"Mah? For who?" Ugwu looked suspicious.

"For Alice. And don't tell the neighbors what we have. If they ask, say an old friend sent books to your master."

"Yes, mah."

Olanna felt Ugwu's disapproving eyes following her as she took the bag over to Alice's room. There was no response to her knock. She had turned to walk away when Alice opened the door.

"A friend of ours brought us some provisions," Olanna said, holding out the bag of salt.

"Hei! I can't take all of this," Alice said, as she reached out and took it. "Thank you. Oh, thank you so much!"

"We haven't seen him in a while. It came as a surprise."

"And you are bothering with me. You shouldn't have." Alice was clutching the bag of salt to her chest. Her eyes were darkly shadowed, traces of green veins crawled just underneath her pale skin, and Olanna wondered if she was sick.

But Alice looked different, fresher-skinned, in the evening, when she came outside and sat next to Olanna on the floor of the veranda and stretched out her legs. Perhaps she had put on some powder. Her feet were tiny She smelled of a familiar body cream. Mama Adanna walked past and said, "Eh! Alice, we have never seen you sitting outside before!" and Alice 's lips moved slightly in a smile. Pastor Ambrose was praying by the banana trees. His red long-sleeved robe shimmered in the waning sun. "Holy Jehovah destroy the vandals with holy-ghost fire! Holy Jehovah fight for us!"

"God is fighting for Nigeria," Alice said. "God always fights for the side that has more arms."

"God is on our side!" Olanna surprised herself by how sharp she sounded. Alice looked taken aback and, from somewhere behind the house, Bingo howled.

"I only think that God fights with the just side," Olanna added gently.

Alice slapped away a mosquito. "Ambrose is pretending to be a pastor to avoid the army."

"Yes, he is." Olanna smiled. "Do you know that strange church on Ogui Road in Enugu? He looks like one of those pastors."

"I am not really from Enugu." Alice drew up her knees. "I am from Asaba. I left after I finished at the Teacher Training College there and went to Lagos. I was working in Lagos before the war. I met an army colonel and in a few months he asked me to marry him, but he did not tell me that he was already married and his wife was abroad. I got pregnant. He kept postponing going to Asaba to do the traditional ceremonies. But I believed him when he said that he was busy and under pressure with all that was happening in the country. After they killed the Igbo officers, he escaped and I came to Enugu with him. I had my baby in Enugu. I was with him in Enugu when his wife came back just before the war started and he left me. Then my baby died. Then Enugu fell. So here I am."

"I'm so sorry."

"I am a stupid woman. I am the one who believed all his lies."

"Don't say that."

"You are lucky. You have your husband and daughter. I don't know how you do it, keeping everything together and teaching children and all that. I wish I were like you."

Alice 's admiration warmed and surprised her. "There is nothing special about me," Olanna said.

Pastor Ambrose was getting frenzied. "Devil, I shoot you! Satan, I bomb you!"

"How did you manage evacuating Nsukka?" Alice asked. "Did you lose much?"

"Everything. We left in a rush."

"It was the same for me in Enugu. I don't know why they will never tell us the truth so we can prepare. The people in the Ministry of Information took their public-address van all over the city telling us everything was okay, it was only our boys practicing with the shelling. If they had told us the truth, many of us would have been better prepared and would not have lost so much."

"But you brought your piano." Olanna didn't like the way Alice said they, as if she was not on their side.

"It is the only thing I took from Enugu. He sent me money and a van to help me on the very day Enugu fell. His guilty conscience was working overtime. The driver told me later that he and his wife had moved their own things to their hometown some weeks before. Imagine!"

"Do you know where he is now?"

"I don't want to know. If I see that man again, ezi okwu m, I will kill him with my own hands." Alice raised her tiny hands. She was speaking Igbo for the first time, and in her Asaba dialect, the F's sounded like W's. "When I think of what I went through for that man. I gave up my job in Lagos, I kept telling lies to my family, and I cut off my friends who told me he was not serious." She bent down to pick up something from the sand. 'And he could not even do."

"What?"

"He would jump on top of me, moan oh-oh-oh like a goat, and that was it." She raised her finger. "With something this small. And afterward he would smile happily without ever wondering if I had known when he started and stopped. Men! Men are hopeless!"

"No, not all of them. My husband knows how to do, and with something like this." Olanna raised a clenched fist. They laughed and she sensed, between them, a vulgar and delicious female bond.

Olanna waited for Odenigbo to come home so that she could tell him about her new friendship with Alice, about what she had told Alice. She wanted him to come home and pull her forcefully to him in the way he had not done in a long time. But when he did come home from Tanzania Bar, it was with a gun. The double-barreled gun, long and black and dull, lay on the bed. "Gini bu ife a? What is this?" Olanna asked.

"Somebody at the directorate gave it to me. It's quite old. But it's good to have just in case."

"I don't want a gun here."

"We're fighting a war. There are guns everywhere." He slipped out of his trousers and tied a wrapper around his waist before he took his shirt off.

"I talked to Alice today."

" Alice?"

"The neighbor that plays the piano."

"Oh, yes." He was staring at the separating curtain.

"You look tired," she said. What she wanted to say was, Tou look sad. If only he was better occupied, if only he had something to do in which the moments of grief that sneaked up on him could be immersed.

"I'm fine," he said.

"I think you should go and see Ezeka. Ask him to help move you somewhere else. Even if it isn't his directorate, he must have some influence with the other directors."

Odenigbo hung his trousers on a nail in the wall.

"Did you hear me?" Olanna asked.

"I won't ask Ezeka."

She recognized his expression: He was disappointed. She had forgotten that they had high ideals. They were people of principle; they did not ask favors of highly placed friends.

"You can serve Biafra better if you work somewhere else where you can use your brain and talent," she said.

"I'm serving Biafra well enough at the Manpower Directorate."

Olanna glanced at the clutter that was their room and home-the bed, two yam tubers, and the mattress that leaned against the dirt-smeared wall, the cartons and bags piled in a corner, the kerosene stove that she took to the kitchen only when it was needed-and felt a surge of revulsion, the urge to run and run and run until she was far away from it all.

They slept with their backs turned to each other. He was gone when she woke up. She touched his side of the bed, ran her hand over it, savored the last of the rumpled warmth that lingered on the sheet. She would go and see Ezeka herself. She would ask him to do something for Odenigbo. She went outside to the bathroom, saying "Good morning" and "Did you come out well this morning?" to some neighbors as she went. Baby was with the younger children, crowded near the banana trees, listening to Papa Oji telling a story of how he shot down an enemy plane in Calabar with his pistol. The older children were sweeping the yard and singing.

Biafra, kunie, buso Nigeria agha, Anyi emelie ndi awusa, Ndi na-amaro chukwu, Tigbue fa, zogbuefa, Nwelu nwude Gowon.