Odenigbo came and stood close to her and she wanted to back away, unsure what he was trying to do. He touched her collarbone. "Look how bony you are."

She glanced down, irritated by his touch, surprised to see how it jutted out; she did not know she had lost so much weight. She said nothing and went back to the living room. Richard was no longer there.

Kainene was still at the table. "So you and Odenigbo decided to look for a place?" she asked. "My humble home is not good enough?"

'Are you listening to him? We didn't decide anything. If he wants to find a place he can go ahead and live there alone," Olanna said.

Kainene looked at her. "What is the matter?"

Olanna shook her head.

Kainene dipped a finger in palm oil and brought it to her mouth. "Ejima m, what is the matter?" she asked again.

"Nothing, really. There is nothing I can point at," Olanna said, looking at the bottle of brandy on the table. "I want this war to end so that he can come back. He has become somebody else."

"We are all in this war, and it is up to us to decide to become somebody else or not," Kainene said.

"He just drinks and drinks cheap kai-kai. The few times they pay him, the money goes quickly. I think he slept with Alice, that Asaba woman in our yard. I can't stand him. I can't stand him close to me."

"Good," Kainene said.

"Good?"

"Yes, good. There's something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You've never even accepted that the man is ugly," Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.

In the morning, Kainene showed Olanna a small pear-shaped vial of face cream. "Look at this. Somebody went abroad and brought it for me. My face creams finished months ago and I've been using that horrible Biafran-made oil."

Olanna examined the pink jar. They took turns dabbing the cream on their faces, slowly, sensually, and afterward went down to the refugee camp. They went every morning. The new harmattan winds blew dust everywhere, and Baby joined the thin children who ran around with their naked bellies wreathed in brown. Many of the children collected pieces of shrapnel, played with them, traded them. When Baby came back with two bits of jagged metal, Olanna shouted at her and pulled her ear and took them away. She hated to think that Baby was playing with the cold leftovers of things that killed. But Kainene asked her to give them back to Baby. Kainene gave Baby a can to store the shrapnel. Kainene asked Baby to join the older children making lizard traps, to learn how to mat the palm fronds and place the cocoon full of iddo ants inside. Kainene let Baby hold the dagger of the emaciated man who paraded the compound, muttering, "Ngwa, let the vandals come, let them come now." Kainene let Baby eat a lizard leg.

"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 Heath-grove, 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."