Song for Night (2 page)

Shelter Is Hands Protecting the Head

Music Is Any Dance You Can Pull Off

Roll Call Is Fingers Counting off a Palm

Fingers Pinching a Nose Is a Bad Smell

Dirty Is a Scrunched-up Face and a Palm Waving

Cowardice Is Spitting Once

A Question Is a Palm Turning Out from an Ear

Vision Is the Same As Dreaming

A Train Is Forearms Back and Forth Like Pistons

Light Is Jazz Hands and a Smile

Mother Is Crossed Arms Rocking a Baby

Rest Is a Chin Held in a Palm

Fear Is an Open Hand Beating over the Heart

Will Is an Emphatic Finger Pointing

Home Is a Palm Fisted to the Heart

Acknowledgments

Also by Chris Abani

Novels

Masters of the Board

GraceLand

The Virgin of Flames

Novellas

Becoming Abigail

Poetry

Kalakuta Republic

Daphne’s Lot

Dog Woman

Hands Washing Water

Of course, for Sarah

And my nephews—Ikenna, Obinna,
Chuks, Craig, Carl, Neven

We die only once, and for such a long time
—Molière

on any path that may have heart. There I travel
—Carlos Castaneda

Silence Is a Steady Hand, Palm Flat

What you hear is not my voice.

I have not spoken in three years: not since I left boot camp. It has been three years of a senseless war, and though the reasons for it are clear, and though we will continue to fight until we are ordered to stop—and probably for a while after that—none of us can remember the hate that led us here. We are simply fighting to survive the war. It is a strange place to be at fifteen, bereft of hope and very nearly of your humanity. But that is where I am nonetheless. I joined up at twelve. We all wanted to join then: to fight. There was a clear enemy, and having lost loved ones to them, we all wanted revenge.

If you are anything like Ijeoma you will say that I sound too old for my age. She always said that: said, because although her name in Igbo means Good Life, she died young, a year ago, aged fourteen, her wiry frame torn apart by an explosion. Since she couldn’t speak either, it might be misleading to say
she said
, but we have developed a crude way of talking, a sort of sign language that we have become fluent in. For instance, silence is a steady hand, palm flat, facing down. The word
silencio
, which we also like, involves the same sign with the addition of wiggling fingers, and though this seems like a playful touch, it actually means a deeper silence, or danger, and as in any language, context is everything. Our form of speech is nothing like the kind of sign language my deaf cousin studied in a special school before the war. But it serves us well. Our job is too intense for idle chatter.

I am part of a platoon of mine diffusers. Our job is to clear roads and access routes of mines. Though it sounds simple, our job is complicated because the term
access routes
could be anything from a bush track to a swath cut through a rice paddy. Our equipment is basic: rifles to protect against enemy troops, wide-blade machetes for clearing brush and digging up the mines, and crucifixes, scapulars, and other religious paraphernalia to keep us safe.

We were not chosen for our manual dexterity or because of our advanced intelligence, though most of us are very intelligent. We were chosen simply because we were small, slight even, and looked like we wouldn’t grow much in the nutrition-lacking environment of a battlefield. We were chosen because our light weight would protect us from setting off the deadly mines even when we stepped on them. Well, they were right about the former, even now at fifteen I can pass for an average twelve-year-old. But they were so wrong about the latter. Even guinea fowl set off the mines. But they must have known: that is why they imposed the silence. I finger the scar on my throat that marks the cut that ended my days of speech.

There is a lot to be said for silence, especially when it comes to you young. The interiority of the head, which is a misnomer—misnomer being one of those words silence brings you—but there is something about the mind’s interiority no less that opens up your view of the world. It is a curious place to live and makes you deep beyond your years and familiar with death. But that is what this war has done. I am not a genius, though I would like to be, I am just better versed at the interior monologue that is really the measure of age, of the passage of time. Why do I say this? Because when we say the passage of time we mean awareness of the passage of time, and when we say old, we really mean experienced. I know all this because my job requires me to concentrate on every second of my life as though it were the last. Of course if you are hearing any of this at all it’s because you have gained access to my head. You would also know then that my inner-speech is not in English, because there is something atavistic about war that rejects all but the primal language of the genes to comprehend it, so you are in fact hearing my thoughts in Igbo. But we shan’t waste time on trying to figure all that out because as I said before, time here is precious and not to be wasted on peculiarities, only on what is essential.

