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“Like what?” he asked, half-offended.
“Like meat,” she replied undaunted.
“Do you still eat meat?” he challenged.
“Who am I? But other big men like you eat.”
“I don’t know which big men you have in mind. But they are not like me. I don’t make money trading with the enemy or selling relief or …”
“Augusta’s boyfriend doesn’t do that. He just gets foreign exchange.”
“How does he get it? He swindles the government—that’s how he gets foreign exchange, whoever he is. Who is Augusta, by the way?”
“My girlfriend.”
“I see.”
“She gave me three dollars last time which I changed to forty-five pounds. The man gave her fifty dollars.”
“Well, my dear girl, I don’t traffic in foreign exchange and I don’t have meat in my fridge. We are fighting a war and I happen to know that some young boys at the front drink gari and water once in three days.”
“It is true,” she said simply. “Monkey de work, baboon de chop.”
“It is not even that; it is worse,” he said, his voice beginning to shake. “People are dying every day. As we talk now somebody is dying.”
“It is true,” she said again.
“Plane!” screamed his boy from the kitchen.
“My mother!” screamed Gladys. As they scuttled towards the bunker of palm stems and red earth, covering their heads with their hands and stooping slightly in their flight, the entire sky was exploding with the clamour of jets and the huge noise of homemade anti-aircraft rockets.
Inside the bunker she clung to him even after the plane had gone and the guns, late to start and also to end, had all died down again.
“It was only passing,” he told her, his voice a little shaky. “It didn’t drop anything. From its direction I should say it was going to the war front. Perhaps our people who are pressing them. That’s what they always do. Whenever our boys press them, they send an SOS to the Russians and Egyptians to bring the planes.” He drew a long breath.
She said nothing, just clung to him. They could hear his boy telling the servant from the next house that there were two of them and one dived like this and the other dived like that.
“I see dem well well,” said the other with equal excitement. “If no to say de ting de kill porson e for sweet for eye. To God.”
“Imagine!” said Gladys, finding her voice at last. She had a way, he thought, of conveying with a few words or even a single word whole layers of meaning. Now it was at once her astonishment as well as reproof, tinged perhaps with grudging admiration for people who could be so light-hearted about these bringers of death.
“Don’t be so scared,” he said. She moved closer and he began to kiss her and squeeze her breasts. She yielded more and more and then fully. The bunker was dark and unswept and might harbour crawling things. He thought of bringing a mat from the main house but reluctantly decided against it. Another plane might pass and send a neighbour or simply a chance passerby crashing into them. That would be only slightly better than a certain gentleman in another air-raid who was seen in broad daylight fleeing his bedroom for his bunker stark-naked pursued by a woman in a similar state!
Just as Glady had feared, her friend was not in town. It would seem her powerful boyfriend had wangled for her a flight to Libreville to shop. So her neighbours thought anyway.
“Great!” said Nwankwo as they drove away. “She will come back on an arms plane loaded with shoes, wigs, pants, bras, cosmetics and what have you, which she will then sell and make thousands of pounds. You girls are really at war, aren’t you?”
She said nothing and he thought he had got through at last to her. Then suddenly she said, “That is what you men want us to do.”
“Well,” he said, “here is one man who doesn’t want you to do that. Do you remember that girl in khaki jeans who searched me without mercy at the checkpoint?”
She began to laugh.
“That is the girl I want you to become again. Do you remember her? No wig. I don’t even think
she had any earrings …”
“Ah, na lie-o. I had earrings.”
