Yes, that is so, Nnaemeka's mother said.

"He spoke only good words about his family," Richard said. He chose his Igbo words carefully.

"Of course he would speak good words about his family." Nnaemeka's father gave Richard a long look as if he did not understand why Richard had to say what they already knew.

Richard shifted on the bench. "Did you have a funeral?" he asked, and then wished he had not.

"Yes," Nnaemeka's father said; he fixed his gaze on the enamel bowl that held the last lobe of kola nut. "We waited for him to return from the North and he did not return, so we had a funeral. We buried an empty coffin."

"It was not empty," Nnaemeka's mother said. "Did we not put that old book he used to read for the civil service exam inside?"

They sat in silence. Dust motes swam in the slice of sunlight that came through the window.

"You must take the last piece of kola nut with you," Nnaemeka's father said.

"Thank you." Richard slipped the lobe into his pocket.

"Shall I send the children to the car?" Nnaemeka's mother asked. It was difficult to tell what she looked like, with the black scarf that covered all of her hair and much of her forehead.

"The car?" Richard asked.

"Yes. Did you not bring us things?"

Richard shook his head. He should have brought yams and drinks. It was after all a condolence visit, and he knew how things were done. He had been caught up in himself, in thinking that his coming was enough, that he would be the magnanimous angel who brought the last hours of their son to them and, by doing so, would assuage their grief and redeem himself. But to them he was just like any other person who had come to pay condolences. His visit made no difference to the only reality that mattered: their son was gone.

He got up to leave, knowing that nothing had changed for him either; he would feel the same way he had felt since he returned from Kano. He had often wished that he would lose his mind, or that his memory would suppress itself, but instead everything took on a terrible transparence and he had only to close his eyes to see the freshly dead bodies on the floor of the airport and to recall the pitch of the screams. His mind remained lucid. Lucid enough for him to write calm replies to Aunt Elizabeth's frantic letters and tell her that he was fine and did not plan to return to England, to ask her to please stop sending flimsy air-mail editions of newspapers with articles about the Nigerian pogroms circled in pencil. The articles annoyed him. 'Ancient tribal hatreds," the Herald wrote, was the reason for the massacres. Time magazine titled its piece man must whack, an expression printed on a Nigerian lorry, but the writer had taken whack literally and gone on to explain that Nigerians were so naturally prone to violence that they even wrote about the necessity of it on their passenger lorries. Richard sent a terse letter off to Time. In Nigerian Pidgin English, he wrote, whack meant eat. At least the Observer was a little more adroit, in writing that if Nigeria survived the massacres of the Igbo it would survive anything. But there was a hollowness to all the accounts, an echo of unreality. So Richard began to write a long article about the massacres. He sat at the dining table in Kainene's house and wrote on long sheets of unlined paper. He had brought Harrison to Port Harcourt, and while he worked he could hear Harrison talking to Ikejide and Sebastian. "You are not knowing how to bake German chocolate cake?" A cackle. "You are not knowing what is rhubarb crumble?" Another scornful cackle.

Richard started by writing about the refugee problem, a result of the massacres, about the traders who fled their markets in the North, university lecturers who left their campuses, civil servants who fled their jobs in the ministries. He struggled over the closing paragraph.

It is imperative to remember that the first time the Igbo people were massacred, albeit on a much smaller scale than what has recently occurred, was in 1945. That carnage was precipitated by the British colonial government when it blamed the Igbo people for the national strike, banned Igbo-published newspapers, and generally encouraged anti-Igbo sentiment. The notion of the recent killings being the product of "age-old" hatred is therefore misleading. The tribes of the North and the South have long had contact, at least as far back as the ninth century, as some of the magnificent beads discovered at the historic Igbo-Ukwu site attest. No doubt these groups also fought wars and slave-raided each other, but they did not massacre in this manner. If this is hatred, then it is very young. It has been caused, simply, by the informal divide-and-rule policies of the British colonial exercise. These policies manipulated the differences between the tribes and ensured that unity would not exist, thereby making the easy governance of such a large country practicable.

When he gave Kainene the article, she read it carefully, with her eyes narrowed, and afterward told him, "Very fierce."

He was not sure what very fierce meant or whether she liked it. He desperately wanted her to approve. Her aura of distance had returned since she came back from visiting Olanna in Nsukka. She had put up a photograph of her murdered relatives-Arize laughing in her wedding dress, Uncle Mbaezi ebullient in a tight suit next to a solemn Aunty Ifeka in a print wrapper-but she said very little about them and nothing about Olanna. She often withdrew into silence in the middle of a conversation, and when she did he let her be; sometimes he envied her the ability to be changed by what had happened.

"What do you think of it?" he asked, and before she could answer, he asked what he really wanted to. "Do you like it? How do you feel about it?"

"I think it sounds exceedingly formal and stuffy," she said. "But what I feel about it is pride. I feel proud."

He sent it off to the Herald. When he got a response two weeks later, he ripped the letter up after reading it. The international press was simply saturated with stories of violence from Africa, and this one was particularly bland and pedantic, the deputy editor wrote, but perhaps Richard could do a piece on the human angle? Did they mutter any tribal incantations while they did the killings, for example? Did they eat body parts like they did in the Congo? Was there a way of trying truly to understand the minds of these people?

Richard put the article away. It frightened him that he slept well at nights, that he was still calmed by the scent of orange leaves and the turquoise stillness of the sea, that he was sentient.

"I'm going on. Life is the same," he told Kainene. "I should be reacting; things should be different."

"You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be, Richard," she said quietly.

But he couldn't let himself be. He didn't believe that life was the same for all the other people who had witnessed the massacres. Then he felt more frightened at the thought that perhaps he had been nothing more than a voyeur. He had not feared for his own life, so the massacres became external, outside of him; he had watched them through the detached lens of knowing he was safe. But that couldn't be; Kainene would not have been safe if she had been there.

He began to write about Nnaemeka and the astringent scent of liquor mixing with fresh blood in that airport lounge where the bartender lay with a blown-up face, but he stopped because the sentences were risible. They were too melodramatic. They sounded just like the articles in the foreign press, as if these killings had not happened and, even if they had, as if they had not quite happened that way. The echo of unreality weighed each word down; he clearly remembered what had happened at that airport, but to write about it he would have to reimagine it, and he was not sure if he could.