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“Hei! I can’t take all of this,” Alice said, as she reached out and took it. “Thank you. Oh, thank you so much!”

“We haven’t seen him in a while. It came as a surprise.”

“And you are bothering with me. You shouldn’t have.” Alice was clutching the bag of salt to her chest. Her eyes were darkly shadowed, traces of green veins crawled just underneath her pale skin, and Olanna wondered if she was sick.

But Alice looked different, fresher-skinned, in the evening, when she came outside and sat next to Olanna on the floor of the veranda and stretched out her legs. Perhaps she had put on some powder. Her feet were tiny. She smelled of a familiar body cream. Mama Adanna walked past and said, “Eh! Alice, we have never seen you sitting outside before!” and Alice’s lips moved slightly in a smile. Pastor Ambrose was praying by the banana trees. His red long-sleeved robe shimmered in the waning sun. “Holy Jehovah destroy the vandals with holy-ghost fire! Holy Jehovah fight for us!”

“God is fighting for Nigeria,” Alice said. “God always fights for the side that has more arms.”

“God is on our side!” Olanna surprised herself by how sharp she sounded. Alice looked taken aback and, from somewhere behind the house, Bingo howled.

“I only think that God fights with the just side,” Olanna added gently.

Alice slapped away a mosquito. “Ambrose is pretending to be a pastor to avoid the army.”

“Yes, he is.” Olanna smiled. “Do you know that strange church on Ogui Road in Enugu? He looks like one of those pastors.”

“I am not really from Enugu.” Alice drew up her knees. “I am from Asaba. I left after I finished at the Teacher Training College there and went to Lagos. I was working in Lagos before the war. I met an army colonel and in a few months he asked me to marry him, but he did not tell me that he was already married and his wife was abroad. I got pregnant. He kept postponing going to Asaba to do the traditional ceremonies. But I believed him when he said that he was busy and under pressure with all that was happening in the country. After they killed the Igbo officers, he escaped and I came to Enugu with him. I had my baby in Enugu. I was with him in Enugu when his wife came back just before the war started and he left me. Then my baby died. Then Enugu fell. So here I am.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I am a stupid woman. I am the one who believed all his lies.”

“Don’t say that.”

“You are lucky. You have your husband and daughter. I don’t know how you do it, keeping everything together and teaching children and all that. I wish I were like you.”

Alice’s admiration warmed and surprised her. “There is nothing special about me,” Olanna said.

Pastor Ambrose was getting frenzied. “Devil, I shoot you! Satan, I bomb you!”

“How did you manage evacuating Nsukka?” Alice asked. “Did you lose much?”

“Everything. We left in a rush.”

“It was the same for me in Enugu. I don’t know why they will never tell us the truth so we can prepare. The people in the Ministry of Information took their public-address van all over the city telling us everything was okay, it was only our boys practicing with the shelling. If they had told us the truth, many of us would have been better prepared and would not have lost so much.”

“But you brought your piano.” Olanna didn’t like the way Alice said they, as if she was not on their side.

“It is the only thing I took from Enugu. He sent me money and a van to help me on the very day Enugu fell. His guilty conscience was working overtime. The driver told me later that he and his wife had moved their own things to their hometown some weeks before. Imagine!”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“I don’t want to know. If I see that man again, ezi okwu m, I will kill him with my own hands.” Alice raised her tiny hands. She was speaking Igbo for the first time, and in her Asaba dialect, the F’s sounded like W’s. “When I think of what I went through for that man. I gave up my job in Lagos, I kept telling lies to my family, and I cut off my friends who told me he was not serious.” She bent down to pick up something from the sand. “And he could not even do.”

“What?”

“He would jump on top of me, moan oh-oh-oh like a goat, and that was it.” She raised her finger. “With something this small. And afterward he would smile happily without ever wondering if I had known when he started and stopped. Men! Men are hopeless!”

“No, not all of them. My husband knows how to do, and with something like this.” Olanna raised a clenched fist. They laughed and she sensed, between them, a vulgar and delicious female bond.

Olanna waited for Odenigbo to come home so that she could tell him about her new friendship with Alice, about what she had told Alice. She wanted him to come home and pull her forcefully to him in the way he had not done in a long time. But when he did come home from Tanzania Bar, it was with a gun. The double-barreled gun, long and black and dull, lay on the bed. “Gini bu ife a? What is this?” Olanna asked.

“Somebody at the directorate gave it to me. It’s quite old. But it’s good to have just in case.”

“I don’t want a gun here.”

“We’re fighting a war. There are guns everywhere.” He slipped out of his trousers and tied a wrapper around his waist before he took his shirt off.