Olanna stared at him.

"What has happened has happened," Okeoma said. "You must be strong."

A short and shabby silence fell across the room.

"Julius brought some fresh palm wine," Odenigbo said finally. "You know, they mix in too much water these days, but this one is very good."

"I'll drink that later. Where is that White Horse whisky you save for special occasions?"

"It is almost finished."

"Then I will finish it," Okeoma said.

Odenigbo brought the bottle and they sat in the living room, the radio turned low and the aroma of Ugwu's soup in the air.

"My commander drinks this like water," Okeoma said, and shook the bottle to see how much was left.

"And how is he, your commander, the white-man mercenary?" Odenigbo asked.

Okeoma darted an apologetic glance at Olanna before he said, "He throws girls on their backs in the open where the men can see him and does them, all the time holding his bag of money in one hand." Okeoma drank from the bottle and scrunched up his face for a moment. "We could easily have retaken Enugu if the man only listened, but he thinks he knows more about our own land than we do. He has started commandeering relief cars. He threatened His Excellency last week that he would leave if he doesn't get his balance."

Okeoma took another swig from the bottle.

"Two days ago I went out in mufti and a ranger stopped me on the road and accused me of deserting. I warned him never to try that again or I would show him why we commandos are different from regular soldiers. I heard him laughing as I walked away. Imagine that! Before, he would never have dared to laugh at a commando. If we don't reorganize soon we will lose our credibility."

"Why should white people be paid to fight our war anyway?" Odenigbo leaned back on the chair. "There are many of us who can truly fight because we are willing to give ourselves for Biafra."

Olanna stood up. "Let's eat," she said. "I'm sorry our soup has no meat, Okeoma."

"I'm sorry our soup has no meat" Okeoma mimicked. "Does this place look like a meat shop? I did not come looking for meat."

Ugwu placed the plates of garri on the table.

"Please remove your grenade while we eat, Okeoma," Olanna said.

He dislodged it from his waist and placed it in the corner. They ate in silence for a while, molding their garri into balls, dipping in soup, swallowing.

"What is that scar?" Olanna asked.

"Oh, it's nothing," Okeoma said, and ran his hand lightly over it. "It looks more serious than it is."

"You should join the Biafran Writers League," she said. "You should be one of those going abroad to publicize our cause."

Okeoma started to shake his head while Olanna was still speaking. "I am a soldier," he said.

"Do you still write?" Olanna asked.

He shook his head again.

"Do you have a poem for us, though? From your head?" she asked, and sounded desperate even to herself.

Okeoma swallowed a ball of garri, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. "No," he said. He turned to Odenigbo. "Did you hear what our shore batteries did to the vandals in the Onitsha sector?"

After lunch, Odenigbo went into the bedroom. Okeoma finished the whisky and then drank glass after glass of palm wine and fell asleep in the living room chair. His breathing was labored; he mumbled and twice flayed his arms as if to shake some invisible attackers off. Olanna patted his shoulder to wake him up.

"Kunie. Come and lie down inside," she said.

He opened reddened, bewildered eyes. "No, no, I'm really not sleeping."

"Look at you. You were gone."

"Not at all." Okeoma stifled a yawn. "I do have a poem in my head." He sat up and straightened his back and began to recite. He sounded different. In Nsukka, he had read his poetry dramatically, as though convinced that his art mattered more than anything else. Now he had a tone of unwilling banter, but still banter.

"Brown

With the fish-glow sheen of a mermaid,

She appears,

Bearing silver dawn; And the sun attends her, The mermaid Who will never be mine."

"Odenigbo would have said, 'The voice of a generation!'" Olanna said.

"What would you say?"

"The voice of a man."

Okeoma smiled shyly, and she remembered how Odenigbo teased her about his being secretly infatuated with her. The poem was about her, and he had wanted her to know it. They sat in silence until his eyes began to close and soon his snoring became regular. She watched him and wondered what he was dreaming about. He was still sleeping, often mumbling and rolling his head from side to side, when Professor Achara arrived in the evening.

"Oh, your friend the commando is here," he said. "Please call Odenigbo. Let's go out to the veranda."

They sat on the bench on the veranda. Professor Achara kept glancing down, clasping and unclasping his hands.

"I have come on a difficult matter," he said.

Fear constricted Olanna's chest: something had happened to Kainene and they had sent Professor Achara to tell her. She wanted Professor Achara to leave right away without telling her, because what she did not know would not hurt her.

"What is it?" Odenigbo asked sharply.

"I have tried to make your landlord change his mind. I have done everything I can. But he refused. He wants you to pack out in two weeks."

"I'm not sure I understand," Odenigbo said.

But Olanna was sure he did. They were being asked to move out of the house because the landlord had found somebody who would pay him twice or perhaps three times the rent.

"I'm so sorry, Odenigbo. He is usually a most reasonable man, but I suppose the times have taken away a bit of our reason."

Odenigbo sighed.

"I will help find another place," Professor Achara said.

They were lucky to find one room, now that Umuahia was thronged with refugees. The long strip of a building had nine rooms, side by side, with doors that led out onto a narrow veranda. The kitchen was at one end and the bathroom at the other, next to a grove of banana trees. Their room was closer to the bathroom and, on the first day, Olanna looked at it and could not imagine how she would live here with Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu, eat and dress and make love in a single room. Odenigbo set about separating their sleeping area with a thin curtain, and afterward Olanna looked at the sagging string he had tied to nails on the wall, remembered Uncle Mbaezi and Aunty Ifeka's room in Kano, and began to cry.

"We'll get something better soon," Odenigbo said, and she nodded and did not tell him that she was not crying about their room.

Mama Oji lived next door. She had a hard face and blinked so rarely that Olanna was disconcerted by her wide-eyed stare the first time they spoke.

"Welcome, nno," she said. "Your husband is not here?"

"He's at work," Olanna said.

"I wanted to see him before the others do; it is about my children."

"Your children?"

"The landlord called him doctor."

"Oh, no. He has a doctorate."

Mama Oji's cool uncomprehending eyes drilled holes into Olanna.

"He is a doctor of books," Olanna said, "not a doctor for sick people."

"Oh." Mama Oji's expression did not change. "My children have asthma. Three have died since the war started. Three are left."

"Sorry. Ndo," Olanna said.

Mama Oji shrugged and then told her that all the neighbors were accomplished thieves. If she left a container of kerosene in the kitchen, it would be empty when she came out. If she left her soap in the bathroom it would walk away. If she hung out her clothes and did not keep an eye on them, they would fly off the lines.