• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1001 0

TV on. It was still raining on the screen, although Dr. Otagbu’s son, the bright young man who is reading electronics engineering, came last week to fix it. My satellite channels went off after the last thunderstorm, but I have not yet gone to the satellite office to find somebody to look at it. One can stay some weeks without BBC and CNN anyway, and the programs on NTA are quite good. It was NTA, some days ago, that broadcast an interview with yet another man accused of importing fake drugs––typhoid fever medicine in this case. “My drugs don’t kill people,” he said, helpfully, facing the camera wide-eyed, as if in an appeal to the masses. “It is only that they will not cure your illness.” I turned the TV off because I could no longer bear to see the man’s blubbery lips. But I was not offended, not as egregiously as I would have been if Ebere did not visit. I only hoped that he would not be let free to go off once again to China or India or wherever they go to import expired medicine that will not actually kill people, but will only make sure the illness kills them.

I wonder why it never came up, throughout the years after the war, that Ikenna Okoro did not die. True, we did sometimes hear stories of men who had been thought dead and who walked into their compounds months, even years, after January 1970; I can only imagine the quantity of sand thrown on broken men by family members suspended between disbelief and hope. But we hardly talked about the war. When we did, it was with an implacable vagueness, as if what mattered were not that we had crouched in muddy bunkers during air raids after which we buried corpses with bits of pink on their charred skin, not that we had eaten cassava peels and watched our children’s bellies swell from malnutrition, but that we had survived. It was a tacit agreement among all of us, the survivors of Biafra. Even Ebere and I, who had debated our first child’s name, Zik, for months, agreed very quickly on Nkiruka: what is ahead is better.

I am sitting now in my study, where I marked my students’ papers and helped Nkiru with her secondary school mathematics assignments. The armchair leather is worn. The pastel paint above the bookshelves is peeling. The telephone is on my desk, on a fat phone book. Perhaps it will ring and Nkiru will tell me something about our grandson, how well he did in school today, which will make me smile even though I believe American teachers are not circumspect enough and too easily award an A. If it does not ring soon, then I will take a bath and go to bed and, in the still darkness of my room, listen for the sound of doors opening and closing.

ON MONDAY OF LAST WEEK

Since Monday of last week, Kamara had begun to stand in front of mirrors. She would turn from side to side, examining her lumpy middle and imagining it flat as a book cover, and then she would close her eyes and imagine Tracy caressing it with those paint-stained fingers. She did so now in front of the bathroom mirror after she flushed.

Josh was standing by the door when she came out. Tracy’s seven-year-old son. He had his mother’s thick, unarched eyebrows, like straight lines drawn above his eyes.

“Pee-pee or a poopy?” he asked in his mock baby voice.

“Pee-pee.” She walked into the kitchen, where the gray venetian blinds cast strips of shadow over the counter, where they had been practicing all afternoon for his Read-A-Thon competition. “Have you finished your juiced spinach?” she asked.

“Yes.” He was watching her. He knew—he had to know—that the only reason she went into the bathroom each time she handed him the glass of green juice was to give him a chance to pour it away. It had started the first day Josh tasted it, made a face, and said, “Ugh. I hate it.”

“Your dad says you’ll have to drink it every day before dinner,” Kamara had said. “It’s only half a glass, it would take a minute to pour it away,” she added, and then turned to go to the bathroom. That was all. When she came out the glass was empty, as it was now, placed beside the sink.

“I’ll cook your dinner so you will be all