The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [23]
“You’re alive?” I asked. I was quite shaken. My family and I saw him on the day he died, July 6, 1967, the day we evacuated Nsukka in a hurry, with the sun a strange fiery red in the sky and nearby the boom-boom-boom of shelling as the federal soldiers advanced. We were in my Impala. The militia waved us through the campus gates and shouted that we should not worry, that the vandals––as we called the federal soldiers–– would be defeated in a matter of days and we could come back. The local villagers, the same ones who would pick through lecturers’ dustbins for food after the war, were walking along, hundreds of them, women with boxes on their heads and babies tied to their backs, barefoot children carrying bundles, men dragging bicycles, holding yams. I remember that Ebere was consoling our daughter, Zik, about the doll left behind in our haste, when we saw Ikenna’s green Kadett. He was driving the opposite way, back onto campus. I sounded the horn and stopped. “You can’t go back!” I called. But he waved and said, “I have to get some manuscripts.” Or maybe he said, “I have to get some materials.” I thought it rather foolhardy of him to go back in, since the shelling sounded close and our troops would drive the vandals back in a week or two anyway. But I was also full of a sense of our collective invincibility, of the justness of the Biafran cause, and so I did not think much more of it until we heard that Nsukka fell on the very day we evacuated and the campus was occupied. The bearer of the news, a relative of Professor Ezike’s, also told us that two lecturers had been killed. One of them had argued with the federal soldiers before he was shot. We did not need to be told this was Ikenna.
Ikenna laughed at my question. “I am, I am alive!” He seemed to find his own response even funnier, because he laughed again. Even his laughter, now that I think of it, seemed discolored, hollow, nothing like the aggressive sound that reverberated all over the Staff Club in those days, as he mocked people who did not agree with him.
“But we saw you,” I said. “You remember? That day we evacuated?”
“Yes,” he said.
“They said you did not come out.”
“I did.” He nodded. “I did. I left Biafra the following month.”
“You left?” It is incredible that I felt, today, a brief flash of that deep disgust that came when we heard of saboteurs––we called them “sabos”––who betrayed our soldiers, our just cause, our nascent nation, in exchange for a safe passage across to Nigeria, to the salt and meat and cold water that the blockade kept from us.
“No, no, it was not like that, not what you think.” Ikenna paused and I noticed that his gray shirt sagged at the shoulders. “I went abroad on a Red Cross plane. I went to Sweden.” There was an uncertainty about him, a diffidence that seemed alien, very unlike the man who so easily got people to act. I remember how he organized the first rally after Biafra was declared an independent state, all of us crowded at Freedom Square while Ikenna talked and we cheered and shouted, “Happy Independence!”
“You went to Sweden?”
“Yes.”
He said nothing else, and I realized that he would not tell me more, that he would not tell me just how he had left the campus alive or how he came to be on that plane; I know of the children airlifted to Gabon later in the war but certainly not of people flown out on Red Cross planes, and so early, too. The silence between us was tense.
“Have you been in Sweden since?” I asked.
“Yes. My whole family was in Orlu when they bombed it. Nobody left, so there was no reason for me to come back.” He stopped to let out a harsh sound that was supposed to be laughter but sounded more like a series of coughs. “I was