Song for Night (3 page)

This time my gestures, pointing to the food and miming eating, seemed to be understood and the old women waved me over. I approached and reached down to the metal brazier with meat on it. I recoiled from the small arm ending in a tiny hand, and the tiny head still wearing its first down. It only took a minute for the women to calculate the cost of my alarm and revulsion, so that even as I was reaching for my AK-47, they were scattering in flight, not forgetting to grab onto bits of their gory feast. I emptied a clip into them, as my platoon cheered at the snapping of old bones and the sigh of tired flesh, even though they didn’t know why I was killing the women. The woman holding onto the head let go as she fell and it hit the ground and rolled back toward me.

It is that little face, maybe a few months old, that keeps me from rest.

Death Is Two Fingers
Sliding across the Throat

Death is always the expectation here and when my throat was cut it was no different. Nobody explained it at first. Nobody had time; nobody cared; after three years of a civil war nothing is strange anymore; choose the reason that best satisfies you. There are many ways to say it, but this is the one I choose: they approached me and said I had been selected for a special mission. I had been selected to be part of an elite team, a team of engineers highly trained in locating and eliminating the threat of clandestine enemy explosives. Even though I had no idea what clandestine enemy explosives were, I was thrilled. Who wouldn’t be after three weeks of training and all the time marching for hours in the hot sun doing drills with a carved wooden gun while waiting for the real thing—either from the French who had promised weapons or from the front, where they had been liberated from the recently dead. That was what determined your graduation date: when a gun could be found for you; ammunition was a luxury, sometimes it came with the gun, sometimes it didn’t, but you had to graduate nonetheless. Armed with our knowledge of marching in formation and with a sometimes loaded weapon, we were sent off to the rapidly shrinking front or to pillage nearby villages for supplies for the front. It didn’t matter which, as long as you were helping the war effort. So when an officer approached me and said I had been chosen to be part of an elite team, I was overjoyed.

I should have been suspicious of the training. I mean I am a smart person; I grew up in a city, not like one of the village fools that hung around us and were baffled by the simplest things like how to open the occasional sardine tins we were lucky to get with the strange-shaped keys—especially as the tins didn’t have keyholes. Stupid village and bush shits, almost as stupid as the northern scum we are fighting. How could I know what the training for diffusion of clandestine enemy explosives consisted of? But the officer was reassuring.
Major Essien
his name tag said. That he was an officer of considerable influence was reinforced by the fact that he was one of the few who had been in the actual army before the war, and he was one of the few who still wore a clean crisp uniform with gleaming brown boots: cowboy boots. We would later nickname him John Wayne, but I am getting ahead of myself.

This is how we were trained: first our eyes were made keen so we could notice any change in the terrain no matter how subtle: a blade of grass out of place, scuffed turf, a small bump in the ground, the sharp cut of a metal tool into earth—any sign of human disturbance to the ground soon became visible to us. The funny thing though is that as keen as our eyesight grew in the day, we were blinder than most at night. Ijeoma, who was smarter than all of us combined, said it had to do with the fact that we burned our corneas in the intense sunlight straining to see. I didn’t know what a cornea was even though I was in secondary school when the war started; none of us did. So she caught a frog, squeezed its eyes from its head, and showed us.

Having trained our eyes, they began to train our legs, feet, and toes. We learned to balance on one leg for hours at a time, forty-pound packs on our backs in so many odd and different positions that we looked like flamingos on drugs, all the while supervised by John Wayne, who walked among us tapping a folded whip against his thigh. Whenever we faltered, that whip would snake out like it had a mind of its own, its leather biting deep and pulling skin with it.

And all the while he would chant: “This is from the manual, the same manual that they use in West Point, the same one they use in Sandhurst; the military manual for the rules of engagement—the rules of war, for want of a better phrase. These are rules even you can understand. Now move out and follow orders!”

Once, Ijeoma asked to see the manual. John Wayne looked at her for a long time.

