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“Will Aunty Kainene come to Nsukka?” Baby asked.

Olanna turned and looked carefully at Baby’s face, to search for clairvoyance, a sign that Baby knew Kainene was coming back. At first she thought she saw it, and then she was not sure she did.

“Yes, my baby,” she said. “Aunty Kainene will come to Nsukka.”

“Is she still trading at afia attack?”

“Yes.”

Odenigbo started the car. He took off his glasses and wrapped them in a piece of cloth. Nigerian soldiers, they had heard, did not like people who looked like intellectuals.

“Can you see well enough to drive?” Olanna asked.

“Yes.” He glanced behind at Ugwu and Baby before easing the car out of the compound. They passed a few checkpoints manned by Nigerian soldiers, and Odenigbo muttered something under his breath each time they were waved past. At Abagana, they drove past the destroyed Nigerian fleet, a long, long column of burned and blackened vehicles. Olanna stared. We did this. She reached out and held Odenigbo’s hand.

“They won but we did this,” she said, and realized how odd it felt to say they won, to voice a defeat she did not believe. Hers was not a feeling of having been defeated; it was one of having been cheated. Odenigbo squeezed her hand. She sensed his nervousness in the tense set of his jaw as they approached Abba.

“I wonder if my house is still standing,” he said.

Bushes had sprung up everywhere; small huts were completely swallowed in browned grass. A shrub was growing at the gate of their compound and he parked near it, his chest rising and falling, his breathing loud. The house still stood. They waded through thick drying grass to get to it and Olanna looked around, half fearing she would see Mama’s skeleton lying somewhere. But his cousin had buried her; near the guava tree there was a slight elevation of earth and a cross roughly made from two branches. Odenigbo knelt down there and pulled out a tuft of grass and held it in his hand.

They drove to Nsukka on roads pockmarked with bullets and bomb craters; Odenigbo swerved often. The buildings were blackened, roofs blown off, walls half standing.

Here and there were black carcasses of burned cars. An eerie quiet reigned. Curved profiles of flying vultures filled the horizon. They came to a checkpoint. Some men were cutting the tall grass on the roadside, their cutlasses swinging up and down; others were carrying thick wood planks up to a house with walls that looked like Swiss cheese, riddled with bullet holes, some large, others small.

Odenigbo stopped beside the Nigerian officer. His belt buckle gleamed and he bent to peer into the car, a dark face with very white teeth.

“Why do you still have Biafran number plates? Are you supporters of the defeated rebels?” His voice was loud, contrived; it was as if he was acting and very aware of himself in the role of the bully. Behind him, one of his boys was shouting at the laboring men. A dead male body lay by the bush.

“We will change it when we get to Nsukka,” Odenigbo said.

“Nsukka?” The officer straightened up and laughed. “Ah, Nsukka University. You are the ones who planned the rebellion with Ojukwu, you book people.”

Odenigbo said nothing, looking straight ahead. The officer yanked his door open with a sudden movement. “Oya! Come out and carry some wood for us. Let’s see how you can help a united Nigeria.”

Odenigbo looked at him. “What is this for?”

“You are asking me? I said you should come on come out!”

A soldier stood behind the officer and cocked his gun.

“This is a joke,” Odenigbo muttered. “O na-egwu egwu.”

“Come out!” the officer said.

Olanna opened her door. “Come out, Odenigbo and Ugwu. Baby, sit in the car.”

When Odenigbo climbed out, the officer slapped his face, so violently, so unexpectedly, that Odenigbo fell against the car. Baby was crying.

“You are not grateful that we didn’t kill all of you? Come on carry those wood planks quickly, two at a time!”

“Let my wife stay with our daughter, please,” Odenigbo said.

The sound of the second slap from the officer was not as loud as the first. Olanna did not look at Odenigbo; she carefully focused on one of the men carrying a pile of cement blocks, his thin naked back coated in sweat. Then she walked to the pile of wood planks and picked two up. At first she staggered under the weight—she had not expected that they would be so heavy—then she steadied herself and began to walk up to the house. She was sweating when she came down. She noticed the hard eyes of a soldier following her, burning through her clothes. On her second trip up, he had come closer to stand by the pile.

Olanna looked at him and then called, “Officer!”

The officer had just waved a car on. He turned. “What is it?”