Things Fall Apart Arrow of God No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe

Author:Chinua Achebe [Achebe, Chinua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The first time Ezeulu left his compound after the Pumpkin Festival was to visit his friend, Akuebue. He found him sitting on the floor of his obi preparing seed-yams which he had hired laborers to plant for him next morning. He sat with a short, wooden-headed knife between two heaps of yams. The bigger heap lay to his right on the bare floor. The smaller pile was in a long basket from which he took out one yam at a time, looked at it closely, trimmed it with his knife and put it in the big heap. The refuse lay directly in front of him, between the heaps—large numbers of brown, circular yam-skins chipped off the tail of each seed-yam, and gray, premature tendrils trimmed off the heads.

The two men shook hands and Ezeulu took his rolled goatskin from under his arm, spread it on the floor and sat down. Akuebue asked him about his family and for a while continued to work on his yams.

“They are well,” replied Ezeulu. “And the people of your compound?”

“They are quiet.”

“Those are very large and healthy seed-yams. Do they come from your own barn or from the market?”

“Do you not know that my portion of the Anietiti land . . . ? Yes. They were harvested there.”

“It is a great land,” said Ezeulu, nodding his head a few times. “Such a land makes lazy people look like master farmers.”

Akuebue smiled. “You want to draw me out, but you won’t.” He put down the knife and raised his voice to call his son, Obielue, who answered from the inner compound and soon came in, sweating.

“Ezeulu!” he saluted.

“My son.”

He turned to his father to take his message.

“Tell your mother that Ezeulu is greeting her. If she has kolanut let her bring it.” Obielue returned to the inner compound.

“Although I ate no kolanut the last time I went to the house of my friend.” Akuebue said this as though he talked to himself.

Ezeulu laughed. “What do we say happens to the man who eats and then makes his mouth as if it has never seen food?”

“How should I know?”

“It makes his anus dry up. Did your mother not tell you that?”

Akuebue rose to his feet very slowly because of the pain in his waist.

“Old age is a disease,” he said, struggling to unbend himself with one hand on the hip. When he was three-quarters erect he gave up. “Whenever I sit for any length of time I have to practice again to walk, like an infant.” He smiled as he toddled to the low entrance wall of his obi, took from it a wooden bowl with a lump of chalk in it and offered it to his guest. Ezeulu picked up the chalk and drew five lines with it on the floor—three uprights, a flat one across the top and another below them. Then he painted one of his big toes and dubbed a thin coat of white around his left eye.

Only one of Akuebue’s

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