“You are lucky I was trained in West Point, otherwise I would just blow your brains out for challenging me. But I am a civilized man. You want to see the manual? It is here”—he tapped his forehead—“that way it can never be lost, nor we. We can never be lost as long as we follow the manual. The manual is like the rules of etiquette for war. Follow the protocols I shall show you from it and you will survive. As for seeing it, the only way that can happen is if you split my head open. Do you want to split my head open?”

Ijeoma shook her head.

“Good. If you don’t want me to split your head open, you should follow orders!”

That was that. We followed orders, did what we were told, even when the training seemed at odds with what we thought soldiers should know, like the feet exercises, mostly from ballet. To make our feet sensitive, we were told, which was funny because we weren’t going to be issued boots. The rebel army didn’t have any, but even if we did, we wouldn’t get them because they needed our toes to be exposed all the time. Then we were taught to use our toes almost like our fingers. One exercise which was cruelly ironic was tying our training officer’s shoelaces with our toes.

Having learned to walk across different terrain with my band of fellow elite, feeling for the carefully scattered lumps in the ground, being careful not to step on them as per instruction, clearing the earth around the buried mines with our toes, we learned to bend and insert a knife under the firing mechanism and pull out the valve. We practiced on live mines and we realized the value of the one-legged balancing when we accidentally stepped on one, arming it. We balanced on one foot, reached down, and disabled the mine. We were discouraged from helping each other in these situations—if things went wrong it was better to lose one instead of two mine diffusers, John Wayne explained, almost kindly.

A week before graduation he took us all into the doctor’s office. One by one we were led into surgery. It was exciting to think that we were becoming bionic men and women. I thought it odd that there was no anesthetic when I was laid out on a table, my arms and legs tied down with rough hemp. John Wayne was standing by my head, opposite the doctor. I stared at the peculiar cruel glint of the scalpel while the doctor, with a gentle and swift cut, severed my vocal chords. The next day, as one of us was blown up by a mine, we discovered why they had silenced us: so that we wouldn’t scare each other with our death screams. Detecting a mine with your bare toes and defusing it with a jungle knife requires all your concentration, and screams are a risky distraction.

What they couldn’t know was that in the silence of our heads, the screams of those dying around us were louder than if they still had their voices.

Memory Is a Pattern Cut into an Arm

I wake up confused. It is dark and I have to remind myself it is still the same night. As soon as I can, I should make some kind of calendar. The branches I am sleeping in are safe but uncomfortable. I can’t place the sound that has woken me at first, but there it is again: the soft
put-put
of a motor. Carefully I look through the net of leaves and see a small motorboat gliding past. There are several men sitting in it, all heavily armed. One is in the prow operating a small searchlight that is sweeping the banks. They are all smoking, and from the smell of the tobacco I can tell it is top-grade weed. I inhale deeply, cautious not to make any noise. God I could use some of that weed; my head is pounding. It is an enemy vessel; but it could just as easily have been taken over by one of us rebels. Although, since the men in the boat are searching for anyone hiding in the water or the thick grass on the shore, it is unlikely. Not because we are not capable of it, but because this was most recently rebel territory and we wouldn’t be killing our own, and murder is clearly the intent of the search. Unsettled, I rub my arm as I watch the boat circle under me then move on. It only lasts for a few moments but it feels longer.

As they depart, I reach for my knife. If Nebu had survived the explosion—which was unlikely since he was standing right over the mine when it went off, and so took the full blast—he couldn’t get far, wounded as he must be. Without a doubt the patrol I have just seen will find him and finish him off. With my knife tip I cut a small cross into my arm for Nebu, wincing as the blood blisters up. I reach behind me and cut into the tree and collect sap with the knife tip and smear it into the small cut. It should help with the healing, I think, but almost immediately it starts to burn and I know this is not a good thing, so I take out my prick and piss all over my arm, feeling it stinging and cooling at the same time. In basic first aid they told us that human urine is the best field disinfectant there is. Holding my arm out, I let it dry in the slight breeze. I reach for a cigarette and light it. I am high enough that the men in the boat won’t notice, even if they come back.