I have become separated from my unit. I don’t know for how long since I have only just regained consciousness. I am having no luck finding them yet, which is ironic given that my mother named me My Luck. But as Grandfather said, one should never stop searching for the thing we desire most. And right now, finding my unit is what I desire most. We were all together, when one of us, Nebuchadnezzar I think it was, stepped on a mine. We all ducked when we heard it arming—that ominous clicking that sounds like the mechanism of a child’s toy. The rule of thumb is that if you hear the explosion, you survived the blast. Like lightning and thunder. I heard the click and I heard the explosion even though I was lifted into the air. But the aftershock can do that. Drop you a few feet from where you began. When I came to, everyone was gone. They must have thought I was dead and so set off without me: that is annoying and not just because I have been left but because protocol demands that we count the dead and tally the wounded after each explosion or sweep. Stupid fools. Wait until I catch up with them, I will chew them out; protocol is all that’s kept us alive. Counting is not just a way to keep track of numbers, ours and the enemy’s, but also a way to make sure the dead are really dead. In training they told us to maximize opportunities such as these to up our kill ratio; for which we would be rewarded with extra food and money we can’t spend. I like to pretend that I do it to ease the suffering of the mutilated but still undead foes, that my bullet to their brain or knife across their throat is mercy; but the truth is, deep down somewhere I enjoy it, revel in it almost. Not without cause of course: they did kill my mother in front of me, but still, it is for me, not her, this feeling, these acts. The downside of silence is that it makes self-delusion hard. I rub my eyes and spit dirt from my mouth along with a silent curse aimed at my absent comrades. If they’d checked they would have noticed that I wasn’t dead.

The first thing I do is search for Nebu’s body. That’s the way it is laid out in the manual (although of course none of us has ever seen the manual but Major Essien drummed it into us and we know it by heart): first locate and account for friendly casualties, then hostiles; in that order—friend, then foe. The funny thing is, though I search, I can’t find Nebu’s body. There are no other bodies either, which means the enemy hasn’t been around.

Let me explain something, which on the surface might sound illogical but isn’t. We all lay land mines, the rebels and the federal troops, us and the enemy, but we do it in such a hurry that no one bothers to map these land mine sites, no one remembers where they are. That and the fact that territory shifts between us faster than sand tracking a desert, ground daily gained and lost, makes it hard to keep up. Given that the mine diffusers and scouts are always the advance guards, it is easy to see how minefields are often places where we intersect. In this case however it seems like there was no enemy, that Nebu simply got careless; or unlucky.

My first instinct is always survival so I abandon the search as quickly as I can and get out of the open. I debate whether to head for the river, fifty yards to my left, or the tree cover, seventy yards or so to my right. I choose the river. Rivers are the best way to keep close to habitation as well as the fastest means of travel. I hug the banks in the shadows and carefully observe any developments, of which I must confess there are very little. So far I haven’t met anybody and I haven’t found any traces of my unit. It is not good to be alone in a war for long. It radically decreases your chances of survival.

But my grandfather always said, “Why put the ocean into a coconut?”

