taken time before believing things and, without evidence, may just not believe at all. Here she was, believing this without evidence. So quickly? So undisputedly? Without having to behave like the pocket lawyer she was sometimes called?
She would have appreciated it had the fears only made her believe they, Okorie most especially, had gone forever and let her be. But “mba,” the fears seemed to be saying in a loud voice. No!
The day the news came over the radio Uka’s mother carried around, in the fallen voice of Philip Effiong: “We accept the existing administrative and political structure of the Federation of Nigeria. . . . That the Republic of Biafra hereby ceases to exist.” Uka felt so bitter. They were finally giving up when they’d lost all they’d ever held dear already. What was the essence of giving up? What was the essence of starting the war in the first place if they would just give up like that? Or has Ojukwu just toiled with the lives of people in the quest to better it? It worried her that her mother was one of the women who ran along the streets, flying the green-white-green flag, shouting, “O bi go, it has ended!” How cold could her mother be? Did she not feel the real impact of the war? The war that took her only son and her husband, the war that made them eat lizards and all manner of rodents, the war that turned them to thieves, people who went at night to harvest other people’s premature cassavas and yams. Memories, which were still very young at that time, invaded her like a Trojan horse. She couldn’t be happy that the war finally was ended, and somehow, she couldn’t be sad either. But she could weep.
And so she wept, as she continues to do up till this day, more so because she was just so young, eighteen, at the time of her lover’s disappearance and she had a daughter in her arms—of whose knowledge the boy lacked, not knowing she was pregnant—who looked just like the boy she used to love. Just herself and the baby. Nothing else.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Orji Victor Ebubechukwu is Igbo. He lives and writes from Port Harcourt, Nigeria. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, The Shallow Tales Review, African Writers Magazine, Kalahari Review and elsewhere. He is the non-fiction editor for The Shallow Tales Review. His Twitter handle is @EbubechukwuOrji