In the dim glow from the cigarette, the crosses on my arm look exactly like what they are: my own personal cemetery. I touch each cross, one for every loved one lost in this war, although there are a couple from before the war. I cut the first one when my grandfather died; the second I cut when my father died, with one of his circumcision knives. My father the imam and circumciser who it was said betrayed his people by becoming a Muslim cleric and moving north to minister; and all this before the hate began. The third I cut for my mother who died at the beginning of the troubles that led to the war. The rest I have cut during the war: friends, comrades-in-arms. With the one I just cut for Nebu, there are twenty in total. Eighteen are friends or relatives, as I said, but two were strangers. One was for the seven-year-old girl I shot by accident, the other for the baby whose head haunts my dreams.

I turn over my right forearm. There are six X’s carved there: one for each person that I enjoyed killing. I rub them: my uncle who became my step-father, the old women I saw eating the baby, and John Wayne, the officer who enlisted and trained us and supervised our throat-cutting and our first three months in the field, the man who was determined to turn us into animals—until I shot him.

“I shot the sheriff,” I mumble under my breath, mentally walking through my memories, examining each one like a stranger walking through my own home, handling all the unrecognizable yet familiar objects.

It was a Wednesday. How I remember that detail is unclear given that nearly all my memories are mixed up, as though I have taken a fall and jumbled the images: probably a result of concussion brought on by the explosion. Wednesday, late afternoon: and the sky heavy with dark clouds. The muted light that fell like a hush was darkened by the deep green of foliage to one side, the red unpaved road scarring the middle, and to the other side a clearing covered with the gleam of white gravel and a church, not much more than a low whitewashed bungalow with a cross atop its corrugated iron roof, half of which had collapsed—maybe from a shell or a mortar, it was hard to tell. Another bungalow, the priest’s house, was off to the back, set close to the encroaching greenery. In the front of the church was a battered pickup truck that was idling in the shade of a tree. A white priest, neck and face red against his white soutane, sat in the cab. In the shadow of the bombed-out church, two women were washing a statue of the Virgin with all the tenderness of a mother washing a child. A seven-year-old girl played in the gravel by their feet. I stared at that sight unbelievingly. Of all the things they could have salvaged, I remember thinking. Just then, a man came round the corner carrying a statue of Jesus, cradled like a baby. I fought tears. There was something matter-of-fact about it all that was heartbreaking.

John Wayne stopped us with a casual wave, and we spread out wordlessly into the formation we had been trained to. The people in the church tableau froze as we approached: the man holding Jesus, the women washing the Virgin, and the priest in the truck whom I assume meant to carry the statues to another church or parish where they would be safe. As we moved forward in a loose fan that tapered into a point, with John Wayne leading, only the child moved. Smiling, she ran toward us. John Wayne bent down, arms spread, a father home from work, except he didn’t look like a father, more like a bird of prey. He picked up the seven-year-old girl and held her to his side. Something about him in that moment must have terrified her though because she began to cry.

“What is your name?” he asked her.

“Faith,” she said, still crying.

John Wayne touched her face tenderly, and then when she smiled tentatively through her tears, he threw his head back and laughed.

“This one is ripe. I will enjoy her,” he said, looking right at me, as though he expected me to challenge him, like I did the first time he had forced me at gunpoint to rape someone, but whatever he saw in my eyes made him laugh even louder. Without thinking, I lifted my AK-47 and opened fire. He moved, instinctively I think, the way an animal will, to escape the shot, and the bullet went through the seven-year-old and found John Wayne’s heart. They both looked at me, faces wide with shock for a long moment, then John Wayne fell, taking the girl with him. Everyone scattered for cover, the women, the man carrying Jesus, still carrying Jesus, and the rest of the platoon; everyone except Ijeoma, who stood behind me, and the priest, who leapt out of his car and ran toward John Wayne and the girl.