Night Is a Palm Pulled
Down over the Eyes

It is dark: lampblack. The only points of light are flickering fireflies. Stupidly I fell asleep practically in the open, under a mango tree near the riverbank, amid the rotting fruit strewn everywhere. I lie still, waiting for all my senses to wake up to any possible danger, remembering how I came to be here, and realizing that I must have fallen asleep after feasting on too many mangoes. I strain and discern dim outlines to my left: the forest. Getting up, I walk across the dark spread of grass between the river and the forest, stopping at the edge of the tree line. The silence is absolute as though the forest has just sucked in its breath. Deciding I’m not harmful, it lets it out in the gentle noises of night. To ground myself, I run my fingers meditatively over the small crosses cut into my left forearm. The tiny bumps, more like a rash than anything, help me calm myself, center my breathing, return me to my body. In a strange way they are like a map of my consciousness, something that brings me back from the dark brink of war madness. My grandfather, a fisherman and storyteller, had a long rosary with bones, cowries, pieces of metal, feathers, pebbles, and twigs tied into it that he used to remember our genealogy. Mnemonic devices, he called things like this. These crosses are mine.

Filtering the dark into gray shadows, fingers still reading the Braille on my arm, I try to force my eyes to adjust, but my night vision is not very good. The forest isn’t familiar territory despite years of jungle and war, and the silence is disconcerting particularly because for the past three years I haven’t been alone at night.

I have been in a pack with the other mine diffusers. Even then, we all relied on Ijeoma to guide us. She always knew the right thing to do, and the right time to do it. God knows I miss her, love her.
Loved
her. But I can’t think about that now. I must move. I glance around me and sift my memory for ideas, guide points. I look up, thinking perhaps the stars will guide me, but there are hardly any and I have forgotten the names of the constellations and their relationships anyway. The only thing I can remember is the phrase,
follow the big drinking gourd home.
I try to make out the big dip of its shape, but clouds and treetops are occluding everything. Honing my fear to an edge, I step off, sinking into the depths of the forest.

I pause to light a cigarette, trying to make out the forest in the dying light: matches are too few and precious to be wasted solely for trying to see. I suck on the filter, singeing the tip into a red glow. In the distance I hear a nocturnal wood dove. I press on, crashing through the forest with the finesse of a buffalo. Bugs bite, sharp spear grass rip at my skin. It finally gives way to wetlands, the beginning of a swamp. The blood from my cuts attracts leechlike creatures that suck on my arms and feet as I splash deeper through what turns out to be a mangrove swamp. I must have traveled in a curve, following the forest back to where the river cut through it. I must have because that’s the only way I can be trudging through a mangrove swamp. It is not fun but we passed a mangrove swamp on the way in yesterday, so I must be retreating the right way. Into safe territory.

I hate mangroves though. The trees skate the water on roots like fingers, so human and yet so hauntingly bewitched they terrify me. The water levels aren’t uniform. Sometimes only ankle deep, sometimes thigh deep, sometimes the ground sheers away beneath my feet submerging me gasping in the chocolate thick brown water.

Exhausted, I find a tree with a few low-hanging branches and climb, high as I can, until the swamp and river below are no more than a black shimmer in the night. Building a nest of branches, something we learned from the monkeys, I tie myself carefully to the thickest one. We might have learned some tricks from the monkeys, but we aren’t monkeys. Sleep is a two-by-four catching me straight between the eyes and knocking me squarely into oblivion. Rest though is another matter. I haven’t rested since that night. There has been exhaustion; sleep even. But not rest. Not since my unit stumbled into a small village, or what was left of it, several huts falling apart at the edge of a bomb-pitted strip of tar. We saw a group of women sitting around a low fire, huddled like every fairy-tale witch we had been weaned on. Armed to the teeth with AK-47s and bags of ammo and grenades, mostly stolen from the better U.S. –armed enemy soldiers we had killed, but still wearing rags, we stood close together, watching the women, unsure what to do; or whether to approach. The women were eating and the smell of roasting meat drove us on.

“Good evening, mothers,” we said, respectfully.

The women paused and cackled, but didn’t reply, and why would they since they probably didn’t understand our crude sign language. We noted that one woman, not as old as the others, was lying on the ground. She was bleeding from a wound to her head and looked dazed.

“May we have some food?” I asked. I was the unspoken, unranked leader of the troop. “We are brave warriors fighting for your freedom.”