"I understand," Olanna said. "But must you join them in buying from enemy territory?"

"What is there to buy in Biafra? They have blockaded us kpam-kpam."

"But how will you go?"

"There is a woman I know. She supplies garri to the army, so they give her lorry a military escort. The lorry will take us to Ufuma and then we will walk across to where the border is porous in Nkwerre-Inyi."

"How long is the walk?"

"About fifteen or twenty miles, nothing a determined person cannot do. We will carry our Nigerian coins and buy salt and garri and then walk back to the lorry."

"Please be careful, my sister."

"Many are doing it and nothing has happened to them." She got up. "Ugwu will have to handle my class. But I know he can manage."

From the dining table where he was giving Baby her garri and soup, Ugwu pretended not to have heard them.

He took over her class the next day. He loved the light of recognition in the older children's eyes when he explained the meaning of a word, loved the loud way Master said to Special Julius, "My wife and Ugwu are changing the face of the next generation of Biafrans with their Socratic pedagogy!" and loved, most of all, the teasing way Eberechi called him teacher. She was impressed. When he saw her standing by her house and watching him teach, he would raise his voice and pronounce his words more carefully She began to come over after classes. She would sit in the backyard with him, or play with Baby, or watch him weed the vegetable patch. Sometimes Olanna asked her to take some corn down to the grinding station down the road.

Ugwu stole some of the milk and sugar that Master brought home from the directorate and put them in old tins and gave them to her. She said thank you but she looked unimpressed, and so, in the middle of a searing afternoon, he sneaked into Olanna's room and poured some scented talcum powder into a folded piece of paper. He had to impress her. Eberechi sniffed it and dabbed a little on her neck before she said, "I did not ask you for powder."

Ugwu laughed. He felt, for the first time, completely at ease in her presence. She told him about her parents' pushing her into the army officer's room, and he listened as if he had not heard it before.

"He had a big belly," she said, in a detached tone. "He did it quickly and then told me to lie on top of him. He fell asleep and I wanted to move away and he woke up and told me to stay there. I could not sleep so the whole night I looked at the saliva coming down the side of his mouth." She paused. "He helped us. He put my brother in essential services in the army."

Ugwu looked away. He felt angry that she had gone through what she had, and he felt angry with himself because the story had involved imagining her naked and had aroused him. He thought, in the following days, about him and Eberechi in bed, how different it would be from her experience with the colonel. He would treat her with the respect she deserved and do only what she liked, only what she wanted him to do. He would show her the positions he had seen in Master's Concise Couples Handbook in Nsukka. The slender book had been squashed into a dusty corner of the study shelf, and the first time Ugwu saw it while he was cleaning, he looked through it hurriedly, sweeping past the pencil-sketched diagrams that somehow became more exciting because they were unreal. Later, he realized that Master probably didn't remember that the book existed so he took it to the Boys' Quarters to study over a few nights. He had thought about trying some of the positions out with Chinyere but never did: there was something about the methodical silence of her night visits that made any novelty impossible. He wished so much that he had brought the book from Nsukka. He wanted to remember some finer details, what the woman had done with her hands in the sideways-from-behind position, for example. He searched in Master's bedroom and felt foolish because he knew there was no way the Concise Couples Handbook would be there. Then he felt a deep sadness at how few books there were on the table, in the whole house.

Ugwu was making Baby's breakfast and Master was taking a bath when Olanna began to shout from the living room. The radio was turned on very loud. She ran out to the back, to the outhouse, carrying it in her hand. "Odenigbo! Odenigbo! Tanzania has recognized us!"

Master came out with his moist wrapper barely tied around his waist, his chest covered in lustrous wet hair. His smiling face without the thick glasses looked funny. "Gini? What?"

" Tanzania has recognized us!" Olanna said.

"Eh?" Master said and they hugged and pressed their lips, their faces, close together as though inhaling each other's breath.

Then Master took the radio and tuned it. "Let's make sure. Let's hear it from others."

Voice of America was reporting it, as was French radio, which Olanna translated: Tanzania was the first country to recognize the existence of the independent nation of Biafra. Finally, Biafra existed. Ugwu tickled Baby and she laughed.

"Nyerere will go down in history as a man of truth," Master said. "Of course, many other countries want to recognize us but they won't because of America. America is the stumbling block!"

Ugwu was not sure how America was to blame for other countries not recognizing Biafra-he thought Britain really was to blame-but he repeated Master's words to Eberechi that afternoon, with authority, as though they were his. It was hot and he found her asleep on a mat in the shade of their veranda.

"Eberechi, Eberechi," he said.

She sat up with the red-eyed, wounded look of a person jerked from sleep. But she smiled when she saw him. "Teacher, have you finished for today?"

"You heard that Tanzania has recognized us?"

"Yes, yes." She rubbed her eyes and laughed, a happy sound that made Ugwu happier.

" America is the reason many other countries will not recognize us; America is the stumbling block," he said.

"Yes," she said. They were sitting side by side on the stairs. "We got double good news today. My aunty is now the provincial representative of Caritas. She said she will give me a job at the relief center in St. John's. It means I will get extra stockfish!"

She reached out and playfully pinched the skin of his neck, a gentle pressure between her fingers. He looked at her. He not only wanted to squeeze her naked buttocks, he also wanted to wake up next to her and know he would sleep next to her every day, wanted to talk to her and listen to her laughter. She was nothing like Chinyere, a fond convenience, but rather like a real Nnesinachi, one he had come to care for because of what she said and did, and not what he imagined she would say and do. He was welling up with a surge of recognition and wanted to say, over and over, that he loved her. He loved her. But he didn't. They sat and praised Tanzania and dreamed about stockfish and were still talking desultorily when a Peugeot 403 sped across the street. It reversed, in loud screeches, as if the driver wanted to make as much of an impression as possible, and stopped in front of the house. biafran army was roughly handwritten on it in red paint. A soldier climbed out, holding a gun, wearing a uniform so smart that the lines of ironing were visible down the front. Eberechi stood up as he walked up to them.

"Good afternoon," she said.

"Are you Eberechi?"

She nodded. "Is it about my brother? Has something happened to my brother?"

"No, no." There was a knowing leer on his face that Ugwu instantly disliked. "Major Nwogu is calling you. He is at the bar down the road."

"Oh!" Eberechi left her mouth open, her hand on her chest. "I am coming, I am coming." She turned and ran indoors. Ugwu felt betrayed by her excitement. The soldier was staring at him.