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“Chiamaka should see life as it is, ejima m,” Kainene said, as they moisturized their faces. “You protect her too much from life.”

“I just want to keep my child safe,” Olanna said. She took a small dash of cream and began to rub it into her face with the tips of her fingers.

“They protected us too much,” Kainene said.

“Daddy and Mom?” Olanna asked, although she knew.

“Yes.” Kainene spread the cream on her face with her palms. “Good thing Mom left. Can you imagine her ever living without things like this? Or using palm-kernel oil?”

Olanna laughed. She wished, though, Kainene would not take so much of the cream, so that it would last as long as possible.

“Why were you always so keen to please Mom and Dad?” Kainene asked.

Olanna held her hands to her face, silent for a while. “I don’t know. I think I felt sorry for them.”

“You have always felt sorry for people who don’t need you to feel sorry for them.”

Olanna said nothing because she did not know what to say. It was the kind of thing she would have discussed with Odenigbo, Kainene’s voicing for the first time a resentment with their parents and with her, but she and Odenigbo hardly talked. He had found a bar close by; only last week, the bar owner had come to the house asking for him because he had not paid his balance. Olanna said nothing to him after the bar owner left. She was no longer sure when he went to the Manpower Directorate and when he simply went to the bar. She refused to worry about him.

She worried about other things: how her periods were sparse and no longer red but a muddy brown, how Baby’s hair was falling out, how hunger was stealing the memories of the children. She was determined that their minds be kept alert; they were Biafra’s future, after all. So every day she taught them under the flame tree, away from the horrible smells toward the back of the buildings. She would have them memorize one line of a poem, and the next day they would have forgotten it. They chased after lizards. They ate garri and water once a day now instead of twice because Kainene’s suppliers could no longer cross over to Mbosi to buy garri; all the roads were occupied. Kainene launched a Plant Our Own Food movement, and when she joined the men and women and children in making ridges, Olanna wondered where she had learned to hold a hoe. But the soil was parched. The harmattan cracked lips and feet. Three children died in one day. Father Marcel said Mass without Holy Communion. The belly of a young girl named Urenwa began to grow and Kainene was not sure if it was kwashiorkor or pregnancy until the girl’s mother slapped her and asked, “Who? Who did this to you? Where did you see the man that did this to you?” The doctor no longer visited because there was no petrol and there were too many dying soldiers to treat. The well dried up. Kainene went often to the Directorate at Ahiara to get a water tanker, but each time she came back with a vague promise from the director. The thick ugly odors of unwashed bodies and rotting flesh from the shallow graves behind the buildings grew stronger. Flies flew over the sores on children’s bodies. Bedbugs and kwalikwata crawled; women would untie their wrappers to reveal an ugly rash of reddened bites around their waists, like hives steeped in blood. Oranges were in season and Kainene asked them to eat oranges from the trees, although it gave them diarrhea, and then to squeeze the peels against their skin because the smell of citrus masked the smell of dirt.

In the evenings, Olanna and Kainene walked home together. They talked about the people at the camp, about their school days at Heathgrove, about their parents, about Odenigbo.

“Have you asked him again about that Asaba woman?” Kainene said.

“Not yet.”

“Before you ask him, just walk up to him and slap his face. If he dares to slap you back, I will come at him with Harrison’s kitchen knife. But the slap will shake the truth out of him.”

Olanna laughed and noticed that they were both walking at a leisurely pace and that their steps were in harmony, their slippers coated in brown dust.

“Grandpapa used to say that it gets worse and then it gets better. O dikata njo, o dikwa mma,” Kainene said.

“I remember.”

“The world will turn around soon, and Nigeria will stop this,” Kainene said quietly. “We’ll win.”

“Yes.” Olanna believed it more because Kainene said it.

There were evenings when Kainene was distant, immersed in herself. Once she said, “I never really noticed Ikejide,” and Olanna placed an arm on her sister’s shoulder and said nothing. Mostly, though, Kainene was in high spirits and they would sit outside and talk and listen to the radio and to the bats flying around the cashew trees. Sometimes Richard joined them. Odenigbo never did.

Then, one evening, it rained, a flinty blustery rain, a strange shower in the dry season, and perhaps it was why Odenigbo did not go to the bar. It was the evening that he finally accepted Richard’s brandy, holding it to his nose and inhaling deeply before he drank, he and Richard still saying very little to each other. And it was the evening that Dr. Nwala came to tell them that Okeoma had been killed. Lightning flashed across the sky and thunder rumbled and Kainene said, laughing, “It sounds like shelling.”

“I’m worried that they have not bombed us in a while,” Olanna said. “I wonder what they are planning.”

“Perhaps an atomic bomb,” Kainene said.

They heard the car drive in then and Kainene stood up. “Who is visiting in this kind of weather at night?”

She opened the door and Dr. Nwala came in, water dripping down his face. Olanna recalled how he had extended his hand to help her up after the air raid on her wedding day, how he had said that her dress would get dirty—as though it were not already dirty from lying on the ground. He was thinner and lankier than she remembered and looked as though he would break in two if he sat down abruptly. He did not sit down. He did not waste time with greetings. He had raised his loose shirt away from his body, was rapidly flipping it to get the water off when he said, “Okeoma has gone, o jebego. They were on a mission to retake Umuahia when it happened. I saw him last month, and he told me he was writing some poems and Olanna was his muse, and if anything happened to him I should make sure the poems went to her. But I can’t find them. The people who brought the message said that they never saw him writing anything. So I said I would come and tell you he has gone but I did not find the poems.”

Olanna was nodding without quite understanding because Dr. Nwala was saying too many words too quickly. Then she stopped. He meant that Okeoma was dead. It was raining in harmattan and Okeoma was dead.

“Okeoma?” Odenigbo spoke in a cracked whisper. “Onye? Are you talking about Okeoma?”

Olanna reached out and grasped Odenigbo’s arm and the scream

s came out of her, screeching, piercing screams, because something in her head was stretched taut. Because she felt attacked, relentlessly clobbered, by loss. She did not let go of his arm until Dr. Nwala stumbled back into the rain, until they climbed silently onto their mattress on the floor. When he slid into her, she thought how different he felt, lighter and narrower, on top of her. He was still, so still she thrashed around and pulled at his hips. But he did not move. Then he began to thrust and her pleasure multiplied, sharpened on stone so that each tiny spark became a pleasure all its own. She heard herself crying, her sobbing louder and louder until Baby stirred and he placed his palm against her mouth. He was crying too; she felt the tears drop on her body before she saw them on his